The four coordinated hijackings, resulting in three deliberate attacks and one downed passenger jet, took 2,977 innocent lives and sowed fear and dismay across the world. They were acts of unconscionable evil intended to not only harm innocents and terrify the wider population, but to destabilize American democracy itself, and derail a people’s journey through history, possibly to erode its most virtuous contributions.

It was a clear, sunny morning and the first plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center had sparked a sustained global news flash, bringing hundreds of millions of eyes to the television footage. There was confusion and disbelief, and just as it was becoming clear there must have been a devastating loss of life, a massive fireball engulfed the top half of the South Tower, clearly signaling a deliberate terrorist attack was underway.

Less than 2 minutes later, the White House chief of staff told the president, then in a public event with schoolchildren, that “America is under attack.” A third plane flew into the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Dept. of Defense, while the fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers reportedly made a fateful and heroic decision to rush the cockpit and take back the plane from the hijackers.

In the days after the attacks, it was often said such heinous acts would not be allowed to change our open, democratic culture or to reduce our commitment to moral leadership in the world. Pres. Bush made a visible, conscious effort to ask that no one treat Muslims or people of Arabic origin or descent, as anything other than members of an open, democratic society, as neighbors and possibly as victims, of the attacks.

But in the months and years that followed, the pressures and temptations inherent in legislating and prosecuting the war on terror drew the US federal government into planning and implementing policies that marked an appreciable and concerning detour away from many of our most cherished shared principles.

We have suffered, in the aftermath of the attacks, fully a decade of war. From the standpoint of an idealist democracy, or of just war theory, from the standpoint of a civilization committed to peaceful coexistence and negotiated outcomes, war is failure. It is the failure of peace, of the institutions of peaceful negotiation; it is the threat of a descent into chaos. War tests the moral fiber of a society more than any other experience.

In one of the most emotional and solemn of the speeches given to commemorate the legacy of those lost, Vice President Joseph Biden noted that “Never before in our history, has America asked so much over such a sustained period of an all volunteer force. I can say without fear of contradiction or being accused of exaggeration that the 9/11 generation ranks among the greatest our nation has ever produced.”

He spoke of 4,478 “fallen angels” who died in Iraq, another 1,648 who gave their lives in Afghanistan, over ten years, many of them in recent weeks, and the more than 40,000 wounded in both wars. Biden has visited the wounded soldiers many times, and said “I am awed not only by their capability, but by their sacrifices, today and every day.”

To this day, military strategists disagree about whether going to war as a response was a major strategic blunder. It was important, and positive, to oust the Taliban from power, to end the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein, but the unity and the worldwide human fabric of sympathy that grew immediately after the 9/11 attacks bled away as a politics of division and confrontation took hold.

Some professional politicians deliberately adopted the attacks as a “wedge issue”, and sought to paint rivals to their political philosophy or to their job security as enemies of the state. A naturally occurring sense of democratic, civic unity was replaced by a push for ideological uniformity. Many Americans began to feel, for the first time in their lives, as if dissent, or even critical thinking, was not welcome in the public discourse.

The very idea of engaged citizenship was challenged by a prevailing attitude of hardline politics, and for many, fear and suspicion. In retrospect, it may have been possible to depose the Taliban and to counter Al Qaeda, without ever going to war in Iraq, without adopting interrogation techniques borrowed from Cambodian death camps, and without giving in to the suspicion that due process was somehow a risky departure from the best service of justice in a free society.

In retrospect, there may have been better ways to channel the collective emotional upheaval that followed the attacks. Historians were already talking of how quickly the political capital of the moment was “squandered”, as less than two years after the attacks, an aggressive, unilateralist drive had totally overtaken American foreign policy. There was, for several years, a great risk that American democracy would be forever changed, and many of its most vital ideals eroded.

But today, in northern Virginia, Vice President Biden reminded us of something else: the attackers misunderstood the nature of the event they had planned and its likely impact on the nation they were targeting. While the risk was there that our culture could be comprehensively destabilized by the grief and anger that follow such an event, Biden suggested we were ultimately protected against that deviation by something Al Qaeda may never have understood:

With the fully restored Pentagon behind him, Biden intoned: “The true source of American power does not lie within that building, because as Americans, we draw our strength from the rich tapestry of our people.” He added that “The true legacy of 9/11 is that our spirit is mightier, the bonds that unite us are thicker, and the resolve is firmer than the millions of tons of limestone and concrete that make up that great edifice behind me.”

Biden explained the miscalculation of a small group of extremists who “never imagined” that the killing of 3,000 people would inspire 3,000,000 to volunteer for military service, to strengthen and defend a population of over 300,000,000. He spoke of the “sleeping giant” that was awakened by the shock and horror of the attacks. He was speaking not of a will to violence or retaliation, but of a spirit of aid to one’s fellow citizens.

In the hours after the attacks on New York City, a fleet of ferries, fishing boats, tug boats, small craft, commercial vessels and patrol boats, spontaneously gathered around lower Manhattan. The United States Coast Guard then sent out a message to “all available boats” to “report to Governor’s Island”. Hundreds of boats converged on the city to assist in the evacuation, arriving at what witnesses describe as astonishing speed.

After the North Tower collapsed into its footprint, engulfing lower Manhattan in a cloud of toxic dust, heat, smoke and debris, tens of thousands of evacuees—some injured, some in shock, many hysterical with panic, some just acting in service of those around them—were flooding the waterfront. Some were jumping into the water, despite the heavy boat traffic, desperate to get off the island and if possible swim to safety.

In what is now referred to as the great Manhattan “boatlift”, nearly 500,000 civilian refugees were evacuated in just nine hours. It was the largest evacuation by sea in history. By comparison, the legendary military evacuation of Dunkirk, during some of the darkest days of World War II, evacuated 350,000 French and British soldiers from France to Britain.

The great Manhattan boatlift was possible because conscientious citizen volunteers from across the region shot into action, heading into the unknowable dangers of an unprecedented disaster zone, risking their lives and livelihoods to help total strangers in desperate need. This was emblematic of a society infused with a strong sense of public trust and civic responsibility, where citizenship and shared destiny are implicit in our sense of who we are.

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have seen a spiritual recovery, in which people recognize that the values of such a society cannot be cast aside for any temporary sense of security. Our politics have seen a reversal, in which an unprecedented number of people voted, in 2008, for a politics of unity and civic engagement. And the hotly contested political campaigns have continued, with fevered disagreement over policy and ideology, but we can, perhaps say, that the freedom to disagree so vehemently is a celebration of the virtues of a free and open society.

Vice President Biden said to the families of victims today, “My prayer for you is that ten years later when you think of them, ten years later when you think of them, that it brings a smile to your lips instead of a pain in your heart.” There are many ways in which the legacy of the 9/11 attacks has long since been reclaimed from both the terrorists and the hardliners, and has come to inspire a commitment to service and shared responsibility.

Speaking of the bond between her family and the family of her brother’s great friend, coworker and fellow victim of the 9/11 attacks, Debra Epps today said, at the opening of the World Trade Center’s new 9/11 Memorial park, that the tragedy had brought the lesson that “People really do catch you, when you fall. It’s been a blessing.”

There are societies where unity in service of the civic space and one’s fellow citizens is a rare, if not unthinkable eventuality, and there are societies that are strong because free people naturally and voluntarily engage with each other with a sense of holding the civic space in trust, with a sense of commitment to the virtues and the vulnerabilities of their common humanity.

Ten years after the attacks of 9/11, the United States has been through many choices, many complexes of complicating choices, in response to the attacks. Many of those choices were controversial, and many have been reversed. Many curbs on civil liberties are still in place, and top officials disagree vehemently about whether there needs to be a trade-off between commitment to Constitutional protections of civil liberties and security.

Now, we enter a new period, in which withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan is already underway, a sometimes clumsy and always complicated process of nation-building is giving way to remote security actions, forceful “smart diplomacy” and a cooperative effort to prevent civil war in both countries. Osama bin Laden, and a number of “second-in-command” and “third-in-command” Al Qaeda operatives have been killed.

Some say the struggle against militant groups with “global reach” may be entering a more conscious deliberative phase, where the liberty-security tradeoff is not seen as being so economical. There is a hunger for reviving a less militaristic civic space, in which the cooperative voluntary citizenship of free people is the strength and the hope of a great democracy, in which the value of the service of millions of volunteers can be truly honored as an expression of their selflessness.

9/11 should, after this 10th anniversary, and in the aftermath of the deviation from and restoration of core values that we have undergone, become a national day of solemn recognition, collaborative restoration, and an affirmation of our civic space, in which citizenship is a sacred trust and human interest in the principal goal of our activity. It should be a day of national reflection and of the reaffirmation of the value of an open, democratic and voluntary civic space.

- – -

Cross-posted from Independents of Principle

TheHotSpring.net :: The debt crisis is attributable to “structural” causes, meaning the way the nation’s financing is structured over the next several decades, but also to political and economic causes, meaning both the way we make policy and the way we live and experience the marketplace for trade, credit and consumer purchases. So, we need to implement policies that make serious, sustainable corrections on all three fronts.

If the leadership of the House of Representatives does not craft a bill that can work as a bipartisan compromise that will pass both houses, and be signed into law, they will be knowingly imposing on the entire American economy a steep “tax”, in the form of rapidly escalating interest rates. Those interest rate increases will impose a real and measurable cost inflation on all interactions with the economy.

Once the nation’s credit rating is downgraded, Treasury bond interest rates will have to go up, and those interest rates will push all other interest rates higher, choking off credit to consumers, families and businesses. And the negative impact will multiply, by very simple logic: will for-profit entities—i.e. banks—who make their profit from interest not only increase interest rates, but increase them enough to pad their profits, if basis rates go up?

The Republican party’s tempting of markets to react to imminent default is not only a “dangerous game”; it is a reckless experiment in the deliberate, long-term degradation of the American economy. It will pose an “across the board” threat to American enterprise, and literally undermine—take the legs out from under—the still slow and tenuous recovery. It will also make permanent some of the driving dynamics of the slow jobs economy.

How? By building into our economic fabric a degraded credit rating, the Boehner-Cantor default will make all government borrowing, indeed all borrowing of any kind, more expensive. This cost increase will not be temporary, as it will propagate the fiscal dysfunction currently at work in the budget process to the entire economy, forcing every man, woman and child in the United States to fund unnecessarily high interest payments.

The burden Republican radicals say they want to put a stop to—the ever-increasing share of the federal budget going to interest payments—will be expanded to all American businesses, households and individuals. Banks will find it harder to make money, as fewer and fewer people are able to meet the threshold for borrowing, and so will push for still higher ROI on ever riskier, and/or less frequent lending.

Republican leaders might object to calling their singularly engineered default, and resulting interest rate hikes, as a tax, but in the sense of imposing a heavy added cost burden on the American people—not to mention the Republican rhetorical flourish wherein everything other than free cash for business is a tax hike—it is.

The cost of living will go up, even as employment opportunity narrows, and wages continue to fall, when adjusting for inflation. Credit will become more scarce, threatening to halt an extremely feeble housing recovery, and to put still more home buyers “underwater”. States will see more pressure to lower property taxes, to mark to market, even as banks fight to avoid the same fate.

There will be more layoffs at the federal and state level, and vital incentives for businesses will begin to dry up, as federal and state budget hawks take note of how difficult it is to finance such incentives through new borrowing. Today, the IMF chief warned that a US credit downgrade could do severe harm to the entire global economy—blocking yet another source of potential income for American businesses and investors.

While anti-tax radicals in the GOP are convinced that a default will be the jolt to the system they need to remake American fiscal policy in a way that spurs economic growth, it will in fact be the single most effective way to insure the contagion of fiscal dysfunction and escalating long-term economic burden to entities large and small that—unlike the US government—cannot afford to bear that burden for even a little while.

The Boehner-Cantor default tax will, in fairness, also be in large part attributable to Rep. Paul Ryan’s radical budget proposal, which itself was rooted in a number of fiscal policy fantasies, chief among them that cutting spending automatically creates jobs, spurs growth and increases revenues, even if tax rates are slashed at the outset.

Ryan’s plan took all of the wrong lessons from the fiscal policy of the Reagan years, amounting to—according to some critics—an irrationally rosy rewriting of history, in the hopes that money and economics will just be different in this next go-round. More specifically: Ryan confused tax cutting with economic growth. He made the assumption that a government small enough so as to be unable to aid in fostering economic health and wellbeing would somehow do so magically.

He forgot to take note of the many tax increases Reagan was forced to sign, in order to make sure the nation did not fall into depression and loses its competitive edge against the Soviet Union, as a result of his radical tax cuts. He forgot to take note of how necessary Reagan made “deficit spending” to the shape and function of our national government and our economy more broadly.

Ryan proposed, essentially, a more radical version of Reagan’s failed policy, ignoring the fact that his plan would ultimately drive the government into far more long-term borrowing, or necessitate a dramatic decline in GDP and key areas of medium to long-term investment. So, it could be a Boehner-Cantor-Ryan tax, but it is Boehner and Cantor who made Mr. Ryan’s radicalism seem mainstream, sparking a misguided intransigence among their own caucus.

The default, if it comes, will be owned by Messrs. Boehner and Cantor, who have, between them, walked out of talks at least three times, simply because they refused to even listen to alternative ideas. And they did so in service of a radical minority of one party, who have already vowed not to assist in avoiding economic chaos.

Polling now shows clearly that while Pres. Obama suffers from an economic approval rating below 50%, that number might be more about incentivizing action than about policy preferences. Recent polls also show a majority of the American people have more faith in Mr. Obama than in either party’s Congressional leadership, to deal with debt and deficits.

Polling also reveals that while nearly 60% of the public believe George W. Bush’s economic policies inflicted lasting harm on the economy, only 37% believe Barack Obama’s policies have caused harm. The suggestion is that the public is more aware of who is offering viable solutions, and who is acting in good faith, than partisan dividing lines would ordinarily allow.

Meanwhile, the new Republican majority has succeeded in driving anti-incumbency sentiment to its highest rate on record, after just six months in control of the House of Representatives. They have lost two important House elections this year already, as the message that they are pushing a radical agenda to eliminate Medicare, while introducing zero pieces of legislation to create or incentivize the creation of even one new job, is sticking.

But all of that is politics. The economic reality is that a Boehner-Cantor-driven default will add measurable, possibly prohibitive new costs to everyday activities, personal and commercial investments and leave the nation with unmanageable new operating costs, slowing economic growth and threatening our standing in the global economy.

At least 80, possibly as many as 120 House Republicans have now vowed they will vote against raising the debt ceiling, no matter what the makeup of the compromise reached, no matter the consequences for the economy, for national security, or for America’s future. Speaker John Boehner is caught between a rock and a … well, the smart thing would be for him to work with Democrats, so he can pass something serious and save the country from an economic disaster of his own making.

Speaker Boehner has the authority—and the good fortune to be living in a country where this is possible, politically—to abandon the irresponsible “blow-it-up” caucus in his own party, and work across the aisle to craft serious legislation that will pass and that will work. The 80 to 120 Republicans who are vowing to vote for the deep economic degradation of their country have no role in these negotiations, as they have already bowed out. Mr. Boehner cannot and will not have their votes, which means that the only way he can pass a compromise is to win support from a majority of Democrats.

The Republican majority is forfeiting its majority, and the Speaker of the House is now truly in a position to lead. He can demonstrate that leadership does not come with a false or pigheaded “consistency”, and that members of Congress who swear an oath which necessitates, in part, not doing their jobs in tough binds, cannot be and will not be taken seriously by serious people.

In fact, since they are clearly and resoundingly declaring that this—not raising the debt ceiling, no matter the cost to the American people—is their one and only most personally important goal, they may not be here after 2012 anyway. They will not help Speaker Boehner build a continuing speakership.

Mr. Boehner said yesterday on Fox News Sunday that he did not come to Washington “to be a Congressman”; he came to “do what is right for the country”. Given the cruel bind he now finds himself in, that remark sounded for all the world like a dare to his party to oust him if they could. It was the one strong moment in a weak and sometimes nonsensical series of claims, and it was kind of leadership he should show in the Congress itself.

His allegiance to party must come second to his allegiance to the people of the United States. Inviting calamity is not governing. Tempting fate is not a plan. And charting a course for the jagged cliffs and high seas of default is not fiscal sanity. We know: if there is no agreement by August 2, it will become more expensive, not less, to borrow money, and those higher interest rates will filter through the entire economy.

At the 11th hour of the 24th day of July, just a week before actual default, Speaker Boehner seemed prepared to abandon all reason and craft a new Republican-only solution, in isolation, with no guarantee from the Senate that it could pass. But there are reports Leader Reid and Pres. Obama are both in touch with Speaker Boehner, and are working to ensure a deal goes through.

The problem Boehner faces is that a large number of his own members will not vote for it. He needs Democratic votes, and a lot of them. Whether he likes it or not, the Speaker who would have a one-party House of Representatives is now leader of an awkward, grudging, unlikely coalition of friends and enemies, and he may not so easily distinguish between the two.

There are now less than 8 days until default.

The Speaker is crafting a new “cut, cap and balance” plan, without the cap or the balance parts. He is almost sure to lose more Republicans than just those who have already vowed to vote against any increase in the debt ceiling. And Democrats are unlikely to vote for anything that resembles “cut, cap and balance”. Many have said they will not support anything that touches entitlements without also raising taxes on the rich.

Plus, “cut, cap and balance” was never a serious plan to deal with the debt:

• Most glaringly, required an impossible super-majority in BOTH houses of Congress, in order to pass a constitutional amendment, which would then have to be ratified by two-thirds of all the states;
• It also made little sense, arithmetically: to cut spending—without a plan to pay down outstanding obligations—, cap borrowing—making this more difficult—, then impose a balanced budget—when so much of our economic wellbeing depends on the borrowing power of our government and the security of Treasury bonds—doesn’t add up;
• Speaker Boehner knew it would never pass the Senate and would never be signed into law.

Given the Senate’s position that there should be $2 trillion in new revenue, it would seem Speaker Boehner is, at least for this coming week, Republican in name only, and the de facto leader of a coalition dominated by Democrats. They are sure to frustrate his triumphant spending-cut-only plan with a demand for new revenues; some moderate Republicans might remind him that if the Bush tax cuts are not dealt with in this deal, taxes might go up by far more than the $400 billion over ten years that caused him to walk out of talks last week.

So the question remains: What can you say yes to? Ultimately, the American people are saying they trust Pres. Obama more than they trust Congressional leaders, to deal responsibly with this issue. They trust him to make political sacrifices in order to save the nation’s economy and standing in the world. He may say yes to a bad deal, because that would be the right thing to do. But Speaker Boehner cannot long stand as leader of his party, if he is so willing to be dominated by non-participating back-benchers and Tea Party freshmen.

There is no productive economic value, tested or in theory, to the radical Republican faction’s view that “blowing it up”—an unfortunately violent metaphor—will somehow cure the government of all the ills they reflexively see at every turn. There is no substance, no evidence, no viable strategy, in the plan to let the nation default, then see what happens.

The United States would not be the first nation to default; it would only be the biggest and most indispensable. Default would:

1. Cause 44% of US government obligations to go unpaid;
2. Cause a Constitutional crisis—the Constitution essentially forbids knowingly entering into default;
3. Cause an immediate decline in GDP, first from the 44% of obligations unpaid, then from the massive new “credit crunch” of rapidly increasing interest rates;
4. Cause massive job loss, first in the public sector, then by extension in the private sector;
5. Cause a deep new recession, possibly a depression, while staunching the borrowing power of the government to speed or incentivize recovery;
6. Give immense new power, over American government policy, to foreign creditors, like China.

Yes, Republicans who are currently voting to throw the nation’s government into default are voting to give the totalitarian Communist regime that rules China, our largest creditor, unprecedented influence over American government policy.

Let us be clear: the world has seen defaults before. When Argentina defaulted, there was a run on the banks, massive business interests collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of its 40 million citizens left the country to start from scratch as immigrants elsewhere. If the same thing happens in the “land of opportunity”, where will everyone go?

The nation will be saddled with crushing economic ripple effects, even as the government is prevented from acting to resolve the crisis, and for the first time in our history, one party in Congress will have voted to give a foreign power, astonishingly, power over our policy.

The radicals seem unfazed by this bleak picture; Speaker Boehner cannot be unfazed. He stands at a crucial moment in history, his entire tenure in Congress, and certainly his speakership, about to be defined by what might be the most tragic error in judgment in living memory, on the part of our legislative branch. He will long be viewed by history as the man who steered the nation to calamity or worked with his rivals to right the ship of state.

So, the true bipartisan coalition that needs to emerge, if anything is to pass both houses and be signed into law by August 2, must have the following characteristics:

1. It must push back the next debt ceiling vote until 2013;
2. It must not make cuts into Medicare or Social security that are not paid for with new revenues;
3. It must take hundreds of billions of waste, fraud and abuse out of Pentagon spending;
4. It must include stepped up financial regulatory enforcement, to prevent abuse and win judgments;
5. It must ease the nation off the debt-ceiling model, instead establishing debt-reduction targets and a “safe threshold” measure for future borrowing as a percentage of GDP;
6. It must achieve roughly $2.7 trillion or more in out-year spending reductions, while not cutting deeply into current GDP.

The Wall Street Journal is an historic and storied publication, known for top-quality journalism and meticulous reporting of facts relevant to financial markets and economic activity more broadly. It is a mainstay of American print media, and has long been known for honoring the bright line that must be drawn between editorial viewpoints and news reporting. Since 2007, however, it is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and not all of that legacy remains certain to everyone.

And Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is rapidly losing journalistic and commercial cachet, as the scandal over bribery and illegal phone hacking deepens. Now, at least three members of the Bancroft family, which sold the Wall Street Journal and other DowJones properties to Murdoch in 2007, say they would not have done so, were they aware of the corruption and illegal spying allegedly rampant at his UK-based tabloids.

According to ProPublica and the Guardian:

Pres. Barack Obama upset many in Israel yesterday, when he called for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea, saying it would not allow Israel to effectively defend itself, and conservative opponents of Obama are now actively trying to vilify him as having abandoned Israel. This is not only not true; it is a dangerous lie that ignores the fact that Obama’s roadmap to peace strongly favors Israeli security.

