The argument that corporations are entitled to the rights of people under the consitution is a terrible principle and has done great damage to our country and our world.

The recent decision of the Supreme to allow unlimited coporate spending on issue ads prior to elections was absurd.

Who speaks when a corporation “speaks?’ Whose opinions are being expressed? It  will not be the opinion of the workers, customers, shareholders or suppliers.

Who decides when a corporation will “speak?” Obviously, it will be the management. So, will the opinion of the managers be expressed. No, it is illegal for management to use corporate resources to express personal opinions. So, when a corporation “speaks”, it will not be expressing the personal political opinion of any of the people who are involved.

What type of opinion will be expressed by the corporation? Management can be challenged in court if they make decisions that cost the coporation money. They are legally obligated to see that their decisions always attempt to increase the corporate profits. So, therefore, we can assume that the only political opinions to be expressed by a corporation will be to try to influence our political system to increase their profits.

This can only lead to disaster for the citizens of our country.

There is a big debate going on about our involvement in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues that don’t seem to be part of the conversation.

The most populace tribe in Afghanistan is the Pashtun. They comprise about 40% of the population and inhabit the Northeast part of the country. The Western part of Pakistan is also Pastun. Part of what we are dealing with is the fact that the Pastun don’t respect the border with Pakistan. It was drawn down the ridgeline by Durand in 1890 and represents the truce line in a war between the British and the Afghanis.

The Tajiks are the next most populace tribe and comprise about 25% of the population. They inhabit the Northwest part of Afghanistan and also have their own country to the north, Tajikistan.

The Pastuns have ruled the country for centuries but were ousted from power when the US drove out the Taliban in 2002. In order to accomplish this, the US aligned itself with Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance. The rise of the Tajiks to power in the central government does not sit well with the Pastuns. They do not trust the government partly because it is dominated by Tajiks.

Then there is the matter of corruption. The Afghan government is corrupt from Karzai down to villiage policemen. The Afghani people are upset and angry about this. They don’t see the US exerting much effort to clean up the corruption.

There is a lot of talk about building up the Afghan army in order to stabalize the country and allow us to withdraw. The Afghan army is a joke. Afghanis can make more money working for the Taliban than they can in the Afghan army. Soldiers in the army regularly desert taking weapons, equipment and supplies with them. Many of them cannot read or write. Unfortunately for us, the Pastuns will reject Tajik soldiers in Pastun lands and the Pastuns will be disinclined to join the army because they see it as being aligned with the US occupiers. 

Obviously, we cannot stabalize Afghanistan unless Pakistan cooperates. We have been able to throw our weight around in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their small populations; about 25 million for Iraq and about 15 million for Afghanistan. But we still have not been able to completely dominate and stabilze either. Pakistan is another matter entirely. They have a population of about 220 million or about 2/3 the size of the US population.  If 1% of Pakistanis are violent and hostile to the US, that is 2.2 million potential enemies.

Pakistan becoming increasingly upset by what they see as the interference of the US in their affairs. The recently announced Pakistan aid package of 1.5 billion for each of the next 5 years comes with some big strings attached. One of the most problematical is our attempt to regulate how they promote officers in the army. The US army is contolled by the civilian government and not influential in civilian affairs. Unlike our army, the Pakistani army is very powerful in their civil society. The upper echelons of the army live in their own subdivisions, the army has extensive investments in business and land and the army has ruled Pakistan on and off since its founding. Any arrangements we make with Pakistan will have to have the approval of the Pakistani army.

When Pakistan was founded, the British drew a line down the middle of the Punjab tribal lands. The Muslim Punjabis moved west and the Hindu Punjabis move east when Pakistan was split off from India. The Pakistani army has used angry Muslim Punjabis for their proxies in causing border clashes with India. They have poured money and weapons into Pakistani Punjabi terrorist groups. Now some of the Punjabi terrorists are working with the Taliban.

In the south of Pakistan, the Baluchi territories are the site of more ethnic strife and suppression. The Baluchis would like to be independent. Now the Taliban are commanding their fight from the southern city of Quetta which is in Baluchistan. So there is a coalition of Pashtun Taliban, Baluchi revolutionaries and Punjabi terrorists carrying out attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the army is divided with respect to who they are willing to fight and who they support. The Pakistani people are scared of India, upset with their government, pushed around by their army, worried about terrorists and mad at the US.

