Fear of the Unknown

All the moats and fortifications that a rich man builds and all the terrorising of populations cannot take away from such a person the fear of an invisible enemy.

One of the ideological undercurrents here for the Republicans is the shock of having a black man as President. Some of them would rather lose the country then face four more years of this humiliation. The world view of white supremacy, which reigned supreme in the south for decades is hard to adjust to despite the civil war. In fact the Civil war never ended. The red necks are joined in this by the Jewish lobby who is still reeling from the fact that Obama can concede to Palestinians having some rights.

No President has faced these issues combined with perhaps leading America down the mountain instead of up the mountain. There seems to be no other way to explain all the raw emotion on the hill.

When the main option being looked at by an overleveraged country is to borrow more then they are running out of options. The brinkmanship in Congress is so intense that the nation is mesmerised by waiting for, who blinks first.


The system is broken, The checks and balances do not work, there is a big disconnect between ruler and ruled, it has become all about how the interests of a minority can be best served, money is the only value that is recognised, all other values have become secondary. This may sound more like a third world country than the USA but tragically it is true.

Lately there has been a formal recognition of this by S&P downgrading the US to AA. Barring the noise against S&P, there is a creeping recognition that the government is not working and unlikely to work going forward. This defers the solution to 2012, when Obama may or may not get thrown out. Billion will be spent between now and 2012 trying to sell the public a pack of meaningless propoganda. No where is Democracy made a bigger mockery of than in the US. Decisions are being made in the interest of the party and not the Country. In the next one year enough bad decisions will have been made to make it meaningless as to who gets elected.
There is no one on the scene who can save the country except a lone black man who is more professor than leader. Perhaps he can see that once you get elected you no longer represent the party but that you represent the country. Perhaps he needs another four years to come of his shell. This will be the issue before the electorate in 2012. So far there is no one else on the scene with the slightest ounce of decency or integrity. In fact decency and integrity have not been in demand, if they were then Ralph Nader would be every ones candidate for the Presidency.

It is now becoming clearer that the huge increase in the Budget Deficit during the Bush years was direcly as a result of actions Bush took after 9/11. It is not being recognised how Osama bin Laden has helped not only to Bankrupt the US but also to set in motion its decline. That is one other reason that the media does not talk about these costs.

An idea whose time has come

"What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys." Pat Buchanan

Whether the Muslims have as yet propogated a system that desrves to be looked on as an alternative remains to be seen but it is pretty clear that in its dying throes the American Empire is disgracing and humiliating itself by its lies and double standards. In the ensuing vacum two forces will compete for a universal message, those that take their inspiration from God and those that do not.
The Muslims can certainly take the credit for stopping the American Empire in its tracks by holding them to a stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan but for bleeding to death from these wounds the Americans alone will have to take the blame. To their shame and discredit, the Muslim countries have failed to unite inspite of extreme provocation both from the US and Israel. This only encourages these two parties to treat them with the contempt that they deserve and the beatings can only continue. This can only promote the extreme elements within Islam and make them heros for having the guts to stand up for their land and honour.
The Muslims have now the uphill task of rejecting the West and rejecting their own extremists by following a message which is very much relevant and needed now more than ever, if only we could see it and have faith in it. At the core of this system is an uncompromising belief in morality which the West now only pays lip service to and have more or less taken out of their lives. The religious fundamentalists of all religions are simply peddling their texts for the worldly power and recognition that it affords them. The masses follow one side or the other because that is what they will always do.
I doubt if people will be mobilised by morality which, for most is too philosophical a subject but they will be mobilised by injustice. The idea whose time has come is Justice.
Khusro

Is the world headed for the mother of all disasters?

"The Invisible Hand of Power
Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.
Elite contempt for democracy was revealed dramatically in the reaction to the WikiLeaks exposures. Those that received most attention, with euphoric commentary, were cables reporting that Arabs support the U.S. stand on Iran. The reference was to the ruling dictators. The attitudes of the public were unmentioned. The guiding principle was articulated clearly by Carnegie Endowment Middle East specialist Marwan Muasher, formerly a high official of the Jordanian government: "There is nothing wrong, everything is under control." In short, if the dictators support us, what else could matter?" Naom Chomsky 2011

A long article, typical of Chomsky but as usual penetrating and matter of fact about the ways of the powerful. The elite of the world have become a problem specially for the environment. It is no longer East verses West, world wide power is being excercised by the few over the many. The concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands is as anti democratic as the system can become. The powerful are unbelievably greedy. unbelievably selfish and ruthlessly committed to staying in power. The really powerful are not the Presidents, Secretary Generals and other high officials but the people who put them there and the people who put them there were not the general populace. This is a system screaming to be changed anf if it cannot be changed then the world is headed for its biggest disaster ever.
Khusro

The Libya Dilemma of Obama

“if we try to overthrow Qaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers to our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs and our share of the responsibility for what comes next.”

