The American Empire Is Bankrupt

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Chris Hedges
June 15, 2009 - TruthDig.com

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This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America's imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, "the most important meeting of the 21st century so far."

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on
Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday's Financial Times called "The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America's Financial-Military Hegemony." "Yekaterinburg," Hudson writes, "may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well." His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester's disturbing exposé of the world's banking system, titled "It's Finished," which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

"This means the end of the dollar," Hudson told me. "It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America's discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don't have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America's military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this."

China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China's yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China's central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a "multipolar world order" which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its
$19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

"China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal," Hudson said. "They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly."

The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America's military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China's, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

"We will have to finance our own military spending," Hudson warned, "and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive."

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

"We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system," Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. "There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it's all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn't supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what's happened."

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and
trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

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Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is called, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, and it will be out in July.

World Bank Loan Withdrawn From Brazilian Cattle Corporation

The US based Cargill corporation burns large areas of rainforest to prepare for soya plantations. (Greenpeace)

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Frank McDonald
June 15, 2009 - The Irish Times

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The International Finance Corporation (IFC), private lending arm of the World Bank, has withdrawn a $90 million loan to Brazilian cattle industry giant Bertin, following complaints that it was using the money to expand further into the Amazon region.

"It is good news that the World Bank is withdrawing these funds, yet scandalous that it was feeding a company that causes Amazon deforestation and climate change in the first place," said Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Brazil's Amazon campaign director.

The move came two weeks after a Greenpeace report, Slaughtering the Amazon, revealed that financial backing for the Brazilian cattle industry had turned it into the largest single source of deforestation in the world.

The report, based on a three-year undercover investigation, showed how Bertin and two other Brazilian companies supplying the global market with cattle products for top brands and supermarkets buy cattle from Amazon farms involved in illegal deforestation.

By helping Bertin to expand into the Amazon, Greenpeace said the IFC had been driving further destruction of the rainforest, a haven for biodiversity and one of the world's key defences against climate change because of its crucial role as a "carbon sink".

"For a bank that portrays itself as the 'knowledge bank', this was a very ill-conceived and thoroughly destructive use of its resources", Mr Adario said at the weekend. "It must now guarantee that it will not invest in such damaging projects in the future."

The last $30 million loan from the IFC will no longer be given to Bertin and it is anticipated that the World Bank subsidiary will ask that the $60 million it had already invested in the company be returned early.

Tropical deforestation is responsible for approximately 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and Brazil has been ranked by Greenpeace as the world's fourth biggest "climate polluter".

Following the slow progress of climate talks in Bonn over the past two weeks, Greenpeace is calling on world leaders to "take personal responsibility for securing an effective climate-saving deal" by attending the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen next December.

"This would include providing $110 million a year for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis, $40 million a year of which should go towards forest protection in return for commitments to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2015 and globally by 2020."

Last week, Brazilian president Lula da Silva announced that he would veto clauses in an Amazon land reform Bill that would legalise the landholdings of millions of people who have settled in the region - a move that could spur more deforestation.

"We want to be an example to the world in taking care of our own things," he said, adding that Brazil was now open to adopting targets to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions if rich countries agreed to do more.

Neo-Nazis are in the Army now

Iraq veteran Forrest Fogarty sailed through recruitment despite his neo-Nazi tattoos. (Photo: Salon)

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Why the U.S. military is ignoring its own regulations and permitting white supremacists to join its ranks.

Editor's note: Research support for this article was provided by the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.

Matt Kennard
June 15, 2009 - Salon

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On a muggy Florida evening in 2008, I meet Iraq War veteran Forrest Fogarty in the Winghouse, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of Tampa, his favorite hangout. He told me on the phone I would recognize him by his skinhead. Sure enough, when I spot a white guy at a table by the door with a shaved head, white tank top and bulging muscles, I know it can only be him.

Over a plate of chicken wings, he tells me about his path into the white-power movement. "I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi," he says. At his first high school, near Los Angeles, he was bullied by black and Latino kids. That's when he first heard Skrewdriver, a band he calls "the godfather of the white power movement." "I became obsessed," he says. He had an image from one of Skrewdriver's album covers — a Viking carrying a staff, an icon among white nationalists — tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after he had another white power symbol, a Celtic cross, emblazoned on his stomach.

At 15, Fogarty moved with his dad to Tampa, where he started picking fights with groups of black kids at his new high school. "On the first day, this bunch of niggers, they thought I was a racist, so they asked, 'Are you in the KKK?'" he tells me. "I said, 'Yeah,' and it was on." Soon enough, he was expelled.

For the next six years, Fogarty flitted from landscaping job to construction job, neither of which he'd ever wanted to do. "I was just drinking and fighting," he says. He started his own Nazi rock group, Attack, and made friends in the National Alliance, at the time the biggest neo-Nazi group in the country. It has called for a "a long-term eugenics program involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America."

But the military ran in Fogarty's family. His grandfather had served during World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and his dad had been a Marine in Vietnam. At 22, Fogarty resolved to follow in their footsteps. "I wanted to serve my country," he says.

Army regulations prohibit soldiers from participating in racist groups, and recruiters are instructed to keep an eye out for suspicious tattoos. Before signing on the dotted line, enlistees are required to explain any tattoos. At a Tampa recruitment office, though, Fogarty sailed right through the signup process. "They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo, and I made up some stuff, and that was that," he says. Soon he was posted to Fort Stewart in Georgia, where he became part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Fogarty's ex-girlfriend, intent on destroying his new military career, sent a dossier of photographs to Fort Stewart. The photos showed Fogarty attending white supremacist rallies and performing with his band, Attack. "They hauled me before some sort of committee and showed me the pictures," Fogarty says. "I just denied them and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch." He adds: "They knew what I was about. But they let it go because I'm a great soldier."

In 2003, Fogarty was sent to Iraq. For two years he served in the military police, escorting officers, including generals, around the hostile country. He says he was granted top-secret clearance and access to battle plans. Fogarty speaks with regret that he "never had any kill counts." But he says his time in Iraq increased his racist resolve.

"I hate Arabs more than anybody, for the simple fact I've served over there and seen how they live," he tells me. "They're just a backward people. Them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I'm concerned. Their customs, everything to do with the Middle East, is just repugnant to me."

Because of his tattoos and his racist comments, most of his buddies and his commanding officers were aware of his Nazism. "They all knew in my unit," he says. "They would always kid around and say, 'Hey, you're that skinhead!'" But no one sounded an alarm to higher-ups. "I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like, 'Let Fogarty go.' They didn't want to get rid of me."

Fogarty left the Army in 2005 with an honorable discharge. He says he was asked to reenlist. He declined. He was sick of the system.

Since the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has struggled to recruit and reenlist troops. As the conflicts have dragged on, the military has loosened regulations, issuing "moral waivers" in many cases, allowing even those with criminal records to join up. Veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder have been ordered back to the Middle East for second and third tours of duty.

The lax regulations have also opened the military's doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members — with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right. A recent Department of Homeland Security report, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," stated: "The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today." Many white supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see it, a future domestic race war. Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military's strategic goals but because killing "hajjis" is their duty as white militants.

Soldiers' associations with extremist groups, and their racist actions, contravene a host of military statutes instituted in the past three decades. But during the "war on terror," U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own regulations. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, "Effectively, the military has a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts."

