Making 'Duck Soup' Out of 2009

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
As 2008 ends and this New Year begins, with all its fledgling promise despite turmoil and crisis, it's also that time when the media offers its lists of ten best or worst this and that of the previous year, an exercise that simultaneously entertains and infuriates.
Forced at knifepoint to make such lists, at least ours would be a little different. One would be favorite headlines of the year from The Onion, the hilarious weekly that doesn't bill itself as "America's finest news source" for nothing. If you can read it without laughing, you probably have been paying too much attention to your 401K.
Some of those we liked best:
$700 BILLION BAILOUT CELEBRATED WITH LAVISH $800 BILLION EXECUTIVE PARTY
GM COVERED WITH GIANT TARP UNTIL IT HAS MONEY TO WORK ON CARS AGAIN
AMERICAN AIRLINES NOW CHARGING FEES TO NON-PASSENGERS
CHINA RECALLS EVERYTHING
HOUSING CRISIS VINDICATES GUY WHO STILL LIVES WITH PARENTS
FACTUAL ERROR FOUND ON INTERNET.
Of course, the problem The Onion's editors have is that reality too often resembles parody. Take the story of Chip Saltsman, the guy campaigning to be chairman of the Republican National Committee by promoting himself with a CD featuring a song called, "Barack, the Magic Negro." That ditty, you'll recall, was made famous on Rush Limbaugh's minstrel show, as sung by an Al Sharpton impersonator. Even The Onion couldn't come up with that one.
Or the claim by Governor Rod Blagojevich that those wiretaps actually reveal how hard he's been working for the people of Illinois. And the circus that ensued when he tried to appoint Roland Burris, a veteran Illinois politician, to Barack Obama's Senate seat -- the one the governor allegedly was ready to sell just weeks ago to the highest bidder -- and Senate Democrats said, "No."
No? From members of Congress for whom pay-for-play is as casual a game as Tic-Tac-Toe? Look at New York's Senator Charles Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. According to The New York Times, the week after he attended a breakfast of financial high rollers and promised them that Democrats would make sure their $700 billion bailout got through Congress, those same fat cats sent $135,000 in campaign contributions.
Or New York Congressman Charlie Rangel, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, who reversed himself on a tax break for a business called Nabors Industries the same month that company donated $100,000 to a City College school for public service named after -- all together now, class -- Charlie Rangel.
Life imitates satire -- and vice versa. Which brings us to our other unusual list. The best movies of... 1933.
Naturally, the original King Kong is on our list. So are The Invisible Man and 42nd Street. But our number one choice: The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.
Why? Because as we enter this final month of the Bush years, the parallels are remarkable. Sometimes it feels as if we live not only in the United States but also in the sidesplitting state of Freedonia, the imaginary country in which Duck Soup takes place. In 1933, a time much like now of calamity, fraud and peril, the Great Depression gripped America. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just become President and declared a New Deal, while in Germany, Adolph Hitler was named chancellor, the beginning of the Third Reich.
As all of this was taking place, the Marx Brothers -- there were four of them then; Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo -- shot Duck Soup, a comedy that almost inadvertently transcended slapstick, becoming a trenchant send-up of power and vanity and the disastrous consequences of both.
Freedonia is bankrupt and asking for a bailout -- sound familiar? The wealthy Mrs. Teasdale, played by the redoubtable Margaret Dumont, says the only way she'll come up with the money is if the country appoints as its new leader Rufus T. Firefly -- played by Groucho, as only a true clown can play a charlatan. He sings, "The last man nearly ruined this place, he didn't know what to do with it. If you think this country's bad off now, just wait 'til I get through with it."
Cabinet meetings are run with a decorum worthy of contemporary Washington. (Finance Minister: "Here is the Treasury Department's report, sir. I hope you'll find it clear." Groucho: "Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail of it.")
Freedonia's Axis of Evil includes neighboring nation Sylvania, and Groucho/Rufus Firefly handles diplomacy with all the tact of a neo-conservative. In anticipation of a meeting with his rival's ambassador, he says he will offer his hand in friendship. But suppose the ambassador doesn't do the same? "A fine thing that will be," says Firefly. "I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That will add a lot to my prestige, won't it? Me the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador! Who does he think he is? ...Why the cheap ball-pushing swine, he'll never get away with it, I tell you! He'll never get away with it!"
Before you know it, the two countries are at war for no good reason, the rabble-roused, flag-waving public buying in as if taking directions from cable news.
Duck Soup is now seen as one of the great antiwar comedies of all time, right up there with Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (written with Terry Southern and Peter George).
Back in 1933, the world situation was grave and it was hard to hear the laughter over the sounds of civilization collapsing. Our chuckles today compete with the sound of renewed violence in the Middle East, melting glaciers sliding into the sea and champagne glasses shattering on the gold bricks of Wall Street.
Our situation may not be as desperate as the one that faced the first audiences of Duck Soup, who found in darkened theaters some relief from the grim world outside. Our current woes, nonetheless, are real, which maybe is why a little humor is the best antidote. As Beaumarchais, that 18th century playwright who doubled as a politician said, "I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry." This, from a man who managed to survive the French Revolution. So Happy New Year -- but keep your fingers crossed.

Did You Know 200,000 Vets Are Sleeping on the Streets?

By Aaron Glantz, New America Media
Posted on January 3, 2009, Printed on January 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/116721/

SAN FRANCISCO - Roy Lee Brantley shivers in the cold December morning as he waits in line for food outside the Ark of Refuge mission, which sits amid warehouses and artists lofts a stone's throw from the skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco.
Brantley's beard is long, white and unkempt. The African-American man's skin wrinkled beyond his 62 years. He lives in squalor in a dingy residential hotel room with the bathroom down the hall. In some ways, his current situation marks an improvement. "I've slept in parks," he says, "and on the sidewalk. Now at least I have a room."
Like the hundreds of others in line for food, Brantley has worn the military uniform. Most, like Brantley, carry their service IDs and red, white and blue cards from the Department of Veterans Affairs in their wallets or around their necks. In 1967, he deployed to Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army. By the time he left the military five years later, Brantley had attained the rank of sergeant and been decorated for his valor and for the wounds he sustained in combat.
"I risked my life for this democracy and got a Bronze Star," he says. "I shed blood for this country and got the Purple Heart after a mortar blast sent shrapnel into my face and leg. But when I came back home from Vietnam I was having problems. I tried to hurt my wife because she was Filipino. Every time I looked at her I thought I was in Vietnam again. So we broke up."
In 1973, Brantley filed a disability claim with the federal government for mental wounds sustained in combat overseas. Over the years, the Department of Veterans Affairs has denied his claim five separate times. "You go over there and risk your life for America and your mind's all messed up, America should take care of you, right," he says, knowing that for him and the other veterans in line for free food that promise has not been kept.
On any given night 200,000 U.S. veterans sleep homeless on the streets of America. One out of every four people -- and one out of every three men -- sleeping in a car, in front of a shop door, or under a freeway overpass has worn a military uniform. Some like Brantley have been on the streets for years. Others are young and women returning home wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, quickly slipping through the cracks.
For each of these homeless veterans, America's promise to "Support the Troops" ended the moment he or she took off the uniform and tried to make the difficult transition to civilian life. There, they encountered a hostile and cumbersome bureaucracy set up by the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a best-case scenario, a wounded veteran must wait six months to hear back from the VA. Those who appeal a denial have to wait an average of four and a half years for their answer. In the six months leading up to March 31st of this year, nearly 1,500 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claims would be approved by the government.
There are patriotic Americans trying to solve this problem. Last month, two veterans' organizations, Vietnam Veterans of America and Veterans of Modern Warfare, filed suit in federal court demanding the government decide disability claims brought by wounded soldiers within three months. Predictably, however, the VA is trying to block the effort. On December 17, their lawyers convinced Reggie Walton, a judge appointed by President Bush, who ruled that imposing a quicker deadline for payment of benefits was a task for Congress and the president-not the courts.
President-elect Barack Obama has the power to end this national disgrace. He has the power to ensure to streamline the VA bureaucracy so it helps rather than fights those who have been wounded in the line of duty. He can ensure that this latest generation of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan does not receive the bum rap the Vietnam generation got. Let 2008 be the last year thousands of homeless veterans stand in line for free food during the holiday season. Let it be the last year hundreds of thousands sleep homeless on the street.

Aaron Glantz is the author of two books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website © 2009 New America Media All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/116721/

The Law of Unintended Consequences: 20th Century and Beyond

by: James Quinn January 05, 2009 |  Seek Alpha
 “The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.” (Andrew Gelman)
Andrew Gelman is dead on. He states that the political system is simple. I’d go a step further and say that lifetime politicians and entrenched government bureaucrats are simple. They show no indication of knowledge or expertise in American history or rational financial theory. The President, Congress, Federal Reserve, and Treasury try mightily to direct our economy. It is an impossible task. With a GDP of $14 trillion, there are thousands of inputs and outputs that feed the system. Their hubris leads them to believe that they are in control and can manipulate the gears of capitalism in a way that will produce their desired outcomes. If a desired outcome occurs, it is simply due to dumb luck. The more likely result of their manipulations of our complex system is a set of bigger problems that never occurred to them.

Congress definitely fits Mr. Gelman’s definition of a simple system. I can’t think of a body of people operating with more ignorance than Congress. The information they act upon, is provided by the 17,000 lobbyists that wine and dine them on a daily basis. Corporate lobbyists, PACs, unions, and special interests buy their votes. Their time horizons are less than a few months. They are constantly running for re-election, raising money and handing out goodies to their constituents. The only feedback they care about is their standing in the polls and the amount of money they’ve raised from “donors”. Their incentives are poor and not aligned with the needs of the American people. They are not willing to do what is right for the country because they have no incentive to do so. Their only incentive is to get re-elected by insuring that their district gets as much pork spending as possible. They do this by selling their votes to the highest bidder.

Unintended Consequences of the Last 100 Years

The 20th century is a laundry list of events that led to unintended consequences.

• Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by anarchists in 1914 was the fuse that set off World War I by causing various Treaties to cause all the countries of Europe to take sides. All sides envisioned a short painless war. The war lasted 4 years and killed 20 million people, with another 20 million casualties. It also lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917 with Lenin and Marxists gaining control of Russia.

• Treaty of Versailles

The harsh terms inflicted upon Germany by the victorious Allies were so ruthless that Germany was unable to meet their reparation obligations without printing currency at tremendous quantities. This eventually led to a hyperinflationary collapse of the German Mark and weakened the Weimer Republic. This eventually led to the rise of Adolph Hitler as dictator and ultimately to the deaths of 70 million people in World War II.

• Creation of Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 in order to make bank panics less likely and to manage the nation’s monetary policy. They have created persistent inflation that has caused the U.S. dollar to lose 95% of its value since 1913. Their actions contributed greatly to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Alan Greenspan’s self serving actions, in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, led to the recent collapse of the worldwide financial system.

• FDR’s New Deal

The programs created during the Roosevelt administration to combat the Great Depression, particularly Social Security, have been on automatic pilot for eight decades. A program whose purpose was to protect poor old people from starving during a Great Depression has morphed into a perceived right of all Americans and has led to an unfunded future liability of $10 Trillion.

• Appeasement

As Adolph Hitler was beginning to gain power and started to flaunt the Treaty of Versailles, other European countries could have crushed him as early as 1935. His military was not yet powerful. Hitler became emboldened by his early success and took more aggressive actions with the Rhineland, Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia. The appeasement strategy practiced by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to avoid bloodshed allowed Hitler to gain enough power to bring about the most destructive war in history. Winston Churchill explained the consequences after the war.

I cried out but no one would listen and now Europe is devastated…There never was a war easier to win…Not a single shot needed to be fired…But, no one listened.

• Manhattan Project

Robert Oppenheimer’s project was to create an atomic bomb before the Germans could invent one. The atomic bomb led to the end of the war in the Pacific as the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His response after the successful test was, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It led to the positive development of the nuclear power industry. It also led to an arms race with the Soviet Union which almost led to nuclear war in 1962. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the biggest dangers to world peace today.

• Creation of Military Industrial Complex

The United States had no Defense Industry prior to World War II. The rise of this industry was essential to winning World War II. In his Presidential farewell address, President Eisenhower warned about the increasing power of the defense industry. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” His unheeded words have led to the Defense Industry amassing overwhelming power in Washington DC, with spending on defense in the U.S. exceeding $800 billion per year and representing 50% of all the military spending in the world. The U.S. spends as much as the next 43 countries combined.

• LBJ’s Great Society

President Lyndon B. Johnson stated his goal in 1964.
We are going to assemble the best thought and broadest knowledge from all over the world to find these answers. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. From these studies, we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

These noble words led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. The unfunded future liability of Medicare is $61 trillion, six times the unfunded liability of Social Security. The programs did not reduce poverty or improve the healthcare system. The Great Society became the Debt Society. Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric is reminiscent of LBJ’s vision. Beware!

• Semi-Privatization of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac

Their purpose was to purchase and securitize mortgages in order to ensure that funds were consistently available to the institutions that lend money to home buyers. LBJ moved them off the government books in order to make his government deficits appear better. The two companies have been compromised for decades by the Democratic Party and were pushed to loosen their standards by politicians like Barney Frank and allowed millions of unqualified buyers to get home mortgages they could never pay off. Both companies have lost tens of billions and are now under the conservatorship of the U.S. government. The likely future liability to the U.S. taxpayer is $200 billion.

• Richard Nixon Takes U.S. off Gold Standard

After World War II a Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the US dollar. The US promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold. Alan Greenspan argued in 1966 that,

under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth… The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit… In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.
Under the regime of the French President Charles De Gaulle, France reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing US economic influence abroad. This together with the fiscal strain of the Vietnam War led President Richard Nixon to eliminate the fixed gold price in 1971. The U.S. dollar has lost 93% of its purchasing power since 1971. The welfare statists have confiscated middle class savings through inflation while being aided and abetted by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve.

• China Embraces Capitalism

The process of economic reform began in earnest in 1979, after Chinese leaders concluded that the Soviet-style system that had been in place since the 1950s was making little progress in improving the standard of living for Chinese citizens and also was failing to close the economic gap between China and Western nations. The reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on creating a pricing system and decreasing the role of the state in resource allocations. The reforms of the late 1990s focused on closing unprofitable enterprises and dealing with insolvency in the banking system.

After the start of the 21st century, increased focus has been placed on narrowing the gap between rich and poor in China. The huge influx of peasants from the countryside to the cities led to a manufacturing boom in China and the gutting of manufacturing in the United States. The feedback loop of Americans borrowing at low rates and spending on Chinese made goods while China kept buying US Treasuries, which kept U.S. interest rates low, has led to an unsustainable boom that has now gone bust. Allowing this unsustainable trend to grow beyond all reasonableness is now leading to social unrest in China.

• Greenspan Put

Alan Greenspan in his role as Federal Reserve Chairman attempted to solve every financial crisis by lowering interest rates and increasing liquidity. It began when he came to the rescue after the stock market crash of 1987. The Fed did the same thing after the Gulf War, the Mexican crisis, the Asian crisis, the LTCM implosion, Y2K, the bursting of the Dot Com bubble, and the 9/11 tragedy. Investors became convinced that Greenspan would always come to the rescue and keep stock prices from falling. This belief caused investors to take much greater risks and led to the colossal overleveraging that took place between 2000 and 2008. The artificial perception of safety led to the worst financial crisis in history. Ben Bernanke is now following in Greenspan’s footsteps.

• U.S. Maintains Military Base in Saudi Arabia after Gulf War

Osama Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 as a hero of jihad, who along with his Arab legion, "had brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. During this time frame Iraq invaded Kuwait and Bin Laden met the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and told him not to depend on non-Muslim troops and offered to help defend Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was rebuffed and publicly denounced Saudi Arabia's dependence on the US military.

After the 1st Gulf War, the U.S. with the support of the Saudi rulers allowed a permanent U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia. This presence led Bin Laden to declare a jihad against the U.S. infidels and eventually led to the 9/11 attack and the War on Terror. This has led to mammoth budget deficits, thousands of unnecessary American and Iraqi deaths, and contributed hugely to the financial crisis of 2008.

• 9/11 Attack

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center killed almost 3,000 Americans and provided President Bush with worldwide support to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his supporters. The U.S. successfully defeated the Taliban and cornered Bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan. The Bush administration declared a War on Terror, invaded Iraq on false pretenses wasting the lives of 4,500 Americans and damaging the lives of 30,000 Americans who were wounded, wasted $800 billion of borrowed taxpayer money, created the Department of Homeland Security at a cost of $50 billion per year, tortured captives, and has allowed the government to monitor private conversations of Americans without a warrant. An attack by 19 men with knives has led to the decline of the United States stature throughout the world and pushed the U.S. towards bankruptcy. The beacon of freedom has seen its light dim.

• SEC Takes Deregulation to Heart

Alan Greenspan and the free market ideologues in the Bush administration thought that no regulation was the best policy for the financial markets. They believed that markets would regulate themselves. This led to non-enforcement of existing rules and regulations. The SEC waived the 12 to 1 leverage ratios for the five biggest investment banks. Those banks then leveraged 40 to 1 and collapsed the worldwide financial system. The SEC failed to catch the Enron and Worldcom accounting frauds. The SEC was given indisputable proof that Bernie Madoff was conducting a ponzi scheme as far back as 1999. It ignored the facts and allowed a $50 billion fraud to destroy any remaining trust in the U.S. financial system. The SEC is in the back pocket of Wall Street. Its executives leave the SEC and get million dollar jobs on Wall Street. Non-enforcement of rules is not deregulation it is government corruption and incompetence.

Ignorance, Stupidity, and Hubris

Sociologist Robert K. Merton popularized the concept of unintended consequences in a paper written in 1936. Some possible grounds for the unintended consequences are the world’s complexity, human stupidity, self deception, hubris and biases. Merton’s five possible causes were:

1. Ignorance (It is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
2. Error (Incorrect analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
3. Immediate interest, which may override long-term interests
4. Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavorable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
5. Self-defeating prophecy (Fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated)

Ignorance, error, and immediate interest sound like a perfect motto for the U.S. Congress, Federal Reserve, and Treasury. When media pundits, pompous economists, self proclaimed “experts”, and corrupted politicians assure you that they have the solutions to all of our problems they are practicing the most evil form of hubris. The arrogance and self importance of these people is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. They put their unproven theories into practice by committing trillions of taxpayer funds. They are only concerned about the next election cycle and not about the long-term consequences of their ignorance and ignorance of crucial facts. The accumulation of blunders over the decades by government has led to unintended consequences that could bring down our country. Recent developments will have disturbing consequences for all Americans.

Unintended Consequences of Cheap Oil

When oil reached $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, panic was setting in among the sages in Congress. Windfall profit taxes on oil companies and government intervention to support alternative energy were the mantra of congressmen and Presidential candidates. Government intervention was going to work its magic. Instead, the markets adjusted rapidly to a worldwide decline in demand and the price plummeted to less than $40 a barrel. This drop has put an additional $200 billion of money back into the pockets of Americans. This was a needed relief in the midst of a grinding recession. The law of supply and demand worked without government intervention. The short-term focus of our politicians and many Americans will likely squander this temporary reprieve.

The pundits concluded that oil reaching $147 a barrel was due to speculators. Once the speculators were forced out, oil prices collapsed. Their view is that this temporary crisis has passed and life will go back to normal. American oil demand declined by 13% in September 2008, but Chinese demand grew by 28%. Auto financing at 0% for five years on SUVs will prevail and all will be well. The ignorance of the true facts by our leaders will lead to a future crisis that will make the current financial crisis seem like a walk in the park. The current economic downturn which has temporarily decreased worldwide demand will end. Oil demand will resume its upward slope, while supply has likely reached its peak. The facts based on exhaustive research by Matt Simmons are:

• 60% of the world’s oil is consumed by 10% of the world’s population.
• America represents 5% of the world’s population and consumes 24% of the world’s oil.
• Middle East oil use is growing more rapidly than China’s.
• China now uses 8 million barrels per day versus 3.5 million barrels per day in 1997.
• China now consumes 2 barrels per person versus 24 barrels per person in the U.S.
• The U.S. has 220 million automobiles for 305 million people. China has 32 million cars for 1.3 billion people.
• Peak supply of 86 million barrels of oil per day has been reached. Demand will grow to 115 million to 125 million barrels per day in the next 20 years.

The price of oil is now dangerously low. There are large amounts of untapped resources in non-traditional places. These include oil sands in Canada, oil shale in the Western U.S., and deep water oil. At $40 a barrel, the cost to extract oil from these sources is greater than the revenue that can be generated. Therefore, all projects in these areas will be stopped or delayed indefinitely. Drilling rigs are being shut down, employees are being laid off, and all expensive deep water projects are being abandoned. Supply has topped out at 86 million barrels per day. Mature oil fields throughout the world are in decline. Projects can take decades to bring on-line. Projects not started today will result in supply shortages in the future.

If the U.S. leaders allow today’s low prices to reduce its sense of urgency regarding energy independence, the consequences will be shocking. The existing energy infrastructure is rusting away. The estimates to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, that is 80% beyond its original design life, run as high as $100 trillion. The Cantarell oil field in Mexico is collapsing and will lead to Mexico becoming an oil importer in the next five years. The U.S. currently gets 11.1% of our supply from Mexico, almost as much as from Saudi Arabia. Another 30% comes from unstable countries such as Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, and Russia. We are not in command of our energy future.
By doing nothing today, we ensure that $147 oil will seem like a bargain in the not too distant future. An all out effort to implement the Pickens Plan now is necessary to regain the upper hand regarding our energy future. Converting our country to wind power, natural gas, and nuclear power would decrease our dependence on foreign oil and keep $700 billion in the United States rather than transferring it to the Middle East.

Unintended Consequences of 0% Interest Rates

The Gross Domestic Product of the United States is $14.4 trillion. Consumer spending makes up $10.2 trillion or 71% of GDP. Government spending makes up $2.9 trillion, or 20% of GDP. Domestic investment makes up $2.0 trillion, or 14% of GDP. The trade deficit of $700 billion reduces GDP by 5%. President Obama has quite a dilemma in trying to revive this economy. The American consumer has borrowed from their homes and credit cards to fuel a colossal spending spree in the last twenty years.

The dilemma is that the U.S. economic growth during the entire Bush administration was a debt induced fraud. From 1953 through 1983, consumption as a percentage of GDP ranged between 61% and 64%. Consumers rarely, if ever, borrowed against their houses. Paying off your mortgage was a goal of all families. A normalized level of consumer spending at 65% of GDP will require consumers to spend at least $1 trillion less per year. Less consumer spending will also contribute to reducing the trade deficit. The Federal Reserve and politicians running our country see a $1 trillion reduction in consumer spending as a disaster. Their positions of power would be in jeopardy. They will do everything in their power to not allow this to happen. The unintended consequences will commence shortly.

click to enlarge

From the time Alan Greenspan took over as Federal Reserve Chairman in 1987, consumption and household debt rose at a faster rate than the economy. The Greenspan Put was a major contributor to these developments. Everyone knew that Greenspan would lower rates and inject liquidity into the system whenever an economic bump in the road came along. Greenspan’s reduction of the discount rate to 1% in 2003 led to the greatest debt bubble in history that still threatens to bring down the financial system.
click to enlarge

The entrenched politician rulers of our country who are bought and sold by Big Business lobbyists, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Media want to preserve the status quo. Their power base depends upon it. Prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, depressions were violent and short. Prices for goods and wages adjusted rapidly, which allowed businesses and workers to survive. Having the dollar pegged to gold, limited what the government could do. The Federal Reserve artificially inflated the money supply in the 1920s causing a normal depression to become a Great Depression. Government interference with wage and price controls and government make work projects did not allow the system to fix itself. It took a World War to pull our economy out of the Great Depression.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

What is required to happen and what will happen, in the next year, will have calamitous consequences for the future of our country. What needs to take place is:

• Consumers need to cut back dramatically on consuming. Spending as a percentage of GDP needs to decline to 65%, or by $1 trillion. This would be approximately $3,000 less spending per household per year.
• Twenty years of consumer debt accumulation must be unwound. This required deleveraging needs to eliminate $2 trillion of household debt. The result will be thousands of retail store closings, mall closings, restaurant closings, and auto dealership closings. The distinction between needs and wants will reveal itself like a sledgehammer.
• The consumer needs to increase their savings rate from 2% to 10%. This would provide more capital for investment.
• People who cannot afford the mortgage on their home need to sell or enter foreclosure. When home prices fall far enough, the market will clear the inventory. Lower prices are the only way to eliminate excess supply.
• Companies that have failed to prepare for this downturn by taking on excessive debt, allowing expenses to soar, and having no clear strategic plan should go bankrupt. Unemployment will reach 9%. New businesses will be created and Americans will be hired.
• The government should make sure that no one starves to death or has to sleep on the streets. The safety net of food stamps and unemployment insurance should be strengthened.
• The government’s purpose is to protect its citizens, enforce the laws and maintain the public infrastructure. Our roads are crumbling, we have 156,000 structurally deficient bridges, millions of miles of pipes under our streets are rusting away, and our power grid is antiquated. The job of government was to maintain these things. They have failed miserably. Why does anyone think a new government infrastructure plan will work? Bridges to nowhere will be everywhere.
• Reducing spending dramatically on our military empire would provide funds to support the social safety net that is required during a depression. Congressmen in the pocket of the Defense industry will never allow it to happen.

What needs to occur would inflict too much pain for our politician leaders to allow. A violent short depression will be traded for a decade long extended depression. A painful deflationary depression will be converted into a hyperinflationary depression that could threaten the very existence of our country. President elect Obama has begun his finely orchestrated marketing plan to spend $775 billion of borrowed taxpayer money. His rationale for the stimulus package is classic Washington politics:

Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don't act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn. That's why we need an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that not only creates jobs in the short-term but spurs economic growth and competitiveness in the long-term.
"An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." – Laurence J. Peter
Not one economist on the face of the earth predicted the events of 2008. None of Obama’s list of blue chip economists saw a crisis coming and they have no idea how long or deep the current downturn will be. They make weather forecasters look highly accurate in comparison. Most economists are either, sellouts (Lawrence Yun), cheerleaders (Larry Kudlow), ideologues, or academic theoreticians. If Barack Obama is depending on economists to determine our future, all is lost. Alan Greenspan was an economist. If we had done the opposite of everything he recommended in the last 20 years, the country would be on the right track. President Obama, with the overwhelming support of a Democratic Congress will double down on the trillions already poured down a rat hole by the Bush administration. The scenario that will play out is:

• The $775 billion plan will grow to at least $1 trillion as Obama will need to buy off various factions within Congress with pork projects.
• Congress will approve the 2nd $350 billion tranche of TARP funds. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi will shovel billions to homeowners who should be foreclosed upon. Billions more will be given to the automakers. GMAC will get more funds from the taxpayer at 8% interest so they can then loan it to subprime borrowers at 0%. This doesn’t sound profitable, but they’ll make it up on volume.
• TARP funds will be given to commercial developers who foolishly overleveraged, overbuilt, and overpaid for properties. Credit card companies that handed out credit like candy for the last 20 years will see their write-offs triple to over 10% by 2010. The government will give more of your tax dollars to these incompetent bankers so they can send out another 5 million credit card offers to deadbeats.
• The Federal Reserve will buy mortgage debt and long-term Treasuries to artificially reduce market interest rates. With money market funds paying .25%, senior citizen savers will be forced to take on risk to get a return on their money. Penalizing savers to resuscitate reckless gamblers is the path that Ben Bernanke has chosen. When the markets decline another 20% in 2009, more senior citizens will see their retirements destroyed by Mr. Bernanke.
• Consensus among the talking heads on CNBC is that markets will go up in 2009 because they went down so much in 2008. This is what amounts to analysis by business television. The people they interview have a vested financial interest in the market going up. So despite the fact that earnings will collapse in 2009, these pundits are sure the markets will rise. I’d bet against the consensus.
• Citigroup (C) and JPMorgan (JPM) will require additional enormous injections of capital from the taxpayer due to their looming credit card and commercial loan losses. The top 10 biggest banks are insolvent. They are being kept alive on life support systems provided by the Federal Reserve and Treasury. All the bankers who didn’t bankrupt their banks should be outraged at this misappropriation of taxpayer capital to incompetent, reckless, immoral, politically connected bankers.
• Home prices will drop another 15% in 2009 and will remain depressed until 2015. The market will adjust to its natural equilibrium level despite all government efforts to keep prices artificially elevated. When you can buy a house and rent it out and generate a positive cash flow, houses will be reasonably priced.
• Despite the immense spending, zero interest rates, and propping up bankrupt financial institutions, consumers will not spend. Economists, bureaucrats and politicians are so focused on models and theories that they have failed to realize that the social mood of the country has changed forever. The poor economic conditions are being caused by the mood change, not vice versa. A return to frugality, saving, and simpler lives will keep a cap on spending for at least the next decade.

The sum total of all that has been done and all that will be done will eventually lead to a hyperinflationary bust. The money supply is being expanded too rapidly, fiscal stimulus spending will be borrowed from foreigners, the dollar will fall as foreigners refuse to accept 2% for 10 years, and the Federal Reserve will react too late just like they did when this crisis began.

This overstimulation of the economy will lead to a panic out of dollars and into real assets. The government will attempt to control the situation by confiscating gold as they did in the 1930s and Americans will be forced to surrender more liberties. In periods of economic and social upheaval - war, revolution, or dictatorship become possibilities.

The average American needs to wake up from their materialistic stupor and understand the risks that lie ahead. An educated concerned citizen is our only defense against tyranny. Orwellian governmental policies will be inflicted upon the populous. Seek out those who are telling the truth. David Walker, Boone Pickens, Ron Paul, Mike Shedlock, Doug Casey, and John Mauldin are among the truth tellers.

Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 by Foreign Policy.com
Think Again: Climate Change
by Foreign Policy.com

Act now, we’re told, if we want to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. Trouble is, it might be too late. The science is settled, and the damage has already begun. The only question now is whether we will stop playing political games and embrace the few imperfect options we have left.

by Bill McKibben
"Scientists Are Divided"
No, they're not. In the early years of the global warming debate, there was great controversy over whether the planet was warming, whether humans were the cause, and whether it would be a significant problem. That debate is long since over. Although the details of future forecasts remain unclear, there's no serious question about the general shape of what's to come.
Every national academy of science, long lists of Nobel laureates, and in recent years even the science advisors of President George W. Bush have agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is a more thorough scientific process here than on almost any other issue: Two decades ago, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing the peer-reviewed science and developing broad-based conclusions. The reports have found since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by humans. The panel's most recent report, in November 2007, found it is "very likely" (defined as more than 90 percent certain, or about as certain as science gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human activities have caused "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century."
If anything, many scientists now think that the IPCC has been too conservative-both because member countries must sign off on the conclusions and because there's a time lag. Its last report synthesized data from the early part of the decade, not the latest scary results, such as what we're now seeing in the Arctic.
In the summer of 2007, ice in the Arctic Ocean melted. It melts a little every summer, of course, but this time was different-by late September, there was 25 percent less ice than ever measured before. And it wasn't a one-time accident. By the end of the summer season in 2008, so much ice had melted that both the Northwest and Northeast passages were open. In other words, you could circumnavigate the Arctic on open water. The computer models, which are just a few years old, said this shouldn't have happened until sometime late in the 21st century. Even skeptics can't dispute such alarming events.
"We Have Time"
Wrong. Time might be the toughest part of the equation. That melting Arctic ice is unsettling not only because it proves the planet is warming rapidly, but also because it will help speed up the warming. That old white ice reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back to space; the new blue water left behind absorbs 80 percent of that sunshine. The process amps up. And there are many other such feedback loops. Another occurs as northern permafrost thaws. Huge amounts of methane long trapped below the ice begin to escape into the atmosphere; methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Such examples are the biggest reason why many experts are now fast-forwarding their estimates of how quickly we must shift away from fossil fuel. Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore on behalf of the IPCC, said recently that we must begin to make fundamental reforms by 2012 or watch the climate system spin out of control; NASA scientist James Hansen, who was the first to blow the whistle on climate change in the late 1980s, has said that we must stop burning coal by 2030. Period.
All of which makes the Copenhagen climate change talks that are set to take place in December 2009 more urgent than they appeared a few years ago. At issue is a seemingly small number: the level of carbon dioxide in the air. Hansen argues that 350 parts per million is the highest level we can maintain "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." But because we're already past that mark-the air outside is currently about 387 parts per million and growing by about 2 parts annually-global warming suddenly feels less like a huge problem, and more like an Oh-My-God Emergency.
"Climate Change Will Help as Many Places as It Hurts"
Wishful thinking. For a long time, the winners-and-losers calculus was pretty standard: Though climate change will cause some parts of the planet to flood or shrivel up, other frigid, rainy regions would at least get some warmer days every year. Or so the thinking went. But more recently, models have begun to show that after a certain point almost everyone on the planet will suffer. Crops might be easier to grow in some places for a few decades as the danger of frost recedes, but over time the threat of heat stress and drought will almost certainly be stronger.
A 2003 report commissioned by the Pentagon forecasts the possibility of violent storms across Europe, megadroughts across the Southwest United States and Mexico, and unpredictable monsoons causing food shortages in China. "Envision Pakistan, India, and China-all armed with nuclear weapons-skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land," the report warned. Or Spain and Portugal "fighting over fishing rights-leading to conflicts at sea."
Of course, there are a few places we used to think of as possible winners-mostly the far north, where Canada and Russia could theoretically produce more grain with longer growing seasons, or perhaps explore for oil beneath the newly melted Arctic ice cap. But even those places will have to deal with expensive consequences-a real military race across the high Arctic, for instance.
Want more bad news? Here's how that Pentagon report's scenario played out: As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would reemerge. The report refers to the work of Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc, who notes that wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25 percent of a population's adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life. Set against that bleak backdrop, the potential upside of a few longer growing seasons in Vladivostok doesn't seem like an even trade.
"It's China's Fault"
Not so much. China is an easy target to blame for the climate crisis. In the midst of its industrial revolution, China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest carbon dioxide producer. And everyone has read about the one-a-week pace of power plant construction there. But those numbers are misleading, and not just because a lot of that carbon dioxide was emitted to build products for the West to consume. Rather, it's because China has four times the population of the United States, and per capita is really the only way to think about these emissions. And by that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.
What's more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United States, Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions in the midst of their country's staggering growth. China now leads the world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there's barely a car made in the United States that can meet China's much tougher fuel-economy standards.
For its part, the United States must develop a plan to cut emissions-something that has eluded Americans for the entire two-decade history of the problem. Although the U.S. Senate voted down the last such attempt, Barack Obama has promised that it will be a priority in his administration. He favors some variation of a "cap and trade" plan that would limit the total amount of carbon dioxide the United States could release, thus putting a price on what has until now been free.
Despite the rapid industrialization of countries such as China and India, and the careless neglect of rich ones such as the United States, climate change is neither any one country's fault, nor any one country's responsibility. It will require sacrifice from everyone. Just as the Chinese might have to use somewhat more expensive power to protect the global environment, Americans will have to pay some of the difference in price, even if just in technology. Call it a Marshall Plan for the environment. Such a plan makes eminent moral and practical sense and could probably be structured so as to bolster emerging green energy industries in the West. But asking Americans to pay to put up windmills in China will be a hard political sell in a country that already thinks China is prospering at its expense. It could be the biggest test of the country's political maturity in many years.
"Climate Change Is an Environmental Problem"
Not really. Environmentalists were the first to sound the alarm. But carbon dioxide is not like traditional pollution. There's no Clean Air Act that can solve it. We must make a fundamental transformation in the most important part of our economies, shifting away from fossil fuels and on to something else. That means, for the United States, it's at least as much a problem for the Commerce and Treasury departments as it is for the Environmental Protection Agency.
And because every country on Earth will have to coordinate, it's far and away the biggest foreign-policy issue we face. (You were thinking terrorism? It's hard to figure out a scenario in which Osama bin Laden destroys Western civilization. It's easy to figure out how it happens with a rising sea level and a wrecked hydrological cycle.)
Expecting the environmental movement to lead this fight is like asking the USDA to wage the war in Iraq. It's not equipped for this kind of battle. It may be ready to save Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is a noble undertaking but on a far smaller scale. Unless climate change is quickly de-ghettoized, the chances of making a real difference are small.
"Solving It Will Be Painful"
It depends. What's your definition of painful? On the one hand, you're talking about transforming the backbone of the world's industrial and consumer system. That's certainly expensive. On the other hand, say you manage to convert a lot of it to solar or wind power-think of the money you'd save on fuel.
And then there's the growing realization that we don't have many other possible sources for the economic growth we'll need to pull ourselves out of our current economic crisis. Luckily, green energy should be bigger than IT and biotech combined.
Almost from the moment scientists began studying the problem of climate change, people have been trying to estimate the costs of solving it. The real answer, though, is that it's such a huge transformation that no one really knows for sure. The bottom line is, the growth rate in energy use worldwide could be cut in half during the next 15 years and the steps would, net, save more money than they cost. The IPCC included a cost estimate in its latest five-year update on climate change and looked a little further into the future. It found that an attempt to keep carbon levels below about 500 parts per million would shave a little bit off the world's economic growth-but only a little. As in, the world would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as it would have been on January 1 of that year. And in return, it would have a much-transformed energy system.
Unfortunately though, those estimates are probably too optimistic. For one thing, in the years since they were published, the science has grown darker. Deeper and quicker cuts now seem mandatory.
But so far we've just been counting the costs of fixing the system. What about the cost of doing nothing? Nicholas Stern, a renowned economist commissioned by the British government to study the question, concluded that the costs of climate change could eventually reach the combined costs of both world wars and the Great Depression. In 2003, Swiss Re, the world's biggest reinsurance company, and Harvard Medical School explained why global warming would be so expensive. It's not just the infrastructure, such as sea walls against rising oceans, for example. It's also that the increased costs of natural disasters begin to compound. The diminishing time between monster storms in places such as the U.S. Gulf Coast could eventually mean that parts of "developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods." Quite simply, we've already done too much damage and waited too long to have any easy options left.
"We Can Reverse Climate Change"
If only. Solving this crisis is no longer an option. Human beings have already raised the temperature of the planet about a degree Fahrenheit. When people first began to focus on global warming (which is, remember, only 20 years ago), the general consensus was that at this point we'd just be standing on the threshold of realizing its consequences-that the big changes would be a degree or two and hence several decades down the road. But scientists seem to have systematically underestimated just how delicate the balance of the planet's physical systems really is.
The warming is happening faster than we expected, and the results are more widespread and more disturbing. Even that rise of 1 degree has seriously perturbed hydrological cycles: Because warm air holds more water vapor than cold air does, both droughts and floods are increasing dramatically. Just look at the record levels of insurance payouts, for instance. Mosquitoes, able to survive in new places, are spreading more malaria and dengue. Coral reefs are dying, and so are vast stretches of forest.
None of that is going to stop, even if we do everything right from here on out. Given the time lag between when we emit carbon and when the air heats up, we're already guaranteed at least another degree of warming.
The only question now is whether we're going to hold off catastrophe. It won't be easy, because the scientific consensus calls for roughly 5 degrees more warming this century unless we do just about everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication, we won't.

Published on Monday, January 5, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Lost in the Rubble
by TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
I often visited Nizar Rayan, who was killed Thursday in a targeted assassination by Israel, at his house in the Jabaliya refugee camp when I was in Gaza. The house is now rubble. It was hit by two missiles fired by Israeli F-16 fighter jets. Rayan, who would meet me in his book-lined study, was decapitated in the blast. His body was thrown into the street by the explosions. His four wives and 11 children also were killed.
Rayan supported tactics, including suicide bombings, which are morally repugnant. His hatred of Israel ran deep. His fundamentalist brand of Islam was distasteful. But as he and I were students of theology our discussions frequently veered off into the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life. He was a serious, thoughtful man who had suffered deeply under the occupation and dedicated his life to resistance. He could have fled his home and gone underground with other Hamas leaders. Knowing him, I suspect he could not leave his children. Like him or not, he had tremendous courage.
Hamas, he constantly reminded me, began to target Israeli civilians in 1994 only after Palestinian worshipers were gunned down in a Hebron mosque by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein [1]. Goldstein was a resident of the nearby Kiryat Arba settlement. He entered the mosque dressed in his army uniform, carrying an IMI Galil assault rifle and four magazines of ammunition. He opened fire on those in prayer, killing 29 people and injuring 125. He was rushed and beaten to death by the survivors.
"Before the massacre we targeted only the Israeli military," Rayan said. "We can't sit by and watch Palestinian civilians killed year after year and do nothing. When Israel stops killing our civilians we will stop killing their civilians." 
Rayan was a theology and law professor at Islamic University in Gaza. He was a large man with a thick black beard and the quiet, soft-spoken manner of someone who has spent much of his life reading. On the walls of his office, black-and-white photographs illustrated the history of Palestinians over the last five decades. They showed lines of trucks carrying refugees from their villages in 1948. They showed the hovels of new refugee camps built after the 1967 war [2]. And they showed the gutted and razed remains of Palestinian villages in what is now Israel.
Rayan's grandfather and great-uncle were killed in the 1948 war [3] that led to the establishment of Israel. His grandmother died shortly after she and her son, Rayan's father, were driven from their village by Jewish fighters. His father was passed among relatives and grew up with the bitterness of the dispossessed-a bitterness the father passed on to the son and the son passed on to his own children. 
Israeli militias in 1948 drove some 800,000 Palestinians from their homes, farms, towns and villages into exile in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring countries. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" details the deliberate Israeli policy of removing Palestinians from their land. 
"There was not a single night that we did not think and talk about Palestine," Rayan said the last time I saw him, his eyes growing moist. "We were taught that our lives must be devoted to reclaiming our land."
Rayan spent 12 years in an Israeli jail. His brother-in-law blew himself up in a suicide-bomb attack on an Israeli bus in 1998. One of his brothers had been shot dead by Israelis in street protests five years earlier. Another brother was expelled to Lebanon, and several more were wounded in clashes.
His sons, according to their father, strove to be one thing: martyrs for Palestine. 
"I pray only that God will choose them," he said.
Hamas, which assumed power in free and fair elections, insists that the real goal of Israel is to break the will of the Palestinians in Gaza and destroy Hamas as an organization. Since Israel unleashed its air and sea campaign, at least 430 Palestinians have been killed, including 65 children, and 2,250 others have been wounded, according to Gaza medics. The bombardment has demolished dozens of houses and raised fears of severe food shortages and disease in the enclave, where most Gazans depend on foreign aid.
"The protection of civilians, the fabric of life, the future of the peace talks and of the regional peace process has been trapped between the irresponsibility of the Hamas attacks and the excessiveness of the Israeli response," Robert Serry, the U.N. envoy for the Middle East, told reporters in Jerusalem.
The Israeli assault began on Nov. 4, when Israel broke the truce [4] that Hamas had observed for several months. Israel then blocked food supplies delivered by the United Nations Relief Works and World Food Program. It cut off diesel fuel used to run Gaza's power station. It banned journalists and aid workers from entering Gaza. The U.N. World Food Program called the situation in Gaza appalling and said that "many basic food items are no longer available on the market." 
All this is being carried out by a modern military against a population with no capacity to resist.
The Israeli leadership has warned that this will be a long campaign and hinted that it may be followed by a ground invasion. Israeli tanks are massed on Gaza's border. The continued pounding of Gaza and the rising death toll are sure to ignite the rage of Palestinians outside Gaza. Israeli police forces are already positioning themselves to deal with what they euphemistically have labeled "spontaneous terrorism," meaning public outbursts of support for Gaza that could turn violent. Israeli police used tear gas on Friday to quell demonstrations [5] by Palestinians in annexed east Jerusalem. Four Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets since the latest resumption of violence.
Barack Obama's only comment on the one-sided slaughter under way in Gaza was: "If my daughters were living in a house that was being threatened by rocket attacks, I would do whatever it takes to end that situation." He repeated word for word the Israeli cliché used to justify an Israeli policy that Richard Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory and a former Princeton University law professor, has labeled "a crime against humanity." If self-defense applies to Israel, why doesn't it apply to the Rayan family? Why doesn't it apply to the Palestinians? It is Israel, not the Palestinians, which defies U.N. resolutions and international law by occupying and seizing ever-larger chunks of Palestinian land.
The walls of Gaza are plastered with poster-sized photographs of "martyrs" shot by the Israelis. Many are pictured holding a weapon in front of the gold-topped al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. These are studio photos taken long before their deaths. The gun was a prop and the glittering mosque a carefully chosen backdrop. All that was real in these photos was the yearning of these young men to fight against Israel and for a Palestinian state-and to die. And for a moment, at least until the pictures fade or peel away, the slain youths will have their brief lives and heroism recognized.
Gaza, like Kosovo's capital of Pristina, is a derelict, concrete slum where car exhaust mingles with the stench of raw sewage. There are 1.5 million Palestinians-70 percent of whom are either refugees from what is now Israel or the descendants of refugees. Half of them are now under 17. They live crammed into a dusty, flat, coastal area twice the size of Washington, D.C. Most are stateless and have never left the Palestinian territories and Israel. Families are piled in boxy, concrete rooms capped with corrugated tin roofs weighed down by rocks. They have little furniture. Water and electricity come sporadically. The population growth rate is one of the highest on the planet-a 3.7 percent annual birthrate, compared with 1.7 percent in Israel. Donkey carts crowd the streets, and orange garbage bins, donated by the European Union, overflow with putrid heaps of refuse.
The only route left for most young men in Gaza to affirm themselves is through death. I have attended countless funerals there. The decision of the young men, sometimes boys, to die is usually a conscious one. It is born of this despair and rage. It is born of a sense of impotency and humiliation. It is born of a belief that to not accept sacrifice, even death, is to dishonor those who have gone before, to neglect the family members, relatives and friends who lost their land, endured the decades-long humiliation and abuse of occupation, and suffered or died resisting.
The young in Gaza have nothing to do. There are no jobs. They have nowhere to escape to. They cannot marry because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. They sleep, sometimes 10 to a room, and live on less than $2 a day, surviving on United Nations or Hamas charities and food donations.  Martyrdom is the only route offered to those who want to achieve a measure, however brief, of recognition and glory.
Palestinians have been nurtured on accounts of abuse, despair and injustice. Families tell and retell stories of being thrown off their land and of relatives killed or exiled. All can tick off the names of martyrs within their own clan who died for the elusive Palestinian state. The only framed paper in many Palestinians' homes is a sepia land deed from the time of the British mandate. Some elderly men still keep the keys to houses that have long since vanished. From infancy, Palestinians are inculcated with the virus of nationalism and the burden of revenge. And, as in Bosnia, such resentment seeps into the roots of society for generations until it resurfaces or is finally rectified, often after much bloodletting.
"Tell the man what you want to be," one of Rayan's wives, Hyam Temraz, said to her 2-year-old son, Abed, as she peeped out of the slit of a black veil the last time I was in their home.
"A martyr," the child timidly answered.
"We were in Jordan when my son Baraa was 4," she said. "He saw a Jordanian soldier and ran and hugged him. He asked him if it was he who would liberate Palestine. He has always told me that he would be a martyr and that one day I would dig his grave."
I was caught in a gun battle at the start of the second intifada at the Nazarim junction in Gaza. A few feet away Marwan Shamalekh, 19, was fatally shot through the back by Israeli soldiers. He was tossing homemade Molotov cocktails at an army outpost, the flaming bottles landing harmlessly against the concrete wall of the compound when he died. He had no firearms. I ran with Marwan's companions as they carried his limp body down the road. We were fired upon by Israeli soldiers as we fled.   
I stopped shaving and grew a beard as a sign of respect and mourning for the boy. I visited his parents. They pulled up a chair on the cement patio outside their tiny house. They served me plates of dates and demitasse cups of bitter coffee. Mrs. Shamalekh was unable to speak. She sobbed softly into a kerchief.
Abdel Razaq Shamalekh, Marwan's father, clutched his 9-year-old son, Bilal. The boy stared at me vacantly.
"I had to carry Bilal to his bed after I told him his brother had been killed," the father said. "He collapsed. Later I found him leaving the house with a knife he had taken from the kitchen. He told me he was going to Nezarim to kill Israelis."

How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done to Americans' Psyches?

By Mark Klempner, AlterNet
Posted on October 29, 2008, Printed on October 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/104906/

When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early '70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "The trouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends with his son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his father would sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put his hand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.
I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken, liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrust of people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could have loosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same thing.
As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles and then barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family just one week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explain everything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trapped in the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding place with Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling "the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto her belief in the goodness of humanity.
Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion about humanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, but also on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," you will probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may not see anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favor fences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it is prudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will have supported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybe even after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions to carry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two evils.
And what if you think that people are "really good at heart"? Though you may be a dove, you will not necessarily be a starry-eyed dreamer. Many of those making the most basic contributions to society fall into this category: nurses, teachers, social workers, counselors. These individuals typically believe that it's better to rehabilitate people than to lock them up, and that negotiation and diplomacy are better than the use of tactics of domination and the last resort of war. They see true peace and security arising from goodwill and generosity, and probably keep a good book rather than a gun by their pillow.
I don't mean to suggest that everyone falls solidly into one category or the other. We have all internalized both attitudes to some degree, and they vie for ascendancy, depending on what is happening in our lives, and in the larger world. In times of peace and harmony we find more people agreeing with Anne Frank. In times of suspicion and mistrust, such as we find ourselves facing now, my alcoholic neighbor's rant has the world's ear.
It's not because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, 9/11 was a defining moment, but there were many ways we could have defined it. The way the Bush administration chose has made us more afraid and has given us more to fear. All the wonderful promise of a new millennium has been subsumed by alerts of yellow, orange and red.
There are many ways to make our country a safer and more secure place. As Samantha Collier, chief medical officer of HealthGrades, points out, far more people die each year from hospital errors than died when the Twin Towers fell. According to Collier, "The equivalent of 390 jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable, in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in the United States."
But hospital errors, infant mortality, AIDS and a host of other threats have not been a priority for Bush. Nor does it seem they will be for McCain if he gets elected.
We are fighting the "War on Terror." Fixated on the "War on Terror." Spending our money on the "War on Terror." Not questioning what it actually means to fight a "War on Terror." Not noticing that the very expression "War on Terror" is an absurd Orwellian oxymoron.
Granted, 9/11 triggered a big "fight or flight" reaction, and when we are swept up in fear, our immediate and only concern is with security. Aggression is processed in the same part of the brain as fear, and it kicks in during the "fight" response, as was evident in the aftermath of 9/11. When an entire population feels threatened, group psychology comes into play, increasing the possibility that a strong leader will be able to exert undue influence upon the masses.
The Bush administration took advantage of all these psychological vulnerabilities. Knowing that much of our capacity for critical thinking would get washed away in the adrenaline, they methodically exploited our fears in order to push forward their radical corporatist agenda. But beyond the body count in Iraq and other physical casualties lies the deeper, invisible erosion of our capacity to love.
I don't think I need to make a case that love is as compelling a psychological factor as fear and aggression. Many others have already done this, including the man Bush places his faith in, the one who exhorted his followers to love their enemies.
However, in order to harness the power of love in a civic context, we have to be able to see the good in others: to recognize that those whom we perceive as a threat, i.e. "the terrorists," are human beings too and might even have their good sides.
Take the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Though their members have been implicated in suicide attacks and their charter calls for jihad, much of the everyday work they perform involves helping their people. No doubt some of the aid they provide allows them an opportunity to indoctrinate recipients into their ideology. But does that totally cancel out its value?
An official document by the Israel Foreign Ministry indicates that Hamas' non-terrorist activities include "an extensive education network, massive activity in institutions of higher learning, distribution of basic foodstuffs 'for the holidays,' youth camps, sports, care for the elderly, scholarships, sponsorship of light industry and religious services under Hamas' sponsorship."
Although I condemn Hamas' terrorist actions and abhor the kind of fundamentalist thinking that calls for the destruction of Israel, I'm also aware they are doing good work among their own people, and thus have some human decency. Is this such a terrible thing to acknowledge -- or are we no longer willing or able to handle such complexities?
When we read about gang members, whether in nonfiction such as Freakonomics or in the creative work of, say, Richard Price, they are presented as human beings, albeit human beings who often do terrible things. Yet the criminals Bush is obsessed with are people from another culture who speak another language. There's a lot we don't understand about them, and he and his staff have been able to fill that vacuum with pure fear. Thus it has been very easy for them to demonize certain people and organizations, and thereby create a vastly more polarized world.
I acknowledge that there have been individuals who are almost entirely evil. But a Hitler is as rare as a Mother Teresa. To snap everyone onto either side of the moral grid -- as if most of them don't belong somewhere in the middle -- is the modus operandi of fanatics, propagandists and warmongers.
People with some degree of wisdom understand that nearly everyone is an alloy of good and evil. They recognize, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts." They also recognize that most people do not want to live in a world where "people are no damn good" and where fear, anger, hatred and war prevail.
Perhaps the hardest truth for progressives to face is how the profound political and moral disappointments of the last eight years have eroded our own sense of hope and our own belief that the electorate can become more informed and less divided. We, too, hate "the Other," but it is the guy in the grocery store with a hunting jacket and six-pack, or the woman behind us at the gas pump with a "Rush is Right" sticker on her Suburban. We, too, have swallowed the banefully binary worldview of the present administration that reduces everything to "us" and "them."
This touches on a confounding problem, one that helps to explain how things have gotten so tangled up: Those of us who have the gumption to push for social or political change encounter formidable obstacles that sometimes discourage us to the point of burnout.
On a personal and neighborly level, in seeking to love, or at least to have friendly relations, we inevitably encounter disappointment, hurt and pain. We want to trust, but we're afraid to trust. We want to lay down our arms, but we want the feared and despised other to lay down their arms first. We want to create a beautiful world, but we think that there are too many people who are going to mess it up, and we hate them for that, thereby marring our idealistic vision before we've even lifted a finger to materialize it.
This leads to a lot of disillusioned idealists. Many people who set out to change the world are changed by the world into cynics or worse. Yet it doesn't have to be that way. The most effective social reformers have been able to transform their idealism into something resilient and enduring.
I believe that an important prerequisite for this is to have, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "a deep and abiding faith in humanity." Indeed, the entire American experiment in democracy would have been unthinkable had the framers of our Constitution simply believed that "people are no damn good."
And yet it is difficult in these times to feel our own goodness. The validity of torture as a political tool is debated on the front pages of our newspapers, as our president smilingly strips away huge swaths of our constitutional rights. When our highest elected officials act shamefully and irresponsibly in our name, it has to take a toll on our psyches. And, indeed, in some ways our reputation with ourselves has fallen as low as our reputation with the rest of the world. This is what happens when one has a government in which corrupt people are on top while persons of integrity are subservient or shunted aside.
The fact remains, however, that there are some truly great people in the United States, and a multitude of people with high ideals and a willingness to sacrifice for the good of all. Our leadership simply doesn't reflect us.
When Bush got in, all the neocons came out of the closet, but if Barack Obama wins, their divisive strategies will be challenged. The White House will no longer welcome or be a home to born-again bigots, torture apologists, habeas corpus revokers and the rest of the industriofascist entourage. I also expect that censored truth commissions, muzzled scientists, harassed librarians, bought appointees and coerced generals will cease to be an issue under Obama's leadership. As he extricates us from Iraq, perhaps he could deliver us and the Iraqis from the Shock and Awe strategists, Blackwater barbarians and Halliburton robber barons.
But none of this can happen without our making a renewed commitment to once again throw ourselves into the struggle and subject our hearts to the dizzying roller-coaster whereby our dreams are brought within our grasp, but might just as suddenly be snatched away.
A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential vision of human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation. This is something Obama alluded to repeatedly in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, reminding us that "we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this."
But what if McCain wins, and we have, to quote Hillary Clinton, "four more years ... of the last eight years"? We will then have to ask ourselves if it is possible to continue to hold out hope for humanity -- for ourselves, our country and the world -- after our hopes have been dashed again and again and again.
The answer is yes; in fact, this was the attitude of the Holocaust rescuers whom I interviewed, including two who had been arrested by the Gestapo and ended up in concentration camps. They felt that the Nazis may have occupied their country and perhaps even captured their bodies, but couldn't break their spirits. By continuing to believe in the goodness of humanity, they implicitly rejected the Nazis' ghastly worldview and inhumane conception of what it is to be human.
Bush's reign of error has not been nearly as horrific -- for those living on U.S. soil, at least -- but he has done more harm than any U.S. president in my lifetime, and possibly in the history of our nation. It appears that McCain would continue Bush's policies, as well as the underlying attitudes behind them. For instance, at a recent religious forum, Obama and McCain were each asked how they would deal with "evil." Obama stated that evil must be confronted, while noting that a lot of evil has been done in the name of good, and that good intentions are not sufficient to ensure a good outcome. McCain gave a purely militaristic response, identifying evil specifically with "radical Islamic extremism" and vowing to "totally" defeat it. Included was his well-worn line to pursue Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell."
Even in the event of a McCain victory, however, we must not sink to the level of our leadership. And if the outcome of this election causes us to adopt a cynical attitude toward humanity and succumb to the belief that our fellow citizens are hopelessly misguided, ignorant or "no damn good," or that our political process is hopelessly corrupt, we eliminate the possibility that things will ever change for the better. On a personal level, we sentence ourselves to never really trusting other human beings. Ultimately, we forfeit everything that makes life worth living.
My father never did find the key to unlock his heart. His body wracked with cancer and more emaciated than I'd ever imagined possible, he looked in death uncannily like the concentration camp victim he always feared he might become. My high school friend found me after more than 30 years (the Internet is good that way) and told me, among other things, that his father had died 20 years before. We are both fathers now ourselves: His children are about the same age as he and I were back in Schenectady, while I, having remarried in my mid-40s, am only just now for the first time raising a family.
I'm curious to find out what my old friend thinks about people, having grown up with a father whose mantra was that they are no damn good. As for me, I'm grateful that, unlike my father, I do not have any deeply rooted fears born of trauma, and that the life-affirming worldview I struggled to establish in my youth has stood the test of time. I recognize, though, that the challenge of calibrating my faith in humanity is more formidable than I'd once imagined. I wonder whether I'll be able to impart to my own children an attitude toward human nature that brings out the best in them and everyone whose lives they touch, while preparing them for their inevitable encounters with various forms of evil.
When I look into my baby girl's trusting eyes, or see the ecstatic smile of my 3-year-old son playing with his friends, I can't help but believe that people are really good at heart. When I read the history of civilization, I am reminded that they often are not, especially when they act en masse. And when I watch the news, I have to question what business I have inflicting a world like this onto my children.
I suppose I could cycle back and forth between these positions until my children are on their way to college and I'm on my way to the grave, but instead I'm going to recommit myself to what I think is the spiritual bottom line: that it is up to each of us to infuse life with meaning -- to choose life. Anne Frank, young as she was, understood this. The sentence that follows her quote about people really being good at heart reads, "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death." And neither can I, or you, or anyone.
Mark Klempner is a social commentator, historian and author of The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. He would like to thank James McConkey and others who commented on an early version of this piece: Amy Denham, Paul Glover, Gerry McCarthy, Alice McDowell, Nicole Sault and Richard Silverstein

