US Presidential Elections

Transcript added. In this highly informed speech, for those who want to know, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior whistleblows on US corporate Deep State as, sadly, he resigns from presidential campaign. BTW, Australia takes orders from the same rotten US Deep State. We are no more a democracy than America. Our governments are in an undeclared war with us.

 

In midst of an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said that if elected president she would drop all charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“What would you do about Julian Assange? What would you do about Edward Snowden?” Rogan asked in the latter part of the episode.

“As far as dropping the charges?” Gabbard asked.

“If you’re president of the world right now, what do you do?”

“Yeah, dropping the charges,” Gabbard replied.

Rogan noted that Sweden’s preliminary investigation of rape allegations has just been re-opened, saying the US government can’t stop that, and Gabbard said as president she’d drop the US charges leveled against Assange by the Trump administration.

(Article by Caitlin Johnson, republished with thanks from https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/14/gabbard-says-shed-drop-all-charges-against-assange-and-snowden/.)

“Yeah,” Gabbard said when asked to clarify if she was also saying that she’d give Edward Snowden a presidential pardon, adding, “And I think we’ve got to address why he did things the way that he did them. And you hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties. Period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that’s why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences.”

This came at the end of a lengthy discussion about WikiLeaks and the dangerous legal precedent that the Trump administration is setting for press freedoms by prosecuting Assange, as well as the revelations about NSA surveillance and what can be done to roll back those unchecked surveillance powers.

“What happened with [Assange’s] arrest and all the stuff that just went down I think poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech,” Gabbard said. “We look at what happened under the previous administration, under Obama. You know, they were trying to find ways to go after Assange and WikiLeaks, but ultimately they chose not to seek to extradite him or charge him, because they recognized what a slippery slope that begins when you have a government in a position to levy criminal charges and consequences against someone who’s publishing information or saying things that the government doesn’t want you to say, and sharing information the government doesn’t want you to share. And so the fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore that fact, to ignore how important it is that we uphold our freedoms, freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and go after him, it has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishers. And you can look to those in traditional media and also those in new media, and also every one of us as Americans. It was a kind of a warning call, saying Look what happened to this guy. It could happen to you. It could happen to any one of us.”

Gabbard discussed Mike Pompeo’s arbitrary designation of WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service, the fact that James Clapper lied to Congress about NSA surveillance as Director of National Intelligence yet suffered no consequences and remains a respected TV pundit, and the opaque and unaccountable nature of FISA warrants.

Some other noteworthy parts of Gabbard’s JRE appearance for people who don’t have time to watch the whole thing, with hyperlinks to the times in the video:

• Rogan gets Gabbard talking in depth about what Bashar al-Assad was actually like when she met him and what he said to her, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone bother to do before.
• The two discuss Eisenhower’s famous speech warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, and actually pause their dialogue to watch a good portion of it. Gabbard points out that in the original draft of the speech, Eisenhower had intended to call it the “congressional-military-industrial complex”.
• Good discussion on internet censorship and the dangers of allowing monopolistic Silicon Valley corporations to control public speech, then later discussing the possibility of breaking up these corporations or treating them as public utilities.
• Rogan asks Gabbard what she thinks happens to US presidents that causes them to fail to enact their campaign promises and capitulate to the will of the warmongering establishment, and what as president she’ll do to avoid the same fate. All presidential candidates should have to answer this question.
• Rogan asks Gabbard how she’ll stand against the billionaires for the American people without getting assassinated. All presidential candidates should have to answer this question as well.

I honestly think the entire American political system would be better off if the phoney debate stage format were completely abandoned and presidential candidates just talked one-on-one with Joe Rogan for two and a half hours instead. Cut through all the vapid posturing and the fake questions about nonsense nobody cares about and get them to go deep with a normal human being who smokes pot and curses and does sports commentary for cage fighting. Rogan asked Gabbard a bunch of questions that real people are interested in, in a format where she was encouraged to relax out of her standard politician’s posture and discuss significant ideas sincerely and spontaneously. It was a good discussion with an interesting political figure and I’m glad it’s already racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

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"If Americans are ever going to survive the Golden Age of Endless War (and the rest of the world is going to survive it too), then we need to elect a president in 2016 who will not bomb, kill, torture, blow up, blast, maim, blitzkrieg, drone-strike or otherwise do bad things to other human beings (or to us either). America needs a new foreign policy -- one that is not just a high-tech version of foreign policies currently deployed by ISIS and the Taliban."

After I had finished writing an ode to Bernie Sanders as my candidate of choice for President in 2016 (based on his excellent domestic policy), it was suddenly drawn to my attention that while Senator Sanders has a domestic policy to die for, he also has a foreign policy to die for too -- literally. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/04/war-babies-why-we-gotta-vote-for-bernie.html

Apparently our Bernie has a tenancy to vote for supporting War Street a lot -- even though he refuses to kiss Wall Street's bottom. Not good.

We've already gotten suckered into voting for a War President when we elected Barack Obama. And Hillary Clinton talks a good talk about her proposed domestic policy -- but she too has that "War President" gleam in her eyes.

And then my friend Rita said, "Sanders always votes for war and military spending. Look it up." Oh crap. Not Bernie too. Hell, even Elizabeth Warren doesn't seem to be very much against Endless War these days.

"Very few Presidential candidates take principled positions against Israeli neo-colonialists," someone else told me too. "And, unfortunately, while Bernie is great on so many other fronts, he does stand with the Israeli neo-colonialists, even during that horrific blitzkrieg on Gaza."
http://www.mediaite.com/online/excuse-me-shut-up-bernie-sanders-defends-israel-from-town-hall-hecklers/

If Americans are ever going to survive the Golden Age of Endless War (and the rest of the world is going to survive it too), then we need to elect a president in 2016 who will not bomb, kill, torture, blow up, blast, maim, blitzkrieg, drone-strike or otherwise do bad things to other human beings (or to us either).

America needs a new foreign policy -- one that is not just a high-tech version of foreign policies currently deployed by ISIS and the Taliban.

And so I'm going to have to give up entirely on the RepubliDems and "Vote Green in Twenty-Sixteen".

