One of the things I remember most about becoming a student at Columbia University in 1957 was the arrogance of the Columbia College football fight song.  “Oh, who owns New York?  Why, we own New York.  C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A.”  A not so subtle reminder of the fact that Columbia once owned Rockefeller Center.

American exceptionalism pales in comparison to the hubris of New Yorkers.  Most Americans believe that the United States is the greatest nation in the world.  All New Yorkers know that New York City is the greatest city on the planet.  Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, “the nation’s mayor,” raised such pretentiousness to heretofore unseen levels.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg is no less arrogant.

New York City is the economic, financial, marketing, cultural, moral, and political epicenter of the world.  Although Washington, D.C. is the nominal capital of the United States, New York City is the de facto capital, since the U.S. Government is owned, operated, and controlled by Corporate America and Wall Street.

Brooklyn writer Christopher Ketcham recently published a scathing indictment of New York City in Orion Magazine based on a study by the New York think tank called the Fiscal Policy Institute.  According to the study New York has the most inequitable distribution of income of any of the twenty-five largest cities in the United States.  In 2007, those households in the top one percent income bracket received nearly forty-four percent of all of the income in New York City.  These so-called “One Percenters” had an average annual income of $3.7 million.  Ketcham notes that the One Percenters consist of only 34,000 households, about 90,000 people, out of a population of 9 million.  And who are these One Percenters?  They work for Wall Street based stock brokers, investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, and insurance companies.  Their employers include the likes of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank.

Ketcham describes New York One Percenters as, “Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.”  Maybe the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators read his piece?

New York City is all about money, power, speed, greed, and looking out for number one.  It is the global capital of technofascism – affluenza, technomania, cyber-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.

My favorite art exhibit in New York City is the large room in the Guggenheim Museum whose four walls are completely covered with 100,000 one-dollar bills.

New Yorkers are primarily into having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling – money, power, people, things, wealth, culture, media, and ideas.  In the words of theologian Paul Tillich, “they are separated from themselves, from others, and the ground of their being.”

Christopher Ketcham has few kind words for the city’s culture which he describes as “cultural nihilism” dominated by “neohipsters.”  “The neohipster is a creature of advertisers:  affluent and status-anxious, which means that he is consumerist and, in the manner of all conspicuous consumers, conforming to the demands of narcissistic chic.”

No one hypes New York chic more effectively than The New Yorker, the magazine for effete snobs.  Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are firmly committed to promoting Wall Street, globalization, American imperialism, and unconditional support for the terrorist state of Israel.

New York City is nothing less than the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.  It is too big, too crowded, too undemocratic, too regimented, too intrusive, too polluted, too noisy, too commercial, too materialistic, and too dehumanized.  It has too much traffic, too many policemen, too much crime, too much drug addiction, and too little sense of community.

The Columbia College football fight song gets right to the heart of what New York City is all about – ARROGANCE!!

Thomas H. Naylor

October 10, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepubic.org.

Humble though its beginnings, the so-called Occupy Wall Street protest movement launched recently in Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan could have profound national and international political and economic implications.  Finally, the Libertarian Left has the right target for its concerns, and it is neither the White House nor the Congress, for the U.S. Government is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America.

Seduced by the success of the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War political movements of the late 60s and early 70s, who focused their attention on Washington, left-leaning political activists have tried unsuccessfully to replicate this approach for the past three decades.  Antiwar, environmental, climate change, working class, antipoverty, and health care activists have all failed to gain traction by concentrating their efforts on Washington.  What seems to have eluded them is the fact during the Reagan years Wall Street and Corporate America gained hammerlike control over our government, and they have remained in charge ever since.  In 1981, when President Reagan fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers, he dealt organized labor virtually a knockout blow.  Previously organized labor had provided a political counterbalance to the influence of Corporate America.

Since taking charge of our government in the 1980s, conservative business leaders, Democratic and Republican alike, have cleverly blamed all of our economic problems on the federal government, the same government which they control.  The effect of this sham has been to deflect public attention away from the fact that while we pretend to be a democracy, the vast majority of Americans are virtually powerless.

