Noam Chomsky - The Contours of World Order: Fifty Years of the United Nations

Phony Debates and Rightful Entitlements

God, I hate these phony ‘debates’. I detest mentally and typographically bracketing the term with inverted commas. These are NOT debates. These are loosely structured opportunities for political stumping in a disingenuous setting meant to elicit intellectual formality and in the case of the ‘town-hall’ format a hint of democratic involvement by the people. Calling these sound-bite cavalcades ‘debates’ is like calling an under-done pork chop a pig; a lifeless, half-baked slice of the real thing served up for consumption.

The one point that seemed to hover like shrouded doom over the sound-stage of the most recent exchange of talking points was the matter of ‘entitlements’ and social programs. We all know (or should know by now) with rueful certainty that whenever politicians start to sound off about tax cuts and spending cuts, they mean one thing – social programs and ‘entitlements’ are going to get the ax. The programs might not be eliminated altogether; that would be political suicide. All that needs to be done is to severely limit the amount of funding to the programs and they become moribund. (The vaunted ‘No Child Left Behind’ programs springs to mind along with George Carlin’s bit where he states “No child left behind; it used to be the ‘Head-start Program’. Looks like we’re losing ground.” Or words to that effect – my apologies to George. RIP)

On the other hand – the dirty one - Pentagon ‘defense’ contracts to GE, Lockheed and the others scarffing the slop at the trough needn’t worry about the volume of swill flowing from the public coffers. They’ll most assuredly get theirs for keeping our nation safe for pork-barrels, boondoggles and ear-marks and save from peaceful initiative and diplomatic negotiation.

Of course, as private citizens, we know we’re going to get ours, too – right in the neck. Moreover, we know that whoever gets picked in November for on-the-job training in the Oval Office will choose to look beyond the pitiable effects of program cuts on individuals losing health benefits or income assistance and will focus, instead on reports on voter demographics for guidance on which programs get the short end.

This is maddening. Big John Madden-type maddening because it’s so ‘boom-bam; run the ball up the middle’ simple. That such simplicity, such obvious, self-evident nodules of truth must be pointed out, declared and clarified to an educated, adult public sets my head to shaking and my mind to boogling.

There is a perfectly good reason the term 'entitlements' is used when discussing Medi-care, Medicaid, Social Security and the other pitiful scraps that Washington deems to toss our way.

Need I say it? I guess I do - They are called 'entitlements' because we, the people who are taxed and who then provide them to ourselves for our own benefit, are ENTITLED to them.

Furthermore, not only are we entitled to the sorry dog-ends we currently snatch and scurry back to our stool in the corner with but much, much more. Consider this: a tenth of the current bail-out/sellout package would pay for universal health care for every American. Why aren't we getting it?

That is not a rhetorical question. We deserve an answer that satisfies us.

The USA is the only modern industrial nation that does NOT have universal health care. All the other industrial nations, including the Republic of China on Taiwan, have manageable, affordable health care for every citizen. Many countries, like Taiwan, even include resident aliens in the health care programs.

Where is the political will of the people, the working men and women of America? We should all be demanding that our money – OUR MONEY – be used to provide free universal health care for each and every man, woman and child. We should demand that the USA should take its place amongst the other industrialized nations, France, Germany, Canada, Great Britain by legislating and funding a universal health care system that benefits all Americans.

Speaking of which, McCain and other Republicrats like to boast about the American worker being the most industrious, hardest-working, workers in the world. Politicians like to polish the apple when talking to the cogs in the wheels of industry. (That's the way politicians operate; they butter you up before they stick you in the roaster.)

Do you ever wonder why the Western Europeans don’t much bother to match that boast about 'hard-working Americans'? It's simple. Western Europeans have, on average, 4 weeks of paid vacation annually. They also get sick days, maternity days for both parents, personal days, public and religious holidays OFF - mostly with pay. Yet, despite the fact that European workers may not match American workers in productivity or the number of hours clocked each week, Europeans have universal health care, tuition-free university education, free trade-schooling and a list of public entitlements that goes on and on. Now, Europe is no utopia, but the E.U. is seriously kicking America’s butt economically. (There’s no reason to think that the recent on-going serial catastrophes on Wall Street will change that, either.) Whatever social entitlement programs are prevalent in Europe and Asia, they have not disabled their economies. No question.

