Government Grants for All

America’s most unwanted turn to the law

The US “supermax” prison system, which is built on the twin pillars of prolonged solitary confinement and extreme conditions, was put on trial this week by the inmates of one of the country’s toughest jails, the Ohio state penitentiary at Youngstown.

Prisoners who have spent years in isolation at the jail watched through the food slots cut knee-high in the steel cell doors as their lawyers listed the complaints against the prison conditions.

They described a regime more draconian than anything found anywhere else in the industrialised democracies, one that has been cited as violating international agreements on torture.

The prisoners spend 23 hours a day in small, sealed metal cells, described by one as living tombs. The 60 minutes of exercise allotted to each prisoner is also spent alone in a bare room. There is no outdoor yard.

The cell lights are never turned off, and prisoners who try to cover them to shield their eyes are penalised, setting back their chances of ever returning to a normal jail.

Prisoners leaving the cell block wear a set of rigid metal handcuffs, known as a black box, which allows no movement of the wrists. They are strip-searched on their way out and on their way back.

Brian Eskridge, imprisoned since 1990 for aggravated robbery, told the court: “It’s wild in there. You’ve got so many people isolated in there with no way of talking with anybody. You have a sense of anxiety and a sense of panic attack. You get isolated so much, the frustration just builds up inside you.”

In the last 20 years of the 20th century, the US built more than 50 super-maximum security prisons, designed as an intentionally merciless environment for the “worst of the worst”: serious felons considered too violent for ordinary prisons.

The get-tough solution was politically enormously popular at the time, when fear of crime was at its height. Some states, spurred by generous federal funding, built themselves two supermaxes.

“Buried in the crime bills of each new administration are subsidies for isolation units,” said Bonnie Kerness, a prison reform campaigner for a Quaker organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. “It’s a moneymaker for the states.”

The prison authorities defend the cells on the grounds that they make ordinary prisons safer for their inmates and create a secure working environment for the warders. They have the generally enthusiastic backing of the guards’ unions.

“I feel very strongly that we are achieving our mission,” the Ohio warden [governor], Todd Ishee, told this week’s trial. “First is always security. We’ve had no escapes and no serious assaults.”

But in the rush to lock up America’s most wanted, far more supermax cells were built than needed for true psychopaths – Ohio has 450 – and they have become a dumping ground for convicts unwanted by the country’s overcrowded jails: those from minority populations, the maladjusted and the mentally ill.

“They say they put purported gang members in there, but who’s a gang member becomes a whole political discussion. In some states it’s Asians, in others it’s native Americans,” Ms Kerness said.

“We also found a lot of mentally ill in these prisons. They don’t know what to do with them so the response is to put them in isolation.”

Some who are relatively stable when they arrive lose their grip on reality in the constant solitary confinement. At the Ohio state penitentiary, (OSP), psychotherapy is available, but the patients are shackled to a pole during the sessions.

After the opening arguments were heard in one of the cell blocks, the trial moved to a courtroom in nearby Akron. One by one, inmates in bright orange overalls were ushered in with shackles on their ankles and chains around their stomach, connected by a short leash to their cuffed wrists.

Keith Garner, a 44-year-old convicted murderer, told Judge James Gwin that he had been in jail since the age of 19, but his worst moment came when the OSP authorities decided to put metal strips around the steel doors of the cells, making them virtually airtight, to prevent disturbed prisoners throwing faeces or urine at the guards.

“Once they sealed it up, it’s like being in a tomb,” Garner said, explaining that it cut off the possibility of yelled conversations with other inmates.

Like Hannibal Lecter

Edward Tilley, serving time for attempted murder, was consigned to a 10x10ft (three metres square) isolation cell for stabbing another inmate who, he claimed, was trying to force him to have sex. Since then he has hardly seen the sky.

“I didn’t even know what time of day it was for those nine months,” he said.

David Clark, sent to the supermax because of a record of escape attempts, complained about the use of the black box. “It cuts my skin and my wrist swells up. Your family has to look at you chained up like Hannibal Lecter or something. They have to look at you in pain, squirming around.”

Human Rights Watch says that the conditions in supermax prisons violate the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture, both ratified by the US.

Prisoners have legally challenged the system in Wisconsin, Illinois and Virginia. Some cases focused on the constitutionality of their treatment, arguing it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. The Ohio prisoners, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, say they are denied due process, because the decisions to place them in supermax and keep them there are arbitrary.

For example, most of the prisoners giving evidence were sent to the OSP for acts of violence against other prisoners. But Daryl Heard was transferred for smuggling marijuana into his cell.

Review boards are meant to assess the prisoners’ behaviour according to an honour points system, with a view to returning them to lower-security prisons better equipped to prepare them for eventual release into the outside world. But their recommendations are commonly overruled by the warden.

Lawyers for the warden argued that he and his officers should be given the discretion to judge when inmates had earned the right to be reclassified. But civil rights lawyers believe that other factors, political and economic, are in play.

“Obviously there’s a pressure, once you build one of these places, to use the beds for prisoners from other overcrowded prisons,” said Jules Lobel, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights. “They have to justify it.”

Rules and practices

Inmates can have four books each, two of which must be religious, and six photographs

They spend 23 hours a day in their cells, and one hour alone in an exercise room

On leaving the cell block they are strip-searched, shackled and accompanied by at least two guards

Supermax prisons hold 20,000 people, 2% of the total prison population

There are supermaxes in 42 states and the District of Columbia, and a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado

Other notorious supermaxes include:

Boscobel, Wisconsin – successfully sued by inmates for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, and forced to stop taking mentally ill prisoners.

Wallens Ridge, Virginia – found last year to be taking overspill prisoners from Connecticut.

Tags: America's, Most, Turn, unwanted

America’s Long War

The message from General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was apocalyptic. “We are at a critical time in the history of this great country and find ourselves challenged in ways we did not expect. We face a ruthless enemy intent on destroying our way of life and an uncertain future.”

