Another Triumph For Feminism

Pentagon Lifts Ban on Women in Combat

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

The groundbreaking decision by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta overturns a 1994 Pentagon rule that restricts women from many positions in the infantry and artillery, even though in reality women have found themselves in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 When asked if they would be required to wear makeup and high heels while killing enemies, Panetta said it would depend on who they were killing. "Some cultures might find it insulting to be murdered by women dressed according to superior western fashion, but others might not mind."  

The Myth of "Free Trade"

Much nonsense has been written about the (mostly imaginary) glories of "free trade," with little mention of the fact that Adam Smith, supposedly the father of the doctrine, endorsed equality of outcome, was quite critical of joint stock companies (the impersonal stock exchange), and entertained business enterprises no larger than a pin factory employing two dozen workers. His critique of 18th century capitalism, far from being a justification for today's enormous centers of unaccountable private wealth, is actually an endorsement of self-organized, human scale markets accountable to the communities that host them, not vast impersonal "markets" dominated by transnational corporations and international banks. Furthermore, he did not sneer at moral judgment, as do today's champions of capitalist "freedom"; on the contrary, he felt that human nature contains a natural and appropriate concern for the well-being of others, and an obligation to not inflict harm on them. This led him to conclude that government had a responsibility to restrain those who failed to fulfill that obligation.

Much of what goes under the name of "trade" today would not be recognized as such by Adam Smith. A huge portion of it is composed of exchanges within the branches of individual transnational corporations, which is to say that it consists of individual corporations shipping components between its various branches. This is done primarily to get around market discipline, not to submit to it.

Transnational corporations shed taxes by overcharging themselves for “inputs” they transfer from “foreign” affiliates and escape government regulation by shifting production to high-repression, low-wage regions of the world, declaring less profits at “home” and more in tax havens abroad. Through publicly-financed merger mania, they buy off competition, mock social responsibility, bid down wages, and restrict consumer choice to those options that directly enrich them. With amazing chutzpah they then defend their monopolies as “rugged individualism,” demanding subsidies for their inefficiencies, protection against competition, guarantees of their credit, coverage of their losses, and bailouts for their bankruptcies. They devote more money and effort to manipulating people into compulsively buying than they do to making things worth purchasing. They borrow billions of dollars to finance mergers and leveraged buyouts, deducting the interest while eliminating the jobs of the taxpayers from whom they borrow. In spite of their pious rhetoric about the need to "support business," they make enterprising small business virtually impossible. As the U.S. Trade Commission noted back in the 1980s, the nearest thing to a Communist command economy is in the front offices of transnational corporations.

While sneering at the "Nanny State," no sector of society is more dependent on it than transnational corporations. Corporate managers in advanced industries like electronics, computers, and pharmaceuticals, insist that the government, which means the taxpayers, absorb the unprofitable parts of the production process, namely research and development. Furthermore, corporate elites require that the public, through the Pentagon, provide a state guaranteed market, which is needed for waste production if commercial markets don’t work, as they often don't. When something is commercially viable, it is sold, and when not, the public purchases it and destroys it. The public pays the costs and the corporation keeps the profit - that's capitalism. And Adam Smith would not have supported it.

One fundamental tenet of “free trade” theory is that public subsidies are not allowed. However, following WWII U.S. business leaders were convinced that the U.S. economy would collapse back into depression without state intervention. They warned that advanced industry, specifically aircraft, “cannot satisfactorily exist in a pure, competitive, unsubsidized, ‘free enterprise’ economy” and that “the government is their only possible savior.” (There are very few "Ma and Pa" aerospace firms - ed.) Corporate leaders also accepted that the Pentagon system would be the best way to shift production costs to the public. Social spending dedicated to promoting the general welfare could also have played the “pump priming” stimulative role, but that route would not have provided a direct subsidy to the corporate sector, and it also would have brought unwelcome tendencies toward public participation in decision-making about how best to invest public money. Military spending had none of these defects, and was adopted precisely for this reason.