And in the meantime, I sorely do apologize to all the people of the world (and also to their corpses and ghosts) for all of the brutal, unconscionable and horrible things that our American political representatives (legally-elected or not) have done to the rest of the world in my name.

Republished from Jane Stillwater http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/05/my-apologia-for-american-2016.html

The writing clearly is on the wall. Nothing stands between us and a North American continent of 500 million people by the year 2050. Nothing except perhaps peak oil, peak soil, water shortages and a basic ecological meltdown. What brokers might euphemistically term as "buying opportunities" of which I'm sure even another K2 event would qualify. But short of those trifling road bumps to "progress", nothing else seems to offer much hope in stopping this juggernaut of mindless population growth. The corporate machine demands cheap labor and the rhetoric of cultural diversity offers the perfect smokescreen for its cold and mercenary motives.

Key minority groups and their hired guns have unwittingly become collaborators in this agenda to squeeze working and middle class Americans out of decent paying jobs and weigh down the environment of America beyond its carrying capacity. They rallied behind a candidate who received, by the end of August, some $389 million in donations from Wall Street corporations, much more than his opponent John McCain received, leader of the GOP, reputedly the party of plutocrats₁. A candidate who, while he exhibited so many obvious virtues not in McCain's possession, nevertheless did not demonstrate any ecological literacy concerning the country's tolerance of growth or the fact that five million American workers lost their jobs to out-sourcing and the kind of immigration policies that he supports.

The emerging power of the multicultural electoral coalition to turn the tide of American politics can best appreciated by looking at Hispanic voters. 10 million Latinos voted in the November 2008 Presidential election. 67% (6.7 million) voted for Obama. 40% of them, or 4 million Latino voters, were immigrants.

78% of immigrant Latin voters voted for Barrack Obama, a porous-borders candidate. That translates to 3.12 million votes.

3.12 million votes is but 2% of the votes cast in the 2008 election. Not much. But not chicken feed either. It certainly wouldn't have been in 2000. And the disposition of votes is what is critical. The Latino vote grew by 32% in just four years to 9% of the electorate, but that 9% is not spread like a pancake across America. It is concentrated in such a way as to have played a pivotal role in denying McCain 6 states.

If that isn't enough, Republicans have to look over their shoulders at the growing electoral force of Asian Americans, twice as many whom preferred the Democrats in 2008 in percentage terms as they did in 1992.

Is the ethnic immigrant voter like the aggressive door-to-door salesman? Once he gets his foot in the immigration door, that door can never be closed? What is the tipping point of political sycophancy? Once a solid 10%, 15% or perhaps 20% of ethnic voters demonstrate that they will vote en bloc as their orchestrators command, the other 80% of the electorate which is fragmented around other issues then just folds? The ethnic tail need not be long. Just solid and determined, and when it wags the Euro-American dog will roll over and perform tricks for it.

Thus what we will have is not a two party system but a one party state. Two growthist "big tent" rainbow coalition parties that embrace cultural and racial diversity, bravo, but not intellectual diversity--because they don't entertain the cognitively challenging concept of population stability or steady state economics.

Do multicultural lobbies play disproportionate and decisive roles in keeping the floodgates open in other countries? Australia? The United Kingdom? In Canada it has been said that ethnic voting blocs deliver two dozen seats, and that federal policy toward Israel or India for example is unduly governed by the sensibilities of expatriates living in those constituencies. Should this be the case then, it is no wonder that the policy of mass immigration should persist for decades in the face of adverse public opinion. For it is not public opinion that matters. But the opinion that is channeled through the ballot box and concentrated in strategic areas.

As time passes, more and more of these areas will become fortified with immigrants. In the United States, some 12% of the population are foreign born (officially), and in Canada, it is 18% and rising. For some the newcomers' culture and even their pigmentation is cause for alarm. What should be worrisome is the impact their numbers will have, and that of the children and grandchildren that they will issue from them. I could live with tortillas and Spanish-only. I couldn't live without an environment.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
9 Nov 08

See also: "An immigration policy bought and paid for?" of 24 Feb 08.

Footnotes

1.↑ www.opensecrets.org All of Obama's Wall
Street donors and the amounts they gave can be found here. Quite enlightening.

It is clear to me, viewing Australia's problems with addressing "growth" from viewing the U.S.'s problems in doing so, that both governmental systems are straightjacketed into the same capitalistic premise: that growth is not something to be concerned with; that promoting unlimited growth is possible.

Here's my analysis of the present U.S. presidential campaign that shows the futility of hoping a candidate for such high office will bring any kind of significant change to pursuing growth. Money and power determine their candidacy and their politics. (Although, as usual, I will vote for the one who just might bring a small amount of change, and that is in this case Obama.

Analyzing the 2008 US Presidential Election

By Richard Pelto

Television and newspaper coverage of the election process can be like entering some kind of weird third dimension. Because coverage is essentially secretarial-like rewrites of press releases, and electoral lying is given euphemistic names like "fact-challenged," or "distortion,"the average-citizen reader can only wonder what is going on.

In addition, columns adjoining coverage of the election provide superficial facts but little analysis about an economy being rapidly flushed down a toilet because of widespread excesses of greed, next to a hard-to-justify expensive military "mistakenly" raining bombs on civilians.

Most importantly missing from the journalism 2008 election coverage is how the GOP-Demo campaigns mirror each other on issues like Afghanistan, campaign finance, the death penalty, gun control, housing, immigration, stem-cell research. Only minor, tactical differences separate the two candidates on issues like health care, Iran, Georgia, social security, and taxes. On the abortion issue there is substantive difference. And Obama is now providing welcome fresh-air change of our "globalization" policy.

But even the spin-meisters of the campaigns note similarity. Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain-Palin, made the case that Obama's response to the bail-out of corporate despair was derived from McCain. "Whether calling for a bipartisan oversight board or prohibitions on golden parachutes, Barack Obama is simply following in John McCain's footsteps while trying to respond to this financial crisis, as he followed in John McCain's footsteps when he attempted to respond to the recent crisis in Georgia," he said. "Again, Barack Obama has shown indecision and a lack of leadership at a time when the American people need certainty." The final sentence is representative of the mindless rhetoric that characterizes U.S. elections today.

