Neither America nor any other country are Businesses .. We are not electing a CEO

Perhaps this is a sign of the corporatization of American government.  That it's the next step after the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling saying that Corporations had unlimited ability to spend money in politics, and there was surely a step before that which looked like an egregious example of the corporatization of our Politics and Government.  What I'm concerned about is a tagline attached to Herman Cain's 2012 Presidential campaign, where he is campaigning to become America's CEO.

Perhaps he'll be bowing out of the race later today due to sexual misconduct.  But for the moment let's just ponder this on its face.  The Cain campaign released a video today, an advertising pitching a not-quite-accurate line of reasoning about jobs creation, and featuring Cain saying "I've spent a life time creating jobs, and if you make me Americas CEO…" which just clicked in my mind as WRONG.  So here I am, writing about how WRONG this is.

Countries and Businesses are different animals, and most importantly play different roles and have different goals.  It is wrong to run a Country as if it were a Businesses.

I'm not entirely sure if there is a canonically correct list of attributes of companies versus countries but this list illustrates what I have in mind.  Perhaps a debate is in order about this sort of thing to make it clear what the differences are.

In fact there is a debate related to this - happening via the Occupy protests and some other organizations like Slow Money, Slow Food, Transition Towns, Resilience Circles, and other groups where we the people are gathering with the idea to recreate our society in a way that works for all of us.

Are we going to continue living under the government that was constructed by and serves the elite, or are we going to create a government that is truly our common body of all of us acting as a united whole?

Businesses are:

• Purpose is to be profitable - highest revenue possible
• Current business practice is the "growth at all costs" mantra that's completely unsustainable
• Based on a web of contracts where people make bargains for money that remove their rights --- for example employees sign employment contracts that in part remove their right of free speech, because employees are required to not speak publicly about corporate proprietary knowledge
• Businesses are essentially top-down dictatorships with, for example, Management holding rights to fire people as a threat to keep everyone in line with corporate dictates
• Formed by getting a permit (business license) from a Government

Countries are:

• Purpose is to maintain a piece of land for the betterment of the people living there
• Purpose is to maintain common resources and well-being
• Collects money through fees and taxes
• Does not have shareholders - instead, in effect, governments are in the ideal mutually owned by the people
• Is not expected to maintain a profit - indeed many politicians have claimed that when a government runs a surplus, that's a sign of the government taking too many taxes, and that's a reason for a tax cut (but such tax cuts later cause government deficits leading to government borrowing and government debt causing a wastage of government resources)
• Is not expected to grow faster than the rate of population growth - indeed many politicians decry overly large government (some of whom hypocritically create massive expansions of government)

 

Hypocratic lying government officials, and why it matters (do we live in a Hypocracy or Democracy?)

Politicians lie, right? That statement is frequently used to sweep hypocrisy and lies under the rug. Why bother complaining because they all do it? Maybe the general consensus is that these lies don't matter and not worth the bother. To me it is important and galling some of the lies being perpetrated.

When the Congressman serving as the House Majority Leader suggests to a news reporter a course of action that's patently unconstitutional, is that important? When a politician calls for bombing a particular country, then two weeks later says we shouldn't be bombing that country, is that important? When a political party makes a lot of electoral hay calling for Constitutional rule, enacts rules of Congressional conduct requiring citations of Constitutional justification, and then does not follow their own newly enacted rule, is that important? When a Congressperson has a public facade of "Family Values" complaining about extramarital sexual affairs of others, but then gets caught redhanded in their own sexual pecadillo escapade and refuses to acknowledge it or resign or anything, is that important?

A couple definitions might bring this into focus:

Hypocracy (urban dictionary):

What Democracy turns into when all of the politicians in your country are liars.

When no party/President that wins the election manages to keep its/his own ideology, and instead, keeps changing it every time it/he feels like it, that's no democracy. That's hypocracy.

A democracy governed by hypocrites.

The British government advocates moral standards to which it does not conform. Britain's political system is therefore a hypocracy.

Hypocrisy (dictionary.com)

1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.
3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.

What these definitions are saying is a disconnect between stated ideology and actual action.

The writings of Christianity include a principle: By their fruits ye shall know them

This comes from traditional agriculture. How do you decide whether to grow one plant or another? It's whether the plant is useful for food production, or, whether the fruit of the tree is edible, nutritious and tasty, or whether it's poisonous or repugnant. You can only tell this from the fruit.

