Globalization and the failing economy

Paul Craig Roberts has a PhD in Economics and a conservative background. As the Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration he was a big believer in supply side economics.  He was a very establishment economist who was editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and holder of the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at Georgetown University.  He was a regular on FOX news until he turned on the Bush administration in 2002.
He has a new book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and the Economic Dissolution of the West (Towards a New Economics for a Full World).  (Unfortunately it is only available in Kindle E-Book format) He sounds more like  a very shrill Thom Hartmann.

Dr Roberts explains why the job creation has been slower than in any recession in recent history and no it's not just because of the Republicans alone - it's globalization and the offshoring of jobs.

The fact that millions of jobs have been moved offshore is the reason why the most expansionary monetary and fiscal policies in US history have had no success in reducing the unemployment rate. In post-World War II 20th century recessions, laid-off workers were called back to work as expansionary monetary and fiscal policies stimulated consumer demand. However, 21st century unemployment is different. The jobs have been moved abroad and no longer exist. Therefore, workers cannot be called back to factories and to professional service jobs that have been moved abroad.
Economists have failed to recognize the threat that jobs offshoring poses to economies and to economic theory itself, because economists confuse offshoring with free trade, which they believe is mutually beneficial. I will show that offshoring is the antithesis of free trade and that the doctrine of free trade itself is found to be incorrect by the latest work in trade theory. Indeed, as we reach toward a new economics, cherished assumptions and comforting theoretical conclusions will be shown to be erroneous.

The economies of the United States and Western Europe are in decline because they now produce little that can be exported and most of what we consume is imported.  An economy that doesn't turn raw materials into something more valuable is not sustainable.

This book is organized into three sections. The first section explains successes and failures of economic theory and the erosion of the efficacy of economic policy by globalism. Globalism and financial concentration have destroyed the justifications of market capitalism. Corporations that have become “too big to fail” are sustained by public subsidies, thus destroying capitalism’s claim to be an efficient allocator of resources. Profits no longer are a measure of social welfare when they are obtained by creating unemployment and declining living standards in the home country.
The second section documents how jobs offshoring or globalism and financial deregulation wrecked the US economy, producing high rates of unemployment, poverty and a distribution of income and wealth extremely skewed toward a tiny minority at the top. These severe problems cannot be corrected within a system of globalism.
The third section addresses the European debt crisis and how it is being used both to subvert national sovereignty and to protect bankers from losses by imposing austerity and bailout costs on citizens of the member countries of the European Union.

There is not a lot in the book but Dr Roberts puts it all together in a concise if shrill way.  He explains what could be done to turn it around but then says it won't be because Wall Street and the large financial institutions have captured the government - we have essentially become an Oligarchy.  Much of his discussion of the financial system comes from Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History by Matt Taibbi.

He also explains why nearly all economists get it so very wrong.

Economists do a poor job of adjusting economic theory to developments brought by the passage of time.   Just as capital theory originated prior to the income tax and free-trade theory originated at a period in history when capital was internationally immobile and tradable goods were based on climate and knowledge differences, economists’ neglect of the ecosystem as a finite, entropic, non-growing and materially closed system dates from an earlier “empty world.”     In an empty world, man-made capital is scarce and nature’s capital is plentiful.   In an empty world, the fish catch is limited by the number of fishing boats, not by the remaining fish population, and petroleum energy is limited by drilling capability, not by geological deposits.   Empty-world economics focuses on the sustainability of man-made capital, not on natural capital.   Natural capital is treated as a free good. Using it up is not treated as a cost but as an increase in output.   Economic theory is based on “empty-world” economics. But, in fact, today the world is full.
In a “full world,” the fish catch is limited by the remaining population of fish, not by the number of fishing boats, which are man-made capital in excess supply.   Oil energy is limited by geological deposits, not by the drilling and pumping capacity of man-made capital. In national income accounting, the use of man-made capital is depreciated, but the use of nature’s capital has no cost other than extraction cost.   Therefore, the using up of natural capital always results in economic growth.

In other words economic theory is based on a world that no longer exists.  Nature's capitol is nearly exhausted. 

This is an important book not because there is anything really new in it but because it puts all the pieces together and is a must read

Note:

If you don't have a Kindle you can download a free app for your PC at Amazon.

Paul Craig Roberts on the Surge

Paul Craig Roberts explains that the "surge" and it's alleged success is just a continuation of the lies and deceptions of the Bush administration and it's neocon allies.

It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime’s lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the "surge" is working.

Launched last year, the "surge" was the extra 20,000–30,000 US troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.

This claim never made any sense. The extra troops didn’t raise the total number of US soldiers to more than one-third the number every expert has said is necessary in order to successfully occupy Iraq.

The real purpose of the "surge" was to hide another deception. The Bush regime is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack US forces. That’s right, 80,000 members of an "Awakening group," the "Sons of Iraq," a newly formed "US-allied security force" consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack US troops. Allegedly, the Sons of Iraq are now at work fighting al Qaeda.

This is a much cheaper way to fight a war. We can only wonder why Bush didn’t figure it out sooner.

And as I discussed here it was also a matter of timing - the surge didn't begin until the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was nearly complete.

