We Are Still Facing Disaster! What Can We Do?

One thing upon which virtually all pelican independents agree is the sickening corruption of our corporate culture and how that leads to corruption in D.C. and in state capitals all over the country. It's properly known as Fascism. Our elected officials are answerable only to lobbyists from big business, it seems, and the corporations do much to help the government spy on Americans in hundreds of ways of which many Americans are not aware. When government and corporate power are so aligned, it poses a deadly danger to Americans and others around the world. 

(Add corrupt religion to that and we have the unholy trinity of the anti-Christ.)

BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

We're headed for disaster. You'd have to be totally blind not to recognize that. So if we don't change -- if this crisis doesn't force us to change -- there will be more and more and more and more. And who knows what the ultimate outcome will be? If we continue to resist, we'll disappear. I mean, you have to be sustainable at some point don’t you, by definition?

-- John Perkins

* * *

Initially, John Perkins seems to be a character you'd love to hate. His tales of spreading exploitation and pushing World Bank loans across the planet as an "economic hit man" make him easy fodder. Perkins has been a member of a group that finds itself more and more unpopular every day since the implosion of Wall Street last year.

In his latest book, he introduces himself as one of the "'hired guns' who promote the interests of big corporations and certain sectors of the U.S. government." He adds that though he had a "fancy title" his "real job was to plunder the Third World."

This was Perkins' basic narrative in his wildly popular book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But in his latest book, Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded -- and What We Need to Do to Remake Them, he connects the plundering of the last three decades to the roots of today's economic crisis.

"We were so successful in the Third World that our bosses directed us to implement similar strategies in the United States and across the rest of the planet," he writes. This is where the global economic crisis came from, and we can only fix it if we understand that.

And that's why BuzzFlash had to talk to the economic hit man himself. Turns out, the H-word that came to mind was not hate, but hope.

In this interview, Perkins explains why "economic recovery," in the mainstream sense of the word, is not desirable for our country, and that such a "return to normal" will only precipitate the next looming crisis. He also told us what he thinks about the supposed "change" as represented by the Obama Administration a year after inauguration and what it's going to take to transition from toxic, predatory capitalism to a sustainable, fair-market society.  

* * *

BuzzFlash:  First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time, and let you know I really enjoyed Hoodwinked. But I do want to start by going back a bit to your first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and your persona in that role. I want to know how well you knew, when you were actually in this role, that you might be doing something wrong as an economist in the Third World.

John Perkins:  Well, Meg, I think it was always in the back of my mind. From the moment I first met with Claudine -- you know, this amazing woman who was my mentor and trainer -- and she let me know what I would be in for. I think I had suspicions. But I felt that I could probably be different. I think we often feel that way.

Also, all my training in business school said that if you build big infrastructure projects in developing countries, that was the right way to increase economic growth. And of course, the business schools were teaching that while I was an economic hit man. I was asked to speak at places like Harvard and talk about these things. And the World Bank was very much behind it. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, patted me on the back and told me what a good job I was doing.

So there were a lot of ways to kind of convince myself that what I was doing was right. And I was living a very interesting life, traveling first class around the world, visiting countries that I’d always wanted to visit. So there’s a side of me that always wanted to convince myself. But as time went on and I questioned more and more, and heard more and more, I saw more and more. Finally after about ten years I reached a point where I could no longer fool myself. I could no longer be in denial.

BuzzFlash:  As a follow-up question, I wonder if you could tell me what you think about some of the people on the political side of the free market capitalism theory such as, say, Ronald Reagan, or even Milton Friedman himself. Do you think they were aware of the underlining immorality of those policies when they’re in action?

John Perkins:  Well, I can’t believe that they didn't understand the implications. I have a sense that people like that don't think in terms of morality very much. Somebody like Friedman says only responsibility of business is to maximize profits in the short run, regardless of the social and environmental costs. He doesn't really leave any room for morality there. When you say the only responsibility is to make large profits, you've ruled out morality. I don’t know that Ronald Reagan thought in terms of morality very much. He certainly talked about family values and things like that. 

BuzzFlash:  I admit it's kind of an unfair question. How would you know what these other people thought?

John Perkins:  Right. But I can’t believe they didn’t understand the implications -- that what we were doing was creating a bigger gap between rich and poor. What we were doing was supporting the rich people around the world. What we were doing was supporting big corporations. And that, in fact, was definitely a part of both Reagan’s and Friedman’s policies. So they certainly understood the implications. Whether they saw it in moral terms or not, I don’t know.

BuzzFlash:  Now getting to Hoodwinked, I was really glad to hear you address the "good news" distractions that would keep us from actually changing the toxic way we’re doing things. Because it's something that the media reproduces all the time with this economic recovery talk. And it makes me wonder if this current crisis can't convince us to change, then what, if anything, will?

John Perkins:  A bigger crisis.

BuzzFlash:  Do you see another looming crisis on the horizon?

John Perkins:  This is not ending. If we don’t do something to change it, it's going to get worse. There's no question about that. I mean, we should have seen this crisis coming -- and anybody who was really looking did see it coming.

When your country is as deep in debt as ours is, when you’re doing essentially what the Spanish empire did back in the sixteen- or seventeen-hundreds, which was plundering the rest of the planet, and not building up your own manufacturing base, but instead going to other countries, borrowing huge amounts of money. This is exactly what the Spanish did. They plundered Latin America for gold and silver, and they took out huge loans based on that plunder from the Dutch and the British and many others, and just lived this lifestyle. They didn’t really build up their own economy, and it imploded.

We're doing the same thing, and it doesn't work. And in addition to that, it's worse today because we've created this world for less than five percent of us who live in the United States and consume more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. And you can't -- the world's so big -- it's such a big population that there's no way anybody else can replicate that. The planet's just not big enough. We'd have to have another five planets to do that.

And so, we’re headed for disaster. You'd have to be totally blind not to recognize that. So if we don't change -- if this crisis doesn't force us to change, there will be more and more and more and more. And who knows what the ultimate outcome will be? If we continue to resist, we’ll disappear. I mean, you have to be sustainable at some point, don’t you, by definition? The species has to be sustainable. A lot of species have disappeared from the planet because they haven’t been sustainable. A lot of human cultures have disappeared from the planet because they weren’t sustainable, like the Mayan culture for example. We have to either become sustainable or perish.

BuzzFlash:  I wonder, a year out from Obama's inauguration, what grade you would give the president on becoming a more sustainable society?

John Perkins:  Well, of course, I come at this from a different perspective. We’re the people who have to do it. I think we’ve put too much stock in our presidents, and a president can come along once in a while who's truly exceptional. I think Franklin Roosevelt was truly exceptional. Even people who don’t like his policies would have a hard time not agreeing with that statement. But these exceptional people are very few and far between. Churchill was that way for England.

Obama’s not in that mold, I think, and I don’t think you can expect that in general of presidents. I think people put a lot of expectations on Obama. Do I think he’s done a good job? No, absolutely not. I’d give him a very, very low rating.

And he has brought in exactly the people who caused the problem. His financial sector is run by guys from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms that caused the problem, and his agricultural policy is run by people from Monsanto and other big companies.

I’m very disappointed in that, on the one hand. On the other hand, I didn’t expect a hell of a lot more, to be honest with you.

I think we need to recognize that we’re at a time in history unlike any other before. The most analogous time would be when the city-states became nations, except today the nations are becoming irrelevant and the presidents are becoming irrelevant. I think I talked in Hoodwinked about how it used to be. Our globe was roughly 200 countries, of which a few had a lot of power: the U.S., the Soviet Union, others at other times.