At no time has Pres. Barack Obama threatened Israel, or sought to undermine its security. That his view of what will work best to secure a lasting peace between two states living side by side differs from the view of those who do not want two states is no surprise. No commentary based on the bias of those who do not favor a negotiated settlement should be taken seriously by anyone who favors Israeli security.

Hard-liners in Israel, under then PM Ehud Olmert’s questionable leadership, fought two needless wars of aggression that achieved nothing to improve Israel’s security, but which did entrench Israel’s enemies and greatly expand their influence along the Lebanese and Gazan borders. The hard-line solution is not always the wisest, and those who care about the state of Israel need to remember this: true power is exercised not by force of arms, but by mercy, wisdom and forethought.

Decisions based on fear often lead to overreactions, poor planning and counterproductive outcomes. In the case of Israel, such missteps could erode fragile diplomatic arrangements on which the future of Israel depends. The panic and hysteria that have overtaken some on the far right, over a US president, in trying to act as mediator between two people’s facing not so much political as existential questions, calling for intelligent compromise, is shameful and could endanger Israel’s security.

There has been a consistent pattern, over decades, in Israeli-Palestinian politics, whereby rhetoric of moderation has moved the cause of moderation forward and rhetoric of hostility has ignited or intensified hostility. The art of statecraft is, in many ways, the art of doing what is right, despite the inability of soundbite media to fashion an honest rhetoric to address the issues.

Netanyahu stands at an historic crossroads: in the wake of two widely unpopular, poorly conceived and ultimately botched wars of choice, Israel finds the region where it has so long been the only democratic state actively democratizing, from the ground up. This is a positive development for the region, for Israel and for all of humanity, and it needs to be addressed appropriately, not according to the reflexive panic of other times.

Israel, like the United States, has an opportunity to quietly guide and reward the democracy movement, not dictating policy or imposing its will, but making friends, and keeping them. Nothing is more vital to the future of Israeli security, and hard-liners whose minds are lost in other wars need to take note of the actual truths of this moment in history.

Heavy-handed security clampdowns are now perceived across the world, by Israel’s allies and by its neighboring populations, as evil acts, illegitimate under law and politically impardonable. A hard-line politics directly endangers Israel’s ability to play a credible, humane, leading role in this period of widespread democratization.

This is the moment democrats and peacemakers, statesmen and ordinary people have been dreaming of for decades, across the region, and it cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to slip away. But as in all places in all times, there are hard-liners who are invested in the paradigm of conflict and hostility, who do not see a future for their own way of thinking in a world of peace and security.

In Israel, specifically, there is a hard-line view that only by affirming every security-oriented action taken over the last four decades can Israel be made secure: that is largely because those individuals were the progenitors of those actions and cannot conceive of a world in which their actions were not the only, the best and the most necessary of all possibilities. Those who have invested everything in the politics, the mindset and the vocabulary of conflict, have a hard time transitioning into the age of peace and stability, and that, more than anything, can undermine a nation’s ability to negotiate effectively.

But on the matter of what Pres. Obama actually said yesterday: he did not say that Israel should confine itself to the borders of June 1967, and he most certainly did not suggest that when the borders of two states agreed upon, Israel should be surrounded by foreign military forces. What he did say was that the 1967 “lines” should be the “starting point” for negotiations regarding territory, and that the final agreement should result from mutually agreeable “swaps”.

In no way was there a suggestion that Israel should be less secure or that Israel should be forced to agree to anything not “agreeable”, from its perspective. The problem of the moment, however, appears to be that Mr. Netanyahu speaks vaguely of “generous compromises”, only to reject outright any consideration of any kind (let along compromise) on several issues without which no Palestinian government could make any move toward peace.

Seasoned diplomatic negotiators in Israel, in Europe and in the US, all of them invested in Israel being secure as the two-state solution goes forward, are accusing Netanyahu of short-sighted political intransigence. And in furtherance of what seems to be blocking a reasonable approach to serious negotiations about what is actually going on, on the ground, numerous hard-line organizations have begun trying to raise money by cynically raising false alarms based on deliberate distortions of what Pres. Obama called for.

What’s more, the policy enunciated by Pres. Obama is not new: the speech was applauded by the Quartet of moderating powers (the US, joined by the EU, the UN and the Russian Federation), and it has long been considered to be the only reasonable starting point from which a viable peace settlement could be reached.

What is new is that Pres. Obama signaled the willingness of the US to push for those negotiations to begin in earnest. That push is an invitation to PM Netanyahu to act in the interests of his people, and commit to moving forward with the difficult, but urgently necessary work of resolving this conflict.

After what was described as a tense meeting with Pres. Obama today, Netanyahu id they agreed that “illusions” about what is possible should not guide the negotiations, because the resulting agreement would not be tenable. What he did not seem to notice, however, is that a viable two-state solution requires balance, fairness, and transparency, that compromises have to be not so much “generous” as difficult, to have the desired effect—that of purchasing a viable peace.

To love and support the people of Israel is to do more than focus with anger and worry on the inexcusable atrocities to which previous generations were subjected. It means to defend the right of the people of Israel to be led by people who support, no matter how inconvenient, the ethical principles of the Jewish faith and the political virtues of modern democracy. It means supporting the right of the people of Israel to establish a viable cooperative peace with their neighbors.

Pres. Obama is absolutely committed to the security of Israel, now and after the two-state solution is reached, and during the negotiations. And, he is committed to helping the people of Israel, and their Palestinian neighbors, achieve a peace that is worthy of the great and noble ideals on which Israeli democracy was founded.

Nothing will make Israel more secure than Israel finding a way to allow for the Palestinian people to enjoy the same freedom, democracy and security to which Israel’s leaders feel their constituents are entitled. Getting there will not be easy, but it requires something more intelligent than the fantasy that without giving anything, something can be secured.

Barack Obama’s security policy is pro-Israel. It favors Israel’s culture of faith and democracy. It favors the security of the state of Israel, and of the Israeli people. And, perhaps most importantly, Obama’s Israel policy is not fatalist: instead, it favors the idea that Israel and its leaders are capable of achieving the seemingly impossible task of harmony, security and democracy, without waiting for circumstances to dictate outcomes.

Today, Juan Cole published an open letter to the political left, asking them to understand the humanitarian urgency of the situation in Libya, and to balance their desire for an end to war and foreign interventions against the need to protect human life and ensure that a viable democracy movement is not put down through massive slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of civilians. Cole is right. Though military action is never the best of all possible outcomes, it is sometimes the only way to protect innocent human life against plans of deliberate mass murder.

The Jasmine Revolution, the spreading pro-democracy movement that has reached into the capitals of so many nations across North Africa and the Middle East, marks an historical moment entirely without precedent in the history of the region. Peaceful, pro-democracy movements telling dictatorial regimes they are no longer afraid and they will not accept any future that continues to fail to be democratic. Muammar Qadhafi has already inspired several regimes to follow his lead and use extreme, massive, lethal violence to put down this peaceful revolution.

In Libya, that scheme of slaughter has gone further than anywhere else. What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and in Tehran in 2009, has been turned into an all-out ground and air war against civilians across the nation of Libya. Qadhafi openly explained, in multiple public speeches, that he would slaughter thousands in Benghazi. He already did so in multiple other rebel-controlled cities. It has only been with sustained coalition airstrikes, and the imposition of a no-fly zone, that the pro-democracy resistance has been able to drive Qadhafi’s forces out of Ajdabiya, Brega and Ras Lanuf.

The pro-democracy movement became a de fact armed rebellion, when large factions of the military defected and joined the resistance. Qadhafi made hysterical claims that he was fighting a perverse coalition of al Qaeda, Israel, the United States, Iran, and “drug addicts”. His son said they were at war with “terrorists and gangsters”.

On one after another occasion, Qadhafi’s government declared a “ceasefire”, in an apparent effort to cause the coalition air forces and the pro-democracy resistance to stand down, while his air and ground assault continued virtually unabated. Footage from international journalists able to gain access to Qadhafi’s front-line positions showed a continual barrage of hundreds, if not thousands, of heavy artillery shells being fired into rebel-held civilian areas.

Yesterday, a woman found her way to a gathering of press at a government-controlled hotel in Tripoli, and screamed and cried that she had been kidnapped by Qadhafi’s militia, held prisoner for two days, and violently raped by 15 men. Reporters scuffled with hotel employees and government agents who tried to silence her. A TV camera was destroyed, the woman was threatened by at least one hotel employee with a butter-knife, and Qadhafi’s forces then forcibly removed her to an unknown location.

The incident clearly amounts to a brutal physical assault by pro-Qadhafi forces on foreign journalists. The woman’s fate is now unknown. The Qadhafi regime is using all force possible to brutally subdue not only the pro-democracy movement itself, but support from the civilian population and the ability of foreign journalists to report facts from the conflict.

In the United States, and across Europe, there has been friction on both the progressive left and the conservative right, among factions that do or do not favor military intervention in Libya, for ideological, practical or political reasons. There has been an unfortunate split between people who feel human life and democracy matter more than ideological preference and partisan interest, clouding the landscape and raising questions about the commitment of the allied forces to helping promote justice in Libya.

It has to be said, no one, of any political persuasion, in the US, Europe or the Arabic-speaking world, views Qadhafi as a legitimate head of state. This means there is a moral blur and intellectual incoherence among those who seek to oppose a limited airborne intervention to limit Qadhafi’s ability to use force against his own people.

In the US, there has been a split on the right between those who have been pushing for swift military action and those who seek to oppose Obama, either for partisan reasons or in adherence to an absolute prioritization of budget cuts. On the left, there has been a split between those who vehemently oppose the so-called “imperial presidency” and those who prioritize the interest of the pro-democracy movement.

In both cases, there has been significant rhetorical confusion about what is happening, how to characterize it, and whether or not there is public support for military action. In the US, polling clearly shows support for Pres. Obama’s response to the Libyan crisis. The people of the United States believe Qadhafi needs to be stopped from slaughtering thousands of civilians in a quest to perpetuate a 42-year-long dictatorship.

The United States Congress will likely soon face the choice of whether or not to retro-actively authorize military force, perhaps for a sustained period, to assist in maintaining the no-fly zone. If NATO officially takes control of the mission, it may be unnecessary to secure a Congressional vote on assistance to NATO, but politicos right and left will be challenged to find coherent positions: do they favor limited action to prevent massive civilian death, or a world in which principled people stand by and watch the slaughter go forward, with the explicit intent of crushing the pro-democracy movement spreading across the Middle East?

The wishful defeatism that is cynically promoting the idea that we should not be involved in implementing the Libyan no-fly zone because it cannot succeed is a cynical attempt to undermine the success of the action, and little more. It depends almost entirely on the view that because we cannot guarantee the perfect democratic success of the people of Libya, in their aspirations for democratic freedom, they don’t deserve recognition or assistance.

This flies in the face of the entire historical political culture of the United States. Though seen as imperialist leanings in much of the rest of the world, the Monroe doctrine —that the US would defend democratic freedom anywhere it cropped up in the Americas— and the Truman doctrine —extending this principle to the entire world— resonated in the US because they echo the sentiment of the American people that the American revolution was 1) not ideological, 2) universal, and 3) a humanitarian and morally necessary action to which all people should have a right.

The aspirations of the Libyan people are the aspirations of people everywhere, to be free of the brutality and torment of a rapacious dictator who imposes his will through thuggish secret police, kidnap, torture and the use of naked military force against civilian populations. But perhaps more significantly, in this particular historical moment, these aspirations are linked to the fate of millions of people in at least a dozen countries, where non-violent protest movements are calling for change, and where even “moderate” regimes appear tempted to try their hand at violent suppression.

The international community failed to act to protect civilians in Rwanda, and nearly 1 million people were murdered in cold blood, in medieval fashion, in just 100 days. The international community has never intervened effectively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and over the last 13 years, an estimated 6 million people, most of them civilians, have died. Darfur continues to live under threat of genocide and in the case of Libya, the international community has three things that warrant immediate action:

1. Qadhafi’s open declaration of an intent to use his military to slaughter thousands of civilians in Benghazi;
2. The invitation of the resistance movement in Libya, which has formed a transitional government;
3. The unanimous support of the Arab League and the UN Security Council for imposing a no-fly zone, using “all necessary measures” to protect civilian life.

To not act, with the historical imperatives, the moral imperatives, the democratic movement at risk, and these three factors, aligning with an international legal imperative to act, would be a morally bankrupt betrayal of our own fundamental principles as a free people that prize the value of individual human life over the whims of the powerful.

Across the middle east region, hardline regimes with more or less favorable relations with Washington are reportedly expressing concern about how the United States “abandoned” Mubarak after a 30-year relationship. These complaints show three crucial facts about the situation they find themselves in: 1) they are not evolving psychologically to keep pace with events; 2) they do not understand what gives them legitimacy; 3) they need to institute credible democratic reforms immediately, if what they want is “certainty” about US support.

It was not for Barack Obama to “stand by” or to support Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has for too long relied on the artistry of bullies and thugs to impose a regime of fear on a noble people; he is the one who sowed the seeds of his own downfall; it was his brutality that lost him support at home and abroad. Any regime that does not see this, persists in the logic of tyranny at its own peril. The language of 1776 can no longer be isolated as “western” and born of American, or French (1789), provenance; it is now a foundational component of contemporary Arab culture.

There are demonstrations in Yemen, in Jordan and in Algeria. Iran’s opposition movement is planning a massive rally for Monday, to honor those who lost their lives in the Egyptian uprising and to recognize the universal right to democratic self-determination. In Yemen, the regime has assaulted demonstrators (there are, at this hour, reports of some deaths); in Algeria, the regime is seeking to contain or disperse protesters; in Iran, the opposition has been barred from marching, and tensions are escalating.

Jordan’s King Abdullah has instituted meaningful democratic reforms and sought to provide economic relief for the Jordanian people, and for now, seems to be on the right side of history. In Kuwait, the government has issued direct payments to every resident, to help cope with the steep rise in food and fuel prices. Marches are planned for Damascus, and Khartoum has been cracking down on opposition organizing, even as the nation begins to cope with the separation of the south.

There are reports Algerian police are trying to block the entire city center of Algiers and specifically targeting women among the pro-democracy demonstrators. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s security forces and hired thugs were notorious for sexually assaulting female protesters in past attempts at organized protest, to undermine the democracy movement’s ability to gain traction among mainstream middle-class Egyptians.

There are concerns that the abduction and mistreatment of female protesters may be a deliberate strategy to harm innocent women in order to instill fear and division in the general population or even in the democracy movement itself.

In any of these cases, having good relations with the United States may or may not rely on strategic utility, but being both strategically useful and favorable toward domestic democracy protest movements would be the simplest, most sustainable way to invite substantial support from the administration of Barack Obama.

Obama’s message to hardline regimes across the world was simple from the beginning, and has been consistent: he seeks to work with leaders everywhere to foster conditions of greater freedom and prosperity for their populations. “If you unclench your fist, we will extend a hand”, he said during his inaugural address.

Egypt shows this philosophy at work. It is a simple recipe: no government is legitimate if does not rule at the consent of the governed, so such regimes are unsustainable and not worthy of sustained good will or trust. Democracy is stable, so long as those in power respect the rule of law, so allies should move in that direction.

Hosni Mubarak refused to honor the will of his people in almost any instance whatsoever over the course of 30 years. It was an incredibly poor record, and when challenged with what was obviously a sweeping nationwide movement, and a rising tide that could destabilize his nation, he continued to put his own personal status ahead of the good of his nation, and murdered as many as 300 of his fellow Egyptians.

Avoid that disgusting record of terror and criminality, and work to honor the legitimate aspirations of the governed, the sovereign people of your nation, and you will find all doors are open. It is not Barack Obama who abandoned Mubarak, but Mubarak who abandoned reason and good will, and sought to rule through acts of murder, torture and repression. He was the one who was not politically mature enough to rise to the level of his own population.

The people of Egypt today mark 14 days of nonviolent uprising against a brutal military regime that has ruled with near total power for 30 years. The peaceful protests are an astonishing coalition of educated and working-class, Muslim and Christian, secularist and religiously driven, old and young, male and female, and yet they are in fact a peaceful citizen-driven revolution against tyranny. The Mubarak regime has waged a brutal assault on peaceful demonstrators, human rights monitors and international press, and now there is concern the international attention may turn away.

Human Rights Watch is reporting that at least 297 people have been killed by the Egyptian regime since 28 January, “232 in Cairo, 52 in Alexandria and 13 in Suez”. The huge death toll comes from just three cities, and according to the human rights watchdog, “The vast majority of these deaths occurred on January 28 and 29 as a result of live gunfire.” It also appears many were killed by rubber bullets apparently fired indiscriminately at ultra-close range or when teargas canisters were fired directly at demonstrators.

The behavior of the Mubarak regime since the outbreak of the protests has been consistent and unwavering: it appears to be the behavior of a military dictatorship with feudal control over the society it rules, which sees no reason to abandon its long-running use of violence, terror and propaganda to impose its will. When news reports began to emerge showing evidence the regime was behind the killings, and that hundreds of thousands had spontaneously joined the protests, a concerted, intense and violent campaign against international journalists began, and paramilitaries began throwing firebombs into crowds of unarmed civilians.

There is concern now that the regime fully intends to push the media out —detentions have continued unabated, despite promises to release high-profile prisoners and implement reforms—, crush non-governmental human rights groups operating in Egypt, and then wage war against the protest movement. CNN’s Anderson Cooper says he feels guilty having left Egypt temporarily for his own safety and to seek medical attention, suggesting protesters may be at risk if international media turn away from Cairo or if the protesters are forced out of Tahrir Square, where media have relatively consistent access to images of events.

The revolution in Egypt is a peaceful protest movement, calling for meaningful democratic reform, and defiantly refusing to accept any promise coming from a discredited president known to rule through corruption, violence and authoritarian abuses. In Egypt, in 2011, the revolution must be televised. International media attention is the closest thing to real security the demonstrators calling for justice can hope to have, and media can help to spread the word about what is really going on under the rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Every day, more information surfaces showing evidence of brutal authoritarian crimes. On Wednesday and Thursday, it is now known, the regime threw firebombs and fired live bullets into Liberation Square, into crowds of unarmed demonstrators which included women and children.

When Mohamed El Baradei —widely seen as a credible Mubarak opponent and spokesperson for the protest movement, a Nobel laureate who used to head the International Atomic Energy Agency— met with 9 leading pro-democracy activists, every one of them was detained by Mubarak’s security forces. The regime is systematically rejecting negotiations with leading pro-democracy activists, while meeting with establishment figures who lead various opposition factions.

Protest leaders, El Baradei, the United States government and human rights watchdogs in Egypt and abroad, all agree the “transition talks” Vice President Omar Suleiman is staging are inadequate and not substantive enough in terms of implementing democratic change in Egypt. Suleiman has said the regime will not lift the state of emergency.

In a shocking moment of contempt, the new prime minister named by Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Shafiq, repeatedly ignored questions by CNN’s Candy Crowley regarding a campaign of arrests against demonstrators and journalists, Shafiq flippantly remarked ”Frankly speaking, if there is some problems, it’s not intended at all, my dear.”

Shafiq’s rhetoric suggests the government either claims to have no ability whatsoever to control the armed paramilitaries and security forces working for the government, or no control over its own authoritarian reflexes. He seemed almost to be laughing as he said “some problems”. Anderson Cooper reported estimates run as high as 1.5 million security agents employed by the regime’s secret police forces.

There is a fundamental logical disconnect between the rhetoric of the regime and its behavior, between the regime’s claim of total incapacity to prevent violent assaults on unarmed civilians and its claim that it alone has the unique ability to prevent “chaos”. And each of these logically incoherent rhetorical flourishes has been used to cover up for brutal anti-democratic measures, which in at least 297 cases have resulted in death for innocent Egyptians.

The world media has a moral obligation not to leave Tahrir Square, not to shift the focus away from the ongoing nonviolent uprising against Hosni Mubarak and his regime. Human rights organizations describe long-running and systematic detention without process and torture, sometimes for nothing more than association with a suspect.

According to Human Rights Watch:

Torture, although it is strictly forbidden under Egyptian law and the international human rights treaties Egypt has signed, has been a widespread and persistent phenomenon in the country, particularly during interrogation of security suspects. Methods of torture include beatings with fists, feet, leather straps, sticks, and electric cables; suspension in contorted and painful positions accompanied by beatings; the application of electric shocks; and sexual intimidation and violence. The government-appointed National Council for Human Rights, in its first annual report released in April 2005, acknowledged that torture is part of “normal investigative practice” in Egypt.

If the protests in Tahrir Square are dispersed, without a significant change in the makeup of the governing political structure, those who have defiantly confronted the regime will most likely be detained and may be subjected to ill treatment in the “normal” atmosphere of extreme violence and total impunity, in which the security forces of Hosni Mubarak have operated.

The government is systematically and decisively ignoring even its own prohibition against torture, and has blocked every attempt to investigate incidents of torture. “To date, Egypt has refused to permit the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit the country,” according to the Human Rights Watch report Black Hole, on the use of torture in Egypt.

There is a fundamental ethical and human obligation to bear witness, to keep attention focused on the fate of those brave souls who are staring down the brutality and impunity of a military dictatorship that disguises itself in the trappings of civilian government and business development. International media, especially television cameras, have an obligation to ensure that they do not walk away from those innocent people who have determined that now is the time for their people to say no to tyranny and degradation.

On Tuesday, more than one million Egyptians turned out for mass demonstrations in cities across the country. On Friday, crowds massing in central Cairo and Alexandria were reported to be even larger than the Tuesday crowds, despite brutal and bloody assaults by pro-Mubarak militia on Wednesday and Thursday. It is now day 13 of the Egyptian transition to demonstrations, and opposition leaders are reportedly negotiating with the government to shape an orderly and peaceful process of transition.

The government of the United States is doing a very necessary tightrope walk, supporting the cause of the pro-democracy demonstrators, while avoiding the political mistake of posing as the driver of the situation in Egypt, but has reportedly urged Pres. Mubarak to resign, in the interests of both his people’s democratic rights and his country’s stability. Mubarak seems to have taken the view that it falls to him, an unelected ruler in office for 30 years, notorious for rigging elections and banning all opposition, to oversee the process of devolving power to the people.

One observer has said leaders across the region must be wary of what seems to be a region-wide stress on populations no longer able to pay the high and rising costs of “bread and food and pharaoh”. While political infighting goes on and disputes between the interim government and the most radical protesters persist, Tunisia appears stable, functional and prosperous just weeks after its own popular uprising against an authoritarian president.

