December 10, 2009
Obama's Rejection Speech
By David Swanson
That was not a peace prize acceptance speech. That was an infomercial for war. President Obama took the peace prize home with him, but left behind in Oslo his praise for war, his claims for war, and his view of an alternative and more peaceful approach to the world consisting of murderous economic sanctions. 

Some highlights:
"There are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened of cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I."
Yet, you did argue. You argued by accepting the prize " and then making a false case for war:
"War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences."
This is simply not true of all tribes and civilizations, unless we include war making as a criterion for being considered civilized.
"The concept of a 'just war' emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence."
How dare someone responsible for illegal occupations and air strikes and the use of unmanned drones say these words? (Responsible, that is, given the failure of Congress and of we the people to stop him.)
"America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide and restrict the most dangerous weapons."
How dare a president refusing to support a treaty on land mines speak in these terms? Are we supposed to not see the actions and just hear the words?
"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.'"
Very wise. Very true. And completely violated by Barack Obama's actions and the better part of the words in this speech. Are we supposed to hear these words in a different part of our brains from the rest of the speech and its advocacy of war?
"A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaidas leaders to lay down their arms."
Now a group of fewer than 100 angry people in Afghanistan, and their allies elsewhere, are the rough equivalent of "Hitler's armies" and justify the brutal occupation of a nation by tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries, tanks and planes, and unmanned drones? And negotiations, with the Taliban or anyone else, are not possible because " because " well, because of that rhetoric about Hitler's armies.
"The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest."
A 1993 Congressional Research Service (CRS) study of the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Center records identified "234 instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes" between 1798 and 1993. This list does not include covert actions or post-World War II occupation forces and base agreements. In a 2006 review of this study and two others, Gar Smith found that "in our country's 230 years of existence, there have been only 31 years in which U.S. troops were not actively engaged in significant armed adventures on foreign shores." In other words, fewer than 14% of America's days have been at peace. As of 2006, there were 192 member states in the United Nations. Over the past two centuries, the United State has attacked, invaded, policed, overthrown, or occupied 62 of them. Read more.
"I believe that all nations — strong and weak alike — must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."
The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is party, and which is therefore the supreme law of the United States under Article VI of the Constitution is apparently not a standard that governs the use of force, since President Obama has just thrown it away in a statement of Obama Doctrine that appears indistinguishable from the so-called Bush doctrine. Obama then doubles down with a Bush the Elder / Clintonian doctrine of humanitarian war:
"I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace."
Obama equates non-military action, non-hostile action, with inaction, pure and simple. Where is aid? Where is diplomacy? Where is cooperation? Why are all non-hostile approaches to other nations banished from the text of a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a mere 25 years after 1984?
"Peace entails sacrifice. That is why NATO continues to be indispensable."
What can be said to render that statement less persuasive than it is on its own? Maybe this:
"That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions."
Torture was illegal internationally and in the US code of law before Obama became president. He publicly instructed the Attorney General of the United States not to enforce those laws. He claimed the power to "rendition" people to other nations where they might be tortured. His CIA Director and a top presidential advisor have claimed the president has the power to torture if he chooses to. And President Obama has here claimed the power to prohibit or un-prohibit torture, spitting in the face of the very idea of the rule of law. The prison at Guantanamo is not closed, and moving those prisoners to Illinois or Bagram or any other lawless U.S. prison will not bring the United States into compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
"I have spoken to the questions that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me turn now to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace."
At last, mid-speech, we are presented with a drop of that toxic trademarked substance: hope. Only to swallow a mouthful of this:
"First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior — for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure — and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."
Set aside the hypocrisy of the globalism and rule-of-law talk from a commander in chief escalating wars and occupying 177 nations around the world. The message here is that a decent alternative to war is crippling sanctions that "exact a real price." The wisdom of a creative nonviolent outlook has not yet penetrated. And the President does not develop the idea any further, turning instead to nuclear arms:
""those with nuclear weapons will work toward disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles. But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted."
The United States is not seriously pursuing disarmament, is developing new nuclear weapons, is in clear violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And Iran is not.
"America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens."
President Obama, in his famous Middle-East speech earlier this year admirably acknowledged the U.S. overthrow of a democratically elected president in Iran, and the installation of a dictator -- who, like many dictators than and now, was one of our closest friends. The greatest success of international law in recent years has been the precedent set by prosecutors seeking to hold responsible Augusto Pinochet. Does anyone recall how he came into power?
"So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal."
Indeed.
"Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach — and condemnation without discussion — can carry forward a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door."
And there, as this reprehensible speech is dragging to a close, are the words with which it should have begun, the words denied by the thrust of everything else here and by the actions of the man delivering the words. And then there was a bit more:
"[A] just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want."

Mega Corruption Scandal At The WHO
By F. William Engdahl
Author of Full Spectrum Dominance: 
Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
12-9-9

