10.10.2012

Walking with Gandhi

An illustrated version of this blog post is available on http://mato48.com/

No, I don’t mean Mohandas Gandhi, the great Indian leader, who is credited with breaking up the stranglehold of the British empire. I would not be able to walk with him because he died already in 1948 and I would also not be able to walk with him in a spiritual sense because his philosophy and his methods are not universally applicable, even if they succeeded in India (according to the sanitized version of history, more about this point later).
1948 was a momentous year, not only was Mohandas Gandhi assassinated, another one million Indians died in sectarian violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs; nine million Indians were displaced and had to migrate as the separation of India and Pakistan was finalized.
In 1948 the nations of Burma and Israel declared independence and Israel drove about 720,000 Palestinians out of their homeland. This was the beginning of a quiet genocide, which is slowly but steadily, relentlessly, and systematically conducted until today.
1948 was a momentous year which also saw the installment of the Marshall Plan, the inauguration of GATT, The first Kashmir war, the assassination of Egypt’s Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi by the Muslim Brotherhood (the Brothers have indeed a rich history), and various other more or less violent events (as a matter of fact rather more than less violent).
I have to admit, that I’m intrigued by and interested in the number 48 also for personal reasons and because 4 and 8 are powers of two, which is significant in the binary number system.
The Palestinian conflict is one example where Gandhi’s methods would not have succeeded, another example is the ongoing conflict in Syria. Without the unwavering and courageous resistance of the Syrian army this country would be already a failed state like Somalia, the DRC, Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan.
More than 8,000 Syrian soldiers and policemen have died until now and still the army stands firm, ready to make any necessary sacrifice to save their homeland the fate of other countries who came into the crosshairs of the West. Qatar is offering huge bribes to defectors but until now only the most despicable characters have left.
This is a conscript army, a fact that together with the (unintended) purification by Qatar may explain why Syria still can hold out against the broad coalition of NATO, the Arab monarchies, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-Qaeda.
Before the conflict started there were not many weapons in circulation, the Syrian police and government militias were mostly unarmed, a fact which resulted in an exorbitant high casualty rate of the security forces in the first phase of the conflict.
Thousands of Syrians demonstrated peacefully for Bashar al-Assad in a manner that would perfectly fit Gandhi’s methodology, but reports of this demonstrations were suppressed by Western media (the revolution will not be televised) and the mass demonstrations didn’t deter at all the armed bandits sent by NATO and the GCC from committing random massacres, the demonstrations didn’t prevent arson, bombing attacks, kidnapping and torturing.
The same had happened before in Libya where tens of thousands gathered in Tripoli’s Green Square in support of Muammar Gaddafi with no Western media coverage.
The reality and the limits of protest movements
I revere Mohandas, or as he later was called Mahatma “The Great Soul” Gandhi and regard him as a visionary and an inspiration for peace loving people around the world. He was the 20th century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics and his example motivated many other leader, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.
His strategy of civil disobedience and mass protests in public spaces though was not the main cause that colonial rule ended. The British, exhausted by the Second World War, were not able to maintain their status as a worldwide colonial power, they were in fact desperate to get rid of their Indian possessions.
Mass protests in the spirit of Gandhi seldom worked to overcome despotic rule or corrupt pupped regimes of imperial powers or military occupation, mass protests never deterred military aggression. Mass protests didn’t work for the Palestinians (as proved by the Intifada), they didn’t work for Libyans, Bahrainis, Yemenites, Syrians, or any other oppressed, abused, exploited, terrorized, tyrannized populations.
Mass protests (color revolutions) worked to overthrow the communist rulers of Eastern European countries but these movements were either organized and staged or instantly co-opted by the West and they only replaced one exploitative system by another one.
Even more disastrous were the results of the “Arab Spring” protests, which until now have only resulted in the installment of Islamist governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and in the destruction of Libya.
The in this context often mentioned “Occupy Wall Street” protests never reached the status of a mass movement (one cannot by any stretch call a rally with not more than two or three thousand participants a mass protest). In an individualistic and competition based society like it exists in the USA, mass movements are probably not possible.
Gandhi’s true and lasting legacy
Mohandas Gandhi wanted freedom not only from imperial rule but also from modern industrial society, whose ways Western imperialists had spread during his life to the remotest corners of the globe. 
While working in South Africa for an Indian trading firm, he was exposed to the dramatic transformation wrought by the tools of Western modernity which were: printing presses, steamships, railways, and machine guns. In Africa and Asia, a large part of the world’s population was being incorporated into, and made subject to the demands of the international capitalist economy.
Gandhi keenly registered the negative moral and psychological effects of the worldwide destruction of traditional ways and life styles and the ascendancy of Western cultural, political, and economic norms; his experiences in South Africa significantly shaped his views.
He upheld the traditional virtues of Indians: simplicity, patience, frugality, spirituality, and he favored the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and centralized nation-state, the small cottage industries over big factories. Gandhi’s advocacy of small-scale village industry and environmentally sustainable life styles is still a factor in Indian political discussions.
His ecological world view, summed up by his homily “The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed,” and his interest into organic farming are as appropriate and exemplary now as they were then.
A few days before he became India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru received a letter from his mentor Gandhi, who wrote: “I am convinced, that if India is to attain true freedom, and through India the world also, then sooner or later the fact must be recognized that people will have to live in villages, not towns; in huts, not in palaces.”
Urban advocates in todays India avow their respect for the Gandhian approach to villages, but insist that it is outdated. They want to push even more villagers into towns or become migrant workers to join the industrial workforce, ignoring the fact, that the villagers existence will most likely be more miserable and the ecological devastation in both the countryside and the urban areas will increase. In Mumbai, a coastal city of 14 million, more than half of the city population lives in slums.
Statistical data clearly shows that Indian industrialization and urbanization is helping only a small elite of entrepreneurs. 37 percent of Indians live in poverty, 200,000 small farmers have committed suicide because they were driven into debt by unfulfilled promises of hyped cash crops (BT Cotton), 42 percent of the nation’s children under five are underweight and malnourished. India is in many respects doing worse than sub-Saharan Africa.
India’s Green Revolution of the 20th century only benefitted the big agribusiness corporations and international commodity traders, India’s IT (Information Technology) revolution of the 21st century will benefit only multinational corporations and the resource-hungry West.
Could Gandhi’s legacy shield India from further exploitation and destruction? Right now it doesn’t seem so, because the nations politicians are corrupt and easy to bribe, the plight of the broad population doesn’t concern them.
The religious aspect of Gandhi’s philosophy
Unfortunately Gandhi integrated his religious beliefs with his political ones, coming to the conclusion that the triumph of a scientific world view over a religious one had “desacralized nature and made it prey without impunity to the most ruthlessly systematic extractive political economies.” He consequently rejected many beneficial results of scientific and technological progress like modern medicine, mechanized mass production, and transportation.
In 1909, on a letter to Lord Ampthill, Gandhi wrote, “railways, machinery, and corresponding increase of indulgent habits are the true badges of slavery of the Indian people as they are of Europeans”.
The antipathy to modern science and technology was based on the assumption, that they are contradictory and incompatible with Indian spirituality and religion. Science and religion are clearly incompatible but a scientific world view doesn’t necessarily exclude spirituality.
If spirituality is defined as the emotional, intuitive, and subconscious dimension of our life, is can be easily integrated with science. The emotional world, the power of intuition, and the various states of meditation, contemplation, prayer, trance, and other mind-body interventions can be explained by neurology and described as the interaction of synaptic functions and neurotransmitters, as the information exchange and the complex collaboration between autonomic and endocrine nervous systems with the brain via hypothalamus.
Neurology together with information theory can sufficiently explain the cooperation of millions of neurons in pattern recognition and working memory actions, which are primarily the conscious part of our mind but include also subconscious functionality.
I will discuss particularities and details about meditation, consciousness, and religion in further blog posts, in the present context I have to sum up this point with the conclusion, that Gandhi’s religious convictions were a negative influence and a grave impediment to his analytical skills. His religious beliefs prevented him from developing more powerful, convincing, and timeless visions.
