The Institute for Justice has published an important new study on the economic impact of licensing laws.

As a new report issued today by the Institute for Justice discusses, more and more Americans now need the government’s permission before they can pursue the occupation of their choice. The IJ report, “License to Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing,” shows that for lower-income Americans, these government-imposed “occupational licensing” hurdles are not only widespread, but often unreasonably high. License to Work details licensing requirements for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations in all 50 states and D.C. It is the first national study of licensing to focus on lower-income occupations and to measure the burdens licensing imposes on aspiring workers . . .

All of the 102 occupations studied in License to Work are licensed in at least one state. On average, these government-mandated licenses force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees. One third of the licenses take more than one year to earn. At least one exam is required for 79 of the occupations.

“These licensing laws force people to spend a lot of time and effort earning a license instead of earning a living,” said Dr. Dick Carpenter, director of strategic research at the Institute for Justice and report co-author. “They make it harder for people to find jobs and to build new businesses that create jobs.”

Data show that those practicing the 102 occupations studied are not only more likely to be low-income, but also to be minority and to have less education, likely making licensing hurdles even harder to overcome. In addition, about half the 102 occupations offer the possibility of entrepreneurship, suggesting these laws affect both job attainment and creation.

Licensing requirements are usually justified under concerns for public safety. But that’s usually just a canard.

 . . . research to date provides little evidence that licensing protects public health and safety or improves products and services. Instead, it increases consumer costs and reduces opportunities for workers.

License to Work provides additional reasons to doubt that many licensing regimes are needed. First, most of the 102 occupations are practiced somewhere without government permission and apparently without widespread harm: Only 15 are licensed in 40 states or more, and on average, the 102 occupations are licensed in just 22 states—fewer than half. This includes a number of occupations with no self-evident rationale for licensure, such as shampooer, florist, home entertainment installer and funeral attendant.

Second, licensure burdens often vary considerably across states, calling into question the need for severe burdens. For instance, although 10 states require four months or more of training for manicurists, Alaska demands only about three days and Iowa about nine days. Such disparities are prevalent throughout the occupations studied.

Finally, the difficulty of entering an occupation often has little to do with the health or safety risk it poses. Of the 102 occupations studied, the most difficult to enter is interior designer, a harmless occupation licensed in only three states and D.C. By contrast, EMTs hold lives in their hands, yet 66 other occupations face greater average licensure burdens, including barbers and cosmetologists, manicurists and a host of contractor designations.

Idea for some econ grad student: Do a study to determine the number of jobs the Institute for Justice has created over the years by suing, usually successfully, to overturn this protectionist nonsense.

How does a person come to hold the belief of absolute nonviolence? What about this belief draws people to it? Is nonviolence the logical conclusion of non-aggression? These are the question that I have been asking myself as of late, because there is a growing number of people within the liberty movement who are latching onto the belief of absolute nonviolence. I’d like to explore this idea, and try to lay out an argument as to why I think it is not only wrong, but also dangerous to adopt this belief.

One who believes in, and adheres to, the non-aggression principle makes a fundamental moral distinction between aggressive violence, and retaliatory violence. One who adheres to a principle of nonviolence does not make the same distinction. Or, perhaps they do, but they see retaliatory violence as violence nonetheless, and therefore wrong, or immoral, or “against God” or something else. It is important to note here that I will not be discussing  non-aggression and nonviolence from a pragmatic point of view, rather I will be discussing these things from a position of principle.

The absolute pacifist paints themselves into a tough philosophical corner. In order to remain consistent they necessarily have to abandon other positions they hold in order to avoid contradictions. For instance, any concept of justice that involves any level of violence must be rejected by one who adopts this belief. It would be a contradiction to advocate for any form of justice that involves capturing and punishing a criminal; any concept of justice that condones the use of physical force to apprehend and contain a criminal must be abandoned. Likewise, any form of government that was not wholly voluntary would also have to be discarded. It may be the case that the entire concept of government will have to be abandoned if it’s not absolutely nonviolent. The only form of government that would be possible if the nonviolent position is adopted is autarchy–absolute self government.

I think it is a non-sequitur to make the jump from non-aggression to the position of absolute nonviolence. I am of the opinion that these beliefs are spawned from two completely different principles. Non-aggression does not presuppose nonviolence, as the person who holds the belief in non-aggression will violently defend the self, while the person who adheres to the belief in nonviolence will not. A person who has chosen to defend themselves using retaliatory violence necessarily believes that their own life is of higher value than a belief in nonviolence. The belief in absolute nonviolence presupposes that the concept of nonviolence is greater than the value of one’s own life. Non-aggresssion is a belief that is founded in the self, and absolute nonviolence is altruistic. This is why I claim it is illogical to jump from one belief to the other, because they are based upon two principles that could not be farther apart from each other. Any person who makes the illogical jump from non-aggression to nonviolence demonstrates a  profound misunderstanding of the principles involved. I believe that even the doubt of self defense would exhibit that same misunderstanding.

Yet, I claim this is exactly the jump that some are making. I think the focus is being placed on the wrong thing. It is true, that, in some cases, nonviolence is a perfectly reasonable tool, and I believe that these particular instances are being mistaken as nonviolence being the correct principle in all cases, but that is a clear error in reasoning. It is important to remember that one who adheres to the non-aggression principle will defend themselves because their ultimate goal is self-preservation. As I mentioned before, non-aggression is premised on the self, and if there is an instance where utilizing retaliatory violence will endanger the self, then, rationally, it ought to be abandoned in that case.

One of my favorite parts in the movie, Rob Roy is the scene where the MacGregor Clan is contemplating on what to do about the feudal landlord thugs who destroyed their home and property. Rob Roy comes to the conclusion that it is more reasonable to not retaliate, because he fears the retribution from the retaliation will be swift and ruthless. He understands that everyone is still breathing in and out, and that property that is lost can be regained except for the self, once that is lost, it’s lost forever. I would like to expand further on this point, because I think it cuts right to the heart of the matter. In this movie scene, Rob Roy demonstrates that even the concept of personal property is not of higher value than one’s own life. One cannot recreate and rebuild if one is not alive.