Published on Sunday, November 2, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Is Water the New Oil?
It's the world's most precious commodity, yet many of us take it for granted. But that's all about to change.
by Juliette Jowit
It's hard to imagine why humans would have chosen the achingly arid stone desert of Wadi Faynan for their first settlement. But water would have been one important reason, says archaeologist Steven Mithen. When Neolithic men and women arrived 11,500 years ago, things were very different: the climate was cooler and wetter; the landscape was covered in vegetation including wild figs, legumes and cereals, and there would have been wild goats and ibex for meat.
Wadi Faynan, Jordan: This Palestinian Beduin Family of 11 live in the desert. They collect their water from the waterpipes and manage to get 15 litres of water each per day. (Photo: Matilde Gattoni/ArabianEye)
Initially WF16, as it's now called, would have been a seasonal camp. But Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, and his fellow archaeologist Bill Finlayson believe that, gradually, people stayed longer. Sifting evidence from so long ago, the archaeologists can't be sure, but remains of food from different seasons and the scale of 'rubbish' piles suggest that about 10,000 years ago the inhabitants stopped moving altogether. If they are right, it would make this one of the oldest sites ever found where humans made a permanent settlement, learned to farm, and changed the course of human civilisation. But the tiny community drawn to water, which attracted successive waves of settlements, would eventually all but destroy the resource which made life possible. It is a pattern that's been repeated for millennia, around the world, and it now threatens us on a global scale.
First people cut trees for shelter and fuel, until rains swept away the soil instead of seeping into shallow aquifers, and the springs dried up. At least as long ago as the Bronze Age, farmers began mankind's obsession with diverting water for crops to feed the growing population. Meanwhile, the moist, cool climate which encouraged the first settlement was naturally becoming drier and hotter.
At least twice, historians believe, Wadi Faynan was abandoned. The first time possibly because of a sharp change in the climate, and later because it became too polluted. Today, Bedouin who survive in the valley have laid pipes down the dry stream bed to suck what is left of the spring in order to irrigate fields of tomatoes they have scratched out of the dry soil. But it's getting harder. According to local water lore, good rains now come in less than every other year.
The farmers in Wadi Faynan are not alone. Like communities around the world, they are paying the price for thousands of years of exploitation of our environment. Already, 1bn people do not have enough clean water to drink, and at least 2bn cannot rely on adequate water to drink, clean and eat - let alone have enough left for nature. Lack of water is blamed for many of the world's most distressing crises: millions of deaths each year from disease and malnutrition, chronic hunger, keeping children away from schools which offer hope of a better life. Mostly it is the poor who suffer, but increasingly rich nations are struggling, too. Australia has endured so many dry years that a leading climatologist has said it's time to stop saying 'gripped by drought' and accept that the lack of rain is permanent.
In parts of the US supplies are so vulnerable that last autumn the Red Cross delivered water parcels to the town of Orme in Tennessee. 'I thought, "That can't be the Red Cross. We're Americans!"' resident Susan Anderson told a reporter. In California, some farmers abandoned their crops this year as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared the first state-wide drought for 17 years. Meanwhile Barcelona was so desperate that it began importing tankers of water from cities along the coast. Even in the notoriously wet UK, water has become such a problem in the crowded southeast that one company plans to build a desalination plant, the sort of desperate measure associated with oil-rich desert states.
The Stockholm International Water Institute talks about 'an acute and devastating humanitarian crisis'; the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, warns of a 'perfect storm'; Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has raised the spectre of 'water wars'. And, as the population keeps growing and getting richer, and global warming changes the climate, experts are warning that unless something is done, billions more will suffer lack of water - precipitating hunger, disease, migration and ultimately conflict.
In a bid to avert this catastrophe, politicians, economists and engineers are pressing for dramatic changes to the way water is managed, from tree planting and simple storage wells, to multibillion dollar schemes to replumb the planet with dams and pipes, or manufacture freshwater from sewers and the sea.
The water crisis is an expression of the environmental catastrophe of human over-exploitation. This is the age the Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has called 'the Anthropocene', because the natural system has been so fundamentally altered by human activity. And it all began when people settled down and began to chop wood and farm.
'The start of sedentary communities is the start of the need to manage fresh water supplies,' says Steven Mithen. 'This is a starting point for our whole modern dilemma. It's gone from the concerns of individual settlements, to cities, to nations, and it's now a global issue.'
There is, in theory, plenty of water on the earth to sustain its 6.5bn people. More than 97 per cent of all the water on the planet is salt water, and most of the freshwater is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. But that still leaves 10m cubic kilometres (km3) of usable water, circulating in cycles of evaporation and precipitation between the atmosphere and earth, where it appears in underground aquifers, lakes and rivers, glaciers, snowpacks, wetlands, permafrost and soil. Each km3 is equivalent to 1,000bn litres, or 1bn tonnes, of water - about the remaining annual flow of the River Nile.
On the other side of the equation, the UN says individuals need five litres of water a day simply to survive in a moderate climate, and at least 50 litres a day for drinking and cooking, bathing and sanitation. Industry accounts for about double the average domestic use. But agriculture needs much, much more - in fact, 90 per cent of all water used by humans. The water is not 'lost' from earth, but over-abstraction by irrigators means it is often moved from where it is needed. Tony Allan, of King's College London, estimates that, together, 6.5bn people need 8,000km3 of water each year - a fraction of what is theoretically available. 'There's certainly enough water for every person on the planet, but too often it's in the wrong places at the wrong times in the wrong amounts,' says Marq de Villiers, author of the 2001 book Water Wars
Three hours north of Wadi Faynan is the much greener Wadi Esseir, where Salah Al-Mherat and his family are one of millions of households in Jordan who feel the daily effects of inhabiting one of the driest countries on earth. Once a week, Al-Mherat gets water from the local irrigation co-operative for his fig, lemon, olive and grenadine trees and vegetables. For the rest he relies on rain. But since the Nineties the springs have been drying, sapped by demand from the nearby capital, Amman, and rain has been declining.
On a hot morning in April, Al-Mherat comes in from picking petits-pois, hitches up his smock and settles on to a pile of cushions. Fidgeting with a pot of scented tea he explains that the crops now barely cover their costs; he has to work as a security guard to supplement his income. 'When I started it was very good compared to now,' he says. 'The first impact was that the size of the irrigated area became reduced. People also changed what they irrigated, so the water now goes mainly to the trees - some farmers stopped completely from doing vegetables.' Al-Mherat says he keeps hoping things will improve, because he will pass the land to his sons. 'It's my life,' he says. 'But even if I'm positive, the reality is it's like the wish of the devil to go to paradise.'
Global population, economic development and a growing appetite for meat, dairy and fish protein have raised human water demand sixfold in 50 years. Meanwhile, supplies have been diminished in several ways: an estimated 845,000 dams block most of the world's rivers, depriving downstream communities of water and sediment, and increasing evaporation; up to half of water is lost in leakage; another 1bn people simply have no proper infrastructure; and the water left is often polluted by chemicals and heavy metals from farms and industry, blamed by the UN for poisoning more than 100m people. And still the rains are getting less reliable in many areas.
Underlying these problems is a paradox. Because water, and the movement of water, is essential for life, and central to many religions, it is traditionally regarded as a 'common' good. But no individuals are responsible for it. From Wadi Esseir to the arid American Midwest, farmers either do not pay for water or pay a fraction of what homeowners pay, so they have less incentive to conserve it and might deprive suppliers of funds to improve infrastructure.
The UN defines 'water scarcity' as fewer than 1,000m3 of renewable clean water for each person every year to drink, clean, grow food and run industry. By this measure half the world's population lives in countries suffering water scarcity. Jordan is one of the most water-scarce countries on earth, averaging just 160m3 of renewable water per person per year.
The result is that it is not just farmers who are rationed. The Al-Mherat family, like the rest of greater Amman, only get water to their house one day a week. A city of more than 2m people runs to the rhythm of 'water day', says Dr Khadija Darmame, who is part of a £1.25m project organised by Mithen and sponsored by Britain's Leverhulme Trust to study links between 'water, life and civilisation' in Jordan, from the earliest settlements to modern day.
Poor supplies and stagnant tanks occasionally lead to infections. But for most, the problem is drudgery. 'The first thing is to do the maximum laundry and then clean the house,' says Darmame. Children and men take a shower, 'and the last thing is for the women to take a shower, and then you need a few hours to fill the tanks,' stacked on every roof.
For millions of others, bad supplies are a question of life and death. Lack of clean drinking water and sanitation are largely blamed for the death of 11m children under five each year from disease and malnutrition; for nearly 1bn people who are chronically hungry; for 2bn who suffer what the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization calls 'food insecurity', because they do not have adequate food and nutrition for an 'active and healthy life'; and for keeping more than 60m girls out of school. These people then get caught in a water and poverty trap: two-thirds of the people who lack enough water for even the most basic needs live on less than $2 a day. 'Variability of water availability is strongly and negatively related to per capita income,' says Professor Jeffrey Sachs, author of Common Wealth: Economics For a Crowded Planet, and a special adviser to the UN Secretary General. Poor health, lack of education and hunger make it hard to escape.
Ultimately, lack of water is seen as a threat to peace. From genocide in Darfur to rows between states in India and the US, Ban Ki-Moon is one of several global leaders who have warned of further legal and armed disputes over water. Intuitively it is obvious people will fight over their most precious resource, but so far few conflicts have broken out. The idea of 'water wars' seized the public imagination in 2001 when Marq de Villiers's book of that name was published in the UK, but the author disagreed with the publisher's choice of title. De Villiers agrees that water is often an underlying cause of tension, but has only identified one water 'war', between Egypt and Sudan. 'You cannot do without water, so when shortages pinch, states do co-operate and compromise,' he says.
But if half the world's population lives in water-stressed countries, how do so many, from the breadbaskets of Asia to the sprawling cities in the arid American west, keep watering fields and running taps?
One reason is that water flows uphill to money, as the saying goes. Thus people in oil-rich Kuwait enjoy expensive desalination, while Palestinians suffer daily hardship; tourists in Amman can turn on the tap at any time, while those in the poorest areas of the city have access to water for a few hours each week. As Tony Allan says: 'Water shortages don't pose serious problems to gardeners in Hampshire or California homeowners with pools to fill.'
Another answer to the conundrum was identified by Allan, who in the Sixties became curious about why Middle Eastern countries without abundant water supplies were not suffering from a more obvious water crisis. The answer, he realised, was trade: by buying food, water-poor societies were 'buying' what he dubbed 'virtual water'. They were helped by farmers dumping grain into the world market once subsidies created massive over-supply. 'This potential tragedy was motoring on and hit the calm waters of the Americans and Europeans providing food [for the world market] at half cost, and the water contained in that food [was water] they didn't have to find.'
The other answer is that communities around the world have been forced to tap rivers and lakes and aquifers, sometimes millions of years old, far beyond the limit at which they can replenish themselves. Above ground, lakes are shrinking and rivers are being reduced to pathetic flows, or drying up altogether. Below ground, a largely invisible crisis is unfolding as millions of wells have been sunk into aquifers - 4m in Bangladesh alone. Many aquifers are replenishable, but not all, and many that can be recharged don't get enough rain to match demand. Sometimes the empty cavities simply collapse, putting them beyond use forever. In his recent book, Plan B 3.0, Lester Brown catalogues the results. In the breadbaskets of China, India, the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and Mexico, water tables are falling, sometimes by many metres a year. Pumps are being drilled a kilometre or more to find water, thousands more wells have dried up altogether and agricultural yields are shrinking. These countries contain more than half the world's people and produce most of its grain, warns Brown. Meanwhile, almost forgotten amid the human suffering are the terrible consequences for the natural world: freshwater fish populations fell by half between 1970 and 2000, says the UN.
All these dams and irrigation channels and pumps and pipes allow billions of people to run up a gigantic global water overdraft. What worries experts is that there is no sign of humans withdrawing less water.
Two years ago, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) published a report by 700 experts warning that one in three people were 'enduring one form or another of water scarcity'. 'Scarcity for me is when women work hard to get water, [or] you want to allocate more but can't,' says David Molden, deputy director of the Sri Lanka-based organisation.
Molden warns that the situation is becoming 'a little bit more critical', because of continuing rising demand for food, the recent boom in biofuels and climate change. To that can also be added another, poignant 'demand': the long-overdue realisation that nature also needs water, which in Europe and other countries has led to laws to ensure 'minimum environmental flows' remain in place.
For food alone, the World Bank estimates that demand for water will rise 50 per cent by 2030, and the IWMI fears it could nearly double by 2050. Whether these crops require rain or irrigation depends on where they are grown, and how much rain there is.
Like a great river fed by many tributaries, water is a conduit for the various effects of global warming: more variable rainfall, more floods, more droughts, the melting of glaciers on which 1bn people depend for summer river flows, and rising sea levels, threatening to inundate not just coastal communities but also their freshwater aquifers, river deltas and wetlands.
From the headline figures, climate change should be good news. Crudely, scientists estimate for every 1C rise in the average global temperature, precipitation will increase one per cent, as warmer air absorbs more moisture. The world's total volume would not change, but it would be recycled more quickly, affecting the majority of the world's agriculture which depends on the volume and timing of rainfall.
Balancing all these impacts, Nigel Arnell, director of Reading University's Walker Institute for Climate Change, calculates that the number of people living in water basins exposed to water stress will rise from 1.4bn to 2.9-3.3bn by 2025 and to 3.4-5.6bn by 2055. In fact, the greatest impact in Arnell's modelling is from rising populations, particularly in China and India, and, globally, climate change is actually reducing exposure to shortages. This may be good news for some, but masks huge disruption, as some regions fear too much water, while hundreds of millions of people start to run out.
It is impossible to attribute one farm's difficulties or one year's rainfall to climate change. But if climate is the statistics of weather, then the rain gauge this year on the farm of Sameeh Al-Nuimat, northwest of Amman, is typical of what the experts forecast. Al-Nuimat had noticed a gradual decline in rainfall for years, but this year it dropped off steeply and there was no rain at all in March, a critical time for summer crops. 'My father told me he'd never seen such a year,' he says.
Such dramatic events have injected urgency into discussions about Jordan's precarious water supplies, says Al-Nuimat, who is also an irrigation engineer at the Ministry of Agriculture. 'Before, when water was available, no one worried about it. But now there's interest - every night people speaking, every night debating, at every level, from the farmer to the planner to the politician. As a farmer I'd like to see drought-resistant crops; from a civil engineering point of view we should look for mega projects; and, if you're thinking about global planning, there should be acceptance of people moving from water-scarce regions to where water is available.'
Around the world the same debates are under way. Rich countries can make significant gains from domestic efficiency, but most of the world's population does not have power showers and swimming pools, or waste great quantities of food. Instead the main focus is on reducing water in agriculture, through more efficient irrigation, by engineering seeds to grow in more arid and salty conditions, and even shifting crops. 'If the world were my farm, I'd grow things in different places,' says David Molden. But even benign-sounding conservation is often unpopular. There is widespread resistance to raising prices for water (or energy for pumping) to increase efficiency, suspicion of genetic modification, and a reluctance among farmers to abandon water-hungry but lucrative crops when they are struggling to feed their family. 'It's a socioeconomic dilemma,' says Al-Nuimat. 'You can't stop now: it's the source of their life.'
Faced with public apathy and even resistance, responses have tended to focus on increasing supply. For decades the scale of ambition has been like a game of global engineering one-upmanship: rivers have been diverted across countries, pumps sunk kilometres into fossil aquifers, and bigger plants commissioned to recycle or desalinate water. And there is no sign of a let-up. As shortages become more desperate and costs and energy use fall, Global Water Intelligence forecasts that desalination capacity will more than double by 2015, and the potential to increase wastewater recycling is enormous, being only 2 per cent of volume.
But huge costs, environmental concerns and public distaste for drinking their 'waste' has forced many communities to reconsider simpler, traditional methods, too. Some of the ideas the earliest farmers would have recognised: tree replanting, ripping out thirsty non-native plants, stone walls to hold back erosion, and rain harvesting with simple ponds and tanks. Some have even urged a return to more vegetarian diets, which at their extreme demand only half the water of a typical American meat-eater's. This is, according to Lord Haskins, the former chairman of Britain's Northern Foods group and a government adviser, 'the most virtuous and responsible step of all'.
And when all options are exhausted at home, countries have another option: to import water in food and even industrial goods. Political meddling with subsidies makes trade a controversial 'solution', but by favouring regions with a 'competitive advantage' in water it can work. Globally the IWMI estimates irrigation demand would be 11 per cent higher without trade, and quotes a projection that imports can cut future irrigation by another 19-38 per cent by 2025. Saudi Arabia has gone further than most, announcing in February that it would stop all wheat production in a few years, though other countries might now be deterred by higher food prices.
Ultimately governments are being forced down several paths at once: to raise prices to reflect the true value of water to humans and the environment, invest in technology to improve efficiency and supplies, engage in more trade, and make peace with neighbours that can hold up incoming water or food. These will only be possible, though, if people can be lifted out of poverty, to afford higher prices, capital spending and imports. 'When you diversify your economy you solve your problems,' says Allan.
Looking back at the history of mankind's struggle for enough water, experience suggests the initiative which enabled humans to settle, farm and dominate the planet will provide many solutions. But sometimes we might have to accept defeat. 'On the one hand you can see this amazing technological ingenuity of humans, which throughout prehistory and history continually invented new ways to manage water supply,' says Mithen. 'On the other, the story of the past tells us that sometimes, however brilliant your technological inventions, they are just not good enough, and you get periods of abandonment of landscapes. We have got to be prepared to invest in technology, but also to recognise in some parts of the world there are going to be areas where we're going to have to say "enough's enough".'
A person uses about 50 litres of water a day; industry accounts for double that. But agriculture needs much more - in fact, 90 per cent of all water used by humans.

The Five Most Wanted Rip-off Artists from Wall Street and Washington
By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted on November 3, 2008, Printed on November 3, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105828/
What the hell's happening here? Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us?
Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. Last year, at the first signs of the global financial slide toward the abyss, we were told that it's just a little hiccup caused by something called subprime mortgages. Not to worry, the Powers That Be declared confidently, for we have the damage contained. And rest assured that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."
Then, this spring, Bear Stearns cratered, requiring an emergency federal subsidy to cover billions in bad loans. Okay, admitted those in charge, that subprime stuff actually is leveraged on up the financial system, and maybe there's been a bit of greed among a few of the big players, but we really do have the problem contained now, and, hey, "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."
But in September--Omigosh!--there went Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WaMu, Wachovia, and others. Well, yes, conceded the now-frazzled financial establishment, but gollies, we're throwing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars into sandbags to contain the problem, and remember: "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."
In October, the contagion rolled through Britain, Canada, and Europe; it spread to Brazil and across to China and Japan; and--Holy Schmoly--suddenly all of Iceland was melting in bankruptcy! Stay calm, cried an openly panicked chorus of Washington officials, for we're holding some big summit meetings soon and consulting our Ouija boards, and...uh...ah...um...y'all just keep clinging to the thought that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."
Laissez Fairies
You don't have to be in Who's Who to know What's What, do you? The fundamentals are NOT sound.
Wall Street and Washington (excuse the redundancy there) want us commoners to believe that this viral spread of economic grief was caused by those lower-income homeowners who couldn't pay their subprime loans--merely an unforeseeable glitch in a complex and otherwise healthy financial system. Hogwash. The source of today's pain is the same as it was in America's previous financial collapses: the unbridled greed of economic elites, enabled by their political courtesans in Washington.
This unbridling has been the long-sought goal of a cabal of deregulation ideologues who dwell in laissez-fairyland. During the past two decades, they have relentlessly pushed their economic fantasies into law. Their theory was that (to use Ronald Reagan's simple construct) "the magic of the marketplace" would create an eternal rainbow of prosperity through financial "innovation"--if only the market was unshackled from any pesky public regulations. What the dereg theorists missed, however, is that magicians don't perform magic. They perform illusions.
Let's meet some of the illusionists who are directly responsible for hurling you, me, America, and most of the world into this dark and as-yet unplumbed economic hole.
Phil Gramm
Snide, sour, and sanctimonious, this former senator from Texas is now head lobbyist for the Swiss-based banking giant, UBS, as well as chief economic adviser for his old chum John McCain. A bathed-in-the-blood, footwashing, free-market absolutist, Gramm advocates a virulent brand of antigovernment, market-knows-best, Rambo capitalism.
In 1999, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he had the power to implement some of his cockamamie dogmas. First, he pushed through a bill to dissolve the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal reform that prohibited banks, investment houses, and insurance companies from combining into one corporation. By keeping these components of our financial system separate, Glass-Steagall made sure that the crash of one of them would not bring down the other two. But a number of Wall Street banks, led by what would become Citigroup, saw a profit windfall for themselves if only they could scuttle the old law and merge banking, investment, and insurance into huge financial conglomerates. The senator was their ideological soul mate, and he was delighted to rig the system for them.
On November 12, 1999, a gloating Gramm celebrated having sledgehammered the regulatory walls that separated the three financial functions:
"We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill; it is a deregulatory bill. I believe that's the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been a part of making it a reality."
But repealing Glass-Steagall was only step one for this free-market holy roller. In literally the dead of night, just before Congress's Christmas break in 2000, Chairman Gramm snuck a short provision into an 11,000-page appropriations bill. The item, which only a few lobbyists and lawmakers knew had been inserted, became law when the larger bill was signed by then-President Bill Clinton. Gramm's little legislative sticky note decreed that a relatively new, exotic, and inherently risky form of investments called "derivatives" were not to be regulated--or even monitored--by the government.
It should be noted here that Democrats were also butt-deep in the dereg orthodoxy. Such Wall Street sycophants as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had drunk deeply from the holy cup of derivatives deregulation, and Clinton's top economic advisors Robert Rubin (formerly with Goldman Sachs and now with Citigroup) and Lawrence Summers (also a veteran of Wall Street) were in harness with the Republicans on this effort.
By 2008, the freewheeling derivatives market, including derivatives based on those lowly subprime housing loans, bloated to a stunning $531 trillion. That's 531 followed by 12 zeroes! These little-understood, essentially secret investment schemes came to dominate our entire financial system--and when thousands of regular folks began defaulting on their subprime loans, the derivatives based on them essentially became worthless. Investment houses, which were up to their corporate keisters in these funny-money subprime derivatives, began collapsing, and the now-interlocked banks and insurance companies began tumbling down with them. Gramm's deregulatory "wave of the future" had become a financial tsunami.
Alan Greenspan
This guy's mug should be on wanted posters in every post office in America. As Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, he held the regulatory power to prevent the irrational inflation of the huge derivatives bubble that has now burst-- yet he fought fiercely through four presidencies to prevent even the meekest oversight by the Fed or any other agency. Nicknamed "The Oracle," Chairman Greenspan was inscrutable and arrogant, but he also possessed a detailed knowledge of financial minutiae and an air of superiority that simultaneously bedazzled and intimidated presidents, lawmakers, and other public officials.
However, not everyone was sanguine about the chairman's reliance on derivatives as the pillar of Wall Street's financial strength. Many wise heads viewed these financial "products" as speculative mumbo-jumbo. Billionaire financier George Soros says his firm never invested in them "because we don't really understand how they work." Investment banker Felix Rohatyn described them as "hydrogen bombs." Back in 2003, investment guru Warren Buffett called them "financial weapons of mass destruction" that were "potentially lethal" for our economy.
But Greenspan's voice was the most powerful, and he was both a determined bureaucratic protector and an exuberant cheerleader for derivatives. Meanwhile, wealthy investors worldwide were making a killing from their investments in these bizarre pieces of paper, and few in Washington were willing even to question The Oracle.
"I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn't want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth," said Arthur Levitt, a well-regarded Wall Street regulator under Clinton. "I don't recall anyone ever saying, 'What do you mean by that, Alan?'"
So the bubble kept expanding.
Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the "free market" that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.
Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan's. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation's economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut.
Chris Cox
A GOP member of Congress for 17 years, Cox was another deregulation diehard and a reliable advocate for Wall Street's pampered CEO class--a role he continued to play after Bush chose him in 2005 to succeed Donaldson as SEC chair. At the commission, he weakened the ability of the enforcement staff even to investigate securities violations by Wall Street firms, much less prosecute them. Also, in an act of pure ideological folly, he eliminated an office that had been set up specifically to watch out for future problems with such high-risk investments as derivatives.
In essence, he took the cops off the beat at the very time more cops were needed. In October, when the stuff was hitting the fan, a chagrined Cox offered this brilliant insight: "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work." Thanks, Chris.
William Donaldson
The Securities and Exchange Commission supposedly regulates investment banks, and in 2004 it was headed by--guess who?--a Wall Street investment banker, Bill Donaldson. On April 28 of that year, he presided over a little-noticed SEC meeting held in the commission's basement to consider an obscure rule change urgently requested by the Big Five investment banks (including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Henry Paulson--yes, the same treasury secretary who just designed George W's Wall Street bailout). The bankers wanted an exemption from a sensible requirement that they keep a sizeable pool of money on hand to cover potential losses. Turn these reserve funds loose, pleaded the bankers, so we can put more of our investors' money into this opaque but lucrative area known as derivatives.
After less than an hour of discussion, Donaldson and his four SEC colleagues voted unanimously to do this favor for the bankers. As a bonus, the generous commissioners also decided to let the banks themselves monitor the level of risk they were putting on investors--and ultimately on the backs of taxpayers.
In this one meeting, which was not covered by the media, the dereg geniuses had struck another major blow for banker recklessness, and the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and others were sent further down the giddy path to their--and our--ruin. "The problem with such voluntary [regulations]," said Roderick Hills, Gerald Ford's former SEC chairman, "is that, as we've seen throughout history, they often don't work." Duh!
Henry Paulson
As honcho of Goldman Sachs, Hank drew a $37 million paycheck the year before Bush waved him into the Treasury Department to oversee the whole U.S. economy. At Goldman, he was considered one of Wall Street's "smart guys" who had figured out how to make billions in brokerage fees by packaging and selling these wondrous pieces of wizardry called derivatives, and he came into government as an unquestioning believer in deregulatory doctrine. Now that deregulated derivatives have turned out to be so much hokum, Hank's in charge of the bailout--and his former firm is in line to get at least $10 billion from it.
The Paulson bailout plan is flawed in many awful ways, but start with this basic one: the money (some estimates now put the total taxpayer cost above $2 trillion) is being handed to the same schemers and finaglers who caused the crash. The public gets to contribute the funds, but it gets no seat at the table to decide how the system (and who in it) will be "rescued."
With typical antigovernment extremism, Paulson's plan makes the public passive investors in the banks we're saving, leaving all the say-so to the banks' current executives and directors. Our money is being given away by the Bush ideologues with no strings attached--not even a requirement that it go into new loans so credit can quickly flow into the American economy again! Excuse me? Unclogging that credit flow was Paulson's rationale for giving $125 billion to nine giant banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, and State Street). He now says he "hopes" the banks will use the money to make loans, but he refuses to require them to do so.
Meanwhile, bankers themselves say they are more likely simply to sit on the money for awhile or--get this--use it to buy up smaller competitors! Yes, that means that our tax dollars will go toward eliminating competition in America's banking market. Not only will this leave consumers and businesses with fewer choices, but this will also increase the size of poorly managed megabanks that have already been designated by the Bush-Paulson regime as "too big to fail."
Laissez-faire follies
One positive to come from this collapse is that it exposes the bankruptcy of several core ideas that have been pushed by free-market illusionists. For example, market infallibility--the notion that Wall Street investors, analysts, and bankers know more than anyone else, and the government (aka the public) should just get the hell out of the way and behold unfettered genius at work. So, behold. (And, by the way, these are the exact same people who only months ago were insisting that Americans would be so much better off if they would move their Social Security money from government hands to the more adventuresome wizards of Wall Street.)
Yet, those bankers and politicos who pushed this antigovernment ethos to today's disastrous conclusion remain delusional. They cry for trillions of our tax dollars, but they insist that the profiteers must control the bailout and remain free of public supervision. George W himself still sticks with fantasy over reality, claiming that the fundamentals of the system are sound and that it is "essential" that any reforms not interfere with the "free market."
It's been a scream to hear these devout market ideologues explain how they've just become Wall Street socialists. Having big, bad government buy up the failed investments, then partially nationalize America's financial system, is an unwelcome choice for Bush. "I frankly don't want the government involved," he said. "It was necessary." Bailout chief Paulson (dubbed "King Henry" by Newsweek) said, "We regret having to take these actions"--but they're necessary.
Why necessary? Because laissez-faire ideology is a crock. It failed. Americans are not being told the blunt truth, which is that the financial mess we're in today is a direct result of the laissez-faire fraud that Wall Street and Washington willfully imposed on our nation. CEOs and banking lobbyists, presidents and treasury secretaries, regulators and lawmakers (of both parties) failed to protect America from money-grubbing bankers, hedge-fund speculators, and other big players.
As we've learned in the past few weeks, there is no "free" market. Indeed, it's quite pricey when it trips and falls over the inevitable outcroppings of greed. That's why strong, vigilant, and aggressive public regulation is essential. Don't be fooled by claims that just throwing money at the hucksters will fix the problem. The only way to make America's financial system trustworthy is to return to the sound fundamentals of public oversight--starting with the bailout itself.

RELIGION AND SECRECY IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
The Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum
Hugh Urban
Ohio State University
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success…Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists… The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.
                                                                                — George W. Bush,  September 23, 2001[i][1]
Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
— Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [ii][2]   
            When contemplating the figure of George W. Bush, the historian of religion—and really, any thoughtful citizen—is presented with a very strange paradox and apparent contradiction. On the one hand, this is by many accounts the most outspokenly religious president in U.S. history—a man who claims to have been not only saved but called by God to political office, who uses extensive references to scripture throughout his public speeches (both explicit and subtly double-coded), who has denounced certain nations as part of an insidious "Axis of Evil," and who promises to bring freedom as a "Gift from the Almighty" to benighted regions of the world like the Middle East.  Bush's remarkable display of piety has been noted not just by the Religious Right, his strongest base of support,[iii][3] and the mainstream media,[iv][4] but also increasingly by historians of religion.[v][5]  Strong morality and grounding in faith have been the bulwarks of his administration and major reasons for his widespread public appeal; and, according to some estimates, they are among the most important factors in the 2004 elections.[vi][6]  
Yet on the other hand, the Bush administration is also arguably the most secretive in U.S. history, displaying an intense preoccupation with information control. Bush and Cheney have been described by various observers as having an "obsession with secrecy,"[vii][7] even a "secrecy fetish"[viii][8] that is "the most secretive of our lifetime"[ix][9] and "worse than Watergate."[x][10] From his first days in office, Bush was busy at work trying to conceal his own Texas gubernatorial records and the presidential records of Ronald Reagan (and those of then vice-President, George H.W. Bush); meanwhile, vice-President Cheney was assembling a highly secretive energy task force, while refusing  Congress knowledge of its membership or workings. This concern with secrecy has intensified dramatically in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Not only has there been much debate over the question of what the administration knew, did not know, or ignored about possible terrorist attacks prior to 9/11, but more importantly, there has been intense controversy over the administration's use of intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003. The accusations of dissimulation do not, however, end with Iraq. In addition, Bush has been charged with concealing many other sensitive matters, such as ties to corporate scandals like Enron, the effects of its environmental policies, and, well, really almost everything. As some critics have suggested, the Bush administration simply dissembles as a matter of policy.[xi][11]
At the same time, ironically, this administration has also displayed a remarkable preoccupation with the surveillance and monitoring of its own citizenry. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and new measures like the USA Patriot Act, public rights to privacy have been significantly restricted, even as the government's transparency has been radically reduced.[xii][12]  
So how, then, are we to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory aspects of the current administration, this intense public display of religiosity and this obsession with concealment?  The kind of secrecy being deployed by the Bush administration is clearly very different from the kind familiar to most readers of Esoterica. It has little if anything to do with the doctrines of “correspondences” and “living nature,” with the use of spiritual “imagination” or “the experience of transmutation” described by Antoine Faivre; nor does it involve the sort of “metaphysical gnosis” and “cosmological gnosis” described by Arthur Versluis.[xiii][13] It is, however, no less relevant to our understanding of religion and secrecy, and it forces those of us who are interested in esotericism to deal seriously with other uses of religious secrecy that have more explicit political implications. The Bush administration, we will see,  does use many strategies and tactics that have much in common with traditional Western esotericism – strategies of rhetorical double-coding, the art of “writing between the lines” and a skillful use of obscurity.[xiv][14] Yet the ends for which these strategies are used are quite different, having less to do with spiritual transformation than with raw political power, in Canetti’s sense.
 In this article, therefore, I will suggest that we look at the Bush administration through the lenses of three controversial theorists who have had much to say about secrecy in both its religious and political dimensions: the German-born political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the Florentine philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the French postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard. I have chosen these three, seemingly disparate, theorists because they correspond to and help make sense of three of the most important forces at work in the Bush administration, namely: 1) the Neoconservative movement, which is heavily indebted to Strauss' thought and has a powerful presence in the Bush administration through figures like Paul Wolfowitz (a student of Strauss) and the Project for a New American Century;[xv][15]  2) the manipulations of Bush's pious public image by advisors like Karl Rove (a reader of Machiavelli) and Vice-President Dick Cheney (often compared to Machiavelli), who have used the President's connections with the Christian Right for political advantage; [xvi][16] and 3) an astonishingly uncritical mainstream media, whose celebration of Bush's image as a virtuous man of faith and general silence about his less admirable activities is truly "hyperreal," in Baudrillard's sense of the term.
Bush himself, I will argue, lies at the intersection of these three (and other) forces, and his political persona has in turn been constructed in multiple ways by his advisors and constituents: he is thus at once the Gentleman, the Prince, and the Simulacrum. The first of these is Strauss’ term for the political figure who serves as the public voice of religion and morality for the wise man or philosopher, who is in fact the one with the real knowledge and power. For Strauss, both secrecy and religion are necessary to the functioning of society: the former protects the “vulgar” public from harsh truths that would endanger them, while the latter gives them faith in the laws that govern society.[xvii][17] The second term is of course from Machiavelli, whose work has been taken up by Neoconservative thinkers like Michael Ledeen who call for a neo-Machiavellian use of both religion and deception in American politics.[xviii][18] And the third is the term developed by Baudrillard to refer to the new era of simulation and hyper-reality that characterizes much of culture and politics in media-driven, late capitalist consumer society. For Baudrillard, the age of the simulacrum in which we live is one in which “the secret” no longer conceals some hidden truth, but simply conceals the fact that there is no truth or reality beneath the appearance.[xix][19]
After a brief discussion of Bush's self-presentation as a deeply religious individual and "Prodigal Son," I will then look at his administration through the three lenses of the Gentleman, the Prince and the Simulacrum. To conclude, I will suggest that the case of the Bush administration forces us to re-think the political role of the scholar of religion and to take a much more active, outspoken and critical role in relation to the powers that be.
I. THE PRODIGAL SON:  Religion and Secrecy in the Bush White House
I know we're all sinners, but I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior.
                                           —George W. Bush, when asked what argument he would give to gain entry to heaven[xx][20]
The centrality of religious faith in the life and politics of George W. Bush is surely no secret.  The narrative that he and his biographers tell of his life is clearly modeled on that of the prodigal son—the young man who fritters his early life away on alcohol and sin, only to find God and return to his rightful place in his father's former occupation.  As he recounts his own redemption-narrative, Bush had become mired in the world of business and the overuse of alcohol, and so turned in his darker hours to the study of scripture.  The beginning of this conversion occurred during a summer weekend in 1985, when evangelist Billy Graham visited George and Laura at their summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. The Reverend, with his magnetic presence and warmth, planted a “seed of salvation" in his soul that soon blossomed into a new birth:
Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year. He led me to the path, and I began walking. And it was the beginning of a change in my life. …[T]hat weekend my faith took on a new meaning. It was the beginning of a new walk where I would recommit my heart to Jesus Christ. [xxi][21]
 
In the course of his recommitment to Jesus, George W.  began a regular study of scripture using Don Evans’ “one year” Bible; he gave up drinking; and he also began working more closely with various members of the Religious Right. According to Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God evangelist and author of the Bush campaign publication, Man of Integrity , the Bush family had close relationships not just with Graham but also with several other religious leaders, including "dear friend," Jerry Falwell.[xxii][22]  The younger Bush would soon put these connections with the Christian Right to good use during his father's campaign, winning the trust of the evangelical audience the senior Bush had failed to reach: "Bush had become so attuned to all the nuances of the evangelical subcultures that virtually no one questioned the sincerity of his acceptance of Christ…Bush had replaced his father's visionless pragmatism with the Manichaean certitudes of Good and Evil…Dubya's bond with the Christian right was a crucial part of what distinguished him from his father."[xxiii][23]
George W.'s religiosity became even more explicit, however, once he decided to run for president himself in the 2000 election.  Indeed, as he confided to James Robinson, he believed that he had in been called by God himself to lead the United States:
I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.[xxiv][24]
As he considered the prospect of his candidacy, Bush met frequently with evangelical leaders. In October 1999, he addressed the Council for National Policy, a "powerful but secretive" group that attracts the "who's who of the evangelical movement," including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Senator Jesse Helms, Congressmen Tom DeLay, Oliver North, and Christian Reconstructionist, Rousas John Rushdoony.[xxv][25] The founder of the Council is none other than Tim LaHaye, the author of the best-selling Left Behind series of novels, which center around an evangelical interpretation of the Book of Revelation as played out in contemporary global politics.  In LaHaye's narrative, the Rapture has taken place, the Antichrist has taken control of the U.N., and the struggle between good against evil is being waged in the Middle East. This narrative, interestingly enough, also happened to fit well with the Neoconservative plans for the Middle East as the center of America's geopolitical struggle:
LaHaye…added a new foreign policy dimension to its agenda, specifically with regard to the Middle East. According to LaHaye, the armies of the Antichrist would soon have their final battle with Christ and 'witness the end of history' after a series of conflicts in the Middle East—- not unlike those taking place today. The belief that the events in the Middle East were part of God's plan, that Christ would return only after Israel truly controlled the Holy Land, put the Christian right on course for a low-profile liaison with a highly unlikely political ally—hard-line, pro-Israeli, neoconservative defense policy intellectuals.[xxvi][26]
            As Kevin Philips observes, many of the Christian leaders with whom Bush has been associating are connected to a large and influential movement known as Christian Reconstructionism or Dominion Theology.  For example, at the 2001 Inaugural Prayer Service at the National Cathedral, Bush chose Reverend Jack Hayford to give the benediction. A charismatic preacher involved with the founding of the "Promise Keepers" men's movement, Hayford is also an important supporter of Christian Reconstructionism.[xxvii][27] Inspired by Dutch-born theologian Cornelius Van Til and his American student Rousas Rushdoony, Dominion Theology is based on the belief that all human behavior is inherently religious and that Christian law should infuse every aspect of social life. The movement has been controversial for its strong political agenda, which calls for the dominance of the Church in political affairs and the creation of a single kingdom ruled by Christian leaders. According to Rushdoony's institute, the Chalcedon Foundation, "God's law is the divine pattern of sanctification in every area of life…The role of every earthly government—including family government, church government, school government, vocational government, and civil government—is to submit to Biblical law.”[xxviii][28]As a form of postmillennialism, Dominion Theology teaches that the creation of a Christian society here on earth is necessary before the final return of Christ and the new millennium.

