Newtopia | Issue #19 - Nov/Dec 2004: "Economics"

"Myself and most Arab and western independent journalists here show the costs of war. Report the massacres, the slaughter, the dead and wounded kids, disaster that this occupation truly is for the Iraqi people. Report on the low morale of most soldiers here, report on how doctors now state openly that due to lack of funds and help from the US-backed Ministry of Health, they feel it is worse now than during the sanctions."

NEW 12.08.04 - Dahr's Photos from Fallujah.

The list of the candidates was ridiculously long; posters with faces and bios of all 24 of them were on the walls - and the one of Yanukovych happened to be the first thing we had to look at as we entered the place. Funny how relative alphabetical order can be when politics is involved: Yanukovych was the last one on the list, but his poster got the best - central - placement at the polling station, whereas those ahead of him on the list were stuck way off to the side, to the "beginning" of the room. If there had been some 50 candidates, then his poster might have been in a less prominent spot, at the "very end" of the room - though I'm sure that even then they would've found a way to have him jump right into the voters' faces.

For those who have always wondered why, after so many decades of foreign aid, poverty still is so pervasive in the developing world, insider John Perkins comes forward and offers an explanation. Perkins claims to have been recruited in the 1960’s through the National Security Agency to work at an American firm responsible for creating plans used to justify billions in economic development loans to developing countries (DCs).

The tiny Dixiecrat counties in northern Florida and the Panhandle are a red herring. Galbraith does have a point in that we should look at historical county votes. But any search for large-scale fraud must by definition focus on the medium and large-sized counties. In these counties fraud would be on the one hand harder to detect, and on the other would potentially generate enough votes to tip the election.

Plus: "18 Amazing (and largely Unknown) Facts About Voting in the USA".

Bush defeated Kerry not because Bush possessed a political vision better suited to the U.S. public than Kerry, but because Bush grasped better than Kerry that in order to sell what is essentially uninteresting (i.e., either of the candidates) it's not political awareness that's necessary but the shrewd use of advertising psychology. In such a context, a candidate's beliefs are less about what the candidate believes than they are about adopting poses meant to make the candidate saleable as a savior figure through whom people can vicariously experience what is missing from their own lives: a sense of completion.

The grand nightmare, or whatever you want to call it, has been building steadily, with power-grabs, oppression, wars, poverty, social upheaval, environment degradation, species extinction, climate distortion, and -- as a consequence of this massive dose of reality -- an awakening in consciousness and resistance to be followed by social reconstruction. As to both the negative and positive aspects of this pivotal period of history, we have barely seen anything yet.

The extremely large number of money exchanges that occurs each day all over the earth form a highly complex web that is very resistant to analysis. However it must be understood that the basic rules of money creation that govern these exchanges are quite simple, and can be readily understood by the average layman. How money works is not complex, even though the web of financial exchanges can become very complex indeed.

This war is not about security, democracy, or the ending of tyranny or even terrorism; the war in Iraq is the first salvo of a trade war. It is the first in what will eventually be a series of wars whose purpose is to establish the security necessary for the United States to dominate the agenda and process of globalization. It is the first step toward bringing all nations into what Thomas P. M. Barnett, in the March 2003 issue of Esquire Magazine described as "the globalizing world...its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence".

Ruppert's highly controversial new book Crossing the Rubicon names Vice President Dick Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and with copious footnotes works to prove that not only was Cheney a planner in the attacks but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate command, control and communications system which was superseding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room.

"United States foreign policy is not what we have been led to believe by the mainstream corporate media or have been taught in our schools. We have all been taught that the U.S. has been leading the fight for freedom and democracy around the world, that the wars we have been involved in have been waged to help protect the innocent people of the world from the 'Evil Doers' as George W. Bush would say. But in truth, it has been the United States who has been making war all over the planet, whether overtly or covertly. These wars and CIA covert operations have been responsible for the deaths of many millions of innocent people in third world countries."

The recent "War on Terror" sloganeering mostly involves the word freedom. President Bush has made the phrase "They attacked our freedoms" a sound bite. Fair enough, but what does that mean? Freedom shows up in the private and public sphere. We allow the state to curtail and coerce behavior in the public sphere, like the Speed Limit above, but in the private sphere, America has neglected to defend freedom. This is where the "unknown civilization that is growing in America" has, well, stopped growing. We have taken freedom and bagged it.

