Tannishblog

One of the tenets of Buddhism is Inter-connectivity: Everything, everyone, is interconnected, interdependent. Our fragile society is so complex that sometimes it’s hard for people to connect the dots. But the following seemingly disparate news items are - to me, at least - so intertwined as to be one, yet I don’t hear anyone putting them together. Taken together, they form a bleak view of American politics over the past few decades.

Exhibit a: President Obama’s July, 25 2011 speech on the Debt Debacle.

This quote alone secures my vote.

“For the last decade, we’ve spent more money than we take in. In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts, while two wars and an expensive prescription drug program were simply added to our nation’s credit card.”

Exhibit B: An artistic portrayal of the state of education in America.

Put these together and what do you get? A nation with mistaken priorities.

Clearly the nations of the world would agree with this assessment. Our “leaders” should take this, pour it into a bucket and stir - Liberally.

This abomination needs to be shared.

According to thinkprogress.org, the Republican led House has drafted H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act. This bill is trying to redefine what constitute rape, by narrowing the legal criteria. It increases taxes on women who might use their company’s healthcare to fund an abortion, as well as her company for offering such coverage in it’s benefit package. Essentially, this is a tax increase.

By banning deductions or tax credits to pay for abortions, women would have to prove in an audit that her circumstances fell under the “rape/incest/life-of-the-mother exception.” If passed, this bill would turn the IRS into Abortion Police. Very scary.

It also seeks to ban abortion funding in the District of Columbia. (Why would anyone live there, when they have less representation than the rest of America. Sorry, I digress.) This insanity has yet to run the gauntlet of the senate, and President Obama vows to veto the bill if it does.

What I don’t understand: How can these misogynists come home and face their wives? How can these same wives allow this? Religious tenets aside, has anyone reminded the GOP of the constitutional edict of “separation of Church and State?”

Today’s New York Times has what may be the most important article you will read this year:

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

It’s a Long piece; 11 internet-sized pages. Do yourself and your loved ones a favor by reading the whole thing. Understand the heights of cynicism and depths of arrogance of our Military/Industrial Complex. Understand how this machinery is in control of our government, our media, and our lives. Finally, understand that we need to do something about this.

Read it and weep.

UPDATE:

My hero Glenn Greenwald bends the pointing finger of the NY Times inward to point out media duplicity in which even the Times themselves partook. Atta boy!

Something I’ve always suspected is confirmed in Britain’s The Daily Mail: that the Age of the White Man is over. This is something I’ve both feared and hoped for since a boy. Even in my public school-victim ignorance, I have felt since I was 10 years old, that the White Man has built his own coffin. Ye Shall reap what you sow.

The truth is that we are masters of the world no more.

The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government’s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

[…]

Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.

But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared to what is happening now.

The U.S. was Britain’s offspring, based on the same values and the same language.

It, too, was an Anglo-Saxon country, and passing the baton across the Atlantic ensured the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon world order, based on democracy, free trade and a belief in human rights, upheld through international institutions that both powers supported.

But the world order we have grown used to - and comfortable with - over the last century is coming to an end.

Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: “When China awakes, she will shake the world.”

After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people - twice the population of the U.S. and EU combined - is awaking almost overnight.

[…]

China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.

As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.

What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it - this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.

To my untrained eye, this explains much about America’s blatant oil grab in Iraq/Iran. (Have no fear, we’ll be in Iran if McCain wins.) Throughout history, wars have been about resources. Today the resource of interest is Oil. That won’t last, soon we’ll have wars over food, over fresh water. All within the ascending century.

And we may have already lost those future conflicts.

Europeans have, for half a millennium, been unchallenged as the global colonisers, but last month the respected Economist magazine dubbed the Chinese “The New Colonists”.

While the Congo in central Africa was once over-run by Belgians, it is now the Chinese that can be found wondering around its mining belts.

In Lubumbashi, the capital of the Congo’s copper-rich region Katanga, the Economist reported “a sudden Chinese invasion”.

Troubled Angola recently shunned Western financial aid because of the amount of Chinese money pouring into it, in return for commodities.

From Kazakhstan to Indonesia to Latin America, Chinese firms are gobbling up oil, gas, coal and metals.

We, as a Caucasian, patriarchal society, have reached our pinnacle and moved beyond to decline. Any attempts to deny this is fantasy. Not only is America in descendancy, so too is Western Culture, as the Daily Mail clearly sums up:

The U.S. company Orient Express complained when Tata tried to buy it, that any association with the Indian company would damage the Orient Express’s premium brand.

Responding, R K Krishna Kumar, a senior Tata executive, thundered that “Indian companies … will take their rightful place in the international arena.

