I do not believe Europe is pursuing a solution that will solve its economic crisis. Austerity suits Goldman Sachs’s and J.P. Morgan’s strategy of enrichment through asset stripping at the expense of governments and their increasingly impoverished taxpayers, but it will only increase unemployment and government deficits. I predict the collapse of the European economy as well as our own from the ramifications of European collapse and our pigheaded plunge into austerity.
In The View From The Center Of The Universe (Riverhead Books 2006) at p. 261, Dr. Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams state:
The world is at a turning point. Not the turning point of this election cycle, not even the turning point of a lifetime., but a turning point that can happen only once in the evolution of a planet. Some may dismiss this as a ridiculous exaggeration, since it is so unlikely that such a momentous turning point would occur in our short lifetimes. Unlikely or not, it is here. If we take our cosmic role seriously and let our largest selves find the sanest way across the mountains we can come down the other side having created a stable and wise long term civilization that will allow our descendants to benefit from the amazingly benign conditions of our beautiful planet. If we don’t they may curse us forever.
The human population of the world has exploded since 1900 and now stands at nearly 7 billion people. For the previous 2,000 years before 1900, it had increased very slowly and no one had lived through a doubling of the population. However, since 1900, it has quadrupled. Primack and Abrams point out at page 254,
Experts dispute how many people the earth can support, but no one seriously proposes that the earth can sustain another population doubling.
Meanwhile, selfish, über rich, nihilistic, and willfully ignorant humans addicted to greed, money, and power are endangering our mother, Gaia. The industrial revolution is headed toward collapse driven by the systematic rape and exploitation of Gaia’s natural resources, principally oil and other fossil fuels, by behemoth multinational corporations owned by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the other too big to fail banks (TBTF).
Muhammad Yunnus and Jeremy Rifkin have shown us a way to cross the mountains and create a stable, sustainable, and wise long-term civilization.
Yunnus created the first microcredit program in Bangladesh. In 1976 when he was an economics professor at Chittagong University he created the Grameen (Village) Bank to lend money to poor people, mostly women, to use in generating income without requiring collateral.
With assistance from his students, he began by selecting the poorest of the poor and organizing borrowers into small homogenous groups of five people. He would lend a small amount of money to 2 members of each group to use in generating income and require them to repay the loan at 16% interest in weekly installments over the course of a year. The purpose of creating a group was provide a support network for the borrower and a group incentive or peer pressure to repay the loan in timely fashion. Eligibility for a subsequent loan was dependent on having repaid the existing loan.
Ongoing support was provided by the bank staff to assist the people in each group to self-select quick income generating activities that employ the skills that borrowers already posses. Loans and ongoing supervision, which included raising political and social consciousness and providing education about basic economics, sanitation, health, and family planning were accomplished by meeting with the borrowers in their homes, rather than making them travel to the city. To maximize transparency, meetings with groups of borrowers took place in a common area in village centers.
As borrowers repaid their loans successfully, the program was gradually expanded to provide credit for housing, construction of sanitary latrines, installation of tubewells that supply drinking water and irrigation for kitchen gardens.
The borrowers own 90% of the Grameen Bank. The government owns the remaining 10%. Since inception, the bank has loaned $11.11 billion.
The Grameen Bank’s microcredit program has been a phenomenal success with a 95% repayment rate on loans and in 2006, Dr. Yunnus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (Palgrave MacMillan 2011), he emphasizes the democratization of energy by the use of micropower to generate and store hydrogen in order to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels and create a sustainable lifestyle that literally transforms the world.
In the mid 1990s it dawned on me that a new convergence of communication and energy was in the offing. Internet technology and renewable energies were about to merge to create a powerful new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that would change the world. In the coming era hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share it with each other in an energy internet just like we now create and share information online. The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering of human relationships impacting the very way we conduct business,govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.
We do not have much time to take back our government from the criminal banksters and prevent the economic collapse and plunge into the black hole of world wide depression.
I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases. Period.
I have many reasons. Here are a few of them.
First and foremost, I oppose it because it is immoral. That it is imposed following a jury trial and appellate review, does not wash the defendant’s blood off the jury’s hands and, by extension, our hands because state sanctioned premeditated murder is still premeditated murder. No government ever should be in the business of killing its own people.
Second, death penalty cases typically cost more than three times the cost of incarcerating a defendant to life without possibility of parole.
Third, the death penalty has no deterrent effect. It does not reduce homicide rates. In fact, the opposite is true. Homicide rates are highest in the states that have a death penalty and lowest in the states that do not have a death penalty.
Fourth, our criminal justice system is so infected with racism, corrupt, and broken that it is impossible to know for certain if any given defendant committed the crime charged and, if he did, whether he deserves the death penalty, as opposed to life without parole.
Most people do not know that under our laws there is no murder, however heinous or depraved, that automatically results in a death sentence. When a jury convicts a defendant of a death eligible offense, the case proceeds to a sentencing phase in which the jury ultimately must decide whether the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating evidence (typically the murder and the defendant’s prior record, if any) so outweighs the mitigating evidence (evidence about the defendant and his role in committing the murder) that the defendant should forfeit his life. Assuring consistency that similarly situated defendants convicted of committing similar murders are consistently sentenced to life without possibility of parole instead of death, or vice versa, has proven to be impossible within states, let alone between states.
In Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994), Justice Harry Blackmun dissented from the United States Supreme Court’s denial of review in a death penalty case stating,
From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored — indeed, I have struggled — along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. The basic question — does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants “deserve” to die? — cannot be answered in the affirmative. It is not simply that this Court has allowed vague aggravating circumstances to be employed, see, e. g., Arave v. Creech, 507 U. S. 463 (1993), relevant mitigating evidence to be disregarded, see, e. g., Johnson v. Texas, 509 U. S. 350 (1993), and vital judicial review to be blocked, see, e. g., Coleman v. Thompson, 501 U. S. 722 (1991). The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.
He concluded,
Perhaps one day this Court will develop procedural rules or verbal formulas that actually will provide consistency, fairness, and reliability in a capital sentencing scheme. I am not optimistic that such a day will come. I am more optimistic, though, that this Court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness “in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that it—and the death penalty— must be abandoned altogether.” Godfrey v. Georgia, 446 U. S. 420, 442 (1980) (Marshall, J., concurring in judgment). I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive. The path the Court has chosen lessens us all. I dissent.
Justice Blackmun was a conservative Republican who believed strongly in the death penalty when he was appointed to the Supreme Court. As you can see, he finally reached the conclusion that it is impossible to fairly and equitably decide who lives and who dies. I reached the same conclusion, based on my 30 years of experience as a lawyer specializing in death penalty defense and forensics.
(h/t to Wendy Davis for her idea to use Janis Joplin’s outstanding version of Me and Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster)
Crane-Station and I went scrappin’ this Sunday morning. We pulled up and parked next to a longbox in a small neighborhood shopping center where several men were tearing down the interior of a former store, now shuttered. The longbox was almost full of ripped out drywall, heating and cooling ducts, and lots of metal, most of it buried. We were going to have to work hard to liberate it.
Mason Investigates Looking For Clues
Mason Finds Clues
We asked the men if we could get in the longbox and take the metal. The apparent foreman said, “Sure, we’ve been letting scrappers take it. Makes our job easier. Help yourself.”
So, we did.
Our first find was a section of chain-link fencing with three posts partially encased in concrete footings. As we struggled to lift the posts and the fencing out of the longbox, one of the men suddenly appeared with an electric band saw and cut the posts above the footings.
“This ought to make it easier,” he said.
He was right.
About an hour later when the temperature started heating up and we were pouring sweat trying to free a large heating duct, he suddenly peaked over the top of the longbox.
“Thought you might be getting thirsty, so I brought you some water.”
He produced two bottles of chilled water that we gratefully accepted.
That was the sweetest water we have tasted in a long time.
The crew stopped and said goodbye a little later.
He was a stranger and did not have to do anything to help us.
I have given up everything of value that I had and now that I have nothing, I find that I have everything I need.
I love the freedom that comes from not having stuff.
I enjoy the peace of not wanting.
Life is about being a part of something bigger, not about winning or losing a competition.
Life is about knowing who you are in relation to the One and to the universe the One created.
Life is about knowing your fundamental values and principles and living those values and principles every day.
Life is about respecting, protecting, and healing Gaia and all that she is.
Life is about empathizing and caring about others.
Life is about lending a hand.
The load in the back of our truck.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe because it does not take anything from others or diminish them in any respect. Unconditional love is giving for the sake of giving without any expectation of receiving anything in return.
Selfishness, on the other hand, is a black hole that gathers everything unto itself and never gives away anything without strings attached. Selfishness creates resentment and a desire to get even or hurt others.
Love creates a desire to be of service to others and to love others. It creates joy and inspires love in return. Like ripples on the surface of a pond, it will travel to the end of the universe and back.
Selfishness can never triumph completely over love because the joy and happiness of loving and being loved unconditionally by others always surpasses the misery and loneliness that selfishness invariably produces.
Free yourself from the obligations of property and the expectations of others.
Namaste
In the same way when you see a flower in a field, it’s really the whole field that is flowering because the flower could not exist in that particular place without the special surroundings in the field that it has. You only find flowers in surroundings that will support them. So, in the same way you only find human beings on a planet of this kind with an atmosphere of this kind, with a temperature of this kind supplied by a convenient neighboring star.
Alan Watts
(h/t to Edger for providing the Alan Watts video where I got the quote)
For many reasons, I have concluded that Barack Obama cannot win a second term and the time has come for the nation to focus on choosing his successor rather than arguing incessantly regarding whether he is a man of good character with honorable intentions who has been victimized by evil Republicans, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing applying the shock doctrine to eviscerate organized labor, eliminate the safety net, and so impoverish everyone except the rich that they are willing to work for peanuts in sweat shops to avoid starving to death.
The bottom line is the Main Street economy is moribund, real unemployment is over 20%, there is little demand for products and services because millions of people lack money to spend, the president’s pivot to creating jobs is not going to git ‘er done, and his proposed austerity measures constitute a clear and present danger to our health, safety, and prosperity.
The time has come for him to go and for we the people to put aside our petty differences and get down to the serious business of electing a candidate who will represent our best interests rather than the best interests of the banks, corporations, and the military industrial complex.
I vastly prefer resignation to announcing that he will not seek a second term because of what he might do before his term in office ends. While I do not believe he would push the War-with-Iran button as a lame duck president, which is something he might do if he is running for reelection and his political fortunes continue to founder, I am worried about Catfood Commission II. I think the commission members would be far less likely to carry out their mission, which is to gut social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, if Obama resigned.
Why risk political oblivion by disturbing the third rail in the midst of a pitched battle for the presidency between as yet undetermined candidates?