On the ground, according to all accounts, Egyptians appear convinced the time has passed for the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. The revolution is not just the masses of people gathering in Cairo or Alexandria or Suez; it is the socio-political dynamic whereby the people of Egypt have taken control of the right to organize political discourse, the right to plan their future, the right to join together online and in public and to confront the abuses of the powerful.

The Guardian has reported:

Mahmoud, a 35-year-old teacher, talks of a revolution, but what he means is not so much people on the streets toppling a hated figure as how they see their relationship with this government and all future governments. “People have changed. They were scared. They are no longer scared. We are not afraid of his system any longer and when we stopped being afraid we knew we would win,” he said. “We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. We will not be afraid to say when we think the president is wrong or the government is bad. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds. Mubarak can stay for days or weeks but he cannot change that. We cannot go back.”

There is another vision of how this kind of transition can take place, one which privileges a specific vision of “order” and “stability”, and that is the vision Hosni Mubarak seems intent on fostering. The Mubarak vision now seems clearly to be that only by a process of disciplined devolution of power, gradually and even grudgingly, with the leverage of the military and an aggressive police force with emergency powers, can democracy safely emerge from an oppressive political status quo.

Mubarak seems intent on using the illusion of order to continue to aggrandize his own legacy and to prevent his people’s taking responsibility for their own future. Illusion, because the pathological dysfunction inherent in Mubarak’s style of authoritarian rule is not order; it is the absence of complication based on the imposition of fear and silence. And that is the source of chaos, suffering and disorder in Egypt.

What we have seen over the last 13 days is a government committed to a pathological refusal to deal honestly with the rights, complaints and just humanitarian demands of its people. After three decades in “emergency rule”, Mubarak continues to allege that any leadership other than his would breed chaos.

This fact itself is the unnamed elephant stomping around in the beating heart of the nation, and it is now openly being named: Mubarak’s 3o-year dictatorship has either failed to bring order, and therefore must end, or it has long since exhausted its usefulness and become abusive, and therefore must end.

The clarity of this view is demonstrated by the fact that the only unrest since the start of the protests has been provoked by hired gangs working for the government, while the pro-democracy demonstrators have cooperated with the military in Tahrir Square and labored diligently to ensure that no weapons enter the square and no violence breaks out.

While the regime has kidnapped and interrogated journalists and human rights activists at secret locations, and paramilitaries have waged deadly assaults on unarmed demonstrators and burned media offices, the crowds of ordinary Egyptians gathering in Tahrir Square have instituted a process of detention for thugs and troublemakers, with the movement pressing for civility and transparency.

Today, it emerged that throughout the two days of violent and direct military assault on the demonstrators and journalists at Tahrir Square, there were women and children huddled near the center of the square, under direct assault from government linked paramilitaries. If it were the proper way forward for the Mubarak government to gently devolve power to the people, could a government that sends thugs armed with machetes, firearms and fire-bombs to attack unarmed protesters, women and children, be trusted?

The question all leaders involved, from the Egyptian government to opposition and protest leaders and foreign diplomats and heads of state, must be asking is: is this transition in the spirit of a people-centered revolution, or is it a clumsy process of devolution managed by a discredited regime? The difference is meaningful, both in fact and form, and the Egyptian people deserve the respect inherent in winning recognition for this great cultural transformation they have undertaken with such courage and determination.

If we look back through history, the great successes in transformative change are solidified by governments that respect the primacy of the people over any administrative regime in the democratic process:

• It was a people’s movement and a transformational political philosophy, not a process of authoritarian devolution that allowed thirteen British colonies in North America to become the United States;
• It was Mohandas Gandhi, his philosophy of satyagraha or non-violent resistance, and not the British parliament, that won India its independence;
• It was the dignity and example of Nelson Mandela, and the justice of the popular uprising against apartheid, not the consent of the apartheid regime, that transformed South Africa into the Rainbow Nation;
• It was the sovereign demand of the Chilean people, and their commitment to justice, and not the wisdom or sanction of a military dictator, that ended a 17-year rule;
• It was People Power, the just and transcendent demands of millions of ordinary Filipinos, and not the generosity of Ferdinand Marcos, that ended his brutal regime…

The question of Egypt’s transition is not one of which authority is best suited to see through a controlled transition to an approved government; it must be a political revolution, in which the agents of power of the old regime give up their hold on power, asking and deserving nothing in return. It is their basic human responsibility to cede to the demand for humanity, liberty and justice, in the Egyptian system.

The pro-democracy movement has shown itself to be committed, thoughtful, peaceful and responsible. The regime has shown itself to be unwilling to respect fundamental natural laws of human dignity and mutual respect; it has murdered its own people; it continues to lie to the world about the nature of the violent crackdown, and is led by a man accused of funneling over $70 billion in money and assets to himself and his family.

One woman has reportedly been camping int he square with her three-year-old son for six days. Her husband is with them and has been making sure to go periodically for supplies. She told the press that she is “doing this for my son.” An accountant, Amira Ismael says her son’s future life will be made or broken by whether or not he is forced to live under the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

“Mubarak,” she says, “has to go because with Mubarak my son has no future, no life. We can’t afford to send him to the good school and Mubarak makes the government schools bad because he wants to keep the people stupid. The government is Mubarak’s government, not our government. I will stay here until Mubarak leaves. I will stay here days, months, years.”

The revolution is in the mind of the Egyptian people, in the nature of their discourse and their aspirations, in their willingness to focus their energies on coming together to negotiate the building of a vibrant and diverse civil society in which every citizen has the right and the guaranteed freedom to express his or her views, to gather with fellow citizens to organize or to effect change, to seek office or to cast votes in a legitimate, free and fair election, to be seen, to be heard, to be fully human in the way he or she chooses.

The revolution is the demand that society seek and honestly move toward justice and fairness, at all times, and without persecution or violence. The transition must be led by people with no connection whatsoever to the abuses of the past.

Over the last two days, Hosni Mubarak has made Cairo the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. After Mubarak’s new prime minister issued an “apology” for the lethal violence waged by pro-Mubarak gangs on Wednesday and into Thursday’s pre-dawn hours, the government appeared to be engaged in an even more intense campaign of violent assaults on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators and journalists.

Throughout the day Thursday, forces loyal to Pres. Hosni Mubarak —acting in lock-step with statements by both Mubarak and his new vice president that reporters and democracy activists are “foreign agents” and enemies of Egypt— escalated attacks against journalists and protesters, beating, stabbing, kidnapping and persecuting them in an apparent attempt to “eliminate witnesses” to whatever is about to follow.

Mubarak and his government have seized public media and are using television and radio to issue fabrications and propaganda alleging “foreign agents” are instigating the protests and trying to destabilize Egypt and subject Egyptians to violence, scarcity and chaos. There are reports the government is using Internet media to spread lies and calling on Egyptians to target foreign journalists and dissidents and to treat Friday’s protests as a dangerous even staged by foreign spies.

Mubarak’s campaign against the media appears designed to “clear the battlefield” of any obstruction to an extreme and bloody totalitarian massacre of his opponents. Seasoned war correspondents, including journalists who have studied or reported on violent extremist groups across the region, say they have never seen such a pervasive and coordinated campaign to assault journalists.

Journalists from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United States, Bahrain, Qatar, Russia, France, and elsewhere have been targeted for attack and/or kidnapped and held unlawfully or interrogated by paid gangs or by agents of the Mubarak regime. Major global news networks have been so consistently and gravely threatened with brute force they even took down live feeds showing Tahrir Square at a distance Thursday.

Cairo has degenerated from a city gripped by peaceful protests to a place where an exhausted and morally bankrupt totalitarian regime is now waging a lascivious assault on humanity itself. Mubarak’s character as leader appears to be the driving force in what is a mounting tragedy, and it is the character of a man who reacts to an historic opportunity for his nation to be transformed for the better by first ceding partially, appointing a reputed torture chief to be his vice president, then sending snipers and thugs to spill the blood of his people.

Since the beginning of the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations, Mubarak’s paramilitary forces may have killed more than 300 of their fellow Egyptians. Death counts for last week’s nationwide rash of violence range from 100 to 300, while the death count for Wednesday and Thursday is currently estimated between 8 and 13. There are fears that many people have yet to be heard from and may be suffering from untreated wounds, or worse.

Now Hosni Mubarak is using state radio and TV to incite violence against “foreigners” and dissidents, using the strategy Slobodan Milosevic used to foment genocide in Yugoslavia and the leaders of the Rwandan genocide employed to seduce their followers into murdering family, friends and neighbors. Mubarak has flagrantly sought to turn all of Egypt into a country overrun by a violent, visceral fear of foreigners, of the press or of human rights activists.

In the last two days, Mubarak’s regime has organized and carried out a comprehensive undercover war against the press, with agents provocateurs —many reported to have been carrying government ID— not only surrounding and intimidating, but attacking with deadly weapons, members of the press from across the world.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has published this summary of assaults:

• The Washington Post told CPJ that the paper’s Cairo bureau chief, Leila Fadel, and Linda Davidson, a photographer, were among a number of journalists detained this morning. Their unidentified driver and translator were also picked up, and the driver was beaten. Fadel and Davidson were freed late today, but the status of the driver and translator was unclear.

• Corban Costa of Brazilian Radio Nacional and cameraman Gilvan Rocha of TV Brasil were detained, blindfolded, and had their passports and equipment seized, according to Brazilian news accounts. The two were reportedly held overnight without water in a windowless room in a Cairo police station. An officer forced the reporters to sign a statement in Arabic saying they would immediately leave Egypt for Brazil, reports said. “We had to trust what he said, and sign the document, “ Corban said. They said they will be sent back to Brazil on Friday.

• Polish state television TVP said that five journalists working in two crews–Krzysztof Ko?osionek and  Piotr Bugalski; and Micha? Jankowski, Piotr Górecki, and Pawe? Rolak–were detained in Cairo and that one of their cameras was smashed. Krzysztof Ko?osionek and Piotr Bugalski were released, according to Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

• The New York Times reported today that two of its reporters were released after they were detained overnight in Cairo.

• Canadian Globe and Mail journalist Sonia Verma tweeted today that she was being taken “into some kind of custody.” She later reported that she was held by the military for three hours.

• CNN-IBN reported that video journalist Rajesh Bharadwajm was “taken away” from Tahrir Square by military forces. Bharadwajm’s status was not immediately clear.

• Maurice Sarfatti, who writes under the name Serge Dumont, was arrested twice within the past day, according to a statement from the daily Le Soir. The Belgian journalist, who was freed late today, works for a number of European publications.

• A German freelance journalist was briefly detained between Alexandria and Cairo, Frank-Dieter Freiling, a senior vice president of ZDF-German Television, told CPJ in an e-mail.

• Three Romanian TV crews were detained Wednesday and Thursday in Cairo, according to Antena 3 producer Vlad Petreanu, who e-mailed CPJ with details. On Wednesday, Adelin Petrisor, a reporter for the state-owned broadcaster TVR, and an unnamed cameraman were detained by Cairo police, searched, and later released. On Thursday, police detained Realitatea TV reporter Cristian Zarescu and his unidentified cameraman. Authorities confiscated their tapes before releasing them. Also on Thursday, Antena 3 reporter Carmen Avram and cameraman Cristian Tamas, were stopped by police. The men sent a text message late today saying they were being held for questioning.

• Mubarak supporters stormed Cairo’s Hilton Hotel searching for journalists, Al-Jazeera reported today. Journalists inside the hotel posted a Tumblr entry that said: “About 20 foreign journalists are currently holed up.” No injuries were immediately reported, but the journalists’ status was unclear.

• Rachel Beth Anderson, a freelance videographer in Cairo, tweeted that “cameras & phones disappearing from journo hotel rooms in the Semiramis hotel! We’re locked inside by staff who says its orders from outside.”

• Fox News reported that correspondent Greg Palkot and producer Olaf Wiig were hospitalized after being beaten by protesters in Cairo.

• The Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported that its correspondent in Egypt, Bert Sundström, is recovering from stab wounds to the stomach in a Cairo hospital. STV said it lost touch with Sundström as he was reporting in Tahrir Square and when they finally reached him on his cell phone, a man answered and told the station that he had been “taken by the military.” STV’s Ingrid Thörnqvist told the online Aftonbladet: “He is seriously injured, but the condition is stable.”

• The Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini said its correspondent in Cairo, Petros Papaconstantino, was “briefly hospitalized with a stab wound to the leg” after an attack by Mubarak supporters in Tahrir Square, according to The Associated Press. The reporter wrote on Kathimerini‘s site: “I was spotted by Mubarak supporters. They … beat me with batons on the head and stabbed me lightly in the leg. Some soldiers intervened, but Mubarak’s supporters took everything I had on me in front of the soldiers.” AP also reported that an unidentified Greek newspaper photographer was punched in the face.

• The Associated Press reported that CBS reporter Mark Strassman and a camera operator were attacked while trying to photograph people throwing rocks. Strassman told AP that demonstrators punched and sprayed with Mace his camera operator, whom he did not identify. “As soon as one started, it was like blood in the water,” he said.

• Dima Salem, a reporter for Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television, was attacked by pro-Mubarak supporters who took her cameraman’s equipment and tried to beat her, the station said. Witnesses helped them escape, Al-Arabiya reported on the air.

• Two Al-Jazeera English journalists were attacked by Mubarak supporters, the Qatar-based satellite station reported on the air. Three other network reporters were detained in Cairo, the station reported. No names were given.

• Alfred Yaghobzadeh, a French photographer working for SIPA Press agency, was beaten while covering street protests, according to AP, which moved a photo of the journalist being aided by witnesses.

• The AP reported that men wielding sticks disrupted operations and seized satellite equipment at one its locations.

• A BBC producer tweeted that Margaret Evans, a CBC reporter, was forced to hand over recording equipment to military forces in Tahrir Square.

• Margaret Warner, a senior correspondent for the U.S.-based “PBS Newshour,” had her camera confiscated. Warner tweeted today: “PBS NewsHour arrives Cairo. Camera gear inspected & confiscated. 2 hours & we’re still haggling.”

• At least four Spanish journalists were attacked in Cairo, according to news reports. Joan Roura, a correspondent for TV3, a Catalan public television station, was attacked by men who tried to steal his mobile phone while he was conducting a live broadcast for the 24 hours news channel. Assaults were also reported against Sal Emergui, a correspondent for Catalan radio RAC1; Gemma Saura, a correspondent for the newspaper La Vanguardia; and Mikel Ayestaran, a correspondent for the newspaper Vocento/ABC.

• Several Turkish journalists were attacked by Mubarak supporters, according to news reports. Cumali Önal of Cihan News Agency and Do?an Ertu?rul of the Turkish Star Dailywere attacked and beaten by pro-Mubarak supporters on Wednesday. Both were in stable condition today.

• Men with knives seized Erol Candabako?lu, a Turkish Fox TV reporter, along with his unidentified cameraman and driver on Wednesday while they were filming in the Boulaq neighborhood of Cairo, according to news reports. The Turkish news agency Anatolia reported that Egyptian police later freed them.

• Metin Turan, a reporter for the Turkish state-run TRT channel, was assaulted today and beaten by Mubarak supporters, who seized his camera, money, and cell phone,according to the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman. The reporter escaped and sought refuge at the Turkish Embassy; embassy officials told the paper they would take Turan to the hospital because he suffered from wounds and bruises. Isa Simsek, a photographer for Today’s Zaman, was also assaulted today by a Mubarak supporter, according to news reports.

• Popular Egyptian blogger Mahmoud (aka “Sandmonkey”) tweeted: ”I was ambushed & beaten by the police, my phone confiscated, my car ripped apar& supplies taken.” He said he was briefly detained.

• Wally Nell, a photographer for the California-based Zuma Press agency, was wounded under the 6th October Bridge at the Corniche on the Nile in downtown Cairo, according to accounts posted by family and friends. Those accounts described Zell as having suffered multiple pellet wounds after being fired upon by police.

• At least four contributors to Demotix, a U.K.-based citizen journalism website and photo agency, were also attacked, Turi Munthe, Demotix CEO, told CPJ in an e-mail. The four included Nour El Refai and Mohamed Elmaymony.

• The British-based communications company Vodafone accused the Egyptian government of hijacking its text messaging services and sending out text messages supportive of Mubarak, according to news reports.

• Multiple journalists for state-owned or government-aligned media have resigned or have refused to work after the government put pressure on them to sanitize the news or to not report on violence against demonstrators, several CPJ sources said. Shahira Amin, an anchor on the state-owned Nile TV channel, said on the air: “I refuse to be a hypocrite. I feel liberated.”

A senior Egyptian judge has called for the indictment of of Hosni Mubarak for crimes against humanity, saying what occurred at Tahrir Square on Wednesday and Thursday was clearly “a massacre” and must be described as such. The International Criminal Court could begin proceedings against the dictator immediately, given the wide array of evidence mounting against him.

The US Department of State has obtained information that the Egyptian Interior Ministry was responsible for ordering the mass detention of journalists. That information may ultimately tip the balance of power in Egypt, as those under Mubarak and in charge of the military see the long-time ruler’s position is untenable.

There are reports that foreigners, including unarmed students seeking to escape the violence and make their way to the airport, may also have been targeted for attack. Foreign governments now have to consider not only whether Egyptians are in jeopardy, but whether their own people are coming under violent assault by agents of the regime.

The governments of the United States and the European Union are reportedly meeting to discuss policies for diplomatic intervention to help speed the process of democratic transition, and there are calls for the Arab League to intervene, to show a united front and in the interests of the Egyptian people and the region, demand the removal of Pres. Hosni Mubarak from power.

There are reports today that Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, has gone to Tahrir Square to join the hundreds of thousands massing there for the “day of departure” rally, in which pro-democracy demonstrators, reportedly including a Catholic cardinal and a top Muslim cleric, who were seen holding hands and calling for national unity.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who was attacked by gangs of pro-Mubarak forces for the second consecutive day, on Thursday, was forced to broadcast from “an undisclosed location”, describing himself as “scared” about what might be about to happen and saying ordinary Egyptians were becoming afraid of what the government might do. He described the day as “the second day of all-out attacks” against pro-democracy and human rights activists and foreign and domestic journalists.

Field reports found doctors were treating many of the demonstrators for gunshot wounds, the shots having been fired by snipers and pro-Mubarak gangs.

Footage was shown in which a police van clearly speeds its way through a crowd of pedestrians, mowing down several and not stopping.

The degeneration of civil society in Egypt is absolutely owing to the failings and moral perversions of an illegitimate regime and of its leader Hosni Mubarak, a man the whole world now sees has been thoroughly corrupted by 30 years of unaccountable rule and arbitrary exercise of power.

A prominent Egyptian scholar, Fouad Ajami, told CNN on Thursday that “last night we entered the dark period” in which “we saw really naked the cruelty of the regime”. He said Mubarak’s cruelty and violence turned the peaceful protests into “a fight for the country”. Where Egyptians were using peaceful means to call for a change in the country’s form of government, the government is using machetes, Molotov cocktails, and gunfire, to kill Egyptians in the streets.

The International Criminal Court should begin collecting evidence from every possible witness as to the nature of Mubarak’s exercise of power, not only during the last ten days, but throughout his period of uninterrupted “emergency” rule. The United Nations should immediately begin drafting a new treaty declaring any prolonged period of “emergency rule” a crime against humanity and resolving to investigate abuses committed under all such regimes.

It is fundamentally unfair to the victims of such brutality that the world wait until millions of souls are steeled with the uncommon courage required to go into the streets and face down a potential onslaught from hired mercenaries and secret police. To overthrow a dictator, and avoid the defeat of a Tianenmen Square, Egypt’s people are trying to get not one, but literally millions of brave citizens to stare down the symbol of state-sponsored violence.

In 1989, in Beijing, it was one man against a column of tanks. In 2011, in Cairo, it is hundreds of thousands of brave souls against gangs of paramilitaries hired to intimidate, to injure and to kill, in order to defend a dictator. Indeed, while the 2nd of February was the day Mubarak sent his forces into Tahrir Square to spill Egyptian blood, the 4th should be the day the people’s interim government is installed, and Hosni Mubarak exiled forever to face criminal charges.

Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House budget committee, gave a vague and meandering response to Pres. Obama’s address, first saying Republicans want to work with the president, then defaming him as a spendthrift socialist bent on destroying American prosperity. He laced his remarks with Republican talking points from the 2010 election cycle, repeating key distortions that have been discredited in the mainstream press.

He suggested that because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, “millions of people will lose the coverage they currently have”. He also alleged that job-creation is being stifled, as businesses beg for relief, even as businesses enjoy a major new tax credit for buying health insurance coverage for their employees. He continued the biting partisan tone of his address, charging that ”The president’s law is accelerating our country toward bankruptcy.”

He is the man who introduced the of gutting vital government programs like Social Security, replacing Medicare with coupons to get a discount from private insurers who would be free to deny coverage for “pre-existing conditions”. At the time he released his “Roadmap for America’s Future”, Republicans were reported to have determined it was a “roadmap for political disaster”.

Today, the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to give Rep. Ryan unilateral power to set all levels for government spending for an entire year, should the two houses fail to agree on a comprehensive federal budget after one attempt. He artfully masked his radical agenda, saying that he wanted to “to secure our borders, to protect innocent life, to uphold our laws,” adding that Republicans want to “provide a safety net for those who cannot fend for themselves”.

He then went on to argue that social safety nets have made “this is a century in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock”, lulling generations of Americans into a comfortable luxury, paid for by taxpayer dollars. The absurdity of this remark is only made more severe by the fact that Mr. Ryan is arguing that our nation is already incapable of paying even for the relatively limited amount offered through those programs he aims to slash.

In fact, his reasoning is that the programs must be slashed in part because they cannot be paid for anyway. Where would the vast sums come from that would provide so much wealth and comfort as to lull a generation into a lazy sleep?

He recognized that the American people treat both parties with great suspicion, and urged viewers to “Hold all of us accountable.” He then followed this pledge to be worthy by claiming that in 2010, the Democratic Congress was responsible for an “unprecedented failure”, when it did not pass a budget for the president to sign—a failure which actually resulted from unprecedented Republican obstruction, by way of filibuster, in the Senate.