The educational opportunities, quality and quantity of supplies, and the condition of school buildings and their contents that children experience are largely dependent on how they fare economically. So, it is fair to say that one's ability to obtain a decent education in the U.S. is largely dependent upon one's ability to pay for it. If your residential tax base is low, that's exactly the level of municipal service you can expect to receive. It's a vicious loop, dizzying to bystanders, that apparently has no end. For the children directly affected, however, it is all too real and stifling. For them there is no parity. For poor children, there is no choice.

Eisenhower made a surprising statement for a person of his background, he warned that we should watch out for the military-industrial complex. We didn't; other businesses/corporations saw that we were not looking, and now several industrial complexes govern us.

In their semi-conscious quest to commit themselves to an obscure free-market and the material fetishes that come along with it, nearly 60 million US citizens indirectly, their Government directly, undermine global environmental sustainability and deprive billions of global citizens of economic opportunities.

"'Reichstag Fire' posits the question: given the undeniable reality that almost all of the wars the U.S. has been involved with have been wars of aggression that were launched on a false pretense -- a lie -- about us being attacked (i.e., the Lusitannia, the Alamo, the Gulf of Tonkin, etc.), is it possible that 9/11, too, was a similar event? Is it possible that, as with previous excuses to start wars, it was an inside job, or it was known about and not stopped? The question should be asked by anybody with their eyes open."

In 1993, Monsanto, one of the world's largest agro/biochemical companies, managed to successfully introduce Posilac, better known as rBGH or recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, into the U.S. dairy livestock market. This milestone event, now feared responsible for an ever escalating, epidemic of potentially fatal chronic diseases, was only able to manifest itself due to Monsanto's control of milk culture political vehicles, such as its influence on government regulatory organizations like the FDA and EPA.

America has been called a "mega-mall of religious consumerism" by sociologists of religion Michael Emerson and Christian Smith. We live in a country that is defined by its freedom of choice. Where marketing slogans such as "Have it your way," "Because you're worth it," and "Be all you can be," can help lull consumers into believing that these products are really worth buying. The focus of the product is not the product itself but "you," "your happiness," "your image," and even "your potential." Although many consider the category of religion as "set apart" or sacred, it is worth everyone's while to attend to its production.

A fledgling group called the New Energy Movement2, devoted to building public consciousness about and demand for new energy technologies, held a conference in Portland, Oregon on September 25 and 26. The scientists in attendance spoke of high hopes for a future in which civilization could run off of new, clean technologies. While their predictions came in varying degrees of pragmatism and New Age wonkiness, they all agreed that these new technologies could become a solution to some serious economic and environmental problems. What they could not seem to agree on is how these technologies should be developed and put into practice.

"The night before 9/11, I sat down with my former campaign manager - a young anarchist - to talk about how would a green as president respond to a terrorist attack in America. 7 hours laters, the planes slammed into the World Trade Tower. I issued a statement on the green party's behalf that afternoon urging that 9/11 not be turned into a cry of war, that it not be used to scapegoat Muslims and people of color, that it not be used to curtail our civil liberties. It was sickening to watch the media and Democrats urge Bush on to war."

Kwame Nkrumah reworked a quintessential Marxist vision into the peculiarities of the African Economic Morass. His prime dissertation was that Africa was tied into a world capitalist order which thrived on the continent’s raw resources, re-routed them into the industries of the West and made the native continent pay direly for its own 'foreignly' developed natural resources.

According to the Center for Voting and Democracy, since 1990, most states have had governors who have won elections with less than 50% of the total vote; in the three presidential elections since 1988, most states awarded all of their electoral votes to a candidate who was opposed by most voters in that state; and a significant number of congressional seats were won by mere pluralities. It's hard to imagine that we allow candidates to win elections with such low percentages, and it's contrary to the democratic ideal of majority rule. When a candidate fails to receive a majority, most people didn't vote for that candidate--most people might actually prefer another candidate, but a plurality elections system doesn't accommodate that reality.

Voluntary Simplicity allows you to sustain your vision, giving you ways to survive in the current culture while working to change it. Conventional wisdom says we give up our ideals when faced with the realities of making a living. But don't these "realities" define the system we are working to change? By living simply now we can show others what the future could be like.

The American medical care system is a monopoly and advertisements promoting it and the services and products it offers are common.

"When I watched the over 700 faces and names of mostly young servicemen, no older than my son, roll across the screen of ABC News Nightlines' "the Fallen" Series, a realization dawned on me. When Jesus told us to "turn the other cheek" when facing aggression in life, he wasn't giving a "holier than thou" admonition to humanity. He was trying to give us a very practical way of dealing with life, that would allow us to avoid misery in our lives."

