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Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination"
AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour with the world-renowned political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred books. He spoke recently here in New York addressing more than a thousand people at the Left Forum.
NOAM CHOMSKY: One month ago, Joseph Andrew Stack crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves a lot better than that.
Stack’s manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act. The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His neighbor—I’m mostly quoting now—his neighbor was a woman in her eighties, surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for the thirty years of his service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing, because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union, not to mention the government, raided the pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on. And Stack could have added that are concerted and continuing efforts by the super-rich and their political allies to take even that away on spurious grounds.
Stack decided then that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him, but only about the rich and privileged. And he couldn’t trust a legal system, which—in his words, in which "there are two 'interpretations' for every law, one for the very rich and one for the rest of us," a government that leaves us with "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies [that] are murdering tens of thousands of people a year," with care rationed by wealth, not need, all in a social order in which "a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities...and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours." And much more, which I won’t repeat.
Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to join those who are willing to die for their freedom, in the hope of awakening others from their torpor. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had in mind the woman eating cat food, who taught him about the real world when he was a teenager, and her husband’s premature death. Her husband didn’t literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash heap, but it’s far from an isolated case, which we can add to the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism.
There are poignant studies of the indignation and the rage of those who have been cast aside as the state-corporate programs of financialization and deindustrialization have closed plants and destroyed families and communities. These studies reveal the sense of acute betrayal on the part of working people who believed they had a fulfilled their duty to society in what they regard as a moral compact with business and government, only to discover that they had only been instruments for profit and power, truisms from which they had been carefully shielded by doctrinal institutions.
There are striking similarities in the world’s second-largest economy. This has been investigated in a very penetrating study by Ching Kwan Lee into Chinese labor. Lee draws the close comparison between working-class outrage and desperation in the decaying industrial sectors of the United States and the fury among workers in what she calls China’s rustbelt, the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast now abandoned by the state in favor of state capitalist development of the Southeast sunbelt, as she calls it. In both regions, Lee finds massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their counterparts here, but in their case betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they had thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that, whatever it was, it’s now bitter fraud. In the sunbelt, workers who lack that cultural tradition still rely on their home villages for support and family life. They denounce the failure of authorities to live up even to the minimal legal requirements of barely livable workplace conditions and payment of the pittance called salaries.
According to official statistics, there were 58,000 “mass incidents” of protest in 2003 in just one province of the rustbelt, with three million people participating. Some 30 to 40 million workers who were dropped from work units—quoting Lee—“are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation” around the country. And she expects that there’s worse to come, as a looming crisis of landlessness in the countryside undermines the base for survival of the sunbelt workers, who don’t even have a semblance of independent unions, while in the rustbelt, there’s nothing like civil society support that exists, to some extent, here. Both Lee and the studies of the US rustbelt make it clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the bitterness about what is perceived to be the treachery of government and business power acting exactly as we should expect them to, unfortunately.
Something similar can be found in rural India. There, food consumption has sharply declined for the great majority since the neoliberal reforms were partially implemented, all of this amidst accolades for India’s fabulous growth, and indeed it is fabulous growth for some, though not for the rural areas, where peasant suicides are increasing at about the same rate as the number of billionaires, not far away. And in fact not so attractive for the workers, American workers, who are transferred to India to reduce labor costs by IBM, which now has three-quarters of its work force abroad. BusinessWeek calls IBM the “quintessential American company,” which is quite appropriate: it became the global giant in computing thanks to the unwitting munificence of the US taxpayer, who also substantially funded the whole IT revolution on which IBM relies, along with most of the rest of the high-tech economy, mostly on the pretext that the Russians are coming. Now IBM is paying them back.
There’s much excited talk these days about a great global shift of power, with speculation about whether, or when, China might displace the US as the dominant global power, along with India, which, if it happened, would mean that the global system would be returning to something like what it was before the European conquests. And indeed their recent GDP growth has been spectacular. But there’s a lot more to say about it. So if you take a look at the UN human development index, basic measure of the health of the society, it turns out that India retains its place near the bottom. It’s now 134th, slightly above Cambodia, below Laos and Tajikistan. Actually, it’s dropped since the reforms began. China ranks ninety-second, a bit above Jordan, below the Dominican Republic and Iran. By comparison, Cuba, been under harsh US attack for fifty years, is ranked fifty-second. It’s the highest in Central America and the Caribbean, barely below the richest societies in South America. India and China also suffer from extremely high inequality, so well over a billion of their inhabitants fall far lower in the scale. Furthermore, an accurate accounting would go beyond conventional measures to include serious costs that China and India can’t ignore for long: ecological, resource depletion, many others.
These common speculations about a global shift of power, which you can read all over the front pages, disregard a crucial factor that’s familiar to all of us: nations divorced from the internal distribution of power are not the real actors in international affairs. That truism was brought to public attention by that incorrigible radical Adam Smith, who recognized that the principal architects of power in England were the owners of the society—in his day, the merchants and manufacturers—and they made sure that policy would attend scrupulously to their interests, however grievous the impact on the people of England and, of course, much worse, the victims of what he called “the savage injustice of the Europeans” abroad. British crimes in India were the main concern of an old-fashioned conservative with moral values.
To his modern worshippers, Smith’s truisms are ridiculed as, quote, “elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks.” I’m quoting New York Times thinker David Brooks. It’s one of the many illustrations of the intellectual and moral decline of what’s called “conservatism” from the understanding of its heroes.
Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I’m identified as the villain who adopts Adam Smith’s heresy, as in fact I do.
Well, bearing Smith’s radical truism in mind, we can see that there is indeed a global shift of power, though not the one that occupies center stage. It’s a shift from the global work force to transnational capital, and it’s been sharply escalating during the neoliberal years. The cost is substantial, including the Joe Stacks of the US, starving peasants in India, and millions of protesting workers in China, where the labor share in income is declining even more rapidly than in most of the world.
Martin Hart-Landsberg has done quite important work on this, and he reviews how China is playing a leading role in the real global shift of power, not the one you read about in the newspapers. It’s become kind of an assembly plant for a regional production system. Japan, Taiwan, other Asian economies export parts and components to China and provide China with most of the advanced technology that’s used. There’s been a lot of concern about the growing US trade deficit with China, but less noticed is the fact that the trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has sharply declined as this new regional production system takes place. US manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for China to assemble and export, mostly back to the US. For the financial institutions, the retail giants like, say, Wal-Mart, ownership and management of manufacturing industries, and sectors closely related to this nexus of power, all of this is heavenly. Not for Joe Stack and many others like him.
To understand the public mood, it’s worthwhile to recall that the conventional use of GDP, gross domestic product, to measure economic growth is highly misleading. It’s a highly ideological measure. There have been efforts to devise more realistic measures. One of them is called the General Progress Indicator. It subtracts from GDP expenditures that harm the public, and it adds that value of authentic benefits. Well, in the US, the General Progress Indicator has stagnated since the 1970s, although GDP has increased, the growth going into very few pockets. That result correlates with others—for example, the studies of social indicators, the standard measure of health of a society. Social indicators tracked economic growth until the mid-’70s. Then they began to decline, and they reached the level of 1960 by the year 2000. That’s the latest figures available. The United States is one of the very few countries that has no government inquiry into social indicators. The correlation with financialization of the economy and neoliberal socio-economic measures is pretty hard to miss, and it’s not unique to the United States, by any means.
Now, it’s true that there’s nothing essentially new in the process of deindustrialization. Owners and managers naturally seek the lowest labor costs. Occasionally there are efforts to do otherwise. Henry Ford is the famous example, but his efforts were struck down by the courts long ago. So, in fact, it’s a legal obligation for corporate owners and managers to maximize profit. One means of doing this is shifting production. In earlier years, the shift was mostly internal, especially to the Southern states. There, labor could be more harshly repressed. And major corporations, like the first billion-dollar corporation, the US Steel Corporation of the sainted philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, could also profit from the new slave labor force that was created by the criminalization of black life in the South after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. That’s a core part of the American industrial revolution, which continued until the Second World War. That’s actually being reproduced in part right now, during the recent neoliberal period. The drug war is used as a pretext to drive the superfluous population, mostly black, back to the prisons, also providing a new supply of prison labor in state and private prisons, much of it in violation of international labor conventions. In fact, for many African Americans, since they were exported to the colonies, life has scarcely escaped the bonds of slavery, or sometimes worse.
AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.
NOAM CHOMSKY: In the ultra-respectable Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we can read—I’m quoting—that “The prison system in America has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history,” making the US “the home to the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass depredation of liberty to be found on the planet,” mostly black, increasingly Hispanic. It’s a product of the past thirty years, the neoliberal years, as is the fact that the United States—quoting again—“leads the world not only in incarceration rates but in executive compensation.” I’m quoting a Harvard Business School professor who points out that this correlation—this is “increasingly recognized to be linked," as is the fact that the United States is lagging far behind much of the world, particularly China, but also Europe, in developing green technologies.
Well, it’s easy to ridicule the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, which are very genuine and real. But it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and particularly, to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a constructive path, while the center is very visibly not holding. And those who have real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger, to themselves and to the rest of us and to the world.
Joe Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences, which I’ll read. “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.” Stack minces no words about the capitalist creed. We can only speculate about what he meant by the communist creed that he counterposed to it. I think it’s not unlikely that he saw it as an ideal with a genuine moral force. If that’s so, it wouldn’t be very surprising. Some of you may be old enough to recall a poll taken in 1976, on the year of the bicentennial, in which people were given a list of statements and asked which ones they thought were in the Constitution. Well, at that time, no one had a clue what was in the Constitution, so the answer “in the Constitution” presumably meant: “so obviously correct that it must be in the Constitution.” One statement that received a solid majority was Joe Stack’s “communist creed.”
Well, I qualified that comment with the phrase “at that time.” Today, a segment of the population memorizes and worships the Constitution, at least the words, if not the meaning. There was a Tea Party convention a week ago which produced a catechism for candidates. One requirement is that they must agree to scrap the tax code and replace it with one no longer than 4,543 words long. That’s to match the length of the Constitution, unamended. Only some amendments share this holy status, one of them the Second, under the recent interpretation by the reactionaries of the Supreme Court. Now, the First Amendment is suspect, because of what it might be taken to imply about separation of Church and state. According to the current version of conservatism, the US is to be a Christian state, kind of like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Jewish State of Israel. In that connection, incidentally, Golda Meir is listed in the catechism as required learning for children, but no Hispanics. Well, along with normal racism, that reflects the very curious amalgam of extreme anti-Semitism and support for Israel among right-wing religious sectors. And such matters should not be lightly dismissed when we try to look ahead.
