Year in Review, 2011

As the year comes to a close, many writers try to list the most important events of the year. Some include such things as royal weddings, personal scandals, deaths of famous people...my list leaves most of those things out because in ten years, they probably won't matter. I think, though, that the following events will have a lasting impact.

• This year we said a thankful goodbye to three dreadful people: al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Yes, other terrorists and dictators will follow in their wake, but at least those three are gone.
• Middle East protests erupted as a result of a disastrous economy, government corruption, and a lack of political freedom. In January, President Ben Ali was forced to resign and fled Tunisia, where he had held power for 23 years. As protests spread, Hosni Mubarak was ousted from Egypt, and Gadhafi fled and was eventually killed after 42 years of tyranny in Libya. Other protests continue in Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco.
• The world economy reached crisis levels in 2011 and the outlook for improvement is grim. Sovereign debt is out of control, fewer people are working and the result is the beginning rumbling of class warfare. As fewer people contribute to economic production and an increasing number of people are consuming, the middle class is expected to pay an unreasonable proportion of their income as taxes. In the U.S., political leaders are calling for greater "taxes on the rich" to pay down the national debt, support ineffective welfare programs, and pay for astronomical federal budget demands. They seem to have forgotten the wise words of Margaret Thatcher: the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

So the word of the year is turmoil - political, economic, and social. I know, you can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs, but right now it's unclear who the cook is. 

Occupy Protestors

Part of the social turmoil this fall in the U.S. has been the presence of protestors calling themselves Occupy (Wall Street, Atlanta, Chicago, etc.). The sit-ins began in New York City on September 17, 2011 and were initiated by a Canadian activist group called Adbusters. The core of the protests is the disparity of wealth in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Protestors attribute this disparity to corporate greed.

At the beginning of the protests, many Americans and some Democrat politicians expressed support for the protestors. Over the past two months, however, as the protestors' encampments have become semi-permanent, the disruption to local small businesses and incidents of rape, theft, and assault have occured, support for the movement has declined. Many celebrities have used the protests to gain attention by going to the protest sites and expressing support, but the average, working American has lost interest.

Some of the loss of support has been due to the protestors' inability to grasp that corporate profits are a major source of income for low-income seniors and other investors who have contributed over the years to mutual fund accounts or are direct shareholders of corporations. Adding to the lack of support is the protestors' refusal to criticize President Obama directly for his acceptance of huge campaign contributions from wall street corporations.

The eventual outcome of these protests, which have now spread across the country, is still undetermined. Presently, their status is one of stagnancy. As the weather worsens, it is likely that the number of protestors will become fewer, the filth of the protest sites will force action on the part of the mayors of those inhabitated cities, and the whole movement may just fade away.

Another Middle Eastern Dictator Dead

Reports from Libya today indicate that the former dictator, Gadhaffi, has been killed by the combined efforts of a U.S. armed drone and revolutionary soldiers on the ground. Gadhaffi was traveling in a convoy when it was struck by the drone; Gadhaffi crawled into a nearby gutter pipe and was dragged out by revolutionaries and shot.

On the surface, this seems like good news for the world; Gadhaffi was a brutal dictator and terrorist leader for the past four decades. The uncertainty, however, of the future of Libya remains of grave concern. Gadhaffi himself came to power through violent revolution and the question remains as to who will now come to power in Libya and will they be able to actual govern the hundreds of tribes which exist in that country.

In other regions of the world, brutal dictators continue to support terrorism, but Libya garnered U.S. intervention because of the oil resources located there. One might wonder whether that should, in fact, be the criteria for U.S. military involvement. Many question whether using that criteria defines the U.S. as a nation motivated by self-interest and greed. President Obama insists that U.S. military action was taken for 'humanitarian' reasons; that Gadhaffi's troops were killing civilians. This argument seems a little too convenient given that troops in nearby Syria are doing the same thing and neither the President nor Secretary of State Clinton have much to say about those violations of human rights.

