A Note From MeanMesa

A quick message to MeanMesa visitors --

A brief explanation of the scarce postings for the month of October may be in order. Well, relax. MeanMesa will soon be "back on the air" full time! There's always plenty going on that needs a solid, sensible MeanMesa treatment, but for the time being, IT'S JURY DUTY TIME!

The blog will return at full steam in about a week, so stay tuned!

Best Regards,
MeanMesa

Halloween Comes For the GOP!

Hey, all you crackers and other crooks,

"something wicked this way comes...!"*

*Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Ray Bradbury title and a GREAT book!

Everyone has been patiently listening to their wholly-owned Senators and the Congressional hill-billies squealing about socialism while they're dithering around, doing the business of their masters, but this Halloween season is bringing another little something to put in their bag of ill gotten goodies. Now, that "goodies" bag is usually just chock full of tax money they've looted during their "free market" Congressional rounds, but Halloween 2009 style may be something of a disappointing surprise for them.

Of course, all their complaints about the health care bill "traveling way too fast" through the Congress are only the latest masquerade they bring to the festival. Any bill moving as fast as this one is, simply put, moving too fast to be properly looted on its transit through the Senate. The looters find it rather troubling that Obama has no intention of slowing anything down.

Having made that now, road weary note concerning health care, we can move effortlessly to the point of this MeanMesa posting. Day by day it becomes more inescapably clear that the real complaint of the health care bill's detractors deals with an old, very traditional, Republican talking point. That would be "The Redistribution of Wealth." The Anti-Health Care Senators, sitting with massive $1,000,000 per day campaign contributions flowing into their all white war chests, are trying their best to protect their, uh, contributors from any possibility of having to "redistribute" their wealth.

The health insurance parasites are becoming unmanageably nervous. We see this in their desperate and pathetic, half-baked public relations adventures. The issue of "The Redistribution of Wealth" is, actually, precisely what is frightening them so much. Their idea of a good time has always been a nice monopolistic, non-competitive, forced labor camp world where they can set insurance prices freely -- that is, set premium rates with only the single reason being the fact that they just simply decide to increase their profits.

The Halloween problem for them, however, is that "The Redistribution of Wealth" is actually a two way street!

After all these prosperous decades of "redistributing" the wealth of anyone who might need health insurance (that is, everyone) into their bloated pockets, they are now facing the unpleasant possibility of having to compete for their corporate profits. Although this appears to be no less than "outrageous fate" when viewed from their eyes, for the rest of us it looks, just as simply, as an economic correction. Our wealth is about to be "redistributed" back to us!

This alone causes a new apoplexy behind all the gates of all those gated communities. And well it should. The flow of money historically flowing into those pockets of theirs amounts to roughly one sixth of the national gross domestic product (NGDP). Now, a sizable chunk of that money is going to be "redistributed" to the people who actually earned it in the form of reduced health insurance costs. The incredibly rich and prosperous are aghast that all the expensive Senators whose souls they have perpetually rented seem unable to stop this unfortunate development.

But MeanMesa's Halloween turns out to have more than one costume. Obscured behind the tea-bagging chaos of the health care debate, rests an even more ominous -- at least, ominous for the billionaires -- horizon. A horizon which seems to be drawing closer with every sunrise.

The stimulus money is about to reach reality. That is, the stimulus money is about to reach the reality of main street. We need to take a closer look at this. It has many incredibly spooky, yet beautiful masks.

First, we can set out a few observations concerning the mental state of those who are watching this miracle of democracy unfold. What had, up to this point, been a theoretical recession -- albeit a recession of immense proportions -- is now materializing in every city and village of the realm. It isn't going away, and it isn't getting any better. It is getting worse.

Americans who were previously "deeply troubled" by the monster are now becoming Americans who are being deeply wounded by the monster. It is no longer theoretical. It has arrived at the door of every home in the country, at least, every home in the country with an adjusted taxable income of less than, say, $1 million a year. There are bankruptcies, foreclosures, uncertain job securities and functional businesses closing their doors from lack of credit.

Most likely, all this is little more than a light breakfast for the monster. The billionaires are waiting in the shadows with their purses bulging, full of Paulsen dollars. They are waiting for the approaching moment where lower wages will look like a Godsend to American labor. They are waiting for the moment when previously successful businesses, starved into submission by a well engineered lack of credit, can be purchased for a dime on the dollar. They are waiting for that new skyscraper they have always secretly wanted, but couldn't, until now that is, afford.

What exactly could be the bright side of something like this?

That bright side is best seen in the faces of the younger Americans who are surfing through this calamity with all the lassez faire optimism of youth. This 2009 Halloween is bringing something out into the light which they have not seen before in their young lives. They are about to see the actual wealth of our country emerge in repaired roads, schools, clinics and libraries right in their hometown!

Money which had always previously disappeared as it wound its way through the Congress is now actually going to survive that gauntlet. Tax money which used to simply vaporize into dollar gobbling ghosts such as the Reagan and Bush Tax Cuts for Millionaires, is now going to resurface to pay for local projects!

Young Americans have never seen anything like this. American prosperity, so far as they have been concerned, has always been for others, the well connected, the tax welfare corporate elite. The young ones have watched the country slip into a place riddled with broken bridges, war profiteering and corporate tax dodging, but, absent any functional civics classes in their high schools, they have remained accepting and complacent. They have never been provided an alternative reality with which to judge their actual prosperity compared to their theoretical prosperity!

The fact is that the nation has been continuously slipping into a third world status under the constant looting of our national treasure by neo-con puppets and their fat cat masters. At the moment, 10% of our population has "redistributed" 80% of all national wealth into their own coffers. But the prospects of this Halloween herald something a bit different. This Halloween there will be a glimpse of American wealth -- spelled tax money -- arriving at a thousand places to make a down payment on the neglect made so seemingly necessary by the avarice of the fat purse crowd.

The spell has been broken.

Once the young -- and the not so young -- among us see the material wealth we constantly pour into the treasury of the country return in a way which actually supports and maintains the country, they are going to be, well, pissed. Any fleeting chance that this new demographic of observers will somehow drift mindlessly back to the Republican Party in the next election has just received a death blow, a real Halloween surprise!

Hooray! It's not scary at all! (unless you're a billionaire...)

