After all the information that has come to light in the last 8 years I'm wondering if anyone (this means you, Salamantis) still supports what the Bush administration has done.
After all the information that has come to light in the last 8 years I'm wondering if anyone (this means you, Salamantis) still supports what the Bush administration has done.
Hmmmm, well, I think the shoe-thrower is almost as popular in the US as he is in other countries. Perhaps if Bush wasn't the most incompetantly lame of all the lame duck presidents we've had in most living memories, some media folk somewhere in the United States may have expressed some sort of outrage over the incident, but instead the coverage ranged from just a few lackadasical comments, to barely surpressed glee. Other than those pesky laws against assault, nobody seems terribly concerned that the POTUS almost got hit by not just one, but two shoes. Yeah we don't REALLY want you to actually kill him (truth be told we're even more worried about Cheney), but feel free to throw shoes at him or even to slap him around three-stooge style if you please. Burn him in effigy if you wish, even patriotic US citizens just might, we're through with him. There will be no Maoist nor even barely Trumanesque verneration of this incompetant.
P.S. - Perhaps we at the Church of the Virus should consider organizing or joining an international pardon Mr. Zeidi petition. I would be shocked if somebody isn't already working on something like that.
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #2 on: 2008-12-28 21:38:56 »
Pardon?
The Nobel Committee should be considering him for a special award.
And the fact that we have presumably established a legal system suited to the "freedom loving, democratic nation" Bush seems to imagine is the disaster in Iraq means that he should be able to sue the administration for the torture he has undergone.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The Nobel Committee should be considering him for a special award.
And the fact that we have presumably established a legal system suited to the "freedom loving, democratic nation" Bush seems to imagine is the disaster in Iraq means that he should be able to sue the administration for the torture he has undergone.
Kind Regards Hermit
First things first, he's got a trial coming up, he's already been beaten, and depending on whether the Iraqi "justice system" such as it is suffices any better than mob rule . . . This man could be facing some significant period of incarceration. A good pardon may be the only thing they've got going for themselves over there. I would hate if he sat in prison for 5 years or more getting beaten up even more by US trained thugs and mercenaries of various and sundry nationalities. Perhaps you might pursue some awards in the meantime to add media pressure, but lets start with the biggest current issues in this man's life. Perhaps Nouri Al-Maliki in the sheer interest of mercy, since the man has already suffered obvious torture/beatings may give him a pre-emptive pardon. W ducked just fine - he wasn't hung over and he must not have hit the whiskey and cocaine so early on this particular day - and no one else got hurt. It sounds like a sensible pardon to me.
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #4 on: 2009-01-09 19:03:02 »
W. and the damage done
President Bush inherited a peaceful, prosperous America. As he exits, Salon consults experts in seven fields to try to assess the devastation.
Source: Salon.com Authors: Vincent Rossmeier (research assistant Salon) and Gabriel Winant (editorial fellow Salon) Dated: 2009-01-09
After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy -- foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial -- starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay.
To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.
THE ECONOMY
Until not too long ago, President Bush's supporters could be heard to argue that the economy was the unheralded success story of his administration. In 2006, Larry Kudlow called it "The Greatest Story Never Told." While praising Bush, Ramesh Ponnuru decried the unfairness of it all. "It seems to happen every week: Some new piece of good economic news comes out, and Republicans sink a little deeper in the polls." To share their admiration, it helped if you ignored the way the wealth was being distributed. Or if you were a repo man.
But the whole debate became moot on Sept. 15, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Now the economy may be the most burdensome of all the Bush legacies that Barack Obama will have to shoulder.
The current financial and economic crisis has grown so massive, consuming everything in sight, that one might be able to forget that it started with bad mortgages. Well, one could try to forget, as long as one still has a home, or is not among the nearly one in four mortgage-holders whose homes are worth less than the debt on their homes.
How bad is it? "An average recession is one in which we lose about 3 percent of GDP. Three percent of GDP is about $500 billion," UCLA economist Lee Ohanian told Salon. "It's not inconceivable that this could be twice as worse, which would be close to a trillion." [ Hermit : raises an eyebrow at the idea of a post-graduate economist from an English language (or at least American language) University who cannot construe a simple comparative.
How much poorer are we going to get before we start getting richer again? Here are some (scary, morbid, gruesome) clues.
Expected shortfall of gross domestic product below normal growth path in 2009: $900 billion
Decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average from its decade high to its value at the close of business, Jan. 7, 2009: 5,394.83, or 38.1 percent
Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million
Real median household income according to the 2000 census, adjusted for inflation: $51,804
Real median household income as of August 2007: $50,233 [ Hermit : This can be compared with just under $150,000 in private household debt, and just over $600,000 per household in public debt and unfunded mandates. ]
Of course, the government didn't sit idly by while our financial future was disappearing down the drain. Instead, the feds have pumped in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, hoping to juice lending and public spending.