Encouraging, this anti-tax extremism that you see in the Tea Party movement is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s desperate action, but it’s suicidal nonetheless, and for reasons that I don’t have to elaborate. What’s happening right now in California is a dramatic illustration. Right there, maybe one of the richest parts of the world, the world’s greatest public education system is being systematically dismantled. And the governor, Governor Schwarzenegger, says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. And other governors are joining in. At the same time, a very powerful states’ rights movement is taking shape, demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs. That’s a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”—the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, which is practically a motto for the times. California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. And that extends over much of the country.
Well, encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of the business propaganda that dominates the doctrinal system. So people must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for very good reasons: of the existing power systems, the government is the only one that, in principle, and sometimes in fact, is answerable to the public and can impose some constraints on the depredations of private power; the corollary to “getting government off our back” is groaning beneath the even greater weight of unaccountable private tyranny. So-called libertarians don’t seem to see that that’s what they’re calling for. But business anti-government propaganda has to be nuanced: business of course favors a very powerful state which serves Adam Smith’s principal architects, the owners of the society today, not merchants and manufacturers, but multinationals and financial institutions. Now, constructing this internally contradictory propaganda message is no easy task. So people have to be trained to hate and fear the deficit, which is a necessary means to stimulate the economy after its destruction at the hands of the dominant financial institutions and their cohorts in Washington. But at the same time, the population must favor the deficits. Almost half of them are attributable to the military budget, which is breaking records under Obama, and the rest of the deficit is predicted—what’s predicted to overwhelm the budget is the cruel and hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system, which is a gift to insurance companies and Big Pharma.
Well, that’s a tricky propaganda task, but it’s been—we can see it all the time. It’s been carried with pretty impressive success. One illustration is the public attitude towards April 15th, when tax returns are due. Well, let’s put aside the thought of a much more free and just society and just have a look at this one. In a functioning democracy of the kind that formally exists, April 15th would be a day of celebration: we’re coming together to implement programs that we’ve chosen. Now, here, it’s a day of mourning: some alien force is descending upon us to steal our hard-earned money. Well, that’s one graphic indication of the success of the intense efforts of the highly class-conscious business community to win what its own publications call “the everlasting battle for the minds of men.”
Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also—he also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency. Now, his grisly record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.
Well, there should be no need to continue with the record, but the outcome tells us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture in which we live. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a “transformative figure.” If you go over to Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institute, he’s a colossus—I’m quoting—whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” Well, painfully to record, many of the Joe Stacks, whose lives he was ruining, join in the adulation and hasten to shelter under the umbrella of the power and the violence that he symbolized.
Now, all of this evokes memories of other days, when the center did not hold, and they’re worth thinking about. One example that should not be forgotten is the Weimar Republic. That was the peak of Western civilization in the sciences and the arts, also regarded as a model of democracy. Through the 1920s, the traditional liberal and conservative parties that had always governed the Reich entered into inexorable decline. That was well before the process was intensified by the Great Depression. The coalition that elected General Hindenburg in 1925 was not very different from the mass base that swept Hitler into office eight years later, compelling Hindenburg, who was an aristocrat, to select as chancellor the “little corporal,” as he called him, that he detested. As late as 1928, the Nazis had less than three percent of the vote. Two years later, the most respectable Berlin press was lamenting the sight—I’m quoting—of the many millions in this “highly civilized country” who had “given their vote to the commonest, hollowest and crudest charlatanism.” The center was collapsing. The public was coming to despise the incessant wrangling of Weimar politics, the service of the traditional parties to powerful interests and their failure to deal with popular grievances. They were being drawn to the forces that were upholding the grandeur of the nation and defending it against perceived threats in a revitalized, armed, unified state, which is going to march to a glorious future, led by the charismatic figure who, in his words, was carrying out “the will of eternal Providence, the Creator of the universe.” By May 1933, the Nazis had largely destroyed not only the traditional ruling parties, but even the large working-class parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, which were quite strong, along with their very powerful associations. The Nazis declared May Day 1933 to be a workers’ holiday. That was something the left parties had never been able to achieve. In fact, many working people took part in the enormous patriotic demonstrations, more than a million people in what was called Red Berlin that were joining farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, paramilitary forces, Christian organizations, athletic and riflery clubs, and the rest of the coalition that was taking shape as the center collapsed. By the onset of the war, perhaps 90 percent of Germans were marching with the brownshirts.
Well, the world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless lessons to keep in mind, and even memories. I’m just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, quoting the distinguished scholar of German history Fritz Stern, who tells us that he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews what he calls “a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason." If that sounds familiar, it is. This is one possible outcome of collapse of the center when the radical imagination, which in fact was quite powerful at that time, nonetheless fell short.
Well, the popular mood today here is complex in ways that are both hopeful and troubling. One illustration is the attitudes toward social spending on the part of people who identify themselves in polls as “anti-government.” There’s a recent scholarly study which is kind of illuminating. It finds that, by large majorities, they support—I’m quoting it—they support “maintaining or expanding spending on Social Security, child care, and aid to poor people” and other social welfare measures, though support falls off significantly when it comes to "aid to blacks and welfare recipients.” Half of these anti-government extremists believe “that spending is too little [on] assistance to the poor.” In the population as a whole, majorities, in most cases substantial majorities, feel the government is spending too little to improve and protect the nation’s health, and on Social Security, drug addiction, and child care programs and so on, though again there’s an exception on aid for welfare and black—welfare recipients and blacks. That’s probably a tribute to Reaganite thuggery, I suppose.
Well, these results give some indication of what might be achieved by commitments that are even far short of the radical imagination, and also of some of the impediments that are going to have to be overcome for these and much more far-reaching purposes.
AMY GOODMAN: MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll come back to his speech given at the Left Forum just a few weeks ago in New York City at Pace University in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: Today it’s Noam Chomsky for the hour, as we return to a major address he gave on the weekend of the seventh anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. It was a gathering of more than a thousand people at the Left Forum at Pace University in New York. Again, MIT professor, author, activist, Noam Chomsky.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The Massachusetts election last January, which undermined majority rule in the Senate, that gives some further insight into what can happen when the center does not hold and those who believe in even limited measures of reform fail to reach the population. In the election—the elections, as you know, were to fill the seat of the Senate’s so-called “liberal lion,” Ted Kennedy. In that election, Scott Brown ran as the forty-first vote against healthcare, which Kennedy had fought for throughout his political life. A majority, it turned out, opposed Obama’s proposals, but primarily because they gave away too much to the insurance industry. And much the same is true nationally, if you look at the polls on which the headlines are based.
One interesting feature was the voting pattern among union members. That’s Obama’s natural constituency, you’d think. Most of them didn’t bother to vote. But of those who did, a majority chose Brown. And union leaders and activists explained why. They said workers are angered at Obama’s record generally, but particularly incensed over his stand on healthcare. One of them reported, “He didn’t insist on a public option nor a strong employer mandate to provide insurance. It was hard not to notice that the only issue on which he took a firm stand was taxing benefits” for the healthcare that had been won by union struggles, retracting his campaign pledge.
There was a massive infusion of funds from financial executives in the final days of the campaign. Now, that’s one part of a broader phenomenon, which reveals dramatically why Joe Stack and others have every reason to be disgusted at the farce that they were taught to honor as democracy.
Obama’s primary constituency all along was financial institutions. Their power has increased enormously. Their share of corporate profits rose from a few percent in the 1970s to almost a third today. They preferred Obama to McCain, and they largely bought the election for him. And they expected to be rewarded. And they were. I don’t have to go through the details. But a few months ago, responding to the rising anger of the Joe Stacks, Obama began to criticize the “greedy bankers” who had been rescued by the public and even proposed some measures to constrain their excesses. Punishment for this deviation was swift. The major banks immediately announced very prominently—front page of the New York Times—that they would shift funding to Republicans if Obama persisted with his offensive rhetoric.
And Obama heard the message. Within days, he informed the business press that bankers are fine “guys,” in his words, singling out the chairs of the two biggest banks, two biggest crooks, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. They got specific praise. And he assured the business world that—quoting him—“I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth,” such as the huge bonuses and profits that are infuriating the public. “That’s part of the free market system,” Obama continued—not inaccurately, as “free markets” are interpreted in state capitalist doctrine. His retreat, however, was not in time to curb the flow of cash that gained the forty-first seat.
Well, in fairness, we should concede that the greedy bankers had a point. Their task is to maximize profit and market share. In fact, as I mentioned, that’s their legal obligation. If they don’t do it, they’ll be replaced by somebody who will. These are institutional facts, as are the inherent market inefficiencies that require them to ignore what’s called systemic risk. They know full well that that’s likely to tank the economy, but such externalities, as they’re called, are not their business. It’s also unfair to accuse them of “irrational exuberance”—that’s Alan Greenspan’s phrase in his extremely brief departure from orthodoxy during the tech boom of the '90s. Their exuberance was not at all irrational: it was quite rational, in the knowledge that when it all collapses, they can flee to the shelter of the nanny state, clutching their copies of Hayek and Friedman and Ayn Rand. The same is true of the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and the rest of the business leaders, who are running a massive propaganda campaign now to convince the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—and with great success. There's been a sharp decline in people who take it seriously. Those who believe in this liberal hoax, as it’s called, have declined to about a third of the population. The executives who are dedicating themselves to this task know perfectly well that the hoax is very real and the prospects very grim. But they are fulfilling their institutional role. If they don’t do it, somebody else will replace them who will. The fate of the species is another externality that they must ignore, insofar as market systems prevail. So you can’t criticize them.
Returning—let’s go back to the very instructive Massachusetts election. It turns out that the major factor in Brown’s victory was voting patterns. In the affluent suburbs, voting was high and enthusiastic. In the urban areas, which are heavily Democratic, voting was low and apathetic. So the headlines were right to report that voters were sending Obama a message. The message was very clear. From the rich, the message was we want even more than what you’re doing for us. And from the rest, the message was Joe Stack’s: in his words, the politicians are not in “the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say,” though they’re very much interested in the voices of the masters. Well, there was no doubt some impact of the populist image that was crafted by the PR machine—you know, “I’m Scott Brown, this is my truck,” you know, “regular guy,” all that stuff. But that appears to have been a secondary role. The popular anger is very real, and it’s entirely understandable, with the banks thriving, thanks not only to the bailouts but to all sorts of other benefits that they’re getting from the nanny state, while the population remains in deep recession. Even official unemployment is at ten percent—actual, much higher—and in manufacturing industry, official unemployment is at the level of the Great Depression, one out of six unemployed, and very few prospects for recovering the kinds of jobs that are lost as the economy is being reshaped, in the manner that—with the global shift of power that I described.
