Why We Are Passive

"A nation that has lost hope can no longer be democratic. What paralysis is to the individual, the listlessness that comes from hopelessness is to the nation."
--Edward A. Filene, President, Economic Club of Boston, March 9, 1905

The genius of the Corporate United States is the thrall of helplessness that steadily wears down and overwhelms its working subjects. The principle stands enshrined in the phrase "Too Big to Fail". I suspect much of the Tea Party's appeal was simply in its call for action, action that was instantly overtaken and exploited by the very powers its advocates either consciously or unconsciously opposed.

It is this festering urge to fight-- the resistance to being frail and uncertain that makes the current Egyptian rebellion so transfixing for those who gave up trying to find change to believe in. The protesters suddenly finding their voices across the Middle East shame us, for we are reminded what the very notion of democracy once used to mean.

Freedom sold for a pottage and a wide-screen TV

Back in 1905, these were the words that thundered from the lips of a Republican President: "Neither this people, nor any other free people will tolerate the use of vast power conferred by vast wealth and especially wealth in its corporate form, without lodging somewhere in the government a still higher power ..." Theodore Roosevelt condemning the Railroad Monopoly's corporate rebates.

By choosing subservience to amoral profit over idealism and intellectual independence Americans became witless marks for Wall Street's hustle; their "Can-Do Spirit" broken by the malaise that attends both despair and self-aggrandizement, they were left to grovel at the glittering altar of greed. Now, having failed to heed all warnings, like the oppressed of Egypt, their tardy attempts to revive their democracy will demand much blood and sacrifice.

And moral courage

Caveat Emptor

There is a mistaken belief that human progress follows some unending upward trajectory. Modern scientists and archaeologists know better. While it is true that successful civilizations gain much of their know-how from their antecedents many valuable innovations lay buried and forgotten, often for centuries, perhaps even lost forever.

Take for example, Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, a parasitic disease transmitted by the small black flies that plague many of Africa and South America's poor. Turns out that famous black makeup that Westerners imagined to be merely cosmetic was not to enhance the beauty of Queen Nefertiti and other ancient Egyptian royals but a salve to kill bacteria and prevent eye infections and other assaults on the immune system.

A central theme in Panama Fever, Digging Down Gold Mountain, is the irony of the French doctors being so enamored of their knowledge and scientific achievement that they fail to see their greatest threat in Panama was the lowly mosquito. 20,000 lives may not have been lost to the canal's great failure had they consulted those ancient Africans. 2,400 years ago the Greek historian Herodotus noted that in swampy areas of Egypt, some people slept in tall structures mosquitoes could not reach or under special material that allowed them to breathe but that mosquitoes could not go through. Napoleon had conquered Egypt yet the French ended up losing Haiti and the Louisiana Territory after their armies fell to the ravages of yellow fever.

No Substitute for Enlightened Government

We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us... or least our insufferable greed. Even now, when knowledge should be widely accessible the less educated can be easily tricked. For instance, the reason malaria continues to be a global killer is a simple lack of sufficient mosquito netting compounded by a scourge of fake medicines. In our brave new de-regulated world many hard drug traffickers are turning to the business of making bogus medicines because the profit margins are much greater and the penalties far milder. It is estimated that drug counterfeiters may be pulling in as much as $75 billion per year.

The Kroll Report: "Sales of counterfeit drugs in Mexico were estimated to exceed $1.5 billion in value in 2008, or 10 percent of the formal market. They are the product of a complex and lucrative shadow industry with a global reach. Well coordinated rings, often working closely with organized crime"

No one knows for certain the extent to which fake medicines have entered the market or their actual provenance. The problem is greatest in poorer countries where governments have less to spend on regulation and/or policing. Africa's leaders could take a page from those ancient Egyptians. Back around 1500 BC, Queen Hatshepsut realizing her royal chemists were trying to pass off inferior herbs in their medicines led an expedition herself to the land of Punt, near current day Somalia.



Hatshepsut's twenty-year reign saw Egypt enjoy unequaled peace and prosperity. When she wanted answers, she went to the source.

A Brand New Year Breeds New Corruption

"The protests (against the Israeli Invasion of Gaza) represent corruption on Earth, and not righteousness or reform." Those are not the words of a far-right Likudnik; they are from the printed declaration of a top Saudi cleric and justice official who claims that the protests in support of the Palestinians are corrupt, and "only serve to foment anger and aggression".


Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (R) shakes hands with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during their meeting in Cairo, December 25, 2008.

In Egypt, as Robert Fisk reports: "the true disgrace of Egypt ... is not in its (lack of) response to the slaughter in Gaza--it is the corruption that has become embedded in an Egyptian society. "the idea of service --health, education, genuine security for ordinary people -- has simply ceased to exist. There has developed in Egypt a kind of religious facade in which the meaning of Islam has become effaced by its physical representation. Egyptian civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances -- yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture."

Greed Uber Alles



There was a time when the Kibbutz represented the highest of human aspirations-- an ideal to live in communion with the Earth-- to thrive and worship in Peace. Such innocence could not long survive in a neighborhood bought off and gilded by Western Avarice. High Principles only last as long or extend as far as the interest on a dollar. A distraught Israeli asks:

"how is it possible for one of Israel's greatest military heroes, a man with a reputation as a patriot and even as a "hard-line" supporter of Israeli settlement in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, to bulldoze through a suicidal project that runs counter to everything he has stood for during the past fifty-seven years? Apparently, new revelations have caused suspicions of a more tangible motive: corruption.

