Adam Ash

The Cheese Party: Is Wisconsin The Start Of An American Revolution (Or Will You Always Be Ruled By Goldman Sachs)?

2011-03-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

Whenever I pay taxes, I think of the fact that GE and Exxon paid no taxes in 2009, that Goldman Sachs pays under 2% taxes, and that billionaire hedge fund managers pay a tax rate of 15%. As Warren Buffett says, his secretary pays taxes at a higher rate than he does.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas talks about the face-to-face encounter with the Other that induces empathy and morality. Well, I feel like my little face is going face-to-face with the gnarly butt of big business. And there's about as much empathy to be gotten from that butt as a mouse gets from a snake.

Bizarrely, I hear everyone walking around saying America and its states are broke, while Wall Street is coining billions and criminally under-paying their taxes. I hear the GOP saying we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. I see Obama extending the Bush tax cuts, which created no new jobs in eight years. And I'm thinking, I have so little hair left, what's the use of tearing out the last few?

Then it occurs to me that Americans must be one of four things, or a combination of all four:
b) stupid victims of learned helplessness.
c) stupidly apathetic to the point of cowardice.
d) stupid masochists.
d) plain stupid.

That includes you and me, dear reader.

Then I think of GOP governors giving tax breaks to big business and claiming teachers have to give up benefits so these governors can balance their state budgets. Teachers are getting paid too much. Not CEOs. Not Wall Street bankers. Not lawyers. Not doctors. Teachers.

Meanwhile, one teacher does more important work in one day than the entire board of vampire squid Goldman Sachs fraudsters do in their entire socially useless lives. Teacher should be paid more, not less.

Then I see the polls say Americans are concerned about jobs, jobs, jobs, but Washington is fighting over deficits, deficits, deficits. The GOP deficit-cutting plan will cause a job loss of a million. Nobody in power is actually listening to what actual Americans want. The big guys are stuffing down Marie Antionette layer cake while one in six of West Virginia's population is on food stamps.

I watch 100,000 public service labor union members in Wisconsin protest to keep their collective bargaining rights, as they bargain away their benefits.

And I think: how pathetic.

They're not asking for rich people to pay more taxes, or for corporations to pay ANY taxes; they're asking to keep their collective bargaining rights.

That's like a guy being skinned alive asking his torturer not to skin his penis.

1. SHE WANTS TO TAKE YOUR COOKIE

Middle-class wages have remained essentially flat since the Reagan Revolution, while our productivity has improved dramatically. But CEO compensation has gone up by the hundredfolds. Between 2002 and 2007, the top 1% captured two thirds of income growth.

You've heard the big joke these days. A CEO is sitting down with a Tea Partier and a teacher, and there's a plate of 12 cookies on the table. The CEO takes 11 cookies for himself, and says to the Tea Partier: "Watch out for that teacher. She wants a piece of your cookie."

Given the fact that Americans are really stupid, really cowardly, really masochistic and really helpless, how can we save ourselves from our predatory elite?

I don't think the Wisconsin protests will do it (what might help a little, is if they recall Governor Walker next year).

What this country needs is some kind of miraculous transplant of smarts and guts, which might lead to our citizens actually organizing themselves into a Cheese Party to take over the Democratic Party and scare them to act progressive for a change -- like the Tea Party has taken over the GOP and scared them hard right.

But do we have the innate guts and smarts for this? For a little genetic contrast: if, for example, what is happening to us were happening to the French, what would be happening?

Let me tell you. We'd have Americans marching by the millions on Wall Street and burning Lloyd Blankfein in effigy. We'd have angry jobless people occupying the offices of Goldman Sachs from top to bottom. We'd have CEOs sitting locked up in their offices by their employees until they stopped outsourcing jobs. We'd have Tahrir Squares on the front lawns of Wall Street partners.

Unlike we Americans, the French people aren't cowards. They've got guts. They don't swallow crap on their knees on a hourly basis like we do, while our elite butt-bang us every minute of our waking days as we stoop to be conquered. When the French government screws up, the French citizens start tearing up the sidewalks and pelt the noggins of their cops with berets made of concrete.

If only we had a little French sass in our genetic makeup. But we don't. We're Americans. We just lie down and take it. For how long, how long, how long?

2. OBAMA HAS THE GUTS OF A FEATHER DUSTER

Forever, it seems.

Our leaders have no guts either. Obama didn't have the guts to go for the big stimulus of $1.3 trillion that his own economist Christina Romer told him was needed, and that Nobel-winning economists Krugman and Stiglitz said we needed in 2009. He settled for less than $800 billion with almost $300 billion wasted on tax remedies which were as stimulating as a road-killed armadillo is to a bunny rabbit on heat. So he came in with a third of what was needed, like a guy trying to impress a date by shlepping her to the local Burger King.

Then Obama didn't have the guts to start a WPA program to employ our unemployed construction workers to repair and rebuild our infrastructure, like FDR did when he created eight million jobs. Then Obama didn't have the guts to call off the costly war in Afghanistan immediately (a war that props up the second most corrupt state on earth after Somalia) but like a typical coward, he sucked up to the Pentagon by sending in more troops, and then he tried to brown-nose the rest of us by promising to pull the troops out in a year or two, or well ... sometime. This July maybe. Soonish. Depends on what people think at re-election time in 2012. Whenever. Never mind the Wikileaks revelation about the $52 million of our money in cash that Afghan Vice-President Ahmed Zia Massoud was caught with when he visited the Arab Emirates where the banks are; $52 million which we let him keep.

Then Obama didn't have the guts to turn the BP oil spill into a national cause for green energy investment.

But don't blame just him. He's following a hallowed American tradition of no guts, no imagination and no smarts. A tradition stupendously honored by the gutless dumbasses we've consistently voted into the presidency for the last 30 years. Reagan, Bush One, Clinton, Bush Two and Obama ... these gutless dumbasses combined don't add up to one cell in FDR's brain or one ab in FDR's guts.

3. THE ONE PLACE THAT OUR SMARTS AND GUTS COULD COME FROM

There's only one place that our guts and smarts might come from. And that's from our unemployed. Yes, being unemployed, like the prospect of being hanged, concentrates the mind wonderfully. And it makes you desperate, too, which can make you gutsy.

You never know what could happen when people get desperate.

In Tunisia, one guy set himself on fire because the government fined his little sidewalk fruit stall, confiscated his equipment and wouldn't give it back ... and a short one month later, after some furious Facebook organizing and protests in which the oppressed populace suddenly grew balls, the dictator president who'd been in power for 23 years, fled the country to save his own suddenly-spooked-spermless balls. (He fled to our good friends the Saudis, whose citizens flew two planes into our World Trade Center, and who also took in Idi Amin.)

This amazing revolution happened in Tunisia without a single word about it in their media: the revolt happened exclusively via Facebook, until Al Jazeera TV got word. Now finally many of the Arab dictators, including the Saudi princes, are shitting bricks like ants trying to pass elephant turds, and making sure they've got a private jet standing by fueled up 24/7 with enough ready Swiss bank money to scarper the heck out of Dodge toute suite, just in case the same thing happens in their oppressed corner of oppressed Muslim Arabia. As has happened in the biggest Muslim nation in the Middle East, Egypt, where Mubarak didn't leave the country, leaving himself open to possible prosecution.

All this came about because one no-account dude got upset when the government swiped his fucking fruit stall.

Here in America, we have a jumped-up-from-nowhere-in-no-time Tea Party movement that has spooked all the GOP leaders to the lunatic right, to the point that John McCain claims he never was a party maverick.

These Tea Party people complain bitterly about Obama's spending. Funny, they never complained about Bush's spending; they didn't even exist then. So where did they spring from so suddenly? Who are these Tea Party people? Here's who: they're simply older white Republicans with time on their hands who had enough money to retire and watch Fox News, and who got worried that a black president was going to take their money and give it to poor people. A black guy got inaugurated and wham! that's all it took for the Tea Party to spring up like maggots on a dead dog, and change the moribund GOP overnight from a party of seemingly slightly unhinged run-of-the-mill lunatics into a party of off-the-wall gibbering crazed-from-sternum-to-cranium lunatics (the GOP's new vaunted brainiac, Paul Ryan, believes in privatizing Social Security, proving him more crazily brainless than a flatworm's anal orifice).

Change can happen real fast in today's internet-connected world.

4. HERE COME THE 99ERS

Here in America the fastest-growing new subgroup of Americans to watch out for isn't the Tea Party, but the so-called 99ers. These are folks who've been unemployed for 99 weeks, so their unemployment insurance has run out.

I'm thinking they could be our saviors -- our Tunisians, so to speak. Listen up as I marshall my facts.

In June 2010, the Labor Department reported that there were an estimated 4.3 million 99ers. It's been estimated that there were 7 million at the end of 2010, and perhaps 4 million will be added in 2011. These are people who have no income: they are drawing down all their savings and losing their homes, and they will become tent city dwellers if they aren't already. If I were George Soros, I'd give them all tickets to go to Washington D.C. so they can make a huge tent city of millions right under the snot-nosed noses of our rulers.

You have to wonder what's going to happen when there are say 20 million of them. 20 million unemployed, desperate, penniless, homeless Americans. Or 40 million. Many of them will be young people who can't find a job, and have moved back in with their parents: young people in much the same position as can't-find-a-job young people in Tunisia and Egypt. Like the Tea Party people, these 99ers will have time on their hands. These 99ers already have their own websites.

Meanwhile, right on time, our punditry is currently banging on about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America. Like the top 1% own 35% of our wealth, while the top 20% own 85% of our wealth, leaving the bottom 80% to squabble for the last 15%, which is rapidly moving away from them into the hands of the folks at the top.

Enough to give the 99ers some food for thought. Enough to turn their natural paranoia and fear of survival onto an enemy out there.

5. THE COMING CLASS WAR IN AMERICA

To make a long story short, the stage is being set -- courtesy of our dumbass elite -- for a good old-fashioned class war. The unemployed against the rest of us. And if the rest of us don't join the unemployed in a class war against the actual greedy-to-the-max 1% -- no more than 1.3 million fat cats out of our working population -- America will tear itself to pieces. Let's hope it will be 99% of us against 1%. That gives us a fighting chance of reversing the class war that the top 1% of don't-care fat cats have waged upon the rest of America -- and won big with the help of our oh-so-caring government.

In the Great Depression -- our only valid comparison point -- there was indeed a class war. Same as now: the downtrodden against the greedy-to-the-max. The downtrodden were so trodden down, when the unemployment rate rose to over 19%, millions of Americans actually died of starvation. Yep, starvation ... while businesses and the government were destroying “redundant” food.

Back in those days, in the spring and summer of 1932, there was a march on Washington of the so-called Bonus Army of 43,000 marchers (17,000 WW1 vets and their families and affiliates). The Bonus Army demanded immediate cash redemption of bonus certificates issued to the WW1 vets in 1924, that were to be paid out in 1945 (maybe the government figured they'd all be dead by then).

Think about the 99ers marching on Washington as the Bonus Army did, and in their case demanding immediate reinstatement of their unemployment benefits. Those 100,000 Wisconsin labor protesters will be a petite storm in a porcelain teacup compared to a tsunami of millions of marching 99ers.

Here's what happened to the Bonus Army. First the Washington Police tried to drive the Bonus Army out of their encampment. Two vets were killed, but the protesters stayed put. Then President Herbert Hoover called in the army. The Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, commanded a bunch of cavalry and six tanks. In the ensuing battle, he drove the vets out of their encampment, killing another two of them. Their shelters and belongings were burnt to ashes. Yes, children, this happened in America, in our capital, when the closest thing to our present circumstances obtained in our dear land.

Finally, in 1936, Congress overrode FDR's veto and the Bonus Army got paid early.

6. THINK OF THE UNEMPLOYED AS GODZILLA

All this, plus other unrest, especially big strikes in 1934, led to the big changes of the New Deal, which was essentially a successful power grab by the people, wresting power away from our then-greedy-to-the-max elite. The people were significantly helped by the fact that a leading member of the upperclass switched allegiance, betrayed his class and joined the underclass in their power grab. He happened to be the President, and from his high perch FDR heard and heeded the voices of the damned. So huge changes happened -- like Social Security, like the Glass-Steagall Act that hogtied the banksters, like labor unions getting strong enough to give workers a decisive voice, etcetera. And after the class war got settled in favor of the people, we had a good long comfortable ride, full employment for forty years after WW2, until that rich man's poodle Ronald Reagan started the comeback of the privileged rich, which led to trade unions being weakened, and immense productivity gains by workers not coming to them but going to the already rich, and the gutting of Glass-Steagall so the banksters were free to fleece us, and the removal of oversight over derivatives -- both under that dumbass Clinton -- and the lifting of the 12:1 leverage limit on Wall Street speculation under that even bigger dumbass Bush Two. Suddenly our economy went into boom-and-bust mode again after growing steadily for fifty years, and the Reagan Revolution turned the loss of the elite during the New Deal into a clear win for them.

Now our fat cats are occupying the fat catbird's seats again. And with the exception of Bernie Madoff, not a single big-time Wall Street bankster is in jail for Wall Street's worldwide Ponzi fraud. If just one of them -- say, Lloyd Blankfein or Dick Fuld -- was having his Hershey canal invaded on a regular basis by some over-muscled prison inmate, Wall Street would behave themselves ASAP. Instead, they're back to making million-dollar bonuses while their victims go jobless and homeless. Result: today our democracy is a fully-fledged plutocracy: government by the rich, of the rich, and for the rich. Wall Streeters have bought themselves a lifetime stay-out-of-jail-free card.

Not that Wall Street should rest all that easy. Their rip-off schemes have become more evident to more of the ripped-off. And when they wreck us again ... well, folks, we may end up living in interesting times.

As our main competition, the Chinese, like to curse their enemies.

I'd say there's a fifty-fifty chance that within the next ten years, if a few good demagogues get on a few media-covered soapboxes, the unemployed may rise up like a mightily pissed Godzilla, and then the national fan could be hit by the sizable excrement like no fan has been hit by any excrement, and there will be bits and pieces of excrement flying flotsam-and-jetsam-like all over the place, all over you and me, dear reader, all over America, from sea to shining sea.

Even a worm like America can turn.

Personally, I can't wait. What with 400 channels and nothing on TV, I could do with an interesting time in my life. I wouldn't mind seeing the 99ers loot the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. I wouldn't mind seeing some of our rich crooks jump on their private jets and flee. In fact, I'd like to see some social and economic justice in our country for a change. How about you?

The Six Emotions Of Revolution: What Egyptians Are Feeling Now -- by Adam Ash

2011-02-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

If you really want to know what's been happening in Egypt, you have to know what folks there have been feeling for decades, and all the new feelings they're feeling now.

Take a basic emotion: fear. Before a revolution can even get started, it has to face feeling terrified.

After all, how do you prevent a revolution from happening? You put fear, massive fear, in the minds of your population. At one point, the Shah of Iran's secret police, SAVAK, had a surgeon cut off the arms and legs of a dissident in prison; then they sent his live torso back to his family and friends as a living warning of what could happen to anyone who resisted. A pretty effective fear tactic.

Revolutionaries swim in that fear. Like fish swim in water.

The conditions that breed revolution may be material: oppression and poverty. Egypt had 15,000 political prisoners to torture. Up to 50% of folks unemployed. But there is something more lacerating than physical hurt and deprivation to consider: the psychology of revolution. A revolution is an intensely emotional experience. It has to be, to break the chains of fear.

That's why trying to make sense of a revolution without considering the emotions involved is like thinking about sex without considering the fact that penises and vaginas are involved. I count six emotions that drive revolutions, all evident in Egypt. They are seldom, if ever, considered by political analysts or historians.

This is a truly startling omission of scholarship. There's no way you'll understand the first thing about a revolution if you don't grasp the emotions behind it. I know these emotions firsthand and can speak to them personally, because I was living in my home country, South Africa, during the 1976 Soweto Uprising, when black kids took on the apartheid regime in a storm of emotion. I was bludgeoned with an insider's education unavailable to most Americans. Be warned: what you read here will change how you think about revolution, about Egypt, and even about your own life.

1. FEAR AND RAGE

A dictatorship tries to pull the teeth of revolution in two ways. First, by mind control: censorship of all media and communication. Citizens are blanketed with state propaganda. In North Korea, the people know little of the outside world: their thoughts are the thoughts of the Leader. Their world does not acquaint them with any consciousness to revolt.

The other form of control is the afore-mentioned fear. The hammer of the state, its feared secret police, can “disappear” you in a moment, with no one knowing where you are. Anyone who challenges authority can be imprisoned, tortured and killed. In such circumstances, only the crazy brave -- the fanatics -- will consider resistance, because they can be pretty sure that, at the end of the day, they will find their genitalia hooked up to electrodes. The vast majority of folks, people like you and me, are cowed and intimidated into silence. Even within your family, within the seemingly-safe walls of a home, political dissent isn't expressed. You walk around with a plug in your mouth and a Maginot Line slung around your brain. Fear slams your innermost thoughts back into your own head, where they ricochet in silence; unspoken, unborn, dead.

Fortunately, most dictatorships can't afford the 24/7 job of instilling fear. You'd need at least one secret policeman for every five citizens to keep everyone scared suitably shitless. In his very model of a modern police state, ex-President Mubarak presided over more than a million informers, agents and police officers, but they had to keep 80 million Egyptians under surveillance -- not all that easy at an 80:1 ratio.

So there was space for cracks of resistance to open. The unthinkable could happen. And it did -- in Tunisia, and now in Egypt.

Naturally, the unthinkable is unpredictable. Ten CIAs in constant communication with microchips implanted in every brain on earth couldn't predict a revolution. Consider what happens: suddenly a whole nation gets all emotional about the state they're in, and takes to the internet in a snit, and then to the streets in communal rage, their fear momentarily overcome by some random spark that annoys the heck out of them. Nobody can envision what that spark will be. Nobody can measure how fierce will burn the fire it lights.

Rampant rage, insensate fury, ice-cold anger: those are the emotions that knock back fear. Journalist Nicholas Kristof was told by a young woman, Leila, in Cairo's Tahrir Square: “We are all afraid, inside of us. But now we have broken that fear.” This rage is of a special kind: moral outrage.

We're not being treated fairly, dammit. Our rulers are rich, they never stop stealing from us. They steal even from the poorest of us. They hurt us. They beat us. They kill or imprison anyone who stands up for us. Those bloody bastards. Let's show them.

Yet even while revolutionaries act in anger, their fear never leaves them. A revolutionary faces death at any moment, like a worm thrown to a bird. We know that at least 300 people have died in Egypt, and they're having quite a peaceful revolution. (The main reason it's been semi-peaceful: the Egyptian revolution is across a classic generational gap: Mubarak and cronies in their 70s and 80s against kids in their 20s, and naturally the old people are wary of starting a shooting war against the young, because they'll be shooting their own children and grandchildren: this revolution is also a family affair, being argued over every family dinner table.)

Here's a report of how hairy even this peaceful revolution can get, for both the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries:

"In Barambel Village in Helwan, south of Cairo, residents set the local police station on fire after a police officer shot and killed a local resident for violating the curfew. The resident had gone out during curfew hours on Monday night and was shot to death after failing to respond to the police officer's warnings. He was killed instantly. Following the incident, village residents torched the police station in which the officer was taking cover, leading to the death of the officer and total destruction of the station and its civil registry. Other police personnel managed to escape before they were caught by residents."

Besides fear and rage, there is another emotion that's even more basic to revolution than those obvious feelings. It's an emotion that poisons the lives of would-be revolutionaries more than fear: a bitter pill they eat every day for breakfast, a potion they drink every night before bed, a sour rancor that stinks up their psyches in unholy crappiness ... so much so, it's the verdant soil for revolution, the corpse that sprouts maggots, the breeding ground, the very seedbed.

2. HUMILIATION AND DIGNITY

The rock-bottom existential emotional condition for revolution is humiliation.

Feeling humiliated sears the soul worse than Coca-Cola eats teeth. If you look at what Egyptians want, it's not only freedom and economic opportunity -- an end to oppression and corruption -- but DIGNITY.

Being oppressed deprives you of dignity, of self-worth, of self-respect, of feeling worthy in this world. It's humiliating not to be able to speak your mind, not to have enough to eat, not being able to get a job, not having a say in your destiny, not being able to contribute to the well-being of your fellow humans. It's humiliating to see the shits of your society on top, lording it over you -- those folks who used to be the suckups and snotnoses and bullies in your school when you were a kid.

So you are ready to get angry. You are dry timber waiting for a spark. Then something stupid happens. Like a lowly Tunisian fruit-seller sets himself on fire because the government doesn't want to give him back his fruit-stall that they confiscated, and his family gets angry, and his neighbors, and they tell their story to everyone they meet, and they go and shake their fists at the people in a government office, and young folks vent their anger on Facebook, and people start congregating in anger, and their numbers grow, and all of them being together makes them feel inexplicably exhilarated and happy and free to express themselves for once, and now they feel powerful, and presto: a revolution.

When I say something stupid sparks a revolution, I mean stupid. Like really stupid. Here's an Egyptian reporter recalling the first time he started feeling revolutionary anger, after he was arrested and being driven somewhere in a truck cooped up with other detainees:

“After a while, the fog of bodily odors was infiltrated by the far more offensive stench of human feces, prompting one disembodied voice to curse, 'Hold it in, you heathens! We’re in for the long haul.'  At that point, I was not particularly worried: my colleague had seen me be taken away, and I was confident that my boss would alert the appropriate heavyweights. Still, it wasn’t a particularly pleasurable experience. To distract myself from the growing sense of panic, I did some mental math problems, regretted it, and instead thought about pretty girls. I thought about the beach, thought about my cats, and then remembered I had forgotten to put food in their bowl. The apartment was empty, and if I was gone long enough, they would surely starve to death. For the first time since my arrest, I began to feel anger towards the current political regime. What did my cats have to do with anything?”

The possible suffering of his cats got this guy going.

3. EXHILARATION AND PRIDE

Revolution rides on emotion. Here's Wordsworth on the revolution that stirred him, the French Revolution:

Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unique sounds.
The soil of common life, was, at that time.
Too hot to tread upon.

There is the hot fear and humiliation and rage that start the revolution, and then, when it is in full swing, there is sheer exhilaration. Before the government sent its goons into Cairo's Tahrir Square, there prevailed a carnival spirit. This past week, this spirit returned. People camped out on Tahrir Square with their families, and created for themselves a sweet little society of happy freedom there, complete with separate garbage cans for organic waste. Here's one report:

“The people who have been staying in the square for the past two weeks have created an organized system so as to be able to continue their strike indefinitely. Food outlets, entertainment, cultural centers and a security system are all available in the square. Protesters stress that they are not tired and are willing to stay as long as it takes for the regime to fall. 'We have a whole country in Tahrir Square -- there's a ministry for sanitation, a ministry for protection, and so on,' says Mohamed Abdel Raouf, who has set up a makeshift newspaper booth in his tent. A family head who had been staying in a tent in Tahrir Square with his wife and two children for the past four days says that he is reassured about the safety of his family sleeping in a tent in the middle of the square -- even more than he was at home.”

They're proving a revolution can work. When the Egyptian regime emptied the jails and withdrew the police from the country to try and create nationwide lawlessness so they could have an excuse for a nationwide crackdown, the citizenry immediately started taking over the functions of policing their neighborhoods themselves. The regime tried to fall back on the basic excuse for their existence: without us the country would fall apart. Apres moi, le deluge. We the elite are the only guarantee of stability. All regimes function because of a snotnosed contempt for their people: they don't believe the people can govern themselves. In his last speech, Mubarak patronizingly said: “I am addressing all of you from the heart, a speech from the father to his sons and daughters.” Then, when he was ousted, he didn't have the guts to tell the country himself, but sent his flunky Suleiman to make the announcement. Pride and cowardice: Papa went into a sulk, and couldn't face his sons and daughters anymore.

When the people do for themselves without interference from above, they flower: the taste of freedom is a heady and exhilarating thing of joy.

It's interesting that the revolution has already freed women. In these last weeks they've walked the streets of Cairo without fear of sexual harassment, which has been a congenital Arab problem in this Arab city. With a regime to harass, males have stopped harassing females.

The revolution lets people take responsibility for themselves (responsibility is what a dictatorship takes away from you). I've read many quotes from the folks at ground zero in Tahrir Square, and I found this response, from one Seif Salmawy, the managing director of a publishing company, the most telling and quote-worthy:

“Suddenly we are human beings. We think we can decide and that what we decide has worth and that we have some value as humans. Before there was the president, the police, the army and their money. We the people were just there to serve them.”

There's nothing like a revolution for you to discover that you're human: a worthy individual with your own muscles to flex, your own mark to make upon the world.

It's of a piece with what Egyptians, and especially expats looking at their country from a distance, are saying: they are now proud of their country. Proud of its citizens. Goddam, my people are standing up for themselves.

“I was not proud to tell people I was an Egyptian,” said Ahmid Awn, 31, on Tahrir Square. “Today, with what’s been done here, I can proudly say again I am an Egyptian.”

One chanted slogan was: “Egyptians, hold your heads high, you are Egyptians.”

4. EMOTIONS AND THE YOUNG

Fear, humiliation, anger, dignity, exhilaration, pride. These are the six emotions that drive and flood revolutions, and we should be cognizant of them.

And we should know that these feelings live most intensely in the young, whose emotions are still burgeoning, because their unnerving hormones only kicked in recently ... unlike the middle-aged and old, who are worn down to the adult cowardice of responsibility, compromise and plain old fear.

To be a grownup with children is to be scared. Above all, you want your children to be safe. Having children is the first big step away from being a revolutionary. You've got to stay alive for the kids. You can't endanger them by putting your own life on the line. They're the little dictators against whom you could never revolt.

The young don't have children to fear for. That's why we need the young to start revolutions.

Wordsworth again:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven! -- Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom. law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress -- to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

5. FACEBOOK DEBATES LED TO REVOLUTION

In Egypt, the budding youth of the country kicked off their revolution. A group of youths began debating the state of the nation among themselves on a Facebook page started by Esraa Rashid, 30, and Ahmed Maher, 28 in 2008. This group called themselves the April 6 Youth movement because they started supporting textile strikers in Mahalla near Cairo, who were violently put down on April 6, 2008 by the Mubarak regime. 70,000 kids began to follow the lively arguments of their fellows on their Facebook page, like thousands watching other thousands playing fervid ping-pong on a vast table. It was a kind of emotional group hug -- sharing their dissatisfaction with their regime anonymously on the web.

The group described themselves on Facebook in earnest adolescent officialese -- somewhat like little Trotskys worried their moms might make fun of them:

“We are a group of Egyptian Youth from different backgrounds, age and trends gathered for a whole year since the renewal of hope in 6 April 2008 in the probability of mass action in Egypt which allowed all kind of youth from different backgrounds, society classes all over Egypt to emerge from the crisis and reach for the democratic future that overcomes the case of occlusion of political and economic prospects that the society is suffering from these days. Most of us did not come from a political background, nor participated in political or public events before 6 April 2008 but we were able to control and determine our direction through a whole year of practice.”

After the Tunisia uprising led to its dictator fleeing the country, these debating kids in Egypt got all excited, and set a date for similar protests in their country. They asked people to gather in protest against their own Egyptian regime on January 25, 2011. They had no idea how many would show up (remember the 60s slogan: “what if they gave a war and nobody came?”). But they knew they had the timing right: their exams were over and schools and colleges were closed for a mid-year vacation.

To their utter surprise, they had made a date with an actual revolution. We know you can use the internet to make a date with a stranger: now you can use it to make a date with something really strange: a revolution.

6. HOW THE INTERNET HELPS MAKE REVOLUTION

Here's the thing about the internet and revolution. Besides acquainting humanity with a blizzard of sexual images, proclivities and opportunities, the internet is also good for these three revolution-enabling qualities:

1. It's a quick and easy way to reach out to like-minded multitudes you don't know beyond your immediate circle of acquaintances. It turns the physical village square into Marshall McLuhan's virtual global village, which then allows you to actually flood the physical village square with all the folks you met in the virtual global village.

2. It's a quick and easy way for people to feel more powerful than they do in their everyday lives. In the virtual world of the Internet, you can give yourself airs you'd never attempt with your real-life friends. We're all quite overly proud on our Facebook pages. That's what Facebook thrives on: the ability of everyone to dream themselves into a virtual existence of their own self-created celebrity. Click on the Internet, and you instantly become arrogant. Your self-created virtual identity empowers your real-life identity. Your internet avatar pumps up your real self.

3. It's a quick and easy way for folks to get highly emotional and intemperate in the relative safety of their homes, because with a single click they can vent whatever they feel to the world out there. There's no physical restraint. The internet breeds unbridled, unthinking in-the-moment self-expression. It brings out people's inner ids: no need to be polite. You have the heady freedom to be as angry as you get privately with your own family ... to be THAT angry in public and for all to see, with not a care that you're offending any strangers, because they're not physically in front of you to make your life physically unpleasant. It's like giving another driver the finger from the safety of your car.

The Internet spins a cocoon of invincibility, a bubble of personal power around everyone, that allows them to be as nasty as they like with no immediate physical consequences. In short, the internet is a safe place to be a bitch. (Look at how, in any argument on the internet in America, within ten or twelve comments, one commenter will inevitably call the other one a Nazi.) You get thousands of people bitching about their rulers on Facebook, and you can have a revolution on your hands.

7. LABOR PLUS YOUTH MADE THE REVOLUTION

But the Egyptian Revolution was much more than a snitfit on the web that spilled over into anger on the streets. It's been in the making for a long, long time -- for as long as Mubarak has been a dictator promising reforms and never delivering. Raising hopes and dashing them. Locking up political opponents. Rigging elections. Running an economy that made him and his family and his cronies superrich (he's purported to have something between $10 to $70 billion stashed away), and caused food shortages for his people (in a country where the average person spends 40% of their income on food, any food shortage strikes right at the guts of the people).

The ruling clique privatized publicly-owned property into gated communities for themselves. Big coastal areas became exclusive resorts for the super rich in government and business. Enclaves like Qatamiyya Heights and Mirage City contain multi-million dollar palatial homes for the very privileged few, to which their owners drive through poor neighborhoods in their luxury cars for all to become irked by this blatantly flaunted inequality.

In this state of the lordly rich, Egyptian workers have been striking for better pay and working conditions for years. From a 2009 AFL-CIO report: "The current wave of protests is erupting from the largest social movement Egypt has witnessed in more than half a century. Over 1.7 million workers engaged in more than 1,900 strikes and other forms of protest from 2004 to 2008." That was then. Now more than 2 million workers have staged an estimated 3,000 strikes and protests since 2004, especially in the textile industry. According to Egypt’s Center of Economic and Labor Studies, there were 478 labor protests in 2009 alone, in which 126,000 workers were laid off, resulting in 58 suicides.

Opposition from labor has bred the Egyptian revolution. When the enthusiasm of youth joined them, the movement grew strong enough to turn the whole country upside down. If Mubarak hadn't stepped down, all the workers in the country were going to strike today Monday February 14th. Yes, EVERYBODY.

Imagine that. And imagine how spooked the regime must've gotten -- to their very coccyxes -- when 6,000 workers in Suez came out on strike, endangering one of Egypt's main sources of income, already kneecapped by the fact that the tourist industry is currently deader than a mafioso in cement shoes. Over 160,000 tourists skedaddled out of Egypt in the last two weeks, a loss of at least $1.5 billion in tourism revenue. The Abu Dhabi-based paper The National reports that the country’s industrial output dropped 80%.

Besides blue-collar labor, even the johnny-come-lately white-collar professionals came out in support. On Wednesday evening, hundreds of judges in black robes and green sashes marched to Tahrir Square. Twelve thousand lawyers in their robes marched on Thursday to Abdeen, one of Mubarak’s presidential palaces in Cairo. The same day thousands of medical doctors and pharmacists marched in their white coats to Tahrir Square. Thousands of journalists chased their government-appointed union president from his office, and marched. Actors, writers, directors, singers, musicians and artists joined the chanting. The workers from all industries united, with nothing to lose but their chains.

8. THE MAIN OPPOSITION GROUPS

An entire society became radicalized in less than three weeks. Here are the known opposition groups in the revolution:

1. Kefaya (Enough!), led by the Nasserist Abdel-Halim Qandil, founded 2004.
2. El Ghad (Tomorrow), the political party founded by the parliamentarian Ayman Nour in 2004. Nour ran as a presidential candidate against Mubarak, and after he came second, was bundled off to prison for four years.
3. The liberal Democratic Front founded by Osama al-Ghazali Harb in 2007.
4. The Facebook page April 6 Youth movement, led by Ahmed Maher (who came out of Kefaya and has used the offices of El Ghad).
5. The Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said,” administered by Google employee Wael Ghonim.
6. Nobel Peace Prize winner ElBaradei's National Association for Change.
7. Amr Moussa has just resigned as head of the 22-nation Arab League, to which he was side-lined by Mubarak because Mubarak wanted Moussa out of Egyptian politics; he intends to run for President.
8. The Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions, established at a meeting in Tahrir Square on January 30 this year, which effectively ends state control of labor exercised via the former state-sanctioned Egyptian Trade Union Federation.
9. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, who assassinated President Sadat, spawned Al Qaeda and Hamas, was banned by President Mubarak, ran for parliament as independents, and has lately become so “moderate”, it took them three whole days before they turned up in Tahrir Square. Having been underground for so long, they are the best organized, and would get anywhere from 10% to 30% of the vote in an election.

This revolution has been falsely called leaderless because it has a bewildering array of leaders instead of a single charismatic leader, and because many instigators chose to remain anonymous to escape capture. Google's Wael Ghonim himself said that he had hoped to remain anonymous, and that now, after Mubarak's ouster, he just wants to go back to his job and his wife. One of the great things about this revolution is that, without a single charismatic leader to idolize, the nation can idolize itself and take national ownership for what happened -- WE did it (not some braver-than-us he/she did it).

9. A REVOLUTION LAUNCHED BY FACEBOOK

Major unrest has been stirring for a long time, but it took three Facebook-enabled thingummies to actually kick off the revolution.

One: the virtual conversations on the April 6 Youth Facebook page, which gave 70,000 young Egyptians a feeling of community, as well as on the Facebook page “We Are all Khaled Said,” started after a young man, Khaled Said, was dragged out of a cyber cafe into the street in Alexandria and beaten to death by cops, a photo of his shattered face a rallying image; this was the Facebook page administered by Google marketing executive Wael Ghomid, who was detained for twelve days, and whose TV interview after his release on February 7 on the privately owned TV channel Dream 2, brought more people to Tahrir Square last Tuesday than there'd ever been there before (one hopes Larry Page and Sergey Brin throw a big party for their most famous employee ever). Also, oddly enough, a big role was played by Egypt's strong soccer fan clubs on the web.

Two: the example of Tunisia, itself driven by Facebook connectivity.

Three: the April 6 Youth group setting a date on Facebook for a mass protest. It started with one video on the Facebook page and Youtube, from 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz, on January 18. She said:

“Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years. Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity…. I’m making this video to give you one simple message: We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honor and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25.”

There was a button to click on. It said: “Will attend.” The clicking began. Still, nobody had any idea that they had volunteered to attend a revolution.

10. THE REVOLUTION GOT BOLDER DAY BY DAY

As the youth streamed to Tahrir Square in Cairo, and other meeting places in other cities, they called out to bystanders and people watching from their balconies to join them. They engaged onlookers in discussions. They went into stores and cafes to talk to folks. They recruited people block by block. This was a crucial tactic by which the revolutionaries enlarged their revolution.

And once the people came out in public in many cities, with the hub in Cairo's Tahrir Square, its demands increased from day to day, as the regime, caught totally unawares, kept lowballing the revolution's expectations. The regime's obtuseness provoked the revolution to want more than it originally wanted. At first the protesters just wanted some basic reforms. At that point they were not yet a revolution: they were only a massive protest. They asked that Mubarak not run again, and that he not make his son Gamal the next president. Then, three days after January 25, they wanted the entire regime changed ASAP, and rejected any concession made while Mubarak was in office. They wanted him to leave, leave, leave. Now they had turned from a protest into an actual revolution, demanding changes that were truly revolutionary. Soon they demanded that Mubarak also be put on trial. These days they want all the money back that he and his cronies stole from the country, and the Swiss, sensitive about their reputation these days, have frozen Mubarak's assets in their banks.

Spontaneity was a great feature of this revolution: it made itself up from day to day. It did not have a single leader or a fixed program. It did not even know it was a revolution. What it did have was two potent ingredients: a Facebook-wielding youth that blindsided the ruling elite; and a disaffected labor mass who bonded with the youth in a big network of opposition.

For the educated youth, the lack of economic opportunity and upward mobility was as great a motivator as wanting freedom. Egypt's educated and ambitious youth have been forced to leave for other countries to make their way in the world. Wael Ghonim himself, who got his MBA in Cairo, worked as Google's Marketing Manager for the Middle East and North Africa in Dubai. In Egypt, it's tough for a young person to make enough money to afford their own apartment, so they can get married and have kids.

"No marriage, no kids, no apartment, no money," one youngster summed up the problems of his generation. In fact, here's a question that goes to the heart of why so many young men went out there to revolt: how much of the revolution was born out of sheer sexual frustration, because young men couldn't afford an apartment, a private place of their own, where they could do what young men like to do, i.e. fuck chicks?

11. WE'RE ALL POTENTIAL REVOLUTIONARIES

Fear, humiliation, anger, dignity, exhilaration, pride. All of us feel these emotions. All of us are potential revolutionaries, with these six emotions ready to be activated. In a very basic sense, all countries are in need of revolution. Heck, America is a more unequal society than Egypt, for example. Our Gini Index is 45, making the US the 42nd most unequal country in the world; Egypt is the 90th most unequal society with an index of 34.4 (the lower the index, the better). The emotions of revolution burn inside us all, like the ignition flamelets on a gas stove. Think about these emotions in your own life; you have all six stirring around in you, each one a different veggie in the soup of your life.

Fear. You have it in you as an American, but you don't know it. It starts young, with fear of the dark, and fear of being abandoned by your parents, and it's assuaged only by your constant and quotidian access to the comforting familiar. As you grow up and are socialized by going to school, where you're forced to sit in rows and listen to a grownup telling you what to do and think, your fear transmutes into a passive acceptance of your lot. So chances are you sink into a life of commodity fetishization, and the only thing you can do to exert a little power over your existence is to vote every few years (and most of us don't even do that). When your government declares an unnecessary war, you might join a march against it for a few hours, but mostly you just submit. You and I, as we live our getting-and-spending lives, seldom realize a profound fact underlying our existence: most of humanity lives in a state of cowardice. We know we're being screwed by our rulers, but we don't bestir ourselves to do anything about it. It's a congenital human condition: inertia, anchored by fear.