The "surge" was also timed to take account of the near completion of neighborhood cleansing. Most of the violence in Iraq during the past five years has resulted from Sunnis and Shi’ites driving each other out of mixed neighborhoods. Had the two groups been capable of uniting against the US troops, the US would have been driven out of Iraq long ago. Instead, the Iraqis slaughtered each other and fought the Americans in their spare time.

In other words, the "surge" has had nothing to do with any decline in violence.

With the Sunni insurgents now on Uncle Sam’s payroll, with neighborhoods segregated, and with al Sadr’s militia standing down, it is unclear who is still responsible for ongoing violence other than US troops themselves. Somebody must still be fighting, however, because the US is still conducting air strikes and is still unable to tell friend from foe.

I think the real purpose of the surge was to keep the lid on the bubbling cauldron that is Iraq until after the November elections so that the next president will take the hit for the loss.

Yes, they are going to do it....

....attack Iran
Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

The always shrill Republican critic of the Bush administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has some thoughts.
The War Criminal in the Living Room

Bush’s war threats against Iran have intensified during the course of this year. The American people are being fed a repeat of the lies used to justify naked aggression against Iraq.

Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening "the security of nations everywhere" and of the Iraqi resistance for "a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power." Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration. The Pew Foundation’s world polls show that despite all the American and Israeli propaganda against Iran, the US and Israel are regarded as no less threats to world stability than demonized Iran.

Bush has discarded habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions, justified torture and secret trials, damned critics as anti-American, and is responsible, according to Information Clearing House, for over one million deaths of Iraqi civilians, which puts Bush high on the list of mass murderers of all time. The vast majority of "kills" by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan are civilians.

Now Bush wants to murder more. We have to kill Iranians "over there," Bush says, "before they come over here." There is no possibility that Iranians or any Muslims who have no air force, no navy, no modern military technology are going to "come over here," and no indication that they plan to do so. The Muslims are disunited and have been for centuries. That is what makes them vulnerable to colonial rule. If Muslims were united, the US would already have lost its army in Iraq. Indeed, it would not have been able to put an army in Iraq.

So, Iran is not threat to the US but it is a threat to US hegemony and oil interests in the region. But that's not what we are told by the MSM.

Meanwhile the US media focuses on whether Republican Senator Larry Craig is a homosexual or has offended gays by denying to be one of them. The run-up for the public’s attention is why a South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is unable to find the United States on a map.

The war criminal is in the living room, and no official notice is taken of the fact.

Lacking US troops with which to invade Iran, the Bush administration has decided to bomb Iran "back into the stone age." Punishing air and missile attacks have been designed not merely to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy projects, but also to destroy the public infrastructure, the economy, and the ability of the government to function.

Encouraged by the indifference of both the American media and Christian churches to the massive casualties inflicted on Iraqi civilians, the Bush administration will not be deterred by the prospect of its air attacks inflicting massive casualties on Iranian civilians. Last summer the Bush administration demonstrated to the entire world its total disdain for Muslim life when Bush supported Israel’s month-long air attack on Lebanese civilian infrastructure and civilian residences. President Bush blocked the attempt by the rest of the world to halt the gratuitous murder of Lebanese civilians and infrastructure destruction. Clearly, turning the Muslim Middle East into a wasteland is the Bush policy. For Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue. Hegemony über alles.

And Roberts explains that it's about a lot more than Iraq and Iran, a lot more than the short or midterm debacle the the attack on Iran will inevitably turn out to be.

Bush has declared himself to be the "decider." The "decider" decides whether Americans have any rights under the Constitution and whether Iran has any rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the "decider" has decided that Iran has no such rights, the "decider" decides whether to attack Iran. No one else has any say about it. The people’s representatives are just so much chaff in the wind.

Whatever form of government Bush is operating under, it is far outside an accountable constitutional democratic government. Bush has transitioned America to caesarism, and even if Bush leaves office in January 2009, the powers he has accumulated in the executive will remain. Unless Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, there is no prospect of the US Congress and federal judiciary ever again being co-equal branches of government.

And don't forget those brave Americans fighting in Iraq. Any attack on Iran will further destabilize the majority Shi'ite Iraq and the Iraqi security forces the US has armed and trained will turn on the American troops.

End of the Republic?

We are experiencing the greatest constitutional crisis in our nations history. Bush and Cheney should be impeached. They have lied and flagrantly ignored the law and the constitution. Josh Marshall has been opposed impeachment and his reasons are solid - the votes aren't there.

Find me seventeen Republican senators who are going to convict President Bush in a senate trial.

That perhaps is the real constitutional crisis. I suspect that there are seventeen Senators who know that Bush (and Cheney) should be impeached but will place partisan politics before the future of the nation. Perhaps they should listen to a couple of Republicans. I discussed Bruce Fein in the link above. That brings us to Paul Craig Roberts. To hear Paul Craig Roberts speak you would think he must be wearing the most elaborate tin foil hat ever. Keep in mind that Dr Roberts has been a Republican insider who knows and has worked with Dick Cheney and others. We heard him on Thom Hartmann but you can also read it Counterpunch.

Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy
Impeach Now

Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.

Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.

Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.

William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008.
Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.

The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

That's right, Dr Roberts thinks that the the Bush/Cheney administration is capable of staging or allowing an attack on the United States in order to maintain power. As Dr Roberts points out it wouldn't be the first time in history.

Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?

Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.

Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.

The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?

Dr Roberts is not confident that this can be avoided. The administration has the corporate media in their camp. But keep in mind this is not from the left, this is from a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and editor of the Wall Street Journal and National Review. A man who knows the personalities he is talking about.

Republicans we should listen to

On the Thom Hartmann show this morning one of the guests was Republican Paul Craig Roberts. Dr Roberts has been trying to warn us about the tyrannical nature of the Bush Cheney cabal for several years and really had his tinfoil hat on this morning. He is convinced that Cheney will "stage" a terrorist attack before the November elections in an attempt to avoid a massive Republican defeat. He agrees with Hartmann's guest the day before, Bruce Fein, a the Republican that authored the Clinton articles of impeachment. Mr Fein repeated some of what he said his Slate article a few weeks ago.
Impeach Cheney
The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.

Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

While the Democratic leadership continues to fear that impeachment hearings would bring on a "Constitutional Crisis" Mr Fein believes, as do many of us, that we are in a constitutional crisis that can only be ended by impeachment. Mr Fein concludes with this:

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

On Hartmann's show this morning Dr Roberts made it clear that he believes that Dick Cheney is capable of anything to consolidate and keep his own power and push his own agenda. That includes attacking his own country. For that reason Dr Roberts agrees with Fein that Cheney must be impeached at once.

That Infamous Hitler Analogy

When talking about the Bush/Cheney administration and the neocon/theocon Republican party Democrats and progressives have been afraid to make comparisons with Hitler. The Libertarian Republicans have not. Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal editorial page Paul Craig Roberts was perhaps one of the first. In an October, 2004 commentary titled The Brownshirting of America he said the following:

Bush’s supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US – truths now firmly established by the Bush administration’s own reports – as treasonous America-bashing.

[......]

In language reeking with hatred, Heritage Foundation TownHall readers impolitely informed me that opposing the invasion of Iraq is identical to opposing America, that Bush is the greatest American leader in history and everyone who disagrees with him should be shot before they cause America to lose another war. TownHall’s readers were sufficiently frightening to convince the Heritage Foundation to stop posting my columns.

Bush’s conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

I'm sure the frenzied hate filled supporters of Aldolf Hitler could have been described in a similar way in the 30's.

Three years later Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead reminds us that the Hitler analogy is even closer to the mark.

Are the Hitler Parallels Too Close for Comfort?

On May 9, 2007, with little attention from the snoozing media, George W. Bush issued a "presidential directive" that allows him to assume control of the federal government following a "catastrophic emergency."

Although the directive doesn't specifically identify the types of emergencies that would qualify as "catastrophic," it is vague enough to encompass "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function." As Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive noted, it could include "another 9/11, or another Katrina, or a major earthquake in California." In fact, the language is so broad that it could include almost anything the public is led to believe might have a major impact on the country. Not surprisingly, the president's order comes neatly packaged within the trappings of national security and safety.

This directive followed on the heels of a bill, which I have previously written about, that was pushed through Congress and which gave the president the power to declare martial law and establish a dictatorship. Under these provisions, the president can now use the military as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any "other condition."

In other words, the groundwork has been laid for the president of the United States to do away with our democracy, such as it is, and establish a dictatorship. The president, in effect, has become a power unto himself.

If you have studied recent history this should sound familiar. It happened in 1933 Germany.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end. After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history. For example, over 70 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.

This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders. Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times – such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country – was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it. In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.

On March 23, 1933, the nation's legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation," which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency. What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself. The leader's name was Adolf Hitler. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The rest is history indeed but it is just as true that we are usually unable to learn from that history.

James Madison, the father of our Constitution, said that Americans should take alarm at the first experiment upon their liberties. But this latest "presidential directive" is not the first attack on our liberties, and I dare say it will not be the last. We'd better open our eyes soon, lest we wake up one morning and find that we live under a new regime. Only, this time, it will be one of our own making.

The trouble with Abraham

The always shrill Paul Craig Roberts reaches new levels of shrillness in
The Real Reason for Bush’s Invasion of Iraq Is
a National Security Secret

Millions of Americans have come to their own conclusions about the reasons for Bush’s invasion: (1) Oil: the US government wants to hold on to power by expanding its control over oil, and Bush and Cheney want to reward their oil company cronies. (2) Military-security complex: Police agencies favor war as a means of expanding their power, and military industries favor war as a means of expanding their profits. (3) Neoconservative ideology: Neocons’ believe in "American exceptionalism" and claim that America’s virtue gives the US government the right and the obligation to impose US hegemony on the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East where independent Muslim states object to Israel’s theft of Palestine. (4) Karl Rove: Rove used the "war president" role to rescue Bush from attack by Democrats as an illegitimate president elected by one vote of the US Supreme Court. (5) American self-righteousness over 9/11 and lust for revenge.

All of these reasons came together to make a cruel war on an innocent people.

So why does Bush continue?

As it is now recognized that every reason for the war is false or illegitimate, the question is: why does Bush insist on persisting with a costly war, the express reasons for which are now known to be mistakes? There were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to al Qaeda, and Bush has installed a puppet Iraqi government that cannot venture outside the heavily fortified and US protected "green zone." The Iraqi government governs nothing.

