Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse

Author and social critic Morris Berman says the fact that we're a nation of hustlers lies at the root of our decline.

March 7, 2012

Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream.

This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by definition be at someone else’s expense.

In Why America Failed, noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. 

Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for "more" -- for individual accumulation of wealth.

So where does that leave us as a country? I caught up with Berman to find out.  READ MORE

Island nation of Kiribati plans mass relocation due to climate change

By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, March 8, 2012 11:08 EST

Rising sea levels created by the melting of Earth’s polar ice caps and glaciers pose such a threat to the low-lying Pacific island nation of Kiribati that its leader said this week they were in talks to purchase land in neighboring Fiji for a mass relocation of its citizens.
Kiribati President Anote Tong said that they were specifically eyeing land on the neighboring nation’s second largest island, Vanua Levu, according to published reports. Tong added that the mass migration was “our last resort” after a number of its tropical atolls vanished beneath the waves. None of the nation’s islands sit higher than two meters above sea level.
The nation has about 102,000 citizens spanning about 32 atolls across a size of the Pacific roughly equivalent to the continental United States, according to the U.S. State Department. One of the nation’s islands was the key site of a World War II battle that saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war.
Many there are currently participating in emergency migrant education programs to make them more attractive to other nearby countries, like Australia and New Zealand, Tong said.   READ MORE

Georgia lawmaker compares women to cows and pigs

By David Edwards
Friday, March 9, 2012 14:41 EST

Republican Georgia state Rep. Terry England says that his experience with cows, pigs and chickens has proven to him that women should be forced to have their babies after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

In a debate over Georgia House Bill 954, which would ban abortions after 20 weeks even if the baby is not expected to live, England recalled the time he had spent with livestock.

“Life gives us many experiences,” he explained. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive — delivering pigs, dead and alive. … It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”

England continued: “You know a few years ago, I had a man come to me in our store, it was when we were debating, talking about dog and hog hunting, I believe, and at that point there was some language inserted in there that dealt with chicken fighting. And the young man called me to the side and he said, ‘I want to tell you one thing.’ And y’all, this is salt of the Earth people I’m talking about, someone I would have never in a hundred years expected to tell me what he told me that day.”  READ MORE


Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo.

Former NJ gov. poses as mentally ill man at homeless shelter

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By David Edwards
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 11:54 EST

Earlier this week, a former governor of New Jersey went undercover to expose the struggle homeless people go through if they are mentally ill.

Democratic state Sen. Richard Codey, who briefly took over as governor after Jim McGreevey (D) resigned in 2004, began calling homeless shelters last November only to find out that they were hesitant to take “crazy people,” required ID or that the person be on welfare.

“To find some place to take you if you were homeless was impossible, essentially, unless you were on some government entitlement program,” he explained to NBC New York.

After spending an hour with a makeup artist to make him unrecognizable, Codey took on the fictional identity of Jimmy Peters, a mentally ill man who had been recently released from a local hospital’s psychiatric ward.    READ MORE

South Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor resigns in ethics scandal

By Muriel Kane
Friday, March 9, 2012 21:29 EST

 South Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Ken Ard resigned on Friday just before being indicted on seven counts of misusing campaign money.

An hour after the indictment was announced, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years of probation and a $5000 fine. He could have faced as much as seven years in prison and $35,000 in fines.
Ard was elected in November 2010 with 55% of the vote, but by the following February the state ethics commission had begun investigating his campaign finances and he was charged with 106 civil violations. Ard admitted to these and paid a fine, but a grand jury soon began the criminal investigation that led to the current indictment.

According to South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, Ard had tried “to create the false appearance of a groundswell of political support through fictitious or bogus campaign contributions.”
  READ MORE

You Are Being Tracked Online: Here Are 5 Ways to Protect Your Privacy

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

If you listen carefully online, you’ll hear a deep sucking sound -- that's the sound of all your personal data being gobbled up by digital service providers.

March 6, 2012

If you listen carefully when you turn on your smartphone or tablet computer or go online using your computer, you’ll hear a deep sucking sound. That's the sound of all your personal data being gobbled up by a growing array of digital service providers.

On Feb. 23, the White House issued a long-awaited report outlining a framework for personal cyber privacy, “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Global Innovation in the Global Digital Economy.” Billing itself a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," the report stresses the need for transparency, security, accuracy and a reasonable limits to what is collected.

Unfortunately, this “white paper” is in keeping with the Obama administration’s overall policy of compromise so that both policy and principle meet the vested interests of those with power. As with the banking and financial service regulation or oversight over healthcare providers, insurance companies and big pharma companies, the interests of the digital data collectors and the advertising industry will be furthered while the privacy rights of ordinary digital user will be sacrificed.  READ MORE

Why Can’t You Smoke Pot? Because Lobbyists Are Getting Rich Off of the War on Drugs

Photo Credit: Theequinest

Why we still put hundreds of thousands of people in steel cages for pot-related offenses. 
March 7, 2012

John Lovell is a lobbyist who makes a lot of money from making sure you can’t smoke a joint. That’s his job. He’s a lobbyist for the police unions in Sacramento, and he is a driving force behind grabbing Federal dollars to shut down the California marijuana industry. I’ll get to the evidence on this important story in a bit, but first, some context.

At some point in the distant past, the war on drugs might have been popular. But not anymore — the polling is clear, but beyond that, the last three Presidents have used illegal drugs. So why do we still put hundreds of thousands of people in steel cages for pot-related offenses? Well, there are many reasons, but one of them is, of course, money in politics. Corruption. Whatever you want to call it, it’s why you can’t smoke a joint without committing a crime, though of course you can ingest any number of pills or drinks completely within the law.

Some of the groups who want to keep the drug illegal are police unions that want more members to pay more dues. One of the primary sources for cash for more policing activities are Federal grants for penalizing illegal drug use, which help pay for overtime, additional police officers, and equipment for the force. That’s what Lovell does, he gets those grants. He also fights against democratic mechanisms to legalize drugs.

In 2010, California considered Prop 19, a measure to legalize marijuana and tax it as alcohol. The proposition gained more votesthan Meg Whitman, the former eBay executive and Republican gubernatorial nominee that year, but failed to pass. Opponents of the initiative ran ads, organized rallies, and spread conspiracy theories about billionaire George Soros to confuse voters.

Lovell managed the opposition campaign against Prop 19. He told Time Magazine that he was pushing against the initiative because, “the last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized.”   READ MORE