We're sold the tale that America is the richest, most powerful, most productive, most enterprising nation on earth. Yet Americans don't provide themselves universal health care or publically funded tertiary education programs. For years, as shown time and again in reputable polls, the majority of Americans want universal health care as well as other social entitlement programs yet the representatives chosen to service the will of the people choose to serve the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical companies and the other profit-driven health-care corporations. This is an unacceptable disconnect of public need, public will and public policy.

What gives?

Not the trickle-down Reaganite policies that have destroyed the social services programs that had been put into place by the New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, programs that assisted many citizens who needed and were entitled to assistance, that's for certain. Those ‘Chicago-boy’, neo-liberal economic theories championed by Milton Freidman have failed - quite often miserably.

Here is the lesson learned about ‘Trickle-down Economic’: The rapacious, anti-social greed of the super-rich allows only the slimmest stream of offal to trickle down to those at the very nadir of the withered teat of neo-liberal economic policies.

As woefully evidenced in Latin America, Africa and Indonesia, the policies of ‘Freidmanites’ more often than not send infant mortality rates higher, life expectancy lower and the majority of the population into horrifically abject levels of poverty and destitution while aggrandizing the ruling oligarchy and enriching the corporate elite.

With the on-going collapse of the investment banking system of high-stakes, high-risk gambling with massive, crushing debt, we are witnessing the neo-liberal policies which the IMF, the World Bank and the US State Department, in collusion with multi-national corporations, have ruthlessly forced upon the Third World with dire consequences come home to roost.

The Chicago Boys of Pinoche’s Chile have invaded the Beltway, folks. They have begun to demand that the American people give up the few still existing social programs that haven’t already been ransacked or discarded by Reagan, Clinton and the Bush Dynasty. McCain and Obama are both talking about cutting taxes and eliminating programs. As stated before, social entitlement programs are always at the top of the neo-con and neo-liberal hit-lists.

How has it come to this?: that the only time the Congress and the White House will support socialist economic policies is to benefit the largest of corporate entities? The American people have been bamboozled and betrayed by their representatives and agents in government service.

Our voices must be raised in unison to demand to know why we are draining the life’s blood from the American work-force and pumping billions into failed banking enterprises brought low by rampant, insatiable greed. We must demand that our government of the people, by the people and for the people steward, safe-guard and protect the health of the American people. We must demand that we get what is rightfully coming to us as citizens of a modern democratic republic – social entitlements.

Let’s see how deftly Obama and McCain can ‘sound-bite’ their way out of that demand in a one-minute rebuttal.

Kirchick's Unwitting Deception Defense

“Bush never lied to us about Iraq.”

That’s the claim passionately made by James Kirchick, an assistant editor of the New Republic, in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times dated June 16, 2008. To forestall any uncertainty about his declamation, the subtitle reads, “The administration simply got bad intelligence. Critics are wrong to assert deception.”

Mr Kirchick, with studied, journalistic style, opens his piece with a reference to former Michigan governor, George Romney’s Johnny-come-lately renunciation of the illegal US war in Indo-China – the Vietnam War. (In 1967, after tossing his hat into the presidential ring, Romney claimed he had been duped into thinking the war right and just.)

Ironic that Mr Kirchick should choose to refer to the claim by a former Republican governor and presidential candidate that he had been deceived about US involvement in another very unpopular and very illegal war. One can only assume that Mr Kirchick contends that such a claim, even coming from a privileged member of the upper echelon of government, loses veracity if used to exonerate or excuse oneself from complicity. Then again, one must be wary of piling assertions upon assertions. A caveat to which, unfortunately, Mr Kirchick pays little heed as a Bush apologist.

“Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception.”

Apart from inferring that ‘unwitting deception’ is a morally tenable notion, Mr Kirchick might be commended for manning the wall against all of the many thousands of poor, deluded members of the US population whom he assumes do not understand what a lie is. (We all must have been out of the room when they explained that.) His commendation for setting the rest of us straight will have to wait until Mr Kirchick learns the corollary to that simple definition: once one realizes or is informed that what one has stated is in error, the statement must be apologized for (at least in polite company), a correction made to rectify the statement in question and if necessary, retribution paid if inconveniences or unpleasantries were caused by the non-factual information. So far, we’ve heard nothing remotely of the sort from Bush and company. (Maybe they and Mr Kirchick missed that part of the class on honesty.)