Another Task for Obama

Heavy Ammo For the Water Cooler Wars

An End to a Sad and Empty Story:

The Republicans

The Addict

Perhaps many of us have watched, horrified, as an acquaintance advanced through the dark and unstoppable journey of alcoholism or drug addiction. Day by day, even when it seemed that matters could not careen any farther into the abyss, they did. At the end of the story, in the best of cases, all those around the sufferer pushed and pleaded until a glimmer of hope was restored and what remained of our friend was dispatched to a treatment center or hospital. In the worst of cases, the addiction seemed to be easily able to simply consume what had once been our friend or relative.

After treatment, sometimes, hope and optimism seemed to re-emerge, only to later be lost in yet another return to the old destruction. In the cases of those who are not so closely loved, the stricken seems, perhaps, to have a few difficulties with the law or with his health as he plummets deeper into a stoic poverty. Somewhere along the line, he disappears. The next we hear, he has died – or been killed – in some far away place. His family, our friends, grieve briefly at some quiet, small, embarrassing funeral. We send flowers, think of our own good fortune, then collect what we need at the office and head for work.

A disturbingly similar fate has taken the old Republican Party. Such a lament is made so blandly today that its meaning may have secretly faded away just as the forlorn addict in our story. Yet, we owe the Republicans one last, sincere consideration – a final visit made more even more sentimental when explained, a bit, by history. That, of course, means not a secret history. It won't be another banal revelation of some diabolical conspiracy or an episode of hate mongering, some recently dispensed fact or opinion, or even an academic, grand view of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present.

There have been Republicans, great men and great, patriotic leaders in our recent past. They have charted our nation's course through the terrors of the Cold War. They have managed our affairs into periods of unbridled prosperity. Let's look at the Presidents we have elected during the last few decades.

The History of Presidents

33^rd Harry Truman (D, no VP), then Alben Barkley 1945-1953

34^th President Dwight Eisenhower (R) and Vice President Richard Nixon 1953-1961

35^th President John Kennedy (D) and Vice President Lyndon Johnson 8 years 1961-1963

36^th President Lyndon Johnson (D, no VP), then Vice President Hubert Humphrey 1963 -1969

37^th President Richard Nixon (R) and Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford 1969-1974

38^th President Gerald Ford (R) and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller 1974-1977

39^th President James Carter (D) and Vice President Walter Mondale 1977 -1981

40^th President Ronald Reagan (R) and Vice President George Bush (Sr) 1981-1989

41^st President George H. W. Bush (R) and Vice President Dan Quayle 1989-1993

42^nd President Bill Clinton (D) and Vice President Al Gore 1993 – 2001

43^rd President George W. Bush (R)and Vice President Richard Cheney 2001 – 2008

44^th President Barack Obama (D) and Vice President Joseph Biden 2008 to present

These are the American Presidents who have served in the lifetime of MeanMesa. In fact, MeanMesa was a strong Republican who voted along party lines in every election until Bill Clinton ran against Bush Sr. in 1998. Now, today, as is the case with roughly 70% of all American voters, MeanMesa wouldn't send a Republican down the block for a gallon of milk, let alone allow them around the children playing in the courtyard of these apartments.

The Question: What happened?

How could matters have changed so much since the prosperous, secure days of Dwight Eisenhower? His seasoned leadership – and his amazing history of service even before the Presidency – satisfied Republican and Democratic Americans alike. Oh sure, all those who voted against him complained – as usual, but none of them suffered through a troubled night's sleep, day after day, desperately wondering if our Democracy was collapsing. During even the darkest of those days we might have worried about the Russians, but we never doubted that our U.S. Government was unmistakably on our side.

There was agitated rhetoric from the politicians of the time. There were speeches filled with hyperbola and exaggeration from statesmen on both sides of the aisle in our Congress. Citizens were inspired, agitated, confused and, rather frequently, profoundly pissed off when we heard these things, but we never questioned the loyalty of those who spoke. We may have questioned everything else, but never their loyalty.

We're slowly and painfully approaching the relevance of the story of the alcoholic and the addict.

Looking back through all of this in a way available only to a geezer in New Mexico, that painful question, “What happened?” seems to perch too heavily to be simply disregarded in favor of another geriatric afternoon nap. That question perches on one's chest as if betraying some dreadful creature with an ambition to stifle one's breath, one's judgement. A dark presence indeed.

The young ones suspect – sickeningly – that what they see all around themselves now is no better or worse than what they might have seen a few decades ago. They have no access to a metric which might quantify a comparison made possible only by the faltering engine of age. Their carefully groomed cynicism blinds them from a true, well seasoned vision of either great possibilities or great danger.

During the administrations of Eisenhower, and even Nixon, (remember, we are discussing Republicans here …) the GOP claimed a fairly well deserved reputation as the masters of foreign policy and economics. Actually, without delving too deeply beyond a general appraisal of the performance of the parties, Republicans really did perform well in these areas. The Democrats, as least in the eyes of the mass of Americans, seemed to do better with domestic issues. Neither of these claims departed noticeably from either the observations or the expectations of the voters. Back in those days we were happy and satisfied with this, perhaps, overly simplified model.

Now, Nixon has become a bit of a villain for breaking into the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate and getting caught at it. Eliminating that minor faux pas from his record, the rest of his term went well enough – he established relations with the Peoples Republic of China and didn't leave too much lasting damage to the economy. However, something dark emerged. It may have emerged before, but under Nixon it lept into the light and permanently set the stage for much worse events to follow.

The History of Division

It was during the Nixon White House that the GOP discovered the vast utility of dividing the country. His Vice President, Spiro Agnew (later indicted for defrauding his state government of transportation money), set out on a mission to divide the country. The people hadn't heard such things from anyone in the government before this. Yes, Spiro's flamboyant vocabulary (“nattering nabobs of negativity”) amused the newspaper reading demographic, but his toxic message slowly and effectively began to penetrate. The underlying foundation of such divisive constructions such as Jerry Falwell's “Moral Majority” (ca. 1979) found a warm home base among Americans who, regardless of the facts, found it pleasing to assume the role of the pious and the patriotic as they ascended over their less righteous peers.

This accomplishment was not lost on the Republicans. They had discovered an easy, inexpensive way to present themselves to Americans as not only war making and foreign policy experts with an almost religious obsession for smaller government, but also as the snake oil promoters of a carefully crafted but undefined promise of lower taxes and greater freedoms. Information challenged voters spent a few years advancing a cyclical, divinely inspired “ranting and chanting” tantrum centered on how poorly – and sinfully – they were being treated by “tax and spend Democrats.”

Thoughts become material when they are thought.