Six decades later the private industrial sector continues to be heavily dependent on taxpayer help, with all key industries heavily subsidized: aerospace, automotive, electronics, agribusiness, automation, biotechnology, communications, pharmaceuticals, just about every dynamic sector of the economy.

Interestingly, American political attitudes very much contradict the “devil-take-the-hindmost” philosophy of “free trade," which favors those best situated to win the competition, namely large, transnational corporations. Overwhelming majorities of Americans favor federal guarantees of public assistance for those who can’t work, unemployment insurance, subsidized prescription drugs and nursing home care for the elderly, at least minimum health care, social security, and federally guaranteed child care for low-income working mothers. The persistence of such attitudes in the wake of massive corporate propaganda repeatedly announcing the “death” of the New Deal is striking.

Because monopoly and public interests diverge, corporate expenditures on the systematic manipulation of public attitudes are huge in the United States. They reached one trillion dollars annually by the late 1990s, and have continued to climb since. Many of these expenditures are tax deductible, so that the American people pay for the privilege of being indoctrinated by corporations sucking at the public tit while denouncing ordinary Americans for depending on the “Nanny State” when they receive far more modest help from their government. The main thrust of this propaganda offensive is that liberty is the right to waste, over-consumption is impossible, and poverty is self-inflicted.

Internationally, "free trade" elevates “property rights” to Divine status, superseding every other established right among nations of the world. In many ways it is simply a bludgeon used to force the poor to subsidize the rich, as all of the industrialized nations got that way through disciplined protectionism, not market discipline, which is the only way known to enter the competition against better established rivals. By now the more powerful states have elevated transnational corporations over the sovereign power of nation states, which have the defect of being occasionally responsive to democratic demands. As political scientist Michael Parenti observes, “free trade” arrangements like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) represent a kind of global coup d’etat by the giant business interests of the world.

Free trade agreements grant anonymous international trade committees the authority to overrule any nation-state laws that are deemed a burden to the investment opportunities of transnational corporations. Meeting in secret, these all-powerful trade panels often have investment stakes in the very issues they are seeking to adjudicate - and they have been elected by no one. Their function is simply to grant carte-blanche to transnational corporations headquartered in countries all over the world. Governments are commanded to reduce tariffs, terminate farm subsidies, treat foreign corporations the same as domestic ones, honor all transnational corporate patent claims on natural resources, and obey the rulings of the WTO's permanent elite bureaucracy. Should a country attempt to resist changes to its laws designed to accommodate the lords of “free trade,” the WTO may impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resisting country of needed markets and materials.

What kind of government policies face "free trade" sanctions? Michael Parenti writes: “The WTO has ruled against laws deemed barriers to free trade . . . has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food . . . has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food . . . has eliminated the ban that various countries had imposed on asbestos and on fuel and emission standards for motor vehicles . . . and . . . has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban some nations imposed on the importation of endangered-species products . . . The European Union banned the importation of hormone-ridden US beef . . . a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade . . . The WTO overturned a portion of the US Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries, along with a portion of the US Endangered Species Act that forbade the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.”

All of these rulings promote minority interests over the general public interest.

Sources:

Smith, Adam, "The Wealth of Nations," (Random House, 1937)

French, Marilyn, "Beyond Power - On Women, Men, and Morals," (Ballantine, 1985)

Chomsky, Noam, "Chronicles of Dissent," (Common Courage, 1992)

Chomsky, Noam, "Profit Over People," (Seven Stories, 1999)

Barnet, Richard J. and John Cavanagh, "Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order," (Simon and Schuster, 1994)

Harrington, Michael, "Socialism: Past and Future," (Mentor, 1992)

Korten, David C., "Agenda For A New Economy - From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth," (Berrett-Koehler, 2009)

Parenti, Michael, "The Face of Imperialism," (Paradigm, 2011)

Bulletins From The Garlic

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The Progressive(ly) Corporate Era 1900-1916

“As the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes.”

