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The drumbeats of an Israeli attack on Iran continue unabated. Read the inflammatory right wing rag, The Drudge Report on any morning and you would believe that war (and $8 per gallon gas) are inevitable. This morning’s New York Times even lays out the supposed Israeli attack plan, though concluding that they might need American help to finish the job.

Earlier this month, a Bipartisan Policy Center report by Charles S. Robb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, and Charles F. Wald, a retired Air Force general, recommended that the Obama administration sell Israel 200 enhanced GBU-31 “bunker busters” as well as three advanced refueling planes.

The two said that they were not advocating an Israeli attack, but that the munitions and aircraft were needed to improve Israel’s credibility as it threatens a strike.

Should the United States get involved — or decide to strike on its own — military analysts said that the Pentagon had the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the United States has plenty of refueling capability. Bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.

That we are even speculating over such an outcome seems insane to me. Read more…

I had dinner last night with one of the most important conservative media voices in America and some of his friends. I had gone to the dinner expecting some fireworks, but was totally caught off guard by his charm and what he had to say.

First, he was disgusted by “the pygmies” in the Republican Presidential Race. As much as he dislikes Obama, there was not a one of the current Republican candidates that he could be enthusiastic about.

Second, we found ourselves in agreement that the issue of Crony Capitalism is perhaps the most pernicious threat to our Republic. Crony Capitalism distorts everything from Crop subsidies flowing to agribusiness to our inability to cancel useless Pentagon weapon systems. And the disease effects both political parties.

As the evening progressed I kept trying to move us beyond the Left-Right dialectic we are trapped in and to suggest that we might find some common ground in the liberal principles that are the basis for our Republic:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Now the word “liberal” is seen as poisonous to conservatives, but it’s origins in John Locke’s Natural Rights theory were the basis for our revolution. Read more…

The reports of the death of the Neo-Conservative Movement have been greatly exaggerated. Dick Cheney has become a cheerleader for Newt Gingrich whose sole intention seems to be to continue The Long War ad infinitum. On a day when we finally ended the most disastrous strategy of the Neo-Cons, the Iraq War, Gingrich is doubling down on the next war–In Iran.

He painted a chain of events in which an Israeli prime minister asked an American president for help with a conventional military invasion of Iran so that Israel would not have to use its nuclear arsenal to defend itself. Mr. Gingrich implied that he would go along. “What I won’t do is allow Israel to be threatened with another Holocaust,” he said. “This is a not-very-far-down-the-road decision.”

A joint US-Israeli invasion of Iran! Unfuckingbelievable. These people are counting on the collective amnesia of Americans.

The juxtaposition of the Gingrich-Cheney Plan for our future with the New York Times discovery of a cache of Top Secret documents about the Haditha Massacre in Iraq couldn’t have been more poignant .

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

As I have said before, this election needs to be fought on two issues: income inequality and cutting the bloated Pentagon and our imperial overreach. Whether President Obama and the Democrats have the guts to fight on those issues will be a test, but strangely enough they might find support among the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party in that fight.

When did it start?

When did America’s mass consensual hallucination begin? When did the boundaries between truth and fiction dissolve?

Consider the evidence.

I awoke this morning to read that a candidate for the Presidency (Newt Gingrich) believes we should launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and Iran because he fears they are about to launch a nuclear missle to be “detonated in outer space high above the American heartland, (which) would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity. Mr. Gingrich warns that it would fry electrical circuits from coast to coast, knocking out computers, electrical power and cellphones. Everything from cars to hospitals would be knocked out. “Millions would die in the first week alone,” he wrote in the foreword to a science-fiction thriller published in 2009 that describes an imaginary EMP attack on the United States. Most scientists regard this as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic even if these two pygmy powers had such a rocket, and yet this man could seriously be the Republican nominee for the President of the United States. This is like Ron Hubbard running for President on the Scientology ticket. Read more…

Barack Obama learned a political trick from Muhammad Ali called Rope a Dope. For you youngsters, this refers to the epic Rumble in the Jungle Heavyweight fight against George Foreman in 1974. Here is the Wikipedia explanation.

The rope-a-dope is performed by a boxer assuming a protected stance, in Ali’s classic pose, lying against the ropes, and allowing his opponent to hit him, toward the end that the opponent will tire and make mistakes which the boxer can exploit in a counter-attack. By leaning against the ropes, much of the punch’s force is absorbed by the ropes’ elasticity rather than the boxer’s body.

In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, attempting thereby to become the eventual victor.

