Washington has lost interest in the unemployed

That is Paul Krugman who wrote in an editorial.

Now, on to the reader's voice:

Jake Wagner

Santa Barbara, CA

The U6 unemployment numbers stand now at 15.9%. For some Americans, those with secure jobs, these are just abstract figures. But I write letters of recommendation for new graduates from a well-known university.

One surprise was when an outstanding student asked me to write for a job in Korea! When I ask around, I find he is not alone. Some of the new US graduates are actually emigrating to get jobs in the developing economies. Other excellent former students are without jobs in spite of excellent qualifications. We are losing a generation of potentially highly productive workers.

Schools are not hiring because state and local governments are cutting back, housing prices continue to plummet. I've lost hundreds of thousands in equity myself, and I've cut back tremendously. When the drier broke I decided why not dry with solar power? I've stopped buying most new clothing. I've cut cable TV. I buy DVD's instead of going to the opera. I've started a garden. And I've been saving like mad because the future has never looked so insecure.

It doesn't need to be this way. Why can't Obama get the simple idea that letting the tax cuts on the rich expire and using the proceeds to fund government jobs in education and construction will make the US more competitive a decade from now and provide millions of workers with paychecks that will enable them to go out and spend. This would increase the aggregate demand that Krugman talks about and would start a feedback process that would lead to more and more spending and more and more jobs. Housing prices would likely stabilize and even I, seeing my home equity stabilize, would have the confidence to buy a new car, perhaps a Chevy Volt.

The sad fact is that NO ACTION is being taken to drive down unemployment. And those new graduates will suffer permanently lower living standards because they are not getting the work experience needed to start their careers. We are thus creating a new normal which is unsustainable because without the extra revenues from higher employment, deficits at 10% of GDP are unsustainable. When we are forced to bring the deficits to an end, we will join Greece and Ireland in austerity. The problem is that austerity just makes things worse, driving up unemployment even more enforcing yet more austerity in a vicious downward cycle.

Krugman is right when it comes to pushing for greater stimulus. Too bad, Obama does not have the FDR-leadership qualities to provide the fireside chats that might get Americans on board.

 

wauch

Burlington, VT

Forget 5 for every 1 job PK I finished my Ph.D. a year ago and only now am getting second interviews. In my field broadly classified as Environmental Sciences/Ecology I have had experiences with faculty positions where for example at Lewis & Clarke there were 260 applicants for a faculty opening and here in Vermont at St Mikes 160. I received an interview in neither case.
OBAMA is proving eerily like Bush from issues as broad as his love of "Golf In War Times" to his treatment of Bradley Manning a citizen of the US in a manner befitting Abu Ghraib or Baghram.
I have no sympathy nor should any self-respecting progressive for any Obama supporter (WHO I voted for!) unable or unwilling to see what he has become and who has become his overseer(s). Maybe not the likes of the Koch Brothers but Goldman Sachs' alumni is worse enough.
I can't imagine how these people with or w/o a GED or maybe a BS are getting jobs as people like myself barely can get sub-$45,000 salary openings. David Brooks is living in La-La Land at this point but your partners-in-crime Herbert and Rich are hitting hard at Obama et al. Please continue to light the fire under those do-nothing Dems and know-nothing Republicans.
I think I speak for most of America when I say that it would be refreshing if in 2012 or 2014 we started to elect some of these unemployed or underemployed folks to congress regardless of their political affiliation, because then and only then would we have Beltway residents that have felt the frustration, disbelief, anger, and bewilderment that comes when you think you are taking all the right steps for all the right reasons with respect to employment only to see not just door after door shut in your face BUT never opened in the first place. Meanwhile we continue to promote free-trade agreements with Columbia and South Korea while we don't even face the facts that GDP has flat-lined relative to population growth. The code words on Wall Street and corporate boardrooms for kicking us while we're down "consolidation", "efficiency discovery", "M&A" are simply nice ways of saying that we aren't going to even pretend that full employment would be worthwhile national goal.
The Great Decoupling of the haves and the have nots, food consumption from production, energy sustainability from energy prices, etc. is only in its infancy. At maturity it will be everywhere creating volatility the world has never seen and will be ill-equipped to cope with. Yet we continue to subsidize Wall Street, Big Oil, and Big Agribusiness none of which have the job multipliers that will get us out of this mess.

 

Fred Drumlevitch

Tucson, Arizona

A society is like a biological ecosystem: destroy certain niches, and, at a very minimum, the former occupant types will be very adversely impacted. (In a worst-case scenario, the entire system will be rendered unstable, provable mathematically). Those that have some "generalist" abilities may successfully scrape by. Other types may manage, after some time (perhaps many generations), to adapt physiologically and/or behaviorally to the changed conditions. Still others may not be successful at adaptation — they may literally be without shelter, they may literally starve to death. Even if not, they certainly won't fare well.

What am I describing? It's basic Darwinian evolution, which, when deliberately imposed by some humans on their fellow human beings, and with inadequate mitigation, is simply brutal Social Darwinism. And done why? In recent years, so that corporations can automate or ship jobs overseas for greater profits, so that the military-industrial complex can continue its waste of our limited resources (while the grunt soldiers continue to die or be maimed), and so that well-off Americans can have reduced tax rates. Both a majority of the people of this country and the national physical infrastructure have suffered.

We do need to repair and improve the physical infrastructure of the United States, but for that to be successful, it must be linked to respect for, and improvement of, the human infrastructure of the nation. Except in totalitarian countries abusing their people in a long march to "progress", the two types of infrastructure are inseparable, they must rise or fall together. And, in fact, that is what has occurred. Ever since Ronald Reagan's presidency, both the U.S. physical infrastructure and the valuation of its human infrastructure have deteriorated; it's time to fully acknowledge the linkage, and act accordingly.

Economic change, including global competition, may be inevitable. But proper values and social justice at any particular time in any particular society are not, as is shown by the varied paths that different countries have historically taken. Neither social progress nor even the continuance of past gains is foreordained. Absent the willingness of people to support social justice and the common good, the nation will regress to the lowest common denominator of human behavior, and deteriorated infrastructure — while still chanting "We're Number One!". We've been on that path for 30 years, and it shows.

With regard to physical infrastructure, several tepid proposals have been floated. These include President Obama's "State of the Union", and budget. And Senator Kerry's proposal of an initial $10 billion for an "infrastructure bank" rates as a pathetic token engagement in the context of the estimated $2.2 trillion needed for infrastructure over the next 5 years. Even more flawed is its belief in the efficacy of private businesses (rather than direct public planning, expenditure, and ownership) to advance the public good. The real "leverage" created by the proposed arrangement will not be leverage of corporate spending by our government, but rather, leverage of the U.S. public by corporations. (Imagine if our interstate highway system had been developed and owned by corporations; vast portions would never have been built (unless compensated by a giant give-away, as with territorial land grants to the railroads), while on those segments that were, corporate owners would be in a position to extract via tolls from motorists many billions of dollars more every year than is currently paid in fuel taxes. Or alternatively, consider big pharma’s leverage of publically-funded biomedical research to produce highly-profitable drugs unaffordable to many.) If we can't allocate vastly more than $10 billion (when our yearly military spending is more than $650 billion) and can't do actual federal spending (not just loans), then there isn't really any significant commitment, it's all over for this country, and we who comment on these matters are just writing a serialized obituary for the United States.

What should be done? 1) drastically reduce military and so-called "security" spending — we can't successfully police the world (and can't afford to), and the biggest threat we face is national deterioration, not foreign attack; 2) stop kowtowing to the corporations, stop expecting needed development for the common good to come from them — they aren't people, possess no conscience, and as currently incorporated have no obligation whatsoever to the betterment of the nation; 3) raise taxes — the necessary investments are large and must be of long duration, and the likely cuts to military spending will not generate enough capital; 4) plan and spend, on both human and physical infrastructure — necessary large changes will not magically occur without planning for and investment in the future.

Thirty years of deterioration can't be fixed overnight, but those steps would be a beginning.

 

 

 

Spence

Malvern, PA

It’s pretty much common knowledge Republicans ignore the facts at will and the spineless, leaderless Democrats will follow whatever the Republicans tell them to do. Joblessness isn’t important because the Republicans don’t think it’s important to their ideological agenda of dismantling government (like ignoring the regulations and laws of the last 8 years) and destroying the social/domestic programs and collective bargaining of the middle class. The complicit Democrats offer no real opposition, let alone offer any principles to get behind. They had their chance to investigate/incarcerate the cronyism and corruption of the last eight years, but they chose not to. Rather, they like their greedy counterparts just feed at the public/private trough regardless of the economic/financial misery around them.

