Kemstone's Journal

Sometimes it really feels like the people in power are deliberately robbing the poor to give more money to the rich. Or to put it more accurately, like they’re funneling money from the middle class to pay their rich friends in the military industrial complex, the energy industry, Wall Street, and so on.

Whenever there’s talk of cutting spending, it’s almost always about spending on the middle-class and never about subsidies to giant corporations. A huge case-in-point came last week when House republican leader John Boehner gave an interview in which he made a policy suggestion for how to deal with the deficit:

House Republican Leader John Boehner said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review out today that he would back raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 for those who will not retire for another 20 years.

Obviously, we can’t keep paying out social security checks if we want to pay for war in Afghanistan. We’re talking priorities, people.

It might not be as scary if it weren’t for the fact that the talk of cutting entitlement spending weren’t coming from both sides of the aisle. Obama took a lot of heat from his own supporters for creating a bipartisan deficit commission to address the growing problem.

“We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there,” commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, former Clinton White House chief of staff, said in a March speech. “If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power and I don’t mean in 50 years. I mean in my lifetime.”

They keep talking about how Social Security is in crisis. That it’s going to go bankrupt unless we take drastic measures such as privatization (i.e. handing control of our retirement money to the same people who caused the financial collapse). This is based on the premise that once revenues from payroll taxes fall short of the cost of paying out benefits, it will be broke. But as Paul Krugman explains, this doesn’t take into consideration the last 25 years of surplus in the program. Social Security is just fine. It’s this giant cash-cow that the wealthy interests have had their eyes on for a long time. They can’t wait to raid social security to cover their financial bets, pay for more war, and do whatever else it is they do with our money.

The big misunderstanding comes from the word we use for programs like social security and medicare: “entitlement” programs. Yes, we’re “entitled” to that money because it’s our money. We pay into the system our whole lives with the expectation that when the time comes and we can no longer work or afford our medical bills, the government will be there to help us out. But they’re trying to take that away from us, to take the money we’re entitled to (because it’s ours–not because it’s some kind of gift that they promised us) and use it to pay for war and financial shenanigans.

Cenk Uygur does a great job explaining it in this clip from The Young Turks:

Don’t let them tell you we can’t afford to pay back your money that you’re paying into the system. There are a hell of a lot of other things we can cut, starting with unnecessary and unwinnable wars.

I’ll finish up my blogging today with a brief thought on Afghanistan and whether the war will be a major factor this year’s mid-term elections.

In short, the answer is no. And that’s really a shame, because considering how much money we’re spending there in the midst of this recession in spite of the hopelessness of success, it really should be at the forefront of current political discourse.

The war got some renewed attention due to the replacement of McChrystal with Petraus in the wake of the Rolling Stone article, but the president made it clear that our strategy has not changed and it looks increasingly doubtful that we’re really going to begin withdrawing troops on the announced deadline of July 2011.

The sad truth is that Americans have become desensitized to ongoing war. This is not like Vietnam when videos of the actual horror found their way onto the news every night. Reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan are embedded with the troops and under strict guidelines as to what they can report and what kind of footage they can show.

The wars were only a major campain issue in 2004 when they were still relatively new and it was just becoming clear to most objective observers that we’d made a massive strategic blunder. Frustration with Iraq might also have been a huge factor in the democrats’ victory in the 2006 mid-terms. But by 2008 we were all focussed on the economy, and that’s where our focus remains. This November, people will go into the polls and vote based on their pocketbook–their feelings on the war will be an afterthought.

And unfortunately nobody is really making the case–with the exception of Alan Grayson and a few others who aren’t taken seriously by the establishment–that Afghanistan is an economic issue. Republicans want Americans to tighten their belts, but they refuse to cut military spending. To dig our way out of the recession they want to cut off unemployment benefits and go after social security, but they refuse to acknowledge the fact that over half of our discretionary spending (money we could spend however we like) is going to fund a war that most serious observers are now admitting is unwinnable.

Democrats, I know you’re afraid of being called “weak” and “anti-war” by the republicans, and its not good politics to stand in opposition to a president from your own party, but you should make Afghanistan an election issue because it’s the right thing to do. Ending the war will go a long way towards ending the recession, but the war is never going to end until we start paying more attention to it.

Use this argument on anyone who still insists on “staying the course” in Afghanistan:

Hypothetical situation: It’s the year 2101 and the United States government has long since crumbled under the weight of its own corruption. Most authority is local, with most cities and towns controlled by Evangelical Christian Militias who aim to impose their own strict interpretation of Biblical Law across the entire country.

Meanwhile, China is the world’s sole super-power and is exterting its influence around the globe. Because they are seen as anti-Christian, the Evangelical Militia groups despise China and would like nothing more than to see it crumble. So they commit an act of terrorism which draws China into a war with the United States.

The Chinese army rolls in, takes out a big chunk of the Militia’s leadership, and sets up a new federal government with China’s full support.

But most Americans never see this government as legitimate, and the remnants of the Christian Militias rise and grow stronger as even non-Christians join them in their struggle to expel the foreign occupiers. On top of that, the latest presidential election is discovered to have been fraudulent, and the president himself is known to have ties to underground drug cartels. Yet the Chinese insist on continuing to back him up militarily.

