Showdown Fatigue

Robert Reich

We’re one week away from a massive cut in federal spending — cuts that will hurt millions of lower-income Americans who’ll lose nutrition assistance, housing, and money for their schools, among other things; that will furlough or lay off millions of government employees (adding more competition for jobs in an already horrible job market--jef), reduce inspections of the nation’s meat and poultry and pharmaceuticals and workplaces, eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of people working for government contractors, and, according to Leon Panetta and other military leaders, seriously compromise the nation’s defenses.

Bad enough. If the spending cuts go through next week our fragile economy will slow further, causing more unemployment and misery. When consumers don’t have the money to buy enough to keep the economy moving, and government pulls back this much, businesses can’t justify keeping people on.

Yet the silence is deafening.

Republicans won’t deal. Obama has already cut $1.5 trillion out of the budget but Republicans insist on far more. They want the White House to propose major cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Meanwhile, the Bush tax cuts have been extended permanently to everyone earning up to $400,000. Only the richest 2 percent have to pay at the rate they did under Bill Clinton, which was far lower than rich paid before 1981. That will generate $600 billion — less than half of the cuts Obama has accepted.

No one in their right mind would call this a balanced approach to deficit reduction. Yet Republican’s won’t even consider raising taxes on the most fortunate members of our society. They won’t limit deductions and loopholes that have driven down the super-rich’s tax rates to single digits (remember Romney’s “carried interest” loophole for private-equity mavens?).

So where’s the outcry? Why aren’t more people up in arms? Why aren’t big businesses (including major military contractors) and Wall Street screaming into the ears of the GOP? Where’s the outrage from Main Street?

I suspect most Americans are suffering showdown fatigue. After all, we got through the debt-ceiling showdown of August 2011 and the fiscal-cliff showdown on January 1, and the world didn’t end. So most people figure Washington will find a way out of this one, too.

Others have bought the Republican-Fox News lies that the deficit is our biggest economic problem, and government spending is to blame. So a massive, abrupt, and indiscriminate cut in spending seems okay.

It’s not okay. It will hurt the most vulnerable members of our society, and much of the middle class.

Yet it would be even worse if Obama and the Democrats were to give in to Republicans, and not demand more from those who have never been wealthier. Inequality is widening again. All the economic gains since the Great Recession have gone to the top. The richest 400 have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together.

Why not limit the mortgage interest deduction to $25,000 a year, so the rest of us don’t have to subsidize mansion mortgages? Why not a wealth tax on assets in excess of $5 million to pay for early-childhood education? Why not a small tax on financial transactions (as Europe is now instituting) to finance better schools? Why not close the loophole that private-equity and hedge-fund moguls live off of, to finance child nutrition and social services for the poor?

It’s no time for showdown fatigue. It’s time to fight.

America's Spiritual Death: the Dark History of the U.S.

Stone's TV series, "Untold History of the United States," digs deep into American atrocities the mainstream media doesn't spend much time on. 

 

February 21, 2013  |

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” --Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam” speech, April 4, 1967

I recently watched all 10 episodes of Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" (on Showtime). I strongly recommend it to everyone, but particularly to America's young people who have been robbed of a most precious legacy: an understanding of their true history, and thus their future. I can't think of a more meaningful gift to young people for, as Stone says, “history must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The same U.S. Executive Branch mentality that produced Vietnam is today illegally and inhumanly murdering and weakening U.S. national security interests throughout the Muslim world, and threatening its own citizens as never before. It has never been more urgent to learn from America’s real history.

I am not ashamed to say this series moved me to tears. First, by its depiction of the millions of lives the U.S. Executive Branch has ruined all over the world. This includes over 21 million -- officially estimated -- killed, wounded and made homeless in Indochina and Iraq alone, bring back the most painful memories of my life: my interviews with over 1,000 Lao refugees who reported seeing beloved parents, spouses and children burned alive, buried alive, and shredded to pieces by years of secret, illegal and inhuman U.S. Executive Branch bombing. [Showtime has made available some of the episodes free to watch over the internet .]

Second, I was touched by the awful beauty of simply seeing the truth told so clearly and vividly. The combination of the information, the imagery and Stone’s narration touched levels far deeper than the mind.

I was most moved by Episode 7, on the war in Indochina, whose closing words below constitute not only an epitaph for the Vietnam War, but for America itself. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr.'s warning as I watched this segment, which chronicles how U.S. leaders waged aggressive war, killing over 3.4 million Vietnamese according to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and hundreds of thousands more Laotians and Cambodians. The U.S. has never apologized for doing so, let alone cleaned up its tens of millions of unexploded bombs and environmental poisons which continue to kill, wound and deform tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The U.S. has never even contemplated paying the reparations it still owes the Indochinese.

I watched this episode after reading Nick Turse’s monumental new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, which documents the systematic “industrial-scale” slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, ordered by top U.S. military officers.

I cannot say that I am surprised that America's political leaders, media and public intellectuals continue to ignore the U.S. Executive's ongoing inhumanity and murder of the innocent -- particularly through its global and spreading drone and ground assassination programs and increasing reliance on the automated warmaking I first saw in Laos 40 years ago. America’s elites are as indifferent to the “mere Muslim Rule” today as they were to the “mere Gook Rule” in Vietnam that Turse so painstakingly documents.

But I am astonished that even those who justify U.S. leaders' actions on the grounds of national security have failed to notice the obvious fact that U.S. warmaking in the 1.8 billion-strong Muslim world is jeopardizing U.S. national security as never before. Just as U.S. backing of the Shah of Iran created a U.S. foreign policy disaster in 1978, the continuation of such policies today will guarantee many more Irans in the future.