—------Bankers’ Magazine, 1901

During the 1900-1916 period,” writes political scientist Michael Parenti, “federal price and market regulations in meat packing, food and drugs, banking, timber, and mining were initiated at the insistence of the strongest companies within these industries. The overall effect was to raise profits for the larger producers, tighten their control over markets, and weed out smaller competitors.”

This era came to be called Progressive because of the much celebrated but largely ineffective legislation enacted to control these corporate monopolies: the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing for a progressive income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct popular election of Senators; and electoral reforms like the long ballot and the nonpartisan election. By 1915, many states had also passed laws limiting the length of the workday and establishing worker’s compensation for industrial accidents. A handful of states had established minimum wage laws and 38 had implemented child labor restrictions. In a few industries workers won the 8-hour day and time-and-a-half pay for overtime.

Though ordinary Americans benefited to some degree from the reforms, historian Gabriel Kolko, a careful student of the period, characterizes these years as “consistently conservative.” Large corporations, not a reformist public, were the dominant force. Observes Kolko: “The pervasive reality of the period is big business’ control of politics set in the context of the political regulation of the economy.”

What did big business want? An absolute priority was the Open Shop (no unions), which would guarantee that conditions for labor remained poor and workers subordinate. Employers’ associations were not shy about asserting their authoritarian vision, perfecting the Open Shop by boycotting union goods, providing financial and other help to businesses trying to ban unions, furnishing strikebreakers, boycotting unfriendly newspapers, bribing union officials, blacklisting union workers, hiring labor spies, forcing workers to sign oaths renouncing union associations, spreading anti-union propaganda, using police, militia, and private goon squads to break strikes, petitioning the courts to cripple unions, and organizing business lobbies to strangle labor legislation.

All this proved to be quite effective in subduing workers. In 1914, labor’s purchasing power was less than it had been in the 1890s, and according to government statistics, two million children were in the marketplace simply to help their families survive. Millions of workers toiled 12 to 14 hours a day for six or seven days a week, without being able to keep their families fed. At the same time, 35,000 a year were killed on the job and another 700,000 were victims of injury, illness, blindness or other work-related afflictions. Such is the price of "personal liberty" under capitalism.

Helping place such conditions virtually beyond remedy was a redefinition of the corporation making it not merely an artificial creation of the state but a voluntary contract among private persons. Some were bold enough to designate it an “organic entity,” part of nature, and therefore not subject to control even by its owners. “Over and over again,” notes Harvard legal historian Morton Horwitz, “legal theorists attempted to find a vocabulary that would enable them to describe the corporation as a real or natural entity whose existence is prior to and separate from the state.” A series of dubious court decisions by radical judicial activists institutionalized this view, allowing corporations to evolve extraordinary powers under the guise of "individual" Constitutional rights - as immortal persons.

With their harrowing cycles of boom, bust, panic, and collapse, largely unregulated markets had produced such a string of catastrophes that even big business had become convinced a completely free market would doom profits and perhaps even society itself. Therefore, the captains of industry pushed to have corporations invested with the rights of flesh and blood persons, allowing them to transfer public power into private hands and administer markets along highly authoritarian lines. The corporate right of free speech was a bonanza, allowing corporations to bombard the public with commercial propaganda, to buy elections, and to relentlessly promote the glories of an acquisitive life. Convinced that control of production rightfully belonged in their hands, workers bitterly condemned these developments, but were unable to wrest control from the corporations.

The "progressive" regulation movement arose from the corporations’ “natural” need to have the government do for them what they were unable to do for themselves. “National regulation,” argues Kolko, reflected corporate efforts “to find political means to resolve the economic problems which economic decentralization, competition, and a whole panoply of new challenges made endemic to American capitalism.” A longstanding problem was price war, which an aggressive series of corporate mergers had been unable to stop. In fact, quite the contrary. In 1900, The Iron Age commented that “the great industrial aggregations, instead of discouraging competition, have rather encouraged it,” while the New York Financier opined that, “The most serious problem that confronts trust combinations today is competition from independent sources...the sources of production are being multiplied, with a resultant decrease in profits . . .” The private sector therefore demanded government intervention to limit competition and bring harmony to the chaos of conflicting regulations passed by dozens of state governments. With business yearning for stable competition and a predictable national market, even the likes of J. P. Morgan partner Henry P. Davison repudiated laissez-faire in no uncertain terms: “I would rather have regulation and control than free competition.”