Carter F. Smith is a former military investigator who worked with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang violence in troops. "When you need more soldiers, you lower the standards, whether you say so or not," he says. "The increase in gangs and extremists is an indicator of this." Military investigators may be concerned about white supremacists, he says. "But they have a war to fight, and they don't have incentive to slow down."

Tom Metzger is the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and current leader of the White Aryan Resistance. He tells me the military has never been more tolerant of racial extremists. "Now they are letting everybody in," he says.

The presence of white supremacists in the military first triggered concern in 1976. At Camp Pendleton in California, a group of black Marines attacked white Marines they mistakenly believed to be in the KKK. The resulting investigation uncovered a KKK chapter at the base and led to the jailing or transfer of 16 Klansmen. Reports of Klan activity among soldiers and Marines surfaced again in the 1980s, spurring President Reagan's Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, to condemn military participation in white supremacist organizations.

Then, in 1995, a black couple was murdered by two neo-Nazi paratroopers around Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The murder investigation turned up evidence that 22 soldiers at Fort Bragg were known to be extremists. That year, language was added to a Department of Defense directive, explicitly prohibiting participation in "organizations that espouse supremacist causes" or "advocate the use of force or violence."

Today a complete ban on membership in racist organizations appears to have been lifted — though the proliferation of white supremacists in the military is difficult to gauge. The military does not track them as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members. But one indication of the scope comes from the FBI.

Following an investigation of white supremacist groups, a 2008 FBI report declared: "Military experience — ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces — is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement." In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Most of them were associated with the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement, which promote anti-Semitism and the overthrow of the U.S. government, and assorted skinhead groups.

Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don't include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans — they "may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement."

In fact, since the movement's inception, its leaders have encouraged members to enlist in the U.S. military as a way to receive state-of-the-art combat training, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, in preparation for a domestic race war. The concept of a race war is central to extremist groups, whose adherents imagine an eruption of violence that pits races against each other and the government.

That goal comes up often in the chatter on white supremacist Web sites. On the neo-Nazi Web site Blood and Honour, a user called 88Soldier88, wrote in 2008 that he is an active duty soldier working in a detainee holding area in Iraq. He complained about "how 'nice' we have to treat these fucking people … better than our own troops." Then he added, "Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come." Another poster, AMERICANARYAN.88Soldier88, wrote, "I have the training I need and will pass it on to others when I get out."

On NewSaxon.org, a social networking group for neo-Nazis, a group called White Military Men hosts numerous contributors. It was begun by "FightingforWhites," who identified himself at one point as Lance Cpl. Burton of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company, but then removed the information. The group calls for "All men with military experience, retired or active/reserve" to "join this group to see how many men have experience to build an army. We want to win a war, we need soldiers." FightingforWhites — whose tagline is "White Supremacy will prevail! US Military leading the way!" — goes on to write, "I am with an infantry battalion in the Marine Corps, I have had the pleasure of killing four enemies that tried to kill me. I have the best training to kill people." On his wall, a friend wrote: "THANKS BROTHER!!!! kill a couple towel heads for me ok!"

Such attitudes come straight from the movement's leaders. "We do encourage them to sign up for the military," says Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement. "We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government." Billy Roper, of White Revolution, says skinheads join the military for the usual reasons, such as access to higher education, but also "to secure the future for white children." "America began in bloody revolution," he reminds me, "and it might end that way."
 
When it comes to screening out racists at recruitment centers, military regulations appear to have collapsed. "We don't exclude people from the army based on their thoughts," says S. Douglas Smith, an Army public affairs officer. "We exclude based on behavior." He says an "offensive" or "extremist" tattoo "might be a reason for them not to be in the military." Or it might not. "We try to educate recruiters on extremist tattoos," he says, but "the tattoo is a relatively subjective decision" and shouldn't in itself bar enlistment.

What about something as obvious as a swastika? "A swastika would trigger questions," Smith says. "But again, if the gentlemen said, 'I like the way the swastika looked,' and had clean criminal record, it's possible we would allow that person in." "There are First Amendment rights," he adds.

In the spring, I telephoned at random five Army recruitment centers across the country. I said I was interested in joining up and mentioned that I had a pair of "SS bolts" tattooed on my arm. A 2000 military brochure stated that SS bolts were a tattoo image that should raise suspicions. But none of the recruiters reacted negatively, and when pressed directly about the tattoo, not one said it would be an outright problem. A recruiter in Houston was typical; he said he'd never heard of SS bolts and just encouraged me to come on in.

It's in the interest of recruiters to interpret recruiting standards loosely. If they fail to meet targets, based on the number of soldiers they enlist, they may have to attend a punitive counseling session, and it could hurt any chance for promotion. When, in 2005, the Army relaxed regulations on non-extremist tattoos, such as body art covering the hands, neck and face, this cut recruiters even more slack.

Even the education of recruiters about how to identify extremists seems to have fallen by the wayside. The 2005 Department of Defense report concluded that recruiting personnel "were not aware of having received systematic training on recognizing and responding to possible terrorists" — a designation that includes white supremacists — "who try to enlist." Participation on white supremacist Web sites would be an easy way to screen out extremist recruits, but the report found that the military had not clarified which Web forums were gathering places for extremists.

Once white supremacists are in the military, it is easy to stay there. An Army Command Policy manual devotes more than 100 pages to rooting them out. But no officer appears to be reading it.

Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg. "In the early 1990s, the military was hard on them. They could pick and choose," he recalls. "They were looking for swastikas. They were looking for anything." But the regulations on racist extremists got jettisoned with the war on terror.

Glass says white supremacists now enjoy an open culture of impunity in the armed forces. "We're seeing guys with tattoos all the time," he says. "As far as hunting them down, I don't see it. I'm seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, 'He didn't commit a race-related crime.'"

In fact, a 2006 report by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command shows that military brass consistently ignored evidence of extremism. One case, at Fort Hood, reveals that a soldier was making Internet postings on the white supremacist site Stormfront.org. But the investigator was unable to locate the soldier in question. In a brief summary of the case, an investigator writes that due to "poor documentation," "attempts to locate with minimal information met with negative results." "I'm not doing my job here," the investigator notes. "Needs to get fixed."

In another case, investigators found that a Fort Hood soldier belonged to the neo-Nazi group Hammerskins and was "closely associated with" the Celtic Knights of Austin, Texas, another extremist organization, a situation bad enough to merit a joint investigation by the FBI and the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. The Army summary states that there was "probable cause" to believe the soldier had participated in at least one white extremist meeting and had "provided a military technical manual … to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets."

Our of four preliminary probes into white supremacists, the Criminal Investigation Command carried through on only this one. The probe revealed that "a larger single attack was planned for the San Antonio, TX after a considerable amount of media attention was given to illegal immigrants. The attack was not completed due to the inability of the organization to obtain explosives." Despite these threats, the subject was interviewed only once, in 2006, and the investigation was terminated the following year.

White supremacists may be doing more than avoiding expulsion. They may be using their military status to help build the white right. The FBI found that two Army privates in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military — including ballistic vests, a combat helmet and pain medications such as morphine — to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement. (They were convicted and sentenced to six years.) It found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military, including a period in 2003 when six active duty soldiers at Fort Riley, members of the Aryan Nation, were recruiting their Army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nation's point of contact for the state of Kansas.

One white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the Army when he was caught trying to mail a submachine gun from Iraq to his father's home in Spokane, Wash. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross' military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Rooting out extremists is difficult because racism pervades the military, according to soldiers. They say troops throughout the Middle East use derogatory terms like "hajji" or "sand nigger" to define Arab insurgents and often the Arab population itself.

