California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

The World's Policeman Cannot Even Police Its Own Borders

by John Lawrence

The U.S. has about 750 military bases across 80 countries in the world and had deployed 173,000 troops in 159 different countries as of July 2021. Yet it can't patrol or defend its own borders. This is the height of ridiculousness. While Congress persons debate some Rube Goldberg solution to border security, the Biden administration should do this if it wants to neutralize Trump's stand on border security: the Democrat policy should be "not one illegal border crossing should be tolerated. We stand for increasing legal immigration while decreasing illegal immigration to ZERO." The US spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, and yet is willing to tolerate people entering the country illegally. What a joke! If Biden wants to defeat Trump, he should take this issue away from him by declaring that his goal is: NOT ONE ILLEGAL ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES.

This means that, instead of spending money on 750 military bases in 80 countries all over the world, the US needs to spend money instead on policing its own border including, but not limited to, physical barriers. In addition there must be electronic barriers, satellite surveillance, and other sophisticated means of surveillance. Why not use AI, the supposed cure all for everything that ails us. Why not put 10 or 100 of those military bases circling the world right on the US border? To be clear I am not advocating withdrawing from being involved in world affairs, but that involvement which is manifested in being the world's policeman has got to change. It has been of very little value if you add it all up. The US can effectively patrol the whole world anyway from the sky, from space and from the sea. It doesn't need land based military bases. The US should be involved in the world by expanding its Peace Corp, building infrastructure like China is with its Belt and Road Initiative and mitigating climate change in vulnerable countries. In other words the US should be a force for good in the world not just a force for preserving US interests or the status quo.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed on January 28, 2024 in Jordan, while more than 40 other service members were injured following an uncrewed aerial system attack at a military base near the Syrian border. Then of course the US has to retaliate to avenge the deaths of those soldiers. Soldiers on many of these bases are sitting ducks and are provocative to those seeking to damage US interests.Yet the role of the US as the world's policeman is not even debated by politicians and probably won't be as the election season heats up. Instead the border debate is a big deal as it should be. Biden needs to assert that his goal is that not one person should enter the US illegally, but that legal immigration should be expanded. He should outTrump Trump on border security if he wants to be elected, and, while he is at it, he should demand that at least 25% of the bloated military budget which amounts to about a trillion dollars a year be redirected to border security. There is no reason why the US should not have the most sophisticated border security system in the world.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden's Changing The Asylum Law Without Congress' Help

by John Lawrence

The asylum law in effect says that any alien who enters the US legally or illegally may apply for asylum. This incentivizes aliens to enter illegally, and, if caught, to simply request asylum. Since they would have to go before a court to determine if they should get asylum and the court is backed up for years, entering illegally and requesting asylum is a guarantee of at least currently five years in the US during which time they could attempt to remain hidden and not show up at court. The reality is that only about 40% of asylum seekers that show up for their court date actually get asylum. The rest are deported. According to U.S. and international law, a claim of persecution must be made based on one of five “protected grounds”: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Poverty, scarce economic opportunities, displacement caused by natural disasters or a desire to reunite with family are not grounds for asylum under U.S. law. Here's the actual law:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.

In order to dissuade asylum seekers from just showing up in a disorderly fashion en masse at the southern border, the Biden administration has been setting up a system to encourage people to apply for asylum in an orderly manner. This includes applying at a port of entry or applying from a country in south or central America. Also,they are disincentivized from coming across the border illegally because, if they do, they are ineligible for asylum for 5 years. Here's the new rule:

SUMMARY: The Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) are issuing a final rule in anticipation of a potential surge of migration at the southwest border (“SWB”) of the United States following the termination of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (“CDC”) public health Order. The rule encourages migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in another country through which they travel, thereby reducing reliance on human smuggling networks that exploit migrants for financial gain. The rule does so by introducing a rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility for certain noncitizens who neither avail themselves of a lawful, safe, and orderly pathway to the United States nor seek asylum or other protection in a country through which they travel. In the absence of such a measure, which would apply only to those who enter at the southwest land border or adjacent coastal borders during a limited, specified date range, the number of migrants expected to travel without authorization to the United States would be expected to increase significantly, to a level that risks undermining the Departments’ continued ability to safely, effectively, and humanely enforce and administer U.S. immigration law, including the asylum system, in the face of exceptionally challenging circumstances. Coupled with an expansion of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, the Departments expect the rule to lead to a reduction in the number of migrants who seek to cross the SWB without authorization to enter, thereby reducing the reliance by migrants on dangerous human smuggling networks, protecting against extreme overcrowding in border facilities, and helping to ensure that the processing of migrants seeking protection in the United States is done in an effective, humane, and efficient manner. In addition, the Departments are requesting comment on whether applicability of the rebuttable presumption should be extended to noncitizens who enter the United States without documents sufficient for lawful admission during the same temporary time period at a maritime border.

DATES: Effective date: This rule is effective on May 11, 2023.

This document is scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on 05/16/2023 and available online at federalregister.gov/d/2023-10146, and on govinfo.gov

The Biden administration is solving the border crisis without the help of Congress in a way that's sure to be challenged in court, but in the way that Congress would actually probably solve it if they were inclined to act and reform immigration laws. Biden should get a lot of credit for going ahead without Congress which is a sewer of conflict, stagnation and malfunction. An orderly process for applying for asylum has been created by the Biden administration which should discourage masses of people showing up at the southern border. For this they deserve much credit.

Off the Top of My Head

The Immigration Debacle - Part 6 - Strengthening the Border

by John Lawrence

As much as the provision of safe zones and other aspects that have been mentioned in this series, strengthening the US southern border is equally important. The problem is that there are those who would rather take their chances illegally entering the US rather than going to a safe zone or a port of entry and asking for asylum there. Right now only about 20% of asylum seekers actually get it. What we want to encourage is legal, orderly immigration, not helter skelter, chaotic and random immigration by people illegally crossing the border and vanishing into the interior of the US. Democrats don't emphasize enough their preference for legal and not illegal immigration enough. One gets the impression that they are for immigration whether it is legal or illegal.  So Republicans are the ones who are left with the issue of strengthening the border to minimize illegal immigration. Democrats should be just as concerned about non citizens breaching the southern border illegally as Republicans are.

Since those going to the proposed safe zones may never be cleared or given asylum, desperate people will still take their chances by trying to enter the US illegally. As the law stands now, if they set foot in the US and ask for asylum, they must be given a court date (right now the waiting time to appear in court is 4 1/2 years) and allowed to stay in the US while they are waiting. They cannot access government benefits and given a green card, however, until asylum is granted. Part of disincentivizing illegal immigration is to change this law so that those entering illegally can be deported. The other part is to strengthen the southern border both physically and electronically. Satellite observation should be used. More human resources should also be put into border protection. Potential immigrants can always apply for asylum at a port of entry, but, if safe zones in Guatemala or other central American countries are realized, people would not have to make the long trek to the US to apply at a port of entry. Therefore, as much as I hate to say it, Trump was right to want to build a border wall. That in and of itself is not enough to discourage illegal immigration. Suffice it to say that more resources should be put into protecting the southern border while incentivizing potential immigrants to apply for asylum in safe zones closer to their home countries as Representative Gonzalez has proposed..

Legal and orderly immigration should be encouraged and the numbers let in should increase. There is a labor shortage in the US for the kinds of jobs that immigrants usually are qualified for. This means agricultural and construction workers among other kinds of laborers. Increasing the number of legal immigrants let into the country will not only ameliorate the labor shortage but will reduce inflation as supply chains will become more efficient. I am for humane treatment of immigrants, but incentivizing them to trek to the southern border and enter illegally is not humane. Asylum seekers, refugees and those wishing to immigrate for a better life should all be treated humanely and incentivized to apply in a legal and orderly manner.

Off the Top of My Head

The Immigration Debacle - Part 4 - Congressman Vicente Gonzalez' Safe Zone Proposal

by John Lawrence

Similar to suggestions in this series, Congressman Gonzalez has proposed a safe zone in Guatemala from which asylum seekers could apply to enter the United States and take the pressure off the southern border. At the same time the law that allows admission to the US for anyone setting foot on the US would change. People doing this would be transported back to the safe zone. They could apply for asylum there. Congressman Vicente's proposal is the following:

“America is a haven for those looking to escape poverty, violence, and religious or political persecution,” stated Congressman Gonzalez. “It is time we address our flawed immigration process and ensure the safety of migrants and the security of our country. I am proud to introduce this legislation that allows individuals to apply for asylum in their home country—breaking the cycle of dependence on human traffickers and the deadly risk of trekking thousands of miles over harsh terrain. 

“The Safe Zones Act provides much needed relief to our border communities and gives a humane path to asylum seekers, removing their reliance on cartels for passage to our southern border. The Safe Zones Act allows people to apply for asylum legally and securely in a process that alleviates pressure on our Border Patrol personnel, border communities, and our immigration courts. The scenes we have witnessed from migrants dying in tractor-trailers to drowning in the Rio Grande are nothing short of horrific and heartbreaking. It is time we adequately address immigration reform with common-sense, bipartisan measures that provide actual results.  

“I urge my colleagues to join me and send this bill to President Biden’s desk. Seeking a better life in the United States should not be a death sentence for families. It is time we change the system for the better.” 

It goes on:

• Safe Zones are designated by the Secretary of State under section 207(g) to accept and process applications for refugee admissions to the United States.

• Safe Zones may include embassies, consulates, other diplomatic facilities, or other facilities as determined to be appropriate by the Secretary of State.

The only thing I would add is, considering conservative concerns, the border itself should be strengthened to discourage illegal immigration. If those attempting to cross the US border know that they will be caught and transported back to the safe zone, they will be disincentivized from doing so.

Off the Top of My Head

The Immigration Debacle

by John Lawrence

The number of people seeking admission to the US and Europe is only going to increase due to a number of factors - climate change will be the main one as time goes on. The international laws on asylum seeking need to be revised. Right now anyone who presents themselves at the border of the US or a European country and requests asylum can legally enter that country and have their asylum request considered although it may or may not be granted. The problem is that the law as written expects that applicants are individuals with a specific request. The situation now, however, is that huge throngs of people are migrating due to war, crime, economic conditions and increasingly climate change. The reality is that it's not an individual phenomenon any more. Although any country is required to accept asylum seekers regardless if they had anything to do with creating the conditions that led to the people requesting asylum, the immensity of the problem makes the current law inadequate and insufficient.

The solution to this seemingly intractable problem is multifaceted. 1) The law that says that anyone setting foot on American soil is entitled to asylum and a hearing needs to be invalidated. 2) Defenses at the border need to be increased so that illegal asylum seekers (those who don't apply for asylum at a port of entry) can't cross the border illegally. 3) The US needs to intervene in countries where the conditions contribute to migration and to the extent possible ameliorate those conditions so that people can stay in their own country and not be in danger of being killed or intimidated by criminals or gangs. In other words so that they can have security in their own countries. In addition the US should assist to the extent possible in creating the economic conditions such that people would want to stay in their own countries since more and more refugees and asylum seekers are economic refugees. 4) The US needs to encourage people to apply for asylum in their own countries by making it impossible to gain entry to the US legally or  illegally by coming to the border and making it propitious to apply for asylum or refugee status in their home countries. This could mean even offering cash to those who apply at home rather than coming to the border. In other words both a carrot and a stick approach. We should give them incentives to stay where they are.

The general approach would be to make it futile for migrants to approach the US border and to encourage them to apply for asylum in their home countries even using incentives for that and disincentives for coming to the border. Right now migrants have every incentive to come to the US border because once they have planted even one foot on US soil, it is required by law to give them an asylum hearing, and, meanwhile, they are in the US at least temporarily and need to be given humane treatment which costs money. To boot they may never even show up for their asylum hearing! This is a ridiculous situation. The US has exploited Central and South American countries economically for centuries. It needs to make up for it now by decreasing poverty in those countries and incentivizing people financially to stay in their own countries. To the extent people feel unsafe due to criminal and gang activities, these gangs need to be rooted out with or without the cooperation of the authorities in those countries.

Off the Top of My Head

And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. Mark 9:42

by John Lawrence

We're going to need quite a few millstones for all the Republicans (and a couple of Democrats) who won't vote to get rid of assault rifles because they are the facilitators of the next school shooting. Whoever thinks gun ownership is more important than childrens' lives is a sick, sad sack of shit. Nobody except the police needs to own a gun. Forget "sport shooting." Is that more important than a child's life? Is deer hunting or the killing of other wild animals more important than childrens' lives. There is no existential need for hunting or target shooting or any other activities involving guns that at all compares with the prevention of the destruction of childrens' lives and the lives of their families. A lot of these conservative Republicans are Christians, so they say. Well, do they give lip service to the above quote from the Bible? Do they take that literally that, if they support the sale of assault rifles, they should have a millstone hung around their neck and deposited in the depths of the ocean. Probably more than half of them don't even know what a millstone is. Well it was something used to grind wheat into flour back in the day, back in the day when water power was used instead of fossil fuel to process food.

