Obama: The Audacity Of Hopelessness...

With Obama's massive troop escalation (can the Nobel Peace Prize be rescinded?) he's made Afghanistan his war, reminiscent of President Johnson's Vietnam War escalation. At the current death rate of 500 soldiers per year the events depicted in the film will soon become a shattering reality for many more Americans. And next year Obama will spend some $65 billion on Afghanistan, more than for the Iraq war.

Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires," is this administration's most egregious failing and is now fated to define Obama's legacy. Beyond Afghanistian, maintaining permanent military bases and large garrisons in Iraq, allowing Israel to evade a just two state peace with the Palestinians, clandestine Blackwater (now Xe services) assassins roaming around Pakistan, the killing of hundreds of Pakistani civilians by CIA Predator drone attacks authorized by Obama early in his tenure, and a continuing U.S. military build-up in Colombia under the guise of a phony "war on drugs," also are on the list.

A one-year litany of domestic disappointments could be captured by a bumper sticker reading "the audacity of hopelessness." After handing over almost $3 trillion to bankers, we have a jobless "economic recovery," an official 10.2 percent unemployment rate which is actually 16.5 percent, the number of home foreclosures continues to rise and a country in which one in four children only manage to keep hunger pangs at bay because of food stamps and soup kitchens.

In the face of this situation Obama's first stimulus package was pitifully small, and while it did "save" some jobs, it wasn't nearly enough for serious job creation. Obama's professed support for helping workers to unionize evaporated shortly after his inauguration. And under Obama's watch, as noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, "Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion dollar bonuses -- this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam..."(10/20/09).

The nine largest banks are distributing $32.6 billion in bonuses. But given the jobs crisis and depression-like situation confronting tens of millions of our fellow citizens, Obama found a record-breaking $664 billion for the Pentagon for fiscal 2010. Finally, Obama and many Democrats quickly abandoned government single payer national health insurance -- the only plausible solution to our healthcare crisis -- caving to the despicable, predatory, for-profit private health insurance lobbyists. (Note: These lobbyists gave $1.8 million to 18 key members of Congress).

For those who worked and voted for Obama, especially younger folks, all of this must be a bitter pill to swallow, a giant step backward toward disillusionment and cynicism. I prefer to interpret it as a necessary and valuable lesson in electoral illusions for those truly serious about making this a better country:

Obama, a brilliant and charismatic politician, was always a conservative corporate Democrat, a self-described believer in "the free market," and an enthusiastic accommodator to the rich and powerful. In the words of one pundit, Obama is Clinton without the sleaze. He would never have been given a favorable vetting by the financial elites who chose our presidential candidates if he represented the slightest threat to their domestic interests and global empire. By the way, the latter includes 800 military bases in 130 countries.

According to astute political analyst Paul Street, the Obama campaign set new corporate fundraising efforts, including nearly $1 million from Goldman Sachs. In short, aside from some crafty rhetoric Obama was never a social justice populist and viewing him that way always contained a massive dose of wishful thinking. In that narrow sense, Obama has been entirely consistent and didn't really betray anyone.

More and more Americans are wise to the fact that because Democrats and Republicans are virtually indistinguishable on the issues that matter most, the "change we can believe it" will not be forthcoming from these two business parties.

Short term we need a mobilized and vocal movement from below that dramatically increases the political costs for those resisting needed reforms. Longer term, we need systemic change, change in the class structure of capitalism. Until and unless workers who produce all the goods and services in our society participate in making the major economic policy decisions -- to run the economy democratically -- we will only be tinkering with a system that primarily serves those who own it. We need a new broad-based political party that actually responds to the genuine grievances and aspirations of ordinary working people and youth.

-Gary Olson ( “Obama’s First Nine Months: Change We Can Believe In?,” CommonDreams.Org, 12.3.2009. Image: "Obama Fraud," Image Products, 2009 ).

The Spectacularly Inept & Shameless Financial Elites...

