A central doctrine of evangelicals for the “free market” is its capacity for innovation: New ideas, new technologies, new gadgets — all flow not from governments but from individuals and businesses allowed to flourish in the market, we are told.

That’s the claim made in a recent op/ed in our local paper by policy analyst Josiah Neeley of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Austin. His conclusion: “Throughout history, technological advances have been driven by private investment, not by government fiat. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon.”

As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. When I read Neeley’s piece, I immediately thought of the long list of modern technological innovations that came directly from government-directed and -financed projects, most notably containerization, satellites, computers, and the Internet. The initial research-and-development for all these projects so central to the modern economy came from the government, often through the military, long before they were commercially viable. It’s true that individuals and businesses often used those innovations to create products and services for the market, but without the foundational research funded by government, none of those products and services could exist.

So I called Neeley and asked what innovations he had in mind when he wrote his piece. In an email response he cited Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. Fair enough — they were independent entrepreneurs, working in the late 19th and early 20th century. But their work came decades after the U.S. Army had provided the primary funding to make interchangeable parts possible, a transformative moment in the history of industrialization. In the “good old days,” government also got involved.

As Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway explain in their book Merchants of Doubt, the U.S. Army’s Ordinance Department wanted interchangeable parts to make guns that could be repaired easily on or near battlefields, which required machine-tooled parts. That research took nearly 50 years, much longer than any individual or corporation would support. The authors make the important point clearly: “Markets spread the technology of machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it. Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the inventor of the modern machine age.”

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That strikes me as an important part of the story of the era of Edison and the Wrights, but one conveniently ignored by free-marketeers.

Even more curious in Neeley’s response were the two specific products he mentioned in his email: “The plow wasn’t created by government fiat, and neither was the iPhone.”

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano The plow and the iPhone are the best examples of innovations in the private sphere? The plow was invented thousands of years ago, in a world in which governments and economic systems were organized in just slightly different ways, making it an odd example for this discussion of modern capitalism and the nation-state. And the iPhone wouldn’t exist without all that government R&D that created computers and the Internet.

Neeley didn’t try to deny the undeniable role of government and military funding; for example, he mentioned the Saturn V rocket (a case made even more interesting, of course, because Nazi scientists were brought into the United States after World War II to work on the project). “But the driver of these advances’ adoption and relevance outside the realm of government fiat has always been the private sphere,” he wrote in his response.

Neeley is playing a painfully transparent game here. He acknowledges that many basic technological advances are driven by government fiat in the basic R&D phase, but somehow that phase doesn’t matter. What matters is the “adoption and relevance” phase. It’s apparently not relevant that without the basic R&D in these cases there would have been nothing to adopt and make relevant for the market.

We’re in real Wizard of Oz territory here — pay no attention to the scientists working behind the curtain, who are being paid with your tax dollars. Just step up to the counter and pay the corporate wizards for their products and services, without asking about the tax-funded research on which they rely.

There are serious questions to be debated about how public money should be spent on which kinds of R&D, especially when so much of that money comes through the U.S. military, whose budget many of us think is bloated. More transparency is needed in that process.

But anyone who cares about honest argumentation should be offended on principled grounds by Neeley’s sleight of hand. His distortion of history is especially egregious given the context of his op/ed, which argues against public support for solar energy in favor of the expansion of oil and gas drilling. Neeley focuses on the failure of Solyndra — the solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy after getting a $535 million federal loan guarantee — in trying to make a case against government support for alternative energy development. When public subsidies fail, there should be a vigorous investigation. But the failure of one company, hitched to a highly distorted story about the history of technological innovation, doesn’t make for a strong argument against any public support for solutions to the energy crisis, nor does it cover up the fact that the increasing use of fossil fuels accelerates climate change/disruption.

The larger context for this assertion of market fundamentalism is the ongoing political project to de-legitimize any collective action by ordinary people through government. Given the degree to which corporations and the wealthy dominate contemporary government, from the local to the national level, it’s not clear why elites are so flustered; they are the ones who benefit most from government spending. But politicians and pundits who serve those elites keep hammering away on a simple theme — business good, government bad — hoping to make sure that the formal mechanisms of democracy won’t be used to question the concentration of wealth and power.