Although not formally associated with Reconstructionism, both Pat Robertson and Billy Graham have expressed ideas similar to Dominion Theology. Robertson's own campaign for president in 1988 is a prime example of the sort of politically-active Christian called for by Dominionists.  Graham, meanwhile, has made outspoken appeals to Christians to take control of American politics. On April 29, 1985—shortly before he "planted the seed" in George Bush's heart—Graham told Pat Robertson’s audience on the 700 Club show that
the time has come when evangelicals are going to have to think about getting organized corporately….I’m for evangelicals running for public office and winning if possible and getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch…I would like to see every true believer involved in politics in some way shape or form.[xxix][29]
Not surprisingly, George W.'s use of religious rhetoric became even more intense in the wake of 9/11.  Following the attacks, Bush began to cast the global situation as a vast war between Good and Evil, the forces of liberty and democracy against the forces of tyranny and terror: "Our responsibility to history,” he declared on September 14, 2001, “is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” In sum, as Bob Woodward observes, "the president was casting his vision and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan."[xxx][30] Thus, in a speech before the FBI on September 25, Bush described his mission as a war of goodness and freedom against hateful, mindless destruction:
I see things this way: The people who did this act on America…are evil people. They don’t represent an ideology, they don’t represent a legitimate political group of people. They’re flat evil. That’s all they can think about, is evil. And as a nation of good folks, we’re going to hunt them down, and we’re going to find them, and we will bring them to justice.[xxxi][31]
 
At the same time, Bush also invoked the "Power of Prayer" to cover over and safe-guard America from future terrorist attacks: he asked that  "Americans pray for 'God's protection" and create "a spiritual shield that protects the country,"[xxxii][32] almost like a kind of evangelical version of Reagan's SDI plan.  
As Bruce Lincoln has argued, Bush's post 9/11 speeches display a powerful and effective strategy of religious "double coding." His statements are laced with specific references to Biblical passages, which are clearly heard by those steeped in scripture, but are generally overlooked as mere comforting words by those not so well versed in the Bible.[xxxiii][33]  "Speech-writer Mark Gerson, a onetime college theology major, filled George W. Bush's delivery system with phrases that, while inoffensive to secular voters, directed more specific religious messages to the faithful. Examples …included 'whirlwind' (a medium for the voice of God in the Books of Job and Ezekiel) a 'work of mercy' …and phrases like 'safely home' and 'wonder working power' taken from hymns and gospel songs."[xxxiv][34]
Indeed, so impressive was Bush's powerful religious rhetoric that he came soon to be recognized as the new leader of the Christian right in America. On the day before Christmas, 2001, the Washington Post   reported that "Pat Robertson's resignation this month as President of the Christian Coalition confirmed the ascendance of a new leader of the religious right in America: George W. Bush."[xxxv][35] Apparently, Robertson had stepped down because "the position has already been filled…[T]he president] is that leader right now. There was already a great deal of identification with the president before 9-11 in the world of the Christian Right, and the nature of this war is such that it has heightened the sense that a man of God is in the White House."[xxxvi][36] In the words of Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition's former President: "God knew something we didn't…He had a knowledge nobody else had: He knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way."[xxxvii][37] 
Bush's intense religiosity also helped support his decision to invade Iraq, one of the key links in this Axis of Evil. As he explained to Bob Woodward, this decision did not come from his political or military advisors or even former President H.W. Bush, but from a much higher authority: "He could …not consult his Secretary of State about going to war and not need to look for strength from his father, the former President, because he was consulting a ‘higher father’"[xxxviii][38] In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he made the strongest case for war against Iraq, Bush made an explicit appeal to God, divine will and Providence to justify the sacrifice of American lives. For they will be dying not just for American people, but for freedom, which is itself "God's gift to humanity:"
Sending Americans into battle is the most profound decision a President can make…This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come …Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity…
We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know…all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.[xxxix][39]
The fact that Bush succeeded in persuading both Congress and the American public to go along with this war is telling evidence of the power of this sort of religious rhetoric.
 
No Need for Explanation: Dissimulation and Concealment in the Bush White House
I'm the Commander in Chief, see…I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President…I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.
                                                                                                                — George W. Bush[xl][40]
While Bush's display of religiosity is surely no secret, a great many other aspects of his administration certainly are. In the words of Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, "This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information."[xli][41]
It would be difficult to catalogue all the examples of secrecy in this administration in a long book,  much less in a short article, so I will simply list a few of the more striking examples here. A member of the most infamous of all college secret societies, Yale's Skull and Bones, Bush knew much
about secrecy and the benefits of a tightly-knit old boys network long before assuming political office. As many critics have charged, there is evidence that suggests he was involved in insider-trading and  suspicious accounting  at his failed company, Harken Energy.[xlii][42]  According to New York Times  columnist Paul Krugman, "Mr. Bush profited personally from aggressive accounting identical to recent scams that have shocked the nation," such as the Enron and Arthur Anderson scandals.[xliii][43]   And there are of course many troubling links with Enron and Ken Lay that the Bush family would like to remain beyond public knowledge ("Kenny Boy," as he was known to the family, has a long history with the Bushes going back to 1980; he and his company were also the largest contributors to W.'s presidential campaign[xliv][44]).
However, the truly astonishing acts of concealment really began when he became president—indeed, almost from the moment he assumed that office. According to U.S. News & World Report, on Day 1 of this presidency, White House chief of staff Andy Card issued a directive to "wall off records and information previously in the public domain."[xlv][45] Bush's own first act as president was not to initiate a new economic strategy or plan to combat terrorism, but to make a concerted effort to conceal his own Texas gubernatorial records. As soon as he received word of the Supreme Court's favorable ruling on his election, W. arranged for his records to be "gathered, placed on sixty large pallets, shrink-wrapped in heavy plastic and, with no announcement, quietly shipped off to his father's presidential library at Texas A & M University."[xlvi][46]  After a year-long battle with the director of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Bush's records were finally returned to their rightful place in the state library (though with the provision that the keys to the filing cabinets containing Bush's records remain in the hands of the new Governor).[xlvii][47] In sum, "it is difficult to believe one would go to so much trouble to hide his records unless he had something he really did not want someone to know about."[xlviii][48]
            Among his next decisions as President was a similar attempt to restrict access to the presidential records of Ronald Reagan (and of his then vice-President father). According to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, these were to be released in January, 2001.  However, after requesting a series of extensions to review the many "legal questions" relating to the documents, Bush issued an executive order in November, 2001 that created an entirely new set of procedures for handling presidential papers and new standards for obtaining information about former presidents. Although the American Historical Association filed a lawsuit to acquire access to these records, the case has been filed and re-filed repeatedly and remains unresolved, apparently until after the 2004 election. Unless overturned, this newly expanded secrecy could allow presidential papers to remain sealed indefinitely; it would require that access to a former president's papers be approved by both the former president and the incumbent president; and it would allow representatives of former president to invoke executive privilege after a president is dead.  It is worth noting here some of the sensitive documents that Bush decided should remain secret: a six-page memo dated December 8, 1986 entitled "Talking Points on Iran/Contra Affairs" and a series of memos dated November 22 and December 1, 1988 entitled, "Pardon for Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Joseph Fernandez," among others.[xlix][49]
No less secrecy surrounds the activities of the Bush-Cheney "Energy Task Force," which has been highly controversial ever since its national energy plans were unveiled in May 2001.  These plans focused primarily on promoting oil, gas and nuclear power, while largely ignoring alternative energy technologies; they significantly weakened environmental regulations; and they called for opening environmentally sensitive areas like the ANWR to oil drilling. Not surprisingly, all of this alarmed many environmentalists and members of Congress. The General Accounting Office, headed by David Walker, therefore requested that the White House reveal who was consulted by Cheney and what was discussed. Cheney's blunt reply, however, was that the GAO had no authority to seek the information—a move that many see as a bold assertion of the administration's autonomy and its exemption from any sort of congressional oversight.[l][50] Walker in turn filed a suit to obtain the information, which was dismissed in December, 2002, by Judge John D. Bates (a conservative appointed by Bush). 
However, Larry Klayman and Judicial Watch filed a second suit, which did proceed far enough to reveal that Cheney's Task Force had relied for advice exclusively on energy companies, many of them big GOP donors. From January to May 2001, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with over 100 representatives of energy companies, eighteen of which contributed more than $16 million to the party since 1999. These include: ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Edison Electric Institute, and Enron. Consumer and environmental groups were barely contacted at all.[li][51]
Among the most astonishing example of secrecy in the Bush administration has been its environmental policy, which is of course closely tied to its dealings with the energy industries. As Dean observes, "no aspect of the Bush-Cheney hidden agenda is more disturbing than the stealth mistreatment of the environment."[lii][52] The Bush environmental policy has been attacked by a variety of critics, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who has made a career of pursuing polluters. In Kennedy's view, the White House “has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind the deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats."[liii][53]  It would take a very long book to recount all of the ways in which this administration has used strategies of dissimulation to conceal a shocking array of assaults upon the environment. Among the more incredible examples:  concealing the fact that the air around Ground Zero was not safe and allowing citizens to return to homes and offices when it was in fact still very dangerous;[liv][54] stifling EPA warnings about the dangers of deadly substances such as vermiculite, which contains lethal levels of asbestos fiber, 16 billion tons of which had been shipped throughout the United States;[lv][55] and declaring that carbon dioxide—which is one of the principal causes of global warming, and of which the U.S. is the world's greatest producer—is not in legally "a pollutant that the EPA can site to regulate emissions from cars and power plants."[lvi][56] Finally, not only did the White House largely ignore the E.P.A.'s 2002 "Climate Action Report," which concluded that global warming is a reality and is directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions;[lvii][57]  it also actively censored the E.P.A.'s  2003 environmental report, by deleting or modifying key sections that provided disturbing data on global warming.[lviii][58]
If the Bush administration was unusually secretive when it came into office, it became markedly more concerned with the control of information in the wake of 9/11. The new war on terror has been used to justify a whole new wave of official concealment, such as "secret immigration hearings, secret court proceedings, secret detentions, secret wars. Government officials have been prosecuted for sharing ‘sensitive’ …information with the press. Guidelines for abiding by the Freedom of Information Act have been tightened so as to virtually gut the intention of the law."[lix][59]  On the Friday of Columbus Day weekend after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft quietly issued an order urging all government agencies to deny whenever possible all Freedom of Information Act requests. In what some have called a "full scale assault on public's right to know," secrecy has become "the  preferred response."[lx][60]
But surely the most controversial example of the Bush administration's tendency toward dissimulation was its use of intelligence to justify a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Between August 2002 and January 2003, Bush and Cheney made repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda (and by implication to the 9/11 attacks). Almost all of these claims have since been shown to be mistaken, misleading or simply false. Among many examples we could mention here: On September 7, 2002 Bush spoke of an International Atomic Energy Agency report indicating that Saddam was just “six months away from developing [a nuclear] weapon.” Such a report did not exist.[lxi][61] On October 7, 2002, Bush gave a televised speech in Cincinnati that was filled with misleading statements, such as a claim that Iraq “has trained Al Qaida members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases” –  a claim that his own intelligence officials had disputed.[lxii][62]  Finally, in his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, Bush presented eight alarming "facts" about Iraq's WMD, every one of which later turned out to involve exaggerated and misleading information.[lxiii][63] The most egregious of these was the claim that Saddam had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa"—a claim the CIA already knew to be untrue, which had in fact been removed from the October 7 speech because of its unreliability. Only days later, Colin Powell refused to use that claim in his United Nations speech because of its lack of credibility (Powell did, however, use a good deal of other mistaken information in that speech, such as satellite photos of "decontamination trucks" that were actually water trucks and an image of an Iraqi jet spraying “simulated anthrax” that turned out to be a leftover from before the 1991 Gulf War, among many others).[lxiv][64]
In some ways even more disturbing than this obsession with secrecy, however, is the striking  increase of government surveillance and the reduction of rights to privacy for ordinary citizens. Perhaps the clearest example is the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” better known by its rather ironic acronym, the USA PATRIOT Act, championed by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Indeed, some critics like Howard Zinn have argued that this Act is in fact "the very opposite of patriotism, if patriotism means love of your country and not the government, love of principles of democracy and not the edicts of authority.”[lxv][65] Among other things, the PATRIOT Act gives the Attorney General unprecedented power to detain non-citizens indefinitely; it allows the FBI to search citizens' homes or offices and conduct electronic surveillance of phone and internet use, without proving probable cause; and it gives government agencies the authority to conduct so-called Sneak and Peek searches, that is, to search our homes or offices without even letting us know they’ve been there.

In effect, under the PATRIOT Act, "concepts of transparency have been reversed;" government has become increasingly secretive, while the public has become increasingly subject to surveillance.[lxvi][66]  As Elaine Scarry aptly puts it, the PATRIOT Act “inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public. It instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque.”[lxvii][67]
I could, of course, cite many, many other examples of the pervasive secrecy at work throughout the Bush administration. However, even from these few examples, it seems fair to say that secrecy and dissimulation have surrounded nearly every major policy of this administration from its inception. As Walter Cronkite concludes, this obsession with secrecy fundamentally calls into question the larger credibility of this administration and its activities over the last four years:   
This administration—the most secretive since Richard Nixon's—already suffers from a deepening credibility problem. It all brings to mind something I've wondered about for some time: Are secrecy and credibility natural enemies?
When you stop to think about it, you keep secrets from people when you don't want them to know the truth. Secrets…are what you might call passive lies.…Looking back at the past three years reveals a pattern of secrecy and of dishonesty in the service of secrecy.[lxviii][68]
But obsessive secrecy does not simply raise serious questions about credibility. It also raises the more fundamental questions of just what the heck are they up to? As former Attorney General (and later Secretary of state), William Rogers, nicely put it, "The public should view excessive secrecy among government officials as parents view sudden quiet when youngsters are playing. It is a sign of trouble."[lxix][69] Finally, this also raises the troubling question of just how this obsessive secrecy could be reconciled with an avowed commitment to a religious faith that values honesty and truth?  

II.  THE GENTLEMAN: Leo Strauss and the Art of Writing Between the Lines
The gentleman…is the political reflection or imitation of the wise man. Gentlemen…differ from the wise because they have a noble contempt for precision, because they refuse to take cognizance of certain aspects of life, and because, in order to live as gentlemen, they must be well off.
— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History[lxx][70]
Just in the last few years, many journalists and scholars have begun to take note of the surprising influence in U.S. foreign policy of the seemingly obscure political philosopher, Leo Strauss.  Born in Germany in 1899, Strauss fled his homeland during the Nazi rise to power.  He finally settled at the University of Chicago, teaching political philosophy and gathering a small but remarkably influential group of disciples. As Irving Kristol describes the enigmatic Strauss and his following,
Leo Strauss…was from a different planet…Helpless in all practical matters, the author of very difficult and complex texts, studious and meditative, a rationalist who pressed reason to its ultimate limits, he was no kind of ‘intellectual’— a class he held in, at best, tolerant contempt …His students – those happy few who sat at his feet – became ‘Straussians,’ though they preferred to be known as ‘political theorists’ …These students of Strauss, in turn, have produced another generation of political theorists, many of whom have relocated to Washington D.C. since the academic world of… ‘political science’ has become ever more hostile to Strauss.[lxxi][71]
 
Strauss is a notoriously difficult author, whose work has given rise to a wide array of interpretations—even among his own students, as we see in the heated debate over his legacy between Harry Jaffa and Thomas Pangle.[lxxii][72] This is not surprising, however, since Strauss himself wrote in the same kind of cryptic, doubly-coded, almost Kabbalistic “esoteric writing” that he believed characterized the works of the great ancient philosophers.  Some authors suggest that he deliberately taught different ideas to different students, believing that there are different levels of knowledge and different levels of capacity.[lxxiii][73]  In recent years, Strauss and his connections with the Neoconservatives have also given rise to a wide array of conspiratorial speculations, which have, unfortunately, only obscured his complex influence on contemporary politics. Some neoconservatives like Wolfowitz have recently downplayed Strauss’s influence, dismissing the idea that Strauss has anything to with contemporary foreign policy. Nevertheless, as Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke argue in their recent study of neoconservatism, “by affiliation or derivation, Strauss’s ideas occupied a space in the education of many students and intellectuals who subsequently progressed to the highest levels of Washington’s political elite.”[lxxiv][74]
From Athens to Chicago:  Religion and Secrecy in Strauss's Political Philosophy
That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only….[A]n author who wishes to address only thoughtful men has but to write in such a way that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of his book.
                                                                                — Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing[lxxv][75] 
            So what is it about Strauss’s philosophy – which is in fact quite controversial and often dismissed within the field of political philosophy  – that has been so appealing to Neoconservatives and others in Washington today?  His appeal, I think, centers around four main ideas: 1) his sense that the modern Western world is in a state of intense “crisis,” which is due in large part to the dangerous weaknesses within modern liberal democracy; 2) his emphasis on secrecy and esotericism, or the art of writing and reading between the lines; 3) his belief that religion is necessary for the coherence and stability of society, even though the philosopher or wise man has transcended such “noble lies;” and 4) his description of the “gentleman,” the public figure or politician who embodies the ideals of religious faith and virtue, and so serves as the liaison between the wise men and the common populace.
Like many European intellectuals of the mid-20th century, Strauss saw the modern Western world as a radical departure from the social and moral ideals of all past Western civilization, and particularly from the “ancients,” such as Plato, Aristotle, and their successors.[lxxvi][76] As Strauss confided in a letter in 1946, the hierarchically-ordered polity described by Plato and Aristotle is in his opinion the ideal political system, and one that we have now mistakenly abandoned:  "I really believe…that the perfect political order, as Plato and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political order.”[lxxvii][77]  
The increasingly chaotic state of modern Western society, conversely, is one of intense crisis. As Ted McAllister observes, "the modern crisis was the focal point for Strauss’s work;" from Strauss’s perspective, coming out of pre-Nazi Germany, "the political stability and economic prosperity of postwar America hid…a deeper angst and a fear that the center would not hold. America would take a course similar to the totalitarian states if it could not shore up its moral center."[lxxviii][78]  In Strauss's eyes, Weimar Germany fell prey to the delusion of Nazism precisely because of its weak and degenerate brand of liberalism. Modern liberal America, he warned, was in danger of falling prey to the same kind of totalitarian regime.  To prevent such a slide in fascism, therefore, we need to "counteract the perverted liberalism which contends  'that just to live, securely and happily, and protected and unregulated, is man's simple but supreme goal' and which forgets quality, excellence or virtue." [lxxix][79]
One of the key differences between ancient and modern worlds, for Strauss, lies in the role of secrecy.  As he argued in his classic but controversial Persecution and the Art of Writing, the great ancient philosophers used a special mode of writing, an esoteric writing that was intelligible only to the educated few who were trained in the art of reading between the lines. To the majority of mankind, their works would appear innocuous and generally beneficial to society. But to the trained reader or philosopher, their works contain a deeper and more profound message. The reason for this esoteric mode of writing, Strauss tells us, is that the truths of philosophy are potentially dangerous.  Society rests upon simple beliefs, conventional opinions and “noble lies” in order to remain stable and coherent.[lxxx][80] The truths the philosopher knows, however, call those noble lies radically into question. Revealing these truths openly might even place the philosopher’s life in danger. Therefore, the wise writer knows how to produce an “exoteric text” that contains an “esoteric” meaning, a text “in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines."[lxxxi][81]  Such literature is addressed, not to all readers, but only to the trustworthy and intelligent:
Philosophy or science, the highest activity of man, is the attempt to replace opinion about ‘all things’ with knowledge of ‘all things’; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy or science is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breaths, and thus it endangers society. Hence philosophy…must remain the preserve of a small minority, and philosophers…must respect the opinions on which society rests…Philosophers…are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable them to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teaching as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and concentrated study.[lxxxii][82]
            Although the philosophers are able to transcend the conventional beliefs and opinions that govern ordinary men, they do also recognize the importance  of these conventions for the good of society.  Perhaps more than anything else, they know that strong religious belief is integral for the health and well-being of a society.  Because the higher philosophic ideals of “contemplation and theory” are accessible "only to the few who are wise," special precautions are needed for the guidance and governance of the populace: "civil government…is not in itself sufficient for orderly corporate life within society. Religion is a regulator of order in social life. …It is…a code of law prescribed for the many by higher intelligences.”[lxxxiii][83]  Indeed, Strauss believed that one of the primary reasons that modern liberal society has entered a state of crisis is that it has lost its religious and moral foundation, and is now breeding a generation that is largely nihilistic, hopeless and without any ethical framework: "His great concern was that since 1950 the American commitment to modern natural right, shorn of strong religious counterbalance, has led to a greater emphasis on relativism and a corresponding loss of a moral compass."[lxxxiv][84]  Without strong religious beliefs such as the immortality of the soul and judgment after death, society lacks a transcendent authority for its laws and values:
[P]olitical atheism is a modern phenomenon which is simply incompatible with a stable and just order. When trust exists in a providential order to which one's conduct conforms, the dignity of moral obligations is enhanced and duty is raised to the level of aspiration. Belief in the immortality of the soul along with eternal awards and punishments acts as a powerful support for morality…No other source of 'modes and orders' could command such a great measure of assent and contribute to the stability of political life.[lxxxv][85]
            Following Plato, Strauss suggests that the ideal society would be one in which the wise men or philosophers would rule over the majority who are less wise. Yet because their unique insight into truth is potentially “dangerous” to the conventional opinions that support society, they are not necessarily the best politicians. Rather, the ideal ruler would be what Strauss refers to as the “gentleman,” a figure who embodies the virtues of religion and virtue that the common populace admirers: 
The best regime is based on the teaching that human beings are unequal from the point of view of their perfection. The wise are better suited to rule over others. The realization of this regime depends on the 'chance' appearance of princes friendly to philosophy…The best possible regime includes the rule of law under which the state entrusts its administration to 'gentlemen.' The gentleman is sufficiently wealthy…and public-spirited to be involved in noble pursuits.[lxxxvi][86]
Yet while the gentleman accepts the comforting narratives and noble values offered by religion, the philosopher knows these to be useful and necessary but ultimately empty illusions:
The esoteric philosophy is about the secret kingship of the philosopher. If the philosopher is identified with the Imam or the descendent of the prophet Muhammad, that is only a concession to public opinion; it is a ‘noble lie’, a ‘pious fraud,’ a matter of ‘considering one’s social responsibilities.’ Nor is it altogether false, since the role that the philosopher must occupy in the real city is not unlike that of the prophet who has the ear of the god-fearing king. The difference is that the philosopher is a prophet without a god. But that is his secret.[lxxxvii][87]
Together, then, the philosopher and the gentleman or ruler represent two different but complementary and ideally mutually-supportive standards of excellence: “the virtue of the citizen best embodied in the moral excellence of the gentleman (the ruler or founder) and the excellence of the philosopher or the wise man.”[lxxxviii][88] As Deutsch suggests in his reflections on Strauss’s impact on American politics, a modern-day gentleman would be most effective serving in the highest offices of government, particularly in the executive branch: “Service in the three branches of government, especially the presidency, would provide opportunities for the 'gentleman' to gain reputations for wisdom, patriotism and the love of justice.”[lxxxix][89] With the striking rise of the Neoconservatives in American foreign policy, followed by the election of George W. Bush, it would seem that Strauss’ ideal of the wise “philosophers” working together with the noble “gentleman” has indeed come to fruition.
 
From Chicago to Washington: Straussians and the Neoconservative Movement
Strauss’s view…suggests that deception is the norm in political life.
                                                             —Gary J. Schmitt and Abram N. Shulsky, “The World of Intelligence” [xc][90]
 [T]he secret, the Geheimnis…distinguished the elite, the establishment of the United States…Their possession of the one or more  secrets made them into Geheimnisträger,  bearers of the secret, rather than Befehlträger, mere carry-outers of instructions.
                                                                                                — Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra (1964)[xci][91]
Despite his relative obscurity and lack of influence within the academy today, Strauss has become remarkably influential among many political circles – and above all in the groups loosely characterized as Neoconservatives.[xcii][92]  As Irving Kristol – the most famous proponent of the term – suggests, Neoconservatism is not so much a coherent “movement” or political party as it is simply a “persuasion” or a moral, social and political attitude.  Over the last several decades, this "persuasion" has had a growing presence in American political thought, first through the influence of think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the related Project for a New American Century (founded in 1997 by Irving's son, William), and second, through publications such as the Weekly Standard. Kristol is very clear about the formative impact of Strauss on his own intellectual development and his concept of Neoconservatism. Reading Strauss was a kind of transformative experience or intellectual awakening that changed his entire way of thinking:  "Encountering Strauss’s work produced the kind of intellectual shock that is a once-in-a lifetime experience. He turned one’s intellectual universe upside down."[xciii][93]  As Kristol observes, much of the Neoconservative persuasion is indebted to Strauss, and particularly to his critique of modern liberal society and its loss of moral compass:
 [I]n the United States…the writings of Leo Strauss have been extraordinarily influential. Strauss’ critique of the destructive elements within modern liberalism, an analysis that was popularized by his students…has altered the very tone of public discourse in the United states…To bring contemporary liberalism into disrepute…is no small achievement.[xciv][94]
Bush himself was of course never a reader of Strauss and at first had little in common with the Neoconservatives’ aggressive foreign policy. However, as Halper and Clarke argue,  Bush’s relatively unformed foreign agenda enabled the Neoconservatives to root themselves firmly in his administration and, particularly after 9/11, to take command of American foreign policy.[xcv][95]
                Although the various characters lumped under the label of Neoconservative are a diverse and eclectic group, they do share a few key points in common.[xcvi][96] One of the most important is their sense that, as Strauss had warned, modern liberal democracy is in a dangerous state of "crisis."  "It is not an exaggeration,” Kristol warns, “to apply the term ‘crisis ‘to the events of recent decades."[xcvii][97] Since the 1960s, and particularly during the Clinton era, American society has lost its moral compass and become increasingly licentious, corrupt and self-indulgent. As Kristol suggests, one of the beliefs that unites them with traditional conservatives is a shared concern about "the steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity."[xcviii][98]  One of the goals the Neoconservatives, therefore, has been to bring about a moral reform or "conversion" within politics and American society as a whole, in a word, "to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."  As Kristol observes, George W. Bush has been a fortuitous gift to the Neoconservatives and has done much to advance this moral and political conversion: "by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did."[xcix][99] 
One of the ideas that most attracted Kristol and others to Strauss's work is the esoteric and "aristocratic" nature of his philosophy. True philosophy, according to Strauss, is not meant for the masses. Indeed, it would even dangerous to the multitudes, who would only misunderstand and "vulgarize it." Philosophy is intended for a kind of "intellectual aristocracy" who possesses the skill, knowledge and courage to handle such potentially threatening ideas:
What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free’. He was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and the political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion.[c][100]
With Strauss, Kristol therefore agrees that a just society is one that is ordered and hierarchical, one in which the wise few lead the many, and in which the inequalities of wealth and power are understood by all to be for the benefit of society as a whole: "A just and legitimate society, according to Aristotle, is one in which inequalities – of property, or station, or power – are generally perceived by the citizenry as necessary for the common good. I do no see that this definition has ever been improved upon."[ci][101]  And capitalism, at least in its original American forms, represents the ideal economic system for this sort of orderly, hierarchical society based on merit and the acceptance that those who are superior to oneself in the social order deserve to be so because of their own hard work and virtue: "What is distinctive about neoconservatism is not so much its celebration of bourgeois economics but of corporate capitalism. The latter is compatible with a hierarchical vision of life in which one prosaically submits to one’s station and its duties."[cii][102]
Like Strauss, many Neoconservatives are also quite clear about the basic need for secrecy and dissimulation in politics. Certain truths, certain information, certain knowledge should not be publicly available but should be restricted only to those who have the wisdom and skills to use that knowledge responsibly. This is one of the basic points of a seminal article written by Gary J. Schmitt (President of the Project for a New American Century) and Abram N. Shulsky (Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans) entitled “The World of Intelligence." Following Strauss, they suggest that secrecy and lying are not just part of, but integral to, all political life. The idea of transparency is instead an unrealistic delusion: 
Strauss’s view certainly alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that dispense with it is the exception.[ciii][103]
            Finally, also in keeping with Strauss, the Neoconservatives are committed to the promotion of religion in the public sphere. According to Kristol, religion is the most important pillar of conservatism and the basis of a strong capitalist economy: “The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism and economic growth. Of these, religion is easily the most important because it is the only power that…can shape people’s characters and regulate their motivation.”[civ][104] Religious faith is crucial to the health of a country. For it provides the spiritual basis of a national "civil religion" in which the populace is taught to revere its leaders and withstand the mundanity of existence: "Moral codes evolve from the moral experience of communities, and can claim authority over behavior to the degree that individuals are reared to look respectfully, even reverentially, on the moral traditions of their forefathers. It is the function of religion to instill such respect and reverence."[cv][105] Like Strauss, Kristol blames the loss of strong faith for the crisis, relativism and immorality of modern liberal society:
It is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as of all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than experiencing one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.[cvi][106]
Thus, in 1995, Kristol argued that the Republican party needed to reach out and embrace the strong religious core of the population – despite its tendency toward un-democratic attitudes— if it was to triumph over the contemporary liberal malaise of Clinton’s America: “conservatives and the Republican party must embrace the religious if they are to survive. Religious people always create problems since their ardor tends to outrun the limits of politics in a constitutional democracy. But if the Republican part is to survive, it most work on accommodating these people."[cvii][107] 
As Kristol observed, many students of Strauss began to make a powerful entrée into Washington during the 1980s.  Foremost among them was Paul Wolfowitz, who studied with Strauss at Chicago, received his PhD under Strauss’s protégé Albert Wohlstetter in 1972 and went on to become the undersecretary of defense under then-secretary of defense, Dick Cheney (1989-93).  Cheney, we should note, is also a former Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, where his wife, Lynne, is currently a Fellow. Together, Wolfowitz and Cheney came up with a bold new plan to entirely rethink U.S. military policy, which was circulated in 1992 in the top-secret Defense Policy Guidance report. So disturbing was this report that it was leaked by a Pentagon official, who believed this strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain. Indeed, it was described by some as nothing less than a plan for the U.S. to "rule the world," without acting through U.N. and by using pre-emptive attacks: "It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but…all powerful."[cviii][108]

Although this rather disturbing plan was quickly shot down after its leak, it resurfaced in a new form in 1997, with the founding of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) by Irving Kristol's son, William.   As William Kristol and Robert Kagan had already argued in Foreign Affairs in 1996, America now has an  opportunity to exercise a "benevolent hegemony " over the world while promoting democracy and free markets—an opportunity it would be foolish to let slip away.[cix][109] Yet like Strauss, they warn that America is today in a state of crisis, in which our "foreign and defense policy is adrift" in large part due to the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration.[cx][110]  Kristol and Kagan's PNAC soon emerged as the leading think-tank and a "who's who of the neoconservative establishment."[cxi][111] According to its own self-description, the PNAC is "dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world: that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy, and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership."[cxii][112] 
The ousting of Saddam Hussein and the rebuilding of Iraq (and by implication, the Middle East)  was a key part of this program for American leadership. In 1998 eighteen associates of the PNAC—including  Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz—wrote a letter to President Clinton. In it, they warned of the need to secure the "significant portion of the world's oil supply"  in Iraq,  advising the President that "the only acceptable strategy…is to undertake military action" and remove "Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”[cxiii][113]
Although Clinton chose not to take their advice, the PNAC did not give up on its bold  vision for America's benevolent global hegemony. In September 2000, the PNAC issued a report entitled "Rebuilding America's defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." Its authors lament the lack of effort to "preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades" and criticize Clinton for squandering his opportunity to make the U.S. the sole, indomitable global super-power. The removal of Saddam and the U.S. occupation of Iraq would provide both the crucial justification and the ideal precondition for this much larger global agenda: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."[cxiv][114] Achieving this goal of undeniable U.S. power, the authors suggest, would require a radical transformation in public opinion and government policy. But they also caution that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a New Pearl Harbor."[cxv][115]  
The attacks of 9/11 appear to have handed the advocates of the New American Century their "catastrophic and catalyzing" event on a silver platter (a fact that has given rise to no end of conspiracy theories).  Indeed, as George W. wrote in his diary before going to bed on the night of Sept. 11, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today."[cxvi][116]
As David Harvey observes, 9/11 did indeed provide the catalyzing event for the forceful imposition of the Neoconservative agenda on both the international and the national fronts. Internationally, it gave them the justification for an extremely aggressive and militaristic foreign policy, of which the invasion of Iraq is the clearest example. On the domestic front, it also gave an excuse to impose extremely invasive new measures like the PATRIOT Act championed by Attorney General John Ashcroft (who is also an active Pentecostal Christian).[cxvii][117] In both cases, these policies fit well with the conservative values of Bush's largest popular base in the Christian Right:
The fortuitous election of George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, to the US presidency brought a neoconservative group of thinkers close to power. …Its primary objective is the establishment of and respect for order, both internally and upon the world stage. This implies strong leadership at the top and unwavering loyalty at the base, coupled with the construction of a hierarchy of power that is both secure and clear…adherence to moral principle is also crucial. In this it finds its moral backbone and electoral base with fundamentalist Christians.[cxviii][118]
 
Yet this aggressive foreign policy also has behind a much larger and, to many, more disturbing global agenda. With Iraq as its base of operation, and Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran close at hand, the U.S. will be in a position to control the flow of oil from the Middle East and, by extension, the flow of capital throughout the planet in an age still dominated by oil and petro-dollars:
Lurking behind all of this appears to be a certain geopolitical vision. With the occupation of Iraq and the possible reform of Saudi Arabia and some sort of submission on the part of Syria and Iran to superior American military power and presence, the US will have secured a vital strategic bridgehead…on the Eurasian land mass that just happens to be the centre of production of oil l that currently runs…not only the global economy but also every large military machine…The US will then be in a military and geostrategic position to control the whole globe militarily and, through oil, economically…The neoconservatives are, it seems, committed to nothing short of a plan for total domination of the globe.[cxix][119]
            In this bold Neoconservative bid for global power, religion plays a complex but integral role. It is no accident, as various critics have observed, that the central spiritual conflict that preoccupies the Christian readers of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series takes place in the same geographic region as the economic and political conflict that preoccupies the Neoconservatives.  For the Christian evangelicals, Christ's triumph in the Middle East is the necessary condition for the Last Judgment and the New Millennium where the just will reign forever more. For the Neoconservatives, control of the Middle East and its resources is the necessary condition for a "New Century" of American hegemony where our own version of just rule will prevail, at least as long as the world remains tied to an oil-based economy.
On one of the most watched current affairs programs on American television, Falwell declared that Muhammad was the first great terrorist, while others expressed support for Zionism and for Sharon's violence towards the Palestinians since this would lead to Armageddon and the Second Coming… It is hard for Europeans to understand that around a third of the US population holds firmly to such beliefs …which imply acceptance of the horrors of war (particularly in the Middle East) as a prelude to the achievement of God's will on earth.[cxx][120]
There is, however, a profound irony in this Neoconservative push toward global hegemony via oil dominance.  Indeed, the irony is twofold. On the one hand, in its desire to be, as Powell put it, "the bully on the block", the US is now pursuing the very politics for which the “evil empire” (the Soviet Union) was condemned and opposed. The second and far more distressing irony, however, is that the U.S. drive toward imperial power  and militaristic over-expenditure could very well end in the same economic collapse that brought down the Soviet empire: "if the Soviet empire was really brought down by excessive strain on its economy through the arms race, then will the US, in its blind pursuit of military dominance, undermine the economic foundations of its own power?"[cxxi][121]

