2 WEEKS TO GO—AMERICANS URGED TO VISIT IRS.GOV FOR FREE TAX PREP AND E-FILING BEFORE APRIL 15^th

The IRS and the Free File Alliance Make Online Filing Free, Quick and Secure for Every Taxpayer Making $56,000 or Less

WASHINGTON, DC (March 30, 2009) – The Free File Alliance today urged every American with an income of $56,000 or less to use free online tax preparation services available on the IRS website, www.irs.gov, before the April 15^th tax deadline. The online program offers free step-by-step preparation and filing services for 70 percent of American taxpayers.

“The Free File Alliance walks taxpayers through the filing process to make it quick, easy and secure,” said Tim Hugo, executive director of the Free File Alliance. “With the recession trimming budgets everywhere, this program helps Americans by offering essential tax preparation at no cost for all 98 million Americans making $56,000 or less.”

Taxpayers who would like to take advantage of the Free File service can visit the IRS website, www.irs.gov. By clicking on the “free file” icon on the left side of the page, users can find e-filing offers from participating companies and choose the one that best fits their needs. Taxpayers are then transferred to the company’s website, where they receive the necessary help to prepare, complete and electronically file their federal income tax returns, just as they would on paper. 

The Free File service is simple and user-friendly, and if used with direct deposit, it can provide a refund in as little as 10 days.  Three of the 19 participating software companies now offer the service in Spanish.

About the Free File Alliance

The Free File Alliance is a coalition of 19 private tax software companies that have partnered with the IRS to provide free, electronic federal tax preparation services for millions of Americans. More than 24 million taxpayers have used Free File Alliance since it began in 2003. According to an IRS survey, 98 percent of taxpayers who used Free File last year said they would recommend the program to others.

29/09/2007 Dm Digital TV & 1001inventions Manchester

Main Speaker: Dr. Salim Ayduz

Associated Professor, Fatih University (TR) and a visiting scholar at University of Manchester (UK)

Senior Researcher at Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC), Manchester, UK, Since 2003.

Associate Editor at http://www.MuslimHeritage.com and 1001Inventions Book… also contributor & author of various books on Islamic Science…

Description: Thousands of Muslim scientific and technological inventions and innovations continue to influence our lives up to the present day. They are in our homes, schools, hospitals, markets, towns and in the world around us. The fascinating, hitherto untold story, revealing 1,000 years of the rich scientific and technological heritage of the Muslim community and the men and women behind these inventions will be told by a galaxy of British non-Muslim and Muslim professors, dignitaries and VIP’s scholars. The chief guest leading this series is Professor Salim Al-Hassani, Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manchester, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization, (FSTC UK) and Chief Editor of the new mind-shifting book "1001 inventions: Muslim Heritage in our world"

11-14

A Muslim woman’s request to wear a hijab with her police uniform has sparked national controversy.

Courtesy Valeria Criscione | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

OSLO – Norway’s biggest headache right now is not the financial crisis. Rather, the predominantly Christian nation is plagued by a religious dilemma over the right of a Muslim woman to wear a hijab as part of her police uniform.

As the controversy has escalated, the country has seen the physical collapse of the justice minister, the public burning of a hijab, and a substantial rise in the popularity of Norway’s anti-immigrant opposition party just six months before general elections.

This is odd for a country known for religious tolerance, generous international development aid, and peace efforts worldwide. But the controversy highlights the latent fears of a nonpluralistic society, where 91 percent belong to the Evangelical- Lutheran Church of Norway.

The dilemma began last fall when a Norwegian Muslim woman petitioned for permission to wear her hijab, the traditional head covering for Muslim women, as part of her police uniform. Norway’s justice ministry originally decided in February to allow it, but revoked the permission a few weeks later after loud criticism from the police union, which argued it breached the neutrality of the uniform.

“A change of uniform regulations, with an allowance for covering hair, has never been a goal in itself. It has always been thought of as a possible means to increase the recruitment of police from minority groups in society,” said Justice Minister Knut Storberget, in defense of his decision to revoke the initial permission.

