Today's Stories

October 13, 2008

Michael Hudson
Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many

October 10 / 12, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is McCain a Lot Sicker Than We Know?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Obama's Nuclear Ambition

Douglas Valentine
Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain

Noam Chomsky
Exposing the Un-Democratic Face of Capitalism

Ralph Nader
The Derivatives Game

Syed Saleem Shahzad
Why the Neo-Taliban is Winning

Patrick Cockburn
War in the Time of Cholera

Paul Craig Roberts
A Possible Solution to the Economic Crisis

Mike Whitney
Run on the System

Peter Morici
The Deficit and the Damage Done

Christopher Ketcham
The End of the Economy

Stephen Martin
Shock and Awe in Economic Warfare

Chellis Glendinning
Wireless Mind, Gullible Mind

Saul Landau
All Guns, No Butter

Ahmad Faruqui
21 Days to Baghdad

Adam Turl
Sheriff Tom Dart vs. the Banksters

Serge Halimi
The Battle for the West

Anthony DiMaggio
Making a Killing: the Business of Elections

John Ross
The Sky is Falling on Mexico, Too

José M. Tirado
Meltdown in Iceland

Paul Krassner
Beat the Crowd in Denver: Cops and T-Shirts

David Macaray
Adventures in Unionism

Robert Fantina
Bankrupt and Belligerent

David Yearsley
The Playlist for Election 2008

Julian Clec'h
The Soap Washing Through Saudi Arabia

Adam Engel
Sexual Healing ... for the Planet

Phyllis Pollack
The Rolling Stones Go Home, Again

Missy Beattie
Going North: the Coming Nation of Alaska

Poets' Basement
Landau, Moser and Henson

Website of the Day
Sarah as Esther? New Video From Inside Palin's Church

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

David Vest
The Great Rescue of 2008: Could Whatever Follows Bush Be Even Worse?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Meltdown at the Pentagon

Andy Worthington
The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama the Subhuman

Helga Serrano /
Hector Tamayo
Ecuador Charts the Way

Dave Lindorff
When Money Flies

Mats Svensson
At the Checkpoint on the Day of Atonement

Rannie Amiri
The Time for Mordechai Vanunu is Now

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Creatures of Capital

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

October 13, 2008

This Just In

Greed is Not Good

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

So, um, prolly you’ve heard by now that we’re having this little problem with the economy, eh?

Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s starting to look like more than just a little problem.  It’s starting to look like 1932 again.  And, who knows beyond that?  What is there to say that 1932 is the baseline?  Just because the Great Depression is the worst scenario we’ve yet to experience, that sure doesn’t mean that it is the worst we could experience.  With astonishing amounts of governmental and personal debt sloshing around the world in a hugely globalized economy, who’s to say that we aren’t now headed for the Even Greater Depression?

Oh, and, let’s also not forget that even that isn’t necessarily the end of it.  Last time the global economy imploded this bad, it got one helluva lot worse before it got better.  The only thing that could ever have made the 1930s look good was the 1940s.  There’s no reason to necessarily believe that that part can’t happen again as well.  If we’re stupid enough to repeat the mistakes of the Gilded Age, surely belligerent, nationalist, chauvinist Americans (and Chinese, and Frenchmen, and Russians) are also stupid enough to launch another world war or two in order to chase down scarce resources like oil or gold.  Or food.  Or water.

Leaving aside for the moment any threats of world war, the only good news I see in our current economic crisis s that at least we’re eighty years down the road from when Franklin Roosevelt broke the psychological barrier previously preventing brainwashed Americans from owning a government that actually helped them, as opposed to allowing themselves to be owned by a government of oligarchs who were helping themselves.  This time, if people are hungry because there’s no money, and cold because heating oil costs so much, and weathered because they’ve been tossed out of their homes, and frightened because they’ve got no job and no healthcare coverage – if we arrive at that state, watch what’s left of the psychological barriers crumble like George Bush’s job approval ratings or John McCain’s lofty principles about running a high-minded campaign.  Watch desperate Americans embrace socialism as if they were the lost children of Chairman Mao waking up from a long nightmare of capitalist errancy.

