Making Money Work

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.

Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh.  Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election.  Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?

With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast.  Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009.  No such luck.  The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.

While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from?  In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million.  Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”

Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.

Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?

But are they?

Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:

I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me.  I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were.  I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this.  Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable.  I have no other word to use.

Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable.  In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.

On the Campaign Trail

When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign.  It was a brave undertaking.  Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas.  Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.

The Taliban move freely in Nuristan.  In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province.  The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.

Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan.  I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do.  Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”

Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot. 

“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”

Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.”  It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all.  Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.

In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed.  Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.

As Seraj wrote:

First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised.  Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.

The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes.  He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.

Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique.  When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:

His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did.  Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified. 

That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did.  Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out.  To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do?  My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.

Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”

Democratic Dreaming

Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America.  She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901.  He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule.  She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.

Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973.  The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.”  Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.

When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation.  She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.

Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:

I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work.  They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms.  I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.

In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:

Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election.  The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’  But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.

Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai.  At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.

Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us?  We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection.  Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."

International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans.  They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat.  As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not.  And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.

Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment.  When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it?  What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise?  If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?

If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart.  If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Copyright 2010 Ann Jones

Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.

There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.

The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.

And they're going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.



So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.

But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren't getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.

Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.

Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh.  Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election.  Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?

With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast.  Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009.  No such luck.  The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.

While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from?  In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million.  Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”

Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.

Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?

But are they?

Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:

I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me.  I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were.  I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this.  Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable.  I have no other word to use.

Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable.  In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.

On the Campaign Trail

When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign.  It was a brave undertaking.  Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas.  Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.

The Taliban move freely in Nuristan.  In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province.  The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.

Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan.  I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do.  Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”

Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot. 

“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”

Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.”  It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all.  Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.

In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed.  Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.

As Seraj wrote:

First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised.  Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.

The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes.  He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.

Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique.  When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:

His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did.  Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified. 

That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did.  Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out.  To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do?  My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.

Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”

Democratic Dreaming

Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America.  She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901.  He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule.  She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.

Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973.  The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.”  Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.

When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation.  She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.

Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:

I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work.  They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms.  I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.

In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:

Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election.  The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’  But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.

Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai.  At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.

Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us?  We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection.  Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."

International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans.  They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat.  As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not.  And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.

Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment.  When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it?  What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise?  If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?

If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart.  If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Copyright 2010 Ann Jones

Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.

There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.

The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.

And they're going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.



So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.

But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren't getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.

Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

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eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

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Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

Afghanistan still awaits final results from the nationwide election held last month to fill the 249 seats of the lower house of parliament. Deciding which of the more than 2,500 candidates won takes time because the Electoral Complaints Commission that investigates voting irregularities, made up of five men handpicked by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was swamped by more than 4,200 complaints.

Last year, when Karzai himself ran for reelection, he busied himself with backroom deals, while his supporters were caught red-handed stuffing ballot boxes and having a good laugh.  Every Afghan knew that the president who had been foisted on them by foreigners in 2001 was stealing the election.  Yet the international community, led by the United States, proclaimed the process if not exactly “free and fair,” at least “credible” -- which is to say: Hey, what’s a little fraud among friends?

With that experience so fresh in memory, the current Electoral Complaints Commission went to work with unusual efficiency, resolving most complaints with unaccustomed speed. And last week the chairman of the Independent Election Commission, an oversight body also selected by President Karzai, announced that it would throw out as invalid almost a quarter of the 5.6 million votes cast.  Until that moment Afghans, who aspire to democracy, had hoped for a more honest election than the charade that returned Karzai to power in 2009.  No such luck.  The partial results of this one look just as bad as the presidential vote, with roughly the same percentage of ballots invalidated.

While dumping fraudulent votes may give the appearance of rigorous oversight, the numbers raise a new mystery: where did those votes come from?  In the two days following the election last month, the running total of votes cast rose from 3.6 million to 4.4 million.  Now, it has suddenly jumped again to 5.6 million -- of which 1.3 million ballots have been discarded, leaving a total of 4.3 million valid votes. Election-watcher Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network described the attitude of the Independent Election Commission this way: “If you want to know where the additional votes came from: They were added fraudulently, now they have been removed, and that is really all you need to know.”

Perhaps noting that the fraud factor was holding steady, a spokesman for the Independent Election Commission declared that a level of fraud with more than one in five votes considered phony is “normal” in an election.