Where else might retaliatory violence be a bad idea? When one is faced with overwhelming odds it may be reasonable to abandon the use of violence. I don’t think I need to give many examples of this, as I’m sure you, the reader, can think of many instances where you may be out manned, out gunned, out witted, or just simply out classed. Many people in the liberty movement believe that armed resistance to an oppressive government is not the right solution–and I happen to agree with them–but this instance should not be mistaken for nonviolence being universally true. There are many differences between resistance to a rogue government, and resistance to a petty thug.

There is a vast epistemological difference between the actor performing under what they believe to be legitimate government authority, and the actor who has actually chosen to become a thug. The thug is the one who is conceptualizing evil, and bringing it into existence. This may not be the case for the government actor. Even though the end results may mirror each other, the two actors are operating under very different premises. One is bringing evil into existence by way of premeditated thought, and one is bringing evil into existence by following orders.  This is precisely why the use of reason may still be wielded on the government actor with some positive result; they have not yet crossed over into the dark side. There is still hope that there is a human being inside of that mortal coil.  This is why nonviolent resistance to a violent government may be effective. Think about it: Would you nonviolently resist if you knew  the person you were facing was acting out of pure evil? Is it reasonable to do so?

Here is a quote from Martin Luther King that touches on this subject…

“When, for decades, you have been able to make a man compromise his manhood by threatening him with a cruel and unjust punishment, and when suddenly he turns upon you and says: ‘Punish me. I do not deserve it. But because I do not deserve it, I will accept it so that the world will know that I am right and you are wrong,’ you hardly know what to do. You feel defeated and secretly ashamed. You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force.”

(Martin Luther King, Jr. — “Why We Can’t Wait”, 1964, chapter 2, “The Sword That Heals”, p. 30)

Would it be reasonable for one who believes in absolute nonviolence to utilize this same tactic against the home invader in the middle of the night? I do not think so. The home invader has made the conscience decision to carry out this act, and has prepared himself physically and mentally to carry out this crime. This example is light years apart from the government actor who is carrying out orders he perceives to be legitimate. The reason that non-aggression is adopted as a principle and not nonviolence is because the goal is to keep on living with their own life being the highest value.

The person who adheres to the non-aggression principle does not paint themselves into that same philosophical corner the absolute pacifist does. The libertarian will adopt whatever they believe to be the most reasonable choice in any given instance. Some of you may be thinking, “but that’s pragmatic!” No, it’s not, because non-aggression is but a tool for the deeper axiom of self-ownership. This is why the self-owner can use the tools of non-aggression and nonviolence interchangeably, because their axiom is their own life. I cannot say that about the person who adopts the principle of absolute nonviolence as they necessarily believe that there is something greater than their own life, and that is false to fact.

In my opinion, it is dangerous to let this type of thinking creep its way into the liberty movement. When a person desires liberty, what they mean is they desire liberty for themselves. The desire to have liberty in one’s own life drives that individual to advocate that all other individuals also have liberty. The adherence to nonviolent resistance–even at the cost of ones own life– is premised on the idea that there is some greater cause that exists out there other than one’s own life and happiness. This is the exact idea that Statism is premised on. That there is a “greater good” out there, and the individual may have to be sacrificed in the pursuit of this concept. I, the individual, reject this type of thinking, and I believe it is up to the individualists in this movement to defeat this type of altruistic, collectivistic thinking wherever it pops up–even within our own ranks.

“No man is free who is not a master of himself.” ~ Epictetus

The European Union is clamping down on China and India’s carbon emissions, claiming that the Kyoto protocol is outdated.

The argument between under-developed nations and industrialized countries has spawned a demand for responsibility for carbon emissions while the fear-mongering of man-made climate change moves into the political areas.

After failing to convince the scientific communities that this propaganda holds up while real world empirical data holds evidence that the projections have been derived from fraudulent computer models, the alarmists are seeking governmental approval. Because scaring elected officials into mandating climate change policies ratified by the UN is easier than changing the general population’s perspective.

In 1997, the Kyoto protocol was formulated from the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit just five years prior. Technological advancing nations like China and India were left out of the obligated countries to curb emissions outputs.

World leaders backed by the UN are prompting questions about the applicability of the Kyoto protocol as unfair, while China moves ahead to become another industrialized country.

In a two-day meeting preceding global climate change talks, Connie Hedegaard, the European climate chief said, “Countries have recognized that the old division between developed and developing countries – there are limits to how useful that is in the 21st century.”

A new global treaty is championed as the answer to carbon emissions. While scientific data shows that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the temperature of the earth, climate change alarmists are using this manufactured threat to usher in global treaties to usurp nations’ sovereign right to conduct business, as well as force governments to pay a global “carbon tax” as a funding source for development and manufacturing for products the alarmists plan on selling to nations and individuals as a necessity for the coming “global warming age”.

By November of this year, Hedegaard hopes to see a new treaty ratified that will begin a new era of falsified claims that the control over man is an imperative to save the planet.

Hedegaard said: “We need to set out a work program [for drawing up a global agreement] and how to get there.”

The European Union is developing strategies to securitize under-developed countries to coerce their governments into adopting the new global agreements to be signed by 2015 and fully implemented by 2020.

China is weary of such global agreements as they mask the global governance agenda. One governing body, which has been slated as the UN, will regulate and classify countries under a new agreement binding obligations to force tyrannical ruling over what are now independent nations.

Climate change alarmists have banded scientists together for their continued assault against governmental roles in the created “global dilemmas” of clean water and energy use.

Statements to governments from alarmist-backed scientists are admonishing world governments to “engage the international research community in developing systematic, innovative solutions” to these pressing problems.

These scientists believe that water and energy securitization by international bodies will assist in the proper management and distribution of resources to those who need them.

While clean water supplies are dwindling, the cost of these endeavors should be allocated into a global taxation as to equally distribute the financing. The scientists urge centralized governments to plan, invest and enforce measures to mitigate the destruction of natural resources by natural disasters.

Public health management is an imperative as the world’s population growth has exceeded the international communities’ expectations. There is a call for development and manufacturing of greenhouse safe products; however, the allocation of funding toward research for finding a way to mitigate or even stop climate change effects seems to be left out.

The business of climate change is expected to be quite lucrative for those successful at convincing authoritative bodies that these technologies must be purchased by their nation and mandated for use by their citizens.

In the end, the cost of climate change trickles down to the citizens.

The scientists demand international cooperation and an agreed-upon methodology that is overseen by a central governing body. This will ensure that nations adhere to the agreement.

Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism. Our alternative news site is dedicated to reporting the news as it actually happens; not as it is spun by the corporately funded mainstream media. You can find us on our Facebook page.

In politics, a partisan is a committed member of a political party. In multi-party systems, the term is widely understood to carry a negative connotation – referring to those who wholly support their party’s policies and are perhaps even reluctant to acknowledge correctness on the part of their political opponents in almost any situation. Partisanship can be affected by many factors including current events, figureheads (presidents), decisions, and even location.

In the United States,  “partisan” has come to refer to an individual with a psychological identification with one or the other of the major parties.

“I have no objection. Let the electorate see the real reason a lot of republicans oppose Obama.”

I shouldn’t be offended since I’m not a Republican, but I do oppose Obama and don’t think that comment reflects well on me and most who have and are speaking out on today’s issues.  The TeaParty was vocal about fiscal responsibility and was called racist.  Please, let the electorate see the real reason a lot of democrats support Obama.  The price of gasoline alone is issue enough to call for his being thrown out.  He railed against Bush when oil prices spiked, by his own words and standards, Obama should be thrown out of office.  He is constantly attacking the “fat cats” on WallStreet while showing compassion for the man on the street suffering thru these hard times.  But who is more responsible for those hard times, WallStreet or OvalStreet?  The guy in the oval office, wearing out our printing presses with “qualitative easing”.  How much has the value of the dollar dropped since he took office?  WallStreet didn’t cause that and the decrease in what you can buy for a dollar.  The one defense I will offer for WallStreet is at least they are honest in what they seek, it’s all about the money!

HOWARD STERN: Who should be the next President of the United States Elle MacPherson, go ahead.

ELLE MACPHERSON: I think Obama’s going to do it.

STERN: You like Obama?

MACPHERSON: Yeah, I’m living in London and I’m socialist. What do you expect?(1)

by Fred Reed

I wonder what purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children while their parents work or watch television. They certainly don’t teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function, I mean.

Schooling, sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate—“graduate”—from high school—“high school”—unable to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society, they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must happen, however we disguise it.

For those of reasonably average acuity, it little profits to go beyond learning to read, which they can do quite well, and to use a calculator. Upon their leaving high school, question them and you find that they know almost nothing. They could learn more, average not being stupid, but modest intelligence implies no interest in study. This is true only of academic subjects such as history, literature, and physics. They will study things that seem practical to them. Far better to teach the modestly acute such things as will allow them to earn a living, be they typing, carpentry, or diesel repair. Society depends on such people. But why inflict upon them the geography of Southeast Asia, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of the nineteenth century? Demonstrably they remember none of it.

Some who favor the public schools assert that an informed public is necessary to a functioning democracy. True, and beyond doubt. But we do not have an informed public, never have had one, and never will. Nor, really, do we have a functioning democracy.

Any survey will reveal that most people have no grasp of geography, history, law, government, finance, international relations, or politics. And most people have neither the intelligence nor the interest to learn these things. If schools were not the disasters they are, they still couldn’t produce a public able to govern a nation.

But it is for the intelligent that the public schools—“schools”—are most baneful. It is hideous for the bright, especially bright boys, to sit year after year in an inescapable miasma of appalling dronedom while some low-voltage mental drab wanders on about banalities that would depress a garden slug. The public schools are worse than no schools for the quick. A sharp kid often arrives at school already reading. Very quickly he (or, most assuredly, she) reads four years ahead of grade. These children teach themselves. They read indiscriminately, without judgement—at first anyway—and pick up ideas, facts, and vocabulary. They also begin to think.

In school, bored to desperation, they invent subterfuges so as not to lapse into screaming insanity. In my day the tops of desks opened to reveal a space for storing crayons and such. The bright would keep the top open enough so that they could read their astronomy books while the teacher—“teacher”—talked about some family of cute beavers, and how Little Baby Beaver….

I ask you: How much did you learn in school, and how much have you learned on your own? Asking myself the same question, I come up with typing, and two years of algebra.

The bright should go to school, but it is well to distinguish between a school and a penitentiary. They need schools at their level, taught by teachers at their level. It is not hard to get intelligent children to learn things, and indeed today a whole system of day-care centers only partly succeeds in keeping them from doing it. They likelearning things, if only you keep those wretched beavers out of the classroom. When I was in grade school in the early Fifties, bright kids read, shrew-like, four times their body weight in books every fifteen minutes—or close, anyway. In third grade or so, they had microscopes (Gilbert for hoi polloi, but mine was a fifteen-dollar upscale model from Edmund Scientific) and knew about rotifers and Canada balsam and well slides and planaria. These young, out of human decency, for the benefit of the country, should not be subjected to public education—“education.” Where do we think high-bypass turbofans come from? Are they invented by heart-warming morons?

To a remarkable extent, dumb-ass public schools are simply not necessary. I asked my (Mexican) wife Violeta how she learned to read. It was through a Head Start program, I learned, called “mi padre.” Her father, himself largely self-taught, sat her down with a book and said, see these little squiggles? They are called “letters,” and they make sounds, and you can put them together….. Vi contemplated the idea. Yes, it made sense. Actually, she decided, it was no end of fun, give me that book…Bingo.

The absorptive capacity of smart kids is large if you just stay out of their way. A bright boy of eleven can quickly master a collegiate text of physiology, for example. This is less astonishing than perhaps it sounds. The human body consists of comprehensible parts that do comprehensible things. If he is interested, which is the key, he will learn them, while apparently being unable to learn state capitals, which don’t interest him.

What is the point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances, trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and the proletariat doesn’t want to strain itself, or to admit that there are things it can’t do.

In schooling, perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as to live, give him the training he needs. But don’t subject either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all equal.

Every once and awhile I’ll be listening to a podcast with one or the other writers specializing on the subject of Peak Oil or collapse and the subject of timetables will come up. When will the collapse finally be here, the callers ask insistently, almost pleadingly, so that they can finally justify their investments in freeze-dried foods, water purification tablets and solid gold coins. Inevitably the guest will demur, and speak more in general terms. But I’m going to be the first pundit to go out on the limb and assign a timeline for the collapse. Spread it far and wide, and let’s see just how good my predictive powers are. Are you ready? Here it is:

Right now.