Though I’m aware that Gandhi’s record and legacy are disputed he is still one of my role models, he is an inspirations, he is a saint.
He had racist tendencies (probably caused by his British education), he had strange ideas about sexuality, he confused spirituality and the emotional aspect of our existence with religion, but he was a messenger of peace, tolerance, and justice.
His life ended tragically when he had to observe the partition of British India into Hindu- and Muslim-majority states, the accompanying murder and uprooting of millions of Hindus and Muslims and the start of a continuous armed conflict and a debilitating arms race between India and Pakistan.
His last major act was a hunger strike protesting the Indian government’s attempt to deny Pakistan its due share of resources.
Gandhi’s record and legacy are disputed, he is revered but also reviled. There is a special website http://www.gandhism.net which tries to throw mud on him. A similar website btw exists for Martin Luther King http://www.martinlutherking.org. I’m quite sure that there is also a defamatory site about Nelson Mandela, though I didn’t find it until now (wasn’t Mandela after all a friend and supporter of Muammar Gaddafi and isn’t he a friend and admirer of Fidel Castro Ruz?)
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I tried to explain the policy of this website and the reason for its existence already several times but a few days ago while looking through old blog posts in search of a special phrase I suddenly realized what this blog is all about: This is a blog for politically interested and critical thinking cat lovers.
Would it help to choose a more acicular and descriptive blog title, like for example: PolitiCat, Catarchist, Catalysis, Catabolism, Cataclysm, Catharsis, Catastrophe? All of these words (especially Catastrophe and Catharsis) would be very appropriate, but one word alone is probably not explanatory enough.
“Cats For World Peace”, “The Analytical Cat”, “CAT-News-Scan”? None of these is a really catching title, and “The Analytical Cat” could also be misunderstood as a reference to “Cognitive Analytic Therapy.”
As I sifted through the dictionary I discovered that not every word with the letter combination C-A-T has a feline connotation. The term CAT scan for instance doesn’t mean that a cat is sniffing at the patient from every angle to find out the exact location of the tumor, it rather stands for “Computed Axial Tomography,” and the scan uses X-rays instead of cats.
Before I become Categorically disturbed, I have to remind myself that Catholicism is not the faith of the congregation of cat hosts, but rather a Christian denomination, that a Cathedral is not the place of worship for faithful cats but the principle church of a diocese, and that the term Catacombs does not mean the secret hideouts of our feline friends but rather human-made subterranean passageways for religious practice.
A Catapult is not a slingshot to hurl a cat like a projectile and Catalonia is not the promised land where the tribe of the oppressed cats of this world one day in future will set up their own independent state, but rather a Spanish region (which wants to be independent too btw).
I would very much like the title “The Cat Whisperer” or “The Meditating Cat”, but there are already at least a hundred websites with exactly these names.
It seems that for now I have to leave the blog title as it is, maybe one of the readers can give me a hint, maybe someone more clever than I can come up with an ingenious suggestion. 
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The blog title “Walking with Gandhi,” doesn’t refer to Mohandas Gandhi, it refers to a little three month old cat boy who joined Mato’s cats when my sister in law deposited a cat mother with her tree tiny kitten at my home because she (the sister in law) was beset by personal problems and was moving to a flat where cats were not allowed.
Mia (the cat mother) and Gandhi Jr. (her little boy) are not fully accepted yet by the cat establishment. Princess Min Ki seems to warm up to Gandhi and she doesn’t mind that he follows her closely and watches her, they also occasionally chase each other and it looks quite funny, when little Gandhi chases Min Ki, who is so much bigger than he.
The other cats though still shun the newcomers. Wendy for example, who otherwise is the most friendly cat of the family and even is on good terms with the outsiders Ma Xi and Sumo, continues to growl at Gandhi, when he approaches her.
Mia and her little boy will probably ask themselves: “Why do they hate us?” (a question that is asked by nationalities, minorities, immigrants, aliens, and queer, eccentric, uncommon people all over the world, a question which points to an issue that for sure deserves a thorough discussion in another blog post).
I don’t think that Mato’s cats are more xenophobic than the average cat population.
The blog title “Walking with Gandhi” refers to a walk with the cat family that I made last week. It was a walk which took place late at night and which was remarkable in several aspects.
When I walk with the cats late at night, I have alway a small LED flashlight with me, because the secret and partly overgrown pathways that we use on our walks cannot be negotiated in complete darkness. The cats have no difficulties to find their way and if I could just follow them they would safely guard me along the chosen route. Unfortunately my cat companions take shortcuts slipping through the underbrush where I cannot follow them and they also don’t mind and easily avert the thorny branches of buckthorn and wild gooseberries, which will bring me in serious trouble when I get entangled in them.
The little flashlight allows me not only to access the more impassable areas of the wood, it is also helpful to easily locate my little friends. It often happens on our walks that I suddenly seem to be left alone, but when I switch on the light, little pairs of yellow/green dots shine bright all around me. Cats have a reflective layer behind the retina that sends light which passes through the retina back into the eye, thereby enabling them to recognize even the faintest details in the darkness.
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When we walk on the main path the cats usually follow me casually, sniffing here and there, chasing each other or disappearing in the bushes if they find something interesting. When I switch on the flashlight I often see a column of yellow/green pairs of dots. Some are static, others are bouncing up and down, it is an incredible sight and I’m always deeply moved, when the little pairs of shiny dots come nearer and nearer until suddenly my little companions appear from the dark.
The sky was clear this night and a slender crescent moon shone mystically through the line of old pine trees along the southern border of the big clearing in the middle of the forest. Most of the trees around the clearing are young and between two and three meters high, this line of old trees with a height of 20 meters and more are the remnants of what must have been a majestic old growth forest.
The strong storms, which become more and more regular because of human induced climate change, always break down a few of these majestic trees, leaving jagged tree stumps standing and splinters scattered around. The wood splinters are often several meters long and so big that one cannot even lift them. Spruce trees sometimes are toppled completely intact with their root system lifted out of the ground.
In a few years this group of majestic trees will be completely gone.
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The cat walk on this day had an unusual cast. Princess Min Ki and Wendy represented the cat establishment, they were joined by Mia and her little boy. Mia and little Gandhi had fully embraced the walking routine as soon as Gandhi could walk longer distances and they now are eager not to miss any event.
Because of the two new participants I’m choosing easier routes for the time being and normally we stroll along the main path, crossing the clearing until a point some 20 meters after the clearing where we divert to the left into a young growth forest.
The log pile there that I mentioned in earlier blog posts has disappeared, it seems that the forest owner fell out with the man who until last year was allowed to collect firewood from the forest. Early in spring the log pile was replaced by an ugly pile of construction rubble, a material that the forest owner occasionally uses to stabilize the ground of the main pathways.
Right now the pile of rubble is not ugly because grass, flowers, and all kind of bushes are growing on it and are completely covering it. The pile of rubble has become a little hill and looks quite nice. The plants of the forest are indeed robust and resourceful, they conquer and colonize even the most uninhabitable places.
After reaching the diversion point we normally follow a narrow and winding path until we reach the old growth area which leads from the northern border of the forest along the western border till a wild growing jungle in the South. This juggle includes also the area right beside my home and it is the favorite playground of the cat family.
As we were crossing the big clearing I turned on the flashlight to look for my cat comrades and suddenly I saw an additional pair of bright shining cat eyes appear and becoming bigger and bigger. I first thought, that it was Rosy who had followed us and now ran after us to unite with the pack.
But it was not Rosy, this cat was lightning fast, as fast as Cindy would have been. It was of course also not Cindy, because Cindy tragically died one year ago. As the cat reached us, I realized that it was Gandhi senior. He didn’t stop and ran right through the group but he was waiting some ten meters ahead of us.
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I have told the story of Gandhi senior (which is also the story how and why our little cat boy was named Gandhi) already two posts ago but I repeat it in short for those who cannot remember or who missed the post.
