That fact is appreciated by every high-school jock shoving the put-upon, the grace-challenged into lockers, leaving their nerdy victims nursing painful scars much deeper than sheet-metal doors can ever tear. And as much by tony mavens snubbing the unfashionable and bad bosses humiliating underlings. Cruelty is locked in an elegantly infantile jig with status, since part of the privilege of exclusivity is providence to savage the common. And more than that: Cruel dismissal underlines stark differences of social and political elevation; it's not just about pleasures of sadism, although that's a huge part of the attraction. It's statement.

By spitting in your face, I prove to the world I'm a winner. Or, at least, not a loser. (It's probably more appropriate to keep this in negative dimension.)

There's something in human nature that can't exult unless someone else agonizes. There but for the grace of God... go I.

The bully is compelling. In his abuse and torment, he tells the world he can stand alone, he can turn others into whimpering flunkeys, he can spit on the rules and push people around. ...A prince or princess.

I don't believe it took seven years to get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed out of the clutches of our cesspit torture dungeons and into a civilian courtroom merely because we had quibbles with his battlefield status or because we wanted to send a message to wannabe terrorists that no coddling, lily-livered courtroom saints would let them off easy. I think widely known personalities in the Bush Administration threw terrorists and innocent "collateral" into cells and tossed the keys simply because they enjoyed doing so.

We make our enemies suffer. In decisions made by officials in the highest reaches of government - by men and women who had absolutely no faith in our Constitution and legal system, and in fact despised them - we've adopted standards of savage war lords and Stone-Age tribes.

It's difficult to feel sympathy for Khalid. He's accused of masterminding 9/11, and even eight years out, that horror is still branded deep in us. But that's not the point. Should we revert permanently to Dark Age methods of criminal apprehension and justice, then Mohammed did more than help knock down the buildings in New York and Washington, and kill the passengers in that lonely Pennsylvania field. By denying him the justice that we claim defines us, we allow him to accomplish the ultimate objective essayed by him and the rest of the wilderness fanatics: The destruction of the United States. We are, after all, a system, not a border on a map. We're not a race or a king or a stamp in wax. We are a collection of laws, an approach to liberal enlightenment and self-government. We're a piece of parchment called the Constitution. We deny the human rights of anyone, no matter how odious, and we burn into cinders that thin document.

The battle is in doubt:

Last week, another federal court ruled that the courts have no jurisdiction over matters relating to the practice known as "extraordinary rendition" - kidnapping a person in U.S. custody and sending him/her to a prison in another country.

In a seven to four decision in the celebrated case known as Arar v. Ashcroft, the appeals court for the second circuit in New York wrote, "If a civil remedy in damages is to be created for harms suffered in the context of extraordinary rendition, it must be created by Congress, which alone has the institutional competence to set parameters, delineate safe harbors, and specify relief. If Congress chooses to legislate on this subject, then judicial review of such legislation would be available."

Our entrenched viciousness infuses much of what should make us better, as well. I wonder, sometimes, if affluent opponents of heath care aren't spurred by a compulsion to degrade those they consider lesser mortals, "underserving poor." Now... I'm not referring to our political class, public office holders; if single-payer proponents could offer them money and whores, they'd rave about the nobility of socialized medicine - on that we can have no doubt.

It seems our gods are mean and relentless and must be served. Sometimes I wonder if, when Congress and the past couple presidents dropped to their knees to swallow every demand of the financial industry, they didn't secretly relish a hatred for all us chumps out here, that they indeed wanted us to suffer under skyrocketing interest rates and unregulated fees that strip to the bone meager resources.

This is the morality of the playground, of immature hecklers and backbiting pecking orders of prom rivalries and cheerleader tryouts. We're one fart joke away from fading into obscurity, an unmourned victim of Peter Pan complex writ large.

Maybe... if we then die, we'll rise to the sky to dwell forever with the Lord of the Flies.

Life isn't fair, you know. Another Democrat noted that: John Kennedy. You remember him - a President and administration more of promise than accomplishment, sanctified by his political martyrdom. But when we look back, we see he was on the hot seat from day one - Bay of Pigs, civil rights (King called his performance in that great struggle, during the mournful weekend of his assassination, "tardy"), the missile crisis, and on and on.

JFK's first year in office must have encompassed one of the shortest honeymoons on record, even more brief than that of President Obama and the "hope 'n change" Demos on the Hill.

