(Semi) Persistent Rationality

A Bumper Sticker

2010-11-05T14:30:00.001-04:00

Reminder (first posted on the eve of election day 2010)

2010-11-05T12:54:00.001-04:00

I just wanted to remind all you people out there how important it is for you to get out and vote DEMOCRATIC today.

Why? So you can say you didn't vote REPUBLICAN.

As Barack Obama has shown, it is very important in a neo-feudal mediocracy to KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE.

Keeping the illusion of hope alive allows us to pretend that we really have not lost control of things in the US and, more importantly, it allows the people who actually run the place not to have to face the anger that kleptocrats usually face when the people they rule find out they are getting systematically screwed.

So again. VOTE DEMOCRATIC!!

KEEP THE ILLUSION OF HOPE ALIVE!

William Astore USAF Retired

2010-11-05T08:49:00.001-04:00

The New American Isolationism
The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities

By William J. Astore

A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.

Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding “entangling alliances” and conflicts abroad. It was tied to America’s historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army -- a tradition in which many Americans took pride. Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been “too proud to fight.” Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether. Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking upon Hitler’s rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.

In the decades since World War II, however, “isolationism” has been turned inside-out and upside-down. Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they’ve done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war’s brutal realities. With rare exceptions (notably John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to pay any price and bear any burden), our elites have not sought to mobilize a new “greatest generation,” but rather to keep a clueless one -- clueless, that is, as to war’s fatal costs and bitter realities -- unmobilized (if not immobilized).

Such national obliviousness has not gone unnoticed. In a recent New York Times op-ed headlined “The Wars that America Forgot About,” former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw asked the obvious question: Why, in an otherwise contentious political season, have our wars gone so utterly undebated? His answers -- that we’re in a recession in which people have more pressing concerns, and that we’ve restricted the burdens of war to a tiny minority -- are sensible, but don’t go quite far enough. It’s important to add that few Americans are debating, or even discussing, our wars in part because our ruling elites haven’t wanted them debated -- as if they don’t want us to get the idea that we have any say in war-making at all.

Think of it this way: the old isolationism was a peaceable urge basic to the American people; the new isolationism is little short of a government program to keep the old isolationism, or opposition of any sort to American wars, in check.

Americans Express Skepticism about War… So?

When you’re kept isolated from war’s costs, it’s nearly impossible to mount an effective opposition to them. While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years, may have sought to remove U.S. public opinion from the enemy’s target list, they have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making powers. Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive“So?” when asked about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008. So what if the American people are uneasy? The elites can always call on a professional, non-draft military, augmented by hordes of privatized hire-a-gun outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they’ve almost become the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. These same elites encourage us to “support our troops,” but otherwise to look away.

Mainstream media coverage of our wars has only added to the cocoon created by the new isolationism. After all, it rarely addresses the full costs of those conflicts to U.S. troops (including their redeployment to war zones, even when already traumatized), let alone to foreign non-combatants in faraway Muslim lands. When such civilians are killed, their deaths tend to take place under the media radar. “If it bleeds, it doesn’t lead,” could be a news motto for much of recent war coverage, especially if the bleeding is done by civilians.

Only the recent release of classified documents and videos by WikiLeaks, for instance, has forced our media to bring the mind-numbing body count we’ve amassed in Iraq out of the closet. If nothing else, WikiLeaks has succeeded in reminding us of the impact of our vastly superior firepower, as in a now infamous video of an Apache helicopter gunshipfiring on non-combatants in the streets of Baghdad. Such footage is, of course, all-too-personal, all-too-real. Small wonder it was shown in a censored formon CNN.

Where’s the benefit, after all, for corporate-owned media in showcasing others’ terror and pain, especially if it’s inflicted by “America’s hometown heroes”? Our regular export of large-scale violence (including a thriving trade in the potential for violence via our hammerlock on the global arms trade) is not something Americans or the American media have cared to scrutinize.

To cite two more willful blind spots: Can the average American say roughly how many Iraqis were killed or wounded in our “liberation” of their country and the mayhem that followed? In mid-October, U.S. Central Commandquietly released a distinctly lowball estimate of 200,000 Iraqi casualties (including 77,000 killed) from January 2004 to August 2008. That estimate (lower by 30,000 than the one compiled by official Iraqi sources) did not include casualties from major combat operations in 2003, nor of course did it have any place for the millions of refugees driven from their homes in the sectarian violence that followed. The recent WikiLeaks document dump on Iraq held at least another 15,000 unacknowledged Iraqi dead, and serious studies of the casualty toll often suggest the real numbers are hundreds of thousands higher.

Or how about the attitudes of those living in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan subject to the recent upsurge of U.S. drone strikes? Given the way our robotic wars are written about here, could most Americans imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of Zeus-like lightning bolts?

Here’s what one farmer in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal borderlandshad to say: “I blame the government of Pakistan and the USA… they are responsible for destroying my family. We were living a happy life and I didn’t have any links with the Taliban. My family members were innocent… I wonder, why was I victimized?”

Would an American farmer wonder anything different? Would he not seekvengeance if errant missiles obliterated his family? It’s hard, however, for Americans to grasp the nature of the wars being fought in their name, no less to express sympathy for their victims when they are kept in a state of striking isolation from war’s horrors.

Analgesic War

Once upon a time, America’s Global War on Terror was an analgesic. Recall those “shock and awe” images of explosions that marked the opening days of Iraqi combat operations in 2003. Recall as well all the colorful maps, the glamorous weapons systems, and the glowering faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein interpreted and explained to us on our TV screens by retired U.S. military officers in mufti. In this curiously sanitized version of war, weapons and other military arcana were to serve to ease our pain at the tragedy we had suffered on 9/11, while obscuring the “towers” of dead we were creating in other lands.

In fostering analgesic war and insisting on information control, our elites have, yet again, drawn a mistaken lesson from the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, even if it took years, free-to-roam and often skeptical reporters finally began to question the official story of the war. Violent images came home to roost in American living rooms at dinnertime. Such coverage may not have stopped the killing, at least not right away, but it did contribute to a gutsy antiwar movement, as well as to a restive “silent majority” that increasingly rejected official rhetoric of falling dominoes and lights at the end of tunnels.

Iraq and Afghanistan, by way of contrast, have been characterized by embedded (mostly cheerleading) reporters and banal images of U.S. troops on patrol or firing weapons at unseen targets. Clear admissions that our firepower-intensive form of warfare leads to the violent deaths of many more of “them” than of “us” -- and that many of them aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, our enemies -- are seldom forthcoming. (An exception was former Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal’s uncommonly harsh assessment of checkpoint casualties: "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.")

“We don’t do body counts on other people,” said a cocky Donald Rumsfeld late in 2003 and, even though it wasn’t true (the Pentagon just kept its body counts to itself), an obliging Pentagon press corps generally fell into line and generally stayed there long after our new wars had lost their feel-good sheen. Clearly, military and political elites learned it’s better (for them, at least) to keep vivid images of death and destruction off America’s screens. Ironically, even as Americans seek more lifelike and visceral representations from ever bigger, brighter, high-def TVs, war is presented in carefully sanitized low-def form, largely drained of blood and violence.

The result? Uncomfortable questions about our wars rarely get asked, let alone aired. A boon to those who want to continue those wars unmolested by public opposition, even if a bust when it comes to pursuing a sensible global strategy that’s truly in the national interest. In seeking to isolate the public from any sense of significant sacrifice, active participation in, or even understanding of America’s wars, these same elites have ensured that the conflicts they pursued would be strategically unsound and morally untenable.

Today, Americans are again an isolationist people, but with a twist. Even as we expand our military bases overseas and spend trillions on national security and wars, we’ve isolated ourselves from war’s passions, its savagery, its heartrending sacrifices. Such isolation comforts some and seemingly allows others free rein to act as they wish, but it’s a false comfort, a false freedom, purchased at the price of prolonging our wars, increasing their casualties, abridging our freedoms, and eroding our country’s standing in the world.

To end our wars, we must first endure their Gorgon stare.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. His books and articles focus mainly on the military, technology, and society. Listen to a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch audio interview withAstore on what it felt like to come out of the military and learn how to write honestly about wars by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here.
He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.

Copyright 2010 William J. Astore

George Duhamel on the Writing of Literature

2010-11-05T08:46:00.001-04:00

Here is an extract The Mission of Literature by the French literary scholar Georges Duhamel, a defense of the idea of humanism propounded by Erasmus and Cervantes. The extract, is, according to Kenzaburo Oe (my source for the quote, writing in El País) from the book's chapter on Cervantes. Obviously Duhamel was thinking about the life of the great author of El Quijote in his exhortation to the young concerning what they should do if they are of a literary bent.

EU

"So, young person, above all, live life. Drink abundantly from the milk of the udder of life in order to feed your future creations. You say you want to write good novels? Take my advice and board a boat in some port. Travel the world earning your living in modest occupations and learn to put up with poverty. Don't be in a hurry to pick up a pen. Subject yourself to pain and suffering. Learn from the thousands of people you come across. What I really wish to say as I give this advice is never ever try to slide past the anxiety that others generate in you or the adversities that you might have to experience in order to make them happy. (...) You want to write good novels? Then, listen to me well. Above all, try to forget the desire to do so. Set out on a journey with no fixed route. Sharpen your sight, your hearing, your sense of smell and your appetite. Hope and wait with an open heart."

Extreme Unction on Radio

2010-11-05T08:44:00.001-04:00

As some of you know, i've been doing some local radio in CT. The other day, I went national on Antiwar.com, where I have also published a number of articles.

The interview is a bit more rambling than I would have liked as the host did not talk with me previously about anything he'd be asking or what topics he was interested in.

That said, "algo es algo".

Check it out:

http://antiwar.com/radio/2010/10/29/thomas-harrington/

Obama and Kirchner

2010-11-05T08:40:00.002-04:00

Well, Obama got his ass kicked him on Tuesday, something, of course, he richly deserved. The problem is that the people taking over are the last more or less openly fascist people in any of the world'd developed countries.

And these nuts, in unison with the media they control (ether directly, or by dint of the fecklessness of the non-Republican "liberals"--CNN, PBS, NPR NYT etc-- in the news game) will rip poor Barry from stem to stern through congressional investigations and media "investigations".

It will be bad.

So, at the time of this debacle, it seems fair to ask "Would it really have been any worse than this had actually done things to serve the liberal base that got him elected?

On the assumption he would be getting his ass whipped either way, would you rather have a president with just a sore ass, or a SORE ASS AND:

1) A single payer health care system

2) A closed Guantánamo and the persecution of all the people committed war crimes under Bush

3) The reinstatement of the rights lost under Bush, for starters the right to email and talk on the phone without being snooped upon

4) A bail out that put money into the hands of America homeowners with mortgage problems rather than banks. That way banks would get there money (because people would not be in default) and the people themselves would get to keep their houses.

5) An Israel forced to either make peace or have its funding cut.

6) A real muscular liberal on the supreme court rather Carreerist Kagan who never met an "anti-terror" abridgment of liberties she didn't like.

7) A real, as opposed to fakely staged, end to the Iraq war.

8) Real vigorous participation in the Copenhagen (Global Warming Conference) rather than the role of cynical preserver of the status quo.

9) No more innocent pakistanis and afghanis dying from drones strikes

The list is endless. He and the media can tell us all they want about our being a center right country and not having the votes BLAH, BLAH BLAH. They are all pitiful cover stories for endemic cowardice.

If you want to see what someone can do when their life is about convictions rather than a purely narcissistic pursuit of power, look at the life of Nestor Kirchner who died suddenly a week ago at the age of 60.

Kirchner was no saint and he was not without his own lust for power. But while he liked power, he also really liked helping its country in BIG WAYS.

This was a guy who came into office on a razor thin majority at a time (2003) of unbelievable crisis for the nation. The country was bankrupt and depressed. (Can you imagine almost all of your savings/ retirement being cut by 75% overnight).

He was basically a nobody (in the eyes of the public) who had worked his way steadily up the ranks of one of the most historically corrupt political parties in the western world, el Partido Justicialista. And this in what had lately been one of the most corrupt national political cultures in the western world

From all appearances he was just a hack who. like the hacks before him, could be expected to fail nd fill his pockets.

But something happened. Nestor Kirchner, as man with an historical consciousness , looked in the mirror and said to himself. 'This is my time and am not going to blow it. I got into politics in the seventies to pursue justice and dignity for Argentina and its people. I may not win all the battles, but I'm going to fight hard on every one of them".

He didn't care who he offended (just look at how the Argentine right and the Establishment press talks about him) .

And guess what? It mostly worked. Argentina is a country on the move with a growing economy, a cancelled foreign debt, a shrinking income gap and a vigorous pubic discussion of human rights where torturers and state-sponsored murderers no longer walk around (as they did for some 20 years) smiling on the street at the people they abused, confident that the law would never touch them.

In short, Nestor Kirchner used every bullet he had at his disposition in his fight for what he thought the country needed. And when he used up the first six, he re-loaded again again and again. According to the doctors, he literally worked himself into the grave.

And if we except the people whose plutocratic party he rudely and crudely (he was not subtle) disrupted (and who have used their control of the media to pursue him endlessly), he was pretty widely loved and respected at the time of his death.

This was supposed to be Obama's story line. Don't you remember all those amateur chess player/Obama supporters who told us again and again "He is just saying what he needs to say to get elected. then he'll fight for us".

Hoo-hah. That's a good one!