Amid the heightened media attention and political backlash from his flip-flopping, the minister collapsed and subsequently announced a two-week sick leave, which was then extended.

The hijab debacle comes on the back of the minister’s other religious-related political defeat over a now-defunct blasphemy law. Mr. Storberget initially tried to replace the law with a new paragraph that would have protected individuals from defamatory religious statements. But after much political opposition, the law was repealed and no paragraph introduced.

This has provided political fodder for the opposition Progress Party, which has stoked fears among Norwegians over “sneak Islamization. “ Progress Party leader Siv Jensen spoke out strongly at the party’s national meeting last month against granting special permission for special groups. She pointed specifically to the case of a largely Muslim neighborhood in Malmö, which she claimed had been partly overrun by Islamic law.

A March poll by Norstat for Norway’s national broadcasting station NRK showed that Progress Party soared 8.5 percentage points to 30.1 percent in the polls from a month earlier. Three government coalition partners, Labor, Socialist Left, and Center Party, all lost ground.

The center-left coalition holds 87 out of 169 parliamentary seats, while the Progress party holds 38 seats, the second largest after Labor. A continuing shift to the right could pose a threat to reelection chances in September for Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s Labor prime minister.

“If they continue to spin these irrational fears, I’m afraid it could lead to a lot of commotion,” said Thorbjørn Jagland, Norway’s parliamentary leader and former Labor prime minister, during a highly-attended religious debate in Oslo this week.

Some 500 people lined up around the block to hear Mr. Jagland, religious professor Torkel Brekke, the bishop of the Church of Norway, and leader of Norway’s Muslim Student Society discuss why religion is suddenly a hot topic.

The panelists discussed the recent media focus surrounding the hijab debate and blasphemy paragraph, the provocation caused by the burning of a hijab on International Women’s Day on March 8 by a Norwegian Muslim woman in protest of the garment, and fears among “religious nationalists” and “secular intellectuals” toward Norway’s Muslim minority.

“We could very well live with the mosques because they stayed in them. But when this began to affect our cultural values, then it became a conflict, and then it became politicized,” Jagland told the crowd. “But Islam is not a threat to Norway.”

“I don’t see Norway as a tolerant society at all, partly based on these debates and how they react to people coming to Norway,” said Professor Brekke, from the University of Oslo. “It’s tolerant in that you can practice any religion, but you have large sections of Norwegian society that react strongly to alien cultures.”

Immigrants make up 9.7 percent of Norway’s 4.8 million inhabitants. Norway has granted permission to about one-fourth of the 328,000 immigrants who arrived from non-Nordic countries between 1990 and 2007 to stay as refugees. The largest immigrant population is Polish, who are traditionally Catholic, followed by Pakistani. Islam accounts for 20 percent of the 9 percent of the population belonging to religious communities outside the Church of Norway.

Sweden has a more liberal policy in accepting refugees than Norway and allows hijabs in its police uniform, as does Britain. France has banned the use of hijabs and other ostensible religious items in its state schools since 2004.

The religious debate has overshadowed the economic one in Norway, which has been relatively shielded from the financial crisis thanks to its vast petroleum resources as the world’s third largest gas exporter.

Norway has a large budget surplus to help fund its financial stimulus packages and relatively mild unemployment – 3 percent, compared to 8.1 percent in the US. Moreover, it has invested its oil revenues in a $329 billion Government Pension Fund.

11-14

Ali Tabassi, senior vice president of global ecosystem and standards for Clearwire Corporation, has been appointed to the WiMax Forum’s Board of Directors.

He has more than 20 years of experience in development, integration, and operation of wireless solutions in the telecommunications, networking, and IP industries. Mr. Tabassi is responsible for leading Clearwire’s industry standards, global advocacy, and intellectual property invention programs, and is also responsible for the company’s international network engineering and operations.

