WHITE HOUSE LIES ABOUT IRAN'S NUKES, SAYS HERSH

CORNEL WEST IS SNUBBED BY THE WHITE HOUSE AND REBUKED BY SOME LIBERALS

Cornel West, a prominent African-American professor and man of letters, has recently ruffled feathers in parts of the liberal class, by calling President Barack Obama "a black mascot" in the service of Wall Street. The president was already stung by accusations from West that he is not much of a progressive. Such criticisms were not well received by some of the president's admirers either. West played a prominent role in Obama's 2008 campaign.

Chris Hedges has argued for a long time that liberal institutions, which were operating as a political safety valve for justice in American history, have largely failed now, because they have basically become derelict. The universities, the liberal church, the labor unions, the national press, have been made complicit in the country's rush to war, or were bought off, cowed into silence, driven further away from responsibilities they once took seriously; meanwhile, democracy and the law are hauled down, bit by bit.

There is pressure to control the conversation: pressure on teachers who answer to an increasing corporate structure in universities; and there is never-ending pressure on working people to surrender more of their dignity and security in the workplace. There is so much tragic pressure put on our jobless youth, to turn themselves over to the military and its wars of occupation, the madness that destroys minds and bodies.

Bernie Sanders, in his famous Marathon Speech on the floor of the Senate, said "...more tax breaks for the very rich is only one symptom of an economic and political system that is grotesquely failing the average American. The simple reality is that the middle class of America is collapsing, poverty is increasing, and the gap between the very wealthiest people and everyone else is getting wider. How did this happen?"

I saw the other day a story about the protests in Madrid. These are real protests that shake up the establishment. When Hedges writes that liberals have become pragmatists about the choice of lesser evils, that they fancy themselves as a respectable liberal class, it is on condition that they comply with the narrow parameters of political discourse, as it is permitted. The morally courageous are viewed with alarm as soon as they reveal too much. This is the sense I take from what he suggests is prophetic. This is painful in a personal sense because our commitment to justice does not compare favorably with that of protesters on the streets in Tahrir Square or in Madrid.

Nader was vilified in an irrational welter of emotion where it is endlessly claimed that he cost Gore and the country the election in 2000; this is the default position because either this is true or there was coup d’etat that was the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. It is too dangerous from a psychological viewpoint to accept responsibility for what happened. Much safer and more comfortable by far to shift the blame.

Reverend Wright was demonized of course for denigrating the idea that God reflexively blesses America. Every US president ends an oration with the words “May God Bless the United States of America”. Many in this country go all clammy and dread the uncomfortable topics whenever conversation turns to our own imperial slaughters abroad, the CIA’s political assassinations, torture, and other of America’s chronic crimes against peace.

Cornel West is revealing the betrayal. And he is attacked as hysterical and trivialized and is accused of petty spite. One would think from the moralizing language of some of his detractors that they suggest that he is like a rejected, wounded suitor. Is it too much to confront the implications of betrayal that is at once personal and political? No we have to go on believing in Obama’s good intentions. In the end the servants and courtiers in the liberal class will rally to his support and will recommend this course of action; moreover they will be crying that the system can still represent the people.

In Madrid, the masses have figured out that the Spanish government doesn’t represent the people. Winner-take-all parties want to bar smaller parties from representation. Voices of the people have been pushed into a place of obscurity, where no elected official hears or responds to them. And the representatives are seen now as wholly owned by corporate powers.

Liberals as a political class have participated in their own moral uprooting, as Chris Hedges has consistently warned us. This is the prophetic part and the sounding of an alarm. All this fiddling with designer politics and “boutique activism of political correctness” distracts us. Those who are committed to the primacy of justice can often be vilified, and have been vilified. We have to be clear about the warning signs in this country; just as a people can civilize themselves and defend what is just, they can also lose sight of justice, and can even debase themselves in the long run, and effectively censor the subjects which are considered unsafe to discuss. They can walk carelessly over virtues they once possessed and be uncivilized.