Nothing will threaten Americans more in the coming decade than an irrational U.S. foreign policy that, in return for killing a handful of "senior Al Qaeda" leaders (often replaced by more competent deputies), has turned hundreds of millions of Muslims against it including countless potential suicide bombers. This foreign policy has greatly strengthened anti-U.S. forces, destabilized friendly or neutral governments, and as revealed by Wikileaks, vastly increased the danger that materials from Pakistan's nuclear stockpile -- the world's fastest growing and least stable -- will fall into terrorist hands. Today’s U.S. Executive Branch poses a far greater threat to U.S. national security, and to each of us, than to its foes.

Oliver Stone's words below pose basic questions: has Martin Luther King's warning come true? And if so, what can we do to promote the birth of decency, humanity and rationality in this spiritually dead nation of ours?

From Episode 7: "Vietnam, LBJ, Nixon and the Third World: Reversal of Fortune," from Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States”:

• “The accepted mythology of the time was the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. But as linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky has pointed out, 'it's called a loss, a defeat, because they didn't achieve the maximal aims. The maximal aims being turning it into something like the Philippines. They didn't do that. They did achieve the major aims. It was possible to destroy Vietnam and leave.' Elsewhere he wrote,'South Vietnam had been virtually destroyed, and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially disappeared.'

When an aging and wiser Robert McNamara returned to Vietnam in 1995 he conceded, somewhat in shock, that despite official US estimates of 2 million Vietnamese dead, 3.4 to 3.8 million Vietnamese had perished. In comparison 58,000 Americans died in the fighting and 200,00 were wounded.

The U.S. had destroyed 9,000 of South Vietnam's 15,000 hamlets -- in the north all six industrial cities, 28 of 30 provincial towns, and 96 of 116 district towns. Unexploded ordnance still blankets the countryside. Nineteen million gallons of herbicide had poisoned the environment. Almost all of Vietnam's ancient triple canopy forests are gone. The effects of chemical warfare alone lasted for generations, and could be seen today in the hospital in the South where Agent Orange was used. Dead fetuses kept in jars. Surviving children born with horrid birth defects and deformities. And cancer rates much higher than in the North.

And yet, incredibly, the chief issue in the United States was, for many years, the hunt for 1,300 American soldiers missing in action, a few hundred of them presumed taken as captives by the North Vietnamese. High-grossing action movies were made out of this topic.

No official apology from the United States has ever been issued, and absolutely no appreciation of the suffering of the Vietnamese.

President Bill Clinton finally recognized Vietnam in 1995, 20 years later. Ever since the war American conservatives have struggled to vanquish "the Vietnam Syndrome," which became a catchphrase for Americans' unwillingness to send troops abroad to fight.

For a war that so mesmerized and defined an entire generation, surprisingly little is known about Vietnam today among American youth. This is not accidental. There has been a conscious and systematic effort to erase Vietnam from historical consciousness.

• Reagan: "It is time that we recognized ours was in truth a noble cause. We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feeling of guilt, as if we were doing something shameful."

It was not only conservatives who whitewashed American history. Bill Clinton: "Whatever we may thing about the political decisions of the Vietnam era, the brave Americans who fought and died there had noble motives. They fought for the freedom and the independence of the Vietnamese people."

The outcome has been shrouded in sanitized lies. The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, dedicated in November of 1982, now contains the names of 58,272 dead or missing Americans. The message is clear. The tragedy is the death of those Americans. But imagine if the names of 3.8 million Vietnamese and millions of Cambodians and Laotians were also included.

The supposed shame of Vietnam would be finally avenged by Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and even to an extent Barack Obama, in the two decades to come.

The irony is that the Vietnam war represented a sad climax of the WWII generation from which Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and all the generals in the high command came, those proclaimed by the mainstream media in the late 1990s as "the greatest generation."

Yet that same media ignored the arrogance of a generation that, overconfident from WWII, dismissed Vietnam as a fourth-rate power that could be easily defeated. From what the ancient Greeks called hubris or arrogance comes the fall. And from this initially obscure war came a great distortion of economic, social and moral life in America. A civil war that polarized the country till this day -- with much denied, little remembered, nothing regretted, and perhaps, nothing learned.

"History must be remembered or it will be remembered until the meanings are clear." The second president of the United States, John Adams, once said, "Power always thinks it has a great soul and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."

Which makes the details of the oncoming history a sad, inevitable bloodbath that repeats itself again and again, as the U.S.A., much too often, stood on the side of the oppressors, propping up allies with financial and military aid, war on drugs programs, police and security training, joint military exercises, overseas bases, and occasional direct military intervention.

The U.S. empowered a network of tyrants who were friendly to foreign investors who could exploit cheap labor and native resources on terms favorable to the Empire. Such was the British and French way. And such would be the American way. Not raping, looting Mongols, but rather benign, briefcase-toting, Ivy-league educated bankers, and corporate executives who would loot local economies in the name of modernity, democracy and civilization, to the benefit of the United States and its allies.

During the Cold War politicians and the media sidestepped debate over the basic morality of U.S. foreign policy, by mouthing platitudes about U.S. benevolence and insisting that harsh, even dirty, tactics were needed to fight fire with fire. The Kissingers of the world called it "realpolitik." But even when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, our nation's policies did not change, as the U.S. time and again, has taken the side of the entrenched classes or the military against those from below seeking change.

It was the American war against the poor of the earth, the most easily killed, the collateral damage.

As was asked at the beginning, was it really about fighting communism, or was that a misunderstood or disguised motivation?

It was George Kennan, America's leading early Cold War strategist who went to the heart of the matter in a memorandum written in 1948:

"With 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6% of its population, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, raising of living standards and democratization. We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better."

But George Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of 102 years old, was an intellectual who never sought political office. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the barbaric proportions of the upcoming presidency of Ronald Reagan.” 