To analyze what "change" these candidates portend we must begin with the coverage in Iowa which began with the press apparently and slavishly following whatever consistency existed in the two viable party’s electoral narrative. Iowa provided the introduction of Obama’s unquestioned repetition of "change," and, once the campaign was down to two candidates, his opponent, despite the similarities and mirroring noted above, attempted audaciously hijacking the word "change." The journalists tirelessly parrot the terms, print polls that attempt to determine which word struck a deeper chord in various age groups, and then pontificate on consistency of message and the polls’ statistical indicators, assuming apparently that the public was well-informed.

But no reporter seriously asks or presents just what "change" might mean either in an Obama presidency, or the more unfathomable "change" parroted by the GOP-nominee, John McCain. Both are "establishment" candidates, and thus both are beholden to the money/power that buttresses it.

It is a given that the public, today, for many easily-justifiable reasons, is very desirous of "change." and some forms of it is likely with Obama. It is particularly informative, then, to carefully note that Obama’s governmental prescription is similar to decades-long policy. Analysis makes clear one has to wonder how much "change" Obama would bring. On Iraq, he initially did not vote for the war’s authorization. That’s clearly different from Bush who made up journalistically sparse-questioned "facts" that led us into it. But as the many years of our occupation of Iraq passed Obama swung more and more toward Hillary Clinton’s position that an indeterminent number of troops and bases must remain there until some undefined advantageous time to pull them out. Thus, after scratching the surface, Obama’s position isn’t substantively different on Iraq nor with George W’s on the so-called "war on terrorism," especially given Obama has indicated he would aggressively pour those troops taken out of Iraq into Afghanistan and Georgia.

One must then assess the foreign policy philosophy of the candidate. Bush’s present focus on endless (and financially draining) "warring" with Islamic militancy appears to be little different from what Obama’s policy would be, given his appointment of Zbigniew Brzezinski as his chief foreign-policy advisor. This is the man who funneled large amounts of money to a wide range of Islamic fundmentalists like Osama Bin Laden in order to create more resistance to the Soviet Union, and is now advising about the Islamic-like danger posed to Israel by Iran. This "change" is decidedly minimal. In addition, another advisor, Sarah Sewall, who heads a human rights center at Harvard and is a former Defense official, wrote the introduction to General Petraeus’s Marine Corps/Army counterinsurgency handbook, the handbook that is now being used worldwide by US troops in various killing operations. Is she a likely means to "change?" Do these "advisors" help define this great "change" that Obama will bring about that the candidate and press herald?

Bush’s globalization has created much unrest and dissatisfaction because it essentially involves exporting industry to cheap labor and importing as much cheap labor as possible. So who does Obama choose to provide advice on how to change policy toward it? It’s Anthony Lake, who pledged to support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the Haiti economy after overthrowing Aristide, which resulted in an increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians and set the stage for the current ongoing political and ecological disaster in Haiti. Lake is a person with a long record of support for globalization. And Obama and McCain continue the globalization push to maximize illegal immigration in order to gain abundant cheap labor while pursuing an assumed unlimited growth. There’s no "leadership" or "change" involved in the Bush/McCain/Obama positions on a "comprehensive immigration reform" amnesty, except a few appearance gestures to "strengthen" the border. Neither shows any understanding at all of the population-growth consequences of additional millions of people impact on resource depletion and already dangerous ecological degradation.

Many are dissatisfied with the costs and impacts of Bush’s unconditional support of Israel. So what kind of "change" would Obama’s advisor, Dennis Ross, bring to this policy, given he pushed the principle that the legal rights of the Palestinians, the rights recognized under international law, must be subordinated to the needs of the Israeli government to expand into doing whatever they want in the occupied territories. And Ross was one of the people who, interestingly, led the political assault on former Democratic President Jimmy Carter after he wrote a recent book critical of Israel. Would he help in being an agent of "change?"

It is beyond doubt that Obama will exacerbate our present policy of unsustainably importing large numbers of illegal-immigrant cheap labor. He will undoubtedly create an even more porous border policy through his support of a variety of political measures facilitating the importation of millions of illegal immigrants. These measures incentivize immigrants' arrival by rewarding their coming here, either through amnestying the illegality of entry or providing such things as free or subsidized schooling, welfare, housing and medical care. And both candidates promulgate their immigration "changes" before activist Hispanic audiences calling for even more porous borders. Thus they make a mockery of professed concern for population-growth exacerbated problems involving the environment and growth management.

The issues not covered: too rapid population growth, rapidly receding availability of strategic resources, and ever-expanding ecological degradation, cry out for emergency "change." This is made clear by the disconnect that exists between peak oil concerns and the presidential race. As prices at the pump rise, each candidate is now talking about their so-called "solutions" to the problem. None of which seriously address population growth and its exacerbating impacts on consumption. Despite clear new warning signs from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Nigeria that peak oil is apparent, McCain made clear he would remain unwaveringly oblivious to the true causes of rising fuel prices, preferring initially to dwell on irrelevant—actually, counterproductive—measures like suspending the federal gas tax during the summer months or taxing Big Oil. This is akin to thinking one is curing melanoma simply by putting a band-aid on it.

Here’s, first, a quick summary of the two candidates positions on energy, and then a more extensive attempt to analyze their positions and the reasons for them.

Obama incorporates improving national energy efficiency as a central plank of energy policy, in housing and the economy overall. McCain is silent on the topic, utterly silent....Both support clean coal. Both support cap and trade. McCain supports nuclear and more drilling, Obama is silent on both....While both candidates have policies on CO2 abatement, neither even bothers to mention the more immediate, critical issues of sulfur, nitrates, and particulates in our air that cause real, measurable damage to people, plants and all other animal groups. ...Both call for more hybrid cars and electric cars, but neither provides the meaningful financing to encourage the shift to cars that are considerably more expensive than the present auto fleet.

"John McCain is energy illiterate. He's just witless about this stuff," Matt Simmons, prominent oil-industry investment banker and lifelong Republican recently stated at a conference meeting involving a dozen oil and gas men in Lafayette, La. He surprisingly added, "I'm supporting Obama." He then said, "He's just witless about this stuff. McCain says things like, 'Oh, we're going to wean ourselves off foreign oil in four years and build 45 nuclear plants by 2030.' He doesn't have a clue. Here's a man who for at least the past 15 years has strenuously, I mean strenuously, opposed offshore drilling. And now it's 'drill, drill, drill.' And he doesn't have any idea that we don't have any drilling rigs. Or that we don't have any idea of exactly where to drill."