Democrats love the status quo – don’t rock the boat is their guiding philosophy. Expensive wars and expensive tax cuts to the wealthy doesn’t faze them. Dr. Krugman was right 2 years ago about the tax cut laden $700 Billion stimulus. Today we have bankers and Wall St. companies making record profits while the rest of America can’t find jobs, feed their families, afford health care and get from under their upside-down homes. We’ve had 3 tax cuts (to the wealthy) over the last 2 years that were supposed to goose the economy and allow the disproved/voodoo Trickle Down theory work its magic. Does anybody feel better off today besides millionaires?

Because Republicans want to talk about deficits, that’s what we are talking about day-and-night. All this fear mongering has gotten people worked up about cutting every program under the sun except for funding for the wars, Defense and the entitlements. Programs like Planned Parenthood, EPA, FEMA, NPR, Headstart, the Department of Education are just some of these useless programs. Who cares about the negative social or economic effects or the people they may help? Republican ideology always trumps all. Win at all costs and take no prisoners.

What’s America coming too? There are no positive effects from all these expensive, supply-side policies and ideological program cutting maneuvers. When will this madness end? Will Americans continue to see and read about government austerity measures that take away their safety nets and break down what’s left of their social fabric? The people in Washington just don’t care or get it. When the top 400 people have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50%, America is now an oligarchy run by ideologues. Be afraid, very afraid because this story isn’t going to end well.

AND I COULD GO ON, AND ON, AND ON!  WHAT HAD THESE PEOPLE BEEN DOING UNDER BUSH?  BUILDING AND SWAPPING HOUSE-S OF CARDS.  WHILE BUSH WAS POSING DUMBER THAN HE WAS...

 

KRUGMAN WRITES THAT WASHINGTON LOST INTEREST UN UNEMPLOYED.  YES, BUT TODAY'S UNEMPLOYED LOST INTEREST IN GOVERNMENT, VIRTUES, AND ANYTHING REQUIRED BY DEMOCRACY AND MARKET ECONOMY--I MEAN, THAT CAREFUL WATCH AND CONSIDERATION.  WE ALL (UNDER-)SOLD OURSELVES OUT! 

 

READJUSTMENT WILL BE SLOW AND PAINFUL.  CAN WE BLAME OBAMA FOR HIS NOT BEING THE HERO WE THOUGHT WE NEEDED?  LET'S JUST SAY, HE'S AN INSTRUMENT, JUST LIKE MANY BEFORE.  

WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD REDISCOVER THE VIRTUES. 

the voice of an operative neo-con

 

Duane Clarridge, CIA agent and clandestine program supervisor for more than three decades.

What's your energy policy? SAVE, start by cutting advertising!

southfork

USA

The nuclear energy industry in Japan is so powerful it demonstrably doesn’t even feel an obligation to accurately inform Japan’s Head of State, or anyone on earth, of the events unfolding at their exploding and burning nuclear reactors, as Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s response, reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency: “What in the world is going on here?” reveals.

This industry, working with General Electric and others, designed built and and operated this at-risk nuclear facility on one of the most at-risk locations on the globe. Their risk calculation failed because it didn't evaluate "major earthquake plus tsunami", but only one or the other alone -- cutting down construction costs. Due to go off line this month, the plant’s operator, TEPCO, lobbied successfully for an operating extension for another 10 years. Last Friday just happened to be the day their card came up. The same faulty logic and vulnerability can be found in the design, construction, and licensing of numerous other nuclear reactors, including many in our own country, all waiting for their card to come up.

Though Japan has the technology and the engineering capacity to be a world class pioneer in developing solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy technologies, the nuclear industry and the capital behind it has roadblocked such efforts. Ironically, Japan’s old rival, China, unencumbered by an entrenched nuclear lobby, has taken over the role of Asian pioneer in renewable energy, creating huge wind and solar production capacities in just a few short years. Instead, Japan’s nuclear industry claimed the need to build even more nuclear plants.

One of the major subsidies to the nuclear industry coming due, but not paid for, is the gigantic cost of secure storage of nuclear waste over many thousands of years until it has decayed to safe levels. One resulting element of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is the fire(s) occurring in nuclear waste pools (old fuel rods) stored irresponsibly and insecurely on-site. In fact, despite tons of nuclear waste accumulating for decades now at hundreds of nuclear plants worldwide, not a single long-term storage facility for nuclear waste exists anywhere on earth.

And why are the costs of inevitable disasters never calculated into the equation? Of course they are not assumed by the corporations or CEOs of the nuclear industry, just as they shirk all responsibility, and all civil and criminal liability, for disasters unfolding on their watch which are a direct result of their decisions. These disasters have of course also not been insured against -- no insurer would ever accept such risks! Rather, these costs too will be shouldered by governments, i.e., the taxpayers, and by entire national economies which have become hostages to the nuclear energy industry, as we are now again witnessing in Japan. The Ukraine, a country short on investment capital, must even today spend 5% of its entire GDP just on the costs of keeping control over the Chernobyl disaster site, billions of dollars in capital that for the past 25 years, and for decades to come, will not be available to invest in their country's future.

We must yet again witness the incalculable cost in suffering from dislocations, mass evacuations, and resettlements of tens of thousands of people, refugees in their own country. The evacuation zone at Fukushima started at 20 miles, it's now at 50 miles, and the zone may well need to be expanded further. The nuclides spewing out of these failed reactors and contaminating the region are, among others, Iodine-131 (a beta-ray emitter with a half-life of 8 days, responsible for causing thyroid cancer in its victims), Caesium-137 (a gamma-ray emitter ingested via contaminated agricultural products with a biological half-life of 1-4 months and a radioactive half-life of 30 years), and several Plutonium isotopes (deadly alpha-emitters that once incorporated stay in the body with a biological half-life of 200 years; among the isotopes to be expected are Plutonium 238, Pu-239, Pu-240 - the isotope used in the MOX fuel rods in Fukushima reactor number 3, and Pu-242, with radioactive half-lives of 87 years, 24,100 years, 6,564 years, and 376,000 years, respectively. Think in that regard, among others, "New York", "San Francisco", and "Los Angeles”, all easily in the evacuation zone of old, at-risk nuclear reactors.

Finally, contrary to popular myths promoted by the nuclear and fossil fuel lobbies, renewable energy can work, and is already working. As we converse, geothermal energy is providing all the electricity in Iceland, wind energy more than 20% of the electrical energy in Denmark, and a mix primarily of solar and wind 17% of the electrical energy of engineering powerhouse Germany. Harnessing the energy of the sun-drenched Southwest of the USA and the "wind belt" from Texas to the Dakotas, combined with a smart grid, could cover U.S. energy needs easily. It’s time we got busy building our renewable energy future.

Ike Solem

CA

Let's consider some of the steps the Soviets took to avoid the worst possible effects at Chernobyl (April 26 1986), both during and after the immediate crisis (quotes from Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly, c.2007)

1) "By Sunday May 4 Soviet Army engineer units had brought in oil-drilling equipment and had begun drilling into the soil below the reactor. Through these channels they pumped liquid nitrogen at the rate of 1,000 cubic feet per day to freeze the soil against a possible core meltdown."

2) ". . . the engineers pumped five million gallons of water out of the bubbler pool. In the coming days they used shaped-charge explosives to blow holes through the concrete foundation, laid pipe into the empty pool, and pumped in enough concrete to fill it to a solid block."

3) "'Liquidators' by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps half a million in all - 340,000 soldiers, many of them recently returned from service in Afghanistan, new draftees, minor government officials such as teachers and inspectors - were pressed into service and took their brief turn scraping away topsoil, paving over roads. . ."

4) "In November 1986, after a heroic effort, workers finished entombing Reactor Number Four within a sarcophagus made of half a million cubic yards of reinforced concrete, and only then did it cease releasing radiation into the environment."

Does Japan have these resources? Chernobyl's graphite fire was very bad, but consider that Fukushima has multiple reactors in meltdown, hot fuel rods on fire - it seems to be bigger if somewhat less intense, but even Chernobyl did not suffer a full "China syndrome" meltdown.

Furthermore, now that everyone has seen the terrible fate of all the Chernobyl first responders and liquidators - cancers, early deaths, etc. - how many will willingly volunteer for the same? The Soviet command just ordered people into action - but who will be willing to risk exposure at Fukushima on the scale needed? GE and its contractors evacuated their people immediately, didn't they?

Consider George Schultz discussing a 1988 dinner with Gorbachev in a memo: "He commented that it was a great tragedy which cost the Soviet Union billions of rubles and had only been barely overcome through the tireless efforts of an enormous number of people."

Bear in mind, each reactor contains some 150 tons of hot radioactive fuel, and steam explosions will eject that material into the atmosphere. There is also the question of all the spent fuel stored adjacent to the reactors - how many tons are there?

Refusing to prepare for the worst case scenario doesn't make it less likely.

Jeremy Horne, Ph.D.