Here's the problem, Chris - can I call you 'Chris'? - you and the rest of the party in Congress don't get no respect because you don't deserve any respect.

Honeymoon? You hypocritical gas-bags deserve some hot tar, feather overcoats and a short ride on a cold rail out of town.

But, damn, Chris - even Maureen Dowd has figured out your reform is as lame as an O.J. alibi.

No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless. The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.

Maureen Dowd, Chris!

As Reuters puts it in a nice post, your re-regulation package this week "is more about getting (you) re-elected than getting a bill through the Senate." It's got consumer protection agency folderole, an exclusive regulation "czar" and other bells and whistles anyone this side of Falls Church knows hasn't a gnat's prayer of passing. Oh, you'll get some showy, empty facade of a bill through, Chris, after you let the banking lobbyists go through the package, water it down, fill it with concessions and riddle it with more holes than the Hostess Donut Archive.

A tough bill plays on populist outrage against Wall Street and mitigates the damaging public perception that he was AIG's man in Washington... So the politics are dicey. But an even tougher package might actually be more of a potential political winner by gaining grassroots support across America. Consider that the public seems to believe two big things about financial reform: The Fed should not be given more power, and too-big-to-fail is terrible policy.

See, Chris, we're mad down here at the bottom of the social ladder. Don't grandstand in front of microphones and throw out on the floor a bunch of sacrificial pie-in-the-sky twaddle. We're pissed, we're taxed to death and drained of everything of value. It's not going to work this time.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd faces new problems in his bid for a new Senate term next year: By a 53-39 percent margin, Connecticut voters do not think he deserves re-election.

And pass the word to Barney Frank: We're not happy with derivatives regulation getting turned into thin gruel despite his gruff, no-nonsense, truth-to-power burlesque.

You Democrats better start getting it done. Or come election time, you're done!

It's hard, sure. I feel for you. Know what? I feel sorry for mice I see wiggling in a trap. Then I grab a garden tool or a brick or my big carpenter's mallet - my favorite - and put them out of their misery.

It's an unfair, cruel world.

I don't make the rules, Chris. I just live here.

I don't know if this term exists or not, but I'm coining it now, to signify the process of mixing tiny shreds of fact and huge dumploads of fiction in order to concoct an impression, a national delusion powerful enough to... build hugely expensive weapons systems... slap sanctions on countries that don't fit within the security blueprint we demand for ourselves and our little geopolitical pals.

...Or, launch a war on a country not making war on us.

And we know Iraq had no connection to 9/11 or al Qaeda. All of that, all the lies about Saddam's involvement in that vast tragedy were fabrications fixed together in a top-level whisper campaign, and vetted on the front pages of what had been, at one time not so long ago, our most distinguished newspapers - the Washington Post and the New York Times among them. Some of the ugly slander even worked its way into President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, to prop up the phony, shabby casus belli sketched out against Iraq.

By August 2003, five months into the war, it was perfectly clear that we'd made war without provocation, without warrant. The need became apparent for mutating our case for war into something else, something that seemed at least credible if not objectively valid. So we cooked up the "crusade for democracy" that figured so prominently in Bush's embarrassing, stupid 2005 Inaugural address - the "fire o' de mind" speech.

Now, our best intentions and foolish credulity erroded by the long slog of bloodshed, exhaustion and cynicism have streamlined the narrative: We're simply in Iraq and Afghanistan, paraphrasing the bitter British Tommy ballad, "because we're there". Long abandoning the idea of turning these ancient, backward "nations" into Jeffersonian democracies, we defend our quagmire combat in the name of security: Leave them in ruins, and we leave them to become failed states and pesthole roosts for fanatics and terrorists.

But here's the beauty of the "graywash": Once a mammoth fraud has been sold to the suckers, the fairy tales and fables underwriting it merely... fade away. They're never re-examined, discounted or "walked back" because they're never again addressed. Our endless wars? We're there because we're there. ...Because we're there! 

A lot has been made of "Islamo-Fascist" hatred - that Muslim radicals hate our freedoms. ...That their religious leaders fill them with hateful propaganda. The neoconservative press has gone full-tilt proposing the Fort Hood mass shooting last week somehow validates the case of a deluded, forever-antagonistic foe lurking in all Islam. Jim Sleeper, in TPM today, counters that with the proposition that all religions produce murderous fanatics, their demons fed by shepherds of ill will masquerading as coduits to God.