The global war on terror, the suppression of civil liberties, corporate greed, pandering to the rich and powerful, global warming, full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, and a culture of deceit can all be traced to Wall Street and Corporate America.  The outsourcing of millions of American jobs, massive military spending, skyrocketing health care costs, financial bailouts, and multi-trillion dollar budget deficits have all been influenced by decisions made on Wall Street, the epicenter of evil in the world.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters have it right on the money.  They have targeted the belly of the beast and the message is loud and clear, “The emperor has no clothes.”

It was this type of targeted attack on the moral authority of communism which brought down six communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union two years later.  Global capitalism is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on humankind.  It has no moral authority whatsoever.

The protestors in Zuccotti Park get it!  And notwithstanding the efforts of the mainstream media to suppress the Occupy Wall Street story, the rest of the world may soon get it too.  Contrary to popular belief, New York City is not the greatest city in the world.  It is the Great Satan, home to Wall Street.  That’s the real message from Liberty Park.

Thomas H. Naylor

September 29, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has recently been elevated to near godlike status by the political Left in the United States.  Some of his fans have even suggested that he should challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic Presidential Primary.  The more often he is accused of being a socialist by his political enemies on the Right, the more convinced the Left becomes that he surely walks on water.

Although Sanders may have once been a socialist back in the 80s when he was Mayor of Burlington, today, a socialist he is not.  Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill.  He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.  He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return.  If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s.  The new high-tech instruments of death will cost $115 million a pop in sharp contrast to the F-16s which cost a mere $20 million each.

From whom might these F-35s protect Vermont?  Possibly, Canada, separatist-minded Quebec, upstate New York, the New Hampshire Free State, or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?  Why on earth would anyone want to invade Vermont?  Vermont has no military bases, no large cities, no important government installations, and no strategic resources unless you count an aging nuclear power plant.  What if Canada, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or even the U.S. Marines were to invade the Green Mountain state?  Just what would they do with it?  Would all of the black-and-white Holsteins be confiscated, or perhaps the entire sugar maple crop be burned?  Imagine trying to enslave freedom-loving Vermonters.  Good luck!

Vermont is too small, too rural, and too independent to be invaded by anyone.  It is a threat to no one.  Furthermore, Vermonters, not unlike the Swiss, tend to stick to their own knitting rather than intruding into the affairs of their neighbors.  Vermont has always been that way and probably always will be.

Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard, has expressed the hope that the Vermont Guard might be morphed into a center for unmanned drone aircraft.  Sanders, not unlike President Obama, thinks drones are cool.

Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel.  He has done everything within his power to keep the myth of Islamic terrorism alive.  He never questions the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israeli acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.  It is as though these are nonevents.

Last, but by no means least, is the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories.  For over two years Sanders and former University of Vermont President Daniel Fogel have been encouraging Sandia to open a satellite laboratory in Vermont.  Sandia, whose historical origins can be traced back to the Manhattan Project in World War II, designs, builds, and tests weapons of mass destruction.  The Vermont laboratory envisaged by Sanders would not be involved with nuclear weapons but rather would be engaged in projects related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric grids.  Sandia, interestingly enough, is operated under contract by Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world.  Lockheed Martin produces F-35s and drones.  General Dubie, who has close ties to Lockheed Martin, recently received an honorary doctorate from UVM.  No one at UVM seems to care whether or not the University gets in bed with a manufacturer of atomic bombs.

Bernie Sanders loves to rail against Corporate America, Wall Street, and the super-rich, but has nothing to show for it.  He’s done little to constrain their power and influence.  But everybody on the Left loves Bernie.

Thomas H. Naylor

September 12, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

We live in the world of make-believe, a world controlled by ciphers such as Wall Street, Corporate America, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon.  These ciphers enjoy the enthusiastic support of the media, the academy, and the shamans to whom we entrust the care of body, mind, and soul.  They reside in cipherspace, a euphemism for what French writer Albert Camus called the absurd.

In the parlance of communications intelligence, a cipher is a secret message deliberately encoded to mislead unintended recipients.  International intelligence operatives routinely employ ciphers to communicate classified information and secret messages among themselves via telecommunication networks.  So, too, do those engaged in espionage, counterespionage, terrorism, and anti-terrorism.  More recently, ciphers have been used to protect the confidentiality of e-mail messages, electronic funds transfers, credit card transactions, and cell phone conversations.