I am concerned that even if he announces that he will not seek a second term, he will continue to push the commission to carry out its mission, and that is the scenario that I hope to prevent.
We the people need to have an informed and thorough discussion about, but not limited to:
1. Whether corporations or people should determine our nation’s future;
2. Whether our nation should continue to engage in endless war for natural resources;
3. Whether we need to bring our troops home and close more than 800 military bases in foreign countries;
4. Whether it is time to end the Global War On Terror:
5. Whether globalization and free trade agreements are in our best interests;
6. Whether we are a nation that follows the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and practices equal justice under law or a nation that ignores civil rights in favor of maintaining a vast surveillance state while exempting the rich from the Rule of Law;
7. Whether we will be a nation that believes it is more important to protect insurance company and Big PhRMA profits than it is to provide affordable health care to everyone regardless of race, color, gender, or religious belief;
8. Whether the banks should be held accountable for the housing bubble, crashing the economy, and Forfeiture Gate instead of blaming the victims of criminal frauds and theft;
9. Whether the torturers and the people who lied us into the aggressive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be held accountable or rewarded for their war crimes;
10. Whether saving the environment is more important than maximizing corporate profits;
11. Whether public education should be abolished and replaced with privatized education; and
12. Whether government should be privatized to the maximum extent possible and its assets, including highways, buildings, parks, and forests sold to the highest bidder.
We absolutely need to have a national discussion regarding these and many other issues and the pressure to do so will continue to build until we do it peacefully or violently.
Author’s Note: Values and Principles is yet another chapter missing from my presentation of Namaste: If Not Now, When? I decided to include it last night after watching the disturbing, if not surprising, audience reaction at the Tea Party/GOP debate to a series of questions CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer asked candidate Ron Paul regarding whether an uninsured 30-year-old man, who could afford but did not buy medical insurance, hospitalized in a coma from traumatic injuries suffered during an accident should be allowed to die without medical intervention to save his life. Several people in the audience shouted out “Yes,” and the audience erupted into loud cheering interrupting Mr. Paul’s response. This incident followed an incident a week earlier in the first debate at the Reagan Library when the audience erupted into wild cheering during the lead-in to a question by Brian Williams of NBC directed to Texas Governor Rick Perry when Williams mentioned that the State of Texas had executed 234 people during his terms in office. After the cheering subsided, he completed the question asking Perry if he had trouble sleeping at night worrying about whether one of them might have been innocent. “No, sir. Not at all,” Perry said.
Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death for setting the fire that burned down his house killing his three children to collect the insurance on the basis of an unqualified expert who testified that the fire was an arson caused by an accelerant. An independent and highly qualified expert reviewed the forensic evidence years later and concluded that the state’s expert was mistaken, there was no accelerant, and the fire was an accident. The report was presented to Governor Perry before the execution in an effort to spare Mr. Willingham’s life. Nevertheless, Governor Perry did not stay the execution and the State of Texas executed Mr. Willingham.
The Texas Forensic Science Commission conducted an independent review of Mr. Willingham’s case and retained another nationally recognized arson expert, Craig Beyler, who agreed with the independent expert. He specifically concluded that there was no credible scientific basis for the conclusion that arson had been committed.
Governor Perry intervened and ended the commission’s investigation before Beyler testified.
The following definition from Wikipedia is relevant to a comprehensive understanding of the information in the chapter:
Kleptocracy: alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from Greek: κλέπτης (thieve) and κράτος (rule), is a term applied to a government that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means “rule by thieves”. Not an “official” form of government (such as democracy, republic, monarchy, theocracy) the term is a pejorative for governments perceived to have a particularly severe and systemic problem with the selfish misappropriation of public funds by those in power. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy)
As always, previous chapters of Namaste: If Not Now, When? can be found here or in my Diaries at Firedoglake/MyFDL.
Values and Principles
Without values and principles we are nothing. Beneath the personalities that we develop and wear like a suit of clothes when we go out in public and the manner in which we perceive the environment around us and express ourselves, our values and principles are the invisible structure that defines who and what we are and informs our lives with meaning and purpose. We begin to develop them early in childhood and, as adults, we are known and will be remembered for our acts and omissions, which were an expression of our values and principles. They will be our legacy and those who are into accumulating money, toys, and power are destined to create a legacy of dust in an barren room.
Values and principles are important to me and I would never sacrifice them for any reason. I believe in speaking the truth, treating everyone with dignity and respect, following the Golden Rule, and being of service to others.
I have saved many lives without seeking anything in return.
My immortal soul is important to me and I would never sell out.
Although inconvenient to be without, money never has mattered to me and I do not like to accumulate stuff.
I have given away everything of value that I owned.
All of my current possessions came out of dumpsters, except my rusty and faded 15-year-old rebuilt pickup truck that I got out of a junkyard.
Most of my food comes out of dumpsters.
Nevertheless, I am happy and consider myself rich beyond measure.
I pity a man like Barack Obama, who has no values or principles, except accumulating wealth and power. He so transparently is for sale to the highest bidder. In his case that is the Kleptocracy that stands behind the curtain and tells him what to do.
Who are the Kleptocrats?
They are the too big to fail (TBTF) high flying Wall Street bankers who call themselves the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) and the über rich who own corporate America and the military industrial complex (MIC). Seeking world hegemony and control of all the world’s natural resources and influenced by neoliberals Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the neoconservative Leo Straus, all of whom who taught at the University of Chicago, the Kleptocrats have an insatiable craving for wealth and power and they are willing to tell any lie and do anything to get what they want.