It's true - all faiths draw zealots willing to kill for what they believe, willing to sanctify their own self-aggrandizing sense of morality with the blood and suffering of others. Sociopaths can be pious, too. But that's irrelevant, as are the touchy-feely therapist diagnoses that Sleeper indirectly defends; they pin the killer's abominable crime on post-traumatic stress syndrome (although he's not a combat veteran) or hazing from other soldiers because of his faith. Or maybe he didn't get enough toys as a child. Something.

But how delusional was the Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan? Regardless of all other explanations, Maj. Hasan decided our policies are at war with the culture, homeland and religion of his forebears. Can we genuinely argue he's wrong in that determination? Would not - do not - disinterested third-party nations see our grand crusades, our "nation building" as war on Islam?

How could they not?

The death toll in Iraq alone - Iraq alone - in our miserable, seven years of war was put at 151,000 by the World Health Organization in the last reputable casualty count released in January last year. There isn't much of a push to update such statistics, since organizations like WHO get a good chunk of their funding from the U.S. - and the U.S. doesn't want a lot of ink shed on "collateral damage".

About a third of those killed are children, but that's still better than the estimated 50,000 Iraqi kids who died - long before their time - in each grinding year of economic sanctions we blithely placed on the severely disabled nation following Gulf War I in 1991.

Add to that the casualties in Afghanistan, our other war, and the unfortunate civilians constantly blasted to vapor in our killer-drone attacks in Pakistan.

If our motivations to attack and occupy and kill are so shady, so unspoken - why can't it be true that we're making war on Muslims simply for being Muslims?

I believe the Fort Hood killings could have been avoided had our country not been hoodwinked into occupying huge swatches of the Middle East.

This is the definition of "blowback", folks.

Get used to it.

Forget about Ritalin jarring us out of micro-second attention span. No drug can keep up with technology. Blackberries and texting have abbreviated and hacked our vocabulary to minimalist nightmare - LOL, MYOFB, FITB and SOOI join old favorites AWOL, NIMBY and FOB (or, Fat Old Broad, an archaic, telling bit of sexism from our latter-day, politically designated Stone Age of Sinatra and Chesterfields burnin' all night long.).

But today, especially for us aging Boomers facing retirements with scarce nuts and berries stored up, the most relevant may be an acronym I first heard on CNN Money's Revell on Retirement in January. Nothing better sums up our new reality of enforced solipcism: YOYO... or You're On Your Own.

Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time... Self-sufficiency is everyone's mantra, from civic associations to city hall.

That may be applicable again today, as another storm - Ida - bears down on Big Easy. Or financial pressure drops on all of us.

In its fine series on the perfidy of Goldman Sachs leading up to the economic meltdown last year and disgracefully continuing now, McClatchey News notes the company, one of the beneficiaries of the federal bailout largesse, has

...dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.

These were the same mortgages Goldman Sachs used to back up its snake-oil "securities". According to McClatchey, in 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs "peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told buyers that it also was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting." Nice. Goldman Sachs pockets huge profits from the securities sale, and credit default swap "side bets" when the mortgage market went south. Now, they're prepping for resale the homes involved - just as soon as they liquidate the dreams of peasants foolish enough to believe they could own the roofs over their heads.

And where was and is the government, that cumbersome, expensive titan that would protect these mortgage-holders from predatory lending practices, or the securities buyers from bust-out fraud? Oh... our government? Well, Henry Paulsen, Bush's Treasury Secretary, was a Goldman alum, as are many of the Obama's current finanicial "brain trust"; quite a durable protocol, it seems. Wall Street and investment bankers are the voices Capitol Hill listens to, as well; they can afford the lobbyists who are, in realilty, architects of this cozy regime/finance paradigm. In fact, it's hard to tell where "public" ends and "private" begins at that transactional altitude.

Obviously, the government isn't going to protect us from itself. That would be counterproductive.

"Our government" isn't our's. Like any commodity, our government has been sold to those who can afford it. "Our government" does the bidding of the national plutocracy, all but certified as above redress, capable of holding in manicured hands the power of life and death. Unassailable... and very litigious, very aggressive and acquisitive. The sheriff, with his warrant, his badge, and, if necessary, his gun, is there to help the money changer throw you out of your house, not prevent a thief from committing fraud, or a fraud from sucking up everything of value you might possess.