“Enterprises and individuals must recognise and adapt to these fundamental economic changes. We believe that those with a fossilised frame of mind risk being marginalised.”

In a world in which we are no longer masters, it is a warning that we ignore at our peril.

The Wise give into the inevitable. Fools fight it.

Nearly a thousand public school students and officials marched yesterday in downtown Chicago to protest a plague of student deaths on the city’s south side. The rally began in response to the slaying of Chavez Clarke, 18, in the parking lot of the Simeon Career Academy. As the Chicago Tribune reports:

Violence has claimed the lives of the 22 district students so far this school year, 20 of them by gun violence, a tally that does not include dropouts such as Shannon Brown, a former Fenger High School student who died hours before the rally, after a shooting on the Far South Side.

Chanting “We want futures, not funerals,” and displaying sign that read “Don’t Shoot. I Want To Grow Up,” the high school students and public officials marched around the James R. Thompson Center, which houses state offices.

The victims are often underprivileged kids who have turned to neighborhood gangs to gain stability and security in their lives. Low income, inner city youths have few options beyond street lives.

Kandyce Dean, a Simeon 11th grader who said she was friends with Clarke, believes getting guns off the street is the first step police must take to keep them safe. But she added that students, especially gang members, need more options, including job training, after-school programs and counseling.

“It’s gang-related. These boys are losing their minds. They don’t have anything to fall back on. They just look toward the streets,” Dean said. “They just don’t care.”

The usual posturing occurred. A prominent South Side Reverend called for $5,000 bounty on the shooters. Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley asked the students to call authorities when they see a gun. But the kids know whats needed:

Bayti Dowling-Brown, a 12th grader at Truman Middle College Alternative High School, … and said officials should work with parents to help them keep their children away from gangs and violence.

“Many of these gang members don’t have parents home 24-7. . . . Being in a gang, it’s safety. You have a group that is going to back you up,” she said.

Students also called on police to take a more active role. Many said they want more police at schools and more officers working to get gangs and guns off the street.

Who says inner city students don’t get an education?

ABC News reports today that a Pentagon report that found no direct link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida is being suppressed. Plans to announce the report via press release are canceled. It wont be emailed to the media, nor is it a available online. the Pentagon will gladly mail the report on a CD to an “interested parties” requesting the information.

Speaking of suppression, the media has spent 3 days airing a certain governors soiled laundry instead of reporting a much more important event: the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, the military commander of US Middle East operations who hinted that he would resign if the government continued to push for war with Iran. Others have noted the media’s disinterest the good Admirals retirement. Or perhaps the Blaring Spitzer Story (no link, you already know…) is a smokescreen?

I’m not into conspiracy theories, most assume an incredible amount of coordination and secrecy. Most coincidences like this are a product of disparate forces working independently in close proximity. That said, I get worried at the pervasiveness of the pattern, wherein a monumental occurrence is foreshadowed in the Media by stories of - shall we say - Total Bimbosity.

Now Admiral Fallon steps down to little fanfare, and he will be just as quietly replaced by a more acquiescent soldier. Just as the General who opposed the surge quit to be replaced by General David Petraus. Even the ABC News story will be swept under a rock by tomorrow. We don’t need further proof of our National Gullibility.

But none of that is NEWS. It doesn’t have any sex in it. Or murder, or violence… or Missing Blonde Women…or Psychotic Celebrities… or…

Move Along. There’s nothing to see here.

The Economic stimulus package just passed by congress is a joke. It will not affect our economy beyond furthering the budget deficit by $168 billion. The reason is simple: the money is already spent. The $1,500 I expect from the deal (if I read the fine print correctly) is mostly gone with a mortgage payment and a weeks groceries and gas. Poof! I will not be using it to buy that wall mounted, high definition television from the local store.

The idea of the US Government handing out checks is laughable. In the words of Shel Silverstein: “get your coat and grab you hat, son. There’s a nut down on the corner giving dollar bills away.”

Aparently I’m not the only one thinking this way. From MSNBC:

(J)ust 19 percent of the people surveyed said they planned to go out and spend the money; 45 percent said they’d use it to pay bills. And nearly half said what the government really should do is get out of Iraq.

Forty-eight percent said a pullout would help fix the country’s economic problems “a great deal,” and an additional 20 percent said it would help at least somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent said cutting taxes.

“Let’s stop paying for this war,” said Hilda Sanchez, 44, of Waterford, Calif. “There are a lot of people who are struggling. We can use the money to pay for medical care and help people who were put out of their homes.”

I concur.

