The History of Democracy

First of all, I'd hardly consider myself a raging leftie, but only as modestly left-leaning. Just because I think young-earth creationists and climate change deniers are lunatics and that George Bush's invasion of Iraq was misguided and at least partially based on lies doesn't make me a member of the socialist alliance. I'd say the road to a fairer world is primarily through electoral success with the odd protest along the way rather than violent revolution. This is evidently the core of most modern leftist movements in developed countries at least. The right is, despite everything, quite similar. Sure they sometimes run a slicker propaganda machine (cough 'Fox News' cough) and the odd Norwegian Christian fundamentalist might go on a rampage, but neither side differs too wildly on their political methods. Overall violence is rare and the public discoure, however vitriolic, is generally decent.

The developing world is sometimes dramatically different. The recent Arab Spring has a definite populist tone. From Tripoli to Damascus people have called for the overthrow of brutal, often decades-old totalitarian regimes. The situation is of course complicated and varies by country, some of those regimes have long been backed by the US (Egypt) or are the result of earlier 'populist' and 'anti-western' revolutions (Libya) but every Arab country that has seen violent protests and civil wars of late has been fuelld by people power. The idea of 'the people' rising up against a dictator to create a newfound democracy is of course brilliant, but often carries a lot of baggage which can take generations of progressive change to eliminate. Even the founding fathers of the United States, who fought against King George III with all the passion of Libya's tribes and Islamists against Muammar Gaddafi, kept the draconian institution of slavery in their newfound country and more than a century would pass before women and ethnic minorities would attain equal rights, such as suffrage, with the rich, white, racist, tax-evading old men who founded America. One must not expect the Arabs to embrace democracy overnight, it took Europe two world wars and half a millenium to get it only kinda right. The Arabs haven't really done too bad a job so far when you think about it.

There was a time when the 'developed' countries of the world went though their own, and often far bloodier, periods of violent revolution. These have occurred from both the left and the right. The English Civil War in the 17th century would have to be one of the earliest examples, when the Parliament won the penultimate battle with the English Monarchy after centuries of power struggles. America and France were among several countries who endured similar revolutions in the late 18th century. By the beginning of the twentieth it looked like democracy was the way of the future. The world's most affluent countries were all relatively democratic and liberal (Britain, France, the US) or getting there (Germany, Italy) while Europe and Asia's old monarchies were in various states of decline (Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, China). However, democracy came too late to save Europe's masses from the meat-grinder that was warfare following the industrial revolution. The sense of superiority European leaders inherited from centuries of colonial conquests was to be their undoing.

The aftermath of WW1 shattered the old imperial order. The Imperial governments of Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey collapsed and by 1920 it has been said that if you stood on the French border with Germany and looked east, the next country you'd see that was functioning effectively was Japan. Even in the more liberal west huge changes were brought about, most European Nations as well as the US gave women the vote after the war and talk of 'empire' became taboo where it had not just been excepted, but downright expected, a few years before. Nearly every country in the world took a dramatic turn to the left and nowhere was this shift more dramatic than in the old Russian Empire, which collapsed into five years of brutal fighting between the Communist 'Red Army' and the most conservative and disparate 'White Army' and its western backers, before it would be reformed in the 1920s as the Soviet Union. The trenches of the eastern front had instilled in much of the Russian populist a sincere anti-capitalist fanaticism that makes Fox New's inherent bias look genuinely 'fair and balanced'. In such a climate democracy, the best hope for populist revolutions, never stood a chance against such power-hungry individuals as Joseph Stalin.

Not everywhere was this shift to the left permanent, it was often made fleeting by anti-communist movements that had arisen out of the ashes of the old Imperialist regimes. In Italy Benito Mussolini's fascists soon became that Kingdom's 'saviours' when they, with the backing of Italy's elite, kicked out the Communists in the 1920s despite the latter movement's widespread support. This would later contribute to the Italian military's low morale and abysmal performance during WW2. Spain underwent a similar civil war in the 1930s, and Francisco Franco's wise decision to keep Spain out of WW2 kept his regime alive well into the 1970s. Only in Germany were the old imperialist dreams so successfully reawakened by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. The lessons of the First World War, argued Hitler so passionately, were not that Imperialism was a bad idea but that a lack of Nationalist pride on the part of the German people, especially those 'vile Jews' and other untermenschen, had led to disaster. He rapidly prepared Germany's second bid for superpower status. Japan, also a rising industrial power, had similiar ambitions and a not so dissimilar worldview. Other factors such as the high unemployment and despair of the Great Depression only heightened global tensions further.

Thus, the stage for the Second World War was set. Whereas the first had been basically an imperialist struggle, a markedly right-wing affair declared and waged by rival, affluent power brokers and fought by the poor and working class from many nations, the second was fought along very different ideological lines. Instead of Imperial Germany in 1914 being scarcely different from the somewhat more democratic British Empire or poorer Tsarist Russia, the three countries by 1939 were ruled by radically different regimes whose power extended from fundamentally different ideologies and worldviews. The western world was basically politically centrist, a mix of corporate dominance, popular elections, military-industrial complexes and universal suffrage and education. Fascist regimes such as Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain leaned dramatically to the right, mocking the weaknesses of democracies and openly calling for the extermination, rather than the empowering, of the 'weaker' individuals of society. The Soviet Union, and later its communist acolytes around the world, from China to Cuba, leaned dramatically to the left calling for an end to the old Bourgeois system and a new world order emphasizing cooperation over virtually all forms of competition.

The Fascists had learned nothing from the First World War, and it would take the utter devastation of their homelands in the second to curb the more brutal political aspirations of Nationalism, racism, Imperialism and Colonialism once and, hopefully, for all. The Communists, blinded by the horror of the war to the importance of freedom alongside equality, had initially learned their lessons too well. Their social engineering and even more so their political repression in pursuit of their ideology would devastate the lives of millions over the next half century. Meanwhile the west, for all its flaws and eccentricities, had taken a much wiser course, and usually managed throughout the 20th century to navigate the narrow political path between blatant right-wing nationalism and full-blown left-wing socialism, something largely made possible by their relatively free and fair democratic systems.

The more recent political landscape of the 21st century seems harder to read, perhaps because we currently lack the obvious benefit of hindsight. The western world has in some ways moved further to the left. Increased spending on social programs, from public education to universal healthcare, social security to environmental preservation, indicates a continuing shift to the left. However the growing power of corporate interests and the widening divide between rich and poor evidences a shift back to the right. Only a few years after the collapse of most die-hard, supposedly left-wing governments with the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991, a new generation of political polarisation, with growing extremes on both the left and right, seems to be emerging.

The current global financial crisis has certainly accelerated this process and curbed the growth of democracy over the past few years. Like the great depression in the 1930s, the economic turmoil of the 2010s may be looked back upon as one of the catalysts of major ideological conflicts in subsequent decades. While over the past two years there have been tentative signs of economy recovery, notably the dropping of the US unemployment rate from 10% in October 2009 to 8.3% at the start of 2012, these may turn out to be illusory in the long run. The income gap is still growing, promised reforms of the world's financial system to prevent another 2008-style collapse have not materialized, the cost of living in nearly every country is rising sharply and, perhaps most worryingly in the long run, the global debt crisis has worsened dramatically and no real solution is in sight. The bottom line is that the structural problems in the world economy that caused the crisis have not been solved. It is possible, I daresay even likely, that any apparent 'recovery' in the world economy in the next few years will prove fleeting and that by 2020 a second great depression may hit for real. Could the next step truly be a Third World War?

