Model: Kelly Krave

Republicans and Tea Partisans are flexing their regressive muscle at various state legislatures and chopping down spending on environmental programs. Most moves include deregulation and lifting bans on land development on protected nature reserves across the nation. Since 10% of the people own 90% of the real estate in the U.S., it ain’t hard to figure out who benefits from these alleged moves to promote “free” enterprise at the expense of fresh water supplies: the same fellows who write the cheques for the GOP.

Meanwhile, in seemingly unrelated news, the Spanish government announced last week that China was about to purchase 9 billion euros worth of Spanish debt, or about 60% of the money needed to maintain a safe and viable banking system. Madrid’s newspaper, El Pais, called China the “Banker of the World.”

Incidentally, the U.S. owes more money to China than to God.

In a reversal of fortune that would’ve been dismissed with ridicule 20 years ago, while Republican goons coerce the Democrat White House into slicing trillions out of infrastructure, education, health, clean energy and scientific development budgets, the biggest spending government in the world, communist China, has now become the economic master of the land of the free. Sad.

President Lincoln, during the Gettysburg Address, reminded Americans of the principles upon which their country was founded. He said that the “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” He never said a word about an oligarchy by corporations for corporations. He actually cautioned us against it.

Model: Julia Skalozub

Corporate thieves are a hybrid species, born out of the crossing of a pirate with an illusionist. While air strikes pummel Libya, faceless revolutions sweep through oil-rich countries and tsunamis sink Japan, executives at America’s S & P top-500 corporations keep taking advantage of the diversions and granting themselves biblical salary hikes.

Governance Metrics International reported that, while employee salaries went up a measly 2.1% in 2010 (an amount all but wiped out by inflation), executives at the abovementioned companies saw theirs increase by an average of 27%. Jamie Dimon, from JP Morgan Chase, was tickled pink to see his salary skyrocket from $1.3 million to $20.8 million. Michael Szymanczyk, from the Altria conglomerate, doubled his 2009 compensation with a loot of $20.7 millions. Kevin Sharer, from the pharmaceutical mammoth Amgen, was showered with a 38% raise and collected $20 million. But the Oscar for Best Corporate Robbery goes to Tim Armstrong, whose salary shot up 40% to $15.3 million, while his company, AOL, kept drowning in red ink.

Obama, we love you, but corporate raiders are raping us with a stick and the warlords of America are now more prosperous than before you won your Nobel Peace Prize. We hope that your memoirs will at least reveal who really controls the U.S. government, if not a President, elected by the people for the people.

Photo: Premium Glam - Model: Lea Lush

Strange. These Northern African and Middle Eastern-ish quasi-revolutions have no leaders. Western media refers to those fighting the powers-that-be as “the rebels” or “the democratic forces.” Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is as close as anyone has gotten to putting a name on revolutionary leadership.

Where are the Maos, the Gandhis, Nerus, Castros, Che Guevaras, Pancho Villas, Titos, Chiang Kai-Sheks, Ho Chi Minhs? Where is Lawrence of Arabia?

Who is leading these people?

Leaders hide in the shadows of these odd revolutions, which outcome no one can predict. But the shadows may not even be in the African continent or Asia Minor. Libya can plunge into tribal war, for all we know. A second Afghanistan. Tunisia and Egypt could become radical Muslim countries.

We have no clue what ideals we are supporting with our mighty armies, other than the ideals of controlling natural resources and feeding the military. Anyone who still believes that elections equal democracy, also believes that Mubarak won all the past Egyptian campaigns going back four decades, and that Russia is as democratic as ancient Greece.

Hey! A thousand people were massacred in Ivory Coast in a couple of days! Where is our civilian protection? Busy taking pictures of pretty oil fields further north.

Photo: G.W. Burns - Model: Eleazia Korbel

This is the first time we post a third-party article in its entirety. We have no permission from the publisher or the author to do so, but we took a chance for reasons that will become obvious from the first paragraph. Thank you, Mr. Bob Herbert:

The New York Times, March 25, 2011

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.

This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.

Photo: Wild Card Photography - Model: Lana Holmes

Below is a 2010 list of the top-20 deadliest countries for members of the media, compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The list ranks nations by the quantity of reporters murdered or killed in cross fires:

Iraq
Philippines
Algeria
Russia
Colombia
Somalia
Pakistan
India
Afghanistan
Turkey
Bosnia
Mexico
Sri Lanka
Tajikistan
Rwanda
Brazil
Sierra Leone
Bangladesh
Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Angola

Generally speaking, the danger to civilians increases in direct proportion to the number of violent deaths of journalists.