Still Clueless About the Economy

The Debt-to-GDP Nonsense
by DEAN BAKER


The latest fad in Washington economic policy debates is arguing over the level at which the government should stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio. The doves are okay with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 73 percent or even 76 percent. The hawks want 60 percent or even less. This is the most fun since the same crew was debating over the year when we would pay off the national debt back in 2000. The good times just keep coming.

If you think that this is an incredibly silly debate and that our leading policymakers don’t have a clue about how the economy works, you’ve got the picture right. Remember, these are people who could not see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. They haven’t learned much economics in the last five years.

The argument over the debt-to-GDP ratio is especially annoying because it shows these people don’t have the faintest clue what they are talking about. There are all sorts of obvious reasons why debt is not a good measure of the burden that we are placing on future taxpayers.

For example, the government has a huge amount of assets that it could sell at any time and thereby reduce its debt. The Institute for Energy Research, an industry-funded research outfit, claims the government owns more than $120 trillion in energy resources. Let’s say they exaggerated by a factor of ten, leaving us $12 trillion in assets.

If we sold off half of these resources it would net the government $6 trillion. This would reduce our debt by almost 40 percentage points of GDP. That should make even the most ardent deficit hawk happy.

Of course it’s not just physical assets that the government can sell. The government gives out monopolies in various areas that have enormous value. That is what patents and copyrights are. The rents earned from these and other forms of intellectual property run into many hundreds of billions of dollars a year. In prescription drugs alone they are close to $250 billion a year.

The government could always sell off more monopolies in order to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio. A flow of revenue equal to what the pharmaceutical industry gets from its patent monopolies could easily be worth $2-3 trillion. That would go very far toward reducing our debt-to-GDP ratio.

These sorts of monopolies will impose large costs on the economy in the future, leading to distortions and rent-seeking. That would be a good reason not to go in this direction. But the debt-to-GDP crew doesn’t ask questions about how well off the country is, they just want a lower debt-to-GDP ratio. And selling monopolies will get us there.

However there is an even more simple and completely painless path to a lower debt-to-GDP ratio. The price of long-term bonds rises when interest rates fall. The price of these bonds falls when interest rates rise.

This latter point is important. Currently interest rates are at near post-war lows. We have issued 10-year Treasury bonds at interest rates close to 1.5 percent and 30-year bonds at interest rates of 2.75 percent. The Congressional Budget Office, along with other official forecasters, project that interest rates will rise sharply over the next few years.
If interest rates rise as projected, then the price of these long-term bonds fall sharply. For example, if the interest rate on 30-year bonds rises to 6 percent by 2016, then the price of a 30-year bond issued at 2.75 percent in 2012 will have fallen by more than 40 percent. This means that if the government issued $100 billion in bonds at the low 2012 rate it could buy them back for less than $60 billion in 2016, instantly eliminating $40 billion of government debt. (Allan Sloan made this point in a slightly different context).

The government can follow this practice of buying up large numbers of bonds issued at low interest rates to eliminate much of the debt it has incurred. Although the government’s debt-to-GDP ratio is reaching heights not seen since the years just after World War II, the ratio of interest on the debt-to-GDP is at post-World War II lows.

This means that when interest rates rise, there will be a sharp decline in the market value of government debt, allowing for massive amounts of debt reduction simply by buying back debt at the discounted value that the CBO is effectively projecting. We should have little problem shaving 15-20 percentage points off our debt-to-GDP ratio through such purchases, hitting whatever target the deficit hawks have decided is necessary.

Of course this is ridiculous. Buying back debt at discounted prices will not change our interest burden at all. But we live in a world where the folks deciding economic policy have now decided that the debt-to-GDP ratio will be the new guidepost for economic policy.

If it seems hard to believe that the very well-credentialed people who control economic policy can be utterly clueless about the economy, remember these are people that missed a $10 trillion stock bubble. They also missed an $8 trillion housing bubble. The same cast of characters who have been getting it completely wrong over the last 15 years are still calling the shots. And there is no reason to believe that their understanding of the economy has improved as a result of their past mistakes.

Meet the New CISPA. Same as the Old CISPA.

Monday, February 18, 2013 by Save the Internet
by Josh Levy

Last year, thanks to a public outcry, the effort to pass overreaching cybersecurity legislation stalled in the Senate. Now supporters have reintroduced the House version of that legislation — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

The “new” version is in fact identical to the original CISPA — and poses the same threat to our digital civil liberties and our freedom to connect online.

Here’s what we had to say about CISPA last April:

CISPA would allow companies and the government to bypass privacy protections and share all sorts of information about what Americans do online. The legislation makes it far easier for authorities and private companies to spy on your email traffic, comb through your mobile texts, filter your online content and even block access to popular websites.

The new CISPA — just like the old CISPA — would protect companies like Facebook and Microsoft from legal liability when they hand over your sensitive online data to the federal government, without any regard for your privacy. The bill would permit the government — including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security — to use that information for matters that have nothing to do with cybersecurity. The whole process would, of course, take place behind closed doors, with no accountability to the public.

Last year’s activism succeeded in improving a similar bill in the Senate, before that bill ultimately failed to move forward. At the time, President Obama vowed to veto any destructive CISPA-like bill that reached his desk.

This time around, for a number of reasons — including changes in Obama’s staff and shifting political dynamics — it’s unclear if the president would once again commit to vetoing CISPA. So if this “new” bill goes farther than it did last time around, we simply don’t know what will happen.

If CISPA becomes law, it will be a major blow to our online privacy. But more than that, CISPA’s passage would have a chilling effect on our freedom to connect online. We won’t feel as free to state unpopular opinions, or to speak truth to power, if we know that Big Brother is getting a feed of everything we say and do.

This is not what the free and open Internet is about. We need to bury this bill for good.

Obama to Receive 'Medal of Distinction' in Israel

Now, go get Iran for us! Isn't that what that means?


