From the Guardian

"The dimensions of the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan are becoming bigger and more daunting by the day. Once-staunch defenders of the "good war" are starting to break ranks. "

"Flanked by two vice-presidents, including a notorious warlord that Mr Karzai accepted as a running mate, Mr Karzai vowed yesterday to tackle corruption. This was rather like a cat promising abstinence on the subject of mice."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/04/afghanistan-political-failure-kim-howells

Emprire building and occupation are such messy tasks. If Gibbon were alive he could have writted the Decline and Fall of the British, French, Portugese, and American Empires in my lifetime.

The Supreme Court of the United States will soon announce a major decision on our lightly controlled system of campaign funding. Will it retain some limitations on corporate influence or will the court blow the lid off and cause a perpetual flood of unrestricted corporate contributions?

An additional outcome may surprise and shock the public.

If the Supreme Court overturns the lower court's decision, foreign nationals, corporations, and governments with partial ownership of U.S. corporations will, in effect, end up contributing to and influencing U.S. candidates in federal elections.

First off, Mauricio Fernandez, the mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, an exclusive community near Monterrey, announced as he was being sworn in for a new term that a feared drug cartel capo who had been threatening him had been found dead in Mexico City. Only one problem, the body hadn't been found yet. That would take another 3 1/2 hours. And it wouldn't be identified for two more days.

The mayor's explanation once the story erupted as a scandal in normally blase Mexico -- the DEA tipped him off:

When pressed, Fernandez said U.S. authorities tipped him off that somebody intercepted cartel communications and learned Saldana was planning to kill him, and he said unspecified intelligence sources told him Saldana was dead. Paul Knierim, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman, said Tuesday he couldn't comment on Fernandez's situation, but said American agents routinely coordinate with Mexican investigators trying to crack down on cartels.

The leaders of Argentina's horrible junta from the 1970s and 80s are finally facing trial:

The trial has begun of Argentina's last military ruler, Reynaldo Bignone, and five other retired generals.

The men are charged in connection with the alleged kidnapping, torture and disappearance of 56 opponents of the military government in the late 1970s.
...
Mr Bignone, 81, appeared frail and rocked back and forth in his chair as the charges were read out, correspondents said.

I hope Dick Cheney's heart holds out long enough to answer before a court of law for atrocities like this.

Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan that came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.

First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,

THE DEPROLIFERATOR -- Recent statements by its chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency suggest that Iran may be backing away from an agreement to ships it low-enriched nuclear fuel to Russia for further enriching. Even, though, after agreeing to the deal, President Ahmadinejad, ever the master of the sweeping gesture, said the West had "moved from confrontation to cooperation."

Among reasons to hope that Iran relents is a fact of which many who proclaim Iran has a right to a nuclear program seem ignorant. Turns out that transubstantiating the fuel used for nuclear energy into nuclear-weapon fuel, far from a miracle, is all too commonplace.

Amid the ongoing debate on escalating the war in Afghanistan come warnings of what will happen should the US not wage the war successfully.  Among these warnings are: the Taliban will re-conquer the country; al Qaeda will regain the freedom of movement and training camps it had prior to 2001; and terrorism will spread more rapidly throughout the world.  None of this is likely and that must be made clear to policy makers and the American public.   

Insurgent Forces in Crisis

Many if not most of the fighters operating against US and NATO forces are not motivated by lofty ideals, religious fervor, or geopolitics.  They are not seeking to reestablish a caliphate or even to establish an Islamist heartland in Central Asia.  They seek, paradoxically enough to westerners who see themselves as avatars of impartial development, to oust foreign forces from their country whom they believe to be trying to dominate it in alliance with northern, non-Pashtun people.  

Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law the $680 billion FY 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, the largest such budget since the end of World War II. If you missed that aspect of the story, you weren’t alone. Many news stories chose instead to focus on the hate crime provisions tacked onto the bill.

I’ve often quarreled with the inclusion of superfluous legislative riders, and the hate crime provision is more superfluous than most. (Indeed, as my Cato colleague David Rittgers has pointed out, it might be worse than superfluous.)