Well, national polls reveal much the same phenomenon. The latest one I’ve seen was just a couple of days ago, Wall Street Journal. It shows what they call a 21 percent enthusiasm gap between the parties, with 67 percent of Republicans saying they’re very interested in the coming November elections, as compared with 46 percent of Democrats. There’s also a major shift from the norm, in that there’s a ten-point margin by which registered voters say they believe that Republicans are better at dealing with the economy. That’s a combination of a solid Republican, mostly quite affluent sector and disillusioned Democrats, who see what’s happening, the Joe Stacks. Half of Americans would like to see every member of Congress defeated in the election, including their own representative. Very remarkable picture of—it’s a remarkable picture of how the center is not holding. And it evokes memories, which we shouldn’t forget, some of which I mentioned. Now, the public conception of democracy is almost as negative as the aspirations of the business world. Of course, they hate democracy, naturally. But they’re now lobbying very fiercely. One of their highest objectives is to ensure that even shareholders should have no say in choice of managers, let alone what are called stakeholders, workers and the community. That’s out of the question. But to quote the Wall Street Journal, some liberals are seeking to find “`a fair position’ that straddles the divide between companies and shareholders.” That’s a very interesting phrase, the divide between companies and the people who own the companies, the shareholders. But they’re right. They’re recognizing the decision of the courts a century ago that the corporation should be identified with the management; the shareholders are irrelevant, just like the rest of the public.
Well, it’s true that there was a federal stimulus, and even though it was much too small, did have an effect. It’s estimated it saved about two million jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But the perception of the Joe Stacks that it was a bust has a basis. Over a third of government spending is by states, and the decline in state spending approximated the federal stimulus. So the aggregate fiscal expenditure stimulus was flat. There was no stimulus. That’s according to a study, recent study, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the standard source of economic information.
Well, the center is clearly not holding, and those who are harmed are once again shooting themselves in the foot. The immediate consequence in Massachusetts was to provide another vote to block the appointment of a pro-union voice at the National Labor Relations Board, which has been virtually defunct since Reagan’s successful war against working people. Well, that’s what can be expected in the absence of constructive alternatives.
Well, are there constructive alternatives? Take a look at the industrial heartland, in Ohio, where General Motors, among others, continues to close plants. There’s one of the few journalists in the United States who pays any attention to labor issues, Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times. He reported recently from the scene of one recently closed plant. He writes that President Obama “never sought to reopen the factory even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in GM during the auto bailout," so they could do what they wanted. What Obama has done instead is to "try to ease some of the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve for the community’s wounds, offer[ing] hope"—remember that—"and aid.” The aid is suggestions which can’t be implemented. Meanwhile, there’s another ambassador, who he doesn’t mention, the Secretary of Transportation Roy LaHood, and that other ambassador is in Spain. He’s offering federal stimulus money to Spanish firms to produce the high-speed rail facilities that the US badly needs and that could surely be produced by the highly skilled work force that’s reduced to penury in Ohio, while Obama shuts down the factories. That’s Joe Stack’s experience in Harrisburg again.
In 1999, LaHood, who was then a Republican congressman, introduced a bill that would have provided federal funding for transportation infrastructure. It would have authorized the Treasury to provide $72 billion a year in interest-free loans to state and local governments for capital investments. That includes investments in transportation, in transportation infrastructure. And interestingly, his bill called for, not borrowing the money, but using US notes. That’s much as Abraham Lincoln did to finance the Civil War and as FDR did during the Great Depression. Well, that was 1999. Today LaHood is using federal stimulus money to obtain contracts in Spain for the same purpose. It’s another sign of how the center has been disappearing in recent years, the past thirty years.
Well, the radical imagination should suggest an answer. The factory in question, and many others, could be taken over by the workforce with the support of—that would, of course, require the support of the communities that are left desolate, and in fact the rest of us. And they could be converted to production of high-speed rail facilities and other badly needed goods. Now, I said "radical imagination," but the idea is not particularly radical. In the nineteenth century, it was intuitively obvious to New England workers—quoting them, quoting their papers—that “those who work in the mills should own them,” and the idea that wage labor differed from slavery only in that it was temporary was so common that it was even a slogan of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Well, during the recent years of financialization and deindustrialization, there have been repeated efforts to implement worker and community takeover of closing plants. A few have succeeded, but not most. The ideas have immediate moral appeal to the affected workforce and the communities, and they should be quite feasible with sufficient public support. And they would be very far-reaching in their implications.
Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize. So what is needed, in short, is the late Howard Zinn. Terrible loss. Well, there won’t be another Howard Zinn, but we can take to heart his praise for “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of the great moments of history, the countless Joe Stacks who are destroying themselves, and maybe the world, when they could be leading the way to a better future.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Andrew Bacevich: Permanent War Now the Norm
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04092010/profile2.html
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. The war in Afghanistan has claimed more than one thousand American lives and in the last two years alone the lives of more than four thousand Afghan civilians. It's costing American taxpayers over three-and-a-half billion dollars every month—a total of some $264 billion so far. But for all that, in the words of one policy analyst quoted by the New York Times this week, "there are no better angels about to descend on Afghanistan."
The news from that torturous battleground continues to dismay, discourage and enrage. America's designated driver there, Hamid Karzai, is proving increasingly unstable behind the wheel. The United States put Karzai in power and our soldiers have been fighting and dying on his behalf ever since. Despite widespread corrupton in his government. Now he's making threats against the western coalition that is shedding blood and treasure on his behalf.
Even more disturbing,for the moment, are the civilian deaths from nighttime raids andaerial bombings by American and other NATO troops. Just this week, we learned of an apparent cover-up following a Special Forces raid in February that killed five civilians, including three women, two of whom were pregnant. It's believed bullets were gouged from the women's bodies to conceal evidence of American involvement.
This slaughter of innocents has led the pro-American "Economist" magazine to question whether ourentire effort in Afghanistan" has been nothing but a meaningless exercise of misguided violence."
With me is a man with first-hand experience of war. Andrew Bacevich served 23 years, some of them in Vietnam, before retiring from the Army. He's now professor of history and international relations at Boston University. Just this week he was at a US Army War College symposium on the highly pertinent question, "How do we know when a war is over?" His book, "The Limits of Power," was a best-seller and his latest, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," comes out this summer. Andrew Bacevich, welcome back to the Journal.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much.
BILL MOYERS: These civilian casualties that we've been hearing about, they're inevitable in war, right?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Sure they are. But I think that what's particularly important about the incidents that we're reading about is that they really call into question U.S. strategy. I mean, when General McChrystal conceived of this counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, one of the, sort of the core principles is that we would act in ways that would demonstrate our benign intentions. We're supposed to be protecting the population. And when it turns out that U.S. forces are killing non-combatants, and there are repeated incidents that have occurred, I think it calls into question the sincerity, the seriousness of the strategy. Or it calls into question the extent to which McChrystal is actually in control of the forces that he commands.
There doesn't seem to be any noticeable change, and any noticeable reduction in the frequency with which these incidents are occurring. So, I mean, were I an Afghan, I think I would not place a whole heck of a lot of credibility on the claims that, you know, "We're here to help."
BILL MOYERS: That nighttime incident in February that I referred to, you know, one woman killed was a pregnant mother of 10 children. Another was a pregnant mother of 6 children. And our people peddled the story at the time that they had been stabbed to death by family members on an otherwise festive occasion. Was that a lie, do you think, a deliberate lie?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Based on the reports that we read in "The New York Times," yes, it was a deliberate lie. I mean, I think one of the hidden issues here, and it's one that really needs to be brought to the surface, is we have two kinds of forces operating in Afghanistan. We have conventional forces.
BILL MOYERS: The Marines and infantry.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Right. And they are accompanied by reporters. We get at least some amount of information about what these forces are doing and how they're doing it. But in a sense, we have a second army. And the second army are the units that comprise Special Operations forces. They exist in secrecy. They operate in secrecy. Clearly there was a violation of some kind in that incident in February that killed the pregnant women.
The question is, are they being held accountable? Who's being fired? Who's being disciplined? What actions are being taken to ensure that incidents like that will not occur again? And again, this secrecy, the fact that they operate behind this black curtain, I think, makes it more difficult for that kind of accountability to be asserted.
BILL MOYERS: To whom are they responsible behind that black curtain?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, presumably they're responsible to General McChrystal, who is the senior US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. And McChrystal himself comes out of the Special Operations community. That's his entire background is in Special Operations. And you might wonder whether or not that gives him a better understanding of Special Operations to enable him to use that capability more precisely. Or you might wonder if it makes him too sympathetic to Special Operations. They're his guys, so give them a break.
BILL MOYERS: General McChrystal himself has said that we've shot - and this is his words not mine—an amazing number of people over there who did not seem to be a threat to his troops.
ANDREW BACEVICH: I think that is—that's clearly the case. When McChrystal was put in command last year, and devised his counterinsurgency strategy, the essential core principle of that strategy is that we will protect the population. We will protect the people. And the contradiction is that ever since President Obama gave McChrystal the go-ahead to implement that strategy, we have nonetheless continued to have this series of incidents in which we're not only not protecting the population. But indeed we're killing non-combatants.
BILL MOYERS: Given what's happening in the killing of these innocent people, is the very term, "military victory in Afghanistan," an oxymoron?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Oh, this is—yes. And I think one of the most interesting and indeed perplexing things that's happened in the past three, four years is that in many respects, the officer corps itself has given up on the idea of military victory. We could find any number of quotations from General Petraeus, the central command commander, and General McChrystal, the immediate commander in Afghanistan, in which they say that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, that we will not win a military victory, that the only solution to be gained, if there is one, is through bringing to success this project of armed nation-building.
And the reason that's interesting, at least to a military historian of my generation, of the Vietnam generation, is that after Vietnam, this humiliation that we had experienced, the collective purpose of the officer corps, in a sense, was to demonstrate that war worked. To demonstrate that war could be purposeful.
That out of that collision, on the battlefield, would come decision, would come victory. And that soldiers could claim purposefulness for their profession by saying to both the political leadership and to the American people, "This is what we can do. We can, in certain situations, solve very difficult problems by giving you military victory."
Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.
BILL MOYERS: Well, President Obama was in Afghanistan not too long ago, as you know. And he attempted to state the purpose of our war there to our troops.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Our broad mission is clear. We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That is our mission. And to accomplish that goal, our objectives here in Afghanistan are also clear. We're going to deny al Qaeda safe haven. We're going to reverse the Taliban's momentum. We're going to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces and the Afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the Afghan people.
BILL MOYERS: That sounds to me like a traditional, classical military assignment, to find the enemy and defeat him.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, but there's also then the reference to sort of building the capacity of the Afghan government. And that's where, of course, the president, he'd just come from this meeting with President Karzai. Basically, as we understand from press reports, the president sort of administered a tongue-lashing to Karzai to tell him to get his act together. Which then was followed by Karzai issuing his own tongue-lashing, calling into question whether or not he actually was committed to supporting the United States in its efforts in Afghanistan. And again, this kind of does bring us back, in a way, to Vietnam, where we found ourselves harnessed to allies, partners that turned out to be either incompetent or corrupt. Or simply did not share our understanding of what needed to be done for that country.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you as a soldier that our political leaders, time and again, send men and women to fight for, on behalf of corrupt guys like Karzai?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't learn from history. And there is this persistent, and I think almost inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some godforsaken country on the far side of the planet will not only yield some kind of purposeful result, but by extension, will produce significant benefits for the United States. I mean, one of the obvious things about the Afghanistan war that is so striking and yet so frequently overlooked is that we're now in the ninth year of this war.