Last summer during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama appeared to be the loser, but yesterday Republicans woke up to the reality that they lost Big Time–that we were going to get $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions, with 50% of the cuts coming from the military and none of the cuts from Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional water carriers for the Military Industrial Complex are in a panic.

Republican lawmakers moved quickly Monday to protect the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts that will be triggered by the supercommittee’s failure, with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee saying he’ll soon introduce legislation to repeal them.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3 rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

So why aren’t progressives celebrating this morning? Got me. As long time readers know, it has been my contention that the key to revival of our democracy and our economy lies in radically reordering where we spend our collective resources. That more than 60% of our discretionary budget flows to the Military Industrial Complex is just the most egregious example of Crony Capitalism. If you had suggested to me last spring that a Republican House would pass a bill cutting $600 billion from the Pentagon budget over ten years, I would have called you crazy. But that is just what happened.

So there is only one election that matters a year from now. And that is that President Obama will be reelected and able to keep his veto threat. There is no possible 2012 electoral realignment of the Senate and House that would give the Republicans a 2/3 rds majority.

This is an amazing victory and all we have to do to hold on to it is reelect the President.

The leaderless Occupy Movement should quietly thank Mayor Bloomberg for ending the encampment in Zuccotti Park. As Ad Busters, the culture jamming magazine which first proposed Occupy Wall Street, suggested yesterday that there are two routes forward.

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Strategy #2 is the way to go. I don’t even think you need the “die-hards” to hold geography, because the movement is not about territory, but about ideas. What is needed over the winter months is a series of Teach-Ins like the epic events that made the Anti-Vietnam War Movement coalesce in the winter and spring of 1965. Now is the time on college and high school campuses to educate the wider public on the issues of economic inequality. The movement has a powerful meme–”We are the 99%”–which was in danger of being diffused by the inevitable crime and sanitation problems that come from putting a small cities in public parks all over the country. Out of these teach-ins should come some specific proposals that OWS would push during the 2012 election. Here are four suggested pillars:

1. A surtax on incomes over $1 million
2. A Tobin Tax on Stock Trading
3. End the corrupting influence of money in politics
4. Bring the troops home

One last thought. In the last few weeks I have often thought “What would Martin Luther King do in this moment?” Ultimately the great social justice movements in America like women’s suffrage, ending child labor or the civil rights movement have come about out of a strict adhesion to the loving principles of non-violence. Dr. King, who I marched with in Boston in April of 1965, consistently held up a vision of a better world that we would make through non-violence. His most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. I know that there is a small group of angry young anarchists trying to influence the OWS movement. Those of us with grey in our beards have been here before, watching the Weathermen subvert a non-violent peace movement. What we ended up with was Richard Nixon (running on a law and order platform) as our President.

We should not make that mistake again.

The very best thing that could happen for America is for the Super Committee to fail. To understand why I say that you need a little history.

In my new book, Outlaw Blues;Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars, I write about Walter Lippman helping President Woodrow Wilson “manufacture public consent” for the U.S. to enter World War I, “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Eric Alterman wrote about Lippmann as the precursor of much of our media manipulation of today: “Lippmann likened the average American-or ‘outsider,’ as he tellingly named him-to a ‘deaf spectator in the back row’ at a sporting event: ‘He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,’ and ‘he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.’ In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that ‘is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict’.” Thus began the culture war.

We are about to endure a Pentagon inspired propaganda campaign in the next month that will be an echo of Lippmann’s campaign of 1916. It will be triggered by the brilliant position, negotiated by Democrats during the debt ceiling crisis, that if the “Super Committee” was unable to reach a compromise by Thanksgiving, then an automatic “Sequester” would take place, cutting the Defense Budget by $600 Billion in the next ten years. Leon Panetta will be leading the charge against the Sequester for the Military Industrial Complex that views it as Armageddon for the gravy train they have been on since the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949. Here is Panetta with the first big lie of this campaign.

“After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability,” he said. “Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.”

Here is the reality of defense spending.