Humiliation. A child feels it when a grownup yells or sneers at them, or teases them, and that child swallows it and lives with it because the grownup is bigger than they are, and it becomes part of that child for its entire life. Humiliation is part of you, because you were once a child.

Anger. In our homes, family members can easily drive us to express anger, but we're not supposed to vent our anger in public. It's embarrassing to ourselves and to others. The embarrassment about public anger is something dictatorships unwittingly rely on to stay in power. The French don't mind being rude in public, which is what makes them a uniquely revolutionary and unruly lot.

Dignity. Who knows true dignity? Only the self-made man or woman. The rest of us trade our dignity for a living, submerge our one life on earth into a job, submit to a boss, fit into a hierarchy, let an alarm clock wake us early every morning to summon us to the drudgery of spending most of our lives earning a paycheck. Only a revolution -- or a comfortable retirement -- can bring us true dignity.

Pride. Are you proud of your life? Are you proud of your station in life? Somewhere, somehow, most of us are a little disappointed in ourselves. We thought we were going to turn out differently.

Exhilaration. When did you last feel it? At a rock concert? Walking through a park on a bright sunny day? Being with a stranger you like, and suddenly realizing, in sweet moments growing on you, hey, chances are I'm getting laid tonight, and who might this lovely person become in my life? There are not many moments of high exhilaration in a normal life, but they are there, and the biggest is when your nation goes into that deeply emotional and highly satisfying snitfit called a revolution. The last time Americans felt something akin to revolutionary exhilaration was when, after the nightmare of Bush Two, Obama became our president. It didn't last very long, but we all felt quite exhilarated at the time. A million of us turned up at the Inauguration. Imagine that exhilaration and hope multiplied by a thousand: that's how a revolution makes you feel. That's what Egyptians are feeling today. Heck, our own Tea Party people feel some of this exhilaration; idiots can also feel revolutionary. No doubt that sublimely grandiose cretin Glenn Beck feels like some kind of revolutionary, especially when he moves his cretinous self to glutinous tears.

12. THE POWER OF REVOLUTIONARY EMOTIONS

Fear, humiliation, anger, dignity, exhilaration, pride. This mixture of heartfelt emotions is why revolutions are so attractive, and why they stir the human heart even more than war. It's why we like to say that “we are all Egyptians now.”

Because suddenly, our emotions are in play like they've never been before. Both negative and positive, each driving the other higher, like volcanoes trying to out-erupt one another. Fear joins humiliation and flips to anger and switches on dignity and pride and sparks exhilaration. If you're an Egyptian in Paris, you get on the first plane to Cairo, or you wish you were there to share in the emotions of your nation. The everyday cracks: life becomes new: existence flaunts possibility: things will never be the same. I know, because when I was in South Africa during the Soweto Uprising in 1976, suddenly, huge emotions flooded the country as though a dam of rich red wine had broken over the citizenry, intoxicating us all. Suddenly fear was trumped by the pride and exhilaration of flinging a Molotov cocktail at the grinning molars of the oppressor.

In a revolution, you are fully human, for once in your life, sharing the same emotions with millions of people. A country becomes a nation. Geography becomes emotion. You become part of something bigger than yourself. You are as one with others. You rise as one. Says 80-year-old Egyptian feminist Dr. Nawal El Saadawi from Tahrir Square: “I feel I am born again.” Everyone becomes a hero, a champion, a freedom fighter. Everyone is Che.

What a glorious feeling.

Your emotion is shared: a mass emotion. Mass emotions are highly contagious, and difficult to contain. The entire Middle East may be about to blow up one dictatorship at a time.

13. POSSIBLE OUTCOMES

Of course, after the exhilaration of revolution can come any one of four rather more sobering feelings:

1. The fear and anguish of The Terror, which is when revolutionaries fight among themselves and the revolution eats its own, as happened in the French Revolution and in Iran's 1979 revolution, when the Shah was overthrown and Khomeini's mullahs killed and imprisoned their fellow revolutionaries and took the revolution away from the people to establish an oppressive theocracy.

2. The major disappointment of a revolution deferred: a successful counterrevolution, when the authorities clamp down and kill and imprison and suppress enough revolutionaries to stop a revolution from happening. As in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and in Iran in 2009.

3. The irritation of having to be patient with a fortunate outcome, which is -- at best -- a slow and messy journey to some form of democracy (like in the Philippines) or a semi-responsible autocracy (like today's post-Mao China, which is giving its people some measure of economic freedom without any political freedom).

4. Most often, if there is a strong military, they will take over in a coup, and then it is up to them to either encourage a civilian authority to flourish (Turkey) or to keep themselves in power, like the Army did in Burma after they put down the 1988 uprising. This is what has happened in Egypt, when Mubarak ceded power to the military's Supreme Council, or rather, was told by them to go the fuck away. So the Egyptian revolution could go one of two ways: either Burma or Turkey. And Egyptians are going to be in a state of fidgety unease until they know which path their military intends to pick.

14. THE U.S. RESPONSE

My suspicion is that the Burma option was the outcome favored by Obama, Biden and Clinton, with their calls for an “orderly transition.” Orderly transition my ass: this was code for giving Mubarak and his Torturer-in-Chief henchman VP Omar Suleiman the time to wait out the protesters. Suleiman baldly stated that Egypt is not ready for democracy. The only emotion to have about Obama's earlier one-step-behind-events caution and double talk is dismay. He was ducking the obvious right thing to do -- to call publicly and insistently, together with all world leaders, for the entire Mubarak regime to retire immediately, to be replaced by a caretaker government representing all the big opposition factions plus some of the country's current bureaucrats, whose sole job it must be to allow political parties to form so there can be a free and fair election ASAP.

What we're seeing is yet another American domino falling: a further decline in American power. Even America's dominoes don't listen to America anymore, despite all the money we funnel their way. Obama has been begging Israel's Netanyahu not to build more settlements. Obama badly wants Pakistan's intelligence services to stop its secret support of the Taliban. Obama would really like China to revalue its currency. But nobody listens to America anymore, even when we shower them with billions. Well might one ask: why the fuck are we giving them money if they don't do what our money is telling them to do? (And why the fuck can't Mubarak hold on to power when we give his military $1.5 billion each year, and even supply him with the tear gas canisters he needs to keep his nation in line?) One pundit likened the irritating refusal of our recalcitrant friends to feel indebted to us, to these words of Prince Schwarzenberg of Austria after the Russians had helped suppress the Hungarian rising in 1849: “They will be astonished by our ingratitude.”

The US was looking as clueless as Mubarak and his VP Omar Suleiman (the intelligence chief who was our long-time CIA point man in Egypt, whom we turned to for the extraordinary rendition of folks we wanted the Egyptians to torture on our behalf). In his interview with Christiane Amanpour, Suleiman said the protest was engineered by jihadists and foreigners. If he believed it, his intelligence was as clueless as our own CIA; and if he didn't, he was trying to imply that the protesters were unruly terrorists deserving of a whacking.

15. THE MILITARY IS EGYPT'S BIGGEST CORPORATION

It's a given that the older generals, like Suleiman, wanted to hang on to power, and that the younger officers wanted the old guys to go -- somewhat like Nasser's young officers' 1952 coup.

The generals are going to have to proceed with some caution, because they are responsible for 15% to 35% to 45% of economic activity in their country (nobody knows how much -- the law forbids anyone to write anything about the Army in Egypt -- but it's a lot). There's a great deal of stuff they'll want to keep for themselves as they orchestrate or impede a transition to democracy. And there is a great deal to grab as they prosecute corrupt businessmen like the unpopular steel magnate Ahmed Ezz. The revolution demands that some rich folks get thrown under the bus, and the military are ready to pick up the spoils. They will surely do all they can to destroy the new crony capitalists like Ezz, ceramics tycoon Mohammed Abul Einein and Ibrahim Kamel, who formed around the would-be successor to Mubarak, his enterprising businessman son Gamal. Since the late 1990s, this business elite became movers and shakers in the National Democratic Party and in parliament. They even became Cabinet Ministers. They've been trying to speed the privatization of an economy dominated by the state and the military, but now the generals have a chance to beat back the new business elite, who were hoping to really coin it when their man Gamal became the successor to his President Dad. Now they're not so happy, because many of them are not allowed to leave the country while legal actions against them are being readied at the Army's instigation.

In essence, the military taking power now does not amount to any great change from anything at all, and renders the Egyptian revolution entirely symbolic. It's a profoundly pre-revolutionary state of affairs. Since the 1952 coup that overthrew the old monarchy, Egypt has been dominated by the military. Its presidents -- Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak -- have all been military men. Current or former military men hold all the governorships. Omar Suleiman, the here-yesterday-gone-today vice president, was a general. Ahmed Shafik, the here-today-probably-gone-tomorrow prime minister, is a retired air marshal. In Egypt, the military is the ruling caste, plain and simple (they have 450,000 poor conscripts under them in the Army itself, who serve for two or three years, and whose sympathy lie with the people, and not with their generals, and who would surely have mutinied if ordered to fire on the protesters).

One reason the Army never wanted to open fire on the protesters is because, being good businessmen, they didn't want to shoot their customers. The Army makes and sells everything from dishwashers to bottled water to pots and pans and clothes. They even grow, process and sell food. They control a great deal of tourism, having turned coastal areas that their troops used to guard into resorts in which their officers have shares. The propane cylinders bought by every Egyptian household that uses gas for cooking are sold by the army.

In fact, the army's most senior man, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, 75, spends more of his time on business matters as the CEO of Egypt's Military Inc. than he does on military matters as Field Marshal. Serving also as Defense Minister, Tantawi is an old-guard Mubarak crony known among fellow officers as “Mubarak's poodle,” and if it were up to him alone, Egypt will revert back to being a military police state with sham democratic elections and a sham democratic parliament. He's strongly opposed to any social change or reform. The military man to watch for signs of a more accommodating style is the younger, seemingly more progressive Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, 63, chief of staff of the armed forces.

It will be very interesting to see if the generals are willing to open up the government for real elections, which will take political power out of their hands, since the party in their control, the National Democratic Party, has now fallen to pieces, and will be replaced by parties like El Ghad, whose leader was jailed for four years; the banned Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidates had to run as independents in the last election; and the many parties still to be born.

The government may very well be taken over by a party, or a coalition of parties, that don't exist yet, with no particular connection to the military. That could threaten the military's business interests. After all, the military wouldn't want a civilian government to open up the economy to the likes of GE and Coca-Cola to come and compete with them and get the Army into a price war with international business invading their territory and conquering their market share.

Not that the youth, in their current state of exultation, fear a military takeover, as they should, because they will have to do their revolution all over again -- what a drag -- if the Army doesn't give them the democracy they want.

Revealingly, the Army stood by and did absolutely nothing when pro-Mubarak goons attacked Tahrir Square (they've also been known to detain and even torture some protesters). So far, the revolution trusts the military more than the regime, even though the military is the regime. A prime revolutionary slogan has been: “The military and the people are one hand.”

They are decidedly not. Egypt's young men, who spend two or three years of their youth in the Army as conscripts, where they are fed, have work, and enjoy manly camaraderie, take back to civilian life a rosy perspective of the Army. They have no idea how corrupt their officers are, and how tight the Army's grip on their country is. Just because the police have been the force chosen by the elite to brutalize and oppress the people, doesn't mean that the Army elite are a swell bunch of innocent babes who shed wet tears of deep sympathy on a daily basis for the common people.

Still, the youth of Egypt are rightfully cocky about democracy's prospects. When Ahmed Sleem, an organizer from ElBaradei's group was asked what he thought about a military takeover, he said: “We know how to force them to step down. We know the way to Tahrir Square.”

16. WHO OWNS EGYPT?

A question to ask besides “who runs the country?” is “who owns the country?” It's not only the people who ran the country who became momentarily disturbed. The folks who own the country are more than a tad freaked, including the military.

This is not just a battle between labor and capital, rich and poor, young and old. It's also a battle over the country's riches. Egypt has the biggest non-oil GNP in the Middle East. Its GDP doubled between 2005 and 2009, from $88 billion to $189 billion. Yet it lost 5% of its purchasing power in 2008. In other words, the income of average folks went down. With the world’s 21st largest labor force of 37 million workers, Egypt is 136th in per capita income. Its service sector, the largest sector in the economy, has an unemployment rate of 50%. Around 40% of its people live at or near poverty, even though its value of traded shares ranks 40th in the world. If Mubarak has stolen $70 billion, as some say, he's richer than Bill Gates with his $54 billion. The Middle East business practice of hawala -- informal non-contractual financial transactions based on nothing else but loyalty and honor -- means he and his cronies have many chips to cash in, and many calls they can rely on to many central banks all over the world. Hawala can be exercised illegally in many ways: money laundering, kickbacks, price gouging, the ransacking of national treasuries. What do you think Mubarak was doing while he hung on to power? He was on the phone, trying to safeguard his billions from the hands of his people. Mubarak and his cronies are as powerful and as crooked as Goldman Sachs, and just as capable of surviving their downfall -- just like Goldman Sachs did.

It's going to be a long, hard fight for some semblance of economic justice in Egypt (easily as intractable as America's fight against Wall Street and Big Business for economic justice). The 15% raise to all public employees in Egypt is a nice gesture, but it's not going to placate Egyptians all by itself.

This is why the psychology of evolution is so crucial to follow. So far the revolution has simply shifted a few butts around on the plush sofas of the elite: not much of a change. But the masses of people themselves are different. They're not the same folks they were three weeks ago. They've tasted freedom; they've tasted power; they've re-invented themselves; they've become human in the full sense of the word. This is the new reality that the elite has to deal with, even though they're still on top. The elite themselves have changed: they've had three weeks of shitting themselves. A different elite, a different people: psychologically. That's the big change, the fundamental upheaval, the real revolution. There's been a 180-degree turn in hearts and minds.

The people cannot be scared into submission anymore. Egyptian labor has become implacably bolshie: it has flexed its muscles and felt the power of resistance against capital. As Egypt goes back to work, workers will feel empowered to stand up to their bosses. Middle managers and business owners are going to feel the heat from a suddenly proud work force who feel they've just won their country back, and will be in no mood to take any shit from their overseers.

17. THE OUTCOME: CYNICISM VS OPTIMISM

So what's going to happen? Now that the people have spoken, what acts will their words induce?

My cynical self says this: the least likely outcome is that there will be free elections in September or within a year, followed by a freely elected government that will allow free and fair elections after that. It just can't happen: there is too much privilege to protect. If that's ice-cold water on your romantic bunny-hopes of revolutionary emotion, sorry, dear reader. Revolutions seldom erupt into instant democracy. Egypt's military hasn't, for example, lifted the Mubarak's decades-old and hated state of emergency.

My optimistic self, buoyed by what happened in my home country of South Africa, says this: the military will oversee a peaceful breathing space for parties to organize themselves; for young people to go into politics and represent young people in young-people parties; for an election to happen; and for a secular coalition government to come into being, led by a moderate president who will not be a kleptocrat.

My optimistic self sings along with the great Arab poet, Nizar Qabbani, who wrote this for the next generation, after the Arabs suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967:

Arab children, 
Corn ears of the future, 
You will break our chains. 
Kill the opium in our heads, 
Kill the illusions. 
Arab children, 
Don't read about our suffocated generation, 
We are a hopeless case, 
As worthless as a water-melon rind. 
Don't read about us, 
Don't ape us, 
Don't accept us, 
Don't accept our ideas, 
We are a nation of crooks and jugglers. 
Arab children, 
Spring rain, 
Corn ears of the future, 
You are the generation that will overcome defeat.

Qabbani did not know exactly what victory the Arab children would win, but it turned out to be a victory by the biggest Arab nation of all ... over themselves.

18. THE IMMENSITY OF WHAT IS HAPPENING

We shall see if the military holds on to power -- or allows a civilian authority to rule and the country's wealth to be shared by its people. At least the Egyptian elite knows their people are upset, and will try to adapt. Meanwhile, Egyptians are more alive now than they've ever been, and ever will be. Bless them. They're having the time of their lives. Said a doctor on Tahrir Square: “If I die, it's for my country.” Let's face it: only a revolution is that immense thing: something that can be worth more to you than your life itself (or to put it in easier-to-understand shallow American terms, something totally worth giving up a fuck with Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt for).

To date, the Egyptian revolution is the 21st century's greatest moment. 2/11 replaces 9/11 as a bigger hinge and rupture of history. And a more positive one. It's youth flexing their idealism. It's 1989 in the Arab world. It's tremendously nervous-making and diarrhea-inducing for all dictators. It's instant-revolution-by-cellphone on the cheap that dislodges a regime in a matter of weeks. It's given young people all over the world a blueprint for the road to democratic power. It's a planetary turn-on. It reminds me a lot of the 60s, when Western youth broke down sexual norms and launched a sexual revolution -- and freed us all to bang each other with impunity.

In the Middle East and North Africa, dictators have their backs against the wall. Algeria says it will lift the state of emergency it declared in 1992. But the “Free Youth Movement in Algeria” organized massive demonstrations this past Saturday, February 12. Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, says neither he nor his son will run for president in 2013. But opposition groups are calling for huge protests. In Jordan, King Abdullah II booted his Prime Minister to dampen down massive protests and began talking to the opposition. And our CIA experts, clueless as they may be, now believe that our big friends, the Saudi regime, exhibit enough instability and inequality to qualify for imminent overthrow. What happens in Egypt will have a big influence: after all, with 80 million people, Egypt is bigger than Iraq (21.9m), Saudi-Arabia (25.7m) and Syria (22.1m) combined. Only Iran's population of 72m rivals Egypt's.

The Egyptian Revolution is certainly giving the moral arc of the universe, said to be very long, a rather sudden and swift kick towards justice. How inspiring, how elevating, how downright spiritual, is the immensity of a entire nation ready to change its face, its character, its very own self! If there's any chance for you to join a revolution, jump at it. You'll never live more intensely. You'll never feel better.

You need to feel better, considering the state of our own American nation, where democracy morphs day by day into plutocracy, and we seem to be going backwards about as fast as Egypt is jumping forwards -- what with our suspended habeas corpus, our predatory Wall Street that milks and bilks us, our corporations that export our jobs, our public school system funded by property taxes that shortchanges our poorest kids, our campaign-funding system that allows corporations to buy the government out from under us, and our legal system that refuses to prosecute torturers and bankster-fraudsters (the US has the biggest prison population in the world, yet not a single person from Goldman Sachs or BP is among them).

What speaks most poignantly to all us non-Egyptians, as we watch what's happening over there with a barely submerged feeling of envy (they're the nation on our planet having the most fun now), is not simply that the entire trod-on world has gained a little bounce in its step from walking like an Egyptian, and caught a little breath of what Egypt is feeling now as its citizens inhale the suddenly freer Egyptian air in deep gulps of exultation, having run the gamut of revolutionary emotions from fear and humiliation and rage to dignity and pride and exhilaration.

To put it plainly, bluntly, simply, starkly: it's not so much that we are all Egyptians now. It's that -- given our humdrum, fearful, cowardly lives -- we really wish that we actually were Egyptians now.

The Capitalist Manifesto: How to Modernize Capitalism from Feudalism to Democracy

2010-07-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

There is a specter haunting the planet. It is the specter of the failure of Western capitalism.

All that is solid -- jobs, homes, retirement savings -- melts into air. Our cock-a-hoop capitalism is staring into a pesky abyss which is either Lacan's mirror or the funky Weltschmerz of its own behind.

Yet far away in communist China, capitalism is alive and well -- maybe because China is not a democracy.

In Western democracies, capitalism is in crisis -- maybe because capitalism is not democratic.

The fact is that capitalism is a feudal system, which therefore works well in a feudal society like China.

But in modern, highly evolved democracies, capitalism is a handicap.

Why? Democracy has evolved, but capitalism hasn't. It's essentially unchanged from its 18th century origins. Capitalism is so feudal, it's almost medieval. It requires a subservience from its minions that hints at slavery, serfdom, or peonage. It grants its captains of industry the freedom to lord it over everyone else like banana-republic dictators or command-economy Kremlin bosses. It booms and busts with the fervor of a yo-yo being yanked by a tuning fork on steroids. Every so often it poops itself like a toddler sans toilet training, and sits there bawling in its own excreta until the state steps in to clean its unruly bottom.

Democracy, on the other hand, has advanced like a nimble marsupial -- maybe because democracy had an earlier start than capitalism.

Today, feudal capitalism is just a painful drag on modern democracy. A bad fit, mixing awkwardly with democracy, like sand on the beach gumming up the lubrication of mating; like original sin damning an innocent newborn.

What follows is a radical prescription to drag capitalism out of its fuddy-duddy necrosis: we're going to give it the tools to act in the sentimental spirit of humane socialism, yet retain the animal vigor of brute capitalism.

It is a simple three-point program to democratize capitalism, which will find agreement from the entire spectrum of economists -- Marxists and Keynesians alike, not to mention Schumpeterians, Hayekians, Minskyites and even out-of-favor Friedmanists. The whole bloody lot, from Adam Smith to Paul Krugman.

Now that's a mighty big tent, and you may think I'm out of my way-too-inclusive mind, but bear with me, my fellow-capitalist: your own mind is about to be turned upside down and then spun around like a tween girl at her first dance party, and you're going to love it.

Let's start with a statement that may upset you Friedmanists (as if your world hasn't been rocked enough already).

Capitalism is too irrational to be left to capitalists.

The capitalist market believes it can operate independently of the state until, in the manner of a drugged-out rock star, it chokes on its own vomit. Then, ever so patient, Papa Democracy has to spank Brat Capitalism and bail it out of yet another reckless adventure that threatens to ruin the whole family.

Attached to democracy, capitalism is as dysfunctional as wagon wheels on a Maserati.

The challenge for any democracy is to make its capitalism as democratic as it is -- to evolve capitalism into modernity, the way democracy itself has evolved out of the ancien regime into the robust mode of today's most successful states.

How? Start with the first and most fundamental question: leadership.

Who leads in democratic states? Elected representatives.

Who leads in capitalist corporations? Non-elected CEOs, appointed by boards who are sort of elected by shareholders.

If CEOs were democratically voted into office, like any other leader in a democracy, capitalism could become democratic, instead of being millstoned in autocracy -- a discordancy more incongruous than implanting a penis on a tennis ball.

Unelected CEOs don't belong in modern society: they're throwbacks to a time when father knew best, pashas were carried around on pillowed litters, and a nation saluted the Fuhrer. It's as if we've let loose a mob of little Napoleons in our midst. The most illuminating analogy for today's corporate leadership is this: our CEOs are like feudal warlords in Afghanistan.

They're all-powerful dictators. Exerting one-man rule by decree. Driven by a looter's mentality: they constantly reward themselves with untold riches, no matter how well or how badly the business is doing. They have the morality of con men. If exiled, they abscond unscathed with massive treasure jokingly called golden parachutes. While in power, they can banish thousands from the tribe in mass lay-offs, to cover for the huge mistakes they make as unaccountable dictators. Life in a modern American corporation is about as democratic as Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin. Our CEOs are today’s version of Genghis Khan.

1. HOW TO EVOLVE CAPITALISM OUT OF ITS PRIMEVAL SWAMP

To modernize capitalism, and bring it out of its outdated feudal stage, we have to start by making its warlord leaders accountable to someone else besides themselves.

CEOs have to be subjected to the democratic indignity of the vote every four years, just like the elected representatives in a democracy.

If being voted into office is good enough for the President of the United States, it's good enough for the CEO of General Motors or Citigroup or AIG.

If these CEOs were subject to the vote, General Motors and Citigroup and AIG would be thriving today instead of half-dead.

Moreover, in a fast-changing world, CEOs should also be subject to term limits -- just like we need a new US President every four or eight years, we need new CEOs every four or eight years, too.

Their hegemony needs to proscribed, because they've been on a power binge as ambitious as the esurient rapacity of Hitler, Mao, Stalin or Dick Cheney. Which has landed us in our present parlous state of living in the command economy of a Kremlin-like system run by financial banker-predators who, instead of contributing to society in any productive way, hatch vast debt pyramid schemes on the backs of the millions of credit-card holders and mortgage-holders they've created as little money spigots in order to clean them out (every US citizen is now a Wall Street ATM) -- with the final intent of going after our actual taxes, and diverting this bounty away from essential social services into their rackets.

With one big difference.

Instead of suffering under the massive Soviet incompetence (examples: Russia's old auto industry and agriculture) of some self-serving Communist apparatchik who hands out top-down orders to thousands because after years of clawing his way to the top by sucking up to a hierarchy of bosses, he's sucked up enough arrogance from them to think he knows better than anyone how to run an economy ... we're suffering under the massive American incompetence (examples: Detroit and Wall Street) of some self-serving capitalist CEO who hands out top-down orders to thousands because after years of clawing his way to the top by sucking up to a hierarchy of bosses, he's sucked up enough arrogance from them to think he knows better than anyone how to run an economy. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism, whether it lives in the USA or the USSR. So is the rank incompetence bred from flagrant arrogance.

Understand this: I've got nothing against leaders. I appreciate how invaluable a good CEO can be, and the qualities required:

1. A good CEO looks beyond dollars (profits) to people (customers), i.e. he knows he's running a customer-serving machine rather than a money-generating operation (take care of your customers and the money takes care of itself).

2. A good CEO realizes that the best use of yields in the present is to help him decide which bets to make for yields in the future, i.e. he knows he's managing an investment vehicle as well as a profit-extracting operation.

3. A good CEO grows future leaders (giving them the big opportunities as well as the big problems), i.e. he knows there's a future beyond himself.

I'm just against unaccountable leaders whose power is so entrenched, nobody would think of replacing them unless they stole into the bedrooms of every board member twice a night to pee on their bed-pillows.

The only way to curb power is to have people vote for their leaders -- whether they're your president, your governor, your mayor or your CEO.

2. WHO GETS TO VOTE FOR OUR CEOs?

Who should vote for a CEO?

It can't be the board. They are the cronies of the CEO. In fact, given their mediocre record of oversight (no better than the SEC, skunks overseeing turds), there's no reason for them to exist at all in an updated, modernized capitalism.

Some would say that shareholders should vote for the CEO. This is a notion as misguided as asking frogs to start fishing for crocodiles. The shareholders are totally removed from the day-to-day operations of the corporation. Their only interest in the corporation is that its shares should move up and that it should pay dividends. Shareholders are like the absentee landlords of yore who lived it up in town while their lands were farmed by peasants; they're like those uninvolved faraway owners who expected rent or a percentage of the harvest for doing nothing.

Who are the people with the greatest stake in the success of the corporation -- the most affected by its success or failure?

Obviously, the people employed by the corporation.

The workers. Those lowly grunts who actually do the real work of the corporation. Who get their actual nails dirty, their actual blue and white collars besmirched, their actual lower backs bent out of shape, their actual fingers carpal-tunneled by keyboards. They earn their daily bread from the corporation; its success is way more fundamental to them than to its shareholders.

The shareholders invest money in the corporation, but the workers invest something more important. They invest their lives. They invest the hours of their days. That's a bigger investment than any shareholder makes.

The shareholders merely own shares in the corporation. The workers ARE the corporation.

They are the people who should get to vote for their CEO, because he is THEIR leader, nobody else's: not the leader of the shareholders, nor the bondholders, nor the customers, nor the board. Take the President of the US: he leads the citizens of America, not the people who've bought US Treasury bonds.

3. IN DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, CEOs HAVE TO CAMPAIGN FOR THEIR JOBS

How would voting for a CEO work?

Every four years the workers vote. They choose between various people from within and outside the corporation, who put themselves forward as candidates for the job of CEO.

These candidates tell the workers how they'd do the best job for the corporation. In other words, they campaign.

The candidate with the most compelling story of future success for the corporation, and the best record of past achievement, will get the most votes from the workers. If the current CEO did a good job for the past four years, he will probably win and become a two-term CEO.

That's it.

A revolutionary idea for sure, but something that will happen for sure, because it's more commonsensical than the wreck we have now. It's too commonsensical to die, now that it exists. Maybe there'll be a hundred wrecks before this revolution happens, but it will happen. Mark my words, fellow-capitalists; mark them like the fingernails of God marked two tablets on a mythical mountaintop.

For too long, capitalism has suffered under the widely accepted notion of the dictatorship of the CEO. Like the old divine right of kings, we've had the divine right of the CEO.

This ludicrous bit of whimsy has been unquestioned for more than a century. How come? Well, the blindness of the human race to the most obvious of facts is an indelible constant of the human condition. One of the greatest minds of all time, Aristotle, saw nothing wrong with slavery. The most obvious fact, by virtue of its obviousness, has the biggest chance of escaping human awareness. That's how the divine right of the CEO has managed to blunder its wacky way across two centuries without being questioned. Well, I am questioning it now.

Forsooth and gadzooks: monarchies lost all credibility back in the 19th century, yet here we have this idiotic corollary of the divine right of the CEO still operating in the 21st century. This is more absurd than foot-binding a marathon runner. Or powering a moon rocket with a horse-drawn buggy. Or constraining a modern woman in a whalebone corset. The divine right of the CEO is a shackle on the real potential of capitalism. It is holding capitalism back, and caging it in the inefficiencies of its feudal origins. You have tinpot dictators paying themselves exorbitant wages, even when their companies lose money. This is totally inefficient. Utterly not market-friendly. Completely feudal, old-fashioned, and in need of change.

4. THE CACAPOOFINESS OF CORPORATE COLONIALISM

Also, incredibly destructive. These capitalist warlords often get nation states to start wars for their benefit -- like getting the US to overthrow democracies in South America or Africa or the Middle East, or invading Iraq (where the sole beneficiaries are Halliburton and Blackwater, with Big Oil angling for its cut after giving their Texas oil buddies Bush-Cheney a nudge and a wink to go get those oil fields at no cost to them but at a cost of a million plus lives to the Iraqis). These predator-capitalists high-handedly cross borders (like terrorists) and globalize their warlord reach into world-straddling multinational corporations, dwarfing nation states in size and power -- and with the supra-national flexibility to outsource their labor to third-world sweat shops, retail their products to first-world consumer markets, and offshore their profits to handy tax havens.

Who sanctions this globally corrupt and absolute power? Nobody but the warlord CEOs themselves, aided by the governments they buy off. They've replaced the old European state colonialism with a new corporate colonialism. They can now pollute the entire planet with toxic emissions, toxic derivatives, and toxic advertising. They colonize our minds and constrain our hearts in a gulag of the free market. Commodification has conquered the globe; its fetishism constitutes a planetary neurosis. It's almost like the spontaneity of all humanity is caged on a vast Prison Planet of the Holy Business Empire. Ironically, neither the inmates nor their warlord wardens possess the keys to launch either outside into free, fresh air. Both bourgeois capitalists and proletarian labor -- the overlords and the underdogs -- live in captivity. (Of course, the cages of the overlords have nicer furniture and greater commodes and shower curtains.)

This warlordism-gone-global is no way to run any business in an otherwise democratic state.

But when CEOs have to earn a regular vote like everybody else wishing to exert power in a democracy, all is changed forevermore -- as dramatic a change as nasty, scaly dinosaurs evolving into free-flying beautifully plumaged birds.

The corporation is changed in its very structure, because now power becomes a give-and-take two-way street -- flowing from the bottom-up as well as the top-down.

This is the first way to start modernizing capitalism: to make the CEO accountable within the corporation. When all CEOs work for their workers, they will serve their corporations best.

5. THE ETERNAL PERTINENCE OF THE ENTREPRENEUR

But what if someone starts a company and builds it up -- should someone who actually owns the company be subject to a vote?

Here's where we get to the nub of capitalism.

Also, we get to my second revolutionary suggestion to drag warlord capitalism out of the feudal age into the modernity of the 21st century. Again, we will be going deep into the fundamentals -- into the obviousness that has escaped the human brain until now.

Fundamental question two: what is capitalism good for?

Fundamental answer: only one thing -- it encourages innovation by entrepreneurs.

The entrepreneur is the only thing about capitalism that remains enduringly functional for all time. The only thing worth preserving.

An entrepreneur is one of the greatest kind of human beings there can be: someone who has a new idea and goes to bat for it full blast, promoting their enterprise with all their heart, soul, marrow, bone, blood, balls and ovaries.

Business has its millions of functionaries and worker bees, but it also has its Steve Jobs, its Richard Bransons, its Bill Gates, its Paul Newman's Owns, its Ben and Jerrys, and its Shai Agassis (google Agassi: within the next ten years, he'll be the most famous entrepreneur on the planet).

Like the Beethovens and Picassos, the Darwins and the Einsteins, the Edisons and the Berners-Lees, these brilliant flames of individuality bring the greatest joy and support to the rest of us. Entrepreneurs are the creative artists of capitalism. We could not be truly human, and grow even more human, without them.

One reason entrepreneurs do what they do, is because if their idea works out, and enough people buy it, they might be richly rewarded.

It's not the biggest reason -- far bigger reasons are their creative passion and their pride in having their idea out there working. (It is an index of the vacuity of apologists for feudal capitalism that they prioritize monetary reward over the deeper passions that drive the human heart. Beethoven didn't compose for money; Steve Jobs doesn't do what he does for money; Warren Buffet hasn't bought himself a castle in the South of France. If you think money is what drives people, you're an idiot. And if money is what actually drives you, you're worse than an idiot: you're a psychopath. Just like the bonus-psychotic, 80-hour-workweek slaves of Wall Street. This may be what's wrong with America: too many of its TV-addled citizens think they should be driven by money; they've been misled about their own nature.)

But the lure of a rich reward does help to get the entrepreneur out of bed every morning, for sure.

So nothing should be done to stifle the creative passion of the entrepreneur. This is after all the one and only good thing about capitalism -- its main driver, its beating heart, the reason why we've been slamdanced out of our subsistence lives of yore into the riches of modernity.

Entrepreneurship is a supreme value of civilization because it reflects a fundamental human value, the creative freedom of the individual.

So here's how to keep entrepreneurship alive, and yet keep capitalism accountable.

6. HOW TO MAKE ENTREPRENEURS EVEN RICHER

Say you have a new idea that could make money. If you're juiced by the entrepreneurial spirit, you start a company. It’s yours, you own it. You're the entrepreneur.

Because your idea is good, your company starts to grow. You add more employees as you make more money so that your expanding company can make you even more money.

Here's my second revolutionary proposal to modernize capitalism.

You are the owner of the company as long as your business employs under a 100 workers. You’re the dictator. You’re free to support your employees, or exploit them.

But:

The day you decide to expand to the point where you need more than a 100 workers -- the minute you hire your 101st worker -- the second you find you need to employ more than a 100 workers to expand even bigger and faster to make megabucks -- at that point, a new change kicks in.

A kind of legal French revolution.

A brandnew law of non-feudal 21st century capitalism.

This law says you now have to share ownership of the company with your workers, which I will call citizen workers from now on, because it sounds more dignified.

The minute you have more than 100 citizen workers, you have to give them 51% of your company.

That's it.

Bear with me before you lose your mind or get your knickers in a painful wedgie or split your entire brain on one little hair ... because it's getting worse, my fellow-capitalist.

After you've handed 51% of your business to your citizen workers, you and your citizen workers may decide to take the company public, but then you can offer only up to 49% of the company to outside shareholders.

Out of your share.

The shares of the citizen workers can never be alienated. They’re not even allowed to sell their shares themselves. If they leave the company, their shares go back to the company, i.e. to the other citizen workers.

In other words, the workers will always own at least 51% of their company.

So when you as the owner get to a 100 workers employed, you face an existential decision. You can decide to stay at 100 employees and be an Afghanistan warlord-type dictator. But if you want to expand to make more money on a bigger playing field, you have to change your company from a dictatorship to a democracy.

In one leap, you have to flip your company out of its feudal stage into a new, democratic future. All by yourself, as one individual, you have to do what civilization has struggled for centuries to accomplish.

Poor you. Such a weight of antiquated history on your puny little latterday shoulders. Imagine. You have to abdicate your throne and allow the peasants into your palace to share your escargots, complete with those funny escargot holders. You have to birth your own French Revolution, replete with guillotine-fierce pangs disturbing your bonny bourgeois belly. You have to storm your Bastille and overthrow yourself.

7. SHARING POWER AS WELL AS OWNERSHIP

Besides sharing ownership you also share power, because now the citizen workers get the right to vote for their leader every four years.

They will keep voting for you, the original owner, if the company does well and makes money for them. But they will vote for someone else if you start to blow it. (As the original owner, you can rule longer than the two-term limit to which a hired CEO is subject.)

If the citizen workers vote for someone else, he or she starts running the company instead of you. You still own your 49% of the shares, but you have no power anymore.

If the citizen workers decide to sell shares to the public, they can do it without your say-so. They can raise capital for the company by selling up to 80% of your 49% share of the company. The capital they raise goes to the company, not to you. You can decide to sell your 20% of your 49% share of the company in the IPO if you want to cash in.

Hold on to your horses (even if by now they've bolted to Mars). It gets worse.

Every year, if there hasn’t been an IPO, you have to give away 5% of your 49% to the citizen workers until the last 20% of it, which you can keep forever and pass on to your kids. Or sell to the citizen workers in what used to be your company, or sell to shareholders.

How's that for an ouch and a yippee in one, fellow-capitalist? An ouch for you, a yippee for your workers.

It works even better than spreading the wealth around via progressive taxation, which works pretty well; it's about spreading ownership around so wealth will be spread around accordingly to help democracy devolve power down from the elite to the plebs. (In America this has been an uphill battle -- ever since our founders rigged our government to allow the elite to stave off the power of the plebs, yet give the appearance of allowing the plebs a fair shake. America has always been a rather unequal society. The closest we ever came to equality was after WW2. FDR's 1935 Social Security made old age less humiliating; strong unions ensured a decent wage; FDR's 1944 GI Bill opened up an upper-class-only college education to regular folks; Civil Rights gave black folks a political voice; LBJ's 1965 Medicare helped the retired delay death, and US capitalism entered its Golden Age that lifted all boats. Then that amiable shit Ronald Reagan came along to make sure it lifted only yachts.)

Distribute ownership, and you distribute wealth more equally, and combat the scourge of inequality guaranteed by feudal capitalism.

Crazy, isn’t it?