Throughout his remarks, Ryan’s tone was condescending and patronizing, as if he expected his audience was 1) not very bright, 2) not able to understand the challenges of government, and 3) easily susceptible to flowery innuendos about who is right and who is wrong in the ideological debate about budget policy.

He suggested that it was government that wasted money, “broke our trust” and ruined a booming economy, though it was the same laissez-faire policies he now calls for that allowed the Bush administration to balloon the deficit, fund two trillion-dollar wars and give rise to the financial crash of 2008.

“Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on Earth,” he said. He added a wink to the right-wing need to believe in an “exceptional” America. This was a partisan attack, commonly used by Republicans and conservatives who argue that Democrats are not patriotic and that their wish to see an America that lives up to all of its values means that they do not believe in “American exceptionalism”.

The attack is doubly vicious, however, when one recognizes that it relies on his assumption that the conservative ideologues to whom he is speaking are incapable of understanding that to be exceptional is to be uniquely virtuous or talented, while “exceptionalism” means a stubborn unwillingness to obey the laws of common decency we expect of all humanity.

It should be seen as being in extremely poor taste for Ryan to have revived this tired and unthinking argument, especially given the unifying and forward-thinking tone of Pres. Obama’s address. But Rep. Ryan favors ending Social Security as we know it for everyone 55 and younger, and so he cloaked that agenda in vague and misleading language apparently intended to suggest he loves everything we all love and would never hurt anyone who is vulnerable, even as he used the official Republican response to slander the president, lie to the American people and muddy the mood of a new year in which innovation and collaboration could be the watchwords.

The American right has been relentless in its assault on the character, talents and leadership qualities of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter since the Republican campaign against him in the 1980 presidential election cycle. Their attacks have rested on the assertion that his altruistic politics, his emphasis on responsible governance, and his wariness of handing public services to private profit-makers, were a general failure of leadership. In fact, their attacks on Carter are rooted in a rhetorical sympathy for the fundamentalist clerics who took power in Iran.

During the years 1978 and 1979, Iran —one of the world’s major oil producers— was convulsed by a political crisis of surprising speed and mind-bending complexity. A decades-long dictatorship, considered benevolent by western powers largely because of the dynamics of Cold War politics, had persecuted ordinary Iranians and sown anger and unrest that bubbled up in a popular revolution. But not unlike the Russian revolution of 1917 or the French Revolution of 1789, totalitarian elements soon took control of the popular movement.

The Grand Ayatollah Syed Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini marshaled the popular sentiment against the dictatorship of the Shah to win support for an Islamic Republic, which —though its constitution provides for democratic protections including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the right to protest and to govern the government by popular elections— he molded into a theocratic state with power so centralized it amounted to a dictatorship by clerics.

The result was what is widely known as the “Second Oil Shock” of the 1970s, which pushed oil and transport costs far higher and hampered economic growth in oil-intensive industrialized nations, like the United States. Pres. Carter had no control over this, and could not rely on the cooperation of oil giants to lessen the political blow Khomeini’s revolution caused to western powers. It was not a failure of leadership by Carter but a failure of collaborative entrepreneurship (responsible “corporate citizenship” would be another way to say it) that led to the United States’ economic woes of those years.

As if to cover up the fact that the economic fallout was a direct result of decades’ worth of anti-democracy, pro-oil policy, nakedly promoted by Republican presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford) and aided along by Democratic presidents (Kennedy, Johnson), the Republican campaign for Ronald Reagan’s election focused on Carter as the sole pivot on which the nation’s economic fates would turn. It was a lie, and economists and politicians knew it was, but Carter was forced to respond to the campaign tactic with more campaign tactics, and the media validated the fallacy by trying to assess his likelihood of success.

Carter failed to overcome the rhetorical machinery of the Republican campaign against him, but many independent analysts believe he would have been likely to win in 1980 had not Ted Kennedy’s primary campaign so undermined his status as Democratic party leader. Whatever the political consequences of the campaign, an honest look at the 1978-1980 period has to consider that the campaign against Carter was Machiavellian and in many ways anti-American.

It allowed people who called themselves “conservatives” to attack the president of the United States as if he were a sworn enemy of democracy in the midst of a global Cold War against ideological Communist totalitarianism. Not only did Carter’s opponents on the Republican side not support the commander-in-chief, they sought to bury the true record of economic data linking the nation’s crisis to oil-trade fallout from Khomeini’s revolution and so sought to exonerate Khomeini and the oil industry while blaming the leader of the free world for their bad-faith actions.

Can we assume the neo-conservative ascendancy was rooted in some sort of inborn respect for popular and faith-based movements like Khomeini’s? Obviously not. We must, then, consider that the shrewd political bargain, which was also a karmic bargain, made by the Republicans, the neo-conservatives and the Christian right, as they aligned in a coordinated effort to assassinate the character of the sitting president had to include a willingness to elevate or insulate Khomeini against western detractors and allegations of creeping totalitarianism.

Conspiracy theorists will immediately take such analysis to mean there was a deliberate attempt to use the situation to sidle up to Khomeini in hopes of winning favor for the oil giants, or at the very least to allow for this in hopes the new theocratic state might somehow turn out to be another “benevolent dictatorship” happy to do business with the oil giants and help secure western power.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Khomeini benefited both domestically and internationally by the Republican attack on Carter; it legitimized his seizure of power, both by way of allowing him to disassociate himself from Iran’s oil interest and align himself with the need to combat a brutal police state notorious for midnight disappearances, torture and persecution of even moderate critics.

There was a fundamentally dishonest debate taking place in American political circles, as the Republican party sought to legitimate the “voodoo economics” —as George H.W. Bush called it— of candidate Ronald Reagan by slandering the economic policies of the sitting president. That fundamentally dishonest debate, the flawed premise and the obscuring of key economic truths, helped distort the international political debate, giving rhetorical cover to Khomeini’s radical co-opting of the pro-democracy Iranian people’s movement.

Now, thirty years on, the legacy of that period continues to be obscured by nakedly false rhetoric from politicians who still seek to legitimate the fictional universe of Reaganomics, which though it caused three recessions in 9 years they persist in claiming is an ingenious strategy for economic growth.

The rhetorical logic of raw deception and extremist fear-mongering is so mutually useful to the anti-Carter voodoo economists and the clerical regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, that it is ultimately undeniable that there was a mutually beneficial spiral of attack and elevation, by which the two fundamentalist forces built their own power-base while unfairly defaming opponents within their own domestic political system.

As the dawn of the 21st century turns to morning, and the “war on terror” has become a global quest for security of established political systems against destabilization, the safety of citizens and the sanctity of democracy depend equally on our having a public sphere that is capable of telling the truth. Politicians who argue that the truth cannot be told because there will be consequences are moral cowards who are openly willing to violate their oath to serve the Constitution and the people of the United States.

Pres. Obama has been brutally slandered for trying to be forthright about the crises the nation is facing, and Republican candidates like Pat Toomey —widely seen as a fundamentalist of the pseudo-Christian voodoo economist band— are making the absurd allegation that he laid plans for economic hardship and that other Democrats “voted for all of it”, as if to wipe away the revolting legacy of the Bush years. Astonishingly, from the moment of Obama’s inauguration, the Republican party openly declared its intention to lie, cheat and steal its way to victory in the 2010 elections.

The rule would be: whatever Obama favors, we must oppose, not just as bad policy but as a fundamental betrayal of all that is American. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have devoted their political legacies to this cause, openly embracing extremist rhetoric and talking about the enemy here at home, stoking inter-ethnic paranoia and working to cast the most popular elected official in US history (Obama received nearly 70 million votes, far more than any candidate for any office in US history) as a crouching tiger waiting to devour anything Americans hold dear.

This kind of rhetoric is the same sort that elevated Khomeini, so he and his revolution could be seen as a credible alternative to competing ideologies of the Cold War superpowers. Fundamentalist Islam became a global alternative and spread to nations with no sound reason to embrace extremism. Khomeini was made wealthy by the oil-centric economics of the voodoo gang, and his platform for propagandizing whole populations that might otherwise have favored American democratic aims was vastly expanded.

Words have consequences, and politicians have to be responsible for the words they choose. But media also have to consider more intelligently the weight of the words chosen by politicians. Bill Clinton’s “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” ultimately carries far less historical weight than his “building a bridge to the 21st century”, and Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” was ultimately more significant than anyone imagined because the guru himself fell prey to that temptation of financial ideologues, when he supported radical measures that would gut the regulatory infrastructure of American finance and enable predatory lending to spin out of control.

Politicians given to extremism are not serious about leadership; they are serious about propaganda, and their closest allies in the political realm are their fellow extremists: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney needed Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and so they systematically elevated them, granting them powers they could never have by virtue of their insane bloodlust. The Reagan team and its vilification of Jimmy Carter, for having the weakness of character to actually attempt the right course of action, did the same with Khomeini, Qadhafi and even Saddam Hussein.

The emotional insecurity of this tendency is a whole other can of worms that would be worth exploring at length elsewhere, but deserves at least brief mention here: for self-defined “strongmen” of international political rhetoric, especially those given to the blind-faith needed for avid support of the voodoo economist mindset, the depth of emotional insecurity required to so relentlessly elevate radical dictators and plutocrats is harrowing to contemplate. There is at once a total faith in the right and the inevitability of American power and a total terror at the notion that any opposing forces might exist on the margins of international politics.

Those diplomats and intelligence officers who understood that marginalizing and containing works better than direct confrontation, fear-mongering and the elevation of the critic, worked diligently during the last several decades to prevent the voodoo mindset from infesting American politics from top to bottom, but the struggle continues. There are saboteurs who wish to turn the adversarial democracy of the American Constitution into a bloodsport where anyone’s opponent becomes an enemy of the state: that kind of extremism portends the dissolution of real democracy in America, and every red-blooded conservative should join with every blue-ocean progressive in marginalizing those elements in our political sphere.

• With some editorial collaboration from J.E. Robertson

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev has said Israel will attempt to intercept the MV Rachel Corrie, a ship carrying humanitarian cargo and aid workers into the Gaza Strip. Tensions with Turkey are reaching fever pitch, as Turkey’s prime minister vows the killing of Turkish nationals by the IDF will never be forgotten, and there is now heated political discussion in Turkey about whether to send warships to escort the next flotilla of aid-bearing ships that sail for Gaza.

When challenged about how Israel would respond if Turkey sent one or more warships to escort a flotilla of humanitarian aid vessels, Mr. Regev rejected the assertion as “hypothetical” and suggested this situation should not lead to such a serious confrontation. He also said Israel had nothing to apologize to Turkey for, asserting that “six interceptions” were done, and only the one resulted in fatalities; Regev suggested the aid workers on board attacked the commandos with potentially lethal force.

The crisis is severe enough that according to Newsweek:

El estado de Arizona —antiguamente parte del territorio español que vino a ser México, y uno de los estados de mayor población de ascendencia hispana— ha legalizado el perfilamiento racial y la persecución sistemática de los inmigrantes. La ley denominada como propuesta SB1070 no sólo permite, sino exige, a los agentes de policía estatales y municipales pedir los documentos migratorios a cualquier individuo que se les parezca “razonablemente” sospechoso de ser indocumentado.

La ley cambia fundamentalmente ciertas normas históricas de la relación entre los estados y el gobierno federal, declarando ilegal al nivel estatal estar en terreno de Arizona sin documentos federales de inmigración legal. Más allá de eso, declara ilegal que ningún agente del gobierno federal intente prevenir que los oficiales locales cumplan con el trabajo exigido por esta ley.

Varias organizaciones profesionales policiales han declarado su oposición fundamental a la lógica de la nueva ley anti-inmigrante, en parte porque les parece pedir un comportamiento que viola protecciones constitucionales de la libertad individual, en parte porque pronostican un deterioro en la relación entre la policía y la comunidad, y en parte porque la ley contiene medidas que agreden directamente a los policías en su trabajo diario.

La ley arizonense anti-inmigrante incluye unas cláusulas fuertemente anti-policía, que permiten a los ciudadanos meter a juicio civil a la policía si sienten que no está ejerciendo lo bastante agresivamente sus nuevos poderes bajo esta ley. Además, la ley garantiza que si en uno de esos juicios gane el quejante, éste recibirá de vuelta, pagado por la policía o el estado, no sólo todos los gastos del proceso, sino también de sus consejeros legales.

Esto último, según varias fuentes policiales y/o con experiencia de procesos civiles, hará que sea tan fácil montar campañas agresivas de ese tipo, que la policía se encontrará constantemente bajo amenaza de proceso jurídico, sólo por respetar protecciones constitucionales, como el derecho de estar seguros en persona, propiedad y papeles, sin riesgo de revisión o inspección sin causa ni orden jurídico.

La ley es radical, o incluso radicalista, por principio, en otros sentidos también. Permite, por ejemplo, no sólo que los policías estatales y/o municipales puedan exigirle los documentos a cualquiera que sospechen “razonablemente” que sea un inmigrante indocumentado, sino también que lo detengan sin causa ni orden jurídico —el texto de la ley [PDF] es explícito: “A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES.”—, y que incluso transporten al detenido a otras jurisdicciones o a otros estados, para entregarle a la custodia federal.

Este poder, de máxima discreción o arbitrariedad, es una expansión radical del poder policial de decidir, sin supervisión ni proceso, el destino de una persona que no ha hecho nada más que “parecer” ser indocumentado. Para algunos críticos, y para los defensores de los derechos civiles, significa una especie de introducción de la “rendición extraordinaria” a la ley doméstica estadounidense, vulneración del principio básico del sistema jurídico del país denominado habeas corpus.

Agregamos ésta a las múltiples razones por las cuales, SB1070 es un ataque frontal a los principios constitucionales de un gobierno del pueblo, regido por distintas ramas del poder legal, que en sus intereses adversariales garantizan cierto nivel de democracia. Aunque algunos políticos del estado, incluido el Senador John McCain (Republicano), quieren dar la impresión de que hay que apoyar estas medidas por razones electorales, la verdad de la verdad es que SB1070 es una amenaza directa a la libertad de todo individuo que viva dentro de EE.UU.

No se puede permitir, ni mucho menos exigir, que la policía adopte la postura de ir a la caza de posibles indocumentados —en plan totalitario, “¡Sus papeles, por favor!”— sin erosionar las protecciones civiles constitucionales de las que nos beneficiamos todos, al vivir cada día sin miedo de que nos persigan por ofensas arbitrarias, políticas o de postura o parecer. La democracia depende precisamente de que no puede haber, en ningún caso, una ley como la que ha promulgado la legislatura de Arizona.

Existe en el diálogo popular respecto a este asunto la posible defensa de que hay gente en Arizona que tiene miedo de “lo que está pasando” en la frontera. Pero esa defensa tiene varios fallos fatales que hay que mirar bien:

1. la democracia no privilegia el miedo sobre la libertad y soberanía del individuo;
2. el miedo no ayuda a crear condiciones de mayor seguridad;
3. la tasa de inmigración —tanto legal como ilegal— ha bajado notablemente debido a la crisis económica;
4. el problema de la frontera son los “coyotes” y los narcoterroristas, no los trabajadores ni sus familias;
5. en muchos casos, los que citan el miedo de la violencia fronteriza no favorecen la prohibición de venta de armas de fuego a las redes que las proporcionan a los narcotraficantes;
6. el miedo que citan los defensores de esta ley, en muchos casos, se debe a una limitación cultural y personal, y no tiene nada que ver con los que sufrirán discriminación y persecución bajo esta ley;
7. la Constitución protege la esfera íntima del ser humano: persona, propiedad y papeles (Enmienda IV);
8. la Constitución garantiza protección igual de las leyes a todos (Enmienda XIV);
9. es imposible efectuar esta ley en la práctica sin un ejercicio descarado de racismo;
10. si se hace sin un enfoque racial, significa la declaración de un estado policíaco totalitario en Arizona, donde nadie queda libre de este nuevo poder arbitrario.

Eso, para comenzar. Baste decir que no podemos dejarnos gobernar por el miedo. En un país donde se hablan cada día como primer idioma 329 idiomas, y sin idioma oficial, no podemos tener miedo de ser lo bastante cultos como para tolerar la diversidad humana, que es la riqueza más importante y el orgullo más brillante de esta vieja democracia, la prueba de nuestra democracia. Y tenemos que recordar que a veces cuesta tener fe, pero si nos dedicamos al principio de que la Constitución prohibe actuaciones tiránicas del gobierno, tenemos que mantenernos firmes en no caer en las trampas que el miedo pone para hacernos desechar tal principio.

Thomas Jefferson dijo que el dólar que gastamos para la educación y el mejoramiento intelectual de la población no es nada comparado con la fortuna que nos quitaría el tirano que subirá cuando ya no somos lo bastante sabios para prevenirlo. Arizona ha votado por la ignorancia, el miedo, y un ataque frontal a los principios básicos de la democracia; ha dejado que subieran las ideas de los racistas más perjudicados y desavergonzados; y cada ser humano en Arizona tiene la responsabilidad de resistir de forma civil esta erosión de su dignidad humana.

En la legislatura californiana, ya se habla de un boicot comprensivo contra el estado de Arizona. Una coalición informal de camioneros ha declarado su intención de no comerciar con Arizona. El Departamento de Justicia está investigando de qué manera vulnera la Constitución federal esta ley. En otros lugares del país, también hablan de montar un boicot comercial y comunitario del estado.

La solución más obvia sería una reforma migratoria federal comprensiva, de acuerdo con todas las protecciones constitucionales y efectuando una manera práctica y humana de normalizar el estatus de aquellos inmigrantes indocumentados que en todo lo demás concuerden con las leyes y contribuyen a la salud y prosperidad de sus comunidades y de la sociedad en general.

Pero para comenzar a tener un debate serio sobre este asunto, hay que recordar que en todo momento, estamos hablando sólo y exclusivamente de seres humanos, que no somos o personas o “ilegales”, que no somos o pueblo o inmigrante, que no se trata de un país “anglo” con una “invasión” de extranjeros, sino que somos un país abierto, democrático, donde las culturas indígenas y europeas tienen que convivir con otras culturas, sin miedo, y con gente de otros lugares, que todos somos seres humanos, y que el orgullo de este país es el poder decir:

“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” —la virtud colosal de la apertura global que reconoció Emma Lazarus en su poema para la Estatua de la Libertad—, que aquí, el ser humano es ser humano, y si uno se encuentra más celebrado que otro, será por el valor de su carácter, no por su raza ni su origen. La Constitución de Estados Unidos no es una serie de ideales inalcanzables o de sueños para cuando no sintamos miedo; es la ley suprema de esta tierra, y su garantía de igualdad, de libertad individual y de protección contra acciones policiales arbitrarias, es la única guía que el ejecutivo tiene derecho a seguir.

• Arizona Immigrant ID Law Ignores Constitutional Protections
• Papers, Please! — Maddow reveals racist origins of Arizona law (video)

If the healthcare reform legislation currently going through the House of Representatives, in an effort to forge a unified House-Senate bill the president can sign, does not include a provision that immediately bans any and all discrimination based on “pre-existing conditions”, people will die. This is an undeniable and tragic fact of life in our country, and the United States Congress has to take far more seriously the real-world ramifications of the timelines they build into the legislation.

A study conducted by Harvard researchers found last year that 45,000 Americans die every year from the specific cause of lacking health insurance coverage. This implies a moral and technical failure of interests and individuals across the system, but indicates a clearly systemic problem. Other studies, reported by the Urban Institute and other think tanks, in recent years, suggest it may be necessary to look at other cases where the connection between uninsurance and death is more subtle or indirect, but real.

In those cases, lack of insurance means undertreatment, misdiagnosis, potential severe complications, which can become compounded, may go untreated or ignored, and where a combination of these factors ultimately leads to the acceleration of death or to entirely preventable deaths. Those figures, depending on how medical error is judged and counted, and whether it is linked to non-coverage, can run as high as 300,000 per year. People are dying, in massive numbers, because of the pre-existing condition exclusion.

The United States Congress has the power to change this. The insurance industry could change this at any time, but has resisted doing so, because, essentially, its accounting suggests its business model will not work if that special bonus (in terms of reducing costs) is taken away. Undercompetitive enterprises are putting our entire private-sector healthcare system at risk of collapse, bankrupting increasing numbers of American households and letting people die who should be treated and saved.

The legislation from the Senate was set to implement a correction of this practice within four years of passage, ostensibly to give insurers time to make the necessary adjustments to their business strategy, so that their own businesses don’t collapse under the weight of higher risk and obligatory contractual costs (insurance payouts promised by contract to paying customers). There is some realpolitik in this, which is reasonable and disheartening, in that people will die because insurers may not be able to insure anyone if they don’t have time to adjust, in which case more people will die.

There has been intense pressure from the progressive side of the Democratic party to implement the pre-existing condition correction immediately upon passage. There have been proposals to use government funding to help people afford the high rates insurers may charge in the time of transition, so that both insurers and insurees can make the necessary transition in a cost-effective way, and lives can be saved. But that might change the math of the proposal, and risk inflating the already exploding deficit.

Pres. Obama has come out in favor of implementing an immediate ban on discrimination for pre-existing conditions, but members of Congress are less willing to line up behind an immediate ban, because they fear pressure from lobbyists could push more Yes votes to No and the result could be an inflation of deficit projections, which might have the same effect, or worse, cause people to lose their seats in the next election.

The president has become more activist in his efforts to champion the legislation over the last weeks, finding his stride in the logic that says, we were elected to solve problems, and this problem has been put off for too long; now is the time to do what is right. There is pressure to ignore this way of thinking and do what is politically right, which means what one guesses is politically right, those guesses usually founded on the prediction that most people will never really learn about the virtues of what is being passed.

But doing the right thing need not be known to be right. One can sacrifice one’s seat, take political risks, base one’s actions on the principle that one was elected to serve the interests of constituents, whether those constituents understand those interests or not. It’s a fine line, and each member of Congress will have to choose according to his or her own conscience or calculation. But the fact is, if this provision does not take effect immediately, people will die during the interim; the only question is: do we have a responsible way to avoid that?

The credit crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and may or may not still be operational, were both set in motion by a series of risky misrepresentations of value and earning potential that led the world’s wealthiest banks into shoddy investments. By October 2008, George W. Bush’s own “Red October”, the financial system was paralyzed, and only massive government investment would save Wall Street’s most powerful institutions from collapse. The big banks were said to be “too big to fail” (TBTF).

