Wednesday, June 29, 2011

A World Overwhelmed by Western Hypocrisy

In America, Lawlessness is Now Complete
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Western institutions have become caricatures of hypocrisy.

The International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are violating their charters in order to bail out French, German, and Dutch private banks. The IMF is only empowered to make balance of payments loans, but is lending to the Greek government for prohibited budgetary reasons in order that the Greek government can pay the banks. The ECB is prohibited from bailing out member country governments, but is doing so anyway in order that the banks can be paid. The German parliament approved the bailout, which violates provisions of the European Treaty and Germany’s own Basic Law. The case is in the German Constitutional Court, a fact unreported in the US media.

US president George W. Bush’s designated lawyer ruled that the president has “unitary powers” that elevate him above statutory US law, treaties, and international law. According to this lawyer’s legal decisions, the “unitary executive” can violate with impunity the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prevents spying on Americans without warrants obtained from the FISA Court. Bush’s man also ruled that Bush could violate with impunity the statutory US laws against torture as well as the Geneva Conventions. In other words, the fictional “unitary powers” make the president into a Caesar.

Constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus, which prohibit government from holding people indefinitely without presenting charges and evidence to a court, and which prohibit government from denying detained people due process of law and access to an attorney, were thrown out the window by the US Department of Justice, and the federal courts went along with most of it.

As did Congress, “the people’s representatives”. Congress even enacted the Military Tribunals Commissions Act of 2006, signed by the White House Brownshirt on October 17.

This act allows anyone alleged to be an “unlawful enemy combatant” to be sentenced to death on the basis of secret and hearsay evidence not presented in the kangaroo military court placed out of reach of US federal courts. The crazed nazis in Congress who supported this total destruction of Anglo-American law masqueraded as “patriots in the war against terrorism.”

The act designates anyone accused by the US, without evidence being presented, as being part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or “associated forces” to be an “unlawful enemy combatant,” which strips the person of the protection of law.

The Taliban consists of indigenous Afghan peoples, who, prior to the US military intervention, were fighting to unify the country. The Taliban are Islamist, and the US government fears another Islamist government, like the one in Iran that was blowback from US intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. The “freedom and democracy” Americans overthrew an elected Iranian leader and imposed a tyrant. American-Iranian relations have never recovered from the tyranny that Washington imposed on Iranians.

Washington is opposed to any government whose leaders cannot be purchased to perform as Washington’s puppets. This is why George W. Bush’s regime invaded Afghanistan, why Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, and why Washington wants to overthrow Libya, Syria, and Iran.

Barack Obama inherited the Afghan war, which has lasted longer than World War II with no victory in sight. Instead of keeping with his election promises and ending the fruitless war, Obama intensified it with a “surge,”

The war is now ten years old, and the Taliban control more of the country than does the US and its NATO puppets. Frustrated by their failure, the Americans and their NATO puppets increasingly murder women, children, village elders, Afghan police, and aid workers.

A video taken by a US helicopter gunship, leaked to Wikileaks and released, shows American forces, as if they were playing video games, slaughtering civilians, including camera men for a prominent news service, as they are walking down a peaceful street. A father with small children, who stopped to help the dying victims of American soldiers’ fun and games, was also blown away, as were his children. The American voices on the video blame the children’s demise on the father for bringing kids into a “war zone.” It was no war zone, just a quiet city street with civilians walking along.

The video documents American crimes against humanity as powerfully as any evidence used against the Nazis in the aftermath of World War II at the Nuremberg Trials.

Perhaps the height of lawlessness was attained when the Obama regime announced that it had a list of American citizens who would be assassinated without due process of law.

One would think that if law any longer had any meaning in Western civilization, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, indeed, the entire Bush/Cheney regime, as well as Tony Blair and Bush’s other co-conspirators, would be standing before the International Criminal Court.

Yet it is Gadaffi for whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants. Western powers are using the International Criminal Court, which is supposed to serve justice, for self-interested reasons that are unjust.

What is Gadaffi’s crime? His crime is that he is attempting to prevent Libya from being overthrown by a US-supported, and perhaps organized, armed uprising in Eastern Libya that is being used to evict China from its oil investments in Eastern Libya.

Libya is the first armed revolt in the so-called “Arab Spring.” Reports have made it clear that there is nothing “democratic” about the revolt.