Additionally, if, after one learns that a statement one has made is false, contains falsehoods, or is misleading and then continues to affirm the truthfulness of the known falsehood, this affirmation is, most assuredly, a deliberate act of deception. A lie. And that is not putting too fine a point on the matter even for a kindergartener. The adult citizens of the United States should expect nothing less from their elected and appointed representatives than they do from their own children.

In an attempt to make lying and deception a partisan issue, Mr Kirchick recommends the following:

If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.”

Here one must ask, “Does Mr Kirchick mean the CIA which brought zero credible evidence to the Bush war planners of the presence of WMDs, a nuclear program, or any but the most gossamer of connection between Saddam and Al Queda? Does he mean to lump the CIA in with the rest of the US Intelligence network that were told to ‘cherry-pick’ and ‘stove-pipe’ information and politicize reports so as to support, contrary to available substantive evidence, the decision, which the administration had made years before September 11^th, 2001, to invade Iraq? The self-same CIA, whose experts on the Iraq and Middle-east desks told the Bush administration that the assertions about WMDs, a nuclear program and Baathist ties to Al Queda were fantasy? THAT CIA?”

One must strive for clarity, after all. One would not wish to see the Democrats ‘vent their spleen’ against the wrong party.

Mr Kirchick continues his lesson:

“This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.”

“Ancient history”? Either this is clearly the expression of raw, brass-balls condescension by Mr Kirchick towards his readers or Mr Kirchick’s long-term memory has undergone some unfortunate trauma, leading him to actually think that 5 years ago is a very, very long time. Perhaps he’s pitching this passage to a fifth grade civics class somewhere; perhaps one of the classes which also missed learning the definition of ‘lie’. One can only speculate, of course.

Kirchick then makes the bold claim that ‘it matters’ what happened five years ago, thus truly insulting and patronizing his readers further. That Mr Kirchick should feel it necessary to point out that the official actions of and by the Chief Executive of the United States and his administration ‘matter’ (waging war, for example) - even those enacted in the ‘ancient history’ of five years ago – reveals an astounding contempt for the readers of the New Republic and the public in general. Even the readers of the on-line version of the New Republic could not be so dense, so intellectually challenged that such a rudimentary truism would escape their understanding without Kirchick’s writing it on the wall in crayon. This evident presumption that his readers are vacuous fools is unworthy of anyone beyond middle-school claiming to be a journalist.

Then again, here it seems is the crux of the biscuit: this is not journalism. Mr Kirchick, as evidenced by this editorial, does not concern himself with understanding the facts or seeking the truth; what any journalist worth their salt most assuredly aspires to. He is content, instead, to recite the proscribed myth of ‘Dubya and the Evil-doers’, as fabricated by the Administration’s cadre of P.R. spin-sters, no doubt gaining, at least for Mr Kirchick, ‘comfort in a world of significant dangers’.

Ignorance is bliss, everybody. Go back to sleep while ‘the Decider’ decides on how best to ‘smoke ‘em out of their holes’ while using the smoke as cover to gut the Constitution.

If Mr Kirchick were concerned with historicity, as a responsible journalist should be, must be, he would cite some of the following incontrovertible facts:

“…President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis …”

The US was Saddam’s chief supplier of arms and armament during Saddam’s eight-year war with Iran, leaving upwards of a million casualties. The slaughter on both sides did nothing to discourage the US from selling arms or providing support to Saddam during the administrations of Reagan and Bush the First. It is well-known that the US supplied the technology and the know-how to build arsenals of WMDs, during Saddam’s reign. This support, furthermore, included whatever nuclear capability Saddam had. As long as he was holding the Iranians in check and rebuking Soviet influence, Saddam was ‘our man’ deserving of favor and support as an ally and a client. Once he decided to use his US-supplied military might for conquest un-authorized by Washington (i.e. invading Kuwait) he fell from favor.

His vicious suppression of the Shi’ite and Kurdish rebellions by utilizing US supplied poison gas and other WMDs following the First Gulf War – rebellions which had been publically and privately encouraged by the US leadership – was met with little more than hand-wringing from Washington in the calamitous aftermath. There’s little reason to think that the cabal led by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, having been key players in the Reagan/Bush years before during and after Gulf War One and having returned to power with Bush the Younger, had had a change of heart regarding the desperate plight of the Iraqi people in the intervening years.

