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.

On July 1, 1966, when thirty year old Norma Watkins bid farewell to her husband of ten years, her four young children, and the good life in Jackson, Mississippi, she was effectively engaging in a personal act of secession from the Magnolia State.  Not only did she say “good-bye” to days filled with tennis, bridge, and church bazaars, tasteful, noncontroversial volunteer work for the Junior League and the Jackson Country Club, but she also fled the racism, sexism, violence, repressive politics, and family intolerance, all associated with the so-called “Mississippi way of life.”  As Ole Miss historian James Silver wrote in 1963, Mississippi was indeed a “closed society.”

Ms. Watkins, my cousin whom I have not seen since 1957, has just published a riveting, soul-searching, brutally frank memoir about growing up in segregated Mississippi in the 40s and 50s, and becoming disillusioned with the state’s big lie – “Blacks are inferior to whites, and, therefore, deserve to be treated accordingly.”  In her new book, The Last Resort: Taking the Mississippi Cure, Watkins demonstrates an uncanny grasp of every nuance of what it meant to live in a state-enforced racially segregated society. Although she was the daughter of firebrand, racist Governor Ross Barnett’s personal attorney, she developed an empathy for the plight of her family’s black servants trying to survive in a culture in which literally everything was stacked against them.

Norma Watkins combines the story-telling skills of Mississippi writer Eudora Welty with the compassion and political passion of North Towards Home author Willie Morris and the psychological sophistication of psychotherapists such as Rollo May and M. Scott Peck.  Interestingly enough, the book was published as part of the Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography Series by The University Press of Mississippi.  Ironically, in 1962 when Governor Barnett tried unsuccessfully to keep African American James Meredith out of Ole Miss, Tom Watkins, Norma’s father, was in charge of Barnett’s legal team.

The setting for nearly half of the book is the family’s hotel and spa, Allison’s Wells, located a half hour north of Jackson.  Norma and her family lived there between 1943 and 1945 while her father was serving in World War II.  She and her sister Mary Elizabeth worked there every summer until they finished high school. Allison’s Wells was Norma’s metaphor for Mississippi and laboratory testing ground for her evolving attitudes about black-white relations in the South.  It was there that she had a chance to observe and ponder the Mississippi Caste system in which blacks cooked all of the meals for the elite hotel guests but were never allowed to eat with them or socialize with them.  It was at Allison’s Wells where the seeds for the radicalization of Norma Watkins were first sewn.

Notwithstanding her increasing doubts about the Mississippi form of justice, or lack thereof, Watkins allowed herself to be temporarily seduced by the lifestyle afforded the daughter of a prominent Mississippi attorney married to a successful white businessman.  By late 1963 she and Fred Craig, whom she married in 1955, had four children, but a happy marriage it was not.

By that time Watkins’s life was in a state of turmoil.  She had resumed her pursuit of a college degree, the James Meredith affair had taken its toll, racial violence was on the increase, the civil rights movement had reached fever pitch proportions, and JFK had been assassinated.  In the midst of all of this Allison’s Wells, The Last Resort, burned to the ground.

Allison’s Wells was Norma’s safe haven where she was loved and understood by her aunt who ran the place, all of the black employees, and the white hotel guests as well.  Life in Mississippi for Norma was effectively over once Allison’s Wells was gone.  She stood alone as the old system continued to implode.  She became increasingly radicalized and politicized as her personal life came unglued at the seams.  Norma had to go.

Then one afternoon in early July in 1966, much to the chagrin of her family and friends, Norma climbed into the blue Triumph convertible of her lover, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, and off they drove to Miami to a life of teaching, writing, and political activism at Miami Dade College.  Free at last!

Life is full of an endless series of secessions including birth, death, divorce, graduation, job changes, leaving home, ending relationships, and moving to another place.  Secessions are often painful, unpleasant, and unpopular with others.  Norma Watkins’s decision to leave Mississippi was no exception to the rule.  Although her decision was based on a strong sense of betrayal and moral outrage, she has written about it with honesty, clarity, sensitivity, style, and class.

The Last Resort reads like a well written classical Southern novel in the tradition of Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty.  Only it happens to be true.

My only regret about this compelling book is that it makes me wish that I had known Norma Watkins a lot better back in the 1950s when we grew up together in Jackson, Mississippi.  We might have had a lot to talk about.  My father’s job also depended on Governor Ross Barnett.  I seceded in 1957.