Earlier, Mr. Tabassi served as the VP, Technology Development at Sprint Nextel, US’ 3rd largest wireless operator with nearly 54 million subscribers.

11-14

Courtesy Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Many Israeli troops had the sense of fighting a “religious war” against Gentiles during the 22-day offensive in Gaza, according to a soldier who has highlighted the martial role of military rabbis during the operation.

The soldier testified that the “clear” message of literature distributed to troops by the rabbinate was: “We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

The claim comes in the detailed transcript of a post-war discussion by soldiers, publication of which has triggered a military police inquiry into allegations about the use of lethal firepower against unarmed civilians.

The investigation was ordered by the military’s advocate general Avichai Mandleblit on Thursday after the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz published extracts from the transcript describing incidents in which Palestinian civilians were killed and property wantonly damaged.

In the fuller version of the transcript published yesterday, the soldier, a unit commander from the Givati brigade, says: “This was the main message and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.” He recalled that his own sergeant was from a hesder yeshiva, a college combining religious study and military service, who led the whole platoon in prayer before going into battle. The commander added that he had sought to talk to the men about Palestinian politics and society and, “about how not everyone in Gaza is Hamas and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us”.

After the offensive, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group called for the dismissal of the military’s head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a brigadier general. It said that he had distributed to troops a booklet saying that it was “terribly immoral” to show mercy to a “cruel enemy” and that the soldiers were fighting “murderers”.

The longer transcript conveys a fuller sense of the debate involving graduates from the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory course. At one point Danny Zamir, the head of the course, says he would have questioned the killing of 180 traffic policemen during bombing on the first day of the operation. One pilot replies: “Tactically speaking you call them police. In any case they are armed and belong to Hamas … during better times they take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens.”

The latest casualty figures published by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights list the names of 1,434 dead of whom they say 926 were civilians, 236 fighters and 255 police officers.

11-14

Courtesy Lieven De Cauter

March 20, 2009 “BRussells Tribunal  “ — The sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is a sad occasion for the balance sheet: during six years of occupation 1.2 million citizens were killed, 2,000 doctors killed, and 5,500 academics and intellectuals assassinated or imprisoned. There are 4.7 million refugees: 2.7 million inside the country and two million have fled to neighbouring countries, among which are 20,000 medical doctors. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans: two million widows as a consequence of war, embargo, war again and occupation, and five million orphans, many of whom are homeless (estimated at 500,000). Almost a third of Iraq’s children suffer from malnutrition. Some 70 per cent of Iraqi girls no longer go to school. Medical services, not so long ago the best in the region, have totally collapsed: 75 per cent of medical staff have left their jobs, half of them have fled the country, and after six years of “reconstruction” health services in Iraq still do not meet minimum standards.

Because of the use of depleted uranium in ammunition by the occupation, the number of cancer cases and miscarriages has drastically increased. According to a recent Oxfam report, the situation of women is most worrisome. The study states that in spite of optimistic bulletins in the press, the situation of women keeps deteriorating. The most elementary supplies are still not available. Access to drinkable water is for large parts of the population a problem and electricity is functioning only three to six hours a day, and this in a state that was once a nation of engineers. More than four in 10 Iraqis live under the poverty threshold and unemployment is immense (28.1 per cent of the active population). Besides 26 official prisons, there a some 600 secret prisons. According to the Iraqi Union of Political Prisoners, over 400,000 Iraqis have suffered detention since 2003, among which 6,500 minors and 10,000 women. Torture is practiced on a large scale, and some 87 per cent of detainees remain uncharged. Corruption is immense: according to Transparency International, Iraq, after Somalia and Myanmar, is the most corrupt country in the world. The American Foreign Affairs journal calls Iraq “a failed state”. This is symbolised by the fact that Iraq, a state that has the third largest oil reserves in the world, must import refined oil on a massive scale. Authorities are on the verge of giving oil concessions for 25 years to international (also European) oil companies, though they have no mandate or legal authority to do so. Instead of being paid reparations for the enormous destruction wrought on the infrastructure of the country, entailing billions in oil revenues lost, Iraq is again in line to be robbed. There is large scale ethnic cleansing going on against the Turkmen, the Christians, the Assyrians and the Shebak. Kirkuk is being “Kurdicised” by massive immigration and illegal settlements (of Israeli inspiration) and its history falsified.  