The overarching symbol of detached rule and deprived subjection is health care. As a supply/demand "product", they don't come any more valuable. In our country, apart from every other Western country for more than a century, medical care - life itself - is available for those who can afford it, or the insurance that underwrites it. We are not to expect help from the government. This is a resource best plumbed by private enterprise. It's a ministry best availed for-profit. That, we are told constantly.

You're on your own.

The next time you try to wade through the dozens of pages of fine print that is your credit-card contract, or watch everything you've worked for auctioned off for peanuts, remember: You're on your own.

Which begs the question: Every April 15, just what the hell are we paying for?

I became impressed with him in February 2007, when I watched him announce his campaign on a cold Saturday to a small crowd at the old statehouse in Springfield, Il - where Lincoln once worked, pundits never tired of telling us.

I liked what he said. It was 180-degrees from the reality we were living, four years downwind of the Iraq invasion, 19 months from the meltdown plunge, six years into the meanest, most infantile administration of physical and moral cowards with which, thankfully, we've ever been burdened in this country's history. If ever we wondered how the country would fare should ultimate authority fall into the hands of obnoxious, coddled frat boys, we discovered, too late, that fate would be a disaster generations mending.

For simply not being Geoge W. Bush, Barack Obama will always have my affection and gratitude, both as voter and American.

I believed.

But judging him by two key indices in the year since his election, the first months of his administration have been disappointing. And the disappointment has been underscored by the grand hopes and blessed relief anyone with any regard for this country and basic human decency felt one year ago Wednesday night.

On the economy, his advisors and underlings, who seem to hail mostly from Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, apparently are committed to reinstalling the crap-game eoncomy that failed spectactularly 14 months ago. On foreign policy, it now can be said: Nothing has changed, and there is little indication it will.

That second point has real resonance, since Barack Obama overcame both Hillary Clinton and John McCain by appearing, more than any other candidate, the president who'd end our pointless, quagmire wars. Up to now, he has not.

Obama has withdrawn some troops from Iraq - very few, not enough to matter - and seems paralyzed in uncertainty whether to beef up our presence in Afghanistan, or draw down and quit that fruitless slaughter altogether. He's urged to try a surge strategy, since such troop escalation in Iraq two years ago has attained such mythic - and utterly undeserved - status in our lickspittle media. Even the stupidest American notices that once troops withdraw from Iraq's cities, violence there spikes to pre-surge levels. If we deepen the commitment in Afghanistan, we deepen ourselves in that quicksand, as well. Time is on the side of the insurgents, or rebels, or terrorists... whatever they're called this week. The reason is simple: They're fighting close to home. In fact, they are home. Their countries are the battlefields.

His Secretary of State visited the area and managed to browbeat and insult our paid-off Pakistani "allies", reminding them they are corrupt lackeys, and at the same time disavow that we've been killing innocent civilians in our "surgical" killer-drone attacks:

Clinton told a group of journalists in Lahore that she found it "hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to." Al Qaeda, she said, "has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002."

I understand the motive behind appointing a former opponent to office, but this arrogant woman, utterly callow to the life-and-death horrors she can help alleviate or intensify, seems hellbent on maintaining our catastrophic foreign policy.

John Bolton in a dress, indeed.

Speaking of patching up our worn-out, shabby status quo, no better summation of how toothless are efforts to re-regulate the financial industry than last Friday's Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan, in which he also pointed out the world derivatives bubble is worth about $500 trillion, while America's net worth is around $17 trillion. "So... you can do the math," he added as a post-script to a show that lambasted the re-establishment of a casino market that makes short-term side-bet killings on derivatives and other crap-shoot "financial instruments" rather than encourage productive investing. Remember that? Remember when investments actually provided capital to make things, or build them?

I guess it makes sense to hire insiders like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and the rest of the "free-market" hacks. Maybe the thinking goes like this: We're so deep in the hole over these trillions in losses, we're just biding time until the other shoe falls. Maybe these money-out-thin-air alchemists can breathe some life back into this Ayn Rand nightmare before we crash through the 1929 floor.

Maybe they're like me, and just hoping for the best.

I'm not soured on Obama, in spite of all this. Dammit, I still believe. This I now know: Hope began a year ago, but change will take time.

It means that non-existent lobby is taking the upstart opposition group seriously.

So far, about a dozen of the original 160 hosts have rescinded their names from J Street's list, including: Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA), Rep. John Salazar (D-CO), and Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY)... Jane Harman (D-Calif.) isn't attending, but still backs the group. 

