THE DOWNSIDE OF ZARQAWI'S DEATH.

Death Penalty

by Spencer Ackerman
Only at TNR Online

Painful as it may be to admit, the biggest beneficiary of Zarqawi's death may very well be Al Qaeda. Last year, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Al Zawahiri--a figure whose profile in jihadi circles far eclipses Zarqawi's--wrote Zarqawi a letter gingerly instructing him to stop his seemingly indiscriminate murder of Muslims, since it was costing Al Qaeda valuable Islamic hearts and minds

Listen to Indonesia, Rummy!

What a bizarre overseas encounter reveals about American foreign policy.

By Fred Kaplan

Then: "It is important to us because, as the world's largest Muslim country, we are aware of the perception, or misperception, that the United States is overbearing or overpresent or overwhelming in every sector of life in many nations and cultures."

George W. Bush and his team came to office believing that, because America had emerged from its Cold War victory as the world's sole superpower, they could do whatever they please, shout orders and receive obedience, respect alliances and treaties when they were useful and disregard them when they weren't.

But in fact, the dissolution of the Soviet Union also meant the disappearance of a common threat whose very presence had bolstered American power. As long as there was this second, opposing superpower, the nations in between felt compelled to choose sides

How Long Will America Lead the World?

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, reflects on the growing competence and cost advantage of countries like China and even Mexico and says, "It's unclear how many manufacturers will choose to keep their businesses in the United States." Intel's Andy Grove is more blunt. "America ... [is going] down the tubes," he says, "and the worst part is nobody knows it. They're all in denial, patting themselves on the back, as the Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead."

There is a puzzle in all this, however, which is that these trends and features have been around for a while, and they do not seem to have had an impact—so far at least—on the bottom line, which is GDP growth. Over the past 20 years, America's growth rate has averaged just over 3 percent, a full percentage point higher than that of Germany and France. (Japan averaged 2.3 percent over the same period.) Productivity growth, the elixir of modern economics, has been over 2.5 percent for a decade now, again a full percentage point higher than the European average. In 1980, the United States made up 22 percent of world output; today that has risen to 29 percent. The U.S. is currently ranked the second most competitive economy in the world (by the World Economic Forum), and is first in technology and innovation, first in technological readiness, first in company spending for research and technology and first in the quality of its research institutions. China does not come within 30 countries of the U.S. on any of these points, and India breaks the top 10 on only one count: the availability of scientists and engineers. In virtually every sector that advanced industrial countries participate in, U.S. firms lead the world in productivity and profits.

The situation with regard to higher education is even more dramatic. A new report, "The Future of European Universities," from the London-based Center for European Reform, points out that of the world's 20 top universities, 18 are American. The U.S. invests 2.6 percent of its GDP on higher education, compared with 1.2 percent in Europe and 1.1 percent in Japan. The situation in the sciences is particularly striking. A list of where the world's 1,000 best computer scientists were educated shows that the top 10 schools were all American.

And then there are the demographics. The United States is the only industrialized country that will not experience a work-force or population loss in the coming decades, thanks to immigration. Germany and Japan are expected to see their populations drop by 5 and 12 percent, respectively, between now and 2050.

The United States' share of the global economy has been remarkably steady through wars, depressions and a slew of rising powers. It was 32 percent in 1913, 26 percent in 1960, 22 percent in 1980 and 27 percent in 2000.

So what should the United States do? What has it done in the past? First, be scared, be very scared. The United States has a history of worrying that it is losing its edge.

As Andy Grove puts it, "Only the paranoid survive."

We boast that our capital markets are the world's finest even though of the 25 largest stock offerings (IPOs) made last year, only one was held in America.

because of bad American policies, London is replacing New York as the world's financial capital.

The best evidence of this lack of fear is that no one is willing to talk about any kind of serious solutions that impose any pain on society.

What we can do is take the best features of the America system—openness, innovation, immigration and flexibility—and enhance them, so that they can respond to new challenges by creating new industries, new technologies and new jobs, as we have in the past.

If we go down this path, we will remain a rich country and a stable one. We will be less troubled by the jarring changes that the new world is pushing forward. But like Britain after Queen Victoria's reign, it will be a future of slow, steady national decline. History will happen to us after all.

The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed

By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.

Ledeen repeatedly urged war or destabilization not just in Iraq but also in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, even Saudi Arabia. "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please," he wrote. "Faster, please" became his mantra, repeated incessantly in his National Review columns.

Rhapsodizing about war week after week, Ledeen became chief rhetorician for neoconservative visionaries who wanted to remake the Middle East. "Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad," he wrote after the attacks. "We must destroy [our enemies] to advance our historic mission."

The U.S. must be "imperious, ruthless, and relentless," he argued, until there has been "total surrender" by the Muslim world. "We must keep our fangs bared," he wrote, "we must remind them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East, until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle."