Alamogordo, NM

How many of these disasters must occur before people realize that a part and major part of the problem is with capitalism and the private ownership of a peoples' resource - energy production and distribution. The persistent bobbing and weaving of GE and Tokyo Electric in this emergency is the same type experienced with BP and all these corporatists. Their SOLE interest is protecting their "bottom line". The fact that the design of these reactors was flawed from the start and the refusal to do anything about (because it was "too expensive") it even after scientists stated the problems is more evidence that it is profits before people. The only answer to all this is socialism or cooperatively-owned major means of production and distribution. When will people get it? Is the capitalist/corporatist ideology so unquestioned that humanity is willing to risk the survival of the species over it?

Diogenes

Boston

It's really interesting reading the blog posts from the bloggers employed by the nuclear power industry. For the last few days there has been a steady stream of comments to the effect that the Japanese crisis is little more than Three Mile Island Part Two and in no way another Chernobyl. Now as things appear to be genuinely getting worse, the spin is shifting to "Well, we can't live without nuclear power and there are risks to other forms of electric generation, so let's just chill and not get too upset."

This is an interesting defense since it seems to defy any connection with the objectivity reality that will ensue if the Japanese situations ends up being equal to or (God forbid) worse than the Chernobyl one. I can't escape the overpowering sense that those who are paid to manipulate public opinion in the furtherance of the economic agendas of their corporate masters no longer have even the slightest sense of what the truth really is. And this is a problem that extends well beyond the nuclear power industry to other areas like the financial services industry.

These are scary times indeed.

John Hrvatska

NY

Let's ban nuclear reactors because obsolete forty year old designs failed. Let's ban air travel because there are occasional accidents that kill hundreds. Let's ban chemical plants because they occasionally have catastrophic accidents. Remember Bhopal! Seriously though, how many well sited, modern nuclear power plants have failed in the last 30 years? None, that's how many. I'm a big believer in energy conservation, wind and solar. And I believe that those should be given first priority in our national energy strategy. But I also believe that nuclear energy is a valid alternative in the right situation. I'll take the remote risk associated with modern well sited nuclear plants over the death by a thousand cuts that we're suffering from a dependence on fossil fuel.

Rick

So. Fla

The ignorance and fear mongering by the anti-nuclear block is stunning. What would you replace nuclear with? Nuclear power is incredibly safe, reliable and clean in comparison to the other energy producing technologies we currently utilize. Some facts: in the 20th century over 100,000 coal miners lost their lives, and that was just in the USA. China has been averaging 6,000 coal mining deaths per year for the past couple of years. The environmental damage of strip mining and the airborne pollutants that are by products of coal based energy far outweigh the damage caused by industrial nuclear accidents. Oil isn't that much better, as everyone knows one of the most dangerous jobs on earth is on an oil rig. The extraction process for natural gas is incredibly dirty and pollutes local water tables while releasing huge quantities of benzene and other carcinogens into the atmosphere.

I work in the alternative energy industry, and to be honest it is not a valid alternative to our current energy sources yet. Solar, wind and hydrokinetics are all in their early stages of development and are not ready or capable of being scaled up to replace nuclear or carbon based energy systems.

When talking about our energy needs one has to weigh the relative costs of each technology in terms of environmental degradation, human health and welfare costs, actual energy prices and a host of other factors. Until we conquer fusion (and that's still an iffy proposition) we are stuck with the technologies we have. To call for abandoning nuclear reactors ignores the relative costs of the technologies that would replace it.

tao

Japan

Thanks for all Americans and other country supporting us.
Im japanese, living at far from tohoku but still having worried about our countrys future.

Now, I dont know which i should believe, our goverment saying or other countrys specilist saying. Our government and most of professional say "there are no risk to live ordinary days on outside 30km area from Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant".
I can understand they try to make citizens calm down. Many people in tokyo are buying too much food, gasoline or something what they need in daily life, and one part of truck driver drop their resposibility to transport supplies for evacuation area outside 20km area(they are non-government worker), because of fear of radiation.
Yes, I understand we should calm down even if the radiation is risk for us. we have trouble not only power plant, but also so many people in stricken area. they can not move freely even if they want. We need keep transporting supplies, food and water. people at evacuation area are still starving.

Now, most of professor on TV are saying optimistic comment, even professor saying little bit pessimistic comment yesterday also become optimist. I expect government ask professor not to comment bad thing , or there are consensus among them.
I think their decision is one of right way, because we have so many enormous problem to solve.

But on the other hand, i think we have a right that we can make decision which action we should do next. but it need correct information. We highly depend on TV to get information about radiation risks , and if professor on TV tell us an underestimate comment, Im afraid people near around Fukushima-1 lost their right to make decision by themselves, im afraid they get harmed by radiation while they don't know anything.
(i think we still can get information "what happened at Fukushima-1" on TV, but we don't know "what will happen next?", citizens always dont have special knowledge)

Now we really hope toden's worker at Fukushima-1 do well. They keep trying to stop this crisis. They are real hero for Japanese.

(Sorry if difficult to read my english)

Cristina

Germany

I was too small to remember the catastrophe in the Ukraine, but I do remember that I was forbidden to leave the house for almost a year, waiting, as my mother told me, for the "cloud to pass" even in the brighter days.
I cannot explain the horror and amazement towards the hubris of those people who dared to build such a dangerous plant in an exposed location. And as someone said earlier, FOR THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF BOILING WATER!! ARE THEY INSANE?
My deeper question is about trust. I really did trust a nation like Japan that developed such high technology that they knew what they were doing, first when the build so many plants, now equivalent for everybody with time bombs, and second, when they operated them! I trusted that when they said they can shut it down, they will be able to do so.
And I also trusted US and other European countries, who dared to build those death-plants, near people's houses, children and into their lives, that they knew what they were doing and that they were able, in case of a crisis, to stop them and take care that innocent people don't take the fall, while other cash on their misery!
As we can see, it is not the TEPCO manager, the guy in suit who received immense bonuses over the time, who fights the fires and radiation, but workers of the plant and volunteers, police and firefighters.
This is beyond irresponsibility, this is insane! And all this, all this disaster, for a stupid attempt to boil water, which already exists in many natural forms??
I never learnt more about nuclear technology as in the last days, but for a sane mind, when presented the risks and the benefits, the building of atomic plants is out of question!
Let's put it this way: Japanese people accepted, trusting their government and the atomic lobby, that this is THE ONLY WAY to produce energy on their island. However, their 55 reactors (read, bombs in waiting), produce about 30%. The idea of boiling water by producing tons of poison doesn't even cover their needs. Then, they were told it is SAFE, but they only did 3 checks in 40 years. They also told that they can stop the plants at any time. They forgot to tell it is not enough and that they CANNOT STOP the reaction in absence of water. A simple shortcut would have led to the same problems.
Second, that is CLEAN....no comment.
Third, that its CHEAPER....is it??? Looking back, at the death toll, at the fall out of atomic waste, at the tons and tons of atomic garbage, active for million of years, damaging our children and generations to come, changing our DNA structure and poisoning our planet....IS THIS CHEAP???

jharris99

Healdsburg, CA

The scariest part of this situation might not be the tsunami. Or the earthquake. Or the fire. These are all occurrences of nature over which man has little control. It is the hubris of man himself that's the scariest part of this disaster. Men have built something over which they seem to have no control. How can major "incidents" continue to occur and nobody has a clue as to what is occurring inside the reactors? As Fred Rogers might be saying, "Can you all say Deepwater Horizon?" Many of the folks working in Antarctica - the front line - have an excellent and realistic take on homo sapiens. We're the next dinosaur.

inmontauk

montauk, ny

Remember the junk shot with the BP oil well? And now we're trying to put out a nuclear disaster with a fire hose? This is the best the international community can come up with? Are you kidding?????????

Who is in charge of this planet? Aliens???

World Citizen

Americas

To the people who say that this is no Chernobyl:
1) When these types of catastrophic events happen, the first casualty is truth (the U.S. government is saying that the radiation levels are extremely high, something that the Japanese haven't acknowledged).
2) These two plants deal with the same thing: nuclear power, one of the most dangerous technologies that mankind has ever devised and manipulated.
3) Accidents happen.
Mother Nature is sending us all kinds of-increasingly alarming-signals and warnings. Will we change our ways before it's too late? Is it already too late? People and societies need to make some very deep structural changes at all levels: the way we live, consume, work, treat each other and nature, distribute resources, assign responsibilities and demand accountability, what our values and priorities are. We haven't done much so far (why do we still believe that gold is the most important resource?? why is the acquisition of gold still worth destroying entire ecosystems and communities?? things haven't changed much in 500 years). Time is running out.

Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined

WHERE ARE THE REST?  THOSE WHO ARE PUBLIC FIGURES INVESTED WITH OUR TRUST...