In short, observes Kolko, “Progressivism was not the triumph of small business over the trusts, but the victory of big businesses in achieving the rationalization of the economy that only the federal government could provide.” Had a business-friendly apparatus not been established, a rising socialist movement stood prepared to shift the goals of production from profit to social utility. With the stakes so high utilities magnate Samuel Insull observed that it was in business’s interest to “help shape the right kind of regulation than to have the wrong kind forced upon [us].” The “right” kind limited competition while placing capital accumulation beyond discussion.

Contrary to popular belief, the presidents of the Progressive Era were faithful servants of the large corporation. Teddy Roosevelt, whose reputation as a “trust buster” stemmed from his sporadic rhetorical eruptions against the “malefactors of great wealth,” actually governed by looking out for their interests. He condemned reformers as “muckrakers,” as though there were something underhanded in exposing injustice, and consistently criticized “sinister demagogs and foolish visionaries” for “seek[ing] to incite a violent class hatred against all men of wealth.” The idea that the economic structure itself might be generating legitimate class resentments was quite beyond TR’s grasp. According to historian Richard Hofstadter, he was “generally hostile” to labor and dismissed the Populists as “crude and ignorant.” In 1895, he had recommended that progressive criminologist John Altgeld and socialist Eugene Debs be “placed before a stone wall and shot.”

Speaking loudly and carrying a small stick, TR displayed a consistently cooperative attitude towards Wall Street, enjoying warm relations with industrial magnates and inviting them to serve in his government. He posed no great challenge to capital during his two terms, which was not surprising since his principal advisors were key figures in the world of industrial and finance capital: Mark Hanna, Robert Bacon, and George W. Perkins of the House of Morgan, and Elihu Root, Senator Nelson Aldrich, and James Stillman of the Rockefeller interests. TR actually prosecuted fewer anti-trust cases, substantially fewer, than did the Harding or Taft Administrations and negotiated a “gentleman’s agreement” with two J. P. Morgan men—Elbert Gary and George Perkins—which guaranteed the legality of their companies in return for their cooperation in any investigation carried out by the Bureau of Corporations. His prosecution of the Morgan railroad monopoly in the Northern Securities case changed nothing, since the key figures in planning the monopoly (Morgan, Harriman, and Hill) suffered no prosecution. The motive for this famous anti-trust action was not to cure the injustices of capitalism, but to head off calls for government ownership of the railroads.

Like most reformers, TR did not oppose the structural evils inherent in a predatory economy, but rather, the occasions of “mismanagement” that bred disrespect for business and thereby undermined its credibility. Thus, he restricted himself to blaming individual corporate leaders, not monopoly capitalism: “The line of demarcation we must draw must always be on conduct, not on wealth; our objection to any given corporation must be, not that it is big, but that it behaves badly.” In a Message to Congress on December 6, 1904, TR summed up his favorable view of autocratic business power: “Great corporations are necessary, and only men of great and singular mental power can manage such corporations successfully, and such men must have great rewards.”

William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson offered no better approach, with neither perceiving any “fundamental conflict between their political goals and those of business.” Like TR, Wilson focused on individual, not social abuses, assailing corrupt political machines and big trusts. But his campaign funds came from a handful of wealthy backers, and he worked cooperatively with associates of the Rockefeller and Morgan empires, showing himself as faithful to advancing the interests of big business as his counterparts in the GOP. In January 1912, Wilson said: “I am not afraid of any corporation, no matter how big. I am afraid of any corporation, however small, that is bad, that is rotten at the core, whose practices and actions are in restraint of trade.” When told that this sounded almost identical to Teddy Roosevelt’s sentiments, Wilson responded: “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is, except that he has a sort of pious feeling about the doctrine of protection, which I have never felt.”