The West managed to push a “no-fly” resolution through its puppet organization, the United Nations. The resolution was limited to neutralizing Gadaffi’s air force. However, Washington, and its French puppet, Sarkozy, quickly made an “expansive interpretation” of the UN resolution and turned it into authorization to become directly involved in the war.

Gadaffi has resisted the armed rebellion against the state of Libya, which is the normal response of a government to rebellion. The US would respond the same as would the UK and France. But by trying to prevent the overthrow of his country and his country from becoming another American puppet state, Gadaffi has been indicted. The International Criminal Court knows that it cannot indict the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity--Bush, Blair, Obama, and Sarkozy--but the court needs cases and accepts the victims that the West succeeds in demonizing.

In our times, everyone who resists or even criticizes the US is a criminal. For example, Washington considers Julian Assange and Bradley Manning to be criminals, because they made information available that exposed crimes committed by the US government. Anyone who even disagrees with Washington, is considered to be a “threat,” and Obama can have such “threats” assassinated or arrested as a “terrorist suspect” or as someone “providing aid and comfort to terrorists.” American conservatives and liberals, who once supported the US Constitution, are all in favor of shredding the Constitution in the interest of being “safe from terrorists.” They even accept such intrusions as porno-scans and sexual groping in order to be “safe” on air flights.

The collapse of law is across the board. The Supreme Court decided that it is “free speech” for America to be ruled by corporations, not by law and certainly not by the people. On June 27, the US Supreme Court advanced the fascist state that the “conservative” court is creating with the ruling that Arizona cannot publicly fund election candidates in order to level the playing field currently unbalanced by corporate money. The “conservative” US Supreme Court considers public funding of candidates to be unconstitutional, but not the “free speech” funding by business interests who purchase the government in order to rule the country. The US Supreme Court has become a corporate functionary and legitimizes rule by corporations. Mussolini called this rule, imposed on Americans by the US Supreme Court, fascism.

The Supreme Court also ruled on June 27 that California violated the US Constitution by banning the sale of violent video games to kids, despite evidence that the violent games trained the young to violent behavior. It is fine with the Supreme Court for soldiers, whose lives are on the line, to be prohibited under penalty of law from drinking beer before they are 21, but the idiot Court supports inculcating kids to be murderers, as long as it is in the interest of corporate profits, in the name of “free speech.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that a court so concerned with ‘free speech” has not protected American war protesters from unconstitutional searches and arrests, or protected protesters from being attacked by police or herded into fenced-in areas distant from the object of protest.

As the second decade of the 21st century opens, those who oppose US hegemony and the evil that emanates from Washington risk being declared to be “terrorists.” If they are American citizens, they can be assassinated. If they are foreign leaders, their country can be invaded. When captured, they can be executed, like Saddam Hussein, or sent off to the ICC, like the hapless Serbs, who tried to defend their country from being dismantled by the Americans.

And the American sheeple think that they have “freedom and democracy.”

Washington relies on fear to cover up its crimes. A majority of Americans now fear and hate Muslims, peoples about whom Americans know nothing but the racist propaganda which encourages Americans to believe that Muslims are hiding under their beds in order to murder them in their sleep.

The neoconservatives, of course, are the purveyors of fear. The more fearful the sheeple, the more they seek safety in the neocon police state and the more they overlook Washington’s crimes of aggression against Muslims.

Safety uber alles. That has become the motto of a once free and independent American people, who once were admired but today are despised.

In America lawlessness is now complete. Women can have abortions, but if they have stillbirths, they are arrested for murder.

Americans are such a terrified and abused people that a 95-year old woman dying from leukemia traveling to a last reunion with family members was forced to remove her adult diaper in order to clear airport security. Only a population totally cowed would permit such abuses of human dignity.

In a June 27 interview on National Public Radio, Ban Ki-moon, Washington’s South Korean puppet installed as the Secretary General of the United Nations, was unable to answer why the UN and the US tolerate the slaughter of unarmed civilians in Bahrain, but support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Gadaffi for defending Libya against armed rebellion. Gadaffi has killed far fewer people than the US, UK, or the Saudis in Bahrain. Indeed, NATO and the Americans have killed more Libyans than has Gadaffi. The difference is that the US has a naval base in Bahrain, but not in Libya.