Enough With the Obamathon

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The president is on TV more than the ShamWow guy, but I want to see a little more action.

Bill Maher
June 12, 2009 - The Los Angeles Times

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President Obama should just join the cast of "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!" It's not that farfetched; he's been on everything else.

I'm still a fan, but there's a fine line between being transparent and being overexposed. Every time you turn on the TV, there's Obama. He's getting a puppy! He's eating a cheeseburger with Joe Biden! He's taking the wife to Broadway and Paris - this is the best season of "The Bachelor" yet!

I get it: You love being on TV. I love my bong, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while. The other day, I caught myself saying to a friend, "Don't tell me if he's fixed the economy yet, I'm Tivo-ing it."

Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shellshocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right. Sorry, senator. I'm sending a nice gift basket of high-fiber muffins your way.

It's getting to where you can't turn on your TV without seeing Obama. Who does he think he is, Dick Cheney? Come on, sir, you don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of "Law and Order." Save some charisma for a rainy day. Taking strangers from a TV show on a tour of your house? We have that show; it's called "Cribs." And letting reporters ask you questions like "You like to be the one who picks out the shaving cream, don't you?" Or as it's called today, "journalism." I was willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt until I saw him take Brian Williams into his bedroom, and at the end of the bed there was a teleprompter and it said, "Who's your daddy?"

I mean, selling the personal part to stay popular, I'm all for it, but you got us already. We like you, we really like you! You're skinny and in a hurry and in love with a nice lady. But so's Lindsay Lohan. And like Lohan, we see your name in the paper a lot, but we're kind of wondering when you're actually going to do something.

I know that's harsh. But when I read about how you sat on the sidelines while bailed-out banks used the money we gave them to hire lobbyists who got Congress to stop homeowners from getting renegotiated loans, or how Congress is already giving up on healthcare reform, or how scientists say it's essential to reduce CO2 by 40% in 10 years, but your own bill calls for 4%, I say, enough with the character development, let's get on with the plot.

And let's stop worrying so much about doing anything that might tarnish the brand. See, this is why I don't want my president to be a TV star: Because TV stars are too worried about being popular - and too concerned with getting renewed.

You can relax about that, Mr. President, knowing that there's a large, rich organization doing everything it possibly can to ensure that you'll get reelected: It's called the Republican Party.

Speaking of which, if you can't beat Republicans now, when they're so down they take orders from Rush Limbaugh, then when? The way to get renewed for your reality show that you love so much is to act boldly now.

Obama needs to start putting it on the line in fights against the banks, the energy companies and the healthcare industry. I never thought I'd say this, but he needs to be more like George W. Bush. Bush was all about, "You're with us or against us."

Obama's more like, "You're either with us, or you obviously need to see another picture of this adorable puppy!"

Bush had horrible ideas, like torture and deregulation and preemptive war and tax cuts for the rich, but he pushed them through, in their full measure, never mind Congress or the Constitution or the Geneva Convention or the Magna Carta or the Code of Hammurabi.

The point is, he didn't care if it made him unpopular with every human on the planet not named Cletus or Fred Barnes. Which it did.

And we need to marry the good ideas Obama really believes in with that Bush attitude and Bush certitude. I'd love for Obama to come out one day and say, "Jesus told me to fix healthcare." Or, "History will decide whether stopping the polar ice caps from melting and drowning us all was a good thing."

In conclusion, Bush was a jerk, but he never cared about being seen having a burger with Dick Cheney. He picked up the phone in the White House and said, "I'm the president, bring me a burger." And they'd say, "Sir, this is NORAD. Would you please stop ordering burgers with the red phone?"

I'm glad that Obama is president, but the "Audacity of Hope" part is over. Right now, I'm hoping for a little more audacity.

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Bill Maher is the host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."

Why the World Should Be Watching Central Asia

Mosque at Naryn, Kyrgyzstan

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Ishaan Tharoor
June 15, 2009 - Time

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When Pakistani troops began to pummel Taliban positions in the Swat Valley last month, there were other military advances against insurgent outposts - barely noticed by the global media - taking place in valleys not so far away. In late May, Uzbek soldiers and tanks patrolled parts of the troubled Ferghana Valley following shootouts with suspected Islamist extremists and a suicide bombing in the valley's main city of Andijan. In neighboring Tajikistan, government forces fanned out across the remote Rasht Valley in a supposed attempt to hunt down a notorious militant commander named Abdullo Rakhimov. The veteran jihadi, according to some local reports, had recently abandoned Taliban allies in Pakistan to resume the struggle in his nearby native land.

While much of the focus of the U.S.-led war on terror now surrounds that theater of operations the Obama administration terms "Af-Pak," the post-Soviet 'Stans to the north present their own strategic quagmire. The tactical support of governments in the region is becoming increasingly vital for U.S. plans to bring stability to Afghanistan. Central Asian countries also sit atop a significant chunk of the world's untapped oil and natural gas reserves, assets which are eyed covetously by both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region - dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes - is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies vulnerable to domestic upheaval. "There is the possibility for really unpredictable change," says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And it's change few Central Asia watchers expect to be positive. While great powers vie for
resources and influence, countries that were once seen as a bulwark against more turbulent nations to the south and west are themselves lurching toward crisis.

Still, Central Asia exists on the periphery for most policy makers in the U.S. When not the illusory realm of Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University, "along almost pathological networks of patronage" - and ones that Moscow knows how to navigate. That close working relationship has been on full display recently in Kyrgyzstan: spurred by a Russian promise of $2 billion in aid, the Kyrgyz government signaled its intent to shut down the U.S.'s pivotal Manas air base there in January, and
reaffirmed that pledge this week despite recent overtures from the Obama administration.

Russia may be keen to deter an entrenched American presence in its traditional sphere of influence, but is more muted about China's expanding role in the region. Resource-hungry Beijing has steadily made inroads west, tying up lucrative energy contracts in Kazakhstan, while committing tens of million dollars to infrastructure and hydropower projects in impoverished Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. China has also become the single largest investor in Afghanistan, building roads through Kabul and setting up a massive $3 billion copper mine. In 2001, China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a geo-political grouping aimed at improving economic and political relations with Russia and other Central Asian nations - as well as a vehicle for Beijing to quash support for separatists in its restive Xinjiang province, whose Muslim Uighurs share ethnic ties with Central Asia's Turkic populations. The SCO - which is set to convene at a summit in
Yekaterinaburg, Russia this week - also declared in 2005 that there must be a timeline for withdrawing all U.S. military bases in Central Asia, a clear sign of Beijing and Moscow's intent to limit U.S. influence. "Russia and China are both interested in maintaining the status quo," says Sean Roberts, a Central Asia expert at George Washington University. See pictures of Chinese investment in Africa.

That translates into a somewhat depressing reality for the over 50 million people living in the region. The world's "freedom rankings" compiled by Freedom House, a Washington D.C.-based human rights NGO, place all five of the post-Soviet 'Stans near the bottom. Independent media is almost non-existent. Human rights activists are frequently detained and tortured, and many others live in exile. Even in Kyrgyzstan, where a so-called "velvet" revolution toppled the ruling president in 2005, the subsequent government has done little to distinguish itself from the past. "Central Asians tolerate an awful lot," says Roberts. "They've inherited a mentality from the Soviet days where they don't necessarily believe in politics, or have faith that turning over the government yields a lot of results."