So now in addition to the gun culture in America there is a "school shoot-em-up" culture. These people, like the gunman in Uvalde, post all their upcoming deeds on social media. Yet the authorities, who evidently can follow all the intentions of foreign countries who might do something nefarious, are incapable of following the social media explicit intentions of Americans themselves. The problem isn't with foreign terrorists. It's American terrorists who are the problem. As it turns out, the police in Uvalde weren't capable of following protocol and putting their own lives at risk. But that's what they are sworn to do - put their own lives at risk to save childrens' lives. It's a sad commentary on the courage of the 19 policemen who stood outside the classroom door for an hour while the shooter was free to wreak the destruction of childrens' lives inside the classroom. They were all cowards, plain and simple, especially the "commander" in charge. They deserve to go to jail for their dereliction of duty. None of them wanted to put their own lives at risk to save children.

Other countries have said no to guns after a mass shooting even those that had a gun culture. Well, they don't have one any more. Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history. So today is Memorial Day. We need to memorialize the lives of fallen children in mass shootings. Teachers don't need to carry guns. School doors just need to be locked at all times. If a teacher hadn't propped open the door through which the shooter entered, presumably, he never would have gained access to the school. In addition the school resource officer, presumably armed, was missing in action. He was supposed to be on campus, and he wasn't. Is he going to be prosecuted for dereliction of duty? There is nothing to memorialize this Memorial Day. The US is in an epidemic of gun violence and the elected leaders don't want to do anything about it because gun ownership, to them, is more important than childrens' lives, than the Grandmas' lives shot at Tops supermarket, There have been more than one mass shooting per day so far this year. Yet America, the lone outlier among nations in this regard, continues on its downward spiral of violence and destruction while it criticizes other nations for their lack of democracy.

Off the Top of My Head

The BIG LIE

by John Lawrence

A lot of people still believe the Big Lie - that Joe Biden didn't legitimately win the election. What isn't talked about is all the other Big Lies which the Republican party has been telling their constituents for years: the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, the Big Lie that Obama was born in Kenya, the Big Lie about selling arms to Iran to benefit the Contras, the Big Lie represented by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which escalated  the Vietnam war (OK that was Johnson, a Democrat), the Big Lie that Hillary was responsible for the death of White House attorney Vince Foster, the Big Lie that Hillary ran a child sex ring in a pizza restaurant and much more. There are more Big Lies, most of them associated with Republicans, especially Republican Presidents George W Bush, Ronald Reagan and Dick Nixon (his Big Lie was "I am not a crook.").

Lying is part and parcel of the way Republicans do business. How else to get a bunch of people to vote against their own real interests? Republicans have trained their base to respond favorably to them based on lies. Lies are usually juicier than the truth. The truth is often very mundane and quotidian. The truth is that Hillary was a very experienced and capable public servant. That's not too exciting. And then there was George H W Bush's dog whistle racist campaign ad about Willy Horton, a murderer who escaped prison on a week-end pass devised by his opponent Michael Dukakis. Racism probably won Bush the Presidency.

George W Bush was determined to invade Iraq. He went out of his way to no avail to pin 9/11 on Saddam. When no evidence could be found of this, he fabricated evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In The Untold History of the United States, the authors write:

"Lacking evidence, they manufactured their own. Cheney and Libby pointed repeatedly to a meeting in Prague between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, even though Tenet had proved that Atta was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting, living in Virginia in the shadow of CIA headquarters. ...

"Using this kind of notoriously false information, the administration challenged the findings of CIA analysts and UN weapons inspectors and tirelessly made its case for invading Iraq. "We know they have weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfield insisted. "There isn't any debate about it." In early October 2002, Bush, echoing a similar warning from Rice a month before, announced, "we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But no one could outdo Cheney when it came to outright fabrications and dire prognostications:

"'The Iraqi regime has ... been very busy in enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program. ... Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat at a top [sic] 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies and us.'"

Of course after the invasion no weapons of mass destruction were actually found. Recently deceased and highly decorated General Colin Powell was sent forth to argue about the existence of WMD in Iraq. The authors continue:

"But the most ignominious moment came on February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell, the most respected and trusted member of the administration, went before the United Nations and made the case for war. Bush had handpicked Powell for the job. "You have the credibility to do this," he told Powell. "Maybe they'll believe you." ...

"It was a thoroughly shameful performance that Powell later called a low point in his career. ... Members of the intelligence community were outraged over Pentagon neocons' hijacking, distorting and fabricating intelligence. When the nonexistent WMD failed to materialize, New York Time columnist Nicholas Kristof described them as "spitting mad" and eager to have their say. One lashed out, "As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know that this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attacks on Iraq."

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said, "As we know today, the Bush administration's reasons for the Iraq war were based on lies."

George W Bush's Big Lie cost a lot of American and Iraqi lives. So far Trump's Big Lie has cost the lives of relatively few Capitol policemen. But the stage is set for an assault on American democracy itself. The perpetration of Trump's Big Lie is being carried on by his henchmen in Congress and in the media. Their use of symbols such as flags in the January 6 insurrection is reminiscent of all the flags, symbols and pageantry of Nazi Germany, much of which was designed by Hitler himself who was an artist who failed to gain entrance to the Munich University before aspiring to world domination. The cries of "We're Number 1" by the insurrectionists and other bellicose Americans are echoes of their predecessors' cries of "Heil Hitler."

Off the Top of My Head

We Need to Change Our Spending Priorities Away From Military Adventurism and Toward Domestic Concerns

by John Lawrence

The military-industrial complex needs to be defunded, and the budgets of Homeland Security, the FBI and cybersecurity need to be augmented. We need to reconsider what "national security" really means especially in an era of climate change and pandemics. If the world's nations can not get along, climate change will end human civilization. The western nations, especially the US, need the cooperation of Russia and China in particular if climate change can even be mitigated to a less disastrous level than is already baked in the cake. Russia is one of the largest exporters of fossil fuel products, and will profit most from the thawing of the Arctic. If they are treated as pariahs, they will not be too concerned if the rest of the world becomes uninhabitable. Scientific American reported in an article entitled It's Time to Rein in Inflated Military Budgets:

"Despite the trillions of dollars Congress and successive administrations have lavished on the Pentagon since the turn of the century, the massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed worldwide are powerless against grave, nonmilitary threats to national security—from a raging pandemic to the fact that tens of millions of Americans breathe foul air, drink tainted water, and struggle to pay for food, housing and health care.

"Such a reassessment is long overdue. No other country’s military outlays come close. In FY 2019, the Pentagon’s budget was nearly three times bigger than China’s defense spending and more than 10 times larger than Russia’s. All told, the U.S. military budget in 2019 exceeded the next 10 countries’ defense budgets combined and singlehandedly accounted for a hefty 38 percent of military spending worldwide."

The truth is that lobbyists for the military-industrial complex will lose money if a sane foreign and domestic policy is adopted. It is a hotbed of self interest which will come up with infinite rationales for continued military spending even when it is obvious to a disinterested observer that the Defense Department is just an unabashed money pit. The article continues;

"There are plenty of reasons to cut the Pentagon’s budget, but its track record of profligate spending is among the most obvious. If the Pentagon were a private corporation, gross mismanagement would have forced it into bankruptcy years ago. Dysfunctional internal controls, aided and abetted by years of lax congressional and administration oversight, have enabled it to waste tens of billions of dollars annually, and the last 20 years are littered with a parade of overpriced, botched and bungled projects.

"In just the first decade of this century, the Pentagon was forced to cancel a dozen ill-conceived, ineffective weapons programs that cost taxpayers $46 billion. They included the Future Combat Systems program, a fleet of networked high-tech vehicles that did not work; the Comanche helicopter, which—after 22 years in development—was never built; and the 40-ton Crusader artillery gun, which never even made it to the prototype stage.

"To put this example of managerial malfeasance in context, these canceled programs collectively cost more than the federal government spent on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the last five years.

At least the Pentagon killed those projects before they wasted any more money. All too often, it does not know when to pull the plug. The Army’s attempt to replace its outmoded Bradley tank is a case in point. Over the last 17 years, it has blown an estimated $22.9 billion on three flawed prototypes, but in February—just three weeks after rejecting the third failed design—it issued yet another request for proposals from defense contractors."

To put it bluntly many peoples' livelihoods and many corporation's profits are tied up with the continued exorbitant spending by the Federal government in support of the Defense Department, but Defense is a misnomer if the spending priorities are so out of wack compared to the actual threats to the American people. In short we are wasting money on so-called defense and letting the real threats go unfunded and undefended.

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Militarization of American Consciousness

by John Lawrence, January17, 2021

Is it any wonder that a culture that celebrates the military and identifies patriotism with the American flag has generated a movement to over throw American constitutional government? Most of these people had their mindsets processed through the military establishment or through the military-industrial complex where the processing is just as military oriented. This combined with a perception that the US is becoming a multicultural, instead of a white oriented, society is enough to set them off. Also the state of American mental health is at a low ebb not least caused by the pandemic and the anger generated by the necessity of closing down small businesses or even with the perceived loss of freedom from a mandate to wear masks! The people chanting "USA. USA" and carrying multitudinous flags are the type of people whose notion of patriotism has to do with America being the Number One nation of the world, is identified with American power backed by the world's largest military. These are not people who served in the Peace Corps.

For example the Oath Keepers is an American far-right anti-government militia organization. The group describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group as "heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government." The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the group's founder as a known extremist and describes his announced plans to create localized militia units as "frightening". According to the SPLC, the group espouses a number of conspiracy and legal theories associated with the sovereign citizen movement and the white supremacist posse comitatus movement.

The bloated US military establishment is funded at a level that is ten times greater than the world's next largest militaries combined. In 2019, the United States spent $732 billion on national defense, which was more than the next 10 countries combined. So it's likely that the mindsets of the Capitol rioters have been processed through an American establishment that encourages their particular notion of patriotism which deemphasizes the idea of democracy and emphasizes xenophobia. It aspires to return to those days when the US was a white dominated country and rues the day that the demographics have changed toward a multicultural one. The American military establishment itself is an anachronism. When you add in the money spent on the US intelligence agencies and the nuclear program which is located in the Department of Energy, not in the Defense Department, the US spends about a trillion dollars a year on its defense establishment and yet it was impotent to prevent a mob of hooligans from taking over the US citadel of democracy - the US Capitol. Clearly our priorities are out of whack. Any ordinary 5th grader could have seen that a Trump rally numbering tens of thousands on the same day that Pence was supposed to legitimate the election results, after lies had been perpetrated ad infinitum that the results were not legitimate, could have been a disaster which it turned out to be.

Democracy cannot prevail without an educated citizenry yet the question must be asked: what kind of education? “If we needed a reminder of the fragility of our democracy, we got one,” said Andrew Delbanco, president of the Teagle Foundation, which promotes liberal arts education. “In the long run, the only force that can save democracy is an educated citizenry -- citizens, that is, who know enough to resist the kind of lies and incitements spewed out by the current president and his enablers.” But the US educational system does not emphasize an education in the humanities. It emphasizes the learning of technical knowledge and skills with an eye on innovation, entrepreneurship and potential profit. You too can invent some product and make a billion dollars. High school graduates are confronted with basically two choices: they can gain a college education while going deeply into debt or they can go into the military where they can get a free college education and even a pension after 5 years of service plus numerous other benefits. Which makes more sense? Young people are funneled into the military which is a command and control structure based on the most powerful leader at the top. Their mindsets are then prepared to want the same thing in civilian society. Trump gave it to them.

Clearly the people who carried numerous flags and chanted "USA. USA." are also of the mindset to chant "We're Number One. We're Number One." They are not the kind of people that want to live in a world where they cooperate with other people, perhaps of a different background or ethnicity, or a world based on US cooperation with other nations. They want to be part of a world in which the US dominates other nations, and the most powerful among us dominate and lead civilian life, just as the most powerful leaders are elevated to the highest ranks in the military and exert unquestioned command over those lower on the totem pole. This is the American mindset that the rioters demonstrate. This is a military consciousness based on American exceptionalism and white supremacy. They can't stand the fact that black and brown people are ascending into positions of power in American government and the world, that there has been a demographic shift in American society that does not favor them and that they will have to live in a more progressive society.

Off the Top of My Head

Finally, We're All in This Together

by John Lawrence, March 1, 2020

What has brought all the world together finally realizing their common humanity - the Coronavirus. You might think global warming would bring us all together to fight a common enemy, but, no, it took the threat of a pandemic. Global warming would only kill us more slowly; coronavirus is a clear and present danger. It can't be licked by taking up arms. It knows no national boundaries. Global warming is akin to the story of the frog who, put in a pot of water on a stove whose heat is gradually increased, realizes something is wrong too slowly until it's too late and he can't move his limbs to jump out. So he perishes. With the coronavirus you have to change the story. The frog is put into the pot of water and the heat is turned up rapidly. The frog, not being stupid, realizes something is wrong in time to jump out.