Let's imagine, for a moment, how different the public debate would be today if it had been unions that had caused the current economic turmoil. In other words, try to imagine a scenario in which union leaders - not financial managers - were the ones whose reckless behaviour had driven a number of Wall Street firms into bankruptcy and in the process triggered a worldwide recession.

Needless to say, it's hard to imagine a labour leader being appointed to oversee a bailout of unions the way former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson was put in charge of supervising the $700 billion bailout of his former Wall Street colleagues. My point is simply to note how odd it is that the financial community has emerged so unscathed, despite its central role in the collapse that has brought havoc to the world economy.

Of course, not all members of the financial community were involved in Wall Street's wildly irresponsible practices of bundling mortgages into securities and trading credit default swaps. But the financial community as a whole, on both sides of the border, certainly pushed hard to put in place an agenda of small government, in which financial markets largely regulated themselves and citizens (particularly high-income investors) would be spared the burden of paying much tax.

The agenda advanced much further in the U.S., but had an impact in Canada, particularly on the tax front.
One would think that those who pushed this agenda so enthusiastically would, at the very least, be a tad embarrassed today. But so influential are those in the financial elite - and their hangers-on in think-tanks and economics departments - that they continue to appear on our TV screens, confidently providing us with economic advice, as if they'd played no role whatsoever in shaping our economic system for the past quarter century.

Of course, we're told there's been a major change in their thinking, in that many of them are now willing to accept large deficits in today's federal budget, in the name of stimulating the economy. While this does seem like a sharp departure from the deficit hysteria of the 1990s, a closer look reveals the change may not be that significant.

In fact, financial types have always accepted deficits - when they liked the cause. Hence their lack of protest over George W. Bush's enormous deficits, which were caused by his large tax cuts for the rich and his extravagant foreign wars. What they don't like is governments going into deficit to help ordinary citizens - either by creating jobs or providing much unemployment relief.

So the Canadian financial community has been urging that the stimulus package consist mostly of income tax cuts - even though direct government spending would provide much more stimulus and do more to help the neediest. If the Harper government follows the financial community's advice, we will simply move further along with the small government revolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s.

Of course, tax cuts are not the same as financial deregulation. But they are twin prongs of a bundled package aimed at reducing the power of government to operate in the public interest.

Surely it's time to rethink this resistance to government acting as an agent of the common good. And maybe it's time for a little humility on the part of a financial elite that long has enjoyed such deference while turning out to be so spectacularly inept.

- Linda McQuaig ("Financial Elite Have No Shame), The Toronto Star, 1.27.2009. Image: Title Card, B-Movie, "Scum Of The Earth," 1963).

History Repeating: The 40-Year Cycle Of Change...Is Here...

Written in 2005:

"First, I want to take notice of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the battle which set the stage for the defeat of fascism in Europe. (Interestingly, the battle which turned the tide in the Pacific War occurred at roughly the same date, June 3 - 7, off Midway Island, in 1942. U.S. planes destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers and even more importantly, the cream of Japanese naval aviation. But that's another story).

As we consider a day 61 years ago, it calls to mind the broad sweep of history, and various cyclical patterns of history--those posited by Nicolai Kondratieff and Ralph Nelson Elliott. For starters, let's consider 1893, 1932 and 1974. Interestingly enough, those bottoms of financial panics or depressions seem to operate on about 40-year cycles. If there is indeed a pattern there, we should get a humdinger of a depression around 2012.

Kondratieff posited that an economic cycle of debt buildup and repudiation repeats every 50-60 years. Given the enormous borrowing binge the world has gleefully embarked on during the past five years (M-3 expansion of around $2 trillion by some estimates, American homeowners tapping their equity to the tune of $1.6 trillion in new debt, Federal budget deficits on the order of $400 billion annually, etc.), it's difficult to dismiss Kondratieff's fundamental insight as entirely wrongheaded.

Many in his camp believe we are entering the "winter" phase which will culminate in a collapse or repudiation of all that debt. It's something to consider, given one irrefutable fact: no economy runs up forever in a straight line of unending growth.