Ciphers are often used to disguise messages encoded to mislead virtually everyone, whether they be citizens, consumers, stockholders, employees, voters, viewers, readers, Internet junkies, students, patients, or parishioners.  They are a sophisticated form of lying and deceit—one of the most important instruments of mass manipulation and social control in our culture.  A person, such as a political leader, who transmits misleading messages is also a cipher.

I first learned about ciphers from a Czech political science professor, Vladimir Suchan, who had become disillusioned with communist apparatchiks in Prague and Moscow as well as U.S government officials and viewed them all as ciphers.

To some ciphers are world-class bloodsuckers who exploit our vulnerability and our inability to cope with the human condition.  Ciphers tell us what to believe, how to live, how to raise our kids, how to work, how to play, how to make love, and how to die.  From them we also learn what to buy, how much to pay for it, and when to replace it, as well as where we will work, how much we will be paid, and what working conditions will be like.  We call this “freedom.”

Cipher is also a synonym for zero, indicating a value of naught, symbolizing nothingness and a hint of nihilism.  It can refer to a person or a thing of no importance, a nonentity.  Ciphers stand for nothing.  Thus a person, a place, a thing, an idea, or a message may be a cipher.  But in our culture, some of the most important ciphers are politicians, TV advertisers, the Internet, text messages and money.

In cryptology, the technology of secret communication, the original message is called the plaintext and the secret form of the message intended to mislead is the ciphertext or cipher.  The method for changing one into the other is the cryptosystem.  Without knowledge of the cryptosystem it is impossible to convert the ciphertext back to the real message, the plaintext.  Encrypting is the process of converting plaintext into ciphertext.  Decrypting is changing ciphertext back into plaintext.

In the Broadway musical Evita about the life of Eva Peron, the ciphertext was “You were supposed to have been immortal.”  But the plaintext was “in the end, you could not deliver.”

The plaintext for the BRAVO television series “Dirty Housewives” is, “Always look out for number one,”  while the not so subtle ciphertext is, “You deserve to have it all.”  The subliminal messages communicated by some television advertisements are so carefully sugarcoated and disguised that the unsuspecting viewer may find it virtually impossible to decrypt their real meaning.

Before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the ciphertext embraced by the New Orleans Levee Board was that the “city that care forgot” was surely invincible.  The plaintext understood by everyone but President George W. Bush was that New Orleans was “a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

Many in need of a quick fix to assuage their feelings of powerlessness and fear of nothingness are drawn to technology.  Technology seduces us into believing we can find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain, meaningless world.  Nothing better illustrates this phenomenon than President Ronald Reagan’s fantasy of an antimissile shield—still supported by our government and most Americans in spite of its failures.  Who could ever forget the affection with which Ronald Reagan held the Peacekeeper missile?  Isn’t the proposed antimissile defense system just code for the militarization of space?

The ciphertext of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was “hope and change.”  The reality (plaintext) has been “business as usual.”  And as we all know, Obama, the Nobel Peace Laureate, soon morphed into Obama, the champion of drones, Navy Seals, and Army Delta Force death squads.  Not only are we still in Iraq, but the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has actually increased.  Furthermore, we are now engaged in wars in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

The ciphertext “war on terrorism” is, in fact, a euphemism for Islamophobia.  The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the proposed Detainee Security Act, and Homeland Security are particularly creative ciphertexts approved by Congress to justify increased government control over the lives of ordinary citizens.  Freedom, democracy, liberty, and American exceptionalism are all clichés used to justify a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch.

The vast majority of the members of Congress are ciphers.  Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul are among the few exceptions to the rule.

At no place are ciphers more widely used than on Wall Street where economists, financial analysts, and corporate CEOs hype the prices of common stocks on CNBC and Fox News and in The Wall Street Journal.

Underlying globalization is a ciphertext called the Theory of Comparative Advantage developed by English economist David Ricardo two hundred years ago:  If every country concentrates on the production of those goods it can make most efficiently and buys from other countries those goods which it cannot manufacture as efficiently, consumers will get more goods at lower cost than if each country tried to be self-sufficient. But the plaintext is that globalization works best if we are all the same and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Inspired by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and his disciples who have all sold out to Wall Street, politicians vigorously promote globalization.  The worldwide network of markets, transnational companies, and information technologies has effectively eliminated the need for national political borders.  Political and economic power have been transferred from nation-states to transnational megacompanies accountable only to their shareholders.  Wall Street is in charge.  It is all about unfettered, free-market capitalism—deregulation, privatization, and the emasculation of labor worldwide.  Globalization is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.  A hiccup in China reverberates around the world at the speed of light.  And Wall Street has declared that this is very good.