Sin of sins, J Street is attempting to unite progressive and, yes, younger Jews in an alternative to the traditional lobby, which, if it existed - and we're not saying it does, mind you - would be made up of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Christians United for Israel, and a whole host of other groups, fellowships, think tanks and chummy clubs hellbent on making sure American policies in the Mideast at large and toward Israel in particular virtually mirror and rubber-stamp those of the Likud Party, no matter how brutal its initiatives. Also, and this is most important, they work real, real hard to assure American largesse to Israel hits its annual nut - more than a third of the entire U.S. foreign aid budget. Any American politician making a peep about that flowing spigot faces de-election... if, of course, such a lobby should, theoretically, exist.

You could read about all the players and their Capitol Hill methods in The Israel Lobby, an hysterically controversial essay and book by American academics Stephen Walt and John Meirsheimer. But doing so could put you on the fightin' side of J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami:

However, when the analysis of that lobby veers over a line and essentially says that all of American foreign policy is controlled by this one lobby and this one interest group, to me, personally, this does smack of the kind of conspiracy theories contained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notion that somehow Jews control this country, they control our foreign policy, that there is some diabolical conspiracy behind the scenes, this is when you cross that line.  I believe that the analysis in the Walt and Mearsheimer book and article crossed that line, but this doesn't take away from my view that this is an incredibly effective lobby.

That's from a remarkably hostile, baiting interview in the Atlantic Ben-Ami granted to neocon stalwart Jeffrey Goldberg on the eve of the J Street conference. While at times Goldberg's questioning technique seems to come from an old Cheka interrogation manual, and Ben-Ami proves remarkably level-headed and measured in his responses, the J Street chief seems to disavow the obvious a lot - and ignoring this Levantine elephant in the room has for decades been a bane to American foreign policy, and toxic to our relations with the Muslim world.

Another stunning development is Ben-Ami's refusal to accept the United Nation's Goldstone report, which certified what was already known by a world availed of unedited coverage of the Gaza insursion earlier this year: Israel committed war crimes against defenseless Palestinians in a military foray which had all the sophistication of a gangland, revenge-killing "policy whack".

In a column today at Antiwar.com, former CIA case officer Philip Giraldi comments:

On many of the specific issues, J Street is AIPAC lite.  It accepts an Israeli state based on religion, not on equal rights for all citizens, specifically supporting the apartheid-like right of any Jew to "return" without affording similar rights to Christians or Muslims who resided in Palestine before 1948. Its Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami calls a one-state solution to Israel/Palestine with all citizens having the same rights a "nightmare."

For myself, the jury is still out. Certainly, it's laudable to launch an organization intended to counter the all-too-real Israel Lobby, which is enormously powerful and directly connected to a foreign country; on that we all agree. But now isn't the time to start denying the obvious. And the era for "sensitivity" is over. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Frankly, I can't see how, when the rest of the world as multicultural mixing bowl is inevitable, a geographical homeland based on any particulars, any grounds of uniqueness, can survive without constant combat. And, so, I can't see how a "one-state" solution would be that nightmare to which Ben-Ami refers.

Israel and its supporters have pled its victimhood so long they believe their own, obsolete propaganda. This bizarre proposition that past suffering absolves an individual or group from present responsibility, or that it conveys some otherworldly dominion over moral issues, has distorted our judgment and recent history to absurdity. Enough. Come down here to terra firma with the rest of us, and talking eye-to-eye, maybe we can come up with some answers, relieve some critical stresses, before we combust ourselves to ash.

Here's the key topic and crucial question: Why can't peace for Israel and its neighbors be secured here and now?

Lately, as I revel in the tepid, dreary pleasure of my drive to and from work in the urban garden that is downtown L.A. - anonymously monolithic and reeking of poverty's urine - I've become annoyed at all the far-Right talk radio cluttering up the airwaves. So much so, that I've started punching the 'scan' button to find something less recklessly heartless.

Edging in amid static, and fading easily, are a few "Radio Free Los Angeles" stations hammering a political line from the far, far other end of the spectrum. Between badly recorded garage punk triumphalism, disembodied voices shout denunciation of all fearsome evils wracking our nation and time - racism, class warfare, counter-revolutionary activity, dogfighting, dog eating, the persecution of Mumia, Palestine, etc. If you're over the age of, maybe, 25, it's all stuff you've heard before. A lot. But a new scare issue has popped up in time for Hallowe'en:

The H1N1 vaccine.