We cannot win in Afghanistan because we cannot deal with the problem of Pakistan and we can’t break even. If we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be bloodshed and suffering. If we stay, there will be bloodshed and corruption. Sort of like that old story about riding a tiger. Can’t stay on and can’t get off. We are addicted to television and movies where problems are solved in an hour or two. There is no happy ending here. We seem to be faced with trying to select the lesser of more than two evils. If we can even figure out what that is.

We are wired to pay attention to the dramatic and novel. Things that are slow, steady and familiar tend to fade out of our consciousness and concern. This is no where more true than our attitude towards death.

3,000+ died on 9/11 and the country freaked out. The patriot bill was passed, Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, hundreds of thousands of civilian in the Middle East were killed, our economy was destroyed and “war on terror” hysteria prevailed.

Every year about 50,000 people die on the freeways in car accidents but we keep on driving, 400,000 people die as a result of their use of tobacco products but you can buy ciagarettes in any grocery store, 150,000 died from alcohol related problems but you can by beer in any grocery store, 100,000 people die from doctors mistakes but we still seek medical advice, and so on.

When you add up all the solvable problems that kill Americans, I bet that you would find that we loose 3,000 + EVERY DAY due to causes that could be prevented. And yet, we sink trillions of dollars and thousands of lives into unnecessary and futile wars in the Middle East.

Maybe if we would pay less atention to screaming headlines and more attention to dry statistics, many more lives could be saved.

We tend to think of nations as having some sort of coherence and permanence although we know that nations come and go in the sweep of history. Something about naming things makes us believe that they have some sort of permanence.

There are new nations in some areas where humanity has lived in cities for thousands of years. A lot of these are in the news lately.

Iraq is home to the ruins of ancient cities such as Babylon and Sumer but it has only existed as a nation since the British drew the boundaries after WWI. India and Pakistan also hold many ancient ruins but it was the British again who drew their boundaries very recently.

Around 1846, a war between the British and Sikh resulted in the consolidation of 22 small states into the State of Jammu and Kashmir. After partition in 1947, Pakistan and India both brought pressure on the State of Jammu and Kashmir to accept being merged with one of the two. Several wars were fought over the Kashmir with the first taking place right after partion and ending with a truce in 1948. The “Line of Control” became the border between the area controlled by Pakistan and the area controlled by India. The Kashmir has continued to be a bone of contention between the two countries down to the present.

The North Western border of Pakistan is the “Durand Line” which was drawn by the British in 1893 as a truce line in a stalemated war with Afghanistan. It divides the territory of the Pushtuns. The tribal people living in that area do not recognize the legitimacy of that border. This is in the headline regularly as fighters pass back and forth across the Durand Line in a batter with Afghan and US forces.

Pakistan was severed from the British India colony in 1949. The “Radcliffe Line” was drawn to separate new Muslim and Hindu countries when the British granted the former colony independence.  The Radcliffe Line runs down the middle of the Punjab territories. Millions of people of Muslim faith moved to Western Punjabe in Muslim Pakistan and millions of people of the Hindu faith move to East Punjab in Indai.

South East Pakistan is the territory of the Sindh people. The ancient Indus valley sites of Moenhodaro and Harappa flourish between 2500 BC and 1500 BC and are hailed as “one of the most developed urban civilizations of the ancient world.

South West Pakistan contains part of the tribal lands of the Balochistanis. They also live in South Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, they are a people divided by arbitray borders who desire a homeland and peace. The Pakistan central government has committed many atrocities againt these people with little attention of the Western media. The Iranians have also treated them harshly.

Pakistan is a patch work quilt of  peoples who do not care for  each other and who do not get along. They are divided by ancient hatreds and disputes. And they are connected to their ethnic brothers across arbitrary borders recently drawn by colonial powers and recent wars. This is a recipe for strife.

There are new rivalries as well. Karachi is a port on the coast of the tradional land of the Sindhis. People who came from the Eastern Punjab in what is now India are clashing with Pushtuns who have come down from the NW Tribal territories. I am sure the native Sindh in Karachi appreciate these recent arrivals murdering each other.

