Brave New Films has a trailer up on their Rethink Afghanistan project:

The full video is available here and is well worth watching.

More striking than the legion of journalists, academics, and ex-government officials Brave New Films presents who are against the escalation in Afghanistan, the inclusion of Afghan voice, including government officials, is striking. Anyone who thinks they know how Afghans feel about our presence would do well to listen closely to what these people have to say.

What do you think?

Imagine that, after World War II, instead of investing in the Marshall Plan in Europe, we allowed Europe to slide into decay. Eight years after the end of the war, unemployment across Europe is 40%. There are reports of literal starvation in the countryside. There are pockets of prosperity — the more fortunate are getting televisions and cars — but the vast majority of the population lives in various stages of misery.

Now imagine extreme political factions — in those days it would have been communists — making inroads, because they pay a small but living wage to new fighters, plus help with food and medicine. There is no work. The extremists are the employer of last resort. This is exactly what is happening in Afghanistan.  People are starving.

Col. Tom Collins, the top Pentagon spokesman in Afghanistan, told PBS:

“There is a low percentage of the total Taliban force who we would call ideologically driven. We refer to them as Tier 1 people who believe their ideology, that what they’re doing is right. The vast majority of Taliban fighters are essentially economically disadvantaged young men.”

And General Karl Eikenberry, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, told Congress in 2007:

“Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families”

Yearly reconstruction assistance has amounted, in adjusted dollars, to $60 per person versus the $600 per person we spent on the Marshall Plan.  Forty percent of the workforce is unemployed. The well-financed Taliban pays $8 a day to its fighters, a fortune in this country, and the Taliban is always hiring! Go figure why the insurgency is growing. What is the Obama administration doing? Following the path which carries the most risk: more troops. More troops, more civilian casualties.  More civilian casualties, more hatred.  More hatred, more Taliban.

The number of jobs being lost is an astonishing number, especially because what it represents is households faced with sudden, alarming, economic disasters. Each job lost represents a tilt into desperation. When a household makes a decision to buy something, a car or a house, or even the inevitable refrigerator or lawnmower, the decision involves the amount of money coming in. When that is shut off suddenly, the purchase becomes a huge problem.

This has happened to increasing numbers of us. It’s a growing disaster.

Much of the attention in this economic downturn has focused on the growing legions of men and women who are officially counted as unemployed. There are now more than 11 million of them.

But a better picture of the economic distress related to employment emerges when the number of jobless Americans is combined with two other categories of workers: the underemployed (those who are working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time work) and the so-called labor force reserve, workers who have abandoned their job searches but who would work if employment became available.

This total pool of underutilized labor has now risen above 24 million, according to researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That total will only grow in the coming months.

The Obama administration has more than enough on its plate at the moment, but before long it will likely have to consider a range of additional strategies, beyond the recently passed stimulus package, for putting jobless Americans to work.

A comparison of the number of people being thrown out of work in this recession with that of the severe recession of 1981-82 will indicate why. The peak unemployment rate was higher in that earlier recession than today’s 7.6 percent, largely because the last big wave of the baby-boom generation was entering the job market in the early ’80s. Those boomers who couldn’t find work were officially counted as unemployed.

What is different and more frightening about the current downturn is the number of people actually losing their jobs — being laid off or fired. That number is dramatically, dangerously higher.

We are a consumer economy. Without consumers, there is not much of an economy left for the country to depend on.

Flipping burgers is a travesty as a job, but without anyone to buy the burgers, even that sort of job is a boon.

Rich and comfortable sorts like to blame irresponsibility for the desperation of losing a home or getting into credit card debt that can’t be managed. It’s hardly the major element for working people who have had gas for the car, then groceries, and everything that has to be transported, go out of their range within a matter of months. The jobs that are evaporating has pushed huge numbers of us over the edge, into financial disaster. The blame isn’t a good thing to throw at the desperate in their plight.

Since Mr. Obama has become President the United States has bombed inside Pakistan on at least three occasions killing 78 people, many of them civilians.

The first Guantánamo detainee released since President Obama took office returned to Britain, saying his seven years of captivity and torture at an alleged CIA covert site in Morocco went beyond his “darkest nightmares.” Binyam Mohamed’s allegations, including repeated beatings and having his genitals sliced by a scalpel.