On Sunday, a couple was arrested for slow dancing in DC inside the Jefferson Memorial. And in other news this past week, the president has shrugged off the legal requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973. He doesn't know what all the fuss is about; after all, Libya is just a little war. The law demands one of these three conditions to be met: "...a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

copeland morris APRIL ARRIVES BY NIGHT

Tohoku in snow
The daffodils collapse
Lying flat one upon the other.
From the fingernail moon you stole
A kiss, April, as you arrived
By night. Haven’t you revealed
The secret of a fox
To whom you are partial, or what
Favor the rain brings?
You laugh, thinking you can get
Away with no orientation, claiming
No dependents, like a ghost who can be
Unburdened. So where, in this deserted
Teahouse, are those who serve and gather?

Here you are, April, in the plowed furrow,
Having stolen away to the fields,
Your brow heavy with grief for Tarukawa,
Who killed himself over his row of cabbages.

LIBYA AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF HUMANITARIAN WAR

Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. --Glenn Greenwald

After a period of official uneasiness about intervening in Libya's civil strife, the White House did a sudden about face, then ran with a propaganda blitz coordinated between the US, Britain, and France. A rebel uprising that was within days of being quelled in its stronghold in Benghazi, was to have its fortunes reversed, was to receive a flow of arms with perfect coordination, and begin chasing Gadhafi's forces back across the sands of Libya. President Obama celebrates clean hands in all of this, claiming that, at last, here is a chance to "align our interests with our values".

But something odd happened to this policy of humanitarian intervention. It was sold to the western public and to the Arab League as a policy of "defending civilians" with a No-Fly Zone. But the intention all along was to draft an "all measures necessary" provision into UN Resolution 1973. The aim was not impartial defense of people, but regime change. Once the votes were in, Britain and France made no bones about wanting Colonel Gadhafi's scalp. And US military spokesmen were careful to say that the violence was not directed at the Colonel himself, even while his compound, and the grand tent that served for his official receptions, went up in smoke. According to US Top Brass, if Gadhafi happened to get killed, it would be an accident, or the result of his own carelessness or imprudence.

Even though President Obama was ordering up a war, he presented no case to Congress; and in point of fact, he bypassed Congress. And the decision to enter hostilities was announced on March 19th, the anniversary of the war announcement made by George W. Bush, on March 19, 2003.

We all should be concerned if there is some common political ground for neocons and liberal interventionists. But one reason I object to the new war, is that it was advertised as one thing: defense of civilians. It is obvious now that the war is about regime change. It really goes after more than defanging the Gadhafi air force; for this is about arming the rebels (by way of Saudi and Egyptian channels) and making sure they can prevail at every step of their advance. Going from no-fly zone to no-drive zone. When French night-attack aircraft bomb sleeping soldiers on the outskirts of Benghazi, this war is revealed for what it is.

There is a reason why Obama (insert any other US administration) favors toppling someone like Gadhafi but not a Mubarak, someone like Syria's Assad but not Yemen's Saleh; and there is no point in the calculations that touches upon democracy or is concerned about defending civilians.

No African country has so far allowed the US military to base AFRICOM anywhere on its national territories. This will probably change; because for an empire, what cannot be obtained by diplomacy, is had by force. When Libya becomes a protectorate/puppet, the US military command's new AFRICOM will have a home. As in the past, empire uses conquest as its last resort.

The oil is an added goodie alright plus globalism's penetration into Libya. This war came on the heels of meticulous planning and propaganda. Gadhafi is not compliant enough, and would under no circumstances allow American basing in his country.

There is a cold cost analysis that is behind this foreign-armed and assisted coup d'etat. Egypt will end up with a troubling military pressure, on its western flank, the US basing in Libya, as a not so subtle nudge to keep people power under control in Egypt. A Libyan puppet who will take the collar will be a lot less worrisome than the Colonel, and more profitable to the powers that be.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich left a comment on the Guardian website, that references what is, perhaps, the suspect planning behind this war.

On November 2, 2010 France and Great Britain signed a mutual defence treaty , which included joint participation in "Southern Mistral" (www.southern-mistral.cdaoa.fr), a series of war games outlined in the bilateral agreement. Southern Mistral involved a long-range conventional air attack, called Southern Storm, against a dictatorship in a fictitious southern country called Southland. The joint military air strike was authorised by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The "Composite Air Operations" were planned for the period of 21-25 March, 2011. On 20 March, 2011, the United States joined France and Great Britain in an air attack against Gaddafi's Libya, pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1973.