THE DEPROLIFERATOR -- Sometimes it seems as if neither the United States nor Russia got the message that the Cold War ended almost two decades ago. Last week I wrote about the Dooomsday Device, a back-up defense system that Russia developed in the 80s. In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, it ensures that, even if no civilian and military leaders are still around to issue the command, a retaliatory nuclear attack will still be launched. Depending on your point of view, it's either the ultimate in deterrence or the most senseless act of revenge ever.

From a MyDD diary by Joe Trippi:

What voters are ready to tell anyone who will listen is that they would like to reject both parties right now if they could. They are trying to find a way to say to both parties, "We want you to change or get out of the way." Both party establishments are in denial. Both party establishments are hard of hearing. And, both party establishments are likely to see the results on Tuesday as Karl Rove sees them - a victory of one party over another. That is the real danger in 2010 and beyond for both parties.

I've heard again and again from Democrats here in D.C. that the Republicans are too damaged by the Bush hangover to really be a threat in 2010 or 2012.

That's really the best we've got, the cold comfort of knowing no matter how shitty a job our party is doing in office, no matter how little we are delivering on our promises that the other party is even less popular and therefore our nominal power will be safe in the coming elections.

Joe Bageant has written something relevant that really pains me as a card carrying Deaniac whose movement ultimately kick-started total regime change in the U.S. only to end up with more of the same weak tea middle-of-the-road corporatist bullshit:

That's what I find disheartening about the so-called grassroots initiatives for change. They are well meaning, but nobody seems to understand that the grass is growing on the turf of a totalist corporate state, with its roots dependent upon the corporate hegemony for nourishment. If the big dogs don't continue to shit on them daily, they whither and die. The big dogs know that, and they know that the grassroots-ers are moreover powerless, and that only the local pups need worry about them at all...

Read the rest at Joe's site.

New York Times, By Tara Parker-Pope, October 26

Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?

The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.

Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process.

You may have been following freshman Rep. Alan Grayson's various media kerfluffles.

Howie Klein has a good piece on the latest:

So last month when Enron's head lobbyist, Linda Robertson, reborn as the Fed's head lobbyist, attacked congressmen pushing for an audit of the Fed-- primarily Grayson and Ron Paul-- as ignorant of the difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy, Grayson reacted by pointing out that Robertson has a long and well-known career as a "K Street whore." She shills for whoever pays her. When it was Enron, she helped them steal billions of dollars from taxpayers and rate-payers and now that it's the Fed, she is crawling around DC starting whispering campaigns about members of Congress who are demanding the audit that the Fed dreads more than anything. Her problem, of course, is that more than half the members of Congress have signed on to the bill calling for the audit. So she's going after Ron Paul and Alan Grayson, the two who are pushing this the hardest.

Suddenly, the month old exchange showed up-- courtesy of Robertson an undisclosed p.r. operative-- on Red State and Politico last night. The right, punked as usual, is aflame with indignation about Grayson calling this wonderful civil servant a whore. But some things transcend partisan ID, political party, ideology and the rest, not the least of which is the class solidarity of the Inside the Beltway elite. Alan Grayson didn't say they should all be lined up against a wall and shot; he probably wouldn't even agree with that as an excellent way to help get the country back on a good footing-- especially because there actually are some good one in the lot. But those good ones do not reside on K Street and no one not of that K Street Culture of Corruption world would count Linda Robertson as one of the good guys. She was, after all, the head of Enron's lobbying office-- a position that defines the word "whore." The outraged and offended congressmembers-- who realize a charge like this is an affront to all of their self-proclaimed senses of dignity-- would probably rather not discuss the substance of the claim.

It's not just Grayson's blog-friendly habit of saying outrageous things and then refusing to apologize for them that has the Beltway Elite freaking out. It's the fact that he's squaring the circle -- he made the "whore" remark on the Alex Jones show. Jones is frequently called an extreme right winger, but he's really more of a paranoid populist (whom I suspect of being in the pay of the corporate right, but that's a post for another time) more akin to Ron Paul than Tom DeLay, more Glenn Beck than Rush Limbaugh.