Gen Pace was endorsing the Pentagon’s four-yearly strategy review, presented to Congress last week. The report sets out a plan for prosecuting what the the Pentagon describes in the preface as “The Long War”, which replaces the “war on terror”. The long war represents more than just a linguistic shift: it reflects the ongoing development of US strategic thinking since the September 11 attacks.

Looking beyond the Iraq and Afghan battlefields, US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. “The struggle … may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come,” the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces.

Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3,700 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units – an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.

The Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, north Africa, central and south-east Asia and the northern Caucasus.

The cold war dominated the world from 1946 to 1991: the long war could determine the shape of the world for decades to come. The plan rests heavily on a much higher level of cooperation and integration with Britain and other Nato allies, and the increased recruitment of regional governments through the use of economic, political, military and security means. It calls on allies to build their capacity “to share the risks and responsibilities of today’s complex challenges”.

The Pentagon must become adept at working with interior ministries as well as defense ministries, the report says. It describes this as “a substantial shift in emphasis that demands broader and more flexible legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms … Bringing all the elements of US power to bear to win the long war requires overhauling traditional foreign assistance and export control activities and laws.”

Unconventional approach

The report, whose consequences are still being assessed in European capitals, states: “This war requires the US military to adopt unconventional and indirect approaches.” It adds: “We have been adjusting the US global force posture, making long overdue adjustments to US basing by moving away from a static defense in obsolete cold war garrisons, and placing emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to troublespots across the globe.”

The strategy mirrors in some respects a recent readjustment in British strategic thinking but it is on a vastly greater scale, funded by an overall 2007 US defense spending request of more than $513bn.

As well as big expenditure projects, the report calls for: investments in signals and human intelligence gathering – spies on the ground; funding for the Nato intelligence fusion centre; increased space radar capability; the expansion of the global information grid (a protected information network); and an information-sharing strategy “to guide operations with federal, state, local and coalition partners”. A push will also be made to improve forces’ linguistic skills, with an emphasis on Arabic, Chinese and Farsi.

The US plan, developed by military and civilian staff at the Pentagon in concert with other branches of the US government, will raise concerns about exacerbating the “clash of civilizations” and about the respect accorded to international law and human rights. To wage the long war, the report urges Congress to grant the Pentagon and its agencies expanded permanent legal authority of the kind used in Iraq, which may give US commanders greatly extended powers.

“Long duration, complex operations involving the US military, other government agencies and international partners will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries round the world, relying on a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches,” the report says. “Above all they will require persistent surveillance and vastly better intelligence to locate enemy capabilities and personnel. They will also require global mobility, rapid strike, sustained unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capabilities. Maintaining a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where US forces do not traditionally operate will be required.”

The report exposes the sheer ambition of the US attempt to mastermind global security. “The US will work to ensure that all major and emerging powers are integrated as constructive actors and stakeholders into the international system. It will also seek to ensure that no foreign power can dictate the terms of regional or global security.

Building partnerships

“It will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the US and friendly countries.”

Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: “When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades.” He added that the strategy was aimed at responding to the “uncertainty and unpredictability” of this conflict. “We in the defense department feel fairly confident that our forces will be called on to be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they’re currently not engaged, but we have no idea whatsoever where that might be, when that might be or in what circumstances that they might be engaged.

“We realize that almost in all circumstances others will be able to do the job less expensively than we can because we tend to have a very cost-intensive force. But many times they’ll be able to do it more effectively too because they’ll understand the local language, the local customs, they’ll be culturally adept and be able to get things accomplished that we can’t do. So building a partnership capability is a critical lesson learned.

“The operational realm for that will not necessarily be Afghanistan and Iraq; rather, that there are large swaths of the world that that’s involved in and we are engaged today. We are engaged in things in the Philippines, in the Horn of Africa. There are issues in the pan-Sahel region of north Africa.

“There’s a number of different places where there are activities where terrorist elements are out there and that we need to counter them, we need to be able to attack and disrupt their networks.”

Priorities
The report identifies four priority areas

• Defeating terrorist networks

• Defending the homeland in depth

• Shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads

• Preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction

Lawrence’s legacy

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.

The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate “an indirect approach”, building and working with others, and seeking “to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

They write: “One historical example that illustrates both concepts comes from the Arab revolt in 1917 in a distant theatre of the first world war, when British Colonel TE Lawrence and a group of lightly armed Bedouin tribesmen seized the Ottoman port city of Aqaba by attacking from an undefended desert side, rather than confronting the garrison’s coastal artillery by attacking from the sea.”

Tags: America's, Long

Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance

By Noam Chomsky
Published by Metropolitan Books
October 2003;$22.00US/$32.95CAN;0-8050-7400-7

From the world’s foremost intellectual activist, an irrefutable analysis of America’s pursuit of total domination and the catastrophic consequences that could follow.

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing—as in the Cuban missile crisis—to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and livable Earth. In Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky investigates how we came to this moment, what kind of peril we find ourselves in, and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species.

With the striking logic that is his trademark, Chomsky dissects America’s quest for global supremacy, tracking the US government’s aggressive pursuit of policies intended to achieve “full spectrum dominance” at any cost. He vividly lays out how the most recent manifestations of the politics of global control—from unilateralism and the dismantling of international agreements to state terrorism and the militarization of space—cohere in a drive for hegemony that ultimately threatens our survival. In our era he argues, empire is a recipe for an earthly wasteland.

Lucid, rigorous, and thoroughly documented, Hegemony or Survival is Chomsky’s most urgent and sweeping work in years. Certain to spark widespread debate, it is a definitive statement from one of the world’s most influential political thinkers.