Gandhi senior is a big and beautiful ginger tomcat. He is intact (that means in cat host terminology that he is not neutered) and despite this fact he is very peaceful and not aggressive at all. Gandhi reportedly has a host family who feeds him and also occasionally brings him to the vet but he is not allowed into the house even in winter.
Gandhi is most probably not the name his host family uses but as I didn’t know how they call him I chose a name that I thought was appropriate and he didn’t object my choice. Gandhi was visiting us last summer and autumn for several month and he also frequently joined the walks until our rogue family member Ma Xi, who is neutered but despite that not peaceful and rather aggressive, chased him away.
Ma Xi is not a nice and agreeable cat, and he deeply resents Mia and her little boy. He was an outsider already before, but now he is becoming more and more unfriendly and he only appears to eat his food hastily. When he has finished he instantly leaves the house. He still wants to make walks, but not with the new family members, consequently he has developed the habit to wait for me in the forest across the road till I come and make a walk with him alone.
I hoped that he would be able to find a new host family but it has not happened until now -- everybody here has already one or more cats. I would not like to see him joining a cat colony on one of the neighboring farms and I would not like him to become a feral cat again, because without veterinarian care he would have a miserable life and would die soon.
I have no idea how this story will develop and if we will be able to find a humane and cat-appropriate solution. Cat relations for sure can be quite complicated.
Back to the reported cat walk:
Mia seemed to be mesmerized by Gandhi senior and she tried to approach him, but he slipped away and retreated onto the little hill of rubble that I described before. It could very well be that the father of Mias babies was a ginger cat and that she had fond memories which she wanted to revive.
When I called him, Gandhi senior didn’t come to me like he always did last year but he followed us for the rest of the walk, intermingling with the other cats. He also didn’t come into the house to eat with us but rather disappeared into the darkness when we reached our home.
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It was intriguing to see the two Gandhi cats in close proximity and be able to compare. Little Gandhi is a bit more than half the size of his big namesake, he will probably never be as big as Gandhi senior, because his mother is a very small and slender cat. His mother Mia is even smaller than Wendy, who was until now the smallest cat of the family.
Mia is the daughter of Rosy’s sister Mary, a cat who my wife transferred to my sister in law who lives in Munich. I didn’t realize at that time that my sister in law doesn’t take care of her cats and only in acute medical emergencies visits the vet, if I would have known I would not have agreed to give Mary away.
Mary was not spayed and soon got pregnant. My sister in law kept the most pretty one of the kittens (Mia) and distributed the other cat babies among her work colleagues. It is likely that Mia’s father was a Siamese, as purebred cats are common in urban areas. Soon after that Mary fortunately found another host and reportedly is doing well but Mia stayed with my sister in law.
The ice is slowly melting
No, I don’t mean the ice in Antarctica or the Greenland ice shield or the permafrost in Siberia (which would release huge amounts of methane and CO2). This subtitle means the symbolic (emotional) ice between the cat establishment and the two immigrants, which fortunately is melting away.
It seems that the two immigrants are slowly and gradually accepted and integrated into the cat community. Princess Min Ki made the start and yesterday Wendy sniffed at Gandhi without growling, Rosy also didn’t growl when she rested together with me on the kitchen bench and Gandhi came and laid down beside us.
Today I was again sitting on the kitchen bench, eating my muesli and sipping a cup of sage tea. Little Gandhi had taken place on my lap, a move that normally is appreciated by the other cats because it means that he is quiet, that he is not running and jumping around and not bothering anybody.
He is always around me. When I go to the toilet and close the door, because I want to have some privacy, he is desperately meowing and scratching on the door till I open it again. He is seemingly afraid that I could disappear and leave him alone and on his own in this hostile world.
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No, I would never abandon him or any of the other cats. Of course, I could drop dead, I could have a sudden heart attack or a stroke. It would be a terrible experience for my little friends, they would sit around me and meow sorrowful and would poke me with their snouts and sniff at my dead corpse till the undertaker would come to carry me away forever.
I will try to avoid that fate, I’m living as healthy as possible, not smoking, not drinking, mainly eating the home grown food from the garden or from organic farms. There are of course environmental pollutants that one cannot avoid anymore, because they have extensively contaminated the biosphere. Some are clearly carcinogenic (POPs like dioxins and DDT, heavy metals), but when I get cancer, I can at least cleanup my act in time and look around to find a good place for my feline friends.
As I was sitting in the kitchen with little Gandhi on my lap, Rosy came in, jumped onto the kitchen bench and laid down beside me. Rosy is now eight years old and she, as I told before, is the aunt of Mia and the grandaunt of Gandhi. Rosy doesn’t know this and if she would know she probably wouldn’t care, because family relations don’t mean much for adult cats.
Rosy looked very long at him and when he curled up to sleep she sighed and put down her head, probably thinking: “Maybe this kitten after all is not that bad” (I know the cats quit well and though I have to guess I’m quite sure that it was exactly what she was thinking).
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Gandhi Jr. is full of energy and he runs around in the house and in the garden and he crawls into every hole and climbs onto bushes, fences, and any elevated platforms. Trees are still quite difficult for him, but he practices all the time and is improving fast, he is undoubtedly destined to become an excellent tree climber.
Yet, with his unbounded energy he is often annoying the other cats, which want to have peace and quiet. 
Gandhi also tries to catch the flies who made it through the open terrace door into the sitting room and from there into the kitchen. Rosy did the same in her youth but now with 8 years and a figure that rivals that of her fellow cat Sumo she is not fast enough anymore.
Gandhi’s attempts to catch flies would be very welcome if he wouldn’t wreck the curtains in his efforts to follow the flies higher up. Fortunately there are not many flies in the house, because I have fly screens on every window (aluminum mesh of course because the cats would ruin any softer material). The windows are covered, the terrace door though is not protected because it is a big sliding door and I have not figured out until now how to install a compatible fly screen.
Yesterday evening Gandhi annoyed also me. He first scratched at my bedroom door, meowing and squeaking till I let him in, ten minutes later he scratched at the door to get out and another ten minutes later he scratched and meowed to get in again. When I let him in reluctantly and told him that this is not fun he first kept quiet laying on the blanket just till I fell asleep and then he started running around until he finally jumped onto the window sill and scratched at the fly screen (which fortunately is made of aluminum as I just wrote).
The rest of the night he spent outside in the hall.
I now understand why the resident cats in their initial impulse rejected the two newcomers. They knew that little cat boys can be quite annoying.
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Gandhi is not mentally disturbed, he has not ADHD, he is not traumatized, he is not psychopathic. He is just a little young cat who has to discover the rules and limits of cat society and the rules and limits of life in general.
Mia is a good mother and she has educated her kitten well. She never slaps Gandhi even if he is very unruly and rambunctious. She is a follower of the antiauthoritarian education style, quite understandable from her urban background.
Princess Min Ki grew up on a farm and has a more down-to-earth approach. As it seems that she will support Mia with the education of the little Gandhi boy he will probably be occasionally slapped if he doesn’t obey, Min Ki did that also with Cindy and Wendy.
I’m quite intrigued by the concept of antiauthoritarian education and I myself never slapped my own son Alexander. But I understand that one occasionally has to make compromises and that practical experience trumps ideology at any time.
Gandhi is okay, he is friendly and social, he is intelligent and a fast learner. He has learned a lot in the first three month of his life. He is always watching Mia and the other cats. Mia unfortunately is not a good mouse catcher, how could she be, when she grew up and was spending the first four years of her life in a flat in the city?
Showing Gandhi the tricks and trades of cat life in a natural environment will be the task of Princess Min Ki.
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Gandhi Jr. is a wonderful addition to the cat family. He was the most friendly and most playful one of Mia’s three kitten to begin with, fortunately the people who took his two siblings didn’t know that, otherwise they would have maybe chosen him instead of the black kitten. Gandhi is intelligent and reasonable, never scratches and never had litter box problems (a common behavior problem of cats which is also called euphemistically inappropriate elimination).
He protested, when I took the litter box away and I had to put it back again because he sniffed around and started scratching on the floor at the point where the box formerly was. So he got his indoor toilet again but when I saw him approaching the litter box I carried him outside to a place with loose soil where he could easily dig a hole to do his business. And when I was cleaning the box and he was watching (he is always around me and watching me) I complained angrily to him that this was completely avoidable because he could as well go outside to do his business.