Grayson is to my knowledge the only Democratic elected official in the country who is willing to consort with outcasts like Ron Paul and Alex Jones. It's because he's on the populist side of the real dividing line in American politics: the one between the haves and have nots.

Something is going on in American politics and so far it's happening only at the fringes, but when the green shoots all die off and the banksters finally drive the economy off the cliff, there will be a sharp realignment. Grayson is the first progressive to make a stand on the populist side of that line.

I'll talk about a Texas Republican who's on the scary reactionary side of that line in the full entry.

While Canada's designated citizen whipping boy, Omar Khadr, remains incarcerated in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, it's becoming increasingly apparent that evidence against his elder brother, Abdullah, was also obtained through torture-induced "confessions". These young men are both members of the unit once described by Barbara Frum's evil spawn as "Canada's first family of terrorism." That catchy phrase seems, at this point, to provide the only shield for government prosecutors, given that little or no provable evidence has materialized concerning the two imprisoned Khadr brothers (and notwithstanding a significant rewrite of that pesky "right to face one's accusers" aspect of the court system in this case.) The youngest of the three brother seems to have escaped attention but he is also imprisoned, in this case by his quadriplegia, (thanks to an American shoot-out.) Then again, perhaps prosecutor's aren't interested in that child's recollections because the family patriarch was also killed in that attack. Pops, being stone cold dead, is obviously exempt from prosecution so there'll be no trial where troubling questions about his true culpability could be raised. Nevertheless, it seems to me some actual evidence of the rest of the family's wrongdoing should be examined in a court somewhere that is devoid of procedural improvisation. To put minds at rest on this, neither Canadians nor American's should fear that finding these kids to be innocent of the charges against them would result in their release into society. So far, court orders notwithstanding, we just keep 'em locked up indefinitely anyway. After all, at the end of the day, WE know better than the courts, don't we? David Frum has already told us all we apparently want or need to know about Canada, about Who's Who in the world of terror, and which of his denominated "axis of evil" enemies are readying for military attack.

It is a testament to the strength of our commitment to democracy that we Americans believe elections will solve the problems of a country – any country. This is a nice civics lesson but the lessons of history are otherwise. And it is not a sound principle of foreign policy. Elections in Afghanistan are unlikely to solve the country’s problems; they may even worsen things. In any event, other political processes are more important – we just haven’t realized it yet.

President Hamid Karzai, amid numerous allegations of fraud in August’s elections, has accepted a second-round runoff with Abdullah Abdullah. Domestic pressure for a second round was significant but it was pressure from the US and western bodies that forced Karzai to accede. Coming amid the Obama administration's debate on sending more troops, one might suspect a deal: Karzai sits for a second election in exchange for more US troops. Any such deal would be a bad one. Escalation should be assessed on its own merits, not on short-term gain. Furthermore, a deal paves the way for more deals: additional troop increases in exchange for what the Afghan government should be doing anyway – acting responsibly.

TruthDig/Alternet, By Penny Coleman, October 23

Every day, for four years as a West Point cadet, Tara Krause lived and worked alongside the men who had gang-raped her.

Still, she managed to graduate in 1982. She served as a field artillery officer during the Cold War and was attached to the 518th Military Intelligence Brigade during the Gulf War. In what she calls "an act of incredible self-destruction," she married a three-tour Vietnam vet in 1985 and, for the next eight years, lived "the private hell of his PTSD."

With the possible exception of Georgia-US-Russia, no US relationship in the former Soviet region is more fraught today than the US-Russia-Ukraine triangle. At a time when Washington and Moscow have variously committed to a relationship reset, a new operating system, and a rerun of the Clinton-Yeltsin strategic partnership, it is disappointing how little substance has followed rhetoric. Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe are still reeling from the US Administration’s abrupt and ill-timed reversal on missile defense deployment, and Team Obama is eager for opportunities to demonstrate its commitment to the new Europe, which received no shortage of love from the Bush Administration.