To fight you have to have courage. and to have courage you have to have values. And to have values, you have to have been something more than a serial pleaser and cameleon. You have to have have things that burn in your gut and keep you up at night.

Barry has none of this.

The Last Best Hope for Mankind? What say the indexes?

2010-11-05T08:35:00.001-04:00

For those that continue to cling to the idea that the US remains a world model of social advancement check out the following indexes. One is the Gini index which measures income distribution in the society and the other is the index of corruption in society.

Given that the American dream is all about anyone being able to "make it", it would figure that we'd be pretty good on income distribution. And given our role as perpetual tutors of democracy for the unwashed, we would figure to be pretty good on corruption.

Well on the Gini (inequality) index we are 45th from the bottom or 57th from the top of 102 countries on which there is full data. Our most immediate neighbors on the list are Uganda, Jamaica Uruguay (slightly worse) and Ivory Coast, Cameroon Iran and Nigeria (slightly better). Outstripping us easily are places like Russia. Morrocco, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Romania.

See for yourself: http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index_2010_0.html

As for the corruption index we are 22nd from the cleanest countries at the top and our neighbors there are Chile and Belgium (slightly better) and France and Uruguay (slightly worse)

http://transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results

Getting that "Place at the Table"

2010-11-05T08:29:00.002-04:00

To A Friend Questioning the Relevance of Hedges' Critique of Liberalism

As I see it, he is saying something relatively straightforward. That is, the values of the liberal consensus forged, in fits and starts from 1932 to 1970, and which created the Middle class (or more ) lifestyle that many of us were able to enjoy--and with it, a sense that the system "worked" for honest people of all good work habits and good will--is broken.

And it is broken because when it came under a concerted attack from the right beginning in the late seventies, the people who had benefitted from it most (people who in many cases became middle class--and sometimes more than that--thanks, in large part because of liberal ideas turned into social policy, refused to go out on the battle field and fight for the Ideals which undergirded all that they had enjoyed.

Our generation took it to the next level: that of the high art of cynicism. (the guild of academics are especially egregious offenders in this regard.) We would all mouth liberal values while putting up with, and often embracing as daily praxis, ever more nasty illiberal values in our workplaces and civic spaces.

We told, and continue to tell, ourselves all sorts of stories about how we needed "a place at the table of power" in order to change the world. But what we really were, and are, doing was all cutting the best deal we could for ourselves in a time of incipient plutocracy. Few of these self-annointed "chess players of liberal power" did anything to stop the steady slide in quality of life those who didn't have the advantages we had.

And none of these less advantaged people believes us one bit when we tell them we really care for their plight. They have been watching us too closely to buy into that crap.

This hasn't stopped us from continuing to tell self-aggrandizing stories of our liberal goodness. We seem not to have noticed that we ourselves are the only people interested in hearing these fairy tales.

This is the narcissistic fraud of Obama in a nutshell. And as Hedges rightly suggests, he and the people that still buy his schtick deserve nothing but derision and ridicule from the many millions of people who have been left behind. He like most "liberals" allergic to the language of social class (well-trained by those righties they pretend to take on) have nothing to offer.

Hedges: The World Liberal Opportunists Made

2010-11-05T08:26:00.000-04:00

The World Liberal Opportunists Made

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/

Posted on Oct 25, 2010

By Chris Hedges

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.

Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.

The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals’ disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.

The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators, but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state.

The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.

The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.

Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power elite and corporate servants.

Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.

The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolinto Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.

“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative,” Russell Jacobywrites. “It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”

Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”

The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.

The Genesis of the Concept of the "War on Terror"

2010-11-05T07:50:00.005-04:00

Speaking recently on US Foreign policy Phil Giraldi says:

"The Israel connection is significant because Israel has long been at the heart of America’s foreign policy woes. America’s misguided war on terror is in fact a complete adoption of Israeli security paradigms without any regard for the actual threats that confront the US, making Israel’s many enemies also the foes of Washington. The Israeli Lobby might not have single handedly brought about the disastrous Iraq war but it certainly was a major factor in the push to invade, taking its cues from the Israeli Foreign Ministry."

Funny I said this in an email to a friend within a month of September 11th, 2001.

In fact, lest you think I am joking, or that Giraldi is exaggerating, check the clip below from the Charlie Rose Program from '95. It is an interview with the then out-of-office Benjamin Netanyahu who was on the program of the Southern-born Suck-Up to the Stars (whose show is underwritten by Bloomberg Sumner Redstone and a bunch of other establishment media types thus guaranteeing it will never step outside the lines of conventional wisdom) flogging a book in which he calls for a "War on Terror".

I remember watching the program in the dark on my living room in at the time and thinking this is the stupidest and most outrageous piece of chutzpah I had ever heard.

Well, six years later crazy, Jewish supremacist (funny, how that term is never used even though supremacist attitudes run through large parts of the Israeli right) Netanyahus's "War on Terror" had become the new organizing principle of American life!

Amazing what you can do when you got congress and much of the media in your pocket and a host of pro-Likudite dual citizens at highest level of the American administrations (Perle, Wolfowitz, Shulsky, Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser). Go ahead do your homework on these names and their connections, and their father's connections, to Revisionist Zionism (the openly racist and authoritarian seed movement of the Likud led by Jabotinsky)

Check out the video and remember we are talking 1995!! And the recall just how quickly and fully the concept of the "War on Terror" was rolled out in the wake of September 11th and just how heavy the role of many of the Bush people listed above was in the writing of the "Clean Break" doctrine, conceived as a a blueprint for Netanyahu's foreign policy program should he get elected, at about the same time he was promoting his book on Withered Rose's program

Check it out. (N.B. You may be required to register in order to access it.)

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6576

The Clean Break Report

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm

Ho-Hum and the Wizard of Oz

2010-11-04T10:24:00.002-04:00

Think of this as one of those columns that your local sportswriter submits when he can't come up with a full story line. One of the scribes around here refers to it as "emptying out the mail bag".

1) Ho-hum. The invading force that famously "doesn't do body counts" not only does them, but has detailed interactive maps showing where every poor Muslim wretch met their end, all 110,000+ of them.

2) Ho-hum. Over 70% of the Iraqis killed by the “precision” weaponry of the coalition and Iraqi militias are non-combatants.

3) Ho-hum. There are some 15,000 new "unexplained" deaths in Iraq, that is, on top of the 110,000 meticulously counted ones that they told us weren't being counted.

As I recall, 3,000 of "our" dead "changed everything". Good thing their lives are worth so much less. Otherwise, everything in the world would have to change at least four more times in rapid succession. And we can't deal with that right now. Agreed? So let's just not talk about it. Agreed?

4) Ho-hum. Picking off people at checkpoints for fun, or for the relief of nervous exhaustion, was, and probably is, quite normal in Iraq. Guess some Iraqi parents had some bad days trying to get home for supper. Ho-hum.

Iraqi kid: "Where's Dad?"

Iraqi Mom: "Sorry to tell you sweetie (motherly smile) He's dead because he looked at a 19 year-old from the US Army the wrong way at a check point. The kid decided it was time to waste a Haji. Don't worry though everything will be all right when his commanding officer comes by with the $2,000 they give to the families of collateral damage like Dad. Ho-hum.

5) Ho-hum. The crew of a US Helicopter gunship spied two Iraqis who were trying to surrender. Itchy fingers on the trigger, they called the unit’s lawyer on the radio to see what to do. After the esteemed jurist told them that, "You can’t surrender to an aircraft", the boys in the big bird let the two raised-arm terrorists (you know they were!) have it. Ho-hum.

6) Ho-hum. The US Army--that that oft-invoked agent of moral betterment for rural kids with no visible future, and on the other end, for dark people who don't love their children with the same intensity we do, and are thus in need of being taught a whole series of life lessons at the point of a gun—issued orders from on high not to report or investigate torture and wanton being killing carried out by the Iraqi Defense Forces, a group over which the self-same US Army had pretty complete operational control. Ho-hum.

The Wizard of Oz: Hillary Clinton, the heavyweight spokesperson of US foreign policy reacted to all of this by saying, in so many words, "Pay no attention to that Wiki-leaks man behind the curtain". .

Ho-hum. The guess here is that most people in the US media and the US population will do exactly that. (Not may little Totos sniffing around in either camp)

Ho-hum. I know, it’s time to get the kids off to soccer practice. I‘ll say a prayer that you get there safely in the SUV. Nowadays, you never know who might be after you…or why.

Class Warfare

2010-11-04T10:17:00.002-04:00

Interesting article. Any fact-based refutations would be welcomed.

EU

Published on Monday, October 25, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Socialism? The Rich Are Winning the US Class War: Facts Show Rich Getting Richer, Everyone Else Poorer

by Bill Quigley

The rich and their paid false prophets are doing a bang up job deceiving the poor and middle class. They have convinced many that an evil socialism is alive in the land and it is taking their fair share. But the deception cannot last – facts say otherwise.

Yes, there is a class war – the war of the rich on the poor and the middle class – and the rich are winning. That war has been going on for years. Look at the facts – facts the rich and their false paid prophets do not want people to know.

Let Glen Beck go on about socialists descending on Washington. Allow Rush Limbaugh to rail about “class warfare for a leftist agenda that will destroy our society.” They are well compensated false prophets for the rich.

The truth is that for the several decades the rich in the US have been getting richer and the poor and middle class have been getting poorer. Look at the facts then make up your own mind.

Poor Getting Poorer: Facts

The official US poverty numbers show we now have the highest number of poor people in 51 years. The official US poverty rate is 14.3 percent or 43.6 million people in poverty. One in five children in the US is poor; one in ten senior citizens is poor. Source: US Census Bureau.

One of every six workers, 26.8 million people, is unemployed or underemployed. This “real” unemployment rate is over 17%. There are 14.8 million people designated as “officially” unemployed by the government, a rate of 9.6 percent. Unemployment is worse for African American workers of whom 16.1 percent are unemployed. Another 9.5 million people who are working only part-time while they are seeking full-time work but have had their hours cut back or are so far only able to find work part-time are not counted in the official unemployment numbers. Also, an additional 2.5 million are reported unemployed but not counted because they are classified as discouraged workers in part because they have been out of work for more than 12 months. Source: US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics October 2010 report.

The median household income for whites in the US is $51,861; for Asians it is $65,469; for African Americans it is $32,584; for Latinos it is $38,039. Source: US Census Bureau.

Fifty million people in the US lack health insurance. Source: US Census Bureau.

Women in the US have a greater lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related conditions than women in 40 other countries. African American US women are nearly 4 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. Source: Amnesty International Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.

About 3.5 million people, about one-third of which are children, are homeless at some point in the year in the US. Source: National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Outside Atlanta, 33,000 people showed up to seek applications for low cost subsidized housing in August 2010. When Detroit offered emergency utility and housing assistance to help people facing evictions, more than 50,000 people showed up for the 3,000 vouchers. Source: News reports.

There are 49 million people in the US who live in households which eat only because they receive food stamps, visit food pantries or soup kitchens for help. Sixteen million are so poor they have skipped meals or foregone food at some point in the last year. This is the highest level since statistics have been kept. Source: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.

Middle Class Going Backward: Facts

One or two generations ago it was possible for a middle class family to live on one income. Now it takes two incomes to try to enjoy the same quality of life. Wages have not kept up with inflation; adjusted for inflation they have lost ground over the past ten years. The cost of housing, education and health care have all increased at a much higher rate than wages and salaries. In 1967, the middle 60 percent of households received over 52% of all income. In 1998, it was down to 47%. The share going to the poor has also fallen, with the top 20% seeing their share rise. Mark Trumball, “Obama’s challenge: reversing a decade of middle-class decline,” Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 2010. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0125/Obama-s-challenge-reversing-a-decade-of-middle-class-decline

A record 2.8 million homes received a foreclosure notice in 2009, higher than both 2008 and 2007. In 2010, the rate is expected to be rise to 3 million homes. Sources: Reuters and RealtyTrac.

Eleven million homeowners (about one in four homeowners) in the US are “under water” or owe more on their mortgages than their house is worth. Source: “Home truths,” The Economist, October 23, 2010.