What is the "fruit" of hypocritical politicians?

What's engendered by the atmosphere indicated by the synonyms of 'hypocrisy'? (affectation, bad faith, bigotry, cant, casuistry, deceit, deception, dishonesty, display, dissembling, dissimulation, double-dealing, duplicity, false profession, falsity, fraud, glibness, imposture, insincerity, irreverence, lie, lip service, mockery, pharisaicalness, pharisaism, phoniness, pietism, quackery, sanctimoniousness, sanctimony, speciousness, unctuousness - from http://thesaurus.com/browse/hypocrisy)

Bush veto limits on torture? Or did Bush say he supports use of torture?

Pres. Bush a couple days ago veto'd a bill which included a provision that would have required all U.S. agencies to abide by the Military Interrogation manual. This would have required all U.S. agencies to not torture. That would be a great thing, it would be a move towards restoring some of the respect the U.S. used to have. But instead he veto'd the bill ... some press reports I've heard describe it in very bland terms, as if the government really is being hindered with limited interrogation techniques. Okay, that's one way to look at this event, and the other way to look at it is that Bush has acted in support of interrogation techniques abhorred worldwide and which are highly illegal. But this is par for the course for this president who has committed one illegal act after another.

Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill is the text of his weekly news address, in which he explains the veto thusly:

Quote:

...Unfortunately, Congress recently sent me an intelligence authorization bill that would diminish these vital tools. So today, I vetoed it....The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us prevent a number of attacks....The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision. The bill Congress sent me would deprive the C.I.A. of the authority to use these safe and lawful techniques. Instead, it would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. The procedures in this manual were designed for use by soldiers questioning lawful combatants captured on the battlefield. They were not intended for intelligence professionals trained to question hardened terrorists....

In other words he's defending the use of torture (calling it lawful) because of the ticking time-bomb defense. The idea is you know there is a bomb somewhere, due to explode at a given time, you don't know where the bomb is, you don't know precisely when it will explode, but you have in your hands the person who planted the bomb. What do you do. If you're the star of the TV show 24 you don't let a little thing like laws stop you, you instead gird up your loins and commit torture in the name of God and Justice and Truth. But the real world experience with torture is the torturee often lies, or rather they get into a state of mind where they'll say anything just to get the pain to stop. You don't end up with truth, you end up with confusion.

The ACLU says:

Quote:

"It is fundamentally un-American when our president vetoes laws against torture," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The president's veto sends a message to the world that despite Congress' actions, our country will continue to engage in this inhumane and heinous conduct when we should be affirming unequivocally and in one voice that torture and abuse will stop and never happen again. No one is above the rule of law, including the president. Congress should hold firm and persist in trying to get an anti-torture bill signed into law."

However the International Herald Tribune, in Bush vetoes bill to limit CIA interrogation methods, says:

Quote:

President George W. Bush further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to halt a congressional effort to limit the CIA's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Oh, gee, he's fighting for the Presidency to have more power? How noble of him! Um, should that extend to the right for the President to authorize or commit illegal acts? Because that's exactly what's going on here, is the President is acting to support illegal acts (torture) which are abhorrent worldwide.

Quote:

The director of the CIA, Mike Hayden, was swift to praise the Bush veto, arguing that the field manual was inappropriate as a guide for the CIA as the two institutions "have different missions, different capabilities and therefore difference procedures".

Uh, does a specific law become invalid in specific circumstances? In other words, if you're a trained race car driver is it then legal for you to drive 100 miles/hr in rush hour traffic? No, it's just as illegal to break the speed limit if you're a race car driver or if you're an 80 yr old half blind retiree. Therefore CIA Director Hayden is, uh, full of it.

Quote:

The veto throws the spotlight back on to America's use of so-called coercive interrogation methods like waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique invented by Spanish inquisitors and adopted by regimes such as the Khmer Rouge.

Put's us in great company... eh? NOT. Look, if America is to live up to the ideal we believe in then we must outlaw torture and make it stick. We cannot let this "President" run roughshod on the law.

