VHeadline.com reports that the Central Bank of Venezuela has approved international currency transactions in Euros in order to diversify its finances away from the U. S. dollar, in accordance with the policy of President Chavez to loosen the influence of the dollar on the Venezuelan economy. Chavez has gone on record as supporting a move by OPEC to scrap the dollar as the standard currency for oil and substitute the Euro. Venezuela had earlier this year sold off its U. S. debt instruments and replaced them with debts in other currencies.

A move away from the dollar as an international settlement currency would not bode well for the U.S. or the rest of the world economy. It's hard to blame Chavez, though; the Bush administration has done everything short of an invasion to depose Chavez and void the Venezuelan Constitution. Chavez, however, does not fear an invasion from the U.S. as our forces are tied down in Iraq and otherwise over-extended.

The next few years are going to be a bumpy ride. Fasten your seat-belts.

It boggles the mind that Congress is again giving the wealthy huge tax cuts and at the same time reducing student loans, medicaid, targeting even poor children. This is not bizarre; it goes beyond hypocritical and ridiculous; we are being ruled by evil and corrupt people.

This nation is resilient; it has endured a calamitous civil war and legions of stupid and crooked politicians.

But Rome was also resilient and endured a long, long time—until a particularly frosty morning at the beginning of the 5th Century when the legions along the Rhine awakened and discovered to their dismay that the river had frozen over and was now a bridge. Gaul and Spain were lost quickly. Less than ten years later, the Visigoths sacked Rome and the western empire was no more.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye.

by Arnold Kenseth

In this snowfall season the birth
Of god's furious and tender Son
Gives us our holy days by fire. Earth
Cradles once more the hope that Eve
And her winter children will receive
The sunlit garden; because fear
Has no room in our Saviour's castle.

All love shepherds us. The pageant kings
Weep for us. In argent rings
Heaven's wild gabriels wrestle
For our very souls. What stables here
Is time for us to give our sin
The shape of kneeling, to perch seven
Times seventy singing robins

Of forgiveness on our tongues,
Blessing our enemies, that the bones
Which we have broken may rejoice.
No one is lost, not one, who yields
Himself to Christmas. The red ribbons
Of his grief adorn us. The voice
Of his mercy is heard in our fields.

Martin Luther King once said "Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.'"

I think it is more likely that the final words were "We've always done it that way."

Civilization makes progress by trial and error. If it works, do it again; if it doesn't work try something else. Common sense says that it's more likely to work this time if it worked before than if it didn't work before. As creatures of habit, however, we eventually assume that if something has worked well for a long time, then it will keep on working forever. Doing what has always been successful becomes a mark of virtue, of acceptability, of stability. We become so set in our ways that we succeed in ignoring accumulating evidence that doing it the way we have always done it no longer works. The world changes. We are changing the world. The sad and fascinating history of Easter Island is a metaphor for the inability to change leading to virtual extinction.

Nature works the same way. Organisms that over-specialize frequently die off when the environment changes. They cannot adapt quickly enough.

The economy of the United States cannot continue as it is, but we have remained uncomfortably oblivious to trends for which we ought to be preparing. Because the governmental and private institutions involved are still driven by the same economic assumptions they have held for forty years, the world economy, including the U.S. economy, is likely to have a nasty downturn before long. Have we forgotten what monsters slink out of the gutters and caves when the economy goes south? The last major economic convulsion, the Great Depression, ended in WWII.

Thomas Palley, an unabashed Keynsian, explains in reasonably simple terms what is now happening in the economy and why it cannot continue. The usual remedies of fiscal and monetary fixes will shortly be inadequate to insure stability worldwide.

For the past five years the global economy has been flying on one engine. That engine is the U.S. consumer who has been on a consumption binge financed by borrowing, in turn backed by a housing price bubble. This situation poses the threat of a serious hard landing when that engine eventually stalls, as it must. Ever inflating house prices and rising debt-to-income levels are not sustainable. And as the late Herbert Stein, Chairman of President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, wryly observed: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Let us hope that economic policy makers have some workable ideas on how to soften that landing.