Cost of finance industry bailout: $350 billion, with another $350 pending congressional approval [ Hermit : Again, this is a horrible misunderestimation. The amount approved was $720 billion (including earmarks). This has been spun into commitments in excess of $7 trillion.]
Cost of auto industry bailout: $17.4 billion, so far.
And even though there's widespread agreement among economists that the government needs to be spending a large sum of money on an economic stimulus package, it still won't look pretty on the public balance sheet.
National debt: $10.6 trillion [ Hermit : Only this does not include the amounts above and some $63 trillion of unfunded commitments including medicare and social security for the "boomers" retiring and about to retire. Neither does this include the enormous $60 to $180 trillion of debt buried in unfunded and unfundable derivative swaps.]
[ Hermit : In my opinion most of this infrastructure should not be repaired. Instead we should be building now for a much more energy efficient future. It is still possible to make a difference before we experience brutal shortages without end in 12 years time or less. When that happens we will not have the energy, the time or the cash available to try to adjust. Now is all the time we have. ]
When that bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 145, we started to remember that the prosaic details of infrastructure policy matter. Nuts and bolts can mean, quite literally, life and death. And the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi is not the only American thoroughfare suffering from underfunding and neglect.
Number of bridges judged structurally deficient: 70,000.
Number of major roads in mediocre or poor condition: Roughly one-third.
Meanwhile, the roads aren't only worn down, they're overcrowded. In part, we can thank an administration that gave tax credits to SUV buyers while targeting public transit for cuts. [ Hermit : It is likely that many of the roads we are building now will at last the traffic on them. Fuel is not the only threat. If I were running the budgets I would cancel every spent on roads and airlines, nationalize the railways and use most every penny available in all transport sectors to work on rebuilding train services (mainly using mixed traffic maglev monorails), deploying bicycle trails and developing airships - the most efficient forms of transport we have. ]
The Bush White House's proposed cuts in public transit funding for fiscal year 2009: $202.1 million.
Though he capitulated in the face of overwhelming congressional majorities in favor of Amtrak, Bush threatened repeatedly to defund the national rail system altogether.
Target level of federal funding for Amtrak proposed by Bush in 2005: $0.
President-elect Obama's proposed infrastructure program: $375 billion to $475 billion.
Amount spent by FDR's Works Progress Administration, up through 1941: $11.4 billion -- adjusted for inflation, that's about $170 billion.
IRAQ
How many times have you heard, "With the money we spend in Iraq in just one week ..."?
So how much has that been, exactly? Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and co-author with economist Joseph Stiglitz of "The Three Trillion Dollar War," thinks the figure in her book's title is, if anything, too low. (Bilmes and Stiglitz put the full price of all Bush administration debacles at $10 trillion in their own excellent damage report for the January issue of Harper's.)
"I think it's still a good figure. It was always a conservative figure. We essentially just took the amount of money that we spent to date, the sort of minimum that we are going to need to spend on veterans' disability benefits, veterans' disability, weapons that have been used up, interest on the money we've borrowed. And then there are some of the economic costs. There are social costs, like parents or spouses of wounded veterans who have to leave their jobs after parents come back. And there are economic costs, such as oil disruption."
Cost: From the start of the war through 2017, "You can't get any lower than $3 trillion."
And a gradual drawdown of troops isn't going to make it better, Bilmes says. Maintaining any presence at all in Iraq entails what economists call high fixed costs. Whether we've got 10,000 troops or 15,000 at a base, that base is still going to cost a lot to maintain. Hence, when the British withdrew half their forces from Basra, their costs fell by an almost imperceptible 3 percent.
Since $3 trillion is hard to digest, let's itemize some of the costs in Bilmes and Stiglitz's comprehensive figure.
Amount of money earned by a married U.S. Army sergeant with children per day in Iraq in 2007: $170
Amount of money earned by a Blackwater military contractor per day: $600
Number of U.S. military deaths as of Jan. 7, 2009: 4,222
Average cost of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle: $3.166 million
Cost of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad: [/b]$592 million [ Hermit : According to the GOA it is now over $720 million. ]
Cost to conduct the war per month: $12 billion
Amount the Bush administration estimated the war would cost from start to finish: $60 billion
The cost to "fix" the military: Meaning, to restore battered and depleted personnel and materiel. Larry Korb, a defense analyst at the Center for American Progress, thinks we're talking about $250 billion. "In terms of materiel, obviously, if you're talking fiscally, you've got the reset cost of the equipment that's been destroyed, used up, burned in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you've got at least $100 billion. So that's one cost, because you assume this is going to last longer, when you bought it." And then there's personnel: recruitment bonuses, the new GI bill, pay raises. Korb's guess is about another $150 billion there. And this isn't money that we'll necessarily recoup when the war ends. "You can never roll those back," he says of the GI bill and bonuses. [Hermit : In my opinion, this is an underestimate of the same magnitude as the Bush administrations "misunderestimation" of the total war cost ].
