It Won't Be Pretty

I know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record on this subject of income and wealth disparity, but I'm a historian, and I know what befalls civilizations when prosperity is not fairly broadly shared. Quite simply, it's a recipe for the downfall of that civilization. There are a couple of recent pieces that I've run across that just drum the message in again. The first can be found here, and the article that it references is here.

Just a few random facts are enough to get me worked up . . . until I realize that getting worked up is just an exercise in futility. Because nothing is going to fix this situation until millions of us are worked up by the screaming injustice of it all. To wit:

• The Koch brothers made $3 million an hour last year. The person who served you your food at Denny's or Red Lobster last week made $2.13 an hour (They live on tips, remember.), less than a millionth of the Kochs' hoard.
• Any one of this country's ten richest citizens could pay for a room for every single one of our estimated 633,000 homeless people for an entire year (figuring on about $560 per month). 
• The combined wealth of the ten richest surpasses the entire U.S. federal housing budget.
• The poorest 47 percent of Americans own ZERO percent of this country's wealth--because their debts overshadow their income.
• America, land of the free and home of the brave, has the fourth highest level of wealth inequality in the entire world (out of 141 countries).
• For every dollar of assets owned by a single black or Hispanic woman--the average one has about $100 net worth--a member of the Forbes 400 has over $40 million.

Had enough yet? When the American people finally wake up to this reaming they've been taking and the lies they've been told and the tax cheating that's been done by the filthiest of the filthy rich, it will not be pretty.

And They Gotta Live Here

Lemme balance off the bad news of the last post with some really good news in this one. I have for several years been aware of what I think is one of the grossest pieces of evidence of what's wrong with the planet and what's wrong with us. To wit: gigantic and monstrous dead zones in all of the oceans of the world--the Seven Seas--caused by concentrations of tons and tons of plastic debris. The so-called North Pacific gyre contains an estimated 100 million metric tons of plastic garbage . . . and that's just one concentration. If people could see this horrible mess, it might spur them to some sort of action. It's largely invisible because the oceans are so vast. Because the stuff breaks up into tiny bits, satellites can't capture pictures of this horrendous mess for all to see . . . but it's there and it's fouling the water and it's entered the food chain of countless marine animals.

It could do the job in five years.

But the good news is there are some pretty smart kids out there who have one characteristic they don't share with geezers like me. They have to live in the crap we are going to bequeath to them, and they've put their fantastic minds and imagination to cleaning up our mess. Here's the story:

19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.

At school, Boyan Slat launched a project that analyzed the size and amount of plastic particles in the ocean’s garbage patches. His final paper went on to win several prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Boyan continued to develop his concept during the summer of 2012, and he revealed it several months later at TEDxDelft 2012.
Slat went on to found The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization which is responsible for the development of his proposed technologies. His ingenious solution could potentially save hundreds of thousands of aquatic animals annually, and reduce pollutants (including PCB and DDT) from building up in the food chain. It could also save millions per year, both in clean-up costs, lost tourism and damage to marine vessels.

It is estimated that the clean-up process would take about five years, and it could greatly increase awareness about the world’s plastic garbage patches. On his site Slat says, “One of the problems with preventive work is that there isn’t any imagery of these ‘garbage patches’, because the debris is dispersed over millions of square kilometres. By placing our arrays however, it will accumulate along the booms, making it suddenly possible to actually visualize the oceanic garbage patches. We need to stress the importance of recycling, and reducing our consumption of plastic packaging.” To find out more about the project and to contribute, click here.

More power. More power to these bright young people. We should be ashamed of ourselves that we've left them such a messed up world in so many ways. 

Among Other Things, Our Water's Rotten

There's a famous line in Hamlet where he says, "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark." (At least, I think it was him.) But there's more than one thing rotten in the state of the USA. You can write your own litany. I just want to talk about one: the watercourses of this nation. Inspiration from this piece I ran across recently. A long while back, I think it was in the Nixon administration, the Environmental Protection Agency was established to keep track of how we're screwing up the ecology of the nation and to enforce what laws the people passed to preserve it. Well, way down the line from then--and the environment was pretty screwed up then--we are here. And the EPA reports that more than half--MORE THAN HALF--the water in the United States is unfit for living things. 

Fifty-five percent of U.S. river and stream lengths were in poor condition for aquatic life, largely under threat from runoff contaminated by fertilizers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday.

High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, runoff from urban areas, shrinking ground cover and pollution from mercury and bacteria were putting the 1.2 million miles of streams and rivers surveyed under stress, the EPA said.

"Under stress"--a polite euphemism for "not fit water to support insect life and crawfish." Do you realize how filthy bad water has to be not to support a mud bug?