Thus do official bodies in Afghanistan’s widely advertised new democracy -- the one for which our troops are fighting -- smooth over all irregularities and make short work of making do, of overseeing elections as usual: not free, not fair, just good enough for Afghans?

But are they?

Without waiting for final results, what passes for “the international community” has already pronounced the elections a “success,” but an email from a parliamentary candidate, a woman I know named Mahbouba Seraj, tells a different story:

I honestly don’t know from where to start. My frustration, disappointment, and anger are so great I am afraid they might get the better of me.  I was involved in the first presidential election of Afghanistan in 2004 and the first parliamentary election in 2005, but oh how different those elections were.  I won’t say they were better because they too were captured by the War Lords, Commanders, and criminals -- just like this election -- but the level of fraud and corruption was nothing compared to this.  Those men used force and got elected by their rifles and machine guns, but this election was… unbelievable.  I have no other word to use.

Many “unbelievable” stories litter this election, but Seraj’s tale is especially instructive because, in the end, it is all too believable.  In fact, it’s a pretty simple story of courageous idealism confounded by big men with money.

On the Campaign Trail

When I last saw candidate Seraj in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in July, she was about to leave for Nuristan Province to campaign.  It was a brave undertaking.  Nuristan lies in the northeast of the country, sandwiched between Panshir Province and Pakistan, along the southern face of the Hindu Kush, a monumental sub-range of the Himalayas.  Its precipitous slopes and high valleys are so forbidding and remote that even Islam did not reach Nuristanis until the late nineteenth century, and they are to this day considered a unique people.

The Taliban move freely in Nuristan.  In 2008, they almost overran a U.S. base there, killing nine American soldiers. Then-Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal responded by withdrawing American troops from all four of their major bases in the province.  The U.S. military high command has given up on certain Afghan locales -- in 2010, American troops notably left the deadly and unattainable Korengal Valley, not far from Nuristan -- but never before to my knowledge had they given up on a whole province.

Nevertheless, Seraj, a woman of fierce energy, wanted to represent the people of the Duaba and Mondawel districts in western Nuristan, where her grandmother was born. She put it this way to me: “I believe in democracy so much. I want it so much for Afghanistan.  I tell my constituents, ‘I don’t believe in buying votes as so many candidates do.  Please give them to me willingly, because then you will have your representative in Parliament who will truly serve you.’”

Worried for her safety, I reminded her that, during the 2005 parliamentary campaign in her province, another female candidate, Hawa Nuristani, and several of her staff had been shot. 

“Yes,” Seraj agreed, “but she survived, and she won.”

Mahbouba Seraj’s recent email about her election race was not meant for me alone. It was addressed this way: “To my beautiful and forgotten province and its lovely and amazing people.”  It was an English translation of an open letter she had written to her constituents explaining why, in this important election, they had not been able to vote at all.  Reading it made clear why she considered the election of 2010 even more outrageous than previous shameful Afghan escapades in electioneering and fraud.

In 2005, the men in power in Nuristan had tried to murder the candidate they opposed.  Since then they have learned that the internationals -- read Americans -- will accept any results as long as the election process looks reasonably good. In 2010, far more sophisticated, they murdered democracy simply by killing time.

As Seraj wrote:

First of all, Nuristan had not been made ready for an election. They didn’t have Army and police personnel to provide security as promised.  Then the hard-working head of the election committee of Nuristan was fired two weeks before polling day because some powerful candidates complained about him to the Election Commission. The young man who replaced him seemed to have no idea what his job was, yet he made sure the ballot boxes didn’t get to Mondawel and Duaba districts, which very conveniently happened to be my constituencies.

The most incredible part of the story is that this young man had the power to stop a plane that was ready to take off to deliver the ballot boxes.  He refused to hand over the ballot boxes for Mondawel district to the official in charge of the district and the staff of armed men designated to carry the ballots through the mountains to all the remote polling centers in Mondawel. He created delays and made excuses for days until it was too late.

Officials in Kabul were also well-versed in the technique.  When Seraj tried to contact the head of the Independent Election Commission in Kabul, she reported:

His very polite assistant would talk to me and tell me, ‘I will ask Mr. So-and-so to call you back,’ but he never did.  Finally, I had to leave Nuristan and come to Kabul to meet with him, but when I arrived for our appointment, he had left the city to take care of other problems, and somehow I had not been notified. 