The Devil and Mr. Obama

Barack promised change -- and sure enough, things changed for the worse
By Joe Bageant
Well lookee here! An invite from my limey comrades to recap Barack Obama's first year in office. Well comrades, I can do this thing two ways. I can simply state that the great mocha hope turned out to be a Trojan horse for Wall Street and the Pentagon. Or I can lay in an all-night stock of tequila, limes and reefer and puke up the entire miserable tale like some 5,000 word tequila purged Congolese stomach worm. I have chosen to do the latter.
As you may know, Obama's public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don't construe this as support for the GOP. It's just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans' party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.
Right now his approval ratings are in the 40th percentile and would be headed for the basement of the league were it not for the residual effect of the Kool-Aid love fest a year ago. However, millions of American liberals remain faithful, and believe Obama will arise from the dead in the third year and ascend to glory. You will find them at Huffington Post.
This frustrating ping pong game in which the margin of first time, disenchanted and undecided voters are batted back and forth has become the whole of American elections. That makes both the Republican and Democratic parties very happy, since it keeps the game down to fighting the enemy they know, each other, as opposed to being forced to deal with the real issues, or worse yet, an independent or third party candidate who might have a solution or two.
Thus, the game is limited to two players between two corporate parties. One is the Republican Party, which believes we should hand over our lives and resources directly to the local Chamber of Commerce, so the chamber can deliver them to the big corporations. The other, the Democratic Party, believes we should hand our lives and resources to a Democratic administration -- so it alone can deliver our asses to the big dogs who own the country. In the big picture it's always about who gets to deliver the money to the Wall Street hyena pack.
Americans may be starting to get the big picture about politics, money and corporate power. But I doubt it. Given that most still believe the war on terrorism is real, and that terrorists always just happen to be found near gas and oil deposits, there is plenty of room left to blow more smoke up their asses. Especially considering how we are conditioned to go into blind fits of patriotism at the sight of the flag, an eagle, or the mention of "our heroes," even if the heroes happen to be killing and maiming Muslim babies at the moment. Patriotism is a cataract that blinds us to all national discrepancies.
Much of the rest of the world seems plagued with similar cataracts that keep it from noticing the chasm of discrepancy between what Obama says and what he actually does. The Nobel Committee awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to the very person who dropped the most bombs and killed the most poor people on the planet during that year. The same guy who started a new war in Pakistan, beefed up the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran cops to phony US-Israeli charges of secret nuclear weapons facilities. It's weapons of mass destruction all over again. Somewhere in the whole fracas has been forgotten that Iran has been calling for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East since 1974. Iran has also been consistent in its position that "petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn for electricity," and that nuclear energy makes much more sense, given that our food supply, whether we like it or not, is fundamentally dependent upon petrochemicals and will remain so until the earth's population is reduced to at least half of what it is now. The Iranian attitude has been to use the shrinking petroleum deposits as judiciously as possible.
To which oilman George Bush replied that "There will be consequences for Iran's attitude." Obama has reinforced Bush's sentiment, stating that not only will there be consequences, but that a military strike on Iran "is not out of the question." Although nuclear weapons are in direct opposition to the Muslim faith, 71 million Iranians must have shuddered and paused to think: "Maybe an Iranian bomb isn't such a bad idea after all."
Under cover of being the first "black" president, Obama is looking to best one of the Bush administration's records. And that is causing unshirted hell for anybody two shades darker than a paper bag, particularly if they are wearing sandals (Obama himself being only one shade darker than the bag and given to size eleven black Cole Haans). So far, two million Pakistanis have been, in official US State Department jargon, "displaced" by U.S. backed bombing and gunfire -- which will surely displace a fellow if anything will. A significant portion of them are "living with host families." Translation: packed into crowded houses ten to a room, wiping out food and water supplies, crashing already fragile sanitation infrastructure, and serving as a giant human Petrie dish for intestinal and respiratory diseases. Many more are still living in the "conflict area." Makes it sound like living next door to a neighborhood domestic squabble, doesn't it? God only knows how many more innocent people will yet be killed in the conflict area of Obama's "war of necessity." You know, the "good war." The war that is supposed to offset the interminable bad one in Iraq, where we continue to occupy and build more bases.
Afghanistan: Grab the opium and run
Then there are Obama's noble efforts to fight terrorism by beefing up troop "deployment" in Afghanistan. Deployment may be construed to mean an American style armed gangbang, in which everybody piles on some wretched flea bitten hamlets for all they are worth, with periodic breaks for pizza and video games.
Now if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, compared to NATO country forces there, you'll find them in a nice even line along what could easily be mistaken for an oil pipeline route. One that taps into the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and, by the purest coincidence, just happens to bypass nearby Russia and Iran. But we all know that "It's about fighting terrorism over there so we won't have to fight it here!" That still plays in Peoria, so we're sticking with it.
At the moment, out-of-pocket cost of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $900 billion. Interest on the debt incurred, plus the waste of productive resources on the war, pushes the cost to three thousand billion dollars (Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz). By comparison, the entire 2009 government budget for elementary and secondary education is slightly above $800 billion. Or to look at it another way, how far would three thousand billion dollars go toward establishing energy independence? As Harvard monetary expert Linda Bilmes points out that there is "no benefit whatsoever for any American whose income does not derive from the military/security complex." I sent an email to Obama pointing this out, suggesting that we pull out of Afghanistan, grab the opium and run. I got a nice reply saying that my president is grateful for the input. So there ya go.
Lately there has been a ruckus about our little "slap shop" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Despite Obama's promises to close down, "Cigarland," it is still open for business. Word has it that Cigarland may be moved to an "underused" maximum security prison (one would think a scarcity of criminals for a maximum security prison would be good news, but what do I know?) in the desperately broke community of Thompson, Illinois. Locals there tell the national press, "Sure, put it in our backyard. No problem." Or, "This town is in the prison business. Prisons R Us." Or more bluntly, "We know how to handle these creeps and we need the jobs."
It's the kind of job creation Stalin would have understood.
Happiness is a warm tent
But at least the recession is over. This, according to Obama's monetary point man, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. For British readers unfamiliar with the US system, the Federal Reserve is not a government agency, despite its agency like name. "The Fed" is an offshore private banking cartel that decides just how much bogus currency can be printed and circulated profitably for bankers without wrecking their Ponzi schemes. And the chairman of that august body has announced that the recession is over. Well halleluja! We can quit rolling our own cigs and buy ready mades, and run recklessly through the Dollar Store scooping up dented canned goods and cheap Chinese tube socks.
That makes us luckier than the three and a half million Americans, most of whom led normal lives a few of years ago, who are now homeless. That includes one million school children sleeping in tents, shelters and other makeshift arrangements, and trying to look presentable each morning at schools that have not even the mercy to let them use the school showers. By the administration's own calculation, the number of homeless and people out of work will continue to escalate at least into the next year. Home foreclosures, and therefore homelessness, "has not topped out yet," says Obama.