This data, referenced in numerous reports, was presented during an information session in the European Parliament organised by the BRussells Tribunal on 18 March by a panel of Iraqi specialists. On 19 March, there was a session in the Belgian Parliament where a national representative after the statement of Dr Omar Al-Kubaissi, a renowned Iraqi cardiologist and expert on health, frankly admitted that he had no idea of the scale of the humanitarian disaster. Who can blame him? In the European press we hear little or nothing concerning this humanitarian disaster. In the newspapers there is talk of elections, of an occasional bomb attack, of the political process, of the positive results of the “surge”, etc, but concerning the suffering the Iraqi people … next to nothing. We have fallen asleep and we console ourselves: Obama plans the retreat American troops; therefore the issue of Iraq is off the agenda.

The truth is that we want to forget this humanitarian disaster, because the West is responsible. Of course, in the first and last instance the administrations of Bush and Blair, but also the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Poland and Italy were part of the coalition and hence accessory while Antwerp was a vital transit port for the invasion. Therefore also Europe bears a heavy responsibility.

How is it possible that we can dissimulate the impact of the war, which initially stirred world public opinion, in spite of the flow of shocking reports? “Darfur” sounds a bell meanwhile (and correctly so) as a sort of African holocaust, but the crimes20against the humanity of a near “genocidal” scale in Iraq are swept under the carpet. If the press does not do its job, how can public opinion be touched? Even activists and well meaning politicians are not on the level. This type of disinformation, and the indifference that comes with it, one could call a form of negationism, or at least a type of immoral ignorance. Wir haben es nicht gewusst, we will say. But the people of the Arab region will not forgive us. Let this be clear.

11-14

By Harun Yahya

Excerpted from the book A Historical Lie: the Stone Age

When we look at the culture and religious values of societies in the various areas of the world, we see that they have much in common. These societies could not have shared any cultural exchange, but they believe in beings such as angels, satan and jinni that do not live in the same dimension as human beings. They believe in life after death, in human beings created from the earth; and their worship contains many common elements. For example, Noah’s ark is mentioned in Sumerian records, Welsh religion, and in Chinese inscriptions and in ancient Lithuanian religion.

This is just one proof that a single, all-powerful deity—that is God, Lord of the worlds—revealed the religious morality. Throughout the world, cultures have been taught religions that came from the same supreme place, revealing the existence of one incomparable deity. Our Lord has revealed Himself in every period of history through those servants He has chosen and exalted; and through them He has revealed the religion He has chosen for human beings. In the Qur’an, Almighty God’s last revelation, He announces that “every people has a guide” (Qur’an, 13:7). It is revealed in other verses that He sends a messenger to all peoples to warn them:

We have never destroyed a city without giving it prior warning as a reminder. We were never unjust.

Ash-Shu’ara:208-209

These blessed messengers always taught societies that they should believe in God as the only deity, serve only Him, and that they should practice good and avoid evil. Human beings will attain salvation through obedience to these messengers, chosen and blessed in God’s sight, and to the holy books they have left behind as an inheritance. The last prophet sent by our Lord as a mercy to the worlds was Prophet Muhammad (may God bless him and grant him peace); and the Qur’an, the last Divine book which is under Almighty God’s eternal protection, is the truest guide for humanity.