But is it any crazier than what we have now? Who says it's better that shareholders own a company rather than the people who work there, the actual human beings who ARE the company? Who says it’s better to have a board-appointed CEO than one democratically elected by the workers? Who says it’s better to have outside shareholders exert some sort of control when they have never stepped foot on the factory floor and only bought the shares on the recommendation of some broker – what you might call a class of absentee landlords? What’s so logical about that?

One idea behind our 21st century capitalism is that it’s OK to be the dictator of a 100 people, but not of more than a 100. You can screw a 100 people in any orifice available, kick their butts on a regular basis like a regular despot, knock 'em downstairs or kick 'em upstairs, bust their balls or stroke their egos, but no more than a 100.

Every small business can be a dictatorship, but all big businesses have to be democracies. In fact, the workers who sign up with your dictatorship are there because they’re hoping your company will grow beyond a 100 workers into a democracy.

8. BUT ISN'T IT UNFAIR TO TAKE A COMPANY AWAY FROM ITS OWNER?

Now you may say this is all totally unfair -- taking a man or a woman’s company away from him or her and handing it to the employees simply because his or her original idea was so good it needed more than a 100 workers to exploit its full potential. Doesn’t he deserve all the money to be made from his idea? Why should these workers be able to muscle in on her profits? He’s the guy who came up with the idea. She’s the gal who took the original risk of starting a business to bring her idea to a waiting world. If we keep doing business this way, we will take all motivation away from those innovators who bring new ideas to our society and keep it growing and changing and vital.

Goddammit: who the heck are these pawns in your scheme for worldwide domination to suddenly become your kings and queens?

It’s easy to mount a counter-argument against this. Who says the guy with the great idea wouldn’t make more money for himself by giving over 51% of his company to his workers, who would now work harder and smarter because they’re working for themselves and not just for him? Isn’t this a better way to make sure that good ideas will better succeed and keep our society growing and changing and vital? And wouldn’t this system encourage natural entrepreneurs to start more than one company: to come up with one idea after the other, and start many companies, one after the other, to get their ideas out in the world -- instead of doing the first good idea they get and sticking with that for the rest of their lives?

9. TURN WORKERS INTO BOURGEOIS CAPITALISTS

Under a more democratic system of capitalism, not only are power and assets shared, but also motivation and incentive.

When everyone is an owner, behavior changes. Everyone in the company, from the CEO to the janitor, owns shares and will be thinking about how they can make more money for the company -- how they can do their job better, how they can save money for the company, how they can maximize profit. The company’s money is their money.

Isn’t that more true to capitalist ideals than it is for the workers to rely solely on a fixed wage?

My contention goes further: I say a democratic corporation will beat an undemocratic corporation run by a board-appointed CEO and owned by absentee shareholders, hands down, no problem -- as easy as milking guilt from a Catholic. It stands to reason: a company owned and run by many capitalists who actually work in the company will work more cost-consciously and more profit-mindedly and more competitively than any other.

Here's the point: turn workers into capitalists. So they act like owners instead of serfs. Take privatizing the economy to the logical extreme of putting it in the private hands of every private individual working in it.

Now the workers will work smarter and harder. The bosses will work smarter and harder. The CEO will work smarter and harder. They’re all working for each other as well as for themselves. They're all accountable to each other. They all want each other to do better, because that way they themselves will do better. They win by sharing.

Like eager beavers, like a colony of ants or bees, like a retreat of monks, like a holistic commune, like a tribe of Bushmen, like a social network, like Mother Theresa's nuns, like an Obama campaign, like Wikipedia, like a Superbowl team, like a black church, like a geek startup, like Costco, like the Civil Rights movement, like that rarest of things, a functional family, they'll not only develop a shared culture, but create something else we seldom see: a shared soul, a whole that's an exponential multiple of its parts, a business that's infused with unbusinesslike emotion, a home-away-from-home haven where humans are delighted to work and work to delight their customers, a community of semi-spiritual empowerment -- which, instead of a mission statement that looks good on paper, births a cause that repletes the soul.

This is the perfect model of a perfect company in a perfectly competitive system. Not the 19th century old-fashioned feudal slow-moving slugs we have now. The fact is that our current feudal capitalism is a miserable system that should be committed to the dustbin of history as soon as enough humans wake up to its profoundly anti-democratic ethos. Feudal capitalism is like an old dog with rotting limbs who miraculously still has a few sturdy molars left to snap at whoever questions the fact that its legs are so gangrenous it can hardly stand. Capitalism is a past-her-time non-erotic sclerotic old sex peddler with a glass eye and more lipstick on her face than a hyena has rotten meat in its intestines. Capitalism is a doddering traumatized soldier of lost fortune who still hits the deck when a baby coughs behind him. Capitalism is the pig shit from an agribusiness farm dumped in a vast lake that renders several counties unfit for human habitation.

But modernized democratic capitalism will be, like democracy itself, an exuberant marvel of human organization -- the reddest rose in the garden of civilization.

Cue the violins.

And now drop the cold water: how the heck do we make this happen? It's all very well to conjure some splendid utopia, but how do you get to a real McCoy, standing tall in the real world, hitching up his gabardine trousers?

Aha. This is where you come in, my fellow-capitalist. Arise from the fainting spell induced by my preceding warblings. Gorge yourself on some tart smelling salts. And get this: it's all going to be up to the you-and-me of the voting public to lean on our elected representatives to nudge capitalism towards modernity by enacting a law that says:

1. Every business that democratizes itself gets a two-year tax holiday.

2. Every CEO who makes democracy happen in his or her corporation within the first 10 years of the program, gets a lifetime tax holiday.

This will probably be the first time in history that a tax break for the rich makes any sense.

So now there is something noble for you to do, my fellow-capitalist. An actual social mission above and beyond your dedication to the making of moolah: start pressing your government for a payback when you democratize yourself -- and enjoy a bigger tax cut than ever imagined by those zombie puppets of predator capitalism, the GOP (aka the Greatly Outnumbered Party).

10. WHO IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS -- CEOs OR UNIONS?

If workers could vote for their CEOs today, which CEOs would survive? Steve Jobs of Apple would, for sure. But how many others?

If you’re a CEO, engage in this thought experiment: do you feel the cold breeze of democratic accountability raise the hairs on the back of your neck?

If only more of our American CEOs labored with that breeze down their necks.

If only CEOs were self-aware enough to know they're not only caging their workers, but themselves: the potential of everyone -- management and labor alike -- is locked down-and-out on the stultifying top-down feudal plantation command economy of 19th century capitalism.

If only our capitalism worked in a more democratic way.

But under our widely accepted and highly admired system, we just have to cope with the results of dictatorship-predator capitalism: cars and burgers that wreck our environment and endanger life on earth; HMOs that deny us operations that could save our lives; and CEOs who make more money in a day than their workers make in a year.

In fact, when it comes to making wise business decisions, it's a good rule to trust workers and their unions more than CEOs and their bail-out backstops in government. Way back in 1949, a pamphlet came out called “A Small Car Named Desire,” which said Detroit should not bet everything on bigness, but that many consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and ran on less gas. The pamphlet was written by the research department of the United Auto Workers Union. After Pearl Harbor, the UAW came up with a plan to convert Detroit's auto plants into arms factories before the CEOs did. When the war ended, the union had a strike at GM with demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM's board, something GM was too dumb to go for. Hey, these dirty-nailed workers are not our class, darling.

But the Union fought on, and most of the things that let workers into the middleclass -- like annual cost-of-living adjustments -- were invented by them against the wishes of the CEOs.

This UAW, whom the GOP today demonizes for Detroit's troubles, helped incubate every new, modern movement of our time. The UAW funded the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech. They funded Cesar Chavez's farm workers union. They provided their conference center in Port Huron, Michigan to the Students for a Democratic Society to write their manifesto. They helped the National Organization for Women get started. They helped fund the first Earth Day.

Tell me one CEO who's been that forward-looking, visionary and modern.

And the UAW has been agitating for national healthcare all along. If the country had listened to the UAW instead of the CEOs of our HMOs, the Big Three would've been able to save themselves the $1,500 extra in employer healthcare payments that an American car costs over what it costs Japan or Europe to make a car.

The UAW has been more business-minded and far-sighted than all the CEOs in America put together. Our workers are the lifeblood and backbone of capitalism. Unaccountable CEOs are the terrorists of capitalism. If the UAW were able to vote for their CEOs, we'd have a thriving Detroit. When all workers everywhere have the basic right to vote for their CEOs, we'll have democratic capitalism, and the US will indeed become a shining city on a hill.

We’re stuck with the capitalism we have instead of the capitalism most of us may prefer, if only we knew about it.

We're stuck with labor and management being enemies, when they should be friends working with the same purpose and motivation. We're stuck with mutual fear and hatred and rage instead of comity and community in the workplace. Workers live in fear of management, because they can be fired for any or no reason. Management lives in hatred of labor, because they think of them as costs that mess up their profits. Management wants machines for workers, and they're stuck with people. The workplace is like a dysfunctional family -- rigid, disciplinarian, abusive Dad vs. rebellious, lazy, unfocused, whiny kids -- instead of a happy family.

We have workers who try to get away with working as little as possible for as much money as possible, and managers who work as long and hard as possible for as much money as possible: not a good life for either. Workers don't have the satisfaction of being committed to their work, and managers don't have the time left over from work to be committed to the satisfaction of family life.

Call me a dreamer. But if democratic capitalism actually happened, you yourself might find that, ohmigod, there’s a dream out there worth following.

11. SOCIALIZING THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS BUT BAD FOR SOCIETY

There's one last point to cover: my third revolutionary proposal.

How do you make companies accountable to the greater society and our planet and our environment when they're driven by the profit motive?

In other words, how do you make capitalism moral?

Well, you can do it without being moral at all. Just make business accountable. The capitalist solution to this conundrum is simple: every business has to eat its own costs.

Let me explain. Take America's dying auto industry, once the most powerful in the world, that made the weapons with which we won WW2.

It makes cars and trucks. But we pay for the roads and bridges, and the traffic lights, and the polluted environment from gas emissions, and the health costs from car accidents that kill more than a million people a year.

Detroit doesn't eat its costs. It makes its profits and leaves the costs to us.

As the mantra goes, under capitalism businesses privatize profits and socialize costs. (Martin Luther King nailed it when he said capitalism is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.)

Under a democratic, accountable capitalism, businesses will have to step up and pay for their costs themselves.

This simple, business-like and non-moral proposal will make capitalism moral.

The immorality of business only happens because it has been able to outsource its costs to the rest of society.

If corporations had to pay top-dollar for polluting the environment, they would stop polluting the environment.

If tobacco growers had to pay the medical bills of those people they give lung cancer to, they might decide to switch to growing fava beans or Golden Delicious apples.

If fast-food hamburger chains had to pay for the environmental costs of the beef they use that come from cattle that fart methane into the atmosphere and cause 18% of global warming, they might invent some really tasty and healthy vegetarian meat-substitutes.

If global finance companies have to account for the social costs of imploding derivatives by paying unemployment insurance to the millions of Americans who've lost their jobs because of this reckless gambling, they might cut down on their trade in risky derivatives.

Here's what's almost Hiroshima-nuking-the-road-to-Damascus brutal and depressing: how America's financial titans managed in a few months in 2008 to socialize their complete failure at the most rudimentary capitalist risk-taking into a Fed-and-Government-Sachs bail-out that they've stink-bombed upon us unwitting taxpayers to the stench-to-heaven tune of $13 trillion -- with nary an apology or sense of shame or, even worse, without the slightest risk of being locked up forever for blatant fraud in an institution devoted to anal-rape rituals.

What can one say? Fuck me with a blowdryer. Paint me yellow and call me a banana. The mind boggles into a fog of boggledom. Extravagant analogies fail me, and I've got the market in extravagant analogies cornered. Let me try. It's as mind-begoggling as Newton espying the grandeur of gravity in a fucking apple, or Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand and holding infinity in the palm of a hand. It's as brain-befarting as a unicorn nodding so fiercely in assent to his lady love's swollen-vagina request for immediate coitus (“yes! yes! yes!”) that -- to the undying frustration of the horn in his crotch -- the horn on his forehead accidentally stabs her through the heart. It's as stomach-bechurning as a mom seeing the freedom of single womanhood waltzing out the front door as she plaintively scoops poop from her squealing baby's bottom at three o'clock in the morning while her husband snores blissfully in bed and her nipples hurt like two little fires burning her dreams of being the first violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic to ashes smoking fitfully at the bottom of a George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine.

Something like that. Anyway, you get the idea. Businesses have to eat their own costs, and bingo! capitalism becomes moral.

12. SOME OTHER STUFF THAT WOULD BE NICE TO GET DONE

Of course there are some other moral things to be done:

1. The way the factory farms of agribusiness treat animals is absurdly cruel and monstrously evil -- caging living creatures together as tightly as skeletons in a mass grave, so confined that beaks have to be snipped and tails clipped to stop them from tearing each other to pieces in claustrophobic rage and sorrow. This has to be addressed by special legislation. One day we will surely stop eating our genetic cousins, and then this legislation won't be necessary. Meanwhile, in America alone, livestock production causes 55% of soil erosion, needs 37% of all pesticides and 50% of all antibiotics, releases 33% of the bad nitrogen and phosphorus going into our surface water, and dumps cancer and heart disease on millions of people. Eighteen percent of all greenhouse emissions in the world come from methane-farting livestock. The sooner we stop eating red meat, the better for our health and our planet. Agriculture should anyway be returned to small farmers all over the world, since subsidized agribusiness doesn't do much to solve world hunger, which is the big moral problem of our time (facts to chew on: a billion humans are hungry to the point of famine; two billion people depend on the food grown by 500 million small farmers in developing countries; these farmers' debt burdens have driven 150,000 Indian farmers to suicide). It can only be solved if each country grows its own food, and maybe if most regions and areas and cities and towns and hamlets and garrets and even most families grow their own local food in their own back garden lots, and apartment dwellers grow food on their window sills and rooftops. Flying food around the world pollutes the planet. (Gardening is the best hobby in the world: if our kids grew up nurturing nature, waiting for fluffy clouds to water seedlings into pretty flowers and colorful veggies, we'd be a nicer, kinder, better world.)

2. What about taxation, so hated by the Reaganauts and the Thatcherites? It has to become heavily progressive again, like it was before Reagan was put in charge by a cabal of Californian CEOs and ruined the Golden Age of American Capitalism 1945-1970 when the middleclass expanded dramatically and a family could live on one paycheck and CEOs didn't pay themselves 300 to 500 times what their workers made. And there should be a tax on all financial transactions.

3. Human rights need a bit of looking at, too, especially equal rights for women. You wouldn't want your sister to grow up in an Arab or African or Asian country. Oppressing women is an economic cost on society, perhaps the biggest cost currently preventing the world from becoming a capitalist paradise. It halves the potential of an economy. The rights of all humans should be expanded in our democracies, plutocracies and dictatorships -- to include the inalienable right of everyone to food, health, shelter, legal and military protection, education and free expression. It may be that all those goods and services should be provided by the state, for free, out of our collective taxes. These rights may be too vital to be left to the machinations of the private sector, too precious to be ruled by the profit motive. It looks like agriculture and finance -- the food that fuels humans, the credit that fuels business -- may be in need of either government takeover or intrusive regulation to steer them away from too-big-to-fail-or-function monopolistic practices in the West.

Feudal capitalism breeds monopolies -- Microsoft and Google are the latest examples of big business crowding out small businesses -- and government's job is to break them up when they happen, and to prevent mergers when bankers and CEOs drool at the hefty fees involved and forget that mergers only work for their short-term pocketbooks but never for any actual long-term business prospects. Not even the omnipotences of the Christian, Islamic and Hindu gods spliced into one Supergod know what the government was thinking when they forced Bank of America to swallow Merrill Lynch and give themselves years of merger heartburn.

4. The financialization of the American economy is a travesty of common sense. Casino capitalism (as opposed to value-producing capitalism) is a waste of human effort. It's a toss-up whether the creation of money (debt) should be left to banks, the government, or to an independent supra-agency (akin to the Supreme Court in the legal system) with the power to sentence to anal rape all those economic war criminals -- banks, brokers, private-equity firms and hedge funds -- who leverage themselves beyond a legal allowance of say 12:1, or give themselves bonuses based on a year's deals instead of five or 10 years' efforts, or spend more than 30% of their capital on gambling with paper assets instead of backing actual businesses that produce real goods and services.

As for the goddam Fed, it should be made accountable to somebody -- perhaps the President. It's the most undemocratic invention ever, created and staffed by banks to oversee banks, giving one man the authority to throw around trillions.

As for the rich, they should be forced -- yes, fucking FORCED -- to use their wealth productively instead of hoarding it in hedge funds. All that money is just sloshing around instead of being productively invested to start new businesses.

Personally I see no place for the gambling of securitization and credit-default swaps in a healthy capitalism. Heard about use value and exchange value and surplus value? Let me introduce you to the value of credit-default swaps: Vegas value. Credit-fault swaps are about spreading risk so far and wide, the whole system is at risk. Look at the numbers: there are $63 trillion of CDS's out there. The Chinese would have to make toy fart balloons for a million years before they'd get up to that Vegas value. These toxic viruses were invented in 1997; before that the world got along fine. What the hell is the raison d'etre of these financial weapons of mass destruction? A CDS is betting that a party will default on their obligation. Hey, let's bet on the fact that we're fuckups. What kind of a system bets on its own failure? This is not the creative destruction of capitalism; it's the destructive destruction of capitalism. It's betting that capitalism will default, which it obligingly does, seeing as its practitioners are willing to bet it will.

While we're at it, I don't see much use for private banks either. Obviously they can't do their jobs; they'd rather speculate than finance businesses. The state runs schools, the police, the army, and should run health. Why shouldn't it run banks as a public utility, and stick to the boring but healthy financing of homes, cars, education and business (instead of reckless gambling with “financial instruments,” a euphemism for Vegas chips)? Just the job for a boring government bureaucrasy, I should think. The government is the solution, not the problem. The greatest advance of the last 30 years, the Internet, was invented by the government. Against the excesses of capitalism, there is only one defense: the nation state.

5. The militarization of the American economy is ridiculous. It must mean one of two things: either we're the biggest bullies in the world, or the biggest sissies. Our government spends more than half our tax dollars -- the so-called discretionary spending part -- on the Pentagon, which is more than the rest of the world spends on its armies combined. We have over 800 overseas military bases. For what? What is the Department of Defense defending us against? Sensible spending of our money? Why aren't they called the Department of Attack? Talk about rampant socialism: the military-industrial-Congressional complex is simply a government handout to corporations who make things we don't need, to do things we shouldn't do. What a circus: weapon systems sophisticated enough to fight alien invaders from the Planet of the Borgs or Klingons but useless against insurgents armed with nothing more than AK-47s, IUDs and the joy of killing Americans; cost overruns running over the moon and back; workers making guns instead of butter, beds, blenders and bulldozers. This boondoggle has no connection with capitalism: it's command-economy Soviet-style communism in action.

6. It may also be a fair legal point to make everyone in a corporation -- workers and management alike -- personally responsible for any harm the corporation causes, instead of moving legal obligations over to the corporate entity, which is a way of escaping personal responsibility.

7. And we may have to get used to the fact that there is a limit to growth -- that developing economies need it, but developed economies don't -- and that the solution to overproduction is to stop stimulating demand, and for all of us to seek happiness in our personal lives instead of in junky stuff. GNH over GNP (gross national happiness rather than gross national product). Research shows that beyond a minimum point of material security, more money makes nobody happier. Moreover, growth by polluting corporations has pitched our only planet into becoming unfit for human life by the time our grandchildren bear children, which should make us all desperately unhappy unless clean, green energy becomes our universal #1 agenda of all time -- a challenge bigger than capitalism itself, that only a modernized capitalism can face. Current capitalism -- caged in its extractive and non-sustainable stage -- caused this problem, and is bound to lose this fight.

8. What to do about our elite? You can't trust them from one generation to the next. Bush Sr was a fairly responsible president with a sense of noblesse oblige. Yet he raised a son who blackened the family name forevermore, plunged the US into two unnecessary wars, stood by helpless while the sea washed an American city away, dug the economy into a grave of debt, buried the GOP under the ideological rubble of absurd unreason, and sanctioned torture. What can one say? That Bush Sr was a terrible parent? That Bush Jr was one exceptionally dumb puppet? That Bush Sr made the monstrous mistake of entrusting his fratboychick to That Really Bad Uncle Cheney? It's a drama out of Sophocles by way of Ionesco.

Like the poor, the elite will always be with us. Privilege breeds entitlement. Entitlement breeds indifference. Indifference breeds scorn. Scorn breeds condescension. Condescension breeds pride. Which comes before a fall.

There's just no getting round the vicious circle. Privilege corrupts. Total privilege corrupts totally. The poor are said to leech on society, but the privileged are full-bore vampires. The bloodlust of our vampire elite is as rampant as a trillion ticks on heat, and can barely be bottled up by democracy. Our income inequality, now back to Gilded Age proportions, is the direct result of the usurious greed of our elite. I don't know what happens at elite universities, but obviously they don't know how to teach their students -- the future leaders of our democratic yet capitalist nation states -- the first thing about social responsibility. Maybe we should make this an entrance requirement to any Ivy League college: go work as a community organizer in some urban ghetto for a year first. America has plenty to choose from. Rub the noses of the elite for a good year of daily exposure in the downer of extreme poverty, and they might emerge with half a heart and a moral compass that points more or less north. (Either that or a No-Child Policy for all millionaires.)

13. EVERT'S THREE-POINT PRACTICAL PLAN FOR MODERNIZING AND HUMANIZING CAPITALISM

These eight points, although important, are all supplemental considerations when it comes to the urgent business of discouraging capitalism from choking on its obvious contradictions like a teenager risking accidental death for a bigger orgasm by masturbating himself with one hand while strangling himself with the other. The fundamentals are really simple, and summed up in Evert's three-point plan for modernizing capitalism and giving it a human face:

1. Any CEO has to earn his job by winning the democratic votes of his corporation's workers for a four-year term, with an eight-year term limit.

2. Any business will be owned by the founder in perpetuity or until it employs more than a hundred employees, after which ownership passes over to the employees.

3. Any company has to eat its own costs.

This is how capitalism can be saved from itself. Three simple, practical suggestions. The sort of thing the granola-sincere but mutton-headed Left and New Left and Marxist Left and the Port Huron statement and social democrats and democratic socialists and assorted Pinkos and Trotskyites and The Fabian Society and George Orwell and Raymond Williams and Old and New Labour and The New Statesman and liberals and progressives and the Seattle Battlers and The Nation and Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and Pete Seeger and Billy Bragg have been looking for, ever since Proudhon's “property is theft” and Marx's “class struggle” and “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” -- but cannot find because they're more epiphanied by theory than praxis: in other words, more interested in pamphleteering utopias than rolling up their sleeves and organizing change on the ground in the world of real people with mouths to take in food and rear ends to crap it out. Armchair activists can be like the philosophers: they often interpret the world in order to leave it unchanged.

That's why my Capitalist Manifesto really takes off from where the Communist Manifesto took off (five of its famous 10 points are still valid) -- a manifesto that certainly changed a good part of the world in surprisingly horrible ways, including many sharp minds in the unchanged parts. Listen, I know. Capitalism is the opium of the bourgeoisie. But we're stuck with it like we're stuck with the irritating biology of two genders: it's the system that came out on top. Marx didn't understand that capitalism could be democratized instead of withered away along with the state, because although he understood capitalism better than anyone ever, he didn't quite grock democracy like we do (even though most of our democracies are really sort-of-benign plutocracies, except for the one model of the most humanely progressive social organization in history so far, the Nordic exception -- also exceptional for being the highest-taxed AND most competitive economy on earth).

My Capitalist Manifesto posits the sort of stuff that the World Social Forum in South America is groping towards (though soiling a “Manifesto” with the moniker “Capitalist” would offend them). In fact, we have to look to Latin America of all places if we want to find the first green seeds of a modernized capitalism sprouting their delicate, cutesy, adorable, teensy flowery heads.

Today's feudal capitalism cannot stand. It is just too old, too 19th century, too stultifying, too deadening, too unfair, too unequal, too costly, too amoral, too demonstrably the dumbfuckest of all dumbfuckery in the history of the dumbest dumbfuckeduppedness of all dumbfuckable dumbfuckosity.

Capitalism is the dinosaur in our midst.

It's not as if it can't change. It's only been around since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. If you think of the entire history of humankind as one day, capitalism has been around for two minutes.

14. NOW IS THE HOUR

There's nothing particularly natural in human nature about capitalism. It's just another economic system that began in England in the 18th century and spread everywhere, and it's been under constant change and challenge since then, with labor laws and the workweek and all sorts of innovations being forced upon it, mostly by workers in opposition to management, and by great new technologies, like the media and the internet. Yet it has not shed its most dysfunctional characteristic -- the labor-management, worker-boss struggle (that Marx figured could be solved by a revolutionary antithesis when all it needs is a synthesis with a little democracy).

Still, things have moved along somewhat. Today's capitalism isn't quite the Seventh Circle of Hell it was when it started out, with children toiling in unhygienic factories for seven days a week, 14 hours a day.

Yet it's still a gazillion miles away from halfway perfection.

Capitalism shares Islam's problem of being mired in a dogma-blighted Dark Age. Read the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages if you want to see how dark. Like Islam, capitalism has not had an Enlightenment, nor a Reformation, nor a Revolution, nor an Age of Reason to help it enter modernity. Capitalism is a selfish greedy hungry whining baby of evolution that needs to grow up. It's an aging lion full of cancerous sores that smells so bad, the young lions can't stand to go near him to oust his stinking ass. We need a new way of thinking about work and workers and markets and production and demand and GDP and arbitrage and leveraged buyouts: freeconomics, not economics. You've got to excuse me here, but you may have noticed: Freedom is my thing. (Responsibility is my other thing.)

It's not markets that should be free, but people.

It's not the freedom of markets that count, but the freedom of people.

It's more important that people be free than markets.

For that to happen, capitalism has to change and become democratized. This will cause an enchanting ripple-effect beyond itself: a democratized capitalism will make democracies themselves more democratic -- as democratic as they should be. Democracy works -- via the vote, freedom of speech, the rule of law, the right to private property, progressive taxes, a social safety-net, and time-tested institutions -- to guarantee the well-being of its citizens, and to give all of them an equal opportunity at achieving their full potential. America doesn't do that: our income inequality grows by the hour; our social mobility is worse than the UK and France, two aristocracy-top-heavy countries. The US is a failure as a democracy because its capitalism is not democratic.

Let's raise the cry: Democracy in all things -- even in capitalism!

We can't have this undemocratic beast of feudal warlord capitalism operating in our democracies, and often making us all miserable, when -- with the three changes I've outlined here -- capitalism can make us all happy.

The time has come for real change. Now is the hour to start working and agitating and demonstrating and protesting and flash-mobbing and publishing and blogging and networking and linking and emailing for a fundamental mutation in our working lives.

Capitalists of the world, catch up! You have nothing to lose but your cages.

Barack Obama Is A Big Fat Fox News Toady Coward -- And So Are We

2010-07-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

So that right-wing creep Andrew Breitbart, who specializes in feeding tapes to Faux News that have been edited to fit in with his wacko narrative that progressives are more crooked or nuts or racist than him, comes up with his latest con.

1. BUTT ME NO BUTTS

He releases a tape to show that the folks at the NAACP are racist hypocrites. Why does he do this? Well, the NAACP had the temerity to ask the Tea Party to get rid of racists in their midst, which they started doing (Tea Party rallies have featured posters of Obama with a bone through his nose as a witchdoctor and slogans that say "The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's Ovens").

Let me be clear: Breitbart is to journalism what a warthog's butt is to Einstein's mind.

So what happens? The NAACP attacks the speaker on the Breitbart tape, US Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, who was telling a story of how she changed her mind 24 years ago when, in her job to help black farmers, these poor white farmers asked her for help, and she didn't put her full force towards helping them, but passed them on to a white lawyer, and when the lawyer did nothing for them, she came to realize that what she did was about helping poor people, the have-nots against the haves, no matter what color they are, and she fought for them like crazy after that (this is a lady whose father was murdered in 1965 by a white man who was never charged).

The Breitbart tape was edited to just show the beginning of the story about how Sherrod felt uncomfortable about helping white farmers, and the Breitbart tape had a title card that said this happened while she was working for the USDA ... all to give the impression that she was a racist, and that the NAACP people listening to her were racists.

That's what Breitbart does; he's a typical rightwing smear machine, a throwback to the McCarthy era. He diarrhees his poison like an elephant who went Neanderthal on a field of blueberries.

So what does Sherrod's boss USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack do, and what does the White House do? They fall for Breitbart's crap, and insist that Shirley Sherrod be fired before the Glenn Beck Show can attack them that day on Faux News.

Funny thing is, Glenn Beck ends up defending Sherrod and attacks the White House for firing her.

Because meanwhile CNN and Rachel Maddow have gotten hold of the white farmer and his wife, now deep in their 80s, who say that Shirley Sherrod went beyond the beyond to help them for two years and saved their farm and couldn't have been more helpful, and they became good friends, and Shirley Sherrod says hello to them on TV, and tells them, now that she has the time, she wants to come and visit.

Then the NAACP apologizes because, they say, they were "snookered" by Breitbart and Faux News.

Snookered my ass. Breitbart's tapes about Acorn were exposed as total BS. So why did the NAACP, on Breitbart's "evidence", react with an attack before asking the woman herself about it, or at least waiting to view the full tape?

2. A MAD RUSH TO INJUSTICE

We know who Breitbart is. Some hippie banged his GF when he was in high school and the wound has never healed; he's still trying to get even. In earlier times, when journalists fabricated stuff, they got thrown out of the profession, and banished from the media, but now you get a platform all over cable news for being a lying blowhard of a scumbag.

The bigger question is this:

Why was Vilsack and the White House in such a mad rush to fire Shirley Sherrod before the advent of the Glenn Beck Show that day, insisting that she pull her car over and submit her resignation on her Blackberry? Not giving her a chance to explain anything?

Here's why: the White House and Obama are scared poop-less of the right-wing noise machine. Obama has made such a fetish all his life of charming the pants off white people -- starting with his grandparents who sacrificed everything to get him into the best private high school in Hawaii, and ending with his charm assault on the US electorate in 2008 -- that now, when he's charmed his way into the highest office in the land, he still bends over backwards to keep up his post-racial BS by taking the criticism of Breitbart and Glenn Beck and Faux News seriously.

3. DON'T BLAME THE TROOPS FOR THE GENERAL'S MISTAKES

If Obama didn't do this personally, then someone on his staff did, because that is the atmosphere of cowardice about race and everything else that Obama has instilled in his White House and his administration.

It doesn't matter if Obama only heard about this so late that he had to make a late-night call to Vilsack to reconsider, who has now apologized and offered Sherrod a new job. You can't blame the troops for the general's mistakes (the secret police in Communist Russia operated under Stalin's orders, even though the Russian people thought that if Stalin knew what was going on, he'd stop it).

Any rot emanates from the top. The cowardice of the White House starts with Obama. He gave his top job of White House Chief of Staff to Blue Dog enabler Rahm Emanuel. He gave his top economic jobs to economic war criminal Larry Summers who made sure derivatives were unregulated under Bill Clinton, and to Wall Street toady Tim Geithner, who made sure that Goldman Sachs got 100 cents on the dollar from what AIG supposedly owed them, and then tried to hide this from Congress. These three anti-progressive Wall Street bastards sure weren't the change that his supporters voted for.

Obama's cowardice in making those appointments (instead of having someone like Joseph Stiglitz on his economic team) is a cowardice that infects his entire administration. Obama has spent more time courting the right wing than his own progressive base. He might call it inclusiveness; I call it cowardice, a cowardice that springs from political calculation. Many years ago, when he started his career, he calculated that he had to become a credible black man, because his ease with white people raised suspicion among blacks. So he became a community organizer among poor black people, became a Christian in a black church, and married a black woman (his girlfriend at Columbia was white). A friend tells me his nickname at Harvard was "Mr. President," because his ambition was that nakedly obvious. Obama is a man whose sincerity is calculated. That doesn't make his sincerity bogus; merely calculated. With Obama, principles and calculation go hand in hand, like with any politician.

4. NO HEADS WILL ROLL

Now that the Shirley Sherrod fracas has been exposed as the high-tech lynching of a good woman, what is Obama going to do?

My guess is, not all that much. I'd be surprised if any heads roll. General McCrystal had to malign Joe Biden openly in print before Obama fired him.

Sherrod herself asked what her grandchildren would think if they heard that the first black Agricultural Director was fired by the first black president.

Mind you, I still think Obama is a better president than any of the candidates supplied by the reckless "Cut-Taxes-of-the-Rich-and-Kick-the-Middle-Class-Now-That-They're-Down" GOP. These are the guys who apologized to BP and want to run the Bush-Cheney playbook again. The gap between them and reality is wider than the gap between Nelson Mandela and Lindsay Lohan. Their dumbfuckery is greater than all the dumbfuckery of history put together in the totality of the immensity of all dumbfuckosity to the most infinite dumfuckallity of desperately dimwitted dumbfucked dumbfuckelosity. Let's face it, the Bush-Cheney presidency was the most dysfunctional government since Caligula, who made his horse a senator. Just think of the GOP's presidential aspirants, all bad jokes in a John Cleese sketch about stumblebum politicians: John Flip-Flop McCain, Sarah Dumbass Palin, Mitt Suck-Up Romney, Newt Big-Lie Gingrich and Jeb Right-Wingnut Bush. The bar they set is lower than the one established by BP semi-CEO Tony Wayward, who in his Congressional testimony, was such an evasive BS merchant, an irate Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla asked him: "Is today Thursday, yes or no?”

5. WHAT SHOULD THOSE OF US DO WHO STILL LOVE AMERICA?

What are we to do, those of us who still love our country enough not to be so un-American as to give rich people more tax cuts when so many of them are shielding their money from the IRS in Swiss banks? In 2007 Goldman Sachs paid 1% taxes; how much did you pay?

It is becoming increasingly evident that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party should do something bigger besides making sure that Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman get thrown out of office ASAP: they should primary Obama in 2012. Not that a primary candidate would win. But Obama has to be scared into growing a spine. He has to be reminded who voted for him (the minute he walked into the White House, he acted as if the 13 million email addresses of his young supporters did not exist).

FDR had a spine. LBJ had a spine. Obama does not, even though he has done more good than Bill Clinton ever did. By 2014, the health insurance industry will not be able to kick out people with a pre-existing condition, although it may be too late to save my friend's brother who was diagnosed with terminal cancer this year. But this one little thing in the healthcare reform bill will actually SAVE LIVES. (Of course, the bad Obama things go on forever, from not closing Guantanamo to the Afghan War where Obama is backing corrupt opium warlords against non-corrupt religious wingnuts because of some asshole Petraeus COIN theory, instead of getting the hell out.)

However, in the healthcare reform debate, Obama did not fight for the public option. He kept mentioning that he favors it to keep the industry “honest,” but when push came to shove on that issue, he and Rahm were MIA. Obama only ever fights when he knows he's got the votes. He NEVER fights when he thinks he's going to lose.

He thinks losing for a principle will make him look bad or weak. That is not what leadership is about. That's not what change is about. That's what cowardice is all about.

In this latest political brouhaha, the White House and Obama have established their credentials of cowardice for all to see.

Which is ironic, in view of the fact that Obama is the best president we could possibly have now, even though he is hobbled by a GOP who held up unemployment insurance because they think it encourages people to stop looking for work. This makes it all the more of a pity that Obama kowtows to the likes of Breitbart, Glenn Beck and Faux News. If you're going to be a coward, you should at least choose worthier boogiemen.

6. THE PROBLEM IS NOT JUST OBAMA, IT'S YOU AND ME

It's not just Obama who's the problem. It's you and me and the people next door. We've been taking it up the posterior from Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness and Wall Street, all of them subsidized by our tax dollars. They love big government when it is subsidizing them. But when middleclass or poor people need a cut of the pie, suddenly government is “intruding on our lives” and our wonderful “free market” is being “regulated” to death. We all know what the “free market” is: it's the rigged market where the casino capitalists of Wall Street can make 40% of corporate profits in one year and small businesses die like flies and subsidized big business exports all our jobs to slave labor outfits in other countries.

A majority of Americans have fallen for the bizarro narrative constructed by our elite. It started with Ronald Reagan, who lowered the top marginal tax rate from where it was at 60% to a ridiculous 28% right after he took office, and there was talk of wealth “trickling down” from the top to the bottom. Yeah, sure, if you believe in trickle down, I've got a bottle of pee labeled lemonade for you to share with your loved ones. Under Bush Two trickle down morphed into gusher up from the poor to the rich, and it is this that the GOP is fighting to continue. Another thing about Reagan: he's the guy who started the whole tradition of vilifying black women that now happened under Obama, when Ronnie picked on "welfare queens" as the America's prime villains.

Whereas before Reagan, a regular guy could work for General Motors all his life and afford a home for his family and retire with dignity on one salary, suddenly and mysteriously it all changed after the Reagan tax cut, by the most bizarre coincidence ever in the economic history of humankind, inexplicably and miraculously, to the point that today most middleclass couples struggle to get by on two salaries. Ask a member of the elite what's going on when he turns off his golden faucet and opens his $6,000 shower curtain, and he'll tell you that in the “free market,” there are winners and losers. Yeah, sure. In our “free market” the banks get to borrow millions from the Fed at 0.2% interest and then go play with it. My granny with Altzheimers can make money on that. And they say the people at Goldman Sachs are smart. If they're so smart, how come they ran crying like babies to Congress to bail them out with our tax dollars? If they're so smart, why do they need a rigged market to make money? Goldman Sachs were about to go under like Lehman Brothers because there was a run on them. Believe me, Goldman Sachs is way, way dumb. They're just not quite as dumb as the other assholes on Wall Street, who have their jobs because they're so useless, Daddy sent them to Wall Street because that's where the dumbass gentlemen C kids of the elite can sell crooked derivatives to their contacts running pension funds. Wall Street is a protected reservation for the disabled offspring of the elite. And these are the entitled bastards who've bought Congress wholesale, who were the biggest contributors to Obama's campaign, and whose lobbyists write our laws.

7. THE BS OF MORNING IN AMERICA

For Reagan's re-election campaign, the elite hired the advertising genius Hal Riney. Riney came up with the brilliant “Morning in America” campaign, and that's when our elite realized they could control the narrative and the voice of American populism with prime BS. They went ahead and bought up all the media properties, and changed the laws so they could destroy all diversity of media in every big city.