"The low-interest-rate-fueled growth in the U.S. economy, says Robert Brusca, president of Fact and Opinion Research, has played out principally through reckless spending from refinanced real estate. I'm convinced that people have taken this money and blown it on gewgaws and junk," he says. "We're basically borrowing money to support our consumption, and we are living well beyond our means."

These "long waves" seem to suggest a severe and long-lasting downturn in the world economy is close at hand, based on the fundamental insight that the enormous mountains of debt which have been accumulated must now be repudiated in order to set up the next cycle of growth.

There is another eerily repetitive pattern of change which has occurred on 40-year cycles in the past century: one of social tumult and change. Consider the explosion of artistic freedoms in film and music of the 1920s, and the concurrent lifting of social constraints, and then note the similarity to the 1960s (ending either with the disasterous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, or Watergate in 1974,depending on your taste in history). If the 40-year pattern holds, we are in the midst of, or at least entering, a similar decade of social turmoil.

We could posit that the cycle began on Septemebr 11, 2001, ushering in a period not of artistic expression but of new constraints and paranoia. The rise of the religious right as a political force could be seen as the penumbra of the 1960s, just as the rise of a radically reactionary Islam could be seen as a reverse analog of the big-power Communist threat the U.S. faced in the 60s.

Where the 60s were all about questioning the conformity which had dominated social and political life in the 1950s, this decade seems to be about reining in the chaos, both outside the national borders and within. A new "ownership" ethic has replaced the paternalistic state ideal of the 1960s, and each new excess in the popular culture (hideously violent Playstation games, crudely misogynist hip-hop music is matched by a shrill new constraint (banning medical marijuana, stem cells, etc.).

Even more troubling, the divide between the wealthy elites and the middle class is widening; as the economy stumbles toward breakdown, the wealth of the nation has flowed to the top 5% of citizenry. As the average Schmoe relentlessly taps his home equity to support a lavishly foolish "upper-middle class lifestyle" filled with the spiritual rot of gimcrack distractions and useless toys, (Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2005, "Lagging Behind the Wealthy, Many Use Debt to Catch Up") the real wealth of the nation aggregates in the elites' hands. As tax rates for the wealthiest plummet to all-time lows, medical insurance becomes a luxury for everyone not independently wealthy or employed by a government agency.

The nation careens down the path of a fiscal policy of endless deficit, transferring whatever wealth remains in the hands on the young to the elderly via unsustainably expensive Medicare benefits, and yet the citizenry are strangely complacent, as if their internal compasses have been scrambled. The events of the decade ahead may provide a lodestone for the dazed American citizenry; as things fall apart, they may find their internal compasses re-set, and the distractions of consumerism less mesmerizing. Can it happen too soon? I think not.

-Charles Hugh Smith ("Are We Poised on the Precipice of Another Age of Turmoil?" 6.2005. Image: - Martin Luther King Jr.'s Mug Shot, thesmokinggun.com, 4.16.1963).

"King was arrested and jailed in Birmingham Alabama after a peaceful protest of segregation. It is here that King wrote "The Letter from Birmingham Jail." The open letter was a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen entitled "A Call For Unity" which agreed that social injustices were taking place but believed that the battles should be taken solely to the court not to the streets in order to better the city of Birmingham. King responded that without forceful, direct actions such as his, true civil rights could never be achieved. As he put it, "This wait has almost always meant 'never.'" He held that Civil Disobedience is justified in the face of unjust laws."-NationMaster Encyclopedia, 2005).

Bailed Out: Financial Wise Guys & The Wall Street Casino...

"The Congress told the American people to go to hell."-Lou Dobbs, on the passage of the 700 billion dollar Wall Street bailout plan, 10.1.08.

PART I: REPEALING ROOSEVELT

"The federal reserve is still struggling to contain what is already the most severe credit contraction since the Great Depression. Yet in all of the press coverage, commentators have scarcely acknowledged that this old-fashioned panic is a child of deregulation. During the past decade, the financial economy has repeated the excesses of the 1920s -- too much borrowing to underwrite too many speculative bets with other people's money, too far beyond the reach of regulators, setting up the entire economy for a crash.