Article Reference: 

Bush: Limiting CIA Interrogations "Could Cost American Lives"

Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill

ACLU Condemns Bush Veto Of Intelligence Bill Preventing Torture

Bush Explains Veto of Waterboarding Bill

Bush vetoes bill to limit CIA interrogation methods

Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms Bush’s Legacy

Bush Vetoes Bill That Would Have Barred Waterboarding (Update2)

Bush vetoes move to ban water torture

President George Bush vetoes Congress ban on CIA use of waterboarding

Bush veto keeps torture techniques on the board

Reaction to Bush's Veto of Torture Bill

Bush vetoes U.S. bill outlawing CIA waterboarding

Bush vetoes interrogation limits

The Torturous Logic of The New York Times

Waterboarding, ‘Harsh’ Techniques OK by Bush

Bush Supports Undifferentiated Tortures, Even as “The People” Explicitly Do Not

extvideo: 

CBS news getting into sliming Obama

It's been awhile since I posted anything about Obama. It's clear the sliming of him by the mainstream news media is continuing. In the linked article they show a clip of Katie Couric, the controversial CBS Evening News anchor. Controversial? She comes from the fluffy-entertainment side of the industry, not the real journalism side, and this news clip is a good example of the problem.

She repeats an accusation which has been thoroughly discredited .. that during Obama's childhood his mother sent him to a Madrassa school. During that time he and his mother lived in Indonesia, and as that country is heavily Islamic there were plenty of Islamic oriented schools in the area. He was sent to a Christian oriented school for some time, and for another time to an Islamic oriented school. However it's been proved the school in question was emphatically not a Madrassa. The Madrassa's being a specific sort of Islamic school which teaches fundamentalist Islam.

Article Reference: 

Couric's "Notebook" rehashed debunked Obama rumors

Should Donald Rumsfeld be charged with Genocide alongside Saddam Hussein?

Will Any Americans Be Charged As Accomplices in Saddam's Genocide Trial? raises an interesting point. Saddam Hussein has been charged for Genocide based on stuff done in the early 1980's. At that time the U.S. government was actively supporting the Iraq government, U.S. officials knew all about the Iraqi use of chemical weapons, the U.S. officials knew Iraq was violating the treaty against chemical weapon use, and despite that those same U.S. officials continued supplying money, armaments, intelligence, etc in Iraq's war against Iran.

That makes Rumsfeld just as culpable in the "Genocide" as is Hussein.

Or, that's what the article says. Like I said, that's an interesting thought.

Not Optional - a nice rant about the oil situation

Not Optional by Jim Kunstler with Clusterfuck Nation is right on the money, so far as I can see. Enjoy -- warning, it gets a little ranty.

The topic he's writing on is collective blindness on several angles. For example, how can the people really believe we can just pull out of this misbegotten war in Iraq. Regardless of how illegal that war is, we started a total mess there and pulling out now would only make matters worse.

The other blindness is about oil. The war is for oil, despite the protestations of the Administration. The Bush Administration has taken lying to the public to a fine art, and for that I must applaud them.

It's about oil because Iraq has a huge chunk of it, and the U.S. has very little. In order to keep our standard of living, which is one of the meme's the Bush Administration keeps mouthing, we must grab the oil wherever it is.

The problem is this is a fools quest. There's not that much oil left in the world anyway, and there are plenty of alternatives. The better route is to invest in alternative energy research in a big way. Not these piddly little bits here and there the Administration has been throwing out to keep the environmentalists happy. There's a real problem here, and with the direction the Bush Administration is leading the country the only result is a kind of world described in the Mad Max movies.

Theocracy in America, an "Unholy Alliance"?

Kevin Phillips is one of the political operatives who helped bring the Republicans into power in the 1960's and 1970's. He's billed as a Republican Strategist, and eventually worked in the Reagan White House. With that as background we have a very interesting book from him, warning of the danger of the neo-Theocracy we find ourselves with today in the United States.

Here's some resources:

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Interview with Democracy Now, March 21, 2006

The Unholy Alliance Kevin Phillips believes the U.S. is threatened by a combination of petroleum, preachers and debt

This gives a sense of where the book is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you talk about radical religion, about debt, and about oil, about this being an oil war. You also talk about peak oil. That's not talked about very much in the mainstream. Explain.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The peak oil idea is that just as the United States oil production peaked in 1971, that we have a limited amount of oil globally, and that it’s something that can't be re-created. It’s running out. And the expectation of some is that the oil production of the non-OPEC countries will peak at some point during the 2010s, and that then the production of OPEC itself will peak in the 2020s or 2030s. Now, some people think that Saudi production has already peaked.