They may call themselves neoliberals or neoconservatives, Republicans or Democrats, but they really only care about playing their dark games exploiting people and natural resources to accumulate wealth and power.
They see themselves as beyond the reach of the law and they instigate never-ending war to steal what they want while manipulating people with myths and archetypes using propaganda to justify what they do.
They steal taxpayer money by giving it away to pay-to-play private contractors with no-bid, no-cap, cost-plus contracts with no expectation that the contract will be completed or the money accounted for.
They are deliberately destroying the middle class in the United States, the labor unions, public education, and the safety net to plunge everyone except themselves into debt slavery in order to exploit them as a source of cheap labor at home and warm bodies to discard in war.
They own the mainstream media and they manipulate it to hide what they are doing by demonizing progressives, teachers, labor unions, Muslims, illegal immigrants, and anyone with dark skin.
I regard Barack Obama and the Kleptocrats who own him as lost souls.
They have doomed themselves to spiritually empty and lonely lives perpetually servicing a runaway addiction to money and power that can never be satisfied.
Although they may own many palatial mansions in exotic locations filled with expensive ornaments, they are little more than plush prisons surrounded by high walls and protected by security guards.
They may own expensive vehicles, yachts, and jet planes, but they dare not go anywhere without a security detail.
They may be surrounded by people, but they are alone because people like them for their money, not for whom they are. Even their families may seem like ghosts with open empty mouths and pale outstretched hands waiting for them to die.
Do the Kleptocrats know or care how many lives have they stained, ruined, and extinguished?
How can they stand the emptiness of their lives?
Better to love and be loved. Be grateful that you are not like them because their days are numbered and no one will mourn their passing.
Namaste: If Not Now, When? Is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.
My real name is Frederick Leatherman. I was a criminal-defense lawyer for 30 years specializing in death-penalty defense and forensics. I also was a law professor for three years.
Now I am a writer and I haul scrap for a living in this insane land.
Author’s Note: This is another chapter that I inadvertently omitted from Namaste: If Not Now, When? I include it here because any honest recapitulation of our nation’s errors and omissions must necessarily include an analysis of the destructive myths and archetypes that have contributed to our national self-aggrandizement and obnoxious sense of entitlement. That behavior needs to stop, if we are to coexist in peace and harmony with other nations.
All of the previous chapters that have been presented are here and in my Diaries at Firedoglake/MyFDL.
A myth is “a traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society.” Myths are not necessarily limited to the past; they can and do frame and inform us about the present. Consider, for example, American exceptionalism. The Reverend John Winthrop told the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts Bay,
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken… we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville described American exceptionalism in 1831:
The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.
American exceptionalism is a myth that Americans are hard working, morally superior, and more intelligent than anyone else in the world. It is intertwined with manifest destiny, an early 19th century belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean.
During the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States relied on manifest destiny to justify the seizure of Spanish foreign colonies as colonies and protectorates of the United States.
President Woodrow Wilson later relied on manifest destiny and American exceptionalism as the basis for an American mission to promote and defend democracy throughout the world.
Relying on false intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as a justification for invading Iraq in violation of the international prohibition against initiating a war of aggression, President George W. Bush proclaimed his intent to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power to free the Iraqi people from oppression and introduce them to democracy. When the United States military did not find any weapons of mass destruction, President Bush casually brushed aside that inconvenient fact claiming in essence that the United States was above the law because its motives were pure and the Iraqi people were now free of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.
To realize how presumptuous, insulting, and offensive these acts were, we need only consider them in light of the negative statement of the Golden Rule; namely, do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. We would not abide such acts, if they were done to us.
Victims of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, such as Native Americans and African American slaves during the 19th century, certainly viewed those myths with disfavor and sorrow.
Approximately 2.5 million Iraqi refugees who fled the sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq by the United States invasion and the Iraqis who survived it have little reason to thank the United States for anything because they are much worse off today than they were before the invasion. More than a million Iraqis were killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the sectarian violence that the invasion unleashed continues to this day. If the dead could speak, I doubt any of them would have anything complimentary to say about the United States.
I doubt Iraqis and Afghans believe United States motives are pure or that Americans are “hard working, morally superior, and more intelligent than anyone else in the world.” Instead, they have good reason to believe Americans are scumbags and the United States government and the greedy corporations it serves are as evil as evil can be.
They know the truth. Despite the United States Government’s protestations to the contrary, it invaded their countries and slaughtered their brothers and sisters so that American corporations could rape and suck their lands dry of oil and natural gas through pipelines to the sea.
An archetype is the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies. Carl Jung defined it as an inherited idea or mode of thought derived from the experience of the race and it is present in each person’s unconscious. Most characters, or gods and goddesses in myths are archetypes.
The rugged and tough individual is a male archetype that the actor John Wayne played in all of his films. Gary Cooper played him to perfection in High Noon and more recently, Clint Eastwood made a successful career out of playing that role starting out as the cowboy Rowdy Yates in the television series Rawhide, progressing to the man with no name in spaghetti westerns, followed by the hardnosed detective Dirty Harry menacingly snarling “Go ahead. Make my day, punk.” Marilyn Monroe personified the sex goddess archetype that the ancient Egyptians personified as Isis and the Romans as Venus.
Most Americans are unaware of the existence and important role of myths and archetypes in controlling how they think and act. The advertising industry knows the power of myths and archetypes and they exploit them all the time. The rugged independent hero sold Marlboros and the sex goddess sold perfume. When they hooked up and partied in bars, they drank lite beer because it was less filling and it cranked up their libidos to do the wild thing after the director hollered, “Cut.”