Throughout history, the political projects of the wealthy have been driven by propaganda. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon, which means popular movements for economic justice and ecological sustainability not only have to struggle to change the future but also to tell the truth about the past.

This article appeared on the Fox News website January 18, 2012. My only question is "How did it get there?" and "Will that writer ever appear there again?"

(compliments to Mark W. for this story)

Iran: The Neocons Are At It Again by Ralph Nader

The same neocons who persuaded George W. Bush and crew to, in Ron Paul's inimitable words, "lie their way into invading Iraq" in 2003, are beating the drums of war more loudly these days to attack Iran. It is remarkable how many of these war-mongers are former draft dodgers who wanted other Americans to fight the war in Vietnam.

With the exception of Ron Paul, who actually knows the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, the Republican presidential contenders have declared their belligerency toward Iranian officials who they accuse of moving toward nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime disputes that charge, claiming they are developing the technology for nuclear power and nuclear medicine.

The inspection teams of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) that monitor compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran belongs, have entered Iran numerous times and, while remaining suspicious, have not been able to find that country on the direct road to the Bomb.

While many western and some Arab countries in the Gulf region have condemned Iran's alleged nuclear arms quest, Israel maintains some 200 ready nuclear weapons and has refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, thereby avoiding the IAEA inspectors.

Israelis in the know have much to say. Defense minister, Ehud Barak, responded to PBS's Charlie Rose's question "If you were Iran wouldn't you want a nuclear weapon?" with these words:

"Probably, probably. I don't delude myself that they are doing it just because of Israel. They have their history of 4,000 years. They look around and they see the Indians are nuclear. The Chinese are nuclear, Pakistan is nuclear as well as North Korea, not to mention the Russians."

The Iranian regime, with a national GDP smaller than Massachusetts, is terrified. It is surrounded by powerful adversaries, including the U.S. military on three of its borders. President George W. Bush labeled Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, one of the three "axis of evil," and Teheran knows what happened to Iraq after that White House assertion. They also know that North Korea inoculated itself from invasion by testing nuclear bombs. And all Iranians remember that the U.S. overthrew their popular elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed the dictatorial Shah who ruled tyrannically for the next 27 years.

Recently, Iran has experienced mysterious cyber sabotage, drone violations of its air space, the slaying of its nuclear scientists and the blowing up of its military sites, including a major missile installation. Israeli and American officials are not trying too hard to conceal this low level warfare.

Israel military historian--strategist Martin van Creveld said in 2004, that Iranians "would be crazy not to build nuclear weapons considering the security threats they face." Three years later he stated that "the world must now learn to live with a nuclear Iran the way we learned to live with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China....We Israelis have what it takes to deter an Iranian attack. We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us...thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."

U.S. General John Abizaid is one of numerous military people who say that the world can tolerate a nuclear Iran--which, like other countries, does not wish to commit suicide.

Using the "Iranian threat," served Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who on his first tour of duty back in 1996, speaking to a joint session of Congress, made a big point of the forthcoming Iranian bomb.

Somehow the Iranians, who were invaded in 1980 by a U.S.-backed Saddam Hussein, resulting in a million casualties, and who have not invaded anybody for 250 years, are taking a very long time to build a capability for atomic bomb production, much less the actual weapons.

In mid-2011, Meir Dagan, recently retired head of Israel's "CIA," repeated his opposition to a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, adding it would engulf the region in a conventional war.

He further took the Israeli government to task for failing "to put forth a vision," noting that "Israel must present an initiative to the Palestinians and adopt the 2002 Saudi Arabia peace proposal, reiterated since, that would open full diplomatic relations with some two dozen Arab and Islamic countries in return for an Israeli pullback to the 1967 borders and recognition of a Palestinian state."

The war-mongers against Iran have often distorted Iranian statements to suit their purpose and kept in the shadows several friendly Iranian initiatives offered to the George W. Bush Administration.

