Terrorists Everywhere!

Report anything out of the ordinary. Be watchful. Be thankful that the police, especially the TSA, insure that we board airplanes safely, no matter the indignity, and now it's protecting us on trains, buses, even highways.

Surliness with 'an officer' could get you arrested. Then, the Supreme Court says, you can be strip-searched, told to "spread 'em," but all in the name of safety, and to prevent terrorists from taking over--and imposing Shariah law on the rest of us. Whew! Thank God for the 'officers' protection.

Actually, the strip-search is for the officers' protection, as Justice Kennedy's brief makes clear, and the Solicitor General's, too. After listing the astonishing variety of drugs found hidden in suspects' rectums and vaginas, the SG's brief includes this: "inmate hospitalized after trying to smuggle a knife into jail inside his body" and "man arrested for selling bootlegged CD's was found concealing a nine-millimeter handgun between rolls of fat."

So, it's the war on drugs plus fear of terrorism plus prison security that persuaded the Supreme Court to allow strip-searches for anyone detained. What happened to the 4th Amendment? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures?"

Traffic accidents easily outpace casualties from terror in the US, or Europe. Yet, governments are using the (manufactured) fear of terror to become police-states. The US leads the way.

Now, the NSA, or other government agency, or private corporation, knows all about you: don't believe those privacy statements guaranteeing privacy. First of all, have you read them completely? Maybe the lawyers who wrote them have. NSA, et al, now have the capability, and acquiescence or support/authorization to collect our email, Facebook posts, this blog, anything anyone ever puts on the Internet. Why? Since we're scared of the terrorists, it's easy to whip up political support for all the surveillance we can stand. However, we're really scared because the United States, with the most deadly and mobile military in the world, can't stop the terrorists, and are the terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Yemen.

Freudians call it projection.

Outside the US, America is perceived as brash, undisciplined and dangerous. Our political polarization and surge towards corporatocracy only reinforces that: our imperial bullying has driven many world-wide into seeing the US as the most dangerous nation on Earth.

The US has a penchant to 'fix' international problems through force. Increasingly, it is resorting to covert means: drones, special ops, mercenaries, spies, and in the US, domestic police are adapting the same techniques.

In the late Roman Empire, the less in control they were, the more vicious government agents became--military or police. We appear to be treading down the same slippery slope.

April's Afghan Outrage

Ah, April: time for another Afghan horror. Every month, it seems, someone in the military releases some damning news, or photo, or carries out a massacre or other Afghan scandal.

In January, soldiers urinated on the dead bodies of Afghans, claimed to be insurgents; in February there was the "inadvertent" burning of Qurans, in March there was the massacre of Afghan villagers by a deranged American sergeant.

Now, in April, the LA Times published the photos of American Airborne soldiers posing, and mugging for the camera with the body parts of suicide and IED bombers. The pictures were actually taken in 2010, but the soldier who released them, sent them to the Times this month.

First of all, these horrors were conscious acts by US soldiers. The first and last events: pissing on bodies, and posing, grinning, with body parts, reflects some American soldiers' attitudes towards Afghans, for whom supposedly they were sent halfway around the world to protect. Probably there are many American troops for whom this kind of cavalier disregard for the people of Afghanistan is not acceptable. It wasn't for the soldier who released those photos; he had complained to his superiors that such attitudes contributed to lax security.

The Quran burning, meanwhile, was not "inadvertent" at all. The Qurans in question had been seized from detainees at the large American detention center in Bagram, and according to accounts there, some at least had been used to send and receive messages between detainees: subversive messages.

If you want to prevent detainees from organizing, obviously, those Qurans had to be destroyed, or, at least, shipped out of the country. What was "inadvertent," was destroying them in plain sight, where our Afghan collaborators could see what to any Muslim would be supreme sacrilege and desecration. What was inadvertently revealed was Americans' total ignorance of the people they are supposedly there to protect.

So far, we have no General Dyer, who ordered machine-gunning peaceful Indian protesters during India's independence movement. However, these Afghan incidents are typical for imperialist militaries: the local people aren't quite real; they are so foreign. The incidents underline why Indians threw out the British and why Africans threw out all European colonials, despite the very real improvements all these imperialists made: roads, railroads, schools, hospitals. It's also, why we lost in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan before us.

These incidents again demonstrate why Americans and NATO have to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and why empire, especially now in the 21st century, is unsustainable.

Military might, the Romans discovered, is especially transient when the people are against you. Resistance to the Barbarians was ineffective in part because the peasants were already oppressed: they welcomed new conquerors.

Given the above, it's surprising we haven't yet been thrown out of Afghanistan. Better to go before we have to scramble for the helicopters.