Have the scheduled war games simply been postponed, or are they actually under way after months of planning, under the name of Operation Odyssey Dawn? Were opposition forces in Libya informed by the US, the UK or France about the existence of Southern Mistral/Southern Storm, which may have encouraged them to violence leading to greater repression and a humanitarian crisis? In short was this war against Gaddafi's Libya planned or a spontaneous response to the great suffering which Gaddafi was visiting upon his opposition?

UPDATE: It looks like all the wolves will be making a meal of Libya.

Wow That Was Fast! Libyan Rebels Have Already Established A New Central Bank Of Libya


IN OTHER NEWS: Grayson Harper sends us this comment by email:

Biden stuck a reporter in a closet during a posh Orlando fundraiser to keep him from talking to the guests--had him in there an hour-and-a-half. Gave him bottled water and posted a staffer outside the door to stand guard. Sounds like something you'd expect to see on an episode of The Simpsons. We live in an absolute cartoon of a country. We have cartoon liberals and cartoon conservatives.

A Simple Twist of Fate

Grayson Harper

Well, here we are in the greatest country in the world. The snow has melted off and the mobs are massing to watch the gladiators have a go at each other. Tickets (in case you're interested) are going for between $3,500 and $20.000. If you don't mind watching it on a big screen outside the Coliseum--er--stadium, last I heard, the price was $200. Probably much higher today. On Super-Bowl Sunday, a thirty-second TV ad is running somewhere in the neighborhood of $3-million.

Meanwhile, half-way around the world, in Cairo, in Alexandria, a different hoard of folks are gathered together. Not just in Egypt, but other places, as well--in Jordan, Tunesia, Syria, Yemen, Sudan. Throngs of people lifting their voices for democracy, crying out to be treated with simple human dignity. The notion of shelling out $3,000 to watch a football game, or even $200 to watch it on a screen, probably would not occur to most of them as an option, not only because probably not one of them has anything close to that kind of money to waste, and perhaps never will, and not only because their reason for coming together could mean life or death, but because of the sheer absurdity of it.

So far, the football fanatics have had to endure snow and icy weather. Pat-downs at the airport. A slab of ice slid off the domed roof of the stadium yesterday and sent someone to the hospital.

And still they come.

Over eleven days, the Egyptians in Tahrir Square have fought off Mubarak's thugs, they've had rocks thrown at them, they've been gunned down in the streets. They've stood up to the lies told about them, by those labeling them as Islamic extremists, by those who say they're being influenced by "outside agitators," by those like Senator John McCain, who brands what's happening in Egypt as a "virus that must be contained." The police have attacked them, the army has threatened them, has made every attempt to shut down the flow of information, including removing news journalists from the streets, taking them who knows where. The army has cut off their food and water supplies.

And still they come.

I wonder how many of them, along with their children, could be fed on all that Super-Bowl money--ad money, football money, money spent on bets on the game, money spent on airline tickets, gasoline, hotels, parties, fine dining, booze, and whores.

How many in my home town could be fed on that money? In my county alone, a fifth of children under the age of 18 live in extreme poverty. In my state, Texas, a quarter of them suffer from food insecurity or outright hunger.

The U.S. President, Barack Obama, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have told the Egyptians they support them in their cause. Of course, they believe in democracy and human rights. They said they want a peaceful, orderly transition from Hosni Mubarak to the newly selected--not elected--Vice President--Omar Suleiman. Suleiman, the former head of Egyptian Intelligence, the C.I.A.'s point-man in Egypt for renditions and torture.

The President said he would journey to Texas if his beloved team, the Bears, were in the running. But they didn't make it. So today he will be hunkered down in the White House watching the Super Bowl. His guests include entertainers--Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. He did not say he would journey to Cairo to stand in solidarity with a people who have endured thirty years of life under a brutal dictator.