Author

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling works, from American Power and the New Mandarins in the 1960s to 9-11 in 2001. A professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, he is widely credited with having revolutionized modern linguistics. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

For more information, please visit the author’s Web site at: www.hegemonyorsurvival.net or www.americanempireproject.com or visit writtenvoices.com

Reviews

“Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty, and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive.”—The New York Times

“For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.”

–The New Statesman. “12 Great Thinkers of Our Time”

“Chomsky’s 9-11 was practically the only counter-narrative out-there at a time when questions tended to be drowned out by a chorus, led by the entire United States Congress, of ‘ God Bless America.’ . . . It is possible that, if the U.S. goes the way of nineteenth-century Britain, Chomsky’s interpretation will be the standard among historians a hundred years from now.” -

--The New Yorker

“Reading Chomsky is like standing in a wind tunnel. With relentless logic, he bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us—and to discern what they are leaving out. . . . Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening.”

–Business Week

“For nearly thirty years now, Noam Chomsky has parsed the main proposition of American power—what they do is aggression. what we do upholds freedom with encyclopedic attention to detail and an unflagging sense of outrage.”

–UTNE Reader

“Chomsky . . . is a major scholarly resource. Not to have read [him] is to court genuine ignorance.”

–The Nation

Published by Metropolitan Books; October 2003 $22.00US/$32.95CAN; 0-8050-7400-7

Copyright © 2003 Aviva Chomsky, Diane Chomsky, and Harry Chomsky

Priorities and Prospects

A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call “higher intelligence,” meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which “achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.” It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants.

Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, he wrote, refutes the claim that “it is better to be smart than to be stupid,” at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber observation that “the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years.”

We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of “biological error,” using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.

The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well.

Two Superpowers

The year 2003 opened with many indications that concerns about human survival are all too realistic. To mention just a few examples, in the early fall of 2002 it was learned that a possibly terminal nuclear war was barely avoided forty years earlier. Immediately after this startling discovery, the Bush administration blocked UN efforts to ban the militarization of space, a serious threat to survival. The administration also terminated international negotiations to prevent biological warfare and moved to ensure the inevitability of an attack on Iraq, despite popular opposition that was without historical precedent.

Aid organizations with extensive experience in Iraq and studies by respected medical organizations warned that the planned invasion might precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe. The warnings were ignored by Washington and evoked little media interest. A high-level US task force concluded that attacks with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) within the United States are “likely,” and would become more so in the event of war with Iraq. Numerous specialists and intelligence agencies issued similar warnings, adding that Washington’s belligerence, not only with regard to Iraq, was increasing the long-term threat of international terrorism and proliferation of WMD. These warnings too were dismissed.

In September 2002 the Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the United States and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9-11 atrocities and was planning others. The campaign, timed to the onset of the midterm congressional elections, was highly successful in shifting attitudes. It soon drove American public opinion off the global spectrum and helped the administration achieve electoral aims and establish Iraq as a proper test case for the newly announced doctrine of resort to force at will.

President Bush and his associates also persisted in undermining international efforts to reduce threats to the environment that are recognized to be severe, with pretexts that barely concealed their devotion to narrow sectors of private power. The administration’s Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), wrote Science magazine editor Donald Kennedy, is a travesty that “included no recommendations for emission limitation or other forms of mitigation,” contenting itself with “voluntary reduction targets, which, even if met, would allow US emission rates to continue to grow at around 14% per decade.” The CCSP did not even consider the likelihood, suggested by “a growing body of evidence,” that the short-term warming changes it ignores “will trigger an abrupt nonlinear process,” producing dramatic temperature changes that could carry extreme risks for the United States, Europe, and other temperate zones. The Bush administration’s “contemptuous pass on multilateral engagement with the global warming problem,” Kennedy continued, is the “stance that began the long continuing process of eroding its friendships in Europe,” leading to “smoldering resentment.”

By October 2002 it was becoming hard to ignore the fact that the world was “more concerned about the unbridled use of American power than . . . about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein,” and “as intent on limiting the giant’s power as . . . in taking away the despot’s weapons. ” World concerns mounted in the months that followed, as the giant made clear its intent to attack Iraq even if the UN inspections it reluctantly tolerated failed to unearth weapons that would provide a pretext. By December, support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10 percent almost anywhere outside the US, according to international polls. Two months later, after enormous worldwide protests, the press reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion” (“the United States” here meaning state power, not the public or even elite opinion).

By early 2003, studies revealed that fear of the United States had reached remarkable heights throughout the world, along with distrust of the political leadership. Dismissal of elementary human rights and needs was matched by a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes easily to mind, accompanied by professions of sincere dedication to human rights and democracy. The unfolding events should be deeply disturbing to those who have concerns about the world they are leaving to their grandchildren.

Though Bush planners are at an extreme end of the traditional US policy spectrum, their programs and doctrines have many pre- cursors, both in US history and among earlier aspirants to global power. More ominously, their decisions may not be irrational within the framework of prevailing ideology and the institutions that embody it. There is ample historical precedent for the willingness of leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of significant risk of catastrophe. But the stakes are far higher today. The choice between hegemony and survival has rarely, if ever, been so starkly posed.

Let us try to unravel some of the many strands that enter into this complex tapestry, focusing attention on the world power that proclaims global hegemony. Its actions and guiding doctrines must be a primary concern for everyone on the planet, particularly, of course, for Americans. Many enjoy unusual advantages and freedom, hence the ability to shape the future, and should face with care the responsibilities that are the immediate corollary of such privilege.

Enemy Territory

Those who want to face their responsibilities with a genuine commitment to democracy and freedom—even to decent survival—should recognize the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many ways similar: to ensure that the “great beast,” as Alexander Hamilton called the people, does not stray from its proper confines.