Flynt L. Leverett, now with Brookings and before a State Department and CIA official, listed three initiatives that were rejected. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, Iran offered to help Washington overthrow the Taliban. The U.S. declined the offer. Second, in the spring of 2003, top Iranian officials sent the White House a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve questions regarding its weapons programs, relations with Hezbollah and Hamas and a Palestinian peace agreement with Israel. This proposal was rebuffed and ignored.

Third, in October 2003, European officials secured an agreement from Iran to suspend Iranian uranium enrichment and to pursue talks that Mr. Leverett said "might lead to an economic, nuclear and strategic deal." The Bush administration "refused to join the European initiative, ensuring that the talks failed," he added.

A few days ago, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Iran was developing a capability for making nuclear weapons someday but was not yet building a bomb. So why is the Obama Administration talking about a western boycott of Iran's oil exports, so crucial to its faltering, sanctions-ridden economy? Is this latest sanction designed to squeeze Iranian civilians and lead to the overthrow of the regime? Arguably it may backfire and produce more support for the government.

Backing the Iranian regime into such a fateful corner risks counter-measures that may disrupt the gigantic flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Should that occur, watch the prices of your gasoline, heating bill and other related products go through the roof--among other consequences.

Isn't it about time for the abdicatory Congress to reassert its constitutional responsibilities? It owes the American people comprehensive, public House and Senate hearings that produce knowledgeable testimony about these issues and all relevant history for wide media coverage.

The drums of war should not move our country into a propagandized media frenzy that preceded and helped cause the Iraq invasion with all the socio-cide in that country and all the costly blowbacks against U.S. national interests?

It is past time for the American citizenry to wake up and declare: Iran will not be an Iraq Redux!

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

Following is a response to a facebook posting concerning "welfare costs" and exhibiting (along with comments from others) an incredible lack of compassion for others...

I don’t think higher education should need to be predicated upon funding from an accident or from service in the military or even from long-term working your way through college.

I got my Master’s through the GI bill and paid totally for my BS by working while taking a full load @ Creighton. But I was extremely lucky in many ways. Times have changed dramatically. In my case $600 earned during the summer would pay for all of my costs the following year. In the end I got a rural paper route that easily paid for all my costs. My parents paid only for my board and room @ home. Nowadays, that $600 would not even cover books. That job, by the way, would never have been open to a black person and probably not to a female either.

The cost of education, once essentially nominal, has risen until many are cut off from this avenue by the need to work just to survive. Meantime, wages have stagnated for well over 30 years even while productivity, corporate profits, CEO/CFO/etc salaries remuneration have sky-rocketed. That is, the top 1% have benefited enormously while the rest struggle to scrape by. This is not some magic. The deck has been stacked.

For almost all of us, health care costs can bankrupt even the most careful. We have very good coverage through Boys Town yet it is true that such coverage can be taken away at any time. We have medical bills of about $300,000 in the last 2 years, mostly covered. My take-home pension of about $1000/month (after 35 years) in 1998 has shrunk to less than $300/month because of rising cost of our medical coverage.

It is also a fact that pensions and/or other supposed contracted benefits can be taken away completely and Supreme Court decisions have allowed such action. The old phrase “There but for the grace of God, go I” applies to most all of us. Compassion for others is critical for humanity to exist…

Lastly, the worries about money spent upon “welfare” forgets the incredible welfare for the rich and powerful. Check out sometime how much tax money was spent on the NY ballpark as just one example. Even more important the 4.2 trillion spent on the current wars and many more trillions for the 800 plus bases and the military to stock them. South Korea and Germany, for instance, are just two solid examples of countries hardly needing our “help” to defend themselves. I would guess my wife and I cost the tax payers at least $250,000 to go to Germany to teach there back in 1999. And to send our entire family in 1978 it probably cost $400,000 in money back when that was a lot of money.

When I went to school Imperialism was a nasty word. Torture, occupation, mass incarceration, and mercenary armies were also considered “Ver Boten”.

Fear and manipulation have transformed our culture/country in too many ways. As a US army officer I would have been appalled at Gitmo or Bagram or the many other sites where we carry on “accepted” policies that are illegal and counter-productive. It is a lie that 9/11 and/or terrorist activity was/is the “worst challenge we have faced as a people or country”. Maybe we never fought the Revolutionary war, The Civil War, WWII, Viet Nam, or came within a whisker of WWIII numerous times… But I think not.