How to harness the Occupy Wall Street movement

A single angry rant by a little known on-air business news editor (and may I say, an absolute nutter) named Rick Santelli on CNBC on February 19th 2009 effectively gave birth to the Tea Party movement. Within 20 months it had morphed from a series of disparate protests into a political and electoral juggernaut. It ended up dominating the 2010 midterm elections and not only handed over Congress to the Repulican party, but scared its leaders so much the Republicans now find themselves wedged into an ideological gap so tight even most of Ronald Reagan's policies wouldn't fit. Similiarly, when a Tunisian fruit vendor, even more of a nobody, named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17th 2010 half the Arab world was soon thrown into violent revolution. Like many revolutions, in both these cases a single widely visible spark ignited an inferno of political and economic tensions that had been simmering for years.

Occupy Wall Street began on September 17th 2011. It was prompted, oddly enought, by a Canadian activist group called Adbusters and over the last few months has spread to hundreds of cities around the world, especially in the United States and Europe. While the Adbusters campaign and the initial demonstrations in Zucotti Park in New York were the spark that ignited it, mountaing economic tensions and continuing political deadlock in Washington are what have sustained it.

The protestor's greviances are numerous and, in my opinion, extensive and largely justified. Five mintues of research on the internet evidences just how vast the wealth gap in the US has become. An excellent article on this complete with detailed charts and graphs can be found here-

http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

It is interesting to compare the scope and views of Occupy Wall Street's to its far-right cousin the Tea Party. Rick Santelli's rant didn't come from nowhere, it was sparked by the Wall Street Bailouts which started under George Bush (though you'll rarely see the Tea Party or their allies on Fox News admit this), the Obama stimulus package and the massive blowing out of the federal deficit from the second half of 2008 onwards. The economic blows the United States has taken recently have greatly shocked its population and deeply divided political opinion on how they should be fixed. This has, even when the Democrats controlled the Whitehouse and all of Congress from 2008-2010, led to bitter political partisanship which only worsened once the Republicans took over the lower house in January 2011. Congress's approval rating, which was already in the '20s before Obama took office, has now plunged to around 10-12%, a new record low and a far cry from the 40-60% approval it enjoyed towards the end of Bill Clinton's term in office.

Public frustration at this reversal in the fortunes of the American economy is inevitable, but the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have become fired up for often widely varying, and in some cases directly opposing reasons. Of course both these movments are diverse. The right has been criticising Occupy Wall Street since its inception for having a vague message. On the O'Reilly Factor a few weeks ago a guest described the protests thus, 'I think if you put every single left-wing cause into a blender and hit power this is the sludge you'd get.' OK fair enough. But how many times have you seen Tea Partiers ranting on about Obama's birth certificate? Or the ground zero mosque, Bill Ayers, the EPA, planned parenthood, NPR funding, Obama's 'Tsars' and a dozen other nonsense 'controversies' proudly manufactured on Fox News, the latest of which is the 'Solyndra' scandal. All of this nonsense of course served the purpose of maximising Republican turnout at the 2010 midterms, and it almost makes me wish Democrats would better coordinate their efforts to stir up similiarly crazy outrage on the left.

Bill Maher, who I'm a big fan of, wittingly summed up the situation last week-



The most astonishing thing about the Tea Party these last two years has been how much power it has been able to wield despite its approval ratings with the general public varying between mediocre and abysmal. Here Gallup records the movement's rise and, lately, its fall-

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/tea-partys-approval-rating-drops-to-new-low-new-gallup-poll/politics/2011/08/10/25290

As can be clearly seen, no more than 30% of American's ever approved of the Tea Party's political doctrine and actions, with most remaining largely impartial. It seems that, ouside of the thick shell of super-hardened bullshit that surrounds Fox News, the vast majority of Americans are basically sensible people and understand that whatever 'class warfare' and 'redistribution of wealth' is currently occuring in the US is primarily directed by the richest 1% against the poor and middle class, not the other way round. On a sidenote, here's Jon Stewart's summary from a few months ago of some of the most notable lies Fox has espoused since Obama became President-
(I apologise for the poor quality, videos on the Daily Show's website aren't available in Australia)



The Occupy Wall Street demonstators on the other hand have gained widespread support, consistently scoring a higher approval rating than the Tea Party in polls over the Past 6 weeks. Of course with the movement still in its infancy this could change, but the vast majority all Americans have expressed sympathy with their views-

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/13/poll-occupy-wall-st-much-more-popular-than-obama-tea-party/

Anther interesting article here lists the major differences between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Its obviously from the point of view of an Occupier, but I think a majority of Americans would agree with most of this list-

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/15-major-differences-between-occupy-wall-street-and-the-tea-party-protests/question-2245857/

Notable is how relatively populist and grassroots the Occupy movement really is. This contrasts with how quickly the Tea Party was hijacked by the corporate right-wing media way back in 2009, with any genuine concerns they had about government bailouts of the rich and ballooning deficits quickly turned into a crusade against the usual hyped-up straw man threasts posed by socialism, atheism, environmentalism and political correctness. However given how timid most Democrats have been in supporting left-wing causes in recent years, it is unlikely that Washington insiders will be running the show where Occupy Wall Street is concerned compared to how warped the Tea Party's goals have become. The Wall Street Bailouts prompted the formation of the Tea Party (i.e. the government's initial response to the problems poised by the global financial crisis) while Occupy Wall Street's response has been more delayed, and it only appeared once efforts to solve the United State's deficit problems stalled with what little was accomplished with the deficit reduction deal congress passed several months ago. This could be taken as a further sign of the movement's grassroots authenticity and its embodiment of people's immense frustration with Washington.

As for who is to blame for the massive debt the US currently owes, this chart lays things out quite clearly-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Revenue_and_Expense_to_GDP_Chart_1993_-_2008.png

As can be seen, at the end of Bill Clinton's term in office US federal government spending was only 18% of GDP while 21% of GDP was taxed, creating a large budget surplus which would have been very handy in paying off the debt as Clinton had started to do. Yet by the start of Obama's term in office in January 2009 the amounts of GDP spent and taxed by the federal government had reversed, with spending now at 21% of GDP and taxes at only 18%. That's a reversal of 6% of GDP or about $800 billion thanks to two wars, the continuing expansion of entitlement spending and massive and unnecessary tax cuts across the board. Then towards the end of 2008 the global financial crisis hits and combined with stimulus spending (40% of which was Republican tax cuts by the way), taxation decreases further to just 15% of GDP (yeah, because Obama's a socialist who increased taxes...?) while spending, mainly due to increased unemployment benefits and welfare spending due to the soaring unemployment rate, increases to 24%. This is again an increase in the annual deficit of 6% of GDP which is only partly Obama's fault, and had he been able to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich at the end of 2010 and end other tax breaks as he's been urging congress to do for the past three years we wouldn't be in as dire a fix as we are now. Mostly for these reasons I'd maintain that the Occupy protestors have much more valid complaints to make about the actions of Washington and Wall Street over the past decade than the Tea Party's hype. While I'd agree that entitlements need to be reformed, the US's budget woes are overwhelmingly more a revenue problem than a spending problem. Over the past two years we should have passed a deficit reduction deal similiar to Ronald Reagan's in 1982, which was made up of about 80% revenue increases and 20% spending cuts. Don't belive me? Have a look at this-

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-budget-deals-of-reagan-bush-clinton-and-obama-in-one-chart/2011/07/06/gIQA98w11H_blog.html

The tenacity and dedication of the Occupy protestors, peacefully resisting forceful actions by governments to disband their encampments, has likely gained them more public support then they've lost due to the messy and violent manner in which the protests have sometimes been broken up. A dissenting voice to this view is George Will (a notable right-leaning media personality) who said something strange the other week-

“I wish for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators a long life and ample publicity, for two reasons. I think they do represent the spirit and intellect of the American left, but also I remember the 1960s. We had four years of demonstrations like this leading up to 1968, when the Nixon-Wallace vote was 57 percent, the country reacting against the demonstrators and the Republicans went on to win five of the next six presidential elections.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/george-will-occupy-wall-street-represents-the-spirit-and-intellect-of-the-american-left/

Personally, I think this is fantasy. It is another example of how distorted a worldview the Republicans really have. Are they really still blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on a bunch of dirty hippies complaining about it back at home? Does George Will not realise that support for the Vietnam War plunged from a modest 52% in August 1965 to a dismal 28% by May 1971? Also that Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and even George Bush Snr. were idealogically about as right-wing as say, Barack Obama?