What we’re witnessing now is the complete and utter repudiation of Reaganism-Bushism, of course, but it runs even deeper than that.  Not just the hyper-kleptocratic version of the American economic system is being left in shreds, but even its more moderate baseline version – the Eisenhower model of nice, gray-suited capitalism – is now also on the chopping block.  Even that form of capitalism – quaintly tame by today’s standards of astonishing rapaciousness – was never sustainable, and part of what we’ve been seeing this last decade is all the ruses by which we had greedily squeezed out more than our fair share of the pie now angrily biting back.  The wars, the environmental rape, the exploitation of nice little brown people all around the world (and, after all, isn’t that why Jesus made them?), the borrowing against our children’s future, the tax avoidance free-riding, the credit card economy, the exporting of jobs to explode profits, the gluttony of 300 pound Americans and their SUVs and the giant screens on which they watch ‘reality TV’ (a nice euphemism for humiliating degradation) – these are all screaming out to us simultaneously today, in an excruciating cacophonous harmony from Hell, that THIS MUST END NOW.

And, boy, did we ever have it coming.  I just want to go on record and say to any historians from the 26th century who might be reading this:  “Yes, it does say ‘American’ on my birth certificate, but I want you to know I wasn’t  part of this!  I did my best and kept shouting out about our national stupidities.  And I always voted for the Green Party!”

Yeah, it’s true, I’m afraid.  We’re going down in history as the stupidist and the shortest-lived of empires (even the Belgians did better than this, plus, they make great beer).  And well we should be so considered, too.  Do they have Darwin Awards for countries, like they do for individuals, who find uniquely imbecilic (though highly entertaining) ways to remove their DNA from the collective gene pool (you know, like getting really stoned and then playing your electric guitar in the swimming pool)?  They should!  And who could possibly trump America, we who gluttonously slurp up oil in order to live like global pigs, sending the proceeds to fund terrorists with ideologies from the 13th century and weapons from the 21st to attack us?  We who chant “Drill, baby, drill!” when the giant planet-wrecking asteroid of global warming is headed right for us.  (Even the real dinosaurs come off looking better than our human imitations of them, since they at least had the excuse of actually having pea-sized brains to explain why they behaved as though they had pea-sized brains.)  We whose government’s insatiable spending sprees on high priority items, like wars that diminish our national security and corporate welfare for oil companies or giant agri-corporations, we fund by allowing China, our rising rival for global power, to own our debt, and therefore to own us.

And what’s that old line about the first time being tragedy and the second folly?  The most astonishing thing about the economic nightmare we’re now entering is how little we learned from having already gone through this before.  We’re not even talking about ancient or foreign history here, people.  You don’t have to force Americans to go watch some History Channel documentary on Charlemagne to figure this one out.  It wasn’t that long ago that we went through exactly the same process, ourselves, right here in gool ol’ ‘Muricah.  Christ, there are people still alive today who experienced it first hand.  You’d think, having found out in the 1930s precisely what happens when you let monstrously greedy people who have their hands on the levers of the global economy go on unregulated bacchanals of decadent self-aggrandizement, that we’d want to avoid that sort of thing in the future, eh?  Perhaps we’d even vow “Never again”, just like we did after the Holocaust.  (But then, given the mass murderous Soviet and Chinese purges which came after Auschwitz and Treblinka, along with the genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur (not to mention Vietnam or Iraq), maybe that wouldn’t be such a great promise to make...)