It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.
BILL MOYERS: But President Obama says, our purpose is to prevent the Taliban from creating another rogue state from which the jihadists can attack the United States, as happened on 9/11. Isn't that a strategic purpose?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I mean, if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve in Afghanistan all the purposes that General McChrystal would like us to achieve, would the Jihadist threat be substantially reduced as a consequence? And does anybody think that somehow, Jihadism is centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? When you think about it for three seconds, you say, "Well, of course, it's not. It is a transnational movement."
BILL MOYERS: They can come from Yemen. They can come from—
ANDREW BACEVICH: They can come from Brooklyn. So the notion that somehow, because the 9/11 attacks were concocted in this place, as indeed they were, the notion that therefore, the transformation of Afghanistan will provide some guarantee that there won't be another 9/11 is patently absurd. Quite frankly, the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming countries is absurd.
BILL MOYERS: In this context, then, what do we do about what is a real threat, from people who want to kill us, the Jihadists. What do we do about that?
ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.
And as with any other international criminal conspiracy, the proper response is a police effort. I mean, a ruthless, sustained, international police effort to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it. Something that would take a long period of time and would no more succeed fully in eliminating the threat than the NYPD is able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City.
BILL MOYERS: You participated this week in a symposium at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the subject, "How will we know when a war ends?" So, the boots are on the ground there. The troops are there, committed, at least through 2011. What do we do?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I have to say, and I mean, I'm sure this sounds too simplistic. It would be way too simplistic for people in Washington. But if you want to get out of a war, you get out of a war. I mean, you call General McChrystal and say, "Your mission has changed. And your mission is to organize an orderly extrication of US forces."
You know, if it were me, I'd say, "General McChrystal, call me back in two weeks and tell me what the plan is and how long it's going to take." But war termination for us has come to be very difficult, because of our inability to understand the war that we undertake.
We are now close to a decade into what the Pentagon now calls, "The Long War." And it is a war in which one-half of one percent of the American people bear the burden. And the other 99.5 percent basically go on about their daily life, as if the war did not exist.
I mean, the great paradox of the Long War, is that it seems the Long War consists of a series of campaigns with Iraq and Afghanistan being the two most important, although one could add Pakistan and Yemen to the list, in which there seems to be no way to wind down the campaign.
Or to claim from the campaign some positive benefit that allows us to say that the end date of the long war is any closer. And we do find ourselves in this circumstance where permanent war now seems to have become the norm. And we don't know what to do about that.
BILL MOYERS: There's something else that President Obama said when he was in Afghanistan. Take a look at this:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. You don't quit, the American Armed Services does not quit, we keep at it, we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.
BILL MOYERS: How do you read that?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think the president has, he's placed down this enormous bet. A bet involves 100 thousand American soldiers.
And the deterioration of circumstances, for example, if Karzai turns out to be an unreliable ally, even that will make it extraordinarily difficult for the president to now say, "Well, I've changed my mind. I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that bet off the table." So in that sense, the rhetoric is not at all surprising, I think. And of course, it's historically incorrect. We quit after the Mogadishu firefight in Somalia. I think that it probably was prudent to quit. That doesn't make Somalia a great place today. We quit in Vietnam, having paid an enormous cost, to try to maintain the viability of South Vietnam. So there are times actually when it makes sense to quit.
BILL MOYERS: Should we quit in Afghanistan?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I think so. I mean again, I believe that ultimately, a sound foreign policy should be informed by an enlightened understanding of one's own interests. That's what we pay people like President Obama big money to do, to advance our collective interests, what's good for this country, this people. And the perpetuation of the war in Afghanistan is not good for this country and for our people.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Because we are squandering our treasure. We are losing lives for no purpose. And ultimately, the perpetuation of this unnecessary war does, I think, serve to exacerbate the problems within the Islamic world, rather than reducing those problems.
BILL MOYERS: Andrew Bacevich, thank you for joining me on the Journal. And we'll continue this conversation on our website at PBS.org.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. The war in Afghanistan has claimed more than one thousand American lives and in the last two years alone the lives of more than four thousand Afghan civilians. It's costing American taxpayers over three-and-a-half billion dollars every month—a total of some $264 billion so far. But for all that, in the words of one policy analyst quoted by the New York Times this week, "there are no better angels about to descend on Afghanistan."
The news from that torturous battleground continues to dismay, discourage and enrage. America's designated driver there, Hamid Karzai, is proving increasingly unstable behind the wheel. The United States put Karzai in power and our soldiers have been fighting and dying on his behalf ever since. Despite widespread corrupton in his government. Now he's making threats against the western coalition that is shedding blood and treasure on his behalf.
Even more disturbing,for the moment, are the civilian deaths from nighttime raids andaerial bombings by American and other NATO troops. Just this week, we learned of an apparent cover-up following a Special Forces raid in February that killed five civilians, including three women, two of whom were pregnant. It's believed bullets were gouged from the women's bodies to conceal evidence of American involvement.
This slaughter of innocents has led the pro-American "Economist" magazine to question whether ourentire effort in Afghanistan" has been nothing but a meaningless exercise of misguided violence."
With me is a man with first-hand experience of war. Andrew Bacevich served 23 years, some of them in Vietnam, before retiring from the Army. He's now professor of history and international relations at Boston University. Just this week he was at a US Army War College symposium on the highly pertinent question, "How do we know when a war is over?" His book, "The Limits of Power," was a best-seller and his latest, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," comes out this summer. Andrew Bacevich, welcome back to the Journal.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Thank you very much.
BILL MOYERS: These civilian casualties that we've been hearing about, they're inevitable in war, right?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Sure they are. But I think that what's particularly important about the incidents that we're reading about is that they really call into question U.S. strategy. I mean, when General McChrystal conceived of this counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, one of the, sort of the core principles is that we would act in ways that would demonstrate our benign intentions. We're supposed to be protecting the population. And when it turns out that U.S. forces are killing non-combatants, and there are repeated incidents that have occurred, I think it calls into question the sincerity, the seriousness of the strategy. Or it calls into question the extent to which McChrystal is actually in control of the forces that he commands.
There doesn't seem to be any noticeable change, and any noticeable reduction in the frequency with which these incidents are occurring. So, I mean, were I an Afghan, I think I would not place a whole heck of a lot of credibility on the claims that, you know, "We're here to help."
BILL MOYERS: That nighttime incident in February that I referred to, you know, one woman killed was a pregnant mother of 10 children. Another was a pregnant mother of 6 children. And our people peddled the story at the time that they had been stabbed to death by family members on an otherwise festive occasion. Was that a lie, do you think, a deliberate lie?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Based on the reports that we read in "The New York Times," yes, it was a deliberate lie. I mean, I think one of the hidden issues here, and it's one that really needs to be brought to the surface, is we have two kinds of forces operating in Afghanistan. We have conventional forces.
BILL MOYERS: The Marines and infantry.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Right. And they are accompanied by reporters. We get at least some amount of information about what these forces are doing and how they're doing it. But in a sense, we have a second army. And the second army are the units that comprise Special Operations forces. They exist in secrecy. They operate in secrecy. Clearly there was a violation of some kind in that incident in February that killed the pregnant women.
The question is, are they being held accountable? Who's being fired? Who's being disciplined? What actions are being taken to ensure that incidents like that will not occur again? And again, this secrecy, the fact that they operate behind this black curtain, I think, makes it more difficult for that kind of accountability to be asserted.
BILL MOYERS: To whom are they responsible behind that black curtain?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, presumably they're responsible to General McChrystal, who is the senior US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. And McChrystal himself comes out of the Special Operations community. That's his entire background is in Special Operations. And you might wonder whether or not that gives him a better understanding of Special Operations to enable him to use that capability more precisely. Or you might wonder if it makes him too sympathetic to Special Operations. They're his guys, so give them a break.
BILL MOYERS: General McChrystal himself has said that we've shot - and this is his words not mine—an amazing number of people over there who did not seem to be a threat to his troops.
ANDREW BACEVICH: I think that is—that's clearly the case. When McChrystal was put in command last year, and devised his counterinsurgency strategy, the essential core principle of that strategy is that we will protect the population. We will protect the people. And the contradiction is that ever since President Obama gave McChrystal the go-ahead to implement that strategy, we have nonetheless continued to have this series of incidents in which we're not only not protecting the population. But indeed we're killing non-combatants.
BILL MOYERS: Given what's happening in the killing of these innocent people, is the very term, "military victory in Afghanistan," an oxymoron?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Oh, this is—yes. And I think one of the most interesting and indeed perplexing things that's happened in the past three, four years is that in many respects, the officer corps itself has given up on the idea of military victory. We could find any number of quotations from General Petraeus, the central command commander, and General McChrystal, the immediate commander in Afghanistan, in which they say that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, that we will not win a military victory, that the only solution to be gained, if there is one, is through bringing to success this project of armed nation-building.
And the reason that's interesting, at least to a military historian of my generation, of the Vietnam generation, is that after Vietnam, this humiliation that we had experienced, the collective purpose of the officer corps, in a sense, was to demonstrate that war worked. To demonstrate that war could be purposeful.
That out of that collision, on the battlefield, would come decision, would come victory. And that soldiers could claim purposefulness for their profession by saying to both the political leadership and to the American people, "This is what we can do. We can, in certain situations, solve very difficult problems by giving you military victory."
Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.
BILL MOYERS: Well, President Obama was in Afghanistan not too long ago, as you know. And he attempted to state the purpose of our war there to our troops.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Our broad mission is clear. We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That is our mission. And to accomplish that goal, our objectives here in Afghanistan are also clear. We're going to deny al Qaeda safe haven. We're going to reverse the Taliban's momentum. We're going to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces and the Afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the Afghan people.
BILL MOYERS: That sounds to me like a traditional, classical military assignment, to find the enemy and defeat him.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, but there's also then the reference to sort of building the capacity of the Afghan government. And that's where, of course, the president, he'd just come from this meeting with President Karzai. Basically, as we understand from press reports, the president sort of administered a tongue-lashing to Karzai to tell him to get his act together. Which then was followed by Karzai issuing his own tongue-lashing, calling into question whether or not he actually was committed to supporting the United States in its efforts in Afghanistan. And again, this kind of does bring us back, in a way, to Vietnam, where we found ourselves harnessed to allies, partners that turned out to be either incompetent or corrupt. Or simply did not share our understanding of what needed to be done for that country.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you as a soldier that our political leaders, time and again, send men and women to fight for, on behalf of corrupt guys like Karzai?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't learn from history. And there is this persistent, and I think almost inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some godforsaken country on the far side of the planet will not only yield some kind of purposeful result, but by extension, will produce significant benefits for the United States. I mean, one of the obvious things about the Afghanistan war that is so striking and yet so frequently overlooked is that we're now in the ninth year of this war.