Yet another important cipher is the Internet.  The plaintext of the Internet is firmly grounded in speed, greed, and instant gratification.  However, some view the Internet as one of the greatest con jobs ever perpetrated on the human race.  They perceive the Internet to be anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-creative and anti-social—capable of destroying community, undermining democracy, creating a spiritual vacuum, inducing emotional instability, and downloading the human mind.

My own view of the Internet is similar to Henry David Thoreau’s view of the magnetic telegraph.  “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas may have nothing important to communicate.  We are eager to tunnel the Atlantic and bring the Old World nearer the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

High on any list of ciphers is the Roman Catholic Church.  According to New York Times editor, Bill Keller, like the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union, “the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own powers.” The late anti-communist, Polish Pope John Paul II, “replicated something very like the old Communist Party in his church.”  He “shaped a hierarchy that [was] intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live.”  And there is every indication that Pope Benedict XVI was cast from the same mold as his rigid predecessor.  In response to criticism of Benedict XVI, the Vatican issued the following press release which gave new meaning to the word arrogance, “The Holy See cannot take lessons or instructions from any other authority on the tone and content of its own statements.”

Before the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russian workers cynically used to say, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”  The counterpart for American Catholics says Bill Keller is, “They pretend to lead, and we pretend to follow.”

Among the high priests of cipherspace not already mentioned are Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and Wal-Mart Chairman Robson Walton.

And who are all of these ciphers?  They are the people who psychiatrist M. Scott Peck called People of the Lie in his disturbing book bearing that title.

Thomas H. Naylor

August 29, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

Could it be that when Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama leaves office that the defining image of his presidency will have been his use of unmanned drone aircraft and military death squads to achieve the will of the Empire?

Hardly a week goes by in which we do not learn of the deaths of innocent civilians in Afghanistan or Pakistan resulting from attacks by U.S. drones.  Attack drones have also been deployed in Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.  This form of pilotless aircraft can be used to inflict death and destruction anywhere in the world.  Drones are controlled by well-trained, high-tech, gutless assassins seated in air conditioned comfort in front of sophisticated instrument panels thousands of miles away from their intended targets.  The beauty of desktop, drone warfare is that it is neat, clean, precise, risk-free, sanitized, and bloodless and can be waged by those who have never set foot on a battlefield or smelled the stench of death.  It’s almost like playing a video game.

The Pentagon recently ordered 55 Global Hawk drones for a cool $23 billion.  There is even talk of converting the Burlington International Airport in Vermont into a drone base.

Drones represent the perfect instruments of war for a risk averse president who shies away from hand-to-hand political combat.  With drones are associated feelings of power and control.  We are in charge.  There is no face-to-face conflict whatsoever.

Drones also offer endless possibilities as surveillance aircraft for high-tech spying, a practice with which the Obama administration seems to feel quite comfortable.

Under the leadership of former CIA Director Leon Panetta, the Pentagon will have U.S. Special Operations forces deployed in no less than 120 countries around the world by year-end.  These instant strike forces include Navy Seals, Army Delta Forces, Rangers, and Green Berets.  Special Operations forces have been used extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Navy Seals garnered international attention recently with their successful assassination attack on Osama bin Laden.  Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi surely would be next!

One can imagine a scenario in the not too distant future in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez receive phone calls from the White House saying, “Cease and desist, or be prepared to die.”  With high-tech, American death squads spread around the world, such a threat becomes increasingly credible.  Will this soon become the preferred way to deal with any nation which has the audacity to challenge the American way?  China and Russia might still be viewed as exceptions to the rule by the Pentagon.

By far, the most prescient line in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech was, “There will be times when nations will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”  Is it possible that what Obama really had in mind with his “hope and change” mantra was replacing old fashioned, conventional warfare with a more sophisticated, high-tech, stealthy, cowardly form of warfare involving drones and kinetic strike death squads?

“Meaningless!  Meaningless!” said the Teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes.  “Everything is meaningless!”

Thomas H. Naylor

August 23, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

A specter is haunting America – the specter of technofascism.  We are enmeshed in a global system of conquest and destruction, dominance and deceit in which Wall Street, Corporate America, the Pentagon, the U.S. Government, and the Israeli lobby manipulate and control our lives through money, political power, markets, media, and technology resulting in the loss of political will, civil liberties, collective memory, and traditional culture.