The Roosevelt schema of financial regulation was built around two principles -- disclosure and outright prohibition of inherent conflicts of interest. All publicly listed and traded companies were required to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to the public all financial information deemed "material" to investor decisions. The New Deal also prohibited stock trading based on insider information, and it created structural barriers against the kinds of temptations that ruined the economy in the 1920s. The most notable of these was the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited the same financial company from being both a commercial bank and an investment bank.

The Glass-Steagall wall was devised to prevent a repeat of the 1920s' scams, in which banks made speculative investments, turned the debts into securities, and sold them off to unsuspecting investors with the blessing of the bank. With Glass-Steagall, commercial banks were tightly supervised and given access to federal deposit insurance, to keep savings secure and prevent runs on banks. Investment banks, meanwhile, were not government-guaranteed and were free to do more speculative transactions for consenting adult customers. But Roosevelt's newly created SEC subjected securities markets to much tighter structures against self-dealing and insider conflicts of interest.

The New Deal also acted on the home mortgage front. Millions of people were losing their homes and farms to foreclosures, both creating human tragedies and deepening the Depression. In response, the Roosevelt administration literally invented the modern system of home finance. Pre–New Deal mortgages had typically been short-term notes, where most of the principal was due and payable at the end of a brief term, often just three to five years. The New Deal devised the modern long-term, fixed-rate, self-amortizing mortgage. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration to insure these mortgages and win their acceptance among lenders. It also created the Federal National Mortgage Association to sell bonds and buy mortgages, and thus replenish the funds of local lenders. And the New Deal devised a system of federal home loan banks to supervise and advance capital to savings and loan institutions. Deposit insurance was extended to government-supervised mortgage lenders.

The system worked like a watch, combining sound lending standards with expanded opportunity. The rate of home ownership rose from 44 percent in the late 1930s to 64 percent by the mid-1960s. Savings and loan associations almost always ran in the black, there were no serious scandals, and the government deposit-insurance funds regularly returned a profit.

If you fast forward to 2000, much of this protective apparatus has been repealed. Regulators who didn't believe in regulation and a compliant Congress have allowed financial engineers to evade what remains. In the 1980s, regulators began allowing exceptions to Glass-Steagall. In 1999, Congress finally repealed it outright, permitting financial supermarkets like Citigroup to operate ANY KIND OF FINANCIAL BUSINESS THEY DESIRED, and profit from multiple conflicts of interest. The scandals that pumped up the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, as well as the most flagrant cases like Enron, and the crash that followed, were the result of the SEC and the bank regulators CEASING TO POLICE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST. In the scandals of the 1990s, corporate CEOs, their accountants, and stock analysts working for their bankers, all conspired to puff up corporate balance sheets and pump up stock prices on which executive bonuses depended. This is a little harder today, thanks to the honest accounting requirements of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (which the Bush administration hopes to water down). But the same kinds of conflicts and potentials for abuse exist when a mega-bank underwrites a leveraged buyout by an affiliated hedge fund, and then hypes the sale of securities when the fund is ready to sell the company back to the public.

Meanwhile, the once staid and socially directed system of providing home mortgages was seized by financial wise guys and turned into another casino. In the early 1980s, exploiting the Reaganite theme of government-bashing, the savings and loan industry persuaded Congress to substantially deregulate S&Ls -- which then speculated with government-insured money and lost many hundreds of billions, costing taxpayers upward of $350 billion in less than a decade.

In 1989 when Congress reregulated S&Ls, the financial engineers just did another end run. Mortgage companies that were exempt from federal regulation came to dominate the mortgage lending business. This loop of the story begins in 1968 with the privatization of Roosevelt's Federal National Mortgage Association. In the wake of that move, investment bankers invented a daisy chain known as "securitization" of mortgage credit. Through securitization, a mortgage broker could originate a loan, sell it to a mortgage banker, who would then sell it to an investment bank like Salomon Brothers, who in turn would package the mortgages into securities. These were then evaluated and coded (for a fee) by private bond-rating agencies according to their supposed risk, and sold off to hedge funds or pension funds. Each of these worthies took their little cut, raising the cost of credit to the borrower. Rather than diffusing risks, securitization concentrated them, because everyone was making the same bet on real-estate inflation.