Here's What We're Up Against, Folks

Normally I don't give stuff like what follows the time of day, but in this case I'll make an exception. My mailbox gets defiled every now and again by such stuff, but thankfully not too often. What follows is from what is described as "A USMC vet." Like that is immediately supposed to impress me with this dude's sagacity. In fact, it has the opposite effect because it tempts me to simply drop my USMC stereotype in place and expect just exactly what I get here: flag-waving blather with not an ounce of true information to sustain it. I know for a fact that all marine vets aren't like this, but I fear many are. And many more agree even though they never spent an hour in uniform. It just depresses the hell out of me to realize that this pinhead represents literally millions of others in this country who actually believe this nonsense.

It's not worth a single moment of my time to go about refuting the "arguments" presented in this screed. But I will make several observations. And forgive me if the observations seem too jejune and obvious to make at all. It's just therapy for me to do this. These thoughts are in no particular order.

• The "American Dream", if ever there was one, has been gone for a long time. It did not just end for the poor and middling folk of the US when Obama was reelected.
• "Norman Rockwell's America" is a figment of the imagination. It never existed.
• This piece is suffused with the terrifying racism that still exists in this country well into the 21st century. It's crude and it's scary. And truth be told, the hatred of Barack Obama that we see and hear every day and that's so evident in this piece is at its fundamental roots because the man is black.
• Want a litany of those who are responsible for all the problems? Read paragraph 2 carefully. You're probably on the list.
• Since when are marines not government workers?
• This guy knows nothing about rules of capitalization, except what maybe he learned as a Marine, and of course, they don't know the rules either. "Militarese" and "federalese" are among the most abominable crimes committed on the English language. I know. I spent my entire working life reading it.
• The best two words in the whole piece are the last two.

The American Dream ended (on November 6th) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.
 A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members,  Environmental Extremists, The Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy, on disabiliy", the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.
The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch...the Pit Bull is in the back yard.
The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Chicago shyster David Axelrod, along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.

Our side ran two candidates who couldn't even win their own home states, and the circus fattster Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing "post Sandy" tribute that elevated the "Commander-in-Chief" to Mother Teresa status.
People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
You will never again out vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates--not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs [Republicans in name only] to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.
Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to "white guilt" and political correctness.....
I'm done.

Wanna See Something Nice?

Try this:



Guaranteed to make you smile.

Too Stupid for Democracy?

Your typical American . . .

Some selected quotations from this article in Slate entitled are "Are Americans too Stupid for Democracy?"

• In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard U.S. Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed. One in three couldn’t name the vice-president. 
• Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.
• People don’t recognize their lack of competence[and] can't judge the competence of politicians
• Politicians think their constituents are much further to the right than polls suggest. (Oh yeah: two scholars polled 2000 state legislators and found this out. And the more conservative the politician, the more wrong they were about what the voters really think).
• The wealthy think the wealthy should pay more taxes, but they don't think they're wealthy. (Almost all Americans – even those in the top 5% of the wealthy – consider themselves "middle class." In fact, if you earn more than $250,000 a year, you are in the top 4% of the wealthy in this country.)
• Americans like Sweden's distribution of wealth, and think they already have it. (I talked about this a few days ago.)
• Government spending has decreased under Obama, but nobody knows it. (It's way, way down under Obama.)

• The deficit has been stabilized and is shrinking, but only six percent of Americans know it.

• "A 2011 poll conducted by CNN found that Americans, on average, think we spend 10 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, and one in five said we spend 30 percent or more helping others abroad. The actual figure: about one percent. The average American also thinks we spend 5 percent of the budget on public broadcasting, when in fact it’s just one tenth of one percent." Here's where the tax dollars actually go.

I would definitely answer the title question in the affirmative. The writer of this piece is a little kinder, saying no, they're not too stupid, but they could be a lot smarter. I wish I were as kind or optimistic. But I look at our educational system, I look at our addiction to mindless entertainment, I look at the almost pride people taking their own ignorance, and I don't see any rosy future for us. I also observe both parties in this country, but especially the Republicans, just outright lying to people. The gross falsehood that Obama is responsible for most of the deficit is just one of the whoppers. I wish I could be more sanguine. But I do see things getting worse, and I don't see the American people getting one whit smarter.

Related articles

• Yes, America still rejects Republican ideas (dailykos.com)
• Corporate Media STILL Wont Cover Progressive Budget, Fall In Deficit (ourfuture.org)

Can You Believe It: Nixon Worse Than Previously Thought

First of all, you have to get past the notion that someone is vain enough to want to record everything they say. The first person that comes to mind, if you are aware of history at all, is Richard Nixon. All of us who are old enough remember the Watergate affair, and the key role that tape recordings of Nixon and his cronies' conversations in the White House had in bringing down the president. What I didn't know, and I suspect you didn't either, was that Nixon's predecessor in the Oval Office Lyndon Johnson also recorded himself in the midst of his duties. And it's because of these recordings that we now know Richard Nixon is a worse scumbag than we ever suspected. I mean, we knew that he was an evil guy, that his little engine of revenge and meanness never stop chugging. We know that he trampled all over the Constitution while  he was president.