How did our education go downhill?

Marie Burns

Fort Myers, Florida

As you imply but don't specify, the problem started in the Vietnam era. I started college before the war revved up, & we had to crack the books to get as much as a "C." I used to see students who were about to flunk out doing what appeared to be studying. We all studied. Or we were gone.

But as opposition to the Vietnam War increased, & as the Selective Service Administration took a series of steps to make student deferments harder to get, many professors started giving "B"s to young men so they could stay in school & keep their deferments. The professors didn't want blood on their hands. Since it wasn't fair to give high marks to some substandard students & not to others, "B" became the lowest grade you could get in some classes. It was kinda like we were all star athletes!

After the war, those low standards never returned to pre-Nam levels. A student could still get a good education at a good university, but it was by his choice, not because the university demanded it.

Then, as the cost of college rose, and as the business of education became more of a business -- competitive, cutthroat and greedy -- and less of an ivory tower, university administrations went pro, especially in private schools. They adopted a strange new sense of in loco parentis, a replacement for the one that kept us girls under lock and key so the boys couldn't have their way with us. In the revised in loco parentis concept, college administrators think they have an obligation to give a sheepskin to every student they admit. So they do.

Often when a professor gives a student a failing grade, say, for seldom showing up for class & flunking the exams, the administration will reverse the professor's decision. This is true in graduate programs as well as in undergraduate schools.

As long as university administrations see students as commodities, not as products, American college standards will remain low. And boasting you graduated with a 3.1 average will be an admission of failure.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

Doug Terry

Out Beyond the Beltway/Md

Where have fellows been the last thirty years? The downward spiral of rigor in the academic setting has been noted in many forums. A Harvard graduate (you have perhaps heard of that school?) wrote a book some years ago saying that he found there was no real sense of a core of academic experience and no substantial guidance in finding his way toward one. He described a sense of being set to sea without a compass, taking courses often taught by graduate assistants and adjuncts. When he finished, he had no deep sense of enrichment or broad knowledge. He described his experience as more of a random encounter with unrelated courses that were woven into nothing like a fabric of learning.

As employers began to demand a four year degree as the price of admission to certain types of employment, there emerged the professional student: someone who was merely in college to avoid being excluded from those jobs. The colleges and universities moved to accommodate this student by opening a pathway to a degree that did not involve deep challenge to the mind. Without this student, perhaps 1/3 to even 2/3s of college enrollment would be gone. The colleges would have lost a massive amount of cash flow if they hadn't taken steps to make the process easier. A good friend of mine, a renowned internationally known painter, told me one assignment given his children in college was to describe what elements they would need for a super bowl party. They were attending a well known, respected college where the tuition is about 40,000 dollars per year per student.

To cover over the massive misdeed of taking rigor out of student life, the colleges created "honors" programs for those who still had aspirations of using their brains on a regular basis. Isn't all of college supposed to be at the honors level? Isn't the entire experience, for every student, supposed to be rigorous? Apparently not.

The word of this easy pathway through four years has filtered down to high school students who know what lies ahead of them. If they don't know how to game the system in their first college semester, they soon learn.

Higher education has always depended on two important elements not supplied by the school or the faculty: the intensity of the student's desire for learning and the contact that student has with other vigorous young minds. The latter factor is one of the main reasons so called elite schools are better places than others: they have their pick of students from all over and can therefore construct a social/cultural environment conducive to learning and inquiry. If many of the brightest students suddenly chose to go to Hogwallow University (a very nice place, by the way), then that would be a great school to attend, the faculty not withstanding.

As for faculty in general, everyone knows that professors have abandoned undergrads as if they all carried body lice. (Perhaps they do.) The colleges have likewise downgraded teaching, in the name of saving money, by having adjuncts and teaching assistants heading up many, if not most, classes. A full professorship at many colleges, in terms of teaching, has become something like a part time job with full time pay. The feeling seems to be that if the student is any good, they will struggle their way into grad school and show themselves to be worthy of a decent education (which they will get largely on their own, through reading and research).

To be sure, college was never what it was imagined to be sixty to a hundred years ago. In that era, those who attended turned out to do rather well because the were drawn (surprise!) from the families of those who had already done rather well and thus embarked in life ten paces ahead of others. Historically, some schools have, nonetheless, managed to teach thinking and instill in their students a desire for a lifetime of learning. The careerist, professional student cares for none of that, until it is too late. The goal is the degree, mixed and stirred with lots of fun getting it. Who can really blamed them?

The end result is more than a problem, it is a disaster. All social and political institutions have a tendency toward corruption unless they face challenge and correction. Instead, our colleges are isolated, secretly and quietly rich and thumbing their noses at our national need for truly educated people who can lead toward a more moral, decent and fair society. It is being done in the name of keeping the process moving, paying good salaries with rich benefits, like sabbatical years, and not rocking the boat. The students and the parents are being ripped off and the nation is being cheated.

Doug Terry
http://terryreport.com

Nowhere Man

Nowhere, CA

This is only one aspect of what is now a systemic failure.

The "self-esteem" foundation of K-12 education ensures we produce 18-year-old humans who know little, have no discipline and are spoiled brats. Johnny didn't do well enough to pass to fourth grade? Well, we'll have to promote him anyway -- we can't have him feel bad about himself.

The colleges and universities are interested mainly in the money. They will enroll anyone who can get a student loan to pay the too-high tuition fees, book costs, etc. Anything to keep those administrators making their $400K annual salaries. The primary goal for students is to have fun -- and to keep renewing the student loans to keep the money flowing. I suspect many of the students know they won't get jobs that will enable them to repay the student loans that will haunt them the entire lives. Why not party while you can!

The day after graduation reality sets in. After a couple of years working at a big box store or as a clerical temp, they realize their lives are untenable. They can't make enough to pay for food, housing, health care, transportation, student loans, etc., and it looks like a treadmill they can't get off. What then?

I've seen some go to blue collar jobs that pay decently. They become auto technicians or electricians or plumbers, reasoning those jobs are not being exported to Pakistan any time soon. Maybe they get a job driving trucks and being away from their families for weeks on end. Even if they can make what used to be "middle-class" wages, they still have to contend with those student loans and the never-ending interest charges that pile on like bad luck in a crooked gambling casino.

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus published the book "Higher Education?" last year about this whole corrupt system (his description), and I wrote about that at:

http://deadreckoning1.wordpress.com...

Like so much gone wrong in this country, greed seems to be a root cause. The future looks grim for anyone who can't find some way to get rich quick.

Do the Chicago School Fundamentalists Own the Mess?or they come in handy for the plutocrats

Barbara Reader

New York

The truth is that the guts started being ripped out of the financial regulatory system so long ago, (late 1970s) that few people still on Wall Street remember when this system operated. I was at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York when Chicago School of Economics PhDs declared war on any regulation that restricted banks in any way. It didn't matter how carefully the method of enforcement had been proven, or how weak the evidence was it was wrong, they fought the regulation. In one case, we ran over 150 regressions, all but two supported the proposition that smaller banks were more efficient and served their customers better than larger banks. Those two included one that was flat, and one that favored larger banks. Both dealt with very large corporate customers.

The right-wing economists, following what has since become the mantra of the right, 'facts are stupid things' wrote up their paper on those two regressions, throwing out more than 150. They pushed through interstate banking, they pushed through rules which made it almost impossible to block proposed bank mergers, and they did it despite the history and statistic which showed them doing harm to the United States. I'm sure they got great jobs at big banks when they left the Federal Reserve.

Similarly, people who invested with Madoff thought themselves smart and cool and in the know. I was threatened with lawsuits by some of them for not matching his results on some funds.

President Obama has shown absolutely no guts in trying to clean out corruption of any system. The Republicans want to just end the system. The US experienced crash after crash from it's founding until the 1930s, when tight regulations were put in place. With regulations in place, from 1930 until 1986, for 56 years, the market has no serious financially lead crashes. This system was taken apart, and in 1987 we had the first crash in over half a century. Instead of learning our lessons, Washington deregulated Wall Street even more, and we had a more damaging crash in 2008. Until we put regulations back on the banking system, we can expect another, as the fat cats move our jobs overseas and destroy the nation.
It's sad and it's scary.

Llord Aig

New York

Since Buffett first referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" in reference to derivatives, the potential derivatives bubble has grown from an estimated $100 trillion to $576 trillion dollars in 2009, according to the most recent survey by the Bank of International Settlements.
Financial Trickery Easy To Do
Buffett references the dangers of derivative reporting on and off the balance sheet. Mark-to-market accounting is a legal form of accounting for a venture involved in buying and selling securities in accordance with U.S. Internal Revenue Code Section 475.Under mark-to-market accounting, an asset's entire present and future discounted streams of net cash flows are considered a credit on the balance sheet. This accounting method was one of the many things that contributed to the Enron scandal.