Myths and archetypes can become traps for the unwary who identify too strongly with them. The American who expects special consideration and treatment in a foreign country because he believes he is exceptional and entitled to such treatment personifies the Ugly American everyone loves to hate.
A warrior never becomes attached to a myth or archetype because he is impeccably living his own mythic story and has no reason to be anything except herself.
Burning Down The House: Dynamite Live Performance By The Talking Heads
Author’s Note: This is another missing chapter from Namaste: If Not Now, When? I apologize for the length of this chapter as it is somewhat longer than the previous chapters presented. I decided not to break it into 2 parts as it is a complicated subject and I did not want to disturb the flow and continuity. Thanks to all for reading. I welcome comments.
Previous chapters can be found here or in my Diaries at Firedoglake/MyFDL.
Barack Obama is a horrible president whose policies evidence idolatry for the filthy rich, loathing and contempt for the poor, and unqualified support for outright criminal predation toward the middle class. On those rare occasions that he uses the presidential bully pulpit, he uses it for so-called “hippie punching” to attack, insult, and marginalize socially progressive democrats who dare question his authority and the wisdom of his decisions. Difficult to imagine a worse set of undesirable qualities in a president during a time of great financial upset.
There is no evidence that he has any empathy or desire to assist people who are suffering through the Main Street Great Depression. For example, his response to the real estate forfeiture crisis, or Forfeiture Gate, is an excellent example of his stubborn and pervasive unwillingness to help people whom banks defrauded.
In September 2004, the FBI began warning about an “epidemic” of control frauds in real estate mortgages initiated by lenders. A “control fraud” occurs when someone who controls an apparently legitimate business, such as a bank, uses the business as a means to commit fraud.
As William K. Black, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the former Senior Regulator in charge of investigating the Savings and Loan fiasco during the Reagan administration explains, control fraud epidemics typically occur when financial deregulation, desupervision, and perverse compensation systems create a “criminogenic environment.” After reviewing the real estate forfeiture mess, he concluded in a piece that he wrote for the Huffington Post, dated February 25, 2009:
(1) the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as “epidemic;”
(2) nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic;
(3) the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked;
(4) the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy;
(5) willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans;
(6) willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves;
(7) both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed;
(8) the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses;
(9) the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation;
(10) many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses;
(11) those big banks and Treasury don’t know how insolvent they are because they didn’t even have the loan files; and
(12) a “stress test” can’t remedy the banks’ problem – they do not have the loan files.
Charles Ferguson, the documentary filmmaker who produced No End in Sight, about the never ending mismanaged war in Iraq, also produced Inside Job, which details how the financial collapse that began in 2008 was caused by the criminal greed of the global financial elite empowered by government deregulation and the viral spread of rapacious neoliberal free-market ideology. These billionaire Masters of the Universe, or the MOTU, do not believe in right or wrong. They only believe in making money. For example, in an interview by Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com, Ferguson said,
When I started making the film I knew that there had to have been some bad behavior, but I had no idea that on a very large scale people had designed securities with the intention of selling them and gambling on their failure. I was stunned when I discovered it.
* * *
If there’s a place in the world where you can make a billion dollars by being a criminal, that place is going to attract criminals. And if you have a system that is appropriately regulated so the only way that you can make money is by doing something worthwhile, you are not going to attract criminals to run that industry.
We now have a situation where the way that you can make the most money is by doing criminal things. And you get away with it. You can even destroy your own company. In some cases, destroying your company is the way that you make the most money. And that’s bad. Personally, from the experience of researching and making this film, I think that legal controls on the structure of executive compensation are a very important part of fixing this.
By the way, from the experience of starting my software company, I can tell you that people in high technology are extremely aware of this. I dealt with the venture capital firm that invested in my company and they were extremely clear. They said: You’re going to get a salary. It’s going to be $100,000 a year. It’s never going to go up. You will never get a bonus. You will have no outside activities of any kind. You will not make a dime doing anything else. Your stock will vest over five years. And if you want to make money, you make that stock worth something. Period. It’s really simple.
The real estate foreclosure crisis is a desperate effort by the insolvent TBTF banks, which Professor Black calls systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs, to avoid liability for fraudulently selling worthless mortgage backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to institutional investors. Criticizing the Obama administration’s decision not to reign in the TBTF/SDI banks as “insane, he says,
The administration may be proposing no new laws to make the oligarchs even bigger, but it (1) has encouraged their growth through acquisitions of failed banks and (2) stood silent and useless as many of the SDIs have continued to grow. It is insane to allow the SDIs to continue to exist and it is doubly insane to allow, much less encourage, them to grow.
In what I can only describe as knowingly and intentionally aiding and abetting the biggest criminal bank fraud ever perpetrated, the Obama administration and the Congress successfully convinced the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to rewrite long standing accounting rules allowing the banks and the Federal Reserve, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral, to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses.
According to William Black and Randall L. Wray, the FASB’s new rule produces enormous fictional “income”and “capital” at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.
The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed’s massive loss exposure and allow Treasury to spread propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems — at virtually no cost. Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable — but we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms — typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans — even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.
If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? The Obama administration’s answer is the fraudulent CEOs themselves, at a time of their choosing. You can’t make this stuff up.