Controlling the general population has always been a dominant concern of power and privilege, particularly since the first modern democratic revolution in seventeenth-century England. The self-described “men of best quality” were appalled as a “giddy multitude of beasts in men’s shapes” rejected the basic framework of the civil conflict raging in England between king and Parliament, and called for government” by countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants,” not by “knights and gentlemen that make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s sores.” The men of best quality recognized that if the people are so “depraved and corrupt” as to “confer places of power and trust upon wicked and undeserving men, they forfeit their power in this behalf unto those that are good, though but a few.” Almost three centuries later, Wilsonian idealism, as it is standardly termed, adopted a rather similar stance. Abroad, it is Washington’s responsibility to ensure that government is in the hands of “the good, though but a few.” At home, it is necessary to safeguard a system of elite decision-making and public ratification—”polyarchy,” in the terminology of political science—not democracy.

Copyright © 2003 Aviva Chomsky, Diane Chomsky, and Harry Chomsky

For more information, please visit the author’s Web site at: www.hegemonyorsurvival.net or www.americanempireproject.com or visit writtenvoices.com

Tags: America's, Dominance, Global, Hegemony, Quest, Survival

America’s Economy is Coming Down!

Facts or suppositions, all Americans have felt it on their pockets that there is something happening to their economy and not towards the positive side. The newspapers have been full of titles like “Oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed”. With the new oil price record of over $135/barrel, the price for food and goods reach new heights as well; keeping in mind that the dollar has dropped by 18% of his international value in 2007. In other words, the slumping American dollar caused the US economy a major hit; the latter shrunk by 16% in the past year when compared to global economy.

The response to what caused the US economy drop is complex; however, some answers can be found in the credit crisis.

Charles Moffat, from The Politics eZine affirms: “Americans have too many mortgages, too many credit cards and too much national debt. They rely on foreign imports from China and other nations and their own economy has become too service oriented and lacks manufacturing.

Imagine you have $10,000 in the bank and the yearly compound interest rate is 5%. Over a year you would get $500 in interest. But imagine for a moment if the value of food, gasoline and all commodities doubled in price in one year. Your $10,500 isn’t really worth the same as it used to be… it is now worth approx. $5,250 in terms of actual purchasing power”.

Economists’ answer

This is the situation in USA at the moment and the most important economists in USA seem to be rather gloomy when referring to the country’s economy:

“The world is set to jump off the top of a waterfall without knowing how deep the water is below.” – Kenneth Rogoff, IMF (International Monetary Fund) Head of Economic Research.

“There’s a 75% chance that the US will experience a currency crisis within five years.” – Paul Volcker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley says:”There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Pastors’ answer

To this reality, I’ll let you read on the spiritual answer of David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, Inc., the worldwide Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation ministry. He is the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, The Vision, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?, Hungry for More of Jesus, Revival on Broadway and many other books. David and his wife, Gwen, live in New York City, where he serves as senior pastor of Times Square Church.

“. . .Beloved, America is facing God’s judgment–and we will never be the same! In the days to come, literally hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose their homes. Why? They’ve leveraged them with equity loans, so they could play the stock market and try to strike it rich!

I tell you, the stock market has become America’s golden calf! People see it as a financial savior, and they worship it daily–trusting in it, depending on it, giving it all their energy and attention. But it’s going to fall suddenly–and none of the small, individual investors will be spared. They’ll suffer the most, losing their homes, their cars–everything!

I must ask you: “Are you prepared for what is coming? If not, are you acting now to get ready? When I speak of being ready, where do your thoughts take you? Do you think immediately of investments, bank accounts, survival plans, safety for your family?”

Indeed, today – while most of America focuses on its prosperity, God is waking a holy remnant in the church. These saints are on their faces, seeking Him with all their strength and crying out for a true Word from the Spirit of truth.

In recent months, our ministry has received hundreds of letters from pastors and believers who are repulsed by most of what they see in the church: hype, foolishness, entertainment, shallow preaching. They’re crying out, “Enough! We’re tired of seeing our pastors go to conventions and return only to introduce come new gimmick. We’re sick of seeing the flesh accommodated. We’re hungry for truth! We want to hear preaching that convicts us and challenges us to holiness and prayer.”

Believer, you can rest assured–in the coming days of calamity, the true revival won’t come through showboating, big-time preachers or TV evangelists. It won’t come through prosperity teachings or other doctrines of false security. No–God’s revival will come through a hidden company of pastors and lay people who have been in the school of Christ, learning His ways and trusting in Him. These will lead a revival of truth!

Yet not everyone is going to want truth. Many will turn to unbridled lust. Indeed, our society could see Sodom replayed a hundred times over. But, as our nation poises on the brink of chaos, many Americans will begin to seek truth, answers, life.

As for me, I want to face the coming times as “… a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth” II Timothy 2:15

I urge you: Ask the Lord to prepare you–His way–for the day “America’s golden calf” comes down. Seek His Spirit of truth in your secret closet. Learn to recognize His voice above all the worldly clamor going on in His church. Then you’ll truly be prepared to face the coming storm.”

Tags: America's, Coming, Down, Economy

America’s Economy is Coming Down!

Facts or suppositions, all Americans have felt it on their pockets that there is something happening to their economy and not towards the positive side. The newspapers have been full of titles like “Oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed”. With the new oil price record of over $135/barrel, the price for food and goods reach new heights as well; keeping in mind that the dollar has dropped by 18% of his international value in 2007. In other words, the slumping American dollar caused the US economy a major hit; the latter shrunk by 16% in the past year when compared to global economy.

The response to what caused the US economy drop is complex; however, some answers can be found in the credit crisis.

Charles Moffat, from The Politics eZine affirms: “Americans have too many mortgages, too many credit cards and too much national debt. They rely on foreign imports from China and other nations and their own economy has become too service oriented and lacks manufacturing.

Imagine you have $10,000 in the bank and the yearly compound interest rate is 5%. Over a year you would get $500 in interest. But imagine for a moment if the value of food, gasoline and all commodities doubled in price in one year. Your $10,500 isn’t really worth the same as it used to be… it is now worth approx. $5,250 in terms of actual purchasing power”.