Two weeks ago I had not time to clean the litter box for two days and when he realized it he went out by himself and since then doesn’t use the box anymore. Just as I write this I see him coming back into the house dripping wet after he went out into the pouring rain to pee. Even the adult cats rather would consider to use the litter box in such circumstances.
I also only had to tell him a few times not to sharpen his claws on the kitchen furniture before he stopped. I never saw a cat who was as compliant and insightful as he is.
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While I write this text, little Gandhi is sitting on my lap (this is now the normal state of things). I softly touch his head, which is about two-thirds the size of an adult cats head. A beautiful little head with a highly capable brain which despite its small size contains all the feelings, dreams, aspirations, and hopes of a sentient being.
And as I look at the little cat boy I have the lyrics of Pieces of Dreams in my head, one of the many marvelous songs Alan and Marilyn Bergman contributed to the great American songbook. I know this song only in the version of Sarah Vaughan, which is all what I need because I cannot imagine that anyone else will interpret this song as sensible and meaningful as Sassy (thats Sarah’s nickname) did.
This is not the most ingenious piece of the Bergman’s and the last lines of the lyrics are not as convincing as the start, it seems they ran out of ideas just before the end of the song. Compared with the crap that is presented by todays Hip Hop, Hard Rock, and Urban Contemporary stars it is still marvelous and if one compares it with the lyrics of Sondheim’s Send In The Clowns or other popular music standards it becomes very clear who the real masters of 20th century American music were.
Little boy lost
In search of little boy found
You go a wondering, wandering,
Stumbling, tumbling, round! round!
When will you find
What's on the tip of your mind?
Why are you blind
To all you ever were, never were,
Really are, nearly are?

Little boy false
In search of little boy true
Will you be ever done traveling,
Always unraveling you, you?
Running away
Could lead you further astray
And as for fishing in streams
For pieces of dreams,
Those pieces will never fit
What is the sense of it?

Little boy blue
Don't let your little sheep roam
It's time, come blow your horn,
Meet the morn,
Look and see,
Can you be far from home?
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The Blueprint for the Syrian Drama

Olga Chetverikova  Strategic Culture Foundation
It became clear recently that the West's former blueprint for Syria -- a conversion of Aleppo into the country's Benghazi and into a foothold for a sweeping offensive against the government forces -- was irreversibly defeated. Having done the due editing on their tactic, the Syrian opposition's curators remote-controlling the process from Paris, Tel Aviv, London, and Washington switched to a combination of 1st constant pressure meant to push Syria deeper into chaos by terrorists attacks, subversion, information campaigns, and externally fueled sectarian strife plus 2nd serious steps towards an undisguised intervention to be launched by NATO and a group of its Arab vassals. The point at the moment is that Syria's slide into a nightmare with no end in sight, perhaps culminating in a shocking episode like the seizure of the Syrian chemical warfare stockpiles by puppet international terrorists to add the final touch to the picture, should eventually provide a credible justification for an international military crackdown on Assad's regime.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague pressed the message on August 5 in response to the Syrian militants' taking hostage 48 Iranians, including women and children, that the country is sinking into a sectarian conflict and that the motivations driving the opposition groups across the spectrum mainly stem from their religious and ethnic rivalries. “It might only be a further collapse of the authority of the regime, bloodshed on an even greater scale...”, said Hague. In the language of the Western politics, airing alarmist forecasts is a traditional form of going public with the actual plan. “In the absence of a peaceful solution we will step up our support for the opposition, continue to deliver humanitarian aid and continue to intensify our work to isolate the Assad regime, its finances and its members, to make life as difficult as possible for it to operate”, pledged the British diplomacy chief.
Vivid illustrations of the current anti-Assad technologies pop up in the Western media. On August 5, The Sunday Times featured British photojournalist John Cantley's account of his captivity in the hands of the Syrian militants: in his words, those were a bunch of international Jihadists which counted in its ranks people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Great Britain, and Russia's Chechnya, and, oddly enough, no Syrians. It did not evade Cantley that 12 of the 30 in the crew were fluent in English, 9 of them speaking with a distinct London accent. Great Britain’s Foreign Office explained in the connection that the security situation in Syria calls for energetic international action.
Roughly at the same time, the Daily Mail published a paper reporting that Great Britain was supplying advanced satellite phones to Syrian militants. The handsets are normally used by the British special forces, and, according to the paper “the provision of training and equipment to the opposition means that British Special Forces are likely to be operating in Syria”. Appropriately widening the political perspective, the Daily Mail said that “the supply of the latest generation of handsets is part of the Foreign Office’s mission to mould militias into a coalition capable of governing the country.”
The US media similarly spill curious information on how aid is being fed to the insurgents in Syria. Up to date, arms supplies to the Syrian opposition were not officially authorized in the US, but those being dished out by the US allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) used to be an open secret. Seth Jones, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation and former senior adviser at US Special Operations Command, wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal issue that “Al Qaeda in Syria (often operating as the "Al Nusra Front for the People of the Levant") is using traffickers -- some ideologically aligned, some motivated by money -- to secure routes through Turkey and Iraq for foreign fighters, most of whom are from the Middle East and North Africa... Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has apparently sent small arms and light weapons -- including rifles, light machine guns, and rocket propelled grenades -- to its Syrian contingent. It has also sent explosives experts to augment the Syrian contingent's bomb-making capabilities, plus fighters to boost its ranks”.
The “death triangle” comprising Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar plays games in Syria in tight coordination with the CIA. The key roles in the concert are given to Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Muhammad Al Thani, the premier and foreign minister of Qatar in one, and to House of Saud member Bandar bin Sultan, secretary general of the Saudi Arabia's national security council and intelligence agency chief. In fact, Prince Bandar, an ambassador to the US in 1983-2005 who is accordingly well-connected in Washington, is both a central figure in the Saudi establishment and a man with a reputation of a top foreign influencer in the US. He is known to have poured money into the Nicaraguan contras, the mercenary groups in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Libya, and Chechnya, and his current support for the Syrian terrorists comes as a logical extension of the record. Suspicion runs high that Bandar was instrumental in organizing the terrorist attack which took the lives of four senior Syrian officials in Damascus last month.
While Saudi Arabia and Qatar at least nominally tend to stay in the shadow, Turkey picked the dirtiest part of the job vis-a-vis Syria, rendering outright assistance in the anti-Assad campaign, hosting the Syrian militants' camps, and maintaining their command center in Adana, at a distance of around 100 km from the Syrian border. The Turkish gift list to the Free Syrian Army is not limited to firearms and, according to NBC News, even featured a collection of 20 man-portable air-defense systems. An instruction penned by the US President seems to have placed the Adana center, conveniently located in the proximity of the Incirlik Air Base, under CIA oversight. The financial infusions into the Syrian opposition over the whole crisis period have approximately passed the 100 million US$  mark, though the fraction of the amount bankrolled in the daylight measures a modest 25 million US$.
Starting this August, the CIA and other US agencies have the President's authorization to engage with the Free Syrian Army in the aim of ejecting Assad, meaning that the transactions are fully legitimized. In late July, the US Administration set up the Syrian Support Group (SSG) to which the US Department of Treasury promptly issued a license to nourish the Syrian opposition, prop it up with information and logistics, and to offer it a range of further, otherwise illicit, services. The proportions of the financial package coupled to the plan are hitherto undisclosed, but the SSG already named nine Free Syrian Army committees to receive money for acquisitions and personnel pay.
Head of the non-profit Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) Mohammad Abdallah, a former Syrian opposition spokesman, praised the above measures as a way of upping the pressure on Assad, and Brian Sayers, a retired NATO officer who contributed significant lobbying to the SSG creation, explained that the arrangements would help boost the efficiency of arms supplies to Syria in comparison to what had been achieved by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He admitted that accounting for the end destination of every cent of the money thrown in would be problematic but expressed a hope that the Free Syrian Army would not forward any of the funding to marginal groups.