And, while these estimates overlap with those made by Bilmes, they don't even account for most of the increased defense spending. The Pentagon's budget is up about 40 percent since Bush's inauguration, says Korb. "I'd only say about one-quarter is due to the things we spoke about. The other is just poor management. You have the cost overruns in weapons systems, $400 billion in weapons systems since they came in."
HUMAN RIGHTS
One of President Obama's important early tasks will be dismantling the culture of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the web of white papers and executive orders that jeopardized habeas corpus and allowed -- encouraged -- torture.
The damage to the image of America may be long-term. Karen Greenberg, the executive director of New York University's Center on Law and Security, says that the stain on America's reputation among foreigners and, for that matter, Americans can never be removed.
"And it sullied -- not so much our reputation, because that's the obvious -- it sullied on some level how we think of ourselves," says Greenberg. "You can't undo the damage that torture's done. You took something out of a box that has vast repercussions, and gave people a chance and a reason to defend a practice that brings out rather horrific things about human beings for very little, for no gain. So the way to go about the torture thing is in a very definitive way. Which is, we're not going to do it. The policy prescription is not to have a policy. We don't torture."
Our methods in the war on terror, says Greenberg, expose a fundamental lack of faith in the ability of democracy to achieve policy successes. "The biggest cost of torture was that it eroded the confidence of the American people. Because if you choose bullying as your method, you are saying, we don't trust ourselves to have the skills, whether they are the intelligence skills, or the law enforcement skills, to be the best in the game and the best and the brightest on the issues that are part of our national security."
But there are also quantifiable costs to holding enemy combatants indefinitely, and creating military commissions to try them.
Number of detainees who have died in U.S custody: Human Rights First claimed that as of February 2006, nearly 100 had died, a figure the Pentagon disputes. In addition, Amnesty International says that more than three dozen individuals believed to have been in U.S. custody have essentially disappeared.
Cost of building and staffing detention facilities at Guantánamo: More than $400 million as of December 2008. Yet to be determined: the price for trying the 250 detainees who remain, or any civil suits that might be forthcoming.
HURRICANE KATRINA
When Katrina's winds were finally quiet, they had left in their wake a mountain of statistical testimony to the power of a hurricane and the incompetence of the government officials who were supposed to deal with it. Fifteen million people on the Gulf Coast were affected and 400,000 jobs and 275,000 homes were lost. The most important statistic of all is the number of deaths. Estimates vary greatly, but deaths directly caused by the August 2005 storm are generally believed to be in excess of 1,100, perhaps about 1,500, with total direct and indirect deaths in excess of 1,800. Another 700 or so people are still missing. Many thousands more, however, who fled Louisiana to escape the storm have never come back. The city's population is still only at 72 percent of its pre-Katrina level of 450,000. Louisiana and North Dakota are the only two states whose populations declined between 2000 and 2008.
But let's talk about money.
Cost to the federal government: As of mid-2006, Congress had approved $122 billion in funds for the region. FEMA had paid $19 billion.
Cost to insurers: A month after the storm, the insurance industry gave the preliminary figure of $34.4 billion. A year later, the number was $40.6 billion. Harry Richardson, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California and editor of a collection of scholarly articles called "Natural Disaster Analysis After Katrina," notes, grimly, that any assessments of the storm's impact should also include financial losses because of fatality. "Generally we estimate the value of life -- even for poor people -- at about $5 million per person. So if you wanted to estimate the cost in human life, you could multiply that [times the number of deaths]." At 1,800 deaths, that's another $9 billion or so.
There has also been a financial impact on people who were spared the wrath of Katrina, who have never heard of a levee and live far from Louisiana and Mississippi. Home insurance has become more costly and/or more difficult to procure. After the storm, many national insurers simply stopped issuing policies for homes that were too close to coastlines.
Cost to repair the levees in New Orleans: $1 billion, with no guarantee, as sea levels rise and hurricanes increase in intensity, that they will hold.
HEALTHCARE
Americans are ambivalent about healthcare reform. They consistently cite it as a top issue in polls, and promising action on healthcare helped Bill Clinton get elected in 1992 and Barack Obama win 16 years later. But they've proved skittish about the actual details, as Clinton learned once in office. Victor Fuchs, an emeritus health economist at Stanford, says that "the public has shown no disposition to support any significant reform."
The Bush administration embodied this schizophrenia. Public concern about the rising cost of heathcare led Bush to push for the the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in 2003, which included a prescription drug program called Medicare Part D that went into effect on Jan. 1, 2006. It was a somewhat compassionate idea, since it helped seniors pay for needed medicine, but it wasn't exactly conservative. Sure, it protected profits for drug companies, but only by forcing the government to pay the high prices that consumers had been paying. To the chagrin of Republicans who helped pass it, Bush's drug plan has turned out to be one of the biggest new entitlement programs of the past 40 years. (It only won enough Republican support to pass Congress because the Bush administration lowballed the actual price.)