Big pharma, in league with... whoever... Tri-Lateral Commission... somebody, y'know... have cooked up a plot to release the deadly virus that caused the 1918 global flu pandemic as a eugenics weapon to thin world population. The vaccine will spare necessary breeders, who can look forward to a horrid Death Cheese existence as capitalist-zombie flu cultures.

Like most of these dystopic visions, the Flu Plot mixes just enough truth to make the hogwash plausible. That 1918 catastrophe was real enough, killing more than 600,000 Americans in a global outbeak with a still-indeterminate death toll, although it's been estimated as low as 20 million, high as 50 million.

But another side to this dark scenario is the billions that supposedly will be made off the H1N1 innoculations, once the vaccine becomes as rare as europium and expensive as a CEO's wastebasket.

That part of the story really scares me witless - the commercially viable aspect of this nefarious, shadowy (and, of course, supernaturally efficient) scheme. As we know from our experience living here on the big blue marble, and especially downwind of the first Bush II inauguration, quibbling details like right and wrong or good and evil are no obstacles to sound moneymaking opportunities:

If parts are being sold for profit, it's mostly because it's such an easy thing to do. Each year, up to 8,000 donors in the U.S. may leave their bodies to science, and while most people like to think of their mortal remains being gently dissected by respectful medical students, the fact is that cadavers might just as easily be sawed apart and scattered to pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms, or even used as flesh-and-blood crash-test dummies... A whole body might cost $1,400, but a harvested heart valve may go for $9,120, and knee cartilage for $14,000. "[Tissue brokers] claim they're only recovering costs," says Arthur Dalley, director of the anatomical gift program at Vanderbilt University. "But if you were trying to build a human being by buying those parts, you'd find it very expensive."

The radio swami spinning the H1N1 terror tale I heard is some doctor connected somehow to an Ivy League school - can't remember, traffic was actually moving at the time, so my concentration uncharacteristically shifted to driving - and, naturally, he's written a book about all this. And that got me to wondering about the Doomsday Industry itself: How big a goldmine is it? How deep does it go? And, sure, is there a way for me to bust off a chunk?

Most of the Armageddoneers take advantage of our contemporary American credence in rattle-brained conspiracy theories. Somebody out there is setting us up, somebody or something is gonna get us. Or they've already gotten someone just trying to do the right thing - be it battle for the freedom of his people or twist the night away with Jackie.

The History Channel, which takes some pretty specious approaches to the past, has made a cottage industry out of some Mayan prophecy of doom arriving the first day of winter, 2012. This seems to be yet another in the revolving "Y2K" End Times fiesta, but the network sells a lot of commericals during each airing and... I've... seen... just about every one of 'em.

Long ago, CBS "60 Minutes" filed a report on dangers of a commercial orchard insecticide which supposedly did everything to the human genome from cause birth defects to render normal people impervious to the powerful temptation of onion dip. Sales of apples fell through the floor, and although the durable commodities were soon back on the shelf, there was a sharp slump on the futures exchange. When the whole story turned out to be hooey and the insecticide, Alar, no more toxic than any other poison we pour on our food, it occured to me that an unscrupulous network could engineer such a market panic on the strength of a false report, buy up the apple futures, make a financial killing and stymie all lawsuits with the "freedom of press" prerogative. Later, there was another notorious, baseless food scare involving Oprah and hamburger.

I know - it's crazy. But, truth is, the H1N1 vaccine has been awfully lucrative for Glaxo, and the market at large:

GlaxoSmithKline Plc said third- quarter profit rose 30 percent after currency gains and orders for the Relenza flu drug boosted revenue. Vaccine sales declined because of a "phasing" of shipments including swine flu shots... "After 11 straight quarters of declining sales growth, it's good to see sales growth is positive," Royal Bank of Scotland analyst Michael Leacock said in an interview. "I'm a bit cautious though because of the one-off nature of swine flu products, and I recognize 2010 will be challenging because of the loss of Valtrex," an antiviral medicine that faces generic threats as soon as the fourth quarter, he said.

Moneymaking itself seemed going the way of the dinosaurs for the past year now, so anything booming is a bright spot, even a product designed to arrest mortal human fear as much as any potential pandemic. Things are down, and some sources see nothing ahead but... well... gloom and doom:

Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente's record of predictions is nearly flawless. His accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the sub-prime mortgage scandal and the latest economic downturn caused by the breakdown of major corporate giants.