 
III. THE PRINCE: Machiavelli and the Political Expedience of Faith
To those seeing and hearing him, [the Prince] should appear a man of compassion, a man of good faith, a man of integrity, a kind and a religious man. And there is nothing so important as to seem to have this last quality. Men in general judge by their eyes rather than their hands…Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are…The common people are always impressed by appearances and results.
                                                                                — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVIII[cxxii][122]
The winning formula is threefold: good laws, good arms, good religion.
— Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership[cxxiii][123]
The second lens through which I suggest we examine the role of religion and secrecy in the Bush administration is work of the Florentine political philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli, and specifically his concept of the Prince.  From the outset, of course, the Bush administration has been accused by its critics of acting in "Machiavellian" fashion. His chief advisor in the 2000 campaign, Karl Rove, is reportedly a regular reader of The Prince and used remarkably aggressive campaign tactics.  Vice-President Cheney, too, has been compared to a Machiavellian adviser working behind the scenes and secretly manipulating his ignorant young "Prince.” However, I would argue that the ties between Machiavelli – and specifically, a kind of fusion of Machiavelli and Strauss or a Machiavellian reading  of Strauss—are more complex and significant than most of the popular literature suggests. 
            Leo Strauss was himself an important scholar of Machiavelli, who wrote one of the most difficult, confusing and widely-debated interpretations of Machiavelli's work.  As various authors have observed, Strauss' work on Machiavelli appears to be written in the same sort of esoteric, deliberately misleading code that he believes characterizes all the great ancient philosophers. Although Strauss begins his book by declaring the seemingly "obvious" fact that Machiavelli was a philosopher of evil who marks the end of the ancient philosophic tradition, it is by no means entirely clear what he means by this. Some have suggested that what Strauss finds most objectionable in Machiavelli is not so much what he says, but rather the fact that he says it openly, in clear, straightforward prose, without the esoteric strategies deployed by the ancients; and his criticism of Machiavelli's "evil" is coupled with a "deep admiration for his genius."[cxxiv][124]   As Strauss put it,
Machiavelli proclaims openly and triumphantly a corrupting doctrine which ancient writers had taught covertly… He says in his own name shocking things which ancient writers had said through the mouths of their characters. Machiavelli alone has dared to utter the evil doctrine in a book and in his own name.[cxxv][125]
 
In any case, regardless of Strauss' own interpretation of his work, Machiavelli has clearly had an impact on much of the Neoconservative movement now powerful in Washington (thus, Irving Kristol also wrote an influential essay on Machiavelli, in which he compared him to a “strong medicine” and recognized that “Machiavelli can  be a dangerous teacher; but…he may be a useful one”[cxxvi][126]).
Born in the Republic of Florence in 1469, Machiavelli spent his political career in the service of Piero Soderini’s government until it was destroyed by the Medici in 1512.  Suspected of conspiracy against the Medici, Machiavelli was arrested and tortured, and then retired to his farm in the country. Still tormented by a desire to return to the metropolis and to politics, he drafted The Prince in 1513.[cxxvii][127]
            Like Strauss, Machiavelli has been subjected to a vast array of conflicting interpretations in modern scholarship.  Indeed, he has been attacked as an "Antichrist" who preached a cynical doctrine of self-serving manipulation, and defended as a tortured humanist who candidly described the realities of life and politics.[cxxviii][128] Without engaging in any of this long history of philosophic debate, I simply want to focus on three of Machiavelli's most important and influential ideas:  the necessity of deception, the political expedience of religion, and the reality of war.
            Machiavelli made no bones about the importance of deceptions and false appearances in politics.  It is  absolutely necessary that  a Prince appear to be virtuous, just, honest and compassionate; without such an appearance the populace would not trust or be loyal to him. But it is no less critical that he be able to act  in ways that are cruel, dishonest, and vicious. If he has a strong reputation for compassion, he can retain the loyalty of his citizens even when he is committing the cruelest of deeds: 
[A] prince must want to have a reputation for compassion rather than for cruelty; none the less, he must be careful that he does not make bad use of compassion…So a prince must not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long a she keeps his subjects united and loyal. [cxxix][129]
Therefore, an ability to lie is a great asset to the Prince. He must understand the ease with which most people are duped and the ways in which the simple-minded can be misled by the one who is clever: "one must know how to colour one’s actions and to be a great liar and deceiver. Men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived."[cxxx][130]
            Interestingly enough, Machiavelli suggests that of all the virtues the Prince should appear to have, the one that is of most political expedience is the virtue of religious faith.  The appearance of piety inspires the greatest devotion in his populace. Yet it is only the appearance of religion that is helpful.  To always act in a religious way would in fact be quite damaging to the Prince, whose station more often demands that he act in ways that are contrary to religion:
A prince, therefore, need not necessarily have all the good qualities I mentioned above, but he should certainly appear to have them. I would even go so far as to say that if he has these qualities and always behaves accordingly he will find them harmful; if he only appears to have them they will render him service. He should appear to be compassionate, faithful to his word, kind, guileless, and devout...But his disposition should be such that, if he needs to be the opposite, he knows how…[A] prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because in order to maintain his state, he is often forced to act in defiance of good faith, of charity, of kindness, of religion. [cxxxi][131]
             Religion, deception, and politics all come together in the harsh reality of war. For war is the single most important fact for a ruler: to rule means to wage war, and the test of the strength and ability of ruler lies in his ability to wage war successfully. Thus, the prince “must have no other object or thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except war, its organization, and its discipline. The art of war is all that is expected of a ruler; and it is so useful that besides enabling hereditary princes to maintain their rule it frequently enables ordinary citizens to become rulers.”[1][132] Both deception and religion are critical in times of war. The former is the key to strategy and the means to outwit one's enemies; the latter is the key to generating troop loyalty and persuading one’s citizens to die for a higher cause:
Religion, too, and the oath soldiers took when they were enlisted, greatly contributed to making them do their duty in ancient times; for upon any default, they were threatened not only with human punishments, but the vengeance of the gods. They also had several other religious ceremonies that had a very good effect on all their enterprises, and would have still in any place where religion is held in due reverence.[cxxxii][133] 
Perhaps even more so than Strauss's thought,  Machiavelli's observations on secrecy, deception, religion and war seem to have had a significant influence on Neoconservative policies of the last decade.
 
Cheney, Rove and the Christian Right: The Prince in a Postmodern Era
If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
                – Quotation on Dick and Lynne Cheney’s Christmas card, 2003[cxxxiii][134]
A]long with good soldiers and good laws, the best state….requires good religion. …fear of God underlies respect for men. …He considers the Roman Catholic Church too corrupt and too soft. He wants a tougher, more virile version of the faith, which will inspire men to fight for the glory of their country…
— Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership[cxxxiv][135]
 
It is not difficult to see the imprint of Machiavelli in the activities of the current Bush administration and in the Neoconverative movement.  As various observers have suggested, Bush's campaign advisor, Karl Rove, is not only an admirer of Machiavelli, but one of the great Machiavellian strategists of all time, who took a thrice-failed businessman and transformed him into a remarkably popular presidential candidate: "Bush is the product. Rove is the marketer. One cannot succeed without the other."[cxxxv][136]  A key part of Rove's marketing  was to repackage  Bush for several different audiences—as a pro-corporate, big business advocate on the one hand, and as a devout Christian and liaison to the powerful evangelical Right, on the other. Rove helped present him, in short, as a kind of ambiguous ink-blot, whose message of "compassionate conservatism" could be read in a variety of different ways according to various corporate and religious interests:
The task of reinventing and marketing [Bush] fell to Karl Rove, Bush's longtime friend, confidant and handler who had earned the sobriquet Bush's Brain. His solution was to create a Rorschach test candidate so that moderates, conservatives, and independents would see in Bush exactly what they wanted to see. Bush's theme of "compassionate conservatism" meant whatever one wanted it to mean. To Wall Street Republicans… Bush was his father's son, a… moderate who would be good for business. To the powerful cadres of the radical Christian right, Bush's vow to restore honor and integrity to the White House, his promise that his deepest commitment was to his faith and family, meant that he was unmistakably one of them.[cxxxvi][137]
Rove's political strategies could in fact be quite ruthless, perhaps in ways that would make even Machiavelli think twice. Rove was known for  the kind of "sour mash tactics of Lee Atwater days, a hard, negative assault on the opponent, sometimes directly and sometimes undercover”[cxxxvii][138] Thus he recruited Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian coalition, to help bring out religious conservatives. Meanwhile, a professor from the evangelical Bob Jones University sent out an e-mail claiming that McCain had fathered illegitimate children.  In sum, "the practice of negative campaigning, the old Sun Tzu,…was something Rove not only practiced but taught at the University of Texas."[cxxxviii][139]
By many accounts, however, the far more Machiavellian (and more powerful)  figure in Bush administration is vice-President Dick Cheney. In an interview with USA Today, Cheney was in fact  asked directly whether the comparisons of his behind-the-scenes politics  with Machiavelli troubled him at all. His half-joking response to the question is telling: "Cheney told USA Today he was not worried about his image as the administration's Machiavelli, skilled in the quiet arts of persuading his 'Prince' to pursue questionable policies, adding, surprisingly unselfconsciously, 'Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually.'"[cxxxix][140]
Going still further, some have compared Cheney, whose "persuasiveness behind closed doors is legendary," to a kind of Svengali or a Rasputin.[cxl][141] Others have compared Cheney to Richelieu, the French Cardinal and Duke who served as France's Secretary of State for foreign affairs and later as Prime Minister—serving  as the "hand behind the throne," who was known for his "horrible overspending on war he fostered."[cxli][142] In a cover story for the American Conservative,  Georgie Anne Geyer observes that the Bush administration  has less in common with egalitarian democracy than with a royal court, complete with its back-scenes intrigue and secret societies:
George W. most resembles the many French dauphins come suddenly to the throne - the young inexperienced prince, with a defense chief who has definite Napoleonic tendencies and a flowing group of courtiers with their own agendas and loyalties, some to foreign countries and some to secret societies outside the realm. With this court, Dick Cheney has become George Bush's Cardinal Richelieu.[cxlii][143]
As various critics have suggested, Cheney's role in the administration is so powerful as to represent a kind of "co-presidency" or "shadow presidency."[cxliii][144] Not only did he assemble the highly secretive energy task force, but Cheney also set up his own national security team. Rather than relying on the National Security Council, he formed his own group of fifteen experienced national security experts, most with advanced degrees and sympathetic to Neoconservative thinking. According to Bush's own National Security Council Staff, Cheney's group constitutes a "shadow" government, while according to others, it represents a kind of "secret government" that lies "beyond the reach of Congress and everyone else as well."[cxliv][145]  Meanwhile, he has played the role of a kind of  "Regent"  in taking care of the inexperienced  boy-king while making most of the important decisions himself:
He loathes…[the] retail kind of politics, the gripping and grinning, baby-kissing…politics. Cheney flourishes in a different political arena. It is the one that few outsiders see, the one in which, particularly in this administration, all decisions are made. It is the politics of governance at the highest level…where the art of guiding the decision-making process is practiced by some of the most skilled inside-the-room players in Washington. And it is the politics at which Cheney is unrivaled.[cxlv][146]
In sum, if Rove was the ruthless strategist who helped forge the Bush image and its ties to the Religious Right, Cheney has played the role of the Machiavellian minister, who has used the pious image of the young Prince to promote the Neoconservatives’ geopolitical strategy.
Michael Ledeen, or Machiavelli Meets the Religious Right
[Moses] knows that somewhere in the shards of the shattered tablets it says 'Thou shalt not murder.' He readily admits that the means are evil, but he insists that they are the only ones that work in such dire circumstances.
                                                                                                — Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership[cxlvi][147]    
However, the most explicit appeal to Machiavelli as a model of modern governance has come from Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential figures in the Neoconservative movement, who also has significant ties to the Religious Right. A former Senior Fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an advisor to the National Security Council, and a special counselor to former Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, Ledeen is currently a scholar at the Neocon think-tank, American Enterprise Institute. According to William O. Beeman of the Pacific News Service, “Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned;” indeed, "Ledeen’s ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz…He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America’s manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.” [cxlvii][148] According to the BBC, The Washington Post and other sources, Ledeen has been regularly consulted by Karl Rove. At the same time, Ledeen also has a relationship with Pat Robertson going back to the early 1980s, and made a number of appearances on the 700 Club. [cxlviii][149]
In 1999 Ledeen published Machiavelli on Modern Leadership; Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago, which was then circulated among Members of Congress attending a political strategy meeting shortly after its release.[cxlix][150]  Ledeen makes an unapologetic call for a return to Machiavelli's harsh but realistic advice, which he sees as the only means to save the United States from its own decline into moral malaise and political ruin.  The Clinton administration in particular, he thinks, represents the decay of strong American values and the surest sign that we need to return to Machiavelli's harsh political realism:
Some fear that the seeming indifference of the American public to the revelations of the Clinton administration…is evidence that the corruption has spread far and wide…If that is the case, we will soon find ourselves in the same desperate crisis that drove Machiavelli to call for anew dictator to set things aright…[W]e need Machiavellian wisdom and leadership[cl][151]
It is time, he thinks, to admit the basic truths about human nature and history that Machiavelli stated so bluntly: that human beings are power-driven, violent, deceitful creatures, that war rather than peace is the ordinary state of human affairs, and that evil acts are often necessary to preserve a higher good. "In Machiavelli's world—the real world as described in the truthful history books—treason and deceit are commonplace;" thus Machiavelli “is simply stating the facts: if you lead, there will be occasions when you will have to do unpleasant, even evil, things or be destroyed."[cli][152] And the times when leaders must enter into evil are precisely those times when the higher good of the nation is threatened, or when some sort of revolutionary change is needed to bring society to a higher level:
There are several circumstances in which good leaders are likely to have to enter into evil; whenever the very existence of the nation is threatened; when the state is first created or revolutionary change is to be accomplished…and when the society becomes corrupt and must be restored to virtue.[clii][153]
War, according to Ledeen, is not an aberration or unusual occurrence in human history. On the contrary, war is the natural state of human affairs: "Peace is not the normal condition of mankind. War and the preparation for war are the themes of human history…Bloody conflicts are history's leitmotif."[cliii][154] Strong leadership means recognizing this fact and fighting ruthlessly to win the inevitable conflicts that structure human relations: "If you're going to lead, you've go to fight. Whether you're on the way up, are striving to acquire greater power or are at the top…you're involved in struggle…The bloody-mindedness derives from ambition, and human ambition is unlimited." It is only through violent conflict, even revolutionary turmoil, that history moves forward: "Change—above all, violent change—is the essence of human history…the origins of political systems [are] all about constant turmoil."[cliv][155]
            One of the things Ledeen most admires about Machiavelli, however, is his recognition of the importance of religion in governance. Indeed, strong religious faith is as important to a healthy nation as a strong army. One need not be religious oneself, moreover, to see the value of religion for promoting the social good and political stability. Religion is, after all, primarily utilitarian from Machiavelli's point of view, a means to achieving the greater good of national loyalty and political strength: 
[A]lthough not a regular church-goer himself, he knows that a good state must rest on a religious foundation. To remain good, a state must 'above every other thing keep the ceremonies of their religion incorrupt and keep them always in their veneration, because one can have no greater indicator of the wreck of a land then to see the divine cult scorned.'[clv][156]
Following Machiavelli, however, Ledeen contrasts two very different kinds of religious leaders: the "unarmed prophet", who knows the good but cannot fight to save it, and the  "armed prophet" who knows the good and knows how to preserve it, even if necessary by "evil" means. The prime example of the former is Girolamo Savonorola, the Dominican reformer who was executed in Florence in 1498.  Conversely, “Machiavelli's favorite example of the armed prophet and his greatest hero” is Moses. For it was Moses who first brought God's Law in the Ten Commandments and then—in a part of Biblical history most Christians would rather forget—ordered the slaughter of all those idolaters who worshipped the golden calf instead:
[H]e said unto them, 'Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel: Put ye  every man his sword upon his thigh, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother , and every man his companion and every man his neighbor'…and there fell of the people that day about three thousand.[clvi][157]
Thus  Machiavelli concluded that "Whoever reads the Bible sensibly will see that Moses was forced, were his laws and institutions to go forward, to kill numberless men."[clvii][158] Continuing Machiavelli's argument, Ledeen concludes that the armed prophet, the religious leader who is willing to kill to uphold the law, is the most effective model for leadership. For the realist knows that "leaders will sometimes have to violate religious strictures to prevail against merciless enemies and competitors."[clviii][159]
Ledeen's Neo-Machiavellian teachings have had a notable influence, not just in Neoconservative circles, but more broadly through his appearances in Christian venues like the 700 Club.  In the 1980s, Ledeen made numerous appearances on the 700 Club, where he offered bold political advice to his audience.  On April 30, 1985, Robertson asked him,  “What would you recommend if you were going to advise the President [Ronald Reagan] as to foreign policy?” to which Ledeen responded: “The United States has to make clear to the world and above all to its own citizens, what our vital interests are. And then we must make it clear to everyone that we are prepared to…fight fiercely to defend those interests, so that people will not cross the lines that are likely to kick off a trip wire.”[clix][160]
There is much evidence to suggest that Ledeen's advice and his aggressive vision of foreign policy has been followed by the Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, particularly in its preemptive invasion of Iraq.[clx][161]  A more disturbing fact, however, is that Ledeen has also been urging the administration to go further still, by taking the next step in asserting its power in the Middle East and using military force in Iran, as well. As he stated in a 2004 interview with the 700 Club,
 Iran is the most pro-American population in the world today—I mean much more pro-American than, California, say, and we should be helping them. It just comes naturally to normal Americans, to want to help democratic freedom-fighters being oppressed by nasty tyrannies…Then you add in the fact that Iran is the center of the terror network…it's the most dangerous of the all the terror countries, and you really marvel that it's taken us this long to get on board with what the president has wanted to do all along.[clxi][162]
Whether or not the current Prince decides to pursue this more ambitious Middle East policy, however, remains to be seen.

IV. THE SIMULACRUM: The Mass Media and the Projection of the Bush Image
Since Machiavelli politicians have…known that the mastery of simulated space is the source of power, that
the political is not a real activity but a simulation model, whose manifestations are simply achieved effects.  
— Jean Baudrillard, On Seduction[clxii][163]
 
[T]here's just the TV image after all, the illusion of the media, and behind it…another group entirely rules. A corporate body of some kind. But who are they and how did they get power? … We came so far; we almost seem to know what's really going on. The actuality behind the illusion, the secrets kept from us all our lives.
                                                                                                                —Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra (1964)[clxiii][164]
You know, I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office.
— George W. Bush, to Roland Betts[clxiv][165]
 
It seems difficult to believe that the aggressive strategies of the Neoconservatives could have succeeded as well as they have without the help of one other important cultural force: the American media, which has for the most part helped to project Bush’s image as a man of religious faith and integrity, while at the same time ignoring most of his less admirable activities. As Bush himself admitted at one point before beginning his political career, he is not so much a politician as a “media creation.” This would seem only the next logical step after the election of a former movie-star to office: in an age of digitally-enhanced movies, when films like The Matrix can conjure not just characters, but entire worlds through the magic of digital simulation, why not a digitally-enhanced president?
            Here I would suggest that we use, but also seriously critique, some of the insights of postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard, and particularly his concepts of simulation and hyperreality. The late capitalist consumer society in which we now live, Baudrillard argues, represents a new kind of culture, very different from early modern culture. We have now moved from a modern society based on industrial production to a postmodern society driven by information, media, and digital technology – in sum, “from a metallurgic into a semiurgic society.”[clxv][166]  In media-driven postmodern society, the very boundary between the real and the simulation, the original and the model,  begins to dissolve as we can now produce digitally-enhanced images that appear more intense, more perfect, “more real” than the already lost and forgotten original object.  We have entered a state of hyperreality:
Hyperreality points to a blurring of distinctions between the real and the unreal in which the prefix ‘hyper’ signifies more real than real whereby the real is produced according to a model …The hyperreal…is a condition whereby models replace the real, as exemplified in such phenomena as the ideal home in women’s or lifestyle magazines, ideal as sex as portrayed in sex manuals…ideal fashion as exemplified in ads…[T]he model becomes a determinant of the real, and the boundary between hyperreality and everyday life is erased. With the advent of hyperreality, ..simulations come to constitute reality itself.[clxvi][167] 
 
In postmodern hyperreal culture, the simulated image no longer covers over some hidden reality or truth beneath the representation. Rather, it conceals the real secret, which is that there no longer is any reality or truth beneath the simulated image.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy…The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate true from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.[clxvii][168]
One need not look far to see the hyperreal quality of contemporary American culture: since the 1980s, we have been fascinated by television shows that simulate real-life, from The Peoples’ Court to the current wave of Reality TV shows (one of the most explicitly hyperreal of these is the “American Candidate,” in which “real” individuals compete to see which one can become the best simulated presidential candidate). For Baudrillard, however, the hyperreal quality of postmodern life saturates not just television and advertising, but all aspects of culture, including news and politics, which have themselves become indistinguishable from other forms of info-tainment. Today, the media no longer simply reports the world in which we live; instead, as we see on Fox News Channel, the media increasingly generates  the world: “the TV newscast…creates the news if only to be able to narrate it.”[clxviii][169] In short, in the postmodern mediascape, “boundaries between information and entertainment, images and politics, implode…TV news and documentary assume more and more the form of entertainment…[I]n recent political campaigns…image is more important than substance, and political campaigns become increasingly dependent on media advisors, public relations experts and pollsters who have transformed politics into image contests.”[clxix][170] For Baudrillard, American politics is one of the most hyperreal of all arenas of culture, where our presidents our now largely simulacra, whose media-generated appearances “conceal that they [are] nothing other than mannequins of power.” [clxx][171]
There is indeed much about the Bush administration that seems scripted, simulated, and often quite hyper-real. One need only think of Bush's staged landing on an aircraft carrier to declare "mission accomplished" and the "end" of the apparently endless Iraq war, which is itself a weird sequel to the first, already hyper-real and media-constructed Gulf War under the first Bush. Such an event is the epitome of Baudrillard’s hyperreality: a display of “models or simulacra which have no referent or ground in any reality except their own.”[clxxi][172]   This sort of hyperreality characterizes much of this administration. At various times, this administration has actually conducted public relations, press conferences, and major political events according to scripts: 
Bush has a White House that works constantly on projecting the image it wants to put out. At times his presidency is literally scripted. Before Bush took office, Karl Rove studied previous presidential debuts, looking for what had worked…Rove developed and tested a detailed plan for the first seven days…The first week launch went off like a successful Broadway opening. Andy Card later acknowledged that it was 'like a screenplay. I had a script.'[clxxii][173]
Still more remarkable than its public presentation, however, is the fact that even cabinet meetings are "scripted." As former National Security Council member Paul O'Neill has revealed, cabinet meetings work according to virtual screen-plays, "where everyone but Bush has speaking parts. Bush's role is merely to nod or listen expressionlessly, aside from his occasional cryptic remarks."[clxxiii][174] As O'Neill's wife observed, "Paul just seemed to leave meetings the President and shake his head. It was like, 'I'm not sure this guy's got what it takes to pull this off."[clxxiv][175]
            Among the more hyperreal of the Bush administration’s plans is the proposal to time the  Republican National Convention in New York City to coincide with the ceremony for laying the cornerstone at Ground Zero. As one observer notes, this is one of the clearest signs that we have entered a new era of virtual culture in which the televised image takes precedence over any sort of “reality,” in which the worst disaster in American history becomes yet another political advertisement:
Something very strange has happened to a culture in which a plan like this can be bruited and elicit no outrage at all...The result is an unchallenged flood of 9/11-inspired symbolism in which the image gets around the world before the reality can even get its pants on…Bush declares victory and touches down on an aircraft carrier, while the U.S. has suffered nearly half as many fatalities since the war “ended” as it did during the shooting. And now they are permitted to contemplate using their convention to appropriate an event that broke the heart of every American…and turn it into an endlessly looped campaign commercial.[clxxv][176]
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has largely played into the image that the administration wants to project. Many observers have pointed out the bizarre irony that the media seemed eager to attack President Clinton for his paltry sex scandals, even as it largely ignored Bush's unprecedented history of secrecy, dissimulation and dealings with the most unsavory characters:
One of the oddest aspects of the Bush presidency has been how reluctant journalists are to report that Bush lies. Reporters who jumped on Bill Clinton for disingenuous hair-splitting and piled on Al Gore for harmless exaggerations have given George W. Bush pass after pass after pass.[clxxvi][177]
One of the most astonishing "passes" that the media has given Bush is their inability to point out the fact that he repeatedly misled both Congress and the American people about Iraq's alleged WMD and ties to Al Qaeda. Although various alternative publications have explicitly pointed out the "lies of George W. Bush," the mainstream outlets have chosen to use far more ambiguous terms such as "dubious" statements, "embroidering of key assertions, " or "flights of fancy"—but never "Bush lied."[clxxvii][178]
As John F. Stacks observes, this unwillingness on the part of the media to criticize the Bush administration is the result of several factors. The first is simply the administration's intense secrecy and unwillingness to share any information with the press: "Today the doors of the government in Washington are being slammed in the reporters’ faces. The job of the press secretary is now to shut out the press." As New Yorker reporter, Seymour Hersh, commented, “This is scary. I have never had less of a pulse [of what’s going on in government]."[clxxviii][179] A second factor, however, is the media's own unwillingness to do the hard work of investigative journalism or allow its ratings to drop by giving its audience disturbing news. The shock of 9/11 in turn aroused a new spirit of hyper-patriotic civil religiosity throughout the country, including the media, in which criticism of the president was tantamount to sacrilege. As Dan Rather put it,  “George Bush is president, he makes the decisions, and you know, as just one American, if he wants me to line up, just tell me where;” or as Cokie Roberts admitted: “Look, I am…a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff, and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it."[clxxix][180] The result of all this is a media that is largely afraid to criticize the administration and instead reinforces its image of strong morality, integrity and faith:
This constant quest for a large audience breeds a real timidity on the part of…the press, even in the face of a virtual information lockout by the Bush administration. Bush is popular, or least has been since September 11, and the press is following the polls. It voiced only mild criticism of the president’s policies, even as he prepared a military adventure unlike any in the nation’s history.[clxxx][181]
            Finally and perhaps most importantly, there is the disturbing fact of the progressive and seemingly relentless corporate consolidation of the media.[clxxxi][182] Already in 1983, Ben H. Bagdikian had raised alarms about the disturbing level of media consolidation, warning that 50 corporations then dominated most of the mass media. Twenty years later, his numbers look practically utopian when compared to our own generation, where  basically six conglomerates now control most of the mass media: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Fox, Viacom, and General Electric. This number may rise to nine or ten if one includes other corporate media outlets like Sony, Seagram, and AT&T. Yet even these nine or ten are inter-locked in complex and homogenizing ways that tend to promote a uniformity of public discourse: "They are intertwined: they own stock in each other, they cooperate in joint media ventures and among themselves they divide profits."[clxxxii][183] In sum, as Alterman concludes, the combined forces of audience- and sponsor-driven corporate media and the Bush administration’s obsessive secrecy have created an increasingly superficial, vapid, and almost “virtual” or simulated brand of journalism:
The current historical moment in journalism is hardly a happy one. …Corporate conglomerates increasingly view journalism as ‘soft ware’ valuable only insofar as it contributes to the bottom line. In the mad pursuit for audience and advertisers, the quality of the news itself becomes degraded…Meanwhile, they face an administration with a commitment to secrecy unmatched in modern American history.[clxxxiii][184]
One of the most important media conglomerates for the dissemination of the Bush's administration's desired image has been the Fox media empire, owned by Rupert Murdoch. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke observe, Murdoch and the neoconservatives share many common political interests and have a relationship going back to the 1990s. Through the vast network of Fox media outlets in television, magazines and books, neoconservative ideas and their version of issues like Iraq and al-Qaeda have been able to reach a remarkably large audience: ”With Murdoch’s financial assistance, the modern neoconservative voice came to be heard in magazines, newspapers and TV news networks…As a neoconservative ally, projecting and conveying its perspectives through the lens of US media [Murdoch] added a critical dimension to the neoconservative effort.”[clxxxiv][185]
The  Neoconservative influence is particularly clear in the case of the Fox News Channel, whose brand of ratings-driven, antagonistic and right-leaning journalism fits nicely with the Neocon's aggressive foreign policies: "when the neoconservatives advanced their carefully crafted political discourse, designed to meld the War on Terrorism into a case for war against Iraq, this media culture was invaluable.”[clxxxv][186] At one point during the Iraq war, William Kristol was even moved to thank Fox News and Murdoch for their support of Bush's policies: “many people at Fox news have been supportive of Bush’s foreign policy. They deserve a bit of mention. And Murdoch personally.”[clxxxvi][187] It would seem there was good reason for the Neoconservatives to be grateful to Fox. According to a study done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes between January and September, 2003, Americans who relied on Fox News as their main source of information tended to have a disturbing number of misperceptions about Iraq and the war on terror. Fox viewers were far more likely than viewers of any other news source to believe that Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda and that the US had in fact found WMD in Iraq:
In testing the frequency of three specific mistaken impressions – that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda had been found, that weapons of mass destruction had been discovered in Iraq, and that world public opinion approved of America’s going to war – results showed that Fox News watchers were three times more likely to hold all three. The audiences of NPR/ PBS, however, consistently demonstrated a majority who did not hold any of the three views. Some 80 percent of Fox viewers…held one or more of the three perceptions.[clxxxvii][188]
Fox is not of course the only media conglomerate sympathetic to neoconservative views. In addition, there is the omnipresent Clear Channel network with over 1200 stations, as well as conservative talk radio icons like Rush Limbaugh and Christian televangelists like Robertson and Falwell. As Halper and Clarke conclude,  "the cable networks, the conservative talk radio shows, and the conservative print outlets were all in place to carry the abstract war into the governing philosophy of American foreign policy by inundating people with the discursive reality created by neoconservatives."[clxxxviii][189]  
In sum, there is a great deal about this administration and its representation in the corporate media that seems remarkably hyper-real, in Baudrillard's sense of the word. Bush himself does in many ways seem to be a largely vacuous media construction, a man with little going on in his own head, who has been constructed, digitally-enhanced and deployed by various others working off-camera and behind the scenes. What makes Bush so effective in conjoining these overlapping interests is precisely his own status as a kind of "floating signifier"—or perhaps what Roland Barthes calls a "degree zero signifier"[clxxxix][190]—that can be manipulated by various factions for their own political interests.
Yet in the end, while I find Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and hyperreality generally useful, I would not follow the postmodern theorist to his final conclusions. For Baudrillard, the simulated image today no longer conceals some hidden truth; rather, it now only conceals the secret that there no longer is any truth or reality behind the simulation: “The secret is never revealed, never communicated, never even ‘secreted;’” for it is, in the end, “meaningless.”[cxc][191]   In contrast to Baudrillard’s empty simulacra, these individuals—Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and company—have committed real acts that have had real consequences and often devastating effects on real human beings: U.S. citizens suffering toxic environmental hazards, U.S. soldiers dying for a false cause, Iraqi civilians killed by the thousands for no apparent reason other than American imperial hubris. There are real secrets hidden beneath the simulacra, and they should be brought to light.
 