"The result of this election was foregone. This is now a farcical, Third World type of situation, with a retarded dictator getting away with whatever he wants. Karl Rove must have told the President long ago, Relax, there's nothing to worry about. The election is in our pocket. The fix was in when the country didn't rise up with one voice against the theft of the 2000 election. The last nail in the coffin was the lack of surprise and protest at the utterly weird and incomprehensible 2002 election results, particularly in Southern states like Georgia. The liberal elite knows; everyone knows what's happening; but no one can talk about it."

"Some may argue that articles in the Times' Magazine represent the author's viewpoints and do not have to live up to the highest journalist standards. But when the author works for the Times and the article is completely unfair and unbalanced, one has to wonder whether there are any serious editors left there. The Sunday 26, 2004 Magazine included an article by John Tierney, a correspondent in the Times' Washington bureau, entitled "The Autonomist Manifesto (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Road). It is arguably the most pro-suburban sprawl article ever published in a major American newspaper. But the quality of its information is abysmal."

"Is it possible in the United States to move from a growth economy to a sustainable economy? Green buildings and closed loop systems have a track record. They work. They save money, they return value. Green public officials have not absconded with the treasury and have been able to nudge municipalities forward. And demonstration project after demonstration project shows that what we want, a Green Economy, can work."

"The elusive and precise Iraqi resistance in the central part of the country is a rolling ball that keeps getting larger and more lethal. This is because of its success in achieving military victories against the most powerful military machine in the history of humankind. The US military in Iraq has had limited effect and is crippled in its ability to obtain even minimal security in Iraqi towns and highways. In both "Operation Desert Storm" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the scenes of destroyed Iraqi military hardware scattered on highways was evidence used by the US government to claim victory. Today, these scenes have been replaced by destroyed US military hardware, from Abrams tanks to Humvees to Bradley fighting vehicles, all seen day in and day out in flames on Iraqi streets and highways. These pictures are now more numerous than those of the carnage of the ex-Iraqi army. The pictures of US soldiers crying and screaming after each attack contradicts claims that these are disciplined and well-trained troops. The typical US soldier has no idea what he is doing in Iraq, and wants to get out."

Most of America's many political, economic and social ills are caused or aggravated by its most fundamental problem: America is not a democracy. America is a plutocracy governed by a wealthy few. Its government is populated by and first and best serves the wealthy who hold a perpetual hegemony of power and wealth through the generations, much to the detriment of the rest of the populace. Elections, offices and the favors of government are bought just like any other commodity.

When they rebuilt the Tower of Babel / after Jehovah the terrorist knocked it down / they stood it upon four cornerstones: / Diebold, Sequoia, ESS, and SAI.

As we patrol for fires / in the midnight cold, / Sue turns her Saturn / into a gravel driveway / and I shine the searchlight / on an abandoned house.

They stare across / the azaleas / and gated bridges, / over surrealistic tolls, / to an aluminum-sided me - / remotely landscaped / far from the bars, / roaches and drive-bys / from / the back alley fights.

We the people are waiting / for the rebirth of democracy / for the restoration of civil liberties / for the re-distribution of wealth / for the return of integrity

At ninety will I take for my role model / Bertrand Russell as he sat yogi fashion / in Trafalgar Square? Or will I stand / with a sign near the Pentagon or Rocky Flats / or Cheyenne Mountain or outside the gate / at the School of The Americas, no matter / what euphemism might hide its purpose by then? / Most likely not

High-rises shudder a little if you look. / Houses mostly sit & settle, / but buildings / hum silently in midday sun.

When I walked in to the Main Office this morning, Teresa the office manager was more friendly with me than usual, but when I told her who I was there to sub for today, she raised a thick blonde eyebrow and said, "Uh oh, I better go see about that." When she said it like that, I felt somehow guilty, just like last time I came to this school. I'd walked in to the office feeling confident that morning and had told her, "Good morning. I'm the guest teacher for Mr. Newman today."

Typical dictionary entries offer rather static explanation of the term ideology, one that would perhaps explain past ideologies in a “common sense” manner. Ideologies today are complex, dynamic phenomena that owe their existence in means that rely far beyond any systemic and rational application of ideas.

CinemaShrink Says “In the recesses of everyone’s mind lies the question. Is this all there is? Do we just get one life? Or is there more than one? Were we here previously? Will we be here again? Or, stepping into the liminal zone created by Birth between one woman’s heartbreaking loss and a young boy’s impassioned longing, are loved ones really gone when they die? Or could a husband reappear as a bird – or a boy?