The result? Today, after constant propaganda about the “free market” and government “takeover,” most Americans are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. We love the guys who are screwing us, even a vulgar shithead like Donald Trump that I wouldn't allow near my dinner table for fear of barfing before I got to the soup. We non-elite Americans have only two options, to suck dick or take it up the Hershey tunnel, and we're happy to pick one or the other; some of us even like to switch hit between oral and anal. We rant and rave about the fat cats on Wall Street, but we don't move our money out of the “too big to fail” banks like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and into small community banks and credit unions.

The lower-earning 80% of Americans have to share 15% of the shrinking American pie, yet the latest incarnation of populist Americans, the Tea Party folks, who are older, wealthier Republicans, are saying that spending is out of control (on Social Security, NOT on subsidies for big business or on wars; by them, it's OK if we blow trillions on whacking Arabs who had nothing to do with 9/11, but hell, we've got to cut Social Security, it's the “responsible” thing to do). These Tea Party deaf-dumb-and-blind humans say the government is “taking over” our lives with “social engineering” and that Obama is a “socialist.” They represent a typical section of the petit bourgeoisie, who have traditionally been more scared of the classes below them than of the upper classes who are shafting them along with everyone else.

The whole charade is more absurd than Eugene Ionesco's play “Rhinoceros.” While we're burning and our elite is fiddling, what are the Tea Party people doing? They're complaining about the quality of the firewood.

America has lost its mind and keeps losing its mind. In Europe they're coming down hard on the banks and on the outsize bonuses that inspired the reckless behavior that led to meltdown.

In America, we're still right behind the Wall Street mantra of IBGYBG: “I'll be gone and you'll be gone, so let's make the deal and let the suckers pay in the end.”

And some known masters of supreme assholicity, like Andrew Breitbart, Faux News and Glenn Beck, have the White House so poop-scared they're prepared to throw a good woman under the bus. At this point their bus has to be bigger than Sarah Palin's mouth to contain all the good people they've thrown under it.

No amount of apologizing can excuse their first reaction of utter cowardice in the face of a known liar's fake threat.

Gadzooks and forsooth, folks. The sane mind boggles. But, but and but again: there's more to this than just another political flap.

Obama the coward reflects the prevailing ethos driving all of us: we are a nation of cowards. Until we show some spine, we shouldn't expect to see any from Obama.

Government Isn't The Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism Of Al Qaeda, BP And Goldman Sachs -- by Adam Ash

2010-07-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

Today there are three forms of terrorism threatening the world: political, financial and environmental terrorism. These three forms of terrorism are responsible for the destruction of human lives, livelihoods, property and the environment to a degree that rivals the ravages of war.

All three forms are executed by global, private-enterprise, non-state agents. Our inch-deep media have bestowed the moniker of terrorism on only one of these forms -- the political-religious Al Qaeda variety -- while leaving the other two off the hook.

This is a little like calling Ted Bundy a crazy serial killer and Jeffrey Dahmer a highly sensitive connoisseur of human protein.

Just consider the many attributes these three forms of terrorism have in common. All three are partly funded by tax dollars -- via tax credits and subsidies, tax-payer bail-outs, and taxpayer-funded wars that serve as recruitment drives for political terrorists. All three expound a crazed fundamentalist faith affirming the rectitude of their respective causes. All three feel entitled to huge rewards for their destructive behaviors. All three leave it up to regular folks to clean up after them. All three are unapologetic about their activities (adding insult to injury, some may issue a belated apology to their victims). And all three display a bizarre indifference to human suffering, despite their rhetoric to the contrary.

Moreover, all three forms of terrorism have been enabled by one gaping sinkhole in the social fabric: they appear to have been aided, abetted and promoted by a lamentable lack of government oversight. In all three cases, the problem isn't too much government: it's too little government.

Here's a brief recap of the three forms of terrorism and their main achievements so far.

Political terrorism. Achievements: the death of 2,976 Americans in NYC on 9/11, and many other deaths in London, Madrid, Bali, India, and Iraq. Motive: anger at America's interference in the Middle East, including US backing of Israel against Palestinians and support of repressive Arab regimes, and US wars against Islamic states. Main agent of terrorism: Al Qaeda. Weapons: airplanes, suicide bombs, car bombs, IEDs, websites.

Financial terrorism. Achievements: Loss of 100 million jobs worldwide. Millions suffering from food insecurity. Wrecked economies. Many small business closings. A great loss of family homes. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: Goldman Sachs. Weapons: speculative bubbles, debt securitization, unsafe derivatives, campaign contributions, regulatory capture, bad mortgages.

Environmental terrorism. Achievements: Bhopal, Exxon Valdez oil spill, Nigerian oil spills, Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: BP. Weapons: unsafe drilling practices, indifference to worker safety, 1960s clean-up technology, useless contingency plans, campaign contributions, takeover of regulatory agencies, misinformation about climate change, managerial indifference to risk and the environment.

Now let's take a look at the three main agents of terrorism in turn and see what government should be, but isn't, doing about them. In this order: Goldman Sachs, Al Qaeda and BP.

1. GOLDMAN SACHS AND WHAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE, BUT ISN'T, DOING ABOUT THEM

You are a victim of Goldman Sachs terrorism because of the loss of your job or house, or a hole in your retirement plan, or because you know somebody who has suffered these disasters. But you may not know this: when Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street terrorists brought about deregulation, they also brought about the deregulation of future option contracts made by farmers to guarantee themselves a future price for their crops. Before deregulation, the price of food was subject to supply and demand. But once the market in food future options was deregulated, Goldman Sachs had a casino going where they could bet on derivatives based on food. In 2006, Goldman Sachs and others abandoned the tanking housing casino and stampeded into food derivatives. Result? The supply and demand of food stayed the same, but the supply and demand of food derivatives shot through the roof. Here's a quote from Johann Hari whose July 2, 2010 article How Goldman Gambled On Starvation in The Independent exposed this scam:

“At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people -- mostly children -- couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it 'a silent mass murder', entirely due to 'man-made actions.'

"Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. 'My children stopped growing,' a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. 'I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died.'”

Do the financial terrorists at Goldman Sachs care? Of course not. They live in a self-blown bubble that isolates them from the catastrophes that their actions inflict on others. It's a habitat that's actually bigger than just Wall Street; it also includes Washington.

The ethos prevailing inside this bubble is very weird. First off there is a strange and stubborn adherence to a fundamentalist faith -- the so-called “efficient market hypothesis” -- despite all evidence to the contrary. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the stickiness of the Al Qaeda brand of Muslim fundamentalism. The big difference is that the Al Qaeda worldview springs from the teachings of a prophet who died centuries ago. The prophet of the Goldman Sachs fundamentalists died in 2006. His name was Milton Friedman and he got the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976. Today he deserves The Tea Party Prize for The Most Deluded Free Market Ideologist Of All Time. Myself, I would give him The Adam Ash Raspberry Award for Wrecking More Lives Than Rasputin.

Other Koranical texts include Atlas Shrugged by the pioneer Tea Party nut Ayn Rand, and the rather excellent Road to Serfdom by ur-libertarian Friedrich von Hayek, who didn't live long enough to see how destructive capitalism can be when it's unbridled and unregulated. Or how toxic financial terrorism can be compared to the brilliant entrepreneurial capitalism of a genius like Steve Jobs -- a guy whom Von Hayek would've loved as a far better role model for his ideas. The creepiest contemporary pamphleteering for the weird and noxious religion of Goldman Sachs-style financial terrorism happens on the editorial pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal (Murdoch also owns Fox News, a great embarrassment to his children, but it makes too much money for Rupert to deep-six it).

There are other curious elements in the terrorist profile of your basic Goldman Sachs group-think hive-mind of bizarro bankster terrorists: a self-perpetuating smugness, a marrow-deep feeling of entitlement, and a megalomaniac hubris.

"We are the smartest guys in the room. We don't need no stinking regulations. We are the free market. We know what's best for the world, because whatever is best for us is best for the world. Heck, in the words of our CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, we're just bankers 'doing God's work.'

"We can package securities into financial instruments that are, in the words of our own Fabulous Fabrice Tourre, 'monstrousities,' but heck, we make a fortune on them. We can make money out of what we know to be 'shitty deals' with our customers because if they want to be our suckers, that's their lookout. We will package a deal with a hedge fund manager who wants to bet against the product we'll sell for him, and we will let him choose the junk inside those securities without telling our customers that the junk was chosen by someone who is betting against the product they're buying.

"We have no idea why the SEC is suing us about this. We're utterly innocent and will fight this crap. After all, we sold our products to sophisticated investors who should've known what they were buying. If we have to pay a fine like we've done before, well, that's peanuts and it's just another cost of doing business. We know how to look out for ourselves -- our guys are in government here and all over the world. We here on Wall Street are Masters of the Universe who are entitled to 40% of the corporate profits in America. We're untouchable and invincible. We deserve every million we make."

I'm not making this up. This is REALLY how they think, based on their own spoken words and emails. It represents a species of psyche that boggles the sane mind. Try to penetrate this mindset and you enter a 21st century heart of darkness. These are not the sort of guys you should want your daughter to marry. When they trot out their favorite excuse for their behavior -- that they sold their “shitty” products to SOPHISTICATED investors -- they are openly acknowledging that they think it's OK to cheat investors AS LONG AS THEY ARE SOPHISTICATED.

They think this actually explains that they're doing nothing wrong -- when it's a straight-up admission of guilt.

They can't for the life of them think why anyone would think their actions are suspect. In fact, all their chicanery makes them feel entitled to bonuses in the millions.

The long hours of relentless 24/7 profit pursuit ... the high-risk gambling on asset bubbles ... the betting against your own customers ... the cheat of computerized front-running and inside-information bets ... the psychology of Wall Street casino group-think ... the turning of 30:1 leverage into massive profits ... the millions gifted to them by the Fed at minimal interest ... the outsized bonuses from short-term gains ... the Wall Street philosophy of IBGYBG: I'll be gone and you'll be gone, so let's do the deal and let the suckers pay for it ... all this has made them bonkers.

They don't even blink when Senator Phil Angelides nutshells their practice of shorting the securities they sell as follows: “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

It's as if wads of crooked cash have sealed off their minds from the quotidian morality the rest of us struggle to live by. You'd have to go down the food chain to the level of an AIDS virus to find a commensurate sense of decency. They share the inside-the-bubble moral myopia of Catholic bishops who shield pedophiles in their midst, of lawyers who write torture memos to provide legal cover for their torture-promoting bosses, of rapists who blame their victims for wearing mini-skirts, and of Al Qaeda bombers who believe their actions are totally justified and will land them in paradise. The big difference being this: a political terrorist believes he'll enjoy his reward in heaven, while a financial terrorist gets to enjoy his reward in the Hamptons.

I'd like to mention two other terrorist groups in the world of business.

Number one: the 52,000 Americans with secret bank accounts in Switzerland, where their money sits happily evading being taxed by our IRS. If you want an idea what those taxes might amount to, consider this: at one point, according to the IRS, the 4,450 secret UBS accounts of Americans whose names UBS have been persuaded to give up, amounted to $18 billion. You do the math. To my mind, there's little daylight between these financial terrorists (let's call them terrorists by omission rather than commission) and an African dictator who rips off his people and stashes his gazillions in a Swiss bank. Yes, he kills people, ouch! But hey, these financial terrorists, all they do is contribute to the infant morality rate in America rivaling a Third World country's, and how bad can that be? As far as I can see, the big difference between rich Americans shielding their fortunes from the IRS and a dictator stashing his money in the same bank is this: the Americans are too cowardly to do the killing with their own hands, and prefer to do it by proxy.

Another Yakuza-like gang of financial terrorists goes by the name deficit hawks. They are terribly concerned about deficits, especially now that a black guy is running up these deficits instead of the white fellow before him.

Pushing back on deficits is a good thing, but pushing back on them NOW is straight-up class warfare. Hooverism. When the private sector is not spending money to keep up employment, the government has to do it. Here is a telling comment from a New York Times reader responding to a Paul Krugman column:

I'm not an economist, but I learned about the Depression and how it stalled out in 1937 when I was in high school -- way back in the 1970's. We learned then what Prof. Krugman is saying here today, that is, balancing the budget in the middle of a time of high unemployment makes things worse. This was once common knowledge. Wha' happened? Are people today stupider than they were in the '70's? Or maybe their education has changed?”

You bet they're stupider. They're being “educated” by Fox News and Glenn Beck.

The real agenda of the deficit hawks is to screw the struggling middleclass and poor and unemployed even more. That is why they bang on about the cost of entitlements -- Social Security and Medicare -- and conveniently forget two things:

1. The military-industrial entitlement of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which will, according to Economics Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, amount to $3 trillion. Now that's deficit spending, kids (plus corporate welfare, big government, and serial mass murder to boot).

2. The fact that the rich dudes who complain about deficits are paying a top tax rate of 35% on their income above $373,651. The top tax rate was 91% to 92% under Eisenhower, 70% to 77% under Nixon, and 60% under Ford. Then something weird happened. Shortly after Reagan assumed office, it was 28%. Wow. What was happening with our debt during these years? From the end of WW2, when national debt was 120% of GDP, it fell steadily down to the lower end of 30% under Carter. By the most mysterious of utter coincidences in the economic history of Western man, the debt percentage started rising sharply under Reagan. It was shooting past 60% when Bush One left office after 12 years of GOP rule. It dipped down again when Clinton was president, with him leaving Al Gore a budget surplus and the likelihood that perhaps maybe one day we might break even if we felt like it. But the Supreme Court decided to make the guy who lost the election the President, and Bush and Dick “deficits don't matter” Cheney pushed our debt-to-GDP ratio over 70%. Today it's heading for the upper stratosphere as Obama struggles to reverse the effects of the Wall Street meltdown.

In other words, our deficit problems started their ballooning performance under Ronald Reagan (remember “trickle-down economics” and “a rising tide lifts all yachts”?). For some totally mysterious reason, when the top tax rate was over 90% under Eisenhower, you could work at General Motors all your life and afford a home and retire comfortably -- all on one salary. Those were the days when it was good to be a member of the middleclass in America, even though suburbia lacked marijuana. Fast-forward to Bush-Cheney, and the middleclass got hammered like a nail hit by a mountain even with two bread-earners per household, while the rich were basking in a second Gilded Age of shower curtains at $6,000 a pop. This was no damn “trickle-down economics”: it was pure “gusher-up economics.” Today the lower-earning 80% of Americans have to try and share 15% of the American pie.

Long story short: “deficit hawk” is code for either “crock of shit” or “let's kick the middleclass even harder now that they're down.”

To me, the most interesting deficit hawk is Peter G. Peterson, Commerce Secretary under Nixon, CEO of Lehman Brothers, cofounder of the Blackstone Group, and founder in 2008 of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He spent a billion bucks establishing this Foundation. Spending a billion to convince us to cut back on entitlements -- Social Security and Medicare -- now that's a heavy personal bet. (Incidentally, he has on his board one Timothy Geithner, famous for making sure that Goldman Sachs got 100% of the money they lost with AIG; also famous for not knowing how to follow Turbo Tax instructions; and currently semi-infamous for being Obama's Treasury Secretary.)

Peterson cofounded Blackstone with another Lehman alumnus, Stephen Schwarzman, who became famous for his 60th birthday party that cost $3m (he was also famous for the $684 million cash he netted when Blackstone went public in 2007 and for his $8.83 billion stake after the first day, which soon plunged rather rapidly). Blackstone is one the largest global private-equity companies in the world. They used to be called leveraged-buyout companies -- they buy companies by loading those companies with debt with which they buy the companies. Then they might break up the company and sell the pieces, or fire enough workers to jack up the share price, and then sell it -- all for a tidy profit. Basically what they do is put the company in debt, and pay a good slice of that money back to themselves. Some companies are bought and sold like this until they're bankrupt, but of course the buyers and sellers all make a profit as they load their pass-along punching bag with more debt. “Private-equity” is a rather sanitary term for what these guys do. I'd call them “debt-prison buyout” companies, being as how they often imprison their targets in debt. Anyway, Peterson is one of the guys who got superduperrich doing this stuff (aka “enhancing shareholder value”) after getting merely superrich at Lehman Brothers.

Here's what this snake in saint's clothing wrote in Newsweek about why he put up a billion to establish the Peterson Foundation. I quote it for its satiric flavor: a Kurt Vonnegut or a Joseph Heller could hardly have done it better. The irony is all the richer because this shyster actually believes what his ghost wrote for him. It comes from his heart. He is his own useful idiot.

For the first time in my memory, the majority of the American people join me in believing that, on our current course, our children will not do as well as we have. For years, I have been saying that the American government, and America itself, has to change its spending and borrowing policies: the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, the dangerous dependence on foreign capital, our pitiful level of savings, the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable. Herb Stein, who served alongside me in the Nixon White House as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, once drily observed, 'If your horse dies, I suggest you dismount.' And yet, we keep trying to ride this horse.

Underlying these challenges is our broken political system. Our representatives, unlike our Founding Fathers, see politics as a career. As a result, they are focused not on the next generation, but on the next election. When the long-term problems are large and real, they anesthetize us, mislead us, divert us -- anything to keep us from giving up something or having to pay for it. Too often, our political leaders are just enablers, co-conspirators in a disingenuous and greedy silence. Our children are unrepresented. The future is unrepresented. The moment is long overdue for us to become moral and worthy ancestors. So I decided to set up a different kind of foundation, one that would focus on America's key fiscal-sustainability challenges. The fact is, for most of these challenges, there are workable solutions. Our problem is not a lack of such options. It is a lack of will to do something about them.”

Prime-grade bullshit. His writer is using boilerplate we might all agree with to push an agenda that will undermine us all. The Tea Party crazies and GOP voters are very useful idiots in Peterson's skeevy project. The astroturf “grass-roots” organization that Peterson has funded is called “America Speaks” (brilliant name), from whose portals concerned Americans, bamboozled by Peterson's glossy brochures, express their concerns about spending on “entitlements.” Heck, the White House is one of these concerned citizens, too. President Obama has a Trojan Horse going called the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (aka the Deficit Commission), co-chaired by former Senator Alan Simpson, who recently referred to us regular Americans -- you and me -- as the “lesser people.” The conservative Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote this about the commission, stuck as this rag is in the syndrome of every-day-some-new-hysteria, a syndrome mightily characteristic of its ilk of dumbfuckery:

"The members of his bipartisan commission could recommend raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages to 75, means-testing benefits, shuttering one-third of the federal bureaucracy, cutting military spending in half, creating a 10 percent national sales tax and slashing the salary of every federal employee by 15 percent and Washington would still have trillions of dollars in debt and unfunded liabilities.”

Cutting military spending by half? There's a better chance an ant will make an elephant pregnant.

OK, so here we have tax-avoiding financial terrorists sabotaging our tax base, deficit hawk financial terrorists launching an attack on Social Security under cover of noble deficit control motives, and Goldman Sachs financial terrorists and their Wall Street cronies sinking us all in misery while they go their very rich, very merry way.

Who stands between these predatory world-wreckers and us, their victims?

Our government.

But they couldn't protect us when Wall Street melted us down, and they won't protect us now. Wall Street bribes every administration every time, all the time. Our officials buy into the same mindset as the terrorists; they suffer from what Simon Johnson so aptly called “regulatory capture.” How did these Wall Street terrorists manage to IED our economy into its present unpretty pass? Often the regulations were there, but the regulators were MIA. Overall there was too little government to supervise and regulate them. There just wasn't enough big government in their faces.

So: what should our government do about them, now that we supposedly know better?

Well, the administration should've taken Goldman Sachs and Citigroup et al into receivership (like they did with Detroit) when they had the chance, and fired the management, but instead they chose to shower them with money with no strings attached, just like Bush-Cheney showered Bin-Laden with recruits when they started the Iraq War.

So what should the government do now?

Regulate, regulate, regulate.

Prosecute, prosecute, prosecute.

If the government can get a people-killer like Al Capone for income tax evasion, they can get job-killers like Goldman Sachs for fraud. And if they can find a way of breaking Goldman Sachs up between their banking and trading activities, they should do that. Plus, they should regulate all derivatives -- no loopholes -- to be transparently traded on open exchanges.

But what is the government doing? Shepherding a bill that does not break up the big banks (“too big to fail rules!”), does not re-instate Glass-Steagall ("let's water the Volcker rule down to nothing!"), does not stop the outrageous rates for pay day loans and credit cards ("400% interest is good for pay day borrowers!"), and does not rein in Wall Street bonuses or CEO salaries ("of course American CEOs should make more in a day than a worker makes in a year! those Japanese CEOs who eat Detroit's lunch for breakfast, they've got it all wrong with their puny CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 12:1!").

When the bills of the Senate and the House were being reconciled these past few weeks, there were all these very oh-so-serious debates going on. Our elected officials were back-and-forthing about whether already-loopholed derivatives by the five largest swaps dealers (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America are responsible for 90% of the swaps and derivatives market) should be spun off into separate entities to keep a wall between regular banking and Wall Street casino gambling. That way, us taxpayers might be inoculated from having to bail out the banks, because a casino could take a dive without taking the bank down with it. The House and the Senate also dithered about whether banks with more than $250 billion assets should be subject to some minute leverage limits when they engage in potentially risky activities. They were also arguing about whether Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, already severely weakened by being put under the Fed (one of the main aiders and abettors of the financial meltdown), should be limited to having only 200 of the nation's 8,200 banks under its aegis, leaving the other 8,000 banks free to cheat us with tricky mortgages and 30% penalty interest on credit card debt.

In other words, the House and the Senate were quibbling about whether they should guarantee the next financial meltdown by a 100% or a 110% or a 120%.

You can bet that the bill Obama eventually signs will be loophole-ready -- and leave you and I and every Main Street person in the world ripe for the plucking and gutting and basting by financial terrorists.

Just look at our states, now going bankrupt and unable to borrow -- while Goldman Sachs and their fellow terrorists can borrow at the ridiculously low Fed rate of 0.2% and stick that money straight into speculating with our future. The government has shoveled trillions at the terrorists, to the point that its own credit rating is wobblier than a toddler trying to foxtrot, while the terrorists don't have to do any cleaning up after themselves. The private debt of speculating terrorists has mysteriously morphed into our public debt. Instead of giving the states and us a helping hand, the terrorists are lecturing us on "fiscal responsibility." Talk about blaming the victim.

Here's something semi-weird: one state has its own state-owned bank. This state, North Dakota, is the only state in the union with a budget surplus. It also has the lowest unemployment and mortgage delinquency rates. Weird, isn't it? Sometimes that dreaded socialism works way better than capitalism, especially when that capitalism is of the unregulated financial terrorist variety.

Maybe the most galling thing about financial terrorism is that there will be no big-time Goldman Sachs or Citigroup or other Wall Street terrorist standing trial. Despite the fact that the SEC got the Department of Justice involved, nothing has been happening on that front. Of course not. Who's going to jail the guys whose contributions to your campaign helped get you elected?

Some smart judge should be sentencing all the top brass of Goldman Sachs -- Lloyd Blankfein et al, even Fabulous Fab himself -- to at least two years penance in some starving village in the Third World, where their terrorist bubble might finally shatter. But it's less likely than Sarah Palin growing a backup brain.

What does it all mean? It means our financial terrorists are more alive than ever, and fully enabled to wreck our lives again. In five to ten years time, Goldman Sachs will be scoring off some other hyped asset bubble (biomass made from tulips, anyone?) or from another batch of hyped stock offerings (green energy IPOs, anyone?), just like they did with the hyped no-profit dotcoms IOPs they peddled before the 2000 market crash. And as the bubble peaks, they'll find a way of betting against their own customers like they did a few years ago. Then, when it all melts down, they'll run to the Fed for bailouts or to us taxpayers or both like they did when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein were on the phone to each more often than New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg calls his mother (every day his first call of the day). Result? They'll be richer and we'll be poorer.

Our homegrown financial terrorists will notch up another great achievement, elegantly executed with the deft connivance of Congress and the White House. There will NEVER be enough government, or a government big enough, or a politician with testicles big enough, to stop financial terrorism. FDR and trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt were once-in-a-millennium phenoms. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and crew are no match for the Scam Artist Wrecking Crew of Goldman Sachs, even though these Dems are a trillion times more sensible and sane than anyone who ever worked for that Yale legacy asshole Bush and that Dick “the bigger the issue, the bigger I lie” Cheney.

Obama, Nancy and Barney try hard (or like to give the appearance of trying hard) but the terrorists of Goldman Sachs have too many votes in the pockets of their silk-lined suits. Obama once wryly observed that the Wall Street banks were like suicide-bombers -- “save us or our downfall will blow up the world!” -- and he was profoundly right.

2. AL QAEDA AND WHAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE, BUT ISN'T, DOING ABOUT THEM

These Al Qaeda terrorists, who go straight for the body, actually have the semblance of a semi-legitimate beef. Their methods are heinous, and their religious fundamentalism is obnoxious to an absurd extreme -- a combination of Dick Cheney obdurateness, Pat Robertson looniness, and Tea Party stupidity -- but there's a rationale behind their madness. They want to kill innocent Americans because the foreign policy of our leaders supports Israel against the oppressed Palestinians, and supports oppressive Arab regimes. That's what 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed said. Many people who aren't terrorists are also upset about this. Millions of them live in America. The vast majority of people in Europe -- probably worldwide -- are upset about it. But we don't fly planes into buildings or strap on suicide bombs to blow ourselves up in public squares.

Osama Bin Laden also mentioned another reason he's upset with us: back before 9/11, our infidel army was parked very near Mecca, a terrible affront to his Muslim soul. Fair enough. Of course, this army of ours contained females, Western females at that, which is something that really sticks in the domestic fundamentalist Arab craw, specifically the male one. It seems the harder an Al Qaeda pecker gets over pictures of Western babes, the more enthusiastic does the owner of said pecker get about strapping on a suicide bomb, marching up to an American checkpoint, and blowing his cock in the general direction of 72 virgins.

In the months before 9/11, there was not much government activity against terrorist threats. The Bush-Cheney administration, true to form, did absolutely nothing despite repeated warnings. A 2001 briefing for Bush on August 6 was called “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” That's what it said on the goddam COVER of the report. Moreover, CIA director George Tenet got so worried because of masses of spooky intelligence that he repeated his warnings to the point that people were tired of hearing them.

But Bush and Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, the Queen of Denial, cared less than Jesus cared for that fig tree he blasted. It wasn't a case of too little government or not enough government. It was a case of ZERO government at the executive end, while 200%-proof warnings were spritzing forth from the intelligence end.

Then, after 9/11, it turned into a case of Big Government In Extremis. Bush-Cheney went so far as to CREATE terrorists in a country where none could exist under the vigilant and violent eye of the arch dictator Saddam Hussein, who hated Bin Laden with a passion. Yet, while our nation cheered, Bush-Cheney bombed away, drawing resources away from where the criminals lurked in Afghanistan. It was as if people in Britain were watching Hitler attack their ally Poland and then, in reprisal, bombed France.

The US invading Iraq: now we're talking a really big government takeover. Deficit spending by the trillions. Funny how it doesn't upset the Tea Party folks one little bit. They don't get riled when president Bush mortgages our future for the sheer joy of whacking non-culpable Arabs, but when president Obama brings in a little health reform to save American lives, they go more Neanderthal than Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

The result? Bush-Cheney advanced the cause of the Al Qaeda terrorists more than Bin Laden himself. Bin Laden's efforts seem kind of puny compared to the Bush-Cheney recruitment drive for Al Qaeda. Because of our wars, young men went flocking to Al Qaeda like hordes of punks crowding Iggy Pop. Plus, when our guys had Bin Laden in their sights at Bora-Bora, Rumsfeld nixed their request for more troops (why? ask him), and Bin Laden skipped away scot-free with his dialysis machine.

Is it irony? Or is it beyond irony? Or does it require a new figure of speech, as yet uninvented? Suffice it to say that the Bush-Cheney response to the threat of terrorism before 9/11 was less than zero, and their response afterwards The Greatest Over-Reaction of All Time, way ahead of Naomi Campbell throwing a cell phone at her housekeeper.

Today Obama is claiming some success with drone attacks on Al Qaeda in Pakistan (these drones are also very good at taking out innocent civilians having a picnic). Meanwhile Al Qaeda types are more likely to be hatching their diabolical plots in Munich, London and maybe Poughkeepsie. Bring on the drones over Trafalgar Square.

My own idea for fighting terrorists is to leave it to our cops. After all, according to the odds, an American has a better chance of drowning in his or her own bathtub than being snuffed by a terrorist. The cops handled terrorists pretty OK before 9/11. We could take the money we spend on Homeland Security and our wars, and have enough doubloons to pave the Mojave Desert with solar panels and build a grid into which to feed that power ... all before Obama's re-election in 2012. But hey, monkeys will land a man on the moon before that happens.

It might also help if -- just like we funnel big bucks to Egypt and Saudi-Arabia -- we funneled big bucks to the West Bank and Gaza. God knows the put-upon bastards in Gaza must get a little edgy living under refugee-camp conditions. We might also give Israel some much-needed tough love to help stop them from embarrassing the Jews. Also, Obama, please, dude, close Guantanamo already. For chrissake.

Not to worry: it won't happen. Our foreign policy will continue to make the world safe for political terrorists. Not too long ago an Al Qaeda-type maniac killed Americans on an Army base here in America. That sweet young man you know who keeps to himself and is all of a sudden growing a beard -- have you checked what he's got in his basement lately?

3. BP AND WHAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE, BUT ISN'T, DOING ABOUT THEM

One thing to know about BP. Even inside the industry, these environmental terrorists are despised for their unsafe ways. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) has fined BP 760 times. Exxon has been fined once. Compare BP's 760 citations for "egregious, willful" safety violations with Sunoco's eight, Conoco-Phillips's eight, Citgo's two and Exxon's one. This one company has a 97% share of all super-serious safety violations.

BP's entire warm and fuzzy “Beyond Petroleum” advertising campaign is a total crock.

Let's consider their history. They're the reason the world moved from coal to oil as a mainstay of energy in the first place.

On May 26, 1908, the Middle East and the world was changed forever. That's when G.B. Reynolds, an engineer hired by William Knox D'Arcy, who had a minerals concession from Shahanshah, the king of kings of Iran, struck a gusher of crude that shot 50 feet high from a well 1,180 feet deep.

D'Arcy formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, today known as BP. In 1911 Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill converted the British Navy from coal to oil. To protect their investment, the British government acquired 50% of APOC's stock. In 1935 APOC changed its name to the Anglo Iranian Petrol Company because Iran insisted on all companies using the name Iran instead of Persia, which was a province inside Iran.

Until 1953, AIOC paid Iran a royalty of 16%. The Iranians weren't even allowed to look at AIOC's books. By then, Western oil companies were running Arab countries like fiefs, and treated their workers like slaves. The oil companies were backed by the military might of their respective governments. Iran's shah was installed by the allies in 1941 and headed up a corrupt dictatorship.

Iranians began to wise up that their country was being run by a British oil company, and shoved the Shah aside to figurehead status, electing a new Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1951. He nationalized the oil industry. Britain contested this at the International Court of Law, but their complaint was dismissed.

So Britain approached America for help, and nothing much happened under Truman. But when Eisenhower, a close friend of Churchill, became president, he approved a CIA plan, Operation Ajax. Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit was in charge of this plan to launch a counter-coup and restore the Shah to power. The CIA paid out $1 million hiring gangs, prostitutes, drug addicts and thugs to demonstrate. Various ayatollahs and big landlords and merchants were behind Operation Ajax, too. Enough riots and chaos were fomented to force Mossadeq to resign. On August 19, 1953 the Shah returned to full power and expressed his personal gratitude to Kermit Roosevelt (who then got a job with Gulf Oil). Then the Shah found Mossadeq guilty of treason and put him under house arrest until he died in 1967. Mossadeq's supporters found themselves in front of firing squads. Mossadeq's foreign minister Hossein Fatemi was taken out of hospital to be executed.

In 1957 the Shah -- with an assist from the CIA and US tax dollars -- created SAVAK, his secret police, and instituted a reign of terror, torture and oppression. One time some SAVAK guys corralled a surgeon to cut off one guy's arms and legs; they then returned the living torso back to the fellow's family as a warning to all his friends. From 1953 to 1979 Iran was nothing but a vast Guantanamo Bay-like BP prison, poor and polluted and brutally bullied.

The US got a quid pro quo from AIOC -- sharing their Iranian concession with US oil companies.

In 1954 AIOC changed their name to British Petroleum. In 1959 they expanded to Alaska. Today they're the UK's biggest corporation, fourth biggest in the world after Royal Dutch Shell (famous for turning Nigerian waters into toxic dumps), Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart by revenue ($21 billion a year) with gas stations and oil wells on every continent in-shore and off-shore.

The bargain of an Iranian coup that cost only $1 million doesn't look like such a bargain if you consider all the crap we're eating now. As for the Iranians, they've been suffering for the past 70 years under our dictatorship and then their own screwed-up theocracy -- when for one shining moment they actually had a democracy in 1953 before we Americans overthrew it to help BP.

As for us, we got ourselves an oil addiction that makes us send billions to countries that don't like us. 26% of our oil comes from the Middle East. Our meddling occasioned the blowback of 9/11 and one of our wars is now. Our. Longest. War. Ever.

Yep, all the Middle East crap we're in today was caused by the same guys who are now ruining our Gulf of Mexico. BP has a lot more to answer for than their oil spill.

We're also getting some insight into the bubble in which BP terrorist-executives live, coming to us via the gaffes of their on-and-now-off CEO Tony Wayward. Apologies: I meant to say Tony Hayward. This guy was born with both feet firmly planted a foot down his gullet, and we should be grateful for this accident of birth, because his comments afford us a useful view into the BP terrorist bubble -- a habitat so confined and sealed off from the rest of us, and so filled with a gas I'm tempted to call Oxygenia Myopia, that the thoughts of the guys trapped inside it sound like they were scripted by John Cleese for a new parrot sketch starring a dead seagull and a live CEO. A Wayward sampler:

1. "What the hell have we done to deserve this?"
2. "It was a bit bumpy to get it going. We made a few little mistakes early on."
3. “I want my life back.”
4. “The oil is on the surface, there aren't any plumes.”
5. "Apollo 13 did not stop the space program. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off of Brazil did not stop the aviation industry."
6. "I am sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill, you know, there's a -- food poisoning is surely a big issue when you've got a concentration of this number of people in temporary camps, temporary accommodations."
7. "It's not possible to measure the flow from the leak."
8. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
9. “There has been no evidence of reckless behavior.”

Only a guy with an idiotically absolutist and fundamentalist faith in his cause can be this unintentionally hilarious. Jeez, he makes Pat Robertson sound like Gandhi. Then there's the BP Chairman from Sweden, with a smug smile on his face, telling us how much he cares about the “small people.” Pray tell, you condescending snot, how big are you compared to us? I mean not as the Chairman of a big oil company, but as a member of this race of humans who share Planet Earth with you? You sound smaller than a microbe in the fanny of a fish worm.

Earlier the CEOs of the other oil companies appeared at a hearing with the disaster contingency plans that they submitted to the MMS to get their offshore permits, and these plans are the same plan, with references to protecting walruses in the Gulf of Mexico (walruses haven't lived there since walruses evolved). It's obvious they copied and pasted their Gulf “plan” from their Alaska “plan.” The names and phone numbers of dead people to call are in their plans. They didn't even bother to proofread their plans. It's not that they just don't care. They don't even care about giving the appearance that they don't care. One company's PR response plan is five times longer than its section devoted to protecting wild life. As Congressman Ed Markey remarked to Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, the only new technology these oil barons had to contain oil spills and protect coastlines was a Xerox machine.

But all this BS was countenanced and aided and abetted by the government agency in charge of vetting applications for off-shore drilling permits, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), whose people approved applications by going over pre-existing pencil marks with ink on forms that the oil companies had already filled out in pencil. Under those great oil men Bush-Cheney, the oil companies and government overseers were all one big happy GOP family.

Then Tony Wayward was grilled by Congress and put up the most evasive performance since Walter Matthau's constant denials in A Guide For The Married Man made his wife doubt that he was cheating on her when she had actually seen him doing it with her own eyes. My favorite moment from this “testimony” was when Wayward was asked this question by an irate Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla:

"Is today Thursday, yes or no?”

So what can government do about this immense tragedy flecked with icicles of farce? Especially when they're harboring a permit-granting agency that ALSO collected revenue, and was enabled by Ken Salazar and a chap named Obama to continue this and other ethically challenged practices, only marginally better than the merry days under Bush-Cheney when the government officials of MMS snorted coke with BP executives and bonked them. Actually physically FUCKED the people they were supposed to vet. Organs inserted into orifices and all that. I find myself at a loss for inventing an analogy vivid enough to express the outrage engendered by this malfeasance, but let me try this one. It's a little like a hangman who, in the months that the prisoners await the day they feel the touch of his noose, visits the cells and fucks all the murderers.

Here's Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson on how Ken Salazar, Obama's “new sheriff in town,” continued the Bush-Cheney tradition of being in bed with Big Oil:

“Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their 'royalty' payments -- the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource -- not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone -- an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. 'This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling -- that's his thing,' says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. 'He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling.' As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

“Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of 'a few rotten apples' at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. 'The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks,' says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. 'In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture.' One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words 'Drill, baby, drill.'
“Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called 'a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling.' In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes -- a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this fuckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling -- a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.”

4. OBAMA TO THE RESCUE

So Obama helped BP to screw us, like he's helping Goldman Sachs to continue screwing us, and helping Al Qaeda to recruit new foot soldiers every day, even among our own population. If Bush-Cheney were superduper-heavy terrorist enablers, Obama is somewhere between lite and super-medium-heavy.

However, in one little instance, it does look like Obama got both his balls back -- after one of them had been banged rather blue by the Health Reform battle, and the other nicked with little cuts all over it in the financial reform struggle against Wall Street.

Obama met with BP and got them to agree to put up the money for a no-cap $20 billion escrow fund, run by an independent third party, and another extra $100 million set aside for oil workers who are unemployed because of the moratorium, and the billions in dividends they were going to pay their shareholders will now be withheld for the next three quarters.

Well, well, well.

One wonders why BP bent over that much. Methinks Obama might have let slip a few details from his emergency plan to take BP America into receivership, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been urging. Or perhaps he reminded them of the many lucrative contracts they have with the US government. These are the only explanations I have for this dramatic outcome. After all, Congress was pushing for lifting the cap from $75 million to $10 billion, and here Obama gets them to pony up $20 billion as a no-cap down payment.