Now, if you believe this, and it’s possible, then we face an enormous convergence, again under specific oil-related circumstances, of a global struggle for natural resources as the price of oil climbs, as we turn the armed services into a global oil protection service, which has been happening, and as we see the administration refuse to grapple with the need to really curb oil consumption in the United States, which is mostly through transportation and especially motor vehicles.

And I just have a sense, as many others on the conservative side do, this administration has no strategy to deal with these converging problems, be they foreign policy, military, oil, debt. They are like the three little monkeys on the old jade thing – the one sees no evil, one speaks no evil, and one hears no evil. Do they know anything? You know, that's an open question.

But, it just goes on and on. Such as an assertion that: "that the Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you have a president who got his start in national politics as his father’s liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and ‘88, you just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way."

Inside the US's regime-change school

For a couple years the Bush Administration has been rattling war against Iran (and Syria). (see here, here, here, and background material for the Iraq war for some of my previous coverage).

The justification is said to be Iran's plan to build out nuclear weapons ability. Except Iran says their plans are for peaceful nuclear power production, just for electricity. And, in any case, Iran is a Non Proliferation Treaty signatory and apparently they haven't done anything to violate that treaty. It's more than a little contradictory that on the one hand we are threatening Iran, who has yet to violate the NPT, while we are making a broad deal with India to support their nuclear power program, and India has never signed on to the NPT and is known to have (today) nuclear weapons.

Logic has never been a strong suit of the Bush Administration. And given their clear goal of toppling Iran after toppling Iraq we shouldn't be surprised to have them invent some kind of justification for launching a new war.

Inside the US's regime-change school offers an interesting glimpse into a "regime change school". It's clear to me the article isn't highly verifiable, instead it's an account of one person who "accidentally" attended a secretive U.S. backed program to train activists in methods that can be used to topple a government.

The "school" was a week-long session held at a Holiday Inn in Dubai. Sessions were led by members of the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. And, given the secretive nature of the "school" the hotel advertised them as "Griffin Hospital".

In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi'ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.

"They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic," Nilofar said. "They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn't mention directly bringing down the regime - they just taught us what they had done in their own country."

Hurm... your tax dollars at work, I suppose.

Later in the article Nilofar described the activists as mahrum, a Farsi word for deprived. Apparently the ones inside Iran most clamoring for change are "lower-class families who have been deprived of everything and now they've decided to overthrow the government".

Employee free speech, and a VA nurse being investigated for Sedition

In September 2005 a pair of hurricanes hit New Orleans and the surrounding land. As a result much of New Orleans has effectively been destroyed. The government response to help the people of New Orleans and the surrounding land has been egregiously bad.

Shortly after the hurricane, a VA nurse in Albuquerque wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining of the bad government response to the hurricane. Immediately afterward she was referred to the FBI and since then has come under investigation by the FBI for "sedition". Sedition being the legal word for advocating the forceful, violent overthrow of the government.

The story is here: V.A. Nurse Accused of Sedition After Publishing Letter Critical of Bush on Katrina, Iraq (as presented on Democracy Now)

The story is astonishing and alarming. The nurse, Laura Berg, acted under belief she was protected by the First Ammendment gaurantee of freedom of speech. In the interview she reiterates her claim of first ammendment gaurantees of freedom of speech.

The government is threatening her with years of jail time, the sentence for "Sedition". But how could her letter to the editor be taken as advocating violent overthrow of the government? This is the U.S. and we have a long history of the right of citizens to criticize their government.

As she says:

LAURA BERG: Amy, I did not sign away my First Amendment rights as a citizen, you know, by choosing to serve in the federal government and choosing to serve veterans and care for people that have been wounded like this, you know. And this letter sounds like something from a totalitarian regime, you know, that we are supposedly going in and share our democracy. This is way out of line. This was way out line. I have a right to speak my opinion. I have a right to say I'm a V.A. nurse. I do not speak for the V.A. I speak as a public citizen....

In my mind the case is open and shut, but for one thing.

