Ryan’s Distortion of America’s Founding

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been roundly criticized for being light on substance and long on fluff. But his running mate Paul Ryan is promoting a dangerous idea that refutes the historical foundations of democratic government. Practically ignored by the mainstream press, Ryan’s manifesto demands closer scrutiny.

When Rep. Ryan accepted Mitt Romney’s invitation as running mate, the Wisconsin Republican uttered a simple, but profound, statement:

“But America is more than just a place. It’s an idea. It’s the only country founded upon an idea: Our rights come from Nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. This idea is founded upon the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination, and government by the consent of the governed. This idea is under assault.”

“Our rights come from Nature and God, not government?” Let us hope this idea is under assault, because it is powerful, and it is dangerous.

We know this idea is historically powerful because Americans once used it to overthrow the authority of the British Empire; we know it is imminently dangerous because contemporary American plutocrats are now using it to undermine our hard-won democracy.

Ryan’s opinion that human rights are conferred by “Nature and God” is breathtakingly unoriginal. Witchdoctors and warlords have been inventing and re-inventing the idea of atavistic and supernatural rights since the first virgin was sacrificed on the bloodstained altar of some prehistoric bogeyman. But more recently, and more civilly, the concept was resurrected by English philosopher John Locke in the 17^th Century.

Locke, a philosophical shaman of the today’s Libertarian-Right set, hawked the idea that human rights were conferred by an imaginary “law of Nature,” which he said pre-existed and superseded any law made by actual lawmaking people. Think of Moses bringing the tablets down from the Mount – but without Moses, or the tablets, or a population that could read.

Please understand that Locke’s “law of Nature” existed in a prehistoric “state of Nature,” a sort of Garden of Eden where he said “men … by nature all free, equal, and independent” existed without either the cost or any benefit of government. But there was a snake in Locke’s garden: “For although the law of Nature be plain and intelligible to all rational creatures, yet men, being biased by their interest … are not apt to allow of it as a law binding to them in the application of it to their particular cases.”

The only solution to humanity’s selfish transgression of the “law of Nature,” Locke explains, was the establishment of government. “The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of Nature there are many things wanting.”

So, according to Locke, man-made law (government) was invented by man to protect rights that man never made in the first place. (This is but one version of the long-running theory of the “Social Contract.”)

But notice the shift from man in a “state of Nature” to man in a governed society: the “chief end” of this novel entity of government was not to protect mankind’s original condition “by nature allfree, equal and independent,” which was their apparent birthright, but “the preservation of their property.”

Does this reasoning sound at least vaguely familiar? It should. It was the same argument that was enthusiastically adopted by the well-to-do, property-owning, tax-evasive, English Colonial elite at the onset of the American Revolution. The current GOP’s political base, if you will – backdated a couple of centuries.

But in contemporary times, Locke’s “natural law” has languished as a hot cocktail party topic for many folks. An interesting exception is arch-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who, when queried about his judicial philosophy at his 1991 Senate confirmation hearing, said he thought “natural law” provided “philosophical background” to the Constitution.

Now Paul Ryan, who like Thomas is a self-professed Ayn Rand devotee, has weighed in with his grandiloquent echo that humans’ irrevocable rights do not originate from their fellow humans, but from somewhere out of the Blue.

The opinion that persons’ rights derive from Nature, or natural law, has been rejected for centuries by philosophical luminaries from Baruch Spinoza to Jeremy Bentham, who pointed out the obvious: rights derive from law; and law as we know it does not and cannot exist without government.

To imagine “law” existing prior to government, said Bentham, is not only a contradiction of terms, but is “nonsense upon stilts.” The world’s greatest scientists confirmed Bentham’s conclusion: Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Albert Einstein, for example, never discovered that “Nature” conferred “rights” to any animal, plant or thing in the known Universe.

Nature – infamous for its so-called Law of the Jungle – is a notorious transgressor of human rights. Any random rattlesnake, bubonic plague bacterium or tsunami stands ready to prove the point to humans foolish enough to fantasize otherwise. Anybody who has ever camped out for a summer weekend without bug repellent can tell tales of woe concerning the “natural rights” showered upon humanity by the natural world.

Whether God confers immutable rights upon humans seems to depend upon whom you ask. Contemporary radical Zionists would probably agree. So might a jihadist terrorist. Adam and Eve, interestingly, could not. Napoleon quipped that God assigned right according to who has the best artillery, but in the following century the Soviets, who in fact possessed the winning artillery at Stalingrad, claimed God did not exist. Go figure.

But even devout believers in the Western monotheistic deity – Christian, Jew and Muslim alike – must admit that, according to scripture, God-given rights apparently do not confer immunity from fatal inconveniences such as Death Angels, plagues, floods, eternal damnation, and, of course, crucifixion.

Declaration of Independence: First Edition

So it would be fair to say Ryan’s “foundational idea” that Americans’ rights come from “Nature and God” is not an established fact. Yet it does have a familiar ring to it, and for good reason. Ryan’s idea was scribbled in stone, as it were, in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which states explicitly that “certain unalienable rights” are endowed by man’s Creator:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

“Assault Thomas Jefferson if you dare,” was the obvious subtext of Ryan’s pronouncement.

But let’s set the historical record straight here: Thomas Jefferson did not conceive that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Others penned those words.

Let us recall that Jefferson was on a committee whose job it was to draft a statement of independence based upon a Congressional resolution authored on July 2, 1776 by Richard Henry Lee (ironically, or not, the great grand-uncle of rebel leader Robert E. Lee). The committee’s other members were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston.