That day I tried to get in touch with anyone I could think of who might be able to help -- the Minister of Defense, the Head of the United Nations in Kabul, Mr. de Mistura, and other officials at UNAMA [The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] -- but everyone was engaged. By then I knew the level of fraud and corruption in Nuristan was going to hit the roof, and it did.  Ballots were stolen from polling stations and scattered on the mountainsides or taken to people’s houses and filled out.  To the last minute, people were offering to buy and sell voting cards and votes. What could we do?  My campaign manager and I filled out complaints to the Election Complaints Commissions in both Nuristan and Kabul.

Those complaints must now be among the thousands filed by people all over the country with similar disappointed dreams of real Afghan democracy -- the very complaints now being so efficiently dealt with in Kabul even as disgruntled voters take to the streets of Herat, Kunduz, Paktia, Ghor, and other cities to protest mass disqualifications that seem to fall inequitably on certain areas or ethnic groups. Yet angry voters and candidates are turned away from the Election Complaints Commission with useless, unregistered receipts. Recognizing election proceedings that look “eerily familiar,” analyst van Bijlert notes: “The processes that are aimed at cleaning up the vote and dismissing fraudulent ballots have become so murky that they themselves are now widely seen as simply the next phase of manipulation.”

Democratic Dreaming

Mahbouba Seraj acquired her dreams of democracy from her ancestors -- and from America.  She is the granddaughter of Habibullah, who was the progressive amir or king of Afghanistan from 1901 to 1919, and the great granddaughter of Abdur Rahman, the amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901.  He introduced Islam to Nuristanis, gave Afghanistan its present borders, and for the first time subdued its disparate tribes, bringing them under centralized rule.  She is also the niece of Amanullah, the modernizing amir who ruled from 1919 to 1929, pioneering in the fields of education and women’s rights, winning a war against the British, and gaining the country its independence.

Seraj herself graduated from Kabul University before being thrown into prison with her family after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973.  The family fled the country in 1978 before the impending Soviet invasion and took refuge in the United States where, Seraj says, “I lived, learned, worked, and in the end buried both my parents.”  Her life changed completely when she saw an Afghan video of the Taliban executing a woman, clad in a faded blue burqa, in Kabul Stadium where, as a girl, she had happily watched games of soccer and buzkashi -- Afghan polo -- and had once attended a concert given by Duke Ellington.

When the Taliban fell, she returned to Kabul and went to work as a volunteer. She trained young diplomats for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; she trained women parliamentary candidates in the arts of political campaigning and, after they were elected in 2005, in the arts of legislation.  She also created and hosted a national public-service radio program called "Our Beloved Afghanistan" and taught aspiring Afghan businesswomen at the American University of Afghanistan.

Then, last summer she went to Nuristan to campaign. To her supporters back in Kabul she then wrote:

I want to help the most underserved people in the whole of Afghanistan, the Nuristanis. If only the world knew how these magnificent people live in these great valleys of Nuristan, without roads, schools, hospitals, electricity, or any of the basic necessities of life. The women of Nuristan do all the difficult physical work.  They gather wood, they pick the fruit from the trees, they tend their animals and their children and their husbands, and they walk for miles, climbing steep mountains with huge loads on their backs and their kids in their arms.  I want to be a voice for Nuristan. I want to put it back on the map of Afghanistan.

In her most recent message to her constituents, she wrote:

Now, I have no idea how the Election Complaints Commission is going to decide who has won this election.  The ECC keeps saying, ‘We have criteria and will decide accordingly.’  But I wonder what criteria they will apply to candidates who have not received votes from their constituencies because some few people got paid to prevent the votes from being cast. Perhaps the government will abandon Nuristan, or perhaps it will pick its own winner and call this “A SUCCESSFUL AND JUST ELECTION SPECIALLY FOR NURISTAN PROVINCE, THE MOST BACKWARD, POOR, BEAUTIFUL, AND FORGOTTEN PROVINCE OF AFGHANISTAN.

Such a conclusion might be good enough for many Afghans whose dreams of democracy faded even before last year’s presidential election when word first began to circulate nationwide that the fix was in for Karzai.  At least it would be no more than they have come to expect from repeated exercises in counterfeit democracy staged, it seems, more for the benefit of international audiences (and voters) than for the Afghan electorate.