Examining the "oil dependency" positions of the candidates' energy advisers gives us little hope our newly-elected government will meet the peak-oil challenges head-on in 2009. They are Jason Grumet for Obama and James Woolsey for McCain. Woolsey’s public comments do indicate he has at least some understanding of the peak-oil issue. But both Grumet and Woolsey say in the campaign that our "oil dependence" is a problem, and both overstate that plug-ins, flex-fuel vehicles, alternative/renewable fuels can remedy the situation. Obama's adviser serves as executive director of Washington's influential National Commission on Energy Policy (NCEP). The commission's December, 2004 report, "Ending the Energy Stalemate," tells us a lot about what the candidates' advisers are thinking about U.S. oil security. McCain's adviser James Woolsey also serves as one of the NCEP commissioners.

The principal NCEP report co-chair was John Holdren. Dr. Holdren's position on peak oil is therefore of considerable interest in so far as it appears to have influenced the views of the presidential candidates' energy advisers. The question that needs understanding is when will global production of conventional petroleum reach a peak and begin to decline, as U.S. domestic production did around 1970, and as most graphs now show has occurred since 2005. Holdren thinks peak oil is "not very important" because we need to cut our oil dependence in any case because of 1) global warming and 2) supply-side security risks.

Grumet and Woolsey’s position is exactly the same—peak oil concerns are overridden by the environmental (climate) problem and geopolitical risks to the oil supply.

Reaching this peak globally will create what is now occurring: large increases in the price of oil, plus a costly and demanding scramble for alternatives to fill the widening gap created by too-rapid population growth (especially in the U.S.) between the demand for liquid fuel and the supply of conventional petroleum.

The preponderance of evidence says that the peak of conventional oil production is occurring now whereas oil-supply optimists say it probably won’t happen until after 2030, perhaps not until after 2050. Similar arguments go on about conventional supplies of natural gas, the total recoverable resources of which are thought to be not greatly different, in terms of energy content, from those of crude petroleum.

It is clear that the U.S.’s present heavy oil dependence carries substantial economic and political risks in a world where high proportions of the reserves and remaining recoverable resources lie in regions that are unstable and/or controlled by authoritarian governments that have sometimes been inclined to wield oil supply as a weapon. It’s also clear that world oil use is a huge producer of conventional air pollutants, as well as being about equal to coal burning as a contributor to the global buildup of the heat-trapping gas CO2. Given these liabilities, it makes sense to be looking urgently for ways to reduce oil dependence no matter when we think peak oil might occur under business as usual.

A "climate first, peak oil not" view dominates mainstream thinking in Washington, but neither Dr. Holdren, or the presidential advisers say anything appreciative of the importance of the timing of the peak.

In a Mary O’Driscoll interview, Grumet reacted to a question about peak-oil impact, "We were intent, Mary, on not having kind of a Robert Ludlow dirty bomb, you know, airplanes into cooling towers. I mean what we looked at was a number of very, unfortunate, but very realistic events. Civil unrest in Nigeria; unfortunately life is imitating art. I mean we're seeing that now reported in newspapers, coupled with some low-tech terrorism. We looked at al Qaeda hijacking a tanker and crashing it into the Port of Valdez, and at a major explosion at a natural gas facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have taken natural gas off the market requiring them to use crude oil to replace their own domestic energy. And then some terrorism that just caused a real anxiety among the oil producers in Saudi Arabia. You put all that together, you take 3-and-a-half million barrels off the market and let me read to you from my cheat sheet of doom; gasoline prices at $5.74 a gallon, global oil price at $161 a barrel, a recession, two consecutive quarters of a drop in GDP, a drop in consumer confidence by 30 percent, inflation 12.6 percent, a 28 percent decline in the S and P 500, as well as I think some very realistic foreign policy concerns... " Thus rather than focus on peak-oil likelihood and impact, he connects oil dependency with the so-called war on terrorism.

Later Grumet was asked this question by Mary O'Driscoll: Well then, what do we do in the short term?

Jason Grumet: We eat it. I mean this is the reality that I think we were hoping to reveal. You know when the national commission put out its report last December the number one priority issue that we addressed was the need to deal with domestic oil security. I think that we have -- the SPRO is a significant buffer. It's very good news that our economy uses about half as much oil to produce the same GDP now as we did before the first oil embargo. So we are in a better position in some regards than we were before, but we use 25 percent of the world's oil. We possess 3 percent of the world's reserves and we are fundamentally now in a system that is stretched so thin ... now if it wasn't civil unrest in Nigeria it could've been a labor strike in Venezuela. I mean these are very real risks and the answer is prices go up.

Mary O'Driscoll: Right.

Jason Grumet: And we probably wind up using our SUVs a little bit less and saying to ourselves, why hadn't government done something to protect us from this?

Mary O'Driscoll: But I mean you're talking about a recession kind of situation, so I mean will we even be able to drive our SUVs at that time? I mean it's a little unnerving I must say.

Jason Grumet: I did see, I saw the Mad Max movie over the weekend and it kind of prepared me for the realities of $160 a barrel oil.

Mary O'Driscoll: Oh boy!

Jason Grumet: These are career-ending prices for many people in this town [Washington] and I think that, our hope is that collectively the Congress and the administration will start to see that not only do we have to work on these issues as matters of national energy policy, that these are issues of national security, economic strength and our foreign policy prerogative.

It is apparent that Grumet fears the potential effects of a sudden withdrawal of 3.5 million barrels per day (mmb/d) from the world market, and he notes that this would result in "gasoline prices at $5.74 a gallon, global oil price at $161 a barrel, a recession, two consecutive quarters of a drop in GDP, a drop in consumer confidence by 30 percent, inflation 12.6 percent, a 28 percent decline in the S and P 500."