Here was the dilemma faced by Obama. He clearly wants regime change but is mindful of the regime change disaster in Iraq. He went to UN for permission but ended up giving responsibility to NATO. His speech lauded by the US media was one of the most confused speeches made by him.
This is not surprising considering what is happening in the Middle East. He never wanted regime change in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia but he does want regime change in Libya, Syria, Iran. In trying to explain why he has different standards he wants to put a humanitarian face to his actions.
Trying to explain to the US public that the USA has a God given right to interfere in world
affairs while still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan and wanting to invade Iran has to be a class juggling act which even Obama is not capable. of. The US public is not even aware how the CIA was kicked out of Pakistan after the Raymond Davis fiasco.
When Germany ( together with China and Russia) abstained from the UN resolution on Libya, the world took one more step in looking the other way in accepting US leadership in International affairs.
Much as I would love to see Ghaddafi kicked out as well as the Bahraini Shaikh and all other leaders in any country who have ruled for more than 10 years, Obama seems to have a very difficult time making that a golden rule for governance. For a country that preaches dissent and debate, the US seems to have no tolerance for Governments which may have a different point of view even if they want to come to power through a Democratic process.
Khusro

Ten years of decline

"Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen, one of the first things he did after 9/11 was make arrangements to come to Washington, and he met with President Bush, with the CIA Director George Tenet, with Dick Cheney, with the head of the FBI. And he basically said to the Bush administration, “We’re going to give you full access to Yemen’s territories to conduct counterterrorist operations.” And, you know, they essentially hatched a plot where Yemen would extract funding for its own military out of the Bush administration in return for the Bush administration being able to conduct counterterrorist operations inside of Yemen, including the killing of Yemeni citizens." Jeremy Scahill


The rationale for the US support of Israel has been to create a terrorisit organisation in the Middle East in order to keep the Arab countries
and subsequently the oil in check. The other startegy has been to create local monsters like Mubarak, Ali Saleh, The Shah of Iran etc who can remain in power for 50 years and repress their people for personal gain and untold power. That era is now visibly coming to an end, with the US clinging to prolong it a little bit longer. There is very little difference in this policy between Bush and Obama. Bush hastened the demise of this era through sheer arrogance and ham handedness. The US media has done an incredible job of insulating it's readers from recognising the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as the absolute rape and desecration of two sovereign nations.

The Al Qaeda bogey has been hugely succesful in pouring billions into the coffers of dictators who were willing partners in crime but has proved to be a huge Foreign Policy debacle by creating an invisible enemy of no fixed address who cannot be defeated. This has created an image of a very vulnerable US who can now be defied. Wikileaks has resoundingly exposed US double speak and US Foreign policy now appears to be in tatters. The BRIC countries watch with glee, the Arabs with concern and the French with open disdain. Nato is no longer beholden to the US forcing them to go to the UN which under Ban Ki Moon has become an obsolete organisation.

The shift in power which came about in the first 10 years of 2010, is continuing. By 2020, a New World will have formly taken root.

Khusro

A nation in decline

The truth is that the world looked upon the US, particularly Obama with a lot of hope and admiration. Two years of Obama have brought about a reality check. Do the neocons represent the views of most Americans? No. Were the neocons, the American Right and AIPAC able to wreak havoc on Ameircan politics including Foreign policy? Yes.
Is there an awareness that these minority groups have access to untold money and power and will continue to have outsize influence on all American policies including ones that lead them into wars? No.
Several areas of major weakness are appearing for the US.
1. An irresponsible media, far too intent on making money to worry about their duty to inform the public rather than to entertain them. This is more true of TV than print.
2. Two political parties far too intent on winning elections than doing the right thing. There is an absence of any long term thinking and short term sound bites rule the day.
3. The role of money in politics has meant every thing is purchaseable, the checks and balances of Democracy have been trampled by every one particularly the Corporate Sector and more particularly Wall Street.
4. A leadership gap is emerging showing that after Obama, the new leaders will be even weaker than him and some of them will make Bush look like an angel. The Democrats and Obama are betting heavily that History will repeat itself, the Republicans will shoot themselves in the foot and Obama will shift far enough to the right and bounce back for another term. Weak as he is Obama still represents some sanity before the lunatic fringe takes over.

All this sounds very pessimistic, but it is not uncommon for a nation in decline. Time will tell whether the actions that they take will slow their decline or accelerate it but key to this will be the leadership that they chose. For the next two years the die is cast
Khusro

Capitalism and Democracy

"Four years on, however, WikiLeaks' release of contemporary troop logs raises serious questions about who, exactly, was doing the lying.
One of the few absolute revelations from the Wikileaks documents is the extent to which Rumsfeld, then-U.S. commander Gen. George Casey, and others had access to ample information from unimpeachable sources -- their own troops on the ground in Iraq -- regarding how badly events had turned in Iraq by 2006, but nonetheless denied a surge in killing to reporters and the U.S. public. "

To this day, the only justification for removing Saddam that is given is that he was an evil man and removing him was worth destroying Iraq for. The fact is that the result of removing Saddam has been, apart from destroying Iraq's infrastructure and making its people refugees, handing Iraq over to Iran sympathetic Shias. I am not saying that this is good or bad, just that this was the last thing on the minds of Rumsfeld, Cheyne, Wolfowitz and the Saudis. In fact if they could think of the worst possible outcome of the Iraq war, this would have been it.
Wikileaks proves something we already know that these people were cheats and liars and together with the the collusion of an inept media misled the American Public for years and years. In fact so geat was the deception that Bush won a second term as President. We also know something else that no one talks about, that the American public or its leaders or the media have learnt nothing from this fiasco. Everyone is locked into a makebelieve world of American superiority and invulnerabilty. As we prepare for mid term elections, no one is focussed on the lying, cheating thugs that we have been electing as our representatives, In fact all indications are that the new breed will be much worse than the previous one. This is not so much a failure of Democracy as the failure of the lethal combination of a Capitalist dominated Democracy.
For better or worse, the Chinese have chosen Capitalism over Democracy while the Indians are following the US model. The Europeans have long shied away from selling their souls to Capitalism. At no time has the world needed more ideas than now as to what is the better form of governance and what is the better form of economic management.
Khusro