It is the longest war in American history. And it is a war for which there is no end in sight. And to my mind, it is a war that is utterly devoid of strategic purpose. And the fact that that gets so little attention from our political leaders, from the press or from our fellow citizens, I think is simply appalling, especially when you consider the amount of money we're spending over there and the lives that are being lost whether American or Afghan.
BILL MOYERS: But President Obama says, our purpose is to prevent the Taliban from creating another rogue state from which the jihadists can attack the United States, as happened on 9/11. Isn't that a strategic purpose?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I mean, if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve in Afghanistan all the purposes that General McChrystal would like us to achieve, would the Jihadist threat be substantially reduced as a consequence? And does anybody think that somehow, Jihadism is centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? When you think about it for three seconds, you say, "Well, of course, it's not. It is a transnational movement."
BILL MOYERS: They can come from Yemen. They can come from—
ANDREW BACEVICH: They can come from Brooklyn. So the notion that somehow, because the 9/11 attacks were concocted in this place, as indeed they were, the notion that therefore, the transformation of Afghanistan will provide some guarantee that there won't be another 9/11 is patently absurd. Quite frankly, the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming countries is absurd.
BILL MOYERS: In this context, then, what do we do about what is a real threat, from people who want to kill us, the Jihadists. What do we do about that?
ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, we need to assess the threat realistically. Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler. Al-Qaeda is not Nazi Germany. Al-Qaeda poses a threat. It does not pose an existential threat. We should view Al-Qaeda as the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy. Sort of a mafia that in some way or another draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition.
And as with any other international criminal conspiracy, the proper response is a police effort. I mean, a ruthless, sustained, international police effort to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it. Something that would take a long period of time and would no more succeed fully in eliminating the threat than the NYPD is able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City.
BILL MOYERS: You participated this week in a symposium at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the subject, "How will we know when a war ends?" So, the boots are on the ground there. The troops are there, committed, at least through 2011. What do we do?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I have to say, and I mean, I'm sure this sounds too simplistic. It would be way too simplistic for people in Washington. But if you want to get out of a war, you get out of a war. I mean, you call General McChrystal and say, "Your mission has changed. And your mission is to organize an orderly extrication of US forces."
You know, if it were me, I'd say, "General McChrystal, call me back in two weeks and tell me what the plan is and how long it's going to take." But war termination for us has come to be very difficult, because of our inability to understand the war that we undertake.
We are now close to a decade into what the Pentagon now calls, "The Long War." And it is a war in which one-half of one percent of the American people bear the burden. And the other 99.5 percent basically go on about their daily life, as if the war did not exist.
I mean, the great paradox of the Long War, is that it seems the Long War consists of a series of campaigns with Iraq and Afghanistan being the two most important, although one could add Pakistan and Yemen to the list, in which there seems to be no way to wind down the campaign.
Or to claim from the campaign some positive benefit that allows us to say that the end date of the long war is any closer. And we do find ourselves in this circumstance where permanent war now seems to have become the norm. And we don't know what to do about that.
BILL MOYERS: There's something else that President Obama said when he was in Afghanistan. Take a look at this:
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something. You don't quit, the American Armed Services does not quit, we keep at it, we persevere, and together with our partners we will prevail. I am absolutely confident of that.
BILL MOYERS: How do you read that?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I think the president has, he's placed down this enormous bet. A bet involves 100 thousand American soldiers.
And the deterioration of circumstances, for example, if Karzai turns out to be an unreliable ally, even that will make it extraordinarily difficult for the president to now say, "Well, I've changed my mind. I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that bet off the table." So in that sense, the rhetoric is not at all surprising, I think. And of course, it's historically incorrect. We quit after the Mogadishu firefight in Somalia. I think that it probably was prudent to quit. That doesn't make Somalia a great place today. We quit in Vietnam, having paid an enormous cost, to try to maintain the viability of South Vietnam. So there are times actually when it makes sense to quit.
BILL MOYERS: Should we quit in Afghanistan?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I think so. I mean again, I believe that ultimately, a sound foreign policy should be informed by an enlightened understanding of one's own interests. That's what we pay people like President Obama big money to do, to advance our collective interests, what's good for this country, this people. And the perpetuation of the war in Afghanistan is not good for this country and for our people.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Because we are squandering our treasure. We are losing lives for no purpose. And ultimately, the perpetuation of this unnecessary war does, I think, serve to exacerbate the problems within the Islamic world, rather than reducing those problems.
BILL MOYERS: Andrew Bacevich, thank you for joining me on the Journal. And we'll continue this conversation on our website at PBS.org.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Bacevich's Second Principle to Abate Militarism
“… revitalize the concept of the separation of powers. Here is the second principle with the potential to reduce the hazards by the new American militarism.”
“In all but a very few cases, the impetus for expanding America’s security perimeter has come from the executive branch.” “The result, especially in evidence since the end of World War II, has been to eviscerate Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which in the plainest language confers on Congress the power “To declare War”.”
“In all but a very few cases, the impetus for expanding America’s security perimeter has come from the executive branch.” “The result, especially in evidence since the end of World War II, has been to eviscerate Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which in the plainest language confers on Congress the power “To declare War”.”
Friday, February 26, 2010
The New American Militarism: how to abate it
Andrew J. Bacevich is a Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam Veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel and is a member of the Council on foreign relations. He is the author of several books, including ‘The Limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism’.
He is not a liberal.
He is not a Democrat.
Having read Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’, I would like to share his proposed means, which ‘rests on ten fundamental principles’ by which to abate ‘the present day militaristic tendencies’.
“First, heed the intentions of the Founders, thereby restoring the basic precepts that animated the creation of the United States and are specified in the Constitution that the Framers drafted in 1787 and presented for consideration to the several states. Although politicians make a pretense of revering that document, when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into t e habit of treating it like a dead letter. This is unfortunate. Drafted by men who appreciated the need for military power while also maintaining a healthy respect for the dangers that it posed, the Constitution in our own day remains an essential point of reference.”
He is not a liberal.
He is not a Democrat.
Having read Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’, I would like to share his proposed means, which ‘rests on ten fundamental principles’ by which to abate ‘the present day militaristic tendencies’.
“First, heed the intentions of the Founders, thereby restoring the basic precepts that animated the creation of the United States and are specified in the Constitution that the Framers drafted in 1787 and presented for consideration to the several states. Although politicians make a pretense of revering that document, when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into t e habit of treating it like a dead letter. This is unfortunate. Drafted by men who appreciated the need for military power while also maintaining a healthy respect for the dangers that it posed, the Constitution in our own day remains an essential point of reference.”
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Impeach the Supreme Court 5
Corporations are NOT the people! In fact, they are not people at all.
Get a free bumper sticker to protest the recent 5 to 4 decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate funding for election campaigns.
![]()
src="http://www.peaceteam.net/imgs/sc_200x69.gif">
Read what Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has to say about corporate influence in Washington. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
And visit the 'Change Congress' website.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
Get a free bumper sticker to protest the recent 5 to 4 decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate funding for election campaigns.
Read what Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has to say about corporate influence in Washington. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
And visit the 'Change Congress' website.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100222/lessig
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Senator Lieberman Goes Orwellian
Sen. Lieberman: “If We Don’t Act Preemptively, Yemen Will Be Tomorrow’s War”
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman suggested the United States should preemptively attack Yemen in light of the failed airline bombing.
Sen. Lieberman: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there. I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”
So, according to the Senator, unless we go to war - that is, engage in unlawful state aggression - we'll have to go to war.
Well, Senator, talking shite seems to have worked for your efforts to protect the massive insurance companies you serve from adverse affects of health care reform. Perhaps your military/industrial masters will reward you for similarly boosting their bottom line at the expense of the American and Yemeni people.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman suggested the United States should preemptively attack Yemen in light of the failed airline bombing.
Sen. Lieberman: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there. I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”
So, according to the Senator, unless we go to war - that is, engage in unlawful state aggression - we'll have to go to war.
Well, Senator, talking shite seems to have worked for your efforts to protect the massive insurance companies you serve from adverse affects of health care reform. Perhaps your military/industrial masters will reward you for similarly boosting their bottom line at the expense of the American and Yemeni people.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Iraq and Afghanistan wars; where's the accountability?
Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, in Washington, DC. Joining us now from Florida is Paul Craig Roberts. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department under the Reagan administration. He was an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Mr. Roberts. When President Obama decided not to prosecute, there were obviously a lot of considerations, both domestic politics and otherwise. But certainly one of the critical pieces of it, if you're going to prosecute, it seems to me that you start with the question of was the Iraq war illegal, was international law violated. And if in fact the Iraq war was waged on deliberate misinformation, it's hard to think of a crime that would be more serious than that. But if Obama were to open that can of worms that the Iraq war is illegal, then the continued occupation of Iraq's illegal, and it puts the entire US foreign policy in the region in a completely different light. So speak about President Obama, his view of the world as articulated in the campaign, this decision not to prosecute, and essentially not just continuing Bush policy in Iraq, but now we can see, more or less, a Bush policy in Afghanistan.
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, ECONOMIST AND COLUMNIST: Yes. Well, I can't say why he made the decision he made. All I can say is that the consequence is that we now have a precedent that neither the president nor the vice president are subject to law, they're outside the law, they can violate the law with impunity. This is a [inaudible] development. I can't think of anything worse to happen to the United States than to establish legally that the rulers are not subject to law. The entire history of liberty in the Anglo-American world, it was to tie the rulers down and make them subject to law, to bring the king under the law. So now we've reversed this thousand-year struggle and we've made the rulers unaccountable to law. This is a terrible thing. I'm sure there are all kinds of political and other arguments made, all sorts of interest groups, but this is the outcome. But there was really no discussion of this. And what this shows is that the American people, the political people, the legal professions, that what was really at stake—they had no idea what was really at stake. And to say that some silly war, which actually probably was an act of treason, since it was apparently based on deception—. You know, the British right now are holding these inquiries. They already know that it was based on deception, and they're trying to find out how they can prevent that from happening in the future.
JAY: Part of what's come out early in the inquiry is that it was very clear that Blair and Bush had decided to invade Iraq as early, I believe, as 2002, and the idea that weapons of mass destruction would be more a rationale than an actual reason was clear as far back as 2002. But what do you make of the lack of American media coverage of the British inquiry?
ROBERTS: Well, what does the American media cover? If you're talking about the newspapers and the television, they don't cover anything. So we don't want the people to know that the war was contrived and that some other agenda was being served that we still have not been told. You know, we don't really know—the government's never told us why they invaded Iraq. They lied to us and said, oh, he has weapons of mass destruction, and yet the record is clear that the government [inaudible] did not have these weapons. This is a known fact now. We still don't know why they did it, and they're not going to tell us. And so probably if Obama was trying to gin up the war in Afghanistan, he doesn't want a lot of news coverage of the British inquiry into how Blair deceived his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide cover for Bush's illegal war in Iraq.