But today, we really envision the power bases being these huge corporations drifting around the planet. 

They’re calling the shots. And they’re calling the shots on Obama. They’re calling the shots on any powerful leader in the world. They threw one out in Honduras recently, the big corporations did. And Obama's very aware that he's extremely beholden to them, and he's in a very vulnerable position.

We the people have to create the change. And in fact, that's always been the case.

Women didn't get the right to vote because Woodrow Wilson was pro-suffrage; he wasn't. They got the right to vote because they'd been fighting for it for a long time. And when he was president, he traveled around the country trying to drum up support for U.S. troops to be sent into Europe to defend democracy there, and women followed him everywhere, and screamed and shouted and carried placards that said, "Why should we send our men off to defend democracy in Europe when we don't have it here? Half of us can't vote. We women can't vote." And he gave in to that. This is an American tradition -- that we the people have to do it.

Franklin Roosevelt certainly saw that when he told union leaders, after meeting with them, "I think you understand that I agree with you. Now you've got to go out there and force me to do the right thing."

We have to force Obama to do the right thing. We have to force the corporations to do the right thing. It's not likely that we get a president that is so courageous, and comes from such an independent resource base that he feels comfortable challenging the status quo. That happens very seldom in this country.

BuzzFlash:  When you talk about using that individual action to create change, I wonder if the two-party system keeps going the way that it is, and lawmakers keep refusing to do what the people demand, then what?

John Perkins:  Well, parties are very much manipulated by big corporations. I'm starting to sound kind of like a stuck record. Maybe part of the reason I sound that way is I come out of the corporate background, not a political background.

So my bias is the corporations, that they call the shots. And I’ve seen this, and I know this. They do call the shots. And both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have been controlled by the corporations and the money that they provide. Nobody gets elected in this country without a lot of corporate backing, either directly or from major stockholders in corporations that may do it as a private donation. But they’re certainly using it to leverage support for their corporations. And we really have to recognize that.

Obama originally started off saying he wasn’t going to take corporate funding. But even if he hadn't -- if he were really upright in that regard -- he’s not, but if he were, he'd still have to work with a Congress that's beholden to corporations. He'd still have to deal with approximately 35,000 lobbyists just in Washington, D.C. And corporations control the press. So they have tremendous power.

So my whole thing here, and what I tried to point out in Hoodwinked, is that we have to force the corporations to understand that they have to change their goal from that of maximizing profits regardless of the social and environmental costs to making profits within the context of creating a stable, just and peaceful world. If we can really convince the corporations that the only ones we're going to buy from or allow our tax dollars to buy from are those that are committed to that sort of agenda and that sort of a goal, then they will see to it that our elected officials come up with policies that level the playing field in a way that ends up making everybody responsible for creating a sustainable, just and peaceful world. But I really believe that if we cannot convince the corporations, it's not going to happen, because they are calling the shots. And they are dependent upon us to buy their goods and services.

BuzzFlash:  Well, let’s look at the less public, kind of "shadow corporations" that don’t directly depend on Americans going out to buy their products. Do we still have a lot of influence with them? What can people do to send that message to those companies that don’t really depend on the consumer market?

John Perkins:  Can you give me some specific examples?

BuzzFlash:  Well, I’m thinking say, this product you may not know comes from General Electric. Or you may not know that the corn that is part of this food product may be from Monsanto. The corn might be grown from genetically-modified seeds, but this product looks sustainable. How can we, as consumers, sort through the myriad of corporations to tell them what we want them to do.

John Perkins:  That's a challenging question and I get asked that frequently when I’m on public speaking tours. And I usually responded to the person who’s asking the question, "Well, make it happen." Create a system where we can see that. You know, it is happening. I agree; we need a more -- what’s the right word? What’s the word that's always bandied about? We need –- you know, we need to be more open. There needs to be greater...

BuzzFlash:  Transparency?

John Perkins:  Very much. We need to have more transparency in that regard. But there is a lot of information. My daughter is 27. She’s really good at this. She goes on the Internet. She gets a lot of information on my Web site and on the Dream Change Web site, there's a lot of links to information. It takes a little work.

By the way, we’re getting there, I think. I know there are several organizations currently that are working on creating kind of a bar code that every product would have, and you could hold your cell phone up to it, and it would basically tell you the whole life cycle of the product, and whether the workers that created this product get fair wages, and so on and so forth. Whether or not at the end, the disposal process is recyclable, et cetera. And it’ll rank them, so you can have a decision-making process, kind of like with food. You can see how many calories are in your food, how much fiber and how much fat, and so on and so forth. All right, we need to move in that direction with other products. There needs to be a lot of transparency, and I think we are moving in that direction.

But you’re right: It’s not always easy these days. And it takes a bit of an effort. And yet, there still are ways to make comparisons. I mean, we know a lot of companies that are not working hard to do a good job -- Nike for example, seems to always try to convince us it’s doing a good job. But all the evidence is that it has slave labor in its sweatshops in places like Indonesia. Or Dole. I love bananas. I won’t buy Dole-secured bananas because they’re behind the coup in Honduras this past year. And so there’s a lot of areas where it’s pretty clear. And there’s a lot of other areas where it’s foggier and we need to develop a better information base in those areas. 

BuzzFlash:  I know you’re more interested in the corporate responsibility angle -- but if there were one thing that the government could do to make companies behave more responsibly, what would that be?

John Perkins:  Well, that’s actually an easy one to answer. I talk in Hoodwinked about how, in the first hundred years of this country, no corporation could get a charter unless it proved it was serving the public interest. And on average, charters were only good for ten years. There were exceptions, but most of them were for ten years. And then you had to prove you had done a good job of serving the public interest and you were committed to continuing before you got your next ten-year charter. I think we should have some laws that reflect that again.

There are a lot of laws that we need to get back to that would have protected us from the recession. Glass-Steagall was the most famous one, implemented after the Great Depression, that I think we need to bring back in.

What’s more important is new laws -- general laws that mandate that corporations have a social and environmental responsibility. Mandate that they be good citizens. After all, corporations were given by the Supreme Court in the late 1800s all the rights of individuals, but not all of the responsibilities. I think they need to have the responsibilities forced on them. They need to be good citizens, corporations. We need to have laws that say a corporation simply won’t have a charter unless it's serving the public interest, unless it's committed, unless it's doing things that are aimed toward creating a sustainable, just and peaceful world.

BuzzFlash:  If there were one thing that you could tell our readers to go out and do tomorrow to help this idea of toxic capitalism die out in our society, what would that one thing be?

John Perkins:  It sounds self-serving, but I would tell them to read this section in Hoodwinked. It talks about what they can do.

There are five general areas of action that I have in Hoodwinked. Every one of us could do any one of those, or all five of them. But I would suggest that people look at those and pick one or two. But pick the ones that really speak to their passion. Everybody has passion, and everybody has talent. And when we follow our passions, and use our talents to follow our passions, we move mountains.

Part of the lesson is that people don’t follow their passions. They go and do something they’re not passionate about, and it doesn’t work too well. So there’s no point in that. We really want people like your readers, who follow their passions. Do what most appeals to them -- their bliss. Use their talents to do that, and apply those in one of these five areas or more that are all aimed at making a sustainable, just and peaceful world.

BuzzFlash:  I think that about does it for all my questions.  But is there anything you want to add?