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

Should your company have a corporate blogging policy?

FOX Sics its Dogs on "Un-American" Professors

The general principle in the articles I've linked is -- employers have the right and ability to restrict the speech of their employees.

How so? For example, what is proprietary information? It's information a corporation wants to keep secret, that gives the corporation competitive advantage, and if an employee is caught revealing proprietary information the employee can very likely be fired for having done so.

That's just one example of many sorts of ways an employer can limit what an employee says.

There have been instances of people being fired for blogging about aspects of their job, even when doing that blogging from home on their own computer onto their own blogging account. For example a teacher with DeVry was fired over comments she blogged about her students. Someone else, who worked in a customer support job, was fired for derogatory comments she wrote on a blog talking about the people who came to her for support were dweebs etc.

The issue with Laura Berg is that her employer is the U.S. government. Specifically, the Veterans Administration. The U.S. government has more options at its disposal for threatening its employees. e.g. trumping up charges of Sedition.

With the tradition of employers being able to control the speech of their employees, what happens when that employer is the U.S. government?

And, I think the bigger question is, why is there such a blanket acceptance of employers controlling the speech of employees? Clearly it represents a huge blanket of suppressed rights to free speech.

Our right to privacy, killed by the Bush administration? Or was it inevitable?

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

No longer can the right of privacy be expected in any walk of life -- an editorial in a local newspaper in Hagerstown Maryland.

Invasion of privacy must stop -- An editorial in a local newspaper in India

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data - A New York Times article by John Markoff

The first two take the opinion that we have a "right to privacy". As the Hagerstown editorial mentions, a right to privacy wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, but that was because the Founders assumed privacy was such an obvious right as "breathing" or "eating" that they didn't bother to discuss it. But little did they have a clue of the sort of technology which would be developed.

The article from India is interesting because of the expression of fear which comes up just with a hint that any of our phone conversations could be tapped.

The NY Times article just demonstrates how the government is continuing to look for more and more surveillance and privacy-destroying tools. It discusses an NSA visit to Silicon Valley looking for data mining tools. Which just makes me think of the Total Information Awareness project.

Data mining is widely used by corporations. For example credit card companies data-mine transactions looking for possibly fraudulent activity. In the article they discuss a prison which used data mining of telephone call records to discover a drug smuggling ring.

The point is technology creates new possibilities. The digitization of "everything" makes privacy invasion so much easier to do. Which gets to the inevitability.

Even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean "we the people" should just allow it to happen without protest.

RenewableEnergyAccess.com | Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project

The cape wind project intends to install dozens of wind towers off Cape Cod. This project has drawn a ridiculous storm of criticism with "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) style protests from people who normally support ecological initiatives, but call this a blight. er... The huge cities are ecological blights, but how are wind towers a blight?

Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project discusses a proposed ammendment by Alaska Congressman Don Young which would change the buffer requirements around offshore wind tower projects. There's more details in the article, the gist being that the current standard is a 500 foot zone around each wind tower and any shipping lanes. Further the current standard has the Coast Guard reviewing these plans. The proposal arbitrarily sets a 1.5 mile buffer zone, and removes the Coast Guard from review.

Fortunately this is only a proposal to put an ammendment on in committee. But it's a dangerous sort of thinking that's clearly intended to scuttle offshore wind projects.

Asia Times Online :: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

Hopefully you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie by Michael Moore that was prominent in 2004. His main topic throughout the movie was to explore cronyism and how that created the war in Iraq. The main example is the laundry list of business ties between the Administration, the Saudi royalty and even to the bin Laden family. That most of the Administration has ties to the Oil Industry (both GW and GHW Bush owned oil companies, VP Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, Chevron named an oil tanker for Condoleeza Rice, etc) figured heavily in this movie.

In one segment Moore talked about the oil in Central Asia and the U.S. plan for bringing that oil to market. The Central Asia oil has been a matter of power play for several years, and it's land-locked position that isn't easily accessible makes it difficult to "extract" and sell on the market. Taking it in one direction, you'd be going through Russia. Another direction and you're going across Siberia and then the port is in the arctic and probably locked in by ice. And to the south are steep mountains, some of the highest in the world. Also to the south is Iran, a sworn enemy of the U.S.