And even if the American people couldn’t make the connection between present circumstances and past analogues, am I the only knucklehead who finds the whole deregulation mania something of an odd idea just at a conceptual level?  How is it that the same people who always jump up and down in passionate support of tough crime laws, loads of jails and busy state killing machines, don’t seem to apply the same logic to nice, white-collar crimes?  I mean, if you need a law to deter people from committing murder, why don’t you need regulations to prevent them from committing greed?  And, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to have these laws, especially in places where the capacity exists for such tremendous harm to be done?  A murder takes a life and wrecks a couple of families.  That’s horrible, and should be prevented wherever possible, and punished where not.  But would it be too much to ask that we also have laws and punishments and regulations to help prevent white-collar crimes that can wreck an entire global economic system, bringing wholesale grief to hundreds of millions of people, and no doubt producing boatloads of deaths in their wake, all in the name of satiating the greed of already fantastically wealthy people?  Indeed, we have the first of these victims on the scoreboard already.  This week a Los Angeles man who lost all his money in the stock market shot his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law before then killing himself.  Get ready for more of the same, and most of them won’t be suicides, I can tell you.  They’ll be homicides.  Murder by greed.

And even if America’s so-called justice system can’t bring itself to punish Wall Street thieves for serial homicide in this case, would it be too much to ask for a little government regulation to prevent a handful of kleptocrats from crashing an entire global economic order and spreading death, destruction and misery across the planet, just so that they could milk the last remaining pennies from the golden goose, its bloodied carcass lying twisted and prostrate across the trading room floor, nothing but lead spilling out of its slashed belly?  Ah, but that would not be capitalism, eh, Mr. Graham?  That would be fettering innovation, right, Mr. Greenspan?  That would limit Holy Growth, no, Mr. McCain?  And we can’t have that.

I don’t really understand the perverse psychology of people like these Wall Street masters of the universe, whose desire for additional wealth seems incapable of being satiated.  Personally, I don’t think I’d know what to do even with the mere pittance of a million bucks, so it’s really hard for me to figure it out when I see them feeling so hyper-compelled in pursuit of throwing tens of millions more on top of their existing piles of hundreds of millions.  I mean, you can only sail on one yacht at a time, right?  You can only live in one mansion at a time, right?  You can only sleep with one gorgeous call girl at a time, right?  Oh, um, okay – well, never mind that last part.  But you catch my drift here, no?

In truth, when I look around this fine country that calls itself my home, I have to conclude that it’s actually me who is the anomaly.  I’m not sure what genetic quirk or what massive failure of the educational machine produced a freak like me, but – apart from not wanting to go into debt, and from owning a handful of very modest toys like a computer or guitar – I really don’t give a shit about money.  Go figure, eh?  You know, my car, bought used, is ten years old.  I think.  I don’t really remember for sure what model year it is, though I’m pretty sure I could tell you how many cylinders it has if I stopped to ponder the question long enough.  This strange absence of an unending greed for Money! and Things! seems to leave me way out in the bizarro fringe outcast category within what passes for a culture for those 300 million inhabitants in the middle of the North American continent.  Just ‘cause I don’t constantly seek cash, or measure myself by the size of my wallet, I’m like six standard deviations from the norm in the disaster affectionately known as America.

And just how disastrous is our national disaster?  Leave it to Sarah “The Embarrassment” Palin to answer best.  She illustrated the other night in her ‘debate’ with Joe Biden how deep the country has sunk these last decades into the miasma of a culture of petty selfishness, and an ethos of pathetic greed.  She reminded us that in Middle America, where she and “Todd” (hey, you scary monster, I am not on a first-name basis with your First Dude husband, and I don’t ever want to be) purport to live, paying taxes is not patriotic.  Biden’s response should have been to ask whether all the Americans who’ve paid all the billions in tax increases in every war America has ever fought prior to this one were unpatriotic, or just suckers.  He should have asked who she expected would pay for the body armor to protect her son in Iraq (as if they’re gonna let that kid anywhere near any real danger), for our roads, our schools, our post offices, our Army and Navy, our Social Security benefits or our police officers.  For that matter, he might also have asked who would pay for Air Force One, who would pay for the tens of millions of public campaign funds now being spent by the McCain-Palin campaign, or who would pay for the army of bank regulators we’ll need to clean up the economic mess her ideological soul-mates have left us.