Yet they are hardly isolated from global events: the impact of the worldwide recession is pushing some Central Asian societies to the brink. Tajikistan, like other poor Central Asian nations, has over the years seen many of its able-bodied men leave to work in the more prosperous cities of Russia and oil-rich Kazakhstan - at least a tenth of the Tajik population of 7 million is migrant labor. Remittances sent home comprise some 40% of the country's total GDP, according to UN figures, and account for only slightly less in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Now, with the collapse of the Russian economy and the drying up of its construction boom, tens of thousands are returning to rugged homelands that offer few opportunities and to families that depended on their labor abroad. Observers in Tajikistan tell of depressed village after village where groups of unemployed men amble around. The situation "is a potential time bomb," says the International Crisis Group, a
Brussels-based think-tank, in a report earlier this year that labeled the country "on the road to failure."

Analysts fear that the deteriorating economic climate, a legacy of ineffectual governance, and an increasingly frustrated population may feed into the designs of established militant groups in the region. The Ferghana Valley, the most densely populated pocket of Central Asia, straddles the Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz borders, and is home to the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a State Department listed terror organization. Militants are known to slip easily across the porous 1,300 km boundary between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which is also a chief thoroughfare for Afghan opium into the markets of the West. According to Pakistani media, the IMU has helped contribute some 4,000 Uzbek and Tajik fighters to the Taliban forces warring with Islamabad.

The specter of an Islamist threat has often worked in favor of the region's governments. After 9/11, U.S. Central Asian strategy was dictated largely by the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Uzbekistan, ruled its entire independent life by the iron-fisted Islam Karimov, was brought into the fold as a staging ground for American operations in Afghanistan, as well as a willing accomplice in the renditions of suspected terrorists. That cozy partnership ended in 2005 when the Uzbek army gunned down hundreds of civilians protesting for reform in the Ferghana Valley under the pretense that it was curbing an Islamist revolt. U.S. and European condemnation only led the government to turn to Moscow's embrace and throw out numerous international NGOs and foreign aid agencies. The country's dissidents receded further into the margins; the more pronounced opposition now tends to be radical and violent. "Islamic militancy here," says McGlinchey, "has
almost always more to do with the oppressiveness of the local governments than some kind of trans-national religious calling."

With the anticipated loss of Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan, the U.S. has again turned to Karimov's Uzbekistan for logistical assistance. Central Asia watchers in the U.S. say that part of the difficulty Washington now faces in the region stems from its own short-sightedness in engaging governments there. "The U.S. approach was one-dimensional," says Mankoff of the Council on Foreign Relations. "A lot of attention has been paid to cooperating with military and security forces at the expense of a broader relationship." The Obama administration has no dedicated Central Asia envoy nor is it willing to pursue a strong agenda for change and reform at the risk of provoking Moscow. "Many think it's a battle not worth fighting," says Roberts.

Events may soon outpace that calculus, given the alarming collapse of the region's economies and spikes in militant violence. It's unclear, though, what a beefed-up American role in the region could look like, and whether it would be in concert - or at odds - with Moscow or Beijing. Headlines in the international press tout the advent of the new "Great Game" in a region that for centuries has been at the whim of larger forces. Not many locals are that interested, though. "We waited and hoped for democratic change after the influence of America," says Umida Niyazova, a journalist and prominent Uzbek activist living in exile in Germany. "But the years since have only brought more instability."

Eating Meat Is Not Natural

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Eating meat is a relatively recent phenomenon in human evolution. And our bodies have never adapted to it.

Kathy Freston
June 15, 2009 - AlterNet

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Going through the reader feedback on some of my recent articles, I noticed the frequently stated notion that eating meat was an essential step in human evolution. While this notion may comfort the meat industry, it's simply not true, scientifically.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of The China Study (please check out the link), explains that in fact, we only recently (historically speaking) began eating meat, and that the inclusion of meat in our diet came well after we became who we are today. He explains that "the birth of agriculture only started about 10,000 years ago at a time when it became considerably more convenient to herd animals. This is not nearly as long as the time [that] fashioned our basic biochemical functionality (at least tens of millions of years) and which functionality depends on the nutrient composition of plant-based foods."

That jibes with what Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine President Dr. Neal Barnard says in his book, The Power of Your Plate, in which he explains that "early humans had diets very much like other great apes, which is to say a largely plant-based diet, drawing on foods we can pick with our hands. Research suggests that meat-eating probably began by scavenging -- eating the leftovers that carnivores had left behind. However, our bodies have never adapted to it. To this day, meat-eaters have a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other problems."

There is no more authoritative source on anthropological issues than paleontologist Dr. Richard Leakey, who explains what anyone who has taken an introductory physiology course might have discerned intuitively -- that humans are herbivores. Leakey notes that "[y]ou can't tear flesh by hand, you can't tear hide by hand ... We wouldn't have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines" (although we have teeth that are called "canines," they bear little resemblance to the canines of carnivores).

In fact, our hands are perfect for grabbing and picking fruits and vegetables. Similarly, like the intestines of other herbivores, ours are very long (carnivores have short intestines so they can quickly get rid of all that rotting flesh they eat). We don't have sharp claws to seize and hold down prey. And most of us (hopefully) lack the instinct that would drive us to chase and then kill animals and devour their raw carcasses. Dr. Milton Mills builds on these points and offers dozens more in his essay, "A Comparative Anatomy of Eating."

The point is this: Thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, we may have needed a bit of meat in our diets in times of scarcity, but we don't need it now. Says Dr. William C. Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, "Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

Sure, most of us are "behavioral omnivores" -- that is, we eat meat, so that defines us as omnivorous. But our evolution and physiology are herbivorous, and ample science proves that when we choose to eat meat, that causes problems, from decreased energy and a need for more sleep up to increased risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Old habits die hard, and it's convenient for people who like to eat meat to think that there is evidence to support their belief that eating meat is "natural" or the cause of our evolution. For many years, I too, clung to the idea that meat and dairy were good for me; I realize now that I was probably comforted to have justification for my continued attachment to the traditions I grew up with.

But in fact top nutritional and anthropological scientists from the most reputable institutions imaginable say categorically that humans are natural herbivores, and that we will be healthier today if we stick with our herbivorous roots. It may be inconvenient, but it alas, it is the truth.

Link:

http://www.alternet.org/story/140643/eating_meat_is_not_natural/

EPA Withholds Locations of 'High Hazard' Coal Ash Sites

Under the stacks of TVA's Kingston coal-fired power plant, the ash spill cleanup continues. (Photo courtesy TVA)

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Public Not Allowed to Know Location of Hazardous Coal Ash Sites

June 14, 2009 - Environmental News Servivce

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There are 44 coal combustion waste sites nationwide that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified as "high hazard," but the agency cannot make the locations of these hazardous sites public, Senator Barbara Boxer told reporters today. The California senator chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees the federal environmental agency.

In the aftermath of last December's spill of more than a billion gallons of coal ash waste at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston coal-fired power plant, the U.S. EPA conducted inspections of the nation's coal combustion waste sites.

Agency inspectors identified several hundred coal ash piles across the country including 44 sites that pose a "high hazard." These sites are located in such a way that if the coal ash ponds were to fail, they would pose a threat to people living nearby.

But, Senator Boxer said, "the EPA, after consulting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security, has indicated that they cannot make the list of 'high hazard' sites public."