“…to remain in possession of what he (Bush) believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program…”

As mentioned before and substantiated in numerous reports, the intelligence network of the United States had no verifiable evidence that Saddam had any active weapons programs or viable caches of WMDs. UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Scott Ritter both contend that Saddam had no substantial stock-piles of WMDs nor any active weapons programs nor the capacity or capability of reviving or initiating weapons programs. After an 8-year stalemate with Iran, a crushing defeat by US and coalition forces in Gulf War Mark 1 and more than 10 years of crippling sanctions and UN inspections, all that was left of Saddam’s US supplied WMDs and weapons programs was what was found after the invasion and after victory in Iraq was declared by our tin-pot Potentate-in-Chief - NOTHING! Nada. Zilch. Bupkis.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had an agenda set well before 2001to finish the job they felt Bush Senior had botched back in 1991 by not getting rid of the recalcitrant Hussein and replacing him with a different, more amenable strongman. The calamity of September 11 gave them the opening they needed. Ahmed Chalabi was to be the replacement despot for Saddam, apparently. Chalabi was also, quite neatly, a prime source of the disputable evidence of Saddam’s WMDs – evidence long since proven false and repudiated as rank, self-serving, wanton, malicious fiction upon which the Bush-ites built much of their case for the invasion of Iraq.

“…in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions…”

As for those long-standing violations of UN resolutions as a just, compelling reason for invasion, one need only look at records of the Security Council and the General Assembly to realize that Iraq was not the only member state on the list of violators. (The United States, itself, would be on that list were it not for its omnipotent veto power by which disagreeable resolutions are stricken from the record and thence sent disappearing down the memory hole.) Israel has held in contempt any and all resolutions that have escaped the US veto regarding Palestine for decades without suffering the threat of US invasion.

On the contrary, Israel is the foremost beneficiary of the US State Department and American tax-payer-funded largesse, amounting to billions of dollars worth of military hardware each year with which they have brutally oppressed the Palestinians and invaded and occupied their Arab neighbors. (To cite just one example; Israel has invaded Lebanon 5 times in 30 years, killing an estimated 20,000 people during the 1982 invasion.) Israel is also the only country in the Middle-east that actually has a functioning and readily deployable nuclear arsenal – one surreptitiously supplied by the US, by all accounts. None of these acts of aggression, nor the presence of WMDs have merited US sanction, reproach or more than the occasional finger-wag of disapproval from Washington.

Further examples of other nations in violation of UN resolutions are easily discovered by anyone interested in knowing the facts. One must conclude Mr Kirchick is not to be counted as one of those. Otherwise, one would assume he would have attempted to utilize some factual evidence to support his preposterous assertion that “Bush never lied to us about Iraq”. He did not. He chose to build a ‘straw man’ and accuse the Democrats of “glossing over this history”; history that he himself distorts in his own feeble gloss in an attempt to purposefully mislead any reader gullible or ignorant enough to swallow such obvious bilge. (That fifth-grade class comes to mind.)

Given Mr Kirchick’s pathetic, fatuous arguments in support of his ‘Dear Leader’ amid the growing avalanche of testimony from reputable sources regarding the Bush administrations’ felonious finagling, one can safely conclude therefore that Bush did, indeed, lie about Iraq. Repeatedly. One must, as a result, soberly consider the unpleasant likelihood that George W Bush continues to prevaricate, equivocate, obfuscate, dissemble, and mislead the American people.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/

Hope; Plucked or Plucky?

"Hope" is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tunes without the words-
And never stops-at all-.

Emily Dickinson (1830-86)

Finally, at long last, the Democratic primaries have thankfully come to a close. What a senseless circus. The fundamental impression left by all of the interminable hoopla, barn-storming, glad-handing and back-stabbing was this: The Dems are simply going to have to get over themselves. They are NOT the party of social programs or social awareness. They are NOT the party of the poor. They are NOT the counter-balance to the pro-Big Business policies of the Republican Party. Small, politically expedient proposals aside, the Dems haven’t been any of the aforementioned since the corporate military industrial oligarchy grabbed the reins of the budget by buying congress lock, stock and equities through extremely well- financed lobbying efforts.

What John Perkins, the repentant economic hit man calls ‘the Corporatocracy’ has largely determined foreign and domestic policy since the Second World War. The further inflation of their power and influence during and afterwards was achieved by US corporations basically being the sole suppliers of war materiel to the Allies. Industrial production in the US tripled or quadrupled while most of the rest of the industrial countries were devastated. (The fact that many of the corporations contracted by the US were also supplying the Axis either before or during WW2 has also been well-established and should not be forgotten.)