Still, I can’t help thinking that millions of Americans sat at home watching this, enthusiastically nodding their head in support of her lunacy.  Let’s face it, after a generation or two of Reaganism-Bushism permeating the culture, no politician can even talk about raising taxes in America anymore without risking career suicide.  It has become the new third rail of American politics.  And that says so much about us.  Because, not only do we want all the benefits of government, but polling data clearly shows that we actually even want the government to do a lot more than it is already doing.  And yet, at the same time, selfish, narcissistic Americans have been well trained now by pandering right-wing politicians to expect it all for free.  Cutting taxes without simultaneously cutting expenditures (let alone while massively increasing expenditures) is one of the single most recklessly irresponsible acts a government can undertake.  Since the only solution to the deficits that must ensue from this simple math is to borrow the difference, the polity in question is simply taking its desire to live large and handing it off in the form of a problem for someone else to deal with, on top of their own problems.  Plus interest on the loans, of course.  And who is that someone?  Faraway foreigners?  Some despised underclass? The millions we’ve incarcerated as criminals, perhaps?  Not at all.  The crime runs even deeper than that.  It’s our own children who are getting the bill.

Which is precisely what we’ve been doing.  I saw Californian voters, when I lived there, launch the modern taxpayer revolt movement by passing the infamous Proposition 13, which took a meat-cleaver to property taxes in the state.  Never mind that the effect would be the same on California’s schools, which are largely funded by property taxes.  They went from being the best in the country to nowadays hanging around with Mississippi, down at the bottom of the list.  But who fucking cares, anyhow?  People got their bloody tax cuts, and they got to buy that nice, shiny new car they wanted with the money.  So what about the kids?

And so it has gone these last decades, tax cut after tax cut in America, which really means tax transfer after tax transfer.  And now we have a ten trillion dollar debt we are passing along.  So that means that the next generation will have to pay enough in taxes to run the government then, plus the share that the current generation didn’t really feel like paying to run the government today, plus interest on that borrowed amount.  What does that mean, up close and personal?  If, right this very moment, we somehow stopped adding to that pile more debt and more interest every day, and just handed out the bill for what is currently owed, it would average out to $67,000 for each and every taxpayer.

I know what you’re thinking.  That sucks, eh?  Well, at least the good news is what you got for it.  For instance, a really expensive war in Iraq that diminished American national security.  And the chance for really, really rich people to become really, really, really rich people through humongous tax breaks.  How about a GOP pork-barrel spending spree – including the Bridge to Nowhere – of unprecedented size in American history?  Huge oil and agricultural company subsidies?  A giant prescription drug bill which provided corporate socialism for drug and insurance companies?  A chance for George W. Bush to frolic in the White House for eight years?  I’m sure every American, working some job they’re not particularly fond of, won’t really mind the extra hours they have to work to pay for all this.  Especially since, if you make, say, 15 bucks per hour, that would only translate to 4,467 hours you’d be working to finance your share of this past years’ pig-out.  Based on a forty-hour work week, that’s roughly two-and-a-quarter years worth of your life.  When you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem so bad, does it?  And, again, that’s just if we stop deficit spending now, and stop accruing interest now.  In fact, we’re actually deficit spending about another $400 billion per year, every year, which just gets added to the pile (and lots more, as well, if John McCain is able to slash taxes on the wealthy even further).  Moreover – maybe it’s just my pessimism kicking in here, but – I don’t think the Chinese or our other creditors are going to be much inclined to waive the interest accruals due to them for financing our decadent little party.  So, in fact, the above accounting of our national and personal liabilities are actually rather, ahem, conservative.  In every way imaginable.

But, of course, America’s problem is way deeper than one kleptocratic president or even a generational binge coupled with a three decade long vacation from responsibility, not to mention rationality.  We have established a pervasive culture of greed, and that’s one angry chicken that has now come home to roost.  What’s worse, we’ve lost the capacity as a society to even imagine an alternative ethos to guide us, though the looming economic tsunami may be just the thing – and likely the only thing – big enough to get us thinking once again.