Conclusion of “A Historical Lie:  the Stone Age”

The Reality of Timelessness Should Not Be Ignored

The historical and archaeological finds we have examined in this book show that Darwinian claims about the evolution of history and societies are nonsense, with no scientific validity. The only reason why they are upheld is concern about the demise of materialism. As we know, materialists make the mistake of rejecting the truth of creation; believing that matter is the one absolute entity that has existed forever and will continue to exist eternally. In other words, they have divinized matter. (God is surely beyond that) Today, however, science has reached the point of confirming that the universe came into being from nothing (that is, it was created), which has invalidated all theories and philosophies supporting materialism and materialist views.

However, even if materialists’ views conflict with scientific evidence, they cannot at any cost accept that matter is not absolute but created. If they could just step back from their dogmatic prejudice for a moment, they would be able to see the plain truth and free themselves from the spell that materialism has cast on them. To do this, it will be sufficient to put their accustomed view to one side, rid themselves of their ideological bigotry and keep an open mind.

One of the first things they must consider is the real nature of the concept of time, because materialists think that time, along with matter, is absolute. This deception has prevented many of them from seeing the truth. Modern science has proven that time is a derivative of matter and that like matter itself, time was created from nothing. That is, time had a beginning. Also, it became known in last century that time is a relative concept; that it is a kind of changing perception and not something stable and unchanging, as materialists had believed for centuries.

The Real Nature of the Concept of Time

What we call “time” is in fact a method by which we compare one moment to another. For example, when a person taps an object, he hears a particular sound. If he taps the same object again, he hears another sound. Believing that there is an interval between the two sounds, he calls this interval “time.” Yet when he hears the second noise, the first one he heard is no more than an imagination in his mind, merely a bit of information in his memory. A person formulates his perception of time by comparing the “present” moment with what he holds in memory. If he doesn’t make this comparison, he can have no perception of time either.

Renowned physicist Julian Barbour defines time in this way:

Time is nothing but a measure of the changing positions of objects. A pendulum swings, the hands on a clock advance.

Briefly, time comes about as a result of comparisons of data stored in the brain. If man had no memory, his brain could not make such interpretations and therefore, he would never form any perceptions of time. One determines himself to be thirty years old, only because he has accumulated information pertaining to those thirty years. If his memory did not exist, then he could not think of any such preceding period and would experience only the single “moment” in which he was living.

Our Concept of the “Past” Is Merely Information in Our Memories

Because of suggestions we receive, we think we live in separate divisions of time called past, present and future. However, the only reason we have a concept of “past” (as explained earlier) is that various events have been placed in our memories. For example, we recall the moment we enrolled in primary school and therefore perceive it as an event in the past. However, future events are not in our memories. Therefore, we regard these things we don’t yet know about as events that we’ll experience in the future. But just as the past has been experienced from our point of view, so has the future. But because these events have not been supplied to our memories, we cannot know them.

Were God to put future events into our memories, then the future would be the past for us. For example, a thirty-year-old person recalls thirty years of memories and events and for this reason, thinks he has a thirty-year past. If future events between the ages of thirty and seventy were to be inserted into this person’s memory, then for this thirty- year-old individual, both his thirty years and his “future” between the ages of thirty and seventy would become the past for him. In this situation, both past and future would be present in his memory, and each one would be vivid experiences for him.

Because God has made us perceive events in a definite series, as if time were moving from past to future, He does not inform us of our future or give this information to our memories. The future is not in our memories, but all human pasts and futures are in His eternal memory. This is like observing a human life as if it were already wholly depicted and completed in a movie. Someone who cannot advance the film sees his life as the frames pass, one by one. He is mistaken in thinking that the frames he has not yet seen constitute the future.

World History Is Also a Relative Concept

All these facts apply to history and social life as well. We think of societies and world history as limited within the concepts of time and space. We divide history into periods and look at it in terms of this relative concept of ours.

We rely on our five senses to survive. We perceive only what our senses allow, and we can never succeed in stepping out of the boundaries of our senses. The time and space we live in are similarly perceived. If our brain cannot detect a being through our five senses, we simply say that that being has “disappeared.” Accordingly, events, images or sensations stored in our memories still exist for us—that is, they are alive, while those that are forgotten no longer exist. To put it another way, beings and events that are not in our memory become past events for us. They are simply “dead” and non-existent.