War without cause is murder, not war.

That Bush persists with a war for which he can provide no legitimate reason indicates that there is a secret agenda that has not been shared with the American people. Are we experiencing the privatization of the US government by police agencies, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby?

And what about the American people?

That the American people and their elected representatives continue to tolerate a war that has killed and maimed thousands of their own soldiers, destroyed the infrastructure of a country, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and created 4 million refugees for no known reason raises serious questions about the morals of the American people.

Is the impotence of the peace movement due to the power of the Israel Lobby or have Americans become morally degenerate as commentators increasingly assert?

So who is more evil? The administration that wages the war or the people and their representatives that continue to tolerate it?

One indication would be the response of presidential candidates to the gratuitous and failed war. What we saw at the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on June 5 is inconsistent with the self-esteem of the American people. All of the leading Republican presidential candidates openly and nonchalantly endorsed using nuclear weapons against Iran unless Iran abandons its right to enrich uranium under the non-proliferation treaty, to which Iran is a signatory (unlike nuclear-armed Israel, India, and US puppet Pakistan).

What is moral degeneracy if it is not using nuclear weapons to murder masses of innocent civilians and spread deadly radioactivity over vast areas merely in order to force a country to do as we order? If this isn’t barbarism, what is barbarism?

Do the American people realize that the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination are monsters who want to murder people who have done us no harm?

After five years of war that has achieved no noble purpose, no valid aim, indeed, no aim at all except perhaps Osama bin Laden’s aim of stirring up uncontrollable strife in the Middle East, how can Republicans cheer for candidates who preach a wider war and the use of nuclear weapons against defenseless people?

Is the approval lavished on Republican presidential candidates, who are willing to use nuclear weapons as means of terrorizing Muslim peoples, an indication that the American people have morphed into inhuman monsters?

If not, what does it indicate? Ignorant fanaticism? Paranoia? Blind hatred? The belief that no one is of any value but Americans?

For six and one-half years the Bush Regime has relied on coercion, intimidation, war, and threats of war. Diplomacy and good will have been shunned. The regime’s blatant warmongering has resurrected the nuclear arms race. China and Russia regard America’s drive for world hegemony with great alarm. China has put nuclear ICBMs on mobile platforms to increase their survivability in event of an American attack. Russia has developed new multi-warhead ICBMs, which can penetrate any known missile defense, and new cruise missiles that Putin says will be targeted on Europe if the US persists in its aggressive military encirclement of Russia.

We need to look at when and why the American people turned on the Bush/Cheney cabal's immoral and illegal war. It took several years and the knowledge that the war could not be won - not because it was immoral or illegal. After 9/11 there seemed to be some blood lust for revenge. The desire to punish some brown skinned people - it didn't really matter if they were responsible for 9/11 or not. My question is what would Jesus think of this reaction by a "Christian Nation". Organized Christianity from the very beginning has ignored the teachings of Jesus and lived by the tribal revenge and violence of the Abrahamic old testament. Yes the same one that inspires the Islamic Jihadists.

More tales from the padded bunker

In The Secret War and Tales from the padded bunker - continued I discussed Vice President Dick Cheney's preoccupation with attacking Iran. This is the subject of the always shrill Paul Craig Roberts' commentary today,
How Can Bush Bring Freedom and Democracy to Iraq When He Brings Tyranny to America?

The Washington, DC, think-tank, The American Enterprise Institute, camouflages its purpose with its name. Its real name should be The Center for Middle East War.

AEI has the largest collection of warmongers in America. AEI "scholars" have agitated for war in the Middle East for years. A moronic president and 9/11 gave them their opportunity. Now that the US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have failed, the AEI warmongers are conspiring with Vice President Cheney to foment war with Iran.

Roberts proposes that the Democrats cynically believe they can gain politically if the war in Iraq drags on. There is a serious problem and danger in this cynical logic.

The problem with the Democrats’ cynical logic is that allowing Bush to prolong the war in Iraq increases the chances that Cheney, Israel, and the neoconservatives can contrive a war with Iran. Most experts, and many in our own military, think that a war with Iran would go very badly for us, endangering our troops in Iraq by exposing them to more intense attacks from the more numerous Shiites, who would be armed with Iranian weapons that can neutralize our tanks and helicopters, leaving our fragmented and divided troops isolated and cut off from supplies and retreat routes.

The pending disaster would play into Cheney’s hands. With America faced with the loss of an army, Cheney and the neoconservatives would likely succeed in convincing Bush to nuke Iran. Cheney and Rumsfeld have already changed US war doctrine to permit preemptive nuclear attack against non-nuclear powers. Surprised by the inability of the US military to prevail in Iraq and by Israel’s military failure against Hezbollah, the neocons concluded that the only way to establish US/Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East is to nuke Iran. The neocons believe that using nuclear weapons against Iran will demonstrate to the Muslim world that they have no alternative but to submit to US hegemony.

The Democrats are far from being alone in lacking the vision to see the abyss into which their cynicism is leading us. With the corporate media serving as propaganda ministry for the administration, Cheney will be able to whip up enough fear and anger to convince the American people that the use of nuclear weapons was imperative.