MUBARAK SOMEHOW MISTAKES HIMSELF FOR THE HOMELAND

"When a regime withdraws the police entirely from the streets of Cairo, when thugs are part of the secret police, trying to give the impression that without Mubarak the country will go into chaos, this is a criminal act. Somebody has to be accountable. And now, as you can hear in the streets, people are not saying Mubarak should go, they are now saying he should be put on trial. If he wants to save his skin, he better leave." –-Mohamad ElBaradei

Hosni Mubarak's ominous comment "...the Homeland goes on but the people do not...", in the midst of a speech where ordinary Egyptians were expecting (at least hoping) for him to announce his resignation, served as quite an eye-opener. The immense crowd in Cairo, roared back as they listened to him explain why he is still indispensable until September; and while they massed in the early morning darkness, their shout was for him to just "Leave".

Mubarak's hated police and his more hated Ministry of Interior, have made people recoil in fear for a long time; but the people began shouting back in unison that they would no longer be objects of abuse. When it becomes customary for police to beat or torture people taken into custody, when the face of a policeman on the street becomes that of a snarling bully who manhandles citizens at his whim, it means that civil society is broken.

What is terrifying is that a nation of over 80 million was placed for so long at the mercy of 1.2 million goons, their hirelings, and accomplices. Bernhard, who hosts at Moon of Alabama, describes this problem:

What to do about the 1.2 million people who work for the Interior Ministery and suppressed the people and protected the regime? Leaving them without income is dangerous, keeping them impossible. The economy is in bad shape - a social-democratic middle ground needs to be found to heal it while also lifting the poor from their mess. It will take years.

The US administration, as Hosni Mubarak's not-so-secret benefactor, embarrassed and contradicted itself at every turn. Vice-President Biden, like a stooge in an expensive suit, maintained that Mubarak is not a dictator. Old Hosni was a dear and reliable ally, serving at the pleasure of officials in Washington, as reputable as the derelict American press could arrange for him to be, lionizing him as a stabilizing presence in the region. Mubarak's counterfeit democracy and brutal repression were skimmed over in US newsrooms; and with press releases in their sweaty hands, the scribes hunched over the sacred writ from today's White House salespeople, acting submissively, just as they had done during Bush's years.

In the United States and Israel, the usual suspects persist in adding disinformation to the news; accusing protesters, labeling them, pointing at them, as looters and rioters. The protesters have been militant and defended themselves, but their behavior has been remarkably good in their large numbers, in these circumstances. Their anger at the Mubarak regime is justified. The real looters have been professional; sometimes shot by soldiers, and sent to hospitals, where they were found with police identity cards. This is the practice used by corrupt governments; they foment chaos themselves; they order it done to bring discredit to those who are protesting in the streets, and to prey on the fears of society at large, with the idea that the authorities alone can fend off social collapse.

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have been tangled up for days in the hypocrisy of their country's insipid diplomatic language. But the real heroism and social responsibility applies to masses of Egyptian people, who have taken steps to heal an abused nation; it is a profound contrast to the world of make-believe, which our president tried to sell to us, in his latest State of the Union speech. The contrivance and junk rhetoric has just worn out its welcome: the stupid recycling of the "Sputnik moment" from a Cold War mentality, morphing into an economic vision of green energy renewal; but for an empire in decline, which can't manage infrastructure or maintain decent wages at home, the US Empire can still build schools and pulverize villages in Afghanistan. And Obama capped all this off by wearing out the phrase, "winning the future".

Winning the future.

Isn't the cry about winning the future just a handy strategy to keep an old exhausted mule tugging at its harness? Winning the future, as rhetoric, is like the long pole with a carrot at the end of it; just enough incentive for a mule.

While Obama points to a worthy citizen in the gallery, and bathes in that person's reflected glory, while he gesticulates and prattles about winning the future, ordinary Egyptians have done something that should humble him, and all the rest of us. Unlike Americans, Egyptians seem to be mastering their fears; and if they can continue this way they will be thinking more clearly. But there is no going back; and it's best to wish them well. They refuse to be coerced any longer by Mubarak's brutality or ever bow down before his brutality again. Once the people take a step like that, they have proven how great they are.