Yet, this holds true only for human beings, because only human beings have a limited memory. The memory of God, on the other hand, is superior to everything. It is boundless and eternal, yet one point deserves mention here: The term “the memory of God” is used only for clarification purposes. It is definitely not possible that any comparison or similarity could be drawn between the memory of God and the memory of a human. God is surely the One Who creates everything from nothingness and Who knows everything, down to the last detail.

Because the memory of God is infinite, nothing existing in it ever becomes lost. In other words, no living being created by God ever vanishes. No flower fades, no drink of water finishes, no period comes to an end, and no food is wholly consumed. In its first form as a cloud of dust, the universe is in God’s sight; every moment in history exists in His sight as they once were. The stones of Stonehenge are being set in place, the Egyptian pyramids are being constructed, the Sumerians are surveying the stars, Neanderthals eke out their living, the Lascaux cave images are being painted, people live in Catal Huyuk, and World War IIis raging. In the same way, societies that will live thousands of years from now exist in God’s sight, even as they are building their civilizations and arranging their lives.

Eternity has begun for a being or an event by the time it is created. For instance, when a flower is created, it is, in reality, destined not to disappear. That it ceases to become a part of one’s sensations and is erased from one’s memory does not actually mean that it has vanished or died. Its state in the sight of God is what actually matters. Furthermore, all states of this being, from its creation, throughout all moments of its life or death, do exist in the memory of God.

11-14

By Syed Aslam

I thank the Muslim Observer and Mr. Jams Adil for talking to Mr. Harun Yahya and publishing his  interview. (MO March 13 2009)

Mr. Yahya repeats the  same thing again and again that science and scientists have refuted evolution.   I don’t understand which science and scientist he is talking about. Evolution among the pseudo-scientists and flat earth enthusiast may be sitting on a shaky ground but among the educated scientists all over the world it is as solid as a rock strongly supported by all the branches of science.

Mr. Harun Yahya in his interview mixes science and religion by asking the question   “can they  account in terms of evolution for how the Prophet Musa’s (as) staff turned into a fully formed snake with digestive, motor and reproductive systems when he threw it down on the ground.   How do they explain that? No one can explain it scientifically or otherwise, nether can Mr.  Yahya, because God does not do anything that is against the principles of nature which He has  established  Himself.

Mr Harun Yahya  ask the question “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Everything is highly regular and perfect”. Yes, Mr. Yahya, millions of transitional  forms of fossils of different species have been found. Archaeopteryx is a glaring example which is intermediate between dinosaurs and bird, more recently many such fossils have been discovered in China.  I can go on and on and fill the paper like Muslim Observer many times over which  Mr. Yahya is looking for. As a mater of fact, you don’t have to look  for a fossil  to prove  that our regular chicken evolved from dinosaurs, because its genes still have some residue of dinosaurs. For example, by manipulating a set of genes, teeth can be grown in chicken’s embryo on its  beak  and  a tail can be extended like one found on dinosaurs.

Of all the billions of species which Allah created only 0 .1% have survived to this day. If every species were formed well defined, and perfect as Mr.Yahya says,  then  why are 99.9% of God’s creation became instinct?  God has a grand plan, and with every changing condition on the planet earth a new  species  evolves to match the environment. The lifeforms which can not survive in a new condition,  simply becomes instinct, what could be more simple and self sustaining than this system which Allah created.

Since we descended from a common ancestor we share a large percentage of genes which is common  with all the living things. The closely related livings things  will have much higher percentage of similarity in their genetic constitution than the distantly related organisms in the  evolutionary tree.  This is the reason why the genes  of  chimpanzee and human beings have 98.77 % similarity while we share 90 % with mice and 89 % with a horse and 60% with the banana. There are many other biochemical methods which has established  evolutionary relationship between the spices and proves without any doubt that evolution has taken place.