CONCLUSIONS: The Political Role of the Historian of Religions Today
As Bachelard neatly put it, 'there is no science but of the hidden.' The sociologist is better or worse equipped to discover what is hidden depending on…the degree of interest he has in uncovering what is censored and repressed in the social world.
                                                                                — Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question[cxci][192]
Nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest.
                                                                                — Luke  8:17
                So after looking at the Bush administration through these three lenses—the Straussian gentleman, the Machiavellian Prince and the Baudrillardian Simulacrum—what then are we to conclude about George W. Bush and his administration? Is he best described as embodying one of these models, none of them, really,  or all of them simultaneously? 
What I would suggest is that the role of secrecy and religion in this administration—like the image of Bush himself—is far too complex to be reduced to any one of these models. Rather, it represents the confluence of several different but complementary and overlapping influences, the most important of which are: the Christian Right, the Neoconservative movement, the energy industries and the corporate media. Together, they have created an image that combines intense religious faith with an equally intense concern with secrecy.  This is a kind of secrecy, to be sure, that is very different from the kind usually encountered in Western esoteric traditions; it is concerned not with spiritual transmutation and visionary gnosis but with political dissimulation and material power. Yet it is no less important for our broader understanding of religion and secrecy, particularly in the present context of global violence and terror.
Perhaps most importantly, we might say that there is a kind of "elective affinity" or "fit" between the Dominion Theology preached by Bush's friends on the Religious Right and the hard-ball foreign policies asserted by Cheney, Wolfowitz and the Necons. Both, after all, focus on the imposition of strong order on both American society and the world; and both see the Middle East as the crucial battleground for a much larger (even eschatological) battle for global dominance.  Bush is in many ways the ideal candidate because his relatively vacuous image can accommodate these several overlapping elective affinities. He can serve as a gentleman, a prince and/or a simulacrum in different contexts in accordance with the different interests of his various constituents. The fact that at least half the American people and most of the media seemed to go along with his aggressive foreign and domestic policies indicates that this image works surprisingly well.
In all of this, however, there is a profound double irony. The first is that, in their efforts to combat the “crisis” of modernity and reform a degenerate liberal society, the Neoconservatives and the Christian Right are in danger of creating the same sort of oppressive society that they so hated in the Soviet Union. In their desire to respond to the weaknesses of liberalism with their own version of strong morality, they risk creating the new totalitarian regime that Strauss had warned might take hold in liberal America. The second and closely related irony, which Harvey points out, is that this aggressive militarism and mind-boggling pattern of deficit spending is likely to bankrupt the U.S. in much the same way that the Soviet Union was bankrupted by the Cold War arms race.[cxcii][193]
To close, I would like to offer a few comments regarding the political role of the scholar of religion in the world today. There was a time when I, like most scholars of religion, believed that the best I could do was to remain as neutral as possible about the political implications of my research while at the same remaining as self-conscious as possible about the ways in which my work might be affected by my own political opinions. Well, I must say that I no longer believe in this sort of comfortable pretense of neutrality. When one's government is committing acts as disturbing as those of the Bush administration, and concealing them under layers of obsessive secrecy, no thinking citizen, can pretend to remain comfortably neutral.  As Bruce Lincoln observes, “there is a political dimension to all religious discourse,” including scholarship.[cxciii][194] Our study of religion is no more neutral or disinterested than the religious objects that we study. The key difference, however, is that as scholars of religion we cannot appeal to divine "authority," a gift from the Almighty or a calling from God; rather, we can rely only on our own human and fallible methods of “persuasion,” by which we marshal evidence and argue our case, while at the same time remaining open to the critical objections of others.[cxciv][195]
Here I would also agree with Pierre Bourdieu, who suggests that the task of the scholar is, among other things, to unmask and demystify relations of power that have been masked and mystified in the social order. By unmasking the subtle forms of misrecognition and symbolic violence at work in society, the scholar is exercising a fundamentally political power:  "There is a political dimension to…what sociology should do in the modern world...Acts of research...are acts of struggle, conquest and victory over taken for granted assumptions about social life: scientific research is a struggle against all forms of symbolic domination."[cxcv][196] For the scholar of religion, that means unmasking relations of power and oppression that have been mystified by appeals to divine authority, wars of Good against Evil, and coded references to scriptures. That is how we can exert our, admittedly limited, political effect within the academy, among our students and within our communities.
It is surely high time that we began doing so.

The Bailout Profiteers

By Naomi Klein - October 31st, 2008
Rolling Stone

Editor’s note: The online version of this story has been amended to reflect developments since the publication of the print edition.

On October 13th, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced the team of "seasoned financial veterans" that will be handling the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, one name jumped out: Reuben Jeffery III, who was initially tapped to serve as chief investment officer for the massive new program.

On the surface, Jeffery looks like a classic Bush appointment. Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years. And as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2005 to 2007, he proudly advocated "flexibility" in regulation — a laissez-faire approach that failed to rein in the high-risk trading at the heart of the meltdown.

Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating — that's all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced: He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War. Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the partisan machine that filled the Green Zone with Young Republicans, investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren't a big issue back then, because the staff's main function was to hand over stacks of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as "a free-fraud zone." During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said he thought that contracts should be handed out with more "speed and flexibility" — the same philosophy he cited back when he was in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.

The Bush Administration has since reversed the Jeffery appointment, perhaps thinking better of giving a CPA alum such a central role in the Wall Street bailout. Still, the original impulse underscores the many worrying parallels between the administration's approach to the financial crisis and its approach to the Iraq War. Under cover of an emergency, Treasury is rapidly turning into an economic Green Zone, overrun with private companies collecting lucrative contracts. Fittingly, one of the first to line up at the new trough was none other than the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani — yes, that Giuliani. The firm's chairman, Patrick Oxford, could scarcely conceal his glee over the prospect of cashing in on the bailout. "This one," he told reporters, "is very, very big." At least four times bigger, in fact, than the post-9/11 homeland-security bubble, from which Giuliani and his various outfits have profited so extravagantly. Even bigger, potentially, than the price tag for the Iraq War itself.

In Iraq, the contractors were tasked with reconstructing the country from the mess made by U.S. missiles. After years of corruption born of no-bid contracts and paltry oversight, many Iraqis are still waiting for the lights to come back on. Today, a new team of contractors is lining up to reconstruct the U.S. economy — reconstruct it from the mess made by the very banks, brokers and law firms that are now applying for contracts. And it's not at all clear that America can survive their assistance.

See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. Private companies wanting to help manage the bailout were given just two days to apply for massive, multiyear contracts. Since it was such a mad rush — after all, the entire economy was about to implode — there was no time for an open bidding process. Nor was there time to draft rigorous rules to make sure that those applying don't have serious conflicts of interest. Instead, applicants were asked to disclose their conflicts and to explain — and this is not a joke — their "philosophy in fulfilling your duty to the Treasury and the U.S. taxpayer in light of your proprietary interests and those of other clients." In other words, an open invitation to bullshit about how much they love their country and how they can be trusted to regulate themselves.

The first major contract to be awarded in the bailout was for legal advice — and the choice Treasury made was Halliburton-esque in its audacity. Six law firms were invited to bid, but four declined, either because they didn't want the contract or because they had too many conflicts of interest. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the fact that so many law firms chose not to bid "shows that the guidelines are sufficiently rigorous."

Or it may just show that the bidder who won the contract — Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — takes a more relaxed approach to conflicts than its colleagues. The law firm is a Wall Street heavy hitter, having brokered some of the biggest bank mergers in recent years. It also provided legal support to companies trading mortgage-backed securities — the "financial weapons of mass destruction," as Warren Buffett called them, that detonated the banking industry. More to the point, it was hired to provide legal services to the Treasury in its negotiations to spend $250 billion of the bailout money purchasing equity in America's banks. The first stage of the plan involves buying stakes in nine of the country's top banks. Incredibly, Simpson Thacher has represented seven of the nine: JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

According to its contract, Simpson Thacher has agreed not to represent any of the banks "against the U.S." when they negotiate with Treasury for the equity money. However, the firm has retained the right to represent banks when they apply for other parts of the $700 billion bailout not covered by its contract. (It has promised to erect a "firewall" to stem the flow of "confidential information" to those clients.) The firm will also continue to work for the banks on a range of other lucrative deals — and that's where the problem lies. Take Lee Meyerson, Simpson Thacher's lead lawyer on the bailout negotiations, who is specifically named in the contract as "essential" to the project. As the company's hotshot attorney, Meyerson has personally represented three of the nine banks that were bailed out in the first round, in addition to many others that will surely apply for cash injections. One of the bailed-out banks is Bank of New York Mellon, whose $29 billion merger Meyerson helped negotiate. Mergers like that can bill in the millions. Is Simpson Thacher able to put aside its loyalties to its biggest clients and negotiate deals for the taxpayer that could exact real costs from those very clients?

It might be possible to set aside concerns about divided loyalties if it were clear that Simpson Thacher is helping Treasury to wrangle the best deals possible for U.S. taxpayers. But the firm's first test — the deal to give $125 billion to the nine big banks to ease the "credit crunch" that is crippling the economy — wasn't exactly reassuring. Secretary Paulson promised that the banks won't just "hoard" the money — they will quickly "deploy it" through the economy in the form of badly needed loans. There is just one hitch: Neither Paulson nor Simpson Thacher got that "deploy" part in writing — nor did they put in place any mechanism to require the banks to spend their taxpayer billions. Apparently, the part about lending the money to homeowners and small businesses was sort of implied.

"There is no obligation for banks to lend the money one way or the other," Jennifer Zuccarelli, a Treasury spokeswoman, tells Rolling Stone. "But the banks have the understanding" that the money is intended for loans. "We're not looking to control their operations."

Unfortunately, many of the banks appear to have no intention of wasting the money on loans. "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion," said John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. Gary Crittenden, chief financial officer of Citigroup, had an even better idea: He hinted that his company would use its share of the cash — $25 billion — to buy up competitors and swell even bigger. The handout, he told analysts, "does present the possibility of taking advantage of opportunities that might otherwise be closed to us."

And the folks at Morgan Stanley? They're planning to pay themselves $10.7 billion this year, much of it in bonuses — almost exactly the amount they are receiving in the first phase of the bailout. "You can imagine the devilish grins on the faces of Morgan Stanley employees," writes Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil. "Not only did we, the taxpayers, save their company...we funded their 2008 bonus pool."

It didn't have to be this way. Five days before Paulson struck his deal with the banks, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown negotiated a similar bailout — only he extracted meaningful guarantees for taxpayers: voting rights at the banks, seats on their boards, 12 percent in annual dividend payments to the government, a suspension of dividend payments to shareholders, restrictions on executive bonuses, and a legal requirement that the banks lend money to homeowners and small businesses.

In sharp contrast, this is what U.S. taxpayers received: no controlling interest, no voting rights, no seats on the bank boards and just five percent in dividend payouts to the government, while shareholders continue to collect billions in dividends every quarter. What's more, golden parachutes and bonuses already promised by the banks will still be paid out to executives — all before taxpayers are paid back.

No wonder it took just one hour for Paulson to convince all nine CEOs to accept his offer — less than seven minutes per bank. Not even the firms' own lawyers could have drafted a sweeter deal.

The day after it met with the nation's top banks, Treasury announced that it had selected the firm that would receive the juiciest contract of all: that of "master custodian." The winning company will be to the bailout what Halliburton is to the military: the contractor of contractors. It will purchase toxic debts from Wall Street, service them and auction them off in the future — a so-called "end-to-end process." The contract is for a minimum of three years.

Seventy firms applied for the gig; the winner was Bank of New York Mellon. Describing the scope of the megacontract, bank president Gerald Hassell said, "It's the ultimate outsourcing — because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we're essentially the general contractor across the entire program. It's going to cross our entire company."

This raises an interesting point: Has the Treasury partially nationalized the private banks, as we have been told? Or is it the other way around? Is it Treasury that has been partially privatized by Wall Street, its massive rescue plan now entirely in the hands of a private bank it is directly subsidizing?

Shortly after receiving the contract, Hassell told investors that his institution is now well-positioned to profit from the market meltdown. "There's a lot of new business that's going on even in this chaotic marketplace," he said, "and so some of those things have been very positive to us." Just how positive, we don't know, because Treasury has blacked out the 10 lines of the "master custodian" contract that reveal how much Bank of New York Mellon will be paid. Though Treasury says it will release the information eventually, the secrecy goes beyond anything the Bush administration attempted in Iraq. Even Halliburton's dodgy contracts came with price tags attached.

Still, when the terms of the contract do become public, they may turn out to be surprisingly modest. Goldman Sachs has apparently offered to fulfill at least one bailout contract for free. Altruism may not be their only motivation. The real money at stake in the bailout lies not in payment for the work but in how the work is done. Think about it: If you're the one selling your debts to the government, wouldn't you also want to help decide which debts are eligible and how much they're worth? "The financial firms with assets to sell are in many instances the same firms the Treasury will rely on to value and manage the assets it is buying," The New York Times observed. "That is an invitation for these firms to set the price too high or to indulge in other mischief at the taxpayers' expense."

Bank of New York Mellon has a bad record for mischief. It is embroiled in a $22.5 billion money-laundering lawsuit in Moscow and has been forced to pay out a $14 million settlement in a related case. Though the bank's "master custodian" contract with Treasury prohibits unethical conduct, the arrangement seems rife with opportunities for abuse. According to its most recent earnings report, Bank of New York Mellon holds $1.2 billion in subprime mortgage securities. That means that in addition to the $3 billion it will receive as part of the equity program, it will also be eligible to apply for taxpayer money from the program it is being paid to administer. Neither the bank nor Treasury would comment on this direct conflict of interest.

On the same day that he allocated the first $125 billion to the banks, Secretary Paulson announced the largest federal budget deficit in U.S. history. Buried in his statement was a preview of the next phase of the financial disaster. The deficit numbers, he declared, reinforce the need to "pursue policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform." He was referring to Americans who feel entitled to receive Social Security in their old age and Medicaid when they are sick. Those programs, Paulson implied, might not be able to survive the budget crisis he is currently creating for the next administration.

This is why the stakes of the bailout are so high: Unless we get a good deal, there will be nothing left over after the banks are done feeding to pay for the meager services now provided in exchange for taxation, let alone for the more ambitious initiatives promised on the campaign trail. The spiraling cost of saving Wall Street from its bad bets is already being used as an excuse for why we can't solve our many other crises, from health care to climate change.

There is a better way to fix a broken financial system. Treasury's plan to buy up the toxic debts never made sense and should be immediately scrapped — a move that would also handily get rid of most of the crony contractors. As for purchasing equity in banks, the next round of deals — and there will be more — has to start from the premise that the banks are bankrupt and will therefore accept whatever terms we choose to impose, including real regulatory oversight. The possibilities of what could be done if a chunk of the banking system were genuinely under public control — from a moratorium on home foreclosures to mandatory investment in green community redevelopment — are limitless.

Because here is what George Bush and Henry Paulson are hoping we won't figure out: When a society no longer has enough money to pay for its most pressing needs, there are worse things than discovering you own the banks

The Top Ten Power Brokers of the Religious Right

By Rob Boston, Church & State Magazine
Posted on November 10, 2008, Printed on November 10, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/103359/

For the past two years, numerous media pundits have been all abuzz over the so-called "death" of the Religious Right. There is one problem, however: Someone forgot to tell the Religious Right.
A recent Americans United study of the finances and influence of the Religious Right shows a movement that is very much alive and kicking. Indeed, our research shows that the nation's leading Religious Right organizations took in more than half a billion dollars over a recent 12-month period. Several of the organizations reported dramatic increases in their budgets; only a few showed a drop.
Financial information was not the only factor we took into account when compiling this list. We also attempted to determine the influence organizations have on the larger political scene. A group can have a modest budget and still cast a long shadow.
Many of these organizations are also well represented in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals. Their lobbyists troll the halls of Congress or state legislatures, in some cases actually helping draft legislation.
For budgetary data, Church & State relied on Internal Revenue Service Form 990, a document that most 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) tax-exempt groups are required to file. In most cases, the figures come from a period spanning the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007.
1. Christian Broadcasting Network
Founder and Chairman: The Rev. Pat Robertson
2006 Revenue: $246,986,289
Location: Virginia Beach, Va.
Web site: www.cbn.org
Overview: Television preacher M.G. "Pat" Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1961, primarily as an instrument of Pentecostal preaching and evangelism. Over the years, the ministry took on a political cast and became a vehicle for the propagation of Robertson's far-right views.
In 1988, Robertson ran unsuccessfully for president in the Republican primaries. He gathered millions of signatures from supporters during that campaign and later used them as the basis for an explicitly political group, the Christian Coalition. The Coalition did well during the 1990s but began to experience financial difficulties and leadership problems as the decade wound down. In 2001, Robertson withdrew from the organization completely. (It still limps along, based in South Carolina, with a budget of $1.4 million.)
Some today deride Robertson's influence among conservative Christians, but no other Religious Right leader has the media and academic platform he has. During the presidential primary season, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani made personal appearances at Robertson's Regent University and courted his support.
President George W. Bush has also labored to keep Robertson happy. At least 150 Regent graduates were placed in the Bush administration. Among them was Monica Goodling, who sparked a scandal by applying a "pro-God" political litmus test to non-political appointments at the Justice Department. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft is now a professor on the Regent campus, and a Robertson charity, Operation Blessing, has received $1.5 million in tax money under the Bush "faith-based" initiative.
CBN's major project is production of the "700 Club," Robertson's talk/news program. The show, estimated to have about 800,000 viewers daily, is Robertson's primary vehicle for spreading his political views, which include vociferous opposition to church-state separation, legal abortion and gay rights. Like the Fox News Channel, CBN gives right-wing members of Congress and authors friendly interviews and publicity.
Robertson frequently uses the program to espouse extremism. Over the years he has ranted that America should be a Christian nation, compared gay people to Nazis, blamed court decisions and civil liberties groups for the 9/11 attacks and asserted that God punishes communities that displease Him with hurricanes, tornados and possibly even meteors. One of Robertson's most infamous observations is that Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians reflect "the spirit of the Antichrist."
Aside from Regent, Robertson's empire includes the American Center for Law and Justice, a Religious Right legal group (see below); Operation Blessing, a charity that has been racked by scandal, and Regent University, a graduate-level school.
Now 78, Robertson has been increasingly shifting day-to-day responsibilities to his son, Gordon, who often appears alongside him on the "700 Club." It has been reported that CBN has an endowment of at least $1 billion, meaning the ministry should be able to continue long after Robertson has retired.
Robertson Quote: "America wasn't built on Hinduism. America wasn't built on Islam. America wasn't built on Buddhism. America and our democratic institutions were built on the Christian faith. There is no question about it." ("700 Club," July 30, 2007)
2. Focus on the Family
Founder and Chairman: James C. Dobson
2006 Revenue: $156,972,266
Location: Colorado Springs, Colo.
Web site: www.focusonthefamily.org
Overview: Child psychologist James C. Dobson formed Focus on the Family (FOF) in 1977. Dobson made his name by endorsing corporal punishment for children at a time when most experts on child rearing were moving away from it, views he outlined in his first book Dare to Discipline.
Dobson came to national prominence in the mid 1980s after serving on a presidential commission charged with studying the effects of pornography. He produced a number of other books, and FOF began publishing a variety of magazines. In 1988, FOF took control of a struggling Religious Right group in Washington, the Family Research Council (see below). Now technically separate, the groups today claim to be "spiritually one."
Radio made Dobson famous. He began broadcasting in March of 1977, when his organization was based in Southern California. FOF experienced rapid growth and by 1981 had 34 employees. Within a few years, the staff had reached 1,200, and FOF branches were being opened overseas. The organization now has representation in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Singapore and Ireland.
Today, according to FOF's Web site, the ministry's broadcasts are heard on more than 5,000 stations in 155 countries, reaching 220 million people daily. The group's budget (excluding its more political arm, FOF Action) is $142,279,843.
Many people view Dobson as a grandfatherly dispenser of homespun wisdom on how to raise kids and build strong marriages. In fact, his political views are quite extreme. He has attacked the concept of tolerance, asserting that it leads to the blurring of right and wrong. A fundamentalist raised in the strict Church of the Nazarene, Dobson embraces a literal interpretation of the Bible. He opposes legal abortion, often attacks public education, berates feminism - Dobson's group has gone so far as to attack the Girl Scouts as a front for humanism and radical feminism - and sponsors programs to "convert" gays to heterosexuality. In recent years, FOF has taken the lead in opposing same-sex marriage in the states.
Dobson, 72, frequently issues personal endorsements of political candidates and in 2004 formed an overtly political arm called Focus on the Family Action. With a budget of nearly $14.7 million, FOF Action produces materials on political issues and sponsors "citizenship rallies" that, it says, "spotlight the positions of candidates for key offices." This allows FOF Action to effectively endorse office seekers while maintaining the faade of nonpartisanship.
FOF is also affiliated with "family policy councils" that lobby legislatures in 35 states. FOF's CitizenLink magazine frequently comments on national and state issues. The FOF Web site says of CitizenLink, "Our experts grapple with contemporary social issues and provide a biblical perspective on national and local news."
Dobson Quote: "The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. No, it's not. That is not in the Constitution…. It's not in the Bill of Rights. It's not anywhere in a foundational document. The only place where the so-called 'wall of separation' was mentioned was in a letter written by Jefferson to a friend. That's the only place. It has been picked up and made to be something it was never intended to be." ("Larry King Live," Nov. 22, 2006)
3. American Center for Law and Justice/Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism
Founders: Pat Robertson (ACLJ) and Jay Sekulow (CASE)
2007 Revenue: $42,658,159
Location: Virginia Beach, Va., Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Ga.
Web site: www.aclj.org
Overview: Attorney Jay Sekulow, a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity, came to national prominence in 1987, after successfully arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Jews For Jesus, which protested a policy at Los Angeles International Airport banning all forms of solicitation.
Three years later, Sekulow, under the auspices of Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (CASE), a group he founded, argued another case at the Supreme Court. This time he represented Bridget Mergens, a public high school student in Washington state who wanted to form a Bible club.
Sekulow's successful litigation of the cases impressed TV preacher Pat Robertson, who hired Sekulow to run the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), an organization Robertson perceived as a fundamentalist Christian answer to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Robertson and Sekulow have used the ACLJ to chip away at the church-state wall, erode abortion rights, oppose gay rights and push other Religious Right social goals. Sekulow, 52, is also close to the Bush administration and helped vet Supreme Court nominees.
Sekulow has a considerable media presence. His daily radio show, "Jay Sekulow Live," is heard on 850 stations, and his weekly television program "ACLJ This Week," appears on several major Christian networks.
At first glance, the ACLJ's funding appears to be slipping. In 2006, Church & State reported an annual budget of $14,485,514 for the group. The most recent 990 puts that figure at $10,433,987. That number is misleading, however. CASE still exists and operates in tandem with the ACLJ. CASE brought in $32.2 million last year, making the Sekulow operation's income considerably higher than it appears to be.
In recent years, the group has been dogged by allegations that Sekulow collects an enormous salary and that CASE has purchased several homes for him. This does not appear to have slowed down the group's fundraising.
Sekulow Quote: "They have taken prayer out of schoolsthe Ten Commandments out of the courtsnow they are trying to stop us from even mentioning God in public. This is an outrage." (ACLJ fundraising letter, June 2006)
4. Alliance Defense Fund
President, CEO and General Counsel: Alan Sears
2007 Revenue: $31,674,124
Location: Scottsdale, Ariz.
Web site: www.alliancedefensefund.org
Overview: Founded in 1993 by a coalition of more than 30 Religious Right leaders, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has become the nation's most prominent Religious Right legal group.
ADF founders, which included James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, the late Bill Bright and the late D. James Kennedy, originally conceived the organization as a funding pool that would finance legal cases brought by other groups that advanced the Religious Right's view in the courts.
This strategy was employed for a few years, but the ADF now directly litigates cases itself and is headed by Alan Sears, formerly an anti-pornography crusader in the Edwin Meese-era Justice Department. The ADF is rigidly anti-gay and promotes its Christian fundamentalist vision in public schools and government institutions.
A flavor of Sears' views can be found in the titles of the books he has coauthored: The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today (2003) and The ACLU vs. America (2005). Sears, 52, is so concerned about the "homosexual agenda" that he once opined that SpongeBob SquarePants might be part of a gay plot to indoctrinate children.
The ADF has become one of the leading proponents of the "war on Christmas." While it raises a lot of money fighting this "war," actual litigation over the issue is rare. Other ADF cases seem to have been filed as ploys to raise cash. In 2005, the ADF sued a California public school after claiming that officials had ordered a teacher to stop using the Declaration of Independence in class. The claims were exposed as false, and the case quickly unraveled and was dropped - but not until the ADF had used the manufactured controversy to win media appearances and raise money.
The ADF has worked aggressively to lure churches into a right-wing political machine. This year, it announced plans to urge evangelical pastors to openly defy federal tax law by endorsing or opposing candidates from the pulpit. The drive sparked a backlash from a group of Ohio clergy and tax law experts, who asked the IRS to investigate ADF lawyers for urging churches to violate tax law.
Working with a network of pro bono attorneys nationwide, the ADF offers training for both established lawyers and law students. The latter are "equipped with a distinctly Christian worldview in every area of life, particularly in the areas of law and public policy," boasts the ADF Web site.
Sears Quote: "Homosexual activists have noticed very astutely that the use of humor is a primary vehicle to help them reach their goal of cultural acceptance. Humor had been used by the entertainment industry in the past to stir up antiwar sentiment (the Marx brothers' Duck Soup, M*A*S*H, Dr. Strangelove) and to promote feminism (Nine to Five) and cross-dressing (Some Like It Hot and Tootsie). Homosexual producers and directors readily admit that humor is their best weapon to soften up the American public for the future promotion of their agenda. If you can get people to laugh about something, you are then on the way to convincing them to accept the behavior as normal." (The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, coauthored with Craig Osten, 2003)
5. American Family Association
Founder and Chairman: The Rev. Donald Wildmon
2007 Revenue: $22,547,087
Location: Tupelo, Miss.
Web site: www.afa.net
Overview: The American Family Association (AFA) was formed in 1977 under the name National Federal for Decency. The goal of its founder, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, was ambitious: clean up smut on television. Wildmon vowed to use boycotts to bring advertisers to their knees.
The original plan did not work out as well as Wildmon had hoped. Years went by, and risqu TV programs continued to proliferate. The rise of cable brought movies and shows featuring sexual themes right into American living rooms. Wildmon shifted gears, changing the name of the organization and adopting a host of Religious Right boilerplate issues, such as promoting religion in public schools, pushing the display of religious signs and symbols in government buildings and opposing gay rights.
Wildmon still promotes boycotts, but their effectiveness is disputed. A long-running Wildmon-sponsored boycott of the Disney Corporation didn't affect the company's bottom line. Wildmon claimed success for a boycott of Ford Motors, but auto analysts said the company's drop in sales was due to other factors.
Most recently, Wildmon has called for a boycott of Hallmark, the greeting card company, which has been marketing a line of cards for same-sex marriages, and of fast-food giant McDonald's, which Wildmon scored for joining the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
Wildmon was instrumental in forming the Arlington Group, a coalition of Religious Right organizations that meet regularly in a Washington, D.C., suburb to plot strategy. (Unlike the Coalition for National Policy - see below - the Arlington Group does not contain secular conservative organizations and sticks to "culture war" issues.)
Wildmon, 70, is a United Methodist minister. He does daily radio broadcasts over American Family Radio to more than 200 stations and distributes a daily round-up of right-wing news called OneNewsNow.
Wildmon Quote: "There is a deep-seated hatred of all things Christian in the entertainment industry. It is reflected in their products. They express this hatred by censoring all positive portrayals of Christianity. They think that the sooner they can drive this 'God idea' from society, the better society will be." (American Family Association Journal, September 2005)
6. Family Research Council
President: Tony Perkins
2007 Revenue: $11,783,971
Location: Washington, D.C.
Web site: www.frc.org
Overview: The Family Research Council (FRC) is the Washington, D.C., beachhead of James Dobson's Focus on the Family (FOF). Founded by Dobson in 1983, FRC is legally separate from FOF, but the two groups acknowledge they are "spiritually one."
The FRC's public profile was boosted dramatically with the decline of the Christian Coalition. FRC annually hosts a "Values Voter Summit," an event attended by thousands that is nearly identical to the "Road to Victory" conferences the Christian Coalition used to sponsor. The group is well connected with the Republican leadership in the nation's capital and often asks GOP lawmakers to speak at its events. In 2007, every major GOP presidential contender attended the Summit.
Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana state legislator, is the current president of the FRC. He took the job after an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2002. During the run-up to the race, Perkins sparked controversy when he agreed to address the Council of Conservative Citizens, an outgrowth of an old racist group called the White Citizens Council. (In the primary, he received only 10 percent of the vote.) The Nation has reported that in 1996, Perkins, then managing a U.S. Senate campaign for Woody Jenkins, paid $82,000 for a mailing list owned by white supremacist David Duke.
Under Perkins' tutelage, the FRC has become more aggressive in attacking same-sex marriage and gay rights generally. The FRC also opposes legal abortion, frequently assails public education and lambastes "judicial activism."
And like other Religious Right groups, it sometimes ventures into unexpected territory. For example, Perkins has attacked Earth Day as "a calculated attack on the sanctity of human life," and he joined with other anti-environmentalism religious activists to push the "We Get It" campaign to minimize concern about climate change.
The FRC now has a 501(c)(4) "action" arm and last month announced the formation of a political action committee to give money to candidates.
Perkins Quote: "We have broken our covenant with God, and if we want our courts to get it right, you and I must get it right by returning to covenant with Almighty God. Are you ready to return to a covenantal relationship with God where there is no other God over America but Jesus Christ?" (Speech to The Call prayer rally, Washington, D.C., Aug. 16, 2008)
7. Concerned Women for America
Founders: Tim and Beverly LaHaye
2007 Revenue: $10,640,810
Location: Washington, D.C.
Web site: www.cwfa.org
Overview: Founded to oppose feminism, Concerned Women for America (CWA) claims to be "the nation's largest public policy women's organization." Its mission is to "bring Biblical principles into all levels of public policy."
CWA was formed in 1979 by Tim LaHaye and his wife, Beverly. At the time, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was gaining steam, and conservative activists sought a vehicle to oppose it that would - at least on the surface - be run by women. (Today, three out of five of the organization's highest-paid positions are held by men.)
Rather than close shop after the ERA failed to pass, CWA moved on to other issues. In the 1980s, its leaders frequently attacked public schools for promoting "secular humanism." The group also added opposition to abortion and gay rights to its plate. Today, its Web site lists "six core issues": opposition to same-sex marriage, opposition to legal abortion, promoting vouchers and other forms of tax aid to private schools, opposition to pornography, "religious liberty" issues and national sovereignty. (This latter category includes opposition to the United Nations and demands for a crackdown on illegal immigration.)
Tim LaHaye, now 82, became famous in the 1990s after he coauthored several apocalyptic potboilers about the end of the world called the Left Behind series. The LaHayes live in semi-retirement and no longer run CWA on a daily basis. The group's Web site lists Beverly LaHaye, 79, as "founder and chairman" of the group, and its current president is Wendy Wright.
Tim LaHaye Quote: "Although the left is determined to turn America into an amoral, socialist state similar to China or Cuba, it is not inevitable. We still have time to turn back the tide to traditional moral and spiritual values and to restore genuine individual freedom. But we must understand how the humanists have gained such mind control that 10 to 15 million of them can literally overpower a nation of more than 270 million people." (Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth in the New Millennium - with David Noebel)
8. Jerry Falwell Ministries
Founder: The Rev. Jerry Falwell
2007 Revenue: $4,208,989
Location: Lynchburg, Va.
Web site: www.falwell.com
Overview: The Rev. Jerry Falwell is considered the godfather of the Religious Right, and the story of how the controversial televangelist was persuaded to lead the Moral Majority by a band of conservative strategists is well known.
Falwell died in May of 2007, leaving his fundamentalist Christian empire in the hands of his two sons, Jerry Jr. and Jonathan. Jerry Jr. serves as president of Liberty University, while Jonathan pastors Thomas Road Baptist Church, a congregation that claims over 24,000 members and oversees the television ministry.
Although the TV ministry is less prominent and takes in less money these days, other aspects of the Falwell empire are doing very well. USA Today reported in May that Thomas Road is growing and that Liberty University has topped 11,000 in enrollment. Reported the newspaper, "Liberty's online distance learning program has reached 27,000 students, exceeding the elder Falwell's goal of 25,000. Revenues grew from $147 million in 2006 to $232 million in 2007."
Liberty's budget now exceeds $203 million annually. Liberty Law School Dean Mat Staver operates Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal advocacy group, from Lynchburg. The creation of this university, and the waves of fundamentalist activists it unleashes on society every year, may turn out to be Falwell's most lasting legacy.
Politically, the Falwell boys are on the same page as their father. Jonathan Falwell told Baptist Press in June that his father would have supported John McCain, in the belief that the Supreme Court might overturn legal abortion if another justice or two are replaced.
"We are so closewe are one vote away from a court that would be a strict constructionist court [and] not one that tries to legislate from the bench," he said.
Jonathan Falwell Quote: "As our nation has turned away from (and even become hostile toward) the Ten Commandments and other biblical principles, we have seen our citizenry become progressively more dishonest and deceptive. Crime has risen, our schools have failed and our culture has become vulgar and crude. I believe it's all related to the ouster of God from our schools, our media and our society." (Newsmax.com, April 18, 2008)
9. Southern Baptist Convention/Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
2007 Revenue: $205,716,834; ERLC Revenue: $3,394,327
Location: Nashville, Tenn., and Washington, D.C.
Web site: www.sbc.net
Overview: It may seem odd to list a religious denomination among the nation's top Religious Right groups, but the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has earned the distinction. The leadership of the nation's largest Protestant denomination has been firmly aligned with the Religious Right for nearly three decades. SBC agencies often take public policy positions identical to that of other Religious Right organizations and joins with them in various coalition efforts and legal briefs at the Supreme Court.
The SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission - a fancy name for a lobbying office - is headed by Richard Land, who openly meddles in Republican Party politics.
Last year, Land, who frequently visits the nation's capital, spent an inordinate amount of time promoting the presidential candidacy of Fred Thompson. Land constantly sang Thompson's praises in the media and publicly defended him on several occasions. Land gushed to one Washington newspaper, "Fred Thompson reminds me of a Southern-fried Reagan. To see Fred work a crowd must be what it was like to watch Rembrandt paint."
Land does not even pretend to be non-partisan. In 1998, he told The New York Times that the Religious Right was tired of being taken for granted by the GOP. "The go-along, get-along strategy is dead," Land said. "No more engagement. We want a wedding ring, we want a ceremony, we want a consummation of the marriage."
During the 2008 primary season, Land compared U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton to Darth Vader and a witch (saying if she failed to be president, she would want to park her broom outside the Supreme Court for life). He has called George W. Bush "the greatest president of my lifetime," and Land claims he recommended that John McCain put evangelical Christian Sarah Palin on the ticket.
Although McCain has not been a favorite of right-wing evangelicals, Land says the Arizona senator can be counted on.
"McCain knows if he wins this election, it is because evangelicals put him in the White House, and McCain is very loyal," Land told an Oklahoma Baptist gathering in August.
Baptist churches are autonomous and somewhat difficult to corral, but SBC leaders dream of hammering them into a right-wing political machine. Land's point man in Washington, Barrett Duke, sees the need to turn up the heat. He told the Christian Index in August of 2007, "There are 16 million Southern Baptists, and we should be able to shut down the congressional switchboard all by ourselves when there is a need to voice our convictions on a certain issue."
In a 1997 sermon, Land insisted he does not favor theocracy - he just believes a majority should be able to impose its religious will on others.
"It's our work to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ," Land said. "But when we preach that Gospel, and God has blessed it and people's hearts and minds have been changed, then they have the right as citizens to come forth in the public arena and say, 'This is wrong, and we want it stopped.' For example, abortion is the killing of innocent children, and we want laws to change it. When we convince a majority of Americans that we are right, that's not called a theocracy, that's called the democratic process."
The SBC has taken some rather controversial positions over the years. It endorsed a boycott against the Disney empire, asserting that the company was promoting homosexuality. The boycott lasted eight years and ended with Disney altering none of its policies.
In 2005, attendees at the SBC's annual meeting entertained a motion calling on all Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. The resolution was eventually watered down to denounce public schools for allegedly putting forth "offensive materials and programs" promoting homosexuality.
In 1998, the SBC approved a resolution calling on women to "graciously submit" to their husbands.
Land Quote: "We must confront those trying to keep us from the public square. [America] was founded by Christian men who believed Christians should use their faith to make public policy." (Family Impact Summit, Tampa, Fla., September 2007)
10. Council for National Policy
Executive Director: Steve Baldwin
2007 Revenue: $1,680,914
Location: Washington, D.C.
Web site: None
Overview: The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a good example of how a small organization with a modest budget can have a big impact. Founded in 1981 by Tim LaHaye and other right-wing activists, the CNP undertakes just one task: convening meetings of the heads of various right-wing groups at posh hotels around the country to share ideas, plot strategy and vet GOP presidential hopefuls.
The CNP does not lobby or file lawsuits. Membership is by invitation only, and the group seeks no media attention. It doesn't even have a Web site. As far as the CNP's leadership is concerned, it would be better if you didn't even know the group existed.
In 1999, the CNP attracted more attention than usual after it was reported that George W. Bush had addressed the group. Bush was pressed by reporters to give details about what went on during the closed-door meeting but refused.
In 2004, a New York Times reporter managed to attend a meeting of the group and even obtained its membership list. At that time, reported David Kirkpatrick, the CNP's membership included Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform.
The CNP's most recent IRS filing sheds a little more light on the organization. Its address is listed as 1411 K St., N.W., Suite 601 in Washington. The form dryly reports that the CNP exists to provide "educational conferences and seminars for national leaders in the fields of business, government, religion and academia to explore national policy alternatives." It adds that "weekly newsletters are distributed to members and a semi-annual journal is produced, consisting of speeches from meetings."
The 2006 filing lists Steve Baldwin, a California Religious Right activist, as the group's executive director. (Most recently, Baldwin - not to be confused with the actor of the same name - coauthored a book titled From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools.)
T. Kenneth Cribb is president of the CNP board, while Heritage Foundation executive Becky Norton Dunlop serves as vice president and long-time right-wing activist Paul Weyrich acts as secretary/treasurer.
The CNP's Board of Directors consists of direct mail guru Richard Viguerie; Family Research Council President Tony Perkins; anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist; Richard P. Bott Sr., president of Bott Radio Network; Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, a wealthy Michigan financier of right-wing causes; Stuart W. Epperson, chairman of Salem Radio; Robert Fischer; Kevin L. Gentry; J. Keet Lewis; Christopher Long; Eugene Meyer; Ken Raasch; Adam B. Ross and Stacy W. Taylor.
Others who have been affiliated with the CNP include TV preacher Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, longtime anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly, Iran-Contra figure turned right-wing talk radio host Oliver North, the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), wealthy California savings-and-loan heir Howard Ahmanson, former House Majority Leader Dick Army (R-Texas), former Attorney General John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
GOP presidential candidate John McCain addressed a New Orleans CNP gathering in March, where he stressed his opposition to legal abortion and same-sex marriage. News of Sarah Palin's selection as McCain's running mate reportedly was joyously received by the group at its meeting in Minneapolis just before the Republican National Convention.
Reflecting on the GOP ticket, Baldwin said members of his group are not crazy about McCain but will back him.
"The vast majority of conservatives are lining up behind him, despite their concerns, because Obama scares the daylights out of us," Baldwin said.
There are plenty of other Religious Right groups, of course. The field is crowded with lesser lights. Former FRC operative Gary Bauer runs American Values, a group he describes as "committed to uniting the American people around the vision of our Founding Fathers." In reality, it's just a vehicle for Bauer to bash gay people, Muslims, legal abortion and church-state separation.
In California, the Rev. Lou Sheldon heads the Traditional Values Coalition, which claims to work with 40,000 churches nationwide, spreading mostly anti-gay propaganda. The group has a lobbying arm in Washington, headed by Sheldon's daughter Andrea. From Lufkin, Texas, Falwell acolyte the Rev. Rick Scarborough runs Vision America, a group with a modest budget struggling to find a niche for itself. In Aledo, Texas, David Barton peddles "Christian nation" propaganda from his WallBuilders organization.
Some organizations specialize. Seattle is home to the Discovery Institute, a group that spends most of its time promoting "intelligent design" creationism. The group's budget was $4.1 million last year.
Other groups have small budgets but exercise great ideological influence. The Vallecito, Calif.-based Chalcedon Foundation had a budget of only $711,390 last year but remains influential. The "Christian Reconstructionist" writings of its founder, the late Rousas John Rushdoony, are cited by many Religious Right leaders as foundational to the Religious Right worldview that secular government is evil and Christian fundamentalism must reign supreme. (Gary DeMar's Powder Springs, Ga.-based American Vision spreads the Reconstructionist viewpoint as well.)
All of this raises the question of how powerful these groups and the constituency they represent are. An answer to that is perhaps found in recent political developments. Republican presidential hopeful John McCain felt the need to placate the Religious Right with an evangelical Christian running mate who shares conservative views on social issues.
The New York Times reported that McCain wanted to put U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) on the ticket but had to back down after his campaign received a series of outraged calls from Religious Right leaders. Scrambling, McCain latched onto Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, even though she had yet to be fully vetted by his staff.
And, despite all of the talk in the media about a new breed of evangelicals who are eager to move beyond culture war issues and take on global warming and the needs of the poor, polls don't show the white evangelical vote up for grabs. They are backing McCain in numbers comparable to George W. Bush in 2004.
"The Religious Right is not dead," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "AU's new survey of its funding and power should help dispel the myth that the Religious Right is on the ropes. Forces determined to merge government with their narrow version of religion are alive and kicking, and it behooves us all to understand their goals and tactics."
Rob Boston is the associate editor for Church & State magazine.