This massive poverty of imagination is what is killing us now, undermining us at the most fundamental levels of societal identity.  To grasp the magnitude of our problem, consider how we socialize our citizens and how our culture sets the priority structure of their values and aspirations.  Sure, some Americans think it is noble and wonderful to pursue careers which serve the public interest, but most are taught, and simply accept, that one should aspire to making boatloads of money, and that the measure of one’s achievement is the size of their bank account and the number of toys parked in the driveways of their McMansions.  I am constantly astonished by the quantity of Americans whose expressed goal in life is simply to make lots of money, which I find especially bizarre since they don’t seem to have any particular use in mind for all this cash.  What this phenomenon has long suggested to me is a country full of sheep so unoriginal in their thinking that they can’t even figure out what to aspire to on their own, and a society so bankrupt in its morality that it feeds them the goal of wanton greed to fill that yawning void.

All that’s bad enough, but, besides the current economic meltdown and a society populated by moral midgets, there are also other repercussions to this ethical failure and this poverty of imagination.  Chief among these is the false choice we are always presented between governance in the public interest, on the one hand, and prosperity, on the other.  This bogus diversionary tactic forms the central argument of the economic predators who’ve been bleeding the country of its wealth (and, in fact, prosperity), as to why we can’t have regulation.  You know, all that Washington red tape (you can’t profit off of pollution, you can’t exploit children as factory workers, you have to pay a minimum wage – horrible restrictions like that) will keep innovators from innovating and entrepreneurs from, uh, entrepreneuriating.

And, you know what?  They’re actually more or less right.  They’re right if, that is, you accept as a predicate would-be innovators and would-be entrepreneurs who are only motivated by an ethos of personal greed, which has been duly pounded into them through the socialization processes of a society that lost its mind and its moral bearing decades ago.  Sure, okay.  Under those conditions it’s probably true that most people will only work for themselves, and will only be motivated by self-interest.  But what if we taught these people something different, right from the get-go when they were toddlers, and reinforced those different values throughout their adult lives?  What if we taught the members of this society to value the community’s welfare as much as their own?  What if we taught them that massive personal wealth was not only not the highest achievement to aspire to, but actually a sort of crass and tacky goal, only to be found amongst the most juvenile and selfish in the society?  What if we strongly imprinted the idea among our people that improving the welfare of the country (or, gulp, the world) is an important life aspiration, and that those who do so are considered among our most admired countrymen, rather than those who have acquired the money to purchase bitchin’ toys and trophy wives?  Is it not possible that our citizens would innovate, and that they would be every bit as motivated as they are today by greed?  Maybe even more so?

And, therefore, could we not transcend this false choice of good governance versus prosperity?  (Not to mention the fact that whatever prosperity we’ve experienced of late is not going to the society, anyhow.  In the last three decades, while GDP has grown at a handsome clip, the middle class – and, of course, we’ve long ago now abandoned even talking about those below middle class status, let alone fighting a war on poverty – has not even stood its ground, but rather has actually lost overall purchasing power.  That, of course, leaves only one mathematical explanation for what has happened.  You guessed it.  All that growth in national wealth has gone to the already richest Americans.)

You know, I’m not a subscriber to the prescriptions of communism for constructing the best system of political economy, much as that might come as a shock to any conservative reader of this piece.  And I think it’s fair to say that the world’s experiments in communism to date – to the extent they weren’t actually just experiments in totalitarian brownshirtism – failed in large part because they possessed just the opposite flaw as that described above.  They attempted to build economic systems on the equally false notion that selfishness can be completely erased from human psychology as a motivating force.  It can’t.  And any system dependant on that proposition for its success will have none.  But, by the same token, a system that is built on the premise that people are only motivated by selfish greed, and therefore can only produce prosperity by letting every actor pursue their own self-interest, unfettered by any societal concerns, is an equally disastrous notion.

And such a society is equally bound for the ash heap of history, just as was the Soviet Union or Maoist China.

In fact, I ‘m pretty sure that’s just exactly what the cosmos is screaming in our ears, at about 150 decibels worth of volume, right at the moment.  The only question is whether we are so deaf we can no longer hear the warning call, even when it’s broadcast over a galactic PA system.

But just in case, here it is.  Newsflash for America!  This just in!  Sorry to burst your little bubble, people, but it turns out, after all, that...

Greed is not good.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.  More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

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