But Bernanke has announced that the recession is over. So there you have it. A grateful nation breathes a sigh of relief. And besides, he is right about it being over. The recession is over for the most important members of a capitalist society, the oligarchs and banksters, who have made fortunes off this recession, thanks to our unique economic system, and may now return to their standard garden variety usury.
Economic systems are merely belief systems. I didn't say that. Keynes said that. For instance, if the early Assyrians believed a shekel was worth a jar of wheat, then it was worth a jar of wheat. American style capitalism eventually stretched belief to the absolute limits of fantasy to the snapping point, as regards general credulity. Nobody abroad still believes the dollar is worth folding up and sticking in a wallet, certainly not worth exchanging for a good old fashioned shekel. However, be it shekels or dollars or euros, there is no economic system at all if there is no production. And there is no production if there are no jobs. Hence the obsession with unemployment rates.
The U.S. Ministry of Truth has announced that our unemployment rate is at 10%. I've yet to meet an American who does not know the official unemployment rate is a complete fiction. One half of the unemployed -- the half that has been unemployed for more than one year -- are simply erased from the official count. Poof! The real rate is somewhere around 20%. But if we acknowledged that, we'd have to admit to being on par with Europe's unemployment rate. And by diddle damned we can never do that. Every American fully understands that the purpose of life is to hang onto one meaningless job or another, two of them if possible. And by the state's official numbers more Americans have a white knuckled grip on the life's purpose than any of those pussy socialist European nations with their free healthcare, low infant mortality rates and ridiculously long vacations.
But the bad news, which the Obama administration openly acknowledges, is this: Unemployment will in all likelihood go higher. And nobody on earth knows how to reduce it (although no one in the administration is about to acknowledge that). The factories are all but gone and they are not coming back. Not unless American workers are willing to work 13 hours a day for two Chinese yuan an hour, which is about 31 cents. What US factories remain are laying workers off due to high interest rates, and waiting for a lower interest rate policy before deciding if it is feasible to call any workers back into production.
During their wait they can watch hell freeze over. Banks know a fatter hog when they see it. And that hog is the consumer credit business (nobody has figured out yet that consumers need paychecks before they can consume anything, on credit or otherwise ). To that end the Federal Reserve has logically set a low interest rate policy. And in true accordance with banking logic, the banks took the Fed's money, then raised the annual percentage rate (APR) on credit card purchases and cash advances and on balances that have a penalty rate because of late payment. Next they raised the late fee. What the hell? If Americans are on the ropes, struggling to make their payments on time, then the logical thing to do is to stick it to them. Bleed 'em for all they're worth. It's an American free market tradition. We the people do not complain. We expect no mercy. America is a business and the American concept of business is pure ruthlessness.
A Deutsche Bank analyst tells me a near term worst is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures have not peaked. A commercial real estate bust is coming down the pike. He says that, while there will be some minor periodic upswings, the fraudulent value of the dollar is now evident as it falls against every other currency, even the Russian ruble (13%), except those unlucky enough to be pegged to the US dollar. As former Assistant Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts says: "What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment an American can make is to bet against the US dollar?" My Deutsche Bank friend, who is younger and has a family to think about, has taken what he considers more appropriate action. He's buying gold and moving to an undeveloped Central American country.
But Mr. Bernanke assures us that the worst is indeed over. Despite the outside world's serious doubts, but Bernanke's announcement just might fly in the U.S. We believe whatever our Ministry of Truth tells us. We believed that debt was wealth, didn't we? And we believed in WMDs, and have come to believe warfare is a prerequisite to peace.
The saddest thing is that Americans are cultivated like mushrooms from birth to death, kept in the dark and fed horseshit. Consequently, they haven't the slightest idea that there is an alternative to the system in which they labor at the pleasure of corporate and financial elites who own both their government and their every waking hour. That alternative is democratic Socialism. Self governance for the broadest common good. Which the Ministry of Truth has defined for them as fascism.
Healthcare and environment? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
I would guess that you have heard about the "debate" over "healthcare reform in America." There really wasn't much debate, just a lot of thuggish behavior and wild tales of geriatric death panels by the right, and groveling capitulation on the left. The "reform" turned out to be a $70 billion a year giveaway to the insurance companies, by forcing those 45 million folks who cannot afford insurance at all to buy it anyway. Taxpayer dollars will make up the difference between what can be wrung out of the working poor, and what insurance corporations can demand and get because they have a throat lock on both of the other parties involved -- the doctors and the patients. As for the doctors, they have played it so cool butter wouldn't melt in theor mouths, and successfully avoided the question of whether their quarter million dollar and up incomes just might be contributing to the exorbitant cost of healthcare. Even with a majority in Congress, the best Obama and the Democratic Party's corporate lapdogs could come up with was total handover to the insurance industry. If this smells a bit suspicious, it is the sweat of cold fear you are smelling. The insurance companies have always made it clear they have billions to spend in defeating and destroying any elected official not on their side.
As for environmental legislation, under the Obama administration environmentalism is pretty much reduced to "cap and trade." In the truest spirit of capitalism, corporations will be able to sell their pollution for a profit, instead of ending it. And even this legislation barely made it through the House of Representatives. Moreover, environmental legislation has had the snot knocked out of it by the economic crash, and opinion polls now show the American public believes the price is too dear. It should be interesting to see what price their children will be willing to pay for oxygen and water.
Goldstone who?
Just when you think your country has reached the limits of raw shame and the outer banks of rogue internationalism occupied by Korea's Kim Jong-Il and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, it surprises you with some new and worse outrage. America's latest is right up there with holocaust denial in sheer unmitigated abrasive gall -- putting the kibosh on the UN's Goldstone Report. The report documents Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Ghetto, where 1.5 million Palestinians have been held miserable hostages by Israel. Admittedly, leadership both in Gaza and Israel is nothing short of a pack of criminals. But the Israeli attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, using illegal munitions such as skin melting white phosphorus, was a war crime by every definition. The UN and the world agree that it meets and exceeds the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis. But as any American will tell you, the United States has never considered itself part of the rest of the world or in any way obliged to join. So the rest of the world was not surprised when the US House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report. The Obama administration has promised Zionist groups that it will never let the report get to the criminal court. The perps are safe. Zionists everywhere threw their hats in the air and cheered. The AIPAC boys at the back of the room nodded in approval: "Now tell us Congressmen, who's yer daddy?"
I might add at this point that I am not one of those conspiracy freaks who see Zionist plots behind everything. The Zionists are but one of many backstage operators with a death grip on some aspect of U.S. policy. Frankly, of all the greaseballs and thugs muscling US domestic and international policy, I fear the Wall Street and the bankers far more than I fear any Zionist (except maybe that spooky shapeshifting motherfucker, Rahm Emanuel. Brrrr!).
