Robert Fisk reports that a demonstration against the Saudi regime is planned for Friday and the government is mobilizing troops to quell it. The regime has a reputation for coming down hard on protestors and has reportedly told the leader of neighboring Bahrain that if he does not crack down on dissent within his country, they will do it, to prevent the contagion from spreading. Bahrain’s protestors have been having daily demonstrations in that country and this is making the Saudi government uneasy.
If there is a brutal crackdown, this will put Obama and Clinton in a quandary. It is fairly easy for them to condemn Libya’s leader for brutality and threaten retaliation against him, although their options are limited. But the corrupt autocrats who rule Saudi Arabia are longtime US allies and friends of US leaders.
(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
There are more concrete signs that the end of religion is nigh than the ones I gave in the previous post in this series. We have the phenomenon of churches closing all over the place. In Cleveland, the Catholic diocese closed a huge number of churches recently, angering the dwindling number of parishioners who still attended them.
Howard Bess, a retired Baptist minister, says that young people are leaving religion in droves.
In a single generation, the Christian church dropout rate has increased fivefold. The Barna Group, a leading research organization focusing on the intersection of faith and culture, says 80 percent of the young people raised in a church will be “disengaged” before they are 30.
In the past 20 years, the number of American people who say they have no religion has doubled and has now reached 15 percent. Those numbers are concentrated in the under-30 population. The polling data continues to show that a dramatic exit is taking place from American Christian churches.
Beyond those numbers, denominations across the board are acknowledging loss of membership, but it is worse than they are reporting. Many churches report numbers based on baptized constituents, yet actual Sunday morning attendance doesn’t come close to those numbers.
The message that is being drummed into our ears every day is that America is broke and that the middle class and the poor are the ones who must bear the pain of solving the problem, because we must never, ever, raise taxes, even on the very rich.
In a speech in Wisconsin in support of the unions, Michael Moore says what I have been saying for sometime, that the problem is not that America is broke but that a greedy oligarchy is looting the country’s wealth.
“Let me say that again, and please someone in the mainstream media, just repeat this fact once. We’re not greedy. We’ll be happy to hear it just once. 400 obscenely wealthy individuals, 400 little Mubaraks, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008 now have more cash, stock, and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined.
…
The nation is not broke, my friends. There’s lots of money to go around, lots, lots. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits in their well-guarded estates. They know. They know. They have committed crimes to make this happen.”
As Jason Easley and Sarah Jones comment:
Moore did something brilliant. He shifted the narrative. Republicans want the Wisconsin story to be about the budget. Early on Democrats were focused on the issues of liberty and collective bargaining. Moore broadened the message and created a third narrative about how decades of pro-corporate and pro-wealthy economic policies have redistributed the nation’s wealth from the people to a small group of super-rich haves. This is the story that terrifies both conservative politicians and the network of billionaire wealth that owns them.
I am glad that someone of Moore’s prominence is getting that message out. We cannot expect the Democratic Party leadership to do so since they are part of the oligarchy.
Like most people, I had assumed that the shortfall in state public sector pension funds that is causing budget problems was because the states had not made sufficient contributions to the fund to met their promises. Paul Krugman says that he too bought that argument.
But a new study (pdf) by Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that the shortfall emerged only in 2007 and is largely due to the financial crisis. As Baker says:
Most of the pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today. This is by far the major cause of pension funding shortfalls. While there are certainly cases of pensions that had been under-funded even before the market plunge, prior years of under-funding is not the main reason that pensions face difficulties now. Another $80 billion of the shortfall is the result of the fact that states have cutback their contributions as a result of the downturn.
…
In sum, most states face pension shortfalls that are manageable, especially if the stock market does not face another sudden reversal. The major reason that shortfalls exist at all was the downturn in the stock market following the collapse of the housing bubble, not inadequate contributions to pension funds.
So the idea that the problem is caused by generous retirement giveaways by state governments to greedy unions is simply false. This serves to remind me that I should not trust any conventional wisdom that aligns itself conveniently with oligarchic interests that control the propaganda apparatus but should always ask for the data.
About a decade ago, when I was on Ohio’s advisory board that was revising the state’s science standards, there was the big debate over teaching so-called ‘intelligent design’ (ID) in science classes. One of the people attending those meetings was the superintendent of schools in a largely rural district that was in the southern part of the state close to the Ohio river that separates us from Kentucky.
[Read more…]
At last she says something I can agree with when she points out that when it comes to news coverage and impact around the world, al Jazeera is eating the US media’s lunch.
“Al Jazeera has been the leader in that are literally changing people’s minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective,” she said.
“In fact viewership of al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” she added.
Who knew that she was such a good media critic? But she should be careful what she wishes for. It is because the US media is so awful that all her hypocrisies (and those of Obama and the rest of the ruling class) do not get exposed.
The US has agreed to a UN resolution to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Libya for crimes against humanity, but only after a clause was included that exempts any Americans from being brought before the ICC.
Glenn Greenwald highlights how the US government’s disgraceful abuse of Bradley Manning continues and how they shamelessly lie about it.
A lawyer for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking secret government files to WikiLeaks, has complained that his client was stripped and left naked in his cell for seven hours on Wednesday.
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The soldier’s clothing was returned to him Thursday morning, after he was required to stand naked outside his cell during an inspection, Mr. [David E.] Coombs said in a posting on his Web site.“This type of degrading treatment is inexcusable and without justification,” Mr. Coombs wrote. “It is an embarrassment to our military justice system and should not be tolerated. Pfc. Manning has been told that the same thing will happen to him again tonight. No other detainee at the brig is forced to endure this type of isolation and humiliation.”
First Lt. Brian Villiard, a Marine spokesman, said a brig duty supervisor had ordered Private Manning’s clothing taken from him. He said that the step was “not punitive” and that it was in accordance with brig rules, but he said that he was not allowed to say more.
“It would be inappropriate for me to explain it,” Lieutenant Villiard said. “I can confirm that it did happen, but I can’t explain it to you without violating the detainee’s privacy.”
Notice that after requiring Manning to be naked for hours on end, they touchingly say they cannot explain the reasons in order to protect his privacy!
UPDATE: Greenwald says today that Manning will be forced to be naked every night and for morning inspection for the indefinite future.
Can anyone doubt that Manning, who has not even been tried let along convicted, of any crime is being humiliated as a form of punishment and to destroy him mentally in order to warn anyone else who might think of crossing the government of its unchecked power to abuse people?