For the first time since the 1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of the business cycle of the 2000s than they were at the beginning. Despite the fact that the American workforce is working harder and smarter than ever, they are sharing less and less in the benefits they are creating. This is true for white families but even truer for African American families whose gains in the 1990s have mostly been eliminated since then. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America.http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/swa08_00_execsum.pdf

Rich Getting Richer: Facts

The wealth of the richest 400 people in the US grew by 8% in the last year to $1.37 trillion. Source: Forbes 400: The super-rich get richer, September 22, 2010, Money.com

The top Hedge Fund Manager of 2009, David Tepper, “earned” $4 billion last year. The rest of the top ten earned: $3.3 billion, $2.5 billion, $2.3 billion, $1.4 billion, $1.3 billion (tie for 6th and 7th place), $900 million (tie for 8th and 9th place), and in last place out of the top ten, $825 million. Source: Business Insider. “Meet the top 10 earning hedge fund managers of 2009.”http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-top-10-earning-hedge-fund-managers-of-2009-2010-4

Income disparity in the US is now as bad as it was right before the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. From 1979 to 2006, the richest 1% more than doubled their share of the total US income, from 10% to 23%. The richest 1% have an average annual income of more than $1.3 million. For the last 25 years, over 90% of the total growth in income in the US went to the top 10% earners – leaving 9% of all income to be shared by the bottom 90%. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America.http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/2008/01/19.pdf

In 1973, the average US CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker; by 2007 that ratio had grown to $275 to $1. Source: Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz, State of Working America. http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/tabfig/2008/03/SWA08_Wages_Figure.3AE.pdf

Since 1992, the average tax rate on the richest 400 taxpayers in the US dropped from 26.8% to 16.62%. Source: US Internal Revenue Service. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07intop400.pdf

The US has the greatest inequality between rich and poor among all Western industrialized nations and it has been getting worse for 40 years. The World Factbook, published by the CIA, includes an international ranking of the inequality among families inside of each country, called the Gini Index. The US ranking of 45 in 2007 is the same as Argentina, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivorie. The highest inequality can be found in countries like Namibia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. The US ranking of 45 compares poorly to Japan (38), India (36), New Zealand, UK (34), Greece (33), Spain (32), Canada (32), France (32), South Korea (31), Netherlands (30), Ireland (30), Australia (30), Germany (27), Norway (25), and Sweden (23). Source: CIA The World Factbook:https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html

Rich people live an average of about five years longer than poor people in the US. Naturally, gross inequality has consequences in terms of health, exposure to unhealthy working conditions, nutrition and lifestyle. In 1980, the most well off in the US had a life expectancy of 2.8 years over the least well-off. As the inequality gap widens, so does the life expectancy gap. In 1990, the gap was a little less than 4 years. In 2000, the least well-off could expect to live to age of 74.7 while the most well off had a life expectancy of 79.2 years. Source: Elise Gould, “Growing disparities in life expectancy,” Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20080716/

Conclusion

These are extremely troubling facts for anyone concerned about economic fairness, equality of opportunity, and justice.

Thomas Jefferson once observed that the systematic restructuring of society to benefit the rich over the poor and middle class is a natural appetite of the rich. “Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to…the general prey of the rich on the poor.” But Jefferson also knew that justice can only be delayed so long when he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

The rich talk about the rise of socialism to divert attention from the fact that they are devouring the basics of the poor and everyone else. Many of those crying socialism the loudest are doing it to enrich or empower themselves. They are right about one thing – there is a class war going on in the US. The rich are winning their class war, and it is time for everyone else to fight back for economic justice.

Bill is Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com

Read on a Chalkboard in a Restaurant in Córdoba, Argentina

2010-11-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

"Time is too slow for those that wait, too fast for those that fear, too long for those that suffer, too short for those that celebrate. But for those that love, time is eternal"

José Saramago

2010-11-04T10:13:00.000-04:00

ere are some quotes from the very recently departed Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago

1) "The best portrait of what I am was written by Gramsci: 'Pessimist of dint of reason, optimist by dint of will' That says it all".

2) " The same thing happens to me with people as happens with women in my novels. I make them better than they are in life because I continue feeding the hope that some day they will take that next step."

3) "The world needs a different way of understanding human relations. It is what I call the ethical insurrection".

4) "Newspapers are words, They don't have anything to do with reality"

5) "I don't know what to say other than I have done all that I have done with the fullest consciousness that I was expressing myself as a human being seeking to describe his identity. I need to find out what the hell I am doing here, in life and in the light of society and history"

6) If God doesn't exist, Jesus can't be his son. Therefore all of "his" civilization, the so-called Judeo-Christian one, is based on nothing. "

Sadly You Have it Right

2010-11-04T10:09:00.003-04:00

A Friend recently wrote the following:

"The economy collapses due to crooks in the private sector with the aid of crooks in government. The crooks in the private sector get bailed out by the same crooks in the government. The rest of America gets left out of the equation and gets downsized. The market is restored and bonuses flow.

Now, to divert attention to this theft and fraud, the same people who created this mess form and fund a fictitious reform movement of not too bright and anxious Americans and help them focus their attention on the government as the bad guys, not the people who really screwed them. The media's in on the scam as well.

All of a sudden we're concerned with deficits. But obviously, the trillions of dollars wasted on War conveniently gets left out of the discussion.

So, the Teachers, Union Workers, State/Federal workers, people on state aid, mexicans, etc. become the target. Elections will come and this furor takes over and more and more public jobs will be eliminated, services cut, stimulus attempts gutted and more government programs privatized.

Boy, we are in trouble, aren't we?"

Response from EU

Very good analysis.

This is what happens to empires at the end of their life cycles. The orthodoxy that runs them, or I should say, the people that wield the orthodoxy that provides the overarching structure of the society (a set of ideas that in one moment may have been passably functional as policybut clearly are no longer), become so incrusted that all debate about how to confront the society's challenges comes to a virtual stop.

As I suspect I have said before, the history of Spain is very instructive in this regard. The very social ideals (basically a religiously fueled militarism) that allowed Spain to become an empire more powerful than any the world had ever seen (much grander than Rome) by 1530, had become by the end of that same century an albatross around the society's neck.

But did Spanish elites respond to the new historical reality with creativity and new ideas? Hell no.

They kept on looking out for themselves and plying the people with fear-based patriotism and superstitious religious bullshit. (For a hilarious send-up on this read Cervantes very short but brilliant Dialogue of the Dogs (available on-line for 2.98)

Meanwhile the British and the Dutch (that days's version of our Chinese and Asian Tigers) were glad to sit back and take Spain's gold while the leadership class of that country committed stupid folly after stupid folly in the international arena, mostly with wasteful wars in the Mediterranean

They (the Brits and Dutch) used the gold to create the foundations of their more enduring models (one's that not coincidentally made social mobility an ever-increasing reality) of imperial power.

Meanwhile, inside Spain the normal people got poorer and poorer and dumber and dumber. At a time when the the combination of the Enlightenment and the Reformation (with its emphasis and rationality and the person's status as and individual before God) were throwing open the doors to new and creative ways of solving problems Spain mired itself in diversion and the idiotic memory games of Catholic Scholasticism. As a result, they virtually missed the scientific revolution

Its almost as if our elites are painting by numbers from the Spanish "plan".

p.d. In a related vein, there is a very funny (but actually very sad) article in this month's Le Monde Diplomatique about how the powers that be keep applauding the Irish economic model (with its slavish obedience to the austerity dictates of the international market) even as said model generates disaster after disaster.

The upshot is that it no longer maters whether the Irish model works or whether the Irish people are doing better or worse. The only thing that matters is that that Tom Friedman (wonderfully referred to in the article as the "ineffable Tom Friedman") and the people who pay him to create pithy, if wholly juvenile. provincial and idiotic myths of how the world works, make sure that the ideas they need to promulgate to insure their continued enrichment continue to be presented as "Common Sense".

More Phil Giraldi

2010-11-04T10:07:00.001-04:00

Such a Parcel o’ Rogues in a Nation
Posted By Philip Giraldi On October 20, 2010 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 28 Comments

Last Friday Condoleezza Rice visited the White House and reportedly had a long chat with President Barack Obama which included an extended discussion of foreign policy that "covered the waterfront." Afterwards, Rice commented approvingly that "there is still a foreign policy community that believes that foreign policy ought to be bipartisan." Rice, who is on a book promotion tour, described the problem exactly, though the word she should have used was "monolithic" rather than "bipartisan." The Obama Administration foreign policy is virtually indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush, whose heavy handed form of internationalism combined with regime change has brought calamity to the United States. Presumably Obama and Rice were able to congratulate each other on their ability to unite Republicans and Democrats in supporting a seamless vision of the world as it might be if only those poor heathen devils out there would learn to behave.

Andrew Bacevich has described the foreign policy consensus that has ruled the United States since the Second World War as a sacred trinity consisting of global military presence, a military capable of projecting power worldwide, and a willingness to intervene anywhere in the world for any reason secure in the belief that Washington is a force for good. These policies have been supported by both major parties and have now led to something approaching war without end as new adversaries are identified and confronted. The peace dividend from the fall of communism was temporary at best, with international terrorism the new threat that has to be combated globally at great cost in lives and treasure. The consensus foreign policy makes for a bleak future for those Americans who actually care about their country, meaning that there will be little difference if we continue with Obama or wind up with President Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton in 2012.

Condoleezza Rice, serving as an inept National Security Adviser and then as an only marginally better Secretary of State, was part of the grand delusion. She once thrilled the American public and the fawning media by describing her vision of nuclear mushroom clouds over US cities courtesy of Saddam Hussein, who, at the time, had no ability to do harm to anyone but his own people. One might have expected public and congressional demands that Rice be called to account for the foreign policy shipwreck she participated in, but she has instead been rewarded and is currently both a tenured professor at Stanford University and a Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is even being spoken of as a possible Republican presidential candidate somewhere down the road.

The benefit of having a monolithic foreign policy based on a consensus crafted by America’s elites is that it will all pretty much function like an exclusive club where members are allowed to disagree mildly over what wine to have with dinner but not argue about the entrée. As a result, there will be zero transparency to what takes place and absolutely no accountability in a system that is designed to avoid internal conflict and change. Those who expect the government to serve the people should be particularly appalled at the revolving door of self-serving statists who proliferate throughout the system, men and women who have never had a genuine job in their lives but who scurry off to their law firms, lobbying offices, think tanks, and universities before returning at a higher level to the government bringing ruin with them.

A system in which neither party is required to behave responsibly means that decisions will be made without regard for the consequences. Seven years ago a major war crime was committed when Iraq was attacked yet no one has been punished, nor has anyone even been seriously challenged on the steps taken that led up to war. The United States bombed and then invaded a country that posed no threat and that had no ability in any event to strike against Americans or American targets. In 1946, the judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia. In spite of the fact that a majority of Republicans now considers the Iraq war to have been a "mistake," a view certainly shared by most Democrats and the public, no American government official was even fired as a consequence.

If one were to ask who were the potential war criminals in the Bush Administration the list would certainly include Rice. She was the National Security Adviser at the time and it was her job to know how good the intelligence was and to advise the president accordingly. If she was not aware that a lot of the information she was seeing was questionable at best, she was not doing her job very well and should be held accountable for her incompetence, incompetence which in this case led to war.

Putting aside the key question whether George W. Bush, "The Great Decider," was aware that he was being sold a bill of goods, there were certainly others who should have known better but went along for the ride. George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his "slam-dunk" comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the war possible to curry favor with the White House, is now Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ, and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been described as a "self-justifying apologia," in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the US invaded Iraq for no good reason.

Tenet, who never actually worked as a spy, having instead wormed his way up through the system as a congressional staffer, provided the intelligence analysis and godfathered the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that hyped the case for Saddam being a threat. It has been argued that he truly believed the intelligence he was providing and, if that is true, he failed to pay attention to the considerable doubts within the CIA about some of the sources used to indict the Iraqis, most notably "Curveball." If Tenet was not aware of that and was not conveying the caveats to the White House he was failing to do what his job required, opting instead to get on board the Administration bus and go after Saddam.

And then there is Dick Cheney. Cheney, unique for a Vice President, made numerous visits to the CIA headquarters to oversee the generation of the Iraq NIE and to make sure that it said what the White House wanted it to say. Cheney and his colleague in crime Scooter Libby also served as a conduit for bogus information being generated by the Pentagon, bypassing the usual intelligence channels through the CIA and the National Security Adviser. In 2002, Cheney disclosed that he was worth somewhere between $19 and $86 million so it is safe to assume that he is currently in comfortable retirement, a millionaire many times over from his time at Halliburton, a major defense contractor. Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2007 but later had his prison sentence commuted by President Bush. He has achieved a soft landing since that time and is now a Senior Vice President at the Hudson Institute.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the "intellectual" driving force behind the invasion of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A bid to reward him for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair.

Wolfowitz’s chief deputy at the Pentagon, Doug Feith, was the architect of the invasion of Iraq. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, he ran the infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP). OSP collected and disseminated information that CIA and State Department Intelligence had found to be suspect. Not surprisingly, Feith’s reports supported the case that Iraq presented a threat to the United States. After the fighting had begun, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, it was learned that much of the phony information had been invented by people like Ahmad Chalabi, who manipulated his neocon friends and was also very chummy with the Iranians at the same time, providing them with classified information that had been passed to him by his US government contacts. Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would be appalled to make Feith’s acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for one cent, plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go by Tenet has turned out to be more esteemed if not venerated with a used copy of his opus available for $2.75.

And so it goes with Condoleezza Rice off on her book signing. No one is found guilty for starting an unnecessary war that has killed 4,425 Americans and many thousands of Iraqis. No one is punished or even tarnished by his or her role. On the contrary, all are, in fact, richly rewarded for their presumed dedication to their country. One can well presume that the old saw about every good deed being rewarded has been turned on its head in the US government, with only those guilty of crimes against humanity being considered for promotion. Can there be any wonder why ambitious people who are ethically challenged flock to start wars and torture for Uncle Sam? They know they will never be held accountable for anything they do and will reap the financial rewards that they think they deserve. Until that culture is eradicated by something like a Nuremberg trial demonstrating that no one is above the law the United States will continue to be a place that the rest of the world quite rightly regards as preaching respect for rules and values while rewarding just the opposite.

Marco Aurélio Garcia

2010-11-04T10:05:00.000-04:00

As most of you well know, I am not easily impressed by most public figures, even those who, living in the second row of public renown, are alleged to be the real brains of the front men, eg. the Peter Mandelsons (Blair), the Karl Roves, the Rahm Emanuels, the Rubalcabas (Zapatero) etc.

But there are always exceptions to the rule.

Last night, I read a very, very long and interview with Marco Aurélio Garcia, the man who is said to be the eminence grise behind Lula's foreign policies in Brasil. All I can say is "Wow"!