In any case, most Americans have never heard of the attack on Gaza or the Goldstone Report. They were prevented from hearing the outside world's news coverage of the grisly two week long specter. Residing in a free Central American country at the time, I was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to hear the daily dispatches from inside Gaza, despite Israeli efforts to suppress them. About the only place the Zionist misinformation machinery really worked was in the United States, where it successfully repressed media coverage of Israeli atrocities and genocide. Not that it required great effort. American politicians and media long ago learned, as a client state of Zion, to look the other way. Or if that is not possible, to support one of the prepackaged lies conveniently provided the U.S. media by the Likudnik media management apparatus. "And besides, weren't the Palestinians the fuckers who danced in the streets after 9/11? Screw 'em! We now return to Cable News coverage of last night's America's Got Talent winners, the ZOOperstars!"
The man with the plan
The same day the assault on Gaza began, January 4, 2009, president elect Obama announced he would create or save three or four million jobs during his first two years in office. Ninety percent of them were to be in the private sector, of which about 400,000 would be in building roads, bridges, schools and broadband lines. Another 400,000 were predicted in solar panels, wind turbines, fuel-efficient cars; and one million in healthcare and education. The key term here was "jobs saved." Any job not lost apparently goes in the jobs created column. I'm rather math impaired, but it seems to me that with real unemployment at about twenty percent and rising, and job losses predicted by the administration to continue for at least another year, it's hard to see how the claim can be made. I suppose that as long as three million jobs remain in the US economy, Obama can claim to have saved them. I'd be the first to admit it's all over my head, and a damned good example of why I am not suited for public office. Then too, I never did understand Bill Clinton's surplus either. Political math is done in some fourth dimension anti-space where terrestrial rules do not apply.
One thing I do know is that for every dollar a worker would earn under Obama's plan, a capitalist corporation employing the worker would earn almost two dollars. That Mexican guy balling sod along the new highway's median strip for the contractor may be making eight bucks an hour he wouldn't have otherwise earned. But he is making his employer about $15.50 on the same hour. As a younger man in Colorado I balled sod, hired the Mexicans and passed out the paychecks, so I know. First rule about capitalist math is: The capitalist owner gets to do the math.
So Obama's plan lines more corporate pockets than those of the working man. This being America however, Obama was charged by conservatives with having an anti-capitalist socialist agenda. These businessmen conservatives are more than happy to take the money. But the rule of thumb in America is "Show No Gratitude! Bite the living hell out of any hand that feeds you, on the chance that it may give up more. Maybe even drop everything it is holding so you can grab it up and run while a crowd gathers to stone the alleged socialist."
But the truth is that Obama's jobs would have done nothing to help the economy "recover" anyway. There is no economy left to recover. It moved to China and India. Things such as road projects do not generate capital. Under capitalism roads are worthless unless they make money, and they can do no economic good if there is nothing being manufactured to haul on them.
Likewise education that does not contribute the gross national product (otherwise known as corporate interests) by producing higher wages to exponentially pump up American consumer fetishism is considered worthless. And let's face it, higher education has become, for the most part, another racket. The student is saddled with massive loan debt (again, there is the odor of hyena banker spoor in the air) on the promise of eventual higher wages. Or at least that the graduate will work in a nice warm dry video store and never have to ball sod. Unfortunately, the number of jobs that require "college educated" Americans -- quite an oxymoron, given the caliber of U.S. colleges these days -- is shrinking right along with the Empire. All those jobs middle managing the Republic, such as helping us cheat on our taxes, brainwashing the school kids, and devising sales strategies for beer, grow scarcer by the day. Even book editing and reading medical scans are being outsourced to Asia. There's a nasty rumor that American medical scans are being read in India by trained Buddhist temple monkeys to save rupees. The US healthcare industry has been mum on the subject.
Obama's recovery plan depends on going deeper in hock to the Chinese. For Christ sake, aren't there any of our tax dollars lying around anyplace other than in Wall Street vaults? Apparently not. So the Treasury Department keeps cranking out more funny money to make payments on the pawn ticket for the Empire. Rather like those doddering old Englishmen one meets on estates in rural Kent sporting "The Queen's Own" military ties, we still prefer to think of ourselves as an Empire.
But the Chinese are looking askance, questioning the wisdom of pouring more money down a rat hole, based upon the US Treasury's allegation that the other end of the rat hole comes out somewhere in China and not on Wall Street. Chinese talk shows publicly question American loans, when upcoming powerhouses such as Brazil are so ripe for investment. You can bet that if it's on television in China, the public is being issued an official state sanctioned opinion they may feel free hold as their own.
The big heist
In the end the campaign rattle and prattle about Obama's recovery plan turned out to be moot anyway. Wall Street moved in and heavied up on the whole damned country, in one of the ballsiest heists in American history. It was a stroke of pure genius as theft goes. Following a meeting of the Five Families, Citicorp, Bank of America, Morgan Chase, Wachovia, Taunus Corp., the financial cartels said, "The rip-off is in. We got it all. Now if you don't hand over all the people's savings and assets so we can loan it back to them, the whole flaming ball of shit you call the services and information economy is gonna come down on everybody's asses like a giant meteor. So you can load three trillion bucks for now into the armored cars lined up out front and nobody will get hurt. Or you can watch the national economy shrivel up until the schmucks out there in the cul de sacs and cardboard condos can't even put together cab fare for their ride to the poor house. It's your call Barack."
There are still a few delusional souls out there who believe Obama is trying to do his honest best to fulfill campaign promises, but just cannot get past the pack of vampire financial corporations and cold blooded Republican lizards. Which is true in a sense. He cannot get past the Wall Street pack because he is running in the middle of it. Obama's nefarious relationship with Wall Street's power players has been ongoing for years. It is no accident that Wall Street got to select the members of the president's financial cabinet. My mutton eating friends, it's a sad and sordid tale, one I have neither the space nor the stomach to cover here. Especially since better journalists such as Matt Taibbi and others have written extensively about it in detail.
Last I heard, the banks never un-assed the dough. Never let it circulate in the people's hands or even through business loans. Instead, they declared a profit, divvied it up in bonuses, and congratulated themselves. Indeed, this was the sort of sheer brilliance we have come to expect from the Yale/Harvard MBA crowd. Getting rich by going broke. Then getting even richer by sticking up the US government and the entire American public, and eventually the entire world, leaving 1.5 quadrillion dollar cloud of toxic derivatives girding the world, to hoover up more money for them before imploding like a dark star. And indeed, the derivatives are even astronomical in nature. They represent $180,000 in debt load for every man woman and child on earth (although I cannot understand why, if the money isn't real, why we should consider the debt real). It is impossible to produce our way out of this calamity. There aren't even enough resources left on earth to sustain that scale of production.
For now the financial mobsters have retired to Tuscan villas to savor their haul. The poor schmucks out there in the US heartland are left to devise new ways of hiding the family ride from the repo man. Never once, though, do they doubt capitalism. They figure it is all just a big financial accident. Fate. And that will somehow "work our way out of it," like we always have. These things happen in a dynamic free market economy.
A new mob moves in
To backtrack, that was when the smell of long green flying out of the public -- the insurance industry. Insurance racketeers moved in with their own muscle to fill the void left by the Wall Street gang. The insurance syndicate dispatched its made men and soldiers throughout the halls of Congress, and, voila! They were able to pass the aforementioned $70 billion a year political blackmail job off as "reform legislation." Say what you want to about my country, but pillage and looting have never been so elegantly ritualized, institutionalized and executed.