John Perkins:  Just that I appreciate you doing this very much. I think this is what democracy’s all about: getting this word out. It’s people like you that are getting the word out.

And I’m very, very hopeful. I think we’re at an amazing time in history, a time of incredible transition. Many indigenous cultures have prophesied this. You know, the Mayan legend of 2012, the Inca legend of the eagle and the condor, the Himalayan legends -- there are many that say that this is a time for opportunity. And I think we’re really at that time.

I’m hopeful and I just encourage people to be hopeful, but at the same time to realize that it’s going to take some -- we’ll call it work. But I think actually a better term would be it’s fun. It’s going to be fun. You know, it is work, but there’s nothing in the world that’s more satisfying than devoting yourself to creating a more sustainable world, a world that future generations will want to inherit. And I think we should have fun doing it while we’re about it.

BuzzFlash:  It's funny you should say you're hopeful, because reading your book was one of the first times that I actually felt hopeful about coming out of this recession in a positive way, so I appreciate that.

John Perkins:  Thank you.

BuzzFlash:  Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

John Perkins: Thank you so much.

BuzzFlash interview conducted by Meg White.

America Unravels: NeoCons And The Reagan Myth

Tear Down This Myth

 Hi, and welcome to the homepage for "Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published in February 2009 by Free Press, an imprint of Simon And Schuster. The book is the first attempt to look at the toxic effect that a mythologized Ronald Ronald -- pushed for more than a decade by neoconservatives to revive their failing political movement -- has had on American politics, and the link between the near canonization of the 40th president and disastrous policies that are drowning America in red ink even as militarism runs rampant and Wall Street runs amok. It seeks to correct the many distortions about Reagan -- to show that his trickle-down economics of tax cuts for the wealthy didn't save the American economy, that he didn't "win the Cold War," and that he was a divisive president whose approval ratings were only average. Booklist says that "[a]nyone interested inAmerica's immediate future should read this book."

The book is available in major bookstores from coast-to-coast, and can be purchased immediately here from Amazon.com.

Other major booksellers offering "Tear Down This Myth" include Barnes and Noble, Borders, Powell's, the Tatttered Cover, and many others that are listed here. Many great independent bookstores are selling "Tear Down This Myth" -- please support them by shopping there if and when you can. The outstanding Web site Buzzflash offers a copy of the book to its donors.

The official Simon & Schuster homepage for the book is here.

Please consider joining the official Facebook group for "Tear Down This Myth." You can follow Will Bunch (me!) on Facebook and on Twitter. A short online bio is located here. The home page for this blog, Attytood, is here, and this is the homepage of the Philadelphia Daily News, where I am senior writer.

Several excerpts of the book have been posted online:

Salon: "How Republicans Created the Myth of Ronald Reagan."
Attytood: "Why Reagan Still Matters."
Here is my recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on how Obama can use Reagan's tactics to undo his harmful legacy.
Here's my Q-and-A with Buzzflash.

Earlier publicity for the book has included this Q-and-A with Vanity Fair.com and this radio interview with LiberalOasis. I will continue to update this section as more becomes available.

The Reagan Project: Norquist and Other Myth-makers

How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

With the Gipper's reputation flagging after Clinton's easy re-election bid, neoconservatives launched a stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.

 

By Will Bunch

 

This excerpt from "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" is reprinted by permission of Free Press.

The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America.

In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away. The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July 1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”

Betrayed? Puleeze! I guess that this ADD/ADHD  crowd in the U.S. was supposed to just forget all about Iran/Contra, admittedly a boring scandal compared to Clinton's, if one doesn't take into consideration how dangerous the Iran/Contra crimes were compared to Clinton's blow jobs. Actually, we are still paying the price for that unholy mess. Google is your friend.

The coming contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid  out in a series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement: that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong. The tone was established by none other than Reagan’s own son, Michael, now himself a talk-radio host, who wrote: “Although my father is the one afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, I sometimes think the Republicans are suffering a much greater memory loss. They have forgotten Ronald Reagan's accomplishments — and that is why we have lost so many of them.”

What? Like winning the cold war? That is the most ridiculous clap-trap I've ever heard. But just for a moment let's pretend that the world is not a more dangerous place today than it was before Reagan and Gorby became good pals. If that's true, then the Goopers, in the incarnation of George II and his second, Shooter, with a republican majority in Congress, damned near started the whole thing over again. I, myself, never believed that the cold war was over. That old Russian bear just went into hibernation, got rid of the dead weight and dumped all of their sociopaths and psychopaths all over the globe, including the U.S. The Russian mafia makes the old Sicilian/Italian mob seem civilized by comparison.

Michael Reagan, like most of the others, mentioned Reagan’s frequent calls for less government — presumably his accomplishment there was simply in calling for it, since he never came close to achieving it. 

Gary Bauer, another former Reagan aide who later ran for president as an anti-abortion “family values” candidate, took a similar tack on the speaking-out issue, noting that Reagan “spoke of the sanctity of human life with passion” — again regardless of his lack of concrete results on that front.
(The Goopers don't want to win on the abortion issue.What would the far right run on if it weren't for that. Well, of course they will still have the gays to kick around, but much like in San Francisco in the 70s, Gays have learned to kick back.)

One of the writers argued: “On the international scene, Reagan knew that only America could lead the forces of freedom” — it was former assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who’d pleaded guilty in a deal to withhold information about Iran-Contra from Congress and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating even went the distance and compared Reagan to the 16th president with his argument that “Reagan's achievement can be compared to Lincoln's, because he faced immense challenges in an era characterized by deep and fundamental philosophical divisions among the people he set out to lead.” Of course, Keating’s analogy implied that stagflation and a left-wing government in Nicaragua were on an equivalent plane with slavery and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on our own soil — dramatizing the rhetorical extent to which conservatives were now willing to go in order to salvage their movement.

Unfreakin'believable, if I didn't know that it's all true.

One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other.

His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was hatched in the spring of 1997 — and perhaps like any successful guerrilla operation, there was an element of surprise. There was no formal announcement, nothing to tip off any alarmists on the left. Rather than incorporate the Reagan project as a separate entity, which carried the potential of greater scrutiny of its operations and its finances, it was simply a unit of the group that Norquist had been overseeing for more than a decade, the Americans for Tax Reform. The Reagan Legacy Project would not even get its first mention in print until October 23, 1997 — by then its first bold proposal had two key backers in Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and that state’s Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell. They had endorsed legislation that would rename the Capitol region’s busy domestic airport, Washington National, as Reagan National. The renaming would not only mean that millions of air travelers would pass through the facility named for the 40th president, but a disproportionate number would be from the nation’s liberal elites, especially in Big Media, who used the airport’s popular shuttle service. Simply put, Reagan National Airport would be a weekly thumb in the eye of the Yankee elites who were still belittling the aging Gipper’s presidency.

The announcement didn’t even get coverage in the hometown Washington Post until exactly one month later, when Norquist’s behind-the-scenes lobbying push had already bagged the endorsement of the influential Republican Governors Association — including George Allen, the governor of the state where the airport is located (in Arlington, Va.) on federal land — as well as House Speaker Gingrich. With Reagan out of public view with Alzheimer’s for three years now, advocate Barr cast the measure as a feel-good proposal that surpassed partisanship. “People appreciate how Ronald Reagan gave voice to Americans' basic good feelings, including a lot of Democrats, ” he said. Democrats, in fact, did what you would expect them to do … they hemmed and hawed. The mayor of Washington, D.C., at the time — with thus the largest presence on the regional panel that ran Washington National — was Democrat Marion Barry, a bitter foe of Reagan’s politics, who could only fret that there were a “host of other” people who should be considered, too; in a later article, Geraldine Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, said that Reagan’s real legacy was the mountain of debt, but then she offered a verbal shrug: “The man was president of the United States; he served two terms.” It almost brought to mind Reagan’s cruel remark about Michael Dukakis a decade earlier, that “I’m not going to pick on an invalid.”