Economists’ answer

This is the situation in USA at the moment and the most important economists in USA seem to be rather gloomy when referring to the country’s economy:

“The world is set to jump off the top of a waterfall without knowing how deep the water is below.” – Kenneth Rogoff, IMF (International Monetary Fund) Head of Economic Research.

“There’s a 75% chance that the US will experience a currency crisis within five years.” – Paul Volcker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Stephen Roach, Chief Economist, Morgan Stanley says:”There’s nobody home on economic policy in America right now. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Pastors’ answer

To this reality, I’ll let you read on the spiritual answer of David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, Inc., the worldwide Christian drug and alcohol rehabilitation ministry. He is the author of The Cross and the Switchblade, The Vision, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?, Hungry for More of Jesus, Revival on Broadway and many other books. David and his wife, Gwen, live in New York City, where he serves as senior pastor of Times Square Church.

“. . .Beloved, America is facing God’s judgment–and we will never be the same! In the days to come, literally hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose their homes. Why? They’ve leveraged them with equity loans, so they could play the stock market and try to strike it rich!

I tell you, the stock market has become America’s golden calf! People see it as a financial savior, and they worship it daily–trusting in it, depending on it, giving it all their energy and attention. But it’s going to fall suddenly–and none of the small, individual investors will be spared. They’ll suffer the most, losing their homes, their cars–everything!

I must ask you: “Are you prepared for what is coming? If not, are you acting now to get ready? When I speak of being ready, where do your thoughts take you? Do you think immediately of investments, bank accounts, survival plans, safety for your family?”

Indeed, today – while most of America focuses on its prosperity, God is waking a holy remnant in the church. These saints are on their faces, seeking Him with all their strength and crying out for a true Word from the Spirit of truth.

In recent months, our ministry has received hundreds of letters from pastors and believers who are repulsed by most of what they see in the church: hype, foolishness, entertainment, shallow preaching. They’re crying out, “Enough! We’re tired of seeing our pastors go to conventions and return only to introduce come new gimmick. We’re sick of seeing the flesh accommodated. We’re hungry for truth! We want to hear preaching that convicts us and challenges us to holiness and prayer.”

Believer, you can rest assured–in the coming days of calamity, the true revival won’t come through showboating, big-time preachers or TV evangelists. It won’t come through prosperity teachings or other doctrines of false security. No–God’s revival will come through a hidden company of pastors and lay people who have been in the school of Christ, learning His ways and trusting in Him. These will lead a revival of truth!

Yet not everyone is going to want truth. Many will turn to unbridled lust. Indeed, our society could see Sodom replayed a hundred times over. But, as our nation poises on the brink of chaos, many Americans will begin to seek truth, answers, life.

As for me, I want to face the coming times as “… a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth” II Timothy 2:15

I urge you: Ask the Lord to prepare you–His way–for the day “America’s golden calf” comes down. Seek His Spirit of truth in your secret closet. Learn to recognize His voice above all the worldly clamor going on in His church. Then you’ll truly be prepared to face the coming storm.”

Tags: America's, Coming, Down, Economy

America’s Last Taboo

Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article for the New York Times in which she pointed out the growing inequality of American society and was promptly denounced, by a rival paper, as a Marxist. “The Washington Times is an extreme-rightwing publication,” she says, so there was no surprise there. But the paper’s reaction underlined a general principle: that while one can say “fairly wild” things about race and gender in the US, there persists a certain coyness about class. “There’s this powerful myth that America doesn’t have classes; that they’re an ancient English or European thing that we abolished. And that if you’re not rich, it’s your own damn fault.”

Now 66, Ehrenreich has devoted most of her career to disproving this maxim. Her 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed was an account of the year she spent trying to eke out an existence on the minimum wage, which caused affluent readers everywhere to exclaim guiltily: “We had no idea!” She reported that companies cheat their staff of wages (there are 70 lawsuits pending); limit the number of toilet breaks staff take; forbid them from talking to each other or using “profanity” on the premises, and that the cleaner you hired through a “reputable” firm is probably made to clean your house while sick or injured. The book’s success owed much to the personal journey of Ehrenreich herself, who suggested the idea to her editor for a younger journalist to take on. But she fitted the profile of the invisible worker – middle-aged, female and knackered. Once in situ, she was bullied by various bosses and forced to retire each night to a motel because she couldn’t afford a flat.

Her latest book, which in the US is called This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, is the animating force behind all this, a collection of columns that almost amounts to a manifesto. The title comes from a Woody Guthrie song, which Ehrenreich can hardly bear to listen to these days. She writes: “I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie’s line, ‘This land belongs to you and me’. Somehow, I don’t think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.” (The book’s UK publisher evidently didn’t feel Guthrie’s song traveled well, and has opted for the title Going to Extremes instead.)

Ehrenreich’s skill, apart from the sheer quality of her writing, is to illustrate her opinions with wave after wave of examples, of unglamorous labour disputes and everyday injustices that don’t get much of a look-in elsewhere. Through them she details how wealth in America has transferred from the bottom to the top, thanks to tax cuts for the rich and Bush’s reluctance to regulate the markets, and exposes the fallacy that “growth” as measured by GDP is, for the majority of Americans, synonymous with better living.

“It was just so fascinating to me, without being an economist, to see how in the past few years growth has become completely decoupled from wages or the real conditions of what we call working people,” she says. “And the reason they were so decoupled is because of the huge inequality. So you could have many [economic] indicators looking very sunny and good, but you’re talking about a population that is so divided there’s not an average there any more.”