JAY: How did you respond to President Obama's speech the other night on Afghanistan?
ROBERTS: Well, I didn't bother to listen to it. I mean, I already knew what he was going to do. [inaudible] interesting thing, because here we have millions of Americans, on that very day, lost their health insurance subsidies from COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985]. So all of a sudden, millions of Americans, no health coverage that day. Or 24 hours before, The Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement to the newspaper, listing all of the metro area foreclosures. In Michigan, 48 percent of the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. And yet Obama thinks we have money to escalate an eight-year-old war that serves no American purpose. You know, it's like the British ambassador Craig Murray said: what the war is about is protecting the pipeline route that the Americans wanted through Afghanistan so they could get the Central Asian gas out without it passing through Iran and Russia. So is this why we should be in Afghanistan? And how do we pay for this? Well, just the other day, Obie, the Democrat chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obie, says, "Oh, we're going to put an additional progressive income tax on every American earning more than $30,000 a year." So I call this trickle-up economics, where you tax the little guy and give it to [inaudible] companies and to the oil companies or the energy companies who would benefit from the pipeline.
JAY: But what do you make of the administration's argument that, one, al-Qaeda's a threat, a vital national security threat, and more than that—?
ROBERTS: That's a total lie.
JAY: And the other piece of it is the issue of dissolution of Pakistan. So what do you make of all that?
ROBERTS: Pakistan is falling apart because we forced our puppet government to attack its own people. All this stuff about al-Qaeda is a lie. It's a hoax.
JAY: Why? Why do you say so?
ROBERTS: Because it doesn't exist in any way that it means anything to us.
JAY: But what's the evidence for that? Because—.
ROBERTS: But what's the evidence that it means anything?
JAY: Well, the evidence—they say the evidence is 9/11, the attacks on the US embassies, and so on. There's certainly been attacks in Europe.
ROBERTS: Oh, you mean they object to our aggressive policies and our hegemony in their own lands. And if this organization exists, it's nothing to do with a state. It's nothing to do with Taliban. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. Pakistan is not al-Qaeda. The whole thing is some kind of a hoax. It's an excuse.
JAY: So what's the—so the real objective is pipelines.
ROBERTS: [inaudible] the 9/11 Commission report. We've had the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission, who apparently drafted the thing, he's written a book and said, you know, the military lied to us. People lied to us who were supposed to be helping us. We've had both cochairmen of the commission say the same thing. The 9/11 truth movement is very large. There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people—architects, engineers, scientists—and they point out all kinds of problems with this report. There's [inaudible] never been an examination. There was a political commission that was denied most of the relevant testimony and information according to their own chairman and legal counsel, and they produced a political document. We don't know what happened. I mean, people can say, "Oh, we believe this because the government did it," but it's the same government that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda connections when we know for a fact he didn't.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
"'Obama's War Choice' pure politics" - Lawrence Wilkerson
Lawrence Wilkerson,"Obama's campaign rhetoric and his generals put him in a corner on Afghanistan."
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Monty Python, Colin Powell and the Terror Industrial Complex
Leave it to Monty Python's Terry Gilliam - Python's 'Yank-in-the-wood-pile', director of 'Brazil', 'Twelve Monkeys' and other cinematic adventures - to pitch a zinger to Keith Olbermann. To wit, "Why didn't Colin Powell's interview about the 'Terror Industrial Complex' become a bigger story?"
Indeed; Why? The answer, of course, is revealed by asking another question; why aren't US forces and contractors out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
(If the embedded video doesn't link to this story, use this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#33336509
Indeed; Why? The answer, of course, is revealed by asking another question; why aren't US forces and contractors out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
(If the embedded video doesn't link to this story, use this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#33336509
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Monday, October 12, 2009
Financial Coup d'Etat by Wall Street?
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10092009/watch.html
BILL MOYERS: What's your explanation as an economist. And a student of this financial system as to why the banks are taking so long to help the homeowners when Congress has allocated funds for that purpose?
SIMON JOHNSON: I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious and it's very tragic. That they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. Bill, they'll expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.
These are very smart, very profit-oriented people. I can assure you, if there was money in it for them. They would be negotiating you know, very various kinds of re-schedulings of these loans. They don't want to do it. They it's not in their interest. It's not where the money is.
This is capitalism, Bill. That's what they're supposed to do. They represent their shareholders, they're appointed by the board of directors to make money for their shareholders. And the way they think that they can best make money is to shape the regulatory rules around housing around derivatives, around all everything we used to have that kept the financial sector under control. Has all been, you know, washed away, one way or another, by their efforts, right? They make money in the boom, that way. And when and when bad things happen, they shove all the downside onto the taxpayer. That's what they're doing their job.
MARCY KAPTUR: It's socialism for the big banks. Because they've basically taken their mistakes and they've put it on the taxpayer. That's the government. That's socialism. That isn't capitalism.
SIMON JOHNSON: Well people some people call that lemon socialism. So, when it turns out to be a lemon, it's you it's yours, the taxpayer. When it turns out to be good, it's mine, I'm Wall Street.
BILL MOYERS: What's your explanation as an economist. And a student of this financial system as to why the banks are taking so long to help the homeowners when Congress has allocated funds for that purpose?
SIMON JOHNSON: I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious and it's very tragic. That they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. Bill, they'll expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.
These are very smart, very profit-oriented people. I can assure you, if there was money in it for them. They would be negotiating you know, very various kinds of re-schedulings of these loans. They don't want to do it. They it's not in their interest. It's not where the money is.
This is capitalism, Bill. That's what they're supposed to do. They represent their shareholders, they're appointed by the board of directors to make money for their shareholders. And the way they think that they can best make money is to shape the regulatory rules around housing around derivatives, around all everything we used to have that kept the financial sector under control. Has all been, you know, washed away, one way or another, by their efforts, right? They make money in the boom, that way. And when and when bad things happen, they shove all the downside onto the taxpayer. That's what they're doing their job.
MARCY KAPTUR: It's socialism for the big banks. Because they've basically taken their mistakes and they've put it on the taxpayer. That's the government. That's socialism. That isn't capitalism.
SIMON JOHNSON: Well people some people call that lemon socialism. So, when it turns out to be a lemon, it's you it's yours, the taxpayer. When it turns out to be good, it's mine, I'm Wall Street.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Listening to Lara Logan
Listening to Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs and 60 Minutes Correspondent on the Colbert Report sell not only her 3-part Special Report on CBS but throwing an impassioned (and obviously well-rehearsed) pitch for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan to the US people.
I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.
Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.
This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.
In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.
Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.
Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=251054
http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-times-whines-that-rethink-afghanistan-film-is-not
I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.
Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.
This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.
In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.
Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.
Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=251054
http://rebelreports.com/post/205318314/ny-times-whines-that-rethink-afghanistan-film-is-not
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Judge Goldstone Defends Gaza Inquiry Alleging Israeli War Crimes
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council held a one-day debate Tuesday on a recent inquiry finding Israel committed a number of war crimes in its assault on the Gaza Strip. The head of the inquiry, Judge Richard Goldstone, said all but one of the individual Israeli attacks examined by investigators had no military purpose.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”
Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”
Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/30/headlines
Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”
Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”
Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/30/headlines
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Obama Beats the Drum on Iran - Where's the change?
It's ironic and hypocritical that the USA fires off missiles as a regular part of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq for years, killing hundreds and thousands of innocent women and children and then raises a political stink about Iran test firing unarmed missiles within their own territory. The irony and the hypocrisy hardly ends there. The USA must look to its own non-compliance as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Scott Ritter was one of the more out-spoken UN weapons inspectors in Iraq who campaigned to continue weapons inspections in order to end the murderous sanctions and avoid war. He was also very vocal about denying the Bush/Cheney claim of WMDs in Iraq.
Go to Mr Ritter's article in the Guardian entitled,
"Keeping Iran Honest; Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant-inspections
Then watch his interview on Democracy Now!
">script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed_show_v1/300/2009/9/29/segment/2">
Scott Ritter was one of the more out-spoken UN weapons inspectors in Iraq who campaigned to continue weapons inspections in order to end the murderous sanctions and avoid war. He was also very vocal about denying the Bush/Cheney claim of WMDs in Iraq.
Go to Mr Ritter's article in the Guardian entitled,
"Keeping Iran Honest; Iran's secret nuclear plant will spark a new round of IAEA inspections and lead to a period of even greater transparency."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/25/iran-secret-nuclear-plant-inspections
Then watch his interview on Democracy Now!
">script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.democracynow.org/embed_show_v1/300/2009/9/29/segment/2">
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Surprise! Welcome to the Third World, Des Moines!
I’ve been working on an essay for several months – ruminating mostly; rolling things round in my head looking for supporting or counter-arguments. The gist of the piece is that the United States is becoming or - more nefariously - is being turned into a Third World economy.
From personal observation, I’ve seen my friends and family, by necessity, change from manufacturing jobs or occupations as skilled workers to service jobs, losing pay, perks, union representation, and a sense that the situation will improve with time. Associating those numerous anecdotes, with the dismantling of social services and the disintegration of infrastructure, I wondered what other element would further the affect the USA’s slide from First World to Third World economy in this depressing scenario.
(n.b. Scenario construction like this is one, is a technique I employ to control my natural ebullience.)
Since the time last March when this dismal thought first occurred to me, the US economy has imploded; the huge no-strings-attached bail-out funds of TARP have mostly been distributed and dispersed to some of the largest corporations on the planet. Unemployment has risen unofficially to nearly 20% and officially in double digits. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are pandemic. The missing element that would precipitate the change in the US from a First to a Third World economy became evident; massive debt to foreign creditors. Being heavily indebted to foreign entities is an economic characteristic of all of the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World.
The unknown trillions of dollars borrowed from the Fed, the PRC, France (and who knows where else) hemorrhaging from the U.S. Treasury to pay war profiteers (e.g. Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.), Defense Contractors, corporate subsidies, and the out-and-out wholesale bail-out of the most morally destitute, most conniving, self-serving, rapaciously avaricious swindlers, scammers, hornswogglers, flim-flammers and thoroughly destructive bunch of crooks seen in nearly a century would, I judge, qualify as an over-bearing burden of debt. A perfect shit storm of financial hanky-panky, two never-ending wars and the continuing slavish dependence on petroleum just might be the fulcrum by which the middle class of the USA begin to empathize with the citizens of Nicaragua and Colombia.
This postulation was an apparent orphan, though, as far as I could tell – a depressing day-dream but nothing more. I found little real evidence supporting the idea and that offered some relief.