Thomas H. Naylor

June 13, 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.

Although I can claim no kinship with McGill University Professor R.T. Naylor, whom I have never met, I am an admirer of his work as an economist, a historian, a criminologist, and a political journalist.  Even though he tackles very weighty problems, Thomas Naylor skillfully manages to find the humor and the irony in the dark side of life.  His latest book, Crass Struggle: Greed, Glitz, and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World, is no exception to the rule.

Crass Struggle is about how the ultra-rich respond to the human condition, namely, separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of death, as well as the devastating global social, economic, and environmental consequences of their behavior.  For those in the top 1 percent of the world’s population who own 50 percent of the world’s wealth, life is all about having – owning, possessing, manipulating and controlling money, power, people, and things – very expensive things such as precious metals, gemstones, diamonds, art objects, historical artifacts, rare coins, fine wines, Cuban cigars, scarce fish, exotic birds, wild animals, and elephant tusks.

To cope with meaninglessness and fear of death many of the super-rich spend their entire lives pretending they are invincible.  One of the ways in which they try to convince themselves that they will live forever is through conspicuous consumption.  They think they can spend their way into a state of never-ending self-actualization without paying any psychological dues for a life of unrestrained pleasure.  They live by the slogan, “I’ve got mine, Jack, and the rest of the world be damned.”

And damned it is, the world which supplies the super-affluent with their expensive toys, playthings, food, and drink.  Naylor describes it as “the low side of the high life, the bad side of the good life, or, more poetically, the underbelly of the potbelly.”  It’s all about the dark underworld which supports the world’s fat cats through debauchery, deceit, bribery, smuggling, fakery, forgery, tax evasion, and virtually every other known form of human criminal activity.

Through a series of well-documented riveting stories Thomas Naylor takes his readers on a global tour of toxic gold mines spewing arsenic and cyanide, diamond fields destroying lives and spreading human misery, purveyors of upscale seafood indifferent to dwindling supplies, operators of disgusting trophy-hunting expeditions, and dealers in exotic pets high on endangered species lists.  The combination of big money and affluenza gone amok yields very troubling results.  To his credit Professor Naylor does not conclude his book with a “happy chapter,” outlining a number of inane policy recommendations aimed at fixing the plethora of problems described in his book.  Rather he leaves us with the following somber assessment of the grim situation:

“Public exhibitions of gross self-indulgence by the ultra-rich lead not to  general outrage and demand for serious political action but to a populace of electronically lobotomized consumatons hopping into their 4×4s to exercise what has become the ultimate human right – the freedom to shop at the discount mall for what they are told is a bargain.  From class struggle to crass struggle: that is the defining feature of the times.  And the genius of today’s political economy has been to convert what used to be a potential life-and-death conflict between haves and have-nots into a minor disagreement between have-lots and wanna-have-mores.”

Through a collection of poignant, sometimes dramatic, authentic tales, Thomas Naylor enables his readers to peer into the soul of globalization, and it is not a pretty sight.  It’s not what the Chicago Boys promised us.  Or is it?

Thomas H. Naylor

May 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.

There he was at Ground Zero in New York City, Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama, basking in the glory of the cold blooded assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which he had ordered a few days earlier.  It reminded me of the celebratory response of white racists in New Orleans in 1963, where I happened to live, to the death of President John F. Kennedy.  They were beside themselves, just like most Americans are about the demise of bin Laden.

But who was Osama bin Laden?  Was he a real person or was he the creation of President Bill Clinton and later transformed by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama into an international pariah?

Few Americans recall that it was Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, who introduced the world to Osama bin Laden back in 1998.  Without any evidence whatsoever, Clinton blamed the Muslim fundamentalist and wealthy Saudi exile for the simultaneous bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  At that time Clinton’s presidency was deeply mired in the Monica Lewinsky affair, and he was in need of something to divert public attention away from his personal life.  Osama bin Laden,  said to be an international terrorist trained by the CIA living in Afghanistan, provided such a diversion, and he did so very well.