The Chinese army won’t leave until the Evangelicals are defeated and the U.S. government is capable of supporting itself and preventing any Militias from ever rising again. Yet the Evangelical Militias remain very popular in many parts of the country and the Chinese are almost universally hated because their soldiers don’t speak English, have no understanding of American culture, and frequently kill innocent civilians through carelessness.

The question: Is it possible for China to succeed in its mission? Could it succeed after only one year? Ten years? A hundred years? Or is this the kind of task that is simply impossible to accomplish, like landing safely on the moon by shooting yourself from a cannon?

Obviously, in this analogy China is the United States. The United States is Afghanistan. The corrupt government is the Karzai regime. And the Evangelical Militias are the Taliban.

The United States is as likely to be able to succeed in Afghanistan–by our own definition of “success”–as China would be likely to be able to stabilize a corrupt U.S. government and completely root out right-wing Evangelicals.

So let’s get. the fuck. out of there.

[Full disclosure: I got this idea while watching Cenk Uygur and Jonathan Kim discuss the film "Restrepo" on last Friday's episode of The Young Yurks]

According to our ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsberg, the U.S. has done such a poor job of containing Iran that Iran is effectively containing us! They’ve played the diplomacy game so well that their new “northern alliance” including Syria, Hezbollah, and now Turkey puts them in a perfect position to finally start that war they’ve been after:

Reports out of Syria after the summit indicate that Hezbollah is primed to provoke a preemptive crisis with Israel to open a “northern front” against Israel should Iran be convinced Israel is preparing to attack it. The pieces are in place: Iran has shipped to Syria SCUD and M-600 ground-to-ground missiles capable of reaching every major Israeli population center and talk of war is in the air.

Never mind that Iran knows it would be crushed and ground into dust if it goes after Israel—the invasion force is gathering. Israel is in dire peril unless…

Unless what, Ambassador? A pre-emptive nuclear strike on the part of the U.S.? That would be a great idea. What could possibly go wrong? We all know how much the rest of the world loved our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, and just how well that worked out for us. Military action in Afghanistan, too, has obviously been tremendously beneficial to the U.S. and made us all more safe.

I’m sure the rest of the Muslim world would understand if we were to nuke Iran. I’m sure none of them would go rushing to join Al Quaeda in their jihad against the west. A nuclear strike against Iran would make us all much safer.

Never mind that Ahmedenijad, Khamenei, and the rest of the evil bastards who run that illegitimate government would probably escape unharmed while millions of innocent Iranians—many of whom were marching in the streets to protest that very government only a year ago—would be blown to smithereens. At least it would send a message that you’d better not fuck with Israel.

I think the world already understands that, Ambassador. And as awful as they are, I think the Iranian government understands it too. It’s to their benefit to take a strong posture against Israel and the West, but they know damned well that actually following through on their rhetoric would be suicide.

Allow me to depress the hell out of you for a moment as I step back and take a broad look at the state of affairs in the world and draw my gloomy conclusions. Hopefully someone can tell me why I’m wrong and that things aren’t as bad as they seem.

Cenk Uygur, the host of my favorite political show—The Young Turks—sees most things almost exactly as I see them with one major difference. He insists that while he may be pessimistic in the short-term, he’s “long-term optimistic” and I know a lot of people who also feel that way. But not me. I look at the world and the human race and I see a species on the verge of extinction, brought about by its own blind ignorance and refusal to accept responsibility for its fate.

Just look at what’s in the headlines today. Wall Street Executives are expressing sighs of relief at the financial reform package just passed in the senate. You don’t need to know a damned thing about economics to take that as an indication that the reforms didn’t go far enough and the bankers can continue with business as usual. Banks can still be too big to fail and they can still trade derivatives. There is slightly more oversight and rules banning some of the more reckless financial practices…but no penalty for banks that break those rules. Just this one line from the New York Times piece says it all:

Some experts predict that Wall Street, like water overcoming a dam, will easily adapt to the new regulations, or at least exploit what loopholes do remain and thrive again.

If I had any money I’d bet heavily on another financial crisis hitting within the next few years. And when it does, the damage is going to be far worse than the last one. The big banks haven’t been broken up so they can still hold the economy hostage. The public has to bail them out or it all goes under. But people are still enraged about the first bailout—how is it going to be politically possible for anyone in congress to vote for another one? I suspect they all will because they can hide behind the cover of “this is absolutely necessary” like they did the first time, but there’s a chance that the people just won’t stand for it this time and the banks will go down. In any case, Obama will be blamed (rightly so in one sense) and the Tea Party movement is likely to boil into open revolt. Economies all over the world will fall like dominos and countries that have a social safety net will find the number of unemployed far too large to handle. Billions will be out on the street with nowhere to turn, and global chaos will ensue.

