Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a percent!

What's going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are a "lagging" indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring waits until a recovery is well underway.

But that isn't true with a deep recession such as this one, because at some point -- and we're well past that point -- high and prolonged unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal. Once people feel that they aren't going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs feel their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72% of economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a "lagging indicator." High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the economic downturn.

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It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it's fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won -- in New Jersey's case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent -- that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

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Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the U.S. didn't want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious -- we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in" surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found itself mired in a brutal war of occupation, and the U.S. had begun, back in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the Russians, not because Afghanistan -- a country even more remote and meaningless in terms of U.S. interests or security than Vietnam -- had any importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in the waning days of the Cold War.

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If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and on the tube, you'd think things had finally turned a corner. The economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter that ended September 30. "The Economy is Back in Gear" shouted the headline on an article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. "The recession ended unofficially in September," said a reporter on NPR.

There was some mention of the fact that earlier in the week there were reports that consumer confidence had fallen, foretelling a sluggish Christmas retail season, and that new home sales slipped an unanticipatedly high 3.6% in September, when analysts had been expecting a rise in sales. Meanwhile, new unemployment claims filed during the third week of October jumped to 531,000, well above the predicted 520,000, indicating that the official unemployment rate is likely to top 10% in the next Department of Labor report due out in early November. As well, fully one-third of the nation's homeowners were now said to be "underwater," meaning that their outstanding mortgage balances are greater than the current value of their homes. Not surprisingly, foreclosures are continuing to surge.

How to explain this seeming oxymoronic situation? Well, that positive economic growth figure, which comes on the heels of a 6.4% decline in GDP in the first quarter and a .7% decline in the second quarter, is, according to government analysts, actually largely the result of two government stimulus programs -- the "cash for clunkers" program that induced people to rush out and buy a new car (usually a much smaller, cheaper and, for the carmakers, less profitable one than they had been buying in prior years), and the $8,000 new home tax credit, which led a lot of people to rush out and buy a first home.

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Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: "Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work."

Kudos to The New York Times and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, and James Risen for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan's stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world's major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that "The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America's war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House." Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about how can the government explain this to the over 1,000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan). But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration's massive warrantless National Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election, this time gave a critically important story full play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month yet for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

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The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the U.S. Army for a permit to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch of flat land in what's called the "saddle" between the sacred mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island, and at the Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing of M101 mortar "spotting rounds," that each contained close to half a pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many as 2, 000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa alone.

But that's only a small part of the story.

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How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate, I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste -- the actual uranium from the used fuel rods -- and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places such as Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust -- and I'm not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs at it.

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The horrors of the U.S. Agent Orange campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on October 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors of the depleted uranium weapons that the U.S. began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it used much more extensively, and in more urban, populated areas, in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

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On October 13, The New York Times ran a news story headlined "Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange," which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases -- Parkinson's, ischemic hedart disease, and hairy-cell leukemia.

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The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been hammering out in Congress a health "reform" bill that, instead of helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the uninsured, while cutting the nation's overall health bill by at least a third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of eliminating any so-called "public option" or government-run health insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of Wall Street's biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a $3,800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health insurance plan from the private sector -- a gift to the industry of some 40-50 million new unwilling customers.

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