So will the present state of world affairs in which the US uses its dominance in arms to tell the rest of the world what to do work this time? You bet your bootie it will not. Will sanctions work? You bet your bottom dollar they will not. Only COOPERATION with the other countries of the world will work to solve this crisis. We will reluctantly have to put aside out arms, our F-35s, our wonderfully advanced ships, plane and missiles not to mention our very advanced drones, even our Space Force. All these tools of mass control and domination will have to be put aside because they are of no use whatsoever in winning the war against the coronsvirus. Finally, we will have to have some compassion for our enemies.

Finally, we are forced to realize how intertwined our economies really are. If China goes down, all the supply chains for Apple products among others go down. The US economy goes down. Will this wake us up that finally we must cooperate with China to get anything done or will we go back to the animosity of sanctions and military threats in the China Sea once this crisis is resolved. Probably we will because there is too much money at stake to carry on with cooperation with other nations. The military-industrial complex needs to get back to business as usual before too much time goes by and too many profits are held in abeyance or go down the drain prematurely.

Is the US capable of manufacturing anything or have those capacities been delegated to other countries while at the same time we are demonizing other countries whom we are doing business with or they are doing business with? Will they withhold their consumer products and even more inportant - vital necessities - as a pandemic shuts down production. Will US sanctions on countries reduce their abilities to control the virus while inexorably it spreads to our "Homeland"? If only we hadn't sanctioned them, maybe they would have been better able to check the virus in their own countries. Instead it may spread more rapidly to the country that sanctioned them.

Let's face it. With the threat of a worldwide pandemic, there are no allies; there are no enemies; there are no rivals. There are only human beings who will die one by one. No one is exempt. The mighty, the low - all are at risk. Kings and princes, oligarchs and billionaires, those with health insurance, those without. Let the rich pay and the market relegate those who cannot to the dustbin while the dustbin claims people regardless of their wealth. God forbid that those in high places are reduced to the lot of commoners. Even then will they refuse to pay for healthcare for all out of their largesse, maybe even out of their self interest realizing that the virus does not discriminate

Off the Top of My Head

The Search for a Comprehensive Immigration Plan

by John Lawrence, August 12, 2019

A reasonable comprehensive immigration plan would consist of 3 parts: 1) who and how many to let into the country legally; 2) what to do with illegals who are already residing in the US and 3) border security. It might be a good idea to look at the immigration policies of other countries to see how they do it since some other countries seem to be more rational than the US when it comes to immigration and a whole lot else. Switzerland, for example, only lets in people they need in the labor force. Canada has 4 classes of people: 1) close members of families already living in Canada; 2) skilled workers and businessmen (^i.e. those with money); 3) refugees and 4) people accepted for humanitarian reasons.

Elizabeth Warren's immigration package is largely a reaction to Trump's policies. She would just be more humane about treating illegals. Her policy says nothing about border protection. Cory Booker has a similar plan eliminating criminal prosecution for illegal immigrants. Again his plan says nothing about border security. It's all about a reaction to Trump's inhumane treatment of illegals. While these ideas offer more humane treatment for illegal border crossers, they say nothing about border security or preventing illegal border crossings in the first place. They would also be more lenient on persons who had put down roots here even though they crossed illegally. This is probably a good idea. If a person or family has established itself here, has a job or jobs and especially have had children born here, then they should be given some kind of legal status if not full citizenship. A green card, a work permit, a visa or some temporary legal status makes sense.

The most important question to ask, however, is why is the border like a sieve? Why is it that so many can cross illegally in the first place? If they couldn't cross illegally in the first place, then all the arguments about detention centers go away. Here's my take on this phenomenon of a sieve like border. The border could be made absolutely secure if the resources were devoted to securing it. Why aren't they? Because the military budget (which doesn't contain border security) is sucking all the economic air out of the room. You would think that the primary responsibility of the military would be to protect our borders, but the military has no responsibility at all to protect our borders. In fact they are forbidden supposedly by the Posse Comitatus Act from protecting our borders. How ridiculous! I'm not saying they should be shooting illegal border crossers. I'm saying that a good percentage of the military and military-industrial complex budget should be devoted to protecting out borders.

What would gold plated border protection look like? The military has the most advanced electronic surveillance systems in the world. So use those satellites, computers, cameras and radars to electronically surveil the border. Assign beefed up manpower as necessary to protect the border. US Customs and Border Protection should be powered up both in terms of budget and manpower while the military should be proportionately scaled down. The Department of Homeland Security budget of approximately $50 billion is pathetically small compared to the military budget which approaches $1 trillion. So who are the leaders of our country trying to fool? The truth is that a gold plated border protection system which would reduce illegal entries to zero could be had for probably one tenth of the military budget. So what is more important - protecting our borders or engaging in wars of choice around the world which so far have produced negative results in every war since WW II. We hear about 5G and Artificial Intelligence. Why not apply those technologies to border protection.

I'm for letting the Dreamers stay and not forcing family separation. I'm also for gold plated border security and a system of legal immigration similar to the Canadians. The Democrats better get on board with border protection because, if they leave this subject to the Republicans, they'll lose. If they appear to be for open borders, they lose. So don't be just a reaction to Trump. Innovate with your own ideas and make it clear you want both a humane and a rational immigration policy. Their ideas of devoting more economic support to Central American countries to alleviate the suffering of people there, which has largely been created by American policies of the past, is also a necessary step and a good one.

Off the Top of My Head

Border Security: Is There a Sane Approach?

by John Lawrence, November 3, 2018

The issue of border security has been so politicized that it's hard to decipher what might be a meaningful approach to the subject. It has been made the linchpin of Trump's attempt to rally his base before the upcoming election. Congress has been in a state of total inaction regarding this and many other subjects. Let's take a look at the two extreme positions on the subject, and see where a line might be drawn that represents a realistic approach.

The extreme Left would like to have open borders. That is nobody would be checked at the border. Anyone could come in, perhaps after showing some ID. There would be no border patrol or quasi military people at the border trying to prevent illegal entry so illegals could come right in. The extreme Right would like a strong border that would prevent anyone form entering illegally. They wouldn't be satisfied until not one person could enter the country illegally. Obviously, that would require a strong commitment of resources.

Right off the bat I reject Trump's proposal of building a wall. I think that would be the most expensive and least effective solution. However, I have to give Trump credit in the fact that it is inconceivable that any American citizen would approve of anyone entering the country illegally. Trump is right that, if you have open borders, you don't really have a country. No European country lets people enter illegally if they can do anything about it. When trains cross borders in Europe, I know from personal experience that guards with loaded rifles get on the train and check everyone's passport even in the middle of the night!

I am in favor of strong border security. The question is - as always - how much do you want to pay for that? The US defense budget is already so bloated with hundreds of military bases located all over the world that I would not be in favor of spending even more money to beef up border security. However, I would be in favor of shutting down at least half of those bases, perhaps diminishing the current defense budget in other ways as well, and using that money to beef up border security. Why are we defending other countries when they have the resources to defend themselves? This is a point Trump has made that he has yet to follow through on and perhaps never will, but it is a valid point. The implication is that the US defense budget should be diminished and spent on other things, and yet Trump has only added to it.

I would be in favor of diminishing the current defense budget which is predicated on the fact of defending the whole world and using part of the money to defend our own borders which means I would be in favor of beefing up border security but in a smart way - no wall. This means additional resources should be employed at the border to make it impossible for anyone to gain access illegally. These would include electronic patrols from tower to tower, satellite surveillance, helicopter surveillance, rapid deployment teams similar to the SEALs, Coast Guard boat patrols in the Rio Grande, drone patrols etc etc. With the expertise the US has, it could secure the border 100% if it transferred resources for that effort and diminished resources going into defending other countries which could provide their own security.

But not only the land border with Mexico needs defending. The Coast Guard should be beefed up patrolling the coasts so that no one can gain access by sea. Ports of entry should have more sophisticated means to detect illegal persons and contraband being smuggled into the US. The border with Canada should be better secured as well. Surveillance of aircraft attempting to circumvent land or sea entry needs to be addressed. People coming in on visas need to be tracked to make sure they leave when they are supposed to.

The sad fact is that so much money has been devoted to high tech weapons systems and aircraft that the idea of protecting our borders has been given short shrift. There's more money to be made for defense contractors like Boeing in building high performance aircraft and high tech weapon systems than there is in the relatively less expensive devices that could be developed to protect our borders. So the emphasis on defense spending is on war fighting rather than defending our borders. If more attention were paid to border security and more resources allocated towards it, the flow of illegal contraband such as drugs could be stopped in its tracks. As it is, the US not only tolerates the influx of illegal people but illegal goods such as drugs as well. One other point is that the US should expedite the flow of legal traffic through ports of entry such as the land port at San Ysidro, the world's busiest border crossing. While stemming the flow of illegal people and goods, the flow of legal transborder people and goods should be expedited. This has been happening at San Ysidro where I cross frequently to see the dentist in Tijuana. My SENTRI card gets me over the border in a short time rather than having to wait for hours to cross the border as in olden days.

My main point is that resources should be taken away from the kind of defense systems that the US currently employs which is an attempt to patrol the whole world and given to beefed up border security defense.

Off the Top of My Head

Does Trump's Challenging NATO Allies to Spend More on Defense Mean that the US Will Spend Concomitantly Less?

by John Lawrence, July 13, 2018

I would be all for Trump's jawboning our NATO allies to spend more on defense if that meant that the US would decrease its defense budget by the same amount as the total increase by our NATO allies. If it just means that the US will spend the same amount, then it's a bunch of poppycock. The EU should take over their own defense with minimal help from the US. Then there would be little reason for the US to spend such huge amounts on defense. The money could be spend on improving infrastructure here at home. If Trump wants to make America great again, he better start thinking about reducing the US defense budget which, all told, amounts to over a trillion dollars. He better start thinking about using the savings from a reduced defense budget to help the American people. In order to Make America Great Again, Step 1 would be to reduce the defense budget, which purportedly is for defending other countries around the globe, and use the money saved here at home. The defense budget should reflect that money which is necessary to defend just the US and not every other country in the world especially the EU countries which have plenty of money. We don't need to be the world's policeman.

Whatever happened to the idea that, if you make friends with your enemies, you won't have to spend so much money defending yourself against them? The US modus operandi is predicated on the fact that there will be permanent and ongoing wars. The military-industrial complex needs war and the threat of war in order to justify its existence and in order to justify all the money they're making off of war. Therefore, they have to gin up the threat. If peace broke out, large corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman would lose business. Their stock price would go down. CEOs and executives wouldn't be able to justify their huge salaries. Therefore, it's in their interests to have a cottage industry thinking up reasons for even more defense expenditures. Besides it appeals to the macho nature of many men, civilian and otherwise.

As William Hartung points out, the defense budget , when you take into account all the hidden costs, is over a trillion dollars. Department of Defense: $639 billion. War Budget (outside the DoD budget): $64.6 billion. Nuclear Warheads (Department of Energy): $20 billion. Other Defense (Money that goes to defense related activities in departments other than DoD): $8 billion. Homeland Security: $50 billion. Military Aid at the State Department: $7 billion. Intelligence (16 separate agencies including CIA and NSA): $70 billion. Veterans Administration: $186 billion. Military retirement: $80 billion. Defense share of interest on national debt: $100 billion.

When you add it all up, pretty soon you're talking about real money - over a trillion dollars worth. Clearly, this situation is not sustainable. But the current mentality on Wall Street and elsewhere is make all the profits you can in the short term. When the whole edifice collapses, take your money and get out to whatever part of the world welcomes you and your money. Clearly, all those profiting from the current corporate culture do not have to stay here. Only the poor have to stay put and suffer the consequences of profligate defense spending.

The world needs realignment. Russia should be a friend, not an enemy. In these respects, Trump is right. The US and the Democratic Party should get off this kick about demonizing everyone that is Russia's friend like Iran, Syria and China. As Trump has suggested, to his credit, the US should accept Russia's annexation of Crimea. The US and the West should get over it - their horror of what Russia has supposedly done, much of it made up to support the military-industrial complex. And Germany is so horrified by Russia, but as Trump points out, they are building a major pipeline with Russia so they can get Russian natural gas. Quelle horreur!

Thanks to Trump, a peaceful world is at least thinkable. But the Democrats won't let go of their support of the status quo which supports Saudi Arabia.Their motto is that the ally of the enemy of my friend is my enemy too. Russia is the ally of Iran which is the enemy of Saudi Arabia so, therefore, Russia must be our enemy too or the whole world based on Nixon's petrodollar deal with Saudi Arabia would collapse. It will collapse anyway as the world goes more and more to recyclables and the value of oil plummets.