Bush’s popularity will return as he prevails over the enemy and tells Americans how he saved them from Iran’s nuclear weapons. The Democrats’ cynicism will have destroyed them and opened new avenues to destruction and violence.

Update

Cernig at Newshoggers explains that while Bush may be talking about a troop reduction in 2008 the real plan is to stay forever.

So who's fault is it.

The other day I discussed Gary Kamiya's hard hitting commentary Why Bush hasn't been impeached. He made the following observation.

The unpleasant truth is that Bush did what a lot of Americans wanted him to. And when it became clear after the fact that Bush had lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway -- revenge was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a misplaced revenge than none at all.

Today shrill Republican Paul Craig Roberts makes the same point in Will Republicans Destroy Themselves Before They Destroy America?.

There is no longer any question whatsoever, not a single sliver of doubt, that Americans were deceived into this disastrous war. The President of the United States lied to the American people, as did the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of Defense, as did every neoconservative in the Bush administration, think tanks, and media.

The fact that the American people were lied to and deceived does not absolve them from blame. The lie was transparent, the logic nonexistent, the true facts available and easy to discover.

America failed, because the American people failed. The American people failed, because their self-righteousness and their hubris made them easy saps for deception.

While most of what the administration told congress and the American people was a lie I believe the administration truly believed it would be a "cake walk". They knew that the lies would eventually see the day of light but after they "won" it really wouldn't matter. They of course were correct. A majority of the American people don't dislike war, they dislike losing a war.

Shrill Alert - Paul Craig Roberts Speaks

It may be my imagination but I think with every piece he pens Libertarian/Republican Paul Craig Roberts becomes even more shrill. In One War Criminal Down, A Fistful to Go his target is - well, practically everybody. He starts with Tony Blair:

Claire Short, a former Blair minister, said, "I think Tony’s place in history is Iraq and the deceit and the desperate mess and it’s sad. It’s going to be a very bad place in history."

Many wonder why Blair destroyed his reputation and that of his country, put himself at risk of being hauled before the International Criminal Court, and squandered his time as prime minister providing cover for George Bush’s war of aggression. The answer must be money. We will see which US corporate boards take Blair as a director and which groups pay him six-figure honorariums for speeches.

And of course there is George W. Bush and his administration of international outlaws.

Bush will have an even worse place in history. There is no longer any doubt that Bush deceived Congress and the American people. At great financial and human cost, Bush took America to war and destroyed Iraq for a hidden agenda. After years of swallowing Bush’s lies, the American people finally caught on. Bush’s approval rating is at 28 percent, but the TV and print media are still sycophantic.

Bush’s approval rating has collapsed despite a favorable press. The people are no longer fooled, but Bush’s favorable press intimidates the Democrats, who have failed to bring accountability to the Bush Regime.

And that brings us to the press with a dash of Bill Clinton thrown in for flavor.

People damn Bill Clinton for many reasons. Perhaps his greatest failure was in permitting the media concentration that destroyed the independence of the "mainstream media." The American media is no longer in the hands of journalists. It is controlled by advertising executives and corporate bosses who will never put their empires at risk by offending government and advertisers. They believe readers and viewers want to be entertained, not challenged by truthful news. Journalism schools now teach students how to spin the news away from uncomfortable truths. Reporters and editorial writers are being turned into shills for those in power.

Democracy is handicapped without the press. When news is spun, falsely reported, and not reported, the people are deprived both of information and of voice. The American people disapprove of Bush, but the American corporate press supports him.

And he concludes with what can only be seen as a call for impeachment.

Leaving Bush in office is extremely dangerous. He has proven himself to be a deceitful and harebrained leader. Bush has one and one-half years remaining in which to attack Iran, start a nuclear war, stage a 9/11 type event and declare a national emergency.

It is extreme folly to keep fanatics in office who have no respect for the US Constitution, civil liberties, and the separation of powers. The Bush Regime values nothing but power. Every day that Bush remains in office diminishes America and erodes its founding principles.

Boy, if I could be that shrill I might get more than a couple hundred page views a day.

The Terrorists/Tyrants have won!

The government could have stopped 911 with the tools they had at the time. They didn't because of bureaucratic incompetence in the FBI and a President/administration that was preoccupied with power and money. The result is the terrorists just keep winning as our freedom, the reason the administration gave for their attacks, becomes a thing of the past. But there is an upside - lots of campaign contributors are making lots of money. That is the theme of Paul Craig Roberts' rant today and he gets it exactly right.
The Security-Industrial Complex

The War on Terror is a marketing campaign for security industries and terrorism experts. The latter are pulling in the consulting fees, and the former are rapidly inventing new products that enable "our" government to watch our every move and to know our location at every moment.

Although it should be working on its corporate ethics, BAE Systems is working on an "Onboard Threat Detection System." The system consists of tiny cameras and microphones implanted in airline seats. The Onboard Threat Detection System records every facial expression and every whisper of every passenger, allowing watchful eyes and ears to detect terrorists before they can strike. BAE says its system is so sophisticated that it can differentiate between nervous flyers and real terrorists.

Think about this for a moment. Aside from the Big Brother aspect, the Onboard Threat Detection System is either redundant or the security authorities have no confidence in the expensive and intrusive airport security through which passengers are herded.