Until I saw a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" from Friday, September 25th, that is. In that segment, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics said, “On bad mornings I wake up and think that we are turning into a Latin American country," Krugman said.
“If America was officially a Third World country, the international monetary fund would come in and say, “You’ve got to break the power of your oligarchs. Those banking interests; they have too much power. You’ve got to end all of this crony capitalism… We’re not in good shape.”
He went on the say that while the American dream is not totally dead, it is "dying pretty fast," particularly when it comes to social mobility.
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I only wish that the surprise was a more pleasant one.
Right this way, Mr and Mrs America. Your hovel is waiting.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/26/krugman-the-american-drea_n_300702.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
From personal observation, I’ve seen my friends and family, by necessity, change from manufacturing jobs or occupations as skilled workers to service jobs, losing pay, perks, union representation, and a sense that the situation will improve with time. Associating those numerous anecdotes, with the dismantling of social services and the disintegration of infrastructure, I wondered what other element would further the affect the USA’s slide from First World to Third World economy in this depressing scenario.
(n.b. Scenario construction like this is one, is a technique I employ to control my natural ebullience.)
Since the time last March when this dismal thought first occurred to me, the US economy has imploded; the huge no-strings-attached bail-out funds of TARP have mostly been distributed and dispersed to some of the largest corporations on the planet. Unemployment has risen unofficially to nearly 20% and officially in double digits. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are pandemic. The missing element that would precipitate the change in the US from a First to a Third World economy became evident; massive debt to foreign creditors. Being heavily indebted to foreign entities is an economic characteristic of all of the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World.
The unknown trillions of dollars borrowed from the Fed, the PRC, France (and who knows where else) hemorrhaging from the U.S. Treasury to pay war profiteers (e.g. Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.), Defense Contractors, corporate subsidies, and the out-and-out wholesale bail-out of the most morally destitute, most conniving, self-serving, rapaciously avaricious swindlers, scammers, hornswogglers, flim-flammers and thoroughly destructive bunch of crooks seen in nearly a century would, I judge, qualify as an over-bearing burden of debt. A perfect shit storm of financial hanky-panky, two never-ending wars and the continuing slavish dependence on petroleum just might be the fulcrum by which the middle class of the USA begin to empathize with the citizens of Nicaragua and Colombia.
This postulation was an apparent orphan, though, as far as I could tell – a depressing day-dream but nothing more. I found little real evidence supporting the idea and that offered some relief.
Until I saw a segment of "Real Time with Bill Maher" from Friday, September 25th, that is. In that segment, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics said, “On bad mornings I wake up and think that we are turning into a Latin American country," Krugman said.
“If America was officially a Third World country, the international monetary fund would come in and say, “You’ve got to break the power of your oligarchs. Those banking interests; they have too much power. You’ve got to end all of this crony capitalism… We’re not in good shape.”
He went on the say that while the American dream is not totally dead, it is "dying pretty fast," particularly when it comes to social mobility.
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I only wish that the surprise was a more pleasant one.
Right this way, Mr and Mrs America. Your hovel is waiting.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/26/krugman-the-american-drea_n_300702.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
Saturday, September 26, 2009
First, Torture; Now, Disappearances?
Two of the thugs in cammies are apparently wearing a black arm band similar to those worn by military police. I could see no other designation of unit or rank. None wore head-cover.
After the civilian is manhandled into the unmarked sedan, riot troops move in warning off the concerned witnesses.
I hope somebody thought to get the license number.
Are we starting to disappear our own people in broad daylight from the streets of a major city with the eyes of the world turned the G20?
Disappearances; another of the counter-insurgency 'skills' along with torture and assassination taught to fascists the world over at the School of the Americas.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/g20-protest-photos-vote-o_n_298692.html
After the civilian is manhandled into the unmarked sedan, riot troops move in warning off the concerned witnesses.
I hope somebody thought to get the license number.
Are we starting to disappear our own people in broad daylight from the streets of a major city with the eyes of the world turned the G20?
Disappearances; another of the counter-insurgency 'skills' along with torture and assassination taught to fascists the world over at the School of the Americas.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/24/g20-protest-photos-vote-o_n_298692.html
Friday, September 25, 2009
Condi Rice continues her neo-Con-Job
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Condi Rice Talks More Shite
In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted with fear-mongering.
"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."
Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!
What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.
This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.
Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.
If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209
"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."
Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!
What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.
This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.
Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.
If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
How do you spell 'Quagmire', again?
Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes, “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term…risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
Does this sound like circular logic to anyone else?
The 'initiative' - meaning the ability to control the battle theater - is an illusion in guerrilla warfare and 'momentum' can only mean sustained and relentless, perpetual military action against the citizenry of the country.
The fact of the matter is that 'insurgency' is a code word for 'citizens of the country that resent the US military for killing their friends and family and have taken up arms to fight hostile occupation'.
Support the troops!
Bring them home to lead productive - not destructive - lives.
Does this sound like circular logic to anyone else?
The 'initiative' - meaning the ability to control the battle theater - is an illusion in guerrilla warfare and 'momentum' can only mean sustained and relentless, perpetual military action against the citizenry of the country.
The fact of the matter is that 'insurgency' is a code word for 'citizens of the country that resent the US military for killing their friends and family and have taken up arms to fight hostile occupation'.
Support the troops!
Bring them home to lead productive - not destructive - lives.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Breaking the Silence - John Pilger
As we near the start of the 9th year of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan, take time to listen to the reasons voiced by George W, Tony B, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and the other architects of the Project for the New American Century that were meant to justify the illegal invasion and armed aggression against a sovereign people. John Pilger's documentary of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. What is the point? What is the justification 8 years on for the death and destruction?
Watch John Pilger - Breaking the Silence in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Watch John Pilger - Breaking the Silence in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Torture Investigation Gets Gonzo's Okay
It would seem that former Attorney General Gonzalez finally remembered something. He remembered the law and what a prosecutor is suppose to do when someone is suspected and accused of breaking it.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Richard B Cheney: please, go back to your safe-room and await the US Marshalls
Cheney's claim that his policies saved lives and foiled terrorist plots reminds me of that joke about the person shredding newspaper in NYC to keep away the tigers. When told that there are no tigers in NYC, the person rejoins,'See how well it works?'
Although correlation is not proof (as this joke illustrates), the number of plots foiled by Cheney's administration by torture and rendition are few and laughable. The heinous acts that they committed are numerous and vile.
Cheney (and Addington, Rice, Tennant, et al) were caught so flat-footed by 9-11 that they went off the moral and legalistic deep end in a frantic attempt to 1) avoid culpability and 2) make political hay.
In Cheney's own words, they went to the 'dark side' which to me indicates that he was already quite familiar with the territory having been there many times before.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Pilger: Obama a Product of Corporate Marketing
Many will be abhorred by what award-winning investigative journalist, John Pilger, has to say about President Obama. Many will ignore Pilger's thesis altogether but will pounce on his cited examples as proof positive that Dubya was right all along but that Obama is still a socialist. Or a fascist. Or Kenyan. Or not really the president cuz it say so in the Bible.
Now that you've heard Mr Pilger's comments about Barak Obama, consider this: why should the idea that the US president is a product of marketing strategies, public relations tactics, and corporate planning be a surprise? The role of PR firms in US elections goes back at the very least to the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns. Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Selling of the President’ recounts Nixon’s successful re-packaging and his triumph in the 1968 presidential race following his loss to Kennedy in the nail-biter of 1960.
Winning the contest for the highest elected government office in the land (if not the world) is most assuredly a prize that corporate America and those in its thrall would do nearly anything to accomplish. This is the self-evident fact of the matter and incontestable. Putting the concepts Bernays and Lippman proposed in the early 1900’s for manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion and thereby controlling the ignorant herd is standard operating procedure. SOP. So last millennium it’s hardly worth mentioning. Nothing new here. Move along.
How many movies have come out of Hollywood –itself a creature of marketing and PR alchemy – that have told the lurid tales of backroom deals, media handlers, corporate shills, wardrobe consultants, press agents and PR strategists? How many summer-reading novels?
The notion that the US president is a corporate marketing creation should not come as a revelation. (A dispassionate observer might need look no further than the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan to confirm the proposition that the quality of packaging and promotion out-weigh the quality of the candidate in a run for the White House.) Nevertheless, the truth of it is disturbing. Mr. Pilger is doing us all a favor by pointing this issue out to us and rubbing our noses in it.
The chief executive of our government – you know, the one that is of the people, by the people, for the people-is a product. A product that is shaped by focus groups and groomed by market research and then sold to the electorate by callously well-crafted media ads in combination with attractive product placement and the scripted pronouncements of pundits in the pay of corporations.
(I’m not really an expert, but I play one on TV.)
Understanding that Americans insist on feeling they are independent in their actions - exercising their freedom, in the parlance of patriotism- the marketing mavens offer a choice of products. Sales departments also know that making a choice can be daunting. Especially when there’s a lot at stake and the choice is to be made in near total ignorance; some of it willful, some by design.
In the US the electorate’s choice has been limited to two so as not to confound the troublesome herd; crispy or extra-crispy? Paper or plastic? Democrat or Republican? For here or to go?
Third-party candidates become the target of PR attack dogs and relegated to obscurity by corporate programmers and editors and made to appear an irrelevancy to the presidential contest.
And may the one with the bigger war-chest and the better sales campaign win!
What Hollywood movies do not typically deal with is nevertheless very closely scrutinized: the source of the funds in a presidential candidate’s war-chest. Although there are laws regulating campaign financing, there are many ways around those regulations. Laws, lawyers and loopholes; this is not a revelation, either. It’s axiomatic. Little could be more obvious than the fact that legal services cost money in the USA; as do the services of public relations firms, marketing consultants, ad agencies, media advisers, speech writers, press secretaries, wardrobe and make-up specialists, to name but a few that are essential to the selling of the president.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics , a research group which has tracked the money in U.S. politics for a quarter of a century and which does not accept contributions from corporations, trade associations or labor unions, Obama’s presidential war-chest was an unprecedented $745, 000,000. That astounding sum is based on the Federal Election Commission data for the 2008 election cycle. John McCain, the Republican runner-up, raised a paltry $368,000,000 according to the same sources. Third party candidates’ campaign funds were beggarly in comparison; raising a measly $5,457,000 to finance four separate campaigns. The lion’s share of which, $4,000,000 – little more than one half of one percent of Obama’s record-setting total - was raised by seasoned campaigner, Ralph Nader.
The source of campaign funds should raise no eye-brows. The money comes from the political action committees (PAC) of major corporations and institutions.
• Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama’s presidential bid.
• The PACs of media conglomerates National Amusements Inc (which owns media giants Viacom and CBS Corporation) and Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate contributed more than a cool million.
• International business law firms, Sidley, Austin LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Skadden, Arps, and Wilmerhale, kicked in an even cooler $1.6 million.