Attorney Ahmed Ghappour says Guantanamo guards are acting even more aggressively before Obama’s year-long deadline to shut the prison down. Ghappour said he’s heard recent accounts of beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners. Other attorneys, including military lawyer Yvonne Bradley, have made similar claims since Obama ordered Guantanamo’s closure.

The moral degradation of these acts is beyond debate for virtually all honest Golden Rule adherents.  Some well meaning “do unto others” practitioners justify the killing of civilians as an unavoidable consequence of the “war on terror.”  This argument is getting stale unto putrefaction.

Decrying the ethical character of these deeds is important but entry level religious commerce.  As a Minister I have been digging deeper to pinpoint the Myth behind these actions.  What is the underlying frame that makes behaviors like this acceptable to many Americans?  My mental image search keeps coming up with Manifest Destiny.

The term is generally traced to newspaper editor John O’Sullivan’s December 27, 1845 editorial in the New York Morning News.  He claimed the right of the U.S. to Oregon territory disputed by the British.  “That claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of Liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

In his classic book on Manifest Destiny, Albert K. Weinberg defines it as being “in essence the doctrine that one nation has a preeminent social worth, a distinctive lofty mission, and consequently, unique rights in the application of moral principles.”  He concludes that this idea soon became “a firmly established article of the national creed.”

Historian Beshoy Shaker notes three key themes usually touched upon by advocates of Manifest Destiny:

The virtue of the American people and their institutions.

The mission to spread these institutions, thereby redeeming and remaking the world in the image of the U.S.

The destiny under God to accomplish this work.

 

I do not believe that the majority of American’s believe in Manifest Destiny anymore.  But in the halls of power and over much of corporate media this presupposition is an etched in granite given.  Crowdsourcing offers alternate possibilities.  It is a process of calling upon the collective wisdom of the group to birth something fresh and renewing.    

Please respond to this blog if you are willing to participate in such and endeavor.  How can we lasso the new myth that is already in the ether waiting to be called out?  What images like John Gast’s 1872 portrait, “American Progress” can we create?  What ideas like posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, wristbands, videos, art can we birth?  Maybe you know of a good software program that will allow us to share our ideas.

America’s Master of Myth Joseph Campbell asserted;

“At present, our world has rejected the world of symbology.  It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded.  You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization.  Our religious life is ethical, not mystical.  The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result. 

The question is whether or not there can ever be a recovery of the mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which human beings are a manifestation.” 

This is the ground of what the myth is to be.  It’s already here: the eye of reason, not of my nationality; the eye of reason, not of my religious community;  the eye of reason, not of my linguistic community. Do you see? And this would be the philosophy for the entire planet, not for this group, that group, or the other group.”

Let’s crowdsource a new life enhancing American Myth!

It’s a phrase that comes from the right seemingly automatically whenever a government program works to solve a problem: big government. The huge stimulus package that President Obama has presented to counter the effect of the past eight years’ battle against public interests calls it forth constantly. While I think liberals slough it off, it seems to be a good time to mention that ‘big’ government is the mantra that is supposed to point out to wingers what is wrong with solving problems.

The Wall Street Journal of course provided the ultimate warning light; Daniel Henninger writes there that we have been, essentially, kidnapped.

…the economic crisis, as it did for Franklin D. Roosevelt, will serve as a stepping stone to a radical shift in the relationship between the people and their government. It will bind Americans to their government in ways not experienced since the New Deal. This tectonic shift, if successful, will be equal to the forces of public authority set in motion by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The Obama presidency is going to be a radical presidency.
(snip)
Mr. Obama believes health-care costs cause a bankruptcy “every 30 seconds” and will drive 1.5 million Americans from their homes this year. Therefore, the budget’s vision on health is “historic” and a “downpayment” toward comprehensive health insurance. This “will not wait another year,” he said.

He announced “tax-free universal savings accounts” as a solution to Social Security’s crisis. This is a savings plan supported by federal matching contributions automatically deposited in individual accounts.