Clinton ordered military strikes against bin Laden’s alleged international terrorist training bases in Afghanistan and a chemical plant in Sudan which was thought to be producing biological and chemical weapons.  Even though the missiles aimed at the Afghan bases actually landed in Pakistan and the so-called chemical plant turned out to be an aspirin factory, almost overnight Osama bin Laden was transformed into a household word synonymous with global terrorism.  At least temporarily, he had become Global Enemy Number One, and Clinton’s political popularity turned upward.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, our government informed us that nineteen Muslim fanatics armed only with boxcutters had pulled off the greatest act of terrorism in history under the command of a charismatic, sinister-looking Arab, also named Osama bin Laden, from his high-tech cave in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.  Without one shred of evidence, the Bush administration claimed that these Arab terrorists commandeered four jetliners, brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon, and almost succeeded in destroying theWhite House and the Capitol.  And they did all of this because they “hated freedom.”

We were further told by Bush administration operatives that 9/11 was a special case of the terrorist activities of a global network known as Al Qaeda which was controlled by Osama bin Laden.  To combat this international network of money, weapons, and Muslim fanatics, the United States needed to launch a global war on terrorism.  Such a war on terrorism not only defined the Bush administration for the next seven years but resulted in illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, staggering budget deficits and no doubt contributed to a major financial meltdown.

Incredulous though it may be, the official U.S. government version of the 9/11 story has gone virtually unchallenged by our tepid media.  Anyone who has the audacity to question this utterly fantastic tale is accused of being an unpatriotic conspiracy theorist and not taken seriously.

Although the real perpetrators of 9/11 are unknown, it would appear that its purpose was to demonize Islam so as to justify a significant American military presence in the Middle East to hegemonize the supply of oil there.

Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that Al Qaeda is the tightly controlled, monolithic, all powerful organization we were led to believe by Team Bush.  Rather it seems to be a highly decentralized network in which terrorist attacks such as those which took place in Madrid and London, for example, were planned, organized, financed, and executed at the local level.  Osama bin Laden was not calling all of the shots from either a cave in Afghanistan or his alleged compound in Abbottabad.

But to the surprise of many liberal Democrats who voted for Obama, the transition of the war on terror from Bush to Obama was virtually seamless.  The legend of Osama bin Laden was still alive and well.  Obama actually increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan and upped the intensity of the search for bin Laden himself.

Then on May 1, 2011, in the Situation Room of the White House, Obama gave the order for a special forces team of twenty-five U.S. Navy Seals to search out and kill bin Laden in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he had been hiding for five years.  Forty minutes later, we were told by the White House staff, Osama bin Laden was dead and shortly thereafter buried at sea.  No photographs or video recordings of his death, his body, or his burial at sea were made available to the American public.  However, President Obama assured us that he was indeed dead.  It was all an eerie reminder of Ronald Reagan’s famous expression, “Trust, and verify.”  But that was not to be.

We may never know whether Osama bin Laden was a real person or not – whether he was responsible for the bombing of the two American embassies in Africa, 9/11, and other international terrorist events.  Neither do we know whether he is dead or alive or, if he is dead, when he died.  But does it really matter?  Osama bin Laden was bigger than life!

What we do know is that he helped save Bill Clinton’s presidency and that his name and image were used to justify an international war on Islam – a war in which several thousand Americans and tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis lost their lives, not to mention the hundreds of billion dollars, possibly trillions, which it cost American taxpayers.  To protect ourselves from the terrorist threat engendered by bin Laden we have been willing to forego many of our constitutionally guaranteed liberties and turn a blind eye towards the abuse and torture of those accused of terrorism.  It remains to be seen whether the assassination of Osama bin Laden will help save Barack Obama’s presidency and pave the way for his re-election in 2012.

Whether dead or alive, the legend of Osama bin Laden lives on.

Thomas H. Naylor

May 6, 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.

In the brouhaha over whether President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii or not, few seem to realize, that in the eyes of many historians and legal scholars, Hawaii is not a legitimate state of the United States of America.  If the government of Hawaii had not been illegally overthrown in 1893 by the U.S. Marines through a classic act of Manifest Destiny and American-style gunboat diplomacy, Hawaii would still be an independent, sovereign nation today.