"If these sites are so hazardous and if the neighborhoods nearby could be harmed irreparably, then I believe it is essential to let people know," Boxer said. "In that way, they can press their local authorities who have responsibility for their safety to act now to make the sites safer."

"There is a huge muzzle on me and on my staff, and the only people I can tell about this are the senators whose states are impacted," said Boxer. "We cannot talk to any of their staffs. This is unacceptable. The committee is going to continue hearings into this matter."

Today, Senator Boxer sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the EPA seeking further information on whether the public disclosure of coal ash waste sites is consistent with the treatment of other hazardous sites.

"One of the lessons we all learned from the TVA spill is that a close look at these facilities is extremely important, and we cannot rely on general assurances that these sites are safe," the senator said. "That is why I am pleased that on-the-ground inspections have begun."

At 1:00 am on December 22, 2008, a retaining wall failed on an 84-acre surface impoundment holding a half century's worth of coal ash at the TVA's Kingston power plant about 35 miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee, at the junction of the Emory and Clinch Rivers.

More than one billion gallons of coal ash "rushed down the valley like a wave," Boxer said. Ash covered nearly 400 acres, destroying three homes and damaging a dozen others. No one was injured.

"The volume of ash and water was 100 times greater than the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster," Boxer said today. "The cost of cleaning up that spill has been estimated at over a billion dollars."

After the devastating Kingston spill, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held an oversight hearing to better understand this incident and how to avoid similar disasters in the future.

"When EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson came before our committee for her confirmation hearing a week later, she committed to move immediately to address the threat posed by coal ash waste," Boxer said today, expressing confidence Jackson would act to regulate coal combustion waste sites.

"Coal combustion waste is subject to very limited regulation," Boxer said. "In fact, there are stronger protections for household garbage than for coal ash across the country."

The EPA has the authority to regulate coal ash, which can contain toxic substances such as arsenic, selenium, lead, cadmium and chromium.

"I do have great confidence in Administrator Jackson's commitment to move forward with regulations," said the senator. "I hope and expect we will have these regulations by the end of this year."

At the site of the Kingston coal ash spill, cleanup continues. On May 11, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency that is the nation's largest public power provider, and the EPA signed an agreement by which TVA recognizes EPA's role and specialized expertise in responding to large-scale environmental clean-ups.

While TVA will retain its status as a lead federal agency, EPA will approve all work plans and schedules going forward.

"This agreement will continue the collaborative work between EPA, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and TVA, using EPA's expertise under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act," said TVA Senior Vice President of Office of Environment and Research Anda Ray.

"All of the agencies involved have a common goal, to meet the nation's highest standards for effectiveness, transparency, and public involvement," said Ray.

Transparency is exactly what Senator Boxer is after. The Environment and Public Works Committee will continue its ongoing investigation of coal ash waste sites and Boxer announced plans to conduct additional hearings on the 44 "high hazard" sites with the intention of learning why their locations are being withheld from the public.

Stop Wasting on the Military

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Amitabh Pal
June 14, 2009 - The Progressive

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The global arms madness continues.

A new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (one of my favorite think tanks) confirms that worldwide military expenditure is again on the up and up, with spending having increased by 4 percent in 2008.

"All regions and subregions have seen significant increases since 1999, except for Western and Central Europe," says the report (available at www.sipri.org).

The United States loomed large over all other countries, with a whopping $607 billion swallowed up by the military in 2008, nearly 10 percent more than the previous year. And SIPRI is being very conservative here, because the total U.S. expenditure was roughly $1 trillion when you add military-related costs that are not in the Pentagon budget. (See my column)

Sadly, the change of Administration has not reversed the trend. The Obama Administration has asked for $663 billion for the military for fiscal year 2010, including supplemental funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Although some wasteful big-ticket boondoggles have been cut and the budget is more transparently honest, the Pentagon is still being showered with money, even in our current parlous economic condition. Plus, President Obama has appealed for an additional $83.4 billion for fiscal year 2009 for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bizarrely enough, some of the U.S. media coverage of the SIPRI report has been focused on the faster increase in Chinese military spending. Duh: It's called playing catch up. The United States accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and China's double-digit increase was only slightly more than that of the United States. The U.S.-China rivalry is a strategic game about who can project power most forcefully. And, here, the United States has, by far, the upper hand.

The section of the SIPRI report that gave me the biggest heartburn was the one on international arms transfers. The United States, Russia, Germany, France and United Kingdom continued their gleeful dominance of the arms racket, while China and India, oblivious to the needs of their people, were the biggest importers of weapons.

"Together [the top five arms exporters] accounted for 79 per cent of the volume of exports for 2004–2008," SIPRI states. "They have been the top five suppliers since the end of the cold war and have accounted for at least three-quarters of all exports annually."

Boeing, BAE Systems (British), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon were the largest producers of death, with arms profits for Boeing itself topping $4 billion. U.S. companies have almost a monopoly on the production of weapons in the big leagues, with almost two-thirds of the total arms manufactures of the top 100 companies being U.S. based.

Perhaps my all-time favorite quotation is by General Dwight David Eisenhower. (I even have a T-shirt with the first sentence printed on it.):

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

This is such a simple, graspable truth that it penetrated the consciousness of even a career military man like Ike. What will it take for the current crop of leaders around the world to comprehend it?

GAO: No problem smuggling secret weapons out of US

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Daniel Tencer
June 13, 2009 - Raw Story

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You've got to hand it to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — they've got initiative.

When the government agency — which has for years been holding successive administrations' feet to the fire over deficit spending and other management issues — was tasked with investigating how secure America's sensitive technologies are, it set up a dummy corporation to buy American weapons and see if it could ship them to countries known as transit points for smuggling weapons.

What they managed to smuggle out of the United States was astounding: Triggers for nuclear bombs; microchips for smart missiles; components for improvised explosives; even current-issue U.S. Army body armor.

And the method they used to do it was brilliant in its simplicity: To avoid export restrictions, they set up their dummy corporation inside the United States. Then, once in possession of the equipment, they shipped it overseas.

From Geopolitical Monitor:

Since most export-restricted technologies are legal to purchase in the U.S., the front company was able to purchase and export restricted technologies to states known to serve as terrorist transshipment points.

This loophole represents a serious threat to non-proliferation efforts as well as a boon to criminal and terrorist networks. According to the Department of Justice, attempts by foreign states and terrorist networks to acquire U.S. arms and technology occur on a daily basis.
Geopolitical Monitor's report links a recent spike in the quantity and quality of Afghan insurgents' weapons to the ease with which advanced American weaponry is moving around the globe.

But the report also points to "state actors" who are taking advantage of the situation. In 2006, the report mentions, a US company was fined $15 million for sending weapons microchips to China, and in 2007, one person was jailed for trying to smuggle smart bomb parts into China.

The report concludes: "The real legacy from export control loopholes will come in the form of an altered military balance between the U.S. and emerging powers such as China."

Wired for War

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The coming robot wars

Book Review by David Isenberg
Wired for War by P W Singer
Jun 13, 2009 - Asia Times

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If you want to understand why Peter Singer's latest book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, is a tour de force, just consider some headlines from the past month.

"Study Urges Using Neuroscience to Improve Soldiers' Performance"

"Pentagon Joins CIA's [United States Central Intelligence Agency] Drone War on Pakistan"

"Mullen: Drones Future Stalwart of US Force"

"America's New Air Force"

"Engineers at the Mojave Desert base are developing a miniature missile that can be launched from a robotic plane against terrorist targets."