Michael Pollan: Eating Is a Political Act

By Mark Eisen, The Progressive
Posted on November 8, 2008, Printed on November 10, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105667/

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.
Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.
Pollan has taken Wendell Berry's memorable phrase "eating is an agricultural act" one step further. "It's a political act as well," Pollan advises.
A lot of people agree. The alternative food movement -- organic farming, local food systems, sustainable agriculture, and more -- is burgeoning today because, one family at a time, consumers are backing away from the global food network. Instead, they patronize farmers' markets, buy food shares from CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, and favor grocers who sell local meat and produce.
Pollan's books are essential reading in this movement. He details the importance of grazing to a sustainable farm's operation and the problems of corn as the cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. But most of all he gracefully chronicles his own journey of discovery in a food world where, amidst $32 billion in advertising, baleful health consequences are carefully obscured.
Pollan's topics include a thorough demolition of "nutritionism," the reigning health ideology that offers dizzying and ever-changing advice on polyunsaturated this and low-fat that, often in the cause of selling highly processed food products.
A good diet is really pretty simple, Pollan declares: Avoid "edible foodlike substances." Instead, eat real food. "Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
I caught up with Pollan two days after he returned from a book tour in New Zealand and Australia. At fifty-three, he looked fit but tired from the travel. He lives on a leafy avenue in Berkeley with his wife, painter Judith Belzer, and their fifteen-year-old son. He teaches journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, after a ten-year stint as an editor at Harper's Magazine. We talked over cups of Darjeeling tea in his kitchen. Here is the edited and condensed interview.
Mark Eisen: You argue that consumer ignorance is essential for maintaining the industrial agriculture system.
Michael Pollan: If people could see how their food is produced, they would change how they eat. My interest in the topic traces to two moments, in 2000, when I learned how our food is produced.
One was driving down Route 5 in California and passing the Harris ranch, which is a huge feedlot right on the highway. It's a stunning landscape. I had never seen anything quite like that.
Miles of manure-encrusted land teeming with thousands of animals and a giant mountain of corn and a giant mountain of manure. And a stench you can smell two miles before you get there.
Most feedlots are hidden away on the High Plains. This one happens to be very accessible. Then I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn't eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.
These two things changed the way I ate. I don't buy industrial potatoes, and I don't eat feedlot meat.
It's only our ignorance of how our food is grown that permits this to go on. Most people, if they went to the feedlot or to the slaughterhouse and saw how the animals are raised and killed, would lose their appetite for that food.
The industry knows this. It works so hard not to label where the food comes from, how it's made, and whether or not there are GMOs [genetically modified organisms] in it, because they know very well from their own research that people don't want food grown that way.
ME: The national organic rules, which took effect in 2002, are credited with creating the boom in organic food sales. Yet you seem skeptical.
MP: Something was gained and something was lost when the federal government defined what "organic" meant. The rules were drawn in a way to make organic friendly to large corporations looking to do organic as cheaply as possible and on as large a scale as possible.
For example, the fight over whether you should really require pasturing for dairy so the cows can eat grass: They drew those rules so broadly that companies like Aurora and Horizon could slip through with very large industrial feedlots.
An "organic feedlot" should be a contradiction in terms, but it's not under the rules. They really wanted to make it possible to have a mirrored food supply. So you could take everything in the supermarket and make its organic doppelganger. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? It's a mixed thing.
The Chinese organic is a real question. First, how organic is it? You hear stories that make you wonder. The other issue is what you can do within the organic rules and still be sending contaminated product. Because the soil is so badly contaminated in China, even if they don't put chemicals on their fields for three years [as U.S. organic rules require for certification], the heavy metals are still there.
So what the consumer thinks they're buying -- organic food -- may not be what they're really getting from China.
ME: The case is made that Wal-Mart's entry into organic sales won't hurt organic farmers, but will help the movement by creating more customers for co-ops and natural food stores.
MP: I hope that's true. But Wal-Mart is one of the reasons we grow beef the way we do in this country, which is to say with brutal efficiency and lots of pharmaceuticals. Wal-Mart's focus on low price tended to mean squeezing their suppliers very, very hard.
Wal-Mart isn't doing that yet with organic. But long term, that's what I would worry about: that they would force organic prices down not by being more efficient in distribution but through pressuring suppliers.
ME: The organic folks I talk with say that Wal-Mart sells only the most popular organic items and doesn't offer the wide selection that serious organic shoppers want.
MP: Wal-Mart feeds the bottom third of the population. So they're not competing with Whole Foods or the corner co-op. It is bringing more people into organic.
The other virtue of Wal-Mart getting into organic is the education factor. There are lots of people in this country who don't know what organic is, and they will learn about it from Wal-Mart.
When I first started talking about the industrialization of organics, there really was a sense that "big organic" would crush "little organic." But I don't think that's what is happening.
They are very separate worlds. There is overlap, but "little organic" is like these smart independent bookstores. They figured out a way to be in a different business. They do events and hand-sell books and have a whole conversation about books that Barnes & Noble and Amazon can't do.
In the same way, you see the really entrepreneurial farmers figuring out they don't have to compete with Whole Foods and certainly not Wal-Mart. They can offer a higher level of quality and more personal attention through the whole CSA relationship and by selling at farmers' markets now.
ME: Newsweek ran a story arguing that the organic market was leveling off because it's just too expensive in an era of higher food prices. Do you agree?
MP: No, I think it's still growing quickly. The demand is still there.
What's slowing the growth is that there is less incentive for farmers to convert to organic because conventional prices are so high. If you're a wheat or corn grower you're getting a real good price. Why would you endure the economic hardship of converting to organic farming?
It takes three years. You have to follow organic practices without getting the benefit of the organic label for your effort. It's a big investment to make the switch.
That's what's slowing down organic growth.
ME: In The Omnivore's Dilemma, you detail the rise of U.S. corn production and the use of high fructose corn syrup as the ubiquitous sweetener in so much processed food. But your discussion of cheap corn gave no sense that corn prices would soon go through the roof.
MP: As a journalist, I was describing what was. I don't think I made any predictions. But the story has changed a lot. How it's going to play out is very hard to predict.
A good deal of The Omnivore's Dilemma dealt with how we took making food out of the solar basis and put it on a fossil-fuel basis. This is what the industrialization of food is essentially. It's introducing cheap fossil fuel in what had been a strictly solar process of using photosynthesis to grow food.
When you do that, suddenly your food economy is dependent on your energy. And that's why prices have gone up. When oil went up, that was the shock. That, and using corn to produce ethanol.
At this very moment, there are executives sitting around the table at Coca-Cola, saying the price of high fructose corn syrup is spiking and will probably stay there for a while. "Do we shrink the portion size, or do we raise the price? Do we to go back to the days before supersizing and sell eight-ounce Coca-Colas instead of twenty-ounce Coca-Colas?"
I hope they shrink the portion size. That would be good for public health.
ME: Does the world have a food shortage now, or is it more a problem of distribution and changing diets?
MP: The spot shortages around the world are really not so much about supply as the price. There are really high prices, and that's driven by ethanol, high oil prices, and the growing demand for grain in Asia.
The whole free trade regime around grains is trembling right now. Countries are recognizing that you don't want to lose control of your ability to feed your population. You don't want the price of food in your country to be dependent on decisions made in Wall Street or the White House.
Trade globalization has forced cheap American and Brazilian grains into all of these countries. As a consequence, they've lost the ability to grow their own grain.
Now they wish those farmers were there.
ME: You seemed to struggle with the concept of vegetarianism and arguments against meat eating.
MP: I'm a pretty harsh critic of 99 percent of America's meat system, but there is that 1 percent I think is important to defend, because first there are good environmental reasons to eat meat in a limited way.
If you believe strongly in building up local food economies, there are places where meat is the best way to get protein off of the land. It's too hilly, too dry. Having animals is very important for sustainable agriculture. If you're going to have animals on the farm, they're going to die eventually, and you're going to eat them.
But I have enormous respect for vegetarians. They're further ahead than most of us. They've gone through the thought process in making their eating choices. They've just come out in a different place than I have.
I think we're going to focus on meat-eaters the way we have on SUV drivers. There will be a lot of pressure and education to show that a heavy meat diet is a big contributor to climate change, and that there are many good reasons to eat less meat.
ME: How is meat consumption tied to climate change?
MP: In several ways. First, it's fossil-fuel intensive. If you are feeding animals grain on feedlots you are growing that grain with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides. You are moving that grain around the country to feedlots. You're moving the meat around the country.
It's a very inefficient way to feed ourselves. It takes ten pounds of grain to get one pound of beef, seven pounds of grain to get one pound of pork, and two pounds of grain to get one pound of chicken.
There is an equity issue, too. If we really have a limited amount of grain to feed the world, and we're feeding 60 percent of it to animals, and another 10 percent to our cars, that's going to be hard to defend in the future.
ME: To a striking degree, you argue that individuals in their daily lives can make a difference.
MP: I really have a lot of faith -- and I know that it's considered naive by some people on the left -- that consumers can change things. I have seen too many cases of what happens when consumers decide to inflect their buying decisions with their moral and political values. It brings about change.
The food industry is remarkably skittish. They're terrified of food scares and food fads, both of which can cost them billions overnight. So they're actually more responsive than you would think.
It's just a matter of consumers voting with their forks for things like grass-fed meat and producers hearing that market signal. But I don't think you can completely reform the food system by just voting with your fork.
There are policy issues, too. The Farm Bill matters greatly. So I'm not naive in thinking all of our answers lie in changes in personal behavior. The same is true of global warming. Individuals have a lot to do, but we also need public solutions. You can't have one without the other.
ME: How is climate change a crisis of lifestyle and character?
MP: Look, 70 percent of economic activity in this country is consumer -- it's our purchasing decisions. That is the economy. We are implicated in these problems, and we have to recognize that. It's our lifestyles; it's how we've organized our cities and the countryside. It's the size of our houses and how we heat our houses. It's all these things. This is global warming.
We can look at supranational institutions to create a new set of rules for this economy. But I don't think that will happen in the absence of people discovering that they can change their lives.
I really believe in what Wendell Berry said in the '70s -- that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. It's really about how we live.
ME: Are people getting it?
MP: On food I have a lot of optimism. I see evidence that people are changing the way they consume. I don't foresee the industrial food system going away. I see it shrinking.
One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body -- and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.
Mark Eisen writes about food, political, and business topics from Madison, Wisconsin.

Published on Monday, November 10, 2008 by the International Herald Tribune

The Climate for Change

by Al Gore
The inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he -- and we -- must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.
The electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of U.S. leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.
The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is "unequivocal." To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to recognize the truth, before it is too late.
Here is the good news: The bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.
Economists across the spectrum agree that rapid investments in a jobs-intensive infrastructure initiative is the best way to revive the U.S. economy in a quick and sustainable way. Many also agree that our economy will fall behind if we continue spending billions of dollars on foreign oil. Moreover, national security experts in both parties agree that we face a dangerous strategic vulnerability if the world suddenly loses access to Middle Eastern oil.
Thirty-five years ago this past week, President Richard Nixon created Project Independence, which set a national goal that, within seven years, the United States would develop "the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources." His statement came three weeks after the Arab oil embargo had sent prices skyrocketing and woke America to the dangers of dependence on foreign oil. And it came only three years after U.S. domestic oil production had peaked.
At the time, the United States imported less than a third of its oil from foreign countries. Yet today, after all six of the presidents succeeding Nixon repeated some version of his goal, our dependence has doubled from one-third to nearly two-thirds -- and many feel that global oil production is at or near its peak.
Some still see this as a problem of domestic production. If we could only increase oil and coal production at home, they argue, then we wouldn't have to rely on imports. Some have come up with even dirtier and more expensive ways to extract the same old fuels, like coal liquids, oil shale and "clean coal" technology.
But in every case, the resources in question are much too expensive or polluting, or, in the case of "clean coal," too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate. If the coal industry can make good on this promise, then I'm all for it. But until that day comes, we simply cannot any longer base the strategy for human survival on a cynical and self-interested illusion.
Here's what we can do -- now: We can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.
What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years.
First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.
Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. The cost of this modern grid -- $400 billion over 10 years -- pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.
Third, we should help America's automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage.
With this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.
Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.
Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world's efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.
Of course, the best way to secure a global agreement to safeguard our future is by re-establishing the United States as the country with the moral and political authority to lead the world toward a solution.
Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.
In an earlier transformative era, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.
This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama's campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.

Published on Monday, November 10, 2008 by TruthDig.com
America the Illiterate
by Chris Hedges
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. 
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. 
The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge. 
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless.  They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both. 
The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think. All we have to do is visualize what we want, believe in ourselves and summon those hidden inner resources, whether divine or national, that make the world conform to our desires. Reality is never an impediment to our advancement.
The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. During the 2000 debates George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Al Gore at a seventh-grade level (7.6). In the 1992 debates Bill Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H.W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did H. Ross Perot (6.3). In the debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon the candidates spoke in language used by 10th-graders. In the debates of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas the scores were respectively 11.2 and 12.0. In short, today’s political rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. It is fitted to this level of comprehension because most Americans speak, think and are entertained at this level. This is why serious film and theater and other serious artistic expression, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of American society. Voltaire was the most famous man of the 18th century. Today the most famous “person” is Mickey Mouse.
In our post-literate world, because ideas are inaccessible, there is a need for constant stimulus. News, political debate, theater, art and books are judged not on the power of their ideas but on their ability to entertain. Cultural products that force us to examine ourselves and our society are condemned as elitist and impenetrable. Hannah Arendt [1] warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that “Hamlet” can be as entertaining as “The Lion King” and perhaps as educational. “Culture,” she wrote, “is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”
“There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect,” Arendt wrote, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”
The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. Huge segments of our population, especially those who live in the embrace of the Christian right and the consumer culture, are completely unmoored from reality. They lack the capacity to search for truth and cope rationally with our mounting social and economic ills. They seek clarity, entertainment and order. They are willing to use force to impose this clarity on others, especially those who do not speak as they speak and think as they think. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.
As we descend into a devastating economic crisis, one that Barack Obama cannot halt, there will be tens of millions of Americans who will be ruthlessly thrust aside. As their houses are foreclosed, as their jobs are lost, as they are forced to declare bankruptcy and watch their communities collapse, they will retreat even further into irrational fantasy. They will be led toward glittering and self-destructive illusions by our modern Pied Pipers—our corporate advertisers, our charlatan preachers, our television news celebrities, our self-help gurus, our entertainment industry and our political demagogues—who will offer increasingly absurd forms of escapism.
The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying. Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage, but these forces will prove to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that awaits us.

Wall Street's Bailout is a Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene -- Why Aren't the Dems Doing Something About It?

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on November 14, 2008, Printed on November 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107000/

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.
In a moment of high panic in late September, the U.S. Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed -- a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."
Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.
Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.
Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.
Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats, including Obama, to get the bailout passed. Now that it is clear that the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right but a grave responsibility to intervene forcefully.
I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. "None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," explained one unnamed Congressional aide.
More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for "change," the mantra abruptly shifted to "smooth transition" and "continuity."
Take Obama's pick for chief of staff. Despite the Republican braying about his partisanship, Rahm Emanuel, the House Democrat who received the most donations from the financial sector, sends an unmistakably reassuring message to Wall Street. When asked on This Week With George Stephanopoulos whether Obama would be moving quickly to increase taxes on the wealthy, as promised, Emanuel pointedly did not answer the question.
This same market-coddling logic should, we are told, guide Obama's selection of treasury secretary. Fox News's Stuart Varney explained that Larry Summers, who held the post under Clinton, and former Fed chair Paul Volcker would both "give great confidence to the market." We learned from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that Summers is the man "the Street would like the most."
Let's be clear about why. "The Street" would cheer a Summers appointment for exactly the same reason the rest of us should fear it: because traders will assume that Summers, champion of financial deregulation under Clinton, will offer a transition from Henry Paulson so smooth we will barely know it happened. Someone like FDIC chair Sheila Bair, on the other hand, would spark fear on the Street -- for all the right reasons.
One thing we know for certain is that the market will react violently to any signal that there is a new sheriff in town who will impose serious regulation, invest in people and cut off the free money for corporations. In short, the markets can be relied on to vote in precisely the opposite way that Americans have just voted. (A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans strongly favor "stricter regulations on financial institutions," while just 21 percent support aid to financial companies.)
There is no way to reconcile the public's vote for change with the market's foot-stomping for more of the same. Any and all moves to change course will be met with short-term market shocks. The good news is that once it is clear that the new rules will be applied across the board and with fairness, the market will stabilize and adjust. Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence has never been better. Over the past three months, we've been shocked so frequently that market stability would come as more of a surprise. That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first. Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that clearly predates him, or fault him for honoring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate. The longer he waits, however, the more memories fade.
When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favors a smooth transition. When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.
This column was first published in The Nation (www.thenation.com), www.naomiklein.org.

Are Human Beings Hard-Wired to Ignore the Threat of Catastrophic Climate Change?

By Lisa Bennett, Greater Good
Posted on November 14, 2008, Printed on November 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106982/

Three years ago, I became obsessed with global warming. Practically overnight, my worries about its potential effects outstripped my worries about so many other national and global issues, even personal ones.
Indeed, as the mother of two young boys, I began to think it a bit crazy that I attended to every bump and scrape on my children's little bodies and budding egos, but largely ignored the threat likely to put sizeable areas of the world, including parts of the coastal city where we live, underwater within their lifetime.
That year, 2005, marked a turning point for many people. After decades of observation, speculation, and analysis, the world's climate scientists had reached a consensus, and increasingly the general public was accepting it. As USA Today reported, "The Debate is Over: Globe is Warming."
The next step, scientists advised, was action. We needed to take significant and urgent steps to cut our dependence on fossil fuels by 25 percent or more, something NASA's top climate scientist, James Hansen, said we had only a decade to do if we were to avoid the great global warming tipping point-that level at which increased temperatures would unleash unprecedented global disasters.
So how are we doing?
Surely, some things have changed. Sales of the Toyota Prius and other hybrids have skyrocketed. Many of us have converted to the new energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs. A flood of books are hitting the market offering tips about how to save the Earth. And there is a frenzy of advertising about everything from "eco-friendly" houses to "green" hair salons, showing just how widespread Americans' desire is to do the right thing for the environment.
Yet none of this adds up to the significant and urgent action scientists have called for. The question is why: Why don't more of us respond more seriously to the most serious threat to the planet in human history?
"Many climate scientists find the response to global warming completely baffling," says Elke Weber, a Columbia University psychologist and the chair of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change's Public Attitudes/Ethical Issues Working Group. According to Weber, climate scientists just can't understand why government and the public have been so slow to act on the extraordinary information these scientists have provided.
But now a growing number of social scientists are offering their expertise in behavioral decision making, risk analysis, and evolutionary influences on human behavior to explain our limited responses to global warming. Among the most significant factors they point to: The way we're psychologically wired and socially conditioned to respond to crises makes us ill-suited to react to the abstract and seemingly remote threat posed by global warming. Their insights are also leading to some intriguing recommendations about how to get people to take action-including the potentially dangerous prospect of playing on people's fears.
Our misleading emotions
There are a significant number of researchers now devoted to studying how people decide that something is truly bad for them. They are called "risk-analysis scholars," and they believe there are, in general, two ways we may assess a risk such as global warming. One is through our analytic abilities, by which we examine the scientific evidence and make logical decisions about how to respond. This is the process that was used by climate scientists to reach the strong and clear conclusion that the risks of global warming are momentous and require immediate and significant action.
But most of us do not rely on our analytic abilities to evaluate the risk of global warming-or any risk, for that matter.
Instead, we rely on the second and more common way of perceiving risk: our emotions.
"For most of us, most of the time, risk is not a statistic. Risk is a feeling," says Weber. We are swayed by our feelings, and those feelings-while an essential part of the decision-making process-can be misleading guides, depending on the type of risk involved.
For example, in a recent paper on how emotion shapes risk perception, Weber cites the growing number of parents who choose to forego having their children vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. To most physicians, this is a highly irrational decision, since vaccinations help prevent serious illnesses and pose very slight risks. So why do parents make such decisions? Because when they learn that roughly one child out of 1,000 will suffer from high fever and one out of 14,000 will suffer seizures as a result of vaccinations, their emotions lead them to imagine that their child will be the one to suffer.
"If I feel scared," says Weber, "that overshadows any amount of pallid statistical information."
And perhaps most importantly, emotions, more than anything else, are what motivate us to act. As decades of behavioral decision research has shown, most people have to feel a risk before they do something about it.
In this way, our limited response to global warming is similar to our limited response to mass murder or genocide, according to Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit that studies human judgment, decision making, and risk.
In a series of research papers, Slovic has explored why reports of genocide so often fail to stir us to action. These reports, he writes, usually stress the thousands or even millions of people who have been killed. In doing so, they speak to our analytic abilities but not our feelings. Slovic has found that people are much more likely to donate money to a cause after reading the story of a single victim than after reading a statistic citing a million victims.
Like genocide, the long-term consequences of global warming are so enormous we can't wrap our heads around them. Scientists predict in 40 years global warming will displace 20 million people from Beijing, 40 million from Shanghai and surrounding areas, and 60 million from Calcutta and Bangladesh. These statistics are daunting, but they're abstract; they don't inspire us to feel for the one individual whose life will be put at risk. As a result, we fail to take appropriate action.
And as with others, so with ourselves: It is emotions, such as fear or worry, that motivate us to protect ourselves from risk. With global warming, this presents an even more challenging situation because, says Weber, our emotions are shaped by two forms of past experience: either direct personal experience or evolutionary experience that still guides human behavior. We feel the hairs stand up on the back of our necks if someone in a dark alley appears dangerous. This happens because, from an evolutionary perspective, deep in our psyches we know what it feels like to have another human being physically threaten us. There's also the chance that we've been threatened or assaulted personally.
But we have no innate experience of global warming that tells us, from personal or evolutionary experience, that when we burn too many fossil fuels, it causes the build-up of greenhouse gases that trap warm air within the Earth's atmosphere, which, in turn, melts ice caps and glaciers, raises ocean levels, and causes hurricanes to intensify, floods to worsen, droughts to increase, lakes and water supplies to disappear, and, as in any such dire and threatening circumstance, famine and warfare to spread. As dramatic as these scenarios are, we can't feel them because we haven't experienced them (yet). Human-driven climate change is simply unprecedented.
"Global warming doesn't make evolutionary sense to us," says Weber. "Our minds haven't adjusted to the much more complex technological risks that are removed in space and time."
Timing is everything
Our lack of past experience with global warming is also exacerbated by the fact that global warming is not a clear and present danger but, rather, something that is projected to reveal its most dramatic consequences decades from now.
"It's a very well established fact about human behavior," says Slovic, "that we discount future negative outcomes a great deal, especially if it means having to postpone some immediate positive benefit, such as the convenience of driving our car." He likens our attitudes toward the future risks of global warming to how teenagers discount the risk of smoking, despite abundant evidence of its risks.
"Young people tend not to be quite clear about whether there will be consequences from their smoking, what they would be, and what it would be like for them," he says. "The future risk is not imaginable, and that tends to make people more complacent."
The fact that global warming appears to represent a hazard of nature also leads people to underestimate the risk. "People don't respect nature and what it can do," says Slovic. "They feel nature is benign, even though it really isn't."
Case-in-point: He contrasts the response to Hurricane Katrina with the response to September 11. "After Katrina, people started to pay more attention to strengthening the levies even though the information was available in advance. There was a short period of time when there was a heightened response, then it dampened."
The response to September 11, in contrast, has been far more significant and long-lasting, even though, he says, "from a physical damage standpoint, 9-11 was relatively smaller." The difference was that Katrina, which many scientists believe was fueled by human-driven global warming, seemed like an act of nature, and that failed to trigger our millennia-old fears of having our homes and lives invaded by a stranger-fears evoked by September 11.
Reality vs. worldview
A third obstacle that limits people's response to global warming-and even their willingness to believe in it-is also one of the most intractable. In a series of recent studies, a group of scholars from Yale and other universities have been studying how cultural values shape our perceptions of risk. Based on the premise that Americans are culturally polarized on a range of societal risks, from global warming to gun control, Paul Slovic, Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, and others analyzed the results of surveys and experiments that matched the risk perceptions of some 5,000 Americans to the worldviews of those Americans. Their finding: People may simply reject evidence that clashes with their worldview.
"To a certain extent our attitude toward risk and behaviors are conditioned not just by the raw facts of the matter, but by the orientation that we have to the world," says Slovic.
In the case of global warming, researchers found two general worldviews that seemed to have the most significant influence on perception and action. One group consists of egalitarians, or people who prefer a society where wealth, power, and opportunity are broadly distributed. Researchers called the other group the hierarchists, those who prefer a society that is linear in its structure, with leaders on top and followers below.
"What we've seen through this research is that egalitarians are generally more concerned about environmental risks over a range of hazards, including global warming. Hierarchists tend to be less concerned," says Slovic. In fact, he says, when it comes to perceptions of risk, one's worldview is vastly more influential than other individual characteristics, such as race or political ideology.
The researchers also found that when proposed solutions to global warming clash with people's worldviews, those people are more likely to reject evidence of the problem altogether. For example, in one experiment, Kahan and his colleagues gave two groups of people two contrasting newspaper articles about global warming. Both reported the problem in similar terms: temperatures were rising, human behavior was the cause of climate change, and global warming could lead to disastrous environmental and economic consequences if left unaddressed. But the articles then went on to offer different solutions: one called for increased regulation of pollution emissions, while the other called for revitalization of nuclear power.
When people with a hierarchical worldview received the article that called for increased regulation-policies currently associated with a more egalitarian and liberal worldview-they were more likely to reject that global warming was a problem than when they received the article that called for a revitalization of nuclear power.
This research helps explain the attitudes and behaviors of global warming skeptics. Slovic says it also shows how difficult it is to communicate persuasively when people feel their worldview is challenged. "The truly disconcerting thing about this work is that it shows how difficult it is to change people's views and behaviors with factual information," says Slovic.
"People spin the information to keep their worldview intact." They do their best to hold onto their worldviews, says Slovic, because so much of their personal identity and social networks are tied up in maintaining it.
Fearful futures, hopeful actions
With such significant obstacles to spurring action on global warming, what can social scientists recommend about how to inspire the necessary response?
First, communication about global warming needs to reach people's emotions and trigger fear, and that means emphasizing the dramatic consequences to come. "It is only the potentially catastrophic nature of (rapid) climate change (of the kind graphically depicted in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow) and the global dimension of adverse effects, which may create hardships for future generations, that have the potential for raising a visceral reaction to the risk," Elke Weber writes in a recent paper on why global warming doesn't scare us yet.
This means making future hardships vivid, imaginable, personalized, and credible, says Slovic. For example, he suggests that people communicating about global warming answer the questions: "How will it change the whole economy and whole quality of life in a particular region? Will the forests die out? Will the summers be so hot and dry that the Earth will be uninhabitable?"
In setting out to evoke fear, however, one must tread judiciously. "If people are being scared without seeing a way out, it makes them dysfunctional and freeze," says Weber. "They will switch channels and watch Britney Spears instead."
And that leads to a second recommendation: People need to be offered a set of actions they can take to combat global warming. "In general, a good guide is: Where does most of our energy get used?" says Susanne C. Moser, co-editor of the 2007 anthology, Creating a Climate for Change. The top three categories of energy-consumption for individuals are transportation, home-energy use, and food consumption. Already, plenty of books and websites offer tips on how to reduce energy use in all these areas. Reports on global warming need to draw on these resources, so that people feel there is something concrete they can do about it.
Finally, beyond the many small energy-saving solutions people can take, combating global warming will require making people more aware of the large-scale lifestyle changes that will really make a difference. "I don't want to have to make a zillion little decisions," says Baruch Fischoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the former president of the Society for Risk Analysis. "I'd like to see people working out for me some alternative ways of organizing my life where it will really be a sustainable way to live."
Indeed, figuring out these big lifestyles changes, Fischoff suggests, is the practical work that now lies ahead for climate and social scientists.
As for ordinary Americans like myself, I believe that significant collective action on global warming will come from a very personal place-such as love for our kids, who will, after all, be among those most likely to experience its greatest consequences. But perhaps even more significantly, I'm finding hope in knowing that the drive to protect our children is another universal desire for which most of us are, in fact, hard-wired.
Reprinted from Greater Good, Vol. V, Issue 2 (Fall 2008), pp. 40-43. For more information, please visit Greater Good magazine.
Lisa Bennett is the communications director for the Center for Ecoliteracy, a nonprofit dedicated to education for sustainable living. She is writing a book about parenting in the age of global warming and can be reached at LisaOBennett@gmail.com.