Monday, February 18, 2013 by Common Dreams
Obama has made 'meaningful contribution to strengthening the state of Israel,' says Israeli leader
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

US president Barack Obama will be given Israel's presidential medal of distinction upon his visit to the country this spring, the office of Israeli president Shimon Peres announced Monday.

In a statement, the office lauded the president for his loyalty and friendship to the country, which has illegally occupied the Palestinian territories through lethal military force for decades and has come under increased condemnation from a growing international community.

"President Obama has made a unique and meaningful contribution to strengthening the state of Israel and the security of its people," the office said in a statement.

"Barack Obama is a true friend of the state of Israel and has been since the beginning of his public life. As president of the United States he has stood beside Israel in times of crisis," it added.

Obama will visit both Israel and the West Bank this spring, although no dates have been announced.

And as Agence France-Presse reports, "The White House has kept expectations deliberately low, saying Obama has no plans to use the trip to push new proposals to break the more than two-year deadlock in peace talks."

Last June, Obama presented Peres with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, at the White House.

America Shamed Again: A colonized people

February 17, 2013 | Paul Craig Roberts

Americans have been shamed many times by their elected representatives who cravenly bow to vested interests and betray the American people. But no previous disgraceful behavior can match the public shame brought to Americans by the behavior of the Senate Republicans in the confirmation hearing of Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Forty Senate Republicans made it clear that not only do they refuse to put their service to America ahead of their service to Israel, but also that they will not even put their service to America on a par with their service to Israel. To every American’s shame, the Republicans demonstrated for all the world to see that they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Israel Lobby. (The Israel Lobby is not their only master. They are also owned by other powerful interest groups, such as Wall Street and the Corporate Military/Security Complex.)

The most embarrassing behavior of all came from the craven Lindsay Graham, who, while in the act of demonstrating his complete subservience by crawling on his belly before the Israel Lobby, dared Hagel to name one single person in the US Congress who is afraid of the Israel Lobby.

If I had been Hagel, I would have written off the nomination and answered: “You, Senator Graham, and your 40 craven colleagues.”

Indeed, Hagel could have answered: The entire US Congress, including Rand Paul who pretends to be different but isn’t.

The real question is: Who in the Congress is not afraid of the Israel Lobby?

The hatchet job on Hagel is driven by fear of the Israel Lobby.

Perhaps the worst affront Israel’s American representatives ever inflicted on the US military was the coverup of the Israeli air and torpedo boat attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. The Israeli attack failed to sink the Liberty but killed and wounded most of the crew. The survivors were ordered to silence, and it was 12 years before one of them spoke up and revealed what had happened (James Ennes, Assault On The Liberty). Not even Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could get Washington to own up to the facts.

The facts are now well known, but as far as Washington is concerned they are dead letter facts. The entire event has been moved to some parallel universe.

Why are the Senate Republicans out to destroy Hagel for Israel?

The answer is, first, back when Hagel was a US Senator he refused to be intimidated by the Israel Lobby and declared, “I am a US Senator, not an Israeli Senator.” In other words, Hagel did the impermissible. He said he represented US interests, not Israel’s interests. Hagel’s position implies that the interests of the two countries are not identical, which is a heresy.

The second part of the answer is that Hagel doesn’t think that it is a good idea for the US to start a war with Iran or for the US to permit Israel to do so.

But a US war with Iran is what the Israeli government and its neoconservative agents have been trying to impose on the Obama regime. Israel wants to get rid of Iran, because Iran supports Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon, thus preventing Israel from annexing that territory and its water resources, and because Iran supports Hamas, the only Palestinian organization that tries to oppose Israel’s total theft of Palestine, although Iran has never supplied Hamas with effective weapons.

The two organizations that oppose Israel’s territorial expansion, Hizbollah and Hamas, represent large numbers of Arab peoples. Nevertheless, both are declared, on Israel’s orders, to be “terrorist organizations” by the servile US Department of State, which in all reality should be called the Israeli Department of State, as it never puts US interests before Israel’s.

In other words, Hagel did not grovel. He did not say how much he loved Israel and how it would be his great honor to sacrifice all other interests to Israel’s, how he has waited his entire life for the chance to serve Israel as the US Secretary of Defense.

Hagel is not an opponent of Israel. He merely said, “First, I am an American.” His lack of craven subservience is unacceptable to the Israel Lobby, which has branded him an “anti-semite.”

Lindsay Graham, in contrast, has what it takes to be Israel’s perfect choice for US Secretary of Defense.

Graham will go out of his way to please the Israel Lobby. He will pull out all stops and behave with maximum servility to a foreign power in his effort to embarrass the President of the United States and his nominee, a war veteran and former US Senator who simply thinks that the US Congress and the executive branch should put American interests first.

Senate Majority Leader Reid has used Senate rules to keep Hagel’s nomination alive.
If Lindsay Graham succeeds in doing the Israel Lobby’s dirty work, he will have handed a defeat of the US President to the Israeli Prime Minister, who has demeaned the President of the United States for not doing Israel’s bidding and attacking Iran.

Americans are a colonized people. Their government represents the colonizing powers: Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, the Corporate Military/Security Complex, Agribusiness, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Mining, and Timber interests.

Two elected representatives who tried to represent the American people–Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich–found representative government to be an inhospitable place for those few who attempt to represent the interests of the American people.

Like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Gerald Celente, I stand with our Founding Fathers who opposed America’s entanglement in foreign wars. In an effort to prevent entanglements, the Founding Fathers gave the power to declare war to Congress. Over the years Congress has gradually ceded this power to the President to the extent that it no longer exists as a power of Congress. The President can start a war anywhere at any time simply by declaring that the war is not a war but a “time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic military action.” Or he can use some other nonsensical collection of words.