Via MaxSpeak, former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, in an essay published by the Washington Post, explains how torture destroys the intelligence services that use it, to the extent that even Stalin, that master of torture, could not control it once it became the modus operandi of the NKVD. Every Czar, he notes, abolished torture at the beginning of his reign, but every successor found it necessary to abolish it once again.

The use of torture internationally carries even greater liabilities in the long run:

If America's leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID [cruel, inhuman and degrading techniques], has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to "legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn't stopped, torture will destroy your nation's important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?

The article is not a pleasant one; Bukovsky describes in detail his treatment in captivity when he went on a hunger strike demanding a lawyer of his own, rather than the one the NKVD had appointed him. It is a grisly story of prison doctors force-feeding him through the nostrils.

We, fellow Americans, have a stake in this controversy. We elected a president in full knowledge of what went on at Abu Ghraib, naively assuming that the torture of Iraqis, many of them perfectly innocent, was the work of over-zealous underlings. Now that the torture memos of Gonzales and other lawyers in the executive branch have been revealed, we have no such excuse; the torture was approved and encouraged at the highest levels of the government, including President George W. Bush

By what political and psychological process have we come to the point that Congress is debating whether or not to prohibit torture by our security forces? As I mentioned before, the propaganda mill that is the mainstream media for years preached that torture was one of the things that distinguished us from the Soviet Union. In the '50s the family-friendly pages of the Readers Digest carried some of the most explicit, X-rated, descriptions of communist torture imaginable. The message was clear: governments that torture are evil. The Russians torture, therefore they are evil.

Now the United States Government tortures. Complete the syllogism. Welcome to the 21st Century.

The story is told that in the '30s Thomas Watson and the executive leadership of IBM asked themselves what it would take to make IBM a great corporation. They decided that in order to become a great corporation, they had to think and act like a great corporation. To many observers at the time, it must have seemed like hubris, but the result speaks for itself. IBM became a great corporation and dominated the computer business for decades.

Jackson has many problems, problems that it shares with other cities: urban slums, suburban sprawl, crime, and a pervasive sense that this city is merely an agglomeration of persons and businesses joined together for economic convenience. There is no sense of common destiny, a shared belief that this city is worth something apart from its value as a place to work and make money.

Great cities are not like that. They have uniqueness, often the result of their history, but uniqueness is not sufficient. Houston is unique but it is not a great city. Size is not a requirement; the city of Florence, Italy, one of the the great centers of civilization in the 15th Century, had at the height of its power fewer people than Jackson has today.

Our leaders and our people don't think in these terms, but until we do, Jackson will go nowhere. We must learn to think and act like a great city.

It is not enough to scrape barnacles off the hull of a ship when the ship is headed in the wrong direction.

Robert Putnam of Harvard University has been studying this subject. Two books of his, Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone, make a significant contribution to our knowledge of what civic institutions and practices are conducive to orderly and prosperous communities and we ignore them at our peril. Although Bowling Alone has been Putnam's most popular and controversial work, I think that the earlier book, a study of Italian provincial governments, is more useful.

The task before us is to start the discussion. I want to live here the rest of my life, but at the rate this city is deteriorating, that won't be possible.

Link: The Bowling Alone web site: http://www.bowlingalone.com/

President Bush has admitted authorizing warrantless searching and eavesdropping by executive order, a Federal crime, and is attempting to use the War on Terror^© to excuse his behavior. If Republicans and conservatives can't figure out where Bush and the neocons are leading this country, they either are deliberately complicit or willfully ignorant of the Fourth Amendment.

Bush ought to be impeached. He is utterly unworthy of the office he holds. If the Congress fails to impeach it will have betrayed the American people.

Via Maxspeak, Harold Bloom writes a fascinating essay in the Guardian on America. The opening, for a sampler:

Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end: "Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!"

I reflected on Huey Long (always mediated for me by his portrait as Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men) recently, when I listened to President George W Bush addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thus benefited by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV channel, which is the voice of Bushian crusading democracy, very much of the Kingfish's variety. Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy.

My beloved violin teacher, the late Daniel Guilet, once observed when the conversation came around to a world-famous violin dealer: "The French have a saying: too polite to be honest."

