The difference: What 40 Dollars Means

The President had a chance to meet a few of the folks who took to the web to make the pay roll tax cut happen. Take a moment to hear what they had to say. It began when we asked everyone to show how that missing $40 would affect them and their families. In a matter of hours thousands of vivid, powerful stories from Americans of all ages, all backgrounds, from every corner across the country were pouring in. For some, $40 means dinner out with a child who's home for Christmas, for others a tank of gas or a charitable donation. In just two days, tens of thousands of Americans were making their voice heard. Read more......

Ron Paul attacks eclipsing the real issues?

Ron Paul in the latest polls is the leading front runner for the GOP presidential nomination. And of course, when you are the leading candidate the smear campaigns will follow. The mainstream media mostly ignored Paul, but now the claims that Paul is a racist have been on almost every media outlet. Although these attacks have increased, no one has attacked him on his policies. Michael Tracey, a journalist, joins us to give us some insight on these recent attacks for the presidential hopeful. Read more....

Congress In The 70's Vs Today (Wealthier, More Conservative)

A Washington Post report breaks down the growing income inequality between Congressmen and the constituents they represent. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur shares the details.


Plutonomy: Economic growth that is powered and consumed by the wealthiest upper class of society. Plutonomy refers to a society where the majority of the wealth is controlled by a minority; as such, the economic growth of that society becomes dependent on the fortunes of that same wealthy minority.
Plutocracy: rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. The combination of both plutocracy and oligarchy is called plutocracy. Read more......

Porter Stansberry: The Corruption of America 2/2

The numbers tell us America is in decline… if not outright collapse. Read more.....

Documentary Trailer, Hole In The Head: A Life Revealed

This short documentary trailer will stun you, disturb you, and move you. A mind-boggling story of America’s ugly past, unknown in the present. View with caution. More here.....

China and Japan Deliver A Huge Blow To the U.S. Dollar!!!

China and Japan agree to start direct trading of currencies. China is the world's second-largest economy while Japan is the third largest, and the currency agreement is part of a move away from using dollars. Read more.....

Gerald Celente: Money Junkies and The Coming "Bank Holiday"

On the Tuesday edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks with noted trends forecaster Gerald Celente on the latest concerning the MF Global heist. Celente also covers the top 12 trends of 2012. Celente is on the record for accurately forecasting and naming the current "Great Recession" and for forecasting the 1987 Stock Market Crash, the Dot-com bust, Gold Bull Run to Begin, 2001 Recession, the Real Estate bubble, the "Panic of '08", Tax Revolts, and the coming "Greatest Depression." He is the publisher of the Trends Journal. Read more.....

Anonymous - #OpB: AMERICA IS IN DANGER!

UPDATE!!! What do Lieberman, Obama, McCain, and Bush have in common? According to this leaked court case...THEY'RE ALL MURDERERS!!!!!! SPREAD THIS EVERYWHERE! THE MOTHERLOAD OF LEAKS! Government Gangsters Revealed COURT CASE!

BREAKING -- Senate just approved #NDAA 86-13, exactly 220 years to the date after the Bill of Rights was ratified.

AMERICAN FREEDOM ALERT - CODE RED!

The Government has committed TREASON against you! Will you sit and watch while your freedoms are taken away? Or will you walk out your door and fight for your rights? THE CHOICE IS YOURS. THE LATTER IS BEST.

Gather an army of people. Flood the streets. If police gives you violence, give them tenfold of that. OCCUPATIONS ARE OVER. REAL REVOLUTION IS HERE. THE FORMER UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT SHALL BE DESTROYED! Read more.....

Welcome to the United Food Stamps of America and the Greatest Depression.

People seeking assistance has dramatically risen during the Greater Depression. They don't even run the food bank in France during warm weather, but gleaning is legal here year 'round. About a third of the French who qualify for benefits refuse to take them. I've been warning my fellow Americans about this for DECADES and have been called all kinds of names. The writing has been on the wall since the '80s. I don't think Americans understand how tough and calm and frugal most Europeans are. We've seen a lot! Uprated. Read more....

Is Sharon (Politically) Dead?

On February 26, 2012 Ariel "Arik" Sharon will be 84, although it is very unlikely that he will celebrate his birthday. This is because he has been in a coma, probably brain dead as well, since January 6, 2006. He will probably die without ever having regained consciousness.