There are stories floating around that the US intends to redraw many boundaries in the Middle East including Pakistan.

“The US State Department has rejected suggestions that Washington is planning to redraft the boundaries of the greater Middle East, including Pakistan, along ethnic and religious lines.

The purported plan appeared recently in the US Armed Forces Journal along with two maps showing the new boundaries.

The article, by Ralph Peters, was the work of an individual and did not reflect the views of the US government, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.”

The articles suggests that the NW tribal territories be shifted to Afghanistan and that Balochistan region of S Pakistan be combined with other Balochistani regions in Afghanistan and Iran to create a Balochistani autonomous homeland. This would leave Pakistan much diminished with just the Western Punjab and the Sindh regions.

I agree in priciple with the author of the article  that:

“International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.”

“Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. “

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
Peters’ Article

Discussion of Peters’ Article

Peter’s article is definitely is food for thought but would be very difficult to implement. But without the changes that he discusses, further bloodshed and suffering are inevitable.

Well, the clock is running out on UN permission for the US to occupy Iraq. We need a new agreement with the government in Iraq by the 1st of January or we will have to leave.

The Bush gang has been applying a lot of pressure to the Iraqi government to sign some sort of Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The Iraqis want all of our troops back to their bases by June 2009. And all of our troops out of Iraq completely by 2010. But we got them to accept 2011.

The main sticking point seems to be that the US wants immunity for troops on active duty and the freedom to carry out any attacks anywhere at any time and to arrest anyone.

The Iraqis want the US to ask permission and coordinate military activity. They want to be able to enter the Green Zone at will and examine records and emails.

The discussion was stalemated for months but recently a draft agreement has surfaced.

Iraq has said that it will need to be approved by their parliment. Bush says that it is not a treaty so our Congress does not need to see it.

Bush wants to get something in place that will commit the next president to the situation in Iraq but the Iragis are not so eager. They have their own election coming up and it won’t help their popularity to be seen cooperating with the US.

Al Sistani, the revered Iraqi Shiite cleric had been in favor of an agreement if the Iraqi parliment passed it. However, he recently came out against it.

Muktada Al Sadr put 100,000 followers in the Iraqi street recently to protest the agreement.

Al Hakim, a rival of Sistani for most influential Shiite in Iraq recently issued a Fatwa that it would be against the Koran for Iraq to sign a SOFA with the US.

Now comes the US attack inside Syria. Senior US officials have said that we reserve the right to attack targets in other countries when ever we deem it necessary. And that the Syrian attack was a “warning” to Syria to do more to prevent Al Queda from coming into Iraq. After a furious reaction by Syria, Iraq demanded that a provision be added any SOFA agreement with the US to the effect that if the US EVER attacked another Middle Eastern country from bases in Iraq, the SOFA would be immediatly cancelled.

The CIA organized the Syrian raid to kill a key provider of soldiers, weapons and money to Al Queda in Iraq from Syria. Considering the inevitable reaction by Iraq and Syria to the raid, you have to wonder what the CIA was thinking. Did they really believe that Syria would be intimidated or did they deliberately sabatoge the SOFA negotiations?

And finally, the US just issued an ultimatum that if Iraq does not hurry up and sign the agreement, the US troops would pull back to the US bases in Iraq and stop any assistance as of Jan 1st.

It seems to me that they may just call our bluff. After all, they did want us back in our bases by June 09 and January 09 is just a few months earlier. And, in any case, in a few months there will be a new US president and they might get a better offer than Bush’s.

There is a lot of discussion about the influence that Israel may have on US foreign policy and all the military aid that the US gives Israel.

There is a story from the Bible about Samson who was chained to pillars in the palace of his enemies after being robbed of his legendary strength. When his strength returned, he pulled the temple down killing himself and his tormenters.

When the Jews rebelled against the Romans in 70 AD, Rome destroyed Jerusalem, crushed the Jewish resistance and pursued the remanants to the mesa of Masada. There the Romans lay siege for months until they were able to build a ramp up the side of the mesa. When they finally breached the defenses on top of the mesa, they found that all of the rebels had committed suicide rather than be captured. A rallying cry for the Israeli army is “Never Again” which refers to what happened at Masada.