Many people attribute the Enron scandal entirely to cooking the books or accounting fraud. In fact, marking to the market or "marking to the myth", as Buffett so aptly christened it, also plays an important role in the Enron story. Mark-to-market accounting is not illegal, but it can be dangerous. (To gain an understanding of this particular weapon, put aside a few hours to watch "The Smartest Guys In The Room", a movie about the Enron scandal.)

Buffett suggests that many types of derivatives can generate reported earnings that are frequently outrageously overstated. This occurs because their future values are based on estimates; this is problematic because it is human nature to be optimistic about future events. In addition, error may also lie in the fact that someone's compensation might be based on those rosy projections, which brings issues of motives and greed into play.

Karen Garcia

New Paltz, NY

Bernie Madoff went to jail because he stole from a lot of other rich people who joined what they thought was an exclusive club. Too many important people lost money with Madoff for prosecutors to ignore him. Had he been a big bank, had his victims been struggling homeowners facing balloon payments on fraudulent mortgages, he’d probably still be living it up in Palm Beach.

Meanwhile, there has been no real financial reform because it is not in the best interests of Wall Street to be regulated. The only shining star in the government at the moment, the only official interested in working for people instead of corporations. is Elizabeth Warren. Her new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just started its own website, where citizens can register complaints and comments.

And what about our president? He just reached out to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and pretended to wheedle them into developing some patriotism and actually using some of their record profits to hire people. That will not happen, and Obama knows it. This is a man who is still trying to establish some Republican street cred by slashing funding to the home heating assistance program, right smack dab in the middle in one of the worst winters in history. The temperature reached minus-31 in Nowata,Oklahoma Friday night, but I bet the Chamber "folks" are staying plenty warm. Nice timing, Mr. President.

We have long been disabused of the notion that we were getting another FDR. The Roosevelt Justice Department actually prosecuted one former treasury secretary. Bankster and Great Depression architect Andrew W. Mellon was charged with tax fraud, but never went to jail. He settled with the government by relinquishing his massive, priceless, ill-gotten art collection. That collection turned into the National Gallery of Washington, D.C. All we have seen from Obama is a Gallery of Appeasement and Capitulation to the oligarchy which now owns and operates the United States of America in all but name.

FDR told the wealthy corporations he welcomed their hatred, and was elected four times. Obama has told them he craves their approval. Unless he miraculously changes course and starts putting people first, his fate as a one-term wonder is all be sealed. The tragedy is that any Republican alternative will be even worse.

http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/

Marie Burns

Fort Myers, Florida

There's a good reason Bernie Madoff is the only financier doing time. Sen. Dick Durbin explained it back in April 2009 when he tried unsuccessfully, at the height of the financial crisis, to get mild bankruptcy reform through the Senate: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

It is hardly surprising that the Congress is underfunding the S.E.C. -- they don't want the S.E.C. catching any big-time crooks. Those crooks are Congress's bread and butter.

But the Congress needn’t have worried. Just as in the days when "No One Would Listen" to Harry Markopolos, the S.E.C. is still pretty much sitting on its hands. Every once in a while, they nab some small-time (by Wall Street standards) crook in a $2,000 suit, but they keep their hands off the big boys. After all, the S.E.C. – in fact, ALL the so-called "regulatory agencies" – are beholden to the crooks, too. Most of the high-ranking regulators come from Wall Street, and after they do their "public service" stint, they'll be right back on the Street, raking in the big bucks. Just yesterday, Eric Dash of the Times reported that "Joseph Jiampietro, one of the government's top deal makers during the financial crisis, has joined Goldman Sachs as a senior investment banker covering the financial services industry...." Dash describes Jiampietro as the FDIC's "main liason to hedge funds and broader Wall Street community," and he adds, "Mr. Jiampietro is the latest in a parade of top federal official to leave Washington for Wall Street." Prior to "his stint in Washington," Jiampietro was an investment banker. Do you really think Mr. Jiampietro's "stint in Washington" had anything to do with public service?

The chair of the S.E.C. – Mary Schapiro – has a long history as a regulator, beginning way back in the days when Ronald Reagan appointed her to sit on the S.E.C. You might think that would make her a tough cookie. Not really. Like the rest of her regulator colleagues, she's in it for the dough. Back in 2008, her last year as head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street's (ha ha ha) self-policing arm, Schapiro hauled in compensation of $3.3 million. According to Wikipedia, "on departure from FINRA, she received additional lump sum retirement benefit payments that brought her total package in 2008 to $8,985,334 (about the same as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein made in that year."

You might suppose that kind of payout would alarm the Senate, which had to “advise & consent” to Schapiro's appointment to head the S.E.C. After all, the Senate regularly puts on hold for months or even years confirmation votes for minor appointments. But, no, in the wake of her big payoff and again during the height of the financial crisis, the Senate cleared Schapiro with a voice vote. The Senate in its wisdom Dr. Schapiro would follow that part of the Hippocratic Oath that reads "first, do not harm." Just think of the great job Schapiro will get with all those marketable "on-the-job" training she's acquired at the S.E.C.

Which, to follow Frank's structure, brings us back to Bernie Madoff. It is hardly surprising that Irving Picard is the prime mover in connecting the dots between Madoff and his enablers at JPMorgan Chase. Despite Mr. Markopolos' many pleas to the S.E.C. and the extensive documentation he sent them, it wasn't the S.E.C. that brought down Madoff. It was Madoff's own sons who told the F.B.I. that their father was running a Ponzi scheme. Where was the S.E.C.? They had previously "investigated" Bernie Madoff. They didn't find a thing. They wouldn’t, would they?

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

 

Gemli

Boston

I don’t think any Picard or Pecora or anyone else is going to change the system. The system has been so corrupted and co-opted by people with enormous wealth and power that it is likely beyond changing. Individuals may try to rise up, or blow whistles, or point fingers, but those impotent actions will get them where they got Markopolos, which is nowhere. How is it possible that billions were extracted from the taxpayers’ pockets to cover the sins of the big financial players, and no one can be held accountable? Why are we stumbling around with empty pockets, wondering where to find justice?

When half the Congress of the United States is tied to big money and are little more than shills for the filthy rich, the idea that justice will prevail is quaint. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Citizens United tells you all you need to know about justice.

It’s said that behind every great fortune is a great crime. This time, the crime is that the criminals are influencing how laws are made. Madoff was foolish to run an illegal Ponzi scheme. He should have used his huge financial resources to buy a few congressmen, or run for office himself. Once in power, he could have worked with his like-minded brethren and simply made Ponzi schemes legal. That’s the American way.

Where is the American activism?Perspectives

Bob Herbert, the distinguished NYTimes editorialist, looks at the crowds in Cairo and asks where is the American equivalent (When Democracy Weakens: While Egyptians celebrate, we should look at the American democracy...)

RT Koenig

Memphis TN

Maybe it's time the American people took a lesson from the people of Egypt and take to the streets. Maybe it's time that the poor and middle class working people of America staged their own Day of Rage. Maybe it's time for a million unemployed workers or the millions who have lost their homes to a recession sparked by corporate greed to march on Wall Street.
Just this week we learn that JPMorgan Chase, one of the banks responsible for the recession and the recipient of millions in bailout money, defrauded thousands of American servicemen and their families. In some cases, the second largest bank in the US illegally foreclosed on U.S. servicemen and their families. If this latest outrage doesn't spark protests, then perhaps we are no longer capable of outrage.
A Day of Rage cannot overlook Washington, where as Herbert has noted so eloquently, neither party is representing the interests of the poor, the unemployed and the underemployed. Americans fortunate enough to still have jobs need to stand together in protest lest they be next.
It's time to get off the couch and take to the streets. As the people of Egypt have shown us, even the powerful cannot afford to ignore millions united for change, freedom and fairness.

Mel Presley

Roskilde, Denmark

There are only two factions that stand in the way of a second American revolution, a true political revolt to end rule by the corporate dollar and restore democracy.

One is partisan cheerleaders for the Republican political cause.

The other is partisan cheerleaders for the Democrat political cause.

The Times' readership seems to divide itself about 10 percent to 90 percent, respectively, in favor of these two opposing camps. There's virtually nobody at all with enough common sense to see that we'll never find our way out of the woods, and away from plutocracy, until we all reject BOTH.

Street protests won't work in America as they have in Cairo, because we face a far more entrenched enemy than the Egyptians. But there's one thing that would. We need to form a temporary, single party of national unity with the sole purpose of having it write a Constitutional amendment to mandate modern, multiparty voting and an end to private funding of campaigns. If we all elect its candidates, and boycott all those of our fraudulent two-party system, we'll have the mother and father of confrontations on our hands, and if the sitting powers attempt to annul the election results, we might even start a civil war. But I can't see any other way to restore rule by the people - which is what democracy is supposed to be in the first place.