Some revisions to Jefferson’s original document seem to have been made by Adams and Franklin, others by the Second Continental Congress as a whole – but it is not known who edited what, exactly. We do know Jefferson’s original words, however. Like any prudent writer, he retained his first draft. This is what he actually wrote:

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

So Jefferson evidently did not mean that human rights are “endowed by their Creator,” or by Nature, simply because that is not what he wrote. It is clear from his original draft that he personally conceived that inherent human rights derived from humans’ equality, not from Locke’s (or Ryan’s) concept that rights come down to man from some pre-extant forcesuperior to human creation.

This difference between the origins of rights – equality vs. superiority – is crucial. Equal rights have generally been repudiated by the economic elite who find it more profitable to claim that rights flow down from upon High. Those who champion equality have usually supported the obverse: that rights, if they flow at all, need to flow up from the people, “grassroots” style.

It takes no flash of genius to perceive that the elites’ preference for the “superiority model” of rights was not only the basis, but also a prerequisite, for the long-discredited “Trickle-Down” economic theory – which holds that the working class is best nurtured from the table scraps of the wealthy.

This pernicious idea has itself trickled down, like some generation-skipping genetic disease, from Jefferson’s editors, to the Gilded Age, then to Herbert Hoover, thus to Ronald Reagan, and now finally to some guy named Paul Ryan.

Of course, the oligarchs’ embrace of a trickle-down theory of human rights was hardly the only flaw in the self-serving reasoning of those who published the Declaration. That indentured servitude, debtors’ prisons, slavery and bonded child labor were acceptable institutions by those who signed off on the idea that “all men are created equal” seems stunningly hypocritical today. Yet it did not quite seem that way to propertied men empowered by votes unavailable to their servants.

To the mostly privileged soon-to-be Founders, social and economic equality – as well as their peculiar idea of liberty – applied only to the elite who already possessed it. Thus, the American Revolution was not led by an American Spartacus, but rather by the Colonial elite who risked treason against the British Empire in order to preserve for themselves the unequal social and economic prerogatives in their new, distinctly American, empire.

The elites’ Orwellian crusade for “government by those who do not consent to be governed” should sound familiar to those who are afflicted by today’s mainstream, corporate-owned media. This message was not intended to further the interests of a democratic society then, nor is it now, and those who value democracy should heed it at their peril.

The Declaration, Disestablishmentarianism and the Constitution

Its editors’ revisions notwithstanding, the Declaration of Independence still served its purpose. But its purpose was not to “found a country” upon the idea that our rights come from “Nature and God,” as Paul Ryan would have it.

Indeed, the Declaration’s specific intent was not to establish any sort of political entity at all, but rather to disestablish a government that already existed and which, by the late 18^th Century, had begun to threaten the prerogatives of the Colonial American elite. The secondary purpose of the Declaration was a public relations play, as its very first sentence makes clear:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Despite Paul Ryan’s belief in his mythical “founding idea,” the Second Continental Congress, including Jefferson, weren’t founding anything with all their eloquent words. They were, however, executing a calculated but gutsy gamble – not unlike that of a disaffected wife serving divorce papers on an abusive spouse who was also the most powerful corporate CEO on the planet – and hoping for the best.

How the divorce was to be justified would be critical to its success. To this end, the “opinions of mankind” (especially those of potential allies) were of paramount importance. This public relations task fell to Thomas Jefferson, whose true genius was to turn the logic of monarchical rule on its head, not to beat it at its own game.

For how many millennia had a rogues’ gallery of pharaohs, emperors, kings, czars, sultans and khans decreed that their right to rule came, as Ryan insists, from “Nature and God, not from government?” The crucial challenge of Revolutionary self-government, Jefferson understood, would be to divorce itself not only from the raw power of the king and Parliament, but from the fundamental logic of despotism.

In effect, Jefferson justified the Colonial bride’s right to divorce her abusive spouse on the grounds of her undeniable equality. But his edited argument – based upon Locke and now parroted by Ryan – was that the bride’s right to divorce was justified by her claim to the sameassumed superiority of her abusive husband. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, in other words. The problem was that the sauce was not good for the goose in the first place.

Jefferson’s vision allowed the moral authority of egalitarianism to challenge – not assume – the king’s fictive mandate from heaven. But when Jefferson argued for inalienable rights based upon human equality, the elitist Paul Ryans in the Second Continental Congress struck his words and replaced them with rights based upon supernatural authority.

In so doing, neither they, nor Paul Ryan, repudiated the medieval principle of Divine Right of Kings. Their reasoning does deny the idea of rule consecrated by divine authority, but rather usurps it.

In any event, the United States of America was not founded, as Ryan announced, upon some extra-legal “idea” of divine authority, but upon the Constitution. Unfortunately for Ryan, who as a professional politician has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution on numerous occasions, our actual founding document contains no reference to the will of “Nature” or “God” at all.

Nowhere does the Constitution say, nor even imply, that persons’ rights are “natural” nor “endowed by their Creator,” nor does it even hint that “rights” are unalienable, inalienable, inherent, natural or somehow sacrosanct. The Constitution does not pass upon the origins of rights.

And it does not confer any rights. As a matter of fact, the word “right” only appears once in the original body of the un-amended Constitution, and only then in reference to patents, of all things. In more bad news for folks like Ryan, neither the Constitution nor any of its Amendments mentions “government by the consent of the governed,” or “self-determination,” or “free enterprise.”

Ryan, in point of fact, is just making this stuff up and hoping the rest of us have never actually read the Constitution, or can distinguish it from the Declaration of Independence, which carries no authority of law.