Does 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform' Contain an Option for Deportation?

by John Lawrence

Like most national debates these days, the debate on illegal immigration is superficial. For whatever reason the debate seems to be about profiling brown people vs protecting the border. Let's expand the debate to include the full panoply of issues. First, it's a no brainer that the US needs strong border, port and vital industry protection including the power grid, the chemical industry, the communications and internet networks. It's not just a matter of illegal workers coming over the border; that could be fixed with a legal bracero program; it's a matter of illegal drug shipments and other illegal materiel such as guns and weapons and cash. Some of these people and things are going north across the border; some are going south. It's important to put an end to all illegal cross border transgressions, not just illegal immigrants. This is where true national security lies - not in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the border is porous, terrorists can gain entry or they can come on student visas and then overstay their visa.

So it is a multi-faceted problem in which 'profiling brown people' is really a minor part. Criminal activity on the part of illegal border crossers is a major concern. The debate seems to be between those who want stronger border protection first and then dealing with the illegal immigrant population second and those who want "comprehensive immigration reform" which translates to amnesty for all illegal immigrants present in the US today first and whatever regarding the border second. I say the first problem is protecting the border so as to stanch the flow of new illegal immigrants because they continue to come across the border on a daily basis. What to do with the illegal immigrants already in the US is a secondary problem.

The major problem is that, while the military budget is approximately $1 trillion for FY 2011, the Homeland Security budget is a paltry $54.7 billion. Clearly, the resources for protecting the borders and vital installations is a fraction of the Pentagon budget. This indicates that US priorities are all wrong. While money and resources are lavished and to a large extent wasted on the military, real defense of the US is neglected. Why? Because vested interests in the military-industrial complex want to keep it that way. There is no doubt that, if a couple hundred billion was transferred from the Pentagon to Homeland Security, not one single illegal immigrant would be capable of infiltrating the border. While drug lords in Mexico have sophisticated submarines, the Coast Guard has no anti-submarine capability while the US Navy has all sorts of submarine and anti-submarine capabilities. This shows the trifling resources that are allocated to Homeland Security. My main point is that border, port and vital industry protection and strengthening are possible if the resources are allocated to them and that Homeland Security represents real defense needs while wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere represent secondary or tertiary defense needs at most. Our priorities are backwards. While resources allocated to the Pentagon allow for the invention of every military technological trinket money can possibly buy, real defense goes begging. Real border security demands a sophisticated satellite and drone surveillance system integrated with rapid response teams on the ground, an electronic fence if you will.

Comprehensive immigration reform should definitely include deportation as one option. That is not to say that every illegal immigrant should be deported, but unless some are as a deterrent, they will not be disincentivized from coming across the border illegally especially if zero illegal cross border infractions doesn't become a major goal. What needs to happen is that identified illegal immigrants residing in the US should be treated on a case by case basis. Obviously, the criminals among them should be summarily deported. Some of those with deep roots in their communities who have been in the US a long time and have families and businesses should probably be accommodated according to what advocates for comprehensive immigration reform mainly want - a pathway to citizenship. Some illegal immigrants who have raised families in the US may have more family members who are legal American citizens than those who aren't. Some sort of court of appeal needs to be set up.

Those for whom it's decided that they should be deported should also be accommodated to the extent that deportation need not be immediate. In some cases time may be necessary in order to wind down or sell businesses or time may be needed to accomodate those who are close to graduation so they can graduate. Deportation, another name for which is repatriation, need not be a completely negative experience. People and families can be relocated (in many cases just a few miles away) with Federal and Mexican national assistance so that their transition need be no more jarring than a move from one town to another within the US to take another job. Which illegal immigrants should be "legalized" in some sense would be left to a court of appeal. All those who are legalized need not be given a "path to citizenship." There are other forms of legal residency besides citizenship. And their legal residency could be time limited.

The whole debate about racial profiling is simply ridiculous. A cop making a traffic stop always asks for ID. He just doesn't ask for ID if he suspects that you're not an American citizen. The cop then runs a computer check from his vehicle to see if you have a prison record. He can and should routinely check social security numbers or any other database that would indicate legal or illegal citizenship status such as E-verify. E-Verify is an Internet-based system that allows businesses to determine the eligibility of their employees to work in the United States. E-Verify is fast, free and easy to use – and it’s the best way employers can ensure a legal workforce according to the E-verify website. So cops have access to the internet from their patrol vehicles so why can't they tap into the E-verify database to determine if someone they stop for a traffic violation is legal or not? The burden of proof should be on the cop not on the person stopped to verify citizenship. This removes the onerous aspects of people having to present their papers or cops having to ask, "Papers, please."

Checking legal citizenship or green card status should be done just as a matter of course and not just for people with brown skins. There are definitely a number of white skinned people who are in the US illegally and some for nefarious purposes. A national ID card or secure social security card, while desirable, isn't really even necessary as long as some form of ID, and I guess it would be a DRIVER'S LICENSE for those detained in a traffic stop, is presented. The cop has access to multiple databases from his internet connected vehicle and can and should check every one out, not just brown people. Of course, a secure ID card would also be desirable as a first step. Almost everyone sooner or later is stopped by a cop while driving for a traffic violation having nothing to do with racial profiling. If every one is checked at that time for all previous violations criminal or otherwise including citizenship violations, I think this is entirely appropriate.

So the debate need not be all or nothing. Like all sticky wickets and thorny thickets this problem is not black and white. There is a lot of gray. The border needs to be protected big time. Residents of the US need to be legal, or legalized in some sense or deported. Crossing the border illegally needs to be disincentivized.

US in Afghanistan: Like a Jobless Couple Adopting a Special Needs Child

by John Lawrence

Tom Friedman came up with this metaphor on Fareed Zakaria's GPS Sunday show. The US in Afghanistan is like a jobless couple trying to adopt a special needs child. 46 out of 50 US states are bankrupt, the Federal government is deeply in debt, yet the US is "committed" to fighting a war in Afghanistan that doesn't seem to have any purpose or any chance of success. Originally the US went into Afghanistan to "get" Osama bin Laden whose name has hardly been mentioned by the current administration or anybody else for years. Now the war has morphed into a counterinsurgency which means that we need to build waste water plants and power stations in addition to winning the hearts and minds of the people and defeating the Taliban. This always happens in unwinnable wars: we decide to do nation building instead of winning the unwinnable. It puts a nice patina on a ridiculous situation and covers up a lack of knowing what the hell we're there for. And it saves face. The world's greatest superpower can't be seen as losing a war to the world's most retarded country, now can it?

Friedman asks "why do we have to train the Afghan army? The Taliban don't need any training, and they're fighting us to a draw. They're illiterate, they can't even read a map, yet they're being successful and the US is not." He says these are the questions even a child would ask. I agree. A child might wonder 1) why we're using military force to win the hearts and minds of the people instead of just building infrastructure without the guns being involved, and 2) why we are training an Afghan military force when the Afghans have been doing nothing but fighting foreign intruders for hundreds of years. Don't they have enough military training already? And a child might ask why we are fighting them with military equipment which costs millions of dollars that can be blown up with a $10. IED?

When the US is just as likely to be struck by a terrorist who happens to be a US citizen, the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to wipe out al Quaeda and ending up killing hundreds of innocent civilians instead is absolutely ridiculous. Meanwhile, other contries like China are building infrastructure in Afghanistan at the same time we're fighting a war there. They are the ones winning hearts and minds. We could be doing the same thing too for far less money and minus the military prescence. Hasn't the Pentagon noticed - al Quaeda isn't even there any more? They're in Somalia and Yemen among other places. The military always has to have some rationale for their interminable claim on US Treasury funds. Why it's unthinkable that the military budget should be slashed; better to make up some excuse to stay in Afghanistan forever.

China has taken a different approach in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Behind an electrified fence, blast-resistant sandbags and 53 National Police outposts, the Afghan surge is well under way. But the foot soldiers in a bowl-shaped valley about 20 miles southeast of Kabul are not fighting the Taliban, or even carrying guns. They are preparing to extract copper from one of the richest untapped deposits on earth. And they are Chinese, undertaking by far the largest foreign investment project in war-torn Afghanistan. Two years ago, the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, bid $3.4 billion — $1 billion more than any of its competitors from Canada, Europe, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan — for the rights to mine deposits near the village of Aynak. Over the next 25 years, it plans to extract about 11 million tons of copper — an amount equal to one-third of all the known copper reserves in China. While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda here, China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce. S. Frederick Starr, the chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, an independent research organization in Washington, said that skeptics might wonder whether Washington and NATO had conducted “an unacknowledged preparatory phase for the Chinese economic penetration of Afghanistan.” “We do the heavy lifting,” he said. “And they pick the fruit.” The reality is more complicated than that. The Chinese bid far more for the mining rights to the Aynak project and promised to invest hundreds of millions more in associated infrastructure projects than other bidders. It is a risky venture that has not yet proved to be economical, and it has already been dogged by allegations of bribery. But the Aynak investment underscores how China’s leaders, flush with money and in control of both the government and major industries, meld strategy, business and statecraft into a seamless whole. In a single move, Beijing strengthened its hold on a vital resource, engineered the single largest investment in Afghan history, promised to create thousands of new Afghan jobs and established itself as the Afghan government’s pre-eminent business partner and single largest source of tax payments.

So I ask you - who is winning the hearts and minds of the Afghani people - the US who is mainly killing there and by the way is building a few water treatment plants or China who is investing big time, becoming a business partner and building infrastructure? Why isn't China worried about bin Laden, al Quaeda or the Taliban? I hate to say it but the US is there like it was in Vietnam, like it is in Iraq - mainly to save face. They've staked their rep on "winning" in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the world goes on with China taking the lead in Afghanistan and elsewhere on a peaceful mission right in the middle of a war. How much more ridiculous does it get?

And then there is Greg Mortenson. One individual, Greg Mortenson, has built hundreds of schools there. Why do we think it takes the US military to build infrastructure? This is just so dumb, it's unbelievable! And to think a smart guy like Obama got sucked into this mess. He and Petraeus should use all their smarts to buy off the Taliban like they bought off the "bad guys" in Iraq (under the guise of a surge), declare victory and get out. Most Americans believe we "won" in Iraq although the same crap is still going on there - mosques being blown up, millions without electricity etc.

They should put Greg Mortenson in charge of an agency to build schools in Iraq, give him a billion dollars and let it go at that.

The US spends a pittance on Homeland Security and a paltry sum on US infrastructure while it devotes the major part of its resources to military adventurism. The US is spending $1 billion per year for every soldier in Afghanistan! Shouldn't that give us pause? Shouldn't we reevaluate our priorities? Then we have a huge recent victory in the Senate to pass a $15 billion jobs bill? [Ed. note: A more recent unemployment extension was voted down in the Senate!] That's just 15 soldiers worth a year in Afghanistan! It's nothing. And while the US military destroys Afghanistan and kills civilians, one guy is going around and building schools. In "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson tells about his experiences in Afghanistan that led him to go back there and build schools - one at a time. If one guy can do this kind of good, how much good could the US government with all its might and resources do if it chose to, instead of choosing to kill civilians in a quest for the fool's gold of eliminating Taliban leadership?

Counterinsurgency is just another name for "let's just keep a military prescence there forever." Meanwhile, the peaceful world is just going on without us including China which is cutting deals in Afghanistan in the midst of a war in which the US thinks it's the central actor. China is simply ignoring us, and Greg Mortenson is building schools without taxpayer money. Go figure!

And I must say that the Chinese form of state capitalism allows it to do things that the US can't. The US can get unlimited amounts of money for its military, but it can't (as a nation) spend billions for peaceful purposes or cut business deals like China can because that would be socialism. The US model requires that only private enterprise can cut business deals. The Chinese model allows cooperation between business and government; government can even direct business and that's why China (as a nation) can be in Afghanistan extracting raw materials and building infrastructure. The US model would not let the US government be involved in such proceedings. Instead, billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet would have to do that. But they're more interested in health issues and working in "pacified" nations.

And then there is this:

Sun Tzu, the Chinese philospher who wrote The Art of War emphasized the Taoist approach of obtaining one's goals without firing a shot if possible. China is well on its way to becoming the 21st century's ascendant nation uses Sun Tzu's principles. China is running its chief rival into debt while the US fights futile wars. At the same time China is tying up valuable world resources by peaceful means not wasting a yuan on ammo. A totally brilliant strategy! Mark McNeilly writes in Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare that a modern interpretation of Sun and his importance throughout Chinese history is critical in understanding China's push to becoming a superpower in the 21st century. Modern Chinese scholars explicitly rely on historical strategic lessons and The Art of War in developing their theories, seeing a direct relationship between their modern struggles and those of China in Sun Tzu's time. There is a great perceived value in Sun Tzu's teachings and other traditional Chinese writers, which are used regularly in developing the strategies of the Chinese state and its leaders. I have blogged previously on this: Sun Tzu in "The Art of War" said that the best way to overtake your enemies is without even firing a shot. This is happening before our eyes as the Chinese have overtaken the US economically, effectively turning the US into a client state. The role of Europe in providing adequate safety nets for its citizens while not investing heavily in weaponry has had somewhat the same effect ironically. The Europeans do not have the same fear of terrorism evidently that the US does. Why else are they not sending a whole lot of troops to Afghanistan? It's as if they're saying "well, if you (the US) want to waste your money on military adventures, go ahead, but we'd rather spend ours on the welfare of our people." If the US is foolish enough to continue espousing "free trade" when the result has been massive trade deficits and the export of its manufacturing base to China, then the US has become a sclerotic old man who can't act with any intelligence in his own interests. If the US political system allows one party to say "no" to everything when it is of paramount importance to act now with no time to waste, then the US is only hastening its own decline.