Forty years ago, Obama (and Clinton before him) would have been known as moderate Republicans.

Some of us will be working very hard for an Obama victory in 2012. Others of us will be working to create an alternative to the current system, and this is part of the reason why.

We still have power locally - here is where change can begin. Support Occupy Omaha and other local change organizations.

In keeping with the spirit of "The 99%", we can acknowledge research by conservatives that actually furthers the well-being of the rest of us. Here is an article that knowledgeably takes apart the arguments by the War Department/war contractors that more money should be poured down the nuclear war rathole.

An article by Chris Hedges that will upset many who are complacent, ignorant, or not yet ready to see where we are as a nation (or heading soon). You who feel not the problems will disagree with the message here but I suggest you read it carefully anyway. As some of you know I have read Books by Chris Hedges and even written book reports on them. His background is rather incredible in that he has seen war personally all over the world as a war correspondent. He worked for the NY Times even. He has a degree from Havard's divinity school. Whatever your beliefs listen to his message. You will not hear this from any MSM yet this article reflects the anger and dismay of both the Tea Partiers (not controlled by their sponsors) and that of Occupy Wall Street. Here is his articel: (By the way we will have a documentary of a presentation by him @ McFosters in the next round of planned movies.)-->>>

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backward from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by CommonDreams.org The Wrath of Ayn Rand by Firmin DeBrabander

Many have commented on the remarkable callousness fashioned by this Republican presidential field. Most prominently, Herman Cain maintained that the poor and unemployed are responsible for their own plight; Ron Paul claimed that people who refrain from buying health insurance but become debilitated should not be bailed out by government healthcare—they should just die instead, his audience helpfully suggested (or hollered, rather); and just about all the candidates have recommended ever harsher, ever more absurd measures to keep out poor immigrants on our border with Mexico: double fences, electric fences, even soldiers with ‘real guns and real bullets,’ as Herman Cain put it.

What’s driving this show of meanness? You might say it’s just what the electorate—or some loud part thereof—wants. It seems like there are some seriously angry voters out there these days, and I’m sure the recession is taking a toll on people’s patience and generosity. And yet, I suspect this is no fleeting trend, but something with deeper ideological roots. In short, I sense Ayn Rand.

Rand has always had a good following, but her popularity has surged in recent years as conservatives repeatedly invoked her to counter Obama’s “Socialist” agenda. She has an impressive roster of conservative devotees: Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ron Paul. Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul quoted Ayn Rand at length during a congressional committee meeting this past year—to argue against government mandates for energy efficient light bulbs, of all things. Congressman Paul Ryan, the rising star from Wisconsin who drafted the Republican’s celebrated plan to slash the federal budget, reportedly urges all his staffers to read her works.

This is a powerful fan-base, and many have feared the consequences of Rand’s influence. I think we are seeing it now, for there are clear strains of her venom in the excesses of the Republican candidates—and beyond. Her trademark callousness is increasingly evident throughout our political discourse regarding the poor and vulnerable of society. The congressional super-committee charged with agreeing on a trillion dollars in federal deficit reduction is reportedly contemplating cuts to food stamps, while Republicans remain steadfast that taxes not rise on the rich. This, as the recession lingers and poverty rates soar, and we witness the greatest concentration of wealth among the rich since the 1920s. The Republican stance is mind-boggling in these circumstances—but Rand would certainly approve; indeed, she might favor far worse. Consider:

In her popular novels, Rand glorifies ambitious, fiercely independent individuals who soar and succeed by virtue of their own resources and willpower alone. It’s her ode to individualism that captivates her fans. Also the simplicity of her world view, I suspect: Rand’s is a Manichean universe populated by a few great souls on one side, and the inept masses on the other; the masses would perennially muddle in their own misery if not for the exceptional creativity and bravery of a few to do great things, and it’s up to the masses to keep out of their way. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand declares “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time.” Upon little reflection, Rand’s reasoning is obviously specious. Who on earth rises to the top without the help of someone, anyone at all? Indeed, luck plays an important role in a person’s success, too—if you evaluate it honestly, that is. Rand’s thinking is a pleasant enough fiction for those at the top of the heap, but it’s wholly improbable, naïve—and rude.