He arrived in Niger on February 26, 2002. "Niger has a simplistic government structure," he says. "Both the minister of mines and the prime minister had gone through the mines. The French were managing partners of the international consortium. The French mining company actually had its hands on the product. Nobody else in the consortium had operators on the ground."

Meanwhile, the C.I.A. had finally penetrated Saddam's inner sanctum by "turning" Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. Tenet delivered the news personally to Bush, Cheney, and other top officials in September 2002. Initially, the White House was ecstatic about this coup.

But, according to Tyler Drumheller, the C.I.A.'s chief of operations in Europe until he retired last year, that reaction changed dramatically when they heard what Sabri had to say. "He told us that they had no active weapons-of-mass-destruction program," Drumheller told 60 Minutes. "The [White House] group that was dealing with the preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested. And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"

"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew." Both Rice and Hadley have declined to comment.

The Future Is Now

by WILLIAM GREIDER

Momentous change is approaching in American politics. Conceivably, the turning point has already arrived, too indistinct to recognize. We are witnessing the demise of the reigning economic ideology.

Something similar is happening now to the Republicans. Their problem is the underperforming economy, which must borrow to stay afloat and, roughly speaking, lifts only half the boats. The conservative order--inspired two generations ago by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and brought to power by Republican ascendancy--pushed government aside so business and capital would be free to generate more lasting prosperity. But their utopian promise was not fulfilled. Instead, the right's principal product, one can say, was economic inequality.

The strange paradox of our times is that despite America's fabulous wealth, most people's lives are shadowed by economic anxieties and real confinements, the wounds that market ideology has imposed.

This starts with the right to health, work, livable incomes and open-ended education, and to participate meaningfully in the decisions that govern their lives. The marketplace has no interest in providing these. It is actively destroying them.

For Life and Liberty

You wouldn't know it from reading the newspapers, but substantial and often overwhelming majorities of Americans have repeatedly endorsed governing concepts that conventional politicians dismiss as radical or unrealistic: Universal healthcare. A job for everyone who wants to work, guaranteed by the government. Secure retirements. Stronger enforcement of environmental laws. Stronger defenses against encroaching corporate power. Union protection for workers against exploitative employers. The list goes on. These widely endorsed goals assume an activist government that nurtures people and society first, ahead of corporations and capital. Imagine a political agenda that sets out to give the people what they say they want.

The heart of the problem is the deterioration of work and wages.

Union density has declined to 8 percent of the private-sector workforce, yet a poll last year found that 53 percent of workers would like to be represented by a union--if they could

Imagine a reformed tax code that clears away all the corrupted loopholes and sets the basic corporate tax rate higher, at around 45 percent.

What Happens if Inflation Is Overstated?

By FLOYD NORRIS

Since 1983, the government has measured the price of homes not by looking at house prices but by computing what it calls "owner's imputed rent." That is the rental value of the house you own. It accounts for nearly a quarter of the entire Consumer Price Index.

Since then the home price index maintained by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight has doubled, while the imputed rent figure has risen by less than a third.

Had the government computed the Consumer Price Index using actual home prices since 1996, I estimate that it would have risen by an average of 4.1 percent a year, as opposed to the 2.5 percent reported. The core rate — inflation excluding food and energy costs — would be 4.2 percent, not 2.2 percent.

Mr. Bernanke wants American consumer spending to weaken, but for the slack to be taken up by American businesses and overseas consumers, particularly in Asian countries with large trade surpluses. He called for "a greater flexibility of exchange rates over time," and no one thinks he meant that the dollar should strengthen.

Tracing the roots of America's post-'60s transformation

By Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent  |  June 7, 2006

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, By Philip Jenkins, Oxford University, 344 pp., $28

In the context of perils from every direction, the rhetoric of unrelenting war against evil triumphed over moral relativism. It became, and remains, the age of martial metaphors. Wars were proclaimed against crime, drugs, porn, and terrorism. Lost in the sloganeering, the author believes, was any sense of moral-political complexity.

Though Jenkins largely keeps his own centrist politics to himself, he gives Reagan high marks for keeping pressure on the Russians. Internal forces alone would not have prompted a withering away of the state. ``No account of the collapse of the Soviet empire," he writes, ``can ignore the vision of Ronald Reagan, who had correctly predicted in the face of all skepticism that we would win and they would lose."

And he credits the president with unleashing free-market capitalism. The explosive growth of high-tech industries in the '80s ``looked like wonderful commercials for decentralization and deregulation, entrepreneurship and risk taking, heroic private enterprise and free trade."

In the author's accounting, Reagan's achievements overshadow the dangers of nuclear brinksmanship and the hypocrisies of trickle-down economics.