Romney and Mormonism

Already, people are beginning to look at Romney's religion. He's a Mormon, maybe the quintessential American cult, but not just a Mormon; he's a Mormon bishop, who's also given millions to his church.

A friend who knows "Christians," as in the ones in Tennessee or Florida, told me that one of his acquaintances wasn't going to vote for Romney: even though he's black, he voted for W twice. He won't vote for Romney, because he's not a Christian.

Set aside the polygamy thing, which only the ultra-reactionary fringe still practices, Mormonism is not your garden variety Protestantism. It's a revelation religion based on the writings and preaching of Joseph Smith in 19th century America, and it has its own holy books, which reference the Bible, but the way the Koran does: Jesus Christ is the previous prophet; Joseph Smith is the final one.

Mormonism may well become an issue. Not only is there a hit musical comedy on Broadway, "The Book of Mormon," there's a bestselling Mormon mystery novel.

Romney is not at all comparable to John F. Kennedy and Catholicism. Santorum said JFK's speech on religion and government made him want to throw up: Kennedy was a secular Catholic; Romney isn't a secular Mormon; he's a bishop who's all but admitted that he baptized long ago dead people, like Jews killed in the Holocaust: some Mormon even "baptized" Anne Frank!

Why is this important? If evangelicals in the South can't stomach voting for Romney, and therefore don't vote, Obama wins.

If I were a Republican, I'd seriously worry about Romney's Mormonism, especially, if I learned more about it, regardless of whether I was evangelical, or secular. That's why some pro-Obama super-pac may yet go after Romney on precisely this issue: all they need to do is point out how weird Mormonism really is. And what a Mormon bishop does.

I've been very disappointed, and even felt betrayed, by Obama--the Yemeni Pulitzer Prize-winner's detention, just the latest example--but I know he's better than Romney, especially a Romney beholden to right-wing Republicans. Romney is the perfect representative of the 0.01%, except for his Mormonism, but he doesn't even represent the 1%. He's a quarter of a billionaire, and he has not a clue how ordinary people have to struggle to make ends meet. On top of all that, he comes across as an uptight hypocrite.

Obama is less of a democrat than I hoped, but at least, although he's part of the 10%, he has some aspiration to represent the rest of us.

If Romney were elected, it would be the equivalent of the super-wealthy Petronius Maximus' accession to the Imperial throne, upon the murder of his predecessor--arranged by him--triggering the Vandal invasion and the wholesale looting of Rome. Maximus was torn apart by the mob, hours before the Vandals arrived. Rome "fell" 20 years later.

If Obama wins, we may have a bit more time.

Iran Is Not Recalcitrant

Even if Iran were secretly trying to develop the bomb, they would be acquiring it for defense. To fear they would drop it on Israel is to think the Iranians are less rational than even the North Koreans. The most they could do is threaten their non-nuclear neighbors, but even that's unlikely, with the US threatening them if they try. Meanwhile, Israel has several hundred bombs and the missiles and bombers to deliver them.

Even if the Iranians built the bomb, it would be for defense: to prevent the US from trying to force "regime change."

But it's pretty much agreed, by the world's best intelligence agencies, the American and Israeli, that Iran abandoned nuclear weapon development in 2004, and hasn't decided whether to resume it. On the other hand, many analysts believe that Iran has the technological and knowledge capability to build a nuclear weapon, and one of the policy points of contention was that very word, 'capability.' If Iran is to be denied nuclear 'capability,' then there are already grounds for attacking it--and scores of other countries.

What is almost never admitted is this: Iran, as a member of the IAEA, has the international treaty right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, as long as it allows inspections to insure that's what it's doing. Enriching uranium to 20% is for medical use, and as someone with prostate cancer treated by radiation, I believe modern nations should be able to supply their own, and Iran is modernizing.

It is possible that a gold bug's theory, explains why the US is acting this way. Iran has been leading an international movement away from the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. If the movement prevails (it will, eventually, even without Iran), the US would owe debt it couldn't pay, and its strength would be checkmated, because it couldn't credibly borrow the huge sums we now depend on monthly, especially to finance our imperial military.

So, the pressure against Iran may not be what it seems. The conflict isn't really about a few nuclear bombs that do not exist. It's about whether the US remains a viable economic superpower.

It is clear that Iran's leaders don't like us, but then we've been helping Israel and the MEK covertly attack the regime for years. Iran's promotion of a post-dollar international economy fits in with their hostility--and with their experience of the US as a malign international entity, consistently hostile--even when the Iranian regime was more liberal, and inclined to view reconciliation favorably.

Iran is 3.7 times larger than Iraq territorially, is 2.3 times larger in population, and has an effective government not based on one dictator. If bluff and sanctions don't work, war with Iran could be the straw that broke the American camel's back: it could bankrupt the US empire; we'd be facing a replay of Rome's fall in 476.