What do they think a collapse is supposed to look like? It seems people just cannot just cannot get past the “Zombie Apocalypse” theory of collapse. They imagine hordes of disease-ridden folks dressed in rags stumbling around and fighting over cans of petrol and stripping cans of food from shelves. That’s not what collapse looks like. It never has been. In fact, there’s very little evidence that a Zombie Apocalypse style collapse ever occurred in the historical record. Instead we see subtle patterns of abandonment and decay that unfold over long periods of time. Big projects stop. Population thins. Trade routes shrink and people revert to barter. Things get simpler and more local. Culture coarsens. High art stagnates. People disperse. Expectations are adjusted downward. Investments are no longer made in the future and previous investments are cannibalized just to maintain the status quo. Extend and pretend is hardly a recent invention.

No, what happens in a collapse is very much more subtle than a Zombie Apocalypse. Things tend to look pretty normal for the following reasons:

1.) People and Institutions are resistant to change.
2.) The system has a formidable array of resources to preserve the status quo.
3.) Sheer momentum.
4.) Creeping Normalcy
5.) Denial

This is how history says collapses go down, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Based on recent archaeology, it seems this is how the Roman collapse unfolded was well. Although images of pillaging barbarians looting burning cities sticks in people’s imaginations when they think of the fall of the Roman Empire, this was not the experience for most people according to recent scholarship. Big events tended to come down to us in the written record, but for ordinary people, it probably seemed much less dramatic. Yes, there were some famines and plagues, as there had always been. The population declined, but there were no apocalyptic battles or mass starvation. Many of the cities appear to have been continually inhabited. There were no mass graves, ruined cities or signs of malnutrition found in excavations. Most people who survived the plagues lived right through the transition from Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity to the Medieval period with remarkable continuity, just a change of institutions and expectations. But something clearly was happening, because we know it from history. Buildings got plainer. Citizens got poorer. Trade routes shrank. Economies became local. Lawlessness increased. The old Roman Empire had been around since far before anyone could remember, and as it broke down more and more and failed to do things it had once done easily, it must have seen to some people like the world was collapsing in on them. It wasn’t, but something was happening. Much depended on who you were, where you were, what your expectations were, and how much you had invested in the status quo, both mentally and in terms of status and resources.

What brought this thought about was reading the heartbreaking article: Suicides in Greece increase 40%

And I remembered a comment I head from Dmitry Orlov in an interview about how much of his high school class were now dead. Yet there were no headlines and there was never any official crisis or emergency. They did not die in gunfights over scraps of food like in The Road. Rather, more quotidian things like alcoholism, unemployment, suicide, homelessness, exposure, lack of medications and ordinary sicknesses like bronchitis and pneumonia took their lives.  Russia’s life expectancy fell dramatically. It’s birth rate declined. Public health fell apart. Suicide rates went up. The population shrank. Entire towns became abandoned. In post-collapse Russia there was a slow die-off that occurred outside of the daily headlines that no one seemed to notice. They were ground down slowly by day-to-day reduction in the standard of living, a million little tragedies that, like pixels in an image, looked like nothing until the focus was pulled back.

And right now the entire continent of Europe is looking an awful lot like post-collapse Russia:

The savage cuts to Greece’s health service budget have led to a sharp rise in HIV/Aids and malaria in the beleaguered nation, said a leading aid organisation on Thursday.

The incidence of HIV/Aids among intravenous drug users in central Athens soared by 1,250% in the first 10 months of 2011 compared with the same period the previous year, according to the head of Médecins sans Frontières Greece, while malaria is becoming endemic in the south for the first time since the rule of the colonels, which ended in the 1970s.

Reveka Papadopoulos said that following health service cuts, including heavy job losses and a 40% reduction in funding for hospitals, Greek social services were “under very severe strain, if not in a state of breakdown. What we are seeing are very clear indicators of a system that cannot cope”. The heavy, horizontal and “blind” budget cuts coincided last year with a 24% increase in demand for hospital services, she said, “largely because people could simply no longer afford private healthcare. The entire system is deteriorating”.

Greece on the breadline: HIV and malaria make a comeback

Is that not a die-off? What would a collapse look like? What should a collapse look like? Zombies? Mad Max? Or would it look like the following statistics from this article:

In Greece, we now have record unemployment, which includes the majority of young workers. Homelessness is up 20 percent, with soup kitchens in Athens reporting record demand, and the usually low suicide rate having doubled.

Portugal has complied completely with the austerity demands it accepted for its bailout deal, but its debt is growing and its economy is shrinking, its unemployment rate continues to reach new heights, there is a crisis in medical care, and a 40 percent rise in emigration, with the Portuguese government acknowledging its own failure by actually encouraging its citizenry to leave.

In Spain, austerity has  resulted in falling industrial output and deepening debt, with record unemployment and a stunning rate of 50 percent youth unemployment. And the Spanish government’s incomprehensible response is to impose even more crushing austerity.

Ireland has fallen back into recession as austerity has led to falling economic output. A better future is being sacrificed, as young workers look for work abroad, “generation emigration” expected to number 75,000 this year.

The success of Italy’s wealthy technocrat government was concisely summarized in similar terms:

Italy’s austerity measures are stunting activity in the euro-zone’s third-largest economy, recent budget and economic data show, suggesting the steps are backfiring.

Italy’s industrial production is falling while its rate of unemployment is at its highest in more than a decade, and its priceless cultural heritage is literally crumbling. But the wealthy technocrats themselves are ensuring that they they don’t have to share the suffering.

Even in the Eurozone’s stronger economies, such as Holland, austerity is hurting the economy, people, and culture, and risks backfiring even more.

The austerity program of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has led to a stagnant economy, with ten consecutive months of rising unemployment and factory output stalled and business confidence in decline.

Even economic powerhouse Germany, while taking advantage of the new flood of migrant workers fleeing Europe’s weaker economies, is facing an austerity backlash.

Outside the Eurozone, the austerity program imposed on Britain by the relentlessly mendacious Cameron government has resulted in an economy that keeps shrinking, with the OECD saying it is back in recession, with unemployment soaring, and the overall brunt being borne by the elderly and minorities and the very young. An additional hundred thousand are predicted to be out of work by autumn.