It is obvious at the time that the armed Syrian opposition disintegrates into an ever growing number of semi-autonomous formations, while its Wahhabi factions open about their Jihadism are gaining weight. The Free Syrian Army, partly run by defectors from the government forces, is already locked in a bitter dispute with the Syrian National Council, an assembly of Syrian dissenters long absent from their home country. The FSA aligned itself with the SSG as a political front and appears to be ripping the financial benefits of the leap of faith. The dynamics, on the other hand, left the campaign's Arab sponsors divided as the SSG is backed by Saudi Arabia and the Syrian National Council lives on donations from Qatar. In the meantime, Syria's branch of the pervasive Muslim Brotherhood distances itself from both and is about to unleash its own armed groups in the country.
The multiplication of the brands of militants in Syria serves to reinforce the impression that the country is overwhelmed and therefore makes it easier for the West to sell what is happening as a full-blown civil war. The time is coming to call a spade a spade and to unmask those who inspire the Syrian bloodshed as the nation is trying to survive the clash with the global evil.

Breaking Point

An illustrated version of this blog post is available on http://mato48.com/
Stable nonlinear dynamic systems maintain their status with a multitude of feedback loops. If negative outside influences or internal contradiction and inefficiencies threaten the system, these feedback loops will keep vital functions intact even if the system structure is already severely damaged. When such a system collapses the breakdown is sudden and catastrophic.
A short while ago I went to the statistics page for this blog (which I seldom do because it is somewhat pointless) and was astonished to see that most of the readers are from the USA.
Addressing this audience and discussing US related issues seems more than appropriate but beside this blogs US readership there are plenty of other reasons to take a look or two at the state of the United States, just to name a few:
A nation of superlatives
The USA is a nation of superlatives in many respects and a military superpower who is not shy to use force. US influence and control is felt everywhere and social, economic, technological developments in the USA have ramifications for the whole planet. In detail:
The US population, which is 4.4 percent of the world population, uses a quarter of the worlds resources. In other words, a US inhabitant uses in average 7.2 times more resources than the rest of the planets population. A detailed breakdown and a comparison by resources and regions shows even bigger disparities, for instance: A US American uses in average 350 liters of water per day, a West European 200 liters, an inhabitant from Sub-Sahara 15 liters.
The USA has the biggest military budget (711 billion US$, which is 41 percent of global military expenditures) and the Pentagon is with a workforce of 3.2 million the biggest global employer. The USA maintains between 600 and 800 military basis abroad.
The USA has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers and 71 nuclear powered submarines (more than all other navies together). The USAF and the Navy operate 5,000 aircraft, 2,200 cruise missiles, 700 drones, 500 LGM-30G Minuteman missiles with nuclear warheads plus 288 Trident-2 D5 missiles (on submarines) with nuclear warheads.
In 2011, the USA exported weapons worth 66.3 billion US$, which is 78 percent of the global arms market.
The USA has the highest gun ownership rate in the world (an average of 88 firearms per 100 people), US Americans possess between 240 and 260 million guns, roughly 40 percent of all globally civilian-owned guns.
The world’s most valuable corporations are based in the USA: Apple, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Google, General Electric, IBM.
Between 2007 and 2009, the profits earned by Wall Street firms increased by 720 percent, while during that same period, US citizens' home equity was slashed by 35 percent.
Mass foreclosures let over 18 million homes stand empty while there are three and a half million people homeless. Most major cities have banned feeding the homeless because they want to keep the cities clean.
More than 25 million US Americans are unemployed, the real unemployment rate (including the longtime unemployed and underemployed) is approximately 23 percent. 50 million (16 percent of the population) live without health insurance and yet US health costs are nevertheless the highest in the world. At least 50 million US Americans (by some estimates up to 100 million) are mired in poverty, panhandling/begging is common in US cities.
43 Million US Americans now receive food stamps (that is in a country which dumps nearly 100 billion tons of food every year).
Life expectancy of less educated whites is falling.
Outstanding students loans are one trillion US$, the default rate is 9 percent. Without a solid education there are no chances for a decent job, but paying for this education will enslave young US Americans to the banks for the rest of their life. Public education is starved to death with nationwide teacher layoffs and class size increases up to 60 pupils. State funding of higher education has plunged by 7.5 percent.
Blessed are the Forbes 400, for they shall inherit the earth.
The 400 richest US-Americans own more wealth than their 180 million fellow citizens at the bottom. Most of the billionaires on Forbes list come from wealthy families, 40 percent inherited enough wealth to make them millionaires or billionaires right from the start (so far about social mobility and the myth of the brave entrepreneur who makes his fortune just by intelligence and hard work.)
Only 10 percent of the blessed 400 are Women.
Why do they hate us?
As I mentioned already in the blog post Walking with Gandhi, the question “Why do they hate us?” is asked by nationalities, minorities, immigrants, aliens, and queer, eccentric, uncommon people all over the world. It is probably ask also by the more sensitive and thoughtful US citizens, which appear to be a sizable minority.
Many US Americans will not bother about alien opinions and still see the USA as “God’s great country,” as a force for good fighting against evil and bringing civilization to the undeveloped barbarian nations of the world.
Didn’t the USA bring them Hollywood films, Coke, Marlboro, supermarkets, fast food, Roundup ready, iPhones, iPads, and a lot of other things that make life worthwhile?
Isn’t it extremely ungrateful, that the USA despite worldwide humanitarian efforts is still not regarded as the shining light on the hill and that the American Dream is rarely shared by foreign nationals?
I avoid reading US mainstream media because their news reports are distracting and deliberately misleading. But I like to look every now and then at the cartoon collections on Daryl Cagl’s website. These cartoons are exploiting any imaginable prejudices and resentments in a cynical and arrogant way, they remind me somehow of German cartoons from the time before World War II.
To be fair, the cartoons in my home country put me off as well and if I contemplate this issue thoroughly I come to the conclusion and have to concede that US Americans are maybe just a little bit more arrogant, intolerant, egoistic, and greedy than my countrymen.
They are maybe only a little bit worse, one even has to consider that they are maybe not worse at all. Yet... They are for sure much more dangerous. They have guns, drones, jet fighters, and nuclear bombs.
A new survey conducted by the British research company YouGov for the Guardian found that the US reputation for upholding human rights, respecting international law, and being a beacon for democracy is at an all-time low.
78 percent of Pakistanis mistrust the USA (which seems understandable in the light of continuous drone assassination) but also 41 percent of Brits and 40 percent of French articulate mistrust. These results are probably still painting a much too rosy picture, people are polite and don’t wan’t to appear as grouchy and grumpy.
I live in a small country in the middle of Europe which usually is ignored by US diplomats or dismissed as an unimportant troublemaker not worth bothering with. There are no poll results about public sentiment towards the USA but I have not found anybody who has anything good to say about the remaining superpower.
Especially the persistent US pressure to bring GM-food on our tables has infuriated my countrymen. Public sentiment here is not anti-American, but it is solidly anti US American. US Americans are regarded as arrogant bullies, trigger-happy gunslingers, and slick con-men who use every dirty trick from the textbook of financial fraud and deception to steal and rob the wealth of other nations.
This is of course anecdotal, anecdotal out of necessity because until now nobody dared to conduct a survey here.
The US system in a nutshell
History tells it all! The USA was founded on the genocide of the native Americans (12 million), on the deployment of slaves from Africa, and on the violent conquest of land and resources (the western frontier, the territories seized from Mexico).
The Texan annexation and the capture of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah in the Mexican-American War was justified by the idea of Manifest Destiny, which was the belief that the USA had a God-given right, or destiny, to expand the country's borders from “sea to shining sea”.
Though Manifest Destiny never became an official dogma of US foreign politics, the belief in a special US American status (the shining light on the hill) and a mission to promote US style democracy and US social and economic organizational structures throughout the world, as expounded by Abraham Lincoln and later by Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, continues to have an influence in US political ideology.