But imagine, for argument's sake, that tomorrow he were successfully revived and like many elderly people who suffer strokes he would be able to recover cognitive function eventually. This would at minimum probably take a year before he could speak without slurring his words and think and function at a high level. And it might be possible--even likely--that while in a coma he had developed some sort of dementia. It is doubtful that voters or party functionaries would trust someone of that age with the premiership. When Sharon suffered his stroke and was subsequently permanently relieved of the premiership he was 77-78, older than any previous occupier of his office. Previously the oldest premier at retirement had been David Ben-Gurion, the first and third prime minister who retired in June 1963 at age 76.5. So no Israeli prime minister has crossed the 80-year-old barrier and none is likely to ever do so--particularly someone who has suffered a severe stroke.  Between Ben-Gurion and Sharon Golda Meir had retired at age 76 in 1974 and Shimon Peres at age 73 in 1996.


Plus he would have to find a party that would let him run as its leader. When he left the Likud in November 2005 he burned his bridges. Among the parties of the Right he is considered to be a traitor or a leftist or both due to his withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005. In Kadima, the third and final party he founded, he would have to compete against both Tzipi Livni and Shaul Mofaz. At age 84 or 85 he would be in no shape to mount a vigorous reelection campaign. In Israel four prime ministers have returned for a second term after a period out of office: Ben-Gurion in 1956 after less than 18 months away; Rabin in 1992 after fifteen years out of office; Peres in 1995 following Rabin's assassination after nine years away and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 after a decade away. Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu remained major figures in their party the whole time they were out of office. Peres returned to the premiership from the defense ministry where he had been minister for 5.5 years and then head of the opposition. Peres served as finance minister and foreign minister between 1986 and 1995.  Netanyahu served as finance minister.  Sharon has been largely out of the news since his stroke.

If not the premiership then perhaps some other ministry? Peres has been the only major party leader in Israel to break the 80-year-old barrier and the only minister I can think of who was over 80 (although it is possible that a leader of one of the religious parties served as a minister in a minor ministry after age 80).  He served as foreign minister under Sharon in a Likud-led coalition from 2001 to 2003. Kadima under Livni has since late 2008 moved far to the left of where it was under Sharon's leadership in late 2005.  If he were to attempt to serve as a minister the press would be full of speculation by doctors about the degree of his mental impairment after the stroke.

So having established that Sharon's political career is over, we are free to examine his legacy. Sharon's legacy as a politician (as distinct from that as a soldier) comes down to four main areas. First, as founder of the Likud in the summer of 1973 he made possible the Right's rise to power in 1977. Thus, he is the equivalent of New Gingrich. Second, as the main political godfather of the settlement movement he made possible under the prime ministries of Begin and Shamir the colonization of the West Bank by religious and secular Jews. Third, as prime minister he brought back assassination after nearly a thirty-year absence as a means of dealing with Palestinian terrorism. He also returned the IDF to Area A (the cities) of the West Bank after an absence since 1995. And he carried out the first removal of settlements within Eretz Israel (Palestine) in August 2005 from Gaza. And finally, by creating Kadima in late 2005 he created a successor party to Labor as a Center-Left party. Next post I will discuss his relative position compared to other Israeli prime ministers.

Are the Palestinians an "Invented People?"

Top-tier Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently caused controversy--mostly outside of the GOP--by stating that the Palestinians were an "invented people." He said this in an interview with a New York cable television channel, Jewish TV, that as the name implies is geared towards Jews. He also referred to the Palestinians as terrorists. Gingrich understands the Palestinians as "invented" i.e. phony because in the past they merely called themselves Arabs. In this he is correct. But this is not unique in the Middle East. The area was until the end of World War I part of the Ottoman Empire and the inhabitants of the Levant thought of themselves as Ottomans, Muslims, and Arabs (or Jews or Kurds or Turkomans). Until the end of World War II the Union of Reform Synagogues, then the largest Jewish denomination in America, insisted that the Jews were not a people but only a religion. (I couldn't provide a link to this because it is something that Reform Jews are ashamed of today, but read any standard history of the denomination and it is found.) This sentiment was shared by the vast majority of Orthodox rabbis in Europe and even Palestine at the time. It was mainly secular Jews who were Zionists. They reached back two millennia in time to a time when ordinary Jews spoke Hebrew (or at least Aramaic), lived in Eretz Israel, and regarded themselves as a nation. Are the Jews an invented people as well?