When the greatest fraud of all, Mr. Ronald Reagan, entered the scene, the stage was set for an even more outrageous deception. The “small government,” “lower taxes” and “strong military” message flew in the face of actual events. The intensity of the rhetoric was increased while the actual facts plummeted to almost perfectly the opposite. Taxes were raised and deficits soared while the Reagan government criminally scandalized American foreign policy with Iran-Contra policies.

MeanMesa voted for Ronald Reagan twice and contributed to his campaign coffers.

Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain

Thirty-five years later we are paying over $200,000,000 annually for the interest on the money he spent. Of course, this is not news to MeanMesa visitors. A previously posted MeanMesa chart showing the growth of the national debt – and the responsible parties – and the responsible Party! – is included below.

(A temporary note from MeanMesa. The chart intended to appear right here is, uh, encountering technical difficulties, birds flew into the engines, cob webs have shorted out the switch gear, there are terminal software glitches, etc. You can see the chart more clearly by linking to the blog post provided below. Apologies, MeanMesa. )

The U. S. National Debt

(From “A Chit Chat With Republicans About the Stimulus,” a post on this blog... http://meanmesa.blogspot.com/2009/03/chit-chat-with-republicans-about.html )

However, what began with Nixon's cautious adventure grew legs under Reagan. He – and his Republican Party – found that fraudulently vilifying the opposition was far easier than actually performing the leadership and management roles it would have taken to convert such hypocritical claims into actual, observable accomplishments. Reagan, and his servant, George Bush Sr. could have brought spending under control, but it was clearly easier for them to blame everything on “those people” they had spent so much effort vilifying!

After they had incited the ideological issues to a fever pitch, facts meant nothing. Now, even this calamitous treachery could have been survived in fairly good order. We did, after all, stumble along until Clinton once again began to make sense out of the incredible explosion of the Reagan deficit. The damage of the Reagan years – including a gigantic tax cut for the richest and an equally gigantic tax increase for the rest of us – still, yet today, haunts the Treasury like the ghost of Christmas past.

However, this post is not about economic corruption so much as it is about divisiveness. That is the ghoul which is now sucking the life out of the country. We used to think that money meant everything. Now we know that crazy, ideological hate mongering can actually amount to more of a death-knell threat than simply running out of money. Although Reagan absolutely laid out the foundation for our present day economic collapse, it was the growing appetite for a violent division of the country into warring opponents which may signal the end of the Republic.

Even after the lackluster drift of the Bush Sr. administration, post Reagan remnants could still manage to spend $60,000,000 tax dollars on the sex investigations of Bill Clinton, rendered by their favorite, psychopathic, post Moral Majority, breathless dirty shirt preacher masquerading as a judge. The prize was division. Division had to be nurtured at any cost. There were no validating successes left for the Republicans to claim. Their obsessive hate had become the currency of the day, the nation be damned!

The bigots and the hillbillies would handle the ground war while wealthier Republican toadies, under the cover of the Senate, would take control of the media. Finally, after the million dollar birth pains of an already failing corporation, FOX reinvented itself as the “Savior of All That is GOOD” and prepared us for what it and its masters hoped would be the final gasp of American Democracy. The fall of the Republic was far closer than any of us thought. The United States had been hurled into a “sausage grinder” where all the little people would spew out their bile from two grisly throats, having no other choice but to emerge to wage a puppet war against each other.

Wait! Did the neo-cons create the hill billies? Not really. During the 1950's U.S. literacy rates peaked (under Eisenhower -- who told all school children that they needed to be smart to fight the Russians) then began a continuous decline until the autocracy (Bush W. told everyone that it was okay to be illiterate and uninformed, "No preblemmo ef'n ya'll wanna be neo-cons... heh, heh") Obama will probably correct this if he has time.

There would be no holds barred. The chart of the National Deficit shows the grim image of what came next. The looting began. The animosity grew more and more violent. It had to grow more and more violent – the carefully sponsored conflict, now raging out of control, had to provide the distraction for the emptying of the Treasury. The disgrace and the outrage knew no limits. Anything goes … at least, anything went.

There is somewhere between $5 and $7 Tn dollars missing.

A Promising Interlude!

Smack dab in the middle of this MeanMesa posting, President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. If you pray, pray for the President. Everyone else, support him as if your life depended on it.

It may.

(The last Republican President to win the Nobel Peace Prize was Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for his effort to end the war between Japan and Russia. In the election of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt, because of the level of corruption in his Republican Party, moved to the Progressive Party, making a third party run for the Presidency and forcing the Democratic Party into a new, populist phase.) Now, back to this posting.

Grumble, grumble, grubs again ...

The degree of the national division became the ultimate measurement of the success of the Republican Party under the unelected Bush (“W”) autocracy. The goals of U.S. foreign policy changed priorities from the good of the nation to that of creating more and more calcified domestic division. The degree of polarization which could be induced between the main groups of voters became the foremost measure of political success. The country staggered under the onslaught of this reckless, paranoid, explosive, destructive dualism. The rift between Americans, carefully groomed under this cheap new scheme of the neo-cons, grew more and more precipitous. The chasm had many dimensions, each one carefully exploited by the guileless public relations pragmatists in the White House (Rove, Atwater, Cheney, Rumsfeldt, etc.).

The distribution of wealth between the rich and the poor erupted into a near economic class war state. Gaseous patriotism, offered up at the hands of functionally illiterate neo-cons, (McCain, Pallin, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.) became the test of ideological legitimacy for every decision. Scarcely disguised, violent war mongering, lubricated with the most despicable sorts of corruption, false religion and looting, overwhelmed every competing – even possibly valid – national interest, domestic or foreign.

Now to connect the story of the Republicans to the story of the addict.

The Republicans, unable to promote much in terms of social, economic or cultural advances, became addicted to the empty possibilities of their scheme to divide the country into manageable parts – one to be constantly incited to more and more vacuous Republican “ideology” and the other to ridiculed as the fallen remnant of “failed” progressive ideas (refer to the chart above). What had been a few Molotov cocktails in the Nixon administration became a leaking, full sized gasoline tanker under the “W.”

The Republican addiction to a greater and greater division between Americans advanced relentlessly. Had any neo-cons been blessed with even a moment of personal peace in this destructive rampage, they would have envied the hopeless, slow shaking of a heroin addict approaching his death. But for them there was no respite. The more outrageous they became, the more, even more, outrageous they wanted to become.

Every possible inhibition and embarrassment fell away as if it were composed of nothing more than the old, foolish old ideas such as the clean underwear and fingernails of the heroin soaked wretch now consumed in his frenzied, full time job of finding more heroin. Like the junkie, there existed not a single coherent moment where the neo-cons might reflect, not even a single, momentary reflection based solely on pragmatism, let alone one based on even so much as a faltering scintilla of interest in the nation itself, about the self-immolation they pursued so impulsively.