A book about the joylessness of the American right must struggle to avoid matching it with a litany of dreary, rival orthodoxies. But Ehrenreich has never been dour, nor for that matter predictable. She lives in the historic town of Alexandria, just south of Washington DC, in a jolly chaos of papers and magazines. On the mantelpiece is a card that reads, “I am not, therefore I buy”, but she is as suspicious of self-denial as she is of self-indulgence, both of which she sees as affectations. In one unexpected column, Ehrenreich flies at Jane Brody, the health editor of the New York Times, who throughout the 90s championed with great influence the virtues of a low-fat, high-carb diet. As well as questioning the health benefits of Brody’s principles, Ehrenreich calls them a way of enabling the well-off to feel virtuous merely by indulging their own narcissism. “The low-fat diet has been the hair shirt under the fur coat – the daily deprivation that offsets the endless greed.”

The “tireless preaching” that bedevils modern life elicits a resounding screw-you from Ehrenreich. Her latest bugbear is “positive thinking”, the underlying philosophy of much life coaching and motivational speaking, which she came across during the research for Bait and Switch, the follow-up to Nickel and Dimed. In it, she spent a year trying to expose white-collar office life but was scuppered by not being able to get a job. Instead Ehrenreich fell into the hands of the gannets who feed on the unemployed and sell them reassurances that getting a job is just a question of attitude. This was illustrated by cheerful Kimberly, a “co-active coach” whom Ehrenreich employed and ended up wanting to kill. As the economy recedes, you wonder if Kimberly and her ilk will disappear. “I tend to think that the irrational, delusional approaches will persist,” she warns.

Ehrenreich is by training a scientist, with a degree in chemistry and a PhD in cell biology. As a child she saw both sides of the economic divide. Her father was a copper miner from Montana who got an education and eventually qualified as a metallurgist and made it on to the corporate ladder at Gillette. “He was a very exceptional person, as he’d be the first to tell you. But he never – nor did my mother – say about people who didn’t do as well, ‘Oh we did it, so they can do it.’ They recognized that theirs was an unusual trajectory.”

Did they identify as working-class?

“No. I think they would have said middle-class. But I think my father always thought that he didn’t fit in. He was too rough-edged. And he had a lot of contempt for, say, Ivy League types or MBA types.”

What she sees as the stigmatisation of the sick in the US is a reaction in part to a “strange little detail” of her childhood. Her mother, who was politically more radical than her father and whom the young Ehrenreich would look at in alarm sometimes and wonder if she was a communist, had been brought up by her Christian Scientist grandparents. “And in no other way was my mother continuing to be a Christian Scientist, except for one thing: health. It was very bad to get sick. I remember when I had trouble seeing the blackboard in about seventh grade, she said, “People in our family don’t wear glasses.” Ehrenreich smiles ruefully.

Her son is a writer and her daughter a lawyer, (Ehrenreich is divorced; she moved to Alexandria to be near her two grandchildren) and half of her family still lives on low wages; her sister and her husband have just been forced to cancel their health insurance. I wonder if she had ethical qualms about Nickel and Dimed; isn’t there something unsavory about a comfortable journalist pretending to be poor and then being paid a lot of money to write about it?

“Well you know, that never entered my mind . . . what began to bother me a little bit was that there was a deception involved; that I had to tell people that I was working these jobs because I needed the money, which wasn’t true. But I always tried at the end to tell people I had got to know what the truth was. And then you can work off the guilt of any money by giving it away. Easily fixed.”

Until the success of that book she had been freelance, and the security, she says, has been wonderful. She hasn’t had a staff position since her first job working for the New York City government as a health planner, which she left after seven months when she decided that “the government was selling out to private interests” and went to work for a “radical collective” lobbying for better healthcare in the city. “That’s where I started writing, because we had a newsletter and I loved to do investigative pieces.”

Nowadays, people write to Ehrenreich with their workplace horror stories. The most shocking in the new book came from an ex-employee of one large retailer, who told Ehrenreich that in 2003 the company held him captive for six hours and interrogated him for giving a colleague a discount on a video game, before getting him to write a false confession and firing him. A former colleague alleged that such incidents were not unusual.

With Obama ascending there is hope of a sea change, although Ehrenreich remains characteristically cautious. She sees him “tacking to the right” and was disheartened by his choice of economic adviser, Jason Furman, “who was to the far right of the Democratic party and made his reputation as a defender of Wal-Mart [one of her principal targets in Nickel and Dimed]. And so in a way, I thought, OK, I’m not going to pay [Obama] any attention for a while.”

I wonder if the huge success of Nickel and Dimed, and the tax bill that presumably came with it, hasn’t sent Ehrenreich skidding off a bit in that direction. “Ha! I have to watch that kind of stuff. But no. I always say, if I could pay more taxes and be in turn told for sure that there would be decent schools for my grandchildren, that there would be healthcare for them, that there would be social security, if there was something in return, other than wars, it would be a wonderful thing.” She cackles. “As it is, I just get angrier and angrier”

· Going to Extremes: Notes From A Divided Nation is published by Granta (£8.99).To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

Tags: America's, Last, Taboo

Olympics: America’s Olympic Hopes Proved Unrealistic

And the winner of the gold medal for national self-flagellation over the early failure of its athletes to live up pre-Olympic expectations is . . . the United States.

In Britain, we may not yet be ready to declare a state of mourning over Team GB’s measly medal total of one silver and one bronze, but then we never proclaimed ourselves to be the greatest sporting nation on the planet; we didn’t send the largest team to Athens, other than that of the host nation; and we didn’t arrive in town with the most hyped (or should that be over-hyped?) water vessel since the Titanic headed out to sea.

At least Michael Phelps has managed three gold medals, although he shines out like a beacon. Yesterday his team-mate Jason Lezak, the fastest 100m freestyle swimmer in the world this year, finished 21st in the heats for the event.

The Americans believed they were in line to win 30 to 35 medals in the pool, including 15 golds. Thus far they have won 18, with six golds – not terrible, but enough to make a mockery of their predictions.