There is nothing left of the American character. Only a people who have lost their soul could tolerate the evil that emanates from Washington.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Friday, June 24, 2011

Bankers Gear Up for the Rape of Greece

Michael Hudson
The need for a popular referendum

Every government has the right and indeed the political obligation to protect its prosperity and livelihood so as to keep its population at home rather than drive them abroad or drive them into a position of financial dependency on rentiers. At the heart of economic democracy is the principle that no sovereign nation is committed to relinquish its public domain or its taxing, and hence its economic prosperity and future livelihood, to foreigners or for that matter to a domestic financial class. This is why Iceland voted “No” in the debt referendum. Its economy is recovering.

Ireland voted “Yes” and now faces a new Great Emigration to rival that which followed the poverty and starvation driven emigrations of the mid-19th century. If Greece does not draw a line here, it will be a victory for financial and fiscal aggression imposing debt peonage.

Finance has become the 21st century’s preferred mode of warfare. Its aim is to appropriate the land and public infrastructure for its own power elites. Achieving this end financially, by imposing debt peonage on subject populations, avoids the sacrifice of life by the aggressor power – but only as long as subject debtor countries accept their burden voluntarily. If there is no referendum, the national economy cannot be held liable to pay the debts owed even to “senior” creditors: the IMF and ECB. Assets that are privatized at foreign bank insistence can be renationalized. And just as nations under military attack can sue, so Greece can sue for the devastation caused by austerity – the lost employment, lost output, lost population, capital flight.

The Greek economy will not end up with the proceeds of any ECB “bailout.” The banks will get the money. They would like to turn around and lend it out afresh to the buyers of the land, monopolies and other properties that Greece is being told to privatize. The user fees they collect (no doubt raising charges in the process, to cover the interest and pay themselves the usual salary jumps on privatized property) will be paid out as interest. Is this not like military tribute?

Margaret Thatcher used to say “There is no alternative.” But of course there is. Greece can simply opt out of this giveaway of assets and economic privilege to creditors.

What do Papandreou’s Socialist International colleagues have to say about current events in Greece? I suppose it is clear that the old Socialist International is dead, given the fact that Papandreou is its head, after all. What passes for socialism today is the diametric opposite of the reforms promoted under its name a century ago, in the era prior to World War I. Europe’s Social Democratic and Labour parties today have led the way in privatization, financializing their economies under conditions that have blocked the growth in living standards. The result promises to be an international political realignment.

Economic austerity cannot secure creditor claims in the end

On Thursday afternoon the Dow, having been down 230 points, leapt up at the close to lose “only” 60 points, on rumors that Greece had agreed to the IMF’s austerity plan. But what is “Greece”? Is it the cabinet alone? Certainly not yet the entire Parliament. Will there be a Parliamentary vote in opposition to the public interest, accepting austerity and privatization?

Only a referendum can commit the Greek government to repay new debts imposed under austerity. Only a referendum can prevent property that is privatized from being re-nationalized. Such a transfer is not legitimate under commonly accepted ideas of political and economic democracy. And in any event, a rent-tax can recapture for the Greek economy what the financial aggressors are trying to seize.

History is rife with instructive examples. Local oligarchies in the region invited Rome to attack Sparta, and it overthrew the kings and their successor Nabis (who may himself have been royal). The sequel is that Rome headed an oligarchic empire, using violence at home to murder democratic reformers such as the Gracchi brothers after 133 BC, plunging the republic into a century of civil war. The creditor interests ended up fully in control, and their own banal self-seeking plunged the Western half of the Roman Empire into an economic and social Dark Age.

Let’s hope the outcome is better this time around. There will indeed be fighting, but more in the financial and fiscal sphere than the overtly military one. The fight ultimately can be won only by understanding the corrosive dynamics of the “magic of compound interest” and the social need to subordinate creditor interests to those of the overall “real” economy. But to achieve this, economic theory itself needs to be brought out of its current post-classical “neoliberal” banality.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Our Bombing is Good for Them

Sentimental Mass Murderer
By LINH DINH

When Obama came into power, there were roughly 35,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Within two years, he tripled that number. Now, Obama announces that 10,000 soldiers will come home by the end of 2011, and 33,000 by the end of next summer. He surges twice, pulls back once, and declares it a successful withdrawal, as promised. I’m sure glad Obama’s not my accountant, or both of us would be arrested for fraud, but wait a sec, Obama is my accountant, and my banker, and my president.

And why are we in Afghanistan? Officially, we are there to fight the Taliban, whom we propped up in the first place. Democratic Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan armed, financed and trained these freedom fighters or Islamofascists. In the 1980’s, America poured gasoline onto the flames of Islamic fanaticism to burn down the Soviets. Now, we are the Soviets.