So what happens? Obama is accused by some oil flunky Senator and various Fox News nutters of “shaking down” BP. I should bloody well hope he shook down BP. I wish he had the balls to shake down Goldman Sachs, too. And Citigroup. And while he's at it, step on the nuts and bolts of a few GOP folk whose collective IQs don't add up to anything higher than the temperature in your freezer. These GOP belly-achers with their tongues knee-deep up BP's oily sphincter have also proclaimed that Obama has now created a big “slush fund” that lobbyists will divert to various nefarious interests.

What can one say? Your standard-issue Obama haters will mouth anything that springs to mind. I'm amazed we haven't been informed by them that our President has a forked tongue and a scabby tail and goat hooves, all of which he hides from us through some teleprompter trick, plus he's got 666 tattooed on his third nipple, and cuts noxious farts powered by fumes emanating from the bowels of Hell itself.

Getting $20 billion for the fishermen and hotel owners and other citizens at the short end of the BP stick ... isn't that what a President is for, dammit? Remember Teddy Roosevelt? He busted the trusts, who complained bitterly, just like the GOP-BP people are kvetching now. But Teddy had greater testicular fortitude than them. Now that Obama has “shaken down” BP, we finally know this for an absolute fact: Obama's gonads can swell to maximum size in an emergency, even if they're still small enough to fit into the pockets of Goldman Sachs.

I think it's the best thing I've seen a president do since Kennedy faced down the Russians in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's better than anything Carter, Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton did put together.

This New York Times commenter supplies some excellent perspective:

“Hearing conservative pundits opine about BP's right to 'due process' makes this former Alaskan ill. Ask the fishermen Exxon has been crushing in court for the last 20 years how much due process they are getting. The continuing failure of that company to pay the civil claims of fishermen in Alaska for the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill is one of the great outrages in the history of American jurisprudence. The President almost certainly saved Gulf fishermen, small businesses, tour guides and other average citizens from enduring a generation of fruitless battle against phalanxes of grey-suited corporate counsel, the smartest people money can buy, who are paid to use whatever process it takes to keep the fishermen of Alaska from recovering their due. Due process, indeed.”

Plus, Obama hasn't done any of the really terrible things other presidents have done, even if his 30,000 extra troops in Afghanistan hits a 7.6 on my Outraged Morality Richter Scale.

Unlike Reagan, Obama hasn't sold weapons to Iran's Revolutionary Guard so he could give money to the Contras to kill nuns. Unlike Clinton, he hasn't stood idly by while the Hutus massacred 800,000 Tsutsis with machetes imported from China. Often the Hutus got so tired from the hard work of chopping down Tsutsis, they simply severed the ankle tendons of their victims so the poor bastards couldn't run away, and then went and had themselves a good night's sleep. The next morning they woke up refreshed enough to finish the job.

While you're wincing, let me fibrillate the tragedy with some tasteless insult comedy. Think of it as a little exercise in mood-switching from your personal emotional trainer. It'll help you become a cannier multi-tasker. Ready? Here goes. Another good thing about Obama: his elegant race-horse trot of a walk is easier on the eye and the stomach than the walk of his immediate predecessor, who had the Texas cowboy swagger down pat, consisting of three actions: the smirk of entitlement; the gorilla swing of the arms; and the male version of the supermodel-catwalk-lead-with-your-vag stride, in which President Bush proudly carried his cojones a few feet in front of him like some avatar caricature of his real-world policies.

But I digress. Back to Obama's $20 billion move. Apparently our president's brilliant coup of coups went whizzz! over the heads of our chattering classes. No ringing praises echoed off the clouds. Our punditocrats appear to be stuck in their own self-blown bubble -- where they're pushing a narrative that requires of Obama that he vent his anger at BP in full view of the American public on national TV. They want our president to be the Drama Queen-in-Chief. Like this solves anything except gives them a headline. Our inch-deep pundits prefer theatrics over results, emotion over effectiveness.

Idiots. Even Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, much as I sometimes like them, couldn't pull their heads out of their tunnel-vision butts on this one. I saw only one guy give the president his proper due on this: Ed of The Ed Show on MSNBC. My man.

Obama's an odd bird for sure. A mystery wrapped inside an enigmatic exterior. He has let himself and his progressive supporters down countless times. He backed the public option because, he said, we needed to “keep the insurance industry honest” -- but in the end, there was no Obama/Rahm/Chicago gun-to-a-knife-fight push to get it through; more likely a push against it.

What happened? Did Obama fold like origami tissue because the votes weren't there? Or had he promised the insurance industry back in 2009 that he would let the public option die? We'll have to wait for an insider's tell-all book before we know.

What we do know is that Obama has kept all the Bush-era human rights abuses that he campaigned against going full-blast full-throttle pedal-to-the-metal, with the single exception of torture. Guantanamo is still open. Indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition remain a permanent blight. Attorney-General Eric Holder uses the same BS Bush-era legal challenges to protect and defend BS Bush-era abuses. After Obama got spooked by the GOP capture of Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat, he trotted out his support for the Volcker rule with former Fed Chairman Volcker standing right there. Will there ever be a real division between commercial banking and investment banking, i.e. between lending and gambling? Fat chance.

Like they say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. If Obama walks like a slippery customer and quacks like a slippery customer, he must be a slippery customer. At best a hypocrite. At worst a liar whose word is not worth the empty rhetoric falling so flowingly from his tongue.

But then, but then ... as we now know, Obama was the only one in the White House who insisted on doing healthcare reform in his first year -- all his people were against it -- so that the insurance industry won't be able to cheat their customers with a “pre-existing condition” requirement again, or kick them to the gutter when they get sick, or put a cap on what they pay out when they get sick. One man, and one man alone, Barack Hussein Obama, set the long slog in motion that led to this outcome, against the advice of everyone around him.

But then, but then ... Obama puts General Petraeus in charge of the Afghanistan surge, probably knowing full well the general can't succeed, and if this hero can't do it, Obama can withdraw the troops and make enough Americans happy to re-elect him in 2012. The only way Petraeus COULD succeed is if he buys off the entire Taliban, like he did the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. But something tells me that not even the Fed (who so happily shoved over $13 trillion of cheap money at our Wall Street terrorists) would advance Petraeus the puny trillion or two he'd need to turn the Taliban into America-friendly druglords.

But then, but then ... Obama gets BP to pony up a down payment of $20 billion on making their Gulf victims whole.

Odd. Is there some steel in all that fluffy friendliness? Is he just shy about showing it? Or is he, ever the community organizer, waiting for us to take on some of the responsibility ourselves like an actively responsible community, who will stick our collective pitchforks in the fat behinds of our irresponsible elite, Obama's sculpted butt included, to force these irresponsible leaders of ours to do the people's bidding? Or is he waiting to show his progressive hand in his second term, when he will have nothing to lose, and Nancy Pelosi might still be leading a majority of fractious Dems in the House, and Chuck Schumer might be running the Senate, and perhaps not be as friendly with Wall Street as he has been all this life?

Who knows and what the heck. Hey, let's rerun the final episode of Lost instead, while we sip from our plastic bottles of Poland Spring Water, and our sixteen-year-old careens down the highway in our SUV on his way to score some meth at the local lab, and let's all say thank you to our various gods for some small mercies.

Actually, $20 billion makes a big mercy. Humongous. Elephantine. Jupiter.

Chalk up one for the small people.

For now, anyway. Because -- cackle-cackle -- there are lurking off-shore, within polluting distance of our coastline, hundreds of BP oil rigs, so many that Tony Wayward couldn't give a precise number at his Congressional grilling (one of them is way bigger than the one that blew up, and just as unsafe as the one that blew up). Do you think BP will shave 20% off their profits just to play it safer in the future? Or invest billions in new cleanup technology? If you believe that, I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. As for Goldman Sachs, they've been back in the million-buck seats for more than a year, and lobbying fiercely for the right to screw us again, and succeeding in their efforts. And as for Al Qaeda, their spawn could be living right across the street from you. Those Al Qaeda freaks know how to snag a bitter teen on the Internet. They were global before your kid got his first DSI.

So where does that leave you and me and everyone else we call human? Just one word of advice, folks.

Duck.

What's Wrong With America? We're Cowards

2010-01-19T11:56:00.000-08:00

Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note.

To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for when I'm gobsmacked by the exceptionalism of our incompetent institutions, like the Fed missing the bubble, our intelligence services not nixing the visa of the Explosive Gonads Bomber, our incompetent pols giving an incompetent Wall Street the right to ruin us again in a few years, the Senate letting Joe Liebermann take one last bite out of the healthcare bill, or the CIA putting out the welcome mat for a triple agent who's about to blow them up. And then there's Obama asking ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to help Haiti, when Bush destroyed Haiti's democracy in 2004 and Clinton's been trying to turn the country into a sweatshop.

I've got this default setting that stops me from foaming at the mouth in Sartrean nausea and grinding my teeth into Heideggerian nothingness. Here's what I do: I sit myself down and zen in on how much I still love our failed state of America, and how there are things about America that are actually exceptional.

Freedom of speech. MLK. Geeks. The internet (invented by the Pentagon). Entrepreneurs. Paul Krugman. Elizabeth Warren. Steve Jobs. Our generosity to disaster victims. 24/7 innovation. Matt Taibbi. John Cassavetes. The Great Gatsby. Flash drives. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. A can-do attitude that once landed us on the moon. Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan, still doing it. A Streetcar Named Desire. The Decemberists. Warren Buffett. My Fair Lady. New York women who don't take crap from men like women do in other countries yet give better blowjobs than women in other countries. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Meditating on these things of wonder and beauty helps. Especially these days.

The incompetence of our institutions is bad enough. It's the spin from officials embedded in these institutions after their organizations have stepped armpit-deep in doo-doo that really grates, and makes one almost wish we lived in a post-Baudrillard simulacrum where one could call Jack Bauer for some assembly-line-waterboarding of everyone connected to Washington and Wall Street.

The all-time winner of the Cretin Award for Supremely Smug Self-Delusion has got to be Lloyd Blankstein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who said: “I'm just a banker doing God's work.” Did he ask the Onion for that one? This is a firm that shorted the derivatives they created and sold to pension funds and the like; in one case the derivatives tanked in months. As Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Chairman Phil Angelides told Blankfein this past Wednesday: "I'm just going to be blunt with you. It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars."

1. SOME WEIRD US-SPECIFIC PSYCHOSIS?

Goldman Sachs and Blankfein would've have been Goldman Blankrupt if his cronies Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner hadn't arranged a secret backdoor bailout via AIG and let him switch to being a bank-holding company so he could suck on the Fed's tit. Some “capitalist” is this Lloyd Scumbag Blankfein: he likes to live by the sword but can't take dying by the sword when his cosmic fraud and intergalactic incompetence backfire on him. Instead of doing the decent thing and jumping out of the nearest window, he bleats like a baby beggar for help from the very people he screwed, the American taxpayer. On top of being an immoral scumbag and an indictable crook, the man is also a total coward. And a great American traitor: Benedict Arnold on steroids. Today the Goldman Gang That Couldn't Trade Straight is still getting cheap money from the Fed and cleaning up now that most of their crooked rivals are gone. According to Kevin Drum's BRILLIANT article in the current issue of Mother Jones: “The sliced-and-diced mortgage securities that caused so much trouble during the credit bubble are being re-sliced and -diced via something called a RE-REMIC (resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduit) -- and business is booming. At Goldman Sachs, leverage in the first half of 2009 was at its highest level in its history.”

Bring back Eliot Spitzer as Attorney-General. If he still had that job, Goldman Sachs would be in the dock and the planet would be a safer place.

I didn't grow up in America, but there must be something that happens to American babies as they suckle at the matronly gazoombas -- some weird US-specific psychosis that makes them permanently poop out any ability to feel any shame.

The leaders of our incompetent institutions have one thing in common: they NEVER man up. Blowing it is never having to say you're sorry. A genuine mea culpa and resignation is as rare as a penguin in the Sahara.

Which bring us to seven cases in point, from the CIA to Haiti, after which we'll get to the cowardice of us all.

2. SEVEN DEGREES OF DYSFUNCTION

Number one: how about our Intelligence Services? They let a known rookie terrorist walk onto a plane to America, even though the Brits possessed the nous to withdraw their visa to him, and in the end our nation has to rely on a Dutch tourist to jump the kid while he's trying to set fire to his nuts on a plane descending over Detroit.

THEN Homeland Security's Janet Napolitano sits on Meet The Press and insists that the system worked after the system screwed up, her unapologetic face trying on various forms of a reassuring grin, like a gargoyle whose strings are being pulled by a puppetmaster suffering from dyskinesia.

Number two: how about those stumble-bums at the Fed? They can't see the biggest bubble in 80 years ballooning right under their nosehairs, and end up shoveling trillions of our lucre into the pockets of a bunch of Wall Street crooks -- mega-Madoffs too connected to be indicted -- to stop a Great Recession from becoming a Great Depression.

THEN Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the supposed savior of a system he could have and should have prevented from tanking in the first place if he weren't asleep at the wheel over his copy of Atlas Shrugged, tells Congress, when asked if the Fed did a good job supervising and regulating financial institutions before the crisis hit: “We didn’t do a perfect job by any means, but I don’t think we stand out as having done a worse job than other regulators.” Is he fucking kidding? They did a job a gazillion times worse than any other regulator. They did the worst job since Hitler didn't foresee losing when he invaded Russia. In May 2007 when the subprime market was in trouble, Bernanke said: "Importantly, we see no serious broad spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market. The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits." Meanwhile, 5 of the 10 largest subprime lenders were being overseen by the Fed. The Fed didn't see the bubble coming, when all Bernanke and his gang of numerate fuckwumps had to do was notice the fact that folks were spending up to twice as much as before on their monthly mortgage payments. Then Time Magazine goes and names this Dunderhead of the Decade their Person of the Year.

Number three: how about our CIA? Five CIA guys and two Blackwater guys don't think they need a Jordanian spy patted down for explosives before they invite him to meet with them, because they know him, and a few minutes later poof! they're gone.

THEN the CIA director Leon Panetta writes this in the Washington Post:

“This was not a question of trusting a potential intelligence asset, even one who had provided information that we could verify independently. It is never that simple, and no one ignored the hazards. The individual was about to be searched by our security officers -- a distance away from other intelligence personnel -- when he set off his explosives.”

So Leon Panetta is saying the brilliant CIA should be thanked because instead of many more intelligence personnel being blown up, only seven were? Is he fucking kidding? Was he born with half his brain missing -- the part to do with responsibility and accountability?

As for the dead guys -- hard-working professionals doing everything they can to hunt down our enemies -- did they ever watch a Mafia movie and notice that everybody pats down everybody else before they have a meeting? Does anybody in the CIA have the balls to look reality in the face and say: this was a brilliant terrorist plot, Al-Qaeda totally outsmarted us, and we were really stupid to let the triple agent go past three checking points without having him patted down?

Number four: how about our Senate?

Sigh. Shrug. Gag. Puke. Let's observe a moment's silence in sympathy with our founding fathers, who are currently spinning so fast in their graves they can't tell their femurs from their coccyxes.

Our Constitution created a nifty balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and then one of them, our glorious Senate, started a little tradition called the filibuster, which the current GOP threatens to use even if the Democrats want to pass a law urging sons to call their mothers every Christmas, so a straightforward majority of 51 is not good enough to get a bill passed, even though it's good enough in every deliberative chamber on the third rock from the sun -- so what Degree of Dotty Dysfunction do we have here?

As you know, in order to get the last two Democrats on board a bill that was already whittled down to an everything-must-go give-away to Aetna, Cigna and Fuckya ...

... Harry Reid had to make it legal for the federal government to pay the cost of Medicare expansion in Ben Nelson's state of Nebraska in PERPETUITY while the other states get theirs paid for only three years ...

WTF!?

... and Hangdog Harry also had to let Dem Traitor Joe Liebermann vent his elephantine spite by wiping his heinie on the idea that people 55 and older might get the right to buy into Medicare ....

WTF? WTF?

... thereby pissing off the progressive base of Harry's party so badly, they may not turn out for the midterms, which may cause the Dems to lose the House (and has turned Ted Kennedy's safe seat in Massachusetts into a toss-up).

WTF!? WTF!? WTF!?

In her New York Times column, Gail Collins quotes these stats to bring home the ludicrousness of the filibuster:

“U.S. population: 307,006,550.

“Population for the 20 least-populated states: 31,434,822.

“That means that in the Senate, all it takes to stop legislation is one guy plus 40 senators representing 10.2 percent of the country.”

NOW for the spin ... Harry Reid and Barack Obama are both proud as hell that they got a bill passed in the broken institution called the Senate where the fate of our nation is torn to pieces on a daily basis. They're happy an extra 30 million Americans can now get affordable healthcare, and that the insurance companies won't be able to turn down folks for a pre-existing condition or drop anyone when they actually need care. And food authority Michael Pollan has pointed out that the health insurance companies might now decide to do something about all that fast food that gives us chronic diseases and the farm subsidies that subsidize the foods that make us sick, because millions of chronically sick Americans will be cutting into their profits. Imagine that: the health insurance industry vs. agribusiness. The one fighting for their right to make big profits off our sickness, and the other fighting for their right to make us sick. Only in America, folks.

OK, maybe we can have between half and one cheer for the Senate's version of a healthcare bill. It's historic and all that, and no one has been able to pass anything like this since Christopher Columbus cut the ears off native Americans, but how about the fact that everyone is now mandated to fork over their hard-earned money to Aetna, Cigna and Bleepya or get hit by taxes or fines: in other words, the government is forcing you to pay for the golden faucets of these predator CEOs, who spend less than 80% of our premiums on actual healthcare while Medicare spends 96%. Howard Dean is right: not having a public option now will keep us fighting the health insurance companies to contain costs for the next 30 years.

Number five: how about the fat cat bankers making out like bandits -- which is what they are -- less than a year after our taxes saved their incompetent asses, and now fighting tooth and nail for the right to build the next bubble -- a fight they're winning -- and for the right to trick us into 30% interest on credit cards?

THEN Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein tells Congress that the popping of the financial bubble engineered by him and his cronies was as likely as four hurricanes hitting LA. In that case, why were they betting against their own products? The Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee Chairman Phil Angelides had to remind Blankbrain that hurricanes are acts of God and financial crises are made by men. The obtuseness of Blankhead was evident in his comment last year when he meant to be wry, perhaps forgetting that the 100 million people all over the world who are now jobless may not appreciate the pitch-imperfection of this wryness: “I'm just a banker doing God's work.” I guess when Blankprick got paid $68 million in 2007, that was God giving him all that money for helping 68 million little old ladies across the street.

If Goldman Sachs were a Chinese institution, their top guys would've all been hanged by now.

Number six: how about Sen. Barney Frank weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill, which will establish a body to protect us against dangerous financial products like we're protected against faulty toasters? First thing Barney did was strip out the idea of the White House that banks should be required to offer “plain vanilla” versions of financial products, such as mortgages with simple terms, like standard 30-year fixed mortgages, and low-interest, low-fee credit besides their complicated products. Next: all the banks with less than $10 billion in assets, i.e. 98% of all banks, are exempted from scrutiny by the Protection Agency.

THEN Barney Frank goes on the Rachel Maddow show and brags about how scared the banks are of his bill.

Number seven: how about the suffering of earthquaked Haiti? Well, they might have suffered a little less if we hadn't destroyed their peasant agriculture by flooding the country with our subsidized cheap rice (Congress needs the votes of American farmers, not Haitian farmers) thereby forcing the peasants to move to Port-au-Prince and build themselves shacks where they can die in the first earthquake. They might have suffered a little less if we hadn't gotten rid of Aristide because he didn't listen to us and was all for doing pesky little things like raising the minimum wage. Now Bill Clinton and George W. Bush of all people, two presidents in a long line of bastards who've backed dictators and/or thrust neoliberalism upon this poor country and helped its elite loot it, are called upon by Obama to help Haiti. First the jackboot, then the helping hand. The irony is diabolical; we need a modern Milton to do it justice. Question: why is Haiti the poorest country in our hemisphere? Answer: us.

Seven cases of mind-boggling incompetence and dysfunction: The Fed is useless, Homeland Security is useless, the CIA are idiots, the Senate is a Maginot Line blocking all progress, Barney Frank is creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill that protects the banks, Bill Clinton is helping Haiti after he screwed it (probably to screw it better in the future), and why haven't the brass of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup been indicted yet?

Here's my answer: cowardice.

3. WHY I AM A COWARD

I understand cowardice, because I was once a total coward for four months. Back in the 90s, me and my muse took off four years from the adworld to write the longest novel in English, a two-generational saga called Love and Gravity about the struggle for freedom in South Africa (unpublished) and when it was done, we had no more money left. At one point I took my last $20 and bought fourteen cans of tuna, so I knew I would be able to eat for the next fourteen days. Then I got an out-of-the-blue call from a headhunter, and the next thing I know I'm on a plane to Winston Salem to work on a pitch for an agency there, where the new creative director had assembled a team of misfits like me. The campaign that I created got the agency their first piece of big new business. I stayed there two years, and helped the agency double its size in that time.

One time the whole creative department had to pitch in on a massive campaign for Winston cigarettes. I don't smoke and I think cigarettes should be banned. But did I say I can't work on the campaign? Did I resign? No, I bent over and went along with the prevailing ethos. I was a complete coward, and the worst kind: a moral coward. Why was I such a coward? Because I didn't want to stand alone, and because I needed the money. Those fourteen cans of tuna reared up like the Furies. I didn't want to face such a humiliation of my body and soul again any time soon. Rather be a moral coward. So much for my strength of character.

So why are Cheney and Bernanke and Obama all cowards? Not because they'll be down to their last fourteen cans of tuna if they shut up (Cheney) or do something for Main Street instead of support Wall Street (Bernanke and Obama). So let's find out how they're cowards and why.

4. WHY CHENEY IS A COWARD

Cheney appears to be speaking for the GOP and more than half the nation -- the 58% of Americans who want the Explosive Gonads Bomber waterboarded. Is Cheney a coward because he's scared of having no money? No.

Dick Cheney is a coward because he wet his pants over 9/11 and they've never been dry since.

But there were some clues to his cowardice before 9/11. (Listen up, spineless Dems, these are your talking points against Dick if you've got the balls to attack him 24/7 and thereby change the conversation and limit your losses in the mid-terms.)

1. Despite his readiness to start wars and send others to war, Cheney himself ducked the Vietnam War, asking for and receiving five deferments. During the hearings about his nomination as Secretary of Defense in 1989, Sen. John Warner asked Cheney about these deferments. Cheney replied: "I would have been happy to serve if called." A lie.

Asked by a Washington Post reporter about his deferments, Cheney said, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service.” Not a lie.

Back in 1992, Cheney acolyte Paul Wolfowitz was critical of the decision by Bush Sr not to invade Baghdad and overthrow Saddam. Later Craig Unger reflected on this: “Interestingly, in what critics later termed ‘Chickenhawk Groupthink,’ the moderate, pragmatic, somewhat dovish policies implemented by men with genuinely stellar [military] records -- George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell -- were under fire by men who had managed to avoid military service -- Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Khalilzad.”

2. Then there is Dick Cheney the macho hunter. His favorite “sport” is canned bird shooting. Here's a report:

“Upon his arrival at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets for the benefit of him and his party. In a blaze of gunfire, the group ... killed at least 417 of the birds. According to one gamekeeper who spoke to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Cheney was credited with shooting more than 70 of the pen-reared fowl.

“After lunch, the group shot flocks of mallard ducks, also reared in pens and shot like so many live skeet. There's been no report on the number of mallards the hunting party killed, but it's likely that hundreds fell.
“Rolling Rock is an exclusive private club for the wealthy with a world-class golf course and a closed membership list. It is also a "canned hunting" operation -- a place where fee-paying hunters blast away at released animals, whether birds or mammals, who often have no reasonable chance to escape ... Bird-shooting operations offer pheasants, quail, partridges, and mallard ducks, often dizzying the birds and planting them in front of hunters or tossing them from towers toward waiting shotguns.”
And Cheney proudly calls himself a hunter. I'm reminded of Elvis loading up his pool with lightbulbs and shooting them, with one difference -- he shot at defenseless LIGHTBULBS.

These two forms of cowardice should have been a clue to what followed after 9/11.

3. Before 9/11, Cheney ignored a memo of August 6, 2001 that said “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In US” and the Intelligence Services under Cheney didn't connect the dots even though three Hamburg members of Al-Qaeda took flight lessons in South Florida and the FBI expressed concern about that. The flat-footed non-response by the Bush-Cheney administration to the memo and other signals allowed Al-Qaeda to pull off the biggest act of terrorism ever. (At this point Cheney was acting as the President behind the scenes, while Bush was a puppet, his strings pulled by Cheney and Rove; Bush starting doing his job only in his second term and began exercising real power when he fired Rumsfeld in 2006. By the time Bush left office, he was so pissed with Cheney he didn't accede to Cheney's repeated requests to grant Scooter Libby a full pardon.)

After 9/11, Cheney the coward did two things. Number one, he wet his pants to such an extent that he sanctioned torture. He came up with the term 'enemy combatant,' to make detainees torture-able, and imprisoned them at Guantanamo Bay, US territory in Cuba, where they were supposed to not be on US soil and therefore not subject to US law and torturable. The men imprisoned here for torture included a 14-year-old, two 15-year-olds and an 88-year-old. Many of the “terrorists” were guys handed to us by thugs of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan making good money from our bounty of $5,000 per head and settling a few scores along the way. Detainees were tortured at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq and Afghanistan and at CIA black sites in Europe. To date 180 people have died in custody, 38 with “homicide” on their death certificates. The innocent Afghan taxi driver Dilawar died within five days of his arrest at Bagram, after two days of continuous beating that pulped his legs, as revealed in the 2007 documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” where his torturers tell all.

The photos of Abu Ghraib were just the tip of the iceberg; Obama later refused to release another batch of photos because former CIA directors complained to him and in typical cowardly Obama fashion, our President caved because research showed his approval rating would go down a few points if he released the photos.

As for Cheney, his “work the dark side” crimes against humanity have forever endangered our troops who might ever fall in enemy hands.

3. Then Dick 'Five Deferments' Cheney sacrificed American kids in two wars he had planned before 9/11 happened, both because of oil. Afghanistan was over a pipeline, and Iraq was because Saddam had the insolence to cut out American oil companies when he made deals with Russian and other foreign companies.

Cheney had a good excuse for the Afghanistan war: the Taliban, whom we had backed against Russia, and who'd been the guests of Texas oil men, harbored the terrorist master-funder Bin Laden. The Taliban offered three times to negotiate Bin Laden's handover, but Cheney refused to negotiate and attacked. The weird thing about his attack was that when we had Bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora, and our guys there were begging for troops on the ground, Rumsfeld refused to commit ground troops because he was scared of the possible losses, and he and Cheney let Bin Laden get away. Cowards.

4. Cheney had no excuse to attack Iraq, whom the US had backed against Iran (even when Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the Iranians). But Cheney had planned a war against Iraq since the 90s, when he was one of the original signers -- along with Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and others -- of the Statement of Principles of the neocon thinktank PNAC (Project for the New American Century) started in 1997 (and ended in 2006). PNAC called for the greater militarization of America and hostile intervention in regimes inimical to the US. These guys were hawks on steroids, actually looking to have wars all over the globe. On January 16, 1998 the PNAC sent a letter to Bill Clinton, urging the President to embrace their plan “for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.”

Once Cheney, who headed up the team to find a Vice-President for Bush, suggested himself as Vice-President, and once the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush-Cheney, Cheney and his neocon cronies had the power to go after Saddam Hussein.

Problem: how to sell such a war? Cheney and crew were casting about for a reason when 9/11 happened. Now two reasons to sell the war occurred to neocons Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (who talked Bush on board). One was a connection between Saddam and 9/11, and the other was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Both were BS, but they were good enough to sell a BS war.

Cheney couldn't make the connection with 9/11 stick, although many Americans believed it, and still do, including Cheney himself. The McClatchy news people reported that one of the reasons Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got waterboarded 183 times and Abu Zubaydah got waterboarded 83 times is that Cheney and Rumsfeld insisted that the interrogators find “proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Meanwhile, there were the weapons of mass destruction. Said Wolfowitz: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

THEN Cheney and Bush later claimed they were misled by faulty intelligence and blamed the CIA when no such weapons were found. The truth is they wanted a war anyway and didn't give a shit what intelligence said as long as they could use it to sell the war.

Today, revisionism has so taken hold of our commentariat that everybody has bought into the lie of “faulty” intelligence that supposedly led Cheney and everyone else astray.

Has Cheney ever manned up about any of this? No. Has he ever apologized for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of the wounded and brain-damaged and those with post-traumatic stress disorder? No. Has he ever apologized for the million plus Iraqis killed? No. Has he ever apologized for the fact that these wars played right into Bin Laden's hands? No. That he was played for a sucker by Bin Laden? No. That his wars led to a huge spike in Al-Qaeda recruitment? No. That his wars led to a huge spike in acts of terror? No. That he made us infinitely less safe than before? No. Has he ever apologized for the fact that there may have been no Explosive Gonads Bomber if it weren't for his wars? No.

Why not? He's a coward. (Has anyone ever tried to nail him on this? No. When they're not cowards, our mainstream media are doltishly ignorant.)

Instead, Cheney is attacking Obama for not being war-like enough, when Obama is committing the folly of stepping up the Afghanistan war. It's like the kettle calling the kettle black.

Here's what Coward Cheney said after the Explosive Gonads Bomber was foiled:

"As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won't be at war.

"He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, 'war on terror,' we won't be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren't, it makes us less safe. Why doesn't he want to admit we're at war? It doesn't fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn't fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency -- social transformation -- the restructuring of American society. President Obama's first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

Obama has said again and again that we are at war. So many times that it drives me crazy. Cheney is flat-out lying again. Why is he doing this? From cowardice. He's trying to rewrite history -- to make excuses for being a war criminal who's too scared to go overseas because he might get arrested and find himself in the dock in The Hague. He's hiding his criminality behind a torrent of lies. He's projecting his own cowardice on the President.

He is not only a cowardly war criminal, he's unpatriotic. Instead of condemning the Explosive Gonads Bomber first, and congratulating the people who stopped the bomber, he does nothing but condemn our president from start to finish. This is the act of an un-American coward. The same goes for his odious lying daughter Liz.

There's a stunning contrast between Cheney and Bush, who said about Obama: "I'm not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.” And: "I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is essential that he be helped in office."

5. WHY BERNANKE IS A COWARD

The Fed was created in 1913 to be independent of Congress and the President. But it's not independent from the banks. It's governed by a board of directors dominated by bankers chosen by banks. Same with the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, including the NYC one, run by Tim Geithner before he became Obama's Treasury Secretary.

Which is why the Fed has done nothing about the scandal of overdraft fees on debit cards. The overdraft industry is only 16 years old, but it's a business of nearly $40 billion. A typical overdraft fee is $35, which, according to Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, gives the bank $2 for every buck borrowed: an annual percentage rate 10,000%. It sure beats what a Mafia loan shark makes. In 2004 the Fed ruled that overdraft fees shouldn't be classified as loans so the banks could continue with their loan sharking. Rock on, banks: keep gouging America.

This Fed is the outfit that Chairman Bernanke runs and uses to flood the crooks of Wall Street with trillions, so they can keep gambling in the Great Wall Street Casino. Bernanke is all for saving the banks, but too much of a coward to do anything about saving America from the banks. He's got Insider's Myopia bad. Why is he a coward? Because he wants to keep his job. Not for the money; for the power.

6. WHY OBAMA IS A COWARD

Here's what makes President Obama a coward: having appointed the wrong guys to oversee the economy, Summers and Geithner, he has not fired them yet.

Tax dodger Geithner is the man who with Paulson arranged the backdoor bailout of overseas banks and Goldman Sachs via AIG, and then, coward that he is, asked AIG to keep quiet about it.

Summers is one part of the four-member cabal that stopped the regulation of derivatives under the Clinton administration. Back then, Brooksley Born was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (its mission is to protect us from fraud and promote healthy futures and options markets). She did an analysis with her team in the 90s that led them to anticipate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Sound familiar? So Born suggested regulating derivatives. She was told to shut the heck up by Greenspan, Rubin, Summer and SEC Chairman Levitt, Bill Clinton's so-called President's Working Group. Her recommendations suppressed, she resigned in frustration as Chair of the Commission.

HOW is it possible that the guy who caused the problem is now charged with saving us? This is like appointing Paul Wolfowitz as our Secretary of Defense when Gates leaves. What the heck is Obama thinking?

He does have one guy advising him who is not culpable: Paul Volcker, Fed Chairman from 1979 to 1987, who heads up Obama's Economic Advisory Board. Volcker is pushing for regulation to ban commercial banks from securities trading altogether. Is Obama doing anything about Volcker's advice? No. Why not?

Obama is a coward. Why? He needs Wall Street's money for his campaign in 2012. That's it, plain and simple. Obama is selling us out, you and me, the American people, because he believes he needs the Wall Street crooks to bail out his ass in 2012. He needs those fraudsters to help him bamboozle us to vote for him again. Wall Street contributed $475m during the 2008 election cycle to individuals and PACs (the healthcare lobby contributed $167m, farm lobby $65m, defense lobby $24m).

That's America, folks. That's why we're a failed state. The most powerful man on the planet, and Congress itself ... both are bending over for a bunch of crooks who are back doing the same socially useless things and making big bonuses -- the very same actions that caused over 17% of Americans to be unemployed or underemployed today.

No one in America has the power or the courage to stop these crooks from practicing their fraud and blowing up our economy again.

In England they've put a tax of 50% on the bonuses of their crooks, but in America we're too cowardly to try that.

In China they hang businessmen for fraud but in America we throw trillions at them so they can keep on ripping us off.

In Europe they're all for putting a tax on all financial transactions to make some socially useful money off them, but we're too cowardly to try it.

Now Obama wants to get our TARP money back from the banks via a tax on them over 10 years, which will cause the fat cats as much pain as a sardine wriggling on a whale's palate causes pain to the whale.

Obama is a big thin coward, but Paul Volcker is not. Speaking to a conference of top bankers on December 8, 2009, Volcker said this about bankers' pay: “Has there been one financial leader to say this is really excessive? Wake up, gentlemen. Your response, I can only say, has been inadequate.”

Bankers say new regulations could stifle innovation; Volcker said: “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth -- one shred of evidence.”

The reason Volcker wants a ban on commercial banks engaging in securities trading is simple: so they can get back to lending and borrowing, and help the economy instead of sabotaging it.

Are there any signs that Obama is being persuaded by Volcker? No. Our president has got Summers and Geithner so deep up his butt that, whenever he has anything to say about the economy, their arms are moving his tongue.

Poor Barack. Between a white mother and a black father, he's genetically engineered to look for the middle. So he keeps trying to find the middle in Washington, which is not easy, given the fact that, number one, the GOP has morphed into the party of crazy people, and number two, corporate lobbyists have taken over the writing of our laws, something we the people mistakenly thought was supposed to be done by the people we elect. Between the lobbyists and the GOP, Washington's middle has moved since Reagan gave it a big push, and now it's moved so far that today the middle sits maybe an inch away from Mussolini's right boot. On a good day.

What should Obama do? Here's a clue from a commenter on a New York Times thread on January 7th, 2010. His name is Michael Radosevich. He spins a great could-have-been fantasy that has the absolute ring of moral truth.

“The Fed should have forced Bear Stearns into a pre-arranged bankruptcy, with protections for innocent investors. Then, it should have sold off the solvent parts, and seized & clawed back all the ill-gotten gains from Bear Stearns stockbrokers, managers, & executives. Then, it should have taken a close look at Citibank, BoA, & the other "zombie" banks, seized those banks, busted up those banks, &, again, seized & clawed back all the ill-gotten gains from managers, & executives. Et cetera with all the other AIGs, Goldman Sachs, et al.

“Then, the U.S. Attorney for New York City should have prosecuted these thieves & fraudsters, starting with the CEOs & executives of these companies. As we saw some of these thieves getting ten & twenty year prison terms, we would not have been so dismayed by paying the bills they left for us.

“Instead we got corporate bailouts & cheated the taxpayers & workers. Barack "Wall Street" Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, Larry Summers & the rest just continued ripping off taxpayers & giving our money to vulture capitalists.

“Most of us who voted for Obama were looking for intelligent leadership. Instead, we got more of the same crony 'capitalism' & stupid, ignorant policy.”

Pretty crisp, eh? The crispest I've read in two years.

What is Obama doing besides his plan to recover our TARP money -- which we know he's doing simply because White House polling tells him the people are angry out there, and he must do something, so he picks the easiest cosmetic thing to do that changes nothing structurally?

He's doing nothing. Zip. Nada. Except of course making a little noise every now and then.

In fact, Obama is making damn sure that the fat cat bankers get to keep all the tools they need to cause another disruption three to seven years down the road. Here's Kevin Drum in his BRILLIANT report in the current Mother Jones about Obama's regulatory proposal:

“'We don't want to tilt at windmills,' he explained last June -- and there was little doubt which windmill he was talking about. Just a couple of months earlier the financial industry had won a stunning victory over a seemingly shoo-in administration proposal to modify bankruptcy laws for strapped homeowners -- and they had not only won, they had managed to get billions in extra bailout money at the same time. That remarkable demonstration of raw power caught the Obama administration's attention, so rather than risk another defeat it began compromising even before its proposal was introduced. Top bank executives and financial lobbyists were part of the planning from the start, and as a result mutual funds and hedge funds got away with only modest new limits, credit ratings agencies were left largely untouched, the most dangerous varieties of derivatives were left alone, almost nothing was done to reduce the size of the biggest banks, and additional powers were given to the Fed, which has shown repeatedly that it's too close to Wall Street to ever regulate it effectively.”
In the first 10 months of of 2009, the financial industry spent $402 million on lobbying and campaign contributions. More than $8 million went to members of the House Committee on Financial Services.
7. WHY THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE COWARDS

We Americans are so used to being screwed over by our elite, we accept it. In fact, we're grateful.

We're big-time victims of Stockholm Syndrome.

Some of us are so deluded we run around waving teabags, calling Obama a socialist, a most peculiar form of Stockholm Syndrome -- call it Evangelical Stockholm Syndrome. When Pat Robertson says the people of Haiti got earthquaked because they made a pact with the devil to win their freedom from the French, he's doing much more than being dadaesque callous -- he's talking an evangelical dialect that is viscerally understood by his Evangelical Stockholm Syndrome people.