American Anarchy vs. Fake Patriots

The Declaration of Independence inspired other independence manifestos, including the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the American feminists’Declaration of Rights and Sentiments in 1848. With crushing irony, even the Vietnamese explicitly copied Jefferson’s masterpiece in their own declaration of independence from the French in 1945.

(Note: one year after the Vietnamese declaration, the United States of America – Ryan’s visionary champion of “self-determination” – re-imposed French colonial domination over the Vietnamese homeland.)

These revolutionary movements that copied our Declaration were the underdogs of their times. But they all eventually succeeded in overcoming the non-consensual rule imposed by the presumed “natural” or “God-given” prerogatives of state-sanctioned religion, male chauvinism, and Euro-American colonial overlord-ship.

They, like Paul Ryan, extolled the ideas of The Declaration. But what possible common ground do religious right-wingers and Ayn Rand cheerleaders such as Ryan & Company share with malcontent, progressive revolutionary movements whose anti-paternalist and anti-capitalist causes were so clearly at odds with Ryan’s neoconservative base? Perhaps the surprising word we are searching for is “anarchy.”

The word comes from the Greek anarchos, “having no ruler.” Anarchy is not a word that any respectable American is supposed to use nowadays to describe a credible political or social movement. This no-no word has associations with evil, alien, bomb-heaving zealots bent on the nihilistic destruction of the “American Way of Life,” apparently just for the hell of it.

Yet this is an odd taboo for a country whose national capital is named in honor of the most famous leader of the most celebrated bomb-heaving radicals of the 18^th Century.

The long war these anarchists fought from 1775-1783 was… messy. American “Sons of Liberty” gangs nailed shut the doors of peaceable, but “politically incorrect” churches. The Crown set slaves free to fight their liberty-loving masters. Patriot forces unleashed preemptive genocidal military campaigns against unsuspecting Indians. British officers led loyalist Americans in atrocities against the own countrymen – and vice versa. Lord Howe’s invaders kidnapped and gang-raped New Jersey farm girls for days on end, while some unpaid Patriot volunteers were beheaded for desertion by Patriot freedom-fighters.

Atrocities, spies, mutinies, traitors, counterfeiters and war profiteering were commonplace. Though only a minority of Americans supported the revolution against aristocratic rule, the Revolution’s top leaders came from the colonial elite, and many of the best were foreign noblemen: Count Pulaski, Baron von Steuben, Lord Sterling, and Marquis de Lafayette. George Washington once personally threatened to shoot his own Patriot troops … and a few guys dumped some tea into Boston Harbor. Let’s not forget that.

If there were a war today that killed the same percentage of the American population, we would have over 3,000,000 graves to dig – ten times as many as we dug for combat deaths in World War II. If this level of disorganized carnage were visited upon America today, would we not be inclined to call it “anarchy?” And what should we think of the document that called us to arms?

The Declaration of Independence is nothing if not a profoundly “anti-ruler” screed. It declared the radical dissolution of the “political bands” which had bound the American colonies to the British Empire for more than 150 years, but it instituted no new government whatsoever to take its place. It is difficult to imagine a more anarchical statement.

But the government the Declaration despised was an astonishingly inequitable system based on aristocratic pretensions and class-based privilege. Even the English Parliament was held hostage to the hereditary wealth and membership of its Upper House of Lords.

The corrupt British government both chartered and owned stock in neo-global corporations such as the British East India Company, whose tea was dumped into Boston harbor, and the Hudson’s Bay Company, that once dominated the resources of an area of North America larger by far than the land mass of the Roman Empire at its height of power. But nowhere in the vast holdings of the British Empire could a man without property cast a vote.

When the truly radical American revolutionary Thomas Paine said, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one” this was the system he meant. Indeed, it was the only kind of government that then existed: an oppressive racket of “God-endowed” kings and hereditary dynasties.

Backed by a proto-military-industrial complex whose sole purpose was to protect the profits of the investor class, these privileged parasites cared little for the toiling masses that physically produced the wealth of the Empire. They cared nothing at all for the millions of indigenous peoples whose lands, lives and cultures were decimated by a pre-planned colonial holocaust that was but a half-step removed from a policy of outright extermination.

This may sound familiar to contemporary Americans whose military-industrial-financial imperium spans the globe under the twin banners of Free Trade and American Exceptionalism. But however problem-ridden our civilization may seem today, it is immensely superior to the system in place the day our Constitution was ratified. Tossing out a king and founding a government were just the first baby-steps in our long journey toward domestic social justice.

Through the power of the democratic process, the American people first unshackled themselves from aristocratic colonial landlords and later from Gilded Age industrial robber-barons; from chattel slavery and child labor; from the criminalization of organized workers; from the disenfranchisement of women, minorities, and the un-propertied; from the specter of old-age squalor and hopeless poverty; from the degeneracy of company-store peonage and sweatshop labor; and from the futility of private-only education.

Having accomplished this much for ourselves, we finally made some small provisions to preserve for our posterity what little was left of our remaining physical resources.

Despite a Constitution which tolerated these gross inequities, and despite the profits that accrued to the wealthy who promulgated them, the American people cast away this rule of cruelty. Eschewing the orchestrated violence of elitist, trickle-down, anti-egalitarian leaders, common Americans achieved their goals legally – not naturally or supernaturally.

With man-made law the American people upheld equal rights – which originated, and continue to be held in common, in the minds of our fellow human beings. Truly “anarchic” Americans thus chose to live “without rulers” excepting ourselves. To re-direct the famous Patrick Henry line: “If this be anarchy, we made the most of it.” And it worked.