Cost of implementing Medicare Part D: $534 billion
Difference in price of brand-name drugs, U.S. and Canada, in 2004: 70 percent more expensive in the U.S.
Increase in average prescription drug price between 1997 and 2007: From $35.72 to $69.91
Number of children kept off of SCHIP because of Bush's veto: 4 million
Meanwhile, the nation's underlying healthcare problems remain unaddressed. Healthcare grows more expensive, and the number of uninsured Americans, as a percentage of the population, is not decreasing.
Number of uninsured Americans: 46 million, or 18 percent of the population under 65. Says Roger Hickey, founder and co-director of the progressive political organization Campaign for America's Future, "That's about 16 percent of the population. A larger and larger percentage of the public is losing their employer-sponsored healthcare because it's become so expensive for employers to insure their people. And that's the backbone of our system."
Increase in the amount that the average employee pays toward employer-provided healthcare since 2000: 120 percent
According to Hickey, the number of uninsured has fluctuated over the past eight years, but the figure is deceiving. "I can't say that it's gotten dramatically worse. (B)ut there was an analysis when the latest numbers came out about three months ago that showed the only thing that kept it from getting worse is that more and more people are signing up for public programs like Medicaid." Hickey expects the number to spike upward very soon. "People are losing their jobs -- there's about to be a huge leap in the uninsured as the recession hits."
Hickey characterizes Bush's expansion of Medicare as "a wasted opportunity," because of corporate influence on drug pricing. "The legislation was written by drug company lobbyists and lobbyists-to-be like Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who wrote the bill and then took a job as the head of PHRMA, the pharmaceutical lobbying organization ... There are actually provisions in that law that protect drug companies from competitive pricing."
Harvard Business School professor Regina E. Herzlinger, author of the book "Who Killed Health Care?," says that the scariest American healthcare stat is probably how much we spend on it as a percentage of our economy.
Cost of healthcare as a percentage of GDP: 16 percent
Ratio of cost of healthcare to cost of national defense: 4.3-1
"As an economist," says Herzlinger, "I am tremendously concerned about the ever increasing fraction of our GDP that's taken up with health care. Most of the countries that we compete with average 9 to 10 percent of their GDP on health care. We spend about 70 percent more and I cannot honestly say that we're getting 70 percent better health care in the U.S."
"I put this squarely at the foot of the Bush Administration. They were purportedly people who were interested in helping consumers but they didn't do a lot of the things that could have helped the consumer."
CLIMATE
Number of nine warmest years on record that have occurred since 2000: Seven.
How much has the Arctic ice cap shrunk? 50 percent since the turn of the century.
By now, the stories of global warming denial and outright censorship of government scientists by the Bush administration are well known. The incoming Obama administration admits the existence of climate change, but a decade has been lost. Meanwhile, there is both a tremendous and growing financial impact from existing climate change, and the specter of the enormous economic commitment that would be required just to return global temperatures to status quo.
"It's difficult to put a cost on sea level rise of 40 feet, or the Southwest becoming desertified," says physicist and Salon contributor Joseph Romm. "[But i]f you were to ascribe to Bush a significant fraction of the cost of catastrophic climate change, then it's a number that's going to dwarf all the numbers you have."
The Stern Review, a report commissioned by the British government, pegs the potential cost of unaddressed climate change at 20 percent of world gross domestic product. While that's an immense figure, it doesn't adequately conjure the Armageddon we're facing, Romm says.
"From my view, you have to start talking, at some point in the second half of the century, about triaging coastal cities. You're certainly not going to try to save every coastal city. Galveston is probably a write-off, but you're certainly going to try to save Houston. You're not going to save the Florida Keys but you'd save Miami, certainly, New York, the island of Manhattan. But it's one thing to save them from a few feet of sea level rise. It's another thing when we're talking about 20 or 100."
So, what's it going to run us to save Manhattan from the sea? It means the replacement in the next three or four decades of all the infrastructure of the developed world, followed by a similar effort in the rest of the world in the second half of the century.
Cost to fix: 2 or 3 percent of global GDP, a couple trillion a year.
The good news: "Because we're so rich," says Romm, "avoiding catastrophe is a huge amount of money in absolute terms, but it's pocket change relative to our wealth."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
After all the information that has come to light in the last 8 years I'm wondering if anyone (this means you, Salamantis) still supports what the Bush administration has done.
On a personal note, Bush is planning on living in my neck of the woods (Dallas) after he leaves office. We've also got SMU here which will host his presidential library. I suppose I'm likely to get wind of numerous attempts to rewrite his legacy. I've already seen Salamantis post several pieces of neo-con whitewash, and I've noticed a general point missing from all of their "analysis" . . . little to no mention of Cheney's role in the Bush presidency.