The chosen U.S. route was through Afghanistan. The U.S. has pushed for this route since the 1990's. The problem was, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan were terribly friendly to the U.S. The Taliban was in control, and Pakistan was very friendly with the Taliban. It didn't make any difference that during the 1980's the U.S. worked closely with Pakistan and the people who became the Taliban. In the 1980's the menace was Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and the U.S. effort to drive Russia out, which meant a secret operation supplying the mujahadeen (as they were known then) with arms and training. By the 1990's that was long in the past, and U.S. policy had shifted away. Even so the Taliban government visited the U.S., as Michael Moore documented, working to negotiate both the opium poppy eradication as well as the pipeline deal.

BTW, since the toppling of the Taliban government, opium poppy production has sprung back to pre-Taliban levels.

In any case there was an existing plan to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. And you can imagine the big question in U.S. and oil industry planning -- how the heck do we get access to Afghanistan? Essentially that country had become enemy territory.

Conveniently the September 11, 2001 attack provided the needed excuse. The culprits were in Afghanistan, which gave us all the excuse in the world to invade that country, topple its government, etc.

And, now, conveniently the path was clear. Afghanistan was no longer essentially enemy territory. Further, in the process of making war on Afghanistan the U.S. established bases and cooperation with several Central Asian countries. These countries had been carved out of the former Soviet Union after its collapse in the early 1990's.

A nagging question is whether the September 11, 2001 attack was merely a coincidence, or whether some behind the scenes conspiracy created it? There's enough connections there to make one ponder. The Bush family had ties with the bin Laden family, to the point that one of the bin Laden cousins bailed George W Bush out of at least one of his failed businesses. And there was the pre-existing plan for a pipeline through Afghanistan, and coincidentally the major players in creating that plan are now major players in both the Afghanistan government and the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan.

But there isn't enough proven data to truly connect the attack to any behind the scenes conspiracy. So we'll just leave that question dangling out there.

What's of interest now is this article: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

It discusses two different pipeline projects to bring Natural Gas to "market". One is the US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) while the other is the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI).

This appears to be part of the larger geopolitics power struggle. The different sources of these two pipelines is interesting. Iran being an U.S. enemy at this moment makes this statement interesting:

Moreover, unlike IPI, the project does not run the risk of being blacklisted for participation by US and European financiers and companies. The US has been encouraging Pakistan to abandon the IPI project and consider TAP for meeting its gas needs.

Blacklisted?? This isn't explained, but clearly the official relationship with Iran is problematic for many countries. But Pakistan probably has a lot of cooperation with Iran, given they share a long border and probably have common cultural elements. But to the U.S. and the "west" Iran is a pariah, being controlled by fundamentalists who are opposed to the western powers.

Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. - Feb 18, 2006

This CNN article: Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. discusses a threat by Hugo Chavez to cut off Venezuela's shipments of oil to the U.S. Part of this has been an ongoing story, for example the American-backed coup attempt in Venezuela a couple years ago.

Chavez has been making statements for years about vague threats against him by the U.S. They might sound like the ravings of paranoia, except that there was this weird coup which started to topple him out of power. A coup which was clearly inspired by American interests. And, there is the long history of the U.S. toppling governments in the Western Hemisphere through following the Monroe Doctrine, in which President Monroe declared to the world, "The Western Hemisphere is ours, and you can't have it" and which has justified repeated actions by the U.S. government against western hemisphere governments from at least the Dominican Republic, to Allende's government in Chile, to the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

A part of the game playing between the U.S. and Venezuela is repeated expulsions of diplomats over allegations of spying.

Which just reminds me of: The confessions of an economic hit-man an interview I heard on Democracy Now a few days ago. The interviewee, John Perkins, had written a book exposing, as a former insider to the game, how the U.S. government has quietly created a worldwide economic empire. A part of that game is to make deals with world leaders where people like him would meet newly elected world leaders and offer them a deal. In one hand the economic hit man will offer riches, kickbacks for example from the sale of whatever resources that country has. In the other hand the economic hit man will hold a threat of violence against that leader or his/her family. These leaders know the history and know that legions of previous world leaders have been assassinated or overthrown by these people.