What I observed was public figure with a formidable intellect, broad cultural formation, superb control of the spoken word, a great sense of history, morally-anchored postures, frankness, a sense of humor, and most of all an incredibly detailed and generally quite humane, view of where he wants/needs to take his country and the region where it is located.

I must say, the sense of admiration I felt before Garcia, carried with it a good bit of sadness.

We used to produce men and woman like this, Kennan comes most immediately to mind. But there were in our elites numerous others.

We now have piggy pigmies like Clinton, Holbrooke, Dennis Ross, Elliot Abrams, people of unbelievably narrow cultural vision who are largely prisoner to their own ambitions.

When you look at Garcia beside the glorifiied political hacks who are now running our foreign policy, it makes you cringe.

...And leaves little doubt about which society is on the ups and which is on its way down.

Chinese Skullduggery

2010-11-04T09:59:00.003-04:00

Can you believe what the Chinese are doing. Check this out. I wonder what their next underhanded tactic will be in their drive for global hegemony.

"China’s economy is thirsty, and so it’s drinking deeper and planning deeper yet. It craves Iraq’s oil and Turkmenistan’s natural gas, as well as oil from Kazakhstan. Yet instead of spending more than a trillion dollars on an illegal war in Iraq or setting up military bases all over the Greater Middle East and Central Asia, China used its state oil companies to get some of the energy it needed simply by bidding for it in a perfectly legal Iraqi oil auction"

From Pepe Escobar Full article:

From Hannah Arendt

2010-11-04T08:19:00.000-04:00

“For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”

Al-Kidd Case

2010-11-04T08:17:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you guys, but I remember clearly that there was one lesson that Watergate was supposed to has taught us above all others: that no one in the US, including the President is above the law.

Apparently either Prince Barry never learned it, or he expediently forgot it. Or maybe he was surfing in Hawaii while the rest of us were being dragged before the TV by our Middle School teachers to "see history".

Abdalluh Al-Kidd is an American convert to Islam who found himself on his way to Saudi Arabia to study Islam on September 11th 2001. He was stopped at the airport and imprisoned on the material witness statute (the arrest warrant was issued on the basis of what have now been proven to to be knowing and blatant falsehoods told to the judge by the FBI) which Ashcroft had bragged about stretching as much as he could in order to be able to more effectively round up "suspicious people".

For the next 15 days he was taken to various prisons in the US and subjected to grueling and abusive torture. After this period, he was released with no charges having been filed against him.

However, the detention caused him to lose the security clearance he needed for his job which, in turn, contributed to his divorce.

He decided to sue John Ashcroft for damages. Ashcroft sustained that as AG, he and his FBI should be immune from any responsibility for this miscarriage of justice.

The case finally arrived to the Federal Appeals court of San Francisco where Milan Smith, a Mormon and Bush appointee, and another judge, a Reagan appointee, FORCEFULLY rejected Ashcroft's claims for immunity, calling them "repugnant to the Constitution".

Naturally Obama's "liberal" AG, Holder was delighted with this attempt to restore the rule of law and hold wrongdoers accountable. Right?

Wrong of course.

Rather than leave this felicitous outcome as is, he ordered his solicitor general to take AS HIS ADMINISTRATION'S OWN CAUSE, Ashcroft's claims to immunity in the full knowledge that this would lead to a Supreme Court case in which the court (with his little hack carreerist Kagan on the sidelines because of recusal) would be likely to uphold Ashcroft's absolutely sweeping and constitutionally "repugnant" claims to immunity.

More "Liberal" change form the "liberal" Obama.

To all those people out there who have suggested that I have been precipitous in my judgement's of Obama's performance in the realm of Constitutional Rights, have you got anything to say?

Is this just another instance of how the Repubs just won't let this well-intentioned progressive get anything done? (Huh?)

Or maybe it is still just all too "complex" and/or too "early" for you to come to a decision about how he is doing.

I realize that if there is anything a well-placed member of the thinking class doesn't want to appear it is too "rash" or "judgemental". It's all about cool and nuance when you are a real "serious" person.

Historical note: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were regularly shunted aside as crazies (with the aquiescence of important--read "cool and "well-placed--members of Argentina's intellectual class) for many years after they began protesting in public about the torture and disappearance of their children. Cool did nothing. Hot won the day.

Georrge Bernard Shaw

2010-11-04T08:15:00.000-04:00

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

G.B. Shaw

Dodging the Dodge

2010-11-04T08:12:00.000-04:00

One of the ke talking points of Obama defenders is that his hands are essentially tied by an obstructive Republican party. But as all of us know, and George Bush, like Clinton before him, proved quite eloquently, is that the modern presidency affords the chief executive an enormous ability to change things through executive orders of one kind or another. So recewntly Jame Hamsher asked some progressive thinkers what Prince Barry could conceivably do with these powers if he were, in fact, the smart good-hearted liberal his reamining supporters insist he really is.

EU

Glenn Greenwald:

Announce that all War on Terror detainees in Guantanamo will be entitled to a speedy trial or be released, and all detainees seized outside of active war zones shall be entitled to prompt habeas corpus review.

Direct the DOJ that the “state secrets privilege” will no longer be used to shield executive conduct from allegations of lawbreaking and judicial review, but instead will be used only for its traditional purpose: to prevent specific secrets documents from being used in litigation.

Cease targeting American citizens for assassination who have had no due process and are not on an actual battlefield.

Instruct the Attorney General that the White House does not wish for any Bush-era War on Terror crimes to be immunized from the rule of law, including prosecution if warranted.

Refrain from prosecuting whistle-blowers and journalists who have exposed government corruption and lawbreaking except in cases where serious national security harm has resulted.

Announce a definitive timetable for full withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and scrap plans for a large State Department private army to be assembled to be stationed in Iraq for the indefinite future.

Order the State Department and Defense Department to cease awarding contracts to Blackwater/Xe based on past abuses and the dangers that relationship creates in the Muslim world

Alan Grayson:

End the wars, and bring the troops home. Even if Obama didn’t cut a dollar from the defense budget, all the money spent on the troops, and all of the money that they spend, would be spent in the United States, and that money would circulate in the United States, boosting aggregate demand and creating jobs.

Direct the Attorney General to prosecute foreclosure fraud and other white-collar crimes vigorously.

Determine that China is a “currency manipulator” (which is stating the obvious), and impose trade sanctions on China, to offset Chinese manipulation of the exchange rate.

Accelerate the award and performance of infrastructure projects and competitive grants to the full extent of FY11 appropriations now, instead of the usual end-of-September orgy of contract awards 11 months from now, to accelerate the spending of appropriated funds in order to create jobs.

Employ Government control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to: (a) finance and refinance loans at lower rates, and (b) temporarily eliminate the down payment requirement — if you can make the monthly payments on the house, then you can own it. (This is, in effect, how FHA mortgages have worked for years, but only at the low end of the market.)

Alan Grayson is a member of Congress from Florida’s 8th Congressional District

Edgar Morin

2010-11-04T08:10:00.000-04:00

Edgar Morin, the great French thinker, a person who, in this time of forgetting and false egalitarianism, still dares to call himself an intellectual says that the job of his particular caste is:

"to lay the fundamental and universal problems that today are completely hidden and which experts of specialized intelligence are unable to imagine"

Memory and Accountability

2010-11-04T08:07:00.001-04:00

Now that the double-dip recession is apparently a reality, is Obama and his base going to pretend that no one saw it coming and that nothing else could have really been done?

Are they going to act as if two quite well-known and articulate Nobels in Economics (Krugman and Stiglitz) weren't shouting from the rooftops that this is exactly what would happen if, in a moment when he had a full mandate for sweeping change from the American people, Obama were to (as he did) tailor his stimulus program to the liking of a Republican opposition that was never going to give him votes by making it both a) smaller than it needed to be b) and more dependent than is should have been on stimulus-inefficient tax cuts rather than infrastructure spending?

My guess is that the spin is already underway and that large numbers of the Obama base will swallow without thinking twice.

This is the nature of American public discourse in our age. No history and, therefore no accountability.

William Kristol and the Neo-cons, criminally wrong on everything (in a very Nuremburg trials kind of way) continue on their merry way, pronouncing on foreign policy on Network TV as often as they please with absolutely no fear of having rotten fruit or eggs thrown in their face.

In Zombie nation we have long-since internalized the golden rule: to be serious and grown-up is to never question those those above you in the power hierarchy.

It's not coming, it's Here

2010-11-04T08:04:00.000-04:00

...if and (this is a big if) you want to let yourself see it.

Birth of the National Security State
By Philip Giraldi 10/04/2010

It is not far fetched to speculate that the United States has, over the past ten years, been sliding into a form of authoritarianism that retains only some aspects of the constitution and a limited rule of law. America's president can, for example, commit soldiers to combat overseas without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war by congress while it is quite possible to be detained by the authorities and locked up without any prospect of trial or opportunity to defend oneself. The government even believes it can kill American citizens based only on suspicion. I prefer to think of this transformation as the National Security State because it rests on a popular consensus that liberties must be sacrificed in exchange for greater public safety from various threats, international terrorism being the most prominent. It might just as well be called the National Warfare State as it also requires constant conflict to justify its existence.

Three elements are necessary for the creation of a National Security State. First, there must be a narrative that can be sold to the public justifying the transformation. Second, a system of laws and regulations must be created that enable the state to act with impunity and also to protect the government from challenges to its authority. Third, technology must be harnessed to enable the state to surreptitiously monitor and control the activities of its citizens. All of these elements have fallen into place over the past decade.

A recent example of abuse of authority by the government demonstrates how several of the key elements can come together. On September 24th, the Obama Administration declared that it would ask a federal court to block a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in opposition to the government's contention that it has the authority to assassinate American citizens overseas if they are suspected of involvement with a terrorist group. The White House has invoked the state secrets privilege, contending that vital national interests would be betrayed if the case were to proceed and further that the president has the authority to target anyone for death in time of war. The state secrets privilege is the ultimate weapon to avoid exposure of government wrongdoing. It has been used frequently by the Obama administration in spite of Obama-the-candidate's pledge that he would run an open and accountable government.

The ACLU case focused on the one US citizen known to be on the administration's assassination list, Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Now, by all accounts al-Awlaki is an unsavory character, involved with at least one extremist group in Yemen, but the evidence that he is an actual terrorist or that he has been closely involved with plotting terrorist attacks has not been made public. At this point, he appears to have been condemned to death without any due process and without any opportunity to defend himself. The Obama Administration abuse of the state secrets privilege in this case is little more than justifying the practice of extrajudicial murder at the whim of a government bureaucrat. It also assumes that the whole world is a battlefield without any declaration of war by congress. If all of that is so, al-Awlaki can be killed and so can any other American for any reason or no reason.

State secrets is only one weapon in the arsenal employed by the government to create a framework of regulation that permits the government to act with impunity. The Military Commission Act, which candidate Obama vowed to let expire, was renewed in 2009 with virtually no changes. Under the MCA, someone can be imprisoned indefinitely on suspicion that he or she has provided material support to terrorism. Material support is not defined and can be interpreted to mean nearly anything. If accused, right to a trial by peers does not apply as the detainee is subject to a military tribunal and habeas corpus is null and void. And how does the government determine if someone is a "terrorism supporter?" Through evidence derived from Patriot Act authorized National Security Letters, which the FBI can obtain without any judicial process whatsoever to look into the private lives of each and every citizen. Nearly 25,000 National Security Letters were issued in 2008 alone. When someone receives a letter demanding that information be provided to the authorities it is a felony to reveal to the subject of the investigation that he or she is being looked at.

The second key element in the National Security State is the media depiction of a threat that makes the public fearful and willing to sacrifice rights in exchange for security. This effort is aided and abetted by the government, which is the principal cheerleader for the fear mongering. In the al-Awlaki case the media obediently depicts the man as a terrorist, never challenging the established narrative so it makes it easier for the public to accept that he should be killed for reasons of public safety. Another recent initiative of the same sort is the narrative that there are numerous American Muslims who have been radicalized and might carry out terrorist acts. One might reasonably note that as there are possibly ten million Muslims in the US if that were true there would be hundreds of incidents occurring annually, possibly one or two a day. Where are they? Yet the government suggests that there is an "emerging" threat and the media buys into it hook line and sinker. The public is again scared into supporting the National Security State.

Finally, there is the technical ability to look into the private lives of each and every citizen, which is increasing exponentially as the technology is refined. The federal government is currently seeking legislation to enable it to monitor internet, blackberries, and social networking sites. The centers of most American citizens are criss-crossed by surveillance cameras, while "traffic control" cameras record automobile information, and cell phone and internet providers maintain complete records on calls and emails for up to a year. These are records that the government can access through the National Security Letters, without any judicial review. Cell phone system monitors are able to locate anyone with a phone turned on within a distance of three feet and whenever a call is made the location is recorded. This means if you attend an anti-war rally your participation might wind up in a security file. Much of this and other information is collected into data bases, together with public record material like driving license information, credit reports, and details of criminal and civil litigation. How much of the information is actually retained is anyone's guess, but it is safe to assume that it is all kept for some time and that government computers can retrieve it at will.