Robots of the world unite against affluenza, technomania, cybermania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism:

Affluenza Overconsumption of more and more stuff

Technomania God-like worship of technology which we equate with progress

Cybermania Obsession with some of the most anti-intellectual, anti-educational, anti-creativity, and anti-social devices ever conceived which have the potential to destroy community, undermine democracy, dehumanize society, and induce emotional instability.

Megalomania Mental condition characterized by delusions of great personal power, influence, grandeur, and wealth and the obsessive-compulsive worship of anything that is big.

Robotism Condition of those who behave as if they were perfectly cloned, mindless automatons, who think the same, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same Web sites, and buy the same consumer goods.

Globalization International system of mass production, mass marketing, mass distribution, mass consumption, mega financial institutions, and global telecommunications, which works best if we are all the same.

Imperialism Foreign policy based on the concepts of full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch.

Thomas H. Naylor

August 20, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

Underlying the endless posturing, bickering, and mean-spirited name-calling associated with the recent Congressional debt ceiling debacle were three important unstated issues – size, excessive globalization, and imperial overstretch, issues which were never even mentioned during the heated Congressional debate.

First, the United States has simply become too big to govern. Second, it has exported too many jobs over the past three decades to China, India, and the rest of the world. Third, it is engaged in too many wars and has too many military bases (over 1,000) in too many countries (153).

Just as the Kremlin found it impossible to manage 280 million people in the former Soviet Union from one central bureau in Moscow, so too are the White House and the Congress finding it increasingly difficult to control 310 million Americans from Washington, D.C. Also, not unlike the former Soviet Union, the United States has a single political party, the Republican Party, disguised as a two-party system. The Democratic Party is effectively brain dead, having had no new ideas since the 1960s.

Three years after the onset of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, the battle rages on as to whether the government should raise or lower taxes, increase or decrease spending, or print even more money. In case you haven’t noticed, the government has been reducing taxes, increasing spending, and printing money as though it were going out of style, and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. The economic recovery remains anemic, job growth is pathetic, and the tepid housing market shows few signs of life. Only the highly manipulated stock market temporarily responded positively to government policy.

Neither President George W. Bush’s 2001, 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut nor its 2003, $350 billion follow on could keep the U.S. economy out of recession. But that did not prevent the Obama administration from pushing through Congress a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts in December 2010.

Keynesian economics supporters rallied behind President Obama early in 2009 to gain Congressional approval for an $800 billion economic stimulus package. Although it may have helped prevent the loss of even more jobs, the stimulus package does not appear to have increased the number of new jobs significantly. The President’s $3.73 trillion budget request and projected $1.5 trillion deficit are more of the same. The spending cuts mandated by Congress recently as part of the deficit reduction bill are likely to result in even more job losses. However, they were insufficient to forestall a U.S. credit rating downgrade by S&P.

Following in the footsteps of his predecessor Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has kept the U.S. economy, and indeed the global economy, awash with money freshly printed by the government’s high-speed printing presses. He has primed the monetary pump with near-zero interest rates, loans to poorly managed mega financial institutions worldwide, and government bond purchases worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unfortunately the impact of all of this intense monetary policy activity on the housing market and the job market has been virtually nil.

What Bush, Bernanke, and Obama have failed to realize is that they have been engaged in a myth of Sisyphus struggle with Wall Street, which has presided over a thirty-year strategy of exporting real American jobs to Asia and elsewhere, all in the name of maximizing shareholder wealth. So many high-paying manufacturing and professional service jobs have been offshored that there are not enough people left who can afford to buy all of the Chinese plastic yuck that must be sold to sustain the American economy.

The neocons scream for more tax cuts, the liberal Democrats demand more government spending, and the monetarists call for even greater increases in the money supply, and it’s not going to make one whit of a difference. Sometimes when you make your bed, you actually have to lie in it. The effects of a thirty-year exodus of American jobs to the rest of the world cannot be reversed overnight.

It’s as though our national economic policy for the past decade has been under the control of three blind mice – Bush, Bernanke, and Obama. “See how they run. Did you ever see such a sight in your life?”

