Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
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But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
Phi Beta Iota: In the interest of the public's appreciation for the current situation, below are three graphics illustrating the current political situation and issue-bias spread; followed by a list of books with one point: We the People are ready to take our country back from Wall Street and the craven Demopublicans that have sold us out. Joe Biden might possibly be the key to a non-violent restoration of the Constitution, the Republic, and a nation able to integrate strategy, integrity, and living within its means.
Paul Ray's Empty Middle
Paul Ray, co-author of The Cultural Creatives, is probably the finest pollster in America because he cuts deep into values rather than just positions.
With full credit to Michael Crane and his Political Junkies Handbook,which provided the original map of all the political factions (we added the art), the JPEG to the right illustrates the death of democracy at the hands of the two-party tyranny acting Of, By, and For the Banks–the special interests. Every Member now serving, with a tiny handful of exceptions, is CORRUPT, both financially, and in terms of “party line” discipline betraying their constituencies, and in terms of abdicating their Article 1 responsibilities for balancing the power of the Executive. America is not a democracy in Helsinki Accord terms–it is a quasi-fascist corporate state in which the White House is theater, policy is not based on reality, and the budget has been bankrupted several times over because Goldman Sachs has been given free rein over the Treasury for the last four Administrations.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field operative says, “The notion that we're in Afghanistan to make our country safer is just complete bullshit… what it's doing is causing us greater danger, no question about it. Because the more we fight in Afghanistan, the more the conflict is pushed across the border into Pakistan, the more we destabilize Pakistan, the more likely it is that a fundamentalist government will take over the army — and we'll have Al-Qaeda like groups with nuclear weapons.”
Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops. . . . . . .
Full Story Online
Why Joe Biden Should Resign
Citing a Newsweek story: “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent.
The central problem of our time is the failure of human organization–its failure to scale, to adapt, to assimilate.
We believe the failure stems directly from a rejection of diversity and a falsification of feedback loops–the absence of integrity.
We've come to the conclusion that the discord between politics and intelligence is contrived–there is no inherent opposition between politics (choice of best path for all) and intelligence (presentation of best achievable truth for all) provided ONE condition is met: integrity among the majority of individuals engaged in each.
According to several recent articles – “Senate Panel to Examine Sale of Diebold Voting Machine Division” http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/diebold-antitrust-2/ and “Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought” http://www.truthout.org/092509I – the largest voting machine company in the country, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), has just bought out its most infamous competitor – Diebold's e-voting division, Premier Election Solutions. This leaves ES&S in control of a significant majority of the voting machines (68%) and potential votes (about 80%) in the United States. This is an extraordinary concentration of power.
This is not, by far, the only problem with the U.S. electoral system, but it is one of the most dangerous and most readily addressed. It is dangerous because it increases the possibilities for direct and untraceable manipulation of the votes in the vast majority of states. Such election fraud is accomplished by electronically changing a voter's vote, adding imaginary voters, or tweaking the total tally, real possibilities demonstrated by, among others, scientists at Princeton and Stanford ( http://bit.ly/m4uXo ) . And in recent U.S. elections, there were some non-random, inexplicable and unprecedented divergences between exit polls and election results. (Exit polls are often used by international observers to monitor fair elections.)
Phi Beta Iota: If democracy is to survive, local control of paper ballots with strong public oversight is a non-negotiable first step. The two-party tyranny is corrupt to the core; benefit of the doubt must be given to public concerns over validity rather than political claims of efficiency. Click on title above for complete discourse and all links.