America goes into Iraq and Afghanistan, turns these countries upside down, then explains that it would be irresponsible to leave them topsy-turvy, but as long as America stays there, these countries will remain messed up. America causes bombs to explode, then insists that it has to stay put until these bombs stop exploding, but America is the bomb! Time and time again, America has set the fire, then shows up as a volunteer firefighter. Such is the burden of being a world leader in freedom, democracy and weapon sales.

America, you are a sentimental mass murderer. You wage war after war, then pretend to mourn for some of the victims. (The “us” victims, not the “them” victims.) As Barack sends America’s sons and daughters into these needless carnages, Michelle urges us to value their pointless sacrifices.

While our grunts perform their imperial overstretch duties overseas, their loved ones struggle back home, so Michelle wants us offer these families comfort and assistance, “It can be helping a neighbor mow their lawn. People can volunteer to babysit for an afternoon, cook a meal, offer to fix a heater, or reach out to a reserve family living away from the support of a military installation.” Of course, these hardships could be avoided if we would only stop sending our gung ho fodders all over to kill and maim, and sometimes be wiped out in turns.

As the husband kills, the wife comforts, but often, this janus trick is performed by the selfsame joker. It has become an annual rite for Colin Powell to give a solemn speech on the Capitol lawn on Memorial Day. This year, he again paid tribute to Americans “fighting the global war against terrorism, serving and sacrificing in Afghanistan and Iraq and at other outposts on the front lines of freedom. The life of each and every one of them is precious to their loved ones and to our nation. And each life given in the name of liberty is a life that has not been lost in vain.”

Though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction, Powell can claim, even now and with a straight face, that it is a front line of the war against terrorism. Done with his unctuous and hypocritical verbiage, Powell went into the crowd to hug a dozen vets and their loved ones. He patted the baby of a brain-damaged and blind man. Why no one, but no one, stood up and shouted, “Hey, Powell, wasn’t it you who helped to lie us into war? Didn’t you stand in front of the whole world and pointed to bogus satellite photos of ‘mobile laboratories for making biological weapons’?” In contemporary America, an architect of war can play at consoling its victims, and no one will bat an eye.

We are also led to believe that the people we bomb, shoot and rape are our beneficiaries. According to Yahoo! News, the withdrawal of American troops brings “a mix of joy and concern [among Afghans] as the nation struggles with the idea of less assistance,” so to invade a country is to assist it, but such is the logics of empire. Next time someone shoots you, know that you’re being assisted.

The empire is going broke, however, so our victims should voluntarily send us loads of cash. Visiting Baghdad, congressman Rohrabacher (CA) declared, "Once Iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country... we would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years. We were hoping that there would be a consideration of a payback because the United States right now is in close to a very serious economic crisis and we could certainly use some people to care about our situation as we have cared about theirs." Bombed by Obama, Libyans should feel a similar gratitude, "If the Libyans for example are willing to help pay, compensate the United States, for what we would spend in helping them through this rough period, that's one way to do it."

With one hand, Uncle Sam will shoot you. With the other, he’ll jiggle the tin cup. Give it up already, all you bloody ingrates! America’s in deep, deep trouble. With our media the way they are, our leaders will continue speak nonsense and there’s nothing we can do about it.

America needs an urgent triage, but none is forthcoming. As she decays, festers and convulses, our next president is asked, “Deep dish or thin crust? American Idol or Dancing with the Stars?”

Harold Koh is the Gollum of Foggy Bottom

Gene Healy

"No more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient," then-Sen. Barack Obama proclaimed on the campaign trail; as president, he'd show the world "that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers."
So, last week must have been tough on the half-dozen or so liberals still naive enough to believe that.

On Thursday, the president answered House Speaker John Boehner's request for an explanation as to why, 90 days into our Libyan misadventure, he isn't in violation of the War Powers Resolution, which requires him to terminate U.S. engagement in "hostilities" after 60 days in the absence of congressional authorization.

"We are acting lawfully," said Harold Koh, the State Department's top legal adviser. You see, since we're hitting Tripoli with offshore missiles and unmanned drones, and the Libyans can't hit back, we're not engaged in "the kind of 'hostilities' envisioned by the War Powers Resolution."

There's a lot to be said about the bald-faced absurdity of that rationale. But one of the most interesting developments is Koh's role in crafting the administration's line.