US to Deploy Drones to Shore Up Border with Mexico

Published on Thursday, June 24, 2010 by Agence France-Presse

by Jordi Zamora

WASHINGTON — The United States plans to deploy two drone aircraft along the Texas-Mexico border as part of a new effort to stem organized crime and illegal immigration, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said Wednesday.

Predator drones will be used to patrol the border and in nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico, once Congress approves the 500 million dollars President Barack Obama has requested, Napolitano said in a Washington speech. (AP)

The two Predator drones will be used to patrol the border and in nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico, once Congress approves the 500 million dollars President Barack Obama has requested, Napolitano said in a Washington speech.

"These types of flights aren't necessary everywhere," she said in comments to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But this is the case in the Texas border."

The United States currently has four drones patrolling the border with Mexico in Arizona and one in the northern border with Canada in the state of North Dakota, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Napolitano said the new aircraft are part of a reinforcement of border patrol efforts including one thousand additional agents and 60 investigators.

"Over the past 18 months, this administration has devoted more resources -- including manpower, technology and infrastructure -- to the Southwest border than at any point in America's history," she said.

Texas Governor Rick Perry had requested delivery of the planes, which the US used extensively in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration is seeking to step up security as it presses for a comprehensive immigration reform measure that likely would allow many of the millions of illegal migrants in the United States to legalize their status.

Many Republican lawmakers say no immigration measure can be considered unless the federal government can ensure security along the southern US border to prevent a spillover of violence from Mexico.

Napolitano also announced a number of new cooperation agreements with law enforcement in non-border states to send personnel to southwest border.

DHS said it is working on a system that will fully link the information systems of all state, local and tribal law enforcement entities operating along the southwest border with those of the federal government.

"Border security is primarily a responsibility of federal government," she said. "We cannot have 50 different state legislations. It will not work."

The remark was aimed at a controversial Arizona law that allows police to question persons suspected of being illegal immigrants.

The agency said it was developing "Project Roadrunner," a license plate reader recognition system aimed at detecting drug trafficking and associated illegal activity along the border.

In a related comment in Congress, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez said the security situation will influence the debate on immigration.

"There are those in the Senate who believe we should basically militarize our borders and until we do, until we meet some standard of militarization, we cannot tackle the issue of comprehensive immigration reform," he said.

© 2010 Agence France-Presse

Oil Companies Go All Out to Save Walruses in Gulf of Mexico

by John Lawrence

Not only did BP's detailed emergency response plan for the Gulf of Mexico call for saving walruses, why so did Exxon Mobil's, Conaco Phillip's, Chevron's, Shell's and virtually every other oil company drilling there. You wouldn't think there was so much concern about the Mexican Walrus, but evidently there is.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mass.) took the companies to task for devoting substantially more of their plans to laying out its media response -- complete with pre-prepared press releases -- than on how it would limit the environmental damages caused by a spill. "It could be said that BP is the one bad apple in the bunch, but it appears they have plenty of company," Stupak said. Markey and Waxman both pointed out that four of the five companies noted in their Gulf spill-response plans how they would protect walruses, which do not live in the Gulf of Mexico. "It's unfortunate that walruses are included, and it's an embarrassment that they were included," Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said after being pressed by Markey early in the question-and-answer portion of the hearing.

Well, the explanation for this series of embarassments is really quite simple. All these oil companies outsourced their emergency response plans to the same company. That company, after being paid quite well I would assume, then went to their Xerox machine and simply copied the emergency response plan that they had already prepared for drilling in the Arctic. Then they simply Xeroxed it again and again as each company requested an emergency response plan. It only makes sense that each emergency response plan for the Gulf would be virtually identical. But not that an emergency response plan for the Gulf would be identical to one for the Arctic Circle!

But wait that's not all. All these emergency response plans contained the name and phone number of a man whom it was really, really important to call in case they got themselves into any kind of oil spill trouble. Only problem was that the emergency response plans for 2010 didn't adequately explain the fact that this man had been dead for five years. I assume his phone had been disconnected. You see it really is all about profits and not at all about safety. The oversight to oil company drilling, the MMS, was set up by James Watt, a Reagan appointee, whose philosophy, when it came to regulation, was "the hell with regulation, let the oil companies do anything they damn please." Is it any wonder then that BP has gotten itself into such a fine pickle? All their sought after profits are going flying out the window as they have to pay for this and they have to pay for that.

And it looks like all those anti-regulation guys who also got it passed through Congress to limit oil companies' liability to $75 million have gone down in defeat due to the enormity of the disaster because BP agreed today to put $20 billion in escrow to pay off economic claims. Bush and Cheney tried to put off the financial collapse of 2008 until the Democrats took over in 2009 but their timing was a little off. The collapse actually occurred during the tenure of their own administration. They were luckier with the Gulf disaster. All their anti-regulatory rhetoric and appointees didn't result in disaster until Obama took over. Therefore, as their logic goes, we should blame Obama. They set up the disaster; now it's Obama's job to clean it up, and, furthermore, to take the blame for it. And the blowhards of the right are doing everything in their power to stick Obama with the onus.

The oil administration of Bush and Cheney did everything in their power to favor oil company drilling and the continued use of oil for energy even though Carter had warned 30 years ago that that wasn't such a good idea due to the fact that we have to buy most of our oil from abroad and due to the fact that putting more carbon into the atmosphere is accelerating the pace of global warming. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House which were peremptorily taken down by Ronald Reagan as he proclaimed Morning in America. We Americans shouldn't have to worry about such things as global warming. Let the gas guzzling resume, said Reagan.

Only now the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of flash floods caused by unheard of quantities of rain falling in a short period of time. This is directly attributable to global warming. The increased ferocity of storms and tornadoes can be attributed to global warming. The warmer the atmosphere the more precipitation there will be. The warmer the atmosphere, the higher wind velocities there will be. Put those together and you have a formula for increased destruction of life and property which we have seen recently in Nashville, Oklahoma City a campground in Arkansas and elsewhere. And it's all directly attributable to oil, the oil Carter wanted to phase out and the oil Reagan, Bush and Cheney gloried in.

If Carter's warnings had been heeded, we would be well on our way to a solarized America, an America in which wind power and other forms of alternative energy would be replacing oil. Instead, because we listened to Reagan, Bush and Cheney, America is losing its lead in green technology to China and other countries while we are reaping the whirlwind of natural and manmade disasters. And it's all about oil. The President must proclaim one area after another disaster zones and give them emergency Federal aid. That alone is breaking the budget. While scores of people are being killed by natural disasters and hardly any by terrorists, we are spending trillions on chasing a few al Quaeda stragglers and in the wrong places I might add. It's like that old song, "Looking for love in all the wrong places." We're looking for al Quaeda in all the wrong places. Hey, wake up. They're actually in Yemen, Somalia and America, and they're not killing Americans at anywhere near the same rate that natural and corporate funded disasters are. Maybe we should spend the money we're now spending on the military-industrial complex more wisely.

And now the US is too poor to invest in solar and wind energy. That must be left to private enterprise which isn't much interested. The oil industry has tons of lobbyists whose purpose in life is to see that oil remains the chief source of energy in the US and that the oil industry continues to receive subsidies and tax breaks when it should be paying royalties for every barrel drilled. Obama gives lip service to mass transit, high speed rail and solar and wind industries. But he is too poor and the US is too poor to do anything about it, and, besides, the oil companies want to keep things just the way they are until they figure out how to monopolize solar and wind energy. Then they might be interested in transferring over. Good luck with that.

FINALLY: Drones to Patrol Border!

Published on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by the Austin American Statesman (Texas)

Predator Drones to Fly Over Texas-Mexico Border by Fall

by Tim Eaton

After years of political pressure from Texas politicians, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said Monday that he expects the federal government to deliver unmanned aircraft to watch over the border with Mexico by this fall.

If approved, the unmanned aircraft in Texas would add to the federal government's existing border effort, which includes a handful of other unmanned aircraft, 20,000 Border Patrol agents, about 650 miles of border fence and 41 mobile surveillance systems, according to Customs and Border Protection. (Ross D. Franklin/2007 AP)

Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, said he has had discussions with top officials from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's office of air and marine operations, and they agreed to the timetable, subject to Federal Aviation Administration approval to allow the surveillance planes — often referred to in the political vernacular as "Predator drones" — to fly over Texas.

Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman, said the administration is "working as quickly as we can on this."

Cuellar said the FAA told him that regulators' main concern has been with Texas' heavy airplane traffic — both private and commercial.

If approved, the unmanned aircraft in Texas would add to the federal government's existing border effort, which includes a handful of other unmanned aircraft, 20,000 Border Patrol agents, about 650 miles of border fence and 41 mobile surveillance systems, according to Customs and Border Protection.

The plane, which is made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and officially called a Predator B, is able to spot illegal border activity and send images in real time to border officials.

At that point, Border Patrol agents could be dispatched, according to Customs and Border Protection.

Cuellar — along with Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison and Gov. Rick Perry — has been trying to bring the unmanned aircraft to Texas for years.

Cornyn and Perry, both Republicans, have been among the most vocal critics of the regulators' pace.

"Washington needs to quit fiddling while the border region of America burns," said Perry, who has been calling for Predators since 2005.

Also last week, Cornyn said that the FAA's pace "borders on foot-dragging."

Cuellar has refrained from using harsh words directed at the FAA.

Instead, he invited FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt and Alan Bersin, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, to his office on May 20 to make sure an agreement can be reached.

"My interest in this is to get this done as quickly as possible," he said.

Cuellar, who leads the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism, has asked the FAA to give priority to Texas' request.

Cuellar and Customs and Border Protection officials said a home for a Texas-based Predator already has been identified at Naval Air Station-Corpus Christi.

Kimberly Kasitz, a spokeswoman for General Atomics, said one unmanned aircraft costs $10 million to $12 million.

Discussions in Washington have centered on bringing one Predator to Texas to be deployed along the border with Mexico to fight drug trafficking, human smuggling and violent Mexican drug cartels.

The Texas plane is still under construction, Cuellar said. If it is not ready by the time the FAA approves its flight, then one would be borrowed from another location, Cuellar said. He would not say where because of security concerns.

Places with unmanned aircraft systems in the U.S. include Arizona, which has three; North Dakota, which has two; and Florida, with one.

Unmanned aircraft have grown quickly in popularity in the defense and surveillance sectors, said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century."

Since 2003, the military has acquired about 7,000 unmanned aircraft that are flying surveillance and combat missions in overseas wars, Singer said, and it happened "in a bureaucratic blink of an eye."

And even today, each branch of the military remains eager to obtain more.

"Basically, the Air Force is buying them as fast as they can," Singer said.

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection has said it intends to increase unmanned aircraft systems across the country this year, and it expects a complete network of the unmanned planes all along the border by 2015.

Officials boasted about the Predators' effectiveness in a fact sheet published in February 2009. They reported that Predator B planes have flown more than 1,500 hours and contributed to the seizure of more than 15,000 pounds of marijuana and the apprehension of more than 4,000 undocumented people.

But more can be accomplished with the unmanned aircraft, Cuellar said Monday.

Discussions already have taken place about turning the Predator's high-resolution cameras, which Cuellar said could read a label on a bottle of water from 19,000 feet, on to Mexico to track movements of drug cartels.

But there are still a lot of sovereignty issues, Cuellar added, so any advancement of the idea would be up to Mexican government officials.

Additional material from The Associated Press.

© 2010 Statesman

Death Toll: Natural disasters 29 (and Counting), Man Made Disasters 36, Terrorists 0

by John Lawrence

With the proliferation of natural disasters like the recent Nashville, Tennesee, floods and man made disasters like the oil rig explosion and the West Virginia mine explosion taking a far greater toll on American lives than terrorism, maybe it's a good idea to reevaluate our priorities. Natural disasters are far more likely to account for more casualties going forward than terrorism is, and we should be prepared for them instead of considering each one some kind of rare event or Act of God that no one could have anticipated or predicted. Massive snowstorms and rainstorms which produce massive flooding are becoming normal events due, no doubt, to global warming. Global warming results in more moisture in the atmosphere. In fact water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased about 5% over the 20th century and 4% since 1970. Monster snow storms like Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse which hit Philadelphia and Baltimore this winter are caused by excess moisture in the air due to global warming. Although global temperatures have increased they are still cold enough to produce snow and ice storms. 