After a couple of years in the wilderness with the rest of the inside-the-Beltway right wing, Norquist had found a new cause that not only advanced the movement but that he could also have fun with. "The guy ended the Cold War; he turned the economy around," Norquist told the Baltimore Sun. “He deserves a monument like the Jefferson or the FDR — or the Colossus at Rhodes! National Airport is a good place to start.”

Norquist was the leader of a new breed, the College Republican-trained version of a bomb thrower. Molded by the 1970s and that political void between the hangover of campus radicalism and the Carter malaise, he was a true believer, with an iconoclastic outlook, who called the counter-cultural drug-overdosing rock star Janis Joplin a hero even as he forged political ties with the Christian Right. Like most political junkies, his ideas were a mix of heredity — his father, a Polaroid executive who raised Norquist in the Boston suburbs, taught his young son to hate taxes at the Daily Joy ice-cream parlor by taking the first two licks of his son’s cone and calling it the income and sales tax — and generational rebellion.

But that rebellion was against the liberal norms at Harvard, which he attended in the mid-1970s, even while working on the left-leaning Harvard Crimson. When he escaped to Washington in 1978, it was still as an outsider; he would later tell the Washington Post that the sight of the more opulent federal buildings there made him “physically ill” because they were built with taxpayer dollars, that they were a kind of “neo-American fascism,” that “[t]hey took people's money to build those things, people who were just getting by, [they] stole their money and built those things out of marble...”

Ronald Reagan came three years later to rescue Grover Norquist, to take a young single Republican nerd and make him a player, albeit a small-time one at first. It was through Reagan’s team that Norquist came to launch the Americans for Tax Reform in 1986, to win support for that year’s overhaul (even though, as noted earlier, the bill raised taxes on corporations substantially — one of the early contradictions among many that would pile up over Norquist’s long career). During those days, the geeky 20-something took strength from Reagan’s support of so-called freedom fighters like Jonas Savimbi in Angola, a right-wing rebel backed by South Africa’s then-apartheid government — his office would be lined with pictures of Norquist’s gun-toting days in the jungle, interspersed with the Joplin memorabilia.

By the 1990s, Norquist was in a new political mode, survivor. He served as a close ally of Gingrich, helping to draft and promulgate the 1994 Contract with America, but the bitter chain of events that seemed to start the day his heroic Gipper headed into the California sunset — followed by Bush 41 and his betrayal on taxes and then the anti-Gingrich backlash — caused him to again focus on the presidency as the place where the action was. Of course, by now Norquist was not so much a rebel as a conglomerate, enmeshed in a tangled web of alliances, sometimes for money. By 1997, Norquist was a registered lobbyist for what was becoming the most powerful business monopoly of the computer era, the software giant Microsoft Corp., while his ATR umbrella group was being probed for its multimillion ad campaign on behalf of GOP candidates in the 1996 elections. In fact, the very spring that Norquist launched the Reagan Legacy Project, his fellow conservative Tucker Carlson wrote a scathing profile that accused the activist of cynically selling out — the article that ran in the left-leaning New Republic (after the conservative Weekly Standard rejected it) carried the headline “What I Sold at the Revolution” and said that, among other things, Norquist was now receiving $10,000 a month from the left-wing strongman who controlled the African nation of Seychelles, the polar opposite of the type of anti-communist rebels he once supported.

So maybe the Reagan project was a little escape for Norquist, a little getting back to his roots, with the kind of in-your-face surprising ploy that had been his youthful trademark. From the start, he handed the task of running the legacy project to a young aide named Michael Kamburowski, who had recently arrived from his native Australia with a kind of zeal for Reaganism that maybe only a newcomer could carry. A decade later, it would come out that Kamburowski — who also lobbied with Norquist on issues such as immigration reform — was here in the United States illegally (and even jailed for a time in 2001, which somehow didn’t prevent Kamburowski from landing a subsequent job as chief operating officer of the California Republican Party). But while he apparently was in the United States as an illegal alien, Kamburowski still seemed to “get” the Reagan Legacy Project from Day One, that it wasn’t just about honoring Reagan but enshrining Reagan’s conservative principles as the American ideal. "Someone 30 to 40 years from now who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask himself, 'Who was this man to have so many things named after him?'” Kamburowski said to the left-oriented magazine Mother Jones in 1997, writing about Norquist’s legacy scheme. The initial media coverage of the idea tended to range from bemusement to amusement. People magazine — the ultimate vehicle for connecting with the Silent Majority of unengaged voters — covered an early effort of the legacy campaign that was a six-foot portrait of Reagan made from 14,000 jelly beans. The item was headlined: “Reagan’s Sweet Legacy.”

All the sweetness and yuks masked a somewhat startling fact — that by enshrining a national myth about Reagan so soon after his presidency, while he was still alive (albeit incapacitated), and for purposes that were essentially partisan in nature, Norquist, Kamburowski and their powerful and growing list of conservative allies were pulling off a maneuver that was unprecedented in American history. Other presidents and leaders had surely been mythologized — a walk from Norquist’s office near K Street to the National Mall would show that — but not while they were still living, or in a manner so blatantly calculated in the very spirit of a presidency built around effective public relations. This may have been American history, circa 1984 — but as if the textbook had been authored by Orwell himself. As young Kamburowski said flatly to the Hartford Courant in December 1997: “The left has been far better at rewriting history. Conservatives just haven't paid that much attention to this kind of thing.”

Excerpted from "Tear Down This Myth:  How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" by Will Bunch. Copyright © 2009 by Will Bunch. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Thanks Alot For The Hate, Bushite Idiots!

Can anyone honestly be this stupid? Can people who have served in so many different capacities as Cheney and Rumsfeld be this stupid? 

HELL NO. 

They wanted to get what they wanted to hear and they knew that someone being tortured will say whatever-the-hell their torturers want to hear. 

They knew the clap-trap about Saddam being big buddies with Osama and having something to do with 9/11 wasn't true. I'm pretty sure they knew that Saddam wasn't capable of what they said he was capable of doing to us; what they said he was going to do. They just needed a reason to invade and occupy Iraq. They should all (including Junior) still be held accountable for the crimes they have committed with out blood and treasure and in our names.

I'm not sure the U.S. has gotten away with protecting some of the worst international criminals in our history from even the slightest accountability for their crimes.. Just take a look at our economy. Yes, most of it is the fault of our own big bankers, but BuCheney were highly successful in making even our longest-term allies not give a hoot what happened to us as long as the damage to them was as minimal as possible.

Nice Work Creating New Terrorists, You Morons

American civilian and military leaders have been creating new terrorists through their:

(1) Use of torture
and

(2) Killing of innocent civilians- especially children - in Arabic countries.

Torture

A high-level American Special Ops interrogator says that information obtained from torture is unreliable, and that torture just creates more terrorists. Indeed, he says that torture of innocent Iraqis by Americans is the main reason that foreign fighters started fighting against Americans in Iraq in the first place.