Sharon appears to be personally and financially beholden to a circle of financial backers and campaign contributors who stand to make a killing from the Gaza "disengagement." In addition, at least one, and possibly three, other powerful officials in the Sharon administration seem to have a financial interest in the expulsion/withdrawal operation.

Three years ago, a mysterious loan that Sharon had received from an old friend and former army buddy, a wealthy British businessman named Cyril Kern, dominated Israel's headlines. Sharon had apparently used the money to pay a stiff fine imposed on him by Israel's election authority for his solicitation of illegal campaign contributions. One of the arguments that he used to defend himself was that Kern had absolutely no business interests in Israel; hence, the loan could not be construed as a bribe.

Now, it seems that a corporation has been formed to develop a gambling casino on the site of the Gaza Jewish community of Elei Sinai, whose land is slated for confiscation and whose inhabitants are marked for expulsion in August, only two weeks from the time that this is being written. The principal organizer of this venture is a financier, Samuel Flatto-Sharon, who has been a fugitive from justice in France for over 20 years, charged with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in a fund he had managed. Israel gave Flatto-Sharon refuge and citizenship under its Law of the Return, which allows Jews of every background and past history to immigrate to Israel. Among the other investors are a Saudi billionaire and--you guessed it--a British citizen named Cyril Kern.

Nor, as it turns out, is this Kern's first venture into the Palestinian casino world. He has been a major investor in the casino in Jericho, which had to close down during the recent "intifada" because the terrorists couldn't resist the impulse to shoot it up.

Another major investor in the Jericho casino is an Austrian financier named Martin Schlaf. Described in the Israeli press as a close personal friend of Sharon, he was also a major source of the illegal campaign contributions that enabled Sharon to be elected Israel's Prime Minister in 2001.

Not that the Flatto-Sharon and Schlaf groups are the only ones that stand to profit from the confiscated land of the Israeli "settlers." Yet a third such enterprise has as its managing director none other than Eival Giladi, the official in the Prime Minister's office whom Sharon has designated as the "coordinator" of the expulsion-retreat. The British-owned Portland Trust corporation has plans to raise $500 million to build 150,000 housing units for Arabs on the land seized from the Jewish farmers. Giladi will substantially augment his meager income as an Israeli civil servant by directing the development of the land, whose present owners are to be "evacuated," after he supervises their expulsion himself. No public official, it would seem, has ever had a stronger incentive for getting his job done!

The principal investor in the Portland Trust is Sir Ronald Cohen, a British billionaire who is a close advisor and political backer of the number two man in the British government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Cohen also recently bought up Israel's monopoly telephone company, Bezeq.

Another public official who has a possible financial interest in the "disengagement" is Sharon's closest advisor, his chief of staff and personal emissary Dov Weissglass. Virtually all-knowledgeable Israelis believe that Weissglass is the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the "disengagement." Weissglass is (also) a friend of the shadowy Palestinian financier Muhammad Rashid, who managed the looting of the PA-owned companies and the transfer of their assets to the personal accounts of Yasir Arafat, Jabril Rajoub, and other Palestinian officials.

Gaza: A History of Corruption

Whether it be in the Palestinian Territories, apartheid South Africa or Northern Arizona, a subject people are easily exploited. Gambling casinos are the perfect cover for laundering one's ill-gotten gains, avoiding the law and unwelcome taxation. Indeed, the Blago scandal seems almost laughable after witnessing the Grand Theft now taking place in Washington. One must conclude that our Congress, for all its transparent failings, has finally produced the unabashed symbiosis between politics, graft and corruption.

“Lobbyists, legislators, and inside-the-Beltway lawyers are the real stakeholders in Indian gambling,” says Alexis Johnson, a lawyer based in Arizona, who has served as an advisor to campaigns against the legalization of tribal gambling in several states. “Abramoff is just the tip of the iceberg.” Johnson likens casinos to the infected goods that the British distributed to Indians during the colonial period. “This is the new smallpox blanket, but everyone is enamored of it because it has got dollar signs all over it.”

Where Mr. Blagojevich crossed the line was in letting the truth escape from his own lips. Were he a more skillful politician he would understand that in high-profile positions such as say the governor of a state, or leader of the Senate, it is incumbent that one run the shakedown through a surrogate. It is a concept that Washington intimately respects as Harry Reid and his three sons will no doubt attest. From the LATimes:

'The name alone made the eyes glaze over: “The Clark County Conservation of Public Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002.” In a welter of technical jargon, it dealt with boundary shifts, land trades and other arcane matters – all in Nevada.

As he introduced it, Nevada’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Harry Reid, assured colleagues that his bill was a bipartisan measure to protect the environment and help the economy in America’s fastest-growing state. What Reid did not explain was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms, federal lobbyist reports show.'

War As Distraction

Timing an Invasion

Israel’s attack on Gaza has made a mish-mash of that country’s upcoming national election.

“They’re saying no political considerations will be part of the decision-making process — which is of course quite ridiculous,” said Shmuel Rosner, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

The election is about corruption, say most knowledgeable Israeli observers, because of Olmert’s indictment, competence and leadership, and the economic crisis. If [Gaza] is a successful operation, Olmert will get some credit and Barak and Livni will share some credit, but the underlying issues for Netanyahu, particularly the economic situation, will still be there.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, cut off from the world, abandoned by their Arab neighbors, are being burned, shot and bombarded, all for the depth our oil-fed greed and political corruption.