The banks and the Obama administration accuse the borrowers of misrepresenting their assets and borrowing more money than they could afford to pay back. Under this scenario, the banks are the victims and they are entitled to forfeit the homes and kick the deadbeat borrowers into the street with all of their stuff. Black and Wray destroy this argument.
That homeowners would default on the nonprime mortgages was a foregone conclusion throughout the industry — indeed, it was the desired outcome. This was something the lending side knew, but which few on the borrowing side could have realized.
The homeowners were typically fraudulently induced by the lenders and the lenders' agents (the loan brokers) to enter into nonprime mortgages. The lenders knew the "loan to value" (LTV) ratios and income to debt ratios that they wanted the borrower to (appear to) meet in order to make it possible for the lender to sell the nonprime loan at a premium. LTV can be gimmicked by inflating the appraisal. The debt to income ratios can be gimmicked by inflating income. "Liar's" loan lenders used that loan format because it allowed the lender to simultaneously loan to a vast number of borrowers that could not repay their home loans, at a premium yield, while making it look to the purchaser of the loan that it was relatively low risk. Liar's loans maximized the lender's reported income, which maximized the CEO's compensation.
The problem is that only the most sophisticated nonprime borrowers (the speculators who bought six homes) (1) knew the key ratios they had to appear to meet, (2) had the ability to induce an appraiser to inflate substantially the reported market value of the home, and (3) knew how to create false financial information that was internally consistent and credible. The solution was for the lender and the lender's agents to (1) instruct the borrower to report a certain income or even to fill out the application with false information, (2) suborn an appraiser to provide the necessary inflated market value, and (3) create fraudulent financial information that had at least minimal coherence.
When the overburdened homeowner began missing payments, late fees and higher interest rates kicked-in, boosting the stated income of mortgage servicers and the value of the securities. Not coincidentally, the biggest banks own the servicers and could maximize claims against the mortgages by running up the late fees. It was quite convenient to "misplace" mortgage payments, so even homeowners who were never delinquent could get hit with fees and higher rates. And when payments were received, the servicers would (illegally) apply them first to the late fees, meaning the homeowners were unknowingly still missing mortgage payments. The foreclosure process itself generates big fees for the SDI banks.
And, miracle of miracles, the banks would end up with the homes and get to restart the whole process again — from resale of the home through the financing, securitizing, and fee-for-servicing juggernaut.
Unfortunately, it did not go quite as smoothly as planned. The SDIs were supposed to act like neutron bombs — killing the homeowners but leaving the homes standing, to be resold. The problem is that wiping out borrowers lowered the value of real estate, crushing not only the real estate market but also construction and through to all associated sectors from furniture and home restoration supplies to big ticket purchases that rely on home equity loans. It also led to questions about the value of the securitized toxic waste manufactured and held directly or indirectly by financial institutions.
Next, a few judges began to question the foreclosures, as they saw case after case in which the banks claimed to have lost the paperwork or submitted amateurishly forged documents. Or, several banks would go after the same homeowner, each claiming to hold the same mortgage (Bear sold the same mortgage over and over). Insiders began to offer depositions exposing fraud and perjury. It became apparent that in many and perhaps most cases, the trusts responsible for the securities (often these are "special purpose" subsidiaries of the banks) never received the "notes" signed by the borrowers — as required by both IRS tax code and by 45 of the US states. Without the notes, billions of dollars of back taxes could be due, and the foreclosures violate state law. Finally, the Attorneys General of all fifty states called for a foreclosure moratorium.
I cannot imagine a stronger issue for a populist president to seize and use to turn his fortunes around as well as those of his party, but not Barack Obama.
He sided with the criminal banks and added insult to injury with his worthless Home Affordable Mortgage Program, or HAMP that cruelly raised financially struggling homeowner’s hopes while setting them up to miss mortgage payments by telling them to miss a payment so that they would qualify for the program and then inventing reasons to extend the application process and finally rejecting them at about the same time that the banks initiated the fraudulent foreclosure process with forged documents. So many people have been burned that hardly anyone applies to enter the program anymore. Only $12 billion out of the $65 billion authorized by Congress for the program has been spent.
Why it is almost as if the president is a full fledged member of the MOTU conspiracy to steal people’s homes. Either that or he is dumber than a box of rocks. I believe all of us can agree that he is not the latter.
Author’s note: I inadvertently left this chapter and a few others out of Namaste: If Not Now, When? and have decided to include them. The previous chapters in the book can be accessed here or in my diaries at Firedoglake/MyFDL.
Ecuador is a democratic republic situated on the west coast of South America. Small and wedge-shaped, it straddles the equator bordering Colombia to the north and Peru to the south. Ecuador also owns the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean 620 miles west of Guayaquil, the nation’s largest coastal city and port. The Andes mountain range traverses the middle of the country from north to south separating it into three distinct regions: coastal plain, highlands, and Amazonian jungle.
Quito, the capitol, is in the highlands at an altitude of 10,000 feet and even though it is less than ten kilometers south of the equator, the weather year round is mild with daytime temperatures in the upper 60s and low 70s and nighttime temperatures in the 40s and low 50s.
I lived in Quito when I was in 6th and 7th grade; my father was a Foreign Service Officer employed by the United States Department of State. I remember Quito very well. It’s one of the most beautiful places I have ever been and I hope to return there someday.
In September 2008, the citizens of Ecuador went to the polls and rocked the world approving a new constitution, the first in world history to recognize that Pachamama, or Nature is not a thing to own and exploit at will. The Constitution recognizes that she has the inalienable right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate her vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes. The Constitution provides,
Rights for Nature
Article 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
Article 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.