But as this article shows, Nixon was up to his nefarious tricks before he was elected president. The gist of it is this: during the 1968 presidential campaign against Hubert Humphreys, Nixon through an intermediary tried to get the South Vietnamese leaders to sabotage the peace talks which had just begun in Paris, and which, according to the article, were off to a promising start. Nixon, who was promising a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war "with honor" during the campaign, did not want to see the peace talks succeeding or give Lyndon Johnson a chance to call another bombing halt. (Full disclosure: to my everlasting shame, I have to fess up to voting for Nixon in 1968 – still under the spell of my hyper conservative father, but that's no excuse – largely on the basis of this "secret plan" because like many American youth at the time, I loathed the Vietnam war and I wanted us out of there and just as soon as possible. This is still one of the great embarrassments in my life to have to admit this, but I can say with pride that I have not cast a ballot for a Republican ever since.) Long story short, LBJ found out about this and put kibosh on it, threatening Nixon with charges of treason for interfering in foreign affairs. Quite a gripping tale. All the details are in the story.

So if you didn't particularly like tricky Dick Nixon before, your feelings are going to be substantiated. and if you did like Dick Nixon before, no amount of truth about the scoundrel will probably change your mind.

Related articles

• Even the TradMedia Almost Admits It Now: Nixon Sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks (my.firedoglake.com)
• Nixon Prolonged Vietnam War for Political Gain - And Johnson Knew About It, Newly Unclassified Tapes Suggest (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)

Tenth Anniversary

Today is the 10th anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. What can be said about this, the worst foreign policy decision ever made by the United States in its history? That it was a crime? a tragedy? a mistake? Certainly all of these. But words do not convey, cannot possibly, the horror of what we did to that country and to the gung-ho, wave-the-flag troops we sent over there under false pretenses and trumped up accusations. I cannot possibly convey my disgust and loathing of the leaders who caused this war as well as the dying Iraq War vet below. I therefore present it to you as a memorial for all those innocent thousands the president of our country sent to their deaths on the basis of a lie. 

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness. 

—Tomas Young
Source of this letter is here.

Where Were You in '69?

Well, if you are as ancient as I, you were well aware of Elvis Presley--and had been aware of him for years, ever since he broke majestically onto the staid music scene of 1954 and soon became what he will always be: the King of Rock and Roll. So that means the accompanying video will probably be as astonishing to you as it was to me. I mean this Brit has got it down. If you are not quite the fossil at or near my age, but in a generation or two younger, you will be seeing the closest replication of Elvis I've ever seen. If you closed your eyes, the voice would be exactly right. And amazingly, this guy almost looks exactly like the real Elvis, dead now for 36 years. Especially in profile. So this is almost an educational video. And for the rest of us, just a delicious slice of nostalgia.

Francis and the Church Ingognito

Habemus papem

This happened yesterday. White smoke from the chapel and roar from the assembled thousands in St. Peter's Square. The conclave of Cardinals in Rome, in the Sistine Chapel, elected one of their own to head the Roman Catholic church as pope. His name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio and he is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is the first pope ever elected from the Americas. You can find a whole passel of stories about him here. He's also the first pope to choose the name Francis. And the first Jesuit ever elected to the papacy. That's a lot of firsts. But in some things he will not be the first, but rather a link in a long chain. He will not be the first to staunchly uphold Catholic doctrine and positions on social issues. So we cannot expect any glimmer of change in the Church's underpinning theology, things that have been roiling in Christian thought elsewhere for decades. As with most things Catholic, doctrine seems immutable. And if that is immutable, then nothing is going to change on the social issues such as gay marriage, married priests, female clergy.

What Francis proposes to do is refocus the Church--read about it here--to put an end to its "self-referential" character and turn its focus outward away from Europe and towards the poor of the world. I can only applaud this from the standpoint of what the church should be doing to best reflect Jesus in the world, but I also can't help but notice that a move towards being less "self-referential" is going to perforce turn off the heat on the church's ongoing scandals: the never-ending pedophilia outrage, the Vatican bank, and various other shifty goings on in the Vatican. And I don't believe for a minute that all those guilty cardinals (like American Roger Mahony--and plenty of others--who spent millions of dollars trying to avoid disclosure and payments to victims of pedophile priests in Los Angeles) didn't welcome a change of direction away from the spotlight on their sordid and despicable behavior.