Pry a little further, however, and Rand’s thinking quickly becomes quite cruel. In a 1967 article entitled “Requiem for Man,” Rand issues a scathing rebuttal to Pope Paul VI who dared suggest that capitalists must be mindful of global wealth disparity and the sufferings of the poor, and recognize a social obligation to help the unfortunate (the Vatican has notably issued similar remarks in a recent statement on the global financial crisis). Rand slams the Pope for urging us to show brotherly love to poor 3rd world “savages." To the contrary, she declares, when civilized man “discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions” he should not feel pity, but “a burning stab of pride” for “the achievements of his nations and his culture…” Amazingly, Rand fails to acknowledge how much the civilized nations have prospered at the expense of the global poor thanks to imperialism. Would she have us applaud the imperialists for their opportunism and exploitation?

In Rand’s view, the poor are better subject to our derision than compassion. What they want, what the Pope calls us to be sensitive to, are perfectly despicable needs: “The inhabitants of the world that the Pope’s encyclical proposes to establish are robots tuned to respond to a single stimulus: need—the lowest, grossest, physical, physicalistic need of any other robots anywhere: the minimum necessities, the barely sufficient to keep all robots in working order, eating, sleeping, eliminating, and procreating, to produce more robots to work, eat, sleep, eliminate, and procreate.” Her message to the millions starving in the world: your needs are not worth our consideration; just die why don’t you.

I’ve long wondered why—or how—Rand’s disciples conveniently, miraculously, ignored her heinous conclusions. It’s time Rand was seen for what she is—no glossing over it. Clearly, it’s not acceptable for our political leaders to be associated with her thought. Conservatives—any of her disciples indeed—have a clear choice: marginalize her work accordingly, or explain how a vision of radical individualism such as Rand’s does not lead to hate. A lot could be gained by the latter. At the very least, it might reveal the appropriate boundaries of our individualism, and make us more thoughtful to the vulnerable among us.

Firmin DeBrabander is Chair of Humanistic Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Since the beginning of November I've received about a dozen requests via Facebook and LinkedIn from Democratic Party hacks I volunteered with during the 2008 election. Anyone else get those? It appears to me that the same old political machinery noted a collective calendar pop-up reminding them "One year count down until the big election, so let’s reach out to all the people we've ignored for the last three years!" I've deleted all those requests.

Obama has done some good things and I can't image how terrible things would be now if McCain were president. But the last three years have by and large been a sad let-down from the hope and inspiration of Obama's campaign. Since the 2008 election Obama has again and again been co-opted by the ideology of all those I had voted against.

I can't speak for the rest of this country, but I for one am desperate for a viable new political party. The Republicans are wholly owned by the wealthy/corporations. (GOP = Greedy One Percent!) The Democrats are at least majority-owned by the same powerful few. As admirable as the Greens positions are, they somehow always come off to me as "damaged goods", rarely getting more than a fraction of a percent of votes - if they field a candidate at all. I've voted for Greens before, but admittedly more out of spite against the worthless D and R candidates. And only when I believed my vote wouldn't have made a difference anyway to the election's outcome: the usual sad reality in a red state.

The Occupy movement seems to have potential in this area, but it is so intentionally (accidentally?) unfocused that it seems to be doing everything it can to avoid becoming a party, or staking out concrete policy positions, or fielding candidates, etc. I realize the Occupy movement is in its infancy and its impact so far has been inspiring, especially given that corporate media has paid it some attention. So far, however, the Occupy movement is creating “more heat than light” (or is that “more smoke than fire”?). I hope it doesn’t fizzle before it really gets going.

What would be wonderful, and I think very much needed, is a Democratic primary challenger to Obama who stands lock-step with the 99% and the Occupy movement. Such a challenger would probably never unseat a sitting president, but think of the platform from which to raise all the issues Obama ignores!