Greg Shimkaveg

Oviedo, Florida

Mr. Herbert, I don't disagree with you. But consider this: where were the disadvantaged and disenfranchised last November? I am a local Democratic Party offficer down here in Florida. I worked for and financially supported a lot of candidates, hundreds of hours and over a thousand dollars. On November 2nd, 2010 I worked the polls. Who showed up? Angry white guys in pickup trucks. Literally scowling as they drove in. Who didn't show up, despite being phoned and visited and mailed? Young people, union people, women, ethnic and racial minorities. I stood in front of a polling place in a middle-class and let's say unpretentious part of the county. The registration breakdown was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. There were lots of diverse people on the rolls. And who bothered to make a difference? Mostly white, mostly male, and overwhelmingly Republican voters.

So we reap what we sew. A decennial election, as you know, controls who decides redistricting. Our Legislature is now filibuster-proof Republican and we have a 2-to-1 Republican Congressional delegation, in a state with a 300,000 Democratic registration plurality. Despite two Constitutional Amendments that did pass requiring fair districts, the Legislature is busy Gerrymandering to keep themselves and their party in solid control until at least 2020.

So, thanks to all those who sat on their hands in November. And as you point out, Mr. Herbert, they'll be the ones most likely to suffer all the more. But they are not just blameless victims. 

joseph parmetler

austria

The USA is not a democracy any more. Or is there anyone int he US government who represents the 40 million poor in the country? Is there anyone who represents the unemployed?
Is there anyone who represents the fading middle classes who are fighting for their economic survival?
Look at the cabinet of the president? They all represent big money.
Look at the Republicans in Congress: the poor, the unemployed do not even exist for them; if they keep on as they do now, Republicans will advance Egyptian conditions in the USA.
This is a corporatocracy or plutocracy.

LAS

Redmond, WA

The executive class holds American workers hostage by threatening to move jobs out of state or out of the country if their demands aren't met. Politicians, in fear of more job losses, then try to weaken the labor unions and accommodate the corporations' desires. Local TV stations are quick to publicize mass layoffs or plant shutdowns and blame them on public officials and labor unions.

States governments are set in competition with each other for the lowest tax rates. In Washington State the unemployment insurance tax rate was tied to the unemployment tax rate. With the increase in unemployment, the tax rate went up and a 36% increase was mandated, 36% above the current rate of slightly more than 1%. Business interests fought this and we all heard that 36% figure, even though the public did not hear that it was 36% of 1%. The unemployment tax fund was solvent, so the legislature canceled the tax increase. However, no one, not even the labor unions, even mentioned using the state's surplus to create a Tier V extension for the 99ers. As a result, the unemployment tax was reduced while there were 38,000 99ers in January, with 4000 more people per month reaching the end of their unemployment compensation with no job opportunities. The prevention of the tax increase was given away without any conditions requiring the hiring of the unemployed. Whatever slight power the state held, it threw away. This tax reduction was tacked onto the bill authorizing the continuation of the federal unemployment benefits extensions just as, in the other Washington, tax cut extensions were attached to the continuation of the federal unemployment extensions.

The corporations holler "Jump!" and public officials ask, "How high?" but it appears to be a lose-lose proposition for workers affected by mass layoffs.

SC

Indiana, PA

Even though it's hard to recall now, Americans did recently show the world that democracy works in this country--with the amazing 2008 grassroots campaign to elect Barack Obama. During the campaign, massive numbers of new voters came to the polls, and the country witnessed a groundswell of democratic participation.

BUT President Obama has betrayed that democratic movement. He has betrayed all of us who supported him in an effort to take this country back from the corporate, financial and military elite. It's sickening and grotesque to watch as Obama continually caves into their demands--the latest being his administration's proposal to drastically cut (by half) home heating assistance to the poor. Instead of pushing back, Obama has revealed himself to be a push-over. Obama has given up so much ground to the right-wing fanatics, that it will take another massive democratic movement to regain that ground. Let's hope the Egyptian people find better leadership, one who truly advocates for democratic and economic transformation that benefits ALL people, not just the wealthy and powerful. The Egyptians are leading the way now.

lure1

O'ahu

Oh cry me a river. I was on line the other day at the supermarket. A woman was using food stamps while yapping on her iPhone.

46% of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three bedroom house with one and a half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio
.
76% of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6% of poor households are overcrowded. More than two thirds have more than two rooms per person.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.

97% of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

78% have a DVD player; 62% have cable or satellite TV reception.

73% own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

As a group, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

While the poor are generally wellnourished, some poor families do experience hunger, meaning a temporary discomfort due to food shortages. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13% of poor families and 2.6% of poor children experience hunger at some point during the year. In most cases, their hunger is shortterm. 89% of the poor report their families have "enough" food to eat, while only 2 percent say they "often" do not have enough to eat.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, DVD player, and a stereo.

His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all the poor. There is actually a wide range in living conditions among the poor. For example, over a quarter of poor households have cell phones and telephone answering machines, but, at the other extreme, approximately one tenth have no phone at all. While the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.

The best news is that remaining poverty can readily be reduced further, particularly among children. There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home.

In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year nearly 75% of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two thirds of poor children reside in single parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

What bothers Herbert and his fellow travelers is that America doesn't satisfy his infantile delusions of a what perfect society should be. I hate to break it to you Mr. Herbert but in every society there have always been poor people. And there always will be. There have also always have been rich people who enjoy privileges. That's not gonna change either. But by all means, keep banging you spoon on the table of your high chair crying "poverty, tax cuts for the rich etc". It's futile but hilarious. Hope and change!

dc lambert

nj

As jobs are continually shipped overseas and we work ourselves to the bone, too scared that we will be next, too exhausted to think about it, the only thing that holds our entire economy together is fear: Fear that our credit scores will plummet and we won't be able to borrow money to survive. Fear that we will be next, that there but for the grace of God and bankers go I. What happens when the worst happens and our fear is realized, and our credit rating IS destroyed and we cannot borrow money anymore?

My good friend is in this situation and finds it liberating. She will be losing her house and has filed for bankruptcy. She cannot borrow money but, as she says, her 'credit score was already shot.' Suddenly she's 'rich.' She isn't paying for her mortgage as she forecloses. She is an educated lawyer but went under when her credit card companies jacked up the interest rates to over 30% when they thought she was late one month. (She had actually paid a month in advance since she was going away for a month, but they'd misapplied her payments and it took too long to straighten out.) Soon her interest rates were unsustainable and she slipped behind. She stopped paying, they refused to work something out, they harassed her and tried to get her to be afraid instead --but eventually, after years, she just stopped paying, and filed for bankruptcy.

People talk of a 'revolution' against the plutocracy, and imply pitchforks and torches. What if our revolution instead is to upend our entire economic system, which is based on usurious loans the banks strongarm us into having to take? I myself have always considered myself frugal but I simply could not function without borrowing. My children could not go to college, I could not drive myself to work or own a home or maintain it, or even a washer/dryer without borrowing.

Banks use our credit scores as giant sticks, but what if people stopped caring about the sticks? What if everyone altogether went into foreclosure? Or didn't care about their credit card scores--just as it is meaningless for the committee to declare everyone culpable in the banking disaster, so it's meaningless if everyone has a rotten credit score.

I don't think people would do this on purpose, because the risks are too great for most. But as jobs continue to be shipped overseas, and our Republican legislature continues to propose slashes to education, basic services, infrastructure, and so on, it seems that it would only take a very little for a tipping point ot be reached, and for the bulk of people to slip and fall into the quicksand of 'bad credit' and foreclosure.

Once that happens, our entire economy, based on borrowing - 'getting and spending' - will be pulled into the wake as more and more houses foreclose and more and more people go bankrupt and can't borrow. Since the chances of this happening are very high, and since the Republicans want to nudge it into being even more likely, one has to ask: Who is pulling the strings here? In whose interest is it that the American economy go under? My motto is to always follow the money. Here we see not only naked plutocracy, not only a plutocracy that cares nothing at all for the economy on which its based, but a plutocracy that, by its OWN decisions (joined with right wing politicians) is actively working to destroy the American economy on all levels, infrastructure, jobs, and debt. Why? This is the larger question.

not understood by a fearful and proudly ignorant population

Wallflowers at the Revolution
By FRANK RICH

A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all but invisible throughout the 2010 election season. Foreign aid is the only federal budget line that a clear-cut majority of Americans says should be cut. And so now — as the world’s most unstable neighborhood explodes before our eyes — does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents. After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely distinguish Sunni from Shia.

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and elsewhere. But as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on The New Yorker’s Web site last week, “surely the least interesting fact” about the Egyptian protesters is that some of them “may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.” What’s important is “why they were driven to do it in the first place” — starting with the issues of human dignity and crushing poverty that Engel was trying to shove back to center stage.

Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, “The Net Delusion,” Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls “cyber-utopianism.” Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its “Twitter Revolution.” More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Chávez first vilified Twitter as a “conspiracy,” but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets.

This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience. We see the Middle East on television only when it flares up and then generally in medium or long shot. But there actually is an English-language cable channel — Al Jazeera English — that blankets the region with bureaus and that could have been illuminating Arab life and politics for American audiences since 2006, when it was established as an editorially separate sister channel to its Qatar-based namesake.

Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.

The noxious domestic political atmosphere fostering this near-blackout is obvious to all. It was made vivid last week when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News went on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is “anti-American.” This is the same “We report, you decide” Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of “Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.

Marie Burns

Fort Myers, Florida

In another New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong case that social media do not a revolution make. He cites as a prime example the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter demonstration that grew exponentially within days, even though the only "social medium" in those days was the telephone. Gladwell explains that "high risk social activism" like the Greensboro sit-in (and the Egyptian uprising) "requires deep roots and strong ties." Reading a stranger's tweet that such-and-such is an atrocity -- even if it is -- doesn't make you want to risk your life for somebody else's problem. People show up at these high-risk events because the issues have deep meaning to them AND they have friends who share their beliefs and are participating in the demonstrations.

One of the minor upsides to the Egyptian uprising has to be all the Americans who suddenly discovered Al Jazeera was a news organization that knocked itself out to get the news on the air, even in English, despite the best efforts of our friend and dictator Hosni Mubarak. As Liz Sly wrote in the Washington Post, since the uprising began, Al Jazeera's "phone lines have been cut, nine of its staffers have been detained at various times, its satellite signal has been repeatedly blocked and on Friday, al-Jazeera said..., a 'gang of thugs' stormed its bureau, smashing equipment and setting it ablaze."

Sly added, "... in what represents perhaps an ultimate act of defiance to the effort to shut the network down, demonstrators in the square have rigged up a giant screen so that even those protesting can follow al-Jazeera's supposedly banned coverage."

I have no doubt the international media, including Al Jazeera, are responsible for saving many Egyptian lives. Mubarak's Plan B, demonstrated most forcefully on Wednesday & Thursday, was to take out the media so the government could proceed with more brutal measures against its own people. The media's success, which required incredible bravery on the parts of reporters, photojournalists & crews, exposed Mubarak & Co., and caused them to back off in the face of international condemnation. If ordinary Egyptian people are the heroes of Tahrir Square, the media are a darned close second.

So thank you again to Nicholas Kristof, Nicholas Kulish, Souad Mekhennet, and all the other Times reporters & other media personnel who risked their own lives to report the news and, in so doing, saved Egyptian lives.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

Karen Garcia

New Paltz, NY

It is indeed laughable that our clueless mass media attributed the Egyptian uprising to Twitter and Facebook, when 40 percent of that country's people live on $2 a day and must spend 40 percent of their incomes on food. I can just envision the poor hungry hordes clutching their Blackberries and i-Phones as they plan their next insurrectional step.

Al-Jazeera may not be carried by the corporate American media, but that hasn't stopped millions of Americans tuning in via their laptops and PCs. As a matter of fact, most Americans get their news from the Internet these days, where a whole new world of unbiased, uncompromised-by-the-government sources of information are available. There is Truth-Out, Pro-Publica, Alternet, as well as countless other blogs and links throughout global cyberspace. We don't have to watch millionaire TV anchor Brian Williams hover helplessly in the background, as Richard Engel and Rachel Maddow tell it like it is. From the establishment side of things, Nicholas Kristof's daily New York Times dispatches have put a human face on the revolution through his heartbreaking interviews with ordinary Egyptians.

Tweets are for twits who don't have the attention spans to care about the difference between Sunni and Shia. Leave Facebook and Twitter to the likes of the Sarah Palins of the world who have nothing substantive to say. In her case, though, crow-like cackles would be a more apt description than innocuous little tweets.

Meanwhile, the USA, after more than a week of its "delicate tightrope" balancing act of not wanting to side with the Mubarak government, is siding with the Mubarak government in its obvious status-quo seeking "transition to Democracy." Hillary Clinton, the Goldwater Girl of yesteryear, has even resorted to repeating a Fox News rumor of an assassination attempt on torturer and dictator-in-waiting Suleiman. When all else fails, the Policeman of the World will use the fear factor (Islamophobia) to hasten the transfer of puppet strings from one USA-bribed despot to the next. Keeping the Suez Canal open for all that oil bound for our shores trumps the human rights of the Egyptian people. And even without benefit of American social media, the people in the square are aware of what's going on. Word of mouth and human-to-human contact still rule. Contrary to popular belief, the world can go on without with Facebook.

http://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/

 

 

geek

MA

Frank, excellent summarizing of last week's events. I see the problem in the US as two-fold, one being the prism of Israel through which everyone views all that goes on in the Middle East and North Africa part of the world. This distorted view reflects in out foreign policy as well.

The second point is that we are so used to the US being an active interferer/player in everybody's affairs that we expect immediate and instant reaction, by our diplomats, by our administration, and by our journalists and media. All these past 11 days, the media has been blaming Obama administration for being "tardy", for not doing enough, OMG what will happen to Israel? Without realizing that Egypt is an ancient civilization and a very mature and sophisticated one at that. The Egyptians are totally capable of creating their own revolution in their own terms. They are energized, they need time, we as observers can voice our support, but we should not interfere in their affairs. If they need help, let them ask. Let us not make another Iraq mistake. Lord, so much bloodshed, when the Iraqis are so capable to do their own revolution, they too are an ancient civilization, wisdom runs in their veins. Why did we have to cause so much pain?

 

 

Gemli

Boston

I suppose Americans in general suffer from the conservative disease of assuming that nations in turmoil probably deserve it. Those folks over there shouldn’t have let themselves be manipulated or exploited by their government. If the wealth of their country has been stolen by a few powerful individuals, and if jobs and resources are meted out by a handful of well-connected corporations, well, they asked for it. If religion is used as a force to interfere in citizens’ private lives, they should refuse to accept it. If they get their information from news media that have ties to the government, or that make outrageous, inflammatory partisan pontifications, or knowingly spread false information, they should change the channel and look for alternative sources. When Twitter and Facebook reduce information to short blurbs, or embed so much advertising in the content that the content is lost, they should know enough to unplug themselves and start communicating in full sentences again.

And when other nations look at us and shake their heads, we should forgive them for assuming that we deserve what we get, too.

20 spruce

MA

Our American civilization currently is more docile than Egypt's. We have lots to protest against, but remain uncharacteristically subdued.

The N.S.A. is enabled to spy into our private communications without warrant and in conflict with the Fourth Amendment. I didn't go out and protest. Did you?

The President campaigns against "stupid" wars, but he continues to wage an abysmal and stupid war in Afghanistan. No substantial demonstrations have followed.

Wall Street continues to bonus its nasty double-dealing crooks while the rest of us try to cough up enough money to keep our schools running with class sizes under 30. No protests in my town.

The Supremes mock the Constitution in Bush v Gore, followed ten years later by Citizens United. Which is more unbelievable, the decisions or the lack of protest?

Mr. Obama does Bush and Cheney one better by proclaiming he can keep Guantanimo prisoners jailed, even if found innocent in an American court of law! Again, no protests. (But then, these people are "the other," so of course we needn't worry about them.)

I have enormous respect for the Egyptians' courage. We, too, have been a courageous people in the past hundreds of years. May we find our way again, even if it finds us in the streets contending for what is right and honorable and undeniably American.

Maani

New York, N.Y.

I agree with Rich on his second point, but not on his first.

There is no question that the U.S. MSM has a very "1984" quality to it: "Who controls the past controls the future; Who controls the present controls the past." By not permitting access to Al Jazeera English (and other alternative media sites), the U.S. MSM has, as Rich points out, created a kind of "media blackout" of anything that is not U.S.-based (with the notable exception of the BBC).

However, I vehemently disagree with Rich's cavalier dismissal of social media as a crucial element in the events occuring in North Africa and the Middle East. It may be true that only 20% of Egyptians have Facebook or Twitter. But I would bet that among those in Tahrir Square and other gathering sites in Egypt, a wildly disproportionate number are among those 20 percent. As well, there is absolutely no argument that the very first protest in Tunisia - the one that effectively began the ENTIRE upheaval throughout the region, the protest tied to the self-immolation of a frustrated vendor - was set up via social networking; that non-connected citizens also participated is almost certainly the result of the "connected" spreading plans of the protest by word of mouth.

However, Rich's biggest faux pas is his central claim that social media could not have been a major underlying factor in Egypt because when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet (and access to social networking), the crowds only got bigger. It apparently doesn't occur to Rich that he has it exactly backward: it was BECAUSE people who had formerly had access to social media no longer DID that they were even ANGRIER, and, again, used word of mouth to increase their numbers.