The Marshall Plan, which in 1948 gave five billion US$ in aid to 16 countries, was by no means a humanitarian action, but a tool to gain influence and to put the receiving countries under pressure to abandon the nationalization of important industries. Truman was disturbed by the formation of British Railways and he wanted to prevent further nationalizations.
GATT, and the following FTAs (free trade agreements) like NAFTA, KORUS FTA, and the right now negotiated TPP all are imposing US economic rules and are the most efficient way to open up foreign markets to US exports. These multilateral pacts take away the sovereignty of the signatory states and hand it over to multinational corporations. 41 percent of US exports in 2010 went to 19 FTA partner countries.
World Bank, IMF (International Monetary Fund), and most UN organizations (ICC, UNHRC) are controlled by bureaucrats, that US diplomacy has selected, appointed, or approved, which means, that these international organizations impudently and unapologetic do the biding of the USA.
Another tool to promote US ideals are US funded NGOs (non governmental organizations) which often pose as humanitarian organizations. Prominent examples are: NDI (National Democratic Institute), Freedom House, International Republican Institute, GOLOS, Moscow Helsinki Group, Avaaz, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch.
One should not underestimate the power of US media, represented by Hollywood, by TV series (sitcoms, reality shows), by Reuters, Associated Press, Voice of America, New York Times and Washington Post.
As US media corporations aggressively expanded their reach, Anglo-American pop culture became the global popular culture. Music, fashion, visual arts promote the US-American way of life and with it the ideals of consumerism, competition, capitalism.
If all that still doesn’t achieve to sweep away native traditions and rules and open the targeted marketplace for US commerce and resource extraction, there is always the possibility to bribe local politicians or send CIA agents to conduct special operations, which is still not the bottom of the toolbox, because if bribes and special operations (assassinations) finally don’t do the trick, one can always send in the drones.
The US economy in a nutshell
The US economy is capitalism pure, based on (cut-throat) competition and self regulating markets. A capitalist economy needs to constantly expand, because otherwise the system inherent losses would bankrupt the economy. The losses are caused by the destruction of outperformed competitors, by market swings resulting in overproduction as well as scarcities, by lack of long time planning (no infrastructure investments and irresponsible exploitation of limited resources), and by the development and production of goods not according to necessity and demand, but according to profitability, purchasing power, marketing opportunities, and corporate strategic plans.
The latter point means, that unnecessary, unhealthy, even dangerous goods are produced, that demands are artificially created on one hand while basic demands on the other hand are not met, that the supply and the range of goods is geared towards the affluent.
This system undermines any kind of social contract and it doesn’t create sufficient funds for public services, because corporations and wealthy individuals use legal loopholes to reduce their taxes. Tax evasion is viewed as a legitimate action to counter government overreach. Between 20 and 30 trillion US$ are hidden in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Bahamas (Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan praised the Cayman Islands and called for making the USA a tax shelter).
The US economic system is not efficient, it can only be kept alive by constant expansion and ruthless exploitation. This is the worlds biggest pyramid scheme (or Ponzi scheme, or chain letter scheme, if one wants to call it this way) -- it will end terribly, but it should end as soon as possible, because every day this scheme goes on increases the damage and the later the breakdown, the more painful it will be.
Well, there is a real chance that the financial system will break down, because the USA is practically bankrupt. National debt has reached 16 trillion US$ and a fiscal cliff is looming.
53 percent of discretionary spending goes to the military, yet the military is needed to enable the cheap exploitation of resources and the trade of commodities to favorable prices.
The Federal Reserve is using “quantitative easing” (a financial tool that doesn’t help anybody except the banks) to unwind the toxic mortgage debacle and to buy fraudulent mortgages, fraudulent mortgage securities, and worthless derivatives with money created on a computer screen. This is deemed necessary because a great deal of the fraudulent paper has been purchased by pension funds and by nations that are important trading partners.
If this fraudulent scheme would unravel all the securities and derivatives would be worth nothing, the pensioners would be moneyless and international trade would stop. It would be the end of the worlds financial system and of world trade in its present form, it would be the end of capitalism.
Creating money on the computer screen is only possible because the US Dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and this fact means also that the USA has to prevent other nations to use different currencies for trading.
Until now the USA has been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States, then the exchange rate against the dollar increases, penalizing exporters. This has allowed the USA to create money without restraint, to buy imports and foreign companies, to fund military operations, and to ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy US American treasury bonds.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan). has already taken steps to replace the dollar as their reserve currency and the ALBA countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, Barbuda) have agreed to create a regional currency, the sucre, for intraregional trade.
Hugo Chavez has also repatriated some 160 tons of gold reserves worth 11 billion US$ from foreign deposits to shield the country from global economic turbulences.
China in tandem with the other BRIC nations has been secretly removing the dollar in bilateral trade agreements with numerous countries, among them the ASEAN trading bloc. In addition China has taken precautionary steps to prepare for a dollar economy breakdown since 2005, when the first Yuan denominated bonds were introduced.
Muammar Gaddafi planned to reduce the influence of IMF and World Bank (and by that also the influence of the dollar) with three ambitious financial projects: the creation of an African investment bank, an African monetary fund, and an African central bank.
This threat has been eliminated.
The US society in a nutshell
The US society is based on six pillars, which are: specialization, competition, individualism, exemptionalism, consumerism, materialism.
Specialization is necessary to handle the immense amount of accumulated human knowledge. Related issues are: information overflow, the extended mind (mental outsourcing). Specialists develop technologies in their area of expertise without being aware of the consequences for society as a whole and the ecosphere as a whole.
People who coordinate the specialists from various areas are either bureaucrats who have no clue, or politicians, military leaders, CEOs, who all have a narrow and detrimental agenda.
Specialization means also higher dependency on services and support systems. Food is not cooked but bought as ready made packages or as junk food from industrial food producers. Appliances are not repaired but replaced by new ones, home repairs have to be made by specialized craftsmen, do-it-yourself skills have declined.
Competition is the guiding principle not only of the market based economy but also of society as a whole. The workplace is trench warfare, everybody wants to climb up the career ladder and elbow his/her way to the top. Watch your back, choose the right friends, but don’t trust nobody.
The Wall Street Journal recommended nine rules women should follow:
  1. Work hard
  2. Do work no one else wants to do
  3. Cultivate the people in charge
  4. Know what you want and go for it
  5. Promote yourself legitimately
  6. Network with your peers
  7. Make your own career
  8. Leave to get ahead
  9. Dress well and play golf
This are commonplaces and shallow clichés, yet the list paints a telling picture of US mentality and workplace climate.
The urge to compete makes cooperation on any level harder and it is a severe hinderance for labor unions, for alternative movements, for local initiatives.
Dissidents compete with each other for media coverage, alternative media organizations and blogs compete for donations and are pushing out posts on hot topic issues in the attempt to get more readers. One cannot blame them, they grew up in this special climate of competition and it has become a part of their personality -- competition is in their blood.
Individualism leads to the atomization of family structures and the dismantling of the social contract. Individualism and competition are closely linked. Everybody is on her/his own.
Exemptionalism means: Manifest Destiny, the shining light on the hill, God’s chosen people. Educating the barbarians outside the USA, giving them helpful advice (and if they don’t take that advice, sending in the drones).
Consumerism: US consumers spend 44 minutes a day on shopping, Christmas shopping takes 42 hours in average. This doesn’t include online shopping times.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota has 520 stores with 230,000 square meter retail space and is visited by 40 million shoppers annually.
A Stanford University study in 2006 concluded that compulsive shopping is a legitimate disorder that affects approximately six percent (18 million) of the US population.
Materialism: Money is king, humans are valued by their wealth, not by their character; to gather as much possessions as possible is the supreme goal.
The US political system in a nutshell
The checks and balances among the three governing branches have collapsed and the power and influence of the same MIC (Military Industrial Complex) that Eisenhower warned against in 1961 have come to pass. The administration ignores court rulings (NDAA, Guantánamo prisoners, body scanners, FDA pollution rules), and refuses court orders to hand over documents, citing National Security reasons.
There is no transparency and accountability, the dealings of the administration are shrouded in secrecy and all important documents are classified. Whistleblowers are harassed and persecuted.