Driving the nation’s trillion-dollar plus military and national security budget is a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, might makes right, and the proposition, just be like us. One result flowing from this insidious foreign policy is the never ending, highly racist war on terror (Islam) which has given rise to immoral, illegal, undeclared wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine (via Israel), Somalia, and Yemen. Weapons of mass destruction, the strategic missile defense system, the Cold War relic NATO, pilotless drone aircraft, outrageously expensive F-35 fighter jets, and 1.6 million American troops are all part of the program.

Size, a moribund economy, and excessive militarization were three of the major forces contributing to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the United States may be well on its way to replicating Soviet mistakes in an American setting. We have spent so much time, energy, and other valuable resources fighting the threat of terrorism that we have diverted our attention, our energy, and our resources from fixing our severely broken economy.

One major unstated conclusion of the debt ceiling debate must surely be that we can no longer afford a continuation of the military madness. It is not in our self-interest to keep perpetuating the myths, half-truths, and out-right lies that have fueled the war on terror since it was launched by President George W. Bush in 2001.

If we were to look back into the eyes of our old adversary, the Soviet Union, we just might see a mirror image of ourselves. We have become much more nearly alike than most Americans would care to admit.

In the meantime, buy gold and prepare to secede.

Thomas H. Naylor
August 12, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning. www.vermontrepublic.org.

What are the people of Germany doing?  Sleeping.  Their sleep is filled with nightmares and anxiety, but they are sleeping.  We have awaited their awakening for so long, yet they continue to remain stolid, stubborn, and silent as to the crimes committed in their names, as if the entire world and its own destiny had become alien to them.  All agree: the German people slumber on amid the twilight of their gods.  They do not love liberty, because they hate criticism.  That is why they are sleeping today.

Albert Camus

September 17, 1944

Albert Camus’s insightful description of life in Nazi Germany, which appeared in the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat a few weeks after the Liberation of Paris, could just as well have been written about life in the United States today.  Not unlike the people of Nazi Germany, the American people are also asleep.

We have slept through over two decades of technofascism—the melding of corporate, state, military, and technological power by a handful of political elites which enables them to manipulate and control most of the population.  Technofascism has evolved into a global system of dominance and deceit in which ostensibly free individuals allow transnational megacompanies and big government to control their lives through money, markets, media, and technology resulting in the loss of political will, civil liberties, collective memory, and traditional culture.  It includes, but is not limited to, affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism.

While claiming to be individualists, we behave as world-class conformists.  We think the same, share many of the same religious beliefs, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same websites, and buy the same low-priced Chinese plastic yuck from Wal-Mart.  “All the women are strong, the men are all good looking, and all the children are above average,” just as they are in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Lake Wobegon.  And we all pretend to be happy.  But is it really true?

Even though we spend $10 trillion annually on consumer goods and services, $2.5 trillion of which is for health care, and billions more on spiritual gurus and religious shaman, are we as happy as we pretend to be?  I think not, because what we are up against is the human condition, God’s gift to us in the Garden of Eden from which there is no escape – separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.  Not a pretty sight.  Our feel-good religious and spiritual leaders to whom we turn for solace try unsuccessfully to sugarcoat it.  French existentialist Albert Camus called it absurd.

Unfortunately, the American Empire itself is a metaphor for the human condition.  Tens of millions are drawn to the Empire in search of a refuge from the human condition only to discover that the Empire is an integral part of the problem, not the solution.

What are our options in terms of possible responses to the existential angst produced by the human condition?  Escape, denial, engagement, and confrontation.

First, we may escape the human condition altogether through suicide.  We may choose death and nothingness now over the pain and suffering associated with separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of eventual death.

Second, we may deny the human condition through a life based on having—owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.  Through having we try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.  Our compulsive desire to have often leads to technofascism.

Third, we may choose to engage the human condition through being—by our creations, our personal relationships, our spirituality, our sense of community, and our stand towards pain, suffering and death.  So-called simple living is a popular form of being.  But if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, for how long can a life based only on being allay our angst?

Fourth, we may confront the human condition and peacefully rebél against the money, power, speed, greed, and size of the icons of the Empire—the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, Wall Street, the Internet, Fox News, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, as well as the churches, schools, and universities which suck up to them.