Having lived in Europe, I know that most of these intrusive technologies first appeared on that continent, where people accept a high level of state control, only to be picked up subsequently in the US. The British government is currently introducing legislation proposing that all wage and salary earners have their paychecks sent directly to the tax agencies for processing. The government's stated intention is to make sure that taxes are being collected, but Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs service computers would also be alert to possible money laundering and terrorist connections, raising the fear level to justify the action. After processing, the British government would then pass whatever money remains on to the person who actually earned it. Scary, but it is perhaps something that will also be proposed in the US by a Joe Lieberman, John McCain or Lindsey Graham, all of whom have used fear of terrorism to justify curtailment of civil liberties and intrusion into areas once regarded as private. Or even by Barack Obama, who appears to believe that a benign big government provides a solution to whatever ails you and is already moving towards monitoring all financial transactions.

The only answer to the National Security State a demand on the part of US citizens to return to constitutionalism and a rule of law. The government should not be empowered to kill citizens extrajudicially, start wars of choice, detain suspects indefinitely and without charges, use state secrets claims to avoid scrutiny, and obtain private information without a warrant. It is difficult to imagine a return to normalcy under the best of circumstances, but congress is complicit in the process and will do nothing. Genuine change will only come about when we the people insist on it.

Copyright © 2010 Campaign for Liberty

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served 19 years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992, was designated as senior Agency officer for support at the Olympic Games, and served as official liaison to the Spanish Security and Intelligence services. He has been designated by the General Accountability Office as an expert on the impact of illegal immigration on terrorism.

Phil Giraldi is now the Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance and provides security consulting for a number of Fortune 500 corporate clients. As a counter-terrorism expert, he has assisted multinational corporations in the upgrade of their security at overseas sites to help them comply with the Patriot Act. He was one of the first American civilians to travel to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, was brought in for consultation by the Port Authority of the City of New York in its planning, has assisted the United Nations security organization, and has helped develop a security training program for the United States Merchant Marine. He has written op-ed pieces for the Hearst Newspaper chain, is a columnist for AntiWar.com, and a contributing editor to American Conservative magazine. His media appearances include Good Morning America, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, FOX News, Polish National Television, al-Jazeera, and 60 Minutes. Phil was awarded an MA and PhD from the University of London in European, and speaks Spanish, Italian, German, and Turkish.

Antidotes to Bewilderment

2010-11-04T07:59:00.001-04:00

Dear All:

I know that for many of you the following will seem all too "neat" an analysis, after all, we live in a "free market of ideas (or at least so you think) and all of this smacks of (oh no Mister Wizard, not that disqualifier!) "conspiracy"- fueled view of things.

Indeed, for many of you the mere mention of Chomsky (only the most quoted and respected US intellectual in the world year after year according to reliable polling data ) is enough (among those of you that actually read Friedman and Krauthammer as something other than our version of Goebbels and friends) to induce gales of snarky condescension.

But be all that as it may, I'd ask you to read this short decalogue to see if it you think any of it might be applicable to our present day situation.

E.U.

Top 10 media manipulation strategies
Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media.

Historically the media have proven highly efficient to mold public opinion. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche.

But how to detect the most common strategies for understanding these psychosocial tools which, surely, we participate? Fortunately Chomsky has been given the task of synthesizing and expose these practices, some more obvious and more sophisticated, but apparently all equally effective and, from a certain point of view, demeaning. Encourage stupidity, promote a sense of guilt, promote distraction, or construct artificial problems and then magically, solve them, are just some of these tactics.

1. the strategy of distraction

The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals (quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”

2. Create problems, then offer solutions

This method is also called “problem -reaction- solution. “It creates a problem, a “situation” referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept. For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant’s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom. Or: create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.

3. The gradual strategy

acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years. That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions ( neoliberalism ) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: the minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, massive unemployment, wages, and do not guarantee a decent income, so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.

4. The strategy of deferring

Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application. It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter. First, because the effort is not used immediately. Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.

5. Go to the public as a little child

Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children’s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient. The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilising. Why? “If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger (see Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”

6. Use the emotional side more than the reflection

Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis , and finally to the critical sense of the individual. Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas , desires, fears and anxieties , compulsions, or induce behaviors …

7. Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity

Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement. “The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes (See ‘ Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”

8. To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity

Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…

9. self-blame Strengthen

To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts. So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual autodesvalida and guilt, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action. And, without action, there is no revolution!

10. Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves

Over the past 50 years, advances of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites. Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically. The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.

Jordi Pujol... and the Moral Misery of Barack Obama

2010-06-20T11:00:00.008-04:00

Dear American Friends:

I spent last night in front of the screen, transfixed by an interview between Miquel Calzada (a local journalist of considerable renown) and the former president of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol on the occasion of the latter’s 80th birthday

I realize that most of you have never heard of him. That's okay because no one has ever led you to him.

He was the president (1980-2003) of a small country (Catalonia) trapped uneasily within a bigger country (Spain), a white man who wears ties and suits and will often sit down with businessmen in Europe and other parts of the Western world. Moreover, within the political spectrum of his country, he bears the label of center-right and is thus not likely to gain cache from much of the intelligentsia.

The world press, led by the big dailies in Madrid, long ago decided he was just another politician, one inspired by the usual motives: power, money and influence.

As so often is the case, they were, and are, dead wrong. Pujol is, and I say this as without the least fear of being hyperbolic, probably the greatest politician of his time (with the exception of the celestial Mandela) in the western world.

And the reason--which Catalans across the political spectrum understand with the intuitiveness that they understand and celebrate the special beauty of Barcelona--is simple; he is a man of unshakable convictions and an ever inquisitive intelligence who from the earliest moments of his performance in public life (the late 1950s in the midst of the Franco dictatorship) always put the love of his country and the pursuit of its well-being above everything else.

Tortured by Franco's secret police, ignored and disdained by the fashionable left of Catalonia in the first years of democracy, and hounded by the wholly frivolous legal challenges by the “progressive” central government of Spain in the 80s and 90s, Pujol simply, and here I quote from his own description from last night's interview of how he got through the torture at the hands of Franco's goons, “did what needed to be done".

And when he didn't do what needed to be done, he would go to the Catalan people and say he screwed up. But he would always remind them that he had made mistakes out of a love for his country and out a fierce desire to see it take its rightful place in the concert of civilized and moral nations.

Coming out of the mouth of almost any other politician, these words would rightly be seen as an act of cowardly sanctimony, an example of, as we like to say in the US, a scoundrel hiding behind the flag. But not with Pujol and not in Catalonia. Indeed, it would be difficult, even in the camp of his most deeply antagonistic long-term political enemies, anyone who doubts the essential truth of this assertion.

Why? Because the Catalans know Pujol and they know, more importantly, that he is, for all his human failings, the realest deal one could hope to ever see in public life.

In my scribblings, I often speak of the advantage of having points of reference that transcend the spectrum of “thinkable thought” in the US. My sense is that this is often seen as an attempt by man with an obscure area of academic and linguistic knowledge to play one-upsmanship with his countrymen.

But whether those that think this want to accept it or not, the experience of closely following the life and public performance of other people in other places facing social and moral problems very similar to our own, greatly enhances one's ability to place the "truths" delivered by a single media system (e.g. "Obama got the best health care deal he could under the circumstances", “They hate us for our freedoms”, Israel is acting in self-defense, “The US is spreading democracy”) in a broader perspective.

Put another way, to know and understand the flawed grandeur of Pujol is to truly begin to understand the moral misery of Barack Obama. With little more than faith in himself and his people and against a not inconsiderable array of hostile forces (the dictatorship, the central government, the Spanish media, and even many prominent Catalan exiles from the civil war) Pujol brought small nation that was near death not only back to life but into the "first division" of places with the highest quality of life in the world.

Conversely Obama, handed the keys of his hugely powerful country with an unquestionable mandate for change at an absolutely key moment of its historical trajectory, has spent his time cozying up to established interests and giving ever more farcically hollow speeches about his desire to make the world a better place.

As Pujol is never shy about reminding his interviewers and the Catalans all political stripes who have come to see him as the somewhat eccentric, but always-worth-listening to grandfather, "Courage matters".

It always has, and it always will.

At 48, poor Barry doesn't know this. A life of sucking up to powerful white men has eviscerated whatever notions of courage might ever have existed in his fatherless soul.

You will recall, Obama burst into the public consciousness with a much-celebrated search for an absent and erratic father. Pujol, in contrast, begins his autobiography, quite tellingly I think, with a simple but stirring affirmation. "I am the son of Florenci (father) and Maria (Mother), Florenci Pujol i Brugat, from Premià de Mar (town), i Maria Soley i Mas, from Premià de Dalt (neighboring town). In short, he is man from a family, a place and a lineage to which he feels a sense of deep honor and duty.

And it is not coincidental in my view that because he was the son of a father (whom he knew, worked with, and adored) he could become the father of a nation.

Because Barry was, as the title of his book tells us, the son of a dream, he grew up to become a dream. But as we know, dreams dissipate in the light of day when there is no conviction, no sense place or time, to carry them forward.

Mature Democracy

2010-06-08T15:44:00.008-04:00

I was walking home from work today and ran into another demonstration, this one even bigger and more spirited then the one I reported on over the weekend. Here are some of the images of this second event, a march by government employers and labor unions against government “austerity” proposals.

Seeing the demonstration got me thinking about democracy and the way it is practiced in different countries.

As everyone knows, Spain is a young democracy where, as the New York Times likes to remind us, people have still not internalized the rules of civic comportment that inhere in other societies with long-standing parliamentary traditions.

The US is, of course, a mature democracy where people have long since understood the rules and fine points of citizenship.

For example, when people in the United States vote for change, they know better than to expect a change in policy. And when the people who voted for "change" see that it is not forthcoming, they understand that it is their solemn civic responsibility to not only not believe their lying eyes but to make excuses for the people who took their votes and did not deliver.

Moreover, they have successfully internalized the notion that the ultimate arbiter of public life and social morality are those wonderful entrepreneurs who, as they have been told time and time again, “create the jobs” that make us all prosperous and happy.

This is why when the new President for Change (PFC) gives corporations nearly $1 trillion to resolve the problems they created out of their own arrogance, greed and carelessness, and asks them for nothing in return, the citizenry in general, and the people who voted him in particular, know that it is absolutely no time for serious questioning. They know that he and his aides are smart men and women who would never knowingly go against the interests of the vast majority of the people who elected them in favor of the moneyed classes that staff the Administration and that showered them with money during the campaign.

In a mature democracy, the press understands its proper role. At a time when newsrooms are being decimated by budget cuts dictated, in turn, by “entrepreneurial” investors who care little if anything about protecting the vital role that the press plays in a functioning democracy, they understand that it is their role to snarkily describe anyone who dares suggest that the country, and the enterprise they work for, are being led by people who are essentially amoral, as a dreamer ( as in "not interested in real grown-up solutions") or some kind of 60s left over.

In fact, I've even heard of cases of journalists working in newsrooms where union power has been smashed and where the fear of firing is thus constant who nonetheless rail against unions and the benefits that unions have conferred upon the rank-and-file in other areas of the economy. But, of course, that's what people are supposed to do in a mature democracy; it is the individual’s job to internalize the sense of fear, insecurity and distrust visited upon them by government and business, multiply its strength, and pass it on to their fellow citizens.

In immature democracies like Spain people are evidently much less responsible. For example, when the Spanish prime minister who was elected with the near unanimity of the left side of the political spectrum announces salary rollbacks for public employees and curtailment of medical benefits for all citizens, those same left-wing voters take to the street against him!

They organize rallies that put him on notice that the votes they gave him can and will be taken away. And in truly immature fashion, they refuse to make excuses for him, reminding him instead of him of his past and present connivances with big business as well as the international agencies that do its bidding.

(Translation of little green sign: “We must cut back on: Bank profits, Subsidies for rich friends, No show jobs, Inept consultants, Corrupt politicians)

And get this, they even go so far as to suggest, in direct contravention of the deeply meditated wisdom of the business press, that money is not lacking at all in Spain and that the key to maintaining the social services that separate civilized societies from those where the mentality of the frontier casino predominates can be recouped from doing silly things like raising taxes on the rich and cutting budgets for armaments!

(translation: "There isn't a shortage of money but rather an excess of crooks" The picture is of Emilio Botín the Spanish Head of megabank HSBC)

I sometimes wonder if Spaniards will ever learn the credulous docility and passivity that being citizens in a mature democracy really requires. Meanwhile, I am sure NPR and the New York Times will keep us informed about Spain’s struggle to grow up.

Cops busy intimidating the crowd.

Outside the Bubble

2010-06-06T19:20:00.011-04:00

As I was walking through the center of Barcelona yesterday, I happened upon a pro-Palestinian and frankly anti-Israeli protest march. See the video I shot of the event here. As an American, I have to say I found this quite refreshing considering the Goebbels-style "big lie" idiocy that has been served in the US press concerning the Gaza Flotilla slaughter, and it appears, widely adopted by most of the movers and shakers in the US government.

But the content of the protest was not the only remarkable thing to these American eyes. There were a number of things that contrasted sharply with how such an event--that is if such an event could ever take place on the largest Avenue of a very large city on a Saturday afternoon without months of previous planning--would occur in today's USA.

The first of these was the near total absence of police presence. Yes, police were there, but they were there as passive onlookers, citizens looking at other citizens with neither fear nor a desire to intimidate. Remember how it used to be before the advent free speech zones and the wholesale recruitment of police into the business of suppressing dissident thought? Well that's what we had here.

The second was the fact that the crowd was largely Catalan, that is, made up of people from this city who were publicly demonstrating a concern for people very far away.