A former FBI interrogator -- who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects -- says categorically that torture does not help collect intelligence. On the other hand he says that torture actually turns people into terrorists.
A 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, says:

"This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.”

Former counter-terrorism czar Richard A. Clarke says that America's indefinite detention without trial and abuse of prisoners is a leading Al Qaeda recruiting tool.

A former U.S. interrogator and counterintelligence agent, and Afghanistan veteran said,

Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It’s used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo.

The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously found:

"The administration’s policies concerning [torture] and the resulting controversies ... strengthened the hand of our enemies."

Two professors of political science have demonstrated that torture increases, rather than decreases, terrorism.

Killing of Innocent Civilians

The former number 2 counter-terrorism expert at the State Department says that military attacks in Iraq increase terrorism.

Indeed, Al Qaeda wasn't even in Iraq until the U.S. invaded that country.

After the U.S. military allegedly handcuffed and then killed a bunch of Afghan kids, thousands of Afghans are protesting the brutal killings, chanting 'Death to America!'.

Nice work creating new terrorists, you morons.


AMEN!!!

Anyone who thinks this is a partisan issue should read this and this.

In related news, not only are the U.S. government's actions creating more terrorists, but "reforms" made to the intelligence agencies have made it MORE DIFFICULT to stop the terrorists they've created.

Idiots.

Jihad Cracking

 

Real Jihad is needed now, all over the world, whether we are Muslim or not. The meaning of Jihad is "inner struggle." It is a spiritual struggle like the one in which we should all be engaged at the moment. Look around, Folks. The entire planet is in big trouble. 

Instead of waging war against the evil we see in others, perhaps we should be looking within. Until we do, we cannot really see good or evil in others.