The focus of Wilson’s “New Freedom” was therefore not the distribution and control of class power but the ease of market entry for small business. Wilson was interested in equalizing exploitation rights, not questioning their validity. He assumed, as Roosevelt had before him, that businessmen were well-intentioned and desired the public good, and therefore he sought merely to strengthen their allegedly altruistic tendencies. He suspected no causal connection between the concentration of wealth in private hands and the widespread lack of political democracy.

A century later, neither do Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Sources:

Boyer, Richard O. and Herbert M. Morais, "Labor's Untold Story," (Cameron Associates, 1955)

Derber, Charles, "Corporation Nation - How Corporations Are Taking Over Our Lives and What We Can Do About It," (St. Martin's, 1998)

Foner, Philip. S., "The Policies and Practices of the American Federation of Labor 1900-1909," (International Publishers, 1964)

Horwitz, Morton J., "The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960 - The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy," (Oxford, 1994)

Kolko, Gabriel, "The Triumph of Conservatism - A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916," (Free Press, 1963)

Link, Arthur S., "Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917," (Harper & Brothers, 1954)

Parenti, Michael, "Democracy For The Few - Sixth Edition" (St. Martin's, 1995)

Zinn, Howard, "A People's History of the United States," (Harper, 1980)

The American Family Gun(s): Why?

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The latest mass murder nightmare in America is provoking much needed discussion about a very serious problem. As is often the case, key points will be avoided in that discussion, especially as it is indulged in by national leaders and their corporate stenographers in media.

The usual suspects in this gun lobby vs. gun control debate have valid points to make, but they are similar to those in any national argument of a political or economic nature; they deal with two sides of a coin without daring  to question the existence of the coin. We argue over whether heads are better than tails or vice versa , treating the coin itself as some form of universal deity over which there should be no question, concern or thought. In this fashion, we are provoked (?) to wonder whether taxes should be raised on a minority of wealthy people or government services should be cut for the majority, assuming that the system within which this argument takes place is natural and beyond any concern for citizens of  an alleged democracy.

The subject of fantastic wealth accruing to a tiny minority while poverty expands among a group fast approaching a plurality in the supposedly richest and most democratic society in  history  is left out of the discussion. In the same tradition, Americans will tear each other apart, insult reason and morality and denigrate the very idea of a social debate of substance in the matter of whether there is a constitutional right to own a gun to protect home, body, soul, family pets, jewelry, or stamp collections, and never wonder why there is no constitutional right to a home, a job, health care and other serious necessities of life.

Those of us who find no need to own a gun will trash those who do, and neither side will question their citizenship duties as members of the most violent nation in world history , committing murder and mayhem all over the globe while waving the flag of democracy and freedom. We will insist, under the direction of our consciousness controllers and their servant mind managers, that individuals  are responsible for whatever is wrong with all of us collectively. Of course we are not supposed to be a society or a collective unless we are at war killing foreigners, shopping, or united in grieving  over  crimes committed by individuals.

A case can be made, sometimes strongly, for idiocy and irrationality on the part of gun lovers, but there can also be an easy target for those lovers when they comment on the gun haters' seeming admiration for a system that brings us , or at least many of us, creature comforts not possible without domination of others and  profits trickling down to us from cheap labor and exploitation, however much we individualize it as only certain companies and certain business leaders. Naturally, none among those individually bad companies and people are the ones we rely on for our lives of relative comfort. So it is easy for each side in these debates to feel righteous, correct and beyond criticism. That’s what keeps the system going and what we need to confront and deal with, unless we wish to see the continuing weapons use in other places and in our midst, the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem, and economic downfall which will ultimately include all of us and not just one or another segmented minority forced into mental belief in being different from everyone else.