There are also an increased number and size of tornadoes like the one that hit Yazoo City, Mississippi, on April 24 that left 10 people dead. Disaster preparedness needs to be put on a par with anti-terrorism measures because natural disasters are causing far more deaths and destruction of property. And after each disaster, the Federal government has to step in and provide relief. That means that the taxpayers are on the hook for increasing amounts of money which is only borrowed and added to the national debt because not enough is budgeted for these increasingly more common events. President Obama announced after the oil rig disaster that British Petroleum would pay the full amount for the cleanup which is expected to reach $10 billion, but subsequently it has been pointed out that, because of a loophole in the law, actually BP is only on the hook for $75 million and guess who bears the rest of the cost? The US government aka the taxpayers. No wonder national deficits are increasing. While record amounts go to the military industrial complex each year, far too little is budgeted for the events that actually take the worst toll on American lives - natural and man made disasters. While record precipitation is bad for areas prone to flooding, it actually has produced something beneficial for California - large snow packs in the Sierra Mountains from which emanates California's water supply.

As far as man made disasters are concerned, most of them are caused by deregulation. Stricter regulatory standards might have prevented both the mine disaster in the Upper Big Branch mine and the oil rig disaster. Both companies fought off stricter safety standards which would have cost them more money to implement. Massey Energy had a panoply of violations which it managed to evade paying any penalties for or correcting do to loopholes in the law which allowed them to continue violating as long as they challenged them in court. British Petroleum lobbied against systems which might have provided a more fail safe shut off of the gushing oil. Now they will undoubtedly get out of paying for it due to another loophole in the law no doubt placed there by oil company lobbyists.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for both terrorism and natural disasters, has to have its budget beefed up while at the same time decreasing the military budget. There needs to be a realignment between the US' actual needs for protection and its imagined needs. As natural disasters take an increasing toll, the monetary cost (hundreds of millions in property damage from the Nashville floods alone) needs to take prority over military spending. The cost of cleaning up natural disasters cannot just simply continue to be added to the defict and the national debt. BP will probably tie up their portion of the responsibility for the oil rig disaster in court with the result being that taxpayers will foot most of the bill. Exxon Mobil tied up the Exxon Valdez disaster in Prince William Sound and over 20 years later has not paid the full amount for the aftermath which was court ordered. Exxon Mobil has dragged its feet in paying the costs of damages to local fishermen while making record profits for itself. The original amount of punitive damages to be paid to the fishermen was $5 billion. That amount was reduced to 4 billion, raised back up to $4.5 billion, then cut to $2.5 billion, then further reduced to $507 million. A Supreme Court ruling is expected soon on whether Exxon should pay interest on this payment after 20 years of waiting. BP will likely use the courts to leave taxpayers holding the bag for the spillage in the Gulf especially since we have belatedly found out that the law limiting their liability is on their side.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil made record profits in 2007 ($40.61 billion) and 2008 ($45.2 billion) as it continued to shortchange Alaskan fishermen. It also paid no US taxes in 2008.

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS: Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

So US corporations (and no doubt BP will follow suit) continue to make record profits while dumping any losses on US taxpayers just as Wall Street bankers did. While other countries such as Norway tax the profits on oil drilling 50% thereby generating profit for the national treasury, the US foolishly just gives away the oil leases so that all profits go to the corporations while the majority of the losses are paid by US taxpayers. No wonder the US has an immense national debt! And global warming produced natural disasters (unbudgeted for) will only continue to get worse adding even more. While the Times Square bomber didn't manage to kill a single person and was caught immediately thanks to excellent police work by the FBI and others not to mention citizen vigilance, which helped to prevent an event which could have produced a number of casualties, the casualties and property damage due to excessive precipitation and high winds continues to mount. Do we have our priorities straight when we continue to allocate billions to the military-industrial complex and paltry amounts to Homeland Security? Homeland Security in addition to being responsible for terrorism and natual disasters is also reponsible for protecting our borders against illegal immigration. Although illegal immigration continues to take its toll on American society, relatively paltry amounts are allocated to it while fantasy wars of aggression continue to be fought abroad. And the cost of supporting over 1000 military bases on foreign soil continues to mount.

The Homeland Security budget for 2010 is $55 billion while the miltary budget is about $1 trillion - orders of magnitude greater. US budget priorities are totally out of whack. While good intelligence and police work has done much to protect US citizens from terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only increased their liklihood due to killing of civilians and stoking the fires of resentment towards the US who are considered to be foreign invaders. Protection against terrorist attacks which have killed very few US citizens and caused very little property damage compared to natural disasters primarilyshould consist of defensive not an offensive measures. The Times Square bomber was caught in part due to a fingerprint database. His finger prints matched those left on the Nissan Pathfinder. A national ID card including links to a fingerprint database would do more to prevent terrorism than the combined efforts of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force because terrorists are just as likely to be American citizens as foreign citizens. And it would identify people in the country illegally at the same time. A national database of student visa holders would have prevented the 9/11 attacks since a lot of them had overstayed their student visas. It can be shown categorically that defensive measures can and will prevent future attacks at a fraction  of the cost of military adventurism which is only increasing their liklihood.

But the real wild card here - and something which can bankrupt the US unless it's figured into the annual budget - is preparedness for natural disasters. Increased moisture in the atmosphere caused by global warming will continue to produce massive rainstorms, snowstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes, increased casualties and billions of dollars of property damage, much of which will be borne privately by American citizens who will become destitute in the process. As if the recession in and of itself weren't enough to devastate the middle class! The US hasn't even recovered from Hurricane Katrina 5 years ago! The US can expect to be devastated by ongoing natural disasters. In order to prevent a fiscal disaster as well we have to budget and plan for them.

Of Paradigm Shifts and Paradigms Unshifted

by John Lawrence

It was 1968. Everybody was looking forward to the Age of Aquarius.

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

So sang the Fifth Dimension. There was to be a forthcoming paradigm shift from the old paradigm of war, acquisitiveness, competition, ticky tack houses, jealousy, suspicion, exclusiveness to a new paradigm of peace, love, cooperation, trust, inclusiveness. There was to be more sharing and less money grubbing, everyone was to be entitled to a good life - no more poverty, no more racism. Harmony and understanding, no more hypocrisy. And everyone could lead a fulfilling life of satisfaction.

What happened? The paradigm never shifted, that's what. Instead of a new paradigm, what happened instead was that the old paradigm intensified. We got more war, a more intensified rat race, more McMansions. Instead of the mind's true revelation we got ... Ronald Reagan! We got fed more drivel about "Morning in America." We got more exploitation, more commercialism. In fact the Age of Aquarius itself was commercialized! Instead of hippies with bell bottoms and tie died shirts, we got J Crew and Abercrombie and Fitch. We got an ever expanding and all inclusive military-industrial complex. We got hedge funds and credit default swaps.

True, the new paradigm was just too risky. Trust and unlocked doors led to the murderous perversion of the Manson family. People withdrew into more conservative lifestyles after criminals took advantage of the trust and openness. The paradigm never shifted. Things went back to business as usual. Students, once relieved of the draft, became more conservative. We entered a 40 year period where Republican politics held sway. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had all been killed. A dream deferred became a dream that, for all intents and purposes, had died. The CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in South America only to replace them with repressive governments, military dictatorships and the Chicago Boys - disciples of Milton Friedman dedicated to the libertarian dream of privatization, deregulation and free trade - a free trade, incidentally, that President Clinton recently admitted had ruined Haiti's rice farmers. It was good to be greedy. Sharing was for the birds. Egotism and arrogance were back in fashion. The USA was number 1, and don't you forget it, baby.

Ronald Reagan initiated the tax break mantra that would lead to all good things including increased government revenues, according to the Laffer curve. Free trade would open up brave, new vistas where American goods and American ideas were exported everywhere. Instead American jobs were exported. Trade and national deficits grew. NAFTA produced that "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot had predicted. The one Democratic President during this period, Bill Clinton, got co-opted and then impeached for his efforts. The Laffer curve turned out to be a fake. The US having lowered taxes collected less revenues and went further into debt. American markets were flooded with cheap foreign imports. THe US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor nation. The US was reduced to begging China to revalue its currency because having invested its prestige in the libertarian philosophy of Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand of free trade, deregulation and privatization, it could not go back even when it became obvious in the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008 that this philosophy had left the US in a shambles, fast becoming a Third World nation left in the dust by the rest of the developed and developing world.

No, when the paradigm really needed to shift from the lower taxes, smaller government crowd, when the libertarian paradigm had proven to be a fraud and a failure, Americans hung on ever more tightly to the outmoded paradigm - America is the best and the wisest nation on earth. We're the leaders. We "won" the Cold War. We're number 1. Even after China had become our banker, loaning us the money to fight ridiculous, unwinnable wars of aggression while leaving our borders undefended, even after the middle class had lost ground under the old paradigm of less government (more deregulation), even after Alan Greenspan had admitted that the banks had not regulated themselves but had screwed up everything and then were rewarded with billions of dollars of taxpayer money, Americans clung to the old paradigm of getting government off their backs and out of their lives. As Ronald Reagan had said: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'". Americans still clung to the happy homilies of "Morning in America."

Barack Obama was elected to bring about change, but change is the last thing American corporations wanted. They clung to the old paradigm with a vengeance. They spent untold millions on lobbyists whose job was to guarantee that there would be no change. The left, which had been so vocal in the sixties, replaced the right as the silent majority with no vision for an America any different from the status quo plus maybe a little extra for the middle class. The right amped up its rhetoric to the point that a health care reform bill became "Armageddon." A bill that guaranteed that there would be only privatized health care corporations which were to be delivered 30 million new customers became socialism. It was unthinkable even to advocate for real socialism. Everything had to be couched in the rhetoric of the right. Reform had to be acceptable to the large corporations. Even human genes had been privatized and patented to the point that biotech companies owned the genes responsible for early onset breast cancer and would send "cease and desist" letters to any other party that had the audacity and temerity to want to do further research regarding them.

Barack Obama had his work cut out for him. No longer was it acceptable to have a War on Poverty. The poor and homeless continued to accumulate on the streets of America as jobs continued to dry up. But Americans considered it immoral for the government to use their tax money to try to help them. It was not immoral, however, to use their tax money to fight wars of aggression on foreign soil while ignoring the real war raging on the border. Arcane rules in the Senate allowed a determined bunch of paid off politicians to stop any progress whatsoever even after the prevailing conservative philosophy had produced the catastrophe of the Great Recession. The big banks, even after having been bailed out at taxpayer expense because they were too big to fail, were determined to get even bigger and to hand out even more outrageous bonuses to their executives. The culture of money and accumulation was intact. Greed was still good. The growing army of bankrupts and the foreclosed upon were losers in the American argot. Americans didn't want their tax money supporting them. Americans, it seemed, only wanted their tax money to go for war and to give corporate welfare to large corporations. They complained that it was socialism and a government takeover when the government took back under its wings the issuance of student loans which had been a cash cow for private corporations at taxpayer expense.

So when the paradigm really needed to shift, Americans wouldn't let it. They were all caught up in the disappearing reality that they were the privileged elite of the world who were entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of the world's garbage. Instead they were becoming Richard Nixon's descriptive term: "pitiful, helpless giants". President Obama had all he could do to get meager health care reform and for his efforts was branded a socialist and a Nazi. He dare not even speak of reducing the deficit by ending the wars and shifting the military-industrial complex budget, larger than that of the rest of the world combined, to more productive purposes like alternative energy production and high speed rail. No, people still wanted lower taxes. They didn't care if their taxes were lowered by just a few dollars while the large corporations had theirs lowered by millions. They didn't care if lower taxes increased the national debt. They didn't care if more futile offensive wars increased the national debt while actual defenae could be had for a relative pittance and the savings used for peaceful purposes. Just don't tread on them.

When the handwriting was on the wall, when the old pardigm had completely failed, when the paradigm really needed to shift, Americans clung to the old paradigm with a vengeance. Even  as large corporations took control over their lives, they clung to their freedom, misidentifying the source of its diminution as the government itself rather than the government as controlled by private corporations by means of their lobbyists, campaign contributions and TV advertising. After all how can there be a national debate when the chief advertisers on "Meet the Press" are the Boeing Corporation (chief defense contractor) and the Exxon Corporation (major oil producer). Do you think the debate on Meet the Press is going to be critical of the military-industrial complex or the oil industry?

So while America treads water, despite the heroic efforts of President Obama and a few Democrats to turn around the ship of state and enter a new paradigm, Americans clamor for smaller government and long for the days in the 1950s when Eisenhauer was President, cars had tail fins and jobs were plentiful.

Immigration Reform

by John Lawrence

The Obama administration and Congress will probably try its hand at immigration reform some time soon. As typical, instead of adopting a clear and well thought out policy, we will probably have some vitiated, watered down Rube Goldberg approach to the matter. Here are some ideas which might just go a long way to solve the problem. First, of paramount importance is to stop future illegal immigration. The most powerful nation on earth, it seems, has been powerless to stop the illegal entry of goods and human beings. This doesn't bode well for stopping terrorists with whatever materiel they deem necessary from crossing the border and wreaking havoc and destruction on the American people to say nothing of the millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs, the millions of dollars in cash going south into Mexico and the cross border gun trade which is allowing drug cartels to build up a veritable military which puts the ragtag Taliban to shame. The greatest military in the world is fighting a primitive group in Afghanistan that has to rely on homemade bombs. Not so for the drug cartels in Mexico which have the most sophisticated weaponry including submarines and helicopters. The US thinks nothing of entering a country half way around the world with a full scale military invasion, dropping bombs on civilians along the way. Yet it does nothing to fight a major foe in another country right on its border.