Overworked, Vacation-Starved America Ranks #1 in Depression, Mental Health Problems

By Silja J.A. Talvi, In These Times
Posted on November 13, 2008, Printed on November 14, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106830/

Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson's character in the 1980 film The Shining, should get credit for popularizing (and making terrifying) a proverb that dates as far back as the mid-1600s: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Nicholson's character sure looked like he could have used a vacation before his psyche disintegrated and he went on a murderous rampage.
In the real world, the danger isn't that we'll start obsessively and repeatedly typing proverbs at the Overlook Hotel before taking an ax to the door (one would hope), but that our country's hard-working denizens will keep getting sicker, sadder, less productive and more miserable.
Medical and poll-based evidence indicates that we seriously need relief. Work-related stress can lead to sudden heart attacks, obesity, anxiety and depression. A World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School study last year put the United States at the top of the list of depressed (or otherwise mentally disordered) countries, while the Gallup Daily Happiness-Stress Index finds that the only consistent upswing in mood occur when Americans get some time off on the weekends or holidays.
As John de Graaf, executive director of the Seattle-based advocacy group Take Back Your Time, puts it, Americans are "time-starved and vacation-starved."
Americans put in more hours at work than any other nation, surpassing even the workaholic Japanese. We average nine more weeks of labor per year than our working counterparts in Western Europe, who get at least 20 paid days of vacation each year.
Finland tops the list of vacation-supporting industrialized nations with 30 paid vacation days per year after the first year of work, plus 14 paid national holidays, according to a July 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. (This is in addition to the possibility that the country might soon grant "love holidays" so that some couples can rekindle passions and have kids.)
Canada and Japan are near the bottom of that list, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days, while the United States has the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation that does not have a mandatory minimum of vacation time. In fact, out of the world's 195 independent countries, 137 have some kind of vacation/annual leave legislation in place.
Each year, de Graaf and his U.S. and Canadian colleagues work to get the word out about their annual celebration, Take Back Your Time Day, which occurs Oct. 24.
De Graaf, an independent filmmaker with a long, impressive list of social consciousness-raising documentaries under his belt -- including the popular PBS documentaries Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza -- explains that he started Take Back Your Time to "challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time-famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."
De Graaf says that the Obama camp responded with "definite interest," although he can't yet share specifics. De Graaf considers time-famine -- and the need for mandatory vacation time for all Americans -- a bipartisan issue, although he says he's aware that Republicans are more likely to object to national legislation.
Even some Democrats, he admits, think he is over-dramatizing the situation: Aren't there more pressing social justice issues for us to worry about? Poverty, healthcare and ethnic/gender disparities, to name a few?
"I've been told by a few prominent progressive activists that, while they're personally supportive of what we're trying to accomplish, they're not willing to get involved because this is really a white, middle-class issue," he says. " 'You couldn't be more wrong,' is what I tell them."
In July, Take Back Your Time released its findings from a scientific telephone sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults. The poll revealed that more than two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans would support the passage of a paid vacation law. Most enthusiastic about vacation-time-legislation were people under 35 (83 percent); African Americans (89 percent); Latinos (82 percent); people earning low incomes (82 percent); women (75 percent, versus 63 percent for men); and families with children (74 percent).
De Graaf says he was surprised but not shocked that such strong support came from low-income communities and communities of color. (One hundred percent of African-American respondents indicated that some vacation time was necessary to avoid burn out.)
"When you're poor, you're socially excluded," he says. "And/or when you're working two or three jobs to make ends meet, you know how important it is to have [downtime] with your loved ones."
But that kind of downtime is harder and harder to come by. According to the group's poll, 52 percent of working Americans received less than a week of paid vacation in the past year -- more than half of those received none -- while 65 percent of workers received less than two paid weeks off.
The result? Too much hard work -- whether unpaid or paid overtime -- really does hurt (and kill) people. Unlike the Japanese and Chinese, we haven't given death-by-overwork its own moniker (karoshi and guolaosi, respectively), much less enacted national legislation that allows surviving family members to sue over the workplace conditions that lead to such deaths (as Japan and Korea have).
In Japan, the image of a typical karoshi victim is that of a businessman who dies at his desk after too many 80-hour workweeks. But several international studies (in Finland, Israel, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) have shown that while both sexes are at high risk for "overwork" consequences -- heart disease, obesity, insomnia and persistent fatigue -- women are far more likely to suffer mental health consequences, especially when they do not take vacations.
A 2005 study funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also noted that roughly one in five women reported taking a vacation only once every six years. (A 2006 "Ask a Working Woman" AFL-CIO survey explains this, in part: Nearly four in 10 women earning less than $40,000 annually receive no paid vacation whatsoever.)
Things haven't always been this bad. Workers' lives have gone from bad to better to bad all over again. The Industrial Revolution brought extreme working conditions and 14-hour days. The late 1800s saw the beginning of an epic workers' battle for the eight-hour workday. As it turns out, Oct. 24 marks the 70th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage in the United States. Most Americans don't know that the original wording of the bill also guaranteed mandatory vacation time for all workers.
In light of that, de Graaf insists that it's high time to enact a national policy to ensure that we don't have to feel guilty (or fearful about losing our jobs) for taking time off.
"We need the right to have that time off," urges de Graaf. "Otherwise, we won't have the [energy for the] imagination we need to better ourselves and our communities."
This piece was originally written for In These Times, a national, monthly magazine based in Chicago.
Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

New Federal Report: U.S. Hunger Spiked Further in 2007
36.2 Million Americans (Up from 35.5 million in 2006),
Including 12 Million Children, at Risk;
New York, New York - November 17, 2008- The number of Americans who lived in homes that couldn't afford a full and stable supply of food increased from 35.5 to 36.2 million in 2007, even before the current economic slowdown, according to data released today by the United States Department of Agriculture.  More than 12 million children lived in such food insecure households in 2007.  Today's surging lines at food pantries and soup kitchens nationwide indicate that the problem has worsened considerably since then.  ("These startling new federal hunger numbers highlight the need for immediate action. Even though President-Elect Barack Obama issued detailed plans to fight poverty and hunger during his campaign, they were all-but-ignored by the media.  I wrote this book to help jump-start a serious national debate on hunger and poverty and to provide the new President and Congress a common-sense, affordable, bi-partisan plan to end domestic hunger once and for all.  I am encouraged by early signs that the book is already engaging Americans in a national debate about hunger in our country.  I hope that our national elected officials will make good on their pledges to work across party lines to implement bold solutions to our country's most pressing problems.  36.2 million hungry Americans cannot continue to wait for action; it must happen immediately."

Gulf War illness is real, new federal report says

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An extensive federal report released Monday concludes that roughly one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.
That illness is a condition now identified as the likely consequence of exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas.
The 452-page report states that "scientific evidence leaves no question that Gulf War illness is a real condition with real causes and serious consequences for affected veterans."
The report, compiled by a panel of scientific experts and veterans serving on the congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, fails to identify any cure for the malady.
It also notes that few veterans afflicted with Gulf War illness have recovered over time.
"Today's report brings to a close one of the darkest chapters in the legacy of the 1991 Gulf War," said Anthony Hardie, a member of the committee and a member of the advocacy group Veterans of Modern Warfare.
"This is a bittersweet victory, [because] this is what Gulf War veterans have been saying all along," Hardie said at a news conference in Washington. "Years were squandered by the federal government ... trying to disprove that anything could be wrong with Gulf War veterans."
The committee's report, titled "Gulf War Illness and the Health of Gulf War Veterans," was officially presented Monday to Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peak.
Noting that overall funding for research into Gulf War illness has declined dramatically since 2001, it calls for a "renewed federal research commitment" to

Gov't Finds Child Hunger Rose 50% In 2007
Nearly 700,000 Went Hungry Last Year
POSTED: 4:21 pm EST November 17, 2008
UPDATED: 4:25 pm EST November 17, 2008
WASHINGTON -- New government figures show that almost 700,000 children went hungry in the United States at some point in 2007, up more than 50 percent from the year before to mark the highest point since 1998. And that's even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.
The department's annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.
Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn't have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.
Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having "very low food security." Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having "food insecurity with hunger."
The findings should increase pressure to meet President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to expand food aid and end childhood hunger by 2015, said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.
He predicted the 2008 numbers will show even more hunger because of the sharp economic downturn this year.
"There's every reason to think the increases in the number of hungry people will be very, very large based on the increased demand we're seeing this year at food stamp agencies, emergency kitchens, Women, Infants and Children clinics, really across the entire social service support structure," said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.
Weill said the figures show that economic growth during the first seven years of the Bush administration didn't reach the poorest and hungriest people. "The people in the deepest poverty are suffering the most," Weill said.
The number of adults and children with "low food security" -- those who avoided substantial food disruptions but still struggled to eat -- fell slightly since 2000, from 24.7 million to 24.3 million. The government said these people have several ways of coping - eating less varied diets, obtaining food from emergency kitchens or community food charities, or participating in federal aid programs like food stamps, the school lunch program or the Women, Infants and Children program.
Among other findings:
The families with the highest rates of food insecurity were headed by single mothers (30.2 percent), black households (22.2 percent), Hispanic households (20.1 percent), and households with incomes below the official poverty line (37.7 percent).
States with families reporting the highest prevalence of food insecurity during 2005-2007 were Mississippi (17.4 percent), New Mexico (15 percent), Texas (14.8 percent) and Arkansas (14.4 percent).
The highest growth in food insecurity over the last 9 years came in Alaska and Iowa, both of which saw a 3.7 percent increase in families who struggled to eat adequately or had substantial food disruptions.
Ninety-three percent reported eating less than they felt they should because there was not enough money for food.
Sixty-five percent of respondents reported that they had been hungry but did not eat because they could not afford enough food.
Forty-five percent of respondents reported having lost weight because they did not have enough money for food.

America’s Wars of Self-Destruction

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081117_americas_wars_of_self_destruction/

Posted on Nov 17, 2008

By Chris Hedges
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. This belief has corrupted Republicans and Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it appears he will, the dark elixir of war and imperial power offered to him by the national security state, he will accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.
Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the “war on terror.” They may want to shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a difference in strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in Afghanistan, the poison will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are doomed to failure. We cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse of banks and the financial services industry, the poverty that is ripping apart the working class, our crumbling infrastructure and the killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a perfect circle. The costly forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are hollowing us out from the inside at home. 
The “war on terror” is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual, or what is now called “generational,” war.  It has no discernable end.  There is no way to define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as any good seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils, however, are not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that are internal. These hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our hubris, self-delusion and ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its deadliest form. 
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable demand for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the United States accounted for one-third of world exports and half of the world’s manufacturing, gave way to huge trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of abandoned factories, stagnant wages and personal and public debts that most of us cannot repay. 
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew Bacevich writes, is “our surrogate religion.” If we continue to believe that we can expand our wars and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of consumption, we will dynamite the foundations of our society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American leadership,” Bacevich writes in “The Limits of Power.” “The Big Lies are the truths that remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households, must ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so many confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this: Power is finite.  Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a consequence, the absence of self-awareness that forms such an enduring element of the American character persists.”
Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the imperial presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these institutions intact and seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that Obama will magically save us from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of consumption and resurrect our imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our disconnection with reality. The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command. 
There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of Sept. 11 will not be the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and propaganda wars, to discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those defined as our enemies. Force, while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The 2001 attacks that roused our fury and unleashed the “war on terror” also unleashed a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and Islamic terrorism, including throughout the Muslim world, where I was working as a reporter at the time. If we had had the courage to be vulnerable, to build on this empathy rather than drop explosive ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far safer and more secure today. If we had reached out for allies and partners instead of arrogantly assuming that American military power would restore our sense of invulnerability and mitigate our collective humiliation, we would have done much to defeat al-Qaida. But we did not. We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our ruthless and indiscriminate use of violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected the very forces that we could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot that fighting terrorism is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war. We forgot that, as strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive isolated and alone. 
The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound economic, political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of self-delusion, circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness, virtue and power, or we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot reverse this decline. It will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break free from our self-delusion, dismantle our crumbling empire and the national security state with a minimum of damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to accept our limitations, if do not face the changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite that has grossly mismanaged our economy, our military and our government, we will barrel forward toward internal and external collapse. Our self-delusion constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront reality or plunge headlong into the minefields that lie before us.
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His column appears Mondays on Truthdig.

Fluoride in Drinking Water may Negatively Affect Health of Fetuses and Infants

(NaturalNews) Did you know that fluoride in our water supplies is the only chemical added for a specific medical purpose, i.e. to prevent tooth decay? All other chemicals are added for treatment purposes, to improve the quality and safety of tap water. And an expert has voiced his concerns over the potential negative impact of fluoride in drinking water on the health of fetuses and infants.

Dr Vyvyan Howard is a medical pathologist and toxicologist, and also President of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment. In a short video clip put together by the Fluoride Action Network, he expressed his concern over the use of fluoride in our water supplies.

About Dr Howard

Over the last two to three decades, Dr Howard's research has centered on the effects of toxic substances on the development of fetuses and infants. This, of course, is a period of life whereby one is particularly vulnerable to certain external effects.

So, how was Dr Howard's attention first drawn to fluoride? According to him, it was the "very very low levels" of the chemical found in human breast milk. This, he said, is due to a mechanism developed in the course of evolution, specifically for keeping the substance away from developing infants.

"Nature has devised a system for keeping fluoride away from the infant, and we are circumventing that by putting fluoride into drinking water, and I think there are consequences," he said.

What consequences? According to Dr Howard, fluoride is a developmental toxin. More specifically, it is a neurotoxin, and it may also affect the intelligence of the child. While the evidence may not yet be clear-cut, there do seem to be strong indications.

Further, Dr Howard said that other studies have shown the possible ability of fluoride to affect hormonal systems and endocrine systems. In particular, it can influence thyroid levels, and that can have an impact on the IQ in children who are in the development phase.

When thyroid levels are measured in the mother, being at the upper limit of the normal range of thyroid and being at the lower limit of the normal range brings about a difference in intelligence in the offspring. Where thyroid levels are concerned, we are thus "tinkering with quite a sensitive system".

About Water Fluoridation

Should fluoride be added to our water supplies? Dr Howard was quite clear about what he felt.

"So, the evidence is out there for us to have to say that we got to be very careful. And my opinion is that there isn't a satisfactory one dose fits all solution through treating our population via tap water. There are going to be some members of that population which will be more disadvantaged than others, and they will obviously include the fetus and the infant, but at the other end of life, people who have got marginal kidney function will be more susceptible. And therefore, I don't think, on a precautionary basis, that we should be continuing the fluoridation of drinking water supplies," he said.

And he had some strong words regarding the authorities who continue adding fluoride to water supplies, too.

"If governments don't have ways of making sure that people in the areas that are fluoridated who are susceptible, like bottled fed babies, are actually stopped from being exposed in that way, then they have no right, really, to be using a mass medication like this," he added.

According to the video clip, Dr Howard is one of over 1,750 professionals from various communities - medical, scientific, and environmental - to sign a statement "calling for an end to water fluoridation worldwide".

Worried about the Teeth?

There may be some of us who are worried about how removing fluoride from our drinking water might affect our teeth. But we may not need to be.

An increasing number of studies have cast doubts on the benefits which water fluoridation can bring to the teeth. According to statistics from the World Health Organization, the tooth decay rates of countries which do not fluoridate their water supplies are just as low, or even lower, than those countries which do.

Further, several studies published since 2000 have reported that there has been no increase in tooth decay rates noted in communities which ended water fluoridation.

And we should also note that, in November 2006, the American Dental Association actually advised parents to avoid giving fluoridated water to babies.

Babies who are exposed to fluoride have a higher risk of getting dental fluorosis, which is a permanent tooth defect arising when fluoride damages the cells which form the teeth.

Fluoride's benefits result from topical contact with the teeth, and swallowing or ingesting it brings minimal benefit. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fluoride's "predominant effect is posteruptive and topical". Posteruptive means "occurring or forming after eruption (as of the teeth)".

Removing Fluoride from Our Water

In fact, ingesting fluoride comes with many health risks. Besides affecting the brain and the thyroid gland, the bones and kidneys can also be negatively impacted.

For those of us who are genuinely concerned about our health, and especially the health of our little ones, removing fluoride from our drinking water is imperative.

Unfortunately, unlike for chlorine, boiling does not do the trick. An installation of a reverse osmosis filter, or carrying out of water distillation, may thus be necessary.

http://www.naturalnews.com/024855.html

Study Shows Preventing Illness More Economical Than Treating the Sick

(NaturalNews) Investing in preventive health care is far more cost-effective than treating people after they get sick, according to a report from the nonprofit advocacy group Trust for America's Health.

"We've got to change the mindset from treating sick people to preventing illnesses in the first place," said U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin in response to the report.

Researchers calculated how much rates of certain diseases could be decreased by investing money in programs that have been proven to lower smoking rates and increase healthy eating and physical activity. They found that within two years, investment in community health programs could lead to a 5 percent reduction in rates of diabetes and high blood pressure, while significantly reducing rates of arthritis and some kinds of cancer within only 10 to 20 years.

For every dollar invested in community-based preventive health care programs, the researchers found, $5.60 in later healthcare treatment would be saved. Investing just $10 per person could lead to savings of more than $16 billion per year within only five years.

People often think that such programs "[pay] off 20 or 30 years from now," Harkin said, "but this shows you get the money back almost immediately, and then the savings grows bigger and bigger."

The report encourages federal, state and local governments to increase tobacco taxes, ban smoking in public places and require nutrition labels on restaurant menus. It also urges governments to increase funding for community health initiatives, like a program in Dallas that has led to improved eating and physical activity habits among participating youth. Governments can also encourage healthy living through relatively simple and inexpensive measures, the report said, such as keeping sidewalks in good shape.

"What's been interesting is that if you make it easier for people to make better choices, they actually do," said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the Trust for America's Health.

http://www.naturalnews.com/024853.html

Two New Studies Find Anti-Homeopathy Review Wrong

(NaturalNews) In August of 2005, the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a review comparing clinical trials of homeopathy with trials of conventional medicine. The conclusion of this study, which was widely hailed as evidence that homeopathy is worthless quackery, stated that homeopathic medicines are non-effective and, at best, just placebos. What's more, an accompanying editorial in the Lancet said this "evidence" should close the door on the non-toxic, alternative treatment method, and flatly proclaimed this review should mark "the end of homeopathy". Now two newly published studies, one in the journal Homeopathy and the other in the mainstream medical Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, have both gone on record to say the Lancet review was enormously flawed and downright inaccurate. Instead of showing homeopathy doesn't work, the conclusion should have been that, at least for some ailments, it is effective.

Homeopathy involves giving very small doses of substances called remedies that, according to homeopathy, would produce the same or similar symptoms of illness in healthy people if they were given in larger doses. The goal of homeopathy is to stimulate the body's defense system in order to prevent or treat illness. Homeopathy treatment is tailored to each individual and homeopathic practitioners work to select remedies according to a total picture of the patient, including not only symptoms but lifestyle, emotional and mental states, and other factors.

The original claim made in the Lancet review that homeopathic medicines are worthless treatments (other than being placebos) was based on six clinical trials of conventional medicine and eight studies of homeopathy. But what trials, exactly, were studied? It turns out the Lancet did not reveal this most basic information and, as the new studies point out, seriously flawed assumptions were made about the data that was presented. There are a limited number of homeopathic studies so it is not difficult to pick and choose facts to interpret selectively and unfavorably, which appears to be just what was done in the original Lancet anti-homeopathy article.

Bottom line: the Lancet's report showing homeopathy is worthless lacked the academic care and scientific approach called for in medical journals. In fact, it could well be seen as a hack job.

In a statement to the press, George Lewith, Professor of Health Research at Southampton University in Great Britain, stated: "The review gave no indication of which trials were analyzed nor of the various vital assumptions made about the data. This is not usual scientific practice. If we presume that homeopathy works for some conditions but not others, or change the definition of a 'larger trial', the conclusions change. This indicates a fundamental weakness in the conclusions: they are NOT reliable."

The two recently published scientific papers that investigated the previous Lancet review conclude that an analysis of all high quality trials of homeopathy show positive outcomes. What's more, the eight larger and higher quality trials of homeopathy looked at a variety of medical conditions. The new studies point out that because homeopathy worked consistently for some of these ailments and not others, the results must indicate that homeopathic remedies can't be simply placebos. In addition, the studies conclude that comparing homeopathy to conventional medicine was a meaningless apples-and-oranges approach. There are also concerns that the original anti-homeopathy review used unpublished criteria. For example, the researchers didn't bother to define what they meant by "higher quality" homeopathy research.

The new studies not only cast serious doubts on the original Lancet review, which was headed by Professor Matthias Egger of the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Berne, but they strongly indicate Egger and his team based their conclusions on a series of hidden judgments that were prejudiced against homeopathy. So far,Professor Egger has declined to comment on the findings of the new studies in Homeopathy and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology,

A press statement from the National Center for Homeopathy explains that an open assessment of the current evidence suggests that homeopathy is probably effective for many conditions including allergies, upper respiratory tract infections and flu, but agrees that much more research is needed. To that end, the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has announced it is currently supporting research in these areas:

* Homeopathy for physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of fibromyalgia (a chronic disorder involving widespread musculoskeletal pain, multiple tender points on the body, and fatigue).
* Homeopathy to help relieve or prevent brain deterioration and damage in stroke and dementia.
* Homeopathy (specifically the remedy cadmium) to potentially prevent damage to the cells of the prostate when those cells are exposed to toxins.

http://www.naturalnews.com/024852.html

Indigo plant may treat chronic skin disease

Mon Nov 17, 2008 4:05pm EST

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Indigo naturalis, a dark blue plant used in traditional Chinese medicine, appears to be effective in treating psoriasis, a study in Taiwan has found.
Psoriasis is a chronic skin disease for which no cure is known, though some therapies bring about a remission. It causes red scaly patches, or plaques, which take on a silvery-white appearance and often occur on the arms, elbows, knees and legs.

A study of the findings of a clinical trial involving 42 patients who had had the condition for at least two years was published in the latest issue of Archives of Dermatology.

The researchers found that indigo naturalis in the form of an ointment was safe and effective in treating psoriasis.

"Current steroid-based medication may cause side effects like thinning of the skin, but this (indigo naturalis) has much less side effects," lead researcher Yin-Ku Lin of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Chang Gung University in Taoyuan, Taiwan, told Reuters by telephone.

None of the patients in the trial had serious adverse effects, though some experienced a mild skin allergy.

They applied indigo naturalis ointment on one side of their bodies and a placebo, or non-medicated, ointment on the other.

Doctors checked on their condition at the start of the treatment and after two, four, six, eight, 10 and 12 weeks.

"The indigo naturalis ointment-treated lesions showed an 81 percent improvement, the (non-medicated) ointment-treated lesions showed a 26 percent improvement," the authors wrote.

For 25 of the patients, plaques that were treated with the indigo were completely or nearly completely cleared.

Indigo naturalis has long been used, externally or ingested, to treat various infections and inflammatory diseases in China and Taiwan, such as mumps, pharyngitis and eczema.

Long-term systemic use has been linked to irritation of the gastrointestinal tract and liver problems, the researchers said. They called for more studies on ways of improving absorption of the ointment

http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000502_psoriasis_Chinese_medicine_indigo.html

Many doctors plan to quit or cut back: survey

Tue Nov 18, 2008 1:36am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Primary care doctors in the United States feel overworked and nearly half plan to either cut back on how many patients they see or quit medicine entirely, according to a survey released on Tuesday.
And 60 percent of 12,000 general practice physicians found they would not recommend medicine as a career.

"The whole thing has spun out of control. I plan to retire early even though I still love seeing patients. The process has just become too burdensome," the Physicians' Foundation, which conducted the survey, quoted one of the doctors as saying.

The survey adds to building evidence that not enough internal medicine or family practice doctors are trained or practicing in the United States, although there are plenty of specialist physicians.

Health care reform is near the top of the list of priorities for both Congress and president-elect Barack Obama, and doctor's groups are lobbying for action to reduce their workload and hold the line on payments for treating Medicare, Medicaid and other patients with federal or state health insurance.

The Physicians' Foundation, founded in 2003 as part of a settlement in an anti-racketeering lawsuit among physicians, medical societies, and insurer Aetna, Inc., mailed surveys to 270,000 primary care doctors and 50,000 practicing specialists.

The 12,000 answers are considered representative of doctors as a whole, the group said, with a margin of error of about 1 percent. It found that 78 percent of those who answered believe there is a shortage of primary care doctors.

More than 90 percent said the time they devote to non-clinical paperwork has increased in the last three years and 63 percent said this has caused them to spend less time with each patient.

Eleven percent said they plan to retire and 13 percent said they plan to seek a job that removes them from active patient care. Twenty percent said they will cut back on patients seen and 10 percent plan to move to part-time work.

Seventy six percent of physicians said they are working at "full capacity" or "overextended and overworked".

Many of the health plans proposed by members of Congress, insurers and employers's groups, as well as Obama's, suggest that electronic medical records would go a long way to saving time and reducing costs

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4Ah3CE20081118

Canola oil diet lowers cancer risk for mom, baby
Last Updated: 2008-11-18 16:28:20 -0400 (Reuters Health)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Replacing corn oil with canola oil may lower cancer risk not only for women, but for their unborn babies, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found that mice fed canola oil while pregnant were less likely to develop breast cancer -- and so were their unborn pups -- than mice fed corn oil.
The findings are likely because of omega 6 fatty acids, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Some research has linked high amounts of omega-6 fatty acids to health problems including cancer.
Fifty percent of the fatty acids in corn oil are omega 6, while just 20 percent of the fatty acids in canola oil are. And canola oil is much richer than corn oil in omega 3 fatty acids, which are linked with heart and cancer benefits.
Elaine Hardman and colleagues at the Marshall University School of Medicine in West Virginia tested genetically engineered mice that develop cancer early in life.
Those fed a canola-rich diet were slower to develop cancer than those fed corn oil, and so were their pups.
"By seeing a delay in their cancer development, we can hope that translates into a delay in cancer development in humans, too," Hardman said in a telephone interview.
Hardman's team also examined the mice for genetic changes associated with cancer, and found for example that CEBP alpha, a so-called transcription factor involved in breast cancer differentiation, and Egr1, a tumor suppressor gene, were overly active in the mice fed corn oil and less active in those fed canola.
And the same was true of their pups.
"The only explanation is that during gestation and lactation, the mother's diet must be imprinting the genes of the baby," Hardman said.
While research continues, Hardman said it would be easy for people to switch to canola oil.
"The bottom line message to people is this is a dietary change that would be very easy to make. It doesn't cost any money and it might help prevent cancer in the future," she said. "At worst it won't do any harm."
Fish, leafy green vegetables, some nuts and canola oil are rich in omega 3 fatty acids while omega 6 fats are found in corn or soybean products and in the meat from animals fed them, including cattle, pigs and chicken.
"Americans now eat a high percentage of omega 6 fats," Hardman said in a statement. She believes cancer rates may be linked to diets high in these fats.
http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2008/11/18/eline/links/20081118elin021.html

Ginkgo Biloba Does Not Reduce Dementia Risk, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2008) — The medicinal herb Ginkgo biloba does not reduce the risk of dementia or Alzheimer's disease development in either the healthy elderly or those with mild cognitive impairment, according to a large multicenter trial led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Findings from the Ginkgo Evaluation of Memory (GEM) Study, which is the first to have the necessary participant numbers and monitoring years to enable measurement of G. biloba's effectiveness and safety profile in dementia prevention, were just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease (AD), is a prevalent chronic disease currently affecting more than 5 million people in the United States and is a leading cause of age-related disability and long-term care placement, according to background information in the article. Ginkgo biloba is prescribed in some areas of the world for preservation of memory; however, there are no medications approved for prevention of dementia.
"Despite early indications that Ginkgo biloba has antioxidant and other properties that might preserve memory, this trial shows that, in fact, it has no impact on development of dementia and Alzheimer's Disease," said Steven T. DeKosky, M.D., principal investigator of the multi-center trial. Dr. DeKosky was director of the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and Chair of the Department of Neurology at the time the study was conducted. He now is Vice President and Dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
G. biloba didn't affect the rate of coronary heart disease or stroke, either, the researchers found.
It's possible that an effect would have been observed, if the study had gone on longer, because it takes many years to progress from initial brain changes to clinical dementia, Dr. DeKosky noted. Therefore, the research team intends to conduct a follow-up analysis of brain function and structure in a subset of participants using magnetic resonance imaging.
In the study, which was conducted at five medical centers between 2000 and 2008, 3,069 people age 75 or older who had no, or mild, cognitive impairment were randomly assigned to take twice-daily doses of either 120 milligrams of G. biloba extract or a placebo. They were reassessed every six months for dementia using several well-established mental status tests. If changes were found that exceeded the expected "normal" changes in aging, a more extensive evaluation, including neuroimaging, was performed.
The researchers found no statistical difference in dementia or Alzheimer's disease rates between the groups. Among those taking G. biloba, 277 developed dementia. Among those in the placebo group, 246 developed dementia. Mortality rates also were similar.
"Studies of this magnitude are never possible without the selflessness of dedicated study participants. They continue to amaze us with their dedication to help find ways to prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. DeKosky.
Other study sites included Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Davis, and Wake Forest University. Data management and statistical analyses were performed at the University of Washington in Seattle. Principal investigator of the University of Pittsburgh site was Lewis H. Kuller, M.D., Dr. P.H., University Professor of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health.
A similarly-sized trial assessing the effectiveness of G. biloba is underway in Europe.
The trial was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Institute on Aging, with support from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood

Garlic Chemical Tablet Treats Diabetes I And II, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2008) — A drug based on a chemical found in garlic can treat diabetes types I and II when taken as a tablet, a study in the new Royal Society of Chemistry journal Metallomics says.
When Hiromu Sakurai and colleagues from the Suzuka University of Medical Science, Japan, gave the drug orally to type I diabetic mice, they found it reduced blood glucose levels.
The drug is based on vanadium and allixin, a compound found in garlic, and its action described in an Advance Article from Metallomics available free online from today. The first issue of the new journal will be published in 2009.
In previous work they had discovered the vanadium-allixin compound treated both diabetes types when injected, but this new study shows the drug has promise as an oral treatment for the disease.
Type I diabetes (insulin dependent) is currently treated with daily injections of insulin, while type II (non-insulin dependent) is treated with drugs bearing undesirable side-effects – the authors note neither treatment is ideal.
The researchers aim to test the drug in humans in future work.
Makoto Hiromura et al. Glucose lowering activity by oral administration of bis(allixinato)oxidovanadium(IV) complex in streptozotocin-induced diabetic mice and gene expression profiling in their skeletal muscles. Metallomics, 2009 DOI: 10.1039/b815384c
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119084835.htm