Win

http://costoftaxcuts.com/

• 1st two attached photos are from Mauro Heck. See the Image Galleries for the photos. Mauro took many photos and videos of the witness that well be available soon. Mauro's contact info: Mauro Jose Heck-Photographer, 1 Joyfield Lane, Iowa City, Iowa 52245 319-337-6324

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Oct. 4th, 1986 Ecumenical Peace Gathering in Assisi and the annual feast of the man of peace, Francis of Assisi. And to mark the tragic 10th anniversary of the beginning of the US war with Afghanistan on October 6th, over 150 people, most of whom were Catholic religions sister and calling themselves "Friends of Francis" converged at the main gate of Offutt AFB, home of STRATCOM from numerous Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota cities Sunday Oct 2nd to pray and act for peace.

This pubic prayer and action for peace was initiated by the Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque, Iowa, who invite the public to join in protesting American militarism; the warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya; nuclear weapons, whose control center is at STRATCOM; and defense spending at the expense of persons who are poor.

The gathering included prayers, singing and dancing. Martha Hennessy, the grand daughter of Dorothy Day - the founder of the Catholic Worker was one of the speakers. At the end of the service the group moved onto the drive leading the the main gate at Offutt AFB. Traffic was blocked while a statement was read and three people crossed the property line and were immediately detained by base security. (See text of statement below)

The three line crossers were:

Marilyn Ryan, a retired school teacher from Omaha NE.

Gilbert Landolt, a disable Vietnam Vet, Pres. of the DM Vet. For Peace chapter and DM Catholic Worker

Marian Klostermann OSF , a Franciscan Sister from Dubuque, a long time peace and justice activist and teacher of nonviolence to the imprisoned.

October 2, 2011 Statement at STRATCOM by 'line crossers": Marilyn Ryan, Gilbert Landolt, Marian Klostermann, OSF

May the Lord give you Peace! With this greeting left to us by St. Francis, we greet you, Commander Robert Kehler and all who are employed at STRATCOM. We say to all of you: May the Lord give you Peace!

As Franciscans, Veterans for Peace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Catholic Peace Ministry, Dubuque Peace and Justice, Catholic Workers, campus ministry organizations, parents, teachers, Midwesterners of all callings, we have traveled here today, ?marking the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the US war with Afghanistan. We come here praying and protesting American militarism: the warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya; protesting nuclear weapons, whose control center is here at STRATCOM; and protesting defense spending at the expense of persons who are poor.

We learned 10 years ago that 5,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal could not and did not protect us from the attack on our economic center in New York and on our military and political center in Washington, D.C. Our weapons were unable to defend our cities.

The nonviolent Jesus also loved the city of Jerusalem and wept over it, saying: If this day you only knew the things that make for peace. Today we believe that Jesus weeps over STRATCOM and is saying again: If this day you only knew the things that make for peace.

Is it the nuclear arsenal controlled here that makes for peace?

Is it the 737 US military bases around the world that make for peace?

Is it the building of 3 new nuclear weapons plants in the US that makes for peace?

For every one dollar the US spends on programs that alleviate poverty we spend $36 million on the military. Does that make for peace?

Three of us stand here before you today to say NO.

We have the witness of a disabled member of Veterans for Peace, Gilbert Landolt, who is also representing his deceased father, a WWII POW veteran and a deceased brother, a Vietnam combat-war veteran. They have experienced the hopelessness of wars. The Veterans of Peace organization's mission includes the abolishment of all nuclear weapons!

The true cost of war is hidden. It includes homelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the high suicide rate of returning veterans. The government has not delivered on the care promised to veterans and their families. War takes a disastrous toll on family life, including divorce, domestic abuse, and family disintegration. I am here to say no to all of that.

We also have the witness of Marilyn Ryan, a retired educator and principal, whose life has been dedicated to teaching the young and forming a new generation of peace-loving citizens.

I want to stand up for what I believe in. We come to STRATCOM to say that war, which is becoming the norm, is not the answer and that is not OK! We have become immune to the suffering that results from war. It is not right to remain silent about that.

We have the witness of a Franciscan sister, Marian Klostermann, who has been actively working for peace as a companion to the poor in rural Iowa and in a Catholic Worker house. For 17 years she has been doing non-violence trainings in prisons.