I think any attempt to explain the Bush administration that minimizes or leaves out Cheney is simply inaccurate. He has certainly been the most powerful and power hungry vice president this country has ever had. Between Cheney and Bush the buck rarely stopped anywhere which is the general consequence of poor leadership skills in the POTUS. Between the two of them Cheney seemed to have a much clearer vision of what he was doing, so in many ways I think he's probably much more personally responsible than Bush for a lot of what happed. A lot of this was reflected in his unique belief that the Vice-presidency was both legislative and executive, or even neither as the situation conveniently required for him to maximize his power and minimize transparency. Any attempt to write history that doesn't deal with that issue somehow, would be failing to address obvious things.
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #7 on: 2009-01-12 13:32:44 »
[letheomaniac] I don't think that dear Dubya will leave a legacy so much as an unpleasant and lingering odour, perhaps like that found at an overripe murder scene.
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #8 on: 2009-01-12 19:05:32 »
Two excellent posts in a day.
Thanks Lethe.
PS While you can take the brandy out of the fruitcake, you will still end up with a fruitcake. In Bush's case the fruitcake has brandy and coke added :-P
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #9 on: 2009-01-12 21:14:43 »
While we can wish away the lingering stench the world will still be left with The Bush Doctrine: Unilateralism, Attacking countries that harbor terrorists, Preventive strikes, and Democratic regime change. Looks like the proverbial road to hell to me.
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #10 on: 2009-01-12 22:51:36 »
While we can wish away the lingering stench the world will still be left with The Bush Doctrine: Unilateralism, Attacking countries that harbor terrorists, Preventive strikes, and Democratic regime change. Looks like the proverbial road to hell to me. [Hermit]
Indeed. What is most tragic is that it was blatantly visible that a Republican victory would have this effect on the world even before the theft of the 2000 elections, never mind 2004 when the brain addled voted him into office.
I found this off the Lenin's Tomb site Blunderov and I sometimes quote, and found it rather appropriate to this discussion. Suspect you will too as we spin down the stream in our respective handbaskets. I think it shows that preventive antiterror has indeed become a global exposition of logical collapse.
I think this is most of the meat from a rather long winded but none-the-less interesting article.
The War Against Preterrorism: The ‘Tarnac Nine’ and The Coming Insurrection
by Alberto Toscano
I. The Case
On 11 November 2008, twenty French youths are arrested simultaneously in Paris, Rouen, and in the small village of Tarnac (located in the district of Corrèze, in France’s relatively impoverished Massif Central region). The Tarnac operation involves helicopters, one hundred and fifty balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen and studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths are accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against the high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the train’s power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing material damage and a series of delays affecting some 160 trains. Eleven of the suspects are promptly freed. Those who remain in custody are soon termed the ‘Tarnac Nine’, after the village where a number of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganised the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly. In their parents’ words, ‘they planted carrots without bosses or leaders. They think that life, intelligence and decisions are more joyous when they are collective’.[1]
Almost immediately, the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, brushing aside Republican legal niceties, intervenes to strongly underline the presumption of guilt and to classify the whole affair under the rubric of terrorism, linking it to the supposed rise of an insurrectionist ‘ultra-left’ (ultra-gauche), or ‘anarcho-autonomist tendency’ (mouvance anarcho-autonome), filling in the vacuum left by the collapse of the institutional Left (the PCF). Invoking anti-terrorist legislation, the nine are interrogated and detained for 96 hours; four are subsequently released. The official accusation is that of ‘association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking’, a charge that can carry up to 20 years in jail; what’s more, the accused might be detained for as long as two years before their case goes to trial. On December 2, three more of the Tarnac Nine are released under judiciary control, leaving two in jail, at the time of writing (early January 2009): Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy.
(...)
The 2006 protests against the law on job contracts for the young (Contrat de première embauche), following hard upon the autumn 2005 revolts in the marginalised banlieues, played a defining role in the rise to prominence and eventual victory of Sarkozy, whose swaggering, bullying performance as a Minister of the Interior during the riots – when he declared his intention to hose down (karchériser) [ Hermit : Karcher produce industrial powerwashers ] those neighbourhoods and to face down the riotous scum (racaille) – became a trademark of sorts. The Sarkozy presidency began under the sign of a deep anxiety, a reactionary rage for order whose other side was the obsessive scrutinizing of the future for signs of social turmoil and radical novelty – in this instance, one might very well agree with the Comité Invisible that ‘governing has never been anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you’.[10] Given the political peculiarities of France, this fear of the future (and its masses) took the form of an exorcising of the past – as in Sarkozy’s campaign ultimatum: ‘In this election, we’re going to find out if the heritage of May 68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever’. The compulsive reference to the rebellious past, which is simultaneously imagined as a future – as in Sarkozy’s recent statement to his cabinet, in view of the possible spread of the ‘Greek syndrome’, that ‘We can’t have a May ’68 for Christmas’[11] – provides the current French administration with its libidinal content, a much needed supplement for its grim vapidity at the level of its programme.