Here’s a question for Americans: Would such a conclusion be good enough for us?  We are, after all, citizens of the democracy that installed the largely fundamentalist government of Afghanistan in the first place, labeled it “democratic,” and staged the first Afghan presidential election in 2004 with unseemly haste as George W. Bush eyed his own run for reelection.  Assuming command in Afghanistan in 2010, General David Petraeus was careful to set American expectations low: "We're not trying to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less," he said. "What's good enough, traditional organizing structures and so forth are certainly fine."

International apologists for “good enough” who foot the bill and stage Afghan elections no longer even pretend to aim for standards like those of Switzerland -- standards that nonetheless enter the democratic dreams of a great many Afghans.  They assume instead that Afghans naturally cheat.  As it happens, Mahbouba Seraj does not.  And while it may be unreasonable to expect perfection, the fact that Afghan elections grow ever more crooked as the years pass, and Afghan voters increasingly disillusioned, suggests that Afghans are learning to play (if they care to play at all) by what they take to be American rules.

Put yourself in the place of an Afghan for a moment.  When you see photographs of President Karzai’s men stuffing ballot boxes, and a U.S. president not only telephones to congratulate him on his victory, while admitting that the election was “a little messy,” but also sends more troops to shore up his government, what are you to make of it?  What else could you make of it but that Americans are complicit in the whole corrupt and costly enterprise?  If you were a Nuristani, eager to cast a vote for a splendid woman candidate, and the ballots never came, what in the world would you make of that?

If you were Mahbouba Seraj, believing fervently in democracy, such things might break your heart.  If you are an American voter uneasy about the course of our democracy, well, maybe you ought to give some thought to this other Afghan democracy: the one we’ve set up, paid for, and sent our soldiers to fight for as an example to the world -- a small but increasingly transparent replica of our own.

Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan and the just published War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War (Metropolitan 2010). Having returned temporarily from conflict zones, she is undergoing culture shock as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Copyright 2010 Ann Jones

Next time you hear an economist or denizen of Wall Street talk about how the "American economy" is doing these days, watch your wallet.

There are two American economies. One is on the mend. The other is still coming apart.

The one that's mending is America's Big Money economy. It's comprised of Wall Street traders, big investors, and top professionals and corporate executives.

The Big Money economy is doing well these days. That's partly thanks to Ben Bernanke, whose Fed is keeping interest rates near zero by printing money as fast as it dare. It's essentially free money to America's Big Money economy.

Free money can almost always be put to uses that create more of it. Big corporations are buying back their shares of stock, thereby boosting corporate earnings. They're merging and acquiring other companies.

And they're going abroad in search of customers.

Thanks to fast-growing China, India, and Brazil, giant American corporations are racking up sales. They're selling Asian and Latin American consumers everything from cars and cell phones to fancy Internet software and iPads. Forty percent of the S&P 500 biggest corporations are now doing more than 60 percent of their business abroad. And America's biggest investors are also going abroad to get a nice return on their money.



So don't worry about America's Big Money economy. According to a Wall Street Journal survey released Thursday, overall compensation in financial services will rise 5 percent this year, and employees in some businesses like asset management will get increases of 15 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is back to where it was before the Lehman bankruptcy filing triggered the financial collapse. And profits at America's largest corporations are heading upward.

But there's another American economy, and it's not on the mend. Call it the Average Worker economy.

Last Friday's jobs report showed 159,000 new private-sector jobs in October. That's better than previous months. But 125,000 net new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the American labor force. So another way of expressing what happened to jobs in October is to say 24,000 were added over what we need just to stay even.

Yet the American economy has lost 15 million jobs since the start of the Great Recession. And if you add in the growth of the labor force -- including everyone too discouraged to look for a job -- we're down about 22 million.

Or to put it another way, we're still getting nowhere on jobs.

One out of eight breadwinners is still out of work. Most families in the Average Worker economy rely on two breadwinners. So if one out of eight isn't working, chances are high that family incomes are down compared to what they were three years ago.

And that means the bills aren't getting paid.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, more than half of all Americans -- 53 percent -- are worried about making their mortgage payments. This is many more than were worried two years ago, when the Great Recession hit bottom. Then, 37 percent expressed worry.