The concept has many applications. My favorite version is "Too Christian to be honest," but thanks to political developments over the past fifteen years, the phrase "Too conservative to be honest" is a close runner-up. Now, with the revelations of prominent libertarian "scholar" Doug Bandow, a Cato Institute fellow, having been paid by Jack Abramoff to write articles favorable to his clients, it now appears that the saying applies to libertarians, as well.

It's beginning to seem that everyone touched by Abramoff has been compromised by his money.

The main lesson I draw from all this is that the purer they are, the more crooked they can become.

See the article in Business Week, "Op Eds for Sale"

This month's Orion Magazine contained a particularly interesting article on whether we can inherit from our parents the effects of pollution and other environmental insults through epigenomes, methyl molecules attached to various parts of the DNA molecule that have the ability to activate genes in response to environmental changes.

It is must faster to turn on a gene than to come up with a new one. Epigenomes can enable an organism to adapt to new circumstances far faster than by mutation, but they can also do some nasty things to human beings, like turn off cancer suppressors. According the the article, abnormal methylation patterns have also been linked to such conditions as diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, and psychiatric diseases.

The real eye-popper in the article, however, is that epigenomes can be inherited, meaning that rapid adaptations to a changing environment can be passed on from one generation to another, even though DNA is not changed. Methyl molecule groups that activate one gene as opposed to another are inherited, surprisingly bolstering Lamarck's theory that organisms acquire useful traits during their lifetimes and pass it on to their children.

These discoveries aren't going to turn biology upside down, but they will likely force some significant revisions, particularly in evolutionary theory. In particular, they would explain how some organisms are able to change more quickly than is predicted by traditional selection theory.

I could never understand why doctors' offices and hospital waiting rooms have TVs that are always turned on. Listening to a soap opera, a quiz show, or a human interest talk show where everyone cries (no doubt on cue) is usually the last thing I want to do when I'm sitting there, waiting to see a doctor. This afternoon I was forced to endure such an auditory assault while waiting for a procedure the preparation for which is purging oneself the night before and refraining from eating until the procedure is over, a process that leaves one hungry and in a bad mood. The best that could be said of the hospital is that its TV wasn't turned up all the way, unlike an after-hours clinic in north Jackson that placed a TV blaring medical infomercials at top volume in front of hapless patients waiting to be seen. What's worse, it couldn't be turned down and the staff refused to turn it off. Can't the medical profession figure out that this isn't a good thing, especially when people aren't feeling well?

I complain when I am subjected to this type of treatment, to no result. If everyone complained there might be progress.

The Washington Post reports that the mainstays of the conservative Christian movement have assigned a low priority to domestic poverty programs. While Congress is contemplating reducing taxes on investment income and drastically reducing all manner of help to the poor of this country, right-wingers like Falwall and Dobson can think of nothing but abortion and gays.

To GOP leaders and their supporters in the Christian community, it is not that simple. Acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said yesterday that the activists' position is not "intellectually right."

The "right tax policy," such as keeping tax rates low on business investment, "grows the economy, increases federal revenue -- and increased federal revenue makes it easier for us to pursue policies that we all can agree have social benefit," he said.

Dobson also has praised what he calls "pro-family tax cuts." And Janice Crouse, a senior fellow at the Christian group Concerned Women for America, said religious conservatives "know that the government is not really capable of love."

"You look to the government for justice, and you look to the church and individuals for mercy. I think Hurricane Katrina is a good example of that. FEMA just failed, and the church and the Salvation Army and corporations stepped in and met the need," she said.

Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said the government's role should be to encourage charitable giving, perhaps through tax cuts.

"There is a [biblical] mandate to take care of the poor. There is no dispute of that fact," he said. "But it does not say government should do it. That's a shifting of responsibility."

Clearly these fools have not read their Bibles and if they have been reading them, they have been reading them selectively with a political agenda in mind. Perhaps they would be better off just chucking their Bibles in the trash for all the good they are getting out of them. Spencer's Social Statics is the true bible of this most unchristian crowd.

They obviously are ignoring the way government policies have been altered to benefit the rich and impoverish everyone else, especially those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The gap between the wealthy and poor has been growing steadily since Ronald Reagan became president and only slightly receded during the latter years of the Clinton administration. The unholy alliance between the right wing and the fundamentalist churches has been achieved by the cultivation of deliberate ignorance, if not outright deception.