At the end of 2004, the EIA data indicates that world oil production (crude + condensate + gas liquids) stood at 79.905 mmb/d. Grumet doesn’t note that at only 1% annual growth, which is below the historical average since 1983, the average daily oil supply for 2007 should have been 82.326 mmb/d. What was it? Supply stood at 81.190 mmb/d, a shortfall of 1.136 million barrels with respect to the modest 1% growth target. The biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, had basically flat-line production despite repeated promises of increasing production. Most of the "growth" that did occur was in gas liquids, which are not used as a transportation fuel. This has not been a sudden oil shock, but rather forms part of a gradual ongoing oil crunch that some call "peak oil."

Thus, neither Jason Grumet or James Woolsey are completely uninformed about potential oil shocks, but they appear to be very badly informed about the ever-accelerating peak oil squeeze resulting from politically-encouraged population growth mostly in the U.S. but also to a lesser degree in Europe.

The energy plan of Barack Obama generally follows the following NEPC guidelines:

• Increasing and diversifying world oil production while expanding the global network of strategic petroleum reserves.
• Significantly raising federal fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks while reforming the 30-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program to allow more flexibility and reduce compliance costs. New standards should be phased in over a five-year period beginning no later than 2010.
• Providing $3 billion over ten years in manufacturer and consumer incentives to encourage domestic production and boost sales of efficient hybrid and advanced diesel vehicles.

"Increasing and diversifying world oil production" obviously did not happen, and it's unlikely to happen. New CAFE standards were enacted in the Energy Independence and Security Act (HR. 6) signed into law in December, 2007, but are belatedly to be phased in by 2020. The NCEP report also advocated ramping up alternative fuels like ethanol to "help to diminish U.S. vulnerability to high oil prices and oil supply disruptions while reducing the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions." Unforeseen cost consequences of this policy soon became apparent, along with its dimunitive impact on our reliance on oil.

Obama’s plan now is to cut oil imports by setting tough new fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and providing retooling assistance to the automakers to help them meet these standards. Also by increasing biofuels production and improving the efficiency of industrial oil use. All these measures would have been undoubtedly helpful 10 years or more ago, but the continuing systemic-growth push mandates (that both Obama and McCain support, or at least seem oblivious of its consequences) means that the industrial cliff is now higher and the gravity pull of peak-oil consequences is much greater.

Obama’s energy-solution steps provide too little help coming too late, an observation which becomes more and more obvious when we consider that a global food crisis is happening at the same time a strategic commodity-availability scarcity is now apparent, and the price of oil recently soared above $140/barrel. Instead of addressing the consequences of peak oil, the candidates are intent on pursuing a politically-correct policy of mitigating anthropogenic climate change so their primary energy initiative is a carbon emissions cap and trade system. This scenario makes problems arising from our oil dependency take a backseat—because they are not perceived as urgent. This approach to our "oil dependency" only makes sense from a climate perspective, which requires us to change our energy consumption and infrastructure over several decades.

The soaring oil price and its underlying causes are the invisible elephant in the room in the presidential race. While many of the candidates' proposals can be chalked up to pandering in an election year, there is no evidence that the candidates get this "peak oil" problem. As the first DOE secretary James Schlesinger said, "We have only two modes—complacency and panic." Complacency rules, and panic awaits and one doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to foresee that anxious day when our leader-to-be exclaims, "Oh, no! Oil is $161/barrel! The economy is falling apart! What do we do now?" This will be similar to the George Bush/Paulson belated decision to institute a public-financed bail out of a suddenly DOA-subprime economy as a last-minute response to a potential disaster.

Of course there is always a range of opinion involved in politics. Even within a political party. Here’s the Democratic Left’s take on Obama: He opposed Rep. John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill , sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill—the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)—that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama’s second-biggest single bloc of donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. And history may note that Obama’s support for the bailout was his most egregious act of all.

Maybe the most important point on which to judge the candidates is how they will steer our relationship with China. Barack Obama referred to China's recent space walk as a sign that it was catching up while America floundered. John McCain, attacking waste in Washington, said: "We owe China $500 billion." Mr Obama went one better, saying (more accurately) China "now holds $1,000 billion of our national debt". Linking finance with power, he added: "There has never been a country on earth that saw its economy decline and yet maintained its military superiority." The best that can be said about those comments is that they show both candidates being careful about what they say.

The lesson? Change is definitely needed, but too long-delayed change may have unforeseen consequences. And the Bush Administration’s last-minute economic moves to institute socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else makes clear even long-repeated dogma can get thrown out the window, given this government bailout was contrary to the republican party’s long-enduring public statements of non-governmental "interference" in the economy, which may or may not be an indictor of just how desperate the decision-making process was in this process.

Serious exigencies are in the offing. Thus journalists have a serious responsibility to report and present information that will allow voters to cast an informed vote. In order for that to occur better journalism and more analysis by the electorate must occur if we are not to be saddled with a similar eight years of Bush miserable leadership most polls show we now do desperately hope to "change." It is clear that McCain is more of a "Bush Junior" on military and neo-con influenced foreign policy abroad then Obama is, but it is clear the latter is a close second. And both candidates would continue present porous, population-growth immigration policy which exacerbates all our problems, while not being frank or realistic about energy policy. It is clear the momentum toward unsustainability consequences will continue regardless of which candidate wins. And unquestioning reporting probably helped cause Obama and McCain, who are in too many ways more of a Bush "shadow" than a Bush alternative, to be the present, active, viable candidates. That makes clear the system determines the political process, and it is probably important to understand "you can’t buck the system."

This is making one thing crystal clear: It is clearly time to assemble the best possible parachute.

See also: An immigration policy bought and paid for? of 24 Feb 08 by Tim Murray, Obama's Chicago Boys of 12  Jun 08 by Naomi Klein.

After the documented loss of 4,152 US servicemen and 90,000 Iraqi civillians killed in the Iraq War and a cost to the US budget, so far, of US$574 billion, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain reveals that he knows how "to get Osama bin Laden". So, why didn't Republican Senator John McCain pass on that knowledge to the Republican Bush administration earlier?

Seven years too late !!!

Senator McCain proclaims, "President Clinton had opportunities to get Osama bin Laden. President Bush had opportunities to get Osama bin Laden. I know how to do it and I'll do it." [3 September]

If he knows how to do it, if bin Laden is truly high-priority, Number-One-Wanted, then why doesn't McCain focus on pursuing bin Laden right now? McCain asserts that he has the credibility and influence to make this happen, even if he cannot give the orders.