Delinquency rates on home loans are rising. Distressed sales are up as a percent of total sales.

Most people in the Average Worker economy own few shares of stock, if any. Their equity is in their homes. But with all the delinquencies and distressed sales, the housing market has a glut of homes for sale. As a result, home prices are still dropping. So the net worth of most Americans is still dropping.

And even though interest rates are falling, most people in the Average Worker economy can't refinance their homes. They can't get home equity loans. Banks don't want to lend to the Average Worker economy because people in it are considered bad credit risks. They still owe lots of money, their family incomes are down, and their net worth has fallen.

And according to the Reuters/University of Michigan survey of American consumers, expectations about personal finances are at an all time low.

Inhabitants of the Big Money economy are celebrating Republican wins last week. They figure financial regulations will be rolled back, environmental regulations will be canned, the Bush tax cut will be extended to the top 1 percent, and it will be harder for workers to form unions.

Inhabitants of the Average Worker economy aren't so sure. The economy has been so bad they're angry at politicians. They showed their anger at the ballot box. They took it out on incumbents.

But if nothing changes in the Average Worker economy, there will be hell to pay.

Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.

eric seiger

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

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eric seiger

eric seiger
eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

If you're a freelance writer, or thinking about becoming one, then you know that writing is the easy part. Finding places to pitch your writing, eg, marketing it, takes up the bulk of your time.

Well, there are a few ways on the Internet where you can start making money right away - as in, within one week. Following are three.

1. Write for Pay Sites (3 Reviewed)

A. AssociatedContent.com: My favorite write-for-pay site. The beauty of writing for this site is that you write what you want and get paid for it - anywhere from $3 to $40 for a minimum 400-word article. They also accept videos for payment.

The reason I like this site is: 1) as mentioned above, you write what you want. No editor guidelines to follow, writing about subjects that you have no interest in and/or tons of research to do. 2) No minimum pay out to reach (many sites have a minimum you have to reach before you get paid); and 3) Fairly quick turnaround time They usually take 5-7 business days to read your submission and make you an offer.

If you have a hobby, a subject you are passionate about, or a subject you want to take the time to write about - for whatever reason - simply set up an Author's account with them (it's FREE!) and submit.

NOTE: On rare occasions, your article will be rejected. However, the editors usually leave a note explaining why and you then have the chance to make changes and resubmit the content. As I said, to be rejected is rare, but on the few occasions I have been, I always rewrote and usually got a higher than normal offer by acting on the editor's suggestions.

Since I've been a freelance writer for over a decade and had a large library of content, I made a couple of hundred dollars in a few week's time by submitting previously published material.

Didn't I mention that the material you submit doesn't have to be original? You will be paid less for it, but as it's already written and has probably been used for other purposes, it's like free cash. They pay more for original material and material that they specifically request (new topics are emailed from the administrator each Friday).

B. WriteForCash.com: With WriteForCash.com, it takes them up to two weeks to review your article, and more often than not, you will have to make some revisions before your article will be accepted.

Also, it takes them up to three months to get your article on the web. Another drawback of this site is that they own the copyright to the work (eg, you can't resell the content) and you have to choose from topics they list on which to write.

To their credit, the list of topics can be wide-ranging and they pay from $10 to $15 per article. But, if you have a hankering to write about, for example, the World Cup, and it's not on their list, you won't get paid for it.

C. Constant-Content.com: With this site, you basically put your articles up for bid, setting your own price. However, a lot of writers there offer their articles for free, which diminishes your chance of selling one - especially if it's in the same genre. Further, you have to keep your price pretty low to sell articles - anywhere from $1 to $5. Although, this can increase if you write for high-paying genres, eg, finance, technical, etc.

On the upside, you can resell content here. So, if you are going to write an article anyway and sell it elsewhere, you might as well post it here. However, another drawback is that you won't be paid until your account hits the $50 mark. Realistically, this can take months, especially if you are only posting one or two articles a week and selling them for $2 or $3 each.

There are tons of ways to sell your writing online; these three sites are just to get you going and/or supplement what you may already be doing.

2. Start an Article Directory: This takes a bit more work, but is very simple to start. What do people look for on the Internet - information - lots of it!