Considering Koh's background, the whole episode offers a cautionary tale about the corrupting effects of power.

Harvard's Jack Goldsmith notes that "for a quarter century before heading up State-Legal, Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war." On the strength of that reputation, Koh rose to the deanship of Yale Law School in 2004.

And Koh seemed to take the War Powers Resolution pretty seriously. In 1994, for example, he wrote to the Clinton Justice Department to protest the planned deployment to Haiti, which was carried out without a single shot being fired:

"Nothing in the War Powers Resolution authorizes the President to commit armed forces overseas into actual or imminent hostilities in a situation where he could have gotten advance authorization."

Yet the implications of Koh's position today are that the president can rain down destruction via cruise missiles and robot death kites anywhere in the world, and unless an American soldier might get hurt, neither the Constitution nor the War Powers Resolution are offended.

On Friday, Koh went before the American Constitution Society, the progressive alternative to the Federalist Society, to give a self-congratulatory speech about maintaining one's integrity in "public service."

"I never say anything I don't believe," Koh insisted; that includes "the administration's position on war powers in Libya." "I've lived the life I wanted to live," Koh proclaimed, "I still believe in my principles." The only thing missing was the refrain, "I did it myyyyy wayyyy!"

Perhaps Koh really believes that he still believes in his principles. In a way that's more unsettling than the thought that his late-inning conversion to presidential imperialism was purely cynical.

John Dean, who served prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up as a young White House counsel to Richard Nixon, once said that young people should be kept away from top executive posts.

They lacked the life experience and independence needed to resist falling under the spell of presidents who want them to bend or break the law.

Koh was in his mid-50s when he joined the administration, coming off a distinguished career built on opposition to the Imperial Presidency. Yet the lure of being "in the room" when the big decisions are made seems to have turned him into the Gollum of Foggy Bottom.

It's the kind of story you hear again and again in D.C. -- on the right and the left -- of principles sold out for the dubious rewards of "access" and "relevance." This town is "Hollywood for the Ugly" in more ways than one.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Fig Leaf Nation

By LINH DINH

When any man falls, we laugh, and when an upright citizen is exposed as just ordinary slime, we hoot and holler. Glad it ain’t me, we reflect. At least I’m not important enough to be publicly shamed. Rest assure, us nobodies could disseminate a steady stream of spine chilling pics of our hirsute or well-shaved shady regions and nothing would happen.

So big man LeBron got upstaged by little J. J. Barea, generously listed at 6 feet even. LeBron couldn’t score when it mattered. He talked big, but acted tiny. His mouth was huge. His deed puny. He shrank before climax. Many of us little people, so miniscule we’re invisible, got a big kick out of witnessing the biggest man, a self proclaimed King, brought down to size.

It’s always about sex, of course, and all performances are sexual auditions in disguise. At least Congressman Weiner thought so, for he sought to convert his public, well-dressed success into a series of ego-swelling, virtual striptease for half a dozen, oh so lucky (?) ladies. It was all a harmless prank, Weiner thought, because he hadn’t done anything but sent out pixels of his relatively adorable or icky self. Everybody is doing it. Hall of Fame football players, teens, preteens, grandmas. What’s the harm, really, aren’t we here to spread the joy? Shouldn’t we all be virtual friends, at least, with virtual benefits? Like countless men before him, Weiner also figured that public triumphs ought to be redeemable as private, sexual rewards, but since Weiner is not JFK or even Clinton, his mistresses are no fleshy Monroe or Lewinski, but wi-fi mirages of an ex porn star, a black jack dealer and a get-out-of-my-face college student.

So LeBron and Weiner have been stripped of their fancy fig leaves, but the most elaborate loin cloth of all is the one still taped to the groins of America. Uncle Sam talks a big game, still blusters about universal freedom, democracy and economic recovery, but what’s left, really, behind that humongous cod piece?

America hides behind state of the art fig leaves. She has long led the world in well-designed, colorful and seductive packaging. Don’t worry about substance, just jazz up the graphic design. Wrapped well, even crap will sell. It’s all packaging, advertising and public relations.

Sport arenas are themselves fig leaves. In city after city, stadia are the best, most impressive pieces of architecture, with the televised fans neatly dressed and well groomed. Slobs in the cheap seats are not visible, but the biggest, fattest slobs are priced out of these spectacles altogether. Drowning out guns and sirens, they can cheer from home, in their distressed neighborhoods. Who else but the well-heeled can afford these hundred-dollar tickets, not to mention overpriced parking, food and drinks?