When Cheney says Obama is pretending we're at war, he's doing much more than lying -- he's talking a language that is viscerally understood by his Stockholm Syndrome followers on Stockholm Syndrome-engendering Fox News.

When Obama says if the banks can pay their employees big bonuses, they can pay back the American people, he's trying to appeal to his base of Obamian Stockholm Syndrome victims. Except a majority of his section of Stockholm Syndrome victims don't buy it. On The Ed Show, the host asked viewers to call in and answer the question: Is Obama doing enough to rein in the banks? 31% of Stockholm Syndrome victims said he's doing enough, 63% of Stockholm Syndrome victims said not.

Call it Stockholm Syndrome or cowardice, it amounts to the same thing: inaction in the face of injustice done to every one of us personally. How many times have you been hit by an overdraft charge? The banks even hit the party who receives the overdraft check. And we put up with this outrage.

Is your bank account at one of the 25 biggest banks in America? If you don't move it to a smaller bank or a credit union, you're helping the fat cat bankers to screw you: you're a coward.

If you're one of the 58% Americans who think the Explosive Gonads Bomber should be waterboarded, i.e. you're willing to sacrifice our principles simply because you're scared, you're a coward.

If you keep paying the minimum on your mounting credit card charges, or if you're paying off an underwater mortgage, you're a coward. Billion-dollar corporations walk away from their obligations all the time; if they're immoral punks, why not you? Especially when they're ripping you off.

If you're giving Obama a pass on his coddling of fat cat bankers, you're a coward.

What is it with us? Don't we have the courage of our convictions? Or don't we have any convictions to be courageous about?

Last Monday, a 100-year-old woman died in the Netherlands. Her name was Miep Gies. She worked for Anne Frank's father Otto, and agreed to keep the Frank family and three other Jews in a secret annex to Otto's office where the Gestapo wouldn't find them. Mrs. Gies biked to various groceries so her food purchases would not arouse suspicion. She and her husband kept the Franks going for more than two years. After the Gestapo raided the office, she tried to bribe them to save the family. She kept Anne Frank's diary, hoping the girl would come back for it. It's because of Miep Gies that we have Anne Frank's Diary.

This is what Miep Gies said about herself: “I am not a hero. I was just an ordinary housewife and a secretary.”

Miep Gies risked her life. Most of us Americans can't even risk our time. We spend a great part of it in front of the TV machine. Our couch-potato passivity and ignorance and cowardice have earned us the right to be screwed by our elite day in and day out.

This is an agonizing time in the life of our nation. I have friends who've been devastated by the Great Recession. A neighboring country is suffering unimaginable devastation. During days as dark as these, our choices define us more precisely than usual. We create who we are in our own eyes and in the eyes of our loved ones, our children, our neighbors, our peers, and everyone whose paths we cross. In pop-Sartrean terms: faced with the absurdity of existence, we're condemned to exercise our freedom of choice. Maybe this is a crude, blunt, shallow way to put it, but I look at it like this:

Once I was a coward. Now I ask myself: who would I rather be from now on? Lloyd Blankfein or Miep Gies?

Over to you, dear reader. When you look in the mirror, who do you want to see?

And what do you want to do about it?

Back after a 2-year-and-a-bit hiatus

2010-01-19T11:47:00.000-08:00

The last time I posted was August 1, 2007. Now I'm back. Much has happened. More later.

After A Full Artistic Life, Ingmar Bergman Lets Death Checkmate Him

2007-08-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Bergman is one of my all-time heroes, along with Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, J.M. Coetzee, Anselm Kiefer, Bertolucci, and not many others. I have spent the past two days reading countless obituaries, and writing my own tribute to him. Here it is.

1. ALL-TIME GREATEST FILMMAKER

People say Bergman’s films were bleak. What they should really be saying is that all other films are sentimental.

One might go further: Bergman was an artist; all other filmmakers are boulevardiers.

Let’s not pull our punches here: in writing we have Shakespeare, in music we have Beethoven, in painting we have Picasso, and in film we have Bergman. Unlike any other filmmaker, he belongs in the pantheon of humankind’s greatest artists.

I count myself lucky: Bergman made his films in my lifetime. I could live my life waiting for the next Bergman film, like I spent my teens and twenties waiting for the next Beatles album. I am happy to have been alive when these two giant entities were doing their work, experiencing the same good fortune of those lucky Londoners who went to see Shakespeare when he was doing his work, those Germans who heard Beethoven and Mozart at the time they were creating their music, and those Parisians who went to Picasso’s shows while he was painting away in their hometown.

I have Woody Allen on my side: "There's no question in my mind that Bergman is the greatest of all filmmakers. No one else even comes close. His accomplishment is that immense. He is the only movie director to ever probe the human psyche on such a profound level. He's the first director to dramatize metaphysical issues. His body of work compares to Proust's cycle of novels or even the plays of Shakespeare."

Our greatest artists are known for the breadth and volume of their work, for their incredible work ethic. This is true of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso and Bergman: they churned them out like regular sausage-makers. Bergman made at least three to four times as many movies as a typical director of today, over fifty in all (only the really old film guys got to be this prolific: Ford made 144 movies, Mizoguchi 90, Kurosawa wrote 69, Ozu made 54, Howard Hawks 47).

Our greatest artists are also known for the transforming nature of their achievements. Picasso, for example, upended the way we look at things, banging forth from realism to cubism to abstraction. This Bergman did, too, incorporating all of film made before him in his work, and leaving his mark on all others who followed.

2. A PECULIAR PERSONAL VISION

Bergman’s achievement was something extraordinary and rather peculiar, in that his art was totally personal. He carried the highly metaphysical and the deeply psychological into moviedom, but it was all about the personal self – his own personal self. No other filmmaker brought such commitment to his own personal vision to his art. That’s all he did – commit his own dreams, fears, hurts and loves to his films. There is no other filmmaker who gets more personal, who was such a public dispenser of private angst. His films are one long, lasting, and painful confession, sometimes veiled, sometimes open, always brutally honest. Nobody delved deeper into the contradictions of his own human heart. Not for him the world out there – it was all about himself. Him and God. Him and death. Him and women. Him and his horror of himself. His personal vision was exclusively inward into his own ego, which made his the single and singular vision that penetrated the human psyche deeper than any other filmmaker. His was the art of personal intensity and obsession. He was the poet of personal extremes.

Touched by the Vietnam War, he gave us “Shame,” which is a grim meditation about how he himself would’ve handled a war that came to his island of Faro, and how it would’ve degraded him personally, and exposed his own defectiveness. This war film is not about war. It’s about projecting Ingmar Bergman into a war.

"The people in my films are exactly like myself -- creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman once said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

His life was a great mess until his last marriage (from 1971 till her death in 1995 to Ingrid von Rosen, who became his secretary and manager). This mess, this utter “fiasco” as he called it, was the material for his films. "I had been married three times when I was 30," he said. "I wanted to become a good director because as a human being I was a failure. In the studio and the theater I could live happily. I still feel that way." He had five marriages and innumerable affairs, moving from woman to woman like a randy tomcat. He had nine children in and out of wedlock, none of whom he was a father to. In the documentary “Bergman’s Island,” he admits ruefully about his non-parenting: "I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused. I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have."

The Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer put the point of Bergman’s personal filmmaking extremely well in an obituary in the LA Times: “The movies of Ingmar Bergman constitute a spiritual autobiography unlike any other in the history of film. He worked out of his deepest passions and, for many of us, this made the experience of watching his films seem almost surgically invasive. He pulled us into his secret torments. Looking at ‘The Seventh Seal’ or ‘Persona’ or ‘Cries and Whispers,’ it's easy to imagine that Bergman, who died Monday, was the most private of film artists, and yet, no matter how far removed the circumstances of his life may have been from ours, he made his anguish our own. Another way to put this is that Bergman -- despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films -- was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second. His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror movie directors.”

Bergman’s life side-stepped family and children into art and an extraordinary work ethic. He lived the life of the true artist: transmuting the entirety of his life into his art. Not other lives: he made art of his own life only. (Or of the art of other artists, in his other life of theater director: "The theater is like a loyal wife," he said in 1950. "Film is the great adventure, the costly and demanding mistress -- you worship both, each in its own way.")

3. BERGMAN’S LIFE IN BRIEF

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. He grew up in Stockholm, where his father, a Lutheran minister, eventually became chaplain to the Swedish royals. His father was a harsh punisher, and his mother blew hot and cold, an unreliable source of comfort. He later speculated that she wanted to leave her husband but hung in there for the children.

"That strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against," Bergman said, giving his family some back-handed credit. "At the same time they taught me a number of values -- efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility -- which may be 'bourgeois' but are nevertheless important to the artist."

He was grateful for his parents having "created a world for me to revolt against."

His revolt started with an escape into self. He saw his first play — a Swedish fairy tale — at the age of 12. He built his own puppet theatre under a table, complete with a revolving stage and moving scenery, where he entertained his younger sister. He put on little works of the famous playwright Strindberg, whose dramas of torment struck a chord.

He recalled his seeing films for the first time as “an entry into heaven.” His grandmother took him to matinées at the local moviehouse. One of his first ambitions was to become a cinema projectionist. One Christmas, he traded 100 precious tin soldiers for a primitive movie projector, a "magic lantern," that a wealthy aunt had given to his brother Dag instead of to him. He got lengths of film from a local photography shop, and spliced together his own short dramas from this ‘found’ material.

His eccentric Uncle Carl was a failed inventor (hiding his patent applications in his underwear, and because he often wet himself, wrapping them in oilskin). He showed young Ingmar how to strip emulsion from film with hot soda water, and then paint scenes right on the strip. None of these bits of early films exist anymore, but in his movie “Prison” of 1949 Bergman refashioned one of them for a scene in which he had young lovers watch an antique biograph.

He went to the University of Stockholm in 1937. He worked in many student productions. He studied art and literature, doing a thesis on August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist who was an overwhelming influence. And he wrote: plays, novels, short stories -- none published.

He took a job as an apprentice-director at a Stockholm theater and in 1941 joined the Swedish film industry as a script doctor. Three years later his first script, "Torment," written with the film’s director Alf Sjoberg, became a hit in Sweden. Accordingly, he got his first directing assignment on "Crisis". There followed a run of journeyman stuff. In 1949, he produced his first characteristic excellent work: "The Devil's Wanton," about a prostitute's suicide, in which his metaphysical, psychological and moral interests came to the fore. Three films about women -- "Three Strange Loves," "Summer with Monika," "Sawdust and Tinsel" –- cemented his reputation in Sweden in the 50s. Then “Smiles of a Summer Night” won critical acclaim at Cannes and made real money in Europe, and Bergman was free to make anything he wanted. He rose to the challenge with two masterpieces. "The Seventh Seal," and "Wild Strawberries” made Bergman an immediate international arthouse staple, and he entered a golden period in the 60s and 70s, that included the Oscar-winning “The Virgin Spring” and his Absence-of-God trilogy "Through A Glass Darkly," “Winter Light,” and "The Silence.”

In 1976, his golden age came to a bizarre stop. Bergman was arrested during a rehearsal of his artistic forebear Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater, bundled off in handcuffs, and charged with income-tax fraud. He went into a long pout and exiled himself from Sweden for eight years. Eventually the Swedish government dropped the charges and apologized profusely, hoping to lure him back. He had some sour revenge: hundreds of people lost their jobs because he wasn’t around anymore, and the Swedish film industry lost millions in potential income.

Abroad, he tried various things. He visited Hollywood and other filmmaking centers, he made his first film in English, the flop “The Serpent's Egg." He made a movie with his namesake (no relation) Ingrid Bergman, the very good "Autumn Sonata.” He directed plays, basing himself in Munich. He finally returned to Sweden when he was 60, more or less washed-up.

In 1983, he made a comeback film that became his greatest international success – a rather gentler-than-usual-for-Bergman autobiographical family movie, "Fanny and Alexander." It got six Oscar nominations (two for best director and original screenwriter) and won four Oscars – the biggest Oscar haul by a foreign film ever.

"Making 'Fanny and Alexander' was such joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,'' he told NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani when she visited him at his island home on Faro. ''I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn't understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with 'Fanny and Alexander' was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt. To make another picture and have it feel gray and heavy and difficult with lots of problems - that would be very sad. And I have seen many of my colleagues get older and older and more and more dusty until suddenly they are thrown out, and they cannot get money for their next picture and must go around with their hats in their hands. That is something I do not want - better to stop now when everything is perfect.''

This melancholy Swede whose life ended with a great triumph, was probably a low-grade clinical depressive for long periods of his life, and perhaps worked as hard as he did to keep depression at bay.

"I was very cruel to actors and to other people," he said when he was in his 60s. "I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, 'You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you.' I don't say I'm pleasant now, but I think I changed slowly in my 50s. At least I hope I've changed."

Liv Ullmann, who lived with him for five years and had a child by him, tells this story: ‘We always had breakfast together, And, as we ate, Ingmar would relate all the nightmares he had experienced during the previous night. And I listened in horror. Because I knew that I would be acting them out as he filmed, later that day.’

The world knows Ingmar Bergman for his films, but in his native Sweden he was an almost overbearing cultural figure. Besides his filmmaking, he was the country's top theater director, he wrote and directed radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he made soap commercials, he wrote novels and two memoirs. Half the country watched his film of the Mozart opera “The Magic Flute’ on TV. His TV series “Scenes from a Marriage” embroiled the whole nation in a continuing debate on marriage. When he died, Sweden stopped. TV was interrupted to show his work, flags were hung half-mast, and the whole country mourned the passing of the world’s most famous Swede.

4. A MASTER CRAFTSMAN

Bergman made his films beautifully. He called them "handmade." His budgets were all under well under half a million dollars. Technically, as a craftsman, he has no peer. The camera simply exists where he put it. It moves like the gaze of an ur-observer. It frames like a Matisse or a Hopper. It sees the light like Rembrandt. He never saw a reason to hurry the viewer along, like Hollywood story-telling does, scared by its own vacuity. In fact, he was more interested in nailing the viewer from image to beautiful image. What he achieved in his cinematography and montage, in the pacing and flow of his images, in his magisterial control, is beyond compare. Nobody touches him. Technically, put next to Bergman, a much-touted technophile like Steven Spielberg is a loud, crass, obvious and unsubtle boor.

A set routine and a set crew brought Bergman to his technical mastery. He worked like Fassbinder, flitting between stage and screen with the same repertory company. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," Sven Nykvist, his second great cinematographer after Gunnar Fischer (“The Seventh Seal”), told critic Roger Ebert in 1975. "Then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot -- usually about the 15th of April. Usually we are the same 18 people working with him, year after year, one film a year." Among the 18, there was the important job of the "hostess," she who served coffee and pastries and made the set a haven of domesticity. "How large a crew do you use?" David Lean asked Bergman one year at Cannes. "I always work with 18 friends," Bergman replied "That's funny," said Lean. "I work with 150 enemies."

Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer, wrote: "I was good friends with Sven Nykvist, who told me stories about Bergman. They sat in a big old church from very early in the morning until as black as the night gets. They noted where the light moved through the stained glass windows. Bergman planned where he would stage the scenes for a picture they were about to do. This had the practical advantage of minimizing light and generator costs. Sven said sitting alone with Ingmar in the church had a profound effect on him. I asked him if it made him more religious. He said he didn't think so but it did give him some kind of spiritual connection to Ingmar, which helped him deal with the times Bergman became very mean."

Bergman said rather humbly of his own process: “I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

In fact, he made three films about the artist and his persecution by society: The Magician, Sawdust and Tinsel, Hour of the Wolf. He had two traumatic brushes with society: his tax arrest was one. The other one sprang from a stay in Germany in 1934 at the age of 16, when he lived as an exchange student with a clergyman's family. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar. He listened to the clergyman toss off sermons based on ''Mein Kampf.'' ''We were absolute virgins politically and we found it marvelous,'' he recalled. ''We were infected.'' He returned to Sweden a ''little pro-German fanatic.'' Years later, he was overcome with shame. ''I understood I had made a great mistake, and since then political thinking has scared me to death.'' For many years, he never read political books or editorials. He didn’t vote.

5. HIS WORK WITH ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

The actress Sheila Reid worked with him: “He gave me very helpful notes that said things like, ‘She is a candle that never goes out’ and ‘She has a screen inside her up to her neck.’ I was extremely fortunate to have worked with Ingmar in both theatre and cinema.”

His actors and actresses were eternally grateful to him – he put their greatest performances on screen for all to see. Typically, he gave them little room for maneuver: he always told them exactly what he wanted and acted it out for them. They had to learn to shine and glow within absolutely exact and precise instructions. In that way, he was like Hitchcock: actors were cattle to him. He knew what he wanted from them and he got it. No director worked with more dictatorial freedom. After the international success of “Smiles of a Summer Night,” he had carte blanche from the Swedish film industry.

6. EXTRAORDINARY RANGE

Despite his films being so personal, Bergman displayed an extraordinary range. When one looks at his greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence, Shame, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, Smiles of a Summer Night – the nine outright pinnacles of masterpieces in his enduring canon (at least twice as many masterpieces than from any other filmmaker), what does one see? A dizzying range. The following brief descriptions will give the reader some idea. They're ranked in my personal order of greatness.

1. “Persona”: an actress struck mute and her talky nurse. This film is Begrman's harshest blow struck deepest into the human soul. Into its alienation and cruelty. Also, into the depths of the making of art, specifically the art of film. Bergman’s “experimental” film.

2. “Cries and Whispers”: sisters and servant gathered around a dying woman. The excruciating pain and emotional isolation of life. First film in color, and the color is mostly red. Bergman’s great “family” film (way more devastating than his other "family" film, Fanny and Alexander).

3. “The Silence”: two women and a boy, disoriented in a hotel in a country whose language they don’t speak. Bergman’s “Huis Clos” and “Germany Year Zero.”

4. “Shame”: a man and a woman on an island where war arrives. Bergman’s “Rome Open City.”

5. “The Seventh Seal”: a knight in the plague-ridden Middle Ages striking a bargain with death. Bergman’s “Faust.” It was his medieval dance-of-death take on living in the spiritual crisis of the nuclear age, awaiting our apocalypse.

6. “The Virgin Spring”: a father avenging the rape of his daughter in a medieval setting. The closest to a plot-driven Hollywood movie Bergman ever came, and it wasn’t close at all.

7. “Wild Strawberries”: a successful man looking back on an emotional stunted life. Bergman’s “Citizen Kane.”

8. “Scenes from a Marriage”: Bergman’s own marriages, all-in-one. There will never be a better film on marriage.

9. “Smiles of a Summer Night”: a partying night of changing loves among couples. Bergman’s “Rules of the Game.”

Looking at this list, it is amazing to see how often he worked in allegorical conceits, the way J.M. Coetzee and Beckett and Kafka write. (Also, symbols: all those ticking clocks, windows, doors.) His people are himself, and he casts himself in allegory and conceits. The conceit of death as a white-faced monk playing chess with a knight. The spooky interaction between a woman struck mute and one sparked into talking talking talking. The startling Dali-like dream life of a professor on the brink of death. Etcetera.

7. BERGMAN’S PERSONALITY

The master of angst was always a suffering, sensitive creature. He was constantly scared of death. He thought about it all the time. But one day, coming out of a death-like anesthesia during a hospital visit, he found himself suddenly unafraid of death. The question of God vanished, too, after which his movies exhibited a sort of nervous humanism: maybe in human love there lay salvation.

He fed off his own anguish and that of others. ''If I would tell him I have a cancer and was going to die, he would be extremely sorry, but also extremely curious,'' said Harry Schein, a former director of the Swedish Film Institute. ''He's interested in the unhappiness of his friends. He dwells on it - he can get material. We often have long phone calls, and if he asks, 'How are you?' and I say, 'Fine,' he would be extremely disappointed. A human being in pain - he can learn much more.''

He had a direct line to his childhood self. ''I have maintained open channels with my childhood. I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was - with lights, smells, sounds and people. ... I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.''

''I think I have just one obsession -- to touch other human beings. That desire for contact, I think, was the reason why I came to this profession, because as a child I was very shy and very lonely and very afraid of other people. Of course, it was not only this very beautiful reason, but it was also a longing for power, for manipulating other people. I think that's a disease every director has - a kind of professional illness.''

Unhappy with his own father, who beat him and locked him a closet for hours at a time, scaring him with the threat that mice would nibble his toes, Bergman played the father to everyone else, discovering early on that he had the power to make people put themselves out for him. His colleagues aver that his manipulation of people reached far outside the studio. ''With his friends, with his actors, he plays the authority figure,'' said Jorn Donner, his producer on ''Fanny and Alexander.'' ''In a sense, he has become the father he hated. He can become very jealous, say, if one of the actors in his film works in the theater in the evening. And he tries to influence their professional life. He says, 'You should do that, you should not do this.' In Sweden, he has enormous power - he has made careers and indirectly probably destroyed them - and so people tend to listen.''

Mind you, he could be very helpful. Here’s director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) on some fatherly advice from Ingmar: “He asked me if I'd decided what to do after my film, and when I said no, he said, ‘Well you're fucked,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘One thing that can happen is that you fail, and it won't be good for your self-confidence. It's much worse if you have success - you're absolutely paralysed by it. So you always have to decide your next movie before the opening of the present one.’ And he was so right. You don't turn into a career pilot, trying to navigate by success or failure, instead of deciding from your heart.”

Bergman has said that his films grew ''like a snowball'' from some insignificant fleck of an event, often triggering a memory. Filmmaking was therapy. ''I have been working all the time,'' he said, ''and it's like a flood going through the landscape of your soul. It's good because it takes away a lot. It's cleansing. If I hadn't been at work all the time, I would have been a lunatic.''

''When Ingmar was younger, there was a bitterness to his films,'' said Harry Schein. ''With 'Fanny and Alexander,' there's a greater sense of harmony. I think Ingmar has it personally as well. In many ways, I feel he still lives a very difficult life - he talks of Angst, of that anxiety where you wake up in the middle of the night - but superficially he seems more harmonic. On the surface, he is nice and charming and almost civilized.''

The 50s Bergman, bent on establishing himself, was the archetypal angry young man, a temperamental, bohemian poseur. He split home, after coming to blows with his father. He read Sartre and Camus. He signed his letters with a scribble of a little devil. He even wore a beret and a scruffy beard. He tore telephones from the wall. He threw adolescent fits of temper. Once he chucked a chair right through the glass of a control booth. ''I was a package of emotions on two legs -- my life was completely chaotic.'' Since those halcyon days, said producer Jorn Donner, Bergman tried hard to change. ''Ingmar has been trying to fight the bohemianism in himself by leading a well-ordered life. When you think you are a bohemian or a lazy person, you have to fight that and impose a discipline - it's a little puritanical. He is very much the bourgeois today - he likes to see Ingrid and himself as the proprietors of a small French restaurant - you can't get more bourgeois than that.''

His wife Ingrid - a steady, kindly woman who looked exactly like his mother -- helped him get together with his brood of eight children from various marriages and liaisons. Later in life, his grownup children and four grandchildren gathered at Faro every July for his birthday.

On Faro, in his last years, Bergman rose every morning at 8 and wrote from 9 till noon. A lunch of berries and sour milk, and then back to work for two more hours. At 3, a nap. Before dinner, a walk. After dinner, TV – he liked ''Dallas'' - or a movie from his 16-mm collection.

Like the shrink Jenny in ''Face to Face'' who has a nervous breakdown, Bergman cultivated neatness and efficiency to contain his anxieties and fears. His surface calm was like Sweden's; underneath, he claimed, he was still ''extremely neurotic.'' ''Ingmar, at the slightest provocation, will produce a nervous breakdown,'' said his agent, Paul Kohner. ''He has a delicate disposition.''

8. AN EYE FOR WOMEN

Bergman was a man, but it is interesting that his three greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence – feature women. Before he exploded on the international scene, he established his reputation in Sweden in the early '50s with three films -- Three Strange Loves, Summer with Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel -- that internalized the psychology of women and what he labeled "their special inner world." He had a dour view of his own gender, i.e. of himself. His male characters are always selfish, intolerant haters, self-indulgent and helplessly standing by, while his women are admirable, strong, empathetic, patient and intuitively wise. He was sometimes described as a prescient, vanguard feminist.

''I was in love with my mother,'' he says. ''I knew what she liked and disliked and I used to try to find ways to win her love.” He believes that ''women are more intuitive than men - they have their emotional life more intact.''

He certainly had an eye for women, featuring an extraordinary range of beautiful actresses in his movies. He was an inveterate ladies man and skirt chaser. He got all the best and brightest babes. He used the same actresses over and over, on stage and in film.

9. THE HUMAN FACE, THE BOURGEOIS SOUL

Bergman's landscape was the human face. And he got hold of some amazing faces. The supremely spiritual face of Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal). The sexually ravenous face of Gunnel Lindblom (The Silence). The unflappable, unfailingly polite face of Gunnar Bjornstrand. The suffering face of Harriet Anderson (Cries and Whispers). The kind face of Kari Sylwan (Cries and Whispers). The sensuous, troubled face of Bibi Anderson (Persona). The intelligent, caring face of Liv Ullmann (The Shame). The everyday face of Erland Josephson, an ardent excusemaker of a man (Scenes from a Marriage). His films expose the human face, blister and blast it, celebrate its suffering, burn it into our own faces.

He gave our inner life an outer form in his glowing, glowering full-frontal closeups. In filming the human face, he gave form to the human soul.

In fact, Bergman’s art makes it possible to speak of the human soul. But what kind of soul is that? It is the suffering soul. But not the soul under the duress of material want. If his art can be said to be about anything bigger than himself (and it can and it can’t), it would have to be about what he was – a bourgeois European. One could say his art was about the soul of the bourgeois. He asks us to think about how the fat, contented bourgeois soul – the soul from which, ostensibly, all worldly suffering has been removed by a fair and just society such as Sweden’s – still suffers. He convinces us that the bourgeois soul is still capable of human suffering -- that the bourgeois soil is perhaps, because of its contented lifestyle, doomed to suffer.

I’d like to get out of the way for the last thought, and quote someone who posted on a NY Times comments section when Bergman died:

July 30th,
2007
1:39 pm
There is a totality of scope in Bergman’s films that mystically inhabits every moment of time and every seemingly unimportant article, along the lines of what the poet William Blake expressed:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
Perhaps above all his films call for a life of inner courage, both in spite of and because of the human tenderness, frailty and resilience which his films exalt.
— Posted by Eric Spaeth

10. HOW TO SEE HIS FILMS AGAIN:

Individual DVDs of most of his films are available in the Criterion Collection.
Then there are these boxed sets:
1. For the total devotee, his first apprenticeship films are on the Criterion Collection’s “Early Bergman,” “Torment” (1944), “Crisis” (1946), “Port of Call” (1948), “Thirst” (1949) and “To Joy” (1950).
2. In the Criterion Collection, there’s a boxed set of his 1960s Absence-of-God trilogy, The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It also includes is a fourth film, “Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie,” a five-part comprehensive documentary on the making of Winter Light, one of Bergman's favorite films. The documentary is directed by filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman (I Am Curious--Yellow), and was, in Sjoman's words, "the first and only time that Bergman let someone document his filmmaking from the first idea to the first showings."
3. “Scenes From a Marriage” (1973). The film was released theatrically in the United States in a 167-minute version. Criterion released the full 299-minute television series as a DVD in 2004.
4. “Fanny and Alexander” (1983). Both the 188-minute feature and the 312-minute original are now part of the Criterion catalog.
5. His final made-for-TV movie, “Saraband,” a look-back at the long-divorced characters in “Scenes from a Marriage, is on DVD from Sony Pictures.
6. There’s an Ingmar Bergman collection by MGM: six DVDs of Persona, Shame, The Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, and the big-budget mess The Serpent’s Egg, with a 2002 interview with Bergman.

11. ALL HIS MOVIES:

1. Apprentice Work:
Crisis (1946) (Kris)
It Rains on Our Love (1946) (Det regnar på vår kärlek)
A Ship to India (1947) (Skepp till Indialand)
Music in Darkness (1948) (Musik i mörker)
Port of Call (1948) (Hamnstad)
Prison (1949) (Fängelse)
Thirst /Three Strange Loves (1949) (Törst)
This Can't Happen Here (1950) (Sånt händer inte här)
To Joy (1950) (Till glädje)
Summer Interlude (1951) (Sommarlek)
Secrets of Women (1952) (Kvinnors väntan)

2. Maturity:
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) (Gycklarnas afton)
Summer with Monika (1953) (Sommaren med Monika)
A Lesson in Love (1954) (En lektion i kärlek)
Dreams (1955) (Kvinnodröm) aka Journey Into Autumn

3. International Breakthrough:
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) (Sommarnattens leende)
The Seventh Seal (1957) (Det sjunde inseglet)
Wild Strawberries (1957) (Smultronstället)

4. Period Movies:
The Magician /The Face (1958) (Ansiktet)
Brink of Life (1958) (Nära livet)
The Devil's Eye (1960) (Djävulens öga)
The Virgin Spring (1960) (Jungfrukällan) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)

5. Absence-of-God trilogy:
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) (Såsom i en spegel) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)
Winter Light (1962) (Nattvardsgästerna)
The Silence (1963) (Tystnaden)

6. Greatness:
All These Women (1964) (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor)
Persona (1966)
Hour of the Wolf (1967) (Vargtimmen)
Shame (1968) (Skammen)
The Rite (1968) (Riten) (TV)
The Passion of Anna (1969) (En passion)
The Touch (1971) (Beröringen)
Cries and Whispers (1973) (Viskningar och rop) (won Academy Award for Best Cinematography)
Scenes from a Marriage (1973) (Scener ur ett äktenskap)
The Magic Flute (1975) (Trollflöjten), first shown on Swedish television, followed by a cinematic release
Face to Face (1976) (Ansikte mot ansikte)

7. After tax arrest:
The Serpent's Egg (1977) (Das Schlangenei)
Autumn Sonata (1978) (Höstsonaten)
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten)

8. Last Period:
Fanny and Alexander (1982) (Fanny och Alexander) (won 4 Academy Awards)
Karin's Face (1984) (Karins ansikte) (TV)
After the Rehearsal (1984) (Efter repetitionen)
In The Presence of a Clown (1997) (Larmar och gör sig till) (TV)
Saraband (2003) (TV)

9. Last work written for others:
The Best Intentions (1992) (Den goda viljan) (directed by Bille August)
Sunday’s Children Söndagsbarn (1992) (directed by son Daniel Bergman)
Faithless (2000) (Trolösa) (directed by Liv Ullmann)

Adam's blogbox: how to make capitalism democratic

2007-07-25T07:24:00.000-07:00

A fact of American democracy that is never discussed is how undemocratic our business lives are.

Many of us spend most of our waking hours on earth working under circumstances that are totally undemocratic.

In a big company, tens of thousands of workers can be fired because of one man’s decision. The CEO of an American company has as much power as an old-fashioned monarch. Life in a modern American corporation is about as democratic as Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin. Our CEOs are today’s version of Genghis Khan.

The basic fact of corporate life is that you have to obey your boss.

Hence the corporate duty of sucking up to the boss. The phenomenon of phalanxes of yes men. The underlying fear in everything a company man does: what will the boss think of this?

It’s amazing that innovation can blossom under such a system. But think how innovation happens: you need to get the boss on your side before you can do anything. It had better be something he likes. It had better be something he can take credit for.

One-man rule: that’s how American business operates.

Of course, democracy and capitalism are not natural bedfellows. A good case might be made that capitalism does better under a dictatorship: witness the runaway success of Singapore and China.

Perhaps an interesting line of enquiry might be to explore how capitalism might work if it were organized along democratic lines.

Let’s engage in a thought experiment: how would one organize a company along democratic lines? What would something as paradoxical as democratic capitalism look like?

A good place to start would be with the workers of the company. We might call them the citizens of the company, like one refers to the citizens of a country or nation.

Just calling them citizens immediately changes how one thinks about them, doesn’t it?

As citizens, the workers would have some rights and some say in how their company is run. Like, for example, the right to elect their leader.

Imagine what would happen to a company in which its citizen workers get to vote for a new CEO every three or four years.

Come election time, there would be campaigns from qualified would-be CEOs inside the company (or outside the company, for that matter) directed at the citizen workers to win their votes.

What kind of campaigns would these CEO candidates run?

Obviously, they’d come up with policies that show how they’d make more money for the company than the next candidate, and how they’d spend that money better than the next candidate.

Now think about this: it would not get these CEO candidates many votes if their motivation for making more money was to return more dividends to the shareholders in the company.

In fact, to get the most votes, they’d have to promise that a solid chunk of the profits generated by their policies would be returned to the voters -- the citizen workers -- themselves. Come to think of it, they’d have to provide really good reasons why they wouldn’t return a 100% of the profits to the workers. (Think of the motivating effect if citizen workers were to make more money when the company makes more money.)

But what about the shareholders? Shouldn’t they be getting dividends?

Certainly. But it very much depends who the shareholders are.

Here’s where things get interesting.

How would you organize a company in which shares are divided between workers and shareholders and owners?

Let’s float an idea that may sound off-the-wall, even though it’s not intended as a cast-in-stone solution. Think of it as a line of enquiry for people to explore, debate, rebut, refine, develop and run with. In other words, a thought experiment. A new model for a new kind of employee-owned corporation.

Here goes. Say you have an idea that could make money. So you start a company. It’s yours, you own it. Because you have a good idea, your company starts to grow. You add more employees as you make more money so that your expanding company can make you even more money.

Here’s the thought experiment: what if corporate life was arranged –- regulated by law -- as follows.

You are the owner of the company as long as your business employs under a 100 workers. You’re the dictator. You’re free to support your employees, or exploit them, as much as you want or need to.

But:

The day you decide to expand to the point where you need more than a 100 workers -- the minute you employ your 101st worker –- the second you find you need to employ more than a 100 workers to expand even bigger and faster to make megabucks –- at that point, a new change kicks in, legally mandated under the new democratic corporate regulations of our thought experiment.

This law says you now have to share ownership of the company with your workers. The minute you have more than 100 workers, you have to give your workers 51% of your company.

After this, if you and the citizen workers decide to take the company public, you can offer only up to 49% of the company to outside shareholders. Out of your share.

The shares of the citizen workers can never be alienated. They’re not even allowed to sell their shares themselves. If they leave the company, their shares go back to the company, i.e. to the other citizen workers.

In other words, the workers will always own at least 51% of their company.

So when you as the owner get to a 100 workers employed, you face an existential decision. You can decide to stay at 100 employees and be a dictator. But if you want to expand to make more money on a bigger playing field, you have to change your company from a dictatorship to a democracy.

You have to share ownership with your workers. You also have to share power, because now the citizen workers get the right to vote for their leader every three or four years.

They will keep voting for you, the original owner, if the company does well and makes money for them. But they will vote for someone else if you start to blow it.

If they vote for someone else, he or she starts running the company. You still own your 49% of the shares, but you have no power anymore.

If the citizen workers decide to sell shares to the public, they can do it without your say so. They can raise capital for the company by selling up to 80% of your 49% share of the company. The capital they raise goes to the company, not to you. You can decide to sell your 20% of your 49% share of the company in the IPO if you want to cash in.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

Every year, if there hasn’t been an IPO, you have to give away 5% of your 49% to the citizen workers until the last 20% of it, which you can keep forever and pass on to your kids. Or sell to the citizen workers in what used to be your company, or sell to shareholders.

Crazy, isn’t it?

But is it any crazier than what we have now? Who says it’s better to have a board-appointed CEO than one democratically elected by the workers? Who says it’s better to have outside shareholders in your company who may never have stepped foot on your factory floor and only bought the shares on the recommendation of a broker – what you might call a class of absentee landlords? What’s so logical about that?

One idea behind our crazy thought experiment is that it’s OK to be the dictator of a 100 people, but not of more than a 100. In fact, the workers who sign up with your dictatorship are there because they’re hoping your company will grow beyond a 100 workers into a democracy.

This is not meant as a hard and fast plan, but as a basis for discussion. A way to deconcept the logic of undemocratic capitalism and point out how democratic capitalism might work. You may have your own ideas.

What cannot be gainsaid is that the capitalism as it is practiced in the US today is totally undemocratic.

Under a more democratic system of capitalism, not only are power and assets shared, but also motivation and incentive.

When everyone is an owner, behavior changes. Everyone in the company, from the CEO down to the janitor, owns shares and will be thinking about how they can make more money for the company –- how they can do their job better, how they can save monet for the company, how they can maximize profit. The company’s money is their money. Isn’t that more true to capitalist ideals than it is for the workers to rely solely on a fixed wage?

My contention goes further: I say a democratic corporation will beat an undemocratic corporation, run by a board-appointed CEO and owned by absentee shareholders, hands down. Every time. It stands to reason: a company owned and run by many capitalists who actually work in the company, will work harder and smarter and more cost-consciously and more profit-mindedly and more competitively than any other.

The workers will work smarter and harder. The bosses will work smarter and harder. The CEO will work smarter and harder. They’re all working for each other as well as for themselves. They're all accountable to each other. They all want each other to do better, because that way they themselves will do better. They win by sharing. The CEO knows he keeps his job only while his decisions and actions do well for the people working under him.

The workers will follow a CEO who makes good money for them with a 110% of their smarts, goodwill and effort.

This could be the perfect model of a perfect company.

If workers could vote for their CEOs today, which CEOs would survive? Steve Jobs of Apple would, for sure. But how many others?

If you’re a CEO, engage in your own thought experiment: do you feel the cold breeze of democratic accountability raise the hairs on the back of your neck?

If only more of our American CEOs labored with that breeze down their necks.

If only our capitalism worked in a more democratic way.

But under our widely accepted and highly admired system, we just have to cope with the results of dictatorship-predator capitalism: cars and burgers that wreck our environment and endanger life on earth; HMOs that deny us operations that could save our lives; and CEOs who make more money in a day than their workers make in a year.

We’re stuck with the capitalism we have instead of the capitalism most of us may prefer, if only we knew about it.

Call me a dreamer. But if democratic capitalism actually happened, you yourself might find that, ohmigod, there’s a dream out there worth following.

(This is from my forthcoming book: Invisible Dictatorship and the Sovereign Self: Why America is a Dictatorship Cross-dressed as a Democracy and How to Live Free in it. Comments are welcome.)