Mr. Obama acknowledged that this spending — which in the public sector’s new vocabulary is always “investment” — will be costly. His read-my-lips moment was that no family with an income under $250,000 will pay a “single dime” in new taxes to support the construction of this new federal skyscraper. If that’s still true in 2015, Mr. Obama will be walking back and forth across the Potomac River.

He told Congress he does not believe in bigger government. I don’t believe that. It’s becoming clear that the private sector is going to be demoted into a secondary role in the U.S. system. This isn’t socialism, but it is not the system we’ve had since the early 1980s. It would be a reordered economic system, its direction chosen and guided by Mr. Obama and his inner circle.

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s postspeech reply did not come close to recognizing the gauntlet Mr. Obama has thrown down to the opposition. Unless the GOP can discover a radical message of its own to distinguish it from the president’s, it should prepare to live under Mr. Obama’s radicalism for at least a generation.

The fair and balanced part, in case you missed it, is that ‘this isn’t socialism’. That is immediately followed by the dreaded control of the Obamas. These are those liberals who are going to run things now, in this lurid picture of being usurped. That big government monster is an operation by the Other Sort - as opposed to the incompetence that the mogul horde ‘base’ has given us for eight years. That we have a radical shift to head off the disaster brought on by corporate welfare that throws the public to the free market - there’s your ultimate threat for those corporate shills.

The opposite of that threatened big government has been seen up close and personal, and it consisted of government agencies run by the very people who opposed them. In the case of FEMA, we saw one of the worst exhibits of Small Government. When a hack who got his post by being a political operative was given real needs to meet, he dressed up and ran in circles while New Orleans drowned. In the case of all the agencies of the executive branch, political loyalty to the opponents of public interest was all the qualifications wanted or accepted. The result has been unmitigated disaster.

This big government thing appears to be really great for a change. Under it, we get agencies headed by those with expertise in their areas, who are actually performing the job they are given. Of course, they will have to fight tooth and nail against the Small. There is only one principle that guides the Small. It is that public interest is and will remain forever the denial of the very services that government is there to perform. It may be called Small Government by the right wingers, but its effect is that of government with Very Little Brain. (Sorry, piglet, you would have done it better.)

The corporate welfare advocates have a lot of bugaboos, and seem to be scared of losing the control they have shown they can’t handle. Big government, like liberal, and socialized medicine, are terms that strike fear in their ranks. It’s time that we liberals started to take pride in producing the antidote to winger disaster.

Radical government is a beginning. It’s much more likely to succeed than the ‘conservative’ kind, that pits the rich against the poor, and cheats. Less government of the Small, by the Small, and for the Small. More radical big government, please.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Too busy today to find something subtly obnoxious enough to earn the esteemed designation of “DAILY SNARK.” That said, one David Denby has explored the past and present of those comments that make us snicker. Denby’s new book, aptly titled Snark, dives into the squalid world of back-handed replies, the very moments when as an observer one can’t help but let laughter break the silence of an awkward circumstance.

Dearest reader(s): I haven’t yet had the time to read Denby’s publication in full. But I assure you that once I do, I will think of something really snarky to quip about. And that’s a promise.

In this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Walter Kirn offered the book’s basis but could have been snarkier. But clearly Denby doesn’t like snarky comments as much as I do. Kirn’s critique:

Snickering at power has it uses, whatever Denby imagines drives the snickerers, and however he belittles their spitting prose. Playing polite, though, exacts a higher price — and one that Denby seems strangely willing to pay for the sake of . . . what? It’s hard to know. One almost wonders if what he so deplores about what he calls “the hunting of the snark” is that, invariably — given his obtuseness about the necessity of irreverent laughter, even if it’s rude, unfair or lamebrained, in revealing or merely helping to abide perceived arrogance and fraudulence — someday the snark would come for books like his.

Ok, maybe this guy Kirn is snarkier than we thought.

As I approach that age when Medicare is available, I am becoming very aware that the system is in desperate straits. The funds available for care are inadequate for present patients, and I hear about doctors turning away Medicare patients because they can’t pay the fees the doctors routinely charge for services.

A study released yesterday gives a bleak view of the medical profession, once again reminding me that Dr. Professor Wombat warns often in our chats at eschaton that profit is not an impetus to quality of service in the medical professions.