Now, more than a year after then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the nation’s 10 largest banking institutions, in exchange for a say in how they engineered their way out of the crisis, some of those same institutions are reporting record profits and paying out record bonuses, even as their stock prices languish at 30% of their former value and the economy broadly is still struggling.

With more than 10% of the American workforce receiving unemployment insurance, foreclosures continuing to mount and smaller banks continuing to fail, both popular sentiment and economic reality seem to indicate that the institutions that are considered “too big to fail” —lest their collapse pose an existential threat to the wider economy— are simply too big. The debate about whether to separate commercial banking from high-risk investment banking seems a formality as compared with the more serious —and credible— proposition that some major banks should simply be broken up into smaller entities, to ensure the long-term health of the marketplace.

The result of financial deregulation has been the building of an entirely new financial system on top of and beyond the means of the long-standing understanding of financial services. Rapid-turnover high-risk trading has led to a questionable redefinition of the role of the financial sector, with numerous economists suggesting the entire sector now sees its role as the creation of wealth within the financial sector itself, not necessarily in service of any actual enterprises, institutions or individual investors.

The reasoning that presumes to know that such a state of affairs —the financial sector engineering new definitions of financial investment in order to vastly expand the potential for “wealth creation”, then capitalizing on these new instruments, without adequately expanding the inflows of new capital investment or generating new value for other sectors— treats theoretical wealth gains, as derived from unsustainable trading practices, as evidence of overall economic output.

The intellectual and economic underpinnings of such claims are largely unsound, and the result of trusting them too far is the banking crisis of 2008-2009. The logic of vastly increasing the size of an enterprise is what is known as the creation of an “economy of scale”, meaning that size makes production at the unit level far more economical, and thereby creates value to consumers by lowering costs and maximizing savings. This kind of business model is meant to produce a vast expansion of business-consumer relations, meaning more revenue, which, when coupled with lower cost per unit, means higher profits per unit of exchange.

The economy of scale is an argument about both in-house production costs and about broader good to society, through the efficiencies of a functioning marketplace. There is significant temptation for large enterprises to cover their vulnerabilities through expansion and mergers, using the losses of more vulnerable firms to bury their own debt and write-off losses. It’s a complex process with some sound economic reasoning, in limited cases.

But the takeover and expansion strategy long ago ceased to generate real economies of scale in the financial sector; between 1996 and 2008, the trend toward ever larger banks came to much more closely resemble a scheme designed to eliminate competition and allow for the engineering of entirely new modes of financial accounting. The bundling of complex financial derivatives, backed by subprime mortgages and insured by a dubious regime of “credit default swaps”, allowed for the generation of incredible new claims of accumulated financial wealth, which then allowed those claims to create entire new areas of lending and investment based only on the concept of a never-realized form of wealth.

The new financial regulatory reforms are designed to rein in such practices and ensure that banks whose funds are comprised of individual deposits and which are insured with taxpayer funds, through the FDIC, not make risky bets on such financial exotics and that their investments, including lending, be supported by a sound ratio of capital in reserve to invested dollars. Banks that require massive taxpayer investment, beyond the FDIC insurance and with the effect of making them even bigger and more oligarchic, are simply too big to be part of a functional, healthy competitive market.

To put it another way, their size and their appetite for increasingly dubious quantities of “new wealth”, to support their profit-by-growth strategy, has a sclerotic effect on the flow of capital and the health of the financial marketplace. As financial institutions increase in size, and take over service providers from parallel and rival sectors, they “lend” and “borrow” an increasing amount of their capital from within the firm itself, creating a new destabilizing factor in the valuation of wealth across the financial sector.

Big banks are problem banks, for the open market prized by a democratic society, middle-class society. And the evidence shows that banks considered “too big to fail” are dangerously dependent on special privileges handed to them through deliberately engineered “deregulatory” policy and on subsidies and investment from taxpayers to help sustain their flawed business model. TBTF means too big to be genuinely helpful to the generation and proliferation of real prosperity in the everyday lives of most Americans. How to tackle that problem may be the salient challenge of 2010.

The elections of 2010 will not be about the specter of “socialism”, nor about terrorism, taxation, or gay rights: they will be about which party can present the most far-reaching, most credible pragmatic approach to solving the actual problems the nation is facing. They will be about whether or not Pres. Obama deserves support in his historic efforts to bring the nation out of a range of crises he was elected to resolve, or better put: whether or not the nation could benefit from his having that support.

The last week of 2009 has seen one of the ugliest and most sinister attempts at fetid feckless electioneering, when Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) decided to use the foiled terrorist plot of 25 December, the logic and strategy of mass murderers, to collect money for his campaign. It is the single most flagrant use of terrorist activity for personal gain by any member of the United States Congress in recent memory, and it may in fact violate federal laws on campaign finance and material gain linked to terrorism.

2010 must be a year in which such misanthropic manipulations are sidelined by a purposeful and committed debate on the merits of real ideas. The historical imperative of this moment is not, as Rep. Hoekstra would have it, grandstanding in order to consolidate power around a hard-core of anti-democratic scaremongering and opportunism; it is to find ways to work together for the betterment of the nation and the healing of economic faultlines that continue to threaten future prosperity.

What we know of Rep. Hoekstra, from his use of terrorist activity for his own personal gain, is that he is not thinking seriously about how to solve the problems facing the people of his district, his state or the nation. The Republican party has spent most of the last 2 years crafting a politics of trumped-up rhetorical naysaying, devoid of practical policy proposals, unwilling to cooperate in any way with the nation’s new majority party and relentless in the tactic of making false claims meant to inflame anxiety and even visceral hate.

The result has been ridicule in some cases —as when the party presented an “alternate budget”, consisting of 19 pages, several of which were title pages or blanks, with no math, no bottom line, and nothing but a cursory outline of long-standing Republican doctrine, or when the party created a special new website consisting of cartoons that proposed tax cuts as the solution to all the nation’s problems— and deep division in others —as when the national party betrayed its local chapter to support a Conservative party candidate who called the Republican a “socialist”.

The “tea party” anti-tax movement has morphed into a kind of front group for Republican strategists seeking to radicalize public opinion against Democratic policies, but by virtue of that marriage of convenience, has now evolved into a direct threat to the Republican party nationwide, with polls showing broader support for a hypothetical Tea Party than for Republican party candidates. The problem is a severe scarcity of proposals oriented toward basic problem-solving, i.e. doing the people’s business.

The Democrats, for their part, have lost standing mainly owing to their own infighting. Fierce dogmatism on a range of specifics in the healthcare debate has split the party between conservatives and progressives, a division conservative propagandists have sought to exploit. Fox News’ Glen Beck has openly sought to align the entire idea of American progressivism —5-day work-week, paid vacations, women’s suffrage, civil rights, Social Security and Medicare— with both fascism and communism, and has openly called for a purge.

The lies of Glen Beck are legion, to the point where responsible commentators on his own network have criticized him for inflammatory and even absurdist rhetoric. But such hate-speech has divided the Republican party, between radicals who believe the false claims and conspiracy theories and conservatives who want a conservative but entirely Constitutional future, in which power changes hands peacefully and there is such a thing as a loyal opposition.

While television punditry appears enamored as ever of the Machiavellian undercurrent, and promotes the idea that all this rhetorical chaos is somehow a boon for Republicans, it cannot be overlooked that extremist rhetoric is tearing the party apart, with some leaders calling for a purge of any ideologically “impure” Republicans and others calling for a pragmatic expansion of the party’s tent. But none of this will matter if the Republicans fail to muster credible solutions to real problems and the Democrats organize around that strategy.

A year after the credit crash of 2008 hit its deepest depths, the banking sector appears increasingly secure, and overall economic indicators are improving. The lot of the average citizen, however, remains degraded, and the second wave of the Pres. Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is getting ready to come to the aid of communities, states and families in need of investment and job creation. It is expected that sometime in the spring of 2010, job creation will be restored and recovery recognizable to the average citizen.

Late 2010 will also see widespread publicity surrounding the advent of the world’s most advanced electric cars (EV), from Tesla Motors and other cutting-edge innovators. The infrastructure of a clean energy economy will be taking shape, and Pres. Obama will be able to announce real successes in helping to divorce US economic prosperity from the whims of oil-rich regimes overseas that are hostile either to the US itself or to American democratic values.

The Republicans will have refused utterly to be part of any of the solutions that are in effect and beginning to work, and by fall 2010, the disparity between the new pragmatist Democratic approach and the radicalized Republican obstructionists will be coming into high contrast. Voters will have to ignore Republican propaganda alleging that Democratic policy successes amount to a “destruction” of “our way of life”, but Democrats will be able to make the case that Americans are free to choose their way of life and Democratic policies have helped to secure their freedom to do so, by shoring up the economy, creating a new reduced-carbon energy infrastructure and investing in education.

The pragmatist approach is the salient political virtue the mainstream media are ignoring, but neither major party can afford to ignore this reality: the party that makes a more credible case for its devotion to pragmatic problem-solving and principled public service, will win. Economic hard times do not favor extremist culture-warriors or anti-government tax abolitionists; they favor leadership that knows how to cope with grave problems and how to shepherd the nation out of troubled waters.

The Republicans’ worst problem is 2010 is that they appear unserious, because they continue to propose no serious solutions to the most pressing problems, even going as far as to suggest that nuclear arms reduction is not a good thing and that global climate change is not only not happening but is the product of a planet-wide hoax involving tens of thousands of scientists over half a century, and all world governments. The Democrats’ worst problem is they appear persuaded by some of the most hollow Republican attacks, and division and waffling could undermine their credibility as pragmatists.

So, at the risk of sounding redundant, to win in 2010, a candidate, or a party, will have to demonstrate:

1. Real engagement with efforts to solve the nation’s problems;
2. A cooperative, pragmatist approach;
3. A commitment to relaying facts, not propaganda, to voters;
4. A rejection of extremist claims and a commitment to help the president heal the economy;
5. Recognition of what affects real quality of life choices for ordinary people.

And a final point of political strategy will clearly be to cast credible pragmatic solutions as opposed to the endeavors of one’s opponents, who might be less credible, less serious, less engaged. The two major parties will both also face the problem of turnout and of unity. Turnout for conservatives is good for Republicans only if conservatives vote Republican, and Democrats need to make sure pro-Democratic independents don’t stay home or use the midterm elections as an opportunity to “make a point” by voting third-party.

China may be fast moving toward global superpower status, with rates of industrialization and wealth-creation nearly unprecedented in human history. But the ancient imperial state still faces pervasive problems of regional and ethnic disharmony and multiple separatist movements intent on breaking up the map of the modern political state. To hold together, Beijing will have to democratize public and private institutions at a rapid pace and in a credible way.

Hong Kong, once a British protectorate, has been granted special political freedoms —as part of the conditions for its return to Chinese rule, and not without significant amounts of public protest from locals demanding them—, including electoral representation and the right to demonstrate. It is a divergent political model within the still largely totalitarian system planned and managed from Beijing, and it may serve as a credible model for how to democratize Chinese institutions of government and enterprise.

In order to meet the social and political demands of coming decades, China will have to grapple with the very real problem of what impact the information revolution will have on Chinese society, which has allowed for a privileged class of central control to impose a strict authoritarian order for thousands of years. Chinese society is already democratizing in terms of information, in that the government has had to admit mistakes in attempts to reorganize and filter information of vital public interest.

The scandal surrounding attempts to cover up the outbreak of SARS in China angered governments and international bodies, and spurred a wave of dissent in China that gave more power to journalists in the state media who sought to put informational value ahead of Beijing politics. Pres. Hu’s “smokeless war” against the press and dissidents has been a questionable enterprise throughout, with limited practical success in promoting Beijing’s projection of power and apparently sparking a surge in dissent.

Authoritarian urges inherent in Beijing’s use of power, both within China and beyond, have generated a notable backlash. In March 2008, an effort to ‘Sino-ize’ the Tibetan economy and consolidate Beijing’s hold on the region led to an outbreak of violence, with ethnic clashes, street demonstrations and security forces attacking civilians in the streets. The demonstrations spread to other regions of China and to neighboring Nepal. As we reported on 31 March 2008:

Demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet turned violent in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, yesterday, as police wielded bamboo clubs and beat demonstrators, including Buddhist monks and nuns. The UN has said Nepal’s harsh clampdown on Tibetan demonstrators violates international human rights law, including the right to peaceful assembly, as embodied in treaties signed by Nepal.

Demonstrations that began in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, more nearly 3 weeks ago have now spread to neighboring provinces in China, and into Nepal and India. The Kathmandu clashes came as large crowds accusing China of human rights abuses in Tibet tried to approach the Chinese embassy grounds.

A similar outbreak of ethnic violence broke out in the western province of Xinjiang, when efforts to centralize political control of the region and marginalize the local ethnic majority led to violent street battles. The government accused Uighur separatists of stoking the violence, while Uighur muslims from the region accused ethnic Han immigrants of undermining the economic opportunity available to the locals.

For the occasion of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, dissidents organized a high-profile petition for political reform, calling the document itself Charter ’08. The document, far from being an outright repudiation of China’s political establishment, calls for an incremental liberalization of the political process, and diversification of the one-party system. It opens with an explanation of the historical moment and the socio-political imperatives the regime will have to face, one way or another:

This year is the 100th year of China’s Constitution, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A “modernization” bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a “modernization” under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.

The government’s response has been to suppress the very idea of a need for liberalization and to prosecute those responsible for the petition. Liu Xiaobo, a moderate dissident and respected literary figure, was detained this summer on charges linked to the Charter ’08 movement and has now been sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power”, a charge the very name of which is a virtual admission of China’s need to democratize. The trial was just two hours long and has been decried across the world as an unfair prosecution without adequate defense or due process for the accused.

Instead of recognizing the constructive role that responsible political reformists can play in crafting a viable future for China —in line with the international system to which China has signed up but whose values it consistently rejects—, those in power in Beijing are treating the very idea of broader political freedoms for the Chinese people as a threat to national security. As the LA Times has reported:

In the last two years, the Chinese government has cracked down on Internet sites, lawyers, consumer advocates and human rights activists, particularly after the collapse of poorly constructed schools in the Sichuan earthquake and the tainted milk scandal in 2008. Liu is a brave democracy advocate and no stranger to jail; he was sent to prison for 21 months after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and to a labor camp in 1996 after demanding clemency for others still imprisoned.

This attack on universal values and persecution of the very dissident voices that could most ably and responsibly shepherd China through a period of needed democratic progress is dangerous in the extreme. Beijing’s hard-line tactics have radicalized and even popularized separatist movements across a number of regions, and efforts to disallow protests and even individual complaints about corruption has sown the seeds of deeper dissent across the country, at a time when tens of millions have lost work due to the global economic crisis.

China has also sought, along with its persecution of dissidents and its use of military force to impose political control over satellite regions, to create a hermetically controlled Chinese-language internet, where information can only be posted if approved by state censors. Instead of seizing the Olympics as an opportunity to plan, test and exhibit meaningful democratic liberalization, the government in Beijing has sought to block websites critical of its policies and control the flow of information across all communications networks in China.

But efforts to impose a blanket censorship-enabling spyware technology on all computers in the country were complicated this summer, when complaints about the substantial security risks and negative impact on business and foreign investment forced the government to back down. In July, we reported:

Amid a storm of protest from Chinese citizens, businesses, rights activists and foreign governments, China has suddenly halted its planned installation of a new enhancement to the ‘Great Firewall’ called ‘Green Dam’. In a statement the UK’s Guardian calls “terse”, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported “China will delay the mandatory installation of the ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers.”

The technology may still take effect, under the guise of an effort to block pornography in order to protect young people, but there is intense resistance from the international community, and from media and business interests in China. There are concerns that aside from a gross violation of fundamental rights to open information, the software could actually destroy intellectual property, impede the functioning of computer hardware altogether, and even subject users to added security risks.

According to the OpenNet Initiative:

The version of the Green Dam software that we tested, when operating under its default settings, is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed. Not only does it block access to a wide range of web sites based on keywords and image processing, including porn, gaming, gay content, religious sites and political themes, it actively monitors individual computer behavior, such that a wide range of programs including word processing and email can be suddenly terminated if content algorithm detects inappropriate speech. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. The operation of the software is highly unpredictable and disrupts computer activity far beyond the blocking of websites.

Features that allow for intimate monitoring of keystrokes and usage logs could permit attacks either from within government monitoring or from non-government criminal enterprises, to access personal information, create extensive archives of data regarding individual lives and networks of people, and subject individuals to identity theft, harassment, and other kinds of computer-enabled endangerment. Such intrusive harvesting of personal data could even put children at far greater risk of exploitation via the Internet.

One of the most fundamental dangers inherent in this type of digital data-based persecution of dissent at all levels is that it first of all assists in the coverup of abusive or corrupt activity and secondly does nothing to reform areas of the political system itself that are causing anger and the spread of hostility to government policies. While the Green Dam spyware project may allow Beijing to conceal or disrupt the communication of dissent, it will do nothing to prevent the dissent-inducing abuses or systemic inadequacies from occurring.

The only practical way to ensure that government services meet the needs of real people, and thus fashion a more harmonious system, is for a freer flow of information among people and between the people and their government. Failing that, even the best-intentioned government programs will run into trouble and be a source of unrest or opposition. Persecution of dissent is an ancient tool of underdeveloped power structures; China has the wealth and technology to democratize peacefully, and can do so by liberalizing the process for selecting and evaluating party leaders, policy-makers and administrative bureaucrats.

The Hong Kong model is complicated, and has many critics, but for a nation as vast and diverse as China, facing all of the crises, political, economic and environmental, it now faces, the Hong Kong model provides a worthy example for how to usher in more permissive political processes, without giving up the integrity of the existing system or the territorial integrity of the nation.

There will need to be practical solutions that help keep long-simmering tensions in check, if China is to avoid further flare-ups of ethnic violence or the aggressive ramping up of separatist activity. Change is emerging organically, across China, and the current government will eventually have to choose between working with or against the driving forces of change. Addressing economic concerns —like quality of life, education, transport and energy— will be key to being able to shepherd the nation through the coming period of political transformation. The following are a few areas that may help ensure stability throughout:

1. Re-evaluate prosecutions like that of Liu Xiaobo, which cripple the political dynamism of the Chinese system and help ensure a sclerotic policy apparatus, unaware of the best competing ideas going forward;
2. Free political prisoners like Liu Xiaobo and other responsible dissenters, who use no methods of sabotage or violence, only words and ideas, to convey their message of liberalization;
3. Reward local officials who find creative ways to integrate citizens into the process of making and administering policy;
4. Encourage freer expression of critical views, in part to show tolerance of dissent, in part to allow for the discovery of sound ideas for making a better way for the nation;
5. Encourage local political organizing, even where dissenting views are more popular than Beijing policy: a system of competing views need not override established policy, but can allow for competing views to filter in and serve the public good;
6. Liberalize selection process for Communist party officials, as a first step toward general elections;
7. Recognize cultural and political autonomy of regional states, like Tibet and Xinjiang: a Spanish approach may work better than the militaristic all-or-nothing conquest-based approach favored until now;
8. Reform the justice system, so that low-level corruption cases and judgments benefitting ordinary citizens can gain prominence and foster a new respect for judicial process: this helps guarantee order, but also prevents corruption and abuse;
9. Take a leading role in championing fundamental political and civil rights in other nations: doing so does not violate anyone’s sovereignty, but failing to do so shows a reduced hold on domestic support for the exercise of it;
10. Prepare for an issue-based divergence of factions within the Communist party, and a credible legal process by which those factions can establish competing parties loyal to a central constitution.

Long-term stability is often cited by China’s authorities as the reason behind extremely hard-line actions. But as we are now seeing in Iran, and as we have seen in eastern Europe and the Philippines, hard-line oppression often sows unrest and brings about far more radical kinds of political change. China is too closely linked to the information technology revolution to not be affected by it, and its censoring-technology approach to manufacturing consensus is not viable; it will collapse under the weight of the challenge.

Planning for the period of liberalization that will follow is the only responsible way for the government in Beijing to move forward with long-term Chinese development and political planning. It is the only policy response that will build confidence among foreign investors and major enterprises, including banks, that wish to locate offices or factories in the country, and it will prove to be the only practical way to prevent sectarian conflict and the disintegration of political ties with the satellite states where unrest is already brewing.

China has outraged political and diplomatic leaders around the world by aggressively blocking agreement on hard targets for binding emissions cuts, refusing even to agree to any accord that would include mention of other nations’ specific cuts. One observer told the BBC that he observed China, India and Saudi Arabia as the key powers working to prevent binding targets from being adopted, but China was the most immovable opponent to a binding agreement.

The reasons are not hard to guess: China has invested unprecedented amounts of money (given the time-frame) in carbon-based fuels. Its efforts to expand the national capacity for coal-fired electric power plants and its holdings in oil-rich highly unstable African countries rivals Allied efforts to secure carbon-based fuel supplies during the two World Wars.

But carbon-intensive energy systems are not just harming the environment, they are degrading vital natural resources and generating massive additional economic costs, already being felt across whole economies, but projected to increase drastically as impacts from global climate destabilization worsen and mount.

The result is that China has signed over its potent economic growth to a kind of resource-relative Ponzi scheme. The numbers don’t add up, if China projects its behavior out over the long term. Extreme reliance on fossil fuels will eventually cripple its growth-driving sectors and limit its capacity to build future prosperity. Beijing’s current approach to the carbon-induced climate crisis appears to be rooted in a persistent unwillingness to face facts about the increasingly unsustainable nature of its carbon-fueled economy.

China can no more write off its historic investment in fossil fuels than Wall Street could just stop using unwieldy, unsustainable financial “exotics” and derivatives. The logic of a bubble economy, which buries its long-term costs under a glaze of rapid growth, easy profit and false abundance, is that the accounting method cannot become more honest, only less so. This is why China, despite devoting enormous amounts of productive capacity and new investment to developing the industrial infrastructure for supplying the green energy economy, will not tolerate a global agreement with binding targets for emissions cuts, and a transparent verification process.

That, and corruption. China’s banking system is notoriously opaque, firmly rooted in the hard ground of centralized power, and the spectacular expansion of private wealth through entrepreneurship has been closely intertwined with personal and family relationships linked to positions of high power in the Communist party. Corruption prosecutions are notoriously selective and often come only after significant signs of spreading public unrest.