Image: Cairo's Tahrir Square (via Moon Of Alabama)

IN REMEMBRANCE OF MARTIN LUTHER KING

Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Our country's leaders can no longer define the conditions that would bring peace; and they won't allow us to disengage from our foreign wars. At home, there is a reckless and persistent drumming up of violence by a right-wing that speaks in a way that suggests a right to nullify elections with guns. Death threats and vandalism at political headquarters, the brandishing of guns at public meetings, and rhetoric that assumes the elimination of political adversaries, is all a grim reminder of the sacrifices which were made in the past for a better world, when we mourned the assassination of our leaders.

"Power without love is reckless and abusive."

The assault of power, in the absence of love, can be seen in the manhandling and dehumanization of passengers boarding airplanes in this country. It can be seen in Afghanistan, as US Special Ops kidnap civilians in the middle of the night; and where occupation troops supervise the cutting down of orchards. It is the hellscape where robot drones appear out of the night to kill sleeping children. Because love lies abandoned, because this kind of power is reckless and abusive, the concept of peace and the blessings of peace are not even acknowledged by our politicians. And our silence, too, in the face of this kind of power, can rob us of our humanity.

"And love without power is sentimental and anemic."

 Martin Luther King fell out of favor, after he spoke out against the War in Vietnam. People, even in his own civil rights organization, the NAACP, criticized him; this was because they could accept only the Reverend King of "The Dream" speech; and the Reverend King who rightly described his country as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" was out of step in their view; and suddenly he became an outcast in Washington, an object of suspicion to the Great Society democrats who once praised him. And how can we, or our president, bind up the nation's wounds, when love lacks power?--when political speech is composed of sentimental and anemic words?

Without justice and without laws in which we have confidence, we are lost. Bertolt Brecht, the poet and playwright, once wrote, "What times are these when a conversation about a tree is almost a crime because it contains so many silences about so many crimes?"  When will the president urge us to humility, as he gives his eulogy for American soldiers who commit suicide? Where are the words to bathe and anoint the body of the  next Afghan child,  killed by our bombs?

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

"DON'T FIGHT ANOTHER FOR A RICH MAN'S WAR"

In London, it was announced that Julian Assange will be freed on bail. And today in the cold, in front of the White House, there was a demonstration, and more, an act of peaceful resistance against the war in Afghanistan.

People can see that acts of resistance like this really matter. Among those in Washington DC who chained or tied themselves to the fence in front of the White House were Daniel Ellberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and Chris Hedges, former NYT correspondent, who has covered wars as a reporter and won a Pulitzer Prize. Colleen Rowley, a whistleblower who has been in the news, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, were among 135 protesters who were arrested late this afternoon.

Raw Story was able to confirm the arrests of Ellsberg, McGovern, Rowley and Hedges, along with Veterans for Peace members Elliott Adams, Mike Ferner, Mike Hearington

copeland morris SHELTER

I smell the cold and my shoulders straighten.
Winter raps at the door, no longer a stranger
To flights of leaves, rearranged.
For all to whom my greeting comes
Each letter steadies my hand
Like shelter to comfort me in bitter weather.

CHRIS HEDGES ON THE DEATH OF AMERICA'S LIBERAL CLASS

CIVILIZATIONS EXIST ON BORROWED TIME (AND MONEY)

The timeless Mark Twain wrote this in a letter to Danish writer, Carl Thalbitzer:

My wife does not allow this manuscript to be published, and as ninety-nine parts of me forbid me to make myself comprehensively and uncompromisingly odious, it has not been difficult to persuade me to restrict the reading of it to myself! But you shall read it when you come to see me; then perhaps you will believe with me that civilizations are not realities, but only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious, and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have made no valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy with any existing savage tribe will show. Indeed the average of the human brain is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years ago.

The empire dream is, without doubt, one of the most brittle dreams of the mind; and the fall of an empire, the point of slipping away, is the moment when corruption gains the upper hand; and the permanent values have to be gathered from the wreckage of broken, impermanent things.

Technological progress has not made human beings better; and with the waging of class warfare, it is the wealthy sector of society that has purchased government outright, and has created a bicameral apparatus for implementing political and military policy, controlling how people live and the kinds of things they think about. This control is not yet absolute; but it is effective enough, in that it permits the looting of the wealth that people at several levels of society have accumulated. The new corporate power is also invested in converting the middle class into an underclass, and ultimately turning the underclass into a slave class; where slaves, of course, are the most invisible, ignored, and expendable class.