At the moment, the Occupy Wall Street movement is at a tipping point. Since the protests began in September many cities across the US have begun running out of patience with the demonstrator's continued presence. Just this week in several cities, notably Oakland and Atlanta, local governments have broken up the encampments by force, not without casualties. Often this use of force has been justified by saying that the protestors have 'made their point'. While the doggedness of the protestors has largely been a virtue until now, the public could tire of the 'occupying' theme before long, especially given the sheer inconvenience to local residents some of the larger protests have entailed. The question however, is how can the movement continue in a form that doesn't heighten tensions with the authorities further but isn't seen as a retreat and the end of the entire campaign?

I'd suggest taking a leaf out of the Tea Party's book and taking their campaign model to heart. Married with genuine populism, it could alter the nature of public debate in the US over the next few years even more dramatically than the Tea Party has over the last two. Lets take a look at what they did-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_from_America

Emulating the example of the Republican's 1994 midterms victory, which was notable for its 'Contract with America' championed by then Republican congressman Newt Gingrich. In 2010 the Republicans did it again with their 'Contract from America'. It is notable for its simplicity, how extraordinarily far-right its positions are, and the grassroots process by which it came about. It started with the creation of a website in mid-2009, just a few months after the Tea Party began, where any Tea Party activists could make suggestions for the 'Contract'. After a few months of this, during which the it received significant press coverage, hundreds of thousands of people had voted on the suggested ideas. Finally, with the cooperation of various conservative advocacy groups and Republicans in congress, the most popular ideas were presented at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010 and voted on, leaving a list of the top ten which were soon basically adopted by the mainstream Republican Party and continue to be the basis for their policies today.

That my friends, is how you get things done in a democracy. Protesting can be very useful in getting a point across, but without proper coordination even a politically popular movement can struggle to get off the ground. It is also notable that during and after this whole process and leading up to the 2010 midterms Tea Party protests continued nationwide (culminating in the 'Restoring Honor Rally' in Washington D.C. in August 2010), so don't worry, there'll still be plenty of opportunities to protest against corporate greed in future. If you go to the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page (which by the way recently passed 100,000 likes) one of the notes on the page, titled 'Demands' lists just that, a list of demands that appears to have been written up by a rather small group of activists. At the bottom of the note it urges you to 'Demand and Distribute' the list. This method of doing things seems completely backwards, people should not be being asked to distribute those demands, but to contribute to them.

I'd suggest organising, starting right now, a major Progressive Political Action Conference early next year. Just as the Republicans are nominating which lunatic candidate they want to take on Obama next November, progressive activists countrywide can be voting on a platform for the Democrats and, hopefully, President Obama to embrace later that year. Just as the Tea Party formed their own Congressional Caucus which after the midterms came to include 62 members of the House and 4 senators, Occupy Wall Street could either form its own 'Occupy' caucus of expand the already existing Progressive Caucus. In the meantime we should be taking votes, hopefully with millions of people participating over the course of a few months, on what concrete policy objectives Occupy Wall Street seeks to achieve. The 'occupation' of city centre's across the county needn't end completely, but can take place intermittently. Occupy them on the weekends for instance, camping overnight from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. The Tea Party over the last two years has staged its biggest protests, with tens of thousands of people attending in some cities, on Tax day, April 15th. We need to choose a day, or several days, for the Occupy protests to flex their muscle fully over the next year. May I suggest September 15, the anniversary of Lehman Brother's collapse in 2008? Or August 27th, the day of the Republican's National Convention next year? All that is needed is several days next year when millions of Americans can briefly occupy every major city centre in the country, and even more importantly 'occupy' the attention of the media and everyone in Washington.

One thing everyone supporting Occupy Wall Street should remember is that this isn't quite the Arab Spring. The US may have fallen to 17th place on the Democracy Index behind the Czech Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#2010_rankings, but it is still, despite the hype, a full democracy. A people's revolt may be quite badly needed against Wall Street, the tax-evading rich and their cronies in Washington, the military-industrial complex, the Pharmaceutical lobby, the Prison-industrial complex and the political paralysis in Washington. But revolts needn't be violent, lets give the political process one more chance shall we? And this time, without Wall Street and Washington hijacking and running the show, maybe we can get some serious things done. We need to send out a message to Fox News, the Republican party and every other anarchist conservative stain on the American dream today. Lets make them end up regretting how far they've pushed the American people, and hopefully Occupy Wall Street will be looked back on by historians as a genuine once in a generation people's revolt by the dispossessed many against the despotic few, before things got too out of hand and the United State's risked slipping into a state of stagnation and decline.

Top 10 Real Time with Bill Maher Monologues

Since I started watching his show in mid-2010 Bill Maher has been my political hero. Forget Michael Moore or even Jon Stewart, Maher gets my vote for the best pundit on American television.

If you've never seen his show 'Real Time with Bill Maher' it airs on HBO Friday nights at 10pm. It isn't broadcast in Australia however so I've been watching it from a few different sources. You can download the audio of every episode here http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/real-time-with-bill-maher/id98746009

Otherwise http://www.mediaite.com/ usually has some of the highlights from each week's show and there are plently of good clips on youtube.

Maher ends his show with a segment called 'New Rules' which he uses as a platform to analyse and satirize American politics and culture. His monologues are often outrageously funny and absolutely spot-on. Enjoy!


10. On the usefulness of the Republican Party (4.6.11)

 

9. On global warming skepticism (4.6.10)

8. On the innaccuracy of think tanks (20.10.06)

7. The American people's love of socialism (29.7.11)

6. Most Americans are dumb and uneducated  (4.9.09)

 

5. On France's system of government (4.5.07)

4. Stupidest State in America competition (highlights) (28.5.10)

3. Democrats are the new Republicans (19.6.09)

2. Bill Maher as a Tea Bagger (23.4.10)

1. On the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (26.3.10)

30 seconds of Social Networking in 50 years time

Wrote this up on a whim, it's a short story that briefly covers some of my thoughts on where social networking, the internet, technology and culture in general are headed. Its very compact so read the notes at the end.

‘This game sux’ Anh Dung thought*. Within seconds over 50 likes had appeared beside the text of his thought that had just appeared in his public display.*

‘Wot u playing?’ Radena, his on-again off-again girlfriend for the last month*, asked. Anh opened up Radena’s visual screen*, he could see she had her VR goggles on too and was sitting on a train, it looked pretty packed, he didn’t bother checking her tracker* to see what line she was on. Her online tab* was private at that moment too, she might have been looking at porn* but he couldn’t know for sure.

‘COD VR3*’ he replied.

‘Y’s it suc?’ Radena asked, she opened up Anh’s VR tab and saw that in the game he was running through an underground corridor, he had Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ playing loudly, over which screams and explosions could be heard in the distance.

‘Its got the same glitch as the last game, when ur firing the flamethrower in the rain the raindrops drop right through it’

‘Instead of evaporating?’

‘Y’. ‘Hey’ he added, ‘is that Marziya sitting beside u?’

‘Y’ she replied, she turned her head around slightly so Anh could see Marziya sitting on the train’s window seat better.

‘Can u ask her if she wants to play COD later?’

Anh didn’t bother opening Radena’s audio screen to hear what they said. He could see Marziya turning to face Radena and her expression as Radena asked her. After what seemed like an age to someone used to people sharing their thoughts almost instantaneously she got back to him.

‘N, she’s got tutor’

‘VR or R?’*

Again the wait.