Notwithstanding a series of clever illegal moves by the U.S. government, Hawaii cannot be considered a legally bona fide state of the United States.  In 1898 the United States unilaterally abrogated all of Hawaii’s existing treaties and purported to annex it on the basis of a Congressional resolution.  Two years later the U.S. illegally established the so-called Territory of Hawaii on the basis of the spurious Organic Act.  After a period of prolonged belligerent occupation by the U.S., Hawaii was placed under United Nations Charter, Article 73, as a “non-self-governing territory” under the administrative authority of the United States.  Then in 1959 the U.S. falsely informed the U.N. that Hawaii had become the 50^th state of the United States after an illegal plebiscite.  Among those allowed to vote in this invalid election were members of the U.S. military and their dependents stationed in Hawaii.  In other words, Hawaii’s occupiers were permitted to vote on its future.

In November 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Public Law 103-150 apologizing to the 140,000 Native Hawaiians, who call themselves Kanaka Maoli, for the January 17, 1893, invasion of Hawaii deposing Queen Liliuokalani which led to Hawaii’s illegal annexation by the United States and eventually to statehood in 1959.  This apology implicitly recognized the unrelinquished inherent sovereignty and right of self-determination of the Native Hawaiian people.

Whether it was his intention or not, President Bill Clinton clearly raised the expectations of the Kanaka Maoli that one day Hawaii might once again be viewed as an independent nation-state.  The downtrodden Kanaka Maoli, who make up less than 12 percent of Hawaii’s population, “die younger, earn less, go to jail more frequently, and are more likely to be homeless than any other ethnic group in the islands,” according to the Honolulu Weekly.

If Barack Obama were born in Hawaii, and his birth certificate says that he was, then why has he shown so little interest in the plight of Native Hawaiians?  Bill Clinton has done a lot more for the Kanaka Maoli than Barack Obama, even though Obama pretends to be a compassionate liberal.

At one level, it matters not whether President Obama was born in Hawaii, Kenya, Indonesia, or Saudi Arabia.  The real issue is how does he behave.  Therein lies the rub.  Not unlike his friend Donald Trump, Obama has a very strong predisposition towards violence and war, caters almost exclusively to the rich and powerful, and palls around with the right wing government of Israel.

Hawaii became an alleged state of the United States as a result of a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch – the same foreign policy employed by Obama over a century later in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and Palestine.

President Obama’s benign neglect of the Hawaiian victims of American nineteenth century imperialism says more about who he is than the name of the country on his birth certificate.

Thomas H. Naylor

May 2, 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.

In stark contrast to the foreign policy of the United States, which is thoroughly grounded in the principles of full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch, stands the foreign policy of four small European nations which are committed to political neutrality – Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland.  In addition to their opposition to war, these democratic, nonviolent, affluent, socially responsible, cooperative, egalitarian, ecofriendly countries share a high degree of environmental integrity and a strong sense of community.

The United States, on the other hand, has over 1.6 million troops on active military duty stationed at over 1,000 bases in 153 countries.  The combined active military force of the four neutral nations amounts to only 85,000 troops.  The U.S. has nearly 80,000 troops stationed in Europe alone, not to mention 36,000 in Japan and nearly 30,000 in South Korea.  Currently the U.S. is engaged in illegal wars in four Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan.  It also provides unconditional military support for the Likud government of Israel in its war against the Palestinians.  Last, but by no means least, it promotes a highly racist war on terrorism aimed squarely at Muslims.

Switzerland has not been involved in a foreign war since 1515, and although it is heavily armed, it has remained neutral since 1815.  It has never been part of a larger empire.  Sweden became neutral in 1814.

Swiss foreign policy is based on four premises:  (1)  Switzerland will never initiate a war.  (2)  It will never enter a war on the side of a warring party.  (3)  It will never side in any way with one warring party against another.  (4)  It will vigorously defend itself against outside attack.

According to the Swiss constitution, every Swiss male is obligated to do military service; women are also accepted into the military service on a voluntary basis but are not drafted.  In case of an attack on the country several hundred thousand men and women can be mobilized within a few days.

Although Austria, Finland, and Sweden are not members of NATO, they are members of the United Nations and the European Union.  Even though Geneva is the home to many agencies of the U.N., Switzerland did not join the U.N. until 2002.  Although the Swiss do trade extensively with member nations of the E.U., the Swiss citizenry has consistently rejected membership in the E.U., even though the Berne government favors membership.

However, neutrality does not mean non-involvement.  Although the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, each of the aforementioned nations is ranked in the top twenty countries in terms of per capita income and each contributes a higher percentage of its Gross National Income to foreign aid than does the U.S.