TRANSCRIPT: What's the Big Idea? True Blue vs. Deep Red: The Ideas that Move American Politics

The 2006 Bradley Symposium

the following questions about the political divisions in American society:

• Are our political divisions indeed significant and based on such grand themes? Or can they be explained by more superficial social and economic divisions?
• Is a politics driven and divided by large and contrasting ideas dangerous and volatile? Or is it healthy and vigorous—the source of American renewal?
• How are these larger intellectual divisions played out in specific policy debates over the size of government, immigration, foreign affairs, economic inequality, higher education, and other questions?
• Clearly, if American politics is driven by “big ideas,” think tanks and foundations are key players. Should such institutions seek to sharpen and enrich those ideas, or should they rather attempt to moderate and bridge major intellectual divides?

Another part of the Specter bill would grant blanket amnesty to anyone who authorized warrantless surveillance under presidential authority, a provision that seems to ensure that no one would be held criminally liable if the current program is found illegal under present law.

Something doesn't quite add up. First, Frist is just wrong about the amount at which the estate tax kicks in. The senator's email mentions "property in excess of $1 million," but as MarketWatch's Marshall Loeb explained this week, the portion of an estate that is automatically exempt from any federal taxation is $2 million (or $4 million per couple).

Second, Frist said grieving kids had "mere months" to pay "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to the government. At a minimum, this is misleading. The law says the estate tax is not due until at least nine months after a person dies, and in some cases, heirs get years.

Third, when Frist noted that the estate tax "runs 40 to 50%" of an estate worth more than $1 million, he's not only wrong about the dollar amount, he's also wrong about how the tax is applied -- it affects an estate's value over and above $2 million, not the whole thing.

And, finally, as Crooked Timber's Ted Barlow told me, it's rather disingenuous for Frist to claim that the tax hits "so many other families," considering how much trouble Republicans have had finding real people who have had to sell their family farm because of the tax.

So, in the end, Frist appears to be have been wrong about ... nearly everything. Here's a final thought: why would the Senate Majority Leader and likely presidential candidate put all of these errors in writing?

And a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from 1968:

As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions... There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence... Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads

Slave City is a dark architectural vision of perfect efficiency, and sustainability-as-principle-of-oppression:

Slave City is an up-to-date concentration camp made out of the latest technology and with the newest management insights. The highly profitable Slave City (7 billion euro net profit per year) is provided with all necessary facilities to make sure that the inhabitants (called "participants") are as efficient as possible. Values, ethics, esthetics, morals, food, energy, economics, organization, management and market are turned upside-down, reformulated and designed into a town of 200.000 inhabitants.

They all work 7 hours a day on tele-services such as customers service, ICT, telemarketing, computer programming etc. After that, they work 7 hours on the fields or workshop and the rest of their time is used for education, sleep and other necessities. This Slave City is a self sufficient ´green town´ that does not use or waste the worlds resources and does not produce any waste material because of efficient recycling

Mexico is planning a 600 mile long, 30 foot wide nature preserve along the U.S. border both to protect the environment and discourage illegal border crossings:

“When you have a roadless area, you make it more difficult for these activities to happen" ... The strip protects a much longer stretch of riverbank, from just downstream of the Texas border town of Presidio to the outskirts of Laredo, Texas, raising the possibility of still larger reserves that will serve as biological corridors, encouraging four-footed traffic but making it exceedingly difficult for humans to pass. In other border areas where U.S. reserves aren’t fully matched in Mexico — such as Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument — primitive roads and ramshackle hamlets have sprung up on the Mexican side to provide supplies and staging areas to illegal border crossers.

Pollution and other ecological impacts of industry are sapping a tenth of the value of the entire Chinese economy:

"Environmental damage is costing the government roughly 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product, estimated Zhu Guangyao, deputy chief of the State Environmental Protection Agency. ...The conflict between protecting the environment and encouraging development is becoming more serious, [Zhu] said. A shortage of resources, a fragile ecological balance and insufficient environmental protection capacity are becoming critical problems hindering China's development."

As Pan Yue said, the Miracle will end soon, if China doesn't act quickly. Now we're seeing why cutting edge Chinese projects, like Dongtan, are getting so much support from the PRC. Those Chinese leaders who care about the future of their country realize that their choices are green, or collapse.

I participated in a conference call last Sunday evening with George Soros.  He is putting out an important book called The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror in which he describes how reality can be manipulated and distorted by political actors, and the consequences of doing so.  I enjoyed his comparisons between financial bubbles and political actions, and his discussions of his foundation activities over the past thirty years.  Now he's coming into the internet sphere, the new arena of public discourse.

First, let me restate something I've said in the past. The US is a propaganda state. There is no other explanation for the fact that pluralities or majorities of Americans believe things that are clearly untrue, and known to be untrue to the public in every other democratic state in the world. (The iconic example, which cannot be explained away, is the fact that most Americans thought that the Iraq was involved with 9/11. There is no credible evidence for this, there never was any credible evidence for this, and yet they believed it. As a result George Bush was able to sell an illegal war against a country that had done nothing to the US and offered no threat to the US. Simply put, the administration told a Big Lie, and the media didn't call them on it.)