A few weeks ago, Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, the long-awaited Senate version of the climate change bill that squeaked through the House in June. With the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen just nine weeks away, U.S. legislative action will be a key to successful global negotiations. Particularly, investment in international adaptation – the multilateral assistance to developing countries in order to withstand the impacts of climate change – is widely expected to be one of the central elements of the looming debate in Copenhagen. Whereas climate change mitigation policies aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation seeks to lessen the vulnerability and enhance the resilience of the most at-risk countries through disaster management and infrastructure capacity-building. Kerry has called international adaptation “part of the glue” holding together hopes of reaching a new global treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. Still, investment in adaptation – at both the domestic and international levels – has been continuously overlooked.

I've been criticized for the apocolyptic slant of my blogging here, but when I see things like this I can't help myself. Chris Jordan, the photographer writes:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

I'm not the only one who hears the bells of doom tolling, from Scuba Diving News:

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. "If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you'd find a little line of plastic," he told The Seattle Times last April. "What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren't able to reproduce. They didn't last very long because they killed themselves."

Throw in rapidly rising ocean temperatures, increasing acidity from CO2, overfishing and Mother Ocean is on the verge of collapse.

The stupidity of an animal that discovers a way to build essentially permanent materials and chooses to use them to build mountains of "disposable" crap is manifest. We're choking the planet with it.

Preview of an exciting looking documentary about the slaughter of dolphins in Japan in the full entry.

From Taibbi:

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

I can't help but finding it very ironic that because of pointless utterly unnecessary lying by Shepard Fairey. The Fairey vs AP case was seemingly a slam dunk opportunity to re-establish the right of fair use and end decades of relentless corporate abuse of copyrights and its been hopelessly botched by Fairey.

Just as the Obama Presidency appeared to be a the herald of a new progressive era decades in the making...sold out stupidly by the President himself when he signed onto the Paulson bailouts and then went on to bring Goldman Sachs in to his administration.

Hence the Sex Pistols reference in the title. That band, the heralds of a revolution in pop culture were brought down by corrupt mismanagement, internal bickering and stupid rock star bullshit (heroin).

Fourteen years later it seemed as if punk rock had finally won and broken through, but that turned out to be yet another sham.

It appears we're headed for a much rougher economic collapse which will require a much more hard-fought political turnover (and it won't be a "virtual campaign" either). Hopefully we'll turn in a good direction but for every Gandhi there are two Mao's, four Hitlers, six Pol Pots, a dozen Francos and twenty five Idi Amin's.

Dave Johnson outlines the seven steps to making money in the leveraged buyout scam racket (the kind that raped Simmons Mattress) and then outlines an idea for a Government incentive regime that rewards a different kind of behavior:

I have described here a destructive, unsustainable system that creates company- and society-breaking machines. These exist because of the economic and social incentives that our government has set up and we allow to stay in place. Breaking unions, stealing pensions, outsourcing jobs and squeezing customers all depend on government not enforcing laws and regulations – especially labor, consumer and environmental rules. (The last administration’s Labor Dept actually gave advice on how to break unions.) As long as we let the economic incentives call us "costs" and getting rid of us "efficiency" this will continue.

Certainly there is no incentive at the top to stop this. This system helps a wealthy few get ever wealthier and do not feel the consequences. The people who do this are celebrated as "successful." And if they don’t like the resulting devastation to the economy, community, country and world they can just hop into their private jet or yacht to retire to their private island or tax haven.

Of course, in the last year we have seen that this was not a sustainable system. The economy collapsed because everyone in the system – the workers, consumers, companies, banks, Wall Street – all hit the limits of how much debt you could pile on our backs. But we haven’t started to make any changes in the design of the system, or in the machines that unsustainably grind up our companies, workers, customers and country. And we haven't changed the ideology and rationalizations used to justify destroying lives and companies and our long-term prospects for short-term profits for a few.

But imagine if instead we put in place economic and social incentives that set up a sustainable system with company-making machines that direct all of this capital and energy toward building good companies that serve all of our interests. Call them "green machines." What if we set things up so people could get rich doing this instead? Then people would create green machines that would grind through the economy, finding companies and transforming them into businesses that serve their customers and communities, creating rewarding and fulfilling jobs in stimulating and enjoyable work environments, and building a better future for all of us.