However, it would be wrong to single out the American swimmers. The US basketball team, packed with NBA stars, was at the embarrassing end of a 92-73 defeat by Puerto Rico. The US shooting team – packed with army-trained marksmen – was expected to win half a dozen medals. So far it has won none.

Needless to say, the inquest has already begun. The New York Times’ thesis was that US athletes have been cowed by their Olympic Committee’s instruction to tone down their patriotism. “This good taste effort is admirable and smart in the current climate but [it] is dulling the edge on the American team,” its columnist Selena Roberts wrote.

Jim Scherr, the chief executive of the USOC, suggested that his team needed the momentum that comes with a few big victories. “We hope to get on a roll, but what happened with the basketball team has probably had a negative impact.”

He could be right. Then again, he could be making the same mistake as his supremely cocky basketball players in refusing to countenance the idea that the rest of the sporting world might just be better.

Tags: America's, Hopes, Olympic, Olympics, Proved, Unrealistic

France Rocks America’s Boat

It wasn’t the first time and it will no doubt not be the last. But this week France’s foreign minister – never one to dodge an argument, especially where America is concerned – was speaking for most of a continent in describing Washington’s new world view as “simplistic”.

In a full-frontal assault on the Bush administration’s post-September 11 foreign policy, Hubert Védrine told French radio that Europe “is threatened today by a new simplism which consists in reducing everything to the war on terrorism. We cannot accept that idea. You have got to tackle the root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice”.

Returning to a thesis he has propounded for most of the past year, the minister said Washington was approaching foreign policy “unilaterally, without consulting anyone, based on their interpretation and on their interests”, and added: “It presents a problem because it is not our vision of the world, it is not our vision of international relations.”

Mr Védrine’s comments may be the harshest yet from the old continent, but they came amid genuine and mounting concern across Europe at the implications of President George Bush’s controversial state of the union speech last week, in which he named Iran, Iraq and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism in an “axis of evil”.

While the European Union fully backed the US-led campaign in Afghanistan, senior Spanish, German and French officials have all voiced their concern this week at the prospect of the war against terror being unilaterally widened.

While the EU undoubtedly shares US fears about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and about its support for anti-Israel groups, it remains highly dubious about the charge that Iran exports global terror or has links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

Europe sees trade and cooperation, as well as support for the reform process and for opposition moderates, as the best way forward in Iran, the Spanish foreign minister, Josep Pique, said this week.

There is also concern in Europe that the aggressive US rhetoric could presage an attack on Iraq. Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Ludger Volmer, said bluntly that Washington should not try to tar Baghdad with charges of terrorism in order to settle old scores.

It was left to Mr Védrine, however, to deliver the more general condemnation of US foreign policy. He is no stranger to the task: the French foreign minister has in the past attacked Washington’s “new high-handed unilateralism” and strongly criticised the Bush administration’s decisions to abandon the Kyoto accord on global warming and to pursue a missile defence scheme.

This time last year, he called the joint American and British air strikes on Baghdad “pointless”, saying almost every other country in the world had expressed their “disapproval, criticism, doubt and disquiet” and that the world community wanted Washington to provide a “redefinition of the policy on Iraq”, not more bombs.

But this time around France – often out on a limb in its frequent criticism of what the French like to call “American economic and cultural hegemony” – finds itself in the unusual position of not being alone.

Summing up Europe’s concern at the Bush administration’s new world view, the French defence minister, Alain Richard, said the EU’s conception of world peace and its approach to resolving crises was simply “not that of the US”.

Mr Bush’s “axis of evil” certainly poses problems to international security, he said, but it was only one of a number of risks including the Middle East conflict. In a remark many European leaders might now share but only a Frenchman would voice, he described Mr Bush’s apparent objective as “the exercise of political domination – purely and simply because he has the biggest boat”.

Tags: America's, Boat, France, Rocks

Pakistan Rejects ‘america’s War’ on Extremists

Serious doubts multiplied yesterday about Pakistan’s commitment to America’s military campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban after parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for dialog with extremist groups and an end to military action.

The new strategy, backed by all parties, emerged after a fierce debate in parliament where most parliamentarians said that Pakistan was paying an unacceptable price for fighting “America’s war”. If implemented by the government, support for Pakistan from international allies would come under severe strain, adding further instability to a country facing a spiral of violence and economic collapse.

“We need to prioritize our own national security interests,” said Raza Rabbani, a leading member of the ruling Pakistan People’s party. “As far as the US is concerned, the message that has gone with this resolution will definitely ring alarm bells, vis-a-vis their policy of bulldozing Pakistan.”

The resolution, passed unanimously in parliament on Wednesday night demanded the abandonment of the use of force against extremists, in favour of negotiation, in what it called “an urgent review of our national security strategy”.

“Dialog must now be the highest priority, as a principal instrument of conflict management and resolution,” said the resolution. “The military will be replaced as early as possible by civilian law enforcement agencies.” It also said Pakistan would pursue “an independent foreign policy” and, in a pointed reference to US military incursions into Pakistani territory, proclaimed that “the nation stands united against any incursions and invasions of the homeland, and calls upon the government to deal with it effectively”.

The force of the resolution was unclear last night, with differences in interpretation between the ruling People’s party and opposition. The document is not binding on the government even though it was party to it. The army remains the ultimate arbiter of security policy. Some analysts believe that differences between the parties will see a tussle over implementation that could temper the resolution’s thrust. The US response was muted, with officials saying they considered it rhetoric for domestic consumption.

But the intense American pressure on Islamabad to take on the militants was underlined yesterday by another US missile strike inside Pakistani territory, an instance of the heavy-handed intervention that parliament railed against. The attack came in Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan, at an Islamic school being used by suspected extremists, killing 11. The madrasa was linked to Afghan Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, who has an extensive network in Pakistan.

There have been about a dozen US missile strikes inside Pakistan since the beginning of September and a ground assault, fanning widespread anti-Americanism in the country. The US and Nato depend on Pakistan to prevent its tribal area being used as a safe haven for Afghan Taliban.