Rebél is a philosophy of rebellion.  It provides us with the faith to claw meaning out of meaninglessness, the energy to connect with those from whom we are separate, the power to surmount powerlessness, and the strength to face death rather than deny it.  Since the word rebel has more than one meaning, we use Rebél to connote resistance to authority and control.

If life is absurd, is there any reason to believe that tomorrow or the day after will be any different from yesterday or the day before, as in the movie Ground Hog Day starring Bill Murray?  Even though no cosmic source of meaning has been revealed to us, we find ourselves drawn to Camus’s idea that the purpose of life is to die happy and that the path to a happy death leads straight to rebellion.

Therefore, rebél against the human condition and the Empire, live life to the fullest, and try to die happy by mindfully defining your personal legacy, which some call your soul.

But Rebél is not for everyone, particularly not the faint of heart, for it offers no spiritual elixir or magic potion to relieve our existential pain.  It is neither a fire insurance policy against hell, nor a ticket to heaven.  It is not a touchy-feely, self-help, feel-good, be-happy philosophy promising pie-in-the-sky to its adherents.  Religious fundamentalists, pacifists, and those in search of a spiritual nirvana are not likely to be drawn to Rebél. Although it may not be what we learned in Sunday School, it surely beats nothingness.

Rebél is about the peaceful denunciation, demystification, and defiance of the tyranny of ciphers.  Its radical imperative involves disengagement, decryption, decentralization, downsizing, and dissolution.

In the meantime,

Rebél

Thomas H. Naylor

June 25, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus at Duke University;  co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.

In return for the support the Vermont political Left receives from the American Empire for its social agenda including abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action, the Vermont Left turns a blind eye towards the egregious behavior of Corporate America, Wall Street, and the Pentagon and provides implicit support for a foreign policy which embraces globalization, full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, and unconditional support for the Israeli military machine.  Underlying this hypocritical stance are six myths:

Bernie Sanders.  One of the most important myths is that Senator Bernie Sanders, the darling of the Vermont Left, is a political liberal.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Sanders is a technofascist war monger disguised as a progressive.  He has done everything within his power to keep the myth of Islamic terrorism alive.  He supports the illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen; Israeli genocide against the Palestinians; the deployment of the Vermont National Guard troops abroad; F-35 fighter jets at $115 million a pop; a Vermont based drone aircraft center; and recruitment to Vermont of a firm which designs, manufactures, and tests weapons of mass destruction – all to prevent Vermont from being attacked by Islamic terrorists.
Sanders loves to rail against Corporate America, Wall Street, and the  super-rich, but does little to constrain their power and influence.

Single Payer Health Care.  Governor Peter Shumlin has convinced the political Left in Vermont and elsewhere that Vermont will soon have the first single payer health care system in America.  This is utter fantasy.  The recent health care legislation passed by the Vermont Legislature not only fails to specify the exact nature of the proposed system but completely ducks all questions related to how much it will cost or how it will be financed.  It is pure pie-in-the-sky.

The demand for health care services in the U.S. is driven by fear of death and the supply side by greed.  When fear of death meets greed, the sky is the limit in terms of health care costs.  They can only spiral upwards.  There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that either Governor Shumlin or the Vermont Legislature grasp this fundamental concept.

Vermont Yankee.  Since the Vermont Legislature passed a resolution calling for the shutdown of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in 2012, most left-leaning Vermonters assume the plant will be closed by its owner Entergy Corporation next year.  What this view fails to consider is that the U.S. government, including the Supreme Court, is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America.  The conservative controlled Supreme Court always favors Corporate America over the will of the people.

Barack Obama.  Notwithstanding the fact that Barack Obama is in bed with Wall Street, Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the Likud government of Israel, Vermont Democrats and Progressives seem to still think that he walks on water.  Obama is essentially a smirk free George W. Bush.  But because he is so much more intelligent and more articulate than Bush, he is, therefore, much more dangerous.  Most Vermonters just don’t get it.

Israel.  There are few states other than Vermont in which the American Israeli Political Action Committee has been more successful in convincing the electorate that Israel deserves special attention.  Few left-wing Vermonters seem to be aware of the fact that for over 60 years Israel has engaged in acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.  Anyone who has the audacity to question the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israel is said to be a racist, anti-Semite.

Federal Government.  Perhaps the greatest myth of them all is the belief that only the U.S. government can solve all of our problems all of the time, failing to realize that the U.S. government is indeed the problem.