I am sure that every new US president receives a visit from an Israeli official who says something like “You can support us or leave to our fate but if they come for us and all hope is gone, we will turn the Middle East into a radioactive wasteland until the end of time.”

Since it is generally accepted that Israel has about 200 nulcear bombs and the planes to deliver them, the new president can only reply, “What do you want?”

So much of diplomacy is a game of finding the right words that are acceptable to both sides who might not completely agree. This process sometimes goes astray.

Recently, the Bush administration was trying to find a compromise between their position of never setting a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and the Iraqi demand for just such a time table. This has been a major sticking point (not the only one) in the drafting of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq to replace the expiring UN mandate for the US presence in Iraq. The Bush administration has been pressing hard for a SOFA by the end of July. The Iraqis have been understanably reluctant to sign any long term agreement with an administration that will be gone in a few months.

Some genius in our state department finally came up with a phrase that was apparently acceptable to both sides, the now famous “time horizon for aspirational goals”. Isn’t that a great bit of polysyllabic garbage! I guess the intent was to craft a linguistuc Rorschach test that would be seen differently by different people. For a day or two, it seemed that the Bush people and the Iraqis were on the same page (even though it was not clear which page that was) but then came the al Malaki interview in the German paper, Der Spiegel.

Al Malaki remarked that he thought that the Obama proposal for a US withdrawal in 16 months was in the right range. He was then careful to say that he did not mean to endorse Obama as a presidential candidate. The next day, the Iraqis released a statement that al Malaki had been mistranslated and misunderstood. The problem with that is that al Malaki’s own translator provided Der Spiegel with the translation. Then the US said that there was not going to be a firm date for withdrawal and that conditions on the ground would determine when we withdrew. In other words, the same position that Bush has always taken. Following that, a senior Iraqi official stated that a firm date was important to the Iraqis. So much for the magic of the State department wordsmith.

I don’t like to be cynical (well, that’s not completely true) but I have to admit that this whole oil price rollercoaster is making me suspicious. If you were in a high government position and you wanted to make a lot of money quickly, is there some way that you could exploit your position? How about this? The oil market is nervous so you make a belligerent public statement about an enemy in the Middle East. The price of oil jumps $8 a barrel. You have used the low margin of $8 a barrel on a futures contract to tie up some oil futures. When the price spikes, you sell and double your money. Then you make a concilliatory statement and the price comes back down. Then your enemy does the same thing. And they double their money. Then someone in the US state department does the same thing and they double their money. Maybe I am just paranoid but I have to wonder…..

There have a been a lot of stories lately from Ted Haggard to Eliot Spitzer that beg the question of why some very smart and capable people do some very stupid things. I have been thinking about this and I decided that some of my recent research on psychology can shed light on this question.

Then all that is left is for the fulfillment of our hidden desires to become public knowledge. And people are left shaking their heads and saying “How could he be that stupid?” The answer lies in the way the human mind deals with “I should” and “I want”.

Those pesky economic bubbles just seem to keep popping up. Then they pop. Things are calm for a little while and then another bubble comes along. There is all this money that wants a home and a “good” rate of return. Now commodities like foods and oil are bubbling.

There is a government commission called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) that is supposed to regulate investment in commodities so that speculators who neither produce nor consume don’t come along and make the prices go crazy. From the US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA)– “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contrasts of sale of such commodities for future deliver…causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the prices of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.” Obviously they are not doing their job.
Unfortunately, this commission is a little too friendly with the industry it is supposed to be regulating.

The explosion of “over the counter” futures investment vehicles and trading methods has left any serious regulation far behind. They are exempt from CFTC by a provision insert into legislation by Enron and other large energy companies. (Gone but not forgotten!)

In addition to oil, basic foods such as rice, wheat and corn are being hammered by price increases of up to 100% in the last year driven by rampant speculation.. People can’t eat and commerce is grinding to halt while the speculators are having a ball (and making a lot of money!)

Now food riots are breaking out all over the world. When a family in the third world is spending half their income on food and the food prices double, there is no money left for fuel, medicine, rent, etc. Unless the US and other governments steps in and reasserts regulation of the commodities markets, this mess could bring down the world economy. Worse yet, a lot of people will suffer and some will die to feed the greed of these speculators.