Adam's blogbox: waiting for the Barbarians to leave Washington

2007-07-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

What will Washington be like when the Barbarians leave town next year?

Will this hapless burg -- home of flagrant hypocrites and BS ejaculators, stuffed from snout to stern with an indigestible lumpen elite of corrupt souls, moral myopics, and wannabe-messiahs -- feel the relief of an epic enema?

We know what Washington has become since the Barbarians took over in 2000. Who back then, when Bush was campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” could have foreseen what his Cheney presidency would bring us?

1. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Arab men, women and children, and nearly four thousand Americans -- not counting the thousands of severed limbs dropped on Iraqi soil.

2. The hatred and contempt of the world.

3. The turning of our proud Army and CIA into low-life torturers.

4. The creation of thousands of fresh, motivated, diehard Al Qaeda terrorists and hundreds of suicide bombers.

5. The staggering amount of $5 to $9 billion poured every month into a cesspool called the Iraq War (so far, more than $440,000,000,000 of our taxes).

6. The tactic of the big lie to con us into war (it worked for Hitler, it worked for Bush).

7. The selling out of America to China (we’ve given them the power to dump us into a depression whenever they fancy).

8. A headlong plunge from a comfortable surplus into a tsunami of debt, making us the #1 debtor nation on earth.

9. The absurd incompetence of FEMA after Katrina.

10. The rampant arrogance of cronyism. (You’re against abortion? Great, that qualifies you to be an administrator in the Green Zone.)

11. The suspension of habeas corpus. (Why have we locked you up without a trial for the past five years? Hey, it’s just the way things work in a democracy like ours, dude.)

12. The rebuilding of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (Pakistan is on our side, isn’t it?)

13. The trashing of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

14. The trashing of international agreements and laws, such as the Geneva Conventions.

15. The breaching of the separation of Church and State (that would be an evangelical church – Jews and Muslims need not apply for our faith-based funding).

16. The breaking of laws by the President. (I’m above the law because I’m your Commander-in-Chief.)

17. The doctrine of “pre-emptive” war. (Didn’t you know? We had to stop the Iraqi Army from crossing the Atlantic en masse to come and bomb us with their scary nukes.)

18. The handing over of our Middle East policy to Israel.

19. The trashing of our environment.

20. The trashing of the middleclass and the poor.

21. Letting a member of Congress get away with chasing interns whose parents thought their kids would be safe in Washington.

22. Helping lobbyists to con Indian nations and others.

23. The enrichment of the already rich, to the point that beneficiaries like Warren Buffett and Bill Clinton are apologizing for it.

24. The use of US attorneys to accuse Democratic Party candidates of whatever it takes to turn the vote.

25. The employment of mercenaries – hired goons -- by the thousands.

26. No-bid contracts for Cheney’s old firm Halliburton.

27. The creation of a Supreme Court that now openly espouses racism and the exploitation of workers by their companies.

28. The refusal to implement laws passed by Congress by the extravagant use of presidential “signing statements.”

29. A foreign policy that has strengthened our arch-enemy Iran to become the #1 player in the Middle East.

30. The wholesale bungling of the occupation of a foreign country.

31. The fostering of a civil war in Iraq.

32. The wholesale spying on American citizens.

33. The wholesale outsourcing of American jobs overseas.

Truly, we’ve had six years of government by the Barbarians. No administration in US history has racked up a more odious record of incompetence, stupidity and venality. It’s like the sacking of Rome from the inside. The cons are running the prison. Darth Vader rules the galaxy. Child molesters oversee the nursery.

During Watergate, pundits proudly stated that the system worked. Well, in the case of the Barbarians, the system worked all right, but it was not the system we call democracy. It was something new in America – dictatorship lite.

Our so-called democracy, this supposedly robust system established by our founding fathers, of a separation of powers, of checks and balances, of an actual written Constitution, of equality before the law, was hijacked by no more than twelve men with a wacky agenda – Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales.

The shame of it is that they were ably supported by not only the usual suspects -- the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the “scholars” of the American Enterprise Institute, the batty "Rapture” Evangelicals and creationists, the rightwing radio windbags, the flag-waving “uberpatriot” imbeciles, the greedy military-industrial complex slurping up our tax dollars -- the whole pea-brained troglodyte spastic chorus of hate-speech-spouting Bible-thumping crooked free-market monopoly capitalism liberal-decrying family-values war-on-terror gay-baiting women-suppressing stem-cell-fearing enemies-under-our-beds science-ignorant paranoid fetus-pitying SUV-driving beer-bellied gun-toting bash-the-poor hysterical racist ideologues who’ve made America the laughing stock of the civilized world, given noble conservatism a bad name, and caused Barry Goldwater to puke on the worms in his grave.

These twelve Barbarians -- who in any other country would be marginalized on the far-right loony fringe -- were also enthusiastically cheered on by the self-proclaimed stalwarts of our “democracy” like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC. These highly intelligent and liberal media fell for the most obvious lies, and became the useful idiots of the Barbarians.

Twelve Barbarians hijacked the country, and the country was only too willing to be hijacked. Hey, we may be against gay marriage, but that doesn’t stop us from bending over when our elite waves a big dick our way.

So much for our so-called democracy. Turns out it can be easily busted by a few determined wingnuts.

Even an election win by the Democratic Party has made little difference. Our kids are still being killed for no good reason in Iraq. The Barbarians, bloodied but unbowed, still rule. Nobody has thought to impeach the most impeachable President and Vice-President in history.

Our system of “democracy” has failed us. The truth is, the system never works. It’s people who make the system work, and we’ve elected the wrong people to make our system work. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach, and that’s that. The electorate never gets a proper alternative to the dictatorial powers-that-be.

It doesn’t really matter which party is in power. The credit-card companies will still get to write the bankruptcy laws. Big Pharma will still be writing drug laws. HMOs will be writing healthcare laws. Big Oil will make sure they’re subsidized by our taxes. The American people will still find themselves eternally ass-up-in-the-air, steadily buggered by their Barbarian elite.

The Barbarians are in charge because a nation of Barbarians put them there, and it took our nation of ignoramus hicks all of six years to find out exactly how Barbarian their chosen Barbarians are. At last Bush’s approval rate sleeps with the fishes, and most Americans want the end of a war most of them now think was a mistake to begin with, but wouldn’t you know? Bush is still on TV, refusing to get his butt out of Iraq.

Now that we know how easy it is to turn our “democracy” into a dictatorship (in the current jargon, a “unitary executive”), what can we expect future administrations to get up to?

Don’t think you can trust an administration run by Democrats to be more “democratic” than the Barbarians. The template has been set. It’s just too easy to hijack our “democracy.” Our media are simply too compliant. Our citizens are simply too ignorant (how many of them realize they make no more money than they did in 1970, even though they’re way more productive and work much harder?). And our business leaders simply buy too many profit opportunities under the Barbarians. Heck, they love the war; they’re making a killing in Iraq.

That shrewd old Nazi, Hermann Goering, explained the whole thing at Nuremberg: "Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

It sure worked here. The Barbarians took over, planning a war on Iraq long before 9/11 for their Barbarian dream of yet another puppet regime in the Middle East. Now they’ve afforded future administrations a shining example of just what a few determined men can do when they want war, or tax cuts for the rich, or the right for corporations to foul up our air, or however they want to screw the average American. The spiders spin, and we sit trapped in their web, being sucked dry, while those who should be warning us are basking in access to power instead of speaking truth to it.

Will anything happen to our Barbarians? Let’s take just one example: pundit William Kristol, the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative vanity publication The Weekly Standard. He told NPR when the Iraq War started: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America, that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni … There's been almost no evidence of that at all.” What happened to this massive fool, whose brain has been squatting in his bowels for his entire life? Time Magazine made him one of their columnists. The stupider you are, the bigger the forum you’re given to be stupid in. The more you screw up, the likelier you are to get a Medal of Freedom pinned on your incompetent backside by our Barbarian-In-Chief.

Even now, our nation of Barbarians have no idea how truly Barbarian their Barbarian rulers are. Three of our GOP presidential candidates don’t believe in evolution. All of them are for torture. How can this happen in an educated society of rational grownups? We’re talking about idiocy on a massive scale here, a kind of dark age of the human spirit. Our leaders may be jokes, but what they do is not funny at all, since it usually entails thousands being ripped off or killed. (Last week’s joke from the NY Times: “Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel ... that he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.” America, never forget you voted for this pustule on a warthog’s butt.)

The American experiment with democracy is over. We need a new De Tocqueville to write not “Democracy in America,” but “Kleptocracy in America.” Here’s the definition of kleptocracy: a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population. Rings a bell, doesn’t it? Especially when we see our pols, after they lose elections, automatically become lobbyists to cash in big-time. And you thought they were there to work for you.

We can now look forward to Barbarian rule in perpetuity. Sometimes it will be Barbarian Heavy, like today, and sometimes it will be Barbarian Lite, like it will be under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Hillary or Obama might make a cosmetic difference, but Paris Hilton will become a nun in the Congo before any administration actually SOLVES our problems of education, healthcare, energy, the environment, campaign funding and income inequality, as opposed to Congress paving them over with a thin coat of superficial law-making. Until public schools are funded equally and not by property taxes, until there's a single-payer healthcare system, until big business is forced to clean up after themselves, until corporate welfare for big oil and other businesses stop, until the rich pay their fair share of taxes, until we stop exporting our jobs overseas, until CEOs stop making more in one day than their workers make in a year, things will go on as before.

The Barbarians have won. Under Bush/Cheney, government of the people by the people for the people has perished from the earth. Sorry, Abe. Our Constitution never stood a chance against our 21st century elite. You thought you birthed a democracy, founding fathers. Tsk, tsk. Long live government of the Barbarians by the Barbarians for the Barbarians.

Even the New York Times, who did all it could to get us into the Iraq War, says it's high time to get the fuck out

2007-07-10T06:09:00.000-07:00

1. The Road Home
New York Times Editorial

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq's government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs - after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush's plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation's alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America's allies must try to mitigate those outcomes - and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now.

The Fight Against Terrorists

Despite President Bush's repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.

This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaeda's leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.

And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.

The Question of Bases

The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.

There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy - and too tempting - to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington's real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations' governments.

The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

The Civil War

One of Mr. Bush's arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq's political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraq's neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.

Iraq's leaders - knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival - might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

The Human Crisis

There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq - Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria - and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees - some with ethnic and political resentments - could spread Iraq's conflict far beyond Iraq's borders.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors' conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.

The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will - translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers - whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.

The Neighbors

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors - America's friends as well as its adversaries.

Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq's borders.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans' demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened - the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage - with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

2. IRAQ'S CURSE
The thirst for a final, crushing victory is firmly woven into the country's history
By EDWARD WONG/NY Times

BAGHDAD – Perhaps no fact is more revealing about Iraq's history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is sahel , and it helps explain much of what I have seen in 3 _ years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, a friend explained. Throughout Iraq's history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction has been able to secure absolute power; that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning. President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the U.S. military involvement on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord.

"We've changed nothing," said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician. "It's dark. There will be more blood."

I first met Mr. Qaisi in 2003 at a Salafi mosque in western Baghdad, when the Sunni Arab insurgency was gaining momentum. He articulated the Sunnis' simmering anger at being ousted from power. That fury has blossomed and is likely only to grow, as religious Shiite leaders and their militias become more entrenched in the government and as Kurds in the north push to expand their region and secede in all but name.

Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq's factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: Their will is ebbing, and their time here is limited.

"Everyone – the Sunni, the Shia – is playing the waiting game," an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. "They're waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you."

Four years into this war, Sunni and Shiite attacks against the Americans are expanding. There is little love among Iraqi civilians for the troops, though many fear the anarchy that could follow an American withdrawal.

"I'm still sticking by my principle, which is against the occupation," Mr. Qaisi said. "I'm Iraqi, and I think the Iraqi people should have this principle. We have the right to defend our country as George Washington did."

As long as I have known him, Mr. Qaisi has rejected the idea that Sunni Arabs are the minority in this country. To him and many other Sunnis, the borders of Iraq do not delineate the boundaries of the war. The conflict is set, instead, against the backdrop of the entire Islamic world, in which demography and history have always favored the Sunnis.

For the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraqis, the unalloyed hostility of the Sunni Arabs only reinforces a centuries-old sense of victimhood. So the Shiite militias grow, stoking vengeance.

The Shiites have waited centuries for their moment on the throne, and the war is something they are willing to tolerate as the price for taking power, said the Iraqi leader who had invited me to dinner. "The Shia say this is not exceptional for them; this is normal," he said.

The belief of the Shiites that they must consolidate power through force of arms is tethered to ever-present suspicions of an impending betrayal by the Americans. Though the Americans have helped institute the representative system of government that the Shiites now dominate, they have failed to eliminate memories of how President George H.W. Bush allowed Mr. Hussein to slaughter rebelling Shiites in 1991. Shiite leaders are all too aware, as well, of America's hostility toward Iran, the seat of Shiite power, and of its close alliances with Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia.

"In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders," said Sheik Muhammad Bakr Khamis al-Suhail, a respected Shiite neighborhood leader in Baghdad who supports democracy. "We need strong rulers or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite."

I was surprised to hear those words. But perhaps I was being naive. Looking back on all I have seen of this war, it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel , the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.

3. Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq
New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.
By T. Christian Miller/LA Times

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.

"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."

The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars, according to the most recent government data.

The array of private workers promises to be a factor in debates on a range of policy issues, including the privatization of military jobs and the number of Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S.

But there are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.

Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.

"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene."

Although private companies have played a role in conflicts since the American Revolution, the U.S. has relied more on contractors in Iraq than in any other war, according to military experts.

Contractors perform functions including construction, security and weapons system maintenance.

Military officials say contractors cut costs while allowing troops to focus on fighting rather than on other tasks.

"The only reason we have contractors is to support the war fighter," said Gary Motsek, the assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense who oversees contractors. "Fundamentally, they're supporting the mission as required."

But critics worry that troops and their missions could be jeopardized if contractors, functioning outside the military's command and control, refuse to make deliveries of vital supplies under fire.

At one point in 2004, for example, U.S. forces were put on food rations when drivers balked at taking supplies into a combat zone.

Adding an element of potential confusion, no single agency keeps track of the number or location of contractors.

In response to demands from Congress, the U.S. Central Command began a census last year of the number of contractors working on U.S. and Iraqi bases to determine how much food, water and shelter was needed.

That census, provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows about 130,000 contractors and subcontractors of different nationalities working at U.S. and Iraqi military bases.

However, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the census did not include other government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.

Last month, USAID reported about 53,000 Iraqis employed under U.S. reconstruction contracts, doing jobs such as garbage pickup and helping to teach democracy. In interviews, agency officials said an additional 300 Americans and foreigners worked as contractors for the agency.

State Department officials said they could not provide the department's number of contractors. Of about 5,000 people affiliated with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, about 300 are State Department employees. The rest are a mix of other government agency workers and contractors, many of whom are building the new embassy.

"There are very few of us, and we're way undermanned," said one State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have significant shortages of people. It's been that way since before [the war], and it's still that way."

The companies with the largest number of employees are foreign firms in the Middle East that subcontract to KBR, the Houston-based oil services company, according to the Central Command database. KBR, once a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., provides logistics support to troops, the single largest contract in Iraq.

Middle Eastern companies, including Kulak Construction Co. of Turkey and Projects International of Dubai, supply labor from Third World countries to KBR and other U.S. companies for menial work on U.S. bases and rebuilding projects. Foreigners are used instead of Iraqis because of fears that insurgents could infiltrate projects.

KBR is by far the largest employer of Americans, with nearly 14,000 U.S. workers. Other large employers of Americans in Iraq include New York-based L-3 Communications, which holds a contract to provide translators to troops, and ITT Corp., a New York engineering and technology firm.

The most controversial contractors are those working for private security companies, including Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Erinys. They guard sensitive sites and provide protection to U.S. and Iraqi government officials and businessmen.

Security contractors draw some of the sharpest criticism, much of it from military policy experts who say their jobs should be done by the military. On several occasions, heavily armed private contractors have engaged in firefights when attacked by Iraqi insurgents.

Others worry that the private security contractors lack accountability. Although scores of troops have been prosecuted for serious crimes, only a handful of private security contractors have faced legal charges.

The number of private security contractors in Iraq remains unclear, despite Central Command's latest census. The Times identified 21 security companies in the Central Command database, deploying 10,800 men.

However, the Defense Department's Motsek, who monitors contractors, said the Pentagon estimated the total was 6,000.

Both figures are far below the private security industry's own estimate of about 30,000 private security contractors working for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, media outlets and businesses.

Industry officials said that private security companies helped reduce the number of troops needed in Iraq and provided jobs to Iraqis — a benefit in a country with high unemployment.

"A guy who is working for a [private security company] is not out on the street doing something inimical to our interests," said Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Assn. of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis make up the largest number of civilian employees under U.S. contracts. Typically, the government contracts with an American firm, which then subcontracts with an Iraqi firm to do the job.

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors' trade group, said the number of Iraqis reflected the importance of the reconstruction and economic development efforts to the overall U.S. mission in Iraq.

"That's not work that the government does or has ever done…. That's work that is going to be done by companies and to some extent by" nongovernmental organizations, Soloway said. "People tend to think that these are contractors on the battlefield, and they're not."

The Iraqis have been the most difficult to track. As recently as May, the Pentagon told Congress that 22,000 Iraqis were employed by its contractors. But the Pentagon number recently jumped to 65,000 — a result of closer inspection of contracts, an official said.

The total number of Iraqis employed under U.S. contracts is important, in part because it may influence debate in Congress regarding how many Iraqis will be allowed to come to the U.S. to escape violence in their homeland.

This year, the U.S. planned to cap that number at 7,000 a year. To date, however, only a few dozen Iraqis have been admitted, according to State Department figures.

Kirk Johnson, head of the List Project, which seeks to increase the admission of Iraqis, said that the U.S. needed to provide a haven to those who worked most closely with American officials.

"We all say we are grateful to these Iraqis," Johnson said. "How can we be the only superpower in the world that can't implement what we recognize as a moral imperative?"

(t.christian.miller@latimes.com)

The back story

Information in this article is based in part on a database of contractors in Iraq obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the public access to government records.

The database is the result of a census conducted earlier this year by the U.S. Central Command.

The census found about 130,000 contractors working for 632 companies holding contracts in Iraq with the Defense Department and a handful of other federal agencies.

The Times received the database last month, four months after first requesting it. Because the Freedom of Information Act law requires an agency to provide only information as of the date of the request, the census is based on figures as of February. During interviews, Pentagon officials said the census had since been updated, and they provided additional figures based on the update.

Contractors in Iraq:

There are more U.S.-paid private contractors than there are American combat troops in Iraq.
Contractors: 180,000
U.S. troops: 160,000

--

Nationality of contractors*
118,000 Iraqis
43,000 non-U.S. foreigners
21,000 Americans

--

Top contractors:

Company: Kulak Construction Co.
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies construction workers to U.S. bases
Total employees: 30,301

Company: KBR
Description: Based in Houston, supplies logistics support to U.S. troops
Total employees: 15,336

Company: Prime Projects International
Description: Based in Dubai, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 10,560

Company: L-3 Communications
Description: Based in New York, provides translators and other services
Total employees: 5,886

Company: Gulf Catering Co.
Description: Based in Saudi Arabia, provides kitchen services to U.S. troops
Total employees: 4,002

Company: 77 Construction
Description: Based in Irbil, Iraq, provides logistics support to troops
Total employees: 3,219

Company: ECC
Description: Based in Burlingame, Calif, works on reconstruction projects
Total employees: 2,390

Company: Serka Group
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies logistics support to U.S. bases
Total employees: 2,250

Company: IPBD Ltd.
Description: Based in England, supplies labor, laundry services and other support
Total employees: 2,164

Company: Daoud & Partners Co.
Description: Based in Amman, Jordan, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 2,092

Company: EOD Technology Inc
Description: Based in Lenoir City, Tenn., supplies security, explosives demolition and other services
Total employees: 1,913

Note: Data are as of February, which is most current available.
*Approximate - numbers rounded
Sources: U.S. Central Command, Times reporting

NATO knows how to fight in Afghanistan; the US never did (is there anything Bush can do right?)

2007-07-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

NATO Didn’t Lose Afghanistan
By SARAH CHAYES /NY Times

Kandahar, Afghanistan

WHEN things go wrong — touchdown passes are missed, products come out defective, wars are lost — it is typical to blame the equipment, or the help. In the case of the unraveling situation in Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has become the favorite whipping boy of American officials and military personnel. NATO countries aren’t sending enough troops, we hear. Those who do arrive are constrained by absurd caveats that prevent them from engaging in combat. NATO lost Helmand Province to the Taliban.

In fact, after watching rotation after military rotation cycle through here since late 2001, I see NATO as an improvement over its American predecessors.

One key difference is NATO’s training program, born of the challenge of gathering troops from different countries, speaking different languages, into a cohesive fighting force. In March, I joined about a dozen civilians who had lived and worked in Kandahar for years at the final training exercise for the NATO officers who recently took over Afghanistan’s Regional Command South. We spent 10 days briefing them, fielding their questions on everything from tribal relations to the electricity supply, eating meals with them and playing roles in a simulation of three days in southern Afghanistan.

“Uh ... we’ve got a bit of a situation here,” I heard one of my fellow teachers, an Australian who was a top United Nations security official, say calmly into the phone. He threw me a wink. He was starting the simulation by reporting the sounds of a large detonation and small arms fire. Later, on another line to an officer training to run public information, a sociological researcher played the role of a journalist, her voice incredulous: “Are you sure you want to say that?”

With the help of these seasoned civilians, experienced NATO officers and some Afghans, the new team was rigorously tested on the many aspects of its mission that go beyond combat tactics. Three months later, after these trainees had taken up their new jobs, the training staff traveled to Kandahar to debrief them to learn which aspects of the training had been useful and which needed improvement.

Given the constant disruption caused by short troop rotations, competent training is key to improving officers’ effectiveness as soon as they hit the ground.

The American troops’ training, in contrast, seemed ad hoc, usually carried out by each unit on its own, rather than by a dedicated training staff. And it involved very few civilians, despite the crucial humanitarian and political aspects of the mission here. (I have occasionally been invited to address American officers, but only when a friend in the unit has convinced a commander that I might have something to offer.)

NATO’s second advantage is continuity, despite its multinational makeup. I observed rivalry between American units lead to confusing policy reversals each time new troops came in. The best American commanders were those who understood that Afghanistan is no toy-soldier battlefield, that they would have to bone up on anthropology, diplomacy and civil engineering. But such commanders were rare, and their replacements — seeking to make their own mark — usually undid their work within weeks.

NATO has tried to reduce the disruption of replacing troops and officers en masse. Rotations are staggered. This may cause some logistical headaches, but it reduces abrupt changes in direction.

But if NATO is doing better than the United States, why is Afghanistan doing worse? The answer is twofold. NATO was brought in too late, and under false pretenses.

Within days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, NATO voted to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — its core principle, which states that an armed attack on one member will be viewed by the others as an attack on themselves. Never before in the history of the organization had the principle been activated. The American reaction was thanks but no thanks. Our government was sure we could go it alone in Afghanistan, that allies would be an inconvenience.

In 2003, NATO moved peacekeeping forces into Kabul and parts of northern Afghanistan. But not until 2005, when it was clear that the United States was bogged down in Iraq and lacked sufficient resources to fight on two fronts, did Washington belatedly turn to NATO to take the Afghan south off its hands. And then it misrepresented the situation our allies would find there. NATO was basically sold a beefed-up peacekeeping mission. It was told, in effect, that it would simply need to maintain the order the United States had established and to help with reconstruction and security.

In fact, as was clear from the ground, the situation had been deteriorating since late 2002. By 2004, resurgent Taliban were making a concerted push to enter the country from Pakistan, and intensive combat between American forces and Taliban fighters was taking place north of Kandahar. By 2005, top Afghan officials could be blown up in downtown Kandahar without drawing much of a reaction from either the Afghan government or ours. Notorious drug lords governed the three main southern provinces to which we were dispatching our allies. It was the bloodiest and most belligerent situation since the fall of the Taliban.

NATO should have been brought in from the start and given the kind of muscular peacekeeping mission it learned to conduct in the Balkans. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, begged for peacekeepers, spread throughout the country, in those early years when they could still have made a difference.

Having snubbed our allies when we should have accepted their help, and having stuck them with the most difficult, yet most strategically critical, part of Afghanistan, the least we could do now is offer gratitude and support, rather than blame our friends for our own follies.

(Sarah Chayes is the author of “The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.”)

If Jefferson were alive today, he'd lead a revolution to overthrow our new King George

2007-07-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

Take the Revolutionary Road
The US has been the world’s principal anti-revolutionary force for almost a century. As Thomas Jefferson would have said, it’s time to rebel.
by Michael Hardt / the Guardian/UK

It cannot but feel rather odd discussing Thomas Jefferson , who occupies such a central position in the US national pantheon, as a figure of modern revolutionary thought. For almost a century, after all, the United States government has served as the principal anti-revolutionary force in the world, striving to suppress revolutionary movements, openly plotting to overthrow successful revolutionary governments, and supporting surrogate counter-revolutionary forces in countries throughout the globe.

National political traditions, however, are not cut of whole cloth but rather contain sometimes surprising divergences and contradictions. The present anti-revolutionary vocation of the United States, in fact, makes it all the more interesting to find the thought of a revolutionary such as Jefferson at its core. When reading some of Jefferson’s most radical writings it is hard not to be struck by the vast gulf that separates his thinking from that of the current United States, its ideology, its constitution, and its political system and culture.

After this initial surprise at the fact that Jefferson’s thought belongs to the revolutionary tradition, we should recognise how it still has important contributions to make, and can help us move beyond some of the central obstacles to thinking about revolution today.

Jefferson’s declarations of independence throughout his life not only mark the separation of the colonies from the colonial power but also, and more importantly, seek to keep alive the pursuit of freedom within society - striving to conceive of how the revolutionary process can continue indefinitely, how what 18th century revolutionaries called “public happiness” can be instituted in government, and ultimately how self-rule and democracy can be realized.

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Jefferson understands well that the revolutionary event, the rupture with the past and the destruction of the old regime, is not the end of the revolution but really only a beginning. The event opens a period of transition that aims at realizing the goals of the revolution. The concept of transition, however, is today a fundamental stumbling block of revolutionary thought and practice. The (often authoritarian) means employed during revolutionary transitions frequently conflict with and even contradict the desired (democratic) ends; moreover, these transitions never seem to come to an end. The travelers on the long journey through the desert end up getting completely lost, no nearer to the promised land, and that leader with a big stick starts looking a lot like the old Pharaoh.

In fact, whenever revolutionaries start talking to you about “transition” today, you had better watch out: they are probably trying to put one over on you. Jefferson’s thought, however, poses a novel conception of transition, which can help steer revolutionary thought around its current obstacles. He provocatively brings together, on the one hand, constitution and rebellion and, on the other, transition and democracy. The work of the revolution must continue incessantly, periodically reopening the constituent process, and the population must be trained in democracy through the practices of democracy.

The first key to understanding Jefferson’s notion of transition is to recognize the continuous and dynamic relationship he poses between rebellion and constitution or, rather, between revolution and government. A conventional view of revolution conceives these terms in temporal sequence: rebellion is necessary to overthrow the old regime, but when it falls and the new government is formed, rebellion must cease.

In contrast to this view, Jefferson insists on the virtue and necessity of periodic rebellion - even against the newly formed government. The processes of constituent power must continually disrupt and force open an establishment of constituted power.

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

Rebellion against the government, he maintains (pdf), is so virtuous that it should not only be tolerated but even encouraged.

Rebellion is not just a matter of correcting wrongs committed by the government, and thus only valuable if its cause is just; it has an intrinsic value, regardless of the justness of its specific grievances and goals. Periodic rebellion is necessary to guarantee the health of a society and preserve public freedom. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” he writes. In Jefferson’s view, rebellion should not become our constant condition; rather, it should eternally return. By my calculation we are well overdue.

(Michael Hardt is a literary theorist and political philosopher. Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, his recent writings deal primarily with the political, legal, economic and social aspects of globalisation. He has written several books, including the world renowned Empire. His most recent is a new edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence)

Sicko: nobody tells it like it is like Michael Moore

2007-07-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore's Sicko
by CHRISTOPHER HAYES /The Nation

About forty minutes into Sicko , Michael Moore's excellent, frustrating new documentary about the American healthcare industry, Ronald Reagan makes his first and only appearance. It's surprising, if only because, unlike in his previous film Fahrenheit 9/11 , Moore focuses relatively little attention on the villains in his story, choosing instead simply to allow their victims to tell their tales. It's a montage of hard luck and innocence. But after introducing us to the horror stories all too typical among even the 250 million Americans fortunate enough to have health insurance, Moore takes a few moments for a brief history lesson. How, he asks, did we get here? And it's in this time warp that we encounter the Gipper. This is not Gipper the Governor or Gipper the President or even Gipper the B-list actor. This is Gipper, silver-tongued shill for the interests of capital.

It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative. As chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism , Reagan was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions. Reagan would be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he spent propagandizing the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged the distinctive Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an amiable uncle.

So as momentum for national, universal healthcare built during the Truman Administration, foes such as the American Medical Association sought to build grassroots opposition. In an ingenious stroke, as Moore reports in Sicko , it organized thousands of coffee klatches across the country where suburban housewives could sip coffee, gossip and listen to a special recorded message about the evils of socialized medicine, a message delivered by the one and only Ronald Reagan.

The presence of Reagan in the film, making an argument that is the inverse of Sicko 's, is fitting. Moore's entire post- Roger & Me career can be understood as a multimedia attempt to undo Reagan's great achievement: persuading blue-collar factory workers and other members of the working class to embrace his heady brew of jingoism, anticommunism, contempt for government and admiration for the virtues of unfettered capitalism.

For years Moore has, like Ahab pursuing the whale, been hunting the elusive Reagan Democrat--the heartland-dwelling, beer-drinking, blue-collar guy (or gal) who bowls on the weekend, loves his country and is fighting to stay afloat in winner-take-all America. He may look on the left with contempt, but it's not because he doesn't intuitively share its views: He is a visceral collectivist and unionist and an enemy of corporations. He is ready, Moore believes, to come over to our side, if only we would talk to him.

That's why Moore spends the final chapter of his first book, Downsize This! , talking to Norman Olson, a co-founder of the Michigan Militia: "You know, you guys were right in the sixties," Olson tells him. "The government lied to us.... So when we finally wised up in the nineties after all these jobs were lost, where were you liberals when we needed your help?" Writing in this magazine in November 1997, in an article titled "Is the Left Nuts? (Or Is It Me?)," Moore asked a variation of the same question, "just who the hell is reading this? Who is the Nation readership? Is it my brother-in-law, Tony, back in Flint, who last night was installing furnace ducts until 9 o'clock?"

It is Tony the furnace-installer who haunts Moore's work like a specter, and for whom the rotund and slovenly Moore acts as a kind of aw-shucks proxy. But the central paradox of his career is that his success in reaching the Tonys of the world is spotty at best. Though he's always communicated his politics in a comedic, accessible, populist vocabulary, his public image is that of an ideologue, a lighting rod, a polarizing figure: more Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan.

In what may be a tacit acknowledgment of this unfortunate fact, Sicko is different from Moore's last two efforts. Not just because of an absence of gimmicky gotcha moments, or a reduction in screen time for Moore himself, but because its topic isn't fundamentally polarizing in the way his previous works were. There's a whole lot of Americans who love their guns, and in 2004 there were a lot of Americans who loved their President, but it's pretty hard to find anyone who loves their health insurance company.

Moore's solution is simple: Get rid of the health insurance companies. Don't just tinker with the healthcare system, banish profit from the delivery of healthcare altogether. Socialize it. Make it a public good. It's a testament to the health insurance industry's power that as "universal healthcare" lurches toward the political middle, this proposal seems in some ways more radical than ever. Moore recognizes that if single-payer is ever going to come to America, it's going to be over the insurance companies' dead bodies. One way of understanding Sicko is as the opening salvo in a battle to make that happen. The movie alone can't do that, which is part of the reason Moore has teamed up with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the labor union most zealously committed to single-payer. It'll be sending its members, along with like-minded doctors, to every single showing of the film's opening night to talk up single-payer to audiences. And it's currently rolling across the country in a multicity tour designed to leverage the film's publicity to push single-payer back into the national conversation.

But Sicko is more than a potent weapon in the battle for single-payer, because in a deeper sense, the movie isn't really about healthcare. At its best, it uses healthcare as a kind of gateway drug to much harder stuff: a robust social democratic vision, articulated eloquently by legendary British Labour gadfly Tony Benn, who waxes poetic in the film about the radical promise of democracy to move power from the "wallet to the ballot." It's the extension of the logic of democracy into provisioning of public goods that provides the philosophical justification for socialized medicine. "The principle," as Benn says, "is solidarity."

As we sat in a movie theater in Bellaire, Michigan, an overwhelmingly Republican town where Moore and his wife, Kathleen, own a house and where Kathleen is vice chair of the local county Democratic Party, I asked Moore if the movie was intended as an argument for social democracy. His eyes lit up. "That's correct," he said. "You know, it works for the fire department, why can't it work for healthcare? They're both life-and-death issues, and we agree that profit should have no interest at all in how we run our fire department."

It's a message at once subversive and nonthreatening. Look at Canada, Moore argues in the film, or England or--gasp--France, where Moore even spends one scene reveling in the bourgeois comforts of a "typical" French couple as a means of rebutting arguments about the country's onerous tax burden. Or look at the United States: We "socialize" a lot of things here in America, Moore notes, as clips roll by of police officers and schoolteachers and public libraries. Why not this most crucial and important service?

That's the argument in a nutshell. "It's a simple thought," Moore told me, "but I think people get it when you put it like that." Oprah sure did. During Moore's recent appearance on her show, she was careful not to seem to be endorsing anything too radical, and Moore obliged by saying that healthcare wasn't a "partisan issue" and he was looking to reach across the aisle. Then Oprah turned to the audience and said she finally "got it" when in the film Moore points out that we don't charge for the services of firemen or think profit should have anything to do with firefighting. Then she told her audience to go out and see the film.

It's not surprising to find commentators noting, as Oprah did, that this film is less political than Moore's previous offering. It's less caustic, less outraged. But to call it less political than Fahrenheit 9/11 is a category error. Fahrenheit was an intensely partisan project, focused with laserlike precision on building a damning brief indicting the Bush Administration. And like a lawyer, Moore was only too happy to grab whatever argument he could find, even if it was at the expense of internal consistency. The film, while effective as propaganda, suffered a bit from this ad hoc approach, like the old law school chestnut about "arguing in the alternative": The kettle was in perfect condition when I returned it; it was broken when I borrowed it; and I never borrowed the damn kettle in the first place.

Sicko is far, far less partisan than Fahrenheit , but much more ideological. And as such, it is more consistent in what it offers--with one major caveat. The film's final half-hour, in which Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba, serves only to reinforce the decades-old slander that equates social democracy with repressive socialism. It's a major miscalculation and nearly squanders the first hour and a half of the film in which Moore so deftly guts arguments that socialized medicine represents the vanguard of Marxism. But that final section aside, the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an alternative way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied nanny who will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child. Who wouldn't want that?

The healthcare industry, for one, and it's betting that itcan once again persuade Americans not to want it either. At a press conference after the American premiere, Moore said that in response to the film we should expect to see all the old chestnuts rolled out by the health insurance industry: "Canada's bad, they've got long lines they wait in, you know, blah, blah, blah," said Moore. "In the Canadian system, there is no wait if you have an emergency situation, if it's a life-and-death issue. The wait to see a specialist or if it's elective surgery, I think the most recent statistic I saw was that it was down to four weeks. But you know, sometimes that's what you have to do when you share with everyone--you have to wait."

Moore continued, "When you share the pie, sometimes you have to wait for your slice. Sometimes you get the first slice, sometimes you get the third slice, sometimes," Moore chuckled, "you get the last slice. But the important thing is that you get a slice, everybody gets a slice of this pie. That's not what happens in this country."

"There are no easy answers," Reagan once said, "but there are simple answers." Social democracy as pie. The Gipper himself couldn't have said it better.

Bookplanet: remembering The Alexandria Quartet

2007-07-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

A Seductive Spectacle
The languid bazaar of Lawrence
Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet
still beckons 50 years later
By Charles Trueheart/ THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Speak the name Lawrence Durrell, as I have been doing recently, and you will have little trouble prompting the title of his masterwork, the four-novel cycle he called “The Alexandria Quartet.” Yes, everyone read it back when. Or some of it. Justine . . . Balthazar . . . The well of memory tends to run dry about there, leaving only the wistful fragrance of the little remembered but not quite forgotten.

Yet half a century ago, when Justine appeared, it elicited a rush of critical superlatives that announced the birth of a literary classic. Almost at once the novel established an outlandish reputation for Durrell, previously known for a precocious first novel and some sublime travel writing. He was confidently placed in the big shoes of Joyce, Proust, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist forebears. “The novel may indeed be dying,” declared the critic Robert Scholes, “but we need not fear for the future. Durrell and others are leading us in a renaissance of romance.”

At 45, the preternaturally energetic Durrell leapt into the awaited moment of his fame, churning out the rest of the volumes—siblings, he called them, not sequels— one after the other, faster than a publisher could keep up with them: six weeks to write Balthazar , he said, 12 weeks for Mountolive , and eight weeks for Clea , the last to appear, in early 1960. Within months of Justine , rights to the whole opus, to his poetry, to Bitter Lemons , a book on Cyprus, were snapped up around the world. Durrell was able to give up nearly 20 years on the British Foreign Office payroll and buy a house in southern France, where he lived ever after, receiving royalty checks, accolades, and pilgrims in inexorably dwindling numbers.

Durrell had found his voice and located his literary identity in a particular place, Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, a seedy polyglot seaport of bygone luster. There is no denying Durrell’s extraordinarily retentive powers of observation, but he was the first to say that his city was woven from many cities in his mind. He was stationed in Alexandria for less than a year, starting at the end of 1944, and once considered setting the whole quartet in Athens, which underscores the invented and nearly arbitrary nature of his terrain. Be that as it may, for George Steiner, another serious critic then and now, “Durrell’s Alexandria is one of the true monuments to the architecture of imagination. It compares in manifold coherence with the Paris of Proust and the Dublin of Joyce.”