But that was then. Now, a media-multitude of freedom-fetishists such as Paul Ryan would hijack the genuine anarchy of American Progressivism by cherry-picking self-serving phrases from the Declaration of Independence. They borrow the language of violent Revolutionary elitism in order to wage an economic campaign against an American government that was reconfigured by a century of legal, democratic revolution.

They, as ever, are corporate-men who envision America only as a place worth owning, while they vilify those who envisioned America as a place that should be worth living in. It is enough to make one wish for a law against criminal farce.

These Revolutionary imposters would have Americans believe that any American democratic-collective institution is synonymous with Soviet state-socialism; that the licentiousness of the privileged few is a necessary precondition for the economic prosperity of the multitude who work for them; that their business corporations are legal persons – and worse yet – that the constitutionally protected rights of such fictitious persons come from some mumbo-jumbo agency of “Nature and God,” quite beyond the authority of a citizen in possession of a ballot.

Then, almost as an afterthought, the Ryans and the other Randistas among us offer the fraudulent consolation that opportunity is somehow more valuable than outcome – as though an equal turn at rolling the dice gives all players the same stake in the game.

“We promise equal opportunity,” Ryan comforted his audience, “not equal outcomes.”

This is the logic of sperm. Perhaps the biologists among us may offer congratulations. Predictable outcomes make opportunities valuable, not the other way around, and if Ryan does not understand this concept perhaps he should find a stockbroker to explain it to him.

Most grievous, these faux Revolutionaries claim some hocus-pocus “natural law” as superior to human rationality, which admittedly is imperfect, but is arguably the sole attribute elevating the human condition above that of asparagus. In so doing, the worshipers of irrationality simultaneously deny Jefferson’s moral vision that human equality is the sine qua non of any civil society that deserves the consent of the governed.

“Our rights come from Nature and God.” Can this be true simply because some guy said so? More important, is this really the “idea” upon which the American nation was either founded, or ought to exist today?

No, it is not, and we know why it is not.

Ryan’s “idea” is the fantasy of a self-indulgent class who, like many of our elitist forebears, would arrogate to themselves the authority to say whose rights will bloom and whose will wither on the vine. His grand idea is merely the scheme of anti-democratic con-men, of fake Patriots, who would rescue self-government – not from any enemy, foreign or domestic – but only from itself. As ever, it is the idea of men who would be kings.

Read more.. http://consortiumnews.com/2012/10/06/ryans-distortion-of-americas-founding/

8 Facts That Prove Our Govt. Is Not Going Broke

Pete Peterson, the billionaire former private equity mogul, is quietly funding a noisy bus tour [3]to whip up debt hysteria across the land. The “Ten Million a Minute Tour” headed by the Peterson Foundation’s former CEO, David M. Walker (and featuring such economic soothsayers as Alan Greenspan and Ross Perot) will end this week in Washington, DC after traveling coast to coast to alert America about the myriad of alleged dangers posed by government debt and deficits.

Really, it should be called the “Million an Hour” cavalcade because that’s about how much Peterson and company made, in part, through obscene tax loopholes designed for private equity firms and hedge funds. If there really is a debt problem, then Peterson and his fellow tax-evading financial moguls have contributed mightily to it.

But America does not face a debt crisis. Nor are we likely to face one in the next 100 years. In fact, we are the last country on Earth that needs to worry about its public debt.

What’s really behind the debt histrionics is a relentless effort by these Very Important People to use a trumped-up crisis to shred the social safety net and bring forth their bleak vision of a dog-eat-dog society where government provides for no one (except the super-rich). Unfortunately, many liberals are also buying into a “debt crisis” that doesn’t exist.

It’s time to inoculate ourselves from deficit hysteria. The first step is recognizing that virtually everything we read and hear about government debt and deficits is misleading, manipulative or just plain wrong. So, here’s your handy guide to the eight biggest lies.

But first, some basic definitions and facts:

• ·         Deficits are how much the government budget goes into the red in a given year. The red ink is covered by the sale of government bonds to investors here and abroad.
• ·         The national debt is the total amount of what the U.S. owes on those government bonds. If we have deficits year after year, then the debt gets larger year after year.
• ·         The projected deficit for this fiscal year is over $1 trillion.
• ·         Our total government debt is more than $16 trillion as of Oct. 1, 2012.

1. Isn’t it extremely dangerous to have such a large government debt?

Supposedly, the danger point comes when investors no longer will buy our debt at reasonable interest rates because they fear we won’t pay it back. Are we there yet? Are we getting close?

Let’s start with a look at debt as a percentage of our nation’s annual economic activity (gross domestic product or GDP). The chart below shows our national debt as a percentage of GDP hit an all-time high of 121 percent during the depths of World War II and recently began sharply rising again in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. In 2011 the debt/GDP percentage reached 102.9 percent. Most forecasts suggest it is now leveling off.

We can also compare ourselves to other large economies. Here’s a list from the International Monetary Fund [4].

•  

Government Debt as a Percentage of GDP, 2011
China	25.8%
France	86.3%
Germany	81.5%
Japan	229.8%
United Kingdom	82.5%
United States	102.9%

What’s going on here? First off, China’s percentage is artificially low because it buries a good deal of public debt in opaque provincial and local government loans and land giveaways. And then you have Japan. Why isn’t everyone screaming about Japan’s debt? Because investors consider its economy to be strong, steady and safe. They’re happy to lend to Japan at very low interest rates. And where is the safest haven in the world? Here in the USA. Investors are willing to lend us money at almost no interest rate at all.

Here’s the rub. Debt is only too high if the underlying economy is shaky. Investors all over the world are betting that the U.S. is the strongest, most stable nation right now, and over the long haul. They expect our economy to grow which automatically will shrink the debt ratio. It’s simple math. Economy up, debt down as a percentage of the economy (all other things being equal).