In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation of non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.
Article 3. The State will motivate natural and judicial persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.
Article 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.
The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.
Article 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.
Ecuador’s new constitution also created an independent federal human-rights ombudsperson who can only be removed by the legislature for cause — not for political reasons. The position is called the Public Defender, a person who serves a five-year term that may be renewed once and, although the office has no prosecutorial powers, the constitution grants it the power to investigate and expose all human-rights crimes, whether committed by the government or by others.
Native and maternal traditions have long recognized that the Earth is our mother. The ancient Greeks did too and they named her spirit Gaia, goddess of the primordial Earth. In the 1960s while he was employed by NASA and working on methods to detect life on Mars, James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.
Gaia is the fabled Garden of Eden and in the spirit of Ubuntu, we are diminished whenever one of us diminishes her.
Not long after Ecuador officially granted Gaia environmental personhood, the RATS on the United States Supreme Court (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, plus Kennedy the swing man) legitimized raping Gaia for profit and killed our democracy in the Citizens United case when they held that corporations are persons with First Amendment rights to buy elections.
Two decisions, one in Ecuador and one in the United States illustrate two societies headed in opposite directions. We must find a way to reverse course. Our survival and Gaia’s survival depend on it.
The banksters and their neoliberal criminal class will reduce our Garden of Eden to a lifeless cinder circling the Sun, if we fail.
Four apelike individuals with human features died when they fell into a 100 to 150 foot funnel-shaped shaft into a deep cave 1.977 million years ago in present day South Africa. Their bodies were swept away in an underground river and exquisitely preserved in a quiet pool of rapidly forming sedimentary rock.
Three years ago, 9-year-old Matthew Berger made a major archaeological discovery when he stumbled over a log while chasing his dog Tau through some tall grass in a hilly area north of Johannesburg called the Cradle of Humankind and discovered the fossilized remains of one of those individuals, a 4-foot-2 boy who was only a few years older than Matthew when he fell into the cave and died.
Matthew is not just any Berger. His father is Dr. Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist with the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. For the past twenty years, Dr. Berger has been searching for hominid bones in a nearby area of the the Cradle of Humankind.
Dr. Berger said the path to the discovery began over the Christmas holidays in 2007 when he began using Google Earth to map caves in the Cradle of Humankind. On a recent visit to his office, he rotated Google Earth images of the dun landscape on his desktop, showing how he spotted the shadows and distortions of the earth that gave clues to the location of caves, often topped with wild olive and white stinkwood trees.
On Aug. 15, 2008, when Matthew called his father to look at the bones he had found, Dr. Berger began cursing wildly as he neared his son. The boy mistook his father’s profanity for anger. But from 15 feet, Dr. Berger, who had done his Ph.D. thesis on hominid shoulder bones, among them the clavicle, was astounded to see that his son had in his hands a clavicle with the unmistakable shape of a hominid.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled. “I took the rock, and I turned it” and “sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died,” he said, adding, “What are the odds?”
Since Matthew’s discovery, Dr. Berger and his fellow researchers from the institute have discovered much more of the boy’s skeleton, including his extraordinarily well-preserved skull, and three other individuals, including a woman.
The New York Times article reported that the fossils from the boy and a woman are a surprising and distinctive mixture of primitive and advanced anatomy and thus qualify as a new species of hominid and have been named Australopithecus sediba.
The species sediba, which means fountain or wellspring in Sotho, strode upright on long legs, with human-shaped hips and pelvis, but still climbed through trees on apelike arms. It had the small teeth and more modern face of Homo, the genus that includes modern humans, but the relatively primitive feet and “tiny brain” of Australopithecus, Dr. Berger said.
The discoverer of the fossils, Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says the new species, known as Australopithecus sediba, is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. Several other paleoanthropologists, while disagreeing with that interpretation, say the fossils are of great importance anyway, because they elucidate the mix-and-match process by which human evolution was shaped.
Dr. Berger’s claim, if accepted, would radically redraw the present version of the human family tree, placing the new fossils in the center. The new species, in his view, should dislodge Homo habilis, the famous tool-making fossil found by Louis and Mary Leakey, as the most likely bridge between the australopithecenes and the human lineage. Australopithecenes were apelike creatures that walked upright, like people, but had still not forsaken the trees.
Dr. Berger and his colleagues present this claim in five articles in the current issue of Science that describe various aspects of the new fossils. As is common in the field of paleoanthropology, the discoverer of a new fossil is seeking to place it as close as possible to the direct line of human descent, while others are resisting that interpretation.
In this particular case, there are many uncertainties regarding the fossil record from that time, including when the human lineage first emerged and how Homo habilis fits in the picture.
The principal significance of the new fossils is not that Australopithecus sediba is necessarily the direct ancestor of the human genus, other scientists said, but rather that the fossils emphasize the richness of evolutionary experimentation within the australopithecine group.
“This is really exciting new material,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “I think it holds the possibility of flinging wide open the question of what Homo is.”
* * *
In the articles in Science, Dr. Berger’s team describes novel combinations of apelike and humanlike features in the hand, foot and pelvis of the new species. The hand, for instance, is apelike because it has long, strong fingers suitable for climbing trees, yet is also humanlike in having a long thumb that in combination with the fingers could have held tools in a precision grip. A cast of the inside of the skull shows an apelike brain, but one that had taken the first step toward being reorganized on human lines.