• Hi-tech powerhouses, IBM, Microsoft and Google nearly doubled the lawyers’ contributions.
• Although it may prompt a warm and fuzzy feeling that Obama’s alma maters, Harvard and Columbia were major contributors along with Standford and the University of California each of these renowned educational institutions is also funded by government research contracts and should be considered part of the military-industrial complex.
• Rounding out the list is General Electric, which benefits directly from the research done by the aforementioned institutes of higher learning as one of the largest recipients of military contracts.
A pattern emerges; international law firms, mammoth media groups, financial sector behemoths, hi-tech giants and colossal military contractors were primary supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. To risk stating the obvious once more, highly successful corporations and institutions do not go around tossing millions of dollars into wishing wells. They make well-considered and sober decisions, choosing, investments that offer low risk and high probability of profitable returns. An Obama presidency, while seen as ‘dark horse’ by the general public (if you’ll pardon the pun), was assessed as a sound political and financial investment. That these corporate and institutional entities hedged their bets by investing in Obama’s competitors is part of what is known as a balanced investment portfolio and should further negate any lingering illusions that they were foursquare supporters of his message of Hope and change.
This is not news. That this sorry reality is not news exposes the fraud of what passes as democratic process in the United States. The 2008 election campaign of the Chief Executive, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States was paid for by major corporations. That this is merely the most recent one in a long uninterrupted series of corporate-sponsored political contests leads to one incontrovertible conclusion: the US is a Corporatocracy, plain and simple. There should be no one of voting age so naïve as to cling to the fantasy, the irrational will-o’-the-wisp that Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, IBM, GE and Microsoft et al. will not claim ownership of what they have paid millions to acquire.
Should this depress Obama supporters? Only if they actually believed the PR hype. One more instance of belief as an obstacle to reason.
We should all be abhorred and politically radicalized by this truth.
To view Mr Pilger's speech 'Obama and Empire' in its entirety go to the Real News.
For more about John Pilger and his work; http://pilger.carlton.com/
To view Mr Pilger's speech
Now that you've heard Mr Pilger's comments about Barak Obama, consider this: why should the idea that the US president is a product of marketing strategies, public relations tactics, and corporate planning be a surprise? The role of PR firms in US elections goes back at the very least to the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns. Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Selling of the President’ recounts Nixon’s successful re-packaging and his triumph in the 1968 presidential race following his loss to Kennedy in the nail-biter of 1960.
Winning the contest for the highest elected government office in the land (if not the world) is most assuredly a prize that corporate America and those in its thrall would do nearly anything to accomplish. This is the self-evident fact of the matter and incontestable. Putting the concepts Bernays and Lippman proposed in the early 1900’s for manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion and thereby controlling the ignorant herd is standard operating procedure. SOP. So last millennium it’s hardly worth mentioning. Nothing new here. Move along.
How many movies have come out of Hollywood –itself a creature of marketing and PR alchemy – that have told the lurid tales of backroom deals, media handlers, corporate shills, wardrobe consultants, press agents and PR strategists? How many summer-reading novels?
The notion that the US president is a corporate marketing creation should not come as a revelation. (A dispassionate observer might need look no further than the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan to confirm the proposition that the quality of packaging and promotion out-weigh the quality of the candidate in a run for the White House.) Nevertheless, the truth of it is disturbing. Mr. Pilger is doing us all a favor by pointing this issue out to us and rubbing our noses in it.
The chief executive of our government – you know, the one that is of the people, by the people, for the people-is a product. A product that is shaped by focus groups and groomed by market research and then sold to the electorate by callously well-crafted media ads in combination with attractive product placement and the scripted pronouncements of pundits in the pay of corporations.
(I’m not really an expert, but I play one on TV.)
Understanding that Americans insist on feeling they are independent in their actions - exercising their freedom, in the parlance of patriotism- the marketing mavens offer a choice of products. Sales departments also know that making a choice can be daunting. Especially when there’s a lot at stake and the choice is to be made in near total ignorance; some of it willful, some by design.
In the US the electorate’s choice has been limited to two so as not to confound the troublesome herd; crispy or extra-crispy? Paper or plastic? Democrat or Republican? For here or to go?
Third-party candidates become the target of PR attack dogs and relegated to obscurity by corporate programmers and editors and made to appear an irrelevancy to the presidential contest.
And may the one with the bigger war-chest and the better sales campaign win!
What Hollywood movies do not typically deal with is nevertheless very closely scrutinized: the source of the funds in a presidential candidate’s war-chest. Although there are laws regulating campaign financing, there are many ways around those regulations. Laws, lawyers and loopholes; this is not a revelation, either. It’s axiomatic. Little could be more obvious than the fact that legal services cost money in the USA; as do the services of public relations firms, marketing consultants, ad agencies, media advisers, speech writers, press secretaries, wardrobe and make-up specialists, to name but a few that are essential to the selling of the president.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics , a research group which has tracked the money in U.S. politics for a quarter of a century and which does not accept contributions from corporations, trade associations or labor unions, Obama’s presidential war-chest was an unprecedented $745, 000,000. That astounding sum is based on the Federal Election Commission data for the 2008 election cycle. John McCain, the Republican runner-up, raised a paltry $368,000,000 according to the same sources. Third party candidates’ campaign funds were beggarly in comparison; raising a measly $5,457,000 to finance four separate campaigns. The lion’s share of which, $4,000,000 – little more than one half of one percent of Obama’s record-setting total - was raised by seasoned campaigner, Ralph Nader.
The source of campaign funds should raise no eye-brows. The money comes from the political action committees (PAC) of major corporations and institutions.
• Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama’s presidential bid.
• The PACs of media conglomerates National Amusements Inc (which owns media giants Viacom and CBS Corporation) and Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate contributed more than a cool million.
• International business law firms, Sidley, Austin LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Skadden, Arps, and Wilmerhale, kicked in an even cooler $1.6 million.
• Hi-tech powerhouses, IBM, Microsoft and Google nearly doubled the lawyers’ contributions.
• Although it may prompt a warm and fuzzy feeling that Obama’s alma maters, Harvard and Columbia were major contributors along with Standford and the University of California each of these renowned educational institutions is also funded by government research contracts and should be considered part of the military-industrial complex.
• Rounding out the list is General Electric, which benefits directly from the research done by the aforementioned institutes of higher learning as one of the largest recipients of military contracts.
A pattern emerges; international law firms, mammoth media groups, financial sector behemoths, hi-tech giants and colossal military contractors were primary supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. To risk stating the obvious once more, highly successful corporations and institutions do not go around tossing millions of dollars into wishing wells. They make well-considered and sober decisions, choosing, investments that offer low risk and high probability of profitable returns. An Obama presidency, while seen as ‘dark horse’ by the general public (if you’ll pardon the pun), was assessed as a sound political and financial investment. That these corporate and institutional entities hedged their bets by investing in Obama’s competitors is part of what is known as a balanced investment portfolio and should further negate any lingering illusions that they were foursquare supporters of his message of Hope and change.
This is not news. That this sorry reality is not news exposes the fraud of what passes as democratic process in the United States. The 2008 election campaign of the Chief Executive, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States was paid for by major corporations. That this is merely the most recent one in a long uninterrupted series of corporate-sponsored political contests leads to one incontrovertible conclusion: the US is a Corporatocracy, plain and simple. There should be no one of voting age so naïve as to cling to the fantasy, the irrational will-o’-the-wisp that Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, IBM, GE and Microsoft et al. will not claim ownership of what they have paid millions to acquire.
Should this depress Obama supporters? Only if they actually believed the PR hype. One more instance of belief as an obstacle to reason.
We should all be abhorred and politically radicalized by this truth.
To view Mr Pilger's speech 'Obama and Empire' in its entirety go to the Real News.
For more about John Pilger and his work; http://pilger.carlton.com/
To view Mr Pilger's speech
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
United Health Group - A story of corporate sociopathology
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Cheney's Self-serving Disinformation
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Former Labour MP and Cabinet Minister Tony Benn on Health Care and Afghanistan
On Health Care:
"And, you see, I suppose it’s really basically a question of, do you regard the health of the nation as a national interest? Now, in the United States, taxpayers pay for the education of children. Does that make it socialized education? The police are paid for by the taxpayers. Does that make it a socialized police force? The fire services are public services. Does that mean they are socialized fire services? You see, this is just the language of very, very rich people who don’t want to make a contribution for the healthcare of others."
"I’m afraid it’s getting an end of it, the whole argument. And the member of Parliament you quoted is being denounced by his own leader. And Mrs. Thatcher said the “Health Service is safe in our hands. And when she said that—and she was the most right-wing leader we’ve had in Britain for many years—when she said that about the Health Service, that gives you the clearest recommendation I can think of for a right-wing American audience."
"We took the view that a government had a responsibility to focus on the needs of a nation in peacetime in the way in which it does in wartime. And if that principle is followed, then all the ideological language can be set aside. You’ve got to judge a country by whether its needs are met and not just by whether some people make a profit. I’ve never met Mr. Dow Jones, and I’m sure he works very, very hard with his averages. We get them every hour. But I don’t think the happiness of a nation is decided by the share values in Wall Street."
On Afghanistan:
"But, you see, I think you have to understand the history of this. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, captured Kabul, and was defeated the following year, and 15,000 British troops were killed in the retreat. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1879. Britain was in Afghanistan in 1919. The Russians were in Afghanistan."
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/18/british_politician_tony_benn_condemns_escalation
http://www.tonybenn.com/
"And, you see, I suppose it’s really basically a question of, do you regard the health of the nation as a national interest? Now, in the United States, taxpayers pay for the education of children. Does that make it socialized education? The police are paid for by the taxpayers. Does that make it a socialized police force? The fire services are public services. Does that mean they are socialized fire services? You see, this is just the language of very, very rich people who don’t want to make a contribution for the healthcare of others."
"I’m afraid it’s getting an end of it, the whole argument. And the member of Parliament you quoted is being denounced by his own leader. And Mrs. Thatcher said the “Health Service is safe in our hands. And when she said that—and she was the most right-wing leader we’ve had in Britain for many years—when she said that about the Health Service, that gives you the clearest recommendation I can think of for a right-wing American audience."
"We took the view that a government had a responsibility to focus on the needs of a nation in peacetime in the way in which it does in wartime. And if that principle is followed, then all the ideological language can be set aside. You’ve got to judge a country by whether its needs are met and not just by whether some people make a profit. I’ve never met Mr. Dow Jones, and I’m sure he works very, very hard with his averages. We get them every hour. But I don’t think the happiness of a nation is decided by the share values in Wall Street."
On Afghanistan:
"But, you see, I think you have to understand the history of this. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839, captured Kabul, and was defeated the following year, and 15,000 British troops were killed in the retreat. Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1879. Britain was in Afghanistan in 1919. The Russians were in Afghanistan."
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/18/british_politician_tony_benn_condemns_escalation
http://www.tonybenn.com/
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