The only time defense spending ever declined in real dollars (blue Line) was during the Clinton Administration, after the Soviet Union had dissolved. So as the economy got less “security oriented”in the 1990′s, a huge amount of innovation blossomed, seeded by government spending (the Internet, the microprocessor) from the 1970′s. This meant that as a percentage of GDP (red line) defense spending fell even more as the digital consumer economy boomed. Although the fall of military spending helped Clinton balance the budget for the first time in years, as soon as 9-11 happened, spending went through the roof

So here is the deal I want to make with all my Libertarian friends. Let’s make sure the Sequester goes through. If  the latest polls are right 27% of Americans have a positive view of the Tea Party and 32% have a positive view of Occupy Wall Street. Since I doubt there is much overlap in these two cohorts, that would mean that almost 60% of the people are against the “establishment”–military, financial or political. Here is a place to man the barricades. Let Ron Paul and Barney Frank join forces to defeat any efforts by the Military Industrial puppets in the Congress to weasel out of the Sequester.

Media pundits like the New York Times’ Bill Keller continue to fret about the Occupy Movement and their leaderless revolution.

I’m prepared to celebrate when the Occupiers — like the lone hunger artist of India — accomplish something more than organizing their own campsite cleanup, demonstrating their tolerance for tear gas, and distracting the conversation a little from the Tea Party. So far, the main achievement of Occupy Wall Street is showing up.

But to look at the words of the Republican leaders last week, I would say the Occupy Movement has already accomplished its main goal—raising national consciousness of economic inequality.

Income inequality, a cause of liberal economists and pundits, is working its way into the discourse of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

It’s a concept that the Occupy Wall Street movement has virtually owned and spread as its protests expand. Democrats have latched on, too, hammering Republicans for economic policies they say favor only the rich. And the Congressional Budget Office released a major report last week, showing that average household income for the top 1 percent of earners increased 275 percent from 1979 to 2007 while increasing just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of earners. So rather than ignore the disparity — and risk looking out of touch — Republicans are acknowledging income inequality. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is discussing it; House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has talked about wealth disparity; and rank-and-file Republicans have started to lace the phrase into talks and interviews.

As soon as you have got Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan defending their support of the 1%, the main political dialogue has changed. There is no real way for Republicans to explain how the Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the fat cats have benefited the country as a whole. Here is an example of their lame defense strategy.

“Absolutely, there’s huge income inequality, and it started right here in Washington,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas). “The way we fix that is getting the government out of the way of the private sector so we can put these people to work.”

Years ago, when Reagan first started cutting taxes for the rich, his advisors put forth the notion of “trickle down economics”, but the new CBO study shows that to be the Big Lie we always thought it was. And as Paul Krugmann points out this morning, there is nothing more hypocritical that Republicans railing against government spending.

Thus Representative Buck McKeon, Republican of California, once attacked the Obama stimulus plan because “more spending is not what California or this country needs.” But two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. McKeon — now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee — warned that the defense cuts that are scheduled to take place if the supercommittee fails to agree would eliminate jobs and raise the unemployment rate.

The Occupy Movement took much of its inspiration from the Arab Spring revolutions, and now as winter approaches, I think they need to borrow another page from the Arab street—The Friday Protest March. Instead of trying to Occupy Wall Street with a small number of diehards, what is needed is a well organized large march at lunch time every Friday in each one of the main Occupy Cities. They would get all the press coverage and more importantly would widen their network over the coming months. The movement has already changed the national conversation as Ohio Republican Congressman Steve LaTourette acknowledges.

“In all [of] the messages that the president has tested this year, income inequality is probably the one that’s picking up the most steam, at least in my hometown, and so it’s something we’ve got to be aware of,” LaTourette said. “I don’t know if it’s something we need to talk about but … it’s something we need to be aware of.”

Now comes the hard part for the Occupy forces. Sustaining a movement for the next 12 months that will be based on economic justice and rebuilding America instead financing useless weapons of mass destruction.

In 1922, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world’s population,and covered more than 13,000,000 square miles: approximately a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. By 1956, after the disastrous attempt to hold on to the Suez Canal, the British finally abandoned the last of their imperial pretensions and settled into rebuilding their own country, culture and spirit. By 1964 the world was sharing in the joy of life after empire.

To read the analysis of David Sanger in the New York Times this morning, life in America for our children will be a pinched, pale shadow of itself.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. Read more…

In this time of constant bickering between the right and the left, the movie Avatar has become the highest grossing film in history. To achieve these astonishing grosses of $1.86 Billion (besting Cameron’s own Titanic in record time), the movie has appealed across all demographics and all political profiles. This is not to say that right wing critics didn’t try to discourage their partisans as Jonah Goldberg points out.

The film has been subjected to a sustained assault from many on the right, most notably by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, as an “apologia for pantheism.”

It would be a cop-out on my part to say the huge success was due only to the gee whiz special effects and the immersive 3D environment. Read more…