President Bush, acting as the Unitary Executive, is making secret deals with Iraq. Under the euphemism “Enduring Relationship,” a Declaration of Principles has been documented, which outlines in the most glowing terms, unending embroilment in the desert.

One of the “Principles” is “Supporting the Republic of Iraq in defending its democratic system against internal and external threats.” This is bothersome on many levels.

And under the law, the president is entitled to broker a status-of-forces agreement without congressional approval.

“The president, as the commander in chief, can enter into an agreement and in theory, certainly as complex an agreement as he deems appropriate and necessary under the circumstances,” says retired Gen. Michael Nardotti, formerly the Army’s top lawyer.

But in the case of Iraq, even the most optimistic assessments don’t expect the situation there to become as stable as Japan or South Korea for decades.

“Bases of the U.S. around the world are not situated in an occupied country,” explains Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi political activist who recently testified before Congress on this issue. “For example, U.S. forces in Japan can’t just go out of their bases and [set up] a checkpoint in Tokyo. They can’t go around Tokyo arresting Japanese people.”

And in Japan or South Korea, the U.S. military isn’t allowed to maintain internal stability. In other words, it can’t protect those governments from internal threats. Indeed, in South Korea, two governments have been overthrown in coups in the past 50 years. The U.S. military could not and did not intervene.

First we illegally occupy a sovereignty, destroy its government and prop up a puppetocracy in its place. Then we let the puppets kill the newly-deposed President. We next start negotiating - at gunpoint, of course - a business deal benefiting American oil companies. Since that failed, we are now negotiating to morph our armed forces into the Iraqi National Guard, to give us the right to protect the nation we broke from “internal and external threats.” We become their military. And, although unstated, I venture to guess that we will be the final arbiters as to who and what constitutes a threat.

Since the US is suffering the Pottery Barn effect (you break it, you buy it) with regards to Iraq, our Liar-in-Chief is tying up the loose ends of his failed hostile takeover bid of Saddam Hussein’s oilfields. As he does so, he is tying a noose around the necks of every single US Solider that will be killed in Iraq going forward, in perpetuity.

Coining vague catch phrases like “Enduring Relationship” or talk of an “Enduring Presence” in Iraq cannot sugar coat the reality that the US is an Imperial power creating a colony out of a previously autonomous nation. We’re there for the oil, and when it’s gone, we’ll leave. Not. Until. Then.

Luckily, people are asking the right questions, these days. Questions like “Is it legal.” the answer, as NPR notes, lies on the boundary between Agreement and Treaty. It’s down to semantics. Sadly, our government is ill equipped to handle the subtly of semantics. Bring in the lawyers.

Lawyering takes time, and our administration expects to broker this deal by Summer. We don’t have the time. We REALLY need to impeach these bastards.

I know I keep swearing off of political blog postings. But all other aspects of life become trivial in the shadow of the colossal catastrophe that is the Bush Administration. Nothing can compare with that. So. I reiterate a chart, initiated by Moveon.org that illustrates the actual changes in the lives of real Americans. Read it and weep.

And then there’s the tally of lies told to a gullible public prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq: totaled at 935. Included is a handy chart of peak falsehoods. I am constantly amazed by the hubris of our elected officials, and the compiling evidence that no one in the White House gives a damn about integrity, honesty, or - the least of all - being civil servants.

Truly astounding.

Yesterday in Abu Dhabi, during President Bush’s  Your Next Iran Mideast Tour, he urges Allies (do we still have any?) to confront Iran "before it’s too late." He’s playing the Iran Sea Confrontation Hoax for all he’s worth, squeezing it dry. Luckily for us, his net worth is sinking rapidly. (And you thought Ronald Reagan was the only Actor-turned-President we’ve ever had.)

The article linked above also says this:

Chiding U.S. allies who have withheld civil liberties, Bush said governments will never build trust by harassing or imprisoning candidates and protesters. But his rebuke was general, and he did not single out any U.S. partner in the region for oppressive practices.

"You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government," Bush said. "And you cannot stand up a modern, confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms."

That’s an interesting statement. Especially so when juxtaposed with this article:

Eighty people were arrested at the Supreme Court Friday in a protest calling for the shutdown of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Demonstrators wearing orange jump suits intended to simulate prison garb were arrested inside and outside the building. “Shut it down,” protesters chanted as others kneeled on the plaza in front of the court.

They were charged with violating an ordinance that prohibits demonstrations of any kind on court grounds. Those arrested inside the building also were charged under a provision that makes it a crime to give “a harangue or oration” in the Supreme Court building.

The maximum penalty is 60 days in jail, a fine or both.

A strange and timely convergence of facts.