In order to make us feel safe the government and make us think it is doing something to make us safe it inconveniences us with for the most part ineffective security measures that threaten our freedom more than they make us safe. And it never ends.

Other firms are developing chip implants that identify a person to scanning machines and allow our movements to be monitored by GPS systems. Still others are developing ID cards that have retina scans and our DNA. No doubt we will be required to have both.

All of this is to protect us from terrorists.

No thought is given to whether the intrusion from the protection is a greater threat than possible terrorist acts by foreigners protesting American hegemony over their own lives. If American hegemony has this big a price, I can do without it.

Some of us remember when it was possible to read a book in an airport while waiting on a flight. Today it can’t be done without ear plugs. TVs blaring the latest propaganda compete with incessant repetitive terrorist warnings interrupted by announcements of flight cancellations and gate changes. The cacophony of sound is maddening. If only we could go back to the days of crying babies and screaming children.

Once a terrorist warning is produced, it lives forever. Every US airport endlessly plays the same ancient warning from decades ago instructing passengers to carefully watch their luggage and not to accept items from other people to carry aboard flights. This warning dates from pre-security days when the explosion of an airliner in flight was blamed on a passenger accepting a parcel from a stranger to carry to a person waiting at the flight’s destination. Allegedly, the parcel was a bomb.

To hear this warning today thirty or forty times after passing through security makes a person wonder about the efficiency of airport security. Were all those warrantless searches pointless?

The greatest problem confronted by marketers of anti-terrorist products is the shortage of terrorist attacks. The only terrorist events Americans have experienced are the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As for 9/11, we still don’t have a good explanation of how so much security failed in one morning.

To prime the market for anti-terrorism products, the Bush administration used 9/11 to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration has been attempting to occupy both countries for several years at a cost to taxpayers estimated at 1,000 billion dollars.

The main result of the military action has been to stir up resentment among Muslims in the hopes that the resentment will find expression in terrorist acts in the US. We have been made less safe in order that entrepreneurs can make big bucks protecting us with new security products. It would have been much better just to give the 1,000 billion dollars to the security firms and not invaded the two countries.

Keep that in mind when you are being monitored in your airliner seat and are blinking too much because you still wear the old hard contact lenses or are suffering from allergies. Excessive blinking is a telltale sign of stress and means that the blinker is about to commit a terrorist act. When you are arrested don’t bother arguing with the foolproof Onboard Threat Detection System. Just be thankful that your senators and representative received enough campaign donations from security firms to be concerned with your security.

So ask yourself - who is the greatest threat to your way of life? The terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan or the ones in Washington DC who are terrorizing your every waking moment and picking your pocket at the same time.

The new KGB as bad as the old one!

It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America.

The above is the concluding sentence of Paul Craig Roberts' commentary on the farcical confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
The Confession Backfired

The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals – that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

I discussed the farcical nature of the confession two days ago and Roberts says the rest of the world saw it the same way.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

Humorists are having a field day with the confession: "’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics."

If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed’s confession removed any reputation left.

This would indeed represent a farce if not for the hundreds if not thousands of lives ruined by the Bush/Cheney cabal's activities.

The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 "high value detainees."

In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families.

And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged "enemy combatants," are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for "terrorists."

The US government does not care that innocent people have been ensnared, because the US government desperately needs both to prove that there are vast numbers of terrorists and to demonstrate its proficiency in protecting Americans by capturing terrorists. Moreover, the US government needs "dangerous suspects" that it can use to keep Americans in a state of supine fearfulness and as a front behind which to undermine constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights.

The Bush-Cheney Regime succeeded in its evil plot, only to throw it all away by releasing the ridiculous confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

This has not only been a crime against those innocents who have been incarcerated but a crime against the American people and their way of life. Incompetent and evil - the two words that sum up the Bush administration. I will close this with the same words I used to open it.

It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America.

Update
While Time may be throwing softballs compared to Roberts' hardballs they do at least seem to recognize the farcical nature of it all.
Why KSM's Confession Rings False

It's hard to tell what the Pentagon's objective really is in releasing the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession. It certainly suggests the Administration is trying to blame KSM for al-Qaeda terrorism, leading us to believe we've caught the master terrorist and that al-Qaeda, and especially the ever-elusive bin Laden, is no longer a threat to the U.S.

But there is a major flaw in that marketing strategy. On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It's also clear he is making things up. I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.

A slide toward tyranny?

On the left we have had David Neiwert talking about a slide into fascism under the Bush/Cheney administration. But the left isn't the only side that's noticed, so has the Libertarian right. In the American Conservative we had Hunger for Dictatorship by Scott McConnell.

And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all-that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.

And there is the always shrill Dr Paul Craig Roberts who talks about the Brownshirting of America. Joe Conason is the latest to explain It could happen here .

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

Of course it's no coincidence that the ghost of Richard Nixon should appear now. The Nixon and Bush administration have a common personality, Dick (the Lord of Darkness) Cheney. From his earliest days a firm believer in the President as all powerful tyrant. In this case however of course the president is only a puppet now and Dick Cheney is the one pulling the strings.