In the first few years of the 21st century, the executive branch has invaded two countries, violated the sovereignty of five others with military operations, and has established military bases in Africa in order to counteract China’s economic penetration of the continent and to secure the resources for US and European corporations, thus enlarging the prospects for future wars. If the Republicans succeed in blocking Hagel’s confirmation, the prospect of war with Iran will be boosted.

By abdicating its war power, Congress lost its control of the purse. As the executive branch withholds more and more information from Congressional oversight committees, Congress is becoming increasingly powerless. As Washington’s war debts mount, Washington’s attack on the social safety net will become more intense. Governmental institutions that provide services to Americans will wither as more tax revenues are directed to the coffers of special interests and foreign entanglements.

The tenuous connection between the US government and the interests of citizens is on its way to being severed entirely.

Sen. Warren Slams Regulators for Failure to Prosecute Big Banks

Friday, February 15, 2013 by Common Dreams
Warren: 'I am really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial'
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer


At her debut on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Thursday, freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled a panel of top financial regulators on their lack of prosecution of banks' criminal activities with repeated emphasis on one particular question: "When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?"

Educating the panel on the value of taking a bank to trial, Warren explains:

If [banks] can break the law and drag in billions in profits and then turn around and settle paying out of those profits, they don’t have that much incentive to follow the law. It's also the case that when we have a settlement, and not a trial, it means that we don't have those days and days and days of testimony of what those financial institutions have been up to.

The question I really want to ask is about how tough you are — about how much leverage you really have.

The regulators—representing the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury among others—responded with predictable platitudes: "We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals," said one and, "When we look at these issues [...] we look at the distinction between what we could get if we go to trial and what we could get if we don't," answered another.

Ryan Grim, writing for the Huffington Post, points out that open-Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz was one of Warren's constituents who she reportedly both met and admired.

Swartz recently committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors over a "harsh array of charges" because they wanted to "make an example" of his activism—a point that Warren may have referenced in her remarks.

"I want to note that there are district attorneys and US attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial to 'make an example,' as they put it," Warren told the group.

"I am really concerned that too-big-to-fail has become too-big-for-trial. That just seems wrong to me."

Cornel West Names Obama as 'War Criminal'

Friday, February 15, 2013 by Common Dreams
'Let Us Not Be Deceived'
Like Nixon, Bush, and others the law is suspended for the president, but "applies for the rest of us"
- Jon Queally, staff writer

Philosophy professor, social critic and activist Cornel West says that like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that President Obama—due to his execution of foreign wars and direction of clandestine military operations overseas resulting in the direct and foreseeable death of innocent people—should be called out for what he is: a 'war criminal'.

Appearing on Tavis Smiley's radio program on Thursday, West said: "We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.”

"I think we have to be very honest," he said.

"... dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.”

A once ardent supporter of the president—campaigning strongly for Obama during his presidential run in 2008—West has been critical of a number of aspects of the president's policies since taking office, including his refusal to adequately address poverty in the United States even as his administration acted mightily to save large financial institutions and Wall Street banks.

West's comments on US foreign policy came as Smiley spoke about the ongoing confirmation process of John Brennan, Obama's nomination to run the CIA and chief architect of the ongoing drone assassination program and what the radio host termed the president's "license to kill".

"Let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they're war criminals," West said. "They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us."

Just this week in Afghanistan, five children were killed and five more wounded when a suspected missile from a US drone exploded in Kunar province. Four adult women were also reported killed in the attack along with a number of adult males who may or may not have been the intended targets.

Making the point, West concluded, "You or I, brother Travis, if we kill an innocent person, we're going to jail. And we're going to be in there forever."

You can listen to the complete exchange between West and Smiley below:

Obama Scientist Makes Industry-Friendly Push for Gas Drilling Bonanza

Saturday, February 16, 2013 by Common Dreams
'Forward' on Fracking?
Despite grave concerns about methane emissions and groundwater contamination signals show that White House push forward with controversial gas fracking
- Jon Queally, staff writer


One of Obama's top scientific advisers has signaled that the White House is poised to make a major push for the controversial practice of known as fracking--which environmental campaigners say is a betrayal of a truly clean energy agenda and evidence that the administration still misunderstands the severity of the climate dangers associated with all forms of fossil fuels.

Green groups, progressives, and environmentalists, though not unaware of Obama's long held "all of the above" approach to US energy may still be shocked to hear the degree to which the administration is gearing up for a push of the practice that studies show have dramatic negative impacts on the environment and communities close to drilling operations.

The signals by Prof. William Press, an astrophysicist who heads the government-funded American Association for the Advancement of Science, were made at both an industry conference this week and in an interview with the Observer in the UK.

"The gas industry is straining to develop underground natural gas reserves across the nation and would love to know the exact rules and constraints by which it can carry out fracking in different states," Press told the Observer's Robin McKie. "Once they know that, they can get on with it."

Press then indicated that Obama "could use executive orders to outline those rules in the very near future and so initiate widespread gas fracking in the US."

Green groups, progressives, and environmentalists—though not unaware of Obama's long held "all of the above" approach to US energy—may still be shocked to hear the degree to which the administration is gearing up for a push of the practice that studies show have dramatic negative impacts on the environment and communities close to drilling operations.

As economist Robert Pollin said in response to Obama's State of the Union earlier this week, the good news was the president's commitment to a clean energy future. The bad news? His continued commitment to a dirty energy future.

"Let’s get serious here: Natural gas is not a clean fuel," Pollin said.

"Yes, emissions are only half as bad as with coal, and it is also modestly cleaner than oil. But that isn’t good enough. If we allow our natural gas production to expand significantly—or even to stay where it is today—there is no way we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by anything close by the 40 percent that is necessary by 2030, and by 80 percent as of 2050."

State level fights against fracking are ongoing in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvanian, New York, and elsewhere as local communities fight back against gas giants trying to cash in on the fracking boom.

But Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, says the practice should be stopped in its tracks, not expanded. "Any position short of a ban on fracking is hurting the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions in the long term," she said, "saddling us with 50 years of infrastructure to continue fracking for gas that will be exported around the world."

As McKie reports, the claim that natural gas is actually cleaner or less carbon intensive than coal or oil is disputed by environmentalists and scientific study:

Greenpeace says no proper analysis has been done on gas leakage from fracking sites. In particular, there is a fear that methane – which is a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – may be escaping from wells and adding to the warming of the atmosphere. Campaigners also claim that there have been more than 1,000 cases of groundwater contamination in the US because of fracking and have urged a moratorium on underground drilling.

And as Common Dreams reported last month:

New research on "alarmingly high methane emissions" brings further environmental scrutiny to natural gas extraction including fracking, and illustrates how the boom in the industry may well be a plan for climate disaster.

The findings, led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), were presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, the journal Nature reports, and reiterated data the team first noted in February of 2012 that 4% of the methane produced at a field near Denver was escaping into the atmosphere. The team also presented preliminary findings from a Utah study that suggested an even higher rate of methane emissions—9% of the total production.

NOAA describes methane as 25 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.

"We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see," says Colm Sweeney, who led the aerial component of the study as head of the aircraft program at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder.

All of this happens amidst a growing climate movement in the US that is putting laser-like focus on the Obama administration to match presidential rhetoric with meaningful executive action. This is best highlighted by the ongoing fight around the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, against which campaigners say they will determine if Obama is willing to show courage by defying the fossil fuel industry's demand for building the pipeline.

On Sunday, over 200 organizations—led by 350.org, Sierra Club and the Hip Hop Caucus—are holding a rally in history in Washington, DC to apply public pressure on the president to oppose—"once and for all"—the Keystone XL project.

But the larger focus of the rally, called Forward on Climate, is to demand that Obama and his colleagues in Congress take notice of the changing political tide across the country in addition to the changing climate.

"We’re having the largest rally in U.S. history on climate change in the National Mall this Sunday," said Sierra Club president Michael Brune. "And it’s coming at a time where there are several important decisions that the president will make: about mountain top removal, about fracking across the country, about drilling in the arctic, whether or not to build a deadly and destructive pipeline."

"What we’re seeing is a resurgence of committed, passionate Americans who are willing to advocate and fight for clean energy," Brune said.

So the voices are loud and clear. The questions remain: Will Obama listen to those leading the climate fight? And will he follow?

20,000 Pound Meteor Explodes over Russia, Injuring Hundreds

Friday, February 15, 2013 by Common Dreams
- Common Dreams staff

The dramatic footage captured by a dashboard video camera in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia in the nation's south-central shows what scientists say was a more than 10 ton meteor entering the atmosphere at over 33,000 miles per hour.

Once meteors break through the atmosphere and explode, the pieces that actually hit the Earth's surface are called meteorites. It is so far unclear how much damage on the ground -- and over how large an area -- was caused by actually pieces of the exploded object or by the sonic boom that accompanied the initial explosion. Expert observers calculate that the meteor "pancaked" and incinerated approximately 25 miles above the ground.

The Associated Press reports:

The fall caused explosions that broke glass over a wide area. The Emergency Ministry says more than 500 people sought treatment after the blasts and that 34 of them were hospitalized.

"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people's houses to check if they were OK," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

"We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.

Captured from another angle:

The U.S.’s Grossly Corrupt Health Protection System

Blame the Pentagon
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK


The nation’s biggest polluter isn’t a corporation. It’s the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste — more than the top three chemical companies combined.

Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon’s partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way.

For the past five decades the federal government, defense contractors and the chemical industry have joined forces to block public health protections against perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been shown to affect children’s growth and mental progress by disrupting the function of the thyroid gland which regulates brain development.

Perchlorate has been leaking from literally hundreds of defense plants and military installations across the country. The EPA has reported that perchlorate is present in drinking and groundwater supplies in 35 states. Center for Disease Control and independent studies have also overwhelmingly shown that perchlorate is existent in our food supplies, cow’s milk, and human breast milk. As a result virtually every American has some level of perchlorate in their body.
Currently only two states, California and Massachusetts, have set a maximum allowable contaminant level for perchlorate in drinking water. But the EPA won’t follow these states’ lead. In the Colorado River, which provides water for over 20 million people, perchlorate levels are high. The chemical is most prevalent in the Southwest and California as a result of the large number of military operations and defense contractors in the region.

In 2001 the EPA estimated that the total liability for the cleanup of toxic military sites would exceed $350 billion, or five times the Superfund Act liability of private industry. But the federal government has been complacent and allowed perchlorate to run rampant throughout our water supplies. This negligence and lack of regulatory oversight has left the Pentagon, NASA and defense contractors free to set their own levels, trimming the high, but necessary costs of restoring groundwater quality.

While the situation has become dire in recent years, it was the Clinton administration that didn’t do nearly enough to begin cleaning up these sites and certainly did not keep a close eye on how the Pentagon spent the money it received. During the 1990s the Defense Department spent only $3.5 billion a year cleaning up toxic military sites — much of that on studies, not actual work. In 1998, the Defense Science Review Board, a federal advisory committee set up to provide independent advice to the secretary of defense, looked at the problem and concluded that the Pentagon had no clear environmental cleanup policy, goals or program, which led lawyer Jonathan Turley, who holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University, to call the Pentagon the nation’s “premier environmental villain.”

“If they can spend $1 million on a cruise missile, it seems kind of ridiculous they won’t spend $200,000 to see if our food is contaminated with rocket fuel,” says Renee Sharp, a scientist with Environmental Working Group. But if the Clinton program was chintzy, the Bush plan has been downright penurious.