Zero Hedge, By Tyler Durden, October 19

When the financial system almost imploded in the fall of 2008, one of the primary responses by the Federal Reserve was the issuance of an unprecedented amount of FX liquidity lines in the form of swaps to foreign Central Banks. The number went from practically zero to a peak of $582 billion on December 10, 2008. The number of swaps outstanding was almost directly inversely correlated with the value of the dollar (much more on that shortly). A graphic representation of this can be seen below:

A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read, my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.

I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.

Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received a note from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15 manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

William Black writes of the five fatal flaws of finance (read the whole thing, his analysis is excellent and should enrage and terrify you):

The financial sector is a tool to help those that make real tools, not an end in itself. But five fatal flaws in the financial sector's current structure have created a monster that drains the real economy, promotes fraud and corruption, threatens democracy, and causes recurrent, intensifying crises.

1. The financial sector harms the real economy.
2. The financial sector produces recurrent, intensifying economic crises here and abroad.
3. The financial sector's predation is so extraordinary that it now drives the upper one percent of our nation's income distribution and has driven much of the increase in our grotesque income inequality.
4. The financial sector's predation and its leading role in committing and aiding and abetting accounting control fraud combine to:
   • Corrupt financial elites and professionals, and
   • Spur a rise in Social Darwinism in an attempt to justify the elites' power and wealth.
5. The CEOs of the largest financial firms are so powerful that they pose a critical risk to the financial sector, the real economy, and our democracy.

Robert Creamer adds four points in another outstanding piece:

1. History has shown that financial markets cannot accomplish their ostensible goal of allocating risk and directing capital to their highest and best uses unless they function within the context of very strict rules.
2. Much of the financial sector does not produce anything.
3. Left to their own devices, financial speculators often kill off productive enterprises through leveraged buyouts and private equity plays.
4. The bigger the financial sector gets, the more power it has to hold the entire economy ransom for huge bailouts when their speculative bubbles collapse.

The Texas Observer has an excellent, in-depth account of two massive prison riots in a private, for-profit facility housing immigrants swept up for border crossing violations. Here's the context in which the riots occurred:

...the Bush administration piloted a “zero-tolerance” policy in Texas that eventually spread across the border: All illegal border crossers would be arrested, detained and, if possible, prosecuted in federal court. Prosecutions surged, as did the need for detention centers, jails and prisons to hold the tens of thousands of newly minted criminals. The Obama administration has more than embraced the policy. The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes—almost 68,000—during the first nine months of 2009 is on track for a 14 percent increase over 2008. More than half of those prosecutions took place in Texas.

The result has been a system swamped with low-level immigration cases and prisons bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants. Rather than build and run the facilities themselves, federal agencies have turned in large part to private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. In 2008, GEO reported more than $1 billion in revenue, an 80 percent increase over 2005.

On a related note, TPM has been investigating the many scams run by private prisons as well and how they implant themselves inside local communities like parasitic wasps:

...a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

The projects have generated multi-million dollar profits for the companies involved, but often haven't created the anticipated payoff for the communities, and have left a string of failed or failing prisons in their wake.

The whole concept of a private for-profit prison makes my skin crawl, especially in our current political environment where money buys legislation. It's very much America Eats Its Own.

During this decade the global economic and financial dynamic that mattered most was the United States - China relationship. China sold cheap manufactured goods to American consumers desperate to maintain their standard of living in the face of a shrinking job market and declining real wages. Americans borrowed money to pay for the essentials of its lifestyle - college education, premium health care, two or more cars, etc. The Chinese were the major lenders to American consumers, financing the purchases of the goods China was selling.

What this dynamic was doing was forestalling the inevitable decline in the American standard of living that began when Deng Hsiao Ping first unleashed China's capitalist spirits. The West looked on this development greedily - 800 million new consumers ready to buy Western products! This was a great misconception, because it assumed somehow that China was going to make its way up the economic ladder by making Westerners richer. In fact the reverse began to happen. Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial manufacturers arose in China, with access to labor willing to work for pitiful wages and no benefits, and with no governmental regulation on working conditions or environmental degradation. The result has been an economic catastrophe for the West, which has seen its manufacturing sector whittled down, its trade deficits soar, and its debt levels skyrocket.