‘R, y?’

‘No reason’

Mohammed chimed in on his earlier thought, ‘I don’t think the flames r hot enough to do that dude’. 20 people instantly liked his status.

Anh, still busy killing Nazis with the flamethrower in the VR game, opened another tab and queried Wikipedia’s problem solving program*. A second later it came back with the answer. Anh linked it to Mohammed, who he could see by opening up his screen was at home in his dining room plugged into his old Flexi. Opening up Mohammed’s VR display it looked like he was sitting in the virtual audience* of some TV talk show Anh didn’t recognise.

‘Here dude, Wikisolver says they should evaporate’

‘Wikisolver’s rubbish, never trust anything that’s free’ Mohammed replied.

‘Ur right, I don’t trust your mum’. Over 100 people liked this, Anh guessed he didn’t even know half of them. Probably random Sudanese kids who’d only had the internet for 6 months*.

Mohammed’s stress meter* spiked slightly, he blocked Anh’s last comment from his parents so they wouldn’t see it the next time they logged in.

‘Whatever’ Mohammed said, then closed his tab to Anh, who had just burned a virtual Goebbels to a crisp.

Radena sent Anh a private message ‘wanna come over tomoz?’

Anh didn’t skip a beat, ‘Y’ he replied as he stepped over Goebbels flaming corpse.*

Radena opened both their schedules and saw he was doing nothing after 5pm the next day. ‘Come by my house about 7?’ she asked.

‘Y’ Anh repeated.

She opened up Anh’s VR game and blew him a kiss. Anh felt it gently on his lips as he ducked behind a wall.

‘C u’ she said.

‘K’ Anh replied as he leapt up and fired the flamethrower directly into Hitler’s face. The Fuhrer screamed in pain before the game ended and a message came up congratulating him on having won the Second World War within his record time.

Anh took his VR goggles off and stood up from the chair in his bedroom he’d been sitting on, he could smell dinner cooking.

*Why bother saying things out loud? Already scientists can tell very broadly what someone is thinking about (or at least how they’re feeling about something) by scanning their brain and seeing what areas exhibit different amounts of activity. Give it 50 years and mindreading technology should be all the rage. The massive potential downsides I won’t cover here though.

*More people online, more time spent online, ergo I think the experience will be a lot more intense and a lot more of whatever ‘likes’ evolve into will be bandied around. Here his 'public display' is just a general name for what could be his Facebook wall.

*I imagine life will be a lot more fast-paced and flexible, including relationships.

*In this case Radena’s ‘visual screen’ is a display of what she is actually seeing (or would be seeing if she wasn't wearing what I have clumsily called ‘VR goggles’, no doubt the next Steve Jobs will give them a fancier name then that). So what I mean by that is that there is a small camera in her goggles facing forwards, looking out at everybody else on the train. We already have CCTV cameras on trains and people can video chat over their laptops on Skype, no doubt they’ll soon have penetrated every aspect of our lives.

*Already people frequently update their location on their facebook status, why not just share your location with select friends all (or most of) the time so they can check where you are anytime?

*Her ‘online tab’ is what she is looking at online through the goggles. There would be displays in front of her eyes whose layout probably won’t change dramatically from computer screens today.

*Give it 40 more years, girls will be looking at porn too, I guarantee you. Equality’s a great thing.

*(Call of Duty Virtual Reality 3)

*Virtual Reality Tutor or real life tutor, the two have become less obviously separable

*Wiktionary, Wikileaks, Wikifashion, why not another Wiki? We already have Wikianswers where users can submit and answer questions. In this case ‘Wikisolver’ is a program that does the same thing but acts as an advanced search engine, where, instead of merely searching for a word or phrase, you ask it a question, even quite a complex one, and it will scour the internet looking for a good answer. This next step in cyberspace should make us even lazier then we are now.

*We already have chatrooms, we can have VR audiences to live TV shows too. ‘The Daily Show’ might in future have 200 people in its studio audience, 5,000 people in its VR audience (who might perceive that they are sitting at a seat in the studio and are displayed on a screen behind the audience or something, though they’re not really there as a hologram or anything, that’s Star Wars you’re thinking of) and millions more merely watching the show on their computers (TVs are already becoming obsolete).

*The internet will eventually spread to Africa’s youth, 20 years ago no one though China would have hundreds of millions of internet users by now.

*Stress meter. Already having health insurance and wearing seat belts in compulsory and millions of people wear glasses or braces. How soon before people have medical devices implanted in their bodies to constantly monitor their health to make sure they’re nice and healthy? This could be greatly expanded upon. Maybe I’ll write some sequels?

*Graphic video game violence, now completely indistinguishable from the real thing in Virtual Reality. Suck on that concerned parent’s councils!

Why did Dubya invade Iraq?

I have honestly been wondering for the last 7 years now why George Bush decided to invade and occupy Iraq. After much consideration and looking at both mainstream and fringe conspiracy theories, here are my thoughts and conclusions.

-You need to learn Saddam Hussein's, Iraq's and the Bush's background. Then the reasons why Dubya invaded become not so much a mysterty - as an obvious repeating of history.

Here's the little known life story of Saddam Hussein (born 1937). In 1959 and then again in 1963 he participated in CIA supported coups against Iraq's government (which had itself overthrown the country's old monarchy in 1958 and had grown quite corrupt) the second of which succeded. He eventually became Vice President of Iraq in 1968 and was considered a bulwark against communism by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s (along with many other brutal dictators now considered the US's greatest enemies). He oversaw many programs which modernised Iraq and by the 1980s had brought electricity to nearly every corner of the country and hugley increased its literacy rate, up till this point he was actually a pretty awesome guy.

Then in 1979 he finally went badass, he forced his boss to resign and executed hundreds of members of the government, giving positions of power to those loyal to him. He'd also pissed off the Soviets in 1978 by cracking down on local communists, so he was actually sorta friends with the west until the 1991 Gulf War pissed them off too. He also pissed off the Kurds by not giving them their independence and fighting a war to keep them Iraqi and never stopped pissing off the muslims because he was far too secular, under his rule women were actually given many rights in Iraq and it was the only arab country in the Middle East not run by Sharia law.

One group he hadn't pissed off was the French, who helped him start building a nuclear reactor before the Israelis bombed and destroyed it in 1981 (they were very pissed at him too).

Finally he pissed off his big eastern neighbors the Iranians. In 1979 the US backed Shah of Iran was overthrown in an Islamic revolution (quite similiar to the way US-backed dictators are being overthrown throughout the Arab world today) and Saddam saw his quite secular rule was threatened by the growing influence of the fundemantalist Shi'ite muslims (plus he and the new Iranian ayatollah went way back to the point where the two men absolutely couldn't stand each other). Skirmishes over border disputes between Iran and Iraq started a full 10 months before Saddam invaded the country in September 1980. He was supported and financed by not only the Arab states but also the US and Europe (the only country that didn't jump on the bandwagon was the USSR, which remained neutral).

Of note was that Iraq's new found 'allies' conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Iranians and Kurds and his attempts to get nuclear weapons, a fact of history George Bush neglected to mention when he warned of WMD's in Iraq in 2002. In fact many of the chemical weapons Saddam used were supplied to Iraq by West German companies.

In 1988 Saddam launched the largest chemical warfare attack on civillians in history against thousands of Kurds in the north of the country to terrorize the population further. The US, it appears, was fully aware of the attack but to save its credibility (the US government couldn't, of course, be seen by the world to be supporting such acts of terror) blamed Iran for years afterwards. It was only in the late '90s that they reversed their position and were able to point to the attack as an example of 'Iraqi terrorism' to try and justify their invasion. Talk about an Orwellian government.