Readers may note that Libya did not make it into this hit parade. They may also observe that there is no orchestrated UN military effort to protect freedom in 18 out of the 20 rascals. There are no no-fly zones, no Cuban-style economic embargos, no air strikes and no warships patrolling their coast lines.

When good-looking American or French politicians take the mic on TV and say that we are bombing Libya to protect civilians, don’t believe them. Few things are more oxymoronic than protecting civilians by starting a war.

When the same politicians tell you the air strikes are surgical and aimed at military targets, don’t believe them. There are many people like you working inside those targets, making an honest living for families that might find themselves fatherless or motherless in the time it takes a RAF pilot to press a button.

And when they tell you we are supporting a democratic uprising and a revolution, which leaders they can’t name or even identify, don’t believe them. Like al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, 21st century military empires love ghostly enemies, undefined by leadership or geographical territory. A feeble hint of their presence is enough to justify profitable interventions.

This is not an endorsement of Qaddafi, a man whose multi-billion dollar deposits have been accepted with pleasure by western banks for four decades. This is a rant against hypocrisy and against meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.

Because if the international community were truly concerned about fellow human beings, there was a list of at least 20 countries to tackle before Libya.

So, don’t believe them.

Photo: Kevin Weaver

Colonel Gaddafi might look like a hung-over merengue singer and deliver the most ludicrous speeches since Don King, but many otherwise democratic citizens are suddenly feeling a strong urge to take arms, tie on a green bandana and go fight alongside the Libyan leader.

This revolutionary impulse to support a megalomaniac dictator is a visceral response to the hypocrisy of western banks and governments, who, for 40 years, have been bending over backwards to open savings accounts for the charismatic wacko. Four decades of wining and dining and serving cookies and tea to the self-appointed Libyan emperor, and taking in, and profiting from, billions of dollars pillaged from this oil-rich North African nation, without as much as a single question or remorse in regards to the origin of the cash.

Until Gaddafi presented these bankers with a withdrawal slip with many, many zeros.

Suddenly, the governments of Canada, France, the US, Germany and countless other nations rediscovered their once-forgotten principles, called press conferences and imposed freezes on the wealth of the “monster.”

One day, perhaps 30 years from now, Gaddafi will no longer rule Libya. And the bankers of the West will owe lots of apologies to its people.

But they won’t offer them. Instead, they will lure the new thieves in the temple with fresh numbered accounts and free Air Miles.

Photo: Rey Trajano - Model: Melanie Elyza

The headline in Spain’s El Pais reads: “Mexico’s Bravest Woman Escapes to the U.S.” The article continues: she didn’t want this nickname “…to become her obituary.”

Marisol Valles Garcia is the 20-year old criminology student who stepped up to the plate and assumed the posting of Chief of Police of Praxedis G. Guerrero, a small municipality near Ciudad Juarez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, famous for its Taco Bell spokesdog and street beheadings of police troopers by sicarios. According to her family, Marisol, who had been hailed by Mexican media as a beacon of hope for her innocent and moving dedication to restore peace and order to this wild west neighborhood, has requested asylum in the U.S., terrified by the continuous threats of organized crime.

And with good reason. Chihuahua state is as safe as drinking a bottle of bleach. On November 29, 2010, a sicario commando ambushed and executed Hermila Garcia, Public Safety Director of the municipality of Meoqui. She was 38 and had been at her job for one month and 10 days. At the end of December, a group of goons entered the residence of 18-year old Erika Gandara, the sole police officer in the municipality of Guadalupe, and snatched her away. No one has heard of her since. A year ago, within a week of Erika’s hiring, a colleague was murdered. Seven others resigned a few months later, and the rest of the force gave their leave of absence when the mayor was gunned down. Erika was left holding the bag.

The amazing thing is not that teenage and twenty-year old girls are the only men with balls to head police stations in Chihuahua, but the fact that such a corrupt and lawless society can share the North American continent with the U.S. and Canada, while our armed forces are roasting in Arabian deserts. If we stop and ponder for one minute, it probably wouldn’t take long for the U.S. and the Mexican army to cooperate, pull out their might and put an end to the climate of murder and fear that rules the entire Mexican north. After all, more people die in this drug war in a month than in the entire Iraq conflict in a year.

But the parties do not want to take action. We leave it up to the reader to imagine why.

Photo: MO Dubois - Model: Barrett Bronsen

Last Tuesday, a rogue Afghan terrorist cell fired a rocket into a New Jersey park, killing nine children instantly. The victims, ages 8 to 12, were engaged in a baseball game when the explosive shell ripped through the dugout. The terrorists were arrested 3 hours later and apologized, stating that they were aiming for the adults on the stands.