Still Trying to Learn Something from the Romans?

Now, a bit more history.

The Romans maintained a Republic until the time of Julius Caesar. However, based on a suspiciously similar exploitation of the existing political divisions in Rome, an man named Sulla, for a brief time, became dictator of what had previously been the Republic. After his death, the Republic idea temporarily returned, albeit shaken and, ultimately, doomed. After Julius Caesar the entire remainder of Roman history was to be marked as an Empire, not a Republic.

Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (Latin: L•CORNELIVS•L•F•P•N•SVLLA•FELIX)[1] (c. 138 BC – 78 BC), or simply Sulla, was a Roman general and politician, holding the office of consul twice as well as the dictatorship.

Sulla's dictatorship came during a high point in the struggle between optimates and populares, the former seeking to maintain the power of the oligarchy in the form of the Senate while the latter resorted in many cases to naked populism, culminating in Caesar's dictatorship. Sulla was a gifted and effective general. His rival, Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, described Sulla as having the cunning of a fox and the courage of a lion - but that it was the former attribute that was by far the most dangerous. This mixture was later referred to by Machiavelli in his description of the ideal characteristics of a ruler. [2]

Sulla used his armies to march on Rome twice, and after the second he revived the office of dictator, which had not been used since the Second Punic War over a century before. He used his powers to enact a series of reforms to the Roman constitution, meant to restore the balance of power between the Senate and the Tribunes.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla )

If you find this troubling tale uncomfortably similar to events unfolding in our own Republic, you and MeanMesa are watching from the same bench.

An Unlikely Task is Added to Obama's “To-Do” List

As Americans, we are traditionally quite convinced that a two party system holds essential advantages for the operation of our social politics. However, our understanding of such a structure implies that it will function in an environment of national unity, hosting opposing views with common aims. The current division of the country, an awful price exacted for the temporary political benefit of the reactionary elements among us, may be our undoing.

Recalling the long term impact of Sulla's ambitions in ancient Rome, America has plunged to a very similar low point in our unity and commonality. A rift so serious as to threaten the continued existence – or at least, the prospects for a continued prosperity – of our own Republic. This historic threat is not to be entirely foisted on the Republicans, either. In acts of political self-defense, the progressives and Democrats have, far too frequently, fallen to the same levels. Too frequently they have copied the "low rent" behavior of their Republican counterparts.

Further, if one party has become determined to follow its addiction to violent division all the way to its own demise, where will that leave the counter balancing “two party” system we have grown to respect so much? It may well not be the Republicans, not withstanding all their present outrageous theatrics, which will ascend to imperial status, but the Democrats!

It may not be crazy, ambitious George W. who plays the role of Sulla. That script may be foisted upon an unwilling and reluctant Barack Obama, although remaining above such avarice of power, when he is still left stranded without an opposition after the Republican suicide becomes a fait accompli.

What further task has been added to Obama's list of Herculean reconstruction chores? He may well be faced with the task of creating a new, coherent opposition party!

We live in strange times, indeed.

No Bone to Pick with Mayor Elect Berry

Well, maybe just one.

The election for Albuquerque's new mayor is complete. The three way race required a 40% margin if the winner was to avoid a run-off. The new mayor, Mr. Berry, managed to win over a roughly 43% majority, making him the new mayor.

It was a three way race. The candidates were comprised of the three term incumbent, Mr. Chavez, a Democrat, Mr. Romero, a pseudo-Democrat emerging from the state Senate and the Albuquerque Public School system, and, Mr. Berry, a hard hat wearing conservative Republican. MeanMesa has no particular problem with Mr. Berry being mayor – yet.

MeanMesa also provided a lukewarm support for the incumbent, Mr. Chavez, a fairly progressive local type who consistently gored the bulls of citizens with all ideologies equally. Of course, there were always the hillbillies and bigots who criticized the old mayor as a serial killer, cannibal and psycho-obsessive abortionist searching for ways to destroy Western Civilization, but in Democratic New Mexico such types rarely got very far beyond the pages of the local Red State Rag, the Albuquerque Journal.

The game breaker in this matter turned out to be, however, quite a different matter. That strange political role, a reckless gambit in perfidy, fell to the grotesque Mr. Romero, an alleged Democrat who had just yesterday finished “re-allocating” his $23,000 Congressional war chest to Republican candidates all across the state after losing that 2008 election. A closer look at Mr. Romero's part in the election of a Republican Conservative to be mayor of a progressive Democratic city brings us to the central issue of this MeanMesa post.

A sober analysis of the votes cast reveals the problem. When we, perhaps over generously consider Mr. Romero a Democrat, around 70% of Albuquerque electors voted for Democratic candidates in the election, yet – the result was a conservative Republican mayor. Was this travesty an outrageous case of Rove-style election fraud? Sadly, no. It can be much more accurately described as a case of a subversive, neo-con, CANDIDATE FRAUD!

Mr. Romero, a screaming, ill groomed shill in the election, successfully portrayed himself – just barely – as a Democrat in the race. Under informed voters who were, very reasonably, reluctant to elevate Mr. Chavez to yet another term as mayor, but who were still firmly Democrats in all their other voting habits, fell for the scheme “hook, line and sinker.”

New Mexicans, like most other Americans, learned a dismal lesson from the consequences of creating the Bush Dynasty. Being “gun shy” of a mayoral dynasty – after all, Mr. Chavez kept getting himself elected, term after term – they embraced a change. However, the precise change they were embracing was different from the Titanic's ice berg only by being slightly smaller and quite a bit more soiled.

Ice bergs are rarely as oily as Mr. Romero.

Republicans, although horrible at foreign policy, limiting government, promoting the economy, winning wars and most other forms of traditional leadership once elected, are, still, incredibly adept at winning elections. They have mastered a juggernaut technique at exploiting every basic fear walking the streets of America from Boston to San Bernardino with their cheap little lies and deceptions. The wretched balloon they inflate with this gaseous reaction-ism stays aloft just long enough to insert them into office, then collapses under the burden of their inevitable greed and failed, simplistic ideology. The results are far too close and bloody to be conveniently dispatched as simply “bad luck,” “bad intelligence,” or any kind of some other “bad something.” You know, as someone else's fault.