I mean, if McCain is the patriot he claims to be, if he loves American as he professes, if he "know[s] how the world works [and] how the military works" [paraphrasing McCain], then McCain abdicates his patriotic responsibilities by not pursuing bin Laden, by not leveraging his knowledge of the world and military, by not persuading the decision-makers and enabling what's required to accomplish this seven-year-old mission.

In fact, McCain prostitutes his knowledge, experience, and self-proclaimed patriotism for millions of dollars and the expectation of millions of votes, instead of lobbying, cajoling, marshalling the information and resources to enable Bush to "get" bin Laden.

Words are cheap; they make great sound-bytes. And McCain's words are seven years too late!

Judy Bamberger,
O'Connor ACT

See also: McCain says knows how to capture bin Laden (Reuters India, 4 Sep 08)

Judy Bamberger		+61-2-6247-6220 (work and fax)
Process Solutions		+61-2-6247-4746 (home)
		bamberg [AT] eaglet rain com

Tim Murray, director of Immigration Watch Canada, follows the money trail in the US Presidential primaries.
Note: all dollar figures given in following article are in US dollars.

Also published in Canada Free Press on 11 Mar 08.

Popular opposition to immigration ignored by U. S. legislators

The numbers are unequivocal. For a decade polls have consistently recorded a wide discrepancy between the attitude of ordinary Americans toward immigration and the attitude of those who govern them. And the gap has been growing. In 2002 a poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 60% of the public thought current immigration levels to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," as compared to only 14% of the country's leadership. This 46% gap compared to a 37% gap revealed by a 1998 poll. 70% felt that reducing illegal immigration should be a "very important" foreign policy goal compared to only 22% of the political elite₁.

Polling done by TM, inc. in October 2006 confirmed these results. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill (S2611) supporting a large increase in legal immigration, 68% of voters thought the number of immigrants, legal or illegal, was too high, 34 times the number who said it was too "low". 71% said that low paying jobs could easily be filled if employers paid American workers decent wages rather than import low-skill labour. And 62% agreed with a statement that Canadian viewers of CBC immigration sob stories have frequently observed, "The media coverage of illegal immigrants is mostly devoted to human interest stories like how illegals risk their lives (to get here), rather than the costs they create and the Americans, particularly low-wage American workers, who may be harmed by their being here."

The polling company Inc./Woman Trend in October of 2006 found 66% in agreement that the population increase caused by the present level of immigration would negatively impact the environment. A Zogbylcis poll of April 2006 revealed that 67% of Americans wanted less immigration to promote the assimilation of those who were already here. A poll conducted a month earlier by the same company found that 60% wanted their congressional representative to support more restrictive immigration policies.

What is interesting about sampling public opinion about immigration is that no apparent or substantial fault lines appear between ethnic groupings. Now it is understandable that African-Americans, given their socio-economic standing, feel the direct brunt of illegal Hispanic labour competition , and would therefore take a severe position on the issue. In fact, 59% of black Californian voters favour imposing stiff penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens, (Field Poll, April 2006), and 66% of them favour building a border wall along major sections of the U.S./Mexico line.

Opposition to immigration embraced by non-European communities

But it would surprise some to learn, especially those like most American liberals, who are ignorant of Caesar Chavez's long standing fight against immigration, that 76% of Hispanics said in a December 2007 poll done by Arizona State University-Southwest that illegal immigration is a serious problem. Or that 53% of Latinos would change the 14th amendment so a child born to an illegal immigrant in America could not automatically become an American unless the other parent was a citizen. Or that 56% of Latinos favour increasing the number of border patrol agents by a third. Unfortunately, as former Mexican government advisor Fredo Arras-King observed, "American Latinos who criticize mass immigration tend not to organize, as they are especially targeted by pro-immigration Latino leaders."

Causes of disparity between attitudes of US citizens and their political leadership

The question that these poll results beg is why? Why the cleavage between leaders and led? The anti-immigration sentiment of America's middle and working class is easily accounted for. According to Centre for Immigration Studies data, in the decade preceding 2003, immigration increased the supply of people without a high school education by 21% and the supply of other workers by 4%. Rudimentary economic theory suggests that the more poorly skilled workers there are, the less money they'll make---a fact confirmed by the National Research Council in their findings that about half the drop in real wages for high school drop-outs from 1980 to 1994 was due to immigration. A report by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Centre found that Americans and established immigrants suffer an 11% wage drop when they work alongside new Hispanic immigrants. Harvard Professor Dr. George Borgias has accumulated similar data and has made the shocking assertion that American workers lose an incredible $152 billion per year in wages from immigration.

Immigration provides a ready-made source of cheap labour, by growing the labour pool it weakens the bargaining power of American-born workers and reduces the clout of their unions, if they still have them₂. Medical benefits not borne by the employer are subsidized by the taxpayers who also pick up the educational costs of their children. Writer Rich Lowry made the best assessment: "No wonder corporate America loves our open borders: they serve as a kind of rolling reverse minimum wage law." And no wonder the late African-American liberal Congressman Barbara Jordan called for cutting back immigration in the 1990s. She was defending her constituency of low-income black workers, the first casualty of the corporate welfare program of high-level immigration, marketed by the left as "multicultural enrichment". Cultural diversity is the fig leaf of naked corporate exploitation.

So blue-collar attitudes to immigration are easily explained, ordinary people are simply following their class interests. And class interests can explain the open borders position taken up by America's opinion leaders and decision makers too. They are much more affluent and educated than the people they lead and attempt to influence, and feel no threat from the illegal immigrants they hire as nannies and gardeners or tip at fine restaurants. One thing is central to the understanding of the immigration divide in the United States, and that is to divest oneself of the almost universal and persistent belief that somehow the Democrats are white knights who represent the working class, the poor and the environment, while the Republicans are the incarnation of power, privilege and plutocracy. To assist you in this task you should be apprised of the following.

A TM Inc poll of 2006 disclosed that those most apt to be satisfied with the current level of immigration which is killing American working class living standards were 25-34 year old liberal college graduates and professionals who identified with the Democratic Party. The same poll found though that it was 35-44 year old conservative Republicans who favoured large-scale round-ups of illegal immigrants. That profiles the supporters of the pro and anti-immigration positions, but the current party leadership positions could best be ascertained by the fact that as of the end of January 2008, all Republican contenders rejected the legalization of "undocumented" immigrants now in the U. S., while the Democrats continue to support it.