Sorry. We got the story all wrong. It didn’t happen in New Jersey, USA. It happened in the province of Kunar, in Afghanistan. The Afghan children (same age) were actually picking fire wood for cooking and heating. The rockets were fired by NATO coalition forces (of unspecified nationality). An apology was issued by the International Security and Assistance Force. They were gunning for the grown-ups.

They have no reason to hate us. We wouldn’t hold a grudge in Jersey.

Photo: Holger Siepmann - Model: Katharina Herrmann

Lordy, lordy, lord. What in the world is going on? We just found out that while we were busy raising hell in Iraq and Afghanistan and calling names to the Iranians, medieval monarchies, ruthless dictatorships and corrupt regimes were, and still are, having a ball all over Northern Africa and the Middle East, pillaging the natural resources of their respective fiefdoms, abusing their citizens and trampling human rights with the eagerness of a bird of paradise in mating season.

Recently, as many as five front page stories in the New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, The Washington Post and practically all reputed papers across the planet, were dedicated to the protests shaking the status quo in such exotic lands as Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia and Egypt, as if no one had been previously aware of the root of the discontent.

The frightening thing is that without these popular uprisings, we could have gone on for decades not giving an excrement about the people in those countries. And, after all, why should we? Our sovereignty starts and ends within the borders of our respective countries. No state has the right to tell another how to live, whether that living is done under a government so democratic that it triggers referendums to decide the color of its voting ballots, or one that would make Ivan the Terrible look gentler than Céline Dion. Internationally speaking, we should only hang out with those people whom we like and who like to be our friends in return. Any kindergarten child could confirm that.

Anyhow, we drift. It remains to be seen what beast will be born out of these romantic expressions of “popular will.” While western media praises Facebook’s role and boosts ratings by displaying epic images of democracy’s great march in the Arab world, few are sitting down to ponder the alternatives to the current regimes.

Sure, Russia is no longer communist. The wall came down. Yay! Democracy and freedom won. That sound you hear? It is us, laughing all the way to watch CNN. Its plots are a lot more entertaining and ludicrous than Lost.

Photo: A. Brito - Model: Vanity

This story comes about a couple of months late. We were reading comics in December and missed it completely, but it is certainly worth repeating.

TIME magazine named Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, its “2010 Person of the Year,” apparently for creating the most impressive waste of human time ever invented. The decision was an arbitrary one, made by the editors, who felt that the winner of the readers’ poll by a huge margin, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, was not a worthy candidate.

Assange received 382,000 votes, double the amount of runner-up, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergodan. As for Zuckerberg, he came in 10th.

TIME’s editors were torn between listening to readers and granting mainstream recognition to the man who used the web to show us the future and power of 21st-century media, breaking real news directly from the sources and making governments squirm to cover dirt, and a man who invented the “wall,” a digital place where friends and semi-strangers can post stupidities.

In the scheme of human affairs, Facebook, serves absolutely no purpose other than boosting the ego of users by creating the illusion that their lives are really exciting, and that other people truly want to read their thoughts and look at their blurry iPhone pictures. As far as communication tools go, Facebook is far less efficient than direct email, texting or phoning directly a person with whom we sincerely want to communicate. Quite frankly, when we stop and think, Facebook is starting to look more and more like an aberration of the Internet age, rather than a life-changing breakthrough like Google (improving dramatically the way we harness the wast pool of knowledge and resources that is the web), Amazon and eBay (altering forever the way we sell and purchase goods), Napster (creating a new way to obtain and share music) and YouTube (making real our wish to access any media and entertainment, instantly, when we well damn please).

Facebook is a wet dream for marketeers eager to target people who have willingly posted their innermost desires for all to see. The evolution of junk mail. And people only like advertising when it isn’t creepy and when it pays for something that enhances their lives. Already, many users acknowledge their Facebook membership with an embarrassed disclaimer (“I don’t really use it that much”), and many are bound to abandon it as willingly as they joined it, as soon as the next hot triviality comes along. Because it is ultimately meaningless. Where are all those 200 million enthusiastic MySpace citizens of 2008?

For that reason, our financial advisors, a chimp and a recently deceased octopus, have urged us to stay away from Facebook stock as soon as this narcissistic monstrosity is forced to go public.

Some will argue that TIME’s decision was prompted by the popularity of the website, with its 500 million users and all. Pokemon and Hello, Kitty! were popular. Nobody gave them any Person of the Year award.

We prefer to keep our eyes on Wikileaks and its disciples. Their impact will be significantly greater, even if they don’t get invited to TIME for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.