Greece appears to be just the dress rehearsal for the rest of the world. And Japan has been experiencing diminished expectations, lower wages, deflation and declining birthrates since 1989. And I don’t think I need to restate conditions in the United States: municipal bankruptcies, school closings, foreclosures, blackouts, roads being turned back into gravel, etc. And conditions are continuing to deteriorate. See this:

So many corporate-owned politicians in Washington these days seem to be going out of their way to work side by side with the Grim Reaper. They declare unnecessary wars. They tax us (not themselves) right down to the bone. They steal all our safety nets in order to have more money to add to THEIR safety nets. They bust our unions, steal our pension plans, enable Wall Street to invent pyramid schemes that ruin our economy, encourage big health insurance companies to cut us loose just when we need them the most, and allow Monsanto to poison our food, mutilate our seed stock and kill off our bees.

In America, death seems to be coming earlier and earlier to those who vote.

And now GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has come up with an even more sure-fire plan to help out his new BFF, the Grim Reaper. Now Romney wants to not only eliminate most U.S. housing subsidies, he wants to eliminate the entire department of Housing and Urban Renewal as well. That will certainly speed up the Grim Reaper’s efforts for sure.

According to Forbes magazine, “In a closed-door Florida fundraiser for donors tonight, Mitt Romney offered a rare glimpse into his policy plans if elected President. And, as NBC reports, he got quite trigger-happy.”

According to TruthOut, “Romney’s plan to eliminate HUD, assuming he didn’t shuffle its programs to other departments, would bring an end to critical programs like Section 8 housing vouchers and community development block grants. And eliminating housing assistance is even more problematic given the disproportionate percentage of veterans in the homeless population.”

But what does Romney’s latest brilliant idea actually mean in terms of you and me? It means once again that the rich continue to get richer and live longer while the rest of us just conveniently die off too soon — because homeless people have a lot shorter life span than folks happily housed in the Hamptons.

You know that senior housing complex in your town where seniors now get a rent break courtesy of HUD? That will be gone. And without HUD, frail and ailing seniors will soon be wandering the streets of your town, dying in alleyways and hogging up all the space in your cemeteries.

You know those low-income “housing projects” on the other side of your town where all the poor people now live? Those will be gone too. Too bad for them. And now desperate poor folks will be wandering around in your part of town, homeless too. And did I already mention that they will be desperate?

And all those homeless vets? There will be a lot more of them now — also wandering around your city or town.

Remember back in the 1970s when Reagan shut down all those mental institutions and suddenly we had all sorts of crazy people wandering around, hopefully taking their meds but probably not? And if Romney’s latest hot new scheme takes hold, even more of them will be back on your streets.

And physically handicapped people will have no place to live either. They too will be wandering around, trying to elude the Grim Reaper.

And the number of homeless children will dramatically increase. A lot more little kids will be living in cars — if they’re lucky.

And all of these homeless people, millions of them, will be pouring into the streets of your city or town, herded in your direction by both corporate-owned politicians in Washington and the Grim Reaper himself — who also will have a sharp eye out for YOU.

Romney’s new housing policy: Offering the Grim Reaper a big helping hand (FireDogLake)

And this: Austerity In America: 22 Signs That It Is Already Here And That It Is Going To Be Very Painful (Economic Collapse Blog)

This is what a collapse really looks like: The poorest and most vulnerable die first, out of sight, and everyone else just does what they can to survive. Peoples’ priorities change: they concentrate on getting by from day-to-day rather than planning for the future. They stop getting married. They have less children or none at all. They live for today. They work harder for less. Taxes go up even as basic services are cut. Long term unemployment has been conclusively linked to greater mortality and susceptibility to illness, physical and mental. Would many of these people not still be alive today if were not for austerity measures and declining middle class opportunity?  Isn’t that a die-off? It’s been said that having children is a referendum on the future. Based on global birth rates, I think the human race is collectively registering a vote of “no confidence.”

Picture the ruin porn of decaying Detroit’s vacant buildings, empty fields, shuttered factories, abandoned houses, crumbling overpasses, bursting water mains, rusting cars, and encroaching wilderness. Does this not look like collapse to you? If this had happened over a span of one or two years, would we even have any trouble of recognizing it as such? If you asked people twenty or thirty years ago what a global economic collapse would look like, would they not describe something very similar to what we are now witnessing? Why don’t we recognize it? Because it is happening too slowly? Because we believe things will “get back to normal?” What are we waiting for, a sign from heaven?

Who you are and where you are effects this dramatically too. Your position on the hierarchy determines how well insulated you are from collapse. Are you poor already? (not middle class, everyone is middle class) Then you probably won’t notice as much difference. Are you filthy rich? (if you’re reading this, I doubt it) Then you have enough power to preserve you wealth or enhance it for a while (at our expense, of course). If you are in the technocratic caste that serves global corporate interests, have the privilege an advanced education, work in certain select industries, have a vast inheritance, or are just plain lucky, you can probably safely hold on to your lifestyle for a long time to come. Your children won’t be so lucky, though. For those people who wonder why they don’t feel like they are in a collapse, please consider, have you gotten a raise lately? What’s your home worth? Has your rent gone up? Taxes and fees? Some people may answer positively to these questions, of course, but that number has a funny way of shrinking over time.

If you live in a big city it also might be easier to get by. Cities have more diverse industries and higher tax bases,  There is more wealth in cites, more social momentum, and more resources to buffer the negative effects of a downturn. For those with social connections closest to the levers of power and the imperial courts, they can manipulate the system to keep the swag coming from their enclaves in Manhattan, Orange Country, suburban D.C., and the Hamptons. Just as in the Roman collapse where the cities were bulwarks of wealth, culture and commerce while countryside became depopulated, rural areas will be hardest hit. Indeed, rural towns that were dependent upon one major industry like farming or steel manufacturing have already become ghost towns, and much of rural America is already a lawless region with little infrastructure; a battleground for drug gangs dotted with marijuana plantations and meth labs.

We have a hard time imagining that in the midst of a collapse everything would seem so normal. That day-to-day life would go one for most of us, seemingly unaffected, and that only after vast stretches of time had passed would we notice anything different. That many of us could hold on to our modern conveniences and familiar things. That many people wouldn’t even notice what’s going on at all. Short of a plague situation, there are not usually piles of bodies during a collapse. Most people don’t die. Here’s what really happens: People move in with relatives. They barter services. They defer health care. They stop going to school. They sell off their possessions. They go on the dole, if they can. They stop caring. You see people happy to have food and warmth rather than the latest consumer toy. You see entire households supported by one breadwinner. You see homeless shelters and soup kitchens fill up and food banks empty out. You see people hanging out on streetcorners during the day and living in tents. That’s what a collapse looks like. Sound familiar? In fact, much of the world never moved from this mode of  existence in the first place. Even during the worst historical collapses people still ate good food, listened to music, used the latest technology, and drank beer and wine with friends on warm summer evenings.