In 1988 the war, which claimed well over a million lives, finally ended and Saddam found that his country's pockets were desperately empty of cash. He'd borrowed so much money off his Arab neighbors and the US that rebuilding his country's smashed infrastructure would have taken many years, however he still had a powerful military left over from the decade of war with Iran and had a firm totalitarian grip on the country,so to him the solution must have semed obvious- invade Kuwait.

Kuwait refused to forget about the $30 billion Iraq owed them, plus they held about 10% of the world's oil reserves (about as much as Iraq) with only a tenth the population, and so it was not long before Saddam was gauging the US response to a possible invasion.

Ronald Reagan had given Iraq more than $40 billion in the 1980s, partly to fight Iran and partly as bribes for Saddam to not turn to the Soviets. This aid had made Iraq the 'third-largest recipient of US assistance' in the world at the time and convinced Saddam that the US would not sacrifice its close relationship with him for the sake of Kuwait, which also happened to be the most anti-Israel and Soviet friendly regime in the Middle East. Saddam promptly invaded and annexed the country.

The US (specifically President George Bush Snr.) took several days to make up its mind how to respond, there were many pros and cons to US retaliation. If the US stood by then the Gulf states (Saudi Arabia has been the US's bitch since the 1940s, oil makes you very attractive in the eyes of industrialised western nations) would get very nervous that Iraq was doing to them the very thing they'd bribed Saddam for 10 years to prevent Iran doing. The price of oil would also go up dramatically (Saddam needed to sell it at a higher price to pay of his country's debts and rebuild its ruined cities) and Britain, would you believe it, had billions of dollars invested in Kuwait that had just gone down the toilet.

Bush decided to 'liberate' Kuwait and before long had unleashed the most awesome can of whoop-arse anyone has ever unleashed on anyone else EVER and kicked the Iraqi's ass so hard that the country never really recovered. Saddam's stunning defeat after a decade of war and oppresion (either supported or ignored by the US, mind you) saw rebellions start all over Iraq which Saddam even more ruthlessly suppressed. Of note is that this 'liberation' of Kuwait saw the reinstating of its old monarchy, with women in Kuwait not getting the right to vote in democratic elections until 2006.

All throughout the 1990s the place was never really at peace, either Saddam was executing someone or the Americans and British were bombing someplace or the UN was knocking on the door demanding to inspect the Iraqi's weapons (Saddam often slammed the door in their face, something he probably regretted later when the US cited his lack of co-operation as a justification for war, it did make people wonder if Iraq really did have WMD's). All throughout the Bush's and Clinton's terms in office they were trying to come up with a way to overthrow Saddam without turning the whole region into a disaster area or upsetting their constituents and voters back home. You could compare Iraq in the 1990s to Libya today, lets hope that doesn't escalate into a ground invasion.

The sanctions against Iraq hadn't worked (Iraq was so reliant on oil exports that only humanitarian aid prevented the whole country from starving, think the Gaza strip today but worse and 20 times larger), the bombing was just embarrasing the US and hardening the Iraqi's resolve and the Muslim world was growing more extremist and anti-US by the day. At one point in the year 2000 Saddam did something a little crazy and ordered that Iraqi oil was to be sold in Euros instead of US dollars, unlike every other OPEC country since WW2 and much to the chagrin of the US government and a helluva lot of big oilmen.

Then along came 9/11.

Finally the US had, if not a real justification, than at least something they could sell to the fearful and bloodthirsty American public as a justification, for removing the ugly Iraqi blemish on American pride, credibility and honor (snort!). Bush decided to kill three birds with one stone by removing Saddam and neutralising the negative publicity the long-term standoff was causing (think how much credibility the Israeli's lose every year blockading and bombing the Gaza strip) as well as removing Saddam as a real menace (which he no doubt was, we can at least thank Bush for executing someone as ruthless as Saddam, even if he and his buddies got away scot free after having supported him for decades, and if Saddam was never really a threat to the western world) while exploiting the panic in the US caused by 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' to boost his own standing and that of the Republican party in general.

Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech, the invasion of Afghanistan, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the sudden vilification of Muslims and Arabs (to this day in most American's minds they are the same thing) and the passing of the USA patriot act (all in late 2001 or 2002, the year between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq) are all examples of the Bush administration either exploiting the American populace's panic or an actual part of that panic (its kinda hard to tell). These however, turned into mere stepping stones to an oppurtunity Bush decided he couldn't miss to resolve the situation with Iraq.

He decided to lie (at worse; greatly exaggerate at best) and say that

- Iraq had or was developing WMD's
- Saddam planned to use them in acts of terror against the US
- Saddam had links to Al Qaeda and 9/11
- The Iraqi's, who'd endured a decade of US sanctions and bombings, would greet the Americans as liberators

After swallowing all this the US public, still reeling from 9/11, was thoroughly convinced that doing anything but invading Iraq would be a grevious error that could lead to another 9/11 or worse. 80-90% of the populace initially supported the war, but a few years and some tens of thousands of coalition casualties later, that number eventually dropped to about a third, as did Bush's approval ratings.

This sums up I think, the most likely reasoning behind the invasion. Its all about scapegoating, just as witches are still burned today in the Central African Republic whenever there's a bad harvest. Bush had a problem, the standoff with Iraq, and the means to solve it, the way the American people rallied around him as soon as he declared the War on Terror. All he needed to do was somehow connect them. However the problem was that everyone basically knew straight away that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda has been responsible for 911 and that Saddam Hussein, despite how happy he may have felt when the news reached him, had no connection to the attacks whatsoever. In the end Bush decided to tell the world the aforementioned lies, all of which eventually became unstuck.

Think of it using a modern day example - the Israelis know that every Palestinian they kill in Gaza or the West Bank causes them to lose a hell of a lot of international support and further tarnishes their reputation, whether they're actually killing real insurgents that are trying to wipe out the state of Israel or shooting down innocent bystanders hardly matters. This was just the sort of quagmire the Americans had gotten themselves into when they decided to vilify and kick Saddam out of Kuwait without bothering to invade all the way to Baghdad. They needed a solution and after 911 they found one.

I'm going to make a prediction here, that the next time a suicide bomber kills 50 people in a busy Tel Aviv marketplace the Israelis will immediately do a George Bush and try and use the implications of the attack to their advantage. Its a greater priority to blame it on who they want to blame it on before they actually look into who did it. Be aware if this happens, it will probably be operation Cast Lead all over again, and this time the Israelis might try and stay for the long haul as the Americans so foolishly and disastrously did in Iraq. I also don't want to sound biased against Israel and America here, other countries and factions do much the same thing. Dictatorships especially can get away with it. In fact one of the best things about the democratic system is it usually prevents this kind of conspiracy from happening. Bush's invasion of Iraq though is just one colossal example that is all the more stark because it shouldn't be possible in a modern democracy. No wonder so many people, myself included, fear that fascism is becoming the norm in the US.

Was it a noble lie?

I'm not the kind of idealist who demands a perfect world. Whenever I encounter someone who claims to have strict 'principles' that they always abide by, I of course ask this old question. If you were in Anne Frank's house in 1942 and the Nazi's knocked on the door and asked if she was home, would you lie? Similiar questions can be matched up with other principles people claim to have, like never killing/torturing another human being. That doesn't mean by the way, that I approved of the Bush administration's use of torture. It didn't work (it DID NOT lead to the US getting Osama Bin Laden by the way, look it up) and thousands of often innocent people have been subjected to harsh treatment in places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base since 2001. But that's a slightly different issue.

In this case, I don't think you can call it a noble lie. I think Bush partly made the decision based on what would benefit him and his party, not the country and the world as a whole. He considered looking tough on terror more important than actually trying to solve the problem. In a way you can't blame him, politicians acting this way has been an evident failing of American democracy for quite a while now, just look up 'mandatory minimums' and the state of America's prison and legal systems. He just took it further, its the deeply corrupt system that needs to be fixed. This is why I'm starting to become convinced America,  someway, somehow, is going to endure a revolution against the corporate fascism that has been dragging it down for almost half a century now. Things will continue to get worse until that happens.

Other points worth mentioning-

-I hardlymentioned oil

Although Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was motivated by oil money, the US in 2003 was not in an economic state anything like Iraq in 1990 (though these days it almost is). Neither was George Bush more inclined to invade Iraq for oil simply because he was a 'Texas oilman,' a point I think many people make far too lightly. Looking at Iraqi oil production today (which is just beginning to recover now around 2010) most of the companies extracting it are either Iraqi or Chinese (although BP is there), making it unlikely that the original US plan was to invade the country and get rich off its oil, despite how simple and attractive an idea this is to swallow. It is likely a factor, especially considering the Iraqi shift to Euros in 2000, but had that not happened it would hardly have changed the dynamics of the situation too much.

-The military-industrial complex?

It is true that more civillian and defense department contractors operate in Iraq and Afghanistan than there are coalition soldiers. Several hundred thousand have been employed since the start of these two wars (although admittedly most of them have been Iraqi or Afghani). No doubt some companies have made billions from the wars (Blackwater Worldwide comes to mind, since it received several major contracts from the Pentagon that weren't offered to any other company. It's recently changed its name by the way, its new title is the far less provocative 'Xe'). In total US defense spending has just about doubled since Bush came to office in 2000 from $300 billion to $700 billion and much of that goes straight to large US armaments manufacturers and into the pockets of their CEOs. High level corruption and secrecy? Almost definitely. A conspiracy to drag the the US into unwinnable and costly wars to make profits? Perhaps, but only as a secondary considration at the most I think, not the primary one.

-Geopolitical grand strategy

Some have said that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a larger, far more long-term plan. Afghanistan, they point out, is right smack-bang in the middle of Asia between Russia, China, India and Iran, four of the US's greatest potential rivals. Iraq also, is near Turkey, Russia and Iran and its occupation could be thought of as asserting US dominance of the Middle East. 'Defending' Saudi Arabia and ensuring the continued hegemony of Israel in the region are possible goals of the US. This vein of thought is stressed by some 'experts' like trends forecaster George Friedman. I think it may have some merit to it, but it does make the old line 'when something has occured either due to incompetence or conspiracy, go with incompetence every time' come to mind.

Why Australia should end mandatory detention

Have you driven across the West Gate Bridge (in Melbourne) lately? You'll no doubt have noticed the suicide barriers that they've been building along both sides of it for the last few months now. These things have cost $20 million and are supposed to prevent people jumping off the bridge to commit suicide, and you know what? They'll no doubt work. Once they're finished we'll be able to say goodbye to the days when every three weeks someone was jumping off the bridge to their death. Mission accomplished yes?

Actually, no.

Some 2,500 suicides occur in Australia every year. So about one in a hundred of them occur on the West Gate Bridge. I can guarantee you that, while suicides off the bridge will stop, suicides off the Rialto, or along train lines, or in someone's garage with a gun or a piece of rope, will take up the slack (no pun intended). That $20 million would much more wisely have been spent on mental health programs or something else that might actually make a difference, and not just appear to be making a difference. You could go so far as to call it a flaw in our democratic system.

So, how's this tie into detention?

Mandatory detention as a deterrent to asylum seekers has historically failed and it wasn't until the Howard government started offshore processing and other even harsher measures that a serious drop in asylum seeker numbers seemed to occur (at the very least its controversial). But basically, if we reintroduced such policies, then that might stop the boats right? So mission accomplished yes?

Again, no.

There are more than 42 million displaced people worldwide. Including 16 million who've fled not only their homes but their home country and are recognised as legal refugees. About one in a thousand flee to Australia. I can guarantee you that building a giant concrete wall topped with automatic lazers, motion sensors and patrolled by man-eating sharks would keep out refugees just fine, but then some other country will inevitably be hosting the few thousand refugees that we've abandoned. The billions of dollars we spend deterring desperate refugees would much better be spent on foreign aid, charity and actually trying to solve the root of the problem, not just creating the illusion that 'stopping the boats' to Australia will actually acheive anything. We are a neighborhood of people lobbying to erect those barriers on the bridge above us, at a huge cost to ourselves, without thinking of the international implications, like what happens to the people living under the bridge the next suburb over.

This is why the UN originally wrote up the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Its a global issue, and just like how individual countries putting tariffs on foreign goods disadvantages us all in the long run and how climate change can only be dealt with if everyone pulls their weight, individual countries having harsh policies on refugees just exacerbates the overall problem. Its a global issue, like how having a central authority to maintain order (the police) or respond to emergencies (fire department) is more efficient and effective in a community than individuals trying to deal with widespread disaster themselves. On an issue like this, we should aim to maximise, not minimise, cooperation, and we should condemn our government for pandering to the selfishness of the One Nation mob just to win elections. Unfortunately, hate sells better than cooperation. 'Stop the Boats' fits on a bumper sticker, while the entirety of the reasoning required to make any major decision doesn't. Asylum seekers in this country are indeed locked up for political reasons, not sensible ones.

But wait, what's that you say? If we open our borders, then people will stream in and take all our jobs, live off the dole (what both at once???) and marginalise our culture?
I basically agree, we need sensible immigration laws, but let us not forget we are talking about refugees. Just as no one wants to grow up to commit suicide, no one wants to grow up to be a refugee. If someone comes here by boat and is found to not be a refugee, than yes, kick them to the back of the line. But if they are, as 80-90% of boat people are found to be, then let them in after a short stay in detention (remember, there used to be a limit of 273 days when the policy was introduced in 1992, but Keating removed it in 1994) for medical checks, then house them in the community and give them the chance to live and work here, maybe even learn English, without being behind barbed wire while their status is verified. Even if they are found not to be refugees, if they behave themselves, then we should at least consider giving them the benefit of the doubt. Every other month we hear of suicides and riots in detention centres, we don't need to stand by and watch this happen.

Also, to put things even more into perspective, as of 2010 there are worldwide about 2,887,123 Afghan refugees alone. Surely a significant portion of them are currently lounging about on Christmas Island? Well if you don't count the 1.74 million currently in Pakistan, the 1 million in Iran, the 30,000 in Germany, the 24,000 in Britain, the 10,000 in Holland, the 8,000 in India and the 6,000 in Austria, then yes, a significant portion of desperate, persecuted Afghanis who've lived through 30 years of civil war are living in Australia, 5,654 to be precise.

But isn't it dangerous for boat people to come to Australia?

Is it particularly dangerous? To return to the West Gate Bridge analogy, do we live under a particularly low bridge from which many people will survive the fall and horribly maim themselves? (ok, so the analogy is starting to get a little flimsy) Surely even the perilous journey to Australia is less hazardous then living in a refugee camp in war-torn Pakistan or in a decrepit migrants camp in Malaysia? I remember Andrew Bolt's rant on MTR after the Christmas Island boat tragedy last December, in which at least 30 people died. According to him, the government had 'blood on its hands' for not going to greater efforts to turn back the boats. But again, this returns us to our earlier point. Nobody wants to be a refugee. This is the rough equivalent of someone running out under the bridge after someone has jumped and survived, and is now in horrible pain, and pointing at them and shouting out 'this wouldn't have happened if the barrier was up there!' Yeah of course it probably wouldn't have, but that would do nothing to solve the root problem. That dying person could just as likely have jumped off another bridge and survived, or shot themselves in the head in such a way that they didn't die. No way of seeking refuge in another country is going to be completely safe, and again this doesn't at all tackle the bigger problem.

So that's my reasoning, that's why refugees should be welcomed with open arms. We are helping desperate people, not dole-bludgers. This really ties back to an old cleche that still rings true. 'Is it theft if a man steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family?' Answer: no (for all reasonable intents and purposes).

Scapegoating asylum seekers by arguing they are somehow ripping us off is politically advantageous to some, just as blaming witches for the plague or a famine sometimes helped people consolidate their power centuries ago (or today in the Central African Republic). Don't forgot that shock jocks are fine with lying and exaggerating if if improves their ratings and garners them fame and fortune. Ask yourself this question, why is Andrew Bolt one of the most famous journalists in Australia? Is he a genius? Is he a brilliant writer or a bold reporter? Not really, he's just more willing to lie than most journalists. Same with Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, Richard Nixon, Tiger Woods and Pinocchio. Although in the lattermost's case I'd say he was in fact one of those 'starving people' and so had something of a right to lie.

You can't suicide proof a city and you can't refugee proof the world, attacking the root problems in both cases is all you can hope to do. For let us not forget we are, afterall, all citizens of the world.

Things that are causing the stagnation of America

INTRODUCTION

I spent a few nights researching and writing up my thoughts on the subject of the apparent and ongoing decline of the US. I've been looking at quite a few facts and figures and I've gotta say, its difficult to say how the Americans aren't stuffed. They haven't got a hope in hell of paying off their astronomical national debt in the forseeable future, and meanwhile a whole lot of other things are just going from bad to worse for them.

So - enjoy!

P.S. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and some of the things on it overlap a little, but I'd love to hear any serious critiques of it.

The 11 things I've listed here are in rough order of significance. Also, i expect number 9 with receive the most serious criticism, I'll agree that that one in particular is debatable.

1. Fighting the ‘War on Terror’

Since 2001, 2463 coalition soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan (1582 of them Americans) and since 2003, 4770 (4452 of them Americans) have died fighting in Iraq. Tens of thousands of US servicemen have also been wounded, many with blown off limbs and other grievous, permanent injuries. Hundreds of contractors and other personnel have also been killed. Total Iraqi fatalities have been estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands and Afghani fatalities in the tens of thousands. The financial cost of the two wars is estimated at about $1.15 trillion as of July 2010, or 1% of the USA’s annual GDP for most of the past decade (or about 4% of its government budget). Take into account future costs like veteran's pensions and medical costs stemming for war injuries, funds required to replace worn out equipment and other costs then the final bill might be as high as $3 trillion dollars.

Currently US fatalities in Iraq are down to a handful a month as most of its military has already withdrawn from the country. In Afghanistan the story is very different, with coalition deaths on course to reach 700-800 for 2011, about the same as 2010, and no end to the escalating conflict in sight. By 2015, when American forces might have largely left the country, several thousand more fatalities and hundreds of billions of dollars will probably have been spent.

As well as the physical and financial costs of fighting the ‘War on Terror’ there has been a serious decline in America’s international standing, both amongst our allies (particularly in Europe) and our enemies (the Muslim world hates us more than ever). When America is looking for future co-operation and favors, European countries and nations like Turkey, China and Russia are now far less likely to trust it and accommodate its demands. At the same time the number of ‘terrorists’ emerging in the Middle East and elsewhere from George Bush’s actions has almost certainly made us far less safe. To call launching and continuing the war a mistake is an understatement, to say that it has exhausted, shaken and divided the nation to the core is not.

2. Spiraling costs of Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/other welfare programs

The combined costs of social security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar government programs now exceed $1.5 trillion a year. While these programs provide enormous benefits to millions of people (half the elderly population no longer dies in poverty, as it did before social security) their costs are growing far quicker than the nation’s economy as the population ages, grows fatter and finds it increasingly hard to bother finding work in an increasingly bad jobs market.

Many proposals to ‘fix’ social security and these other programs have been proposed such as privatization or raising the retirement age. These efforts have often been stalled for the simple reason that no one wants to hear the logic behind them. Talk about changing social security has long been a ‘third wire’ in American politics where neither party dares to tread. Another way of putting it is that most US politicians understand the reasoning that by trying to change these programs they'll be upsetting so many people that it would greatly shorten their term in office. The passage of 'Obamacare' in 2010 goes a long way to introducing universal healthcare and bringing down healthcare costs, but it still largely leaves in place a badly broken system.

Whatever happens, something substantial will have to be done about these programs or before long they’ll be costing the same amount of money as all the taxpayer revenue the government collects alone, leading to even larger annual deficits in their federal government's budget.

3. The cost and influence of the military-industrial complex

Ever since Eisenhower warned us of this hidden boogeyman of Washington politics in his parting address to the nation in 1960, it has been debated by all sides of politics how influential and destructive it may be. It is fair to say that under the Bush administration it probably grew in power considerably and may have been a major factor in Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US is responsible for almost two-fifths of the global arms trade, exporting some $6-8 billion worth of arms annually, and spends far more than that on domestic arms production and more on arms development ($70 billion+) than nearly the rest of the world combined. From 2000-2009 US defense spending increased hugely from $300 to $700 billion a year, with per capita expenditures almost doubling from a historical low of $2000 up to cold war levels of $3500. Including defense related spending in the departments of State, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and Energy as well as NASA and Federal Law-enforcement and defense-related payments of debt, the US spends a whopping 19% of its budget on defense.

American troop deployments overseas (excluding 200,000 personnel fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan) include an additional 10,000 in Kuwait, more than 80,000 in Europe (just in case the Russians invade) 60,000 in East Asia and several thousand more in places like Australia, Egypt and Columbia. The deployments in Europe especially defy logic, for all they do is subsidize how much Europe has to spend on defense (with most European countries spending less than half as much on their militaries per capita as the U.S.) while costing the American taxpayer tens of billions of dollars a year. Bringing most of these troops home immediately would do much to alleviate America’s spiraling debt and bring down its military expenditures, for maintaining this expensive ‘empire’ is something America will clearly not be able to do forever.

4. Foreign trade deficits

If you’re an American, looking at a graph of the US trade deficit is truly frightening. The US last had a trade surplus in 1975, but by 1997 it was running a $100 billion deficit that has grown exponentially since as its exports continue to decline in the face of cheaper foreign goods and services (plus the Chinese keeping their currency, the Yuan, deliberately undervalued to drive their exports), causing it to pass $800 billion in 2006. $200 billion of this was with China, $120 billion with Europe and a solid $80 billion with Japan.

Some hope, surprisingly, comes in the form of recessions, which tend to see a large if temporary reduction in the US trade deficit, with it declining to $376 billion in 2009. However once the current global financial crisis is over the deficit is predicted to soar back up and possibly reach more than a trillion dollars annually within the next few years.

A major aspect of the trade deficit includes the trading of oil, with the US currently importing two thirds of its oil at a cost of several hundred billion dollars a year, with that amount subject to sudden price swings (a return of crude oil to US$100 would see that amount rise to almost $500 billion a year). Aside from imposing enormous tariffs on imported goods and other possible policies aimed at stopping the somewhat inevitable trend to globalization, there isn’t much anyone can really do to solve these huge deficits.

5. The overgrown prison-industrial complex

Before 1980 there were less than half a million Americans in prison, but that number has since risen sharply and continues to skyrocket, with it passing 2,500,000 in 2010. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics - “in 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year-end — 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults,” subsequently the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. It is 12 times that of Japan and 8 times that of Europe.

The sudden quadrupling of the prison population was not due to violent crime (rates of which have generally declined since the 1990s), but due mainly to public policy decisions such as the issuing of more prison sentences, ‘three strikes’ laws and reductions in the availability of parole or early release. These policies were championed as protecting the public from violent offenders, but instead have increased the proportion of non-violent offenders in prisons to about 50% today. As well as that, more than 20% of those sent to prison are convicted on drug charges, with this result of the ‘war on drugs’ probably being the greatest single force behind the boom in the prison population. The cost of this massive prison system has risen by about 600% since 1980, with it costing about $23,000 a year to hold someone in jail a total of $68 billion was spent on corrections nationwide in 2006. Funding for police and judicial services, including the holding of hundreds of thousands of people awaiting trial at any given time, have also increased 4 or 5 fold over the same period and totals a further $140 billion.

There is no real sign of the escalation of the prison population reversing any time soon, although proposals such as an end to the ‘three strikes’ rule, the privatization of prisons (a process gradually occuring today), the legalization of marijuana or a greater focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment in sentencing are in some places being considered.

6. Paying off the national debt

Although the USA’s skyrocketing debt is caused by many things (the largest of which are among those other things listed here) paying off the interest on the debt alone cost $261 billion in 2008. The United States national debt is expected to pass 100% of GDP in mid-2011, a level it is projected to remain at for the foreseeable future. There is much debate among economists whether high debt levels result in slow economic growth or whether the relationship is primarily the other way around, but regardless such a financial burden being placed on an already shaky economy can’t be good.

There is a chance that the astronomical debt levels will de-stabilize the US dollar in years to come to the point where it no longer remains the world’s reserve currency, and someday not too far off there is also a small chance that oil-producing countries (particularly ones that don’t like the US) like Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Norway, etc might decide to stop trading oil exclusively in US dollars and decide to trade with a currency like the Euro as well. Such a move, if it occurred, could de-value the greenback by 10-20% and severely damage the US economy. Another possibility is that America could lose its triple-AAA credit rating (like Japan did in the 1990s when its debt shot up past 100% of its GDP), something which would also cause enormous harm on US economic interests. A combination of almost draconian austerity measures and the introduction of policies to curb other spiraling US expenditures (many of which are on this list), such as an end to the ‘War on Terror’ would be the most effective, but in many cases politically suicidal, ways to rein in US debt.

7. The obesity crisis

It is predicted that by 2015 75% of all adults in the US will be overweight and 40% obese, a higher rate than any other country in the world (although most developed countries are suffering from an obesity crisis to different extents). Already the extra medical costs of obesity are estimated to be between $75 and $150 billion in the US annually and it has been cited as a contributing factor to approximately 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year (4-16% of all deaths).

The main reasons for this are the sedentary lifestyles of much of its population and the widespread consumption of cheap and unhealthy fast foods. In the last thirty years alone the prevalence of obesity in teenagers has increased from 5% to 19% with similar increases among other age groups, and in the military obesity is currently the largest single cause for the discharge of uniformed personnel. Obesity related medical problems include type II diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and an increased probability of complications arising in babies born to obese women. The costs of obesity have surpassed those caused by smoking or problem drinking and worldwide it is coming to be seen as a problem as serious in some countries as malnutrition is in others.

8. Outsourcing of jobs overseas

It has been said that America’s middle class has become globalization’s losers. So here's a little history lesson for ya. Initially free market capitalization brought enormous wealth to America, with things going swimmingly up until the end of the 1970s. During the first three decades after WW2 American incomes more than doubled, with the bottom 20% of society increasing their wealth by 120% and the top 20% by 94%, with every other group in between. It was as if the American dream had manifested itself in statistics. But then the trend reversed, Europe and Japan had recovered from the devastation of the World Wars and China was soon to open up its borders to trade. Global commerce shifted directions and businessmen left their home turf seeking new places to invest in. The United States, who’s banks had made it the world’s greatest creditor and its factories the world’s greatest exporter for four decades, shifted so much of their investments and centers of production overseas it gradually became its greatest debtor nation and net importer.

In the span of only a few decades US industry has shrunken to only half of what it once was, today it makes up only 22% of its GDP, compared to 25% in Brazil, 28% in Europe and India, 32% in Russia and 47% in China. That decline means an average of 750,000 American manufacturing jobs have gone overseas every year for the last 30 years, explaining why the US unemployment rate, even in the 1990s-2007~ boom before the current global financial crisis, was the highest inbetween recessions in the country's history. Like its massive foreign trade deficit, this is a trend that even the US government can't really solve and one that will continue for the forseeable future.

9. Christian fundamentalism

The percentage of Americans who believe in evolution is estimated to be around 40%, compared to around 60% of Europeans and researchers have noted with some alarm that the portion unsure if it is true or not has increased significantly in recent years. The portion of the US population that has no religion is also much lower than other developed countries at around 15% compared to around 15-50% in European countries and 20-30% of Canadians. A 2007 Gallup poll indicated only 45% of Americans would be prepared to vote for an atheist president, compared to 55% for a gay candidate, 88% for a women and 94% for a black president.

Over the last fifty years the influence of the ‘Christian Right’ in American politics has grown considerably, voicing their opposition to secular education, the teaching of evolution and other scientific theories (also including global warming) as fact, premarital sex, abortion, government funding for scientific fields that might contradict the bible, stem cell research and human cloning, the separation of church and state, the concept that America is not a ‘Christian nation’, the acceptance of homosexuality, gay marriage and the adoption of children by gay couples, pornography, prostitution, the use of contraceptives, planned parenthood, international co-operation and arguably anything they perceive as having a ‘liberal bias.’

The general reason for this resurgence is mainly due to the recent increase in the number of Americans and people around the world who consider themselves to have no religion (although the number of atheists is still small). A similar reaction to the perceived threat of the officially atheist Soviet Union during the cold war led to the adding of the words ‘under God’ to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, with the words ‘in God we trust’ printed on US currency for the first time four years later. It is hard to estimate how much damage Christian fundamentalists have done to the US and its international standing (they would have to be one of the most laughed at groups in the entire world) in the last half century, but their reign of 18th century style beliefs has no immediate end in sight.

10. Fighting the ‘War on Drugs’

Launched initially by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, Reagan and Clinton subsequently escalated what could be called America’s longest running conflict. Tying in with the exploding prison population of the US, some 1.5 million Americans were arrested for drug offenses in 2008, with 500,000 imprisoned.

Several wars have also been fought partly or wholly because of the drug trade. The 1989 US invasion of Panama, which killed several thousand civilians and left 20,000 homeless, was fought partly to indict the country’s dictator Manuel Noriega, a long time US ally, on drug and money laundering charges. 'Plan Columbia', the US program of providing military and economic aid to Columbia to fight drug-dealers and far left-wing rebels, costs almost $1 billion year and has been going on since 2000. Spraying herbicides on cocaine crops with aircraft, another strategy to fight production of the drug that has gone on since the 1970s, has often backfired with local farmers complaining of health problems and damage to their crops. In addition violence fueled by drug cartels has also escalated in northern Mexico, where more than 20,000 people have died since 2006.

Overall American aid to governments in Latin America and money spent on drug law enforcement totals $44 billion every year, with that amount steadily increasing. It is estimated that legalizing marijuana and taxing it would provide $7 billion in revenues annually, while legalizing other (more harmful) drugs such as cocaine and heroin would provide an additional $26 billion. However, it is possible that legalizing such drugs could cost the US healthcare system more than their taxation revenue, making continuing or ending the war on drugs something of a lose-lose situation.

11. Probably the early affects of global warming

Although it is a hopeless exaggeration to point to any particular unusual weather occurrence as caused by anthropogenic climate change. It is equally naïve to say none have yet occurred and impacted the United States. Weather related insurance losses have increased from only a few billion to tens of billions of dollars a year since the 1980s (by comparison, 9/11 cost $20 billion), disruptions in energy supply due to extreme weather events have increased tenfold since the early 1990s (while other causes have shown little increase), heat related deaths are predicted to increase two-fivefold from around 10,000 a year today and notably the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season (the one with Katrina) was the most active on record, causing almost 4,000 deaths and costing some $130 billion. Many of the worst hurricane seasons on record have occurred since the mid ‘90s with conditions expected to worsen further. These are just some of the examples which indicate the United States is likely already paying a steep price in lives and money for its past greenhouse gas emissions.