The very notion of ‘preterrorism’ is deeply symptomatic: it makes patent the link between the obsessive identification of ‘dangerous individuals’ and the imagination of future revolts that call for repressive pre-emption. As Boltanski and Claverie have noted, there is an echo of Minority Report and its ‘precogs’. The context of the world economic crisis and the not unrelated upsurge of the ‘600 euro generation’ in Greece serve as a backdrop. Indeed, as an anti-terrorist magistrate recently confessed: ‘There is a temptation during a time of crisis to consider any illegal manifestation of political expression to be of a terrorist nature’.[12] Reading the extracts from the RG and DCRI service reports, the radical minded pessimist might be heartened to see such confidence in the possibility of radical revolt being shown by the state and its agencies. ‘Alternatively, she might muse that the logic of immunising oneself against ‘terrorism’ by nipping pre-terrorism in the bud – with all of its hackneyed references to Baader-Meinhof or Action Directe (‘they too started out by writing pamphlets and living in communes…’) – is more likely to accelerate and intensify a process of so-called radicalization, fashioning the state and the legal system into enemies with whom one cannot negotiate. Whatever it may say about the prospects for radical politics and its attendant suppression, this ‘affair’ illustrates the metastasis of a transnational politics of securitisation, which is now being applied to any form of activity that importunes the established order – from hacking to separatism, from anti-war demonstrations to environmental activism. The looseness of anti-terrorism legislation recalls Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of the police in his ‘Critique of Violence’: ‘Its power is formless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states’ – a situation enhanced by the development of what the parents of the accused pointedly refer to as ‘reality-police’, as one might speak of ‘reality-TV’‘[color=yellow].
Julien Coupat’s father, Gérard, turned by his son’s ordeal into an eloquent and intransigent advocate for civil liberties, recently put the stakes of this police campaign in stark terms: ‘[color=yellow]They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs and to demonstrate against the government. … The government is keeping my son in prison because a man of the left with the courage to demonstrate is the last thing they want now, with the economic situation getting worse and worse. Nothing like this has happened in France since the war. It is very serious’.[13] Like many others, Coupat senior has underscored the ominous prospect of a form of government so politically illiterate and monolithic in its reactions that it cannot distinguish sabotage – a practice that has always accompanied social and workers’ movements – from ‘terrorism’, a term that is indiscriminately albeit deliberately used to cover everything from mass murder to train delays.
II. The Book
What then of the book which – considering the meagre pickings for the police at Tarnac (ladders, train schedules, bolt cutters) – seems to be the centre-piece in the state’s inquisitional arsenal: L’insurrection qui vient? The legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text – one that moreover cannot be personally imputed to any of the accused – is obvious. The right to practice collective anonymity, against the crude biographism and sociologism of the press, should also be stressed. It is nevertheless of interest to consider the Tarnac affair in light of this combative pamphlet – half inspired dissection of the misery of everyday life in contemporary France, half breviary for a diffuse anarcho-communist defection from capitalist society. It appears that L’insurrection was first brought to the attention of the powers that be by the criminologist Alain Bauer who, coming across it on the shelves of the FNAC in 2007, immediately bought up 40 copies and circulated them to various security experts and agencies.[14] A passage from it has been repeatedly referred to as incriminating evidence against Coupat: ‘The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable: its flows are not merely for the transportation of people and commodities; information and energy circulates by way of wire networks, fibres and channels, which it is possible to attack. To sabotage the social machine with some consequence today means re-conquering and reinventing the means of interrupting its networks. How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?’[15] [ Hermit : Imagine considering holding possession of a book containing a hypothetical question like this as evidence of anything? Beyond ridiculous. Perhaps these authoritative fools should read some modern novels. ] A socialist with some sympathies for the emancipatory and egalitarian potential of railway travel might answer like the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste spokesperson Oliver Besancenot, commenting on the sabotage, that ‘we want more trains, not fewer’, and end the discussion there.[16] [ Hermit : I rather approved of this response. ] But it is worth considering the diagnosis and prognosis advanced by L’insurrection, if only to understand the intellectual backdrop to this call to interrupt the flows.