So then why is the collapse occurring? Is it all about debt, as we’ve been led to believe? Or is it about something else?

Imagine if you were the leader of one of the world’s major industrial nations, with millions of people, economies worth trillions, and huge armies at your command. Now imagine that your top generals and admirals have briefed you and told you that the fundamental substances underlying modern industrial civilization were running out. That there would be shortages. Scarcity.  Resource wars. Dwindling food supplies. Decreased industrial output. A shrinking tax base. Insurrection. What would you do? Panic? Or would you do exactly what world leaders are doing right now: using economic policies to shrink the economy to a lower level and cause a slow die-off? Claim that “there is no alternative”, and that once “confidence” is restored, things will be back to normal? Consider:

Last year two military planning organizations went public with studies predicting that serious consequences from oil depletion will befall us shortly. In the U.S. the Joint Forces Command concluded, without saying how they arrived at their dates, that by 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear and that by 2015 the global shortfall in oil production could be as much as 10 million b/d. Later in the year a draft of a German army study, which went into greater detail in analyzing the consequences of peaking world oil production, was leaked to the press. The German study which was released recently is unique for the frankness with which it explores the dire consequences which may be in store for us.

And see this: Energy Security: an annotated military/security bibliography (2010 update) (Energy Bulletin)

Of course, to assuage the public’s anger, governments will promise an imminent return to normalcy. What they mean is, slow collapse down to a slow enough pace that it is less noticeable. And they’ve been saying this for four years already. Want to bet they’ll be saying it four years from now? And four years after that?

Once things did “stabilize” everything would return to a sort of normal and you would be considered a hero by the public. And things will look great, because people only judge things in contrast with the immediate past, not decades before. And in relative terms, after years of “austerity”, things will be “recovering.” Temporarily at least, until the next crisis hits. But by that time you hope there will be another sucker sitting in the White House, or 10 Downing Street, or the Élysée Palace while you spend your retirement skiing in Zurich or sunning yourself in Monaco. And the cycle begins again. Your family members, as “elites,” will be unaffected, of course. Debts can be cancelled. It’s just the excuse they need.

Really, austerity makes no sense otherwise. As Steve Keen put it in a recent interview, “they think causing an accelerated economic collapse will make it easier to pay their debts.” Indeed. Even some of the world’s most renowned economists have declared such policies insane. If even Nobel-prize winning economists think it’s crazy, then why are governments doing it? But these economists are in the main, ignorant of Peak Oil, willingly or unwillingly. They can only think in terms of reactivating “growth” in a Keynesian sense. But based on the above, it’s clear world leaders know that’s not going to happen. What other reason could there be? After all, capitalism requires growth, and only after enough is destroyed can growth begin again. Is what we are witnessing now not a slow destruction? Austerity is a wildfire set by the political/banking elite classes to get rid of the underbrush and start anew.

Certainly they could implement more humane options if they so desired. But most of those would require a diminution in the power of corporations and banks. They need not fear socialist revolution as they did generations ago, because everyone knows that socialism has failed and that wealth redistribution makes everyone poorer (right?). Entire populations can now be effectively controlled by the media apparatus, and if all else fails, you can bust out the tear gas and pepper spray. From now on, all we will be permitted is what we can claw from the impersonal and shrinking market. Social Darwinism has finally been given free reign by the powers that be.

Of course they could just as easily come clean with all this and initiate policies that minimize the pain and suffering of the general population. They could implement policies that allow for graceful and gradual decline and stop spending money on malignant things like prisons, security, war, bank bailouts, corporate welfare, and needless consumerism in favor of public health measures, redistributing wealth, work programs, etc. They could cancel the debts. But today’s governments are wholly owned subsidiaries of the banking establishments that control national economies, and they will have none of it. Over our dead bodies they say, we prefer your dead bodies. The real purpose of austerity and neoliberal economic doctrine is to get the remaining wealth of industrial society into their bank accounts before the shit hits the fan so they and their ancestors can pick up the pieces in a post oil-crash world. They will continue to have the best of everything. Someone’s going to have personalized genetic medicine and android servants, just not you or I. I myself am skeptical, however, that things will go as planned. This is why they need Authoritarian Capitalism.

People often wonder if the Romans knew at the time that their society was collapsing. Even if some  intelligent and literate Romans did recognize it, could they have done anything about it? We who know better at least know that we are on our own to deal with this. You know the truth. You don’t have to flee to a bunker, and you don’t have to die off either (of course we all will someday, but that’s a different story…). Don’t wait for politicians to tell you the truth about austerity, because they never will. You can see that this engineered collapse is exactly what we’ve been fearing all this time. No reason to fear the collapse-look around, you’re already living though it even as you read these words, and you’re presumably still here. Take a deep breath. Relax. Have a beer. Listen to some music. No Zombies Required.

For years my colleagues and I have been asking Ron Paul about a slew of petrochemical disasters in and around his Houston-area congressional district. Several of them occurred during federal terror exercises, and resulted in record profits for Big Oil. He has stonewalled not only us, but also his constituents on this life-and-death subject.

At last there may be cause for hope, though. During a Thursday Austin speech, Paul said he was concerned that a “false flag” attack might be used to plunge the United States into a war with Iran. Hopefully this means that he is now prepared to answer questions about what we believe to have been false flag events in his own back yard.

Some have suggested that Paul’s truther remarks are an attempt to appease false flag students who think that he is simply another establishment apparatchik, albeit one who poses as an anti-establishment rebel. After all, five years before this latest headline, Ron Paul Warns of False Flag in Town Hall .Speech, there was Presidential Candidate Fears “Gulf Of Tonkin” To Provoke Iran War. Between the two “candid candidate” moments, though, there has been half a decade of dodging, while wishful supporters supposed that their man was somehow different from the rest.

On March 3, 2008 W. Leon Smith, publisher of The Lone Star Iconoclast, presented a penetrating editorial about the real situation in Paul’s home district, which is as compelling now as it was then:

Time To Investigate Houston Is Now
The Lone Star Iconoclast (3/3/08)

Every time there is a disaster or “mistake” involving the petrochemical industry, gasoline prices shoot up. The federal government assures the American public that gasoline prices are going to continue to rise. In fact, recent official predictions suggest $4-a-gallon gasoline this summer.Thus lies the basis for governmental predictions of continued disasters and, ultimately, of an impending new 9/11. They say it’s not if, but when.