Target Iran

A few months ago I quoted Gene Healy's post at Cato@Liberty

For the neoconservatives, it’s not about Israel. It’s about war. War is a bracing tonic for the national spirit and in all its forms it presents opportunities for national greatness.

With the congress and most of the American people preoccupied with Bush's surge in Iraq we are reminded that the neocons and the Bush administration are preparing to fulfil their testosterone requirements by attacking Iran. The first warning comes from the always shrill conservative Republican Paul Craig Roberts.
Bush Is About To Attack Iran
Why Can’t Americans See It?

Rather than winding down one war, Bush is starting another. The entire world knows this and is discussing Bush’s planned attack on Iran in many forums. It is only Americans who haven’t caught on. A few senators have said that Bush must not attack Iran without the approval of Congress, and postings on the Internet demonstrate world-wide awareness that Iran is in the Bush Regime’s cross hairs. But Congress and the Media – and the demonstration in Washington – are focused on Iraq.

What can be done to bring American awareness up to the standard of the rest of the world?

In Davos, Switzerland, the meeting of the World Economic Forum, a conference where economic globalism issues are discussed, opened January 24 with a discussion of Bush’s planned attack on Iran. The Secretary General of the League of Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and the world. Writing for Global Research (January 24), General Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs and former Joint Chief of Staff of the Russian Armies, forecast an American nuclear attack on Iran by the end of April. General Ivashov presented the neoconservative reasoning that is the basis for the attack and concluded that the world’s protests cannot stop the US attack on Iran. There will be shock and indignation, General Ivashov concludes, but the US will get away with it. He writes:

"Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle (an attack on Israel or the US targets including military bases). The scale of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the Congress will certainly say "Yes" to the US President."

And posting at The Left Coaster Col Sam Gardiner paints a similar picture.

The President said he not going to attack Iran. If that’s true, I am left wondering why the outrage effort. Why has the White House created an interagency working group whose mission is to build outrage in the world about Iran? The whole effort is so much in the pattern of message preparation for Gulf II that I am left concerned.

In other words, not only does it look as if there are military preparations for striking Iran, it looks as if the White House is doing public opinion preparations for a strike on Iran. Three items stand out this week.

The British Daily Telegraph quotes a senior European defense official: “North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Tehran’s preparations to conduct its own possibly by the end of this year."

I don’t know a single serious student of the Iranian nuclear program who would give the report any credibility. I talked to a Newsweek reporter about the story. He said the same about the Telegraph guy wrote the article. The story, however, is extremely important.

Using the playbook on strategic communications, when you want to plant a false story, you first find a reporter or a newspaper that will accept what you give them. With just one plant, you can achieve an echo that will support your cause.

It has not been usual for stories to be planted in UK newspapers. There is a great deal of message cooperation between the US and the UK.

In the early part of the fighting in Afghanistan, Cherie Blair and Laura Bush were both telling the press, using exactly the same words to argue why we had initiated the attack. They both said if you wear polish on you nails you could have your nail pulled out. The obvious conclusion was that we should be enraged.

During Gulf II preparations, we saw leaks from officials to UK newspapers with wonderful pieces of information such as the fact that Saddam Hussein was given a passport by France so he could leave Iraq. We read that the reason Saddam Hussein was not found was because the Russian Embassy had allowed him sanctuary. Stay enraged with Iraq, the French and the Russians.

US reporters maintain their integrity by writing that it was “reported in the Telegraph” and don’t have to violate any standards of journalism. With this story, the echo appeared in over 300 outlets over the course of the week. It was immediately reported on Fox News.

There are now many in the world who are outraged that Iran is less than a year from a nuclear weapon.

The other significant item has been some short ads that have appeared on television stations in the Washington area. These ads say things like, “Iran sent thousands of children marching to their deaths to clear minefields, armed with only plastic keys to unlock the gates of heaven.” Obviously, we are to be enraged.

As with the planted story, I can’t prove this is coming from the Media Outreach Working Group, but the pattern makes me very suspicious. Tracing individual and group connections to the ads, the DNA is Republican. During the preparation for Gulf II, we saw the same kind of ads. We also know the RNC has spent money for ads supporting White House policy positions in other cases.

Finally, the Holocaust surfaced in a major way this week. Certainly, the President of Iran whose mouth exceeds his authority in the country created the opening. I fear the strategic communications teams will exaggerate to build outrage.

Both Roberts and Gardiner are pointing out how the media propaganda organ is being fired up once again, reporting the lies and deceptions of those who want war at any cost.

Escalation of the failed effort in Iraq is nothing but a decoy at this point. It's Iran that probably always was the necons target. It was Iran after all that has kicked sand in their faces more than once. And George W. Bush made it clear yesterday that he is still the King and that congress is not only irrelevant but according to Secretary of Defense Gates traitorous.

A Rude Rebuff?

Robert Novak complains that the Democrats were rude to the belligerent, incompetent bully who has resided in the White House for the last six years. They were rude to a President who feigns interest in bi-partisanship only after his administration is going down in flames. And who is the rudest Democrat of them all? A former Reagan Republican, Jim Webb

What is it about those former members of the Reagan administration and George W. Bush? The rudest of the rude has been Reagan's assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts. Now E.J. Dionne thinks that former Reagan Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb has become a Reagan Democrat. Not because of ideology but because of the way he talks, a real "straight talk express".