The Boeing company recently was given a paltry sum of money to come up with a virtual fence which turned out to be a joke. This is not to denigrate the idea of a virtual fence which is a good one. However, the execution by Boeing was abysmal. This idea should be pursued with satellite and drone technology. If we can read a license plate in Iraq, we surely can detect warm bodies crossing the border. Helicopters should be used to parachute in intercept teams once incursions have been detected. The Border Patrol and Coast Guard are terribly underfunded. They should be given resources equivalent to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Those resources should be diverted from the current Defense budget which should be correspondingly reduced. Or better redefine the roles of the military so that border protection becomes the main mission. Secondly US military bases should be built along the border instead of on prime real estate. Camp Pendleton which is located about 50 miles from the border should be relocated right on the border thus freeing up thousands of square miles of prime California real estate for future development which would give a boost to the economy. Locating military bases on relatively undesirable real estate could free up thousands of acres of prime real estate on which they are now  located.

A major portion of the military budget including research and development should be redirected to border and port protection as well as strengthening internal infrastructure to withstand a terrorist attack not to mention the far more likely events of natural disasters. The Department of Homeland Security should be beefed up and the traditional military industrial complex which has become more or less of a massive boondoggle should be beefed down. The resources both in terms of manpower, procurement, and research and development should go into actual defense and not phony defense and fighting wars of aggression against ragtag groups that are illiterate and don't even have driver's licenses. This reorientation of priorities would not only strengthen US defenses, but would also solve the drug problem and put the drug cartels in Mexico, which are a much greater threat to US security, out of business. The idea that criminal operations can cross the US borders (both ways) with impunity is totally repugnant, and we just shouldn't be lulled into accepting it as business as usual. The goal is to improve legal immigration and legal border crossings and to elimiate illegal ones. In fact legal border crossing for humans and materials should be expedited to improve the flow of commerce and to expedite the flow of legal seasonal labor if needed. The pedestrian crossing from San Diego to Tijuana is a total disgrace and needs to be redesigned and rebuilt.

As far as illegal drugs are concerned, legalizing marijuana (but not the other drugs) makes a lot of sense. First, it takes a whole branch of illegal drug smuggling off the table. Second it provides a tax base for marijuana currently grown and sold illegally in the US. It would not only create jobs but provide a revenue source for state and federal government. Then resources can be concentrated on hard drug smuggling and apprension.

But the real question is what to do with illegal aliens that are already in the US, many of whom have integrated themselves into the work force and have established families here. First the law that says that anyone born on American soil is automatically a US citizen should be repealed. Anyone born on US soil to parents that have entered the country illegally should not automatically become a US citizen. The fact that they do complicates the whole problem of deportation. First, illegals already here should be divided into different categories. All prisoners in the US penal system should be deported as well as all single people. For those who have children born in the US who are legal US citizens, there has to be a different approach. To dive into this nasty thicket I would say that some arbitrary dividing line has to be put in place. My recommendation is that all those who have been here less than five years should be deported with the choice being given to leave their children who are US citizens here with relatives or to take them with them. All those who have been longer term residents of the US and who are well established here in terms of jobs, property ownership and business ownership should be given a path to becoming legal citizens. This is a somewhat arbitrary and simplified solution, and probably many situations need to be decided on a case by case basis.

As for the necesity of importing seasonal labor from Mexico because of the jobs that Americans supposedly don't want to do, isn't it laughable in a recession in which many people are out of work that there are any jobs Americans don't want to do? The government should facilitate the hiring of American unemployed and unemployable citizens for these jobs. WPA style programs could set up a work force to pick fruit or whatever the braceros usually do. Programs for unemployable ex-felons and homeless people as well as the chronically unemployed, inner city black youth for example, could be set up to deliver labor to industries that have previously employed illegals. Jobs are needed and workers should be employed right here at home. It's ridiculous to have a huge army of unemployed citizens on the government dole while at the same time American industry is employing huge numbers of illegals. It should be a government policy to transition these industries away from employing illegals and towards employing American citizens who are chronically unemployed. Employers who employ illegals should be sanctioned and fined if not imprisoned while incentives should be given to employ marginally employable US citizens.

So my solution to the illegal immigration problem is five fold:

1) Divert military resources from wars of aggression and military bases abroad (currently upwards of 1000) to extensive programs of border and port protection here at home. This includes research and development and basing military assets along the border. Intelligence operations like the CIA should concentrate on border protection as well as hunting down bad guys overseas. In addition to preventing terrorists from crossing the border, illegal drugs and other illegal imports should be stopped completely and whole illegal industries shut down. This will help not only the US, but it will help Mexico too in that the drug cartels will be eliminated. At the same time legal border crossing and immigration should be expedited.

2) Eliminate illegal jobs in the US by establishing a jobs program that employs chronically unemployed American citizens such as ex-felons, the homeless and inner city black youth and that facilitates the hiring of these people to replace the need for illegal labor. Give incentives to business to hire the marginally employable while fining them for hiring illegals. The government needs to be the facilitator because, left to their own devices, US industry that employs illegals will simply take the easy way out and continue to employ illegals.

3) Change the law regarding anyone born on American soil automatically becoming a US citizen. Babies born to illegals should not automatically become US citizens. This law should be retroactive for some period of time so that families whose parents are here illegally can be deported.

4) Make a judgment call as to who needs to be deported and who will be given a path to US citizenship based on how long a family has been here and how well established they are.

5) Legalize marijuana.

Ignoring the Real Threat on US Border

by John Lawrence

While attention is focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is ignoring the real threat on its border with Mexico. Drug-running cartels with advanced military weapons, airplanes, submarines and plenty of cash are wreaking havoc along the border. They could even possibly take over the government of Mexico. While the US continues to spend countless billions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it spends chump change on border protection and Homeland Security in general. It's not a question of militarizing the border; it's a question of properly operating the border so that legal border entries of both goods and materials can be expedited while stopping all illegal cross border activity. Legal cross border activcities can be facilitated while stopping illegal activities in their tracks if the US only had the mindset and intestinal fortitude to do it. Instead real threats to US security are ignored while phantom threats are pursued. The drug cartels in Mexico are a bigger threat to the US than the ragtag Taliban in a third world country half way around the world.

Texas Governor Rick Perry wants US troops patrolling the border:

EL PASO - Gov. Rick Perry said he wants 1,000 troops to help guard the Texas-Mexico border, and for the U.S. to fund strong security measures to fight the Mexican drug cartels that have spread violence and fear in Mexico, including Juárez.

"We're (also) asking the (Texas) Legislature for $135 million for border security - to go after transnational gangs, for technology and aviation assets," and the federal government for 1,000 troops, said Perry at a news conference Tuesday at the Chamizal National Memorial.

"I don't care if they are military, National Guard or customs agents. We're very concerned that the federal government is not funding border security adequately. We must be ready for any contingency."

Retired General Barry McCaffrey said the U.S. government spends $12 billion on Iraq and $2 billion on Afghanistan each month, "without taking into account what is happening in Mexico." McCaffrey has criticized the relative lack of resources the US has devoted to what amouints to a full scale war right on its border.

The bottom line—nearly 7,000 people murdered in the internal drug wars since 2006—3,985 murdered this year alone through 25 November. The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPGs, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 cal sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.

The US has invested a paltry sum in a "virtual" border fence which was contracted out to the Boeing corporation. The Boeing Corporation produced a botch job which doesn't work. That doesn't mean that another tack shouldn't be taken along the same lines. The idea is basically sound. It just needs to be properly resourced and properly implemented. And I would second Governor Perry's idea. The Border Patrol is the poor stepcousin of the US military. While hundreds of billions of dollars go to support the Army, Navy and Marines whose mission is not to protect US borders but to fight useless foreign wars of aggression, The Border Patrol and Coast Guard go relatively unfunded. As a result we have a mess along the border with Mexico. Illegal persons and materiel flow across the border in both directions. Since the border is a sieve, terrorists could cross with impunity carrying suitcase nuclear weapons. The drug problem in the US only gets worse as countless tons of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and oxycontin are smuggled in. US jails fill up with drug offenders costing US taxpayers countless millions of dollars. When paroled, they flood the streets with unemployable workers. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

But the US is solving the wrong problem. It is going after a ragtag band of illiterate third world yahoos while the real threat to US security exists right on its own border. These guys are ultrasophisticated and well funded. While the Taliban has to resort to primitive devices like IEDs, the drug cartels have advanced military weapons, a Navy and an Air Force. They have every military asset money can buy.

US Killing Civilians in Afghanistan: How Is This Winning Hearts and Minds?

by John Lawrence

The stated goal of the US military in Afghganistan is to "win hearts and minds." But yet they are killing many more civilians than supposed bad guys. This creates a complete contradiction. It's impossible to win hearts and minds if you are constantly killing civilians.

NATO forces in southern Afghanistan bombed a civilian convoy, killing 27 people including women and children and injuring many more, Afghan officials said. The airstrike in a remote part of Oruzgan province yesterday capped a bloody week for Afghan civilians that has seen some 60 innocent people killed by NATO weapons. Afghanistan's cabinet called the attack "unjustifiable" and condemned the raid "in the strongest terms possible".

This should be enough to stop the war right there. The US is not winning. It is defeating itself because it can't pursue the Taliban without killing large numbers of civilians. Then after each attack General McChrystal has to get up and abjectly apologize to the Afghani people about American "mistakes." Oh we just knocked off another dozen women and children. So Solly! It's ridiculous. The Americans are losing the war not because of superior Taliban military tactics but because of inept and stupid US military tactics resulting in killing the wrong people. Winning hearts and minds would be building roads and dams; not winning hearts and minds is killing civilians. Oh, by the way that's what China is doing - building roads and cutting business deals while the US is killing civilians. Who do you think is really winning the hearts and minds?

And the US is spending billions upon billions of dollars to kill civilians in Afghanistan. That's money that can't be used to build roads and bridges in the US. That's money that's not being spent to protect US borders. That's money not being spent to create jobs in the US. How does killing civilians abroad and letting infrastructure crumble at home while going deeper into debt make the US more secure or more "free" or a better place? It's just so obvious that for a fraction of the cost the US could actually be winning hearts and minds around the world by sending in the Peace Corps instead of the Marines.

The US spends a pittance on Homeland Security and a paltry sum on US infrastructure while it devotes the major part of its resources to military adventurism. The US is spending $1 billion per year for every soldier in Afghanistan! Shouldn't that give us pause? Shouldn't we reevaluate our priorities? Then we have a huge recent victory in the Senate to pass a $15 billion jobs bill? That's just 15 soldiers worth a year in Afghanistan! It's nothing. And while the US military destroys Afghanistan and kills civilians, one guy is going around and building schools. In "Three Cups of Tea" Greg Mortenson tells about his experiences in Afghanistan that led him to go back there and build schools - one at a time. If one guy can do this kind of good, how much good could the US government with all its might and resources do if it chose to, instead of choosing to kill civilians in a quest for the fool's gold of eliminating Taliban leadership?

And the thing is no matter how many Taliban you kill, there will always be others to spring up elsewhere and everywhere around the world because the root cause is poverty and ignorance. The root cause is that earth is a Planet of Slums. One billion of earth's people live in abject poverty, living on less than a dollar a day, drinking filthy water, eating filthy food, ill housed, ill clothed. For a paltry sum, the majority of the world's people could be given a decent life, and this would do more for world peace and for the security of the US than all the civilian killing now in progress in Afghanistan ever will. Because you can't win hearts and minds by killing the hearts and minds you're trying to win. Winning and killing don't go together when the people you're trying to win are the people you're killing. Oh, I know it was just an accident - killing all those civilians - another accident, an ongoing accident. We're so solly. There's really no excuse  especially when it happens over and over and over.

When McChrystal took over last year as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, he promised to reduce the number of civilian casualties after a series of similar errant bombings. A total of 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed last year, the highest number in any year of the war, according to a U.N. report. Further complicating the U.S. effort, the deadly airstrike Sunday took place in an area under Dutch military control. A day earlier, the Dutch government collapsed over an effort to extend the mandate of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The 2,000 troops from the Netherlands may leave by the summer. The Australian and Canadian governments are also under public pressure to pull out. And while the U.S. military and its allies continue to push forward, they wait for Afghan troops to catch up. Several media reports from the field have cited the high illiteracy rate within the Afghan National Army, and an inability of some of its troops to read maps. A report in The New York Times cited an American Marine unit whose members said they led every one of its engagements against the Taliban, organizing the Afghan forces, transporting them in American vehicles, and supplying them with weaponry and ammunition. The Afghans' lack of preparedness raises questions about President Obama's declaration that American forces will hand over more responsibility to Afghan security forces as they work toward a target date to begin withdrawing in July 2011.