Jeremy Scahill: On CNN The Real Abu Ghraib Scandal is The Photos, Not the Torture | The Huffington Post

U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq are torturing their prisoners. Pictures are published documenting the torture. And what's done? What does the press do, that is? The press complains that the only legitimate pictures that can be taken are ones by the Defense Department, and can only be done for documentation purposes. At least that's the story here: On CNN The Real Abu Ghraib Scandal is The Photos, Not the Torture

Jeremy Scahill quotes a CNN reporter who repeatedly said: "Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is all about."

er... Again, U.S. and British soldiers are conducting torture, and the whole thing the story is about is the illegally taken pictures? What about the bigger crime of torture?

Is this the country we want to have, where our soldiers are conducting torture?

Iraq, Vietnam all over again?

In Permanent bases in Iraq? Tom Engelhardt suggests we interpret Iraq as Vietnam.  Iraq is a worsening situation, where it's hard to see any face-saving exit from the country and where the population is increasingly rising up against the American presence.  Plus, at home there's a growing anger over this war.  I don't know what's taken the American people so long, the war is clearly illegal and immoral.

Engelhardt's main point of discussion is to contrast the plan for troop reductions with a fact "on the ground".  Namely the presence of the permanent bases that have been constructed, which cost several billion dollars.  An army engineer tasked with facilities development described them in an engineering magazine article with "staggering" cost.  If the plan is to withdraw, then why spend billions of dollars on bases?

One of the bases has finally been discussed in the mainstream press as having a "small town feel".  It has all the comforts of home, extensive telecom and other infrastructure, etc.  And in the London Telegraph is another covering the still-under-construction al-Asad airbase.  Apparently each of these bases cover 15-20 square miles of land.  There are at least four of these bases in Iraq and the fact we're stating this as "at least" is a symptom of the secrecy.

CNN.com - Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks - Feb 9, 2006

Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks Prosecutor says Libby shared classified intelligence with media: Summary is, Scooter Libby, VP Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, has apparently testified that he leaked Valerie Plame's identity under orders from his superiors. While the article tries to be vague about who they are, well, doesn't a "chief of staff" generally work directly for the person whom they are the chief of their staff? So isn't the superior for the Vice President's chief of staff, then, the vice president?

U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country"

"I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country.." - G.W. Bush in the wake of an unexpected landslide victory by Hamas in the latest Palestinian elections. Hamas has been a bloody terrorist organization, but has recently turned to political action and has now won the elections in the Palestinian territories.

It seems the U.S. is two-faced about wanting democracy. We say we want democracy, but then when democracy turns up an unwanted result then there's only complaints. In this case the election chose Hamas, but no sooner than the results were in than the complaints began. President Bush, I label you HYPOCRIT.

In case it's not obvious -- what's really galling about the above quote is that GW Bush himself laid out a call for the destruction of another government. Which? Iraq's government under Saddam Hussein. That's what the phrase regime change means, the destruction of another government. Further the NEOCON strategy for the middle east is to destroy not just the Iraqi government, but also that of Syria and Iran.

Oh, and apparently the U.S. government was meddling in the Palestinian election by giving huge funding to Hamas opponents:

Palestinian Groups Accuse U.S. of Meddling in Elections: And in the Occupied Territories, the Bush administration is being accused of meddling in this week's Palestinian parliamentary elections. On Sunday the Washington Post reported the U.S. has clandestinely funneled $2 million into public service projects ahead of the elections in an effort to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority and its governing Fatah party. Officials from Hamas have questioned whether the aid violates rules barring Palestinian political parties from receiving funds from foreign sources. Independent candidate Mustafa Barghouti warned the Bush administration's efforts could backfire and end up helping Hamas in the elections. Barghouti said, "Every time the United States says it doesn't want Hamas, they boost Hamas. Let us do our elections entirely on our own. These interventions run counter to our efforts, and they hurt the Palestinian people. This effort was completely counterproductive." -- Democracy Now, Jan 24, 2006

But the Bush administration has demonstrated anti-democracy tendencies in the past. For example all the actions taken to undermine Hugo Chavez's rule in Venezeula, including a U.S.-backed coup attempt against the Venezuela government. For example the U.S. backed coup that tossed Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti. In both cases it's a democratically elected government that wasn't to U.S. liking. But this isn't new to the Bush administration, as the U.S. government has been toppling democratically elected governments for decades.