"In future, machines could decide when to fire weapons"

The most fascinating thing about them is not that they are appearing only months after the book's release, though that will undoubtedly help boost sales. It is that every one of those headlines reflects an aspect of the issue, each of which has its own chapter in the book. They serve as testimonials to the prodigious amount of research and serious reflection on the issue that Singer has done.

It bears mentioning that Singer, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC Brookings Institute must be making many other scholars gnash their teeth in envy. He is either the luckiest academic on the face of the planet or has an unparalleled sense of coming military trends. If he could discern economic futures as well as he does with military ones he would be giving advice to Warren Buffett and George Soros.

His 2003 book, Corporate Warriors, examining the realm of private military and security contractors, came out less than six months after the US invasion of Iraq. That book became the gold standard for academic writing and media reporting on the issue. It was also the work which inspired the writing of countless other dissertations and theses on the subject. Although the subject had been covered by others, including myself, before then, his book made firms like Blackwater and Halliburton household words. To this day one can't read a paper on the subject without seeing a discussion of Singer's "typology" of the different types of private military contractors.

That book's popularity was all the more impressive, considering it was his former PhD dissertation. A type of writing normally known for giving one bleary eyes and splitting headaches.

After that he wrote a well received book on child soldiers.

Fortunately, Singer has improved even more as a writer. Stylistically he has lightened up. His copious research is lightened by numerous pop culture references, much of it understandably drawn from science fiction, which is quite understandable, considering his subject is robots. That means references to the like of H G Wells and Jules Verne to Star Trek, Terminator movies, and, of course, Isaac Asimov. And almost all of them are highly informative and amusing. How many people knew that Wells predicted the advent of the atomic bomb?

Despite the effort to appeal to a broader audience this is not a casual book. It is a very serious book about the future of one of humanities oldest activities, war. And while war and conflict has long been a staple of science fiction the problem, as Singer notes, is that science fiction is turning into science reality. He notes the famous quote by the late English physicist and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and gave us HAL, the malevolent supercomputer (think the artificial intelligence SkyNet from the Terminator movies) that: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

While robots are not magic, the technologies that are on the battlefields today, not to mention those on the drawing boards, are at the limits of human imagination. And perhaps beyond the limits of contemporary ethical and moral limits on the use of force and rules of war.

Singer has very methodically and dispassionately looked at the past and present and has peered, on the basis of future weapons contracts, peered into the future. What has he seen? The answer is, though he does not put it this way himself is, to quote the tag line from one sci-fi movie classic (The Fly, 1986) is that we should "Be afraid ... Be very afraid."

Right at the outset, in his author's note, Singer makes some critical points as to why this subject is important. Given that many people might think this is just another book about "gee whiz" technologies on the battlefield they are worth noting.

First, "We embrace war but don't like to look to its future, including now one of the most fundamental changes ever in war."

Second, "While we accept change in other realms, we resist trying to research and understand change in the study of war. For example, the very real fear about what the environment will look like as far away as 2050 has driven individuals, governments and companies alike to begin (belatedly) changing their practices. Yet we seem willing to stay oblivious to the changes that will come well before then for war, even though, just like the changes in global climate, we can already see the outlines of the transformation under way."

Some of what Singer writes about has been known for years, at least for those who follow military technology issues. These include PackBots, used for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), made by iRobot, the same firm that produced Roombas, the robotic vacuum cleaner. PackBots can also be equipped with a shotgun. So much for Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which says robots shall do no harm.

Another firm, Foster-Miller, produced the Talon, a ground robot which comes in EOD, reconnaissance, and hazardous material versions. Its true lethal weapon claim to fame, however, is its SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System) version. This is the military version of a Transformer toy; able to carry almost any weapon less than 300 pounds, from automatic rifles and machine guns to grenade launchers and anti-tank rocket launchers.

But is not just quantitative firepower that is remarkable; it is the accuracy and immunity to battlefield chaos. Not being affected by emotional stresses, every weapon it carries is capable of pinpoint precision, turning it into the equivalent of a sniper's rifle.

The arming of a system likes SWORDS vastly increases the range of combat military duties it can do, from street patrols and sniping to urban warfare. Considering it can drive through snow or even underwater to a depth of 100 meters feet that means it could show up in the most unexpected places.

But lethal weapons are not the only kind that robots are being equipped with. There is also ongoing work to equip robots with incapacitating chemical, acoustic, and directed energy weapons (think Star Trek phasers), and lasers.

Ground robots can come in all shapes and sizes. The MARCBOT (Multi-Function Agile Remote Controlled Robot) is essentially a toy car with a video camera. But it has been used to carry anti-personnel mines to kill insurgents in Iraq.

As of last year there were 22 different ground robot systems, over 12,000 in all, operating in Iraq. But robots aren't just for the army. They operate on the air and sea also.

Most people today are familiar with the Predator, a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) or drone, which can fly for a day and reach an attitude of 26,000 feet. Their cost of US$4.5 million each is miniscule compared to average cost of today's fighter or bomber aircraft. More importantly, they can stand stresses that human pilots cannot. Thus, the trend is that pilots will be used less and less.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks Predators were armed, both by the CIA and the US military with Hellfire missiles, and have carried out thousands of missions, and at least hundreds of armed attacks.

Aside from the predator there is its bigger brother, Global Hawk, which can stay in the hour for up to 35 hours and reach an altitude of 65,000 feet.

Systems like these are actually piloted by human controllers working back in the United States. One hour they might be at work firing a missile from a Predator and the next back home eating dinner with the family. That has interesting, to say the least, implications for military professionalism and the warrior ethic.

There are many other smaller aerial systems, used for reconnaissance, such as the Raven, Shadow and Wasp. Last year, according to Singer, there 5,331 drones in the US military inventory, almost double the number of manned planes.

Drones are also being used domestically for homeland security and for policing the border with Mexico.

At sea there is REMUS (Remote Environmental Monitoring Unit) used for clearing mines from waterways.

In short, increasingly the US military will rely on robots. Even former president George W Bush acknowledged that. "Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles. We're entering an era in which unmanned vehicles of all kinds will take on greater importance - in space, on land, in the air, and at sea." To borrow from the world of fashion, military robots are the new black.

All that just comes from the introductory overview. That is followed by chapters on the history of robots from ancient times to the end of the 20th century, fundamentals of robotics, and exponential change in technological trends.

In chapter five, things become even more intriguing, and ominous, as Singer looks at the robots of the future, now on the drawing board. SWORDS is scheduled to be replaced by MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System). Aside from more powerful weapons, a green laser "dazzler" and tear gas it will have a loudspeaker to warn insurgents that "resistance is futile".

And, straight out of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, is the REV (Robotic Extraction Vehicle) which will be able to perform complex surgeries on wounded soldiers. Ironically, many of these systems are supposed to come together in the US Army's Future Combat Systems program, parts of which were recently cancelled after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested cutting the program's ground vehicle and giant cannon components. He argued that they would not be as useful in the military's fights against insurgencies in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan.

At sea there are both unmanned surface and underwater vehicles. Already there is the Spartan Scout, a 30 foot robotic speedboat, packing a .50-caliber machine gun. Some of the underwater vehicles mimic marine life, like the Robo-lobster, which detects and destroys mines close to shore.