Fascism Now!

The Late Roman Empire was much like a Fascist state--without the populism. The Senatorial class was legally established as the class with power over government, but not the military. Not by coincidence, the Senators in the western empire monopolized wealth in the three forms in which it was recognized then: land, slaves and gold.

Because of their disproportionate wealth, Senators and their sons monopolized high civilian imperial offices: they bought them. Their wealth enabled them to exploit everyone else. Closeness to government and avoidance of taxation favored wealth accumulation among Senators. Since Senators as a class, also failed to reproduce themselves, estates tended to get bigger and fewer--inherited by the dwindling number of sons, nephews and cousins. They were the 0.01%.

Morally, culturally, or in the realm of "social issues," the Senators were extremely conservative or reactionary. Old ways were better, be it the old Roman religion over newfangled Christianity, social relations between landowner and coloni, performing meticulous rituals maintaining their class, or sucking up to the Emperor.

Fascism may be a mass movement--the Tea Party, for example--but paradoxically, it reveres class divisions with the 'best people' on top. The poor are either powerless, or the "masses" led by the best people. They don't talk of "classes," except as in leftists waging "class warfare," especially, when they try to assert their rights, or their own collective power.

Fascists in Italy and Germany incorporated large corporations in their economic system: they were major beneficiaries, even of the war-economy, with its need for armaments and its supply of slave labor.

In the US, we haven't gone quite that far, but the ground has been laid: unions weak or nonexistent, prisons privatized, a defense industry subsidized by government, the largest defense industry in the world; strengthening security services to the point of arrogance--getting away with strip-searching almost anyone by decision of the Supreme Court! The same court gave corporations the lever to regain control of government, after a 97-year hiatus, and perhaps corporations will--in the person of Mitt Romney, and a Republican leadership in both houses of Congress. Certainly, they are, transparently, the marionettes of the most aggressive anti-government billionaires the world has seen.

The question, the 6 billion dollar question, is: will money and media control buy the election? Or will people finally see, will Obama and Democrats finally articulate the rejection of this overweening security state, this demonizing of the jobless and women, this CLASS WAR being waged by the equivalents of the Roman Senators, waged on all the rest of us.

When the Senators won Roman governance, they reduced everyone else to serfs, and then were swept away by Germanic upstarts, the beginning of feudalism. Where we're headed, though, looks more like Fascism, its modern, mafia equivalent.

Unless Americans can wake up.

Insanity

In November 2012, we will be faced with the choice between a quarter-billionaire who continually re-invents himself politically, and an incumbent who may not be trustworthy either, a casualty of the terror war.

Romney would cut taxes on the wealthy, cut services for everyone else and go to war at the drop of an Israeli's hat. Obama told Yemen to keep a Pulitzers prize-winning Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Shaye, imprisoned. The real charge against him: he interviewed possible terrorists, making him an "associate" of al Qaeda. According to Obama's new NDAA, associates of al Qaeda can be detained indefinitely.

Shaye crossed Obama, because he proved that the US is waging war in Yemen. The transparent American-Yemeni official fiction: Yemenis were doing it themselves--assassinating opponents with drones only the US had. Many people suspected this was going on, but Shaye was in the field and witnessed it. So, he was doing his job and informing the world; what the best journalists do. And for that he's still held in a Yemeni prison, thanks to Obama's personal phone call to Yemen's President.

On one side there is a plutocrat who will take any position if it will win him GOP votes, and on the other, a former constitutional law professor, who acts as if freedom of the press is a national threat. And he's the signer of the NDAA that gave him this power. He first objected that it wasn't strong enough!

What would happen if Romney were elected? He supports attacking Iran and virtually every other war; he's likely to escalate the one in Yemen.

Who is Obama? On government leaks, he has become more extreme than Nixon, while on economic and social issues he's somewhat sane, compared to the positions Romney has taken to win GOP support.

Some have said that the November election will be between a born-again right-wing Republican and a moderate Republican marked D on the ballot. Romney has compromised anything he ever stood for when Governor of Massachusetts--and his advisor revealingly blurted out that everything Romney said for the primaries would be wiped clean in his General Election campaign (the etch-a-sketch remark). Romney's unabashed hypocrisy is astounding, but he won't be able to hide from it: his primary positions are flying all over the internet, such as his pledge to defund Planned Parenthood as soon as he takes office. Republicans will hold him to it.

Super-pacs will broadcast every slip Romney made, every cockamamie thing he said to win over the right-wing--over and over. They're having to doctor voices and events to get Obama, but super-pacs will do that, too.

Hold your nose, wish there was a viable third party, but know there isn't, then vote, hoping our progression towards what happened to Rome in 476 is slow enough that we can reverse it--if we can Occupy sanity, instead.