Dubbed as the world's greatest trends forecaster by CNN, USA Today and CNBC, Celente insists that despite the latest market bounce, and increase in consumer confidence, the economy's fundamentals are broken...."Washington is inflating the biggest bubble ever: the bailout bubble," Celente said. "This is much bigger than the dot-com and real estate bubbles. When the bailout bubble bursts, it should be understood that a major war could follow."

He had me going, right up until he makes a trendy, tea-baggie "Obamageddon" crack. And, of course, he has a book out.

Trick or treat!

It's hard to picture such international combustion today, on the quiet edge of the Chihuahuan Desert plateau, where deep red, ore-rich earth and dark green mesquite scrub dress the rugged countryside almost perennially in festive color. But the bullet holes and deteriorated trench lines falling back into the earth at the outskirts of town echo fairly sophisticated conflict that itself encapsulated the clash of old and new so much a part of that blood-drowned decade: cavalry charges and machine guns, sabre duels and long-range artillery barrage. The spectacular, set-piece battles drew huge crowds of Americans to hillsides on their side of the fence, to watch the carnage, and, to their credit, aid many of the refugees.

And we think border violence is bad today.

Well... maybe it comes close.

Gunmen have carried out another attack on a drugs rehabilitation centre in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, killing 10 people and injuring two others. The shooting follows the deaths of 18 people in an attack on a separate rehab centre in the same city this month. Such shootings have been blamed on drug traffickers who accuse the clinics of protecting dealers from rival gangs. 

The long, torturous, capitalist venture to supply drugs to affluent gringos north of the border has all but rendered Mexico a failed state. In many areas of the country, the military has been forced to take civil control, simply because local law enforcement is too corrupt or too intimidated to take action against the cartels. Sometimes, it's hard to figure what keeps Mexico going. Sometimes, it's easy to imagine that the drug combines - los narcostrafficantes - are themselves the de facto state, supplying whatever order there is, however brutal.

Next month is the centennial of the 1910 Mexican Revolution that produced names and places which still resonate, at least in this part of the world - Villa, Huerta, Pershing, Vera Cruz, Emiliano Zapata. And from this side of history, it's hard to see where the upheaval ended. Mexico is still saddled with a government at best negligent and at worst corrosive, it still must endure a greedy, derisive - and decidedly unneighborly - neighbor to the north. It must tolerate the voluntary evacuation of its best and brightest, its strongest and most industrious, to "el Norte", where dwindling, meltdown opportunity still beats that at home.

But by how much? It's getting hard to tell. How far are we, here, from becoming a failed state?

On the web, I came across a student essay that boils down in simple terms the causes of the 1910 revolution that toppled the regime of the old Juarista Porfirio Diaz:

This government created severe poverty with their corrupt system that caused a severe separation between the classes and created tension between the classes, finally the Mexican economy (which was already suffering) was completely dependent on (loans from) foreign nations... This foreign dependency caused the Mexican economy to have no stability or control of either its growth or decay. Prior to the revolution these nations began to demand that Mexico pay back its debt to them. This was absolutely devastating to the already crippled Mexican economy.

Huge debt held by foreign creditors and a ruling elite utterly detached from its citizenry. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

In the processes of our economic meltdown, and especially in "revovery" efforts by our government, it isn't hard to feel common Americans - the famous "little people" that are so much the national bulk supporting from far below that airy tip of our political and economic pyramid - have been left out of the equation. Left behind. Efforts to re-establish investment markets, and even install a new health-care system, are power lunches by insiders, by a detached minority firmly in control of what should be, in a democracy, our commonly designed social and political mechanisms. Everything is pitched to those who stand to gain the most from any public intervention, any avenue of official control or aid; the rest of us... dwindle. We pay for it. That's all.

Paul Craig Thomas is a Libertarian columnist who's sometimes a little dotty, but capable of real insight and vivid reasoning. In a piece this week he proposes, The U.S. Is a Failed State:

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400...

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks...

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington's wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar's value reduces the purchasing power of Americans' already declining incomes...

Maybe 14 months ago it would have been easy to write off Roberts' alarms as ravings of a dime-store Cassandra, as grudge-fueled nonsense. Now? We have reports the TARP recovery money probably won't be repaid fully by our banking system, too big to fail, and that after all that taxpayer revenue was handed out, and helped lace bankers' pockets in the form of bonuses, the U.S. financial system is "shakier than ever." Those tidbits come on top of an August report that estimated U.S. banks will collect a record $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year. ...Just overdrafts.

