Ideas and Revolution

Happy Independence Day America, on this 4th of July! I just have a couple thoughts to air before I go to my girlfriend’s family reunion where we will feast on food and engage in various friendly (ha!) sporting competitions. It’s my understanding also that her brother has enough fireworks to overthrow a small Latin American country (OK, think peace now) so it should be a fun time.

-Republicans are more patriotic

Since the Reagan administration the far right wing of the Republican party has tried to monopolize God and patriotism. I say it is high time the people realize the real patriots are progressives who want to move America forward again and improve our way of life. I think the people are starting to realize the status quo is not a option anymore now.

-Stop with the hate America crap

The “hate America” label seems to be a new invention of idiotic right wingers. When anyone dares criticize any of the wrong headed policies or war crimes of the Bush administration or has a different point of view, they will since have no counter argument shout back you “hate America”. Let’s save the “hate America” label for the “real” terrorists.

-Fireworks

It is a American tradition on the 4th of July to blow ones self or someone else up but it’s time to end this practice on the foreign policy front. Americans need to let the powers to be know that the bombing (by us or Israel) of Iran is not a viable option or in our best interest. We can’t fall asleep while waiting for the election.

-Let’s take the word “independence” to heart

This time next year if we have the right President in office we should have a plan to start withdrawing our troops from Iraq. We need to let Iraq follow their own path for independence now.

I can’t think of better day then the birth of our nation to officially mention on this blog I will be giving my vote to Barack Obama for President. Who better to usher into the White House but a man who is the most like all Americans? I can’t think of anyone who has run for the highest office in our history that is not only racially mixed but also comes from a diverse cultural background. I think all Americans can see a little of themselves in Obama.  While Mr. Obama is not a perfect man (still a mere politician), I trust him the most to fix our economy, work on health care access for all, to uphold our civil rights, and have a plan to bring our troops home. I believe he will try to address our problems with us together instead of using rhetoric to divide us like the last administration. My fellow Americans, please think clearly and not be misled so you can do the right thing and make the next election day a historic one…

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The May 12, 2008 Issue of Newsweek featured a adaption of Fareed Zakaria’s upcoming book “The Post-American World”. I would encourage everyone to read this excellent piece since few can match Mr. Zakaria’s keen insight into world affairs that affect us all. I had previously posted another of his articles - Iran and the coming of World War III… Huh?

It’s true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead. Americans are glum at the moment. No, I mean really glum. In April, a new poll revealed that 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the “wrong track.” In the 25 years that pollsters have asked this question, last month’s response was by far the most negative. Other polls, asking similar questions, found levels of gloom that were even more alarming, often at 30- and 40-year highs. There are reasons to be pessimistic—a financial panic and looming recession, a seemingly endless war in Iraq, and the ongoing threat of terrorism. But the facts on the ground—unemployment numbers, foreclosure rates, deaths from terror attacks—are simply not dire enough to explain the present atmosphere of malaise.

American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. “Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus,” wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.

Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, “they” have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

I. The End of Pax Americana
During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.

People would often ask me about … Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India’s newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world.

“Click here” to continue to read the rest of the article…

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Many of you know that the Shadow Democracy blog (link still works but not for much longer) which I was involved in as the webmaster and as a infrequent contributor come to an end a couple of months ago. This happened because my good friend Matthew Podoba, the blog owner needed to take a break because of family issues. The good news is Matt will be starting a new blog and there will be announcement in regards to this very soon!

I decided to import my key posts from Shadow Democracy into this blog to archive and for your reading and comment pleasure…

Huge Protests Tonight At Berkeley City Council Meeting Over Military Recruiting…

Iran and the coming of World War III… Huh?

Taser this: Fuck Bush - Yeah I just said that…

Get government out of the marriage business!

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This post originally appeared in the Shadow Democracy blog which is a old project I was part of but no longer exists.

Reprinted from Newsweek Written by Fareed Zakaria

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass murderers.

If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollar.

We’re on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about. The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30 years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country’s vibrant civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in 2003.

The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush’s representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that “the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make the final concessions that we asked for.” Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, “looked down and rustled his papers.” No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They’re mad.

Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, “is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world” (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

© Newsweek, Inc.

I had to post this article since felt there has been a lack of common sense and reporting of facts from the media in regards to Iran. Fareed Zakaria you are breath of fresh air on the Iranian situation and I am hoping more people will read this article. My questions are… Are the American people gullible enough to believe another set of lies from the Bush administration as we beat the war drum once again? Will the mainstream media again be a willing accomplice for another possible Bush manufactured war? Let’s hope we have different outcome with Iran then what happened in Iraq.

So the Brits are realizing Iraq is losing proposition and are cutting out. Blair has said that the move is in tune with Bush’s new policy but seems hard to believe when we are looking to increase our troops. More telling is when he said they were “informed by Baker-Hamilton” referring to the report commissioned by our own administration. Now only if G.W. would have listened to that report. General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff said it best, Britain should “get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems. We are in a Muslim country, and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear”. No kidding..

What I am really worried about is this may mean that Bush really is looking to start war with Iran. It is well known that Blair knew about Bush’s plan for war in Iraq well before the American public was informed. I am referring to the Downing Street Memo. Maybe at the point Blair now realizes Bush is madman and jumping ship. Can Bush really be so stupid to get involved with Iran and will Congress stand up to him this time? We can only hope will not see repeat of Iraq.