Cracks in the Jihad
 
by Thomas Rid

“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under frequent assault.   Paris pinned its hopes on an energetic general who had already served a successful tour in Algeria, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud. In January 1840, shortly before leaving to take command in Algiers, he addressed the French Chamber of Deputies: “In Europe, gentlemen, we don’t just make war against armies; we make war against interests.” The key to victory in European wars, he explained, was to penetrate the enemy country’s interior. Seize the centers of population, commerce, and industry, “and soon the interests are forced to capitulate.” Not so at the foot of the Atlas, he conceded. Instead, he would focus the army’s effort on the tribal population.    Later that year, a well-known military thinker from Prussia traveled to Algeria to observe Bugeaud’s new approach. Major General Carl von Decker, who had taught under the famed Carl von Clausewitz at the War Academy in Berlin, was more forthright than his French counterpart. The fight against fanatical tribal warriors, he foresaw, “will throw all European theory of war into the trash heap.”   One hundred and seventy years later, jihad is again a major threat—and Decker’s dire analysis more relevant than ever. War, in Clausewitz’s eminent theory, was a clash of collective wills, “a continuation of politics by other means.” When states went to war, the adversary was a political entity with the ability to act as one body, able to end hostilities by declaring victory or admitting defeat.  Even Abd el-Kader eventually capitulated. But jihad in the 21st century, especially during the past few years, has fundamentally changed its anatomy: Al Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no longer an adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be defeated. But the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength: Because of its transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired yet fitter to survive its present crisis.   In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition forces toppled the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s core organization in Afghan­istan, the bin Laden brand has been bleeding popularity across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result, has been torn by mounting internal tensions. Today, the holy war is set to slip into three distinct ideological and organizational niches. The U.S. surge in Afghanistan, whether successful or not, is likely to affect this development only marginally.   The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe,  fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.   The most visible divide separates the local and global jihadis. Historically, Islamist groups  tended to bud locally, and assumed a global outlook only later, if they did so at all. All the groups that have been affiliated with Al Qaeda either predate the birth of the global jihad in the early 1990s or grew later out of local causes and concerns, only subsequently attaching the bin Laden logo. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for example, started out in 1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an offshoot of another militant group that had roots in Algeria’s vicious civil war during the early 1990s. Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, the force allegedly behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 170 people, was formed in the 1990s to fight for a united Kashmir under Pakistani rule. In Somalia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the Al Qaeda brand has been attractive to groups born out of local concerns.   By joining Al Qaeda and stepping up violence, local insurgents have long risked placing themselves on the target lists of governments and law enforcement organizations. More recently, however, they have run what may be an even more consequential risk, that of removing themselves from the social mainstream and losing popular support. This is what happened to Al Qaeda in Iraq during the Sunni Awakening, which began in 2005 in violence-ridden al-Anbar Province and its principal city, Ramadi. Al Qaeda had declared Ramadi the future capital of its Iraqi “caliphate,” and by late 2005 it had the entire city under its control. But even conservative Sunni elders became alienated by the group’s brutality and violence. One prominent local leader, Sheikh Sattar Abdul Abu Risha, lost several brothers and his father in assassinations. Others were agitated by the loss of prestige and power to the insurgents in their traditional homelands. In early 2006, Sattar and his sheikhs decided to cooperate with American forces, and by the end of the year they had helped recruit nearly 4,000 men to local police units. “They brought us nothing but destruction and we finally said, enough is enough,” Sattar explained.   The awakening (sahwa in Arabic) was not limited to al-Anbar. One after another, former firebrand imams, in so-called revisions, have started questioning the theological justifications of holy war. The trend may have begun with Gamaa al-Islamiya, Egypt’s most brutal terrorist group, which was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 and the slaughter of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997. As the Iraq war intensified during the summer of 2003, several of Gamaa al-Islamiya’s leaders advised young men not to participate in Al Qaeda operations and accused the organization of “splitting Muslim ranks” by provoking hostile reactions against Islam “and wrongly interpreting the meaning of jihad in a violent way.”   Another notable revision came in September 2007, when Salman al-Awda, an influential Saudi cleric who had previously declared that fighting Americans in Iraq was a religious duty, spoke out against Al Qaeda. He accused bin Laden in an open making terror a synonym for Islam.” Speaking on a popular Saudi TV show on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Awda asked, “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda?”   Other ideologues have followed, including Sajjid Imam al-Shareef, one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders, who used the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl. “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” he wrote in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.   In Afghanistan, coalition soldiers see the global-local split replicated as a fissure between what they call “big T” Taliban and “small t” Taliban. The “big T” ideologues fight for more global spiritual or political reasons; the “little t” opportunists fight for power, for money, or just to survive, to hedge their bets. A family might have one son fighting for the Taliban and another in the Afghan National Army; no matter which side prevails, they will have one son in the right place. U.S. Marines in Helmand Province say that 80 to 85 percent of all those they fight are “small t” Taliban. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign aims to co-opt and reintegrate many of these rebels by creating secure population centers and new economic opportunities, spreading cleared areas like “inkblots.” But the Taliban have long been keen to spread their own inkblots, with a similar rationale: attracting more and more “accidental” guerrillas, in the famous phrase of counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, not just hardliners.   Yet even Afghanistan’s “big T” Taliban, the ideologues, cannot simply be equated with Al Qaeda. Last fall, Abu Walid, once an Al Qaeda accomplice and now a Taliban propagandist, ridiculed bin Laden in the Taliban’s official monthly magazine al-Sumud, for, among other things, his do-it-yourself approach to Islamic jurisprudence. A number of veterans had criticized bin Laden in the past, among them such towering figures as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, one of the key architects of the global jihad. But Abu Walid’s criticism was more biting. Bin Laden’s organization lacks strategic vision and relies on “shiny slogans,” he told Leah Farrall, an Australian counterterrorism specialist, in a much-noted dialogue she reported on her blog. Consequently the Taliban would no longer welcome the terrorists in Afghanistan, he said, because “the majority of the population is against Al Qaeda.”   At the root of the disagreement between the two groups is the question of a local, or even national, popular base. Last September, Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s founding figure and spiritual overlord, issued a message in several languages. He called the Taliban a “robust Islamic and nationalist movement” that had “assumed the shape of a popular movement.” Probably realizing that pragmatism and a certain amount of moderation offer the best chance of a return to power, Omar vowed “to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect.”   Al Qaeda’s reaction was swift and harsh. Turning the jihad into a “national cause,” in the purists’ view, was selling it out. Prominent radicals, in a remarkable move, compared the Taliban’s turnabout to the efforts by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to distance themselves from Al Qaeda. Hamas in particular, perhaps because it is, like Al Qaeda, a Sunni organization, has been the subject of “relentless” criticism in Al Qaeda circles, says Thomas Hegghammer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. When a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda faction appeared in Gaza, Hamas executed one of its leading imams and many of his armed followers. Jihadi ideologues were aghast. The globalists shuddered at the thought that local interests could compromise their pan-Islamic ambitions. “Nationalism,” declared Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, “must be rejected by the umma [Muslim community], because it is a model which makes jihad subject to the market of political compromises and distracts the umma from the liberation of Islamic lands and the establishment of the Caliphate.”   A few weeks later, Mullah Omar pointedly reiterated his promise of good neighborliness and future cooperation with Afghanistan’s neighbors, including China, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—all of whom face their own jihadi insurgencies and are on Al Qaeda’s target list.   The Taliban’s new tactics are throwing an “ideological bridge” not only to nearby countries but to parts of the current Kabul elite, most notably politically mobilized university students, notes Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. Even the newly moderate Taliban, it should be clear, remains wedded to inhumane and medieval moral principles. Yet Omar’s pragmatism immediately affects the question of who and what is a desirable target of attacks.   Perhaps the greatest tension between the local and global levels of the jihad grows out of a divide over appropriate targets and tactics. Classical Islamic legal doctrine sees armed jihad as a defensive struggle against persecution, oppression, and incursions into Muslim lands. In an attempt to mobilize Muslims around the world to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Abdallah Azzam, an influential radical cleric who was assassinated in 1989, helped expand the doctrine of jihad into a transnational struggle by declaring the Afghan jihad an individual duty for all Muslims. Azzam also advocated takfir, a practice of designating fellow Muslims as infidels (kaffir) by remote excommunication in order to justify their slaughter. Al Qaeda ideologues upped the aggressive potential of such arguments and expanded the defensive jihad into a global struggle, effectively blurring the line between the “near” enemy—the Arab regimes deemed illegitimate “apostates” by the purists—and the “far” enemy, these regimes’ Western supporters.   In the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that produce many of today’s radicals, however, local and tribal affiliations are powerful. One U.S. political adviser who worked in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, a hotbed of the insurgency, describes prevailing local sentiment as “valleyism” rather than nationalism. It is a force that drives the tribes to oppose anybody who threatens their traditional power base, foreign or not—a problem not just for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for any Afghan government. Al-Zawahiri complained of this in a Even the students (talib) themselves had stronger affiliations to their tribes and villages . . . than to the Islamic emirate.” The provincial valleyists, to the distress of Al Qaeda’s more cosmopolitan agitators, are selfishly eyeing their own interests, with little appetite for international aggression and globe-spanning terrorist operations.   The contrast with the character of jihad in the Muslim diaspora could not be starker. For radical Islamists in Europe, the local jihad doesn’t exist. And they understand that toppling governments in, say, London or Amsterdam is a fantasy. These radicals are less interest driven than identity driven. Many young European Muslims are out of touch with their ancestral countries, yet not fully at home in France or Sweden or Denmark. For some, the resulting identity crisis creates a hunger for clear spiritual guidelines. The ideology of global jihad, according to a report by EUROPOL, the European Union’s police agency, “gives meaning to the feeling of exclusion” prevalent among the second- and third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants. For these alienated youth, the idea of becoming “citizens” of the virtual worldwide Islamic community may be more attractive than it is for first-generation immigrants, who tend to retain strong roots in their native countries.   The identity problems of these young people seem to have affected the character of the jihad itself. Like the disoriented Muslim youth of the diaspora, the global jihad has loose residential roots and numb political fingertips. One sign of this disconnection from the local is that Al Qaeda’s rank and file does not include many men who could otherwise join a jihad at home: There seem to be few Palestinians, Chechens, Iraqis, or Afghans among the traveling jihadis, who tend to come from countries where jihad has failed, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria.   Al Qaeda’s identity crisis is also illustrated by how it treats radicalized converts, often people without religious schooling and consolidated personalities. Olivier Roy, one of France’s leading specialists on radical Islamism, has pointed out that convert groups assume responsibilities “beyond all comparison with any other Islamic organization.” Roy has put the proportion of converts in Al Qaeda at between 10 and 25 percent, an indicator that the movement has become “de-culturalized.”   These contrary trends, in turn, create chinks in Al Qaeda’s recruitment system. The most extreme Salafists, deprived of identity and cultural orientation, have an appetite for utopia, for extreme views that appeal to the margin of society, be it in Holland or Helmand. Recruitment in the diaspora, as a result, follows a distinctive pattern, not partisan and political but offbeat and outré. The grievances and motivations of European extremists and the rare American militants tend to be idiosyncratic, the product of unstable individual personalities and a history of personal discrimination. Many take the initiative to join the movement themselves, and because they are not recruited by a member of the existing organization, their ties to it may remain loose. In 2008 alone, 190 individuals were sentenced for Islamist terrorist activities in Europe, most of them in Britain, France, and Spain. “A majority of the arrested individuals belonged to small autonomous cells rather than to known terrorist organizations,” EUROPOL reports.   As a result of the change in its membership, the global Al Qaeda movement is encountering strong centrifugal forces. The rank and file and the center are losing touch with each other. The vision of Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who laid much of the ideological foundation for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, blends a Marxist-inspired focus on popular mass support with 21st-century ideas of networked, individual action. Al-Suri’s aim was to devise a method “for transforming excellent individual initiatives, performed over the past decades, from emotional pulse beats and scattered reactions into a phenomenon which is guided and utilized, and whereby the project of jihad is advanced so that it becomes the Islamic Nation’s battle, and not a struggle of an elite.” The global jihad was to function like an “operative system,” without vulnerable, old-fashioned organizational hierarchies. That method is intuitively attractive for a Facebook generation of well-connected young sympathizers, but the theory contains an internal contradiction. Self-recruited and “homegrown” terrorists present a wicked problem for Al Qaeda. As a bizarre type of self-appointed elite, they undermine the movement’s ambition to represent the Muslim “masses.”   The problem is embodied in the online jihad. For Al Qaeda, Web forums operated by unaffiliated Islamists have been the most important distribution platform for jihadi materials. But after the arrest of a top-tier online activist in London two years ago, the connection between the forums and Al Qaeda’s official media center, al-Sahab, began to loosen. Al Qaeda has lost more and more control of the online jihad. And, just like others online, jihadi Web administrators face increasingly tough competition for visibility. Within the forums the tone has become harsher. Brynjar Lia, a specialist on Salafism at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, says that “interjihadi quarrels seem to have become more common and less ‘brotherly’ in tone in recent years.”   Some far-flung jihadi groups are enjoying newfound independence of another kind, as a result of criminal ventures they have established to fund their efforts. This too is intensifying the centrifugal forces within the global movement. Some groups are tipping into a more purely criminal mode.   A cause is what distinguishes an insurgency from organized crime, as David Galula, an influential French author on counterinsurgency, noted decades ago. Organized crime does not have to be incompatible with jihad. It may even be justified in religious terms: Baz Mohammed, an Afghan heroin kingpin and the first criminal ever extradited from Afghanistan, bragged to his co-conspirators that selling heroin in the United States was jihad because it killed Americans while taking their money.   A budding insurgency has only a limited window of opportunity to grow into a serious political force. If the cause withers and loses its popular gloss, what remains as a rump may be nothing but a criminal organization, attracting a following with criminal energy rather than religious zeal, thus further damaging jihad’s status in the eyes of the broader public. For some groups, this already appears to be happening. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb funds itself through the drug trade, smuggling, extortion, and kidnappings in southern Algeria and northern Mali. Indonesia’s Abu Sayyaf Group and the Philippines’ Jamiyah Islamiyah engage in a variety of criminal activities, including credit card fraud. The terrorist cell behind the 2004 Madrid bombings earned most of its money from criminal activities; when Spanish police raided the home of one of the plotters, they seized close to $2 million in drugs and cash, including more than 125,000 Ecstasy tablets, according to U.S. News and World Report. The Madrid bombings had cost the terrorists just $50,000.   The goal of leading Islamists has always been to turn their battle into “the Islamic Nation’s battle,” as al-Suri wrote. Far from reaching this goal, the jihad is veering the other way. Eight years after 9/11, support for Islamic extremism in the Muslim world is at its lowest point. Support for Al Qaeda has slipped most dramatically in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Jordan. In 2003, more than 50 percent of those surveyed in these countries agreed that bin Laden would “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” the Pew Global Attitudes Project found. By 2009 the overall level of support had dropped by half, to about 25 percent. In Pakistan, traditionally a stronghold of extremism, only nine percent of Muslims have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, down from 25 percent in 2008. Even an American failure to stabilize Afghanistan and its terror-ridden neighborhood would be unlikely to ease Al Qaeda’s crisis of legitimacy. But it would be naive to conclude that the cracks in Al Qaeda’s ideological shell mean that the movement’s end is near. Far from it. Islamist ideology may be losing broad appeal, and the recent global crop of extremists may be disunited and drifting apart. Yet in the fanatics’ own view, the ideology remains a crucial cohesive force that binds together an extraordinarily diverse extremist elite. Salafism, despite its crisis, continues to be attractive to those at the social margins. One of the ideology’s most vital functions appears to be to resolve the contradictions of jihad in the 21st century: being a pious Muslim, yet attacking women and children; upholding the authority of the Qur’an, yet prospering from crime; depending on Western welfare states, yet plotting against them; having no personal ties to any Islamic group, yet believing oneself to be part of one.   Al Qaeda’s altered design has a number of immediate consequences. The global jihad is losing what David Galula called a strong cause, and with it its political character. This change is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish jihad from organized crime on the one side and rudderless fanaticism on the other. This calls into question the notion that war is still, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of politics by other means,” and therefore whether it can be discontinued politically. Second, coerced by adversaries and enabled by the Internet, the global jihadi movement has dismantled and disrupted its own ability to act as one coherent entity. No leader is in a position to articulate the movement’s will, let alone enforce it. It is doubtful, to quote Clausewitz again, whether war can still be “an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.” And because jihad has no single center of gravity, it has no single critical vulnerability. No matter what the outcome of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and other places, a general risk of terrorist attacks will persist for the foreseeable future.   In combating terrorism, therefore, quantity matters as much as quality. But some numbers matter more than others. How many additional American and European troops are sent to Afghanistan matters less than the number of terrorist plots that don’t happen. Success will be found subtly in statistics, in data curves that slope down or level off, not in one particular action, one capitulation, or even one leader’s death. It will be marked not by military campaigns and other events but by decisions not taken and attacks not launched. Because participation in the holy war in both its local and global forms is an individual decision, these choices have to be the unit of analysis, and influencing them must be the goal of policy and strategy. As in crime prevention, measuring success—how many potential terrorists did not join an armed group or commit a terrorist act—is nearly impossible. Success against Islamic militancy may wear a veil.