But it is in the air that the military robot future is advancing the quickest. Already, the Reaper, a successor to the Predator, that is four times bigger and nine times more powerful, is deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other drones are being developed for electronic warfare, submarine hunting, and even air-to-air combat.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) plans to field a VULTURE (Very-high-altitude, Ultra-endurance, Loitering Theater Unmanned Reconnaissance Element) drone, which it hopes will be able to stay aloft for five years at a time. People may recall that when the original Stark Trek series aired back in the 1960s the USS Enterprise was on a five-year mission.

Lockheed Martin is pitching a robotic High Altitude Airship 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp. Such an airship could be parked in the air for years and serve as spy satellite or even airstrip for other planes and drones (like the carrier in Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow).

There are also miniature drones that can eavesdrop into windows or climb up walls and pipes. Someday such systems may reach the nano scale, working at the molecular level, resulting in tiny missiles or nanobots destroying a target from the inside out.

Singer writes that the air force sees at least 45% of its future large bomber fleet being able to operate without humans abroad.

And for fighter jocks, like the ones Tom Cruise played in Top Gun, the news is grim. Already there UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles), such as Boeing's X-45 or Northrup Grumman's X-47, which can land on an aircraft carrier. The X-45 was, in fact, so threatening to the US Air Force's newest manned fighter planes, F-222 and F-35, that the X-45 was canceled, although some believe it still lives on in the classified "black" budget.

Robot systems are also being envisioned for use in space. The X-41 Common Aero Vehicle is a cross between an intercontinental ballistic missile and the space shuttle. It would give the United States the ability to crush someone anywhere in the world on 30 minutes notice.

And, as Singer points out, given the increasing number of private companies who are developing space travel capabilities the day may come when they have the ability to conduct military operations on their own. At that point the current private security contractors will have to change their acronym to private space contractors.

All of this is fascinating, as Spock would say, but it poses profound implications for human control over war. Policymakers always like to toss off sound bites about humans being "in the loop" but there is no reason to think that is always true at present and far more reason to think it will be far less so in the future. In fact we started removing men from the loop in World War 2 with the Norden bombsight and the gap has been growing steadily since. As Singer notes, it is lip service, not reality.

Already we have systems like the Aegis Defense system aboard US Navy warships which can operate in an autonomous mode, not needing human authorization to fire. And the sheer amount of sensor data that robotic systems generate will certainly be beyond the ability of human operators to assimilate, no matter how enhanced they are with neural implants or other technology.

Not to mention that the imperatives of warfare are going to make robot autonomy inevitable, if only because once a robot is fired at it is going to need to be able to fire back, without waiting for human approval.

By the way, that Terminator-like humanoid robot on the battlefield future is not far off. Scientists predict 2020 while soldiers predict 2025.

All of this raises interesting questions. Will robots be vulnerable in the future? Can their communications links and operating systems be hacked? And, if so, what then?

Or looking at Iraq and Afghanistan are robot systems really going to be effective in fighting insurgencies, where cultural awareness is as important as destructive power.

And, as the United States increasingly relies on robots what happens when other states and non-state actors acquire their own? Already UAVs are widely traded around the world. And, in Iraq, insurgents have captured US robots and used them back against US soldiers.

In an e-mail Singer wrote this is:

Very much a growing field. The Predator and new Reaper variant for instance is being bought by pretty much half of North Atlantic Treaty Organization [nations]. Turkey just put in to buy to use against Kurds for instance.

So what happens when other countries which are even more advanced in electronics and robotics, like Japan, start investing in military robotics?

As Singer notes the US is not the only player in this. And, as an early adopter, the US may well be surpassed by other countries which piggyback off US developments.

Because so much of robotic development is based on open source information their increased use may well hasten the global redistribution of power; not exactly the result that those hoping the use of military robots will allow continued US military hegemony.

And how does the US military field enough scientifically and technologically adept personnel, when it has trouble attracting sufficient high school graduates, which was the case until the recent recession eased its recruiting problems.

These are just a few of the questions Singer explores and it takes you barely past the halfway point.

It is worth remembering that in the history of military technologies those who have wanted to develop something simply because they can have always won over those who questioned whether it should be developed.

Singer makes it quite clear that the same is occurring with military robotics. If one walks into a lab where such systems are being developed one is going to be greeted with a shrug or a yawn. Right now, such systems are being developed in large part because doing so is "freaking cool".

Currently there is already a dangerous divide between the American public and its military. What happens when the fighting is increasingly done by robots operated by "cubicle warriors"? Will policymakers find it even easier to go to war?

Putting all other questions aside, Singer believes that Murphy's Law "Anything that can go wrong, will - at the worst possible moment" also applies to robots.

Given the stakes, that alone is sufficient reason to be having a global debate about the subject. The fact that we are not is itself frightening.

But for anyone interesting in having the debate Singer's book is a must-read.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P W Singer, Penguin Press, 2009. ISBN-10: 1594201986. Price US$29.95, 512 pages.

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David Isenberg is a researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. He is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, a US Navy veteran, and the author of a new book, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq.

TOON

Death Talkers

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Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

    - "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Report, 07 April 2009

William Rivers Pitt
June 12, 2009 - TruthOut

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The much-maligned DHS report on the rise of right-wing extremism in America, released last April by Secretary Napolitano to conservative cries of outrage, appears to have been pretty much on the button.

Three days before the report was made public, three Pittsburgh police officers were shot to death by a right-wing gun-ownership extremist who believed President Obama was coming for his guns. One month after the report was made public, an anti-choice zealot named Scott Roeder gunned down Dr. George Tiller in the vestibule of Tiller's church in Kansas while his wife sang in the choir. On Wednesday, a security guard was shot and killed at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC, by James W. von Brunn, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who filled pages on his blog with screeds about a Jewish world conspiracy and, you guessed it, Obama's so-called "false" birth certificate.

Where is all this fear, hatred and violence gaining its inspiration? I can think of a few examples.

Last March, Fox News personality Sean Hannity ran a poll on his web site asking readers what kind of revolution they'd prefer: military coup, armed rebellion or war for secession? "#3 seems most realistic," opined Hannity, "since it does present an opportunity for more homogeneous states to sort of capitalize on their homogeneity. However, it would likely lead to mass migrations of the minority partisans out of the rebel states. Of course, that may be fine with those states. Yet it seems that the ultimate paradox in any rebellion for freedom from within is that the ultimate goal is to impose the will of the rebels on everyone else through force. It seems the very foundation of representative democracy is ****tered if we accept that we exchange the power of ideas for the power of the sword upon each other. Nevertheless, I am still very interested in your own preferred form of revolt."

A month later, conservative radio host Glenn Beck accused President Obama of lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell research in order to begin genetic development of a new master race. "So here you have Barack Obama," said Beck, "going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing - remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it was science. Let's put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don't we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it! And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don't know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to
wake up."

Newt Gingrich claimed recently the United States is surrounded by "paganism." Mike Huckabee claimed recently the California Appeals Court decision to uphold the Prop. 8 ban on same-sex marriage was "a miracle from God's hands." Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has accused the Obama administration of actively seeking to destroy the country by aiding terrorism and embracing socialism. The list goes on.

A pertinent section of the April DHS report:

  Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool. Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.

  Historically, domestic rightwing extremists have feared, predicted, and anticipated a cataclysmic economic collapse in the United States. Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and "end times" prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons. These teachings also have been linked with the radicalization of domestic extremist individuals and groups in the past, such as violent Christian Identity organizations and extremist members of the militia
movement.

Where is all the fear and violence gaining inspiration? The same places it has been for a while now. Those right-wing media people keep talking, and people keep getting killed. Coincidence?