Yet, here we are, staring down the barrel of the next four years with a Republican mayor and all the mischief we can credibly expect to accompany that unfortunate fluke. We'll give Mr. Berry the benefit of the doubt, but we won't be too surprised when we see Albuquerque's descent into a new carnival of even more distance between the “haves and the have nots.”

Mr. Berry's four year term may well prove to be long enough to re-establish the foothold of a new well connected, privileged elite. The wealthy subdivisions in the North of Albuquerque are full of repossessed mansions selling at 60% of the price they commanded two years ago. The state is rapidly filling with Stimulus Money, much of which will arrive for civic projects for Albuquerque. Under a Republican mayor -- especially one with an appetite for "hard hats" -- and a “purified” neo-con city government, MeanMesa has a sickening suspicion about exactly which Albuquerque citizens will get “stimulated.”

Yuck. They've done it again.

Albuquerque Mayor: Strange Bedfellows

WOW! The neo-cons at the Albuquerque Journal like Chavez while the progressives at the local ALIBI like Romero! MeanMesa, a stalwart ALIBI reader who uses the Journal to line his bird cage -- unread, of course -- is amazed! New Mexico is the land of mystery and enchantment, and this is a story of the mystery part! A true, high desert tale of strange bedfellows, indeed!


For our MeanMesa visitors who live far away from Albuquerque, please stand by. An infrequent but necessary aspect of being a blog from the "Other Mile High City" calls for MeanMesa to pay just a little bit more attention to the local mayoral campaign. Because "all politics is local," and because MeanMesa is both about as political and as local as you can get while you remain standing, we have to jump into the fray with respect to the main "?Democratic?" contender challenging the incumbent mayor, Marty Chavez.

We're not going to trot out another toad strangling concoction of Chavez's accomplishments because MeanMesa just mailed our mail in ballot -- we voted for him. So, what does that leave "on the table" for a quick blog posting?

Actually, quite a bit.

Mayor Chavez's "?Democratic?" rival has already shown his colors. His early campaign literature railed about the "crime wave" inundating our city while proclaiming that his policies would re-invigorate small business. As Richard Romero's campaign matured from this first onslaught of ill-defined positions, it simply "grew like Topsey," engulfing Albuquerque's Public School System and blaming the incumbent for predictable set backs in local industry occurring due to the flaming case of "recession" left over from the Bush Autocracy.

For background on Romero's gaseous "crime and small business" claims, jump back to

"A Mayor for Albuquerque. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid."

http://meanmesa.blogspot.com/2009/09/mayor-for-albuquerque-be-afraid-be-very.html

Now, however, it turns out that Mr. Romero is quite the neo-con turn coat in his own right. For those MeanMesa visitors old enough to remember, this campaign reminds us of the ancient neo-con crookery called The Silent Majority of the last century. In that case, sterile, aging, corporate reactionaries actually descended to ground level to propose a strategic, proletariat scheme to undo what had become, for them, a troubling shift toward progressive ideas and a burgeoning Democratic demographic in the voting electorate.

Their strategy? As usual, an unruly crowd of the standard unwashed hill billies and bigots of the time, marching under the Crusade-like, inflammatory toxin of dirty shirt preachers such as Falwell and Dobson, and allegedly validated by equally suspicious sorts such as Ronnie Rayguns (who, BTW, raised taxes more than any other President in history) launched a 20th Century version of the 21st Century campaign to Take Back America. The tactics they cooked up for this ambition of theirs were to start at the bottom. That meant that their supporters were to take local elections for dog catcher, school board, museum committees and the like, insinuating themselves into positions of local government from which they could spring forth into more important roles and, uh, Take Back America.

Well, all this would amount to little more than a tedious recounting of local politics, gleefully left in the dust bin of history, except for the matter of Mr. Romero. Now that this strange beast has emerged to run for Mayor, we see a bit of that old deception returning, cleaned and painted, of course, but even more virulent (In the words of President Bill Clinton describing the "right wing conspiracy" in an interview with Kristina Wong, ABC News -- http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/09/bill-clinton-says-right-wing-conspiracy-now-after-president-obama.html ).

What exactly about Mr. Romero is so troubling?

Well, he recently ran in a New Mexico Democratic primary election to defeat "$ Halliburton Heather $" (Republican Representative Heather Wilson), and, thankfully, lost to a real Democrat, Martin Heinrich. Now, old Heather had horribly soiled herself performing years of political fellatio on the autocrat's (the "W") every crooked, uh, scheme, so it was actually no big shocker that a Democrat replaced her -- except, as it turned out, NOT Mr. Romero! Immediately after losing that primary election, Mr. Romero started divvying up what was left of his campaign funds in gifts to State REPUBLICAN campaigns!

What's the problem? Well, Mr. Romero dutifully followed the Silent Majority style of the old Take Back America scheme by serving in the State Senate and being Principle in a local school. Those were his versions of the dog catcher, museum committee jobs. However, good old Mr. Romero actually went a even a bit deeper into the muck of the neo-con "swamp of deception."

He successfully masqueraded as a Democrat in his "dog catcher" days!!

After prancing around New Mexico for a long enough period -- long enough, he hoped, for everyone to comfortably forget his true stripes -- he emerged in the Congressional race. After failing to win there, he gave $20,000, or more, of his left over war chest to state Republican candidates, then jumped back into Superman's phone booth, changed his costume back into a Democrat, and ran for Mayor. Yuck.

That's why MeanMesa voted for Marty Chavez. As a mayor, he ain't perfect. But as a candidate, he remains refreshing in line with what he has always been!

The following link will take you to another interesting local blog, Democracy for New Mexico.

http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/2009_albuquerque_mayoral_race/

The Problem with American Influence

United States foreign policy seems to now be stumbling at challenges it once faced much more effectively. The current difficulties in places such as Iran, Afghanistan and even in Somalia are clear reflections of our not having sufficient influence to support the goals of our international policies, and more troubling, this appears to be more the general case rather than a few unfortunate exceptions.

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A quick note from MeanMesa: Please excuse the "font and size problems" with this post! We have a fabulous new computer -- generously supplied to us by one of our most frequent visitors -- but we are still experiencing a few operational problems. We hope you will be able to enjoy this latest post anyway! It's all here, just mixed a bit... We'll do better soon!

h

And yet, we see an approach quite removed from that we have been pursuing yielding significant and durable models of social and political influence in places where our own efforts have become dismal failures. In Gaza, the thoroughly questionable politics of the Hamas Party has successfully “sold” itself to the voting population, including the idea of its self-destructive aggression against Israel, with a package of modest public services as a redeeming “sweetener” in the mix. The influence of Hamas services rather easily crowded out the service neglecting corruption of the Fatah, the local party being groomed as our favorite partner.