China Continues Chemical Warfare On American Kids

 I know it's hard to say, NO, to our spoiled rotten kids but do they really need jewelry? I mean, at pain of death? Geebus!

When Are American going to just say NO to Chinese goods. The Chinese have proved themselves to be dangerous over and over again when it comes to manufacturing just about everything. Melamine in the baby formula (and in dog food), lead in the paint on kids toys, now they've switched to cadmium. God only knows what's in so many of our supplements (vitamins and minerals) which are largely made in China. 

Can't we just be content to let our own food processing industry poison us? At least other Americans will have jobs, until they succumb to death by processed food stuffs, Big Pharma products and a host of corporate polluters.

Toxic metal in kids' jewelry from China

By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press Writer Justin Pritchard, Associated Press Writer 

LOS ANGELES – Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains or franchises, tested at 89 percent, 86 percent and 84 percent by weight. The testing also showed that some items easily shed the heavy metal, raising additional concerns about the levels of exposure to children.

A spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children's products, said Sunday that the agency "is opening an investigation" and "will take action as quickly as possible to protect the safety of children."

Cadmium is a known carcinogen. Like lead, it can hinder brain development in the very young, according to recent research.

Children don't have to swallow an item to be exposed — they can get persistent, low-level doses by regularly sucking or biting jewelry with a high cadmium content.

To gauge cadmium's prevalence in children's jewelry, the AP organized lab testing of 103 items bought in New York, Ohio, Texas and California. All but one were purchased in November or December.

The results: 12 percent of the pieces of jewelry contained at least 10 percent cadmium.

Some of the most troubling test results were for bracelet charms sold at Walmart, at the jewelry chain Claire's and at a dollar store. High amounts of cadmium also were detected in "The Princess and The Frog" movie-themed pendants.

"There's nothing positive that you can say about this metal. It's a poison," said Bruce A. Fowler, a cadmium specialist and toxicologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the CDC's priority list of 275 most hazardous substances in the environment, cadmium ranks No. 7.

Jewelry industry veterans in China say cadmium has been used in domestic products there for years. Zinc, the metal most cited as a replacement for lead in imported jewelry being sold in the United States, is a much safer and nontoxic alternative. But the jewelry tests conducted for AP, along with test findings showing a growing presence of cadmium in other children's products, demonstrate that the safety threat from cadmium is being exported.

A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these nuggets of cadmium from U.S. store shelves. If the products were painted toys, they would face a recall. If they were industrial garbage, they could qualify as hazardous waste. But since there are no cadmium restrictions on jewelry, such items are sold legally.

The CPSC has cracked down on the dangers posed by lead and products known to have killed children, such as cribs, it has never recalled an item for cadmium — even though it has received scattered complaints based on private test results for at least the past two years.

There is no definitive explanation for why children's jewelry manufacturers, virtually all from China in the items tested, are turning to cadmium. But a reasonable double whammy looms: With lead heavily regulated under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, factories scrambled for substitutes, just as cadmium prices plummeted.

That law set a new, stringent standard for lead in children's products: Only the very smallest amount is permissible — no more than 0.03 percent of the total content. The statute has led manufacturers to drastically reduce lead in toys and jewelry.