Bush sees vote proving 'power of democracy' But he urges Abbas to stay in chief post (Boston Globe, By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff, January 27, 2006)

Hamas invited to form government (BBC, Jan 27, 2006)

Hamas’ victory upends Israeli politics Opposition politicians blast government for failing to stop group's ascent (By Scott Wilson, The Washington Post Updated: 5:29 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006)

Hamas victory explodes Middle East peace plans (theage.com.au)

Voters did not elect Hamas because its charter commits it to the destruction of Israel; indeed, that goal was dropped from its election platform, an implicit acknowledgement of public opinion by an increasingly pragmatic political force. Hamas has observed a ceasefire for the past year, after carrying out about 60 suicide bombings since the second intifada began in 2000. Only a minority of Palestinians subscribe to its hardline Islamic ideology; instead, they rejected Fatah because of its divided and ineffective administration and its entrenched corruption. Hamas has quietly attended to the practical side of community politics, providing services to the poor and building a reputation for discipline, efficiency and integrity. Its officials in Gaza, where Hamas first won municipal elections, have even co-operated with Israel on administrative matters, out of necessity. Hamas has sent out mixed signals on broader co-operation, and even the taboo matter of peace talks, which it may decide to let President Abbas pursue, as this was the platform on which he was elected.

All politics is local, eh?

Susan Pynchon: Diebold in Florida

There's been big questions from the 2000 and 2004 elections about whether the election system is rigged. In the 2004 elections a big sideshow formed around electronic voting machines, especially those from Diebold. The electronic voting systems (a.k.a. touchscreen voting) was supposed to fix the glaring problem with the 2000 election fiasco, which centered on the punch card system. But that's presuming touchscreen voting is the only alternative, which it is not.

"I Saw It Hacked": Diebold in Florida by Susan Pynchon relates a test performed in Leon County Florida of the Diebold voting system installed there. This test has become rather infamous as the "Harri Hursti Hack".

What she describes is a staged test. They ran a small mock election in which Harri Hursti demonstrated a vulnerability with the Diebold voting software.

Her article contains this very powerful paragraph:

And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.

Okay, so she managed to put together a powerful paragraph, but I don't see her report demonstrating what she claims. Nowhere in her report is this claim substantiated:

However, the Hursti hack is individually significant because the flaw it exposed is a planned vulnerability in the system, not something that is accidentally there. It had to be PUT there (programmed) on purpose.

I work with software and software quality in my job. I know very well that every piece of software has bugs in it. The existance of a bug doesn't constitute proof that the author purposely put that bug there.

She has not demonstrated that Hursti's hack is anything more than a bug in Diebold's software.

It's easy to point a finger at the Diebold corporation and claim they're evil. Their CEO was widely quoted before the 2004 election as boasting about how GW Bush would win the election. And of course it's easy to think, that might not have been bravado, but knowing that he can go in and twiddle the election results and ensure that GW Bush would win the election.

I agree with her theory -- it's very possible for Diebold or any other election hardware vendor to be selling machines which contain backdoors allowing elections to be rigged. For our democracy to succeed we have to ensure that's not the case, and that has to involve independant auditing of the voting machines. The secrecy surrounding the election hardware is troubling as it impedes the public from independantly verifying the voting machines are trustworthy. Unless the people can trust the voting machines, how can the people trust that our representatives were properly elected?

But that's just a theory until you can prove the assertion. In her story she brushes over the proof, jumping from describing the test to concluding that therefore Diebold purposely implanted the backdoor which Hursti walked through.

Bush Crimes Commission

The President of the U.S. has broken the law, as has member of the Cabinet etc. I wonder why the people aren't rising up in protest against this? Well some are, but the infractions by the Bush Administration are so completely obvious the people of the United States have to be fools to not see it.

The Bush Crimes Commission is working to illustrate the crimes of the Bush Administration. They have been holding public "hearings", and recently delivered a set of indictments to the White House.

In the indictments they cover Wars of Aggression, Torture and Indefinite Detention, Destruction of the Global Environment, Attacks on Global Public Health and Hurricane Katrina.

In March 2004 I called for the Impeachment of GW Bush. In my case I focussed on the lies told to "justify" the war in Iraq, the fact that the UN Secretary General has called that war "illegal", the damage the conduct and justification of that war has done to U.S. credibility, etc.