In addition to the dozen or so neutral countries of the world, there are over twenty countries without armed forces.  They include Liechtenstein and Costa Rica, the latter of which abolished its army and became neutral in 1949.  Most of the other such countries are small island nations scattered throughout the world.

Under the doctrine of full spectrum dominance, the Pentagon claims the right to engage in pre-emptive military strikes against any country in the world which it considers to be a threat to our national security.  This policy is based on two aphorisms – “might makes right”  and “just be like us.”

The Pentagon can send its high-tech instruments of death – B-2 bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and unmanned drone aircraft – anywhere in the world it wants to spread death and destruction, all in the name of freedom, democracy, and humanitarian concern.

The objective of the Pentagon, says F. William Engdahl, is not only to take control of the entire planet but the universe as well including land, sea, air, space, outer space and cyberspace.  At the root of all military encounters is the control of global supplies of oil, natural gas, minerals, other natural resources, and related pipelines and the prevention of these supplies from falling into the hands of the Chinese and the Russians.  Anyone who pretends that “peak oil” is not a problem should take a long, hard look at American foreign policy.  It’s all about oil!

To facilitate regime change in country after country the Pentagon gameplan calls for the use of propaganda and media control, the Internet and social networks, complicit NGOs, and so-called Color Revolutions such as Georgia’s Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Tibet’s Crimson Revolution, and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution.  What has been happening during the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East appears to be more of the same.  Basically the idea is to make carefully controlled, sophisticated regime change plots appear as spontaneous democratic revolutions.  The Iranian demonstrations in 2009 were a case in point.

As further evidence of America’s policy of full spectrum dominance, the White House supports surrounding Russia with an anti-missile defense system, expanding membership in NATO, and demonizing and isolating North Korea and Iran.  Not a pretty picture.

As Congressional gridlock continues to play out over the issue of the 2012 budget, few Democratic or Republican lawmakers seem to have the stomach to challenge the military-industrial complex lobby over the trillion-dollar military defense/national security budget.  For how much longer can we afford to play the role of the world’s policeman?  Is there no limit as to how much we are prepared to spend on the highly contrived war on terror?

Even though World War II ended in 1945 and the Cold War ended in 1991 with the implosion of the Soviet Union, we continue to have tens of thousands of troops stationed in Europe, Japan, and South Korea.  Why?  Why too do we continue to stockpile nuclear weapons and every other conceivable form of weapon of mass destruction?  Towards what end?

America needs a new paradigm – an alternative to its obsessive compulsive attraction to unlimited military might.  Maybe it’s high time we examine the nonviolent neutrality of small countries like Sweden and Switzerland?  Why do we always feel compelled to exercise the military option?

We need a big military defense budget, so the story goes, because we are a big country with vast strategic resources, many big cities, dozens of military bases, hundreds of defense contractors, and thousand high-tech weapons, all of which must be protected.  The more we spend on military defense the more we need to spend in the future protecting what we already have.  This type of perverse, self-fulfilling logic enabled the U.S. to justify spending $13 trillion dollars on the Cold War.  Today the war on terror is used to drive up the defense budget in much the same way which the Cold War did for nearly a half century.

Perhaps the military budget is so big because the country itself is too big?  Maybe we should consider the possibility of downsizing the USA as well as its military?  Both the American people and the rest of the world might benefit from the experience.  Towards that end we should:

1. End the illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Pakistan  immediately.
2. Remove all American troops from Europe, Japan, and South Korea and close all but 100 of the American military bases scattered throughout the world.
3. Shut down NATO.
4. Not only encourage Iran and North Korea to shelve their nuclear weapons programs but insist that China, England, France, India, Israel, and Pakistan do the same, not to mention ourselves.
5. Terminate the missile defense program.
6. Discontinue all economic and military aid to Israel.
7. Cease being the arms merchant of North Africa and the Middle East.
8. Close the Guantanamo prison now.
9. End the embargo against Cuba.
10. Repeal the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act.
11. Reduce military spending to $200 billion annually.
12. Replace the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State with people who embrace peace, not war.  (Leon Panetta is not such a person.)

Above all, we should recall what economist Leopold Kohr said about military power in his book The Breakdown of Nations:

For whenever a nation becomes large enough to accumulate the critical mass of power, it will in the end accumulate it.  And when it has acquired it, it will become an aggressor, its previous record and intentions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Thomas H. Naylor                                                      April 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.