To start an article directory, all you have to do is put up a simple website and start soliciting writers to submit their articles to you - free of charge. Most article writers are promoters of something - e-books, seminars, software, workshops, etc. They are constantly looking for free and/or low-cost exposure.

Soon, you can have hundreds of pages of content. How will you make money? Add Google ads (details below). Every time someone clicks on one of the ads, you make money.

Many article directories take articles on many subjects; some specialize. Only you can decide which is right for you. I personally prefer niche directories because as the web expands, I think users will revisit a directory that carries quality information on a specific topic more often than one that carries a lot of articles on everything. Even if you separate them out by category, I find the "all inclusive directories" too overwhelming. Again, it's up to you.

The real key to making money with an article directory is promoting it and getting good, quality articles for your site. To get excellent articles, surf the web using key words on your subject. Once you find an article you like, contact the author (most will have their contact info in the resource box at the end of the article) and ask them to regularly submit articles to your directory. They will almost always say yes.

Once your directory has been indexed by search engines, many will start sending you articles automatically. This is when your site should really take off. Once you have a few hundred articles in your directory (and this can literally take as little as a few weeks if you put in the time), slap those Google ads on each page, and voila - you have hundreds of pages of content carrying ads that, each time they're clicked, is money in your pocket.

NOTE: There are many article directories online where you can automatically pull articles from to get started. Do a Google search for "article directory" and about 3.5 million (yes, million!) results pop up.

Article Directory Software: If you want to put out a little money, you can purchase software that will completely automate this process for you. Do a Google search for "article directory software" and close to half a million results come up. With most of the software you can choose to buy and install yourself, or have the publisher install it for you. Note: You have to be a real techie if you choose to go the self-install route.

Before starting an article directory, I recommend taking several hours and doing some reading on the subject. While it's a relatively simple concept, it can be a lot of work up front - but can pay huge dividends over the months and years to come.

To learn more about getting those Google ads you see on many websites, go to Google.com. Click on "Advertising Programs" (a plain text button right under the search box). Then click on "For Web Publishers: Google AdSense". Finally, click on "What is AdSense? Quick Tour". The program will be explained in detail and you can have it up and running in about 5 minutes.

3. Start a Blog: This is becoming old hat, but is still new and fresh enough that if you have a passion for something and can target a highly defined niche, you can start a blog on it, add some Google Adsense ads, and turn it into a few hundred bucks a month without too much effort. Want to make more? Like anything in life, the more time you commit to it, the more your income will rise.

There's even a new website, Scoopt.com, that acts as a blog literary agent. What do I mean by this? Specifically, they "help you license your blog for both commercial and non-commercial use." In essence, they help you sell your blog's content. See full details at their site.

Blogs are no longer just for ranting about your last bad relationship or the bad dye job your colorist did on your hair. They are professional outlets for making money now.

To read a case study of how a personal interest can be turned into a popular, moneymaking blog, go to ProBlogger.net and do a search of their site for ""Back in Skinny Jeans". The article should pop up. It's very, very interesting reading.

FYI, to start a blog, go to blogger.com, create an account and start blogging away. It's FREE!

SUMMARY: These are not get-rich-quick schemes. My mission at InkwellEditorial.com is to help creative and editorial freelancers earn a decent living. I will never promise you that you will "make thousands a month by just doing x", as many will. Don't believe the hype.

I have been in publishing since 1987, and have been a freelancer since 1993. Believe me, I've heard about and tried so many different programs. The only way to make money is to consistently plug away at something. It takes time and effort, effort and time. The good news is that if you are determined to make a living as a creative professional, the Internet makes it easier than ever. And, it can be done "relatively" easy if you choose effective methods and consistently implement them.



eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

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News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger

Weekly Health <b>News</b> — Oh She Glows

Well, it is a good thing I made energy bites for last night because we needed them to fuel our beer and chatting marathon on the couch! Last night = Sitting on the couch > Kinect I am a strong.

Atlanta Hawks: Off Day <b>News</b> and Notes - Peachtree Hoops

News and Notes from following the Atlanta Hawks games against the Bucks and the Jazz.

Peggle bounces onto PSP next week PSP <b>News</b> - Page 1 | Eurogamer.net

Read our PSP news of Peggle bounces onto PSP next week.

eric seiger