Were one in the business of the RG and the DCRI, one could argue that a host of themes link L’insurrection to Tiqqun pamphlets such Théorie du Bloom and Premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la jeune fille. A narrative of completed nihilism; a Debordian excoriation of the spectacle (embodied in the ‘young girl’, the commodity made flesh, and carried by the schizophrenic entrepreneur); the vitriolic polemics against sundry lefts (Trotskysts, Negrians, ecologists…)[17]; the view of communism not as a programme but as an ethical disposition and collective experimentation, an attempt to recover an emancipatory notion of community; ‘the silent coordination of a sabotage in the grand style’[18] and the very idea of an Invisible Committee (or an Imaginary Party) – all of these betoken a certain political continuity. Yet the differences are also significant. First, stylistically. The works of Tiqqun practiced a kind of second-order situationist détournement, keeping Debord while losing much of the Marx and Lukács which the author of The Society of the Spectacle had felicitously plundered, and throwing into the mix a generous helping of Agamben– an author who, albeit not so hard to pastiche, does not lend himself all that well to Debordian operations. L’insurrection is a more measured and plain-spoken text, whose politics are rooted more in anti-urbanist libertarian anarchism than in the metaphysical auguries carried by Agambenian figures such as the ‘young girl’ or the ‘Bloom’ (after Joyce). Though the agenda of L’insurrection is still dictated by a situationist-inspired total critique of contemporary society, the lengthy analyses of the ills of everyday metropolitan life in the age of flexitime and the new economy are more in keeping with the recent concerns of critical French sociology than with prophecies about homo sacer. Just as a Bourdieusian perspective marks the sections dealing with France’s singular relation to the State and the School as structures of subjectivation, so the influence of Boltanski and Chiapello’s diagnosis of the dissolution of class solidarity as a foothold for social critique can partly account for the indifference of L’insurrection to a Marxist discourse of class struggle, and its delinking of anti-capitalism from class politics.[19]
This is not to say that a certain catastrophism, or better active nihilism, does not pervade this book too, as it did the bulk of Tiqqun’s production. L’insurrection begins with the lapidary lines: ‘From every angle, there’s no way out from the present. That’s not the least of its virtues’.[20] I
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #11 on: 2009-01-13 05:28:06 »
[letheomaniac] Thanks Hermit! The road to Hell does indeed seem to lie ahead, although it does not appear to be paved with good intentions as advertised, but rather with self-interest and greed.
[I thought this article was hilarious when I first read it back in 2001. Now it seems eerily prescient and foreboding.]
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' JANUARY 17, 2001 | ISSUE 37•01
President-elect Bush vows that "together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us."
"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."
Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"
On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.
Wall Street responded strongly to the Bush speech, with the Dow Jones industrial fluctuating wildly before closing at an 18-month low. The NASDAQ composite index, rattled by a gloomy outlook for tech stocks in 2001, also fell sharply, losing 4.4 percent of its total value between 3 p.m. and the closing bell.
Asked for comment about the cooling technology sector, Bush said: "That's hardly my area of expertise."
Turning to the subject of the environment, Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge's coastal plain to oil drilling. As a sign of his commitment to bringing about a change in the environment, he pointed to his choice of Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior. Norton, Bush noted, has "extensive experience" fighting environmental causes, working as a lobbyist for lead-paint manufacturers and as an attorney for loggers and miners, in addition to suing the EPA to overturn clean-air standards.
Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as "a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman's right to give birth."
"Soon, with John Ashcroft's help, we will move out of the Dark Ages and into a more enlightened time when a woman will be free to think long and hard before trying to fight her way past throngs of protesters blocking her entrance to an abortion clinic," Bush said. "We as a nation can look forward to lots and lots of babies."
Continued Bush: "John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state."
The speech was met with overwhelming approval from Republican leaders.
"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."
"For years, I tirelessly preached the message that Clinton must be stopped," conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said. "And yet, in 1996, the American public failed to heed my urgent warnings, re-electing Clinton despite the fact that the nation was prosperous and at peace under his regime. But now, thank God, that's all done with. Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up."
An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.
"After eight years of relatively sane fiscal policy under the Democrats, we have reached a point where, just a few weeks ago, President Clinton said that the national debt could be paid off by as early as 2012," Rahway, NJ, machinist and father of three Bud Crandall said. "That's not the kind of world I want my children to grow up in."
"You have no idea what it's like to be black and enfranchised," said Marlon Hastings, one of thousands of Miami-Dade County residents whose votes were not counted in the 2000 presidential election. "George W. Bush understands the pain of enfranchisement, and ever since Election Day, he has fought tirelessly to make sure it never happens to my people again."
Bush concluded his speech on a note of healing and redemption.
"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."
"The insanity is over," Bush said. "After a long, dark night of peace and stability, the sun is finally rising again over America. We look forward to a bright new dawn not seen since the glory days of my dad."
Re:Bush's Legacy
« Reply #14 on: 2009-02-19 10:40:36 »
Bad News From America’s Top Spy
Source: Truth Dig Authors: Chris Hedges Dated: 2009-02-16
We have a remarkable ability to create our own monsters. A few decades of meddling in the Middle East with our Israeli doppelgänger and we get Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaida, the Iraqi resistance movement and a resurgent Taliban. Now we trash the world economy and destroy the ecosystem and sit back to watch our handiwork. Hints of our brave new world seeped out Thursday when Washington’s new director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. You wouldn’t know this from the Obama administration, which seems hellbent on draining the blood out of the body politic and transfusing it into the corpse of our financial system. But by the time Barack Obama is done all we will be left with is a corpse—a corpse and no blood. [ Hermit : This is unfair. It began with the looting of the state and destruction of regulatory systems under the Republicans in the late 70s and 80s, and was made inescapable by the Bush Administration's focus on the self-made threat of terrorism instead of focusing on production and the future in an energy constrained war. Though it is a pity that the Obama administration is continuing with more of the same failed people and failed strategies. ] And then what? We will see accelerated plant and retail closures, inflation, an epidemic of bankruptcies, new rounds of foreclosures, bread lines, unemployment surpassing the levels of the Great Depression and, as Blair fears, social upheaval.