Thomas Frank, in the December issue of Harper's Magazine, has described the peculiar deterioration of academia in this country; a market glutted with historians, for instance, where he describes the complaints of colleagues and friends who "...all told the same story of low-wage toil, of lecturing and handing out A's while going themselves without health insurance or enough money for necessities."

His article concentrates on failing standards of professional journalism and the further exploitation of workers there, that he traces to the creation of what he calls "content-mills", in which professional people are tethered to the same economic models that are degrading academia. There is a reliance on the input of focus groups. Newspapers are less and less interested in describing the world as it really is, and more inclined to tailor content to fit things the audience has been polled about, what people seem to want.

What people want, and what they are told they want, must bear a closer examination. When Walmart trumpets "ALWAYS LOWER PRICES!" it means that somewhere, sometime, someone must work for less. A world market is a collection of national markets; and societies that are brimming over with the unemployed are surely those where people are willing to scratch for life, and are left at the mercy of new robber barons, who are flush with loot and plunder.

As far as American empire-building goes, look no further than the 19th Century's Gilded Age, for the blueprint, the words of Samuel Insul:

My experience is that the greatest aid to the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate.  (ibid)

It looks as though Americans must be shaken by realizing that they are owned by a financial empire that has been on a looting spree, one which has not been hampered with criminal prosecutions. The criminal class in capitalism can cause a meltdown and profit from the new situation. The racketeers in the financial and banking institutions have discovered that waterboarding the Golden Goose will provide a few more eggs.

The free ride, the impunity to act without fear of punishment, is accorded to those who have the pluck to bring down the world's economy; and these lively entrepreneurs are bringing misery to hundreds of millions of people. As Mark Twain has reminded us, people need to focus on the crucial difference between permanent and impermanent things. Technology remains an enchantment to the progressive crowd; but it is a two-edged sword.

So powerful is our desire to believe in the benevolent divinity of technology that it cancels out our caution, forces us to dismiss doubt as so much simple-minded Luddism. We have trouble grasping that the Internet might not bring only good; that an unparalleled tool for enlightenment and research and transparency might also bring unprecedented down-dumbing; that something that empowers the individual might also wreck the structures that have protected the individual for decades.  (Frank)

The word on the street is that evil is ascendant; therefore take precaution as you must. The republicans keep telling their damned lies about Obama; but America's first black president reacts mildly to republican nihilism, and its bubbling cauldron of lies, believing that it is more important to work with such people, despite their ugly motives, and put up with them for the alleged good of the country. The candle snuffer of hope has disillusioned many who voted for him in 2008. American energy corporations keep blowing the tops off mountains, come what may. They pollute the rivers to get at the coal. Big natural gas producers, like Chesapeake, use millions of gallons of fresh water in fracking operations, and have turned it all into a toxic soup, which is either dumped somewhere or injected back into the earth.

If we aren't willing to give up the empire; then we can't save the country. The empire cannot be saved because it costs much more than the money spent to keep it on its feet. The empire is an impediment to our progress as human beings. It is the impermanent, but callous machine that destroys democracy. The empire maintains itself with hideous violence. The empire needs psychological war, and an immense network of outlets, for all its lies. The empire now rests on the military as its ultimate enforcer, and counts on it in a deteriorating society, to employ our jobless youth. And the empire is a financial empire at its root, feeding on debt, on compound interest, on crooked financial instruments, on drug cartels, on rigged accounting agencies; and it is only satiated when it can drink a substantial quantity of blood.

The whole process that has been dubbed, "Disaster Capitalism", cannot be allowed to go on; for the economy, like the body, can only take so many shocks before it collapses. In India, another wounded democracy, the more comfortable people are also mesmerized by the shiny bauble of corporatism, the new wave of development that is called "India Shining", where life will get better for the better-off, just as soon as some tiresome tribal people, the truly dirt-poor, are dispossessed and driven off their land.

Cue Barack Obama, a truly graceful American actor in the land of India, coming onstage with an entourage of 250 corporate representatives, and among them, men who have practical experience in securing mineral rights and opening the mines, in drilling and blasting. "India Shining", like "Change You Can Believe In", is advertised to the skies, and is described by all present as wonderful.