When some future Gibbons writes the sad story of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, the fundamentalist churches and the plutocratic charlatans that lead them will be remembered as some of the chief abettors of the utterly corrupt scoundrels whose imperial arrogance brought about much of that decline. God have mercy on them, because history won't and neither will their duped followers--when they eventually wake up.

The Jackson Progressive has already written on possible solutions to the problem of touchscreen fraud. There is no perfect system. There is no avoiding the fact that the integrity of elections depends upon the integrity of the people running the elections. Even with the most sophisticated mechanisms for insuring an accurate vote, there is at least one link in the chain that depends on the human element. A hand-counted, paper ballot system depends upon the honesty of the local ballot-counters. Machine-read paper ballots require accurate counting machines that can be fixed. Voting machines are at the mercy of the technicians that keep them running. Touchscreen voting can be corrupted at a number of points in the chain of information from voting booth to the central vote-counting computers.

Computerized voting mechanisms are indeed black boxes. Because of proprietary software and the general lack of expertise on the part of voters, they will remain black boxes. Thus there is only one verification method for insuring accurate vote counts: voters must be able to verify their vote after it has gone through all the black boxes. That means that a voter should be able to examine his vote on the Internet after it has been transmitted to election authorities. The only way this writer thinks that can be done is for the voter to draw an identification number from a fishbowl at the precinct, enter it into the touchscreen machine along with his vote, and then take the number with him to identify his vote when he pulls up the election database on the web.

Other measures would help. The operating system and software used must be open-source, so that trap doors and vote-altering code can be discovered and corrected. There must be a reliable paper trail that allows voters to see their ballot after they have entered their choices. Still, none of these measures will work unless the individual can check his own vote anonymously after it has been sent to the authorities.

One other necessity: the entire voting database must be easily available by download. That is the only way to insure that the totals are accurate. That way, every Tom, Dick and Susie can put the votes into Access or FileMaker and see for themselves whether the big computers are honest.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

http://www.votescam.com/home1.php

http://www.ballotintegrity.org/

Undernews: Diebold CEO Resigns

Hunter on the Daley Kos interviews Mary Mapes about her new book, Truth and Duty. Mapes worked on the CBS story about the Killian memos and lost her job when the conservative right-wing blogosphere went crazy over charges that they were forged and CBS collapsed before the onslaught.

Mapes defends her story and claims that other documents from the Texas Air National Guard typed around the same time show the same characteristics as the Killian memos that were claimed to be impossible on late 1960 typewriters.

This is an important interview and her book looks to be an important book.

Somehow or other, I missed The Republican Nemesis, an extraordinary essay on a winning Democratic strategy by economist James Kroeger. This is a website I have bookmarked and plan to explore. Kroeger makes the simple observation that linguist George Lakoff's theory of framing the political language, doesn't completely explain the success of the Republican campaign strategy since 1980. Voters are motivated to vote for a candidate or party by feeling, not clear thinking, and therefore the framing must be emotional to a much greater degree than conceptual or intellectual. The Republicans have masterfully manipulated the feelings of the electorate to be elected even when a significant majority of the voters are more aligned policy-wise with the Democrats:

So it’s not the words we use, Democrats; it’s the emotions we show when we use particular words. Consider the phony outrage that Lynne & Dick Cheney expressed after the third debate. At a time when it was crucial for Kerry to continue to build momentum after a solid debate performance, his advisors ended up losing the post-debate spin. They lost it because they didn’t understand how crucial Kerry’s response would be and they didn’t understand how a candidate absolutely must respond to an Angry Outrage Performance if she wants to win. The big story that Swing Voters saw on TV the next day (those who didn’t watch the debate) was that the Cheneys were really angry that Kerry had called their daughter a lesbian on national TV. What turned this into a home run for the Republicans was Kerry’s unfortunate response; a written statement that sounded a lot like an apology.  The overall impression this gave to Swing Voters was that Kerry had apparently done some “dirty politicking.” Then, after the Cheneys apparently called him on it, he offered [what sounded like] a weak apology and then tried to change the subject.