Realistic people on the left have long known that the last act of American strong-arm capitalism would be a massive gunpoint redistribution of wealth from the public to the owning class through the private financial sector -- which the owning class happens to own. But few would have expected it to be executed under a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate. Or under a Democratic administration honchoed by the first black president. One liberal blogger wondered aloud, "Imagine what the Republicans would have done had John McCain been elected?"
The same thing, brother. The same thing. Only with a different cover story. Both parties exist at the pleasure of the same crime syndicates.
How to join the rackets
As I remember, it was a Mexican diplomat who once told me that graft, theft and bribery are socialized in his and other Latin American countries -- democratically distributed throughout much of society. But in America, he said, this sort of criminal activity is legislatively institutionalized. Only the elites are allowed to practice usury, theft, insurance blackmail and other forms of non-violent looting (violent looting being reserved for oil bearing Middle Eastern countries). The first step in building one of these rackets is become a legally recognized interest group, in order to access the key Congressional players you wish to bribe or strong-arm into acquiescence or complicity.
The banking mob, the insurance mob, and other criminally organized legislative muscle men, cartels and commodity syndicates, are all officially sanctioned as "interest groups" operating alongside hundreds of others in that whorehouse by the Potomac River.
To list just a few, there are environmental interest groups such as the Sierra Club, which exists so its officers can draw fat salaries and meet movie star environmentalists. There is an interested group for education, which exists to assure the mediocrity of our public schools. Munitions manufacturers are an interest group. Gambling casinos and tobacco corporations are interest groups. There is an interest group to force feed us corn sugar, in order to sustain Midwestern Republican farmers and ensure the future of the ever expanding weight loss and diabetes industries. There are even lobby groups to protect the interests of syndicates in other countries, such as Israel. There is an interest group for everything except we ordinary American pudwhackers. The folks who just want to raise families in peace, and maybe have modest financial security in old age. And there are thousands of interest groups whose purpose is to make damned sure we never get either one.
We ain't mean, just thrifty
Yesterday I watched a CNN host ask two experts: "Is stepping up the war in Afghanistan really the best use of our tax dollars?" The killing, maiming and displacement of untold thousands is discussed in terms of the best use of capital. A dehumanized and monetized capitalist society sees everything in dollars and cents and return on investment. Even infant mortality is rated that way, though seldom does anyone admit it. Saving a black ghetto baby has a low return on investment, according to some human services analysts, as regards their lifetime contribution to the gross national product. I actually heard an expert on a television panel show say this.
Yet Americans sitting in front of their TV sets do not find this one bit odd. Or even mean spirited, much less an indication of a cruel society. No American thinks of himself or herself as cruel, or connected in any way with the world's largest human and environmental killing machine. No American doubts his inalienable right to drive around or run air conditioning or drink wine from grapes grown in Chile at the expense of a national war on the environment and those of the world's people who have been born amid energy resources. If there are things such as cruelty and injustice, we the people aren't the ones doing it. We the voters and taxpayers are not the CIA snatching people off to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to be raped with broken bottles and boiled alive to extract those "terrorist confessions" that keep the war on terror alive. We simply finance such operations.
And accountability? Well, on the very slight chance that someday the world will hold America accountable (which will never happen so long as we possess more armaments that the rest of the world combined and are quite clearly willing to use them toward our own ends) we the people can express our shock and disgust as citizens. We good people would never, never, never have approved of all those awful acts. And besides, there is not much the ordinary person can do about such things anyway. Right?
Maybe not. But it was Americans who so loudly proclaimed that complicity through silence is no defense, when we rubbed the German people's noses in the grisly filth of the concentration camps and hung their national leadership.
The revenge of Smirking George
We haven't heard much from George W. Bush since he packed up his comics and moved to Dallas. But his policies remain like dog piss stains to stink up the Obama White House. Rendition and assassinations continue, as does warrantless spying on the citizenry, along with other civil liberties violations in the name of the "war on terror."
All of these are terrible things for a president who ran on reform and change to continue to do. But it is the thing Barack Obama and his party did not do, the thing they did not insist upon, that will have the greatest ongoing effect on this country. Obama and the Democrats refused to prosecute Bush and Cheney, ensuring that:
1 -- No quail hunter is Georgia will ever be safe as long as Cheney's pacemaker still functions;
2 -- The precedents set by the most criminal administration in US history remain. Until they are confronted and rectified, America will not to have the opportunity to heal and recover. Honestly speaking though, the patient has been dead since the 2000 election fraud went unchallenged.
Obama's election was the only chance America had to hold the Bush Republicans accountable for their crimes. Now it's gone.
Opportunities to exercise moral principles as a nation and a people are rare to begin with, and fast vanishing. At some point they will be extinguished by the exigencies of human species survival. It doesn't take a prophet to know this. Anyone paying attention to planetary population, resource depletion and the eco-collapse understands it in the gut. The mounting worldwide competition for human survival will not allow for much high mindedness. So we should exercise principle and administration of justice while principle and justice are still possible.
There are endless rationalizations proffered as to why Obama has not come within a mile of fulfilling the promise and potential of his presidency, and the Democratic Party is writing more of them every day. Disappointed Democratic voters grab at them, and desperately defend each one on internet forums and in letters to the editor. But we must use our own personal capabilities as free rational human beings to assess Obama, and decide why he is failing. Or not failing. To hell with highly crafted official explanations about "wars of necessity" and trillion dollar blackmail payments.
George W. Bush left office wearing the same smirk he came in with. Perhaps it's congenital. But if Bush was smirking when he left office, he must now be convulsed in crazed hysterical laughter. His gang not only got away clean, but Obama carries on the dark Bush-Cheney legacy. And, almost as if to top the whole black escapade with a cherry of irony, the most inarticulate president in American history is now on the motivational speaking circuit at $200,000 a pop. Never let it be said that the Devil does not care for his own.
Will Americans ever rise up in defense of their own common well being through such things as education, health and a productive peace caring society? Nope. Because it has been seen to that socialism -- the administration of the nation solely for the common good and benefit of all the people without preference or privilege -- doesn't stand a chance in America. For over a century those who have attempted to further socialism have been shot, hanged, burned alive in their beds on Christmas Eve, imprisoned, falsely accused of crimes and falsely convicted, and demonized by the capitalist elites of the corporate state. The cause of socialism has effectively been wiped out in the US. Few Americans can even define the word. Most think it is a political system when it is a social philosophy. Hell, half the socialists these days think it is entirely a political system.
But even if Americans understood socialism, they are too terrified to ever admit to its virtues, much less publicly support the cause. And without free and open public participation in some democratic form of socialism, regardless of the name or label given it, there can be no recognition of the people's common welfare and good. And so the most egalitarian social philosophy ever conceived dies within a nation, with very little chance of being reborn because such an ideal, by its definition, cannot exist within the narrow mindset of bankers and oligarchs.
Bush smirks, Obama breakdances in and around the minefield of his false promises, and Wall Street CEO bonuses are higher than ever.
Like I said, the Devil does take care of his own.