While our personal obsession with guns has declined over the years, from half the homes in the country  armed now down to only (?) a third, the number of weapons we own has increased. The Gun Market expands every time there is a mass murder as those homemakers rush to buy even more weapons before a supposed ban is instituted. What is important to remember is that these loyal, patriotic and freedom loving citizens are allegedly protecting themselves not from foreign invaders or outer space attack but from other Americans. According to this view ,you never know when some nut case will break down your doors and assault your family, given the wide open, murderous and lawless society we live in. And it isn’t far from the reality experienced by millions of Americans, though they hardly rely on legally purchased weapons to suffer from or participate in the bloodbath that finds more than 1000 people murdered every month via gun violence.

Of course we kill three times that number in our vehicles – as gun lobbyists will point out – but it is rare for a person to consciously wish to die or inflict death on others via driving, however often that is the outcome of a ride to work, shop or school. Nevertheless, despite legends, myths and outright lies about the great saviors of freedom that armed Americans have become, guns are primarily used to commit suicide and murder innocent people, with the few cases of actually interfering with or stopping a crime being broadcast all over the internet, and most of those turning out to be urban legends only believable to those who need – sometimes desperately so – crisis intervention and adult management  in their lives.

Yes, of course, a ninety seven year old woman killed thirteen terrorists who threatened her home, and yes, of course, a three year old boy used his father's gun to kill the monster about to rape his mother. Sure. But these myths and fables only feed into a national disorder which probably follows from historic origins of armed settlers needing to protect themselves from the people on whose land they were settling. But to actually believe we need personal armed protection in the 21^st century, with police departments, armies, navies, air forces, drones, rockets, missiles and a  network of eavesdropping spies supposedly protecting us from the menace of evil, should pose the question:

What the hell are we Americans scared of?

Answer: Other Americans.

And that is the problem whose solution will not simply involve refraining from killing one another because we are so fearful of one another, but facing what it is we fear, and why? It is easy to dismiss gun ownership as an aspect of PRS ( Penis Replacement Syndrome) and there may be some cases that involve just that, along with very loud auto engines and other socially induced signs of personal machismo. But women own and practice gun use – the mother of the mass murderer in Connecticut suffered death at the hands of her son using her own weapons – and along with rural customs and honest hobbyists there are target shooters and others whose only purpose in having a gun is for the hunt, sport or collection value. Silly? Then what is ownership of pets, to a non-pet critic? Or wearing cosmetics, to those who find the practice sexist and demeaning? While pet ownership and makeup use hardly seem as  dangerous as weapons, a detractor could make a case for skin, respiratory , hygienic and environmental disorders connected to those socially induced and privately provoked profit making market ventures. The point is not what individuals practice personally  under  socially induced pressure, but the power of that pressure and who or what truly profits most from it, and who or what absorbs the social loss for those private profits.

If we can get a little closer to confronting that problem as a result of the latest atrocity in America, we may get closer to ending the atrocities we commit in other places and arrive at a democratic standard that brings  safety and well being to all of us and not just some of us. That would be a worthwhile public debate.

SYRIA RECOGNIZES TEA PARTY AS U.S. GOVERNMENT

The Syrian government announced its recognition of the Tea Party as the true representative of the American people.

"After extensive viewing of Fox TV News and reading the corporate media in the few places in the USA where people are still able to read, it became clear to us that the only real voice of the aspirations, beliefs and thinking in the USA must be the Tea Party ." said a spokesperson for the Syrian government.

Watch Out For the Cliff: Which One?

As America develops newer deadly weapons to threaten more nations with its inspired movement for humanitarian democracy through rape and murder, our economy is supposedly headed for what an ad campaign has branded  “the financial cliff”. We need to either raise private taxes on a tiny minority of the 1% super rich or cut  public spending on the overwhelming 99% majority. Only in a nation run by people who  regularly visit  a proctologist to have their heads examined could this be seen as a crippling dilemma involving tough choices and necessarily shared suffering. But that’s how it’s being played by our consciousness commissars and their servants in mind management.

This while the annual shopping frenzy commemorating the birth of a prince of peace - to the god of war - threatens to sink more of the 99% into greater debt for the benefit of the 1% creators of the alleged cliff over which we are all invited to plunge, on their behalf.