How narrow a margin are we on... right now? If we're shoved to the wall long enough, hard enough, will we push back? Will our own Villas ride? Will we find our own "La Cucaracha" to march to? And if that nightmare comes, how long before we set right our failure?

Ever?

I guess I should be real impressed the Obama administration has drawn a line in the sand and told seven banks they couldn't pay their executives kings' ransoms out of the bailout kitty. It's an emotional issue, after all. Why should already-rich, overpaid crooks who got us in the meltdown jam profit with taxpayer money? As current affair, it's like episodic TV and freeway driving: There are good guys, bad guys, dumb folk and bang-up excitement. Maybe even a little blood and some broken glass.

Meanwhile, though, efforts to plug up the crumbling dike that is the derivatives market with safe-and-sane regulations are fading away slowly under cover of the bankers' salary smokescreen.

There's been a big push by Democrats in Congress, reform advocates and the Obama administration to bring federal regulation to these deals. At the very least, advocates wants these contracts to go through clearinghouses or be traded on exchanges in order to make their terms public.

...But there are exemptions. In an effort to protect companies like airlines and manufacturers that use derivatives to hedge against things like price fluctuations and currency exchange rates, these so-called end-users would not be required to make public the terms of their contracts. Rather, they would continue to operate in the dark.

But (Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin) Peterson on Wednesday amended the bill to extend the exemption to big banks and financial institutions, as long as their contracts were with these end-users... Peterson's amendment "fatally weakens the bill," said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. [Source: HuffPo]

Since Peterson is a committee chair in the Hope and Change Congress, you may have guessed already that he's a Democrat, and evidently one of many who didn't get the Blackberry tweek about that big push by the party to re-regulate.

Regulation was dropped from derivatives late in the Clinton era, when this relatively new "financial instrument" began picking up steam as an upper-level investment money-maker. From the same hothouse that gave us the oily, treacherous "junk bonds" in the '80s, derivatives are basically side-bets on how investments will perform, or not perform, as the case may be.

Here's what I would do to game the set-up: If I had an investment that was a mediocre performer, I'd bet on it doing badly, sell it off at its premium price - pocketing the sale price and my side-bet that it would take a sell-off hit. That kind of gaming almost crashed Wall Street itself in 1910, so our bright forebears outlawed "bucket shop" wagering... until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Today, the dice-roll is a little more sophisticated - a lay bet that a stock will lose is paid off with a "credit swap", a form of insurance not called such because, of course, insurance is regulated. Because such swaps are unregulated, nobody has bothered to actually fund the "policy", and over the past eight years, all this gaming tore a hole in worldwide investment markets estimated to be in the trillions of dollars.

Since the other shoe hasn't fallen on all this debt, banks are sitting on their earnings and starving small businesses that live on short-term loans. Nevertheless, the investment industry wants the wide-open, crapshoot system back, and our Congress is more than willing to do just that:

Representative Barney Frank's central role in drafting new regulations for the US financial industry has dramatically boosted his power as a political fund-raiser, helping him increase campaign contributions by almost a third more than at this point in the last election cycle.

As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank was a major player in the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package last year, and is now the point person working on legislation proposed by the Obama administration to prevent another economic crisis like the one that plunged the nation into a recession.

Frank's place in the thick of economic policy making has made him the focal point for a variety of executives, unions, advocacy groups, and individual supporters who have poured $1.2 million into his campaign account since January. That is 32 percent more than the $907,000 he raised during the same three quarters of his 2007-2008 reelection campaign.

Hmm. Could that 'splain why he's been such a laggard in tightening up regulation of derivatives markets? He's even been lauded on conservative blogs for this "pragmatic approach" to regulation.

On the West Coast, in the '90s, the Russian mob had a pragmatic approach to gasoline it sold to convenience stores - by mixing the fuel with water!

Frank is a perennial favorite of what passes for the progressive media these days, taking his slobbery hound-dog Baahs-tin persona to the mike stand every time we need a no-nonsense, urban perspective. Wonderful! It's like watching William Bendix gargle with hippie jug wine.

The "regulations" bill made it out of committee this week, so we'll see. Timothy Geithner seems to like it. That's never a good sign.