But much more far-reaching than the question of China’s banking transparency or political corruption is the question of how China will provide resources for its booming economy and growing consumer class. Even as environmental degradation ravages the world’s most populous nation, with deserts rapidly expanding across the northwest and river systems under threat from contamination and other environmental factors, across the south and east, China has signed up for an 18th-century model of how to power economic growth, using unsustainable farming methods and privileging coal over most other fuel sources.

As the Copenhagen Accord is put into action, in the next round of international negotiations, in Mexico in 2010, attention needs to be focused on how to motivate both China and India to redirect behemoth industrial-scale funding for fossil fuels to a comprehensive, affordable approach to greening the entire infrastructure for energy production and distribution of industrial resources. Achieving that goal, whether through international funding incentives or a multilateral trade agreement, will help motivate the necessary awakening that will allow Beijing to admit to its fuel-economy catch-22 and make the hard choices needed to emerge from it.

The United States Senate has been grappling all this year with a record number of threatened filibusters of key legislation, a problem which has held up work on issues of vital national interest and slowed economic reforms designed to help speed recovery and prevent future abuses. The healthcare reform process is now synonymous with the worst effects of the filibuster, famously used by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond to block civil rights reforms that would bring the law in line with the US Constitution.

Before we address how to fix the problem, it’s necessary to examine what the filibuster is and why it exists. The word itself is derived from the Spanish filibustero, essentially: pirate. It refers to the use of Senate procedural rules on debate to literally hijack the course of legislation and threaten a freeze of all Senate business. The entire Senate can be hijacked by just one senator unhappy with a piece of legislation, for virtually any reason.

The tactic goes back to the founding of the republic, when the Senate itself and the Electoral College (which uses the Senate’s non-population-based numbers to boost the presidential voting power of small states) were created in such a way as to protect the interests of slaveowning states and individuals. It was feared that without some compromise in the structure of the national government and its elections, pro-slavery states would be marginalized by the more populous northern states and would break up the Union.

This did, indeed, happen, but only many decades later. The filibuster itself works because the Senate cannot end debate on a bill unless at least 60 senators vote to end debate and move forward to vote on passage of the legislation. This helped the less populous, less powerful, rural states that, prior to the Civil War, were pro-slavery, because any attempt to move legislation through Congress that would work against slaveowning interests could be blocked by just one senator.

This was also the logic behind pro-slavery states demanding that of all new territories to become states, at least one of every two should have legalized slavery, because they wanted to guarantee they could impede the advance of anti-slavery legislation in the Senate, thereby preventing its abolition indefinitely. That system worked to hold the Union together throughout the early years of the republic, but it failed to bring the slow but steady change that could have prevented the Civil War.

The filibuster has been touted throughout history by its proponents as a means of blocking unjust or “tyrannical” legislation from undermining the integrity of the American system of government, and the Republicans today who have sought to use it to stop healthcare reform have spoken of it just so fondly. But it has been a serious obstacle to social justice and democratic progress throughout the nation’s history, and there are good arguments for abolishing the Senate filibuster.

The question is how to do it. The Senate and the House rightly function differently, to afford some diversity of viewpoint and procedural checks and balances within the legislative branch. Ideally, that balance would slow the advance of major legislation to a more deliberative pace, allowing for closer examination, better design and more effective and positive legislative results.

But the slow pace of the Senate is often seen by critics as little more than an opportunity for wealthy interests to line the pockets of senators they want to influence, with the result being that legislation is typically watered down, or even hijacked by the very interests it is supposed to protect the citizen against. And as the healthcare reform process seems to show, few people are happy about the results of legislation that emerges after being fundamentally altered by one after another filibuster.

So, how could the Senate rules be changed to allow for something a little more straightforward? Many argue it should have a simple up or down majority vote, like in the House. But there are some valid reasons for allowing a minority voice to have its say in the most powerful legislative body in the nation. Simple majority rule can yield policies that are piecemeal and fickle; public sentiment can back major changes in national law that are designed to target minorities or to erode fundamental freedoms.

The Senate’s rules for debate and passage, including the filibuster, in theory, make it less likely such situations will arise. But as said above, in practice, it is often the case that such delays only serve to corrupt the process and undermine good legislation. If there are going to be rules changes, there needs to be ample time for debate, and all legislation should be online, in full, for 3 to 10 days, before a final vote.

The question is: how many votes makes a majority, if the number of vote needed to end debate is going to be the same as the number needed for passage? Instead of taking the simple majority (half, plus one), which in the Senate equates to 50 senators with the vice president breaking ties in his capacity as president of the Senate, it could be a narrow majority in terms of numbers equating to states.

For instance, half plus one would be 25 states (50 votes) plus one (52 votes — not all would have to be two votes from one state, just an equation of the numbers). But to add to the significance of the majority, it could be a “simple majority in numbers equivalent to states” (52 votes), plus one, making it either 53 votes needed (plus one senator) or 54 votes needed (plus one state’s worth of senators).

For all Senate business to be conducted with a 54-vote majority requirement would be fine for the Democrats now, with their 60-member caucus, but in normal times, it could be just as much of a brake on progress as is the filibuster. So it might be worth making it optional. The Senate could, at least in the early stages, choose at the beginning of a legislative process, whether it will use the 60-vote cloture hurdle (the filibuster scenario) followed by a simple majority vote or whether it will go for the simpler 54-vote majority.

School taxes are soaring, but schools are losing funding. States are going bankrupt and teachers are being threatened with mass layoffs. Property taxes are high, but property values are falling, and banks won’t refinance and won’t make new loans. The federal government is working to foster economic recovery through targeted investment, lending and community-building projects. But states are dealing with the budget crisis by hiking property taxes and shifting more responsibility to municipalities.

That transition in the manner and nature of funding for state and local government services is being brought about by an economic crisis rooted not only in the mischief of ill-advised financial sector derivatives trading, but also by the extreme impact the Iraq war has had on federal funding priorities. The hundreds of billions devoted year after year to funding the war in Iraq has been drained away from middle America, from programs that provide public services, funding to states, and school districts.

The missing money, poured into the black-hole of an Iraq war that has spawned more terrorist activity than any single undertaking in the history of the United States or the world, is money which would go toward education, healthcare, infrastructure, emergency preparedness and even homeland security. The result of an underfunded economy, with federal assistance to states drying up, has been disorder and the degradation of entire sectors of the economy.

It is due to these Iraq-induced shortfalls that citizens around country are finding state and local taxes becoming more intrusive and less conducive to flexibility in personal choices about life priorities. Foreclosures and other major personal-finance cut-backs are coming not just from irresponsible personal choices, but also from the still mounting stresses of a system that failed to establish fiscal responsibility, because its fiscal resources were drained away for a war in Iraq.

Even with large-scale troop withdrawal scheduled for a year from now, the Iraq war will continue to cost hundreds of billions of dollars this year and next, and much of that cost might wind up being shifted to Afghanistan, along with troops and equipment. That war is now entering its ninth year, making it the longest US war since Vietnam and the second longest our nation has ever fought.

Military strategists and Bush opponents are not alone in arguing that Afghanistan should not have been a decade-long quagmire, but that the war effort there suffered severely when the Bush administration ordered up a new war effort in Iraq, with no connection whatsoever to the attack of 11 September 2001, and began directing four to five times as many resources there as had been devoted to Afghanistan, despite never capturing Bin Laden or Mullah Omar.

It is now possible that by the end of Barack Obama’s first term, the Afghanistan war could become the second of George W. Bush’s trillion-dollar wars, a colossal and unnecessary waste of blood and treasure that will continue to eat away at the integrated circuitry of public services and federal funding, degrading quality of life at home with questionable benefit to US interests abroad, unless the Taliban threat to Pakistan is halted and al Qaeda significantly dismantled.

The Iraq war devastated the American war effort in Afghanistan, while federal tax policy took an irrational and dangerous turn toward reduced revenues in a time of war. In the meantime, economic and fiscal policy have spurred the collapse of the banking sector and an historic surge in energy prices, actually halting economic growth. The combined drain on federal resources is putting pressure on American states and municipalities to tax their way out of bankruptcy.

How is state or local bankruptcy linked to overseas wars? Because the federal government is not only funding those hugely expensive war efforts, it has also slashed taxes on the wealthiest Americans multiple times during the last decade. (This is part of why the wild success of the investment banks’ profit recovery is not filtering down to the rest of the economy yet.)

The government is so strapped for cash, it is starving the states and municipalities of much-needed funding. The incidence of unfunded mandates —federal laws imposing costly change on states without providing funding to enable the changes— increased dramatically under the Republican-controlled Congress, between 2001 and 2006. No Child Left Behind was full of them, and even carried penalties that would reduce funding still further.

In fact, that law was so full of funding problems it wound up being a federal case in which school principals were suing the federal government. The executive director of the NASSP has said:

The unfunded mandates of NCLB have seriously strained America’s public schools. The federal government’s refusal to fully fund NCLB has forced schools to pull resources from other areas, and as a result has reduced the funds available for programs such as music, art, and foreign language.

There are anti-tax radicals in the Republican party who have famously declared their intention to use public policy to “shrink the federal government until it can be drowned in a bathtub”, which leads some to speculate whether the coordinated assault on social service funding brought by the two trillion-dollar wars, the massive tax cuts, the huge number of new unfunded mandates and financial regulatory changes that led directly to the record multi-trillion-dollar bailouts, was really a coordinated assault on social services and the federal budget.

That is a story for another day. For now, we’re grappling with the aftermath of these devastating policy choices. And the key factor in the whole picture is the war in Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein was deposed, but we have a country that may remain for generations on the verge of all-out civil war, and no other event in modern American history has been more devastating to our national finances or economic outlook.

The most famous book written to date about the war in Iraq was titled Fiasco, because aside from “regime change”, not one of the stated goals of the Iraq war planners was achieved. The men and women of the US armed forces have performed valiantly and professionally, with a few very visible exceptions, and have succeeded in stabilizing Iraq, so it won’t break apart.

Iraq may not only hold together, but US military efforts in rebuilding infrastructure and working with communities and tribes to foster cooperation and a new spirit of civic engagement, collaboration with police and local government, and a reduction in insurgency, have been vital in moving Iraq toward peace. The men and women doing that work deserve credit for such monumentally difficult tasks, it must be noted.

But catastrophically damaging ripple effects from the invasion itself and the clumsy, extreme violence of the early years of the war, have increased the threat to US security, proliferated the number of rogue terrorist groups aiming to kill Americans and left us having lost years of potential global collaboration on security, economic and climate issues, while a handful of companies working as “contractors” in Iraq made tens of millions or even billions of dollars.

The states have seen the tax burden shifted heavily toward them, with no apologies and no plans for reversal. Because no other choice was readily available, given the deep recession he inherited, Pres. Obama’s economic recovery strategy calls for putting off the reversal of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, in order to help spur job growth and a return to economic expansion. Until then, states will see federal money harder to come by, will have to borrow, will be forced to raise taxes or commuter fares —where relevant— or decrease tax incentives.

There are elections this year and next, in which voters will be judging whether sitting governors or legislatures, or members of Congress, deserve to remain in office, and anger over local and state taxes is sure to drive public opinion in those races. The issue people need to keep in mind, because it is very much a present-tense problem, is what those officials did to support or oppose the Iraq war’s massive drain on federal funding, what they thought about Bush’s tax policy, and what they did regarding the 2001-2006 Republican Congress’ unfunded mandates.

With a profound philosophical rift emerging in the nation’s chief opposition party, intolerance and programmatic lack of empathy are becoming the hallmarks of a troubled Republican minority. Party strategists are now worrying that, whatever the benefit might be for “building the base”, a more hard-line, less flexible, less inclusive vision of Republicanism will hurt the party’s chances in national elections.

The two elements of the problem are crucial: Intolerance, because ideological conservatives have seized on Obama’s inclusive 21st century message of “change” as a touchstone they can use to signify a threat to all things traditional, American, and, if you will, read: white. No-empathy, because their positions routinely ignore the human element in issues of major political controversy.

Empathy vs. Non-empathy in Public Service

Empathy became a catch-word this summer, when Republicans sought to use the word to describe Obama’s choice of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court as a “racist”, because she might “empathize” with actual human beings making an argument before her. The term they were looking for, of course, was sympathy… empathy is not sharing a view, but sensing the shared humanity of the other, possibly of someone whose views are diametrically opposed to one’s own.

In terms of judicial talent, empathy is an absolute necessary quality, because it allows the judge to see not only the meaning of a law on paper, but the meaning of a law’s wording and effects in the lives of actual human beings. Democracy cannot be defended if there is not a respect for the rights of human beings living in the democratic society in question. But that’s almost beside the point: the Republican party is now grappling with an even more grave miscalculation.

An intelligent Republican strategist could point out to the party elders that an absence of empathy has a clinical definition: sociopathy. Republican leaders would do well to hear that comment before it is picked up by Democratic strategists and party leaders. One may be more or less indifferent to human suffering, or afraid of difference, but who wants to elect political leaders whose party aims bear resemblance to a profound psychological sickness?

Intolerance and lack of empathy are, however, different problems for the party: intolerance shrinks the tent, because specific groups are directly excluded, or feel they are, by coded language and by inelastic rhetoric on specific social issues. Lack of empathy, however, further shrinks the tent by signaling an unwillingness to stand by you if you need the support of the people you elected.

Exodus: Movement of the People

Republican party strategists are worried about the direction this ideological shift has taken: with long-time senior Republicans like Arlen Specter fleeing the party for fear of their political fortunes, the message of the moment is clear: the Republican party is banking on a hard-right leap of faith, ousting those not in line with the ideology and demonizing all other elements in society. This means that if the bet goes south, the party loses still more ground, with nothing to fall back on.

By the swearing in of Barack Obama as president of the United States, in January, strategists and pundits, even among Republicans, were beginning to question if the party would be able to adapt to the 21st century, demographically and ideologically, and survive, or if it would be marginalized as some other party moved in to take its center-right place on the American political spectrum. In the 2008 election cycle, the Republican party actually lost overall membership numbers, while Obama alone brought 13 million people into his campaign.

Part of the problem is that the Republicans are fighting to be the conservative party in a system not of their own making. The Democratic party fashioned, in large part, the existing system of public services and national government, through the New Deal and the 60 years of Congressional dominance, from 1932 through 1994.

To defend the existing norms would be the Democratic thing to do. So, ironically, it was Republican “conservative” propaganda that allowed Barack Obama to be the “change candidate” the entire globe was able to see as distinct and revolutionary. Obama’s message is new, and would bring change, but his politics is Democratic, and seeks mainly to continue pursuing the aims of the Democratic party historically, in an updated, more dynamic fashion.

The Green-Lib Coalition

What Republicans need to worry about is triangulation. They have been fighting a pitched battle against Democratic “liberalism”, while offering no coherent platform of public services or government accountability that is strictly “conservative” yet able to operate in the system that already exists. This makes them first of all a reluctant party of radical change, and second, a party at risk of being boxed out ideologically by more policy-oriented parties.

For instance, there is significant overlap between the policy goals of the Green party and those of the Libertarian party, despite deep philosophical differences on the role of government. A multi-state coalition among representatives of these two parties could forge a path for viable opposition to the two-party stranglehold on power. The effects would likely see one of the two major parties pushed into third place.

As the numbers stand now, a Green-Lib coalition might be able to shave as much as 10% off Democratic support nationwide, assuming Democrats or liberal independents —still wary of repeating the 2000 election, where a Green candidate effectively denied the Democratic candidate the White House— believed the coalition was big enough to keep the Republicans at bay. Republicans might lose anywhere from 20% to 35% of their support, as they struggle against Green-Lib claims that they are not rights-oriented and not green enough.

This may be a little bit like fantasy baseball, but there’s something to the idea: Bill Maher, a staunch libertarian and a committed liberal, clearly sides with Green party politics on a number of issues. His audience sees the world through a very complex, but real and palpable, Green-Lib prism of political choices. Voters are looking for something more “their own” nowadays, something different from and more personally relevant and attuned than the old prevailing norms.

The question of why or how a Green-Lib coalition might play out —and that is really just one example— will have a lot to do with what party is bleeding votes in what way, and why? Right now, the Republican party is bleeding votes because 1) Bush’s politics failed on a grand scale; 2) the party has acquired an air of radical intolerance; 3) the party appears to be “out of touch” with the average voter; and 4) because Obama’s 21st century message of dynamic vision, inclusiveness, public service and sustainability, is prevailing.

Those four factors all suggest a Green-Lib coalition would more easily capture would-be Republican votes —perhaps all of them independents— than Democratic votes, as the Democrats are now more united and more determined than at any time in nearly 50 years. Pres. Obama needs to make sure he keeps his own message, his own revolutionary pragmatist framework at the center of the Democratic discourse, because that is what brought over 65 million voters to his cause in 2008.

The Republicans do not have that luxury. They don’t have a nuanced, complex, adaptable message that fits so many competing interests. If the Democrats can hold onto that momentum, analysts now suggest, they have a much better chance to expand their electoral base and build reliable votes into every election for coming decades, in part due to demographics, in part due to changing attitudes on a range of social issues.

The Republican party wants to carry the conservative banner, but has had a difficult time explaining what conservatism means in modern America. As such, the party has opted for an explanation whereby modern America is the problem and conservatism is about stripping away layers of change, making social structures more rigid and shifting power back toward the top of the socio-economic pyramid.

Electoral Fortunes

In 2006 and 2008, this approach was roundly rejected by American voters, which is why Barack Obama won 16 million more votes than George W. Bush did in 2000 (69,456,897 [PDF] to 50,456,002). It was by far the most votes any presidential candidate has ever received, and well more than doubled his opponent’s Electoral College tally (365 to 173).

The Republican party’s shift toward corporate interests is not really a conservative political ideology at all, but a matter of fact for a party which is struggling to inspire small donors in large numbers. Money became key to political stature in the United States when the Supreme Court found that “money is free speech”, effectively allowing political parties to organize their philosophical platforms around fundraising.

Barack Obama, however, demonstrated that big-donor fundraising doesn’t necessarily equal political might. He won more support from a larger number of small donors (individuals giving under $200) than any presidential candidate in history, and in some months actually tripled previous records for fundraising. There is a new model for how to do political outreach, and the Republican party may not have the rhetorical or philosophical reach to do it well.

Wayward & Wandering

Despite some rhetorical hullabaloo this summer —about Sonia Sotomayor’s non-existent “racism” and healthcare reform’s non-existent “socialized medicine” agenda—, the party is still adrift, unable to bring together corporate interests, social ultraconservatives, Christian voters (many of whom favor the Democrats’ social justice positions) and rural voters (whose intermittent conservatism is often non-ideological).

The Republican party needs to be wary of its own strategy of paring down, peeling away moderate policy positions, marginalizing, driving away or even deliberately opposing moderate members of the party, and attacking values that huge segments of the population now see as integral to life in 21st century America. The strategy is a little like burning the village to save it.

On immigration reform, the Republican position is aggressive, hostile to human need or welfare, and undemocratic; it is likely to make anywhere from 10 to 40 million votes unavailable to them, possibly for generations. On healthcare reform, the 52 million uninsured will likely never support the Republican position, which amounts to a political declaration of war against that population. Assuming there is some overlap, we are looking at 60 to 80 million votes that the Republicans are throwing away.

And not every voter who believes in moderation is one of those 60 to 80 million; plenty of people will be turned off by the hostile grandstanding that pits Republican party politicians against the needs of those too powerless to defend themselves in the public sphere or to acquire healthcare coverage.

There are many conservatives whose view is that conservatism is moderate by nature, not radical, and the radicalizing elements in the Republican party may drive those conservatives toward the Libertarians or to Obama’s generally moderate pragmatism. There are a range of issues on which the Republican party’s inflexibility and lack of empathy hamper its ability to craft viable solutions that can win broad support.

Christian Morality in Public Service

A significant number of evangelical voters are outraged over the Iraq war and over the simultaneous inaction on humanitarian crises like Darfur. Global climate destabilization and energy innovation are increasingly seen as issues of Christian moral obligation, as poorer and underdeveloped countries are likely to see the most widespread suffering as a result of the current crisis. The Republicans are losing votes there as well.

As an example of how progressive values and Christian social policy are converging, especially on economic and environmental issues, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) writes, in its pastoral letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the US economy, entitled Economic Justice for All, that:

All people on this globe share a common ecological environment that is under increasing pressure. Depletion of soil, water, and other natural resources endangers the future. Pollution of air and water threatens the delicate balance of the biosphere on which future generations will depend. The resources of the earth [sic] have been created by God for the benefit of all, and we who are alive today hold them in trust. This is a challenge to develop a new ecological ethic that is both just and sustainable. (¶12)

The pastoral letter goes on to talk about the need to act in favor of basic Christian values of fairness and human dignity in economic policies, stating specifically that: “No one may claim the name Christian and be comfortable in the face of the hunger, homelessness, insecurity, and injustice found in this country and the world.” (¶27)

The USSCB calls for the founding of a new “common moral vision” of society and its economic institutions, and adds that “human dignity, realized in community and in connection with the whole of God’s creation, is the norm against which every social institution must be measured.” (¶25)

Instead of constructive ideas, viable programs, plans to reduce the deficit while finding funding for much needed reforms, the Republican party is gambling on a logic of confusion: call the opponents the “Democrat party”, instead of the Democratic party, confuse the word empathy with the word sympathy, tell people that all government actions are by nature “socialist”.

That logic of confusion may have the desired effect of sowing confusion, but such an outcome won’t build support for a Republican party that is not offering viable ideas and seems wed to confusion. The Republican party has stripped away any sensible strategy for making a moral case for its leadership, in favor of a morally vacuous tactical assault on the image of Democratic politics; this opens them up to the charge that their own politics is devoid of a genuine moral vision of public service.

Rapid Third-party Rise

At the point where ideological radicalism starts to take precedence over the quality of public service a party can hope to deliver, philosophical splits become something far more concrete. Israel is a clear example: when the conservative Likud party began to move toward an ideological hard-line agenda, its most popular leader at the time, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, split from the party, and founded a “national unity” centrist party, called Kadima.

Within months, Sharon’s Kadima party had won support from leading Labor party figures, adopted important left-of-center ideas, and comprehensively swore off associating with any far-right ultranationalist figures. The reason: even in Israel, where the population must live in actual physical fear for terrorist attack, on a regular basis, the bellicose and intolerant positions that came to dominate Likud were unacceptable to a majority of voters.