While Bush has boosted overall Pentagon spending by billions, the administration has simultaneously slashed its environmental remediation program. Moreover, the Bush defense plan has called for “new rounds of base closures” to “shape the military more efficiently.” Efficiency is usually a code word for sidestepping environmental rules.

These military sites, which total more than 50 million acres, are among the most insidious and dangerous legacies left by the Pentagon. They are strewn with toxic bomb fragments, unexploded munitions, buried hazardous waste, fuel dumps, open pits filled with debris, burn piles and yes, rocket fuel. An internal EPA memo from 1998 warned of the looming problem: “As measured by acres, and probably as measured by number of sites, ranges and buried munitions represent the largest cleanup program in the United States.”

When a site gets too polluted, the Pentagon has chosen simply to close it down and turn it over to another federal agency. Over the past three decades, the Pentagon has transferred more than 16 million acres, often with little or no remediation. The former bombing areas have been turned into wildlife refuges, city and state parks, golf courses, landfills, airports and shopping malls.

Serious contamination of streams, soil and groundwater is a problem at nearly every military training ground. The sites are often saturated with heavy metals and other pollutants as well as unexploded weapons. The Government Accountability Office’s list of the kinds of unexploded munitions left behind on many training sites reads like a catalogue for a Middle East arms bonanza: “hand grenades, rockets, guided missiles, projectiles, mortars, rifle grenades, and bombs.”

But the government has gone to great extents to cover up its deadly legacy. In 2002 the Pentagon, defense contractors and perchlorate makers persuaded the editors of a prestigious journal to rewrite an article on the chemical’s health effects without the lead author’s knowledge or consent. Then in 2005 the White House loaded a National Academy of Science panel, which was set up to assess the health risks of perchlorate, with paid consultants of the rocket fuel industry, which, not surprisingly, recommended that exposure levels be set many times higher than the lower doses recommended by numerous independent research studies.

“Perchlorate provides a textbook example of a corrupted health protection system, where polluters, the Pentagon, the White House and the EPA have conspired to block health protections in order to pad budgets, curry political favor, and protect corporate profits,” Richard Wiles, Executive Director of the Environmental Working Group, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 7 during a hearing held by committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who would like to see national safety standards for perchlorate in drinking water.

“All the pieces needed to support strong health protections are in place,” said Wiles. “This is a nightmare of epic proportions for the Department of Defense and its contractors, and rather than address it head-on, they have spent 50 years and millions of dollars trying to avoid it.”

The Ruthless War on Hackers and Whistleblowers

The Empire Cracks Back
by CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN
Stockholm, Sweden.

At the height of the purported cocaine “epidemic” in the US in the 1980s, politicians and law enforcement officials felt something had to be done. What Congress did was to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986: one of the most draconian, overtly racist pieces of legislation in US history. The law introduced mandatory minimum sentences, including an astonishing 5 years in federal prison for the possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine. What moved the law from the medieval to the outright racist, however, was the fact that in order to spend the same 5 years in prison for possession of powder cocaine, one would have to be caught with 500 grams of the substance. In other words, there was a 100:1 sentencing disparity between convictions for possession of crack versus powder cocaine. Expensive powder cocaine tended to be the drug of choice for upper-middle class suburban kids and white-collar bankers, while much cheaper crack was favoured by poorer drug users. Despite such a blatant discriminatory factor, it took 26 years to pass the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 which pushed the sentencing ratio down from an outlandishly racist 100:1 to an outrageously racist 18:1.

What does this have to do with hacking and whistleblowing?

A lot. At the most basic level, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 stripped bare any pretence that justice in the US was blind, or that the scales were calibrated so that no preference would be given to a particular citizen on the basis of race or socio-economic status. The law sent a loud, unambiguous message that there are two sets of rules in the US: one for those with power and social capital, and one for the rest. Thus, when it was widely reported in the wake of his suicide that the hacker and programmer Aaron Swartz was facing 35 years in prison for illegally downloading academic articles from the JSTOR system, it became clear to many unfamiliar with the case just how skewed the US legal system is, and the extent to which prosecutors were willing to go to “make an example” of someone whose greatest crime was downloading articles that academics provide to publishers for free, which are then re-sold to those same academics for a healthy profit. JSTOR itself did not wish to press charges, but the prosecution went ahead, with a computer hacker facing more years in prison for downloading journal articles about Emily Dickinson and film theory than any Wall Street CEO, Blackwater executive or corrupt politician.

When we speak of state violence, we tend to think of overt acts of physical violence against the body: the death penalty, police brutality or warfare being classic examples. Violence, however, is not relegated only to the application of pain, but can also include the limiting of physical and psychological freedom. As such, imprisonment is a significant act of violence, and is, along with the ability to take a life through capital punishment or warfare, a significant power afforded to states. Financial sanctions may cripple a person economically, but if they are still free to walk the streets, play with their children or engage in the many simple acts that make up the day-to-day existence of a human being, then that person still retains the core elements of dignity and humanity. I cannot believe that someone would be denied these for a quarter century for the crime of downloading academic articles; nor, for that matter, can I fathom the UK sending Anonymous hackers Christopher Weatherhead and Ashley Rhodes to prison for 18 and seven months respectively for the crime of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. This, while the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Fred Goodwin, walks free after taking home a salary of £1.3 million, while overseeing the biggest loss in British corporate history, £24 billion.

In addition to hackers we have whistleblowers, none more famous than Bradley Manning, who also faces the possibility of spending the better part of his life behind bars. Already confined for almost 1000 days, and initially placed in solitary confinement, Manning is accused of placing the security of the United States in jeopardy by providing classified documents to WikiLeaks. A portion of the information he leaked was footage (now known as the “Collateral Murder Video”) showing the killing of civilians by a US attack helicopter in Iraq. The irony is, were Manning a Chinese, Iranian or Cuban soldier who had exposed potential war crimes committed by his government, his solitary confinement and impending life sentence would be held up as evidence of the barbarity and anti-democratic tendencies of the “regimes” in question, and calls would be made for his release on “humanitarian” grounds. As it is, Manning (like Swartz) is being given the 1986 crack cocaine treatment by the US government: the threat of a wildly excessive prison sentence, at odds with both logic and law, for the purpose of crushing the individual in question.