The United Nations’ International Labor Organization estimates that some 50 million workers will lose their jobs worldwide this year. The collapse has already seen 3.6 million lost jobs in the United States. The International Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in 2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since World War II. There are 2.3 million properties in the United States that received a default notice or were repossessed last year. And this number is set to rise in 2009, especially as vacant commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About 20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold or were nationalized in 2008. There are an estimated 62,000 U.S. companies expected to shut down this year. Unemployment, when you add people no longer looking for jobs and part-time workers who cannot find full-time employment, is close to 14 percent. [ Hermit : The UN are optimists and using the definition they have used, the jobless rate in the US exceeds 20%].
And we have few tools left to dig our way out. The manufacturing sector in the United States has been destroyed by globalization. Hermit : Worth noting that the problem is not "globalization" (which was inevitable) but the way in which globalization has been used as a reverse Robin Hood strategy, extracting wealth from the poor to give to the rich. Globally. At this point 80% of the world's wealth has migrated to the US, and 90% of the wealth in the US is in the hands of less than 1% of the population. Time for change perhaps? ] Consumers, thanks to credit card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in debt. The government has pledged trillions toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in the form of new money. It is borrowing trillions more to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We will never be able to pay these loans back. We are supposed to somehow spend our way out of the crisis and maintain our imperial project on credit. Let our kids worry about it. There is no coherent and realistic plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security state’s strategies to crush potential civil unrest and you get a glimpse of the future. It doesn’t look good. [ Hermit : Particularly when the end of cheap fossil fuel availability is NO MORE THAN 12 YEARS AWAY using the current (still optimistic in my opinion) IEA data.]
"The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications," Blair told the Senate. "The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism." [ Hermit : Too late. As a percentage of the market and on a per capita basis the loss of value already exceeds that of the Great Depression, as does personal indebtedness and job loss. And the bottom is nowhere in sight. Worth wondering why the unregulated US suffers first.]
The specter of social unrest was raised at the U.S. Army War College in November in a monograph [ click on Policypointers’ pdf link to see the report ] titled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development.” The military must be prepared, the document warned, for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”
“An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on.
“Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document read.
In plain English, something bureaucrats and the military seem incapable of employing, this translates into the imposition of martial law and a de facto government being run out of the Department of Defense. They are considering it. So should you.
Adm. Blair warned the Senate that “roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown.” He noted that the “bulk of anti-state demonstrations” internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they could not spread to the United States. He told the senators that the collapse of the global financial system is “likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year.” He added that “much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism.”
"When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we’re looking for that," he said. He referred to "statistical modeling" showing that "economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period."
Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the economic unraveling accelerates we will be told it is not the bearded Islamic extremists, although those in power will drag them out of the Halloween closet when they need to give us an exotic shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists, anarchists, unions and enraged members of our dispossessed working class who threaten us. Crime, as it always does in times of turmoil, will grow. Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news reports with the growing criminal underclass.
The committee’s Republican vice chairman, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, not quite knowing what to make of Blair’s testimony, said he was concerned that Blair was making the “conditions in the country” and the global economic crisis “the primary focus of the intelligence community.”
The economic collapse has exposed the stupidity of our collective faith in a free market and the absurdity of an economy based on the goals of endless growth, consumption, borrowing and expansion. The ideology of unlimited growth failed to take into account the massive depletion of the world’s resources, from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming and climate change. The huge international flows of unregulated capital have wrecked the global financial system. An overvalued dollar (which will soon deflate), wild tech, stock and housing financial bubbles, unchecked greed, the decimation of our manufacturing sector, the empowerment of an oligarchic class, the corruption of our political elite, the impoverishment of workers, a bloated military and defense budget and unrestrained credit binges have conspired to bring us down. The financial crisis will soon become a currency crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
The corporate thieves, those who insisted they be paid tens of millions of dollars because they were the best and the brightest, have been exposed as con artists. Our elected officials, along with the press, have been exposed as corrupt and spineless corporate lackeys. Our business schools and intellectual elite have been exposed as frauds. The age of the West has ended. Look to China. Laissez-faire capitalism has destroyed itself. It is time to dust off your copies of Marx.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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The road to Hell does indeed seem to lie ahead, although it does not appear to be paved with good intentions as advertised, but rather with self-interest and greed.