And then we have the soon to be fulfilled Mayan prophecy, accepted by some so terrified of material reality that immaterial fantasy is their only defense. Beseeched souls expect the oceans to rise and the land to sink, not because of capital’s attack on nature in its pursuit of profit, but because of ancient people’s ability to forecast the distant future while they were being evolved out of existence for inability to comprehend their nearby present.

We do have a deadly serious problem, recently avoided by most global representatives at a conference on the dilemmas posed by climate change, and some of the worst case scenarios would seem to fit into Mayan, Christian, Islamic, Judaic, science fiction, schizophrenic or realist patterns of observation and prophecy. The question is how to deal with these  real problems that need a confrontation with global political economics, while our brains are filled with personal, fictional and mythological cases that defy reason and only serve the cause of further increasing profits  for the few, as always, at  even greater losses for the many, as usual.

The incredible claims that Syria is about to use chemical weapons on its own people are (un)balanced by those citing newer and more deadly Iranian plans to nuke the world, especially Israel, despite no evidence other than supposed (un)intelligence  from an anonymous nation – ??? – supplied regularly to its american puppets and then widely reported by those puppets, without blushing, as fact. Having shattered Libya out of nationhood and into an alleged central government that, like Afghanistan’s, has little power outside the capital city limits, the rush to destroy Syria by any means necessary is joined with the long desired crushing of the Iranian regime in pursuit of destroying anything standing in the way of continued domination of the world by a fading if still malevolent empire. As the power of  eastern Islam rises and western Judeo-Christian dominance falls, the Abrahamic religious trio mostly controlled by capital must confront its role in propping up political economic power under the guise of one or another scriptural excuse for inequality, racism and endless war.

While Islam is still in opposition to the interest collecting model of the JC west, it also entertains enough symbolic unity with the older members of the triad to only offer short  term relief, if that, from the universal model of democracy in name and hypocrisy in action that has brought the world to its current predicament.

Nowhere can the contradiction of the material and the immaterial find greater gaps than in the USA, where incredible wealth has enabled a standard of living for most that has until recently been beyond the grasp of much of the world. The rising of the present rest at the sinking of the past best has offered a means of bringing the positives and negatives of profit and loss capital markets to more people the world over. As it is shown quite clearly here – to any who will bother to look at the material reality and not simply the economic religious fables that give it psychotic substance – the sector gathering the profits gets smaller in number every day even as its personal wealth expands, while those absorbing the loss expand in number while their personal losses grow . This is happening in China, Russia and anywhere else the model of private profit/social loss enterprise is in command and control.

And nature has begun to call out in a louder voice than even some political demands for democracy and freedom. Deadly storms , floods and eruptions which are clearly the response – except to corporate science and its political shills - to treating the natural environment as a simple profit making commodity are causing breakdowns both physical and mental. Millions succumb to hysterical economics, ignorant superstition and fanatic legends to explain what is kept from their consciousness by the political high priests , rabbis and mullahs speaking from global capital’s banking cathedrals.

Almost daily stories of an economy allegedly recovering and booming once again are contradicted within the same bulletins with conflicting signs of pending doom for that same economy. Whatever figures we are given about employment on the upswing, consumer confidence growing and democracy expanding through warfare, always assume the reality is worse, and usually much worse. Just as corporate capital keeps three sets of books - one for itself, one for investors and one for tax purposes - the corporate government keeps books which are juggled by public accountants as much as private capital’s accountants juggle its profit figures.

When corporate government says the patient is resting comfortably or getting better every day, that could mean the patient is dying, or already  dead. We are nearing the edge of a cliff, but it is hardly this childish nonsense over a national debt which has been incurred almost exclusively for war, the destruction of nature and the murder of millions all for the benefit (?) of a shrinking minority. Humanity does face serious problems over our collective future, but one of those problems is a government owned and operated by private capital, at the expense and loss of just about everyone.

Disregard fairy tales about a financial deficit but regard that real imperial cliff with growing concern and informed democratic action, before fanatic profiteers push us all over the edge.