Remember before the press constantly told us that "all politics are local" and that people "always vote their pocketbooks"? I do.
Back then, people used to have a belief that the mistreatment of people far away was also their concern, especially if it involved monies from their own government. But here I was in the midst of a crowd from a country that is not generally implicated in the Middle Eastern mess that, on the face of it, still seemed to believe that politics could be or should be something more than a referendum on one's pocketbook or on one's parochial concerns.

Silly them. Don't they understand that being concerned with mistreated peoples in other places is so yesterday? Don't they understand that they are citizen are there merely to carry out the "missions" that the empire has mapped out for each and every one of them?

The third was the crowd's ability to, as our blessed press likes to say, connect the dots. Where we come from people are not real big on cause and effect. Rather, we prefer to wallow in a strange mixture of self-pity and historical ignorance. But here in Barcelona we had a protest leader screaming into the microphone, a man by the way from a labor union, who was chanting about the fact that Israel's impunity was made possible by the indulgence of the European Community and by Israel's overwhelming control of certain financial sectors, and from there, large swaths of the media landscape.

Well, there must be a lot of anti-Semites in Barcelona. Either that, or a lot of people with a very tenuous grasp of international political realities in the US. Take your pick.

Junk by Design

2009-11-13T11:19:00.002-05:00

The health care plan that is wending its way through Congress is junk. It will do nothing to stop the ungodly ascent of health care prices. In fact, it is likely to to accelerate this upward trend. The reason is simple. It contains virtually no incentives for exercising downward pressure on costs.

As soon as it passes, we will be showered with the predictable apologetics from the Obama camp and its generally mindless minions. "You've got to start somewhere" "Change is incremental, we can make it better later", "There you go again, rigidly insisting on your own (read: wildly and out of touch and ultra- liberal) version of good in what is inevitably a messy legislative process". Every other democrat interviewed, will repeat some version of the phrase allegedly uttered by the now-departed Ted Kennedy "We must not let the perfect become the enemy of the possible".

This would all great except for one salient fact: the perfect (single payer) was never given the opportunity to be the enemy of the possible. It was taken off the table before the entire process of negotiation began. And this was done as a result of cold calculations taken at the very highest policy-making levels of the White House. They got into bed with the insurance industry and big Pharma way back in the late winter and assured them that the money machine they currently operate would not be substantially affected by Obama's "reform" plans. In return, the White House gained the tacit assurance that a) industry money would continue flowing to the Democrats and b) Harry and Louise would not be brought out of mothballs to frighten and befog the minds of the "low information" voters in the general populace.

Should you have any doubts about the ironclad, ""til death do us part" nature of the deal, consider the following. Until late last week the congressional version of the bill which passed on Saturday contained an amendment that would have shielded those states interested in setting up single-payer programs of their own from anti-trust lawsuits brought by insurance companies. The provision was stricken from the bill at the last moment after heavy lobbying pressure from .....none other than the White House itself.

When this White House makes pledges to big industry its word is truly its bond. That a bunch so evidently craven in its dedication to corporate interests is often successfully labeled as "socialist" speaks to the truly delusional nature of much of our public discourse.

This is not an isolated incident. Rather, this way of operating is deeply encoded in the D.N.A. of the post-Clinton Democratic party in general, and the Obama White House in particular. These are the Placebo Politics of a Placebo Presidency. The unquestioned master of all this is Rahm Emanuel. For Rahm and his proteges practicing what the media consistently, if wholly fallaciously, portrays as the school of "sharp-elbowed partisan politics", winning elections is the only thing that matters. Actually doing something substantial about the balance of social and economic powers that so heavily determine the rhythms and stark realities of day-to-day life for millions of Americans once in office is absolutely beside the point. Indeed, he and gang know quite well that actually doing so will threaten the pipeline of campaign donations they see, rightly or wrongly, as being the key to winning more elections.

This is why they give us legislative "Junk by Design". Why we accept it as readily as we do, I do not understand.

NSA Announces the Launch of New Personal Transcription Program (PTP)

2009-07-26T10:42:00.005-04:00

Responding to Congressional pressures to develop new revenue streams for an increasingly debt-ridden Federal Government, the NSA (National Security Administration) yesterday launched its Personal Transcription Program (PTP). The program is designed to provide US consumers, for a fee, with on-demand transcriptions of any and all of their personal phone conversations within 48 hours of their occurrence. According to the NSA spokesman Don Weber, “Our target demographic for the program is the 45-65 age group, people with active lives and nothing to hide who find that their ability to recall important interactions just isn’t what it used to be”.

He went on to explain that the Agency believed it was time to make better use of the vast stores of data they currently have on the personal lives of ordinary Americans. “In the wake of the recently released Inspector General’s report on President Bush’s (and now President Obama’s) Surveillance program http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/psp.pdf, showing that this massive data gathering effort could not be linked to the interruption any terrorist plots against the Homeland, we thought it was time to begin re-branding the program. In the long-run, we know the American people will not stand for seeing billions of dollars of their own money spent to provide Washington insiders with the ability gather dirt on their opponents or to have the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) put millions of completely innocent people on ‘no fly’ and terrorist ‘watch’ lists”. Weber would not speculate on just how much revenue the agency hoped to recoup from the program. “That is strictly classified information”. he said.

When asked her opinion of the new program, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Diane Feinstein called it a “Neat idea.”. She continued, “We came to realize that in budgetary times like these, we need to look into every possible source of revenue. This is information about the personal lives of American citizens. They should have every right to buy it back from the government at the right price. We view it as a win-win situation” She would not, however, comment on whether she favored selling the same transcripts to third party marketing firms.

Slap on the Cuffs!

2009-07-26T10:35:00.002-04:00

As Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, and subsequently, President Obama have made clear, there can be no denying the unfair and frequently brutal treatment men of color have long faced in the realm of “law enforcement” in the U.S. It would be a shame, however, if this very necessary discussion of police actions and race were to short circuit what is arguably an even larger and more universal problem: America’s (or at least prosperous America’s) increasing acquiescence to a “slap on the cuffs first, ask questions later” brand of authoritarianism.

I grew up in an America where there was still a healthy skepticism about the motives of people who chose to spend their life in blue uniforms. We knew and acknowledged there were a lot of good and law-abiding cops. But we also knew that there was a considerable number of them for whom wearing the badge was mostly about belonging to a fraternity that gives them the right to capriciously lord their will over others.

This skepticism has largely disappeared in the wake of 9-11, supplanted by a media-fueled idolatry of all things having to do with the military and law enforcement (“our brave men and women in uniform”). Emblematic of this new civic religion is the practice of wearing of NYPD and FBI caps and t-shirts.

This public cult of cop worship has had the effect of further emboldening the cohort of power-trippers in uniform as they go about their daily business. They know a public weaned on a steady diet of their supposedly universal virtuousness (and with it, the supposed omnipresence of readily identifiable “bad guys”) will almost always give them the benefit of the doubt. So why hold back?

A middle-aged black guy in Cambridge gives you more rhetoric and vocabulary than you feel like hearing on call, “Slap on the cuffs!” and write a police report painting him as “unreasonable”. A kid videotapes the police roughly arresting one his classmates in the school cafeteria after a completely non-violent senior prank (as happened not long ago in these parts), confiscate his camera, “Slap on the cuffs!” and press charges on him that prevent him from graduating and that imperil his college career. Protesting citizens making politicians and patricians of business feel uncomfortable by gathering outside the site of a board meeting or convention? Trump up a pretext about a “security perimeter” (don’t recall seeing any mention of such a thing in the Constitution) and “Slap on the cuffs!”. A few people wearing anti-Bush t-shirts at a presidential speech in 2004? Follow the directives of White House operatives and “Slap on the cuffs!”. And on and on…

The problem police mistreatment of minorities, especially males of color, is all-too-real in today’s America. It must, however, be seen in the broader context of our consumption of simple moralizing storylines, and the enormous sense of license these narratives give to the fallible and often power hungry people (in this sense, they are no different than the rest of us) we have charged with the patently unattainable goal of “insuring our safety”.

The Not So Magic Realism of the Bush Years

2008-11-16T19:27:00.002-05:00

During the 1960s and 70s a literary sensibility known as “Magic Realism” emerged in Latin America. Its most illustrious practitioner was the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read the Colombian author’s capital work is a literary experience like no other, especially for readers from the so-called First World where, since birth, we have been taught that there is a clear and essentially non-negotiable line between the realms of reality and fantasy in our lives. One of the keys to the success Garcia Marquez’s novel can be found in its clever use of situational irony, that is, the way in which he employs a deadpan narrative style to explain “incredible” occurrences.
When critics gather to discuss the grandeur of Garcia Marquez’s writing, they talk about many things, his descriptive might, his politics, and his keen sense of history.

What they seldom mention, however, are his readers. Without them, or perhaps more precisely, without their deeply internalized sense of what constitutes social normality, his literary project would be considerably less compelling. He delights us, or at least those of us raised in the so-called developed world, precisely because he breaks our expectation of how one should react before ostensibly abnormal events.

Over the last eight years, the Bush Administration has executed series of policies that, when viewed in the context of our nation’s core ideals, are nothing short of deviant. These include, among many other things, a belief in the government’s right to wage pre-emptive war (something that certainly exercised us greatly when Hitler and Hirohito invoked it!), imprison citizens without charge, spy widely and with virtually no oversight on American lives, kidnap and torture anyone the president deems dangerous, and withhold from the congress and the general citizenry any information the president himself considers proprietary.

Taking a page from García Márquez, the American political press, deeply indoctrinated with the belief that being “objective” means treating all claims to morality and truth as equally compelling, narrated these abridgements of liberty in wholly non-plussed tones. And their brothers and sisters in the commentariat, who had long since internalized the idea (propagated expertly by the Right in the wake of the sixties and seventies) that expressing anger and outrage are antithetical to being intellectually serious, followed suit, writing article after soberly anguished article about the competing claims of liberty and security in the “new” age of terror. (As if “security” had not been a concern in the decades when these constitutional freedoms were first hammered out, times when, for example, the White House itself was burned down by foreign "terrorists").

Faced with the clear disconnect between the gravity of these constitutional infractions and the ever-equanimous tone of the reportage, American newspaper readers, like those of the great Colombian novelist, have sat back in their easy chairs and learned to laugh and dream with the wryly ironic literature now being served up to them as news in the daily press. Right?

Well, actually, for the most part, they have not. Indeed, the prestige of institutions such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN remains pretty much intact, largely unaffected by their recent off-Broadway run as situational ironists. The question then becomes, Why? While one can never be sure when meditating complex issues such as these, the time may have come to confront a logical, if highly disturbing, explanation: the majority of the readership no longer has an internalized precinct of constitutional normality from which to gaze upon the crimes of the Bush administration and their poker-faced treatment by the media.

The Absurdity of Media "Balance"

2008-10-07T10:52:00.000-04:00

This morning, both NPR and the New York Times have stories about how the campaign is starting to get "rough". The information adduced to justify the assertion is the same in both places. On one hand, we learn that McCain is accusing Obama of cavorting with terrorists based on the fact that he served together on a community board with a former member of the Weathermen. On the other hand, we learn that Obama is accusing McCain of having been a member of the Keating Five.

In both cases, the reporter treats these allegations is essentially equal and thus self-canceling, stuff to be filed away under "tactics", "he said-she said", or the province of mere " strategic gambits".

It is precisely this type of reporting, devoid of context and the ability to discern the relative historical import of of a public figure's actions, that has rendered the American people civically stupid.

There is no way that serving on a community board with someone whose background involved radical politics is in any way equivalent with a Senator knowingly participating in one of the biggest influence-peddling scandals in history of the U.S. Congress. First of all, we are not able to choose the other people with whom we serve on community boards. Moreover, if this friend, Ayers, had done anything wrong, he had long since paid for it by the time Obama came along to share the occasional monthly meeting with him.

In contrast, McCain's participation in the Keating affair was completely volitional. He was very happy to help deregulate the banking industry in ways thatwere destructive for the common person, providing that he received financial help for his campaign in return. It was only after his perfidy was discovered, that he "renounced" his participation in the scheme. And only then when censure by his colleagues (or worse) was looming over his future. When we talk about the Keating Five we are talking about one of the most brazen examples of corruption in one of the biggest financial scandals ( the Savings and Loan crisis) that this country has ever known.

Reading and listening to what passes for the "liberal press" in the popular imagination, you'd never know anything about these key differences.

The Right has understood for years that the goal of "seeking balance" in news delivery (something, by the way, most intelligent adults in most other developed countries see as neither possible nor desirable), can be manipulated time and time again in their favor. They correctly see it as an effective means of making the trivialities they want to circulate significant and/or the egregious things they do, insignificant. They know that the Mara Liasson's of the world have no stomach for true "discernment". Rather, they understand that their desire to remain "in the loop" and out of trouble with the right-wing attack machine is really their paramount concern. And so it goes...

Democracy is not possible under these conditions.

A Better Question Might Be, “How Isn’t it Fascism?”

2008-08-22T12:23:00.004-04:00

Have you ever spoken to someone who lived through a fascist regime? If and when you do, you might be surprised at what you hear, especially when it comes to the relatively benign remembrances of daily life in places like Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal. Videla’s Argentina, Vargas’s Brazil or Bordaberry’s Uruguay.