Ultimately, Rich is wrong about social media's impact on the upheaval in the region. But he is correct that Americans have become "dumbed down" - particularly re foreign policy and foreign affairs - by a tightly controlled media that wants to "control the present."

Sandy Lewis

Lewis Family Farm, Essex, New York

Outrage and a Facebook Page That Gave It a Voice, Jennifer Preston, page A10, February 6th, 2011, The New York Times: If there is a face to the revolt that has sprouted in Egypt, it may be the face of Khaled Said.

That 28-year-old Egyptian businessman was pulled from an Internet cafe in Alexandria last June by two plainclothes police officers who beat him to death in the lobby of a residential building after they learned that he had posted a video on his personal blog showing them with illegal drugs.

The Egyptian police and security services have a well-earned reputation for brutality and snuffing out political opposition. But in Mr. Said, they unwittingly chose the wrong target.

Within five days of his death, an anonymous human rights activist created a Facebook page — We Are All Khaled Said — that posted cellphone photos from the morgue of his battered and bloodied face, the video of the corrupt police officers and other YouTube videos contrasting his corpse with pictures of his bright and smiling face from happier days. By mid-June, 130,000 people joined the page to get and share updates about the case.

It became and remains the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt, even as protests continue to sweep the country, with more than 473,000 users, and it has helped spread the word about the demonstrations in Egypt, which were ignited after a revolt in neighboring Tunisia toppled the government there.

“There were many catalysts of the uprising,” said Ahmed Zidan, an online political activist marching toward Tahrir Square for a protest last week. “The first was the brutal murder of Khalid Said.”

The Tunisian rebellion was set off after a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after being humiliated by the police. His desperate act led to protests, which were recorded on mobile phones, posted on the Internet, shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by Al Jazeera.

But Mr. Said’s death may be the starkest example yet of the special power of social networking tools like Facebook even — or especially — in a police state. The Facebook page set up around his death offered Egyptians a rare forum to bond over their outrage about government abuses.

“Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them,” said Jillian C. York, the project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. “This case changed that.”

While it is almost impossible to isolate the impact of social media tools from the general swirl of events that set off the popular uprisings across the Middle East, there is little doubt that they provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charges.

Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.

Far more decentralized than political parties, the strength and agility of the networks clearly caught Egyptian authorities — and American intelligence analysts — by surprise, even as the Egytian government quickly attempted to shut them down.

Mr. Said, who was from a middle-class family and worked in the import-export business, was not an activist or involved in politics: he was simply offended by the corruption he saw. After police officials lied to his family, saying he was involved in drugs and died of asphyxiation from swallowing a package of marijuana while in police custody, witnesses went public, telling their stories in YouTube videos. Cellphone photos of Mr. Said’s shattered and broken face began to circulate online and provided evidence that eventually authorities could not ignore.

“What made this case different is that Khaled Said was just an ordinary person,” said Gamal Eid, 47, a lawyer and executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo. “He was just a guy who found evidence of corruption and he published it. Then when people learned what happened to him, when people saw pictures of his face, people got very angry.”

Mr. Eid said that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and mobile phones made it easy for human rights advocates to get out the news and for ordinary people to spread and discuss their outrage about his death in a country where freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited and the government monitors newspapers and state television.

“He is a big part of our revolution,” said Hudaifa Nabawi, a 20-year-old student in Tahrir Square on Saturday.“ Khalid Said was a special case. He didn’t belong to any faction, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He became the way to focus our perceptions around the oppression that all the youth all face

N. Ray

North Carolina

I was among the many tuned in for hours via laptop to Al Jazeera English for something of a real look at Egypt. As I watched I was impressed by the bravery of the AJE crews and the professionalism of their production. I also marveled that such a fresh window on the world was available in America only to those with both the equipment and curiosity to find and open it on the internet. And this in a "free" country, with a sizable Muslim population.

It is a measure of the pinched imperialism afflicting many Americans that we believe that a desperately poor Arab population is capable of revolt only because the white man has provided new and wonderful communication tools. Over the years, dictators much worse than Moubaric have been dumped by populations without any access to so much as a telephone.

However, the unavailability here of news outlets such as AJE, and the active hostility to them by the Fox News faction of our population, is yet more indicative of how deeply Americans have adopted an imperial outlook on the world. While AJE zeroed in on the drama in the streets, most of our domestic commentary centered on what sort of government would replace that currently running Egypt, and whether the new bosses would be friendly to the US, or to our extension in the Middle East, Israel, as usual, as though it were the 51st state. The running subtext was a near hysteria that some sort of jihadist regime would come to power. Beck offered that a caliphate would soon engulf the entire Middle East and North Africa, and maybe even Europe. American narcissism was on display in full color. It was all about us. A few words were spared for the poor in Egypt who have finally decided they have taken enough. But for the most part, the folks forcing the changing with their blood and courage were treated as little more than the chorus, occupying the streets while the stars of the show within the Egyptian and American governments got a "transition" all worked out and maintained stability. Heaven forbid that those Egyptian protesters should somehow derail our economic recovery.

Our narrative seemed to ask just who needs worry much over facts ordering the lives of little people in a poor part of the world that seems to cause us nothing but trouble, when we have so many interests to attend to world wide. Many Americans don't know and don't want to know about the problems of these foreigners. After all, the sun never sets on a real empire and the work at the acquisition of the resources necessary to sustain it. Most Americans seem to have accepted the difficulties of running their own, but they've also lost patience with and sympathy for the predictable efforts by the oppressed out there to improve their lives. Our own revolutionary ideals of freedom and liberty seem to have become little more than words spoken but not understood by a fearful and proudly ignorant population.

...is a Prague Spring in the Middle East, are the U.S., Britain and the EU now going to play the role of the old Soviet Union?

Ike Solem

CA

"As the United States and leading European nations threw their weight behind the Egyptian vice president’s attempt to defuse a popular uprising..."

Try replacing "defuse" with "violently crack down on" maybe?

Isn't this the also same General Omar Suleiman who was deeply involved in the 'secret' CIA proxy rendition-torture program of the past decade? The person closest to Mubarak? How is that not like removing Stalin and installing Beria in his place?

Suleiman and Mubarak should both be encouraged to leave the country immediately, and a rapid election schedule should be implemented, with the Egyptian military serving a temporary peacekeeping role.

From PBS, 2007:

CIA’s Confirmed Proxy Dentention Facility Prisons in Egypt:

1. Tora Prison , South of Cairo

". . . Infamous for decades, the prison has held thousands of the country’s security detainees. . . . Most prisoners are transferred to Tora after their interrogations have been completed, and it is only at this point that a detainee becomes an officially recognized prisoner. Generally, after any injuries from torture have healed, detainees may receive visits from their family or lawyer. . ."

2. State Security Investigations Stations, Lazoghly

". . .Located behind black-painted walls and defended by machine-gun nests on each corner, Lazoghly Square is one of the country’s most notorious addresses. Rounded up in early morning raids, political dissidents and Islamists are often taken here first for processing and, according to consistent accounts from former inmates, for torture. . . [which] involves prisoners being beaten, suspended over the edge of doors by arms tied behind their backs, subjected to cigarette burns and electric shocks, sexually harassed, deprived of sleep and food, and forced to watch relatives being tortured."

3. Mukhabarat al-Aama Headquarters, Cairo

"Situated in the Abdeen area of Cairo, Mukhabarat al-Aama is the headquarters of the General Intelligence and Security Services, headed by General Omar Suleiman. The Mukhabarat usually receives rendered detainees for initial interrogation. . . "

4. State Security Investigations National Headquarters, Nasr City

". . . a torture room is also allegedly close to the [50] cells so that detainees, even when not being tortured themselves, were privy to the constant screams of others."

It's now obvious that the U.S. "plan to bring democracy to Middle East" (endorsed by the G8, no less) was just window dressing to justify the war for oil in Iraq (where police just fired on protesters, another Tunisia-inspired situation being ignored by U.S. media).

Apparently, the last thing our Washington-Wall Street nexus wants is democratic outbreak upsetting their corrupt kickback-based economic relations in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia - and the center of that corruption appears to lie in the U.S. State Department, the ones pushing this ludicrous plan. Obama and Mubarak are looking more and more Carter and the Shah of Iran - and that's not a very good sign.

Of course, their larger concern is probably the spread of democratic uprisings to other countries across the region - the "domino effect."

Curiously, the last time the "domino effect" was mentioned in U.S. foreign policy circles was with respect to the spread of communism across Southeast Asia - so is democracy the new communism? Likewise, if this is a Prague Spring in the Middle East, are the U.S., Britain and the EU now going to play the role of the old Soviet Union?