Bribery is legitimized and institutionalized, it is called lobbying. Every member of congress has 26 lobbyists on his/her heels. Driving through the country in a campaign bus doesn’t cut it anymore, candidates for political positions need to buy advertising. In this time of information overflow the candidates need a lot of money to get heard and most of this money comes from companies who belong to the MIC (Military Industrial Complex).
The candidate with the most campaign money wins the election and US Americans in general think that this is just fine. The Supreme Court ruling Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission was not a watershed, it was only another step to enable the unlimited bribery of politicians.
Governments hire industry professionals for their private sector experience, for their influence within corporations that the government is dealing with, and to gain political support (donations and endorsements) from the corporations.
The companies in turn hire politicians who are not reelected or have quit by themselves to gain personal access to government officials, to achieve favorable legislation, win contracts, and get insider information.
This is called the “revolving door” principle.
US Democratic Representative Dick Gephardt left his congressional post to become a lobbyist and his lobbying agency Gephardt Government Affairs Group earned 7 million US$ in 2010 from clients including Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc., Ameren Corporation, and Waste Management Inc.
The function of US media
Mainstream media is controlled by big corporations, who of course push the corporate agenda (which is: No regulations and taxes and free rein to exploit the planet for every potential resource, leaving death and destruction behind).
The TV networks are owned by:
General Electric: NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Universal, Telemundo, hulu
Time Warner: CNN, TNT, Headline News, Turner Classic
Disney: ABC, ESPN, Lifetime
Rupert Murdoch: Fox, Sky, Premiere, National Geographic
Sumner Redstone: CBS, Viacom, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central
TV, together with Hollywood, presents a virtual world, a world of illusions that not too often corresponds with reality. TV depicts a world, where consumerism, globalization, steady economic growth, and the replacement of natural systems with our own artificial constructions can go on forever without negative consequences.
On TV the superrich become good samaritans (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the Rockefeller family), political leaders are first and foremost concerned about the welfare of the people, and corporations are forces for good, guaranteeing prosperity for all.
In the last years, TV became backed up by internet media (YouTube) and social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google+). Despite the possibility of real time interaction there are seldom meaningful discussions, the public discourse is conducted via catchlines, slogans, buzzwords.
This is the age of soundbytes and short attention spans, the trend towards the banality, simplification and trivialization that the advertising industry developed and propagated is now prolific throughout society. Complex issues are merely commodity forms and reduced to brand identities for sale in the market place.
What is left of the left?
The remaining individuals who are not sedated and brainwashed by the non-stop propaganda of corporate media and are still able of critical thinking gather in small activist groups and try to form local initiatives.
They sign petitions, they try to organize public protests (Keystone Pipeline, OWS), they let off steam in segregated corners of the internet (blogosphere, dedicated Facebook and Twitter accounts, comment sections of alternative media outlets).
Many continue to believe that the USA is still a functioning democracy with a few flaws that can be fixed just by electing the proper candidates into important positions.
Many assume that the mounting environmental and social problems can be solved without a significant change in their lifestyle. They are ready to start a revolution, but not by revolutionizing their own life. They believe in a smooth transition to a new and better society, they believe in the vision of a “Green Economy”, where setting up the right companies and buying the right goods will solve all ecological problems.
The vision of a Green Economy is probably a pipe dream because the USA cannot even maintain its present infrastructure with 150,000 bridges in need of repair or enlargement and one-third of the roadways in substandard condition. Half of US households have no access to rail or bus transit. When a storm knocks out power lines the customers have often to wait for days till they are reconnected to the energy grid (this would be unthinkable here in Europe).
How can anybody assume that the current US political and economical system will be able to manage the costly transition to a Green Economy when not even the present structures can be kept in working order?
US Americans drove an estimated 4.6 trillion kilometers in 2011, only three percent less than in 2007. US car dealers sold 1.19 million cars, trucks, and SUV’s in September 2012, a 13 percent increase from a year ago and the highest sales rate in four years. This is in stark contrast to Europe where new car registrations sharply declined (18 percent in France, 26 percent in Italy, 37 percent in Spain).
The beneficiaries of the car sales boom btw where Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen. Sales of GM and Ford were basically flat.
People lined up in front of Apple stores to get the new iPhone 5. Initial sales were lower than expected but rather because of supply problems than because of weak demand. Technology analysts predict, that the product ultimately could bring more than three billion US$ into the economy by the end of the year. Samsung’s Galaxy S 3, the iPhone competitor, is also selling well. The combined smartphone sales of both companies rose 43 percent in one year.
The sales of smartphones, already present in more than half of US homes, and tablet computers, found in one-third of US homes, are expected to drive annual consumer electronics sales to 206 billion US$ this year, which would be a growth of 5.9 percent.
Consumer spending increased 3.3 percent in 2011, US consumer credit grew at an annual rate of 8 percent and total consumer borrowing as reported in August now reaches 2.72 trillion US$.
What does that mean: It means, that the US consumer is having a party at the expense of the planets ecosphere and despite the fact, that it is already early in the morning the US consumer doesn’t want to go home because he/she knows that after this party they will have to endure the excruciating pain of a terrible hangover.
Send in the clowns
(Send in the clowns is a song by Stephen Sondheim from his musical A Little Night Music).
It is amazing to see, how intelligent and on the surface seemingly rational US Americans still take sides for the incumbent in the forthcoming presidential elections.
I presented my opinion already in the post Words of limited importance and don’t want to repeat myself, I only want to point to Michael J. Smith’s well written and witty blog “Stop me before I vote again”.
Actually, a few additional ideas and corresponding old ideas in new formulations may not hurt, so here they are:
Not voting will delegitimize the system and send a signal to fellow citizens who still have not got it.
If you really want to vote because you believe in democracy and want to dwell in the illusion that you had your say and you could make a difference, vote for a third party candidate (Stein/Honkala, Barr/Sheehan, Lindsay/Osorio). Voting for a third party candidate will also send a signal, though it is the second best option.
Voting for Mitt Romney is not a good option but it is still better than voting for Barack Obama. Romney may be excellent in robbing and steeling, he may be an expert in hostile takeovers, tax evasion, and restructuring companies to death by layoffs, but he is not as good a liar and deceiver as Obama. Both are “confidence men” but Obama is the more gifted one.
Electing Romney would make the dysfunction of the system more apparent and would make it easier for the left (is there a left left?) to leave the Democratic Party behind.
Voter registration drives understandably are failing for Democrats, but Obama is outspending Romney on TV ads and has reportedly twice as much campaign cash as his Republican rival.
Mitt Romney made so many mistakes until now and performed so poorly that one has to asked, if this could be a fixed game? Have the plutocrats (the permanent government) after Obamas grandiose performance in his first term decided to use him another four years, is the election campaign just a staged spectacle to confuse, nauseate, sedate the population?
Lately I’m not so sure about this possibility because Mitt Romney surprisingly won the first of three televised debates with President Barack Obama, polls and analysts say. After the 90-minute duel focussing on taxes, the deficit, and healthcare, polls gave Romney a 46 to 67 percent margin with Obama trailing on 22 to 25 percent.
Maybe Romney is not such a bad performer as it until now seemed and it took him just some time to adjust his style for a new audience. In his old job he needed to fool investors, but now he needs to fool the broad public, which has a significant different psyche.
Debates though never had much impact on election outcomes. No candidate who was leading in the polls six weeks before the election lost the popular vote since Thomas Dewey in 1948.
Was this just another fixed round of the game to make the race more interesting again? WWE-wrestling in politics? Both candidates are performers and US politics is about performance, not about ideas or ideals. The blessed Forbes 400 have hedged their bets and they will win in either way, in the end they will get the best performer as president to sell their politics to the population.
But why then this gigantic sums of campaign money? The presidential elections will cost 2.5 billion US$ and the total cost of US elections in November (for the presidency, House of Representatives, and Senate) will be 5.8 billion US$.
For the ruling elite this is money well spent, because it distracts, sedates, misinforms, brainwashes the population. Critical issues are not debated, the current social and economic system is never critically examined, is not questioned and challenged.