Past attempts by Pakistan at making peace with militant groups in the tribal area have allowed them to regroup and led to a sharp increase in cross-border attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Yesterday a US official made clear what it expected. “Pakistan needs to and is attacking insurgents in its northern areas,” Patrick Moon, a deputy US assistant secretary of state, said during a visit to Kabul. “Sanctuaries for Afghanistan Taliban in Pakistan complicate our security operations. Pakistani Taliban and other extremists such as al-Qaida are posing a threat to the stability of Pakistan.”

Pakistan is confronting multiple crises, political, security and financial, which threaten to overwhelm the nuclear-armed country and push it into chaos. It is heading towards bankruptcy, forcing Islamabad this week to approach to the International Monetary Fund for a rescue package. But the IMF bailout could be jeopardized if Washington is not on board.

Ordinary people complain that the country feels like it is falling apart, with a severe shortage of electricity causing blackouts of 12 hours or more in many areas, and crippling food price inflation, running at up to 100%, swelling the numbers living below the poverty line.

The country’s north-west, especially its tribal border area with Afghanistan, is under the control of Taliban and al-Qaida, who are connected to militant groups that have networks across the country. Yesterday, in what is now a typical day for Pakistan, aside from the US missile strike, eight anti-Taliban tribal leaders were killed by militants in the Orakzai part of the tribal area, and the army killed 20 fighters in Bajaur, another part of the tribal belt.

In Swat, a valley in the north-west, the headless body was found of a policeman, previously kidnapped by Taliban, and posters went up in Swat warning women against shopping in markets, saying it was “unIslamic”.

“Our country is burning,” said Senator Khurshid Ahmad, a member of Pakistan’s upper house of parliament for Jamaat-e-Islami, a mainstream religious party. “We don’t want Bush to put oil on the fire. We want to extinguish this fire.”

Sherry Rehman, minister for information, said the motion was a “firm resolve to combat terrorism”. But Talat Masood, a retired general and security analyst, said: “The army will be disappointed there was not a clear consensus. I think the army will continue with the existing policy.”

Backstory

Pakistan’s tribal territory, formally known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), is a legacy of the Raj, a 10,000 square mile sliver of territory that has become central to geopolitics and the homeland security of the US, Britain and Europe.

The laws of Pakistan do not extend to the tribal belt, which is run under its own punitive laws and tribal custom, a system developed by the British. Fierce customs mean that men all carry guns, and guests, including al-Qaida militants, must be protected.

Al-Qaida’s leadership and thousands of Taliban escaped the US war in Afghanistan after September 11 2001 by slipping into the tribal area, which runs along the border.

Under a treaty with the tribes, the Pakistan army was not allowed to enter the Fata, but the accord broke in 2004 under US pressure calling for al-Qaida bases to be disrupted. This sparked a tribal insurrection and pushed the locals towards extremism, creating a Pakistani Taliban. TalibanIslamic law, though it is believed that most tribesmen remain moderate.

Tags: America's, Extremists, Pakistan, Rejects, War'

Schoolboy Voted in As America’s Youngest Mayor

The new mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan, is a man of the people, ready to listen to their every concern, but only until 6pm. Then he has to do his homework.

The local elections on Tuesday may have been dismal for George Bush’s Republican party, but they were a triumph for Michael Sessions, an independent who emerged as the country’s youngest mayor at the age of 18.

Mr Sessions, who is too young to drink in his own town, won by just two votes after a recount. By 670 votes to 668, he beat the sitting mayor, who is 51, and had all the advantages of incumbency. And he won despite the fact that his name was not even on the ballot.

He was too young to stand by the spring deadline for registration, so after he turned 18 he entered as a write-in candidate – meaning voters had to remember his name and add it to the ballot by hand in order to support him. The circumstances make his triumph all the more likely to be a model for future insurgent candidates.

He started by winning the support of a powerful interest group, the Hillsdale firefighters’ union, who had fallen out with the town council.

The union has a membership of three, but in post-September 11 America it wields symbolic clout. Before endorsing Mr Sessions, its president, Kevin Pauken, called his teachers to check on his credentials.

“The guys were a little leery at first because of his age, but he really impressed us with his openness and his energy,” Mr Pauken told the Detroit News.

To help get his name known, Mr Sessions raised $700 (£400) selling toffee apples over the summer and spent it on posters and placards which were sprinkled around Hillsdale’s lawns by election day. His month-long campaign involved going door to door, explaining his vision of the town’s future in the kitchens of his initially sceptical neighbours.

“They’d look at me, and say ‘How old are you again? How much experience do you have?’ And I say ‘I’m still in high school’,” he recalled.

He promised Hillsdale’s voters he would revitalise the local economy and made his youthful energy his selling point. “I was optimistic the whole time,” he explained. At one point, five days before election day, that enthusiasm threatened to get the better of him. He spent so long out on the streets knocking on the doors, ignoring his mother’s pleas for him to wear a coat, that he ended up in a hospital emergency room with bronchitis. But by then his momentum had become unstoppable.

Mr Sessions insists that his high school obligations will not get in the way of his mayoral duties, pointing out that the $3,000-a-year job is part-time.

“From 7.50am to 2.30pm, I’ll be a student. From 3 to 6, I’ll be the mayor of Hillsdale, working on mayor stuff,” he said.

To help him do the “mayor stuff”, he is assembling a transition team of trusted advisors, who will help him deal with the town council and the town manager, who run the town between them.

The ousted mayor, Douglas Ingles, conceded defeat graciously and prepared to return to running his business, a roller-skating rink, full time after four years in office. “This is a very exciting time for our community. We need to find ways to generate enthusiasm, and I am 100% supportive of any change that makes that happen,” he said.

Tags: America's, Mayor, Schoolboy, Voted, Youngest