Thomas H. Naylor

June 25, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

Then what are you going to do about the Empire?  More specifically, how will you deal with the following:

Governance

1. The complete loss of moral authority of a government owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby.
2. An empire which is economically, militarily, politically, morally, socially, and environmentally unsustainable because it is too big.
3. A nation governed by a single political party disguised as a two-party system.
4. Congressional gridlock – an ungovernable nation which is, therefore, unfixable.
5. The fantasy of campaign finance reform as a panacea for solving most of our problems.
6. A populace which still believes that only the U.S. government can solve all of our problems all of the time, failing to realize that the U.S. government is the problem.

Foreign Policy

1. A foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, might makes right, and the proposition, just be like us.
2. The disproportionately large influence which the Israeli Lobby has on American foreign policy.
3. Our inflammatory policy towards Iran.
4. Our lack of commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
5. The support we provide to dictators and authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, North Africa, and the rest of the world.
6. The Cuban embargo.
7. Our predisposition towards the use of the military option in resolving international conflicts.

Military Might

1. The never ending, highly racist war on terror (Islam).
2. Our immoral, illegal, undeclared wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine (via Israel), and Yemen.
3. The 1.6 million American troops stationed at over 1,000 military bases in 153 countries.
4. The 80,000 American troops stationed in Europe, the 36,000 in Japan, and the 30,000 in Korea.
5. NATO, the 27-nation Cold War relic which has lost its way.
6. Ronald Reagan’s fantasy of a strategic missile defense system.
7. The American led proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
8. The unconditional military support provided to the right-wing Likud government of Israel.
9. America‘s unchallenged position as the world’s leading arms merchant.
10. American pilotless drone aircraft spreading death and destruction worldwide.
11. The outrageously expensive F-35 fighter jets which cost $115 million a pop.
12. The trillion-dollar plus military and national security budget.

Civil Liberties

1. The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the proposed Detainee Security Act.
2. The highly intrusive, money-guzzling Department of Homeland Security.
3. Prisoner abuse and torture.
4. The rendition of terrorist suspects.
5. White House ordered assassinations.
6. The Guantanamo prison.
7. Citizen surveillance and the suppression of civil liberties.

The Economy

1. A moribund housing market.
2. An inability to create enough real jobs to compensate for those exported to China, India, and elsewhere over the past two decades.
3. Stagnant real incomes for all but the super-rich.
4. An ever widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
5. Increases in the number of people who find themselves to be among the poor, homeless, or uninsured (no health insurance).
6. A multi-trillion dollar national debt.
7. Increased dependence on China, Japan, and other foreign countries to finance our national debt.
8. A government which prints money as though it were going out of style.
9. Uncertainty about the future value of the U.S. dollar and the rate of inflation.
10. An unreliable system of public and private retirement pension systems.
11. Uncertainty over the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare.
12. A financial regulatory system which favors Wall Street mega-banks at the expense of ordinary citizens.
13. An organized labor movement which has been rendered impotent by two decades of hostile, anti-labor employers such as Wal-Mart.
14. An economy driven by our intense psychological need to fill our spiritual and emotional vacuum with more and more stuff and the illusion that the accumulation of wealth and material possessions can provide meaning to life.  Whoever dies with the most toys, wins the game.
15. Wal-Mart with its seductive low prices and the promotion of the idea that what life is all about is unrestrained personal consumption.

Social Services

1. A health care system driven by fear of death on the demand side and greed on the supply side which is spiraling out of control.
2. Over two million people in prison.
3. An international war on drugs that is a complete failure.
4. A federal education program committed to a one-size-fits-all corporate model of education.
5. A social welfare net that is woefully inadequate.
6. Patronizing, racist programs of support for Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Eskimos, and Inuits.

Energy and Environment

1. Unabated dependence on imported foreign oil and its inherent price fluctuations.
2. Under investment in alternative energy sources by government and private industry alike.
3. A failure to confront the problem of climate change.

Infrastructure

1. Widespread aging infrastructure including highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, dams, levees, and public water systems.
2. Obsolete air traffic control system.
3. Grossly inadequate railroad passenger train system.

Summary

A government that is too big, too centralized, too powerful, too undemocratic, too intrusive, too materialistic, too environmentally destructive, too racist, too violent, too militaristic, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities.

Thomas H. Naylor

June 15, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org.