The fallacy of  “lesser evilism”
At the end of September Rebecca Solnit posted a piece on TomDispatch.com, where she is a regular contributor. The article was titled: “Rain on Our Parade: A Letter to the Dismal Left,” and it tried to drum up support for Barack Obamas reelection and to dismiss criticism against his policies.
Her piece used a rich vocabulary and included a multitude of popular quotes and idioms but in the end it was nothing than a long and tiring tirade, a stream of clichés and platitudes. Rebecca Solnit is a gifted writer and though I not always agree with her I appreciate her writing alone for her skillful use of language. But this piece was not skillful at all and I was amazed how a talented writer could so profoundly fail to deliver.
I have seen that before when otherwise excellent journalists and bloggers tried themselves as Obama apologists and the phenomenon can be easily explained: When one has to excuse the inexcusable (murder, warcrimes, betrayal, lies and deception) and explain the unexplainable, so much working memory computation is needed, that there is not enough brain capacity left to maintain a brilliant writing style.
I was interested in the public reaction to this article but as there is no comment section on TomDispatch I visited Common Dreams, which usually republishes Solnit’s articles. Her piece was there, together with 728 comments, which was probably a record breaking response and enough material to gauge the mood of the audience.
The reactions were predominantly negative and most times more skillful and witty than the article itself. When the article was not worth reading, the comments were and therefore I have to give Solnit at least credit for creating an opportunity where progressives (alternatively also named as liberals or “the left”) could express their true sentiments.
A few excerpts from the comment section:
I am always astonished by the mental gymnastics and rhetoric which twists in the wind while saying nothing valuable.
Kind of tortuously hard to follow the many comparisons in her logic, but I bet it came real easy to Rebecca. So go to bed now all you dismal, complaining, bitching, punishing, condemning, bitterness poisoning, premature surrenderist "radicals obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else" (say what?) and think long and hard about what it really means to value truth, and to distinguish on-going victories from minor differences, (you know like "voting for the killing of children, as opposed to voting for the protection for other children or even killing fewer children", see -- it gets easier...) Stop raining on this parade of pragmatic and imperfect victories and terrorizing people with threats of Che pedicures.
Ms. Solnit's cliche filled essay complains about the cliche of the lesser of two evils, because she must admit that she has hitched her wagon to Obama's stairway to heaven and declared the slaughter of Muslim children OK because "thousands" of American children will do better under Obamacare.
Ms. Solnit can go through life with her rose-colored glasses afixed to her pollyanna head -- and maybe she even sleeps well at night since she clearly doesn't give a thought to Obama's war crimes -- but I prefer critical thinking.
We judge what evil a person is capable of doing, not by the occasional good things they do, but by the worst things they have actually done, and on that count, Obama has no scruples, ethics, or moral constraints that I can see or understand. He is a cypher behind all his lies. I don't know what motivates him, other than a quest for power (for what end, I don't know) and personal gain for himself and his family. I don't know what his underlying values are, but I do see, in his behavior and policies, how carelessly and easily he craps all over values I rate very highly.
And your (Solnit’s) fear-mongering rings hollow so long as you cannot point to any possible policy which Romney endorses that you would not be just as willing to excuse or overlook if Obama implements it as you have all his previous crimes and misdeeds. You dismiss lesser-evilism as a cliche but what better explanation can you offer for how you could have been brought to scribbling apologetics for a president who has consistently operated to the right of Nixon?
In explicitly endorsing the more effective evil, Wall Street's Trojan horse, you (Solnit) are collaborating in war crimes including drone murders and illegal coups, in the shredding of the constitution, and in the wholesale violation of human rights. You are co-conspiring in blanket amnesty for financial fraud, in rigged trade pacts, in the subversion of national sovereignty, in welfare for the sickcare rackets, and in the coming austerity and destruction of Social Security.
I don't appreciate being chastised for pointing out that atrocities are atrocities, and maybe should actually be taken into account when casting a vote for someone.
It's a manipulative article, or, I should say, that it attempts to be, as most posters here are not taken in. What strikes me about it is its dishonesty. Like other Obama supporters on this site, she should just admit that she doesn't really care about people being murdered in other parts of the world. 
Quislings like the author of this piece and her loyal defenders, coupled with those in the White House sipping on their double mocha latte while measuring human life in terms of ‘collateral damage’ sickens me.
I'm not bitter that Obama proved to be a lying lackey of the plutocracy. It just means I'm done with him.
Why do you want a war criminal reelected?
No authentic leftist considers the Democratic Party remotely worthy of salvation or reform. As Chris Hedges noted recently: "Obama is not in charge. Romney would not be in charge. Politicians are the public face of corporate power. They are corporate employees. Their personal narratives, their promises, their rhetoric and their idiosyncrasies are meaningless. And that, perhaps, is why the cost of the two presidential campaigns is estimated to reach an obscene $2.5 billion. The corporate state does not produce a product that is different. It produces brands that are different. And brands cost a lot of money to sell."
Solnit's campaign is naive and counter productive. And she does not seem to understand -- or care -- that the difference is in "brand" only.
This is an insipid piece. I bet she thinks Gore's cap and trade is progressive. And if she doesn't get the connection between 'empire' and what happens in the homeland, she is not very bright.
Makes you wonder how much character and what type of principles this writer has. I'm sure Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon and George W Bush did some good things also.
As fascism becomes increasingly overt here, many people, especially those among the professional class, mired in the type of mindless careerism exalted via capitalism, are driven deeper and deeper into denial, as they have a great deal of themselves invested in the illusions of the current poisonous sociopolitical systems... therefore, the 'system' to them, although marred with a few minor blemishes, (!?) is basically fine.
The worst part is that these paranoiac people will once again accept ever last thing and lie Obama throws at them, NDAA Sec 1021, increase in spying on them, kill lists, unconstitutional wars, drone killings, etc.
Thank you for taking a proud and declarative stand on one side of history's great moral imperative, on the side of imperial fascists, comfortably-ensconced in your own liberal-elite veal pen. I'm surprised and terribly disappointed that such spineless moral relativism comes from Tom Dispatch.
Many who visit this site (Common Dreams) live in the only developed country that does not have a mainstream, national non-right wing party to vote for (the US). And then on top of that predicament, if they intend to refuse to vote for one of the two mainstream right wing parties, they come upon this lecture at one of their favorite sites claiming they are bitter and impractical. In other words, metaphorically speaking, they get a slap in the face.
Obama didn't get elected because of some populist movement. He got elected because of the slickest marketing campaign of 2008. The corporatocracy loves him, maybe even more than they love Romney.
Nice attempt to pacify the dissenters, but it does not convince. I know it is not possible to not participate in evil in this life; I know we are corrupted by the corrupting influences of the world around us and simply saying we "don't believe" in the evil doers who run our nation does not free us of our share of responsibility... I know, I know... but still. When there is one shred of free, liberating action we can take, that is, to CHOOSE to not participate in this one, simple, symbolic act (voting or not voting in the two-headed one party system), some of us will take that freedom and hold it. Yes, go ahead with your lesser evilism if you must, comfort yourselves with your nose-holding practicalities... but don't ask us to refrain from our “self-righteous positions" when you won't refrain from yours.
All the above is intelligent, well said, pointed, and a pleasure to read, yet it has to be seen, if the outcry of a small group of disillusioned dissidents can eventually be transformed into a general paradigm shift of US society.
This may happen or not, but no matter what, it appears, that the breaking point that I referred to in the title of this post and the nature of which everyone who has read the post attentively will be able to easily guess, will soon be reached in anyway.
Finally, as a proof, that even non native speakers of English can have a small repertoire of clichés and popular idioms at their disposal this one:
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst (which in this case curiously could be the same).
Peace!
P.S.: Some readers will wonder why I risk alienating my main audience by posting such a massive criticism of the USA. Please take into account, that this blog is not about competing with and outperforming other bloggers, it is not about gaining as much readers as possible, it is not about publishing some good feel phrases that are acceptable for everybody who steps by.