When Our Leaders Fail to Lead

Posted by David Korten at Dec 02, 2009 05:39 PM | YES MAGAZINE
We have to make them. What David Korten learned from his experiences during the Vietnam War.

On Tuesday night, President Obama announced his decision to increase U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan. It was a tragic error. He specifically said that to compare Afghanistan with Vietnam is a misreading of history. In a way, I would have to agree. We ultimately left Vietnam in humiliation. Afghanistan is not comparable, because our prospects for success there are even worse.
I am neither a military strategist nor a student of military history, but I recall well the U.S. experience during the Vietnam War. I was serving at the time as a U.S. Air Force Captain. My first assignment was as an instructor at the Special Air Warfare School in Florida, where we instructed Air Force pilots heading for Vietnam to be part of the Air Force's role in counterinsurgency operations. I later served in the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as military aide to the civilian responsible for monitoring all Defense Department-sponsored behavior and social sciences research.
These assignments brought me into contact with the most advanced thinking of the time aboutunconventional, asymmetric warfare—in which a conventional military force seeks to defeat an enemy who cannot be distinguished from a civilian noncombatant unless he is firing on you. This was the case in Vietnam and it is the case in Afghanistan.
I recall clearly one of the lectures I gave to Air Force pilots on the substantial body of social science research demonstrating that dropping bombs on civilian populations increases their will to resist. It isn’t a particularly startling finding, and I’m sure it holds up as well for any military operation in which seemingly indiscriminate fire causes significant civilian casualties.
So why are our prospects in Afghanistan even less hopeful than they were in Vietnam? As in Afghanistan, the enemy in Vietnam blended in with the people. In Vietnam, however, it operated as a coherent body with an allegiance to a command structure. Vietnam had experience functioning as a nation with a central government; it also had more physical infrastructure and a more educated population.
Afghanistan has never functioned as a nation under the central rule of either foreigners or Afghanis. It is a land fragmented physically and politically into feudal fiefdoms ruled by local warlords united only by a fierce commitment to resisting any form of foreign occupation. What passes for a central government has less legitimacy than did the government of South Vietnam, is even more corrupt, and is arguably not even fully in control of Kabul, the capital city. The idea that we or any other group of outsiders can pacify Afghanistan and bring it under some semblance of central democratic rule with a legitimate and reasonably competent government is beyond ludicrous.
It is difficult to convince civilians that you are there to help them when you are maiming and killing their loved ones for no evident purpose. Yet when you cannot identify the enemy, you will almost inevitably kill more civilians than combatants. I know how I would respond if a foreign army inflicted such harm on my family. The more troops we put into Afghanistan, the greater the resistance.
On November 20, 2009, Bill Moyers PBS Journal presented an episode on President Lyndon Johnson’s path to war. It is a piece of history that Moyers knows well, having served as a top-ranking member of President Johnson’s staff from 1964-1967. Drawing on the archive of White House tapes, Moyers tells the story, in Johnson’s own words, of how the political dynamics of the time drew him into an ever more costly escalation in a war that he knew from the beginning we could not win.
President Obama seems to be repeating this sad history, caught up in much the same dynamic in an even more futile war. This one may not end with pictures of the last Americans in Afghanistan departing by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy roof, but the time will come when we will recognize as a nation that we cannot win this war. The only uncertainty is when that time will come that we make the decision to leave.
Ultimately we left Vietnam not because of bold presidential leadership, but because we the people of this country demanded it. We had been told that the fall of Vietnam would lead to the fall of Southeast Asia, with devastating consequences for U.S. interests and national security all around the world. It didn’t happen. Following our departure from Vietnam the people of Vietnam formed a coherent national government and rebuilt their country. Asia became stronger, freer, and more democratic; Vietnam is now one of our major trading partners. There has been much agony along the way and Vietnam is no model of democracy, but everyone is far better off than during the war that should never have happened.
Invading Afghanistan was a tragic error. Escalating our presence there compounds the error. We have created a terrible mess, but it is not within our means to clean it up. The sooner we leave Afghanistan and let the Afghani people sort out their future for themselves, the better off both we and they will be. We now know it will happen only when we send a message to our politicians, including President Obama, too loud and too clear to be ignored.

David Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. David is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, and president of the People-Centered Development Forum. His books include Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World.