Like him or not, Ronald ("Tear Down This Wall") Reagan spoke in a clean, clear prose that almost always left listeners with a sense that he stood for something.

It may thus be no accident that Jim Webb, Virginia's new Democratic senator, was once a Reaganite.

In his reply to President Bush's State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Webb defined the two central moral issues that animate most of the Democratic Party's rank and file: the mess in Iraq and the fact that the fruits of a growing economy are not being shared by all Americans.

Then Webb did something rather astonishing: He didn't fudge on his language or try to take the hard edge off his impatience with the status quo.

Webb did something too many Democrats have been afraid to do, toss the speech carefully crafted by political consultants and say exactly what he meant which is exactly what a majority of Americans know to be true.

There was no mush from Webb. On the contrary, he tried only to make his two points, on Iraq and inequality, and he showed what he was upset about.

Many Democrats tremble that they will be accused by some right-wing Web site or presidential spokesman of waging class warfare. Webb made clear that there is a class war going on and that the wrong side is winning it.

"When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did," Webb said. "Today, it's nearly 400 times."

Yes, that's a standard sort of line from your standard progressive speech. But then came this arresting sentence: "In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day."

And on Iraq more "straight talk".

On Iraq, Webb did not mince his words about Bush's responsibility. "The president took us into this war recklessly," he declared.

Instead of qualifying this strong statement, Webb backed it up: "He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the Army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command. . . . " The list more than supported Webb's next thought, that "we are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable -- and predicted -- disarray that has followed."

Jim Webb is exactly what the Democratic Party needs, someone who will ignore the consultants, ignore the DLC and come right out and say what a majority of Americans feel.

Jim Webb has already taken down one Republican hopeful. The Republicans should be watching Jim Webb with a great deal of fear.

Republican Paul Craig Roberts says.....

....impeach Bush now.
Now Paul Craig Roberts may be a conservative Republican, a former member of the Reagan administration and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal but he has never been a fan of George W. Bush and in fact one of his most eloquent critics. While the newly minted Democratic majorities in congress may be to timid to suggest impeachment but Mr Roberts is not and in fact suggests it may be the only way to save this Republic.
Only Impeachment Can Prevent More War

Everyone knows that Bush’s Iraq "surge" will not work. Even the authors of the plan, neoconservatives Frederick Kagan and Jack Keane, have emphasized that the plan cannot work with any less than an addition of 50,000 US troops committed to another three years of combat. Bush is only adding 40% of that number of troops, and Defense Secretary Gates speaks of the operation being over by summer’s end.

On January 18 a panel of retired generals testifying on Capitol Hill slammed Bush’s surge plan as "a fool’s errand." Even the easily bamboozled American public knows the plan will not work. Newsweek’s latest poll released January 20 shows that only 23% of the public support sending more troops to Iraq and that twice as many Americans trust the Democrats in Congress than trust Bush.

A majority of Americans (54%) believe Bush to be neither honest nor ethical, and 57% believe that Bush lacks "strong leadership qualities."

Nevertheless, Bush defended his surge plan, telling a group of TV stations last week, "I believe it will work."

Bush is correct that it will work – indeed, the surge is working. We have to be clear about how the plan works. It does not mean that 21,500 more US troops will bring order and stability to Iraq. The surge is working, because it is deflecting attention from the Bush Regime’s real game plan.

The real game plan is to orchestrate a war with Iran and to initiate wider conflict in the Middle East before public and military pressure forces the Bush Regime to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

Now Iran has been a primary target of the neocon lunatics since their front man and friendly tyrant Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was run out of the country in 1979. Roberts reminds us that the Bush/Cheney cabal is putting everything into place for an invasion of Iran and attempting to set up their own Gulf of Tonkin justification.
Bush the tyrant

Civil libertarians who have observed the Bush Regime’s concentration of dictatorial powers in the presidency expect that war with Iran, especially if fearful nuclear weapons are used, will be accompanied by Bush’s declaration of a state of emergency. The Bush Regime will use the state of emergency to grab more arbitrary and dictatorial powers in the name of protecting "national security interests" and American citizens from "terrorism."

As the Regime’s crimes against the US Constitution and humanity will be monstrous, dissent will be throttled in ways that will make Americans afraid to speak, or even to think, the truth. By stifling dissent, the Bush Regime will escape accountability for launching wars on the basis of blatant lies. It will complete its destruction of the civil liberties that protect free speech, dissent, and Americans from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention without charges or access to attorneys.

Congress is wasting precious time with non-binding resolutions and debates over cutting off war funding. The Bush Regime is rushing the country into a war and a domestic police state. Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick reports that one of the main goals of the so-called "war on terror" (essentially a propagandistic hoax) is to achieve a massive expansion in unaccountable executive power. This is a long-time goal of VP Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. It is also the main goal of the "conservative" Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers from whose membership Republican judicial nominees are drawn.

American public opinion is being manipulated. In the name of protecting "American freedom and democracy," the Bush regime rides roughshod over both as it ignores both the public and Congress and proceeds with a catastrophic policy supported by no one but the Bush Regime and a cabal of power-mad neoconservatives..

Nothing can stop the Regime except the immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney. This is America’s last chance.