Mr. Yahya ask this question,  Evolution is a theory unable to explain even how a single protein came into being. First, he asks this question to the wrong people. Yes chemist and biochemist have produced amino acids and proteins in laboratory from gases present in the early earths  atmosphere.

Before the biological evolution, chemical evolution happened on the young earth surface thats why it took about two billion years for life to evolve. It was a simple cell bacteria called cyanobacteria which lived about three billion years ago. It took another 2.5 billion years to form organism with hard body parts, like a trilobite which lived 600 million years ago.  We find  the fossil of fish like creatures with no eyes 100 million years later. Then fish with eyes and then fish with bony leg like fins, an ancestor of tetrapod.  As the years passed the age of dinosaurs came and after the end of the dinosaurs age some 65 million  ago  the age placental mammals started but not in Australia because it separated from Pangea (Super continent) before the evolution of more advanced placental mammals and so all the animals remained marsupial even to this day.

Can Mr. Yahya deny all these  geological,  microbiological. palaeontological and genetic facts, which Darwin has nothing to do with? Should we Muslim abandon all these subjects  which provide the evidence that evolution is a fact?

11-14

By Bob Wood, MMNS

The week’s big news continued the debate raging over how best to fix our country’s dire economic situation. What amazes me most about this altercation is that the political party tied so closely to big business, capitalism and free markets continues to confuse its priorities, thus making the chaos even worse.

By now, it seems that enough blame has been directed at those who did most to derail our economy, including the stock, housing and jobs markets. Our recent leaders in Washington obviously missed frequent signals begging for financial regulation, which could have helped avoid this disaster. That Republicans owned the White House and controlled both houses of Congress in the middle years of this decade, when the makings of today’s crisis were at their peak, doesn’t dissuade party leaders from making disparaging remarks about the new government’s attempts to fix their mess.

Those former leaders had once showered praise upon then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, dubbing him ‘’the Maestro,’’ the ‘’greatest central banker in history,’’ and ‘’a national treasure.’’ Meanwhile, he was cutting interest rates to historic lows (bottoming at 1%) and encouraging home buyers to discover the wonders of financial innovations like adjustable rate mortgages.

Greenspan raised few eyebrows in Congress when he proclaimed that waiting until the asset bubble imploded before rushing to clean it up was better than stifling free markets. To do otherwise, he theorized, would impede growth with regulation and tighter credit. And just how is his plan working?

Of course, Greenspan was only part of the failed thinking that led the U.S. into an economic abyss. He garnered plenty of support for his claims about the benefits of de-regulation, lower taxes for the smallest portion of us, outsourcing good-paying jobs and the idea that a service-oriented economy would be just as robust as one based on manufacturing.

To this day, many continue to seek guidance from the leadership of the University of Chicago’s Economics department, home of the late Milton Friedman. Friedman’s best ideas, you may recall, served but one purpose: how to create an environment where a very small number of people could become fabulously rich. That those ideas had an uncanny way of making a much larger number of people ruinously poor was obviously considered inconsequential.

And our country’s political right wing appears almost oblivious to how a majority of us are victims of the dismal failings of its approach to running our economy during the Bush administration. They continue to call for even more of what has caused our current perilous economic situation!

Right on cue, this faction gets support from economists at the University of Chicago, as voiced in an opinion piece found in the March 20, 2009 Financial Times. The title of the article written by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy signals their anguish about the Obama team’s changing course: ‘’Do not let the ‘cure’ destroy capitalism.”

But who am I to criticize a Nobel Prize winner like Becker? Yet I can’t resist comparing the strategy proposed in the article with the results we’ve already seen from it.

Becker and Murphy cite the wonderful period of economic growth seen in the U.S. and around the world since 1980, with “world real gross domestic product growth” of 145% until the end of 2007. That works out to 3.4%/year, on average. Yet they fail to note that, in recent years, growth has been stronger in less capitalistic economies like China, Russia, Brazil and India!