If the message of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was that the poor and minorities needed learn their place in an America ruled by white elites, then what is the message being sent in relation to Manning, Swartz and the two Anonymous hackers in the UK? Much the same as in the case of crack versus powder, actually. While the US and UK make geopolitical hay out of their commitment to free speech and democracy, dissenters and activists must learn their place. They are useful to the neoliberal project in that they show that moderate dissent is tolerated; but once that dissent crosses the line and trespasses upon the sacred turf of corporate profits and military power, then action must be taken. If that means sending a man to prison for life for exposing potential war crimes, or driving a man to suicide for downloading academic articles, so be it.

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While Left And Right Fight, Power Wins

February 14, 2013 | John V. Walsh

My experience with the American left and right leads to the conclusion that the left sees private power as the source of oppression and government as the countervailing and rectifying power, while the right sees government as the source of oppression and a free and unregulated private sector as the countervailing and rectifying power. Both are concerned with restraining the power to oppress, but they take opposite positions on the source of the oppressive power and remedy.

The right is correct that government power is the problem, and the left is correct that private power is the problem. Therefore, wherever power is located--the government or private sectors cannot reduce, constrain, or minimize power.

How does the progressive Obama Regime differ from the tax-cut, deregulation Bush/Cheney Regime? Both are complicit in the maximization of executive branch power and in the minimization of citizens’ civil liberties and, thus, of the people’s power. Did the progressive Obama reverse the right-wing Bush’s destruction of habeas corpus and due process? No. Obama further minimized the people’s power. Bush could throw us in prison for life without proof of cause. Obama can execute us without proof of cause. They do this in the name of protecting us from terrorism, but not from their terrorism.

Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.

The view of human nature held by the right and the left depends on whether the human nature is located in the private sector or the government sector (“public sector”). For the right (and for libertarians) human nature in the private sector is good and serves the public; in the government sector human nature is evil and oppressive. For the left, it is the opposite. As the same people go back and forth from one sector to the other, one marvels at the transformations of their character and morality. A good man becomes evil, and an evil man becomes good, depending on the location of his activities.

One of my professors, James M. Buchanan who won a Nobel Prize, pointed out that people are just as self-serving whether they are in the private sector or in government. The problem is how to constrain government and private power to the best extent possible.

Our Founding Fathers’ solution was to minimize the power of government and to rely on contending factions among private interests to prevent the rise of an oligarchy. In the event that contending private interests failed, the oligarchy that seized the government would not have much public power to exercise.

The Founding Fathers’ design more or less worked except for interludes of civil war and economic crisis until the cold war built up the power of government and the deregulation of the Clinton and Bush presidencies built up the power of private interests. It all came together with the accumulation of new, dictatorial powers in the executive branch in the name of protecting us from terrorists and with deregulation’s creation of powerful corporations “too big to fail.”

Now we have a government, whose elected members are beholden to a private oligarchy, consisting of the military/security complex, Wall Street and the financial sector, the Israel Lobby, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and the energy, mining, and timber businesses, with the power to shut down people’s protests at their exploitation by robber barons and government alike.

Vast amounts of government debt have been added to taxpayers’ burdens in order to fight wars that only benefit the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby. More vast amounts have been added in order to force taxpayers to cover the reckless gambling bets of the financial sector. Taxpayers are denied interest on their savings in order to protect the balance sheets of a corrupt financial sector. Legitimate protestors are brutalized by police and equated by Homeland Security with “domestic extremists,” defined by Homeland Security as a close relation to terrorists.

Today Americans are not safe from government or private power and suffer at the hands of both.

What can be done? From within probably very little. The right blames the left, and the left blames the right. The two sides are locked in ideological combat while power grows in the private and public sectors, but not the benevolent power that the two ideologies suppose. Instead, a two-headed power monster has risen.

If the power that has been established over the American people is to be shattered, it will come from outside. The Federal Reserve’s continuing monetization of the enormous debt that Washington is generating can destroy the dollar’s exchange value, sending up interest rates, collapsing the bond, stock, and real estate markets, and sinking the economy into deep depression at a time in history when Americans have exhausted their savings and are deeply in debt with high levels of joblessness and homelessness. The rise in import prices from a drop in the dollar’s exchange value would make survival an issue for a large percentage of the population.

Overnight the US could transition from superpower to third world penitent begging for a rescue program.

Who would grant it? The Russians encircled by US military bases and whose internal serenity is disrupted by inflows of American money to dissident groups in an effort to destabilize the Russian State? The Chinese, the government of which is routinely denounced by a hypocritical Washington for human rights abuses while Washington surrounds China with newly constructed military bases and new deployments of troops and naval vessels? South America, a long-suffering victim of Washington’s oppression? Europe, exhausted by conflicts and by Washington’s organization of them as puppet states and use of them as mercenaries in Washington’s wars for hegemony?

No country, except perhaps the bought-and-paid-for puppets of Britain, Canada, Australia, and Japan, would come to Washington’s aid.

In the ensuing collapse, the power of Washington and the power of the private robber barons would evaporate. Americans would suffer, but they would be rid of the power that has been established over them and that has changed them from a free people to exploited serfs.

This is, perhaps, an optimistic conclusion, but those relatively few Americans who are aware need some hope. This is the best that I can do. The majority of Americans remain trapped in their unawareness, which implies a bleak future. The insouciance of the American population is its downfall.