Actually all peoples are "invented." That is to say nationalism is a business or process of selection of bits of culture, history and even language to create a common national identity. In Yugoslavia it involved selecting a particular dialect to become the basis of Serbo-Croatian that was then taught in the schools for both Croats and Serbs. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s the opposite process occurred and the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) all infused their new "languages" with different words to differentiate them. The easiest job in the world was to be an inter-Yugoslav translator or interpreter. Select episodes in history are emphasized and heroes who are useful at the time are set up as exemplars for the population. Needless to say many of the German heroes from the Nazi period are no longer taught in schools as German heroes. 

But none of this is really important to Gingrich, the man who continually reinvents himself. He knows that pro-Israel anti-Arab rhetoric is red meat to Republican audiences. If he is someday elected president and decides to deal with the Middle East diplomatically he can always use the Foreign Service to explain what he really meant (or to explain to the Arab rulers that it was all political rhetoric, which they should understand without too much of a problem). Here is why Evangelical Protestant conservatives have replaced American Jews as Israel's main American constituency. And here is what that may mean for Israel down the road. And here is a post from one of the HaAretz blogs on what the problems with Gingrich's claim are.

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog: Syracuse Restaurant Becomes "Pharmaceutical Dinner Facility"

The Carlat Psychiatry Blog: Syracuse Restaurant Becomes "Pharmaceutical Dinner Facility"

Why Kadima Can't Replace Labor as Peace Party

Here are five quick reasons why Kadima cannot replace the Labor Party as the backbone of the Israeli peace camp:

1) It is led by a leader, Tzipi Livni, who has confessed that she doesn't like politics and feels that politics is like a sewer. Here is Ha'Aretz's take on that revelation.

2) Tzipi Livni barely beat out Shaul Mofaz for the leadership of the party in 2008. Mofaz has in order three ambitions: a) take over as Kadima party leader; b) replace Barak as defense minister--his old job; 3) replace Netanyahu as leader of the Right.

3) In order to nearly keep its same strength in the 2009 election as in 2006, Kadima had to cannibalize Labor and Meretz. This has left it incapable of leading a coalition on its own.

4) Kadima has no core principles or ideology--it was founded as a party of convenience like the Center Party and the DMC before it. It has avoided their fates simply because it was much more successful at the polls the first time out because of Sharon, who is permanently gone.

5) Kadima's potential Palestinian peace partner is Fatah, which is as conflicted as  Kadima.

Diplomacy Needs a Museum

On prime real estate on the Capitol Square in Madison, WI is the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. It contains exhibits on all the major wars from the Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Wisconsin citizens have served in. There are similar, but smaller museums in Milwaukee and Oshkosh. They are funded by a combination of Veterans Administration funds, donations of old equipment by the Defense Department, private donations and bookshop sales. If we conservatively estimate that each one receives $100,000 annually in taxpayer funds to pay for rent, salaries, and display expenses that is a total cost of $.3 million in Wisconsin alone. If we conservatively multiply that by 30 to 40 times (to account for smaller New England and Eastern states that may only have a single museum each) this amounts to a total of $9 million to $12 million annually to subsidize American military history.

There are two other types of taxpayer funded military museums--those on military bases funded by the Defense Dept. and military battlefield national parks funded by the Interior Dept. I'm not claiming that this is wasted money--it is important that the country's citizens have a chance to learn the cost of war. Battlefield National Parks are popular tourist destinations and useful for training young Army and Marine Corps officers in tactics. The base museums help to educate officers on combined arms operations and the functions of the various branches of their services. But these museums create a distortion, funded by the taxpayers. Foreign policy is most effective when there is a tight coordination between military threat and diplomacy. The public is being educated about the means and reality of the deterrent half of the equation, but not about the diplomatic half. There is no public museum yet dedicated to diplomacy.

During the bloody twentieth century several methods of conflict resolution were developed following the end of World War I and continuing after World War II. First, on the initiative of President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister Jan Smuts of South Africa the League of Nations was established as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It failed to prevent World War II, but it did sponsor the first peacekeeping forces (in Central Europe) and a system of mandates for supervising the administration of the conquered German and Ottoman territories and colonies. There was also a major experiment in naval arms control in the 1920s and early 1930s that eventually broke down because of Germany and Japan. Following World War II these early attempts were renewed and expanded under the auspices of the United Nations. The UN took over supervising the League of Nations mandates as UN Trusteeships. Starting in 1957 a system of peacekeeping forces was developed with forces donated on an ad hoc basis by UN member nations for specific peacekeeping missions around the world--particularly in the Middle East and Africa. Starting with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (which also involved Britain) there was a regime of nuclear arms control negotiated between the two superpowers resulting in a series of arms control treaties in the 1970s and 1980s that proved much more successful than the naval arms control of the 1920s. And for internal civil wars, political sciences have developed a theory of consociationalism or power sharing based on the experiences of four Western European countries after World War II. This has proved successful in ending the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Museum specialists using maps, photos, copies of treaties, etc. could build a museum dedicated to diplomacy and conflict resolution as interesting as any military museum. And think of all the material that Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and Africa and two Camp David summits (1978, 2000) would provide the museum! Such a museum could educate the public about the means at diplomats disposal for resolving conflicts, keeping the peace, and creating a relatively peaceful world. Those who attend universities and major in international relations and political science are educated about these techniques. But the wider public is largely ignorant of them.  