Alexandria, in fact, is the central character in the Quartet—the fabric that, if anything does, holds together the threads of narrative. Durrell gives the city personality and moral will: “Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi .” Alexandria: “the capital of Memory.” And how lovingly he describes

streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children—the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. . . . And then the street noises: shriek and clang of the water-bearing Saidi, dashing his metal cups together as an advertisement, the unheeded shrieks which pierce the hubbub from time to time, as of some small delicately-organized animal being disembowelled.

If Durrell’s Alexandria has a mind and soul of its own, the same is not always true for his human characters, whose exoticism and wordiness hide more than they reveal. The more Durrell tells us about them, perversely, the fuzzier they become. He was carefree, or careless, about imputing thoughts and behaviors to characters as the spirit moved him, not as their integrity would demand. Durrell’s fondness for grotesques, like his fondness for place, was an attraction to surfaces. Form revealed content, or shrouded it—a nascently postmodern ethic that worked best in miniature. In any case, the principal players of the Quartet tend to be impressionable, transient, self-absorbed, and fallen—or well on the way.

Ifirst encountered Durrell, in my early adolescence, drawn by the clothbound pastel editions on my parents’ shelves, by the idea of a quartet of novels, and by the aroma of decay and sexuality they managed to exude. This would have been in the mid-1960s. I was not much beyond John Steinbeck and Wilkie Collins at the time, and could not have anticipated the seductive spectacle of Durrell’s languid bazaar, the world-weary eccentrics and tortured adulterers who while away the hours drinking and smoking and screwing and talking. How they talked and talked, about love, death, art, and the universal questions. My young brain and soul drank this in like—like absinthe, I suppose. I feel sure that it was in the pages of The Alexandria Quartet that I was first exposed to abortion, lesbians, hookah pipes, incest, Spanish fly, female circumcision, cross-dressing, and child prostitutes, to say nothing of the agonies and imponderables of love.

Just as seductive for a would-be writer was Durrell’s literary style: its lushness and near abandon, its pervasive eroticism and reckless profundity, its dazzling vocabulary (“Phthisic”! “Eburnine”! “Usufruct”!), its tales within tales within tales, its palimpsest of versions, its mistrust of certitude. The narrative was hard to plumb, allusive to a fault, slippery in intent; like poetry, it bore rereading. Now I appreciate the novels of the Quartet better as writers’ books. But at the time, like Durrell himself, apparently, I barely noticed that half the characters were novelists or artistic illusionists of some kind, that their preoccupations toggled between the pleasures of the senses and the meaning of life, and that they never paused to earn a living, change a diaper, or wait for the bus.

Durrell’s indulgence in aphorisms also tickled a young reader’s fancy. On a single page I found these three tossed off: “You can’t put a soul into splints.” “Nothing matters except pleasure—which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.” “Real innocence can do nothing that is trivial, and when it is allied to generosity of heart, the combination makes it the most vulnerable of qualities under heaven.” You would think Durrell’s main ambition was to appear in Bartlett’s Quotations ; if so, it was frustrated. Not that his aphorisms are all bad. Pombal, the French consul, has a good one: “Women are basically faithful, you know. They only betray other women.”

Lawrence Durrell—you say Durl , not Dur rell , unless you wish to be understood—was born in India in 1912 to middle-class English parents who had made their lives in the Raj; his father built railroads in the Himalayas. Twelve-year-old Larry was shipped back to England to be schooled for an eventual return to the civil service in India, and his father died before he ever saw him again. Durrell failed his university entrance exams, hated England, and left as soon as he could for the writing life in Corfu. He took with him not just his new wife, but his mother and siblings, including Gerald, 13 years his junior, who went on to become a famous naturalist and nature writer.

Lawrence Durrell remained an expatriate for life, but that was a state of mind (and money) more than a state of anger, as his biographers Ian MacNiven and Gordon Bowker make clear. Short and barrel-chested, Durrell was pugnacious, charming, generous, and moody; a prodigious drinker too. For two decades off and on, he renovated humble dwellings on Mediterranean islands, befriended the locals in their taverns, and sat at his typewriter. In the 1930s he began corresponding with fellow writers and other literary folk, notably Henry Miller, also little known at the time. A fan letter about Tropic of Cancer triggered a lifelong friendship (and a fine collection of their letters). Miller, T. S. Eliot, Durrell’s patron in London publishing circles, and Anaïs Nin, another lasting friend, applauded Durrell’s youthfully brash decision to refuse the offer of a British publisher to issue The Black Book (1938), his overwrought early novel, only if they could make prurient emendations (“f—k,” for example). Durrell had it published in Paris with the full text and was none the worse for it; it didn’t appear in Britain until 1973.

Like many British writers of his generation, Durrell was employed during World War II and long afterward by the British government as a public information officer, which meant he could do a novelist’s research on the public purse. He served in Cairo and Alexandria, in Argentina (which he hated) and Yugoslavia, in Rhodes and Athens. Despite his short stay in Alexandria, he did come away with a second wife, Eve Cohen, widely regarded as the model for Justine.

Durrell was versatile and prolific. He published 13 volumes of poetry. He was an agile humorist in his vignettes of diplomatic life—homages to Wodehouse— Esprit de Corps (1957), Stiff Upper Lip (1958), and Sauve Qui Peut (1966). His books about Corfu ( Prospero’s Cell , 1945), Rhodes ( Reflections on a Marine Venus , 1953), and Cyprus ( Bitter Lemons , 1957) confirm him as superb memoirist, journalist, and travel writer whose literary heirs include Peter Mayle, Bruce Chatwin, and John Berendt. He also wrote a pretty good espionage yarn called White Eagles Over Serbia , which appeared the same year as Justine ,Bitter Lemons , and Esprit de Corps . Nineteen fifty-seven was in every sense a peak year for Durrell.

Justine is a memoir of a love affair between Darley, the novelist-schoolmaster-narrator, and Justine, the haunted Jewish wife of a wealthy Egyptian Copt named Nessim Hosnani. The story has internal accounts of the triangle and interlocking others to cite and is based on what may be Justine’s diaries and a novel about her by a former lover, as well as by Darley’s own beliefs and secondhand knowledge. Upon Justine is layered Balthazar , named for a homosexual mystic who finds a draft of Darley’s memoir and sets out to correct it. He is the “Great Interlinear,” revealing to Darley and to us that not all is as it seems—notably that Justine’s dalliances with Darley were a beard to hide from her husband her real love affair with another novelist named Pursewarden, who has since committed suicide. Mountolive is the most conventional novel of the first three and, today, the most satisfying: a third-person account of the same events from the point of view of the eponymous British diplomat who returns as British ambassador in Cairo (and to his own past love affair with Nessim’s mother). Here we see Darley as others see him, not always flatteringly. Clea , the fourth book, is Darley, elegaic, returning from island exile to Alexandria after the war, sifting through memory and desire to reach some kind of reconciliation with the city and the past.

Durrell had a fancy construct for the Quartet, which he laid out in a brief prefatory note to Balthazar . Voraciously self-taught—and with a sizable chip on his shoulder from his thwarted university education—he described “a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition.” The first three novels are three versions of the same story, set in Alexandria on the eve of World War II, and the fourth is a look back at events of the first three. “Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum,” Durrell wrote.

My reading of this today is that he was infatuated with the concept but not deeply engaged by it; the shrugged use of “soup-mix” acknowledges as much. In the many discussions of form and structure by the Quartet’s characters, as well as in answers he gave to solemn literary interviewers, Durrell comes across as someone who takes himself very seriously and yet is eager to prove that he doesn’t. Of Darley, one of several Durrell doppelgängers in the Quartet, another writer says: “Poor Darley’s books— will they always be such painstaking descriptions of the soul-states of the . . . human omelette?” Or take this fragment from Clea in which someone discusses the structure of a very similar novel:

A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré. The curvature of space itself would give you stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across a continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw the idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy. . . . And nothing very recherché either.

Such a passage is self-lampooning, defensive, and poignant all at once.

The novels are not plotted in any conventional sense, although they don’t seem nearly as experimental today as they did when I first read them. The stories are about doomed relationships, the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or another, the hold of memory and the elusiveness of truth. They are punctuated with events—a masked ball, a hunting party, a mysterious murder, a shocking suicide, a gunrunning plot—but display more interest in states of mind and the vagaries of fate than in the connection between action and consequence, in moral choices, or in any of the other wheels that turn tales. These novels are unabashedly interested in themselves, in their own art and architecture.

In rereading these books, I was struck by how subdued a place Alexandria was even during wartime. There are always gunships in the harbor, and allied troops are going to or coming from battle in the desert. The plot by a Christian Copt cabal to supply arms to Jewish guerrillas in Palestine provides the only real-world intrigue to lift the reader from the hermetic inwardness of the novels. Looking back now, from an age when the Islamic world has a dramatically different face, the Quartet’s detachment from its milieu—an intimacy with which is supposedly its strongest suit—is disconcerting at best. Durrell has taken the affects and atmospherics of Muslim culture and left Muslims mostly out of the core of the plot.

Icame back to Durrell with mixed feelings, and as I read through the four novels for the first time in 40-plus years—encountering my own youthful enthusiasms in the margins— was sporadically impatient or mortified (for me, for him) when I came across examples of what Durrell himself called his “over-efflorescence.” These lines from the opening page of Justine had merited heavy underlining when I was young: “I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.” Today, I might have scrawled: Oh, please .

How can an author capable of subtlety and originality also write potboiler sentences such as these?

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”

With every succeeding mile I felt anxiety and expectation running neck and neck. The Past!

“Come now,” he said suddenly; he was dying to possess her, to cradle and annihilate her with the disgusting kisses of a false compassion.

There came over her an unexpected lust to sleep with him— no, with his plans, his dreams, his obsessions, his money, his death!

If Durrell touted the Quartet as “an investigation of modern love,” I’m not sure he truly got it about men and women. The evidence in his personal life (five wives and many more lovers) doesn’t settle the question—as in his fiction, perhaps he was more interested in the trees than the forest. His rendering of lovemaking can be swollen to the point of narcissism, and it’s telling:

The kiss did not for a moment expect itself to be answered by another—to copy itself like the reflections of a moth in a looking-glass. That would have been too expensive a gesture had it been premeditated. So it proved! Clea’s own body simply struggled to disengage itself from the wrappings of its innocence as a baby or a statue struggles for life under the fingers or forceps of its author. Her bankruptcy was one of extreme youth.

Durrell was the toast of the town, but he did not convince everyone. The novelist Anthony Burgess dismissed Durrell’s magnum opus in 1962 as “sadistic-sentimental exotic escapism.” Later, in 1975, Time magazine critic John Skow said the effect of Durrell’s prose was “that of Berlioz played by an orchestra of gondoliers,” which is pretty mean and pretty funny. And in the same year, the novelist and critic Edmund White cited, not unkindly, Durrell’s “willingness to run the risk of seeming ludicrous,” which I think gets at the heart of my ambivalent reading and rereading of the Quartet.

Running the risk of seeming ludicrous, I think, fairly states the burden on a poet. Durrell called poetry “an invaluable mistress . . . because poetry is form, and the wooing and seduction of form is the whole game,” a conviction that his novels do not contradict. We permit our poets rhetorical ambition, verbal gymnastics, wordplay, allusion, aphorism, the concrete and specific in a soup-mix with the vast and ineffable. Why does the prose form render the same words less effective? Break the quoted paragraph on lovemaking on this page into lines of verse and see if it doesn’t sound different, and even better.

The kiss did not for a moment
Expect itself
To be answered by another—
To copy itself . . .

If 1957 marked the end of Durrell’s lifelong struggle to make ends meet— publication of the Quartet permitted him to move into a house he bought with his third wife in the French village of Sommières, where he lived until his death in 1990— something else ended in that season. The eight novels he wrote after the Quartet, including an inchoate set of novels he dubbed the Avignon Quintet, were tepidly received, disappointing his hopes—and not just his—that lightning would strike a second time. Perhaps his hunger was gone, or the creative well was dry, leaving only self-caricature. It’s also possible his public lost patience. The Alexandria Quartet is a tour de force, but a little Durrell goes a long way.

Memory and distance throw light on what The Alexandria Quartet was a half century ago—a dying burst of romance in the heyday of realism, an appeal to credulity on the eve of so much skepticism, a bold experiment in form that in only a few years literary experimentalism would render almost pallid. But the books do bear rereading for the same reasons, as a sweet remembrance of things from not so long ago. “Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honored by an awakened spirit,” Durrell once aphorized. By his lights and mine, The Alexandria Quartet remains a work of art.

(Charles Trueheart, a contributing editor of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, lives and works in Paris.)

The author of The Dangerous Book for Boys tells what made him write it

2007-07-10T05:41:00.000-07:00

In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces
By Conn Iggulden/LA Times

When I was 10, I founded an international organization known as the Black Cat Club. My friend Richard was the only other member. My younger brother, Hal, had "provisional status," which meant that he had to try out for full membership every other week. We told him we would consider his application if he jumped off the garage roof -- about eight feet from the ground. He had a moment of doubt as he looked over the edge, but we said it wouldn't hurt if he shouted the words "Fly like an eagle!" When he jumped, his knees came up so fast that he knocked himself out. I think the lesson he learned that day was not to trust his brother, which is a pretty valuable one for a growing lad.

I wrote "The Dangerous Book for Boys" as a handbook for boys with scenes like that from my childhood in mind. I wasn't trying to please anyone else. I was just trying to free boys to be themselves again, the way we were when my brother and I were growing up.

Back in the 1970s, our father was a schoolmaster and part of his job was caning boys. He was prepared to do this on the job, but the only time he ever brought his work home was when I stole money from him and somewhat naively put it in my moneybox. Perhaps because that punishment was a unique event, I've never stolen anything from anyone since that day.

Looking back, I realize now that my father was an incredibly patient man. He loved wood, and whenever a school threw out an oak table or mahogany benches, he would rescue them and bring them home. One day, my brother and I took all that wood and nailed it to the tree in the front garden. It was perhaps the ugliest treehouse ever built, and my father was not impressed. In fact, I think he was close to tears for a moment.

He was born in 1923. He has seen a different world -- one before television, before mobile phones and before the Internet. He flew in Bomber Command during World War II, and when he tells stories, they're always grim, but funny at the same time. He lost half a finger in one bad crash, and at various times in our childhood, he told us that he'd worked in a sausage factory and pushed the meat too far into the grinder, resulting in the best sales the factory had known; that a German sniper had recognized him flying overhead and thought, "That's Mr. Iggulden, I'll just fire a warning shot"; or that he was the new Bionic Man, but the British government could afford to replace him only a bit at a time.

His generation understood the cars they drove, could hang wallpaper and fix just about anything. In his 80s, he is still an immensely practical man, but at the same time, he still quotes poems he learned as a boy, demonstrating that a man can love a good line as much as a good dovetail joint.

Of course, my mother was important to our childhood. An Irish Catholic, she gave us a faith that endures today, as well as an appreciation for literature that made me want to be a writer from a young age. She kept chickens in a garden no more than 30 feet square in a suburb of London, and the neighbors complained about the cockerels waking them up.

When she gave birth to me, the nurse walked down a line of babies saying, "This one will be a policeman and this one will be a footballer." When the nurse came to me, she said "Ah, but this one has the face of a poet."

My father, though, made me the man I am. He was playing bridge on the night I was born. When he saw me the following morning, he said, "I hope he never has to kill anyone."

We had books in the house with titles such as "The Wonder Book of Wonders" or "Chemical Amusements and Experiments," showing their age with instructions directing you to buy "a shilling paper of Potassium Permanganate." I read them all, and I'm lucky to have all my fingers. We made bows and arrows every summer, cutting them green and hunting in the local woods. We managed to trap a raven, though I think it must have been ill. I had an idea about training it to attack so that I would be the terror of the local park. Sadly, we found it cold and stiff one morning in the chicken run.

The Black Cat Club gathered in the garden to give it a warrior's cremation. We used my father's lighter fluid and poured it over the bird where it lay in a nest of bricks. We lit it and stood back with our hands clasped in prayer. The flames roared, and I think we wept until the flames died back down again and the bird was still there. We poured more lighter fluid, and eventually realized we'd cooked the bird instead of cremating it.

When I had a son of my own six years ago, I looked around for the sort of books that would inspire him. I was able to find some practical modern ones, but none with the spirit and verve of those old titles. I wanted a single compendium of everything I'd ever wanted to know or do as a boy, and I decided to write my own. My brother, now a theater director in Leicester, a city in the midlands of England, was the obvious choice as co-writer. I had dedicated my first book "To my brother Hal, the other member of the Black Cat Club." It was official at last. I persuaded him to come and work with me 12 hours a day for six months in a shed.

We began with everything we had done as kids, then added things we didn't want to see forgotten. History today is taught as a feeble thing, with all the adventure taken out of it. We wanted stories of courage because boys love those. We wanted stories about men like Royal Air Force fighter pilot Douglas Bader, Scott of the Antarctic, the Wright Brothers -- boys like to read about daring men, always with the question: Would I be as brave or as resourceful? I sometimes wonder why people make fun of boys going to science fiction conventions without realizing that it shows a love of stories. Does every high school offer a class on adventure tales? No -- and then we complain that boys don't read anymore.

We added sections on grammar because my brother once said, "If anyone had told me there are only nine kinds of words, I'd have damn well learned them." Boys like to see the nuts and bolts of language. Of course they can empathize and imagine, but they need the structure as well. Why should the satisfaction of getting something right be denied to those who have been educated since the '70s?

We filled our book with facts and things to do -- from hunting a rabbit to growing crystals. As adults, we know that doors have been closed to us. A boy, though, can be interested in anything.

Finally, we chose our title -- "The Dangerous Book for Boys." It's about remembering a time when danger wasn't a dirty word. It's safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys' lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own. You only have to push a baby boy hard on a swing and see his face light up. It's not learned behavior -- he's hardwired to enjoy a little risk. Ask any man for a good memory from childhood and he'll tell you about testing his courage or getting injured. No one wants to see a child get hurt, but we really did think the bumps and scratches were badges of honor, once.

Since the book was published, I've discovered a vast group that cares about exactly the same things I do. I've heard from divorced fathers who use the book to make things with their sons instead of going out for fast food and a movie. I've received e-mails from 10-year-olds and a beautifully written letter from a man of 87.

I thought I was the only one sick of non-competitive sports days and playgrounds where it's practically impossible to hurt yourself. It turned out that the pendulum is swinging back at last. Boys are different from girls. Teaching them as though they are girls who don't wash as much leads to their failure in school, causing trouble all the way. Boys don't like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don't like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes.

It's all a matter of balance. When I was a teacher, I asked my head of department why every textbook seemed to have a girl achieving her dream of being a carpenter while the boys were morons. She replied that boys had had it their own way for too long, and now it was the girls' turn. Ouch.

The problem with fighting adult gender battles in the classroom is that the children always lose.

I expected a backlash. If you put the word "boys" on something, someone will always complain. One blog even promoted the idea of removing the words "For Boys" from the cover with an Exacto knife so that people's sons wouldn't be introduced to any unpleasantly masculine notions such as duty, honor, courage and competence.

The dark side of masculinity may involve gangs and aggression, but there's another side -- self-discipline, wry humor and quiet determination. I really thought I was the only one who cared about it, but I've found many thousands who care just as much.

I know there are women who can lift heavier weights than I can, but on the whole, boys are more interested in the use of urine as secret ink than girls are. We wanted to write a book that celebrated boys -- with all their differences and geeky love of knowledge, skills and stories. There just isn't anything wrong with trying to do that.

We all care about our sons -- scabby knees, competitive spirits and all. It's about time we let our schools and governments know how much we care. Let the pendulum swing.

(contact@conniggulden.com -- Conn Iggulden is a novelist in London)

Art World: the Venice Biennale; and abstract painting is back

2007-07-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

1. Big Ideas
The Venice Biennale
by Peter Schjeldahl/The New Yorker

“Tranquila ,” a Spanish observer was heard to judge, with a warmth just short of enthusiasm, on the opening day of the keenly anticipated fifty-second edition of the Venice Biennale—the most venerable of international art shows—directed by the American curator, critic, and teacher Robert Storr. That sounded on target to me. “Boring,” or its equivalent in other languages, was an adjective more commonly bruited about, but I found myself looking sharply at those who uttered it and wishing they were more attentive. Many were collectors, dealers, and kibbitzers impatiently primed for the casino action of the Art Basel fair, which opened three days later. Others were a trusty contemporary type: the novelty addict. (Their ilk is served by auxiliary attractions in Venice, such as an entertaining show of the French billionaire François Pinault’s violently trendy collection, at the Palazzo Grassi—champagne to the main event’s tawny port.) For me, the conduciveness to meditation that holds up throughout the acres of new and newish international art in the Biennale’s two main sites—the grandiose Fascist-era Italian Pavilion, featuring, as it usually does, a world-embracing exhibition of putatively top artists, and the quarter-mile-long Arsenale, an ancient facility of the Venetian navy, devoted to emerging talent—borders on the miraculous. As the director, Storr curated both venues, laying a cool hand on the brow of today’s money-fevered, intellectually dishevelled global art world. His presentations, grounded in his own personal tastes and loyalties, in the painting-rich Italian Pavilion, and in his penchant for melancholic political idealism, in an Arsenale that favors conceptual projects, court consideration of a genuinely critical sort. His effort is no less estimable for being, perhaps, quixotic. It thoroughly overshadows the village of national pavilions, in the leafy Giardini (overseen by curators from their home countries), whose local heroes—Great Britain’s Tracey Emin, Germany’s Isa Genzken, France’s Sophie Calle—register, for the most part, wanly.

Storr was born in 1949, and earned an M.F.A. in painting (he still paints, though rarely shows his work) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. I have known him for years; he is a cosmopolitan of eager charm, formidable intelligence, and limited humor. (He is notorious for writing long, dense letters to editors, in hair-trigger response to perceived slights.) As a student spending a year abroad in France, he was swept up in the revolutionary fervor of 1968—a formative experience, he has said. He rose to prominence in New York in the nineteen-eighties as a critic championing artists at eccentric or challenging angles to fashionable taste, many of them women—notably Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Spero, Susan Rothenberg, and Elizabeth Murray—along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Gerhard Richter, and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. (All these artists are prominent in Storr’s shows. Another of his favorites, the late conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, commands the American pavilion this year, curated by other hands, to antiseptic, pious effect.) Storr was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art from 1990 to 2002—his exhibitions there included retrospectives of Richter, Max Beckmann, and Tony Smith—and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 2002 to 2006. He is now the dean of the Yale School of Art. The most anti-academic of academics, he has fiercely opposed rationalist theoretical tendencies in criticism, arguing for the priority of the artist’s initiative and the viewer’s intuition. As the first-ever American-born director of a Venice Biennale, he mounts his point of view on tank tracks, titling the event, with Storrian benevolent bossiness, “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense.”

The product is as lucid as its label is murky. It kicks off, in the Italian Pavilion, with a skylit exhibition of paintings by the paragon of antic irrationalism, Sigmar Polke: abstract works, with cartoonish elements, that are preposterously big on purpose, I think, to make sport of their own ambition. Translucent, in brownish pigmented resin, they are hypersensitive to the moods of the Venetian sky. Then come superb abstractions by established stars—Ellsworth Kelly, Richter, and Ryman—and by two veteran painters of small, tangy pictures, who should be better known, the American Thomas Nozkowski and the Belgian Raoul De Keyser. Storr hereby invites open-eyed aesthetic receptiveness for the mixed array that follows. There is a riveting new Nauman, “Venice Fountains,” in which crude wax life masks spew water into sinks with faintly nightmarish relentlessness. (Many art folks cited this as the show’s crown jewel.) Other successes are animations by the Americans Kara Walker (horrors of the Old South) and Joshua Mosley (clay figures of Pascal and Rousseau sharing lofty thoughts in real woods) and by the young Japanese master Ayako Tabata, who calls herself Tabaimo (big hands furnish a Victorian doll house that develops symptoms of organic distress, including erupting sea creatures). The Palestinian Emily Jacir elaborately documents the assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zwaiter by Israeli agents in Rome, in 1972, for an alleged role in the massacre of Israeli athletes at that year’s Summer Olympics. (The incident is a stark episode in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”) Jacir is undoubtedly partisan, but her work allows for a range of reflections on the Middle East’s world of pain. Its mournful ambiguities anticipate the prevailing elegiac, even despairing tenor of the Arsenale.

Like the Italian Pavilion, the Arsenale starts with a bang: “A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow,” an installation by the Italian Luca Buvoli commemorating futurism, the movement that was announced in a manifesto by its leading propagandist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in 1909. (A year later, Marinetti leafleted Venice from atop the clock tower in St. Mark’s Square.) Rakish sculptural elements in flimsy materials and rich colors apostrophize futurist forms and typography. Video documentary clips and animations evoke an artistic delirium that meshed with the afflatus of early Fascism. On two video screens, sufferers of aphasia struggle, in Italian and English, to read Marinetti’s 1909 screed, with lines like “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene!” Buvoli’s bottomlessly ironic work does for Italy, in tones of light opera, something like what Anselm Kiefer’s did a quarter century ago, in tones of Wagner, for Germany—bringing to consciousness a historical nexus of aesthetic rapture and political insanity. Stirring the very emotions that he criticizes, Buvoli eschews the starchy condescension of academic political art.

Much of the art in the Arsenale conveys similarly brave intimations of excitement and dread in the present day, without the advantage of hindsight. In a video of bombed-out ruins, a boy kicks around a human skull; people in photographs conduct normal daily lives at the fringes of minefields. Tiny drawings catalogue American war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan; a comic strip details an African’s failed attempt to emigrate to Europe. In a huge mechanized mixed-media sculpture, an airliner repeatedly crashes in a city of skyscrapers. (With miserable prescience, it was made by the American Charles Gaines in 1997.) Is there no hope? There’s some, of a solemn variety, in a great film by Yang Fudong, of China, “Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest,” whose five parts punctuate the Arsenale. Its questing young heroes wander their country in black-and-white tableaux that are part scroll painting, part neo-Antonioni, and altogether entrancing. There is also a heartening separate section of zestful contemporary African art, “Check List Luanda Pop.”

Visitors whose attention skates over the depths of perception and feeling in Storr’s Biennale are not wrong, if the purpose of new art now is, as the dictatorship of commerce affirms, to enable a general glorying in products of creative crackle and fizz, never mind graver yearnings of the soul and dire news of the day. I can’t condemn the skaters, given that sheer energy, no matter how apparently feckless, is always the truest sign of what will distinguish the art, and the styles of enthusiasm, in any era. Art doesn’t change the world, and the world changes art only in ways that, whatever else they may be, are consistent with unforced pleasure. By insisting on contemplative absorption and civic conscience, Storr is a bit of a schoolmarm, demanding dignity of irresponsible pupils. But he marshals a lot of artistic talent to his side—and, for clarity and rhythm of presentation, his shows constitute by a long shot the most elegant of the several Biennales I’ve seen. I think the event will be remembered as a cautionary service, conservative in spirit and progressive in principle, to a frenetic time.

2. The New Abstraction
True, it never really went away. But abstraction is in the midst of a revival, flaunting its brilliant past as it reconfigures itself for the future
by Barbara A. MacAdam

Abstract painting is back. True, it never really went away, but it had been shunted aside by the vagaries of time and fashion. Abstraction was attacked for being old media, played out, new-idea stunted, and out of sync with contemporary life and thought—as well as for being decorative and solipsistic. While abstraction persisted in Europe and even Asia, it became a sidebar to the New York art scene, which was flooded, paradoxically, with a technologically sophisticated assortment of new-media works, along with an array of updated conventional representational paintings.

Just as the figure—once disparaged as academic, facile, or simply frumpy—experienced a renascence, showing up in numerous guises to suit the social, political, and artistic moment, abstract art has been flaunting its brilliant past and reconfiguring itself for the present and future.

It says something when a painter of modest-size, solid abstract canvases like Tomma Abts wins the Tate’s Turner Prize, an award that usually targets edgy, controversial art.

And then there are the shows like “Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century,” at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts (through the 22nd of this month), which opened with an explosion of new abstract art. The works in the show, by 15 mostly emerging artists, were inspired by nothing less than “computer technology, cosmology, quantum physics, information theory, genetics, complexity theory, remote sensing, and other sets of current scientific visual languages,” according to exhibition curators Nick Capasso and Lisa Sutcliffe. Where Barbara Takenaga depicts an imploding—or expanding—universe, creating a spectral buzz, Cristi Rinklin draws on computer imagery for her painterly abstractions and explains that “technology recalibrates how we imagine the world.”

We are seeing both the return of abstraction and a new abstraction. In the last few months alone, there has even been an exhibition of figurative sculptor Audrey Flack’s abstract paintings from the 1950s at the Rider University Art Gallery in Lawrenceville, New Jersey; not to mention an Albers and Moholy-Nagy show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Whitney’s Mark Grotjahn exhibition.

But why now? The resurgence could in part be a response to contemporary life—to globalization and the desire for a universal language, to the technological revolution, to new materials, and to the endless pursuit of something novel. Abstract pictures may convey a more comprehensible range of associations than personal, narrative pictures can. Or it could be a form of nostalgia.

It may well be that the “art world is still dominated by an interest in images across the board,” as Gary Garrels, chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, suggests. While he acknowledges that there seems to be a healthy regard for abstract work, he says, “I don’t know if it’s been more or less since Pop art took Abstract Expressionism off its pedestal.” What he has definitely seen among the new abstract painters is an “interest in going back to the roots of modernism and the fundamental issues of modernism—to Mondrian and Kandinsky.”

He also points out that “Minimalism has been fully embraced lately. It has become an accepted vocabulary, especially among collectors.” But scholars, too, have begun to revisit it. “It’s the appropriate time to do a dissertation about the 1960s,” Garrels says. “The information is all there. People are still alive; it’s far enough from the immediacy of that moment so you can have a historical perspective.”

Linda Norden, an independent curator and writer currently advising on the 2008 Whitney Biennial, sees the renewed interest in abstraction as one of two concurrent impulses. “There’s a documentary impulse that provides some way of responding directly to the world and a corollary urge to abstraction, which aims at the emotional fallout and underlying forces driving those actions,” she says. “Both impulses speak to the state of the world and change—the big millennial questions as well as the issues of the present.” She finds that much of the work today is “more in the spirit of earlier 20th-century artists like Malevich, where abstraction emerged out of something both real and revolutionary, like war, industrial technology, and the radical social, economic, and cultural upheavals endemic throughout Europe at the time.”

Norden continues, “The problem with abstraction is always its closeness to the decorative, to something that feels escapist and closed-eyed rather than probing, as, for example, when Peter Halley attempted 20 years ago to overlay a graphic notation, referring to both the cultural critique of Michel Foucault and the black lines of Mondrian, onto a ground of phosphorescent house paint. In the painting of Amy Sillman or Tomma Abts, there is something more concrete at play—an effort to make every decision visible in the painting of the painting.”

The abstract revival brings back into view the intensively inscribed, nonobjective, but strangely thoughtful drawings of veteran Conceptualist William Anastasi, the nervous gestural painting of Cora Cohen, and the architectural abstractions of Joan Waltemath. It also introduces young emerging artists like Torben Giehler, who unites nature, technology, and psychology in works that combine digital and conventional media and play with spatial reconfigurations.

Some painters are reappearing and taking unexpected turns, like Op star Larry Poons, famous for his dancing dots, who showed densely worked, surprisingly impressionistic compositions still engaged in optical tactics but of a more subtle sort at the Danese gallery in New York last winter.

Meanwhile, shows such as “Elemental Form,” at L&M Arts last fall, have featured some of the best works of the high Minimalists, with major pieces by masters of the 1960s and ’70s like Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre.

Bridging the long-established and the young, techno-savvy artists is a group, ranging from Jeff Elrod—who shows with Fredericks & Freiser and essentially paints with his computer mouse on flat-colored computer-screen-like surfaces, merging the look and ideas of old media with those of the new—to Grotjahn, represented by Anton Kern Gallery, who, in a kind of quiet Op mode, sharply but subtly vectors into space with improbable colors and acute diagonal lines to establish a disorienting visual field.

Jason Duval paints letters and shapes that are at once curved and angular using minor-key colors, recalling CoBrA artist Bram van Velde and a style that evokes Per Kirkeby, A. R. Penck, and Markus Lupertz. “One reason I continue to be interested in abstract painting,” Duval says, “is because it allows me to simultaneously engage with the history of painting while being inventive and idiosyncratic. This is partly because it often feels like no one is looking, and I mean that in a good way.”

Alongside these players are people like Ryan McGinness, who blends his growing personal library of graphic symbols with agitated flourishes and scrawls in an abstract language that embraces and comments on art history and youth culture. Chicago’s Scott Short makes photocopies of a sheet of colored paper and then copies each copy hundreds of times, finally photographing a single page in slide form, projecting it, and then reproducing the image as a real painting. Here accident and painstaking care merge new and old media. At the other end of the spectrum, Uruguayan Ricardo Lanzarini’s conceptual tactic is to draw crowds of tiny, insignificant people, vegetables, or objects and use them as elements in design rather than figures in a narrative, although they do induce in the viewer a sense of angst.

A number of artists are making spiritually based works. These take many forms, from Shirazeh Houshiary’s near-invisible paintings based on the almost microscopic transcribing of chants and prayers to the many evocations of the cosmos in the manner of Vija Celmins to the more traditional, tantric-inspired luminous paintings of Stephen Mueller. These works prove that abstraction can indeed accommodate spiritual and emotional content, which may or may not be communicated to the viewer. Through it all, Agnes Martin, who regularly appears internationally in solo and group shows, seems to have attained high-priestess status.

Oliver Herring, the German-born conceptualist who frequently uses the figure in his fractured, cubistic photographs, videos, and mirrored sculptures, is among many who take issue with abstraction for being “unemotional,” but he makes an exception for Martin. He recalls how “tears came to my mother’s eyes when she first saw Martin’s early works.” What he and others rail against is what they consider the empty elegance of abstract painting.

But none of these issues is new. Since the time of the early modernists, painting has had to answer to such criticism. The truth is that there have always been abstract paintings that deal with big and small issues, both spiritual and formal. Testifying to abstraction’s strength and persistence is the current traveling show “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–1975,” organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed for Independent Curators International, and on view at the National Academy Museum in New York through the 22nd of this month.

The show reveals the extent to which abstract painting has engaged social, political, and spiritual issues in its own way. Mary Heilmann introduced a femininist spirit in her boldly colored allusions to handiwork and craft, while Joan Jonas extended painting into performance, addressing the body. All this was happening as Conceptual art, video, and other new forms were emerging.

The exhibition and catalogue capture a pivotal time in American history. In his essay, Reed, a painter, recalls the dynamic, individualistic emergence and cross-fertilization among artists ranging from Joan Snyder and Pat Steir to Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, and Dorothea Rockburne. Reed laments how the 1960s and early ’70s refrain of “painting is dead” reflected a misunderstanding of the “innovations in painting and its often conceptual nature.”

Now these innovations are being acknowledged. The work of many of the artists in “High Times,” which also includes Ron Gorchov, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Howardena Pindell, and Richard Tuttle, has been appearing in museum and gallery shows, often alongside the work of younger artists. Boundaries have blurred, and there’s a growing anything-goes spirit. “I think the exciting possibilities of ‘abstract’ painting now have to do precisely with a freedom from labels or categories,” says painter Chris Martin, who points out that “anything is possible if it arises out of inner necessity.”

Jay Gorney, director of the New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash, has observed that “there seems to be a real interest in abstraction and a real hunger for it among collectors.” Gorney recently presented a group show that included work by artists ranging from the reemerging Chris Martin, who was first active in the mid-1980s and was known for his strong, graphic, highly textured, “spiritually” driven paintings, to the recently emerged Alison Fox, whose bright, dynamic canvases take their footprints in still life and landscape into a seductive and distinctive personal abstraction.

Much abstract work today is not overtly political; it doesn’t deal with politics or cultural issues as easily as video can, but it does relate more subtly to cultural issues. Annabel Daou speaks of trying to accommodate genre to content. The Lebanese-born New York artist works in a shifting combination of abstraction, conceptualism, and linguistic and numerical jottings, as well as sound. Although the words may be decipherable, they are essentially designed as elements in a land- or thought-scape; the ideas are like abstract forms for viewers to assemble on their own—or not. Her materials—paper, torn and not; tape, fingerprinted or fresh; pencil, smudged or clean; translucent gesso—are simple, accessible, and fragile, and thereby adaptable to different places, situations, and ideas. The work can be seen as literary or political or personal.

Daou poses the question “What is abstraction?” and begins to answer it: “I think abstraction is a mental process where the artist extracts form and creates form. For instance, I looked out my window and saw a window across the street. One frame was slightly off-kilter, and I began to think of an off-kilter grid—and from there, about minor gestures, how the tiny shift in the big grid changed everything. You could take anything as the starting point—abstraction lets you do that. Then it becomes its own world, and it’s like being inside the work.”

New York gallerist Peter Blum has found that in the last two years collectors in the United States have become increasingly interested in more Minimalist art, particularly work from the 1960s and ’70s. “They are looking beyond the major names like Serra and Judd,” he says, “and considering other artists who were working at the time and probably even influenced some of the bigger names, as in the case of Judd and David Rabinowitch.” Of course, Blum points out, the work is cheaper than that of artists in the Minimalist pantheon.

Another artist who has reemerged is Suzan Frecon, who has been making her style of abstract painting for a number of years. She shows with Blum in New York and Lawrence Markey in San Antonio. Suddenly, she is having major museum shows, with one coming up at the Menil Collection in Houston in September.

Says the Menil exhibition’s curator, Josef Helfenstein, “I think she is an extraordinarily interesting and serious painter, sort of a stabilizing force in today’s fast-moving and commercially driven art world. Her painting seems almost like an existential way of being an artist; painting really as a form of knowledge, very modern and yet deeply rooted in human history.”

Painter David Row—who became known in the 1980s when he showed at John Good Gallery in New York with abstract painters Jacqueline Humphries, Juan Uslé, Nancy Haynes, Stephen Ellis, Jonathan Lasker, and Fiona Rae—acknowledges that he has indeed seen a renewed interest in abstract painting, especially in the last 18 months or so. “One of the things I have found,” he says, “is that there’s been a change from abstract art having to deal with its precursors—that is, the three generations before. Now artists tend to be inside the work.

“It becomes a personal thing,” he explains. “The conceptual issues fall away.”

(Barbara A. MacAdam is deputy editor of ARTnews)