As a Franciscan I am committed to being an instrument of peace. I believe that war is insanity. To remain silent about it is to give my consent. So I come here today to say publicly that the preparation for war happening here at STRATCOM is a futile waste. It squanders the resources that belong to the most vulnerable among us. Today as we celebrate the birthday of Mahatmas Ghandi I know that non-violent resistance changed the country of India. It can change ours. It is still a possibility. At one time St. Francis of Assisi thought that knighthood and fighting to defend his city were a noble cause. The experience of war was his conversion and taught him that only the peace that comes from God's love can truly transform. By the time of his death Assisi had become a city of peace and the site where 25 years ago today Pope John Paul II first gathered leaders of the worlds religion to pray for and commit themselves to peace.

We come here today because the wisdom of veterans and our own is not heard by our Congressional representatives and the administration. Have any of them known combat, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, lack of health insurance, and the many other faces of poverty?

We come to STRATCOM, the center of our military might, to protest the trillions of dollars in military expenditures, enlisting the brightest of our young graduates to exploit our natural resources for destructive purposes. The result is more poverty and destitution in the richest nation in the world. We call this INSANITY!

We cross this line today because our words and the words of so many others have not been enough. We proclaim with our bodies and with our actions a strong no to war a strong yes to peace and non-violence.

Protesting for Peace Fox 42 TV News Omaha http://www.kptm.com/story/15599097/2011/10/02/protesting-for-peace

Posted: Monday, October 3, 2011 The Dubuque Telegraph Herald news paper "Dubuque Franciscan sister arrested during peace protest: Sister Marian Klostermann 'crosses the line' outside an Air Force base in Nebraska" By Erik Hogstrom http://www.thonline.com/news/tri-state/article_41d99f55-8ad8-5df3-b50d-6d4b84d6f0cf.html?cbst=55

A Franciscan sister from Dubuque was arrested Sunday after participating in civil disobedience at the U.S. Strategic Command center at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb.

Sister Marian Klostermann, OSF, was one of three people arrested for "crossing the line" during a protest termed "Friends of St. Francis for Peace."

"It was very moving," said Sister Pat Farrell, OSF, one of the participants from Dubuque.

The others arrested were Gilbert Landolt, a military veteran with disabilities and a member of Veterans for Peace, and Marilyn Ryan, a retired teacher and principal in Omaha.

The trio were arrested, booked and sent home to await a court date.

Farrell noted a convergence of anniversaries coinciding with the protest, including the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II convening leaders of world religions in Assisi, Italy, to pray for peace and commit themselves to peacemaking.

Assisi is the birthplace of St. Francis, founder of the Franciscan religious order.

Tuesday, Oct. 4, marks the Feast Day of St. Francis.

Protesters also marked the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. war with Afghanistan.

"It's just such a critical time to call for peace," Farrell said. "There were just so many things that called us to do this today. We wanted to call attention to all of that."

Groups converged in Omaha from several Iowa cities, including Dubuque, Sioux City, Waterloo, Ames and Des Moines, as well as cities in Nebraska and South Dakota.

"We had 150 people who gathered," Farrell said.

This article is the best idea I have heard yet - a way to demonstrate a strong Progressive stance without throwing the election to he-who-must-not-be-named. (Although it happens every four years... the Democrats trot out some presentable candidate whose main qualification is that they are not the awful, terrible, no-good, horrible Republican.)

Good article on the upcoming attempts to replicate recent world-wide uprisings in the United States.

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/listeningpost/2011/09/201191072650815920.html

This week on the Listening Post: A special look at the media in the post-9/11 world.

Few would forget where they were on September 11, 2001, but most knew the world would never be the same again.

When the two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre that day, the impact was registered by those who perished that day – and the countless others who have perished in the wars fought ever since.

But the force of the impact was also felt on the media landscape itself and its complicity in the construction of the global war on terror that rearranged and justified the political events in the ten years that have passed.

In a series of interviews with journalists and media commentators, we look back at a decade of lies, misrepresentation, manipulation, flawed or fake intelligence, and how many in the western media bought into that narrative and colluded in its construction.