The law also contained the first explicit regulation of cadmium, though the standards are significantly less strict than lead and apply only to painted toys, not jewelry.

To determine how much cadmium a child could be exposed to, items are bathed in a solution that mimics stomach acid to see how much of the toxin would leach out after being swallowed.

The jewelry testing for AP was conducted by chemistry professor Jeff Weidenhamer of Ashland University in Ohio, who over the past few years has provided the CPSC with results showing high lead content in products that were later recalled. His lab work for AP assessed how much cadmium was in each item. Overall, 12 of the 103 items each contained at least 10 percent cadmium. Two others contained lower amounts, while the other 89 were clean.

Ten of the items with the highest cadmium content were then run through the stomach acid test to see how much would escape. Although that test is used only in regulation of toys, AP used it to see what hazard an item could pose because unlike the regulations, a child's body doesn't distinguish between cadmium leached from jewelry and cadmium leached from a toy.

"Clearly it seems like for a metal as toxic as cadmium, somebody ought to be watching out to make sure there aren't high levels in items that could end up in the hands of kids," said Weidenhamer.

The CPSC reacted swiftly to the AP story. Agency spokesman Scott Wolfson said: "CPSC will open an investigation into the products tested by Professor Weindenhamer, who we have worked closely with before." He said CPSC would study Weidenhamer's results, attempt to buy the contaminated products content and "take appropriate action as quickly as possible."

Weidenhamer's test results include:

• Three flip flop bracelet charms sold at Walmart contained between 84 and 86 percent cadmium. The charms fared the worst of any item on the stomach acid test; one shed more cadmium in 24 hours than what World Health Organization guidelines deem a safe exposure over 60 weeks for a 33-pound child.

The bracelet was purchased in August 2008. The company that imported them, Florida-based Sulyn Industries, stopped selling the item to Wal-Mart Corp. in November 2008, the firm's president said. Wal-Mart would not comment on whether the charms are still on store shelves, or how many have been sold.
Sulyn's president, Harry Dickens, said the charms were subjected to testing standards imposed by both Wal-Mart and federal regulation — but were not tested for cadmium.

In separate written statements, Dickens and Wal-Mart said they consider safety a very high priority. "We consistently seek to sell only those products that meet safety and regulatory standards," Wal-Mart said. "Currently there is no required cadmium standard for children's jewelry."

As was the case with every importer or retailer that responded to AP's request for comment on the tests, neither Sulyn nor Wal-Mart would address whether the results concerned them or if the products should be recalled.

• Four charms from two "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" bracelets sold at a Dollar N More store in Rochester, N.Y., were measured at between 82 and 91 percent cadmium. The charms also fared poorly on the stomach acid test. Two other charms from the same bracelets were subjected to a leaching test which recreates how much cadmium would be released in a landfill and ultimately contaminate groundwater. Based on those results, if the charms were waste from manufacturing, they would have had to be specially handled and disposed of under U.S. environmental law. The company that imported the Rudolph charms, Buy-Rite Designs, Inc. of Freehold, N.J., has gone out of business.

• Two charms on a "Best Friends" bracelet bought at Claire's, a jewelry chain with nearly 3,000 stores in North America and Europe, consisted of 89 and 91 percent cadmium. The charms also leached alarming amounts in the simulated stomach test. Informed of the results, Claire's issued a statement pointing out that children's jewelry is not required to pass a cadmium leaching test.

"Claire's has its products tested by independent accredited third-party laboratories approved by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in compliance with the commission's standards, and has passing test results for the bracelet using these standards," the statement said. Those standards scrutinize lead content, not cadmium.

• Pendants from four "The Princess and The Frog" necklaces bought at Walmart ranged between 25 and 35 percent cadmium, though none failed the stomach acid test nor the landfill leaching test. The Walt Disney Co., which produced the popular animated movie, said in a statement that test results provided by the manufacturer, Rhode Island-based FAF Inc., showed the item complied with all applicable safety standards.

An official at FAF's headquarters did not respond to multiple requests for comment when informed of Weidenhamer's results; a woman at the company's office in southern China who would not give her name said FAF products "might naturally contain some very small amounts of cadmium. We measure it in parts per million because the content is so small, for instance one part per million." However, the tests conducted for AP showed the pendants contained between 246,000 and 346,000 parts per million of cadmium.

"It comes down to the following: Cadmium causes cancer. How much cadmium do you want your child eating?" said Michael R. Harbut, a doctor who has treated adult victims of cadmium poisoning and is director of the environmental cancer program at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit. "In my view, the answer should be none."

Xu Hongli, a cadmium specialist with the Beijing office of Asian Metal Ltd., a market research and consultancy firm, said test results showing high cadmium levels in some Chinese-made metal jewelry did not surprise her. Using cadmium alloys has been "a relatively common practice" among manufacturers in the eastern cities of Yiwu and Qingdao and the southern province of Sichuan, Xu said.

"Some of their products contain 90 percent cadmium or higher," she acknowledged. "Usually, though, they are more careful with export products."

She said she thought that manufacturers were becoming aware of cadmium's dangers, and are using it less, "But it will still take a while for them to completely shift away from using it."

The CPSC has received dozens of incident reports of cadmium in products over the past few years, said Gib Mullan, the agency's director of compliance and field operations. Though the CPSC has authority to go after a product deemed a public danger under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act — the law used in lead-related recalls several years ago — there have been no enforcement actions.

"We are a small agency so we can't do everything we think would be a good idea. We have to try to pick our spots," Mullan said. At most, the agency can investigate 10 percent of the tens of thousands of reports filed by the public each year, he said.

With the help of an outside firm, the CPSC has started a scientific literature review of cadmium and other heavy metals, including how the substances fare in leaching tests, according to spokesman Wolfson. "If there has a been a shift in manufacturing to the use of cadmium, CPSC will take appropriate action."

Meanwhile, the CPSC's Mullan cites "a trend upward" in cadmium reports the agency has received — and private-sector testing AP reviewed shows cadmium is showing up more frequently.

Two outfits that analyze more than a thousand children's products each year checked their data at AP's request. Both said their findings of cadmium above 300 parts per million in an item — the current federal limit for lead — increased from about 0.5 percent of tests in 2007 to about 2.2 percent of tests in 2009. Those tests were conducted using a technology called XRF, a handheld gun that bounces X-rays off an item to estimate how much lead, cadmium or other elements it contains. While the results are not as exact as lab testing, the CPSC regularly uses XRF in its product screening.

Much of the increase found by the Michigan-based HealthyStuff.org came in toys with polyvinyl chloride plastic, according to Jeff Gearhart, the group's research director. Both lead and cadmium can be used to fortify PVC against the sun's rays. Data collected by a Washington-based company called Essco Safety Check led its president, Seth Goldberg, to suspect that substitution of cadmium for lead partly explains the increase he's seen.

Rick Locker, general counsel for the Toy Industry Association of America, and Sheila A. Millar, a lawyer representing the Fashion Jewelry Trade Association, said their industries make products that are safe and insisted cadmium is not widely used.

Millar said jewelry makers often opt for zinc these days. "While FJTA can only speak to the experience of its members," Millar wrote in an e-mail, "widespread substitution of cadmium is not something they see."
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The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org
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Associated Press writers Alexa Olesen in Beijing and Shaya Tayefe Mohajer in Los Angeles, and Associated Press researchers Xi Yue in Beijing and Julie Reed in Charlotte, N.C., contributed to this report.