Despite what you hear from nearly every media outlet and every politician, investors do not see our debt as dangerously high. They are more than willing to pour money into the most stable, dynamic economy in the world – one that is both safe now, and likely to grow in the future.

2. Aren’t we’re in danger of becoming the next Greece?

Greece is in a heap of trouble even though its debt-to-GDP ratio (169.8%) is far below Japan’s (229.8%). With an unemployment rate of over 25 percent, Greece’s economy is shrinking rapidly. The more it shrinks the more it has to borrow to pay back previous loans and to balance its budget. But it can’t borrow unless it cuts its budgets. To cut its budgets, it has to lay off public employees and cut its social safety net, which further increases unemployment and shrinks its economy. Unless you’re in love with retsina, this is not a great time to be living in Greece.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Greece’s recovery is that it doesn’t have its own currency. If Greece did, it could let the value of that currency fall, which would make its economy more competitive. Obviously, both the US and Japan have their own currencies. Also, the U.S. and Japanese economies are much, much richer, stronger and diverse than Greece’s. Therefore, there is no chance – none whatsoever --- that the U.S and Japan will face Greece’s debt problems. Anyone who makes that comparison is either a fool or a demagogue hoping to skewer popular social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

3. Won’t cutting the national debt make the economy grow?

When economic calamity strikes, we humans seem instinctively to hoard our remaining resources. (Once we had belts, we tightened them.) But complex modern economies are not like families. Economies mired in major recessions require spending, not austerity, to function properly. As John Maynard Keynes noted two generations ago, when an economy is in a depression, the worst thing you can do is pay down government debt, precisely because families and businesses already are belt-tightening so much. Instead you need to run up even more debt to make up for the demand we lose when households “tighten their belts.” If major governments move to austerity during hard times, the recession grows deeper.

You want proof? Look at Europe today, where a real-time austerity experiment is in progress. Led by Germany, each European nation is cutting back on social services and increasing taxes. The net result: The 17-nation Eurozone is falling back into another recession with unemployment now rising to 11.4%. As the New York Times [5] reports:

Greece had an unemployment rate of 24.4 percent in June, the latest month for which data were available. Spain still had the region’s highest jobless rate, at 25.1 percent, and an even bigger problem among young people. Nearly 53 percent of Spaniards younger than 25 were classified as unemployed in August.

There is no way in hell that cutting government debt will put America back to work. Instead it will send our economy into a nosedive. We’ve already unnecessarily unemployed more than 650,000 public employees due to self-destructive cuts in local, state and federal budgets. It would have been far, far, better for the government to borrow more to put America back to work.

4. But isn’t it ominous that the rating agencies took away our AAA rating?

Ludicrous, not ominous.

Rating agencies were first established to help investors judge the ability of corporations to repay their debts (corporate bonds). At first the rating agencies were paid by investors who wanted the information. But, a new business model emerged --- agencies were paid by the corporations and banks who were selling bonds in question. No one seemed to care much about the obvious conflict of interest until the recent Wall Street crash. Then we painfully discovered that these “independent” rating agencies made tens of millions of dollars doling out AAA ratings on every piece of toxic trash that investment banks paid them to rate. Then when the crash hit, the rating agencies had to reclassify thousands of mortgage-back bonds from AAA to junk. In short, the rating agencies are best viewed as pet poodles for the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks and investment houses.

Rating agencies also evaluate debt offerings by governments and government agencies so that investors can decide how much risk to take on. The lower the rating, the higher the risk, and therefore, the higher the interest rate for the government offering. Fair enough.

But when it comes to rating major economic powerhouses like the U.S., Japan or Germany, what the rating agencies say is meaningless. When the U.S. “lost” its AAA rating, it was supposed to signal a rise in risk and therefore a rise in the interest rates the U.S. would be forced to pay investors to hold its debt. Instead, U.S. government bond rates went down as investors poured more money, not less, into buying our debt.

So why did the rating agencies bother to offer what obviously was a meaningless downgrade? Because again, they were acting as Wall Street poodles, hoping to tip government policy toward debt reduction and away from making Wall Street pay for the unconscionable mess it created. It’s amazing to watch highly educated politicians genuflect before these bogus ratings. It’s theology, not economics.

In short, the cut in our AAA rating should be viewed for what it really is: a political act to help Wall Street support the Republicans, submarine new financial regulations, and redirect the debate away from increased taxes on Wall Street and the super-rich.

5. Isn’t China buying up most of our debt and doesn’t that put us at its mercy?

The U.S. imports more from China than it exports to China. This produces a trade deficit (not government debt). In the first six months of 2012 we imported $235 billion worth of goods from China but exported only $61 billion to China for a net trade deficit of $174 billion. (There are many reasons for this imbalance, but a big one is that China keeps its currency artificially undervalued, which in turn, keeps its products cheap and ours more expensive. That makes it very hard to compete.)

Since China wants to do something with all those extra dollars, it buys U.S. government bonds. How much of our debt does China now own? About 8 cents of every dollar of outstanding U.S. debt. Other U.S. agencies like the Social Security Trust Fund and the Federal Reserve own about 30 cents of every dollar of our debt, and individual investors, corporations and other countries own the rest – about 62 cents of every dollar of debt. (See U.S Treasury Department[6] and Businessinsider.com [7].)

Yes, China is the biggest foreign player, but it's not about to make trouble. It couldn’t even if it wanted to. China needs us to buy its goods or its economy will collapse. (Think for a minute about the trade. We get real goods and China gets paper…or rather little electronic signals in a currency account. It’s not clear who’s getting the better of that deal.)