Corporate donations flow toward pro-immigration candidates ...

The true alignment of the Democratic Party with corporate interests can be vividly illustrated by a look at campaign financing. McCain, Clinton and Obama are, to put it bluntly, Wall Street candidates. The big banks, the financial firms, corporate law firms and private equity firms pay the pipers. But, according the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) (www.opensecrets.org), the Democrats are the clear favourite. Hillary Clinton took in $106.1 million and Barack Obama $102.1 million for all of 2007. McCain received susbstantially less at $41,102,178. Hillary Clinton received $1.3 million from private equity firms, while Obama received $1 million. McCain finished a distant fourth at $ 395,000. Wall Street promotes the candidates who serve its interests and the Democrats have delivered for them since their November 2006 victory.

Democratic leaders buried a proposal to tax the massive incomes of hedge fund operators at normal tax rates, allowing billionaires to claim most of their income as capital gains taxed at a far lower rate. Clinton and Obama have also refused action on the subprime meltdown that would have threatened big financial interests. Corporate law firms gave Clinton over $11 million and Obama over $ 9 million. McCain only got just over two and a half million dollars, the most for Republican candidates. As of February 22, 2008, bagmen have raised over $138 million for Obama, over $134 million for Clinton, and over $53 million for McCain.

Most interesting is the disposition of "Silicon" money. Between 1998 and 2006 almost $83 million in political contributions in the form of individuals donations, PAC contributions, and soft money were made by 40 technology companies. Amounting on average to just $295,708 per company per year of lobbying, it was money well spent. The concession Bill Gates wanted, the H-1B Visa program that allows cheap technology workers into the country, reaped profits a hundred times that investment. But Microsoft wanted to be more certain the fix was in. Over that that seven year period they gave $5,7888,286, with half of Congress on its payroll it would seem. AT+T donated $3,504,773, Apple $3,620,823, and Vericon $4,237,884₃. Data for the 2008 campaign showed Obama at $981,459 and Clinton $954,325 as the leading recipients of "computer-internet" donations, with McCain getting a third of their take. To put all of this in perspective, Hillary Clinton, the great white hope of progressive liberalism, received only 11% of her PAC money from labour, but 56% from business. It would be difficult to imagine that the AFL-CIO could match the donation dollars put up by Wall bankers and law firms.

The most revealing fact to be gleaned from presidential campaign donation statistics is one found when donation records are subjected to sector analysis. If one studies 12 business or professional sectors of American society from Agribusiness to Construction to Health to Labour etc., there is one sector that is clearly salient---the "financial-real estate" sector. It has contributed over $73 million to various campaigns, $25 million more than any other sector.

Real estate interests (including mortgage brokers, homebuilders and property developers) gave $4.8 million to Clinton, $2.7 million to Obama and $1.9 million to McCain. The conventional interpretation of their motive is that they want access to the winner when an expected crackdown over predatory lending and a troubled housing finance system reaches the top of the legislative agenda. But there is an alternative, or at least supplementary explanation. One that has been advanced by Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman. The land tenure system that characterizes Anglo-American societies encourages speculation, and much money is to be made simply by population growth. Newman has written extensively to demonstrate that real estate developers are key players in lobbying for mass immigration. US campaign donation records seem to vindicate her hypothesis, as does the fact that a nation like France is close to achieving population stability because the real estate development industry cannot exist as an agent for growth, given that land cannot consistently be reduced to a speculative commodity largely because of the way tenure is arranged₄.

... whilst anti-immigration contenders miss out

What then became of the candidates who challenged the corporate open borders agenda? Their campaigns died from lack of funds. Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado is a case in point. Wall Street likes pro-immigration candidates for obvious reasons and so they will reward those who sing their tune. Tancredo insisted on singing an objectionable note, like a three year moratorium on immigration. So he paid the price and collected just $6 million dollars or less than 6% of what Clinton received by year's end and was forced to end his campaign. Clinton at that time was Wall Street's anointed one, someone who, in the words of Numbers USA, "consistently pressed for U. S. population growth, immigration and foreign labour importation." But of course such an agenda of unabashed greed needs always to be camoflauged with a politician's candy floss, the spin is what they are purchased for. So Clinton obliged her corporate donors by saying that "we should always be open to legal immigration-it reforms, it makes us better." Well, it certainly makes a few of us richer Hillary, doesn't it, like your donors and supporters, the most well-heeled of either party!

Corporate America gets what it has paid for from open-border legislators

An examination of Clinton's voting record should confirm that big business is getting what it paid for. Clinton was co-sponsor of Bill S-2109 to help employees import cheap high tech workers while the big law firms who give to her campaign are counseling them how to use the legal system to avoid hiring qualified U.S. workers. Her support of Senate bill 2109 helped expedite the processing of the infamous H-1B visas that depress wages and displace workers. She supported an amnesty of illegal agricultural workers (S bill 1340) and another one of a similar nature (S. bill 2137) that would have brought an amnesty to another 860,000 workers not counting family. Clinton's support of Kennedy's bill S 2381 would have meant amnesty to almost all illegal aliens. Her numerous attempts to sponsor "shamnesty" bills is reflective of a comment she made to a man who said that his wife was an illegal immigrant. "No woman is illegal", Clinton replied.

If Hillary's record is atrocious, it is doubtful if Obama's is any better. His positions seem almost indistinguishable from Clinton's, the difference being more one of emphasis than policy. He supports employer verification of employee identity to deter the hiring of illegals, she doesn't. She favours lower legal immigration intakes, he doesn't. Obama's main focus is the human rights and economic needs---of those knocking at America's door wanting to come in and those already in, legally or illegally. On the Senate floor he stated on May 23, 2007 that "Where we can re-unite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with skills our economy needs, we should." This was an ominous declaration. Since the law was changed in 1965 to create the so-called family re-unification system, "chain migration"---where an immigrant sponsors several others who in turn sponsors several more---has caused the numbers under this category to spiral out of control. In 36 years the number of immediate relatives admitted was over 13 times higher than it was when the law was first enacted to almost one-half million per year.