They do mention growth in India and China, “after they introduced market-based reforms,” but not how little their economic principles resemble ours from recent years. And what about stronger growth seen in more balanced economic systems in Canada and Northern Europe, whose economies are often derided as “Socialist”?

The authors cite vastly improved global health statistics with higher life expectancies in the U.S., higher than in lower-income countries. Are they implying that, in Socialistic countries, medical advances have been muted or stifled in any way? Of course, we cannot know for sure what would have happened if any of these countries’ economic planning had gone another way. But can we assume that medical advances would not be better elsewhere than in America, which vastly overspends on private sector health care?

They also note that real per capita incomes have risen by almost 40% since 1980. Doesn’t that seem out of synch with reports that American workers’ average earnings, in real terms, haven’t budged in decades? Sure, those at the top have enjoyed much higher incomes, but what of the rest of us? Becker and Murphy fail to mention, as well, the role of the Federal Reserve under Greenspan, his massive money printing and the inflation stoked by it. They don’t explain why is it so hard for a single breadwinner to support his family today when this was the norm in the 1950s and 1960s.

The authors then delve into how new policy changes by the Obama team will ‘’foster unionization and a more centralized setting of wages’’ — and how that will be a bad thing: ‘’The relative freedom of U.S. labor markets in no way contributed to the crisis and would help to keep it short.’’

If pounding wages lower to less than subsistence levels is a good thing, the method doesn’t seem to produce real results. In what must be a case study in irony, a segment on CNBC’s “Market Watch” covered a Met Life survey of middle class Americans. It showed how roughly 28% of the group considers itself just one paycheck away from falling behind on financial obligations. And one half of the group believes they could get by for up to a month without a job before financial hardship takes hold.

Pounding workers’ wages as low as possible surely has not in any way contributed to massive foreclosures, record setting defaults on credit card loans, a huge pull back in consumer spending, or the shuttering of thousands of retail stores around the country, right? Ah, yeah, sure.

The last economic disaster brought about by this brand of unfettered free market capitalism, greed and concentration of wealth among a few at the top of the heap was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet the authors cite that event as having ‘’induced a massive worldwide retreat from capitalism, and an embrace of socialism and communism that continued into the 1960’s. That surely led to slower growth in places like Russia, China and India.

Actually, those were great times for America and the thriving middle class that benefited from strong unions and higher wages, with high taxation at the very top of the income scale. Economic growth was strong and steady after WWII, when health care advances remained steady, and higher education became available to more young people. How can these authors make the case that government involvement made it worse for us collectively than in those periods of unfettered free market capitalism that seem to swing us endlessly from boom times to bust?

Hey, wait a minute! Maybe that’s the real reason, after all! Maybe they really don’t care about our collective well being but merely strive to continue Milton Friedman’s life work: making a very small number of us fabulously wealthy and selling that to the rest of us as being in our best interests!

I’m guessing this is the true aim of what they preach, as if, as a nation, we have yet to wake up to how their best ideas have ruined so many of us and the grievous harm they have done to the country as a whole. The past eight years of Republican government and the free market economic policies championed by the Chicago School have nearly bankrupted us, and our potential pales in comparison to results achieved in Socialist Brazil (covered on the same page of the Financial Times one week earlier).

Results should matter. Warning us to wait long enough to see the proof of their ideas isn’t good enough. Their best ideas have failed the vast majority of us, while enriching a very few. The time for those ideas has passed. Trickle down didn’t trickle down, after all. Tax cuts for the richest haven’t produce jobs as promised, and deregulation has put us on the brink of economic disaster. Wouldn’t you think that these two would see our crisis, admit that its roots centered on the basic beliefs they champion, and do us all a favor:

Sit down, shut up and mercifully allow us the time to fix what you’ve broken!

Have a great week.
Bob

Bob Wood ChFC, CLU Yusuf Kadiwala. Registered Investment Advisors, KMA, Inc., invest@muslimobserver.com.