Regardless of our impression of the relative value of peace compared to conflict, the daily, personal efforts of Hamas representatives distributing food and providing even a modicum of health care became a very effective foundation in the politics of the place. Palestinian voters were clearly willing to “live with” the Hamas rockets flying into Israel – and the predictable results – in favor of continuing this “on the ground” social support effort.

Iran's Hezbollah has performed equally well in the wreckage of Lebanon. Perhaps with substantial additional resources from neighboring Syria made available for its program of social services there, the party has demonstrated a very tangible ability to attract large parts of the Islamic population. That cultural loyalty remains in place today, even after the last violent incursion of the IDF as it attempted to suppress Hezbollah rockets launched from behind Lebanon's border into Israel.

Other examples of insufficient American influence, still developing at this present moment, are also plentiful. In fact, we can characterize almost all international difficulties in a common frame when they are viewed in this sense. Afghanistan is another revealing case which can be quickly added to those in the Gaza and Lebanon.

However, this posting is not about the specific difficulties of our foreign policy. It is about influence.

After subjecting Afghanistan to eight years in a military “meat grinder,” our influence is rapidly descending to an unsupportable nadir. In some important features, the citizens of Afghanistan are suffering the same hardships as the residents of Gaza or Lebanon. During the US occupation, those hardships have increased, not improved. Between the destruction of years of military violence and the apparent – at least in the eyes of many Afghans – support of government corruption by the NATO occupiers, there have been few successes in advancing the qualities of basic Afghan life.

In Iraq, a similar situation prevails, even in the improved security positions there. Years of violent military action coupled with claims of improved security have yet to provide fundamentals to the residents of much of Iraq. There are still grinding deficiencies in even the simplest public services such as water, sewer and electricity. The Iraqi government appears to be slightly less corrupt than the government of Afghanistan, but the hardships of life in both places seem to simply continue.

How can a military undertaking, especially an anti-insurgency strategy, expect to garner popular support when the public faces such static conditions of neglect? Further, in both countries, the United States has paid a gruesome wage for not having public support. During the worst period of the Iraqi occupation, a widely cooperating public could have provided intelligence of such great value that the military conditions would have been immensely improved. The same can be said for our efforts in Afghanistan.

Now, a few billions of the money the late autocrat borrowed for these wars was actually allocated to restoring some of these fundamental services. Yet, the material improvements remained little more than ludicrous public relations gambits for domestic consumption here in the US. Additionally, we can see that our local adversaries in both cases place a high value on denying us the tactical advantages such improvements, if they were actually ever completed, might bring. Al Quaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan have both undertaken dangerous and risky – to them – missions to destroy such infrastructure when it might have increased our influence in a local region.

And if the Al Quaeda and Taliban were not enough of a destructive influence, all those insurgent goals were further amplified by outrageous corruption. Even good projects wound up with cracking foundations, doors which wouldn't close and pipes that leaked the first time water entered them. Such defects can not be blamed on military insurgency activities. No, these are the products of corruption and greed. Under the prevailing regimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, what the insurgents can't destroy will fall apart predictably enough thanks to the corrupt extraction of everything that can possibly be removed from the project and added to someone's pocket book.

By the way, all that corruption and greed was not perpetrated solely by the locals, either. Yes, the contractors we hired to perform this work were already adequately corrupt to reliably sabotage the outcome, but it's now clear that the “watchdogs” we placed in charge of finding and correcting such corruption were just as corrupt as the contractors. The Bush Autocracy seemed to have enough energy to literally “search the world over” for something that, although it might have looked like a low bid, was actually simply someone willing to quietly participate in massive payola.

The Rumsfeldt Defense Department was unable to tell the difference between an electrical grid or a sewer system that actually functioned and another one which didn't. After all, every disastrous reconstruction project could be conveniently blamed on “security issues.”

Now, all those disasters are “coming home to roost.” We find ourselves seriously handicapped when it comes to popular support and cooperation – influence – which might have been based on improvements in the quality of life for those we claim to be committed to helping. We also see the equally uncomfortable, comparable results of similar, successful activities in places such as Gaza and Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah improved the conditions of public life in those places, and today, both enjoy significant support – they have influence.

There remains yet one final observation. This influence we are discussing cannot be “purchased” over night. Yes, Bremer, the American Viceroy in Iraq, was delivering multi-million dollar pallet loads of US $100 bills to practically everyone who would stand still long enough to take it during the early days of that war, but even that largess turned out to be severely lacking much effect in terms of generating noticeable popular support – influence of the kind that would assist US military intelligence efforts, for example, in locating IEDs being buried in the roads.

Consistent with historical US foreign policy traditions, we wound up with what turned out to be a very seedy collection of paid off nobodies who still couldn't be trusted. Although cast in a slightly different light, the same outcome seems to be prevailing in Afghanistan where we sponsor a similar situation in which the primary paths to prosperity remain a sickening mix of bribes, heroin making and brazen corruption. In both cases our reputation with the precise local citizens who could help us the most, frankly, sucks.

This is the basic paradigm we have consistently held for decades. Being suspicious of our basic natures, we have been plagued with the idea that influence can only be bought, not earned. Our behavior has, unremarkably, grown to complete this self-fulfilling, prophetic lack of self-esteem. Firmly founded on the principle that our essential natures were not up to the task of influencing anyone, we made sure that our actual natures followed suit. We habitually unleashed the most unsavory of our fellow Americans – miscreants ranging from the fascist United Fruit in Latin America to the Exxons and Chevrons unleashed decades ago all around the Middle East – with carte blanch marching orders implying that the ends of corporate profits justified any means necessary to gain them. We backed up that disastrous proposal by promising that we, as a nation, would assiduously avoid ever looking at those methods.

Now, it's pay back time. And that dramatic claim turns out to be much more than simply drama! Our traditional approach worked well enough in the delivery of the loyalty – or at least, the complicity -- of untrustworthy local criminals and other sociopaths cultivated by our “capitalists,” but failed miserably and in many cases, permanently, to create a foundation of popular influence. All the wealth extracted by those medieval, untethered, savage American plutocrats now rests comfortably in trust funds for their idiot progeny while we face the perpetually lingering distrust and hatred for those old crimes absent any of the influence we so sorely need right now.