The powers that be — including senators running for re-election or a higher office and a lame president — have chosen to embrace the series of oil incidents as accidents. It wouldn’t be in their personal self interests to focus an investigation upon these continued “once-in-a-lifetime” events, for there are profits at risk. Besides, what better way to impose an indirect tax upon the American public?The candidates tout “change” in their speeches. In reality, “change” would be the removal of these parasites from the federal government. “Change” is not imbedding them deeper

These so-called public servants sprinkle upon themselves the image of a ruling class, when in reality they are merely useless employees who have blatantly plundered the public for their own personal gain.They are not patriots; they are thieves. Patriots by now would have taken appropriate actions to investigate why these incidents continue to occur, and then do something about it. This neglect makes them players — and profiteers.

For five years Captain Eric H. May, our military correspondent, has been warning the Houston area, dense with petrochemical targets, that it is the the nation’s foremost terror target. In this issue of The Iconoclast, in Spook and Nuke, he turns his attention to the curious campaign of Commander Brian Klock, an ultra-secretive naval intelligence officer. Klock is seeking the Republican nomination in Texas Congressional District 22, which is the heart of the terror targets zone that Captain May has long identified.

Captain May was the first military expert to analyze the Houston area as the target for “9/11-2B,” the “next 9/11″ that official sources and major media constantly remind us is going “to be.”He has asserted that the real danger to the Houston area is not from a contrived terror threat called Al Qaeda, but from sources inside our own government. In his trenchant analyses, he has anticipated the dismal course of the Iraqi war at a time when retired officers senior to him were boasting of a war that was already won, or soon to be won. He has been right on the biggest issues before, and in the face of the most highly touted experts.

In the two years that he has been a writer for The Iconoclast, this newspaper has been intimately aware of his analyses and predictions.Two years ago he predicted to us a major petrochemical event in the Houston area for July 1, 2006. He was accurate to within one day, given the explosion of the Exxon Mobil refinery in the Houston suburb of Baytown, which drove oil to record prices.

In October 2007, The Iconoclast published his The Texas Triangle: Terror and Treason, in which he detailed the process by which he issued a red alert to southeast Texas just hours before the Oct. 18 explosion of a Dow Chemical pipeline in Port Arthur, which had been hosting military/police exercises simulating just that scenario a few days earlier. The Iconoclast staff was directly involved in that emergency alert.

Captain May’s notes and articles, provided to The Iconoclast, back up his claims to have issued the information to the FBI and local media that brought about a terror alert to southeast Texas on March 24, 2004. His prediction day for a major petrochemical incident was March 31, and he was off by one day again. The BP refinery in Texas City exploded on March 30, resulting in record profits for big oil.

In early July 2005, he predicted a July 27 event, and was contacted by the FBI as the day approached. Yet again, he was accurate to within one day, as the BP refinery in Texas City exploded on July 28, yet again resulting in record profits for big oil.

In mid January of 2006, he predicted the attempt of a nuclear attack on Texas City on Jan. 31. On Feb. 1, area residents were highly alarmed to find a U.S. military nuclear team on the Galveston beaches just south of Texas City.. Citizens went on record with their belief that Captain May’s alert had interdicted what was to be a false flag attack. Five news articles, three of them written before Jan. 31, offer invaluable insights on how and why he issued the alert, and what would have happened if he had not.

The rhymes are the “official” stories. The reasons lie in the profits garnered from a hidden agenda masked by a knowing and enabling force holding office.

The Iconoclast exhorts local and national political, military, and police leaders — if any with a conscience remain — to look into Captain May’s results in predicting petrochemical incidents in southeast Texas.Their unwillingness to investigate so far does not argue that this highly trained military intelligence officer is a mere conspiracy theorist, but rather that there is an official conspiracy to attack petrochemical targets in southeast Texas to induce oil profits at will, and perhaps to inflict mass casualties on American citizens.

For Captain May’s many articles on Ron Paul and the false flag operations in his district, refer to his Iconoclast columns, 2006-2009.

Mitt Romney may have all but locked up the Republican nomination with his victories in the East Coast primaries this week, but Ron Paul and his army of acolytes aren’t ready to give up the fight just yet.

As the rest of the political world’s attention shifts to the general election, Paul is still quietly amassing delegates at district and county conventions, and is now poised to take a real bite — or at least a big nibble — out of Romney’s delegate total.

In just the last week, Paul locked up 49 delegates, including five in Pennsylvania and four in Rhode Island, two states thought to be firmly on Romney’s turf. In Minnesota, Paul won 20 of the 24 delegates awarded at last weekend’s district caucuses, an impressive sweep that guarantees that Paul will control a majority of the state’s delegation at the Republican National Convention.

And despite staunch opposition from the state Republican Party, Paul took 20 of the 40 delegates awarded in Missouri last weekend, according to campaign chairman Jesse Benton.

In at least five other states — Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Washington, and Maine — Paul has done remarkably well at county and district conventions, and his supporters are expected to win a big chunk of the RNC delegates at the state conventions later this spring.

“We are very pleased with the results,” Benton told Business Insider. “We still have a long way to go, but we’ve done very, very well at the county caucuses and district conventions and that bodes well for our strength when we get to the state conventions. Now we need to keep our nose to the grindstone.”

Even Rick Santorum, who earlier in the race accused Paul of shilling for Romney, acknowledged the Texas Congressman’s impressive organization this week, telling CNN’s Piers Morgan that “Ron Paul is working the delegates hard.”

In a surprising twist, a lot of Paul’s recent success can actually be attributed to Santorum’s decision to suspend his campaign earlier this month. In many places, Santorum supporters have banded together with Paul organizers in an attempt to deny Romney delegates.

In Colorado, for example, Santorum supporters have bonded with their Paul counterparts over a shared skepticism of Romney’s conservative values. Although the Colorado GOP won’t select its RNC delegates until the state convention next month, Paul organizers have gotten many of Santorum’s pledged delegates to commit to supporting Paul over Romney.

“In Colorado, there is a real anti-Establishment sense — they want to send a very conservative delegation to the national convention,” Benton told BI. “We’re fighting it out, and we think there are enough Santorum delegates that are sympathetic to Ron Paul who will come over to us.”