Why It Augurs a Sinister Banksters' End Game

Obama's "We Got No Money" Rap

By MIKE WHITNEY
There's no fixed number of greenbacks in a vault at the Treasury that limit how much the federal government can spend. Since the US pays its debts in its own currency--it can print as many dollars as it pleases. Of course, if boosting the money supply triggers inflation, the Fed has to withdraw liquidity and raise interest rates. But that's not the problem at present. The problem is how to zap the economy back to life. The problem is how to get 16 million people out of unemployment lines and back to work. That's the real challenge. The problem is political not economic.  Obama is surrounded by industry reps who are trying to scare him about the size of the deficits. But deficits aren't the problem; unemployment is. Once people get back to work and build their savings, their creditworthiness will improve, and the next economic expansion will begin. When more people are paying into the system, the deficits will come down. But the deficits won't come down if tens of millions of people are still on the sidelines and forced to cut their spending. Judging by last Thursday's  speech at the "Jobs Summit", Obama still doesn't grasp this:
 "But I want to be clear," Obama boomed. "While I believe that government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector.  We don't have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis.  It is only when the private sector starts to reinvest again, only when our businesses start hiring again and people start spending again and families start seeing improvement in their own lives again that we're going to have the kind of economy that we want.  That's the measure of a real economic recovery."
This is nonsense.  When Obama says "We don't have enough public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created by the crisis." He's just flat wrong.  As Marshall Auerback pointed out on this site yesterday, the government can print as much money as it wants; it's not "revenue constrained".   What keeps the Fed from printing its way out of every jam, is the fear of inflation.  But, consider this: inflation fears never stopped Fed chair Ben Bernanke from hosing down the entire financial system with $11.4 trillion, did it? Also, the Fed never hesitated to bulk up excess reserves at the banks by $1 trillion so bankers could shove it into high-risk assets and make windfall profits for themselves while the real economy drifted into coma. The only time the Fed's "inflation alarm" goes off is when there's the remote chance that someone on the low end of the economic food-chain might benefit from a government jobs program.  Then the trumpets blare, the lights blink red, and Bernanke scuttles up to Capital Hill with dire warnings of impending doom. It's all politics. Bernanke's world view is shaped by institutional bias, the same as Summers and Geithner. Obama has aligned himself with this swarm of rogues.
Obama again:
"Now, let me be clear.  I am open to every demonstrably good idea, and I want to take every responsible step to accelerate job creation.  We also, though, have to face the fact that our resources are limited.  When we walked in, there was an enormous fiscal gap between the money that is going out and the money coming in.  The recession has made that worse because of fewer tax receipts and more demands made on government for things like unemployment insurance.  So we can't make any ill-considered decisions right now, even with the best of intentions.  We're going to have to be surgical and we're going to have to be creative.  We're going to have to be smart and strategic.  We'll need to look beyond the old standbys and fallbacks and come up with the best ideas that give us the biggest bang for the buck." (Remarks by the President and Vice President at the Opening Session of the Jobs and Economic Growth Forum)
This is infuriating. Our resources are NOT limited. Obama is just parroting the GOP "deficit hawk mantra". Hasn't the president noticed the Fed's printing presses purring-along at full-throttle to keep the financial markets flooded with liquidity?  And where does he think demand is going to come from if consumers continue to cut back sharply on spending?  When consumers and businesses stop spending, the government has to pick up the slack or the economy nosedives. Fiscal expansion--particularly through government jobs programs--is the best way to  put money in the hands of people who will spend it pronto. It's a way to circumvent the credit bottleneck created by insolvent banks.  Surely, Obama's advisors realize this, which is why there must be a more sinister motive behind the rhetoric. Here's how economist Marshall Auerback sums it up:
"The Obama Administration continues to fantasize that it can get away with creating Potemkin prosperity of levitating asset prices via trillions of dollars of financial guarantees to Wall Street in lieu of deploying fiscal resources needed to lay the groundwork for the real thing.
The budget deficits can maintain growth in demand to keep income growing and hence support private saving. Budget deficits should aim to fill in that “hole in private savings” and not allow aggregate demand to “fall through it”, which would lead to income and employment collapses. Government spending has to rise so as to ensure that firms are willing to maximize the use of their productive capacity, which in turn generates further employment. You don’t need a job summit to figure that one out, Mr. President. The only “resource deficiency” here is one of political courage.
The only unemployment increase worth applauding would be the sacking of the President’s entire economics team, all of whom persistently regurgitate deficit myths that constrain output and employment and prevent us from recouping genuine prosperity." 
Amen, to that. Summers, Geithner and Bernanke should have been booted down the White House stairwell long ago. Instead, Obama is still in the thrall of Chicago school "trickle down" economics. Meanwhile, the nation's most valuable resource--its people--remain idle waiting for government to do what the private sector is no longer capable of doing; create jobs. Obama's task is to fill the hole left by the sudden rise in personal spending. That means government jobs programs to redistribute wealth, rebuild demand, and get the economy rolling again. Here's how progressive economist James Galbraith puts it:
"So long as we have people who need jobs, we should find them work. There are better and worse ways to do this, but the money isn't a limit. It's just a tool to get the job done. And if we do too much, we see it in the jobs. As joblessness falls, the private sector will pick up. Government can then ease off. Mission accomplished! Our real choice is between a large bold program that works quickly, and a slow cautious program that doesn't seem to work at all."
Unemployment is not going to bounce back like it did after previous recessions. In fact, unemployment is following the same flat-line trajectory as business investment. Too many high-paying jobs have been shipped overseas; too many businesses have moved offshore. Free trade has changed the economic landscape dramatically. If Obama doesn't take decisive action now, the wealth gap will widen, double-digit unemployment will be the norm, and a permanent underclass will emerge in America. The social unrest that this will generate, will be significant. It would be wiser to avoid potential disruptions and preemptively address the minimal needs of ordinary people in distress. That means jobs, lots of jobs. 
Here's what Paul Krugman anticipates if we continue along the same path we are now:
"What’s going to happen, economically and politically... I have a vision (but) It’s fairly grim.. Start with the short-term economics.... unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more.
And politically it’s hard to do anything about that. Those economic half-measures have landed the Obama administration in a trap: much of the political establishment now sees stimulus as having been discredited by events, so that it’s very hard to come back and scale the policy up to where it should have been in the first place....
“The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right and demoralized the movement that brought him to power.
“Along with this will come a process of defining prosperity down. All the wise heads will tell us that 8 or 9 percent unemployment — maybe even 10 percent — is the ‘new normal’, and that only irresponsible people want to do anything about the situation.
So what I see is years of terrible job markets, combined with political paralysis....as best as I can tell, the administration strategy is to insist that only a few minor course corrections are needed, and to wait for the jobs to start coming in." (Paul Krugman, "Things to Come", The Conscience of a Liberal, New York Times)
Obama is deliberately precipitating another crisis on the advise of his chief lieutenants. Summers and Geithner are steering the economy back into recession so they can implement the same austerity measures and "structural adjustment" programs which have been used throughout the developing world.  It's "starve the beast" all over again.  As the stimulus dries up, revenue-depleted states will be forced to auction off public lands, resources, parks and other assets to the highest bidder. The banksters and robber barons will feast on the country's treasures while the middle class is crushed by the freefalling dollar, lost home equity, and persistent high unemployment.
Government jobs programs can help to avert another tragedy, but time is running out.

Confronting the Globalcrat

Comment by Greg Palast

This article appeared in the December 21, 2009 edition of The Nation.