Medicare costs vary wildly across the country, according to a study that found the government paying twice as much for treating a patient in Miami as in San Francisco.

The dramatic cost differences don’t appear connected to climate or to who lives where, and people in the more expensive areas don’t get better care.

More expensive medical technology is only part of the picture, according to the report released Wednesday by the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which studies medical resources. The findings were being published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study said the differences in spending from one area to another can be blamed on decisions made by individual doctors who are influenced by what medical services are available nearby.

“Technology doesn’t drive the growth in health care spending, people do,” said Dr. Elliott Fisher, the lead study author and a medicine professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

Fisher said physicians are not the only issue, but also questions like whether there’s a local medical health race among local hospitals or whether a community has a single hospital that is more focused on primary care.
(snip)
The Dartmouth Atlas findings, drawn from an analysis of government Medicare data from 1992-2006, suggest great inefficiencies in care in some parts of the country. It also says there is plenty of room for reform if practices in the regions of the country that are less expensive could become the national norm.

That won’t come easy since the country’s medical system frequently rewards expensive practices, the study notes. For example, hospitals lose money if they improve care in a way that reduces admissions. Doctors don’t have a financial incentive to spend time carefully listening to a patient rather than quickly referring them to a specialist.

“There are no financial rewards for collaboration, coordination or conservative practice,” the study said.

As medical expenses have constituted the cause in about 50% of bankruptcies in this country, the need to restrain those costs is very obvious. Those of us who don’t have work provision of insurance are well aware that we are paying exorbitant rates for what may be pretty poor service if we ever need it.

The review of medical care in this country now being performed under President Obama’s instigation needs to take a close look at elements driving up costs without any benefits in better service. The U.S. should exit from its present role of the only country among ‘civilized’ nations that lets its citizens suffer the lack of health care. Bringing our health system into a role of protector of U.S. citizens, from its present role of taking advantage of us, would be a good beginning.

(This post also at http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/ )

Weighing in on the current debate over the status of Mexico - is it a failed state, or not? - I believe the only credible answer is the latter. I do so for reasons that largely jibe with those expressed in a comment left at the Latin American-focused blog Two Weeks Notice:

I’m not the first to point out that for a large, poor country, Mexico is relatively safe, its public services are relatively well administered and it has none of the problems — such as active, armed revolutionaries or foreign invaders — that typically identify a “failed state.”

Mexico’s drug violence is truly terrifying and merits the attention it is receiving from the Mexican government and the foreign press. But calling Mexico a “failed state” does a disservice to the development success it has achieved and also cheapens a useful, and damning, designation.

In the end, however, the failed-state argument is rhetorical, and irrelevant for those living the reality. Thing is, soon enough, that may include all of us north of the border: on his list of threats to US security, outgoing CIA director Michael Hayden listed Al Qaeda at #1. The drug-related violence in Mexico came in at #2.

There is, and always has been, a negligent feeling of insulation from Latin American affairs. In the past it has led to indifference, neglect, outright atrocities; no matter what foul* action or inaction we commit, it was believed (more or less correctly), those chickens would never come home to roost.

In this case, however, US citizens’ addiction to drugs, and the US government’s addiction to the War on Drugs, has created the biggest destabilizing threat Mexico has seen since Napolean III tried to make Mexico a colonial-type protectorate, or maybe even further back, when the United States stole half Mexico’s territory. That threat is proving harder and harder to contain. Let’s hope Obama & Co. can help the Mexican government tamp down the trouble before too many more Mexicans more die, and before we start seeing the effects this side of the Rio Grande.

* ill-advised bird pun removed.

Introducing a new feature to this ‘bril’ blog:

The DAILY SNARK

Today’s award goes to an ace reporter who had the patience to sit through an entire press conference with State Department spokesman Robert Wood. This dutifully snarky reporter inquired about the geographical boundaries of Dennis Ross’s new diplomatic post:

QUESTION: Have your ace geographers been able to determine what Southwest Asia is and thereby figure out what exactly Dennis Ross’s mandate is?

MR. WOOD: I’m so shocked that you asked that question. Let me give you my best – our best read of this. From our standpoint, the countries that make up areas of the Gulf and Southwest Asia include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen, and those are the countries

At least Wood snarked right back at him.

The highlights: