Here's the real reason good marriages can go bad: If a scientist places two rats on a metal grid and then passes an electric current through the grid, every time the rats feel an electric shock they will attack each other. Likewise with humans: when life gets stressful, we instinctively pick a fight with our spouses.

Have you ever looked at your spouse and secretly wondered, "Did I choose the wrong mate?" Many of us marvel at how we could have felt such a powerful chemistry for our mates before we married, but later we catch ourselves daydreaming about divorce.

It's not our chemistry that failed us. Rather, humans have forgotten we are animals, and we share with animals a little-known, unconscious instinct to scapegoat those around us. That is what drives couples apart. But a simple awareness of our scapegoating instinct can transform how we view our marriages.

Scapegoating is an ancient defense mechanism in the brain that allows us to off-load our anxious reactivity onto others. Bestselling author and primatologist Frans de Waal describes our tendency to blame others as one of our least conscious, yet most powerful instincts. This displacement of blame happens so often, in so many animal species, that it must be hardwired in us, dating back thousands of years.

From a survival of the fittest perspective, scapegoating was a valuable adaptation. Back in our caveman days, a little bit of anxious reactivity was a useful survival instinct, because it triggered our fight-or-flight response and kept us on our toes.

But if too much anxiety overwhelmed our brains we might shut down--unable to hunt, gather or procreate. So scapegoating probably evolved to help us lighten our load of anxiety by off-loading it onto those around us, which cleared our minds to better focus on competing for scarce resources. The Blame Game is a primitive survival instinct.

Of course, blaming others for our suffering is nothing new. The term "scapegoat" comes from Hebrew and describes an ancient Jewish ritual of atonement during Yom Kippur. People believed God made them suffer as punishment for their sins.

So their atonement ritual involved two goats as symbols. One goat was sacrificed as a symbolic "payment" to God for the debt they had amassed by their sinning. The other goat (the "escape goat") was driven into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the sins of the people on his back. This was how people paid for their sins in order to free themselves from their suffering. That's why today, a scapegoat usually refers to an innocent person who is blamed for the suffering or wrongdoing of others.

So, here's the key lesson we can learn: When we criticize our spouses, we tend to believe we are pointing out true, objective faults. But in fact, blaming our spouse may just be our anxiety talking. As discussed above, people with higher anxiety are more likely to overreact, so spouses with high anxiety will have a greater tendency to fight-or-flee each other, which may lead to a downward spiral that sours their marriage. When the going gets tough, rats, humans and many other species scapegoat.

This is actually great news, because now we can give up searching for a Spouse-Upgrade. Our marriages will fare better when we let go of the illusion that the grass would be greener with a different mate.

Sure, we all know folks who would swear their ex-spouse was a dud and the chemistry they felt at first was dead wrong. But they may be kidding themselves. Their second spouse may have different traits, but the basic ways humans cope with anxiety--fight, flight or scapegoating--are always beneath the surface.

Until we become aware of our own anxiety and scapegoating instinct, we simply drag all of our baggage into our next marriage as well. That's why the divorce rate for second marriages is 60 percent, and for third marriages it's 73 percent. Things only seem different in a new relationship.

Marriage is a school for lovers, so contrary to popular belief, it's not about managing your partner. It's about managing your anxiety. This insight can help you accept yourself and your spouse as you are, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. As my mother-in-law was fond of saying, marriage is not a "correctional institution."

So, I'm curious. How does my point strike you? Do you agree that the scapegoating instinct we share with animals may cause divorce? What has been your experience? What have you observed in the marriages of your friends and family?

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I sat down with the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at his office in Ramallah for aPalestine Note exclusive interview.

Ramallah - For three years, Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister in the West Bank Palestinian Authority (PA), has been a focal point for Mideast debate.

As an unelected official, he is reviled by Hamas and democracy activists alike for taking over the PA after the disillusion of the 2007 Palestinian unity government. He is also said to have alienated many within Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas, who see him as a limit to their influence in the West Bank.

But he has also won praise from other segments of society and adoration among Western commentators for his program of reforming, broadening and rebuilding Palestinian institutions, a process he says is a step toward founding a Palestinian state.

Yet his state-building program, too, has come under scruitiny, prominently with the release of a study in July by Nathan Brown of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which argued that Fayyad's program is lagging in key areas such as the rule of law, and that his efforts are proceeding in an "authoritarian context."

Confronted with these and other criticisms, Fayyad has an unflinching, some would say misguided, faith in himself and his program, which he sees as having "transformative" potential.

"This is a state-building track," he told me in a Palestine Note interview at his Ramallah office.

He added that his efforts are "supposed to ensure readiness for statehood. We think it's going to take us two years to get there. It's a bit ambitious, but doable despite the occupation. To end it, to end it means that--that's the dynamism of this--build, build, build despite the occupation to end it."

So great is Fayyad's confidence in the power of his own plans that he believes popular support for them could eventually be the key to reuniting the PA.

"Political parties, Hamas included, will find themselves compelled to go along," with his state-building vision, coupled with hoped-for progress in peace negotiations, Fayyad said. "Or they resist and they start to pay dearly in political terms, a very, very heavy political price associated with going against that trend."

Fadi Elsalameen: How do you respond to Nathan Brown's Carnegie Endowment study that criticizes your program?

Salam Fayyad: It's a question of building up capacity. It cannot be taken literally or nominally as building institutions that did not exist before. Especially when he says that the issue was maintenance of existing institutions. That's a badge of honor. Fixing, reforming, maintaining--that's very much the nature of the task. Reform, upgrading capacity, getting those institutions better able to deliver services, maintaining them. All of these are elements of the state-building effort. To complete the task of getting ready for statehood. So to suggest we are building things from scratch, I never said that. The program doesn't say that, but when you're talking about building up capacity to govern ourselves effectively, that could mean introducing new institutions. But it certainly focuses on bringing up capacity of existing institutions.

In terms of infrastructure, there, of course, have been lots of new things. You can't say, "They're just maintaining existing infrastructure." Over the span of two years, we implemented 1,000 community development programs, especially in rural areas, long-marginalized and most devastated by war, settlement activity, and whatnot. It's going to take us about half the time to implement the next batch of 1,000 projects--we're almost halfway through. You know, we celebrated project 1,000, I said afterward the next 1,000 projects will take us only one year. Before the year is out, I said, we're going to have another 1,000 such projects. And we are more than halfway through that mark already today, and I am certain we are going to make it. This will involve water, electricity, new schools, road networks, rural roads, the recreation center that your colleague started in Nablus [Tomorrow's Youth Organization] for the refugee camp. People have a lot of opportunities now that did not exist before. That really enters under the heading of 'new.'

And it's very much related to the need to enhance the capacity of our people to withstand the adversity of occupation. On the way to statehood, on the way to freedom, you don't do these things--people do not have adequate education and services. They want to leave if they could. Just exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing. With all due respect, it's very superficial [Nathan Brown's argument]. I can better understand and better relate to those who assert that this is the other side of Netanyahu's economic peace coin. At least there is some thinking that went into making that statement that I cannot really dismiss as being superficial. It's wrong, I disagree with it, but at least there's a little bit of thought process that I can see leading to that conclusion. But here, to say, "Oh, there are no new institutions," that's almost childish. I don't know who funded this work, and it does not really... [have] any degree of scholarship. It's just really weak. How can you do that? And on the basis of what? Anecdotal stuff? "I talked to people." Who are they? I would like to know how many people he talked to. Forget about whom he talked to, but how many people he talked to. Assuming it's an unbiased sample, how many people did he talk to? How long did he stay here, to form these impressions? And it's not true that it's only Ramallah. We started this campaign in Nablus. So, this is way too superficial, if you ask me. Way, way too superficial.

FE: You've led a campaign to boycott settlements and settlement products. People are asking, what is the Palestinian government offering to the people? Are they offering employment opportunities, are they helping businesses get alternatives?

SF: We are in many ways, and I can give you an example. If you look at the statistics on unemployment for May, which is the last month for which we have data, for the first time in many, many years, unemployment has inched downward to 14.6%, to below 15%. I'm talking about the West Bank now, [but] it's down in Gaza as well, compared to before, and there are reasons for this, but I'm talking about the West Bank now. This is a 10% decline [in unemployment] over three years. 10% unemployment decline. And it's still high! Don't get me wrong, 14.6% unemployment is nothing to write home about, but it's substantial improvement over what existed before. And it's happening in a growing economy. You know, unemployment data, the measure of unemployment officially (by the methods used in the International Labor Organization), you know they ask you, "Fadi, are you employed?" And if you say "yes," then you're employed. "Are you unemployed?" You say "yes," and the next they ask you is, "are you looking for a job?" And if you are not looking for a job, you do not count as unemployed. Now, in a recession, or in a weak economy, there is a phenomenon called "discouraged workers" - those who stop looking for work. So they are counted out of the pool, they're counted out of those who are actually unemployed. Now what is really interesting is that in a growing economy, those sitting around not looking start to look [for work]. So therefore you have more people who are unemployed who say they are looking, so they begin to be counted as part of unemployment.

So I think, with a little bit of patience, if we really manage to keep this on track, you're going to see further improvement. That's one observation. The second, what I think is the most interesting observation and the most relevant, is that here we are. We are disengaging structurally in the sense of dependency on employment opportunities in Israel. We're reducing our unemployment--unemployment is coming down--in the context of disengagement in terms of labor dependency. So it looks like the theory is working.

FE: What about tax collection? Is that increasing?

SF: Definitely. For the first time, you know, this year we're projecting over 20% increase in overall tax take to take us over the $2 billion dollar mark for the first time in the history of the PA.

FE: How does this affect the budget?

SF: Well first of all, it reduces dependency on aid, for sure. This too is a very good story. In 2008, the external financing requirement--for budget support only, without development expenditure--amounted to $1.8 billion. This year, it's $1.2 billion. In 2011, we're reducing it to below a billion. So we're working very hard on attaining financial viability, you know what I'm saying. Reducing dependency on aid--the vision we have for the state is not one of perpetual dependence on aid. One thing that I personally tend to be credited for is the fact that we get aid. I say I measure success not by how much aid we get but by how much less of it we need. And so therefore, reducing reliance on aid is something that is definitely on top of our agenda. And we're doing it.

FE: What will happen at the end, by 2011, the date that you have set to be prepared for the creation of a Palestinian state?

SF: I view this as a dynamic process. People who look at with this with suspicion, doubt, I break into two categories. One that says, "How can this be done? It's impossible." Of course there's a third category, worst of all who say, "this is a conspiracy"--we'll skip them. And there are fewer of these people. There's definitely growing support amongst the public. There are some who say, "How can we possibly do that?" The people who say I think that's partly because they do not see the process of doing this as capable of influencing political outcomes, which is completely contrary to a guiding principal underlying this work. I mean basically we have an objective, we know what the endgame should be, so that's what we will be seeking. On the way to getting there, the idea is to exploit the momentum generated by creating positive facts on the ground. To order what otherwise would be a complete static vision. This is not static, this is dynamic. The [state-building] process itself is intended to generate pressure on the political process to produce, you know what I'm saying? So therefore the idea, the idea here is amass enough facts on the ground, enough critical mass of positive change to where the reality of the state will impose itself on the world. This is different from saying "unilateral declaration of statehood."

When I announced this program in August of last year, this is exactly what I said. And that's why everyone said, "Ah, watch out, this is dangerous." What I said, and I still say it today, the idea is what we hope and expect. This is a state-building track. It's supposed to ensure readiness for statehood. We think it's going to take us two years to get there. It's a bit ambitious, but doable despite the occupation. To end it, to end it means that--that's the dynamism of this--build, build, build despite the occupation to end it.

We estimate that it will take two years to finish this. It is our hope and expectation that by then the political process will have produced an end to the Israeli occupation. That's our hope and expectation. If it hasn't, then the reality of the state would be so obvious, so strong, so compelling as to exert so much pressure on that political process to produce.

On the way to getting there, with all the lift of the spirit of the people that it brings, Palestinians but internationals as well: With more and more people investing in this possibility--I don't just mean economically, materially but also psychologically, morally, politically--that cannot but influence the political process. It's a not a coincidence that the Europeans came out with a landmark statement out of the European Council last year. It was against the backdrop of, "Guess what, the Palestinians are getting ready." That's an example. I know that's what happened. All of the sudden everyone is talking about a two year timeline. The Quartet on March 19 of this year said two years. Well, their two years is longer than ours - we started a bit earlier.

We are already seeing some benefits because we are in a hurry to do this. When was it actually an issue for the world, the so-called 'Area C?' Now everybody's talking about 'Area C!' Finally, well last but not least, another key contribution this has made is the following: when, and I think this is really major in terms of the political process, the end of the interim period was crossed in May 1999, it seemed as if we had ushered into an endless open transitional period. Nothing, no timeline. [In 2009] we came and said, we're going to be ready for statehood in two years. And all of a sudden, the notion of this [transitional period] having to come to end started to resurface again. Not only, although that is not small, in terms of the window closing fast on the two-state solution, which is often said because of the settlements, but also because of this notion that, "Well, it's what we have said about Palestinians all along, they'll never build a state, they're terrorists, they're corrupt," all this since, they're not going to be there. This is something I often express, the other thing that I positively believe, that some adjustment will have to occur before a settlement is possible. Because well, Israeli politics how they are today, if you really look at it, it's most unlikely that it will be able to produce something that will measure up to being a settlement from our point of view.

So therefore, you really would want to, again, deploy that process in a way that, as a matter of fact--let me back up a little bit. You asked me, for the two-state solution: the majority says "yes." But you ask the same majority a different question: How many of you really believe that the state of Palestine will emerge along side the state of Israel? The percentage will drop substantially. What this means is that people have become desensitized to slogans of two states, of the Palestinian state. We have [said], in every speech we have, "The state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital," but how many people really believe it? People when I go and talk to them, I keep saying, "This state won't happen if you believe it won't happen." And I believe it will happen.

You know what is really happening here, is that--the same situation on both sides, the Palestinians and the Israelis--getting that majority to really believe it can happen is the challenge that has for long been underestimated. I think we really need to do that, and I keep saying, you know this state of Palestine is not going to happen to Israel or to Israelis or for the Palestinians, it's going to grow on them. First, we have an overarching vision for the state, based on the foundation, principles that are consistent with universally accepted values. Then you continue, you persevere in a manner fully consistent with those principles. The reality of it begins to force itself on you. So that's the process what I call transformation and transition of Palestinian statehood from a concept to the realm of possibility and then to the realm of reality. That's the power of it. It's the power of ideas. Ideas are important! Ideas are very important.

FE: But the political track is a different story. A friend, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, asked me to ask you this question. The Obama administration believes they can pursue a peace track while excluding Hamas, and in order to build a Palestinian state, you either have to build in Hamas or you have to crush them completely, and he's not sure how you reconcile the two.

SF: You know, I look at this issue in a way that's conceptually not different from the whole political process and the state-building track, in a dynamic setting. If you really put it this way, you have a Hamas that does not accept the platform of the PLO. You have certain requirements for engagement internationally, and as a matter dictated by agreements entered into by the PLO and commitments they made. So you look at this as a given, and you say "impossible, there is no way." So you come to the conclusion of these "golden solutions" I call them: exclude or include right now in order to produce a solution. This is the product of static thinking. It's not dynamic. There are many scenarios that are possible on this, and maybe a combination of those scenarios is what could bring this impasse to an end.

One for example is, here we have a political process that is going on, maybe a feeble one, but it doesn't really matter, but if all of a sudden there is a breakthrough of sorts that could suggest to people, "well, this actually may happen." That would have a major impact on the situation. The day after is not going to be like the day before. It's watershed. That in itself produces a political revolution. Where the differences on the Palestinian scene begin to be perceived as very sharp and too difficult to overcome is a circumstance where people lose hope, lose faith in the political process and its possibility. But if you deal with that scenario, that changes the dynamic enormously. It probably would make it a little bit more appealing to Hamas to join the consensus, or to find ways to make it possible for them to get into this, as opposed to any other way. That's one scenario.

Another scenario is that through the work we do and the fact that we're not engaging in "they say, we say" debate, split in television debate, but rather "they say, we do, and these are the results", and it could be, as it has been I believe, because the positive reaction that I detect exists on the part of people, ordinary citizens, toward this program and toward this vision, not only in the West Bank and Gaza as well.

So, people begin to see, that also influences the way people look at issues. Political parties, no matter what ideology they have, they cannot be indifferent to the way people feel. What we have is a situation characterized in the main by this divide politically. I think one way of dealing with it is to set in motion initiatives, activities and all of that that are seen as serving the interests and the over all good of the Palestinian people. Political parties, Hamas included, will find themselves compelled to either go along, and that reduces the differences or the extent to which they separate, or resist and they start to pay dearly in political terms, a very very heavy political price associated with going against that trend.

The answer to this is that the political process should produce. The effort to get ready for statehood should proceed. The worst thing we can do is sit on our hands and wait for something to happen. That perfect alignment of starts is never going to happen. Instead, it's better to work and hope that something happens. I say that we Palestinians are due for a lucky bounce [laughs]. Overdue, as a matter of fact.

What this does is ensures that when that happens we are on the playing field, and not outside the arena altogether. It's not going to settle anything, and it's not guaranteed to produce anything, but it certainly positions us much better to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge. So that's really my attitude. I'm not sure one can or should look at this as an either or, this or that. If it is that, I have to wait until we bridge all of our differences. I have my own views on that. I think it's important from a point of view of sustainability, in order to get where we're going, and sustaining it. Security. What kind of security doctrine.

I am a firm believer in nonviolence as a path to freedom, combined with this positive agenda, creative positive facts on the ground. Yes, every day something bad happens that discourages. Yes the Israelis demolished barracks a couple of days ago, but for the first time in history, there is an Authority that is there the next day building again with people. That lifts the spirit. All of a sudden you defeat the defeatism. You cease being either completely submissive or completely belligerent. This has tremendous power. It's transformative. I believe in it.

FE: President Obama promised 400 million dollars to the Palestinians in June. Some of that money was supposed to go to Gaza. My question is twofold? Where did it go if it was supposed to go to Gaza? Second, he called on Israelis and Palestinians to increase their security cooperation. You recently met with Israeli Defense Minister [Ehud] Barak. Can you give some idea about this?

SF: Yes they do have money for projects in Gaza and today I had discussions with an American official on that, and we're working very closely on that, to integrate the various initiatives intended for Gaza under the overall national plan. And that also helps bring about a greater sense of oneness even though the separation has become more deeply entrenched. I recognize this as a reality. And it's not coincidental that I keep saying, each day, getting ready includes, importantly, reuniting the country. There's not going to be a state of Palestine unless our country is reunited. And I believe that. It's important. In fact this week when [EU foreign affairs chief] Catherine Ashton was here a few days ago. She announced a program that's being implemented by us with European money to help the private sector. We're getting there, and we're certainly working and planning to work similarly with the Americans in building things and helping to restore a bit of normalcy, on the road to restoring economic life in Gaza and ending the hardship of people there. It's very, very important . We attach great importance to that. I spend a great deal of my time these days on this issue, trying to really push the agenda, trying to deal with the problems there.

The other issue related to security. That meeting [with Barak] really focused on, among other things, Gaza, and the need for there to be a change of paradigm completely and to get rid of this approach that was restrictive and based on 'everything is disallowed unless otherwise indicated' to the opposite of that and to actually implement it this way. So there was a lot of discussion on that.

There was also a lot of discussion on getting political deliverables associated with the improved security situation, in the main getting Israel to stop its incursions into our areas, and getting us to have a uniformed permanent security presence in Palestinian centers outside of Area A. This is very important - I said political deliverables. Why? Because the whole thing is pivoted on the notion that all Palestinians want a state of Palestine and that's how we internalize the security doctrine because we made it so organically tied to the objective of statehood. You want statehood? Then security has to be done this way. If still people see the Israeli army come into Nablus, Ramallah, people start to wonder. Conversely, if tomorrow Israel says, as I believe it should, as I believe it should have, "We are no longer sending troops into Palestinian territories," this is huge There's nothing that defines a state, or a state in the making, more than where its security services are, not where the security services of the occupation are. So it's very important for that to begin to happen. Also for us to begin to have security presence in our own areas, where Palestinians live, to really have a little bit of a security presence. I travel around the country. If I happen to be traveling in rural areas, which is oftentimes, I see security there, our security, they are allowed to go there with coordination by the Israelis. I leave, they leave. So I think to myself, if this is a place I am visiting for the first time, it will be the first time our citizens there will have seen Palestinian security. Imagine what it will do to people if they wake up every day to the reality of a police station in their neighborhood. You know, statehood begins to make sense. The whole project begins to make sense. What we do every day improving quality of life, building institutions, building our capacity to govern ourselves and all of that begins to make sense as part of an effort aimed at getting us to freedom. You see what I'm saying? Absent that this beings to apply an exercise in adapting to the reality of permanent occupation. Then this could really be seen, in a way that cannot be challenged, as a sort of implementation of the 'economic peace' vision. Which it isn't. That's not what is intended.That is why Israel is definitely required to it. That's what we're talking about.

FE: Did Barak promise anything? Was this mainly the beginning of a discussion?

SF: No, it was not the beginning of a discussion. We have have raised these issues many times. I have many times. Many many times. Unfortunately they did not receive the attention they deserved early on. Now they are, so good. Fine. But can we really produce something after this? I don't want to stay in the realm of you know, "we ask, they think about it, we ask, they think about it, we ask, they agree in principle." What we really would want to see is something concrete happening. It's very very important. That is what is required.

The steady erosion of American productivity and viability may not just be unfortunate happenstance or a natural socioeconomic evolution, but a premeditated, consolidated effort to reap reward from fomenting failure.

And, as an interesting bit of collateral damage, people no longer have any faith in someone or something unless there's money involved, hence the curiously adhesive qualities of the moronic quasi libertarian meme of preferring the unregulated shenanigans of the private sector over a democratically elected and regulated government. And here's where those people who have been able to free themselves from the 24-hour-a-day opiate known as The Media slap themselves in their heads and say "Sheesh!"

But as evidenced by the steady reduction of overall quality in ideals America once prided itself on (i.e., productivity, creativity, education, the democratic process) and the attendant illogic of such routine breakdowns of formerly reliable concepts (i.e., quality control, protecting the welfare of all its citizens), there is the sinking feeling that the country that was built upon the highest ideals by those whose grasp of power, history and human nature, has been subsumed by those who revile such high aims. In fact, the guys that run things now have pasted "Fire Sale" over "We the People." And they're cashing in.

The culprit is, of course, the corporate mentality, a plague that manifests in the unrelenting consumption of disposable goods and useless services to maximize profit at the expense of people.

Like the icons she worships, like the plastic personalities digitally downloaded into our daily feeds, America's overriding principle is no longer one of thrift, service and civility but an obsession with things wasteful and divisive. That's our latest and greatest export.

Just because it sometimes feels good to scratch a mosquito bite until it bleeds, let's take Sarah Palin, for instance. The self-styled Mama Grizzly is actually the embodiment of the current fetish for failure, a bespectacled avatar of the mediocre intelligence and misguided ambition that is the hallmark of today's American idol.

While never having been in possession of basic leadership skills, let alone insight into the classic workings of democracy and the awesome responsibility such knowledge should impart, she is instead a facade from a corporate costume shop. Strutting her secondary sexual characteristics and bleating whatever shallow Republican talking point flashes across her staff's iPads, she nonetheless continues to be a leader of the gormless mass who raise fists and rail against that black guy in office and/or anything else she tells them to.

Then there is Jabber the Hate himself, Rush Limbaugh. The undisputed king of caustic right wing vitriol has made it his mission to destroy, divide, delude, and in so doing drive his profits through the roof of what must be a mammoth McMansion, proportionate in volume to his gargantuan ego.

And then there's that confounding blight, which is the so-called Tea Party, the latest Sam's Club clumping of the angry-for-whatever-reason volkische who seek only quick fixes to simplistically labeled problems, loathe their villains and embrace their heroes no matter how inane or discredited their reasoning. Deprived of a decent education and livelihood by the very forces with which they are aligned, they among all other obstacles to progress remain the most frustrating to observe, as the power to effect positive change is in their hands. It's their minds which have been highjacked.

And somewhere in this mishegoss, someone is making a shitload of dosh.

And guess what -- they're right in front of you exhorting you to fear immigrants, hate government, love Big Oil, hate the poor, fear the president and on and on. The right wing loves to court the least informed and most in pain. Because that's how they make their money. They've created a mass of Yokelsteins.

Don't get me wrong: Americans -- be angry! Assemble in the town squares! Take your representatives to task!

But while you're at it, read a book. Or two. Thumb through a reputable newspaper. Go to Europe. Have a conversation with someone from a feared and despised culture. Avail yourselves of the many sources and perspectives out there on the internet, hovering like fruit just waiting to be picked.

Discover agendas. Suss out key investors in places that insist they are trustworthy (*cough* Saudi Arabia and Fox News *cough, cough*). Realize that things are not as fair and balanced as the talking heads are telling you they are.

And then maybe we can get back to some kind of reason and stability. As history has shown repeatedly in the lifespans of many an empire, our days as the greatest superpower on Earth may be waning, and those who revel in the pride that defined our greatest, boldest days might not be willing to relax their desperate grip on such a regrettable reality.

But given the preponderance of proof that the powers that be are making moolah from mass misery, we must not forsake our opportunity to reclaim some civility, dignity and sense, three things that those corporate fascisto-capitalist dickheads who are stoking cynicism and despair for fun and profit detest.

Bad for business, you see.

Back in December in blisteringly cold Copenhagen, tens of thousands of activists, government workers, lobbyists, and world leaders came together for what many hoped would be a diplomatic breakthrough. Though the weather was cold, conditions seemed ripe: Environmental groups across the globe had worked hard to generate a strong display of public will, culminating in 350.org’s Day of Action earlier in October, which CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.” Bolstered by the announcement that President Obama would attend the talks personally, hopes were high for meaningful engagement on the part of the United States after more than a decade of inaction.

It seemed to many environmental organizations and their supporters that their international strategy might finally pay off. They were mistaken and left Copenhagen only with questions: What had gone wrong? Why did world leaders punt on the biggest crises facing our planet? And the most important of all: What now?

At Copenhagen, representatives from the Obama Administration told activists straight to their face: You’ll have to make us do this. And your movement is just not big enough.

Fast forward seven months, to blindingly hot Washington D.C., and we have the same result—though this time it was Congress’ turn to punt, despite a great deal of behind-the-scenes negotiations. Senator Kerry (D-MA) said, "We believe we have compromised significantly, but we're prepared to compromise further."

Despite that display of, um, generosity, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) explained, this time they were just not big enough.  Unable to get the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster, no climate legislation will move forward in the Senate this year. Since they’re likely to have even fewer votes after the midterms, this does not bode well for hopes of a national policy any time soon.

This is a double blow because the one outcome of COP 15—the Copenhagen Accord—is predicated on countries voluntarily setting and meeting domestic targets. So the lack of national climate legislation also means that our only hope for meeting our 2020 reduction targets is the EPA’s authority, which is likely going to be challenged in court for as long as the delayers can manage. That, or further steep declines in economic activity, like what has happened recently in the UK.

Gladly, I’m no Beltway insider, and my assumptions should be read as just that. But the way I see it, this result (or lack thereof), is not much of a surprise. Four of what are likely many reasons:

1. The Kerry-Lieberman bill was so badly flawed that not even the Big Green environmental groups could hold their noses enough to back it. Though they had staked their strategies, dollars, and reputations on getting something, anything passed before the likely loss of Democratic Party majorities in Congress, they saw that this bill could in fact be worse than no bill.

2. Our leaders’ allegiance to the mythical god of growth trumps their concern over the proven chemistry and physics of global climate change. The irony is rich, of course, considering that even after a veritable iceberg of evidence corroborating anthropogenic global warming, fabricated “scandals” like climate gate still somehow send the media into paroxysms of doubt and politicians diving for the nearest rock (likely to be underwater in about 30 years). In the meantime, there’s a wholly unsubstantiated belief shared by politicians, pundits, and plebeians of all stripes that without endless economic growth our entire universe would spontaneously implode.

And so, anything that could be viewed as putting our economic “recovery” at risk is simply a bridge too far, particularly in the run-up to mid-term elections.

3. Senate Republicans determination to block any bill that hit the floor. You’ve got to give Senate Republicans credit for their single-mindedness, and ability to wholly divorce their legislative positions from the love I’m sure they feel for their children and grandchildren. That takes a special level of determination and obstinacy.

4. The Obama Administration is simply not serious (enough) about our energy and climate crises. That was made abundantly clear in his oval office speech on June 15th when in the midst of the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history, his tepid response was this:

So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party—as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead.

No specific call to action, no plan offered up. Just an invitation to explore ideas. It was clear in that moment that President Obama was not prepared to stick his neck out for substantive energy and climate policy. Not even when Americans were shaking with anger over the ongoing Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill.

And so here we are again, asking, “What Now?”

More and more in my conversations with environmental groups, activists, and funders, it seems their focus is shifting from the international to the national to, now, the state and local level. For several reasons, I think this is a smart strategy.

In my next post, I’ll touch on the politics and possibilities of local action. Then, I’ll toss out an idea for getting Sarah Palin to serve as the ultimate spokesperson for national climate legislation. Trust me, she won’t like it.

Through the blare of screeching feedback from portable translation headsets and microphones, unionized bank workers from Brazil, England, Chile, Germany, and Uruguay are encouraging American workers to undertake an unprecedented campaign against a common enemy: Grupo Santander, the global banking giant which last year took control of Sovereign Bank.

The largest bank in the Euro-zone, where it is based, Santander is the world's eighth largest banking company by market capitalization. While the company is very good at generating profits around the world (it's the world's fourth largest bank by profits), this international meeting is focusing on something else: how the bank's new U.S. branches might become as unionized as branches in Europe and Latin America.

Santander bank branches are on average 75-percent unionized outside the United States, according to UNI Global Union Finance Director Oliver Roethig because most other industrialized nations have unionized banking sectors. In the United States, however, less than 1 percent of all front-office bank workers are organized. In fact, the unionized janitors working for contractors that clean Sovereign Bank's headquarters in Boston, Mass., often make more than the bank tellers and personal bankers, whose average wage is $10-$12 dollars per hour, despite individually producing millions of dollars in profits for the bank each year.

But the financial sector, at the center of the U.S. economy, has never been unionized. The international workers and local leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) gathered in July to use the clout of global union federations like the UNI Global Union to give labor a foothold in Santander's Sovereign operations, and potentially organize the industry from there. If Santander employees are heavily unionized overseas, and corporate profits are so robust, then why shouldn't American workers also join a union?
Bank reform from the inside

Santander has already responded to the organizing campaign, labor activists say, firing three Boston Sovereign workers in June for organizing activities--Steve Crowley, Janice DeJusi and Gary Rozenas. Crowley, who had worked at Sovereign for 30 years, was honored by the bank this spring for being a top seller, but was fired a week after signing a letter about office problems following Santander's acquisition of the bank. DeJusi and Rozenas were fired after talking to colleagues about forming a union, according to Andy Kerr of CWA.

Santander has denied discriminating against employees for union activity, saying Sovereign Bank adheres to all U.S. labor laws. A Sovereign spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on union-busting allegations.

When Santander acquired Sovereign, it immediately laid off 23 percent of its new subsidiary's workers. The company cut pay, slashed hours and doubled the cost of healthcare for workers. Sovereign workers knew they had to do something, so they approached SEIU last spring to help them organize.

But why would SEIU, which has risen to prominence during the last 25 years in part by organizing janitors, be interested in organizing bank workers?

"Well, it started out in the 1980s; we would organize a building [where janitors worked]... and find out that the management firm that owned the building was really owned by a pension fund, which was owned by an investment firm, which was ultimately owned by a bank," says Stephen Lerner, the brainchild of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign and now director of SEIU's Banking and Finance Campaign. "This began a thirty-year process in which we began to discover how much power the big banks have."

The theory is that if workers gain some control over the banks through the power of unions and the ability to strike, they could have a chokehold on one of the economy's key sectors. "Our members are facing layoffs as a result of the economic crisis caused by the banks," says Lerner. They "are screaming out to do something against the banks...scamming them with outrageous bank fees and sub-prime loans."

The large corporations at the center of the subprime mortgage meltdown, such as Countrywide, often based pay for personal bankers on selling risky products. "The more money I sold you and the higher the rate, the more money I made," said Donna Feener, a former Bank of America employee who worked in the company's credit card balance transfer department. "The more outrageous fees and the higher interest loans they can sign you up for, the more workers who have a base salary of only about $10 an hour make."

To read the rest of this story please go here. Its an exclusive indepth look at the launch of an ambitious campaign that has the potential to reshape organized labor's economic and political power - please go to In These Times where I am contributing editor. (Sorry to give a teaser link, but I work for a non-profit and we need to keep the doors open somehow)

For several days now, Senate Republicans have ridiculed their Democratic counterparts for prioritizing campaign finance legislation over a bill that would benefit small businesses, arguing that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was putting electoral advantages over jobs for everyday people.

On Tuesday, the DISCLOSE Act failed to get the needed votes for cloture, in the process providing the Senate the time needed to move on to other business. But when leadership brought a revised version of the small business bill to the floor on Thursday morning, they were met with united Republican opposition.

Despite complaining about the delay in consideration, Republicans filibustered the measure by a vote of 58 (in favor of cloture) to 42 (against). GOP leadership argued that it wasn't against the aims of the bill per se. They objected mainly to Reid's refusal to allow consideration of amendments to the legislation.

"It's not going to die," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spokesman Don Stewart, who noted that another vote could be held as early as today. "We just want to have amendments considered. They made a start, allowing three -- so we're making progress."

But as the GOP noted when chastising the consideration of DISCLOSE, the window for considering legislation is close to closing. As it stands now, Democrats are set to put energy legislation on the legislative calendar Friday and consider the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court next week. After that, they will head out of town for August recess. Allowing a lengthy amendment process could derail the remainder of what the party was hoping to consider.

The other major tenet of GOP criticism is that that the bill, which has been under consideration since late June, has moved far away from its original conception. Speaking on the floor, McConnell bemoaned the fact that "over a billion dollars in agriculture spending" has been added to the text. That said, there are fairly substantive bipartisan components to the legislation, which would eliminate capital gains taxes for investment in small firms, create a Small Business Lending Fund to underwrite loan through community banks and create a credit initiative for small business to help meet state budget shortfalls. Reid, moreover, has offered the chance to consider several GOP amendments already, and could well open the window for more.

The drama, which seems likely to extend throughout the day, is not only a reflection of just how ground-down the procedural elements of the Senate have become. It also shows how difficult it has been for Democrats to push forward on economic recovery -- which, in concept, has bipartisan support but always seems to come up a bit short when it comes to a roll call.

"Eighty-one percent of the jobs lost in America are from small business," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). "So when the other side complains and complains and just flaps and flaps all day long about it's a jobless recovery, we put a bill on the floor to creates jobs for small business and they say no... They can color it, paint it any way they want, that's what it was."

NEW YORK — It was a night in early November during the infancy of the Cold War when the anti-communist dissidents were hustled through a garden and across a gully to a vehicle on a dark, deserted road in Budapest. They hid in four large crates for their perilous journey.

Four roadblocks stood between them and freedom.

What Zoltan Pfeiffer, a top political figure opposed to Soviet occupation, his wife and 5-year-old daughter did not know as they were whisked out of Hungary in 1947 was that their driver, James McCargar, was a covert agent for one of America's most secretive espionage agencies, known simply as the Pond.

Created during World War II as a purely U.S. operation free of the perceived taint of European allies, the Pond existed for 13 years and was shrouded in secrecy for more than 50 years. It used sources that ranged from Nazi officials to Stalinists and, at one point, a French serial killer.

It operated under the cover of multinational corporations, including American Express, Chase National Bank and Philips, the Dutch-based electronic giant. One of its top agents was a female American journalist.

Now the world can finally get a deeper look at the long-hidden roots of American espionage as tens of thousands of once-secret documents found in locked safes and filing cabinets in a barn near Culpeper, Va., in 2001 have finally become public after a long security review by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The papers, which the Pond's leader tried to keep secret long after the organization was dissolved, were placed in the National Archives in College Park, Md., in 2008 but only opened to the public in April. Those records plus documents obtained by The Associated Press in the past two years from the FBI, CIA and other agencies under the Freedom of Information Act portray a sophisticated organization obsessed with secrecy that operated a network of 40 chief agents and more than 600 sources in 32 countries. The AP has also interviewed former officials, family members, historians and archivists.

The Pond, designed to be relatively small and operate out of the limelight, appeared to score some definite successes, but rivals questioned its sources and ultimately, it became discredited because its pugnacious leader was too cozy with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other radical anti-communists.

The documents also highlight issues still relevant today: the rivalry among U.S. intelligence agencies that have grown to number 16, the government's questionable use of off-the-books operations with budgets hidden from congressional oversight, and the reliance on contractors to undertake sensitive national security work.

Created by U.S. military intelligence as a counterweight to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, it functioned as a semiautonomous agency for the State Department after World War II and ended its days as a contractor for the CIA with links to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

The organization counted among its exploits an attempt to negotiate the surrender of Germany with Hermann Goering, one of Adolf Hitler's top military leaders, more than six months before the war ended; an effort to enlist mobster Charles "Lucky" Luciano in a plot to assassinate Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; identifying the location of the German heavy water plants doing atomic research in Norway; and providing advance information on Russia's first atomic bomb explosion.

There were other tangible successes, such as planting a high-level mole in the Soviet secret police and, in a major operation code-named "Empire State," the Pond paid a group of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain with CIA funds to obtain cryptographic systems to break coded messages from Moscow.

But it was Pfeiffer's successful escape that was among the most high-profile operations, garnering headlines, although the Pond's role was kept secret for years.

McCargar, a State Department official who secretly was the Pond's agent in Budapest, had been ordered to find a way to get Pfeiffer and his family out of the country. The Hungarian was the leader of a small but increasingly popular anti-communist party that had made gains in August elections, and he had begun to get death threats.

McCargar coordinated the escape with the help of fellow State Department employee Edmund Price, also identified in the papers as working for the Pond. But it was McCargar, armed with a pistol, who drove them from Budapest, past four road blocks. At one, a Russian guard asked to see what was in the four crates. McCargar bribed him with cigarettes.

They arrived in Vienna, a hotbed of international intrigue, where the U.S. shared control with their allies, the French and the British, as well as the Soviets. Against this politically fraught backdrop, Pfeiffer and his family were taken to an airfield and spirited away to Frankfurt and on to New York. They arrived in the U.S. on Nov. 12 as heroes of the anti-communist opposition.

One of the escapees, Pfeiffer's daughter, Madeline, told the AP she remembered sitting between her mother's legs in one crate and that she was given sleeping pills to keep her quiet.

"It is strange to realize that I have lived though this, and that my parents lived through this," said Madeline Pfeiffer, 67, now living in San Francisco. On the 50th anniversary of their flight from Hungary, she said she sent McCargar a bottle of cognac – what he and her parents drank after escaping. Two other dissidents were taken out with them.

The head of the Pond was Col. John V. Grombach, a radio producer, businessman and ex-Olympic boxer who kept a small black poodle under his desk. He attended West Point, but didn't graduate with his class because he had too many demerits, according to a U.S. Army document. His nickname was "Frenchy," because his father was a Frenchman, who worked in the French Consulate in New Orleans.

The War Department had tapped Grombach to create the secret intelligence branch in 1942 as a foundation for a permanent spy service. Grombach said the main objectives were security and secrecy, unlike the OSS, which he said had been infiltrated by allies and subversives. It was first known as the Special Service Branch, then as the Special Service Section and finally as the Coverage and Indoctrination Branch.

To the few even aware of its existence, the intelligence network was known by its arcane name, the Pond. Its leaders referred to the G-2 military intelligence agency as the "Lake," the CIA, which was formed later, was the "Bay," and the State Department was the "Zoo." Grombach's organization engaged in cryptography, political espionage and covert operations. It had clandestine officers in Budapest, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm, Bombay, Istanbul and elsewhere.

Grombach directed his far-flung operations from an office at the Steinway Hall building in New York, where he worked under the cover of a public relations consultant for Philips. His combative character had earned him a reputation as an opportunist who would "cut the throat of anyone standing in his way," according to a document in his Army intelligence dossier.

In defining the Pond's role, Grombach maintained that the covert network sought indirect intelligence from people holding regular jobs in both hostile countries and allied nations – not unlike the Russian spies uncovered in June in the U.S. while living in suburbia and working at newspapers or universities.

The Pond, he wrote in a declassified document put in the National Archives, had a mission "to collect important secret intelligence via many international companies, societies, religious organizations and business and professional men who were willing to cooperate with the U.S. but who would not work with the OSS because it was necessarily integrated with British and French Intelligence and infiltrated by Communists and Russians."

On April 15, 1953, Grombach wrote that the idea behind his network was to use "observers" who would build long-term relationships and produce far more valuable information than spies who bought secrets. "Information was to be rarely, if ever, bought, and there were to be no paid professional operators; as it later turned out some of the personnel not only paid their own expenses but actually advanced money for the organization's purposes."

The CIA, for its part, didn't think much of the Pond. It concluded that the organization was uncooperative, especially since the outfit refused to divulge its sources, complicating efforts to evaluate their reports. In an August 1952 letter giving notice that the CIA intended to terminate the contract, agency chief Gen. Walter Bedell Smith wrote that "our analysis of the reports provided by this organization has convinced us that its unevaluated product is not worth the cost." It took until 1955 to completely unwind the relationship.

Mark Stout, a former intelligence officer and historian for the International Spy Museum in Washington, analyzed the newly released papers and said it isn't clear how important the Pond was to U.S. intelligence-gathering as a whole. "But they were making some real contributions," he said.

Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and author of "The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency" who has reviewed some of the collection, said there was no evidence the Pond's reports made their way to decision-makers. "I'm still not convinced that Grombach's organization was a worthwhile endeavor in World War II and even less so when it went off the books," he said.

What it may have lacked in quality and influence, however, the Pond certainly made up with chutzpah.

One of the outfit's most unusual informers was a French serial killer named Marcel Petiot, Grombach wrote in a 1980 book.

The Secret Intelligence Branch, as he referred to the Pond, began receiving reports from Petiot during the war. He was a physician in Paris who regularly treated refugees, businessmen and Gestapo agents, but he also had a predilection for killing mostly wealthy Jews and burning their bodies in a basement furnace in his soundproofed house. He was convicted of 26 murders and guillotined in 1946.

Nevertheless, Grombach considered him a valuable informer because of his contacts.

One cable discovered among the newly released papers appears to confirm the Pond was tracking Petiot's whereabouts. In the undated memo, the writer says Petiot was drawn by a Gestapo agent "into a trap to be arrested by the Germans." Petiot was briefly arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo.

Such sources were often feeding their reports to top operatives – often businessmen or members of opposition groups. But there were also journalists in the spy ring.

Ruth Fischer, code-named "Alice Miller," was considered a key Pond agent for eight years, working under her cover as a correspondent, including for the North American Newspaper Alliance. She had been a leader of Germany's prewar Communist Party and was valuable to the Pond in the early years of the Cold War, pooling intelligence from Stalinists, Marxists and socialists in Europe, Africa and China, according to the newly released documents.

But it was the help from businesses in wartime that was essential to penetrating Axis territories.