Maybe that won’t happen for a few decades, but that seems to be the direction we’re heading in. Thanks to these financial crises the human race seems to be waking up to the fact that the entire global monetary system is based on nothing more than a kind of international consent. We agree that your money is worth something and you agree that ours is too. But economies are becoming less based on actual tangible goods and more on abstract ‘financial products’ that have no intrinsic value. Wealth is just a number in a bank account, scarcely more real than points in a video game. The entire global financial system is a balloon filled with hot air and we’re doing nothing to stop those who keep blowing into it because they hold the balloon—they own everybody in a position to potentially stop them—and sooner or later the balloon is going to burst.

But that’s just money. The global chaos that will ensue when the balloon bursts may set humanity back to the Dark Ages but it won’t kill us all. The other big story in the news these days is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which in and of itself won’t be too devastating but it’s just one symptom of a much larger problem—one far more threatening than any economic collapse.

Not everyone accepts that CO2 emissions are warming up the earth’s atmosphere and not everyone believes that the earth’s resources are as limited as environmentalists claim they are, but just about everyone accepts the concept of a food chain. Anyone who knows anything about ecosystems knows that all forms of life depend on other forms of life for their survival. Nature establishes equilibriums, and when it’s thrown off balance the consequences are usually devastating. Remove just one species from a marsh and hundreds of others might disappear depending on how crucial that species was.

This planet is currently undergoing what scientists have labeled the Sixth Extinction, in which the earth loses about 30,000 species per year due to human activity. This has been going on since the development of agriculture thousands of years ago, but there is no doubt it’s accelerating rapidly due to industrialization. The Gulf oil spill is almost sure to take its fair share of species from the ocean, and there is no indication that we as a species have any intention to stop drilling any time soon.

And of course there’s only so much oil in the earth’s crust, so when that’s gone we’re really going to run into trouble unless we can find another fuel source that can provide us with as much energy as fossil fuels do. Wind and solar won’t provide enough power to keep civilization running as it currently is, and nuclear energy has its own problems, the biggest being radioactive waste.

But even if we find a way to keep the engines of civilization churning, those engines will continue to rape the environment, pollute the sky, and destroy species by the minute. Common sense tells us that there’s only so much damage we can do to the environment before a tipping point is reached and some element of the food chain that was critical to our survival disappears. It may not happen for another century, but unless we drastically alter our way of living it is bound to happen, and I see no sign of willingness on the part of humanity to make such drastic alterations.

The last story I read today is about the Muslim world’s perception of America on the one year anniversary of Obama’s Cairo speech, and how nearly all of the hopes he raised in that speech have been dashed over the last year. The prison at Guantanamo remains open, Israel is still building new settlements in disputed territory, and American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the wars, Iraq may be “winding down” but people are still being killed by insurgents nearly every day, while Afghanistan truly is “heating up” while many objective observers are saying that our presence there is counter-productive. Our troops are basically there to prop up and support a corrupt, criminal government with a leader who almost certainly won the election through fraud.

Why is this important? Why is it a sign of humanity’s impending doom? Because the leader of the free world is not George W. Bush anymore—it’s Barack Obama.

I came to true political awareness during the Bush administration and back then I was just as filled with doom and gloom. Clearly, the guy was the worst possible president we could have had. Not only was he an ignorant buffoon who probably genuinely believed that Jesus wanted him to start these wars—he was transparently a puppet of the giant corporations that dominate us. He was a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Oil and a staunch ally of the military industrial complex. Under Bush, you could be sure that the environment would continue to be raped and war would be the order of the day. Clearly, there would be no effort towards world peace or environmental sustainability.

But then Barack Obama came along with a promise of change. He talked the talk and inspired the world with the very vision we needed most—the vision of a world united in peace, an end to unnecessary wars and a true drive towards clean and renewable energy that would protect and preserve the environment we all depend on. If anyone was going to lead the way to that future dreamed about by men like Gene Roddenberry or Carl Sagan—in which humanity survives its technological adolescence and dedicates itself to its own betterment and to exploring the universe beyond our planet of origin—it was Barack Obama.

But clearly we’re a long way from the United Federation of Planets and it’s doubtful we’ll ever get there. If Obama had the best of intentions when he got into office, he quickly discovered that there were serious limitations to what he could accomplish. The powers that be were already too powerful. If the best he could do with Wall Street was to give them a slap on the wrist and warn them not to cause another financial crisis, if the best he could do with the two wars was to slightly alter the deployment numbers and shift a few resources around, if the best he could do to address climate change was to offer more subsidies for offshore drilling and then give up the fight when something went wrong, and if the best he can do during an actual environmental catastrophe like the one in the Gulf is to let the corporations handle it and hope the story just goes away—then humanity is more fucked than most people care to admit.

It turns out that it really doesn’t matter at all who the president is. If we’re heading in the wrong direction no matter who is at the helm, we’re eventually going to fall off the cliff. And what can I do about it? What can any of us do about it? That’s a question for another blog entry, one I’ll write if I ever come up with anything. For now I think the best we can do is simply recognize it. To understand that humanity’s survival is not guaranteed—that our grandchildren may not live to have grandchildren of their own—and that the only hope we have is to stop making enemies of each other and to come together and fight against extinction, the common enemy of us all.