Greed and corruption

On Friday, October 14, 2011, the White House issued a written statement to Congress revealing that on Wednesday it had started deploying combat equipped troops to Central Africa to assist in the hunting down and capturing or killing of the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, a group that has been causing havoc in that region for the past two years. It seems odd that after two years of terrible human rights violations the U.S. would suddenly take military action. Odd, that is, until you start to look at the relationship between Obama appointee Kase Lawal, member of the  Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiation, and his involvement in a gold smuggling operation earlier this year in Central Africa. Kase Lawal is the owner of CAMAC International, which loaned a private jet to a man named Carlos St. Mary who used it to fly to Central Africa with Mukaila Aderemi 'Mickey' Lawal, brother of Kase, under the pretense of buying gold from a seller in Kenya, the birthplace of Obama's father. In February, the jet was impounded and its passengers and crew were detained by the Congolese government in Central Africa. Officials there accused Lawal and St. Mary of smuggling gold from rebel territories in the nation's eastern provinces. St. Mary's company, Axiom Trading Co. Ltd, issued a statement through their attorney, Mike Adrovett, denying any wrongdoing and insisted that the $23 million worth of gold had been legally obtained. The governments of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya began a joint investigation; subsequently the lead investigator of the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) was brutally gunned down in front of his home in view of his wife. The KRA had also been investigating the theft of more than 475 ingots of gold valued at 1.6 billion shillings  from a warehouse that was intended for sale to Mickey Lawal. The investigation had uncovered that the gold was Congolese gold, which is illegal to trade. After almost two month of detention, Lawal and the other participants were levied a fine and released.

Carlos St. Mary's company, Axiom Trading Co. Ltd, is currently attempting to finalize a rare earth mineral deal in Angola on behalf of Black Fire Minerals. Drilling is scheduled to begin in November, but the chaos caused by the Lord's Resistance Army has delayed drilling operations. Axiom Trading Co. Ltd is also serving as Corporate Advisor to Predictive Discovery, which recently issued its initial public offering (IPO) and began trading on ASX. Predictive Discovery is primarily focusing on gold exploration in Africa.

Convoluted? Yes. Discouraging for those of us who would still like to have faith that our elected officials are somehow above illegal and sordid behavior? Absolutely. Business as usual? Probably.

Yet Another Revolution

This week we see on the news stories about the Obama administration giving over $500 million of taxpayer money to the Solyndra company, whose major investor raised $10 million for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Continued information emerges about a program called Fast and Furious that the Department of Justice and ATF carried out whereby they allowed foreign nationals to purchase thousands of firearms that were supplied to the Mexican drug cartels. Protestors around the country are involved in a movement called Occupy Wall Street; they are angry about the corporate involvement in campaign contributions, effectively 'buying' the White House. The economy is in terrible shape with millions of home foreclosures and the unemployment rate over 9% - an underestimate of the number of actual Americans who are without jobs. Tens of millions of illegal aliens in the country competing with American citizens for the jobs that are available with no effort by the federal government to address the issue. Social, economic, and political chaos.

It isn't that the country hasn't been through these kinds of chaotic situations before - mass protests about the military involvement in Vietnam, the corruption of the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal, and of course, more recently, the sex scandals of the Clinton administration. The U.S. military has been involved in military operations all over the world since World War II, much to the dismay of the majority of American taxpayers and voters. For today's young people, though, it feels like something new. They feel driven to take to the streets and protest the greed, corruption, and perceived hopelessness and helplessness. Their anger is preferable to complacency and apathy, but it does lend an air of turmoil to society.

Middle age taxpayers want the protestors to shut up, get a job, save some money and take advantage of the low cost of housing and home loans. The elderly are fearful that the chaos will result in the loss of safety net programs that they rely on to provide income and health care for them now that they can't get out there and earn money.

Underneath it all, a few voices can still be heard suggesting that the external chaos will come and go but that what is really important is for each of us to pay attention to our own soul development through meditation and contemplation. The chaos will continue long after each individual has departed this earthly exixtence.

Individual revolution is of the highest importance and not mass revolution. - Krishnamurti

How did it come to this?

I am conflicted - to watch the news and wonder how the world became so crazy or to ignore the news and be oblivious? Each choice has advantages; I've been a news junkie since I was in college and Watergate fascinated all of us. My friends and I spent hours watching news coverage of all those old, rich, white guys who got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. We knew they had been up to no-good and there was a little bit (okay, a lot) of satisfaction knowing that they were on the hot seat. After all, these were the guys who had sent our friends and brothers to VietNam to get killed, injured, and traumatized. These were the guys that said we couldn't smoke dope or drink beer in the car. These were the guys that made us feel paranoid because they had made rules against everything we did. Now they were getting a little bit of their own medicine.  Oh yeah, we felt some satisfaction.

These days, though, I don't get that same sense of satisfaction. No, what I feel instead is a deep sorrow. When Nixon's 'plumbers' got caught it was news. It was new! It bordered on amazing, fascinating, heroic. These crooks (yes, Nixon, you were a crook) had broken the political code and a couple of unknowns busted them. There was Deep Throat, whispering in the dark, guiding a couple of young journalists. There was the daily unfolding of scandalous behavior, denials, intrigue, finger-pointing, scape-goating. Oh it was edge-of-your seat stuff. Now, it's business as usual. A new guy (or gal) comes in all full of Hope and Change and Transparency but before long little bits of truth start to ooze out and before you know it, you know it. The same old 1970's corruption.