In the end, large global economies are joined at the hip. China will buy our debt because it has no other choice. It has no interest at all in roiling the U.S. debt markets. If we go down, they go down.

6. Isn’t the debt caused by runaway entitlements?

Now we’re getting down to what this debt debate is really about. The austerity folks don’t want to tighten just any belt. They want to shred our social safety net. Debt is their excuse. Instead of making an open and honest case for a dog-eat-dog society, the social Darwinists (with Paul Ryan their new leader) make the utterly untruthful claim that so-called entitlements are driving up debt.

With a little addition, we can see how bogus this claim really is.

About a decade ago we were running a yearly surplus, meaning that each year we were paying down our national debt, not adding to it. Then stuff happened.

• ·         The Bush tax cuts (continued by Obama under severe Republican pressure) cost $250 billion a year in revenue.
• ·         The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan added another $300 billion a year in unfunded expenditures.
• ·         The Wall Street crash (which destroyed 8 million jobs in six months) led to a total of $350 billion a year in lost tax revenues and increased expenditures for the unemployed.
• ·         The bailout/stimulus rescue of the economy cost an additional $300 million a year for two years.

As the bottom black line on the graph below shows, instead of our current trillion dollar deficit, we’d be very close to a balanced budget were it not for Wall Street’s reckless greed, the unnecessary wars, and tax cuts for the rich. And we’d get there without shrinking social programs.

7. Isn’t this Obama’s fault?

As we just reviewed, Obama is not the cause of the rising debt. The tax cuts, the unfunded wars, the Wall Street crash and the bailouts started on Bush’s watch. Obama did indeed push the stimulus through, but that was a good move for our economy not a bad one. Furthermore, it was too small, not too big. (And Obamacare, over the long haul, is roughly neutral when it comes to the national debt.)

Obama, however, is not blameless. He should be faulted, not for running up the debt, but for not running it up more! Instead of kowtowing to deficit mania he should have visited unemployment line after unemployment line to make the case that Congress must allocate the funds needed to put America back to work.

With long-term interest rates at record lows (2.81% for 30 years) we could easily afford to borrow more to rebuild our infrastructure, weatherize all public buildings, provide free tuition for college students, and finance a host of other public programs that would move us to a full employment economy. And Obama could even make the case for funding much of it through a financial transaction tax on Wall Street’s casinos, as well as increased taxes on the super-rich. Of course, the Republicans wouldn’t go along with it. But the Communicator-in-Chief could have done more to educate the public that jobs, jobs and more jobs should come first. No talk of debt reduction, no “Grand Bargains” with the Republicans, until unemployment comes down to 5 percent! (And by then the debt/GDP ratio would be rapidly declining anyway because of economic growth.)

8. Won’t our kids be forced to shoulder the debt we leave behind?

Yes, this is a real tearjerker. Who among us wants to pawn off our debts onto our kids? A sad thought, if were true. But it’s not. Government debt, unlike our mortgages, is rarely repaid in full. Instead they roll over. The cost to taxpayers is the interest we pay on the outstanding debt and the refinancing of it. With the global economy at stall speed there is no danger in the foreseeable future of rising interest rates.

What about in 30 years when our darlings are at the helm? The answer depends on the economy, not on debt. If we borrow cheaply now to put our people back to work, if we invest fully in funding higher education, and if we build up our crumbling infrastructure and tend to the environment, then we’ll leave behind a prosperous economy. Debt will shrink over time as the economy grows. And more revenues will come in as our people go back to work.

However, if we become obsessed with debt and deficits, and slash to the bone the programs that develop future prosperity, we’ll leave behind a faltering economy and an even bigger environmental mess.

Debt hysteria is like a pandemic that quickly cripples logical thinking. Once infected, Very Important People with Very Impressive Degrees sound like fools.

Let’s hope there’s a cure…and soon.  

Read more.. http://www.alternet.org/economy/8-facts-prove-our-govt-not-going-broke

Chris Hedges -- The Maimed

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

It is only the maimed that finally know war. And we are the maimed. We are the broken and the lame. We ask for forgiveness. We seek redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war.

We do not speak of war. War is captured only in the long, vacant stares, in the silences, in the trembling fingers, in the memories most of us keep buried deep within us, in the tears.

It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the scars and wounds. These we carry within us. These we cannot articulate. The horror. The horror.

War gives to its killers a God-like power to take life. And there are those here tonight that have felt and exercised that power. They turned other human beings into objects. And in that process of killing they became objects, machines, instruments of death, war’s victimizers and war’s victims. And they do not want to be machines again.

We wander through life with the deadness of war within us. There is no escape. There is no peace. We know an awful truth, an existential truth. War exposed the lies of patriotism and collective virtue of the nation that our churches, our schools, our press, our movies, our books, our government told us about ourselves, about who we were. And we see through these illusions. But those who speak this truth are cast out. Ghosts. Strangers in a strange land.

Who are our brothers and sisters? Who is our family? Whom have we become? We have become those whom we once despised and killed. We have become the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving over her murdered child, and we murdered this child, in a mud-walled village of Afghanistan or a sand-filled cemetery in Fallujah. Our father is the father lying on a pallet in a hut, paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister lives in poverty in a refugee camp outside Kabul, widowed, desperately poor, raising her children alone. Our brother, yes, our brother, is in the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgency and al-Qaida. And he has an automatic rifle. And he kills. And he is becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It teaches us to deny another’s humanity, worth, being, and to kill and be killed.