Published on Saturday, September 3, 2011 by The Independent/UK Lies We Still Tell Ourselves about 9/11 Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? by Robert Fisk

By their books, ye shall know them.

Smoke spews from a tower of the World Trade Center. I'm talking about the volumes, the libraries – nay, the very halls of literature – which the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 have spawned. Many are spavined with pseudo-patriotism and self-regard, others rotten with the hopeless mythology of CIA/Mossad culprits, a few (from the Muslim world, alas) even referring to the killers as "boys", almost all avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.

Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there?

American publishers first went to war in 2001 with massive photo-memorial volumes. Their titles spoke for themselves: Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of Swords... Seeing this stuff piled on newsstands across America, who could doubt that the US was going to go to war? And long before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, another pile of tomes arrived to justify the war after the war. Most prominent among them was ex-CIA spook Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm – and didn't we all remember Churchill's The Gathering Storm? – which, needless to say, compared the forthcoming battle against Saddam with the crisis faced by Britain and France in 1938.

There were two themes to this work by Pollack – "one of the world's leading experts on Iraq," the blurb told readers, among whom was Fareed Zakaria ("one of the most important books on American foreign policy in years," he drivelled) – the first of which was a detailed account of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction; none of which, as we know, actually existed. The second theme was the opportunity to sever the "linkage" between "the Iraq issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict".

The Palestinians, deprived of the support of powerful Iraq, went the narrative, would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians' "vicious terrorist campaign" – but without any criticism of Israel. He wrote of "weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses (sic)", the standard Israeli version of events. America's bias towards Israel was no more than an Arab "belief". Well, at least the egregious Pollack had worked out, in however slovenly a fashion, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had something to do with 9/11, even if Saddam had not.

In the years since, of course, we've been deluged with a rich literature of post-9/11 trauma, from the eloquent The Looming Tower of Lawrence Wright to the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, whose supporters have told us that the plane wreckage outside the Pentagon was dropped by a C-130, that the jets that hit the World Trade Centre were remotely guided, that United 93 was shot down by a US missile, etc. Given the secretive, obtuse and sometimes dishonest account presented by the White House – not to mention the initial hoodwinking of the official 9/11 commission staff – I am not surprised that millions of Americans believe some of this, let alone the biggest government lie: that Saddam was behind 9/11. Leon Panetta, the CIA's newly appointed autocrat, repeated this same lie in Baghdad only this year.

There have been movies, too. Flight 93 re-imagined what may (or may not) have happened aboard the plane which fell into a Pennsylvania wood. Another told a highly romanticised story, in which the New York authorities oddly managed to prevent almost all filming on the actual streets of the city. And now we're being deluged with TV specials, all of which have accepted the lie that 9/11 did actually change the world – it was the Bush/Blair repetition of this dangerous notion that allowed their thugs to indulge in murderous invasions and torture – without for a moment asking why the press and television went along with the idea. So far, not one of these programmes has mentioned the word "Israel" – and Brian Lapping's Thursday night ITV offering mentioned "Iraq" once, without explaining the degree to which 11 September 2001 provided the excuse for this 2003 war crime. How many died on 9/11? Almost 3,000. How many died in the Iraq war? Who cares?

Publication of the official 9/11 report – in 2004, but read the new edition of 2011 – is indeed worth study, if only for the realities it does present, although its opening sentences read more like those of a novel than of a government inquiry. "Tuesday ... dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States... For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta..." Were these guys, I ask myself, interns at Time magazine?

But I'm drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. "All the evidence ... indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level," they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on "the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel". Palestine, the authors state, "was certainly the principal political grievance ... driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg".

The motivation for the attacks was "ducked" even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this "issue" – cliché code word for "problem" – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: "This was sensitive ground ...Commissioners who argued that al-Qa'ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa'ida's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy." And there you have it.

So what happened? The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, "settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive". There's a hint in the official report – but only in a footnote which, of course, few read. In other words, we still haven't told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – "changed the world for ever". Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I'm really not surprised.

When the Israeli Prime Minister gets even the US Congress to grovel to him, the American people are not going to be told the answer to the most important and "sensitive" question of 9/11: why?

© 2011 The Independent

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.