Whenever Democratic candidates are the target of a Republican politician’s expressed anger, it is crucial that they respond properly if they want to win The Image Campaign. Impressions formed during such confrontations are usually remembered on voting day. John Kerry should have responded emotionally by calling for a televised press conference, and then using the spotlight to laugh at the Cheneys’ phony display of anger. Laughter is the appropriate emotion for a candidate to feel and express when he is guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever. After laughing at the Cheneys, Kerry would then have been able to focus the media’s attention on the real story, which was/is the clever manipulations and deceptions that the Republicans always use to mislead voters. Anyone remember what Karen Hughes did to Al Gore in 2000 with the same kind of expressions of emotion (outrage, indignation)?

Read the article. Kroeger has latched onto something important.

By all accounts, the Republican party is in the doghouse with the American people. Here is Ruy Teixeira's post at The Emerging Democratic Majority:

Here are data from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on which party the public thinks would do a better job on various issues: protecting the environment (+39 points in favor of the Democrats); dealing with gas prices (+28); dealing with health care (+26); dealing with Social Security (+22); reducing the federal deficit (+19); dealing with education (+19); dealing with energy policy (+16); dealing with the economy (+14); controlling government spending (+12); dealing with taxes (+10); protecting America’s interests on trade issues (+10); dealing with foreign policy (+9); dealing with abortion (+8); dealing with immigration; promoting ethics in government (+5); and dealing with Iraq (+3).

For the latest on the polling analysis, Teixeira's centrist Democratic analyses are a good place to start when trying to make out the myriad of national and local polls that often seem to be in conflict.

For those with a left-of-center persuasion heavily committed to developing a sustainable civilization, there is bad news in the article as well:

The Republicans also retain some important leads on party associations like know what they stand for (+14) and security and keeping people safe (+13). The Republican lead on the former characteristic is underscored by a NBC News finding that only 11 percent think the Democrats have a “very clear message and vision for the future”, 7 points less than believe that about the Republicans and 45 percent believe the Democrats don’t have a clear message and vision for the future, 9 points more than think that about the Republicans.

The position of the electorate reflects this writer's mood. Put in even more stark terms, can the Democrats govern and if they can will they govern any better than the Republicans on a host of critical issues? As I pointed out on November 15th, many of the same people that went along with the Republicans on almost every important issue in the last twenty years still carry the party's banner on Capitol Hill. Is there any evidence that they will do anything differently if they come to power? Can a leopard change its spots?

The Children of Israel were forced to remain in the wilderness 40 years until an entire generation passed away. Jehovah declared them unfit after they refused to enter the promised land for fear of its inhabitants. Sometimes I think that this entire generation of DLC-inspired politicians in Washington must pass on before the party becomes worthy of the trust of the American people.

There is also more bad news. The Republicans have been stacking the electoral deck to make if far more difficult for a Democratic majority to recapture Congress:

There are structural reasons why Democrats may have difficulties translating their substantial issue advantages and Republicans’ political woes into big gains in November, 2006, ranging from the concentration of Democratic votes in House districts that are lopsidedly Democratic (a problem that has been exacerbated by GOP-led redistricting efforts) to a well-oiled GOP political apparatus with an extensive bag of tricks designed to insulate the party from the consequences of its unpopular policies. All these advantages are usefully summarized by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their New York Times magazine piece last Sunday (which should whet your appetite for reading their excellent new book, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy.)

The job for progressive Democrats is clear. First, move the party towards a progressive stance. Many politicians and high-level operatives, perhaps the majority, will have to leave before this can happen; they got us into this mess and they have built their political careers on being Republican lite. Second, present a clear, progressive message to the American people. This will require some party discipline until the benefits of progressive policies become apparent to the public, at which point the pols will run out front to lead. Third, the contradiction between Republican rhetoric and Republican policy must be brought home to the public. Their dishonesty must be exposed: that they are family-friendly; that they are responsible stewards of the nation's economy; that their policies promote a strong national defense; that they are Christian, etc.

Accomplishing the third task will be hampered by the fact that many of the Democratic pols in Washington supported the very Republican policies that have so damaged the fabric of our society. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to admit that they went along because they were either fools or cowards.