There are days we wish we were whole. We wish we could put down this cross. We envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war and celebrate what we know is despicable. And sometimes it makes us wish for death, for the peace of it. But we know too the awful truth, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” And we would rather be maimed and broken and in pain than be a monster, and some of us, once, were monsters.

I cannot heal you. You will never be healed. I cannot take away your wounds, visible and invisible. I cannot promise that it will be better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation—this plague of war.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child?
A long ways from home
A long ways from home

Towering about us are banks and other financial institutions that profit from war. War, for some, is a business. And across this country lies a labyrinth of military industries that produce nothing but instruments of death. And some of us once served these forces. It is death we defy, not our own death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark, primeval lusts for power and personal wealth, the hypermasculine language of war and patriotism, are used to justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent and mock justice. ... And we will not use these words of war.

We cannot flee from evil. Some of us have tried through drink and drugs and self-destructiveness. Evil is always with us. It is because we know evil, our own evil, that we do not let go, do not surrender. It is because we know evil that we resist. It is because we know violence that we are nonviolent. And we know that it is not about us; war taught us that. It is about the other, lying by the side of the road. It is about reaching down in defiance of creeds and oaths, in defiance of religion and nationality, and lifting our enemy up. All acts of healing and love—and the defiance of war is an affirmation of love—allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however broken we are, we are not yet helpless, however much we despair we are not yet without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist. And it is in this act of resistance that we find our salvation.

Read more.. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_maimed_20121007/

FEMA VIDEO

Here is the video Gary mentioned on his radio show.  

Dr. Brian Moench - Mitt Romney: Gold Medal in Dishonesty

Even as Mitt and Ann Romney were going for a gold medal with their dressage horse, Rafalca, in the London Summer Olympics, Mitt already - in my opinion - had a gold medal wrapped up. Maybe not for horse dancing, but for mental gymnastics, and by that I mean lying. And not just for lying about his Bain Capital tenure, or being deliberately deceitful about Obama. I think a serious fundamental defect in Mitt has been on display for a long time.

In 1969, at age 19, I went on a Mormon mission just like Mitt. I eventually supervised about 200 other missionaries. A few years later, while living in Boston during my medical residency, I also attended the same church as Mitt and Ann Romney. Mitt had several high callings from the Mormon Church hierarchy during his time in Boston, eventually supervising the ecclesiastic affairs of about 4,000 Boston Mormons, much like a shepherd watching over his flock. Ann and my wife shared positions of responsibility in our local "ward," and in that capacity, Ann was in our home several times.

My wife and I both thought highly of Ann and liked her as a friend and a fellow church member. We liked Mitt as well, in that he was married to Ann. Mitt would offer a firm, robotic handshake on Sunday mornings, but he managed to make his "Good morning, it's great to see you," feel condescending and superficial.

Mitt was distinctly impersonal and it seemed his interest in me was only to the degree that I could further his career, which I couldn't - I had no pedigree to enhance the value of my Harvard appointment. He was nakedly ambitious and it was widely assumed by fellow church members that he would eventually run for president.

Mitt climbed quickly up the Mormon Church ladder, becoming a "Stake President" at a very young age, while simultaneously laying the foundation of his high-profile political career. Within the Mormon faithful his ascendancy to the doorstep of the presidency is viewed with almost as much anticipation as the Second Coming of Jesus. They look to a Mitt presidency as validation of their belief system and a golden opportunity to disseminate it worldwide. To them, Mitt embodies simultaneous theological and political triumph.

Read more...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/10481-mitt-romney-gold-medal-in-dishonesty

Graham Peebles - Incarcerated Inside Israel Palestinians Tortured And Isolated

Detention without trial, the presumption of guilt, denial of family visits, solitary confinement, torture, violent interrogation, and denial of access to appropriate health care, such is the Israeli judicial system and prison confinement experienced by Palestinian men, women and indeed children.

Currently there are, according to B'T selem “4,484 Palestinians – security detainees, confined in Israeli prisons.” Family contact is virtually impossible for prisoners, most of who are held inside Israel . This contravenes international law in the form of the universally trumpeted Fourth Geneva Convention (Article's 49 & 76), consistently violated and disregarded by Israel .

International laws – legally binding upon Israel , who are not above the rule of law, must be respected and enforced. Richard Falk UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, in the UN news 2/5/12 called “on the international community to ensure that Israel complies with international human rights laws and norms in its treatment of Palestinian prisoners.” The UN makes its feelings clear in the ‘Question of Palestine Administrative Detention' report (UNQAP) when it says, Israel “has historically ratified international agreements regarding human rights protection, whilst at the same time refusing to apply the agreements within the Occupied Palestinian Territory , attempting to create legal justifications for its illegal actions.” A comprehensive list of international legally binding agreements dutifully signed, ratified and consequently disregarded by various Israeli governments are cited by the UN, which sits hands tied, impotent it seems in the face of Israel's illegal and violent occupation (a fact that cannot be stated often or loudly enough), submissive to the imperialist Godfather. America .

Since the six-day war in 1967 an estimated 750,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons, including 23,000 women and 25,000 children. This constitutes, Richard Falk states “approximately 20 per cent of the total Palestinian population in the occupied territory or 40 per cent of the Palestinian male population there.” Staggering figures of those personally imprisoned, whist a whole nation is held captive intimidated by an illegal occupying power upon their homeland.

Read more...

http://www.countercurrents.org/peebles120812.htm

Brad Johnson - Meet Paul Ryan: Climate Denier, Conspiracy Theorist, Koch Acolyte

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, is a virulent denier of climate science, with a voting record to match.