In the sub-prime sector, you could get a loan without a full credit check, or even without income verification. The initial "teaser" rate would be low, but after a few years the monthly payment would rise to unaffordable levels. Both borrower and lender were betting on rising real-estate prices to bail them out, by allowing an early refinancing. But when a soft housing market dashed those hopes, the whole sub-prime sector crashed, and the damage spilled over into other financial sectors.

How aggressively the Fed should move has been the subject of extensive commentary. If the Fed moves too slowly or doesn't cut enough, it ends up playing catch-up behind an advancing panic. If it moves too quickly or too generously, it just invites the next round of speculation with cheap money, and in passing might erode confidence in the none-too-robust dollar. But all of this commentary misses the larger point: If monetary policy is the only tool the government has at its disposal, the Fed can't possibly solve the larger crisis (or prevent the next one) by using interest rates alone.

Indeed, until Congress dismantled financial regulation, the Fed was not called upon to mount these heroic rescues, which have become so common in recent years. Until the 1960s, the central bank could keep interest rates low, confident that they would underwrite the growth of the real economy rather than risky financial speculation, for the simple reason that entire categories of speculation did not exist.

But during the past quarter-century, as deregulation has turned the economy into a casino, the Federal Reserve has had to mount major rescues at least six times. In the early 1980s, it bailed out the big New York banks, some of which lost more than the total amount of their capital in failed speculative third world loans; the money-center banks would have been adjudged insolvent if the Fed hadn't bent its usual capital-adequacy rules. Next, the Fed poured huge quantities of liquidity into financial markets after the stock market crash of 1987, in which the market lost more than 20 percent of its value in a single day. The Fed intervened again on several occasions after speculators destabilized several third world currencies and economies from Mexico to Malaysia. The Fed cleaned up after the aforementioned Long Term Capital Management collapse. It flooded markets with money after the dot-com crash and the attacks of September 11, and most recently in the credit crunch of summer 2007.

Indeed, markets have become so reliant on the Fed's bailouts that they even have a term for it -- "the Greenspan put." A put is a financial term meaning a right to sell a financial security at a predetermined price. The knowledge that the Fed would cheapen money in a crisis reassured speculators that they could always unload their paper. That awareness also influenced financial insiders to behave more recklessly."

PART II: WHOSE TO BLAME?

"There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation."

-Robert Kuttner, PART I: "The Bubble Economy," The American Prospect, 9.24.07 , Part II: –Joe Miller & Brooks Jackson "Who Caused the Economic Crisis?" Factcheck.org, 10.1.08. Image: -John Wardell, "Roulette Wheel," Flickr 1.1.06).

History Repeating: America In The Gilded Age: Past, Present & The Commodity Futures Act...

THE PAST:

"The saga of American wealth creation, both for the nation and for its enterprising capitalists, reached its apotheosis during the Gilded Age, a period roughly delimited by the end of Civil War and the beginning of World War I. The Gilded Age ended sometimes in the first third of the 20th century, Some cite the 15th of April 1912, the night when the ocean liner Titanic sank. Others mention World War I or the stock market crash of October 24, 1929. All these events certainly had an impact on the factors which put an end to the Age of Moguls in America. The Titanic disaster taught mankind that there were still limits to where it could go. World War I started a process in which the power of the federal government was increased against the power of the tycoons, a process which would be furthered by the depression which followed the stock market crash of 1929. But what really put an end to the Gilded Age or the age of the moguls, was the introduction of income and estate taxes during the Wilson administration. Corporate and income taxes rendered wealth accumulation slower and more difficult, whereas the estate taxes prevented the perpetuation of wealth in the hands of the founding families."