Principled pragmatism made them feel safer. In the aftermath of Sharon’s suffering a stroke, the next prime minister Ehud Olmert strayed from some of Kadima’s most centrist pro-peace positions, and launched two aggressive wars that earned Israel near global denunciation for attacks on civilians, the very thing Israeli politics is organized to oppose. For that reason alone, Likud was able to form a government in association with a far-right ultranationalist party which Kadima roundly rejects.

Sentiment there seems to be that a credible Labor party would be the standard second-place finisher to a credible Kadima. A new generation of leadership is taking over Kadima, and has expressed its determination that radical elements in Likud or among its ultranationalist coalition partners, not be allowed to guide national social or security policy.

There is a price to pay for ideological radicalization: the shrinking of the electorate available to the radicalized party. The lesson: even where Likud was able to form a fragile coalition government in Israel’s parliamentary system, its fortunes are gravely set back by ideological radicalization. The “third party” Kadima bloc is now likely to return to the majority, and the radicalized conservative party is essentially in competition for second place, with a disorganized Labor party, struggling to find its footing as well.

Conclusion

The question ultimately is: will the Republicans figure it out in time? If not, the Green-Lib coalition just might spring up. Likely not in 2010, or even in 2012. But if the Republican party loses more ground to the Democratic party in 2010, or in both 2010 and 2012, it is virtually impossible to imagine that the American electorate would not start searching for a viable opposition, to avoid a concentration of power that is generally seen by all as unhealthy for democracy.

It is unpleasant, if one is a Republican party leader, to contemplate the need to do business with and be cooperative in the policy goals of the current administration, which came to office on a wave of movement-level public support that opposed the party’s central ideas. But there may be no other way for the Republican party to show that its ideas, and its people, can work to the benefit of the nation, given the problems and the ethical tests of the 21st century.

The United States is working to develop closer strategic and economic relations with China. The relationship has always been tricky, due to the binary opposition of strategies, which is convenient for those who would like to disqualify the other side’s policies as “evil” or contrary to all reason. Pres. Barack Obama has been clear that he sees the US-China relationship as one of global ethical responsibility, and the driving economic and political bond in the 21st century.

He has also been clear that he expects regimes that favor authoritarian measures and oppose dissent within their borders to recognize the liberating and resilience-inducing effects of democratic processes and to work to legitimize their policies through a turnover of power to the people. His phrasing has varied widely, sometimes speaking of how American democracy “set the captives free” by achieving the abolition of slavery, or asking rival nations to “unclench your fist” — relax constraints on dissent and free assembly in order to be more active in substantive international negotiations.

China and the US are increasingly immersed in a symbiotic economic relationship, which may or may not be healthy for either of the two nations, their respective political systems, or their obligations to domestic populations or to allied nations. But it is on the question of human rights and “sovereignty” where the two differ most severely. China routinely defends not only its own harsh internal security measures, but also those of nations around the world, under the logic of “sovereignty”, essentially the argument that any nation’s government can do whatever it wants within its own borders.

The American position is generally the opposite —though there are serious questions of “American exceptionalism”—, holding that all nations’ governments have a moral obligation to legitimate any and all government activities through checks and balances, democratic elections, respect for the specific tenets of international law and the broad principles of human rights. Both nations hold permanent positions, with unilateral “veto power”, on the United Nations Security Council, and as anyone might expect, realpolitik dictates that each nation votes according to its perceived interests, as well as its principles.

The question going forward is: how can closer US-China ties bring about a more united front, backed by the global reach of both powers, that promotes responsibility, democracy and human dignity, in economic and security policy? While for hardliners on both sides, these are fuzzy, “academic” questions better dealt with as matters of military superiority and global strategy, the actual way in which these questions play out in US-China negotiations, on a range of issues, will determine much about the geo-political framework of the 21st century.

Sovereignty is used by China to justify its opposition to binding emissions reduction targets, even where those targets are more favorable to China —still in the midst of industrial “development” and economic “modernization”— than to wealthy industrial democracies. Breaking down this staunch opposition to international commitment may be the trickiest and most perilous job of diplomats representing the Obama administration’s “3D” diplomatic agenda — development, diplomacy, defense.

The above-mentioned question of “American exceptionalism” is the perceived double-standard, whereby the US is supposed to be granted more leeway —immunity from prosecutions before the International Criminal Court, for instance— in security matters, due to 1) its self-professed role as defender of democracy and human liberty and 2) its outsize contribution in dollar terms to funding the UN system and security operations around the world.

The exceptionalism is seen as such by nations or factions that perceive US security policies or operations, or its economic agenda, as hostile or as working against certain principles of international law. The feeling that such a special status might be justified tends to be rooted in the idea that US involvement abroad is done altruistically, or in defense of commonly held ideals. Pres. Obama’s talk of “universal values” is an updating of this kind of language, but represents a more generous diplomatic approach as well.

China, however, does not see such language as inherently friendly: the perception tends to be that politics is rooted less in values than in interests, and the old-world idea that there is never enough to go around of any major resource or living-standard driver, means every negotiation among polities must be a negotiation of self-interest, never shared interest. In this light, the US president speaks of “universal values” only as part of a thinly veiled effort to place intolerable constraints on China’s discretion, domestically and abroad.

The Obama administration has to walk the rhetorical tightrope between such perceptions and the opposing viewpoint —that negotiations on economic or climate policy that avoid confrontations over alleged detention and security abuses are capitulation to tyranny—, if there is to be any progress on actions and attitudes of shared interest on any of these matters. The best approach might be to not veil the real goal at all: to openly present, as Pres. Obama has done, the defense of human rights and the democratic decentralization of power as tools for strengthening the state and promoting future prosperity.

The two nations are also hard pressed to make such negotiations happen effectively, because both are rare cases of “successful” revolutionary systems, the one 233 years old, the other 60 years old. Both nations have established well-used and ideologically deep-rooted legal systems and structures of government, based in revolutionary ideals that are not to be put aside. The US experiment with democracy has an ethical leg up by not being totalitarian in its underlying assumptions or in practice, but China’s system also rests on ideals that can be used to foster decentralization, democracy and human rights.

As the US-China relationship moves forward, finding ways to demonstrate this dynamic, the productive interplay of revolutionary ideals within a pragmatist approach to economics and human well-being, may be the single common key to success or failure in any negotiation. The Chinese government does not want “regime change” at home, and the US does not want to further the methods of the totalitarian state abroad or in its political relations… so every step toward better promotion of shared human interest and human rights protections will require an incremental approach with demonstrably pragmatic benefits.

Related stories:

• Death Toll in Xinjiang Unrest Rises, as Public Assembly Banned
• G8 Summit Hits Snag in Establishing Global Emissions Reductions
• Nuclear Weapons-free World the Right Goal, Best Way to Serve American Ideals
• China Backs Away from ‘Green Dam’ Censorship Technology
• AP Reports Repression Marks 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre
• ‘Ghost Net’: Cyber-spying Probe Reveals Vast Network of Cyber-espionage Based in China
• It’s Time for China to Start Defending those Victimized by Corruption

America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.

The idea of the ‘automatic’ in human affairs is an extremely dangerous fallacy — l’automaticité as a functional problem in French ethical and/or political philosophy. It presumes to be able to rule out nearly all human elements of any relationship: free choice, and by extension human error, the interrelationship of people in a community, or across a market. It dehumanizes for the sake of intellectual convenience, or in the case of banks, for the convenience of using accounting methods that ignore risk.

Though the ‘marketplace’ is the most efficient way of turning a sum of money into more than it started out being, and the marketplace is made up of human beings with human relationships, subject to the whims of timing, collective direction, the emotional cascades that dominate trends in trading and the rules set forth by major institutions (like the banks), the banks have sought to siphon as much wealth as possible out of the marketplace, while totally disregarding the humanity of the millions of players whose lives become the source of their profits.

So what’s the solution? Isn’t the automaticity of repayment part of what motivates banks to lend freely, as they have over the last decade? And aren’t the banks reminding us, day after day, by way of indirect protests against legislative action, complaints about the stifling effects of regulation, and over the last year their relentless devotion to the rigors of the not-lending marketplace, that they need such added motivation to do what it is that most behooves banks, which is to lend and hold debt as future income? (Why deprive ourselves of future income by falsely claiming it as past income?)

What can be done to make an institution founded on lending break its apparent addiction to not lending? The answer just might be in treating people like people, building human relationships that are not authoritarian in their zeal or fictional in their assumptions. The legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Obama, in May, known as the Credit Card-holders’ Bill of Rights or the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, sought to make those ‘adjustments’ that would require more human relations between banks and borrowers, but it is just a start.

It should be noted, the entire nation has colluded in the grand delusion, letting the banks pretend that by making a loan and selling the loan, somehow the same profits it acquired would also be acquired by the buyers of the loan, and the borrowers would also locate the needed additional wealth to compensate everyone, in the time allotted. That conceptualization of lending and wealth-generation allowed for the delusion that new money could be made almost out of thin air, just by willing it.

A loan became a “product”, and the product could then be sold, over the counter, and morph from wealth projected to product sold to new wealth generated, eventually becoming an “engine” of economic growth. But with such a high percentage of all loans falling into this category of renamed, rehashed, and re-imagined value bases, the “engine” effect was getting too much like an effect and less and less like a genuine engine producing substantive thrust.

The idea of wealth replaced actual wealth. There was a bubble. There was a correction. We are living in the aftermath of the correction. But it is necessary to understand how widespread this financial market bubble was and what philosophy about the creation of wealth allowed for it to get so far beyond sustainable, or substantiable, expansion. The idea that by way of repackaging debt, new wealth would automatically emerge, underpinned an entire philosophy about how banking could be something new, something different, a break from the past.

But it was not the past from which these innovative finances were breaking; it was reality, the measure of the concrete, the measurable, the comprehensible. Money is abstract enough as it is: paper or coin that represents value, formerly backed by silver or gold, now just a currency with value against other currencies. So to craft whole new terrains of complex abstraction, within which money appears to do amazing new things, perform new functions, is to stretch the bounds of lived reality.

Here’s another way to look at it. Banks are required, at least in the US, to keep a certain amount of capital in reserve, to guard against losses and cover obligations to pay out withdrawals to account-holders. In the process of assessing the fallout of the 2008 credit freeze, banks that were taking money from the federal government were found to have inadequate capital in reserve: they had been using investments, bundled assets and projected earnings as “capital in reserve”, which they were not.

This fictionalization of the banking business has many causes, over many years, and cannot be attributed to a single individual, a single idea, or any one point of departure. But at some point, innovative thinking and the generation of valuable financial derivatives morphed into a fictionalization of value, in which there simply was not and could not be enough value generated, in a short enough period of time, to sustain the claims of value being made by those institutions generating and selling off the bundled assets, derivatives and exotics.

So, we can say, the fiction of automatic wealth is bankrupting the US. Yes, even today, even as we are in recovery. Because fictionalized finances found their way into the long-term investment strategies of major institutions, including state governments. California is now broke. Banks have refused to continue accepting IOUs from the state, and the state government now has to shut down one day a week. California, the world’s 5th largest economy, lost billions when the markets seized up and hemorrhaged wealth last year.

It is the second time in a decade that California fell head over heels into a massive swindle. The Enron debacle nearly bankrupted the state, because the power-trading giant had allegedly colluded with other power companies in California to fix prices, forcing the governor to sign an agreement to buy power at many times market rates for up to ten years. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power in the wake of that collapse, and now the end of his second term is seeing another collapse, brought on by huge losses caused by a financial system whose claims of real value were simply not real.

The entangling of state pensions plans and other long-term investments with the esoteric workings of the financial system is a natural consequence of a mindset in which every player has a right to earn, and to profit, via financial investment. The problem is, someone generally has to lose wealth in order for someone else to gain substantially, so the more players involved, the more risk —one might think— that more players will wind up losing. Creative strategies have to be adopted to prevent this, or at least to make it look like it will not occur.

The math might change altogether. A 30-year mortgage, which may or may not ever be repaid at its highest projected value, is counted as an asset. The lender claims to in fact hold that wealth now. $500,000 was just paid out, but in fact, the bank will claim to hold the $500,000, plus all the accumulated future interest. It does not, in fact, have the money, but it says it does. And it makes this questionable logic look viable by selling the debt.

With most commodities, this works, because the risk of lower value is taken on by the buyer, and such is the speculation that comes with buying and selling commodities. At some point, there will be a buyer who has to know the risk is mounting and he may never see a higher price than he paid. But with debt, the value of the loan is fixed: the borrower will not in fact pay more than the highest amount allowable under the loan agreement.

So once the bank sells the debt at the highest price it can, the buyer is very likely never to see a higher price or a return on investment. To get around this, debt holdings were “bundled”. Or rather, they were fragmented, then recombined. So the $500,000 plus interest becomes 5,000 $100 values, each with potential accumulated interest, and each with a speculative price that might actually go up. The money multiplies, and the buyer has some confidence that this speculative commodity will in fact yield a higher price than what he pays for it.

But the problem remains the same: the underlying loan will never be worth more than the monetary value assigned to it in the initial loan agreement. At some point, someone somewhere will be holding debt, which they “bought” at a very high price, which will either be repaid at the initial agreed (lower) value, or not be repaid at all, because in fact the wealth necessary for the borrower to successfully repay the loan never materialized at all.

Imagine this happening hundreds of thousands of times across the financial system, then millions, over several years. Imagine people with fixed-rate mortgages, able to repay, refinancing their homes in order to get access to more wealth, buying into new loans that work in this way, so that a majority of all loans were in fact of this kind. Banks were long past the critical mass on unsustainable debt when the house of cards started to wobble last summer.

What happened between the spring and the fall of 2008 was that a scenario some economists had predicted for years actually became apparent and apparently inevitable: there simply was not enough real wealth in the world to sustain the claims of value being made by the financial sector as a whole: too many outstanding mortgages were in fact unpayable as it was, let alone in a world where repayment depends on a financial system with exorbitant growth levels and where wages are expanding too slowly —actually declining by $2,000 per household from 2000 to 2008— and cost of living skyrocketing — namely food, fuel, healthcare and credit.

We are still working our way out of the labyrinth of that fictionalized financial world. But it’s important to recognize the underlying big picture conceptualizations of wealth that led to the mess we are in. The idea that wealth can automatically materialize from cunning manipulations, or even from what might be essentially nothing more than a shift in vocabulary, is dangerous and must be guarded against.

Automaticity is a tempting idea: it periodically takes hold of and distorts entire political systems. It is the logic behind building ever more destructive weapons —logic that the use of brute force will automatically compel our enemies to respond as we wish— and of prejudice of all kinds —if a stereotype can be applied to an entire group, then why not pin the blame for all our ills on that group—, and so the logic of automaticity is at the root of some of the most massive and widespread suffering in human history.

In banking, it has led to millions of bankruptcies and home foreclosures, millions of layoffs, a frozen credit industry. A lack of government response may have allowed the nation to slide into a long economic depression, by many economists’ forecasts. So the lesson has to be: wealth is not generated automatically by any flip of the wrist, by any sleight of hand, by any cunning financial innovation; it emerges, over time, from real evolutions within the economy as a whole, and has to correspond to measurable real-world value.

Banks are no more entitled to an automatic unending expansion of the wealth they hold or claim to hold than is any one individual. Banks are no more virtuous than any borrower, when they make claims about future wealth projections. The virtue is in the human element, which is expressed by the measurable wealth construct, the figures that are not purely figurative but actually correspond to lived reality.

We must remember that banks are made up of human beings, just as the market landscape of borrowers and investors is made up of human beings. Ideas are tools we use to serve our purposes, but they cannot be bought and sold independent of the human world in which they function; innovative financial instruments must operate on the human scale, so that investors know they are not handing over real wealth in exchange for unsustainable wealth claims.

The Khmer Rouge sought to establish a red Khmer empire in Cambodia, with some ambitions of expansion beyond the nation’s borders, by stamping out any human life or mind that varied from the project, as narrowly conceived by Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The “killing fields” that ensued, with the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million people, were an attempt to establish a new break in time, the time before and the time after the purification —as the regime proposed— of all Cambodia.

Beyond Utopia, it was a lust to fashion a paradise built on millions of purgatories. It was the paradox of a violent Heaven, a wisdom of intolerance, a corrupt purity, an abstraction drowned in the blood of innocents. In order to establish absolute power, either for themselves or their ideology, a purge was undertaken that would attempt to eliminate nearly all people of learning, leaving by one count only 4 highly trained Cambodian legal minds remaining.

The totalitarian nature of the purge was, like all political purges and all totalitarianism, based on the lie, the false promise of finality: The Khmer Rouge bet the lives of millions and the fate of their nation on the idea that once they had killed enough people, the perfect society would emerge and the ills that threatened their plans would be cured, purged successfully, overcome without risk of return.

If the political logic of the deranged practitioners of the Cambodian genocide are to be believed, they believed they could make a just and ordered world by attacking with thunder and steel everything vulnerable in the human beings they judged as outside their reach, and erasing human virtues like compassion, justice, tolerance, from the communities they favored, by shaping their society through a system of torture and murder.

The evils of the Khmer Rouge terror were nothing less than the wholesale abdication of humanity, in service of a power structure that elevated thugs and psychopaths, testing their merit by urging them to exhibit incomprehensible degrees of cruelty.

This is so much the case that in the ongoing trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch (pronounced ‘Doik’) —a prison director accused of a vast array of war crimes, committed in furtherance of the Khmer Rouge purge—, the defendant has alternately broken down in hysterical demonstrations of guilt and regret and attempted to delegitimize testimony questioning the identity of witnesses by saying he had long ago had that person killed.

The metaphysical arrangement of such a regime of bloodlust could be classed as habitual psychotics —more than as physics or metaphysics—‚ behavior so far outside what even the perpetrator’s heart and mind can countenance, that it amounts to a deliberate casting off of any intellectual or moral coherence, a descent into something antithetical to the involvement of anything we might call human qualities.

By casting off the restraint that stems from having human qualities like conscience, moral compass, tolerance and civil social structures, in exchange for an experiment with habitual psychotics, the genocidal regime is able to spread the logic of its brutality, by disqualifying virtually anyone from the broad category of humanity, both the victims and its allies in perpetrating the killing.

This accounts for the mysterious inability of any moral considerations to explain or account for the logic of genocide. It is not logical; it is not intellectually or morally coherent; it is not actually in service of any reasonable or worthy political aim. It is the sowing of injury and contempt in a way that will take root, leaving a landscape of devastation and tragedy in its wake, the fundamental crippling of a nation for generations to come.

Now, long after the killing ended, Cambodia has finally been able to put together a legal process for prosecuting and punishing the crimes of that era (1975-1979), but only with the help of international jurists assisting in an ad-hoc “hybrid” tribunal system meant to enforce and expand the scope of Cambodia’s own evolving humanitarian law.

The trials are a criminal prosecution that stands in for what has been tried in other places, the “truth and reconciliation” process aimed at fixing crimes and grudges firmly in the past, in order to clear the terrain of the society’s future for something better and more humane. Each society that faces the horrors of such a history has unique circumstances, unique crimes to address, and unique demographic makeup that may favor one solution over another.

Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, conceived a complex but broadly applicable process of community hearings, in which the perpetrators of the horrific Rwandan genocide openly confessed in front of their neighbors their involvement in the crimes of those 100 days in 1994 — when over 800,000 men, women and children were murdered by machete, dagger, fire and beating, by people who had always been part of their communities.

Kagame told Fareed Zakaria on Sunday’s edition of GPS —the “Global Public Square”— that “We had to bring the victims and perpetrators back together”, because those on either side of the genocide live in mixed communities everywhere across Rwanda. Zakaria praised Rwanda for finding a nuanced and well-thought solution to the problem of continued cohabitation of both communities, even as the nation seeks to recognize the genocide and prevent another round of the same, perhaps in retaliation or frustration for hard living conditions.

In fact, “spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide” is now sowing unrest in North Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Cattle rustling used to finance militia activity is fomenting inter-ethnic conflict among Hutus and Tutsis, some of whom are émigrés from Rwanda, having fled in the time of the genocide. As the Christian Science Monitor is reporting:

While the trade in blood cows finances rebel activity here, but it’s also a form of psychological warfare. Another major rebel group in the region, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), is a predominantly Tutsi movement which sees itself as protecting its people. It also defends their traditional livelihood; For centuries, the pastoral Tutsi have measured a man’s wealth by counting his cattle.

“Nothing riles the CNDP and the Tutsi more than having their cattle stolen,” says Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. When they turn to battle, she says, the CNDP can be brutal: In a bid to regain villages controlled by Hutu militias, in April the CNDP killed over 100 civilians, some of them the elderly and children.

However galling or economically traumatic, the theft of cattle is substantially less significant than the mass slaughter of innocents, but the Kivu experience demonstrates how the unresolved fallout from the 1994 genocide is again stoking the fires of ethnic hatred. Can Paul Kagame do enough in his second term as president of Rwanda to establish a reliable civil society to effect a lasting truth and reconciliation process in which the crimes and animus of the genocide are relegated to the past?

The effects of the slaughter will be part of Rwandan life, part of the immediate life experience and family structures across the nation, for generations to come, as is the case in Cambodia, as among Europeans both Jewish and non-Jewish who lived through the Holocaust, as is the case for residents of the former Yugoslavia or of today’s Darfur. The false promise of the final solution will, in every case, become ingrained in the evolution of a people, and may impede any real ascent to ideal structures favoring harmony among rival groups.

We need to establish international structures with reach and authority that can detect and prevent such campaigns of slaughter. The prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, decries China’s treatment of Uighur muslims in Xinjiang province as “genocide”, though many believe the programmatic “ethnic reordering” in which Beijing has engaged is not as dangerous as more aggressive “ethnic cleansing”. But some say such situations as those in Xinjiang, or the North Caucasus, need to be viewed as early warnings and halted without further loss of life.

Framing a social plan of any kind in the logic of ethnic cleansing or political re-engineering implies the desire to use force to command the restructuring of communities. Doing so in a way that takes lives or forces entire ethnicities or groups of political dissidents out verges on what could be called a purge campaign. Such ideas of a final solution are tempting to the subset of political actors who disqualify their rivals from humanity and seek to sweep them from existence, and are the root structure of a burgeoning genocide.