In Washington, Santorum’s county caucus organizer sent an open letter to his fellow supporters urging them to vote for Paul’s delegates rather than Romney’s.

Here’s an excerpt of the letter, obtained by Business Insider:

Romney wants everybody to quit. Quitting may be his solution when his back is up to the wall, but it’s not what we want from our leaders. Our country has it’s back up against the wall! We need principled fighters and not a pretty boy in a suit. We nominate Romney and it’s the equivalent of making him the starting quarterback because he simply looks good in the uniform. He’s a defensive coordinators dream. The mere fact he wins in the same places liberals do in the general election says a lot.

At some point, and it might as well be now, people are going to reign back power from party leaders, unite and actually make something like a Paul/Santorum unity slate work. As I see it, it’s the only way to balance power, restore it back to the people and take it away from big money.

Those against such an alliance, especially elected state delegates, might want to address future problems and complaints concerning government to the person in the mirror. I fail to see the logic in people not trusting such an arrangement that both Paul and Santorum’s people have agreed to, yet they’ll trust the same people running the party for years that have helped bring us to this junction in history.

That Santorum’s supporters are taking a second look at Ron Paul rather than vote for Romney’s delegates is an indication that the former Massachusetts governor still has major problems with his party’s Republican base.

“The plurality of them just don’t want to vote for Romney,” Doug Wead, a senior advisor to the Paul campaign, told Business Insider. “A lot of people are upset that Romney has not reached out to them at all. [They feel like] ‘Why in the hell should we support him when he’s not asking for our support or doing a single thing to get it.”

Both Wead and Benton concede that it would be difficult — if not impossible — to deny Romney the delegate majority he needs to win the nomination. The goal now, Benton told BI, is “to win as many delegates as we possibly can.”

“We want to have a strong, respectful presence that says ‘We are here, we are are going to participate, and we are ready to talk about the party platform with you if you take our issues seriously,” he said. “We’re going to send a message that the liberty wing of the Republican party is strong, and that it isn’t going anywhere.”

The Romney campaign declined to comment on Paul’s delegate wins. But if Paul continues his hot streak, the presumptive nominees might not be able to ignore the libertarian iconoclast and his army of delegates by the time the national convention rolls around.

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Iran wanted to “wipe Israel off the face of the map” in an interview with Al Jazeera last week.

Meridor made the surprising departure from the frequent talking point in an interview with Teymoor Nabili on Talk to Al Jazeera. Video of the interview can be seen below.

Al Jazeera’s Nabili writes about the interview: “It’s when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran’s supposed determination to ‘wipe Israel off the face of the map,’ that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.”

Meridor: [Iran's leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out’, you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;

Nabili: Well, I am glad you acknowledged they didn’t say they will wipe it out, because certainly Israeli politicians…

Meridor: … they say it will be removed, needs to be removed …

Juan Cole explained on his Informed Comment blog that Ahmadinejad’s quote “comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all.” He writes that “it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that ‘the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.’ It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.”

The widely repeated mistranslated quote is from a speech given by Ahmadinejad in 2005, often used by politicians and corporate media.

[Nabili begins questioning Meridor on the misquote at about 4:10 in.]

Teymoor Nabili in Al Jazeera’s Blogs: A rare admission from Israel

Was it a momentary lapse of concentration or an honest admission?

Last week, in an interview with Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in Jerusalem, I heard something I have not heard before.

Let’s start with the background.

With the P5+1 (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) talks on Iran’s nuclear programme about to kick off, and the air thick with talk of a military attack on Iran, it seemed appropriate to try to gain some perspective from the Israeli establishment.

As Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy with a background in Iran issues, Meridor was the perfect man to talk to to.

An able and experienced politician, Meridor was mostly happy to skirt the direct questions and recite approved talking points.

It’s when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran’s supposed determination to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.

Meridor: [Iran's leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out’, you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;

Nabili: Well, I am glad you acknowledged they didn’t say they will wipe it out, because certainly Israeli politicians…

Meridor: … they say it will be removed, needs to be removed …

The minister spent much of the ensuing conversation arguing that for Iran to simply question Israel’s long term future amounts to an existential threat; there are many who agree with him.

But it’s his acknowledgement that there’s nuance in Iran’s position that’s so significant, and so rare.

Politicans from Binyamin Netanyahu through Britain’s William Hague and most of the US congress won’t do it; they have invested a great deal of political capital in arguing just the opposite, claiming incessantly that Iran will launch a nuclear weapon on Israel because, in their minds, Iran’s president has more or less said so.

Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University in the US points out, this position has remained unmoved by contradictory facts:

Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly said that his remark was misinterpreted. In January 2006, complaining about the ‘hue and cry’ over his statement, he said: ‘Let the Palestinians participate in free elections and they will say what they want.’ In July 2008, he told a meeting of the D-8 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey) that his country would never initiate military action but that the Israeli regime would eventually collapse on its own.

But there’s little doubt which opinion is most heard, and most listened to.

The Guardian of April 13^, 2012, contained a remarkable example of this.

This article, questioning the legality of an attack on Iran, is unusual anyway, simply because it addresses the issue of international law at all.

But more surprising are the statements in it, made by some fairly learned lawyers, which are not so much legal analysis as verbal callisthenics.

That Alan Dershowitz gives Israel the legal green light to bomb Iran is to be expected, but here’s Anthony D’Amato, a professor of international law at Northwestern University:

Iran says it wants to push the Israelis into the sea and that they are constructing nuclear weapons. That’s enough for me to say that cannot be allowed. If the US or Israel takes the initiative to block that action, it can hardly be said to be violating international law. It can only be preserving international law for future generations.

The combination of factual error and partisan analysis here is remarkable.

Firstly, his characterisation of Tehran’s policies is almost unique.

If “Iran” (and he doesn’t actually clarify who he means here) has ever actually said that it wants to “push Israelis into the sea” he doesn’t point us to the source.

Secondly, he doesn’t explain why such comments from Iran should cause more existential anguish than similarly belligerent comments made by Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in reference to Palestinians, or by Hillary Clinton in reference to Iran.

As for the concept of “preserving international law for future generations,” he does not clarify his thoughts on whether Russia and China might also be justified in unilaterally attempting such a feat, or in deciding what can and cannot be allowed in international politics.