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell started work on establishing a Museum of American Diplomacy and visitors center at the State Dept. It is still not completed.

Israel: The Siege Tightens

I have written a number of posts in which I assert that Israel is a siege democracy along with Northern Ireland. Here is an article by veteran New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent and now columnist Thomas Friedman on Israel's environment as perceived from Israel.

Israeli perceptions may seem to outsiders like paranoia--and they definitely are not the perceptions of a normal state. But Israel is not a normal state inhabited by a normal people. It is the Jewish state called for in the UN General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947 (whose 64th anniversary was marked by Friedman's article).  Jews have suffered from a basic insecurity from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ACE/AD until the present day. There have been good periods of relative security and well being followed by periods of extreme insecurity. From 1881 to 1946 there was a period of extreme violence for European Jewry starting with a series of pogroms (incited massacres) in Russia and Romania and culminating in the industrial slaughter of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in the Holocaust. Not coincidentally, this is exactly the period that saw the rise of Zionism with the first Zionist theorists on anti-semitism in Europe (Leo Pinsker in 1882, Theodore Herzl in 1895) and the first Zionist immigration to Palestine. But the perceptions are perfectly rational and normal for a people that has suffered the experiences of the Jews in recent history.

Likewise, Palestinians seem paranoid at times about what they perceive as Israel's attempts to steal all of their land. Such perceptions are also normal for any people that has suffered the experiences of the Palestinians since 1948, when Palestinians were expelled in an-Nakba from parts of modern Israel by the same logic as Germans were expelled from Central Europe in 1944-46 by the victors in a war that Germany had started. Since 1967 Israel has gone about settling the West Bank and Gaza, first in a few strategic locations in an attempt to reverse the results of the 1948 war when Jewish settlers were expelled from Gush Etzion near Bethlehem and from the Old City without allowing the Palestinians to do the same. Then starting in the mid-1970s Jews were allowed to settle in many settlements throughout the West Bank. So just as Jews fear that Arabs want to finish the job that Hitler started, Palestinians and Arabs fear that Jews want to finish the process that they started in 1948.

Extremism feeds off of extremism. Twenty-nine years of Arab siege led to the Likud coming to power in 1977. In 1948 the party that became the main part of the Likud, Herut, was marginal to Israeli politics and was excluded from all Israeli governments until June 1967. The settlement project sponsored by the Likud and the religious Zionists of the National Religious Party along with the corruption of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority led to the rise of Hamas. Hamas won the Palestinian election of January 2006. The threat of Hamas helped stiffen Yasir Arafat's spine at Camp David in July 2000 when he denied the existence of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (to the annoyance of the American Arabic interpreter, an Egyptian Copt) and sunk the possibility of any compromise with Israel. Arafat then initiated the Al-Aksa Intifada with Israel in October 2000. This led to Sharon coming to power as first prime minister in February 2001 and then as head of the victorious Likud in Knesset elections in 2003. Since this time all Israeli governments have been dominated by the Right. With the prisoner exchange deal with Hamas, in which over 400 prisoners were traded for Gilad Shalit, Prime Minister Netanyahu was attempting to weaken Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a negotiating partner. 

In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists cooperated quite nicely against the peace deal of the moderates at the beginning of the decade of the 2000s. After they sufficiently weakened their ethnic rivals they then made a deal to share power. Unfortunately, in the Middle East it is more difficult. Both Hamas and the Likud in practice oppose the two-state solution. If they continue to oppose it long enough they will then have to make the bloody transition to sharing power in a one-state solution. Now outsiders are only pushing Northern Ireland as a successful example of negotiation politics. In another decade they may begin pushing it as a successful model of power sharing between ethnic enemies. Then Israel and the Palestinians will be in real trouble.