War profiteering is a cash cow that has been milked by nearly every modern administration one chooses to investigate. The administration of Bush Jr has by far been the most blatant, callous and ruthlessly cavalier about profiting from death and destruction but this is by a matter of degree only and should not be considered an aberration. To bring this fact into sharp focus, one must only be reminded that the US spends more on the military (euphemistically termed ‘defense’ spending) than do all of the rest of the nations of the world combined. The US out-spends the People’s Republic of China, the second-place entrant in the bloated military budget derby, by a factor of nearly 10 to 1: $623 billion to the PRC’s $65 billion. The remaining ‘axis of evil’, Iran and North Korea, spend $4.3 billion and $5.0 billion, respectively.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm

Is it any wonder that education, health care and veterans’ benefits, amongst a long litany of depleted yet much needed social services in the United States, are given such short shrift?

Eisenhower had seen the military industrial complex from both sides; as a staff officer in Washington DC, as the Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theater during WW2 and then as president during the Korean War. That’s why he broadsided his parting shot against the military industrial complex in his farewell address to the nation. It was meant to echo strongly the warning first sounded by Jefferson against the deleterious influences of business interests and the military on the health of a democratic republic.

Ever wonder how many congressmen and senators own stock in the major and minor military contractors?

Ever wonder how many of our elected representatives and appointed officials sit on the board of directors of or hold advisory positions with corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, GE, or Lockheed?

Ever wonder why the federal budget is always in reverse order to the people’s wishes for the allocation of funds? Defense spending trumps social services every time despite the will of the people as voiced through opinion polls. 80% of Americans think that there should be some kind of universal health care system. Every other major industrial country has one. Why shouldn’t the USA?

The answer to that question is always pitched to the economic side of the plate. “How would we pay for it?” Slicing 50 or 60 billion from the Pentagon’s massive pie might do it, don’t you think? The war in Iraq costs the US taxpayers roughly a quarter of a million dollars each minute longer it goes on; $341.4 million per day. Take a week of that budget - $2.4 billion, or a month of the current budget to wage the illegal war in Iraq - $71.6 billion and put it towards health care. Or education. Or job training. Or renewable energy research and development.

(Which brings up another means by which the US could pay for social programs; the money that should be paid to the US Treasury by corporations for the licensing of processes and products underwritten by taxpayers providing funding for research and development of same. It seems only logical that the American people should actually and legally own what they have paid for with their hard-earned dollars. NASA’s funds paid for the development of microprocessors, for instance. Why doesn’t each and every manufacturer of micro-chip technology pay a licensing fee to the US taxpayer for the use of that invention in commercial enterprises? Why doesn’t the sale of every jar of TANG provide a penny or two to fund social programs? The middle-class finances research and development, the most costly part of the equation and then turns the results of the research over to private enterprise which then sells it at whatever the market will bear back to the US taxpayers. It doesn’t take much to see that the taxpayer is getting the short end of the stick; the same stick that the Corporatocracy beats them with.)

So, the Dems had just better get over themselves. More to the point, the American voters had better get over the Dems and the Republicans, both. When was the last time either party did more than enrich themselves and their soulless criminal pals at the expense of the folks who actually work for a living?

Being a wet blanket is not a favorite role but for those folks who believe the campaign rhetoric of Barack Obama, one very significant point must be stated and restated: Obama has already pledged to increase the budget of the Pentagon if elected. Granted, he probably will introduce and support legislation bolstering the social programs gutted by Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. He will undoubtedly attempt to make a change in the country’s domestic policies; perhaps even regain the level of social programs enjoyed by US citizens more than thirty years ago under LBJ. Regardless of his message of ‘Hope’ and his stated desire to end the war in Iraq, from his declarations about the military budget, and his views on Iran and Israel expressed at the AIPAC convention, any hopes that American foreign policy will be set to rights under his administration and that our international reputation as an imperialistic bully and a ‘rogue state’ will be rescinded are ill placed.

I hope I'm wrong.

(editor's addendum)

On June 5, 2008, in Bristol, VA, Barack Obama, Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee, announced that the Democratic National Committee will ban Lobbyist and Special Interest PAC Money.

"I've sent a strong signal in this campaign by refusing the contributions of registered federal lobbyists and PACs, and today, I'm announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard and won't take another dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. They do not fund my campaign. They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I'm President of the United States."

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993, 1995 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.