THE PRESENT:

" How Did We Get Here This Time? That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing. This isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.

And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done slinging their gold card guts about the halls of congress, every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit."

THE FUTURE:

"In fact, it really does look as if the foundations of US Capitalism have shattered.

"Nothing will be like it was before," said James Allroy, a broker who was brooding over his chai latte at a Starbucks on Wall Street. "The world as we know it is going down."

Many are drawing comparisons with the Great Depression, the national trauma that has been the benchmark for everything since. "I think it has the chance to be the worst period of time since 1929," financing legend Donald Trump told CNN. And the Wall Street Journal seconds that opinion, giving one story the title: "Worst Crisis Since '30s, With No End Yet in Sight."

The only thing that is certain is that the era of the unbridled free-market economy in the US has passed -- at least for now. The near nationalization of AIG, America's largest insurance company, with an $85 billion cash infusion -- a bill footed by taxpayers -- was a staggering move. The sum is three times as high as the guarantee provided by the Federal Reserve when Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase in March.

The most breathtaking aspect about this week's crisis, though, is that the life raft -- which Washington had only previously used to bail out the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- is being handed out by a government whose party usually fights against any form of government intervention. The policy is anchored in its party platform.

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return," financial historian Ron Chernow told the New York Times. "We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams."

The Past: -Drew Caradine Shouter, ("A Classification of American Wealth: History and Genealogy of the Wealthy Families of America," 2008). The Present: -James Moore, ("A Nation of Village Idiots," Huffington Post, 9.18.08). The Future: -Marc Pitzke ('The World As We Know It Is Going Down,' Der Spiegel Online International, 9.18.08. Image: "Liberty Not Anarchy," 19th Century Labor Print, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections, Georgia State University, Harper's Weekly, 9.4.1886).

Scientific Proof: Emotion & Mental Belief = Physical Disease

"The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is an ongoing research project which is perhaps the largest scientific research study of its kind. Its purpose it to analyze the relationship between multiple categories of childhood trauma and health and behavioral outcomes later in life.

ACE is examining the effects of:
• Recurrent physical abuse
• Recurrent emotional abuse
• Contact sexual abuse
• An alcohol and/or drug abuser in the household
• An incarcerated household member
• Someone who is chronically depressed, mentally ill, institutionalized, or suicidal
• Mother is treated violently
• One or no parents
• Emotional or physical neglect

To learn more about the study, and to calculate your own ACE score, take a look at the link below:

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Test

Dr. Mercola's Comments: I have long maintained that your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease -- from heart disease, to depression, to arthritis and cancer. Even the conservative Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that 85 percent of all diseases have an emotional element, but the actual percentage is probably much higher. Other scientists and medical doctors who have left their conventional medical and scientific dogmas behind -- once they saw the proof for themselves -- claim that 100 percent of your current health status is due to your mental and emotional reactions to events that take place during your lifetime.

Notice that this ACE study was published nearly 10 years ago? So how come you haven’t heard all about it already? For the same reason that Dr. Geerd Hamer’s breakthrough “German New Medicine” hasn’t hit mainstream, even though he’s been at it for nearly 30 years. Or the reason why Bruce Lipton’s “New Biology” isn’t taught at schools everywhere even though his research spans across the past 20 years.

Removing an ingrained dogma is difficult, takes time, and requires people who are strong enough to teach an unpopular truth. People died for saying the earth was round not flat, and Dr. Hamer has been imprisoned for his medical treachery, which has an astounding overall 92 percent success rate. However, I believe we’re nearing the point of breaking through. Soon, there will be no denying the fact that your physical health is deeply connected to your mental projections and beliefs. I think this is exciting news – it puts the power back in your hands! But it may scare many who are not ready to take responsibility for how they feel, what they think, and their beliefs about their world."

-American Journal of Preventive Medicine (EXCERPT:May 1998; 14(4): 245-258)

On Susan Sontag: What We've Wrought Upon Our World

"In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."
- Steve Wasserman, Los Angeles Times, 2004 Obit for Susan Sontag