It's no surprise that those same “trust fund” brats are spewing forth with monumental divisiveness and war mongering now. Because they think everyone is just as vacuous, avaricious and sterile as they are, they mistrust the entire process of “having a decent reputation” and the popular support it makes possible. Viceroy Bremer embodied this outlook to an unimaginable degree with his scheme to “buy friends” in Iraq with millions of US dollars. (His real face emerged when he attempted to corrupt his new prize from the autocracy, the IMF, by illicitly promoting his mistress.)

Anything goes.

Is MeanMesa careening “off the tracks” with this idea? You know, are there REALLY a clutch of billionaire monsters subverting a major part of the American ideal? Although the evidence is so voluminous that an eighteen wheeler couldn't carry a fifth of the books already written about it, consider the following two excerpts:

Wealth Inequality and Class

In 2004, the wealthiest 25% of US households owned 87% ($43.6 trillion) of the country’s wealth, while the bottom quartile held no net wealth at all. The middle 50% of the country held 13% or $6.5 trillion of the total household net wealth. The previous data are taken from analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) which over samples wealthy households. This over sampling more accurately represents the true wealth distribution [since most of the wealth is concentrated at the top]. This data shows that the top 25% of American society holds on average a net wealth of $1,556,801 which is 33 times more than those of the lower middle class, or the 25th-50th percentile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#Wealth_Inequality_and_Class

World's richest 1% own 40%

of all wealth, UN reports

The richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet's wealth, according to the largest study yet of wealth distribution. The report also finds that those in financial services and the Internet sectors predominate among the super rich.

Europe, the US and some Asia Pacific nations account for most of the extremely wealthy. More than a third live in the US. Japan accounts for 27% of the total, the UK for 6% and France for 5%.

The UK is also third in terms of per capita wealth. UK residents are found to have on average $127,000 (£64,000) each in assets, with Japanese and American citizens having, respectively, $181,000 and $144,000. All data relate to the year 2000.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/dec/06/business.internationalnews

Gurdjieff said, “The man with a full belly cannot understand the man who is hungry.” We seem intent on repeatedly proving this annually.

Are these folks really the good citizens they pretend to be? Granted, the major part of these ugly, flippant thugs is now busy injecting more and more grotesque, half-baked ideology into the Republican party, but we can be comforted by the fact that they consider such an undertaking little more than a hobby. They are beyond even the savage greed of the neo-cons, their convenient puppets.

The domestic evidence of this curse has emerged a little in the health care debate. The well established plutocrats are simply calling the “cards” they bought and paid for in the Senate. Americans are not to be permitted a chance to purchase any sort of health care which cannot be looted to add to their already immense wealth. However, be assured, the stench ranges far and wide beyond health care to defense suppliers, Wall Street bankers and stinky contractors such as Blackwater and Halliburton, toward an odorous, toxic cloud filled with innumerable others.

In all those foreign countries where we wish we had a better reputation and more influence, we encounter the generational victims of the same petty criminals. Even more the case than in the US where distractions are plentiful and memory much more short lived, those folks seem to have an uncanny – and enduring – memory of the way they were treated.

MeanMesa presumes that our national image might be rehabilitated, but any counter insurgency plan in a nation filled with victims of the plutocracy's previous attention (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Iraq), will, of necessity, be based more on fleeting theoretical dreams than any likely popular support or assistance. But, we might ask, what about those who live places without resources or other treasures which might have caught the eye of these looters? Places such as Afghanistan? Absent the regional treasure which might have caught the eyes of our American billionaires, perhaps we still have the remnant of positive reputations in these “less fortunate” places which could yet yield the popular support we need for our present day military adventures.

Sorry. When there is no “prize” to be exploited, our US government still has all the bad habits it would have held just as if there had been a “prize” of some sort. For the poorer places where we wish to leverage our influence in favor of more purely ideological ambitions, such as Afghanistan, it turns out that we have already “soiled the chair” by acting with hubris just as outrageous as our policy toward and our treatment of those places where there were “prizes.” Sometimes, influence turns out to be a very valuable "prize."

Aren't we a lovable lot? It is at this point that our American neo-cons, accompanied by the predictable chorus of hill billies, bigots and other illiterate freaks, will place the blame for our intractable lack of influence squarely on the shoulders of our new President. Of course, this would never be an actual problem. Although no one else pays much attention to them, they still continue to obsessively believe and inspire each other.

So, how will we restore our influence sufficiently to re-establish our ability to successfully pursue our policy aims? We can begin with a single, very important idea. Our military efforts in Iraq, today, consume just under a billion dollars every twenty-four hours. We all now realize the sobering truth about how much influence all that cash, along with the presence of a 120,000 plus American troops, will buy us in that same twenty-four hours. Or, for that matter, also consider how much influence our massive occupation forces, along with their costs, “purchase” for us in Afghanistan.

Now, let's consider a short, fictional history where the United States actually wound up having some solid influence. There is nothing special about Tanzania, but it will serve just as well as innumerable other opportunities to explain just how this is done.

Step one, park all the bombers and battleships. MeanMesa is not particularly pacifist or isolationist. That stuff has a purpose in this world. It is intended for use in ways which keep us safe. It is not intended as a means to facilitate the Iraq Hydrocarbon Treaty with Chevron.

In Tanzania, that same billion dollars – when well managed – could build all sorts of things. Let's make a list. If clinics cost $100,000 each and another $100,000 per year to staff, equip and operate for each one, and schools (Have you ever seen a Tanzanian school?) cost $100,000 each and cost $50,000 per year to staff, equip and operate for each one, and a university $15,000,000 to build and another $3,000,000 per year to staff, equip and operate, our daily Iraq “price tag” would produce the following:

200 clinics and their cost of operation for ten years = $220,000,000

(220 Mn)

200 schools and their cost of operation for ten years = $120,000,000 (120 Mn)

2 universities and their cost of operation for ten years = $120,000,000 (120 Mn)

"Let's see. Add the twelve, carry the five, divide by ten and … your total comes to $460 million! "

Of the $1,000,000,000 (1 Bn, or, 1,000 Mn) “one day in Iraq” budget, we would have over half remaining!

That is how we wind up with influence. If we want influence, we know how to get it.

Calling the Department of Defense

Informed Americans think about our troops all the time, read the newspapers and pay attention to what is happening with our military. These patriotic Americans occasionally have good suggestions for the Defense Department. Is it possible that our DoD is really too busy to even tell us to "go fly a kite?"