A favorite of the Koch brothers, Ryan has accused scientists of engaging in conspiracy to “intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He has implied that snow invalidates global warming.

Ryan has voted to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse pollution, to eliminate White House climate advisers, to block the U.S. Department of Agriculture from preparing for climate disasters like the drought devastating his home state, and to eliminatethe Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E):

Read more...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/11/677051/meet-paul-ryan-climate-denier-conspiracy-theorist-koch-acolyte/

Michael Carmichael - The Romney- Ryan Ticket: Running the Radical Republican Right-Wing

Shocked by the latest poll numbers showing that he trails Obama by 7 points and stunned by the fact that the American people demand to see his tax returns for multiple zero tax years, Mitt Romney needed to come up with something fast to distract the incessant media barrage besieging his faltering campaign for president.

After a devastating trip abroad that led to a Niagara of negative ink about a lengthy concatenation of diplomatic blunders from London to Jerusalem to Poland, Romney has tried just about everything his puny mind can conceive to distract the public from his business record, his taxes and Bain Capital.

However, the month of August presented Romney with two tactical opportunities to evade (at least momentarily) the insatiable onslaught of the probing media.

First and foremost, Romney had the option of naming his Vice Presidential running mate.  Secondly, Romney will be featured as the Guest of Honor at what promises to be one of the most dreadful spectacles the world has ever seen:  the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida later this month.  With Romney’s luck, this convention will be tantamount to a public lynching, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

To erect a shield to provide a partial screen of defense from the ceaseless media attacks bombarding him and his frazzled staff, Romney finally selected a running mate whose economic views uncannily mirror his own for the privatization of government.  In order to re-enforce his core philosophy of the divine right of corporate and plutocratic financial supremacy, Romney has turned to Paul Ryan of Wisconsin’s 1^st District that encompasses the swish metropolitan areas of Kenosha, Racine, Muskego and the Congressman’s hometown of Janesville.

On the 29^th of January 1970, Paul Davis Ryan was born the youngest of four children of his Irish-German Roman Catholic parents.  In his youth, Ryan enjoyed the out-of-doors activities of skiing, hiking and camping in the Colorado Rockies.  While attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Ryan worked as a counselor at a summer camp until he landed the prestigious position as a “Hotdogger” for the Oscar Mayer Wiener Company, a job that permitted him to wheel around Ohio and Wisconsin in the now world famous Wienermobile promoting the sales of hot dogs, bacon and over twenty-five kinds of ‘lunchable’ meats including:  bologna (aka:  “baloney”).

Read more...

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32308

Wendell Potter - "Path to Prosperity?" For Many Senior Citizens, VP Pick Ryan's Plan Would Be Path to the Poorhouse

If Americans who are embracing Rep. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" -- and that now includes Mitt Romney -- spent a few minutes reviewing a few recent research reports, they just might conclude that the Wisconsin Republican's plan to reduce the deficit might better be renamed the "Path to the Poorhouse" because of what it would mean to the Medicare program and many senior citizens.

Ryan's proposal, which will get new scrutiny now that Romney has made him his running mate, would end the current Medicare program for everyone born after 1956. It would replace Medicare with a system in which beneficiaries would receive a set amount of money from the government every year to buy coverage from private insurers. That money would go straight into insurance companies' bank accounts, which would make them far richer and even more in control of our health care system than they already are.

While the amount of money beneficiaries would receive would depend on their health status, the average 65-year-old would get $8,000 under the Ryan plan in 2022, the year it would take effect. That's the amount the current Medicare program is expected to spend on the average 65-year-old that year. After 2022, the annual increase in the "premium support" payments would be based on the consumer price index (CPI). And therein lies one of the biggest problems for anyone hoping to live long enough to enroll in Medicare and stay alive for a few years.

Last month the government reported that the consumer price index had increased 1.7 percent between June 2011 and June 2012, meaning we've been paying on average 1.7 percent more this year than last year for goods and services. The cost of medical care, however, shot up 4.3 percent -- more than two and a half times the CPI. And that was not an aberration. The cost of medical care has been rising faster than the cost of just about everything else in this country for years. That's one of the reasons why private health insurance premiums have been increasing so rapidly. That and the fact that insurance corporations have to report a big enough profit every quarter to satisfy their shareholders and Wall Street analysts.

Read more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/path-to-prosperity-for-ma_b_1767573.html

Stephen Lendman - War Without Mercy in Syria

If wars had labels, Syria's conflict would be called Made in America. 

Paul Wolfowitz and other Project for the New American Century (PNAC) ideologues planned it years ago. They also targeted half a dozen or more other countries.

PNAC's Statement of Principles called for "shap(ing) a new century favorable to American principles and interests." Doing so it said requires: 

• "increase(ing) defense spending significantly;"

• "challeng(ing) regimes hostile to our interests and values;" and

• "accept(ing) responsibility for American's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."

PNAC effectively declared war. Independent nations were targeted. Implementing policy required a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." 

False flags provide pretexts for militarism, wars, occupations, domestic repression, national security state extremism, and other policies antithetical to free and open societies. PNAC members got what they wanted. 

They comprise a rogues gallery of hardcore neocon extremists. Charter members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Jeb Bush, and others.

In 2009, PNAC reinvented itself as the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). Policies remain unchanged. Regime change in Syria is prioritized. Direct intervention is urged. 

Obama is criticized for inaction. "What is clear," it says, is that America "sent a horrible message to tyrants elsewhere about the (non-existent) costs of mass killings of innocents."

FPI knows Washington bears full responsibility. It's not enough. FPI wants full-scale war initiated.

Read more...

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2012/08/war-without-mercy-in-syria.html