2,412 Afghani civilians killed in 2009 - that's 2,412 hearts and minds that won't be won over to the American cause. Multiply that by 100 to include all the victims' relatives and townspeople and there's a whole lot more that won't be won over. How many bad guys were killed compared to the number of civilians? A handful, probably. And for all the bad guys killed there is a new generation of young men ready to pick up their banner and become freedom fighters because far from winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan what the US is really doing is creating enemies. They are losing hearts and minds and for this reason alone they are losing the war. They're creating a people who will hate America if for no other reason then that America has killed a relative, a friend, someone they knew.

The US spends more on its war machine than all the other countries of the world combined while spending a pittance on its own Homeland Security and being the world's largest debtor. US values are so out of whack that it's totally pathetic. And it has a political structure that, despite the noble efforts of a few, seems bound and determined to keep on conducting business as usual until there is a complete collapse. The level of political ignorance that is actively inculcated in the American people is alarming. The amount of money corrupting the political system is frightening. President Obama, who is to the right of Dwight Eisenhauer and Dick Nixon, is painted as a socialist! It's laughable. America is becoming a joke in the eyes of the rest of the world. It would be laughable if it wasn't also so pathetic because the US owns a nuclear arsenal that can pulverize the rest of the world. It owns military assets that can utterly destroy the rest of the world. When the likes of Dick Cheney take power again, they will be all too prepared to use it.

Right now there are over 700 US military bases in Afghanistan. There are that many or more in other countries throughout the world. The planet is literally being militarily dominated by a financially bankrupt nation whose only real asset is its military arsenal and its millitary-industrial complex. And this is the way America intends to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world? Instead it is losing hearts and minds, day by day, civilian death after civilian death.

Austin Pilot Not a Terrorist: Whew! We Can All Breathe a Huge Sigh of Relief!

by John Lawrence

After a plane was driven into a building in Austin, Texas, yesterday, we were reassured by TV commentators that this was not, I repeat not, an act of terrorism. It was just another isolated, disgruntled American. How reassuring! As if we are in total fear of terrorists, but horrific acts by American citizens are no big deal. It was just a crime not an act of terror. It was the same with the Fort Hood shooter who killed 12 people. He was just another nut, not a terrorist. Get real, folks. How many Americans have been killed by "legitimate" terrorists on American soil since the attacks on 9/11/2001? Well, none. How many have been killed by disgruntled Americans? There was the Fort Hood massacre. There was Amy Bishop, the Huntsville professor who killed three people just the other day. These incidents go on and on, one or two a day. Drip. Drip. Drip. Violence in the workplace where disgruntled workers kill current or former employees or supevisors. Campus violence. Virginia Tech where a student killed 32 people. Going postal. When you sum up all these incidents, they involved thousands of people being killed by people with no former criminal records since 9/11. Call them domestic terrorists or random nuts, but they are definitely not common criminals.

So what is a terrorist? Do we really need to parse it? Politicians have us in fear of rag tag groups on the other side of the planet so they can justify $700 billion in military expenditures while here at home where the real violence occurs, why, we shouldn't be afraid at all. After all as long as these incidents are not performed by terrorists, we have nothing to fear. The terrorist/fear industry is crucial to the careers of politicians, lobbyists, defense contractors, but isolated violence undertaken by disgruntled Americans such as the Austin pilot are nothing to be concerned about. Luckily, only two people were killed yesterday including the pilot. But how much property damage was done. Probably millions. The building was largely ruined.

Meanwhile, 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of health insurance. Nobody seems to be concerned about this. Part of Joe Stack's suicide statement addresses this:

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political "representatives" (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the "terrible health care problem". It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

So was this guy crazy, insane? Many people who have not gone to such extreme measures have voiced the same sentiments. The corporate media would like to dismiss this act as well as numerous others as the acts of a random, isolated nut. But there are many random isolated nuts in the world. Some of them are more organized and live in mountains on the other side of the world. But those guys have not been effective. Yet we devote hundreds of billions of dollars to dealing with them. Politicians base their careers on dealing with them. They can't be seen as being "soft on terrorism." This is the same crew who couldn't be seen as being "soft on communism."

Yet the same guys who devote hundreds of billions of dollars to wiping out a few disgruntled rag tag gropups like al Quaida or Taliban (don't worry, they'll spring up again no matter how many #2s we kill) devote an extremely paltry sum to actual defense of the American "homeland." The Homeland Security budget is less than a tenth of the "Defense" budget. The budget for the Coast Guard which is reponsible for 12,383 miles of American coastline is less than $10 billion. No wonder that they are outspent by Mexican drug smugglers whose budgets far exceed this amount and can afford submarines! Yet US politicians are not the least concerned about this. Defense contractors grease their palms. The Coast Guard doesn't. It's that simple.

The whole Homeland Security budget for 2010 is only $55 billion. The Department of Homeland Security is reponsible for protecting US borders - both land and sea borders. They are also responsible for cyber security, protecting transportation systems (TSA), disaster preparedness (FEMA), financial infrastructure, illegal immigration, illegal drugs and much more. In other words real defense of the US is in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. Offensive wars of aggression are in the hands of the Department of Defense which is really a misnomer. It should be called the Department of War, its original name. The so-called war on terrorism is really a war of aggression against non-state groups of rag tags which involves invading sovereign countries. Military invasions of foreign countries should be reserved for countries that have taken military actions against the US not rag tag stateless actors. Those should be dealt with by covert operations not full scale military invasions. And I fully support US intelligence gathering operations and covert operations designed to get rid of bad guys without causing civilian casualties. Infiltration and surveillance of networks of bad guys makes sense; full scale military invasions against them doesn't.

Within the budget for Homeland Security is the budget of the US Customs and Border Patrol agency (CBP) which includes the budget for the Border Patrol which is responsible for 7458 miles of US land borders including the borders with Mexico, Canada and the Canadian Alaska border. President Obama's 2011 budget calls for cuts in border patrol agents in Arizona. It's virtually impossible to find out what the 2010 budget for the Border Patrol is by googling it. This information is apparently well guarded. I did find that the 2008 budget for the whole CBP was around $10 billion. This is indeed a paltry sum compared to the budget of the US Army ($225 billion), the US Navy and Marines ($172 billion) or the US Air Force ($160 billion). If the US Defense Department was really concerned with US defense and not the pursuit of aggressive wars against rag tag groups, the Army would be protecting US borders and the Navy and Marines would be protecting the coastlines. At least a large percentage of the budgets for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force would be going to border and coastline protection and not to foreign wars. At least Mexican drug dealers would be outspent.

Instead the US has a pathetic defense of its borders and ports. It has a pathetic defense of its electrical grid and other vital facilities. It has a pathetic defense against illegal drugs, immigrants, gun and money shipments. It has a pathetic excuse for disaster preparedness. Natural disasters alone are causing many more deaths than terrorists. In short the US is spending more than all the other countries of the world combined on military adventurism while leaving the "homeland" relatively unprotected against incursions by illegal immigrants, illegal terrorists, illegal weapons, illegal money, illegal cyber attacks and natural disasters.

But this situation should not surprise anyone. When has the US government in recent years been more concerned about the safety and welfare of its citizens than the safety and welfare of its corporations and lobbyists? A lot of this blog post addresses the same concerns - but in a less personal way - as those of domestic suicide bomber and domestic terrorist Joe Stack who flew his plane into a building housing a branch of the IRS. I don't recommend taking that approach. The only point I'm trying to make is that domestic terrorism or domestic disgruntlement or whatever you want to call it is a far greater threat then al Quaida or the Taliban. The killing of civilians by the US military which killed several including children just the other day in Afghanistan is enough to stoke the continuing hatred of foreigners for the US. But despite that they have been relatively ineffective insofar as attacking US citizens on American soil. The far greater threat is the disgruntlement of US citizens who have been sold out by their government which is far more interested in protecting the rights of transnational corporations than it is in protecting US citizens. So I question US government priorities both military and civilian.

Christmas Failed Airplane Bombing Not a Failure to "Connect the Dots"

by John Lawrence

Administration spokesmen have characterized the boarding of Abdulmutallab on an airplane bound for the US as a "failure to connect the dots" in the same way that allowed the 9/11 terrorists to board airplanes. Actually neither case was a failure to connect the dots particularly in the case of Abdulmutallab. In the case of the 9/11 terrorists at least two of them, the ones from San Diego, were in an FBI database. In the case of Mutallab the one dot that was big enough that it needed no connecting was the fact that his father had gone to the US embassy to tell them that he suspected that his son currently in Yemen was a terrorist.  This fact in and of itself should have been sufficient to put Abdulmutallab on a no-fly list instantaneously. The other dots - that he bought a one way ticket with cash and didn't check any baggage, that there was some intelligence that a planned bombing was in the works, that he had been denied a visa to the UK - were clearly secondary and not necessary to the fact  that Abdulmutallab should have been on a no fly list. The only reason that any dots would need to be connected in any case is if no one dot in and of itself was necessary and sufficient. When one dot is necessary and sufficient, there is no need for more dots. In  fact the excuse that the dots were not connected is ridiculous on its face.

The other issue is that evidently anyone can walk on a plane under the current protocol with PETB in their underwear. Clearly, full body scanners are necessary to close that loophole, and they better get on with it, the sooner the better, because in future situations there may be no intelligence that would place a would be bomber on a no-fly list, dots or no dots, connected or not. In a concession to the politically correct crowd, I'm glad that they are going to start to "profile" people from countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other Muslim countries although the government won't characterize them as "Muslim" countries. That would be too politically incorrect.

But insofar as the use of intelligence that would prevent other Abdulmutallabs from flying, this is what should happen. The government should establish a hotline similar to 911 that anyone could call with intelligence whether they were inside or outside the government, whether they were official or inoffcial. There should be one level of interpretation on the other end of the line, the purpose of which would be to weed out crank calls. Other than that, if the intelligence was deemed to be credible, that person should be placed immediately on one all encompassing no-fly or complete security check database. There should be a very low threshold for flagging people as no-fly particularly if they're not US citizens because what is the worst that could happen? That some innocent person wouldn't be able, temporarily, to fly. Is that so bad compared to the worst that could happen - hundreds of innocent lives lost? Every airline should be required to check this no-fly or thorough security check list prior to issuing a ticket to anyone. So it takes a couple of seconds to input a name and have a computer match it with a database. Big deal. The whole thing would then only hinge on the fact that each flyer would have to present credible identification. Forged passports would get bombers on planes. Other than that scenario, a system in which any credible intelligence placed a potential bomber immediately on a no-fly list which would have to be checked before issuing any ticket, would solve the "failure to connect the dots" excuse. There should be no reason to connect any dots. One dot should be enough to flag a person, and there should only be one list not several. If a dot is considered to not be necessary and sufficient in and of itself, the person could be flagged for at least an extremely thorough search of person and baggage. This knowledge can then be conveyed by the ticket agent himself to the TSA agents at the gate in order to flag that person for a thorough security check. Or, alternatively, the ticket agent should refuse to issue a ticket.

There should be one and only one list, one and only one database, of suspicious persons. There was an excuse that Umar Farouk was on a database but one that consisted of 500,000 names implying that it was too large. C'mon!! That list is computer searchable in a couple of seconds. And, furthermore, there should be no intervening layer of government personnel which needs to make up its mind whether or not a person is dangerous. All information regarding any person on an overall list, that would be checked by each airline before issuing a ticket, should be available to the TSA agents at the security check at the gate. So the only decision that needs to be made is by the airline itself whether to not issue a ticket in the first place or to issue the ticket but submit the flier to a thorough security check in the second.  And this would be a no-brainer. And there should be a very low threshold to designating a person as a no-flier. Once so designated that person should have the right of a thorough review of his case including the submission of information by himself which would determine whether or not that person should be considered a threat and not allowed to fly. At most this would only inconvenience the person temporarily if in fact he or she was placed on the no-fly list by mistake.

Of course, maybe it's too much to ask that the government put in place a streamlined system that takes advantage of the latest technology and solves the problem in a rational and expedient manner. After all the government is deeply in debt, does not operate rationally and spends $600 billion a year on the military industrial complex which has nothing to do with homeland security. A rational assessment of our real defense needs would take a large share of this money and put it into systems to actually protect our transportation and other vital systems and to protect our ports and borders. This is the central crucial distinction to make. Homeland security is the poor stepcousin of the military industrial complex which hogs all the money for unnecessary, but lobbyist protected, military components. The fundamental problem is a misallocation of resources. Homeland security is real defense. Military invasions of foreign countries is adventurism which only results in the enmity of the people in the country being invaded. How would we feel if a foreign power invaded our country? What is considered to be defense is just a defense of the financial interests of defense contractors by politicians whose pockets are being larded by them.