Most Americans who’ve lived abroad have, at one time or another, had the experience of talking with a foreign friend who, though never having lived in the US, is pretty well convinced that they understand the cardinal elements of our culture. Why? Because for years, that person has consumed a non-stop diet of Hollywood movies and programs. When, after fully acknowledging cinema’s great value as a tool of cultural knowledge, you try and help them become aware of the many social realities this medium cannot or, as currently constituted, will not convey, they often become annoyed or indifferent. They have their story and they are going to stick with it.

It seems to me that our culture’s relationship to fascism has much in common with this. Over the last sixty years, Hollywood has given us constant stream of images about life under authoritarian regimes. As a result, most Americans are generally pretty confident of their ability to not only recognize the basic contours of this socio-political phenomenon, but also “do the right thing” should the authorities begin pursuing their neighbors for no good reason. Of course, this presumes that fascism almost always looks the way Hollywood, with its intense Germanic fixations and penchant for clean morally unambiguous story lines, tells us it does, you know, with armed checkpoints, draconian curfews, dimly-lit streets, grey skies and a complete absence of joy.

But of course, fascism has never consistently or even predominantly manifested itself in daily life the way Hollywood has told us it does, even in the occupied territories of the Third Reich. If you have any doubts about this, read the account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris written by Carles Fontseré. In it, we see an exiled Catalan Republican Anarchist (could there be any human profile any more apt for harassment and extermination by convinced Nazis?) earning a living in the French magazine and publishing industry, regularly interacting—often quite cordially--with German officers while partying and having regular sexual trysts in his off hours.

Am I saying occupied Paris was a carnival or that the Nazi regime was not brutal or violent? Absolutely not. Rather, I am suggesting that contrary to what Hollywood has taught us, those who run authoritarian regimes often go to great lengths to preserve most elements of complexly embroidered fabric of “dailyness” in the societies they control. The reason is obvious: to do otherwise is run the risk of provoking overt anger and rebellion from those being manipulated and oppressed.

Do you think most people were reduced to constantly skulking from back street to back alley to get to their friend’s house undetected or that they stopped going on summer vacation, drinking wine and making love during the Argentine Dirty War? On the contrary, at the very time its agents were pulling out fingernails and waterboarding people at the ESMA detention center in Buenos Aires and chucking cement-weighted bodies into the Atlantic from helicopters, the Argentine regime hosted the World Cup of Soccer, one of the world’s great tourist celebrations! As they like to say after parish spaghetti dinners, “A good time was had by all”, that is, all except the tortured and the disappeared.

Well, if Fascism seldom announces itself the way Hollywood taught us it would growing up, if the dimension of its terror and destruction is, almost by design, beyond the ken of the vast majority of the population caught up in their daily concerns, what can we do to combat it?

Most of all we must shift our thinking from the realm of the affectively or visually powerful vignette to that of analytical description.

Human beings possess an incredibly strong tendency to deny malfeasance among what they consider to be their “own” social group, be it familial or communal or national. And in their drive to deny the perfidy of their clan, they will avail themselves of WHATEVER materials they can to preserve their sense of moral intactness and/or superiority. In this context, having an institutionalized vision of authoritarian evil that located far away from one’s own place—both geographically and temporally—is extremely “useful” in psychological terms. The existence of this widely internalized “distant” vision of evil, which is seen—quite incorrectly—as representing fascism in more or less comprehensive terms, has the effect of placing an absurdly heavy burden of proof upon those wishing to open a discussion about the existence of this social tendency here and now

When critics allege the existence of a type of fascism in today’s America their interlocutors often “refute” the charge by insisting that the accuser demonstrate the existence here and now of ALL known tropes of the “distant” (that is, consensually visualizable) version of the social plague. When he cannot, they declare our society free of the disease and go back to whatever it was they were doing. “Yes Jack, I know that habeas corpus is gone, that the officer class in the military is more loyal to the own caste and the Republican party than the Constitution, that there is an incestuous alliance between big business and government, that systemic critiques of the nation’s core foreign policy goals are not tolerated within mainstream political discourse, that spying and informing on innocent citizens is rampant, that there is a small army of intelligence operatives carrying out “patriotic” missions that will never be subject to any public scrutiny never mind public sanction, that clearly illegal acts or torture and domestic espionage have been retroactively immunized by congress with the full complicity of the “opposition” party, but there are still no jackboots in the streets!

Imagine if your physician worked this way? “Yes, you have 7 of the 10 attributes associated with this dangerous syndrome, but we’re only going to concentrate on the three that you don’t have and declare you fit as a fiddle!"

For those truly interested in pursuing an analytical approach to the question, there are tools available. The historian Robert Paxton has given us a splendid start with his Anatomy of Fascism. In it, he describes fascism as “A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.'' Lawrence Britt has also provided a useful framing device with his succinct “Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism”.

So the next time you want to bring up the subject of fascism, cut to the quick. Instead of letting your friend lead you on an intellectual scavenger hunt whose only real purpose is to rule out the possibility that the disease might be present among us, put the onus him or her. Ask instead how, in the light of Paxton’s and Britt’s definitions, the US isn’t a fascist society? If nothing else, the results of the conversation are likely to be far more instructive than the usual self-congratulatory pap we usually get on the question in these latitudes.

Who’s Gonna Tell the Kids?

2008-08-14T15:45:00.003-04:00

Who is going to fill the American people in on the truth and significance of what’s going on in Georgia? From all indications, no one in the national press corps is up for the job.

The op-ed fraternity, dutifully echoing the Bush administration, is running with a narrative that goes something like this: Georgia, led by an urbane young man (Saakashvili) who seeks nothing more than peace and prosperity for his plucky little nation, has been brutally attacked by a Russian bear bent on meting out wanton destruction. The reporter class, ever attentive to their appointed task of providing evocative vignettes and images to justify the storylines dreamed up by their superiors (a group that includes the aforementioned pundits as well as “government officials” and serious-appearing right wing think-tank hacks), has gone about their task with the brainless dedication we’ve come to expect from them. Now its time for Americans to do what most of them believe (in the face of abundant statistical evidence to the contrary) they do best: provide the poor and besieged around the world with “humanitarian aid”.

In a functioning democracy with a more or less empirically-based media system, this little bedtime story would be quickly superseded by real reportage, and from there, a mainstream narrative that would go something like this.

In the wake of September 11, Cheney and the neocons at the White House decided they would use the crisis as a pretext for implanting US bases throughout the “new” republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The strategic intent of this move, accomplished largely through the buying off of corrupt dictators, was two-fold. a) To project US military power into a region of enormous and still relatively untapped mineral wealth. b) Continue the process, begun in the late 1990s with the rapid eastward expansion of NATO, of militarily encircling Russia so that it would never again be able to seriously challenge US hegemony in the world. An integral element of this strategy was using the CIA and other US government funded agencies to catapult US-friendly “democrats”, such as the Columbia-trained yuppie, Saakashvili, to power in the satellite Republics of the former Soviet Union. And as is the custom with this particular White House crowd, they made sure that the Israelis were deeply involved with their covert operatives at every level of this strategic effort.

Putin, it appears, was fully aware of this neo-con agenda from the beginning. And as a keen reader of human psychology, he also understood the fundamentally priapic character of its key architects. You can’t keep a hard-on forever, he reasoned, especially when you are trying to stick it in every available strategic “orifice” between Ankara and Indonesia. And so he watched and waited, playing Rope-a-Dope with the US for seven long years.

Like many members of the US neo-con fraternity that invented him, and has sustained him up until now, Saakashvili appears to be long on swagger and short on smarts. And as has occurred with many foolish CIA assets in the past, he apparently began to see himself through the hagiographic prism of the propaganda his handlers regularly churned out on his behalf. No doubt remembering how the summer timing of Israel’s rape of Lebanon two years ago helped to cushion the public relations fall-out from the event, Handler and Asset apparently decided that now was the time to poke the Russian bear in the eye. And so they planned a lightning strike to seize South Ossetia.

Putin was ready. He came off the ropes and struck back with a clean and crisp left hook to the jaw which left the Asset (and by extension, his Handlers) crumpled on the canvas. End of match.

With this single, expertly landed blow, Putin has laid bare for the world to see the enormous gap between neo-con fantasies of domination and real US power. The setback has also made manifest the almost complete bankruptcy of the current US leadership class on issues of international law and morality. When Bush, seeking to put the best face on the enormous strategic setback just handed to him by Putin, proclaimed the Russian use of force as “unacceptable” a wave of uncontrollable, if profoundly bitter, laughter swept through the chanceries and more important news rooms of the world. The only ones able to keep a straight face through it all have been the eternally-immune-to-irony-acolytes of power in the US media.

The US has just suffered a debacle that, when viewed through the lens of history, may very well be seen as a key turning point not only in its trajectory as a Great Power, but also the definitive end of its long-held image (warranted or not) as an agent of constructive change in the world.

Who’s gonna tell the kids?

Seeing and Not Seeing

2008-07-29T08:38:00.001-04:00

Seeing and Not Seeing

José Ortega y Gasset, the great Spanish aphorist and journalist who masqueraded for many years in public as a serious philosopher, once said that every act of seeing is also an act of unseeing. That is, when we fix our gaze on one thing, we are deciding (consciously or unconsciously) not to direct our attention to another.

These words came to mind as I read a recent New York Times report on ¨When Spies Don´t Play Well With their Allies¨. Eyeing the story´s portentious length and its broadly constituted title, I expected a more or less complete account of the outstanding acts of disloyalty committed against the US by its supposed allies in recent years and decades, a narrative sure to include, among many other unfortunate events, the Jonathan Pollard case and the attack on the USS Liberty by the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War. To my surprise, the report focused wholly on the perfidy of the Pakistanis during the so-called War on Terror.

A simple case of a bad match between headline and story content? Perhaps.

While they may not be as important as they were 50, or even 25 years ago, the great national newspapers (New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, Le Monde, Le Figaro, La Corriere de la Sera, Die Welt, and more recently, El País) continue to play an inordinately important role in establishing the parameters of acceptable social and political debate in the countries where they are published. Put another way, what they choose to “see” (a.k.a. the news they see as being “fit to print”) has an uncanny way of becoming confused in the minds of the vast majority of citizens, (including among a distressingly high percentage of the educated elites) with the totality of information available on a given subject. We know, moreover, that readers have an inherent desire (remember that “willing suspension of disbelief” from English class) to internalize and adapt as “real” and complete the logic of the narratives they consume.

So, when, in generating an ostensibly comprehensive account (remember the headline!) of the problem of allies that spy on the US, the NYT foregrounds the role of the Pakistanis and buries similar problems with even more closely aligned foreign powers, it is all but assuring that a large part of the media class, and from there, the general citizenry interested in political and social affairs, will tend to frame the problem in similar terms.

Every act of seeing is also an act unseeing. To analyze social thought in terms of its palpable discursive logic is good. To analyze it terms of this, and whatever one can imagine lying on the editing room floor, is even better.

Livin' La Vida Barroca

2008-07-28T08:16:00.003-04:00

Livin’ la vida barroca

With a bit of foreign travel looming on the horizon, it was time to renew the passport of my youngest child. I gathered the requisite papers and brought them to the post office. A few weeks later, the coveted document arrived.

I opened it up, expecting to find what I always had found inside US passports: a dry one-page recitation of personal data followed by numerous empty pages for recording the traveler’s entries and exits from various countries.

The moment my eyes focused on the inside flap, however, I was reminded of my continuing lack of post-September 11 imagination. How foolish of me not to realize that in times like these passports can, and should be, a full-blown propaganda documents, replete with the cheesiest and most hackneyed evocations of national grandeur. Page 1: a quote from the Star-Spangled Banner in a lithograph-like image of The War of 1812. Page 2: Lincoln’s famous quote about “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. Pages 3-4: a multicolor image of an eagle and a flag towering over the image and personal information of the passport’s bearer. And on and on for 24 more pages with graphic backdrops such as Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, and yes, buffaloes roaming across the open plains.

When most Americans think of the Baroque it is probably in association with French music or Latin American architecture. It is certainly not inaccurate to do so. But it is important to remember that the Baroque was was, and is, much more than this.

The term has its roots in the Iberian Peninsula of the late 16th and 17th centuries, a time when Spanish and Portuguese empires were both hugely important and visibly decadent. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries these two relatively underpopulated and unsophisticated kingdoms had leapt to world prominence on the basis of their ferocity (honed in the centuries-long frontier struggle against the Moslem “heathen”) and their precocious understanding of naval technology. Between 1470 and 1550 they came to control much of Africa, all of Central and South America, and a substantial pieces of Europe (much of southern Italy, the Low Countries and a good part of today’s Germany and Austria). But no sooner did they establish control of these places then, as could be expected, resistance to their rule began to grow.

In the Americas, the Iberians’s relative military and naval superiority allowed them to overwhelm the opposition until the beginning of the 19th century. In Europe however, things were far more complicated. There, especially in the lands of northern and central Europe, the opposition to Iberian rule was not only military, but also ideological. The Reformation, which we now tend to think of almost wholly theological terms, was in fact a movement with an enormous geopolitical subtext. For the Dutch and for the Germans, becoming Protestant was not only a matter of talking more clearly and directly to God, but also ridding themselves of their Spanish overlords and their Italian ecclesiastical agents.

The Spaniards reacted to the challenge of the Reformation and its incipient embrace of empiricism, by instituting the Counter-Reformation, the upshot of which was an effort to re-package--but in no way fundamentally alter--the now time-worn tenets of their Church-centered philosophy of cultural hegemony. It was what we might call today a campaign of cultural “re-branding”. As such, it was largely circumscribed to the realm of the esthetic.