The Philips companies, including their U.S. division, gave the Pond money, contacts, radio technology and supported Grombach's business cover in New York. Philips spokesman Arent Jan Hesselink said the company had business contacts with Grombach between 1937 and 1970. He added that they could not "rule out that there was contact between Philips and Grombach with the intention of furthering central U.S. intelligence during the war."

The Pond laid the groundwork and devised a detailed postwar plan to integrate its activities into the U.S. Rubber Co.'s business operations in 93 countries. It is unknown if the plan was ever carried out. The Pond also worked with the American Express Co., Remington Rand, Inc. and Chase National Bank, according to documents at the National Archives.

American Express spokeswoman Caitlin Lowie said a search of company archives revealed no evidence of a relationship with Grombach's organization. Representatives of the other companies or their successors did not respond to requests for comment.

The Pond directed its resources for domestic political ends, as well.

In the 1950s, Grombach began furnishing names to McCarthy on supposed security risks in the U.S. intelligence community. By then, the Pond was a CIA contractor, existing as a quasi-private company, and the agency's leadership was enraged by Grombach's actions. It wasn't long before the Pond's contract was terminated and the organization largely ceased to exist.

The CIA withheld thousands of pages from the National Archives collection of Grombach papers, including eight rolls of documents on microfilm; the National Security Agency kept back devices used to send coded messages. The CIA also declined a Freedom of Information Act request by the AP detailing its relationship to the Pond, which the AP has appealed.

Grombach wrote to the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, dated June 10, 1977, indicating most of his classified papers would go to the American Security Council Foundation, an anti-communist group that works on national security policy. Grombach died in 1982.

Henry A. Fischer, the council's executive director, said safes at the 683-acre Longea Estate – site of the council's former Freedom Studies Center – were mistakenly removed by contractors hired to transfer the contents of its Boston, Va., library. He said he had been told by staff of the error when FBI agents were called to examine them. "I have no idea what they were going to do with them."

FBI historian John Fox said only one safe was removed from the property by the contractors and drilled open, its contents turned over to the CIA, which informed the bureau about the discovery in December 2001. Fox said the FBI recovered four other safes from the council and took them to Quantico to be opened. After an investigation, Fox said the remaining documents were transferred to the CIA.

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Associated Press writer Toby Sterling in Amsterdam contributed to this report.

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Online:

National Archives Research Catalog: http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/

CIA "Pond" article: http://bit.ly/cx5VIX

John Grombach obit, see p. 132: http://bit.ly/cOnWW5

WASHINGTON — A bill to increase small business lending is in jeopardy in the Senate as lawmakers struggle to reach agreement on a series of Republican amendments.

Democratic leaders have scheduled a key test vote Thursday on the legislation. But the bill won't advance unless Democrats can attract Republican votes.

The bill would create a $30 billion government fund to help community banks increase lending to small businesses, combining it with about $12 billion in tax breaks aimed at small businesses.

Democrats say banks should be able to use the lending fund to leverage up to $300 billion in loans to small businesses, helping to loosen tight credit markets.

While the fund would be available only to banks with less than $10 billion in assets, some Republicans likened it to the unpopular bailout of the financial industry.

Democratic and Republican leaders tried to negotiate a handful of amendments Wednesday with the goal of scheduling a vote on the bill. Both party leaders, however, said they reached an impasse.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Democrats were blocking GOP amendments to the bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Republican demands kept changing.

"We all know this is an effort to stall and not do this bill," Reid said. "This is the proverbial stall that we've had all year."

McConnell sounded more optimistic, saying, "This is a discussion worth continuing because somewhere in all of this, there is a bipartisan bill."

The lending fund overcame a Republican filibuster in the Senate last week, but Republicans wanted to vote on a handful of amendments before voting on the final bill.

GOP amendments included measures to beef up border security, impose a government spending cap and lower the estate tax, which is scheduled to return next year with a top rate of 55 percent on estates larger than $1 million.

One Republican amendment would repeal a new tax reporting requirement for businesses that was included in the massive health care overhaul enacted last spring.

Democrats, meanwhile, have added about $1.5 billion in disaster relief for farmers who lost crops in 2009, a measure sponsored by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

Democrats also want to add an amendment to settle long-running class-action lawsuits brought by black farmers and American Indians.

One lawsuit concerned the government's management and accounting of more than 300,000 trust accounts of American Indians. The other is a discrimination lawsuit brought by black farmers against the Agriculture Department. The cost of settling them both: about $4.6 billion.

The small business tax cuts in the bill include breaks for restaurant owners and retailers who remodel their stores or build new ones. Other businesses could more quickly recover the costs of capital improvements through depreciation. Long-term investors in some small businesses would be exempt from paying capital gains taxes.

Much of the bill would be paid for by allowing taxpayers to convert 401(k) and government retirement accounts into Roth accounts, in which they pay taxes up front on the money they contribute, enabling them to withdraw it tax-free after they retire. Taxpayers who convert accounts this year would pay the taxes in 2011 and 2012, generating an estimated $5.1 billion.

Crack cocaine, it is widely known, causes irrational behavior. I speak not of irrational behavior among the drug's users, but rather among politicians. It has done so ever since crack appeared on the scene in America during the 1980s. Today it was announced that Congress has approved a bill (which will now head for President Obama's desk) which will scale back the worst of the irrational legislation which passed in the Reagan era. Somewhat. In true incrementalist fashion, Democrats have now made things slightly less unfair, but fell far short of actual fairness. It's as if, right after the Civil War, Congress announced that black people would now count as four-fifths of a person, instead of the previous three-fifths -- in other words, a step towards equality, but not exactly the giant leap of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Which makes it rather hard to praise such an effort, even though it does represent (some) progress.

Crack cocaine is no different, really, than powder cocaine. They're both the same thing, in other words -- a chemical (or "drug") that influences the human body. The only real difference between the two is that crack is in a form which can be smoked, and powder is in a form which can be snorted, or melted and injected. Powder actually can be smoked (or "freebased") as well, but it requires some effort to do so -- such as the use of ether to separate out the impurities, and the use of a very hot flame to ignite it. Ether, by the way, is highly flammable (one might accurately say "explosive"). And using a blowtorch around ether can lead to accidents, as Richard Pryor can attest to (as he later joked: "when you are running down the street... and you are on fire... people get out of your way"). Crack cocaine was developed to be easier to ignite, meaning you could smoke it using an ordinary cigarette lighter, instead of a blowtorch. This development occurred in the 1980s, as previously mentioned.

The politicians of the day freaked out. The appearance of crack, during one of the high points (pun intended) of Drug War hysteria (see: Nancy Reagan) caused politicians to fall all over themselves to pass tough-on-crime drug laws for this new crack epidemic, before machine-gun-wielding crack babies attacked the Capitol en masse.

The result was extremely harsh "mandatory minimum" sentences for the new form of the drug. If you were caught with as little as five grams of crack in your possession, you got five years in the slammer. Now, five grams is about what a street-level dealer might have on him (or her). It's enough to get a limited number of people high, or enough to last a single crack smoker at least a week (the actual time would vary, depending on the user's habit, of course). For comparison, a gram of any powdered substance (for those of us who have forgotten the metric system) is about the same amount as is in one of those little packets of sugar you get in a coffee shop. Five sugar packets' worth of crack equaled five years in jail.