Beyond the outfield is gorgeous downtown, with their phallic banks jutting into the sky. Americans get their glimpses of distant cities most often through sporting events, so with these slick, beautiful stadia and postcard perfect downtowns, everything looks first rate and first world, still.

In slums across America, you can go for a mile or two without sighting a supermarket or a bank, only donut or fried chicken shacks, check cashing agencies, liquor emporia and store front churches. Though ubiquitous and spreading, this America is almost never seen.

A block may be half abandoned, yet each occupied home, even one with a leaky roof or collapsed porch, will sport a working satellite dish so images of a glamorized normalcy can be beamed in nightly. White, black, brown or yellow, most Americans look fantastic on television, don’t they? All of television is a commercial for its host society. This is how we live and play, or, rather, this is how we want you to believe we live and play. All of television is a fig leaf.

Take New Jersey. (Please.) On television, it’s an ocean lapped playground where a nice tan and decent sex are the only aims and worries, but in real life, a desperate Atlantic City casino has just added a “naked circus” to draw in customers. In South Jersey, three women were just arrested for removing 380 military grave markers, plus flower urns, from cemeteries and selling them for scraps. Some of these date back to the Civil War. The same week, firefighters fighting an arson, set in a long abandoned factory, had to draw water from the river because nearby hydrants had been vandalized. Their brass threadings had been stolen and sold for scraps.

How much can you get for a bit of brass, you may wonder? But when people are desperate, they’ll resort to anything. In Philadelphia, I often see men pushing shopping carts filled with aluminum cans. Scavenging, they can make about 20 bucks a day, though one claimed he earned 50 daily. “I have to get up at five every day,” he proudly said. An impressive dude, he even wore a work uniform with a “SERVICE” patch on his chest. In Denver, one man explained that to make a single buck, you have to walk a mile. In Detroit, 500 bricks will fetch you a hundred dollars, and I saw two young men trying to knock down an abandoned
factory wall with hammers.

Is it that bad? Of course, it’s that bad, but you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media. There are more than four available workers for each job opening, but that’s the official statistic, so you can double it. When McDonald’s had a national job fair recently, a million people filled applications, but only 62,000, or 6.2%, were hired. A McDonald’s job used to be the last resort, a joke, really, but now it has become an out-of-reach, first aspiration for many Americans. I know a recent law school graduate who considers himself lucky to be employed as a manager at Subway. An ex security guard told me he had applied for over a hundred jobs in six states. Out of options, this 34-year-old was thinking of joining the Army.

Except as criminals or horny garbage, desperate Americans rarely make the news, yet stories like “Celebrities Out of Makeup,” “Celebrity Styles Worth Stealing” and “Michelle Obama Steps Out in $29 Gap Dress,” etc., have become national fare, presented each day for our contemplation and edification. Evening, we can sit behind our triple bolted doors and stare at a televised ballgame in a beautiful stadium, with a serene yet virile skyline in the background.

But at street level, even the beautiful downtowns are showing cracks, with commercial spaces at prime business spots abandoned. It is now customary to cover empty stores with large photos or false fronts touting their potentials. Imaginary, well dressed clients are tastefully displayed, and over them, the screaming pitches. IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! PICTURE YOURSELF HERE! YOUR RESTAURANT HERE!

Across America, these potemkin hallucinations are mushrooming, and in New Orleans, I even saw a smallish, much graffitied shell of a building projected as a future time travel terminal! Among the destinations, Paris 1968, San Francisco 1957, Berlin 1973, Enlightenment, Garden of Eden and Victory Condition. It is telling that no recent years are on offer, no 2001 or 2008, for example. The current mantra of recovery, recovery means that Americans would rather not be in the here and now, but as things get even worse, we may yet develop a nostalgia for this frustrating, desperate and confusing era. As hard as it is to believe, we may grow to miss 2011.

Thanks to resource depletion, primarily oil, the entire global economy is contracting, but this crisis has been compounded by corruption, misallocation and waste, with none greater than the trillions our Pentagon spends on its six, is it six?, illegal wars. As the United States shrinks, its bright, kinetic fig leaf will swell until the country is nothing but giant fig leaf masking the rot and emptiness within. Don’t bother switching the channel, because it will only be the same show at another station. Try looking outside.