An Obama policy statement maintains support for "improvements in our visa programs, including the H-1B programs, to attract some of the world's most talented people to America." But H-1B visa holders are not paid as much as Americans, and even Microsoft admits that salaries have not kept pace with inflation. That would do much to explain a so-called labour shortage in the field. As for Obama's goal of attracting the best and the brightest, the vast majority of H-1B holders make in the $60,000 range (Intel's median salary is $65,000), but top talents in the industry capture more than $100,000. And ironically the great majority of awards for innovation have fallen to Americans, indicating that the industry is not shackled by a domestic cognitive deficit that needs relief by a massive injection of foreign Einsteins. The quest for the best and brightest of overseas talent is a smokescreen for the tech corporations' prime motive, the hunt not for the brightest minds but those that come at the cheapest price. And the H-1B program doesn't even require employers to give hiring priority to qualified American citizens, and they have an arsenal of legal measures to reject those who apply. If one is given to wonder why a U.S. Congress would expand the H-1B program in 2000 when their employers, the American taxpayers, most of whom are workers, were not its obvious beneficiaries, Utah Senator Bob Bennett's comment would be informational: "There were, in fact, a whole lot (of Congressmen) against it, but because they are tapping the high-tech community for campaign contributions, they don't want to admit that in public."

John McCain, the only Republican contender left standing, were it not for his title as waterboy for Iraq, could run for the Democrats. He got the ball rolling in 1986 when he signed the 1986 amnesty for illegals and thereby gave the green light for aspiring border-crossers who knew that American law could be violated with impunity and trespass retroactively forgiven. He ran his nomination race on a full-throttle amnesty platform until he found religion earlier this year and back-pedaled. He has voted for S-1639 to double legal immigration, to continue chain migration and the ridiculous annual jackpot lottery of 50,000 applicants from third world nations called "Diversity Immigration". McCain's problem is that he is a dark horse and Wall Street, while hedging its bets, likes to back winners. So his take of their money is but one-third of Obama's and Clinton's.

Ron Paul is a footnote, like Tancredo. His $32 million was not enough and he is the only one who doesn't know its all over, apparently. Paul's anti-immigration stance has not been as comprehensive or as strident as Tancredo's, but firm nonetheless, as reflected in his statement that a nation without secure borders is no nation at all. But Paul is a walking/talking contradiction. While he favours the the usual gamut of measures to protect American workers from the competition of the illegal invasion---border security, employee verification, no amnesty, no welfare for illegals, no alien birthright citizenship etc.---he is also a libertarian in the Friedman tradition. Leaving the working class alone to fend for itself against an unregulated free market is like trusting a ravenous beast to mind your children. With closed borders and free markets Ron Paul offers American workers a goblet of hemlock mixed with green tea for good health. Paul thus falls between two stools. He's no good for Wall Street and he's no good for Main Street either. A curious fellow.

Failure of immigration opponents to address its causes

The most disappointing feature of the American immigration dialogue is its one-dimensional nature. Two critical elements are virtually absent from the arguments presented by both open and closed borders advocates. One is that both sides talk about what attracts Mexican labour to America, and therefore the measures for turning them away. But no one talks about the conditions in Mexico that drove people to take desperate risks to get to the United States and who is responsible for those conditions. When is America going to look in the mirror and admit that the larcenous NAFTA agreement and rapacious rampage of multinational corporations undercut a viable Mexican economy and the basis for a decent life for so many Mexicans? When are American politicians and opinion-makers going to acknowledge that much of American prosperity is built on the backs of those people and others like them in the hemisphere and the world? All the measures proposed by the anti-immigrationist forces are necessary, but by no means sufficient to defend the borders. America cannot play King Canute and hold back a tide of billions. It must reduce the tide by ensuring that the billions do not want to leave home. Scrap the trade agreements, the IMF, SAPs (Structural Adjustment Policies) and offer restitution to rebuild economies that have been pillaged₅.

Carrying capacity of U. S. overlooked in debate

Aside from NAFTA, there is another crucial phrase missing from US immigration discussions. Carrying capacity. Each year the United States adds the equivalent of another Chicago. During the Bush administration it has grown by 21 million people. Immigrants, their children and grandchildren will account for 82% of all population growth in the years leading up to 2050, when the country will reach a staggering 438 million if this growth rate is not slowed. Some worry about assimilation, since the share of non-Hispanic whites will fall from 67 to 47%. Obviously the labour market is the focus of most, who would share Samuel Gompers's conviction that "immigration is fundamentally a labour issue." But full employment and economic prosperity in a culturally or linguistically cohesive America would be a pyrrhic accomplishment if such a nation were to rest on a collapsing ecosystem. Can America sustain half its current population when critical resource shortages appear or biodiversity services are compromised ? The works of analysts like David Pimental, Dale Pfeiffer and Richard Heinberg do not inform any Congressional debate about how many people the country should admit. Clearly a Population Plan is overdue.

The American people have spoken on immigration but the political elite will not listen because they are paid by their corporate benefactors not to listen. It is sad to see the world's greatest democratic experiment come to such grief. The Founding Fathers devised a system that they embedded in a constitution with mechanisms to counter-act the natural instinct of the political class to usurp power and exercise it as a permanent elite dominating pauperized subjects on the old European model. They counted on a "vigilant and manly spirit" that animates the American people to breath life and vigour into the constitution. But alas, the Founding Fathers couldn't possibly foresee the power and the scale of Wall Street money.

In America today, anything's for sale, even democracy. I hear a Senator earmarked for the White House can be had, for, oh around 134-138 million. Sound right?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
February 23/08

Footnotes

1. See www.worldviews.org/detailreports/usreport/html/ch535.html, www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1402.html.

2. See Tim Murray's article "Is it reactionary to oppose Immigration?" of 16 Dec 2007 at webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2240, candobetter.org/node/284l.

3. See chart of political contributions from hi-tech companies at www.news.com/2009-1028-6050978.html.

4. Refer to Sheila Newman's 2002 Master's year thesis "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France (PDF - 2.6MB) downloadable from candobetter.org/sheila.

5. Refer, also to Tim Murray's article "Closing our borders can't mean turning our backs" of 25 October 2007 at candobetter.org/node/228.