Ha.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book is, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation."

Sarah Palin's Dysfunctional Organization May Be Her Undoing

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Half-Baked Alaska

Kathleen Parker
June 10, 2009

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Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and GOP "It" girl, can warm up the Republican base like a hot toddy in a duck blind. But further inside the party organization, the air is a little nippy.

Everyone seems to have a Sarah Palin story of ignored calls, mishandled invitations or unanswered e-mail. Disorganized is how one might charitably describe the Palin operation.

"Basically, it's just rude," says one political operative who is a Palin fan. "They've been running the great snub machine. That's the reason the boys in the Republican Party are unhappy with her."

That unhappiness has been building gradually in the past seven months, and it was on full display this week as the party faithful gathered for a fundraising dinner at which Palin originally was invited to speak. She was later uninvited, and Newt Gingrich took her place.

Watching the dinner-speaker spectacle develop, then unravel, then redevelop (Will she or won't she speak/attend?) felt like watching a middle-school romance in which a friend tells another friend that so-and-so has a crush on you-know-who, but don't tell anybody. A little silly, in other words. And embarrassing.

The "tick-tock" of what happened is a byzantine exercise in blame-shifting. Briefly, someone in Palin's "organization" accepted the original invitation in March, whereupon the dinner hosts issued a press release announcing that Palin would be the keynote speaker.

Yay!

But then, no, Palin had not accepted. In fact, the press release was the first she'd heard of it. The official story suddenly became that SarahPAC had jumped the gun and that Palin wasn't sure she could make the event. Enter Newt Gingrich. Then last week, so-and-so said she'd like to come, but you-know-who said, "We like someone else now."

There's more -- and stories vary -- but a common theme emerges: Seven months after the election, Palin still can't shoot straight. Unless something changes dramatically and soon, "Missed Opportunity" should be the title of her memoir.

By the time Palin returned to Alaska last fall, her popularity and fundraising ability were second only to Barack Obama's. Instantly, she was drowning in speaking requests. Boxes and boxes of invitations stacked up  and went unprocessed.

Without any effort on her part, 75,000 to 80,000 fans around the country organized pro-Palin groups. Said a frustrated Palin promoter: "All she had to do for those 75,000 people was hold an electronic town hall, and she couldn't get around to it."

Of course, it's not that Palin has nothing else to do. But her problem is the same as it was a year ago. She isn't ready. For whatever reason -- skittishness, distrust or, quite possibly, executive weakness -- Palin has been unable to make the transition from Alaska politics to the Big Game Hunt of the national arena.

Plenty of experienced people have tried to help. Veteran operatives created SarahPAC to raise money for staff to at least open mail and return phone calls. It was a Kevin Costner field of dreams: Create the Web site, and they came, all right. The PAC raised $400,000 in its first month without so much as asking.

What happened next?

Nothing.

"We couldn't get them to decide on office space," says my source. "You couldn't get them to be professional."

Palin's fiercely independent streak is part of her charm but also may be her undoing. It's one thing to campaign on an anti-inside-the-Beltway platform. But to play in the big leagues, you need people who know what they're doing.

You don't flirt and say "yes," and then say "no," and then say "maybe," and then show up expecting a bouquet. The tease is a risky business. Palin did get to walk across the stage with Gingrich -- to appreciative applause and a few whistles -- but she wasn't allowed to talk. Something about upstaging Gingrich.

Palin also managed to get in a few words during an interview with Fox's Sean Hannity, which aired Monday night during the fundraising dinner. But anyone listening to both Gingrich and Palin would find preemption concerns ludicrous. Palin may be more fun to watch, but Gingrich dominates on the battlefield of ideas.

Whether Palin can rally her resources by 2012 remains in serious doubt, even among her fans. Said yet another Palin admirer: "The problem is, she has had months to get it together and they haven't. They could have had an excellent national team and state team working seamlessly."

But they didn't.

More ’sickening’ truths about torture soon to be revealed

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David Edwards and Muriel Kane
June 11, 2009 - Raw Story

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A crucial CIA Inspector General's report from May 2004 is expected to reveal some long-hidden truths about the Bush administration's use of torture.

According to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "This report is sort of the big kahuna in terms of what we have been waiting to see from the government's own files on torture. That report, which is long and has been described by people who have seen it as 'sickening,' apparently stopped the torture program in its tracks."

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently warned in a speech on the floor of the Senate that almost everything we think we know about the Bush administration's torture program is wrong.

"There has been a campaign of falsehood about this whole sorry episode," Whitehouse stated. "We've been misled about nearly every aspect of this program. … Measured against the information I've been able to get access to, the storyline that we have been led to believe … is false in every one of its dimensions."

Maddow then asked Newsweek's Michael Isikoff whether the report will fill in the mission information to which Whitehouse referred.

"We don't know how complete the disclosures are going to be," Isikoff cautioned. "Will we see the complete unredacted report? That is the key question here."

"There are three key questions to look for," Isikoff explained. "Were there harsh interrogations that began before the … legal authorizations? … Did they go beyond what was authorized? … Did it go beyond just finding out about possible plots against the United States to provide other information, such as supplying possible evidence that could be used to justify the war in Iraq?"

Isikoff noted that there are footnotes in the torture memos already released which "quote from the Inspector General's report that what was actually done went beyond what was authorized — that how waterboarding was conducted, the frequency with which it was conducted, and the manner in which it was conducted was beyond what the CIA told the Justice Department it was going to do when the Justice Department authorized the technique."

Isikoff emphasized, however, that almost none of this information is being released voluntarily. It's being slowly pried out through Freedom of Information Act requests, most of them filed by the ACLU, and "it's become trench warfare — document by document."

"The CIA and the intelligence community has pushed back hard," Isikoff stressed. "People in the intelligence community never wanted this stuff out to begin with."

This video is from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast June 10, 2009:

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/11/maddow-more-sickening/

Cheney still in crosshairs of Senate Intelligence probe

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John Byrne
June 10, 2009 - Raw Story

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney isn't out of the woods yet for his role in briefing Congress on the Bush Administration's secretive harsh interrogation program.

In a carefully worded statement to Mother Jones' David Corn for an article Wednesday, a spokesman for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein indicated that the conduct of individuals who briefed Congressmembers on the CIA's interrogation program is under review.

"The Senate intelligence committee's study includes an examination of how the committee was briefed on the CIA's detention and interrogation program," Phil LaVelle, a Feinstein spokesperson, was quoted as saying. "This includes briefings of committee leadership, and is not limited by who conducted the briefing."

The Intelligence Committee's probe has been ongoing — quietly — since March.

But "there have been no public hearings," Corn writes. "In fact, Feinstein has made no commitment to hold hearings on this subject or to release a public report when the investigation is completed. The committee said in March that its investigation would take about a year.

"The committee has restricted this part of its review and is not examining briefings provided to other committees–such as the House intelligence committee–according to a congressional source familiar with the probe." he adds. "But given that Cheney briefed two senior members of the Senate intelligence panel, the committee can review what Cheney told Roberts and Rockefeller about the interrogation program and evaluate whether his assertions were supported by the facts. That is, the Cheney briefing is fair game for the Senate investigators.

Feinstein's spokesman declined to comment on whether the committee was investigating the 2005 briefing Cheney gave Senate Intelligence Committee members.

"The committee is not confirming or denying any specific aspects of its inquiry, including the witnesses it has or will be interviewing," Corn avers.