International structures that can provide for monitoring such policies that put a society at risk of ethnic cleansing need to be established, tested and strengthened. Observation of crimes like those ongoing in Darfur, and possibly ready to flare up again in North Kivu or the North Caucasus, is not enough: observation with vocal protest which amounts to no intervention empowers the perpetrators and condones their worst actions.

Building consensus among the “great powers”, namely the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of whom wields a veto power over any action taken by the Council, is the first step. Genuine issues of sovereignty can be addressed, but Moscow and Beijing could be persuaded to see that reducing inter-ethnic conflict wherever it exists, especially within their borders and in neighboring countries, is in the interests of their existing systems of government and influence abroad.

Cambodia is now facing its savage and inexplicable past, and doing the truly hard work of trying to adjudicate who pays the price for the crimes of a regime whose legal framework for ruling could not be justified as “legal” under any recognized notion of legitimate government. Evidence presented in court may show that some of those responsible for the crimes were following orders; the orders, and the legal authority behind them, must be shown to be beyond the scope of any allowable legal structure.

What faces Cambodia, however, is more than just judging the guilty; it’s accounting for all that was lost, all the cultural potential of the lives cut short, all the vision and humanity that will never be recovered. That ache is memorial and immemorial, tightly woven into the fabric of Cambodian politics, and transcendent; it must permeate what takes place in the future, but also be put aside so that the future can be free of it.

When Pres. Barack Obama met with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, the tone was optimistic, visionary, encouraging: the heads of state of the two former Cold War enemies were agreeing to historic legally binding reductions in their respective nuclear arsenals, and shifting their vocabulary toward something more akin to a consensus position on defensive weapons innovations, namely a missile shield.

The two had met before, and had from the start seen opportunities for meaningful progress in US-Russia relations. But some in Russia are uncomfortable with this dynamic: Obama’s global popularity and his unabashedly pro-democratic message lead some hardliners to see Medvedev’s willingness to negotiate so openly as a subtle but clear signal he will take a secondary role in global policy leadership.

Medvedev’s own mentor and political benefactor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is perhaps the leading hardliner in all of Russia, a shrewd political boss and a militant defender of Russia’s ability to project power abroad. Obama described Putin, after their first meeting, as “tough, smart, shrewd, very unsentimental and very pragmatic” on a range of issues. His diplomatic language acknowledged Putin’s tough core personality, but seemed to indicate he would like to see a more pragmatic, less ideological bilateral US-Russia relationship.

Putin is seen by many as being behind Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s comments suggesting the agreed nuclear arms reductions will not materialize if the US does not adequately assuage Russian fears about the possible offensive or strategic uses of a defensive “missile shield” in central Europe, namely Poland and the Czech Republic. Putin, then, would be the reluctant interlocutor Obama’s team must either sideline or persuade.

The negotiations are taking place across a range of agencies, at multiple levels of authority, simultaneously. Military chiefs have been involved in negotiating both transit routes through Russia to Afghanistan and work on a new round of strategic arms reductions. Top diplomats have been working on both the agreed language and the timing and means of verification for “legally binding” arms control treaties.

And, of course, Pres. Obama has met and spoken with privately the two most powerful men in Russia. Perhaps the most contentious point of difference between US and Russian policy-makers is the status of Georgia, one of the now independent former Soviet republics. When Georgia’s military moved into South Ossetia last year to undermine the spreading influence of separatist groups and reclaim territory, Russia responded with a massive military invasion of Georgian territory.

The Obama administration has been clear that its aim is to persuade Russia to remove its troops from South Ossetia. The US also favors Georgian entry onto a path to NATO membership, which Russia finds strategically and ideologically intolerable. Russia sees NATO expansion eastward as a hostile maneuver designed to surround Russia and reduce its sphere of influence; the US views it as a way of expanding the zone of protection for its allies in Europe and securing the freedom of vulnerable former Soviet republics.

Competition for natural resources in the Caucasus region is another reasons cited for US-Russian differences on the sovereignty of Georgia and neighboring nation-states. Russia, under Putin’s presidency, and now Medvedev’s, has repeatedly use its natural gas supply to force economic concessions from the European Union’s massive market, using the deadly cold of winter to impose price hikes and undermine the influence of “transit states” like Ukraine.

Kremlin watchers say the current alignment of Russian government power puts more hardline anti-American zealots in control of Russia’s government than at any time since the 1980s, perhaps even the 1970s. One recent report said that Putin and his people are “terrified” by Obama, because his popularity means they will be forced to open up Russian policy to some of the goals the US administration holds most dear.

If collaboration in the achievement of US goals is anathema to Vladimir Putin, and he proves to be as powerful a prime minister as he has said he would be, persuading Putin to either come to the table and find middle ground, or to let Medvedev lead on Russian strategic foreign policy, will be key to any substantive improvement to US-Russian relations in the near term.

Obama’s eloquent blend of populist and progressive rhetoric may startle the likes of Putin, who used his presidency to consolidate government control of the economy and batter political rivals. Obama said, in an address to the New Economic School: “The arc of history shows us that governments which serve their own people survive and thrive”. He added that “Governments which serve only their own power do not”, language some might say is a veiled criticism of Putin’s hardline tendencies.

Barack Obama has been observing, researching and critiquing nuclear weapons policy for three decades. He seeks to put in motion the most ambitious global denuclearization effort ever conceived, grounding his approach in a hard pragmatist awareness of what drives the build-up of ever more destructive weapons arsenals. He has said throughout this year that his plans would never remove the US nuclear deterrent capability while any nuclear threat remains in the world. Now, he goes to Russia to seek a bilateral strategic arms reduction treaty.

The New York Times today reports that Obama’s 1983 Columbia University essay “Breaking the War Mentality” criticized the dangerous logic of the limitless Cold War weapons build-up and warned that policy-makers who sought to find ways to champion the fighting and winning of nuclear war might be inviting destruction and chaos. In that article, written for the Columbia newspaper Sundial, the young Obama called for steps to bring about “a nuclear free world”, as the only “decent” choice.

Obama was at that time writing during the massive build-up of the most destructive weapons the world had ever seen, as top Reagan advisers like Richard Perle —whose policies won him the honorific “the prince of darkness”— argued for a first-strike capability designed to eliminate the entire Soviet Union from existence. The popular “nuclear freeze” movement sprung up, with millions demonstrating in the streets of New York and other cities, decrying the devotion to a weapons regime that could wipe out all life on Earth.

Catholic bishops banded together to release a pastoral essay denouncing nuclear war as a great evil. The nuclear freeze movement was so successful —and was in part driven by nuclear accidents at peaceful facilities on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, and later at Chernobyl, in Ukraine— that no new nuclear plants have been built in the US since then. Pres. Ronald Reagan was persuaded, by the potential catastrophic destruction that would result from nuclear war, to promote and achieve, in cooperation with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbechev, the most aggressive denuclearization treaties ever undertaken.

Now, as the world enters what could be a new nuclear weapons age, with 9 nations —the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea— proven or thought to possess nuclear weapons, the student has become the teacher, in a sense, and he seeks to re-orient the prevailing global nuclear policy toward total denuclearization.

While old hands like Perle —despite having been proven wrong by history on nearly every count of their nuclear policy advice— continue to argue that only the naïve would favor the elimination of nuclear weapons, brazenly siding with the most sinister rogues on the world stage, it is hard to imagine how anything allowing the continued proliferation of new nuclear devices among the 9 nuclear nations would help prevent proliferation to those who seek to join the club. Obama’s goals are bold, but they are the most appropriate for long-term global nuclear strategy.

There are concrete, measurable steps being undertaken to move the US and the world toward a reduced nuclear future: the cancellation of development of new nuclear weapons —which could spur a global arms race of unprecedented proportions—, locating and sealing all “loose” nuclear material around the world, new strategic arms reduction treaties (StART), strengthening the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and reducing abrogation or cheating, and a global ban on the production of weapons-grade fissile material, which would put an upper limit on the number of weapons that could be built.

Each of these points would make for measurable means of regulating or restricting outright the production of nuclear weapons, making it easier for a global regime of inspections to detect even the slightest variation from the arms reduction protocols. Taken together, these proposals would make the intelligence game more precise and more effective the work of preventing even accidental nuclear detonation or release.

He was critical not only of the spread of nuclear weapons, but of the facile and tempting doctrines of confrontation and cynicism that aided in promoting their proliferation. He wrote of “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” in his 1983 article and has consistently warned that giving in to such attitudes undermines both the security of the United States and its allies and the values on which American democracy is founded.

Obama, who has remained committed to global denuclearization throughout his course of study and career in public life, took on the issue immediately upon entering the United States Senate. He has observed that “The United States has far more nuclear weapons than it needs,” adding that “any attempt by the U.S. government to develop or produce new nuclear weapons only undermines U.S. nonproliferation efforts around the world”.

He developed under-reported but very heavyweight international arms control credentials when he sponsored and piloted through the Senate a major new arms control initiative, related to securing nuclear weapons-related materials. He traveled to Russia to study nuclear deactivation and containment efforts, including the complicated work of retrieving all proliferation-potential materials from now independent former Soviet republics, some of which have too little funding or too lax a regime of controls to keep the valuable science and materials under lockdown.

Sen. Richard Lugar, Obama’s Republican backer in the nuclear security initiative, says “When we got there, he was clearly all business — a very careful listener and note taker and a serious student”. Obama visited nuclear facilities and deactivated nuclear silos, studying the virtues and the perils of Russia’s existing activities to contain or scale back its own nuclear arsenal, giving him more hands-on insight into the problem than most Washington policy-makers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama continued to ramp up his efforts to build consensus for an aggressive non-proliferation and denuclearization policy, aligning himself with such heavyweights as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz (both Cold War era Republican secretaries of State), William Perry (a Clinton Defense secretary) and fmr. Sen. Sam Nunn, who has fought persistently for aggressive non-proliferation policy.

Obama has been relentless in pushing his belief in the virtues of deeper and more informed imagination in policy-making, constantly highlighting and criticizing the failures and the risks of intellectual inertia and ungrounded thinking about the virtues of militarism. He has demonstrated both with his record of public service, his legendary campaign of innovation and his immensely productive first year in the White House, that talent and drive can do more than doctrinaire cynicism, and he now takes that spirit of possibility and efficacy to Russia, to show that both former Cold War enemies can see immediate, real-world benefits to spurring a new age of non-proliferation.

• There is No Button to Push, Thankfully
• Reports Say DPRK has Launched More Missiles, Abandoned Armistice
• North Korea Has Tested a Nuclear Device
• The Radical Naïveté of Newt Gingrich
• Taliban Foothold in Buner Severe Risk to Pakistan/Regional Security
• Against the Good Nukes / Bad Nukes Fallacy, or: David Frum’s Prophecy Problem
• Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons More Realistic than Selective Non-proliferation
• Bush-era Policies Have Put Nuclear Weapons within Reach of Taliban
• ‘6 Powers’ (including US) invite Tehran to Denuclearization Talks
• Obama Calls for Coordinated Global Effort to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
• Obama Prague Speech on Global Denuclearization (video + transcript)
• US, Russia to Discuss Improving Ties in Geneva Meeting

There are still skeptics who say that wind power cannot generate enough power to be useful, or that the transition to renewable sources of energy is not really of urgent necessity. Here I offer some ideas to counter that argument. First of all, the US is shamefully behind in developing wind power generation, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen, as some suggest.

A quick look at Europe, which is far ahead on this, from Lester Brown, one of the most respected sources on ecological science and renewable energy, for four decades:

Europe is leading the world into the age of wind energy. In its late 2003 projections, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) shows Europe’s wind-generating capacity expanding from 28,400 megawatts in 2003 to 75,000 megawatts in 2010 and 180,000 megawatts in 2020. By 2020, just 16 years from now, wind-generated electricity is projected to satisfy the residential needs of 195 million Europeans, half of the region’s population.

Read more about this at the Earth Policy Institute. These are serious people, doing real science, and real economic analysis. Their research is read by world leaders and UN agencies. Anyone who wants to understand the global economy as we shift to a less primitive, less dangerous way of harvesting energy would do well to read their work.

[ad#cafsen-intext]

The US Department of Energy found in 1991 that Texas, Kansas and North Dakota alone had enough wind “resources” to generate 100% of US domestic electricity needs. Almost 20 years later, the standard wind turbine is more than twice as tall, with much larger blades, and is able to capture a much greater supply of wind energy. Advances in efficiency and delivery mean that those three states alone could potentially account for all US energy consumption, via wind power. If the infrastructure is built, that is.

The ONLY reason it is not considered the cheapest, most efficient method of producing a reliable energy flow is because our infrastructure is designed to harvest carbon for combustion, and our government literally pays the oil companies to do what they do. If the infrastructure is built, and the subsidies shift, you’ll start to hear industry types complaining about how hard it will be to be in the oil business, and you’ll see quieter, subtler minds figuring out how to make huge profits from wind power.

In a recent debate on the issue of climate destabilization and the potential fallout from glacial melt in the Himalayas, a critic of the carbon-free vision of the future suggested that it is “alarmist” to express concern about people whose life-sustaining resources are being rapidly depleted. The Gangotri glacier, which feeds the Ganges, and a vast network of river systems across south Asia, is melting at an unprecedented rate.

We know that burning carbon-based fuels contributes to the warming of the global climate. A mere 1 degree increase in the annual average global temperature started the process. The annual average global temperature has risen another 2 degrees since that time, and in the course of just one century, the glacier, which took millions of years to form, has retreated by 70%.

500 million people rely on the river systems that are fed by that one glacier in order to survive. Bangladesh and India have already come close to armed conflict over these water resources. There are 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayan range. Over 1 billion people across the region depend on those glaciers for fresh water. Scientists estimate that at the current rate of melt, every Himalayan glacier will be gone by the year 2035. 

This is not alarmism. This is happening now. “Nature” can survive burning a little more petroleum, of course, even a lot more, but not every ecosystem and not every species will survive the changes “nature” will undergo. We knew in the 1950s that the Gangotri glacier was melting at three times the rate for the previous 200 years, yet nothing was done to prepare to make responsible changes. Even now, when the rate of melt is by far the fastest on record, there is still a prevailing skepticism about what practical measures might be taken to slow melt. 

If you study the history of the relationship between climate and human civilization, you find that relatively minor climate variations have brought an abrupt end to periods of great prosperity: ancient Sumeria is one case; ancient Egypt is another; the Mayan civilization as well; and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a man-made climate disaster. Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China also saw tens of millions each die from environmental degradation and agricultural collapse. 

Lester Brown, whom I mention above, actually helped to save hundreds of millions of lives in India, in the 1960s, by working with the UN to prevent famine. Those kind of things can only be accomplished once we learn to pay attention to the relevant facts. We have learned from those experiences, or at least some of us have, and responsible nations have established methods of preventing the collapse of harvest yields, fisheries and other environmentally sensitive sectors of the economy.

But those are just baby steps. We have not even begun to apply most of what we already know, and weaning ourselves off carbon-based fuels is part of what we need to do. Other nations may indeed continue to rely on carbon-based combustible fuels for their energy they may lag dramatically in making the shift, which would reduce the overall usefulness of efforts to cut emissions and combat climate change.

This is often cited as a reason why we should also voluntarily lag, and invest in more oil, and coal, and not in renewables. That plan is not sound economics, however. In fact, it would be like economic suicide, because we have the wealth, the science and the technology to speed our transition to renewables, so that we don’t have to compete for the overpriced oil of 10 to 15 years from now and bankrupt ourselves in the process. Doing nothing will make us far more vulnerable to oil shocks, perpetuating unnecessary economic weaknesses we could overcome by innovating now.

An Iran observer last night told CNN that sources inside Iran report Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s most pre-eminent political figures, and a powerful leader of the Expediency Council —which resolves disputes between Parliament and the Guardian Council—, cleric and former president, has called for an emergency meeting of the Assembly of Experts, in Qom. The Assembly of Experts is a group of clerics who are the only body in the Islamic Republic able to select or unseat the supreme leader of the Guardian Council.

The news suggests an effort by Rafsanjani to charge that Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i may have violated the Iranian Constitution and participated in or condoned the rigging of the election. Rafsanjani himself is the current head of the Assembly of Experts, and is formally referred to as Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Some say the political tide began to shift away from Pres. Ahmedinejad when Rafsanjani, a conservative but a fierce critic of the hardline president, when Rafsanjani was named speaker of the Assembly of Experts in 2007. 

As we reported yesterday:

Article 3 [of the Iranian Constitution] lists as one of the principle goals of the state “the elimination of all forms of despotism and autocracy and all attempts to monopolize power”, as well as “the participation of the entire people in determining their political, economic, social, and cultural destiny”. Article 8 establishes on religious grounds a community principle, a “universal and reciprocal duty that must be fulfilled by the people with respect to one another, by the government with respect to the people, and by the people with respect to the government”.

[ad#cafsen-intext]

Rafsanjani could press for reprimand of or removal of the supreme leader on the grounds that he violated his duty to the people, or that he engaged in prohibited despotism, or that he obstructed the right of “the entire people in determining their political, economic, social and cultural destiny”, should it be shown he had a hand in or knowingly condoned the adoption of a falsified count in Friday’s election. While the supreme leader’s title and the reputation of the office holders has always suggested expansive almost unchecked power, there are constitutional constraints that could be brought to bear, and Khamene’i has apparently made serious errors in judgment over the last week.

His immediate and unconditional approval of the dubious official vote-count favoring Ahmedinejad implicated him in any scandal that may emerge if wrongdoing is publicly confirmed and uncovered. Rafsanjani resigned his post as head of the Expediency Council, which has often sided with the supreme leader, thus distancing him from the potential misdeeds of the current leadership. 

Pictures and video are emerging reporting that the Basij militia have raided university dormitories, seizing and destroying computers, arresting students and opposition supporters, and threatening and using violence. There are reports that as many as 7 people were killed yesterday when security forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators. Another man was shown dead in the street, appearing to have died after being attacked by security forces over the weekend. Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has called for a national day of mourning to honor those who were killed demonstrating in favor of a fair election.

The result of Ayatollah Khamene’i's administration of security forces and the election has led to the most widespread public demonstrations since the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic. Beginning on the night of the election, when Khamene’i claimed a “divine” victory for Ahmedinejad only hours after voting had ceased, in an election with 40 million ballots to be hand-counted, the supreme leader has made almost no effort whatsoever to demonstrate personal allegiance to the constitutional requirement that “the entire people” have their say in electing the president.

What’s more, his pronouncement that the less than credible process was a “divine assessment” could be interpreted by the Assembly of Experts as “detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam”, the one category of media freedom banned by the Iranian Constitution (Article 24). Should he be found to have degraded Islam by his actions or statements, that might be enough to disqualify Khamene’i from continuing as supreme leader, even if he is not demonstrated to have conspired in the rigging of the vote or the killing of unarmed civilians.

Since Friday evening, when Khamene’i declared an absolute victory by landslide to Ahmedinejad, his preferred candidate, the supreme leader has agreed first to a thorough investigation of all allegations of vote-rigging, then to a partial recount, which was rejected by the opposition as an attempt to justify an illegitimate process. Now, his legitimacy is being called into question, an escalation in the campaign for legitimacy in the democratic process that puts Khamene’i at a significant disadvantage politically.

It has been reported that the struggle between Rafsanjani and Khamene’i, rival candidates for the succession to the nation’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, is really about the republican structure of the state. According to a report by the Guardian newspaper, Khamene’i enjoys the support of a network of “radical mullahs, revolutionary guards and intelligence officers who may not have been in the vanguard of the Islamic revolution but cut their teeth in Iran’s bloody 1980-88 war with Iraq”.

In this account of Iranian political affairs:

[Khamene'i's camp] which has coalesced around Ahmadinejad, harbours dreams of transforming Iran from an Islamic republic to an Islamic government, a distinction which would do away with elections and the need to observe the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s invocation to respect the “people’s will”. By this vision, Iran would forever take its guidance only from the divine, in the form of an all-powerful spiritual leader.

This then would explain the emergence of a powerful coalition of cross-party opposition figures, including reformists, conservatives, clerics and former military officers, whose critical voices have permitted a vastly expanded public space for open dissent and criticism of the nation’s top political leaders. 

It may be that the Assembly of Experts, which has the power to strip the supreme leader of all political authority and replace him, is contemplating with concern the massive nationwide opposition to the official results of the election and is preparing to make a choice between continuing to back Khamene’i personally, or replacing him in order to overturn the discredited election and reaffirm the constitutional legitimacy of the Islamic Republic as such.

Though the Assemby of Experts has never yet exercised strict supervision of the activities of either Khamene’i or his only predecessor in the post, Ayatollah Khomeini, it is also true that Iran has not seen such widespread anger at official misdeeds or open dissent since the revolution of 1979. Khamene’i may have handed the reformers their most significant victory, by robbing them of it.

UPDATE, 21:22 GMT: McClatchy reported yesterday that the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, another of the founding circle of revolutionaries and one of the most prominent religious figures in Iran, has said that “No one in their right mind” can believe the official results declaring Ahmedinejad the winner of Friday’s vote. 

Montazeri’s online statement reportedly suggested official endorsement of the current count would call into question the legitimacy of the regime, saying  ”A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy”. He also admonished security forces not to resort to brutality in order to silence dissent: “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ‘sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God.”

Montazeri’s statement also urged the reformist movement to continue their calls for full electoral fairness in peace and non-violence, saying “I invite everyone, specially the youth, to continue reclaiming their dues in calm, and not let those who want to associate this movement with chaos succeed.”

He is not the only establishment figure to side with the opposition against Ahmedinejad and Khamene’i. Reports from Tehran also suggest at least 16 senior members of the Revolutionary Guards have been detained for communicating with the army to possibly join the opposition movement. Some or all of those detained are reportedly being held at an undisclosed location in or near the capital. 

• Pro-Mousavi Demonstrations & Iranians’ Constitutional Rights (video)
• Iran Opposition Movement Forces Khamene’i to Investigate
• Iran Crackdown: Is it Tacit Admission Vote was Rigged?
• Iran Declares Ahmedinejad Winner, Results Widely Questioned as Fraudulent
• Rivals Ahmedinajad & Mousavi Both Declare Victory in Iran Election
• Iranian Polls Kept Open Several Hours Longer than Planned
• Iran Votes, with Popular Reformist Challenging Hardline Ahmedinejad