Now, it's hard to stand up for a crack dealer's rights. It was even harder back then when Congress was proposing such things. "Toss them all in jail, and throw away the key" was how the country's thinking went at the time. This was before we surpassed the Soviet Union and China for the number and per-capita percentage of people in our jails, by the way.

There was only one problem with the whole scheme. And that was that Congress conveniently forgot to change the law for powdered cocaine at the same time. Which meant that to trigger the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence, you had to get caught with five hundred grams of powdered cocaine. Five hundred grams (again, for the metrically-impaired) is over a pound of coke (it's close to a pound and an eighth). Which is a lot of cocaine, worth an enormous amount of money. We're not talking about the corner dealer here, we're not even talking about the guy the corner dealer buys his stuff from -- we're talking about the wholesaler who sells to the middleman who sells to the corner dealer. A major drug trafficker, in other words, and not some small fish who is feeding his own habit by selling to a few other folks.

From the Associated Press story about the new bill:

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the main sponsor of the bill in the Senate with Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said last year close to 1,500 people were convicted for possession of somewhere between five and 25 grams of crack cocaine, subjecting them to mandatory minimum sentences.

Some 80 percent of those convicted of crack cocaine offenses are black.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama said the sentencing disparity "has disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino drug users." He cited figures that blacks serve almost as much time for drug offenses -- 58.7 months -- as whites do for violent offenses -- 61.7 months.

The major impact of this law was to treat inner-city drug users and dealers much more harshly than the folks out in the suburbs doing a few lines. In other words, whether the intent was there or not by the politicians who passed this law, the upshot was that white people had a whole different set of laws than black and brown people -- for what is essentially the same substance. The inherent unfairness of this should be readily evident to all.

But now, for the first time since the Drug War began, Congress has eliminated a mandatory minimum sentence (for first-time possession of crack cocaine). And it has changed the level of crack you must be caught with which triggers that five-year mandatory minimum -- from five grams to 28 grams (which is roughly an ounce).

This is landmark legislation, I realize. Moving away from the "lock them all up" mentality, for politicians, is remarkable simply because it does not happen often (read: "ever"). Backing down on Draconian drug laws is not exactly atop the priorities list of many politicians, because the ads attacking them for doing so just about write themselves. So I do applaud Congress for addressing the issue (both houses have now passed the bill).

But, at the same time, what they've done is to change the ratio of unfairness from one-hundred-to-one (500:5) down to roughly eighteen-to-one (500:28). The penalties for crack and powder cocaine are still nowhere near parity. Someone possessing an ounce of crack will get a much stricter punishment than someone possessing a full pound of powder cocaine. It's as if we decided to make coffee illegal, and instituted mandatory minimums for possessing five cups of coffee -- while at the same time applying the same penalty only if you were caught with 500 cups of espresso. Or made water illegal, but set a much higher bar for possessing 500 ice cubes. Either way, it is the same substance. The only thing which differs is the penalty for the "lower class" version of the substance.

Meaning that even the newly-passed bill is not exactly an exercise in equality under the law. Not by a factor of eighteen. President Obama, to his credit, called for true fairness on the campaign trail, when he said that the disparity in crack/powder cocaine punishment "cannot be justified and should be eliminated." He was right. It should be eliminated. Either start jailing a lot more suburban white kids (which would cause its own kind of outcry), or stop jailing inner-city folks disproportionally. Lower the bar for powder, or raise the bar for crack, in other words, until the penalty is equalized.

While Congress did not have the courage of their convictions to do so this time around, they did take a baby step in the right direction. This is momentous, because it is the first such step in this direction in three or four decades. But I still can't help but wish that Congress had tackled the problem not in such an incrementalist political fashion, but rather as an issue of rank inequality to be rectified by removing all of the legally-codified unfairness at once -- to restore the concept of equal treatment under the law, rather than perpetuating (if slightly lessening) the inherent injustice which still exists.

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President Obama managed to show just how nimble and how disingenuous an administration can be in his response to the WikiLeaks fiasco:

Obama, speaking from the Rose Garden after a meeting with congressional leaders to discuss funding for the war and other issues, deplored the leak, saying he was concerned the information from the battleground "could potentially jeopardise individuals or operations".

...

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said he was appalled by the leaks, telling reporters "there is a real potential threat there to put American lives at risk."

Now, it may or may not be true that this leak put people in Afghanistan at risk, but I find that to be a very interesting point for this president to be making, considering that the policy and execution of his policy absolutely jeopardizes individuals in Afghanistan and around the world. After all, if you put Julian Assange and President Obama together in a room, only one person in that room is ordering heavily armed people into a hostile war zone filled with civilians. And only one of them is executing a policy that increases the likelihood of a suicide bombing campaign directed at the United States and its citizens and that kills thousands of civilians each year.

This is a tried-and-true warmonger move: according to this canard, it's those that oppose the war policy or that take action to show the conflict between societal values and actual policies that endanger everyone, not the brutal, costly policy. I would say I was a bit shocked, but this is the same president that stood up during his Nobel Peace Prize lecture and opined about the necessity of war when he feels it's justified. The President of the United States has tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, thus putting them in harm's way for a policy that doesn't make us safer and that causes enormous hardship for those caught in the crossfire. Those who support this policy but are attacking WikiLeaks for releasing this data need to take a good, hard look in the mirror before they jump on Julian Assange for "endangering" anyone.

But he went on to say the material highlighted the challenges that led him to announce a change in strategy late last year that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. The policy is due to be reviewed in December.

...

"We failed for seven years to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge," Obama said today, of the period starting with the 9/11 attacks. That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy," he said, adding he has also sent one of the finest generals in the US, General David Petraeus.

Insisting that the strategy "can work", he ended with a plea to the House of Representatives to join the Senate in passing a bill to provide funds for the Afghan war as a matter of urgency.

Help me out here. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that the WikiLeaks information is "proof" that the president was right to initiate a massive escalation. If I were the president, this would be the drop-dead last argument I'd be making, because it begs the question: Okay, well, what's the situation on the ground like now, 7 months into the escalation policy, compared to the time period captured in the War Logs leak?

Short answer: the president should be pining away for the good ol' days depicted in the WikiLeaks report.

Here's a chart from the latest Afghan NGO Safety Office report, showing a massive jump in the seasonal peaks in insurgent-initiated violence since President Obama took office and started his repeated escalations.

Here's a quote from a December 2009 military report, "The State of the Insurgency" (.pdf):

• Organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding
• Strength and ability of shadow governance increasing
• Much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations

Compare that with this quote from the latest "progress" report to Congress:

• Organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding.

...

• The strength and ability of shadow governance to discredit the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan Government is increasing.

...

• Insurgents' tactics, techniques, and procedures for conducting complex attacks are increasing in sophistication and strategic effect.

Lots of change there, apparently. Good work, Mr. President.

Here's a map from that same report that shows that the Kabul government is falling further behind the insurgents when it comes to winning sympathy or support in key regions of the country (a chart that the Pentagon laughably refers to when it wants to show "progress" to Congress, because they know Congress doesn't actually read the reports).

Here's another quote from the same source that compares the level of violence in 2010 to the level of violence at the time depicted in the WikiLeaks material:

Violence is sharply above the seasonal average for the previous year - an 87% increase from February 2009 to March 2010.

Like everyone else, I'm still combing through the documents and reading various summaries and reactions. But I don't even have to get through any of the WikiLeaks material to see that the president's attempt to spin this leak as a justification of his policies is totally bankrupt. The publicly available reports from his own administration prove it--no leak required.

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