This might have worked had the German and Dutch complaints with the Spanish been esthetic. But, of course, they were not. Rather, they were bound up in much more essential questions of dignity and self-determination. There thus ensued what the Spanish nowadays call a “dialogue of the deaf”. On one hand, we have the Spaniards and Portuguese (the kingdoms were united between 1580 and 1640), with their ostensibly sophisticated and worldly Jesuits at the fore, inventing new ways to sell old imperial and theological wine. On the other, we have the rebel elites of Holland and numerous German kingdoms who had long-since decided that their social and commercial dreams could never realized within the framework of a Catholic empire led from Madrid.

Unable to entertain, never mind admit, the validity of the ideological or territorial claims of their unruly northern subjects, the Spanish Hapsburgs and their official creators did what all frustrated ideologues do in times of crisis: they pumped up the volume. It is in this act of historical desperation that we find the core logic of the Baroque. “If only we can say it more colorfully, more artistically, more ingeniously we will win them back.”

But of course, with the intended Northern audience long since inured to the siren song of the South, the only people left to listen to the ever more extravagant claims of cultural superiority were the captive citizens of the Iberian Peninsula itself! And so it was.

From the 1580s onward, precisely the moment when the first cracks in the façade of the omnipotent empire began to show, the Spanish political and intellectual class plied the populace with an unremitting diet of self-aggrandizement, punctuated only by the lacerating ironies of Miguel de Cervantes. This constant stream of church-state propaganda kept viceroys and their armies well-motivated for a good long time. But it did nothing to prepare Spain for the challenges of modernity. Indeed, the implied demand that even the best Spanish thinkers work and create within the ever more narrow alleys of patriotic and theological self-affirmation (as opposed to the expansive fields of free inquiry), virtually assured the country’s relegation to he dustbin of history.

There was a time in the not very distant past when the US leadership class believed the essential vitality of the US cultural political heritage. But judging from the design my child’s new passport, they no longer trust in its ability to speak for itself. It appears we too are now denizens of the Baroque, destined, like he Spaniards before us, to live out our decline in a propagandistic netherworld designed (so they tell us) for the benefit of others.

Obama and Structural Change

2008-07-25T07:09:00.004-04:00

Obama was in Israel yesterday pledging his eternal devotion to Israel’s own defnition of what constitutes security for Israel. (Is there any other country in our multi-polar world that claims, and is perpetually granted by the US, the right to define completely on its own subjective terms what constitutes a reasonable level of security in relation to its neighbors?)

My liberal friends want me to believe that he will bring real change to to US foreign policy. In order for me to second their dreams I need a) to know he really doesn´t believe the pledges he made yesterday or in his equally snivelling speech to AIPAC about a month back, or b) embrace the “see no evil because I´m afraid of being called an anti-semite” idea that the Likuddite vision for securing Israel´s strategic dominance of the Mideast has had nothing to do with the execution of US foreign policy in the Mideast during the las seven years. Though I too want to believe, I can't say I see either proposition as having much basis in truth.

A Question of Audience Participation

2008-07-25T06:33:00.006-04:00

The arrest of Karadzic has brought us back to chapter of recent “Western” culture that most of us have worked very hard to forget. Today I read of how the the former philosopher king of the Bosnian Serb Republic once invited a fellow poet, the Russian Limonov, to have lunch with him in Pale, the mountain resort overlooking the city of Sarajevo. Since the beginning of the attack on Bosnia, inspired in large measure by the ideas and policies of Karadzic, Pale had undergone a transformation of function. The cool mountain breezes, which once attracted those seeking peace from the hustle bustle of the city below during the heat of summer, now served as a stimulant for the commission of rapes upon Bosnian women and the sportive shelling and machine gunning of those in the urban valley who were slow to get with the new logic of ethnic cleansing. Before sitting down to eat, Karadzic offered Limonov the “aperitif” of taking a few potshots at the unfortunate ants below. The Russian poet accepted the gracious offer and fired off a few rounds. See video here. The two bards then went off, it is said, for a meal of roast pig followed by a solidarity-building round of slivovitz with the young soldier-rapists on watch.

Disgusting.

But is it any more disgusting then the time that George Bush, sitting before the near entirety of the Washington press corps in 2004 made jokes, complete with hide-and-seek pantomimes, about someday finding the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When the butcher of Bosnia did his schtick with his Russian brother in letters, no more than a few aides and a cameraman were there to laugh or applaud. Bush, however, was lucky enough to have an entire auditorium full of people giggling and tittering in the thrall of his self-evident charm.

I guess that’s why Karadzic will be going to the Hague for war crimes while Bush will be heading to Crawford, Texas to cut brush and ride trail bikes until such time as he is overcome by either arthritis or Alzheimer´s.

The Art of Strategic Forgetting

2008-07-24T07:59:00.003-04:00

I read once again yesterday that “the West” finds Iran’s pursuit of nuclear power “unacceptable”. Indeed, every time I read the papers I receive the same message in one form or another. What I seldom, if ever, read is why this pursuit of nuclear power, which has been fully and continuously vetted by the IAEA, is “unacceptable” (and thus apparently deserving of imminent attack) when Israel, which is less than 1000 kilometers to the West, faces no opprobrium for having a large, fully-formed and completely uninspected nuclear arsenal. Search as I might (and believe me I regularly do!) in the US and Western European press, I never get an answer to this question. In fact, I never even see the question posed at press conferences, on op-ed pages or in interviews with leading politicians and so-called “strategic thinkers”.

When I ponder this situation, I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Kundera´s Unbearable Lightness of Being when members of Czechoslovakia´s leadership class disappear a from official photos as they fall out of favor with the Communist Party. By expunging the image of the person in question, the
Party leadership sought to control the public’s perception of the past. Why? Because they understood all too well that the ability to mobilize the population for large-scale social enterprises is rooted in “the people’s” understanding of ¨history”.

This management of the past can be exercised in two basic ways. The first is to actively provide narratives which exalt the heroic solidarity of the population in the face of a real or perceived external threat. The second is to disappear, or, more effectively still, relegate to the fringe of public consciousness, elements of the collective´s past which leadership class has deemed to be either indifferent or hostile (in terms of their psychic triggering effect) to the set of “forward-looking” goals they have prepared for the society.

Perhaps the most common -and all too often justified- critique of military planners that they tend to devise strategies based their comprehension (such as it is) of “the last war” rather than a an understanding of the challenges they are likely to face in the “next” conflict.

The same might be said of those whose job it is to study and explain the wherefores and whys of social and political thought.

The totalitarian systems of the mid-20th century awakened the US and Western Europan intellectual elites to the enormous (usually destructive) power of the first type of “memory management” referred to above. Though the great sectors of the population are (as we have seen in recent years) still quite from susceptible to the appeal of this proactive, binarily-conceived chauvinism, professional cultural analysts are generally pretty good at seeing this type of stuff for what it is.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the social upheavals that occurred between 1968 and 1974 in most Western nations were largely about the refusal of the rising elites to accept the rhetorical blunt instruments that had shaped their fathers’s view of the world. They understood all too well how proactive propaganda, that is, the type which openly exalts the intrinsic goodness of one tribe over the other, could make people do things they would very much regret the morning after. Imbued with this consciousness, they sent the message that they would were not willing to mimic and amplify the tropes provided their elders with a sense of ontological certainty

This resolve of the rising elites to “just say no” to the language and practice of ethnocentric dehumanization deeply alarmed the major social and political stakeholders of the Western world. Their first reaction was incredulity. (Think of the dazed and rageful countencances of both Nixon and DeGaulle at their respective nadirs).

But this this momentary punchdrunkenness soon gave way to careful long-term planning. the upshot of which was to shift the focal point of “consensus management” from a primary reliance on the active creation of memory” to the more “passive” practice of selectively eliminating factually or ideologically incompatible elements the past.

When it comes to detecting and denouncing this second type of memory management, the track record of progressive Western intellectuals has been considerably less stellar.

The success of the conservative counterattack upon the challenges posed to their hegemony--and the concommitant failure of intellectual wachdogs to detect it and defend against it—was, and is, their understanding of the essentially oedipical nature of much countercultural anger. That is, they understood that the real drive of most (though certainly not all) activists was (and is) not so much to change the relations of power in the world, but rather to have their “fathers”, survivors of the twin cataclysms of Depression and World War, challenges of a dimension they realized they would probably never face, take their ideas and their relatively frivolous lifestyles more seriously (Lest there be any doubt about the ongoing centrality of Daddy anxiety among those born between 1945 and 1965 consider just how much mileage the patently stupid and cruel Dick Cheney has gotten among the now baby boomer dominated press with his pasty impersonation mid-twentieth century gravitas)

This intuition led to a key change of tactics. We all know that one should not engage a rebellious teenager frontally. Why? Because to repeated invocation of our “adult” convictions is, to him or her, little more than an invitation to rebellious refutation. Skilled parents understand that what rebellious teenagers crave more than anything else is a sense of peer to peer dialogue. They also know that granting it to them will lead to a fateful loss of authority. The solution?

Provide them with simulacrum of peer-to-peer comity, that is, engage them in “free” dialogue, but on only after one has carefully and pre-emptively delimited parameters of the discussion. Doing so well, requires one to master the art of disuasory rhetoric, verbal codes which insistently but unobtrusively inform the interlocutor he or she is approaching the outer limits of the accepted semantic field and is thus in danger of falling into the abyss. Faced with the persistent application of this discursive method, the young person, avid to preserve his tenuous status as a burgeoning “person-in-the-culture” and the remaing reserves of parental affection, eventually begins to self-police his previously unbridled challenges to authority.

All of which brings us back to the Middle East and the strange invisibility of the Israeli nuclear program in our daily chronicles. The last thing that Israeli elites and the American political and social establishment that supports them with undying fealty want is a free and logical (in the sense of adhering to basic canons of distributive justice) discussion of the nuclear balance of power in the region. They know is that it is a discussion they cannot win. How could anyone with a minimal sense of fairness say that it is okay for one country which has repeatedly invaded its neighbors and appropriated considerable amounts of their territory to maintain a large and completely unregulated nuclear program while another in close proximity who has never invaded anyone and who has, moreover submitted their very nascent program to unstinting international scrutiny, cannot?

The solution? Engage in a putatively “free” discussion while taking great care to establish and enforce through disuasory rhetoric the parameters of “thinkable thought” on the issue. This campaign has been carried out with such efficacy and thoroughness by Israel and its US-based propaganda infrastructure that most reporters in the US and Western Europe, fearful of of losing your hard earned reputations as “culturally serious” people, no longer even engage the question. Leaving aside what this tells us about the intellectual intrepidness and collective emotional development of the press corps, this means that, for the effective purposes of public debate, Israel’s nuclear weapons do not exist!

An example of Post-‘68 consensus management at its best! Don’t engage, ignore... Ignore with a menacing passion that makes your enemies ( both real and potential) abandon the drive to affirm what they once knew to be palpably true

Depressing? Yes indeed. But if there is one thing but that Kundera’s masterful novel teaches us, or at least me, is that officially and semi-officially-induced acts of disappearance are never as final as their intellectual authors assume them to be. Though no longer the prestigious physician he once was, the book’s protagonist continues in a to make love and dream, and in his hedonistic way, seek to engender solidarity. His acts did not magically right the wrongs of his time. But they did offer the suggestion that tyrannically induced absurdities can also be worn down by those that refuse to accept the perverse “logic” that undergirds them.

We may not “see” Israeli nuclear weapons, but those living in their brutal shadow certainly do. And guess what? They could care less about being viewed as being “unserious” or “anti-semitic” by our opinion-making class. They are thus free in a way most of our pundits cannot even begin to fathom. No amount of oedipal shaming wil make Hasran Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah or his counterparts in Hamas, or for that matter, Hugo Chavez, go away. And this failure to cede in the face of pressure from their “elders” in the first world actively inspires millions of others with nothing left to lose to do begin doing the same.

This presents a huge problem for the US leadership class. The question now is what will they do as they realize (as the more enlightened among them already have) that “strategic forgetting”, the Plan B of the post World War II consensus management apparatus, has also apparently reached the end of its effective life cycle. Wilth no plan C in sight, what will happen? Will they go even further down the road than they already have in the last seven years with the use of raw violence?

Much will depend on the on the extent to which Obama has resolved his wn oedipal anxieties. So far, the returns are not terribly encouraging. While some of his rhetoric hs given us reason to believe he wants to break once and for all with mentality of the Post-War imperial structure, his actions say something very different. He still seems to a considerable need (so typical our generation) to seek approval of the “wise men” of the establishment, the very fools who in the last quarter century torn apart our social fabric and run the ship of state into the ground.

The Byways of Fear and Prosperity

2008-07-24T07:49:00.004-04:00

We were once the ones who taught anxious Europeans, plagued by endless wars and a seemingly intractable system of class privilege, to live without fear. Now we live and sell the fear and they remind us through their daily comportment (don't believe what the Wall Street Journal says, and the the rest of the US press regularly parrots about the malaise-inducing unsustainability of the European social model) of what we-or at least a good chunk of our white population- once had. Whether the US elites and their media acolytes are ready to admit it or not, social mobility, and with it the enjoyment of middle class life, in Europe is demonstrably superior to that which exists today in the US. Not a very edifying thought when we consider the centrality of the American Dream to the maintenance of social cohesion in the imperium. Maybe that's why the US media works so hard to underplay an denigrate the the very real achievements of today's Europe.