Meanmesa's attempts to reach an operational “suggestion box” anywhere in the Department of Defense have led to the conclusion that those boys are simply not interested in any advice they haven't contracted and compensated. In fact, the closest MeanMesa ever got to actually making a suggestion was a rather hefty set of “Contractor Identification Forms” a non-com was kind enough to issue as a reply to our inquiry. Naturally, as far as even a careful reader could get with those babies was that, once completed and approved, an authorized contractor ID number would be issued.

Of course, the forms couldn't be submitted for processing without the contractor ID number which would be assigned only after they were successfully processed. Any MeanMesa visitor who has served in the nation's military can easily understand such a humorous conundrum.

So, we'll just post a couple of suggestions here on MeanMesa. Perhaps one of our visitors will be impressed with it enough to figure out a way to forward to the DoD.

Suggestion 1: Additional, Low Cost IED Suppression

A modified crop duster – something the military might actually not have, but they're cheap – can overfly miles and miles of roadways in Afghanistan spraying an extremely light coating of a metallic trace mist which will cover the entire roadway. The result would be a uniform coating which covered all the areas in question, but, without sensing equipment would remain largely invisible to a possible insurgent approaching the area on the ground. A subsequent over flight by a UAV – or even a satellite – could rather dependably detect any areas of the coating which had been disturbed during one of the nightly “bomb burying adventures” by the bad guys.

Once the location of such a disturbance in the metallic spray was detected, during the over flight, the information could be relayed to our military folks who would investigate. Will such a program detect every IED? Of course not, but a robust stream of timely, interesting possible clues as to the whereabouts of these buried killers might be well worth the trouble and expense.

Now, once the adversary picks up on the general idea, we can expect him to be making false disturbances right and left. To exploit and counter this behavior, the mist which was previously sprayed on the road way could have the additional quality of being a lasting, permanent, ultraviolet dye. Whoever was doing the digging – whether planting an IED or just creating a bothersome false call – would unavoidably contaminate himself with some of the “spy spray.” For a few days, he would be detectable among the locals in the area where it occurred. Our military might be interested in figuring out who he was and talking with him about his digging habits.

The crop duster could stay busy all year round, even when the roads were covered with snow. If the mist being sprayed were just a little oily, it could be designed to withstand wind and dust storms. Because of the low cost of the crop duster and the spray material, road coverings could be refreshed frequently, creating a constant “heads up” especially in suspicious areas where someone might be likely to want to plant an IED. This program could be remarkably cost effective and quickly and easily implemented on a trail basis.

MeanMesa is tired of US military personnel being injured and killed by IEDs.

Suggestion 2: Tracking the Taliban

We hear frequently about the problem posed by the mountainous border with the problem areas of Pakistan. MeanMesa thinks that there might be a rather inexpensive, high tech solution.

Here, we can follow the effective example used by the Moroccans when they were facing a seemingly undetectable stream of insurgent Arabs who were gaining entry into the country from the East, across the desert. The government there deployed a large number of “tell tales,” small monitoring devices, all along the border. These little “eyes” could detect – via infrared scanning – nearby surface motion through the rather long, desert “back door.” When anything suspicious was detected, an automatic message code was transmitted to the Moroccan military, allowing them to dash right out to the scene and determine what was going on.

The Moroccans deployed so many of these little “tell tales” that the insurgents found it more and more difficult to sneak through the electronic barrier without being detected. There were other high tech components of the Moroccan “desert fence,” but the scattered, solar powered detectors were among both the most cost effective and easily managed.

Now, Afghanistan's insurgent migration problem is, granted, a little more complex. However, the fact that Taliban fighters can “disappear” while crossing those rocky mountains has become one of their foremost tactical advantages. An effective military program to neutralize that advantage makes good sense.

So, how could this work?

We would need to start with a bit of technology. Nothing new, mind you, just a new combination of some pretty much “off the shelf” items. What was avoided in cost and complexity would be counter balanced by simplicity and quantity. A single “tell tale” would duplicate many of the features the Moroccans found so effective.

Each of the little devices would require a “hard wired” code which could specifically identify it as the source during any of its communications with the “central” detection system. It would have GPS capacity so it could locate itself after deployment. The devices could be dropped from a low flying plane, each one making a safe descent with a small, biodegradable parachute. The plan should provide for the deployment of very many of these little “spies.” How many? Thousands, or, even, millions of them!

Even after DARPA is through complicating matters, each device should have a manufacturing cost of less than, say, a hundred dollars. A million of them would set the DoD back $100,000,000. That seems like a lot of money, but good intelligence rolling in constantly from such disbursed “tell tales” might prove to be worth the tab. Our extraction of operable intelligence from the Afghans, although impressive, hasn't really “blossomed” in our favor.

Once a device landed, it would deploy a small solar panel to charge its equally small battery. It should be able to operate effectively for a few days without much sunshine. Its first task would be to use its GPS capacity to locate itself. Once it had good coordinates, it could call the central computer and place itself in operation. Communications could actually be quite simple, perhaps no more than a beep every time it sensed something warm moving through its infrared scanning range. Lots of beeps would indicate that something interesting might be unfolding at that distant, deserted, dark mountain pass.

The Taliban would be motivated to find and disable the tell-tales, wherever they could, but even that would send a message to military commanders that something was going on. If a million, well camouflaged little devices were scattered without any particular pattern, we can assume that it would be almost impossible to eliminate enough of them to open an undetecteable corridor or otherwise seriously hamper the program's data gathering.

Some of these little machines would fall down under trees, between rocks and all sorts of other places where they could not function, but a myriad of others would find themselves perched all over the place. The mountains and plains between Afghanistan and the Pakistan border could gradually be saturated with so many “tell tales” that the possibility of an unseen insurgent column moving through the region would become less and less likely. The system could not be defeated by some of the devices falling into enemy hands, there are no expensive, high tech secrets incorporated in any of them.

The command procedure would be fairly straightforward. A main frame could easily maintain a field model which showed all the locations of devices which had successfully landed, identify each one by its unique code number and display the whole data set on a topographic map with aerial photographic details. When messages were received via satellite from the “tell tales,” additional observations could be ordered immediately. Guns and other metal weapons show up very distinctly from aerial surveillance – even at night.

Recap:

Lynn Montrose in his timeless text War Through the Ages, gave example after example of the tactical benefits of denying an enemy his combat advantages. In Afghanistan, the enemy values more than anything else his ability to sneak around, showing up without warning. MeanMesa doesn't recall whether or not Mr. Montrose mentioned anything about Defense Departments having "suggestion boxes."

It's time to take this advantage away from our enemy. There are not really any very good excuses for the continuing losses the United States is suffering in the Afghan -- Pakistan theater.