This mixture of apelike and humanlike features suggests that the new species was transitional between the australopithecines and humans, the researchers said at a news conference on Wednesday. Given its age, Australopithecus sediba is just old enough to be the ancestor of Homo erectus, the first species that paleoanthropologists agree belonged to the human ancestry and which existed 1.9 million years ago.
But the fossils are significant even if sediba is not a direct human ancestor. They are evidence that a ferment of evolutionary experimentation was going on at the time, out of which the human lineage somehow emerged. “If you take sediba as a metaphor for evolutionary change, it is a whole lot more powerful than the claim for direct ancestry,” Dr. Tattersall said.
Here is an exciting video of Dr, Berger describing the discovery.
Never underestimate the intelligence and knowledge of our ancient ancestors
In October, 1900 divers discovered an ancient shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera, which is located in the Aegean Sea off the northwest coast of Crete. The divers recovered many works of art from the sunken ship and transferred them to the National Museum of Archaeology for cataloging and storage. Among the items they recovered was a mysterious mechanism with wheels and gears.
On May 17, 1902 archaeologist Valerios Stais examined it and decided that it was an astronomical clock. Other experts, however, disagreed because they believed that it was too complex to have existed at the same time as the other items recovered from the wreck. The wreck appeared to be the remains of a first century BCE cargo ship carrying treasure looted by conquering Roman soldiers from Antikythera or other nearby islands and destined to be exhibited by Julius Caesar in a triumphal parade in Rome.
The strange mechanism would languish in obscurity for almost fifty years before English physicist Derek J. de Solla Price examined it in 1951. After several years of study, he published an article in Scientific American in June 1959 entitled An Ancient Greek Computer in which he identified it as a mechanical device for measuring the movements of the stars and the planets. In other words, the earliest known analog computer.
In 1971, Price, by then the first Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, teamed up with Charalampos Karakalos, professor of nuclear physics at the GreekNational Centre of Scientific Research “DEMOKRITOS”. Karakalos took both gamma- and X-ray radiographs of the mechanism, which revealed critical information about the device’s interior configuration.
In 1974, Price published “Gears from the Greeks: the Antikythera mechanism — a calendar computer from ca. 80 BC”, where he presented a model of how the mechanism could have functioned.
Price’s model, as presented in his “Gears from the Greeks”, was the first theoretical attempt at reconstructing the device based on its inner structure revealed by the radiographs. According to that model, the front dial shows the annual progress of the Sun and Moon through the zodiac against the Egyptian calendar. The upper rear dial displays a four-year period and has associated dials showing the Metonic cycle of 235 synodic months, which approximately equals 19 solar years. The lower rear dial plots the cycle of a single synodic month, with a secondary dial showing the lunar year of 12 synodic months.
One of the remarkable proposals made by Price was that the mechanism employed differential gears, which enabled the mechanism to add or subtract angular velocities. The differential was used to compute the synodic lunar cycle by subtracting the effects of the Sun’s movement from those of the sidereal lunar movement.
The conclusions of Price and others led to the creation of The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project that continues to study the mechanism. The Project has published three papers in Nature in 2006, 2008, and 2010.
The new discoveries confirm that the mechanism is an astronomical analog calculator or orrery used to predict the positions of celestial bodies. This work proposes that the mechanism possessed 37 gears, of which 30 survive, and was used for prediction of the position of the Sun and the Moon. Based on the inscriptions, which mention the stationary points of the planets, the authors speculate that planetary motions may also have been indicated.
On the front face were graduations for the solar scale and the zodiac together with pointers that indicated the position of the Sun, the Moon, the lunar phase, and possibly the planetary motions.
On the back, two spiral scales (made of half-circles with two centers) with sliding pointers indicated the state of two further important astronomical cycles: the Saros cycle, the period of approximately 18 years separating the return of the Sun, Moon and Earth to the same relative positions and the more accurate exeligmos cycle of 54 years and one day (essential in eclipse prediction, see Eclipse cycle). It also contains another spiral scale for the Metonic cycle (19 years, equal to 235 lunar months) and the Callippic cycle with a period of 1016 lunar orbits in approximately 76 years.
The Moon mechanism, using an ingenious train of gears, two of them linked with a slightly offset axis and pin in a slot, shows the position and phase of the Moon during the month. The velocity of the Moon varies according to the theory of Hipparchus, and to a good approximation follows Kepler’s second law for the angular velocity, being faster near the perigee and slower at the apogee.
On 31 July 2008, a paper providing further details about the mechanism was published in Nature (Nature Vol 454, Issue 7204, July 31, 2008). In this paper, among other revelations, it is demonstrated that the mechanism also contained a dial divided into four parts, and demonstrated a four-year cycle through four segments of one year each, which is thought to be a means of describing which of the games (such as the ancient Olympics) that took place in two and four-year cycles were to take place in any given year.
The names of the months have been read; they are the months attested for the colonies of Corinth (and therefore also traditionally assumed for Corinth, Kerkyra, Epidamnos, and Syracuse, which have left less direct evidence). The investigators suggest that the device might well be of Syracusan design and so descend from the work of Archimedes; alternatively it could have been ordered by and customized for any of these markets and was being shipped.
Nature published another study on 24 November 2010. The study interprets the mechanism to be based on computation methods used in Babylonian astronomy, not ancient Greek astronomy, implying that Babylonian astronomy inspired the Greek counterpart – including the mechanical constructs.
Andrew Carol, an Apple software engineer, built a replica of the mechanism out of 1,500 LEGO pieces, and has correctly predicted the Solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 as a demonstration of its accuracy.
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