December 2, 2009

Geneva
You could call him the Generalissimo of Globalization. The World Trade Organization's director general, Pascal Lamy, was a bit defensive, wanting to assure us that the WTO "wasn't created as a dark club of multinationals secretly cooking plots against the people. We do things in the open. Look at our website."
It's been a year since globalized finance brought the planet to its knees, yet here in Geneva, where in late November the WTO opened its grand "seventh ministerial," the diplomats are in denial. One confidential document from the files of WTO members--definitely not on the WTO website--tells us that despite financial and environmental crises, the globalizers still want to party like it's 1999.
In that year, just eight months before the Battle of Seattle, the WTO's Financial Services Agreement (FSA) became global law, breaking down old rules against cross-border trade in currency and financial derivatives. Financial goods spread rapidly. So did financial bads. The result: the collapse of US mortgage-backed securities slammed holders worldwide. When California home prices swooned, Iceland's banks melted.
But Lamy, throughout our lengthy one-on-one chat, insisted we see the WTO not as a corporate enforcer of deregulation but rather as the promoter of "interdependence," a kind of Oxfam or ACLU for trade. "This interdependence has a lot of good sides," he told me, "about freedom, about human rights, about technology, about media, about political civil liberties."
I suggested that, outside the WTO's gated compound below the Alps, few people associate derivatives and mortgage securitization with human rights and freedom. "They should!" Lamy said. "They should!"
I attempted to steer the director general back to the devilish details of this document, marked "ensure this text is not made publicly available": the demand of the European Union, echoed by the United States, that Brazil open its borders to derivatives trading and the sale of other exotic products of foreign banking giants. The EU nations were none too happy, it seems, that "Brazil has not yet accepted the Fifth protocol," that is, stood alone among major nations in flat-out rejecting the FSA.
Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, resisted hopping into the financial free-trade free-for-all, which saved his nation from most of the pain of the Great Recession, allowing its GDP to rocket upward at a 9 percent rate over the past three months. Wasn't it just a bit nuts to demand that Brazil now join the derivatives casino? Lamy replied, not unreasonably, "Trade is not the problem. The problem is whether what you trade is regulated or not."
The solution, then, to the problem of bankers gone wild is to regulate them, as they were just ten years ago. But there's a catch. As Lamy acknowledged, "In the WTO you can always claw back." Go ahead and re-regulate, but "there's a price to pay to claw back." Quite a price. Under the FSA, once a nation has stripped itself bare of banking regulations it cannot, despite the crisis, reimpose protective rules that get in the way of newly established foreign bank operations. For example, were Ecuador to follow former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker's advice to reinstate regulations that prevent commercial banks from gambling in derivatives, the US government, by WTO rule, would probably be able to slap a stiff tariff on every banana from Ecuador to make up for US banks' lost trading profits. In other words, it could cost a pretty penny to a treaty signer to rein in the local JPMorgan trading desk.
How did governments get tied hand and foot by the Financial Services Agreement?
When the WTO financial treaty took hold in 1999, ours was a very different planet. A month before the protest against the WTO, Robert Rubin had joined Citigroup, a megabank effectively created by the deregulation pushed by... Rubin, when he was Bill Clinton's treasury secretary. At that time Rubin was Merlin, and except for the protesters in Seattle ("ridiculous...yuppies looking for their 1960's fix," wrote the New York Times's Thomas Friedman), few doubted Rubin's magic.
In 1999 the international trade in equity derivatives and credit default swaps was too rare to track. But thanks to WTO treaty terms negotiated by Timothy Geithner, then assistant treasury secretary for international affairs, cross-border trade in swaps and derivatives would grow to a $115 trillion business by 2008, the year of Citigroup's near collapse and government bailout.
A decade ago, during the Battle of Seattle, Lamy himself wore the epaulets of the financial shock force of globalization as director general of the French banking giant Crédit Lyonnais, whose privatization he engineered. On leaving, I asked him if the protesters hadn't been proven right by the crisis--that breaking down financial borders was fraught with danger.
The banker turned globalcrat insisted that the WTO's woes are not a matter of policy but of public relations. "We've realized that there was a part of our activities which needed more transparency, more explanation. We've done a lot of that, I think."
Martin Khor thinks not. As executive director of the South Centre, and as former director of the NGO Third World Network, Khor is the closest thing the anti-globalization insurgency has to a leader--and a quite successful one at that. The South Centre, based in Geneva, provides Brazil and many other developing nations with the technical firepower to defend themselves against the diktats of the United States and Europe.
Khor says the WTO's bad rep stems from its chutzpah in pressuring developing nations to replicate, in the guise of trade rules, the deregulatory frenzy that put the United States and Europe "into the soup." And he finds it rich indeed that banks that would have gone bust if not for massive government bailouts are still preaching to emerging nations the gospel of deregulating financial markets. "If there had not been those bailouts, these financial institutions would no longer exist. But having been bailed out, they now continue to think they're going to go back to business as usual."
Apparently they haven't heard that the party's over.

About Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin). His reports on globalization are aired on BBC Television Newsnight and Air America'sRing of Fire. more...

Progressive Leaders Pan Obama's Decision for More War in Afghanistan -- 10 Reactions

By , AlterNet
Posted on December 4, 2009, Printed on December 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144356/

President Obama's speech announcing a troop escalation in Afghanistan did not go over well with many progressives. As soon as his intentions to send tens of thousands more troops became clear, dozens of progressive leaders and writers -- including many former prominent Obama supporters -- voiced their concerns in newspapers, on the radio and on the Internet. The following is a sampling of their responses:
1. Tom Hayden writes for The Nation:
"It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car. Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency."
2. Laura Flanders writes on GritTV,
"...for those who’d thought they’d voted for the death of the Bush Doctrine. Sorry. Bush/Cheney live on in the new president’s embrace of the idea that the U.S. has a right, not only to respond to attacks, but also to deploy men and women in anticipation of them."
3. Jim Hightower used his most recent column to warn:
"Obama has been taken over by the military industrial hawks and national security theorists who play war games with other people's lives and money. I had hoped Obama might be a more forceful leader who would reject the same old interventionist mindset of those who profit from permanent war. But his newly announced Afghan policy shows he is not that leader."
Hightower says that just because we've lost Obama on this issue, it's not over; that we as citizens...
"...have both a moral and patriotic duty to reach out to others to inform, organize and mobilize our grassroots objections, taking common sense to high places. Also, look to leaders in Congress who are standing up against Obama's war and finally beginning to reassert the legislative branch's constitutional responsibility to oversee and direct military policy. For example, Rep. Jim McGovern is pushing for a specific, congressionally mandated exit strategy; Rep. Barbara Lee wants to use Congress' control of the public purse strings to stop Obama's escalation; and Rep. David Obey is calling for a war tax on the richest Americans to put any escalation on-budget, rather than on a credit card for China to finance and future generations to pay."
4. Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford compares Obama's delivery to how George Bush might have given the speech:
"Barack Obama's oratorical skills have turned on him, revealing, as George Bush’s low-grade delivery never could, the perfect incoherence of the current American imperial project in South Asia. Bush’s verbal eccentricities served to muddy his entire message, leaving the observer wondering what was more ridiculous, the speechmaker or the speech. There is no such confusion when Obama is on the mic. His flawless delivery of superbly structured sentences provides no distractions, requiring the brain to examine the content – the policy in question – on its actual merits. The conclusion comes quickly: the U.S. imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Pakistan is doomed, as well as evil.
"The president’s speech to West Point cadets was a stream of non sequiturs so devoid of logic as to cast doubt on the sanity of the authors. '[T]hese additional American and international troops,' said the president, 'will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.'
"Obama claims that the faster an additional 30,000 Americans pour into Afghanistan, the quicker will come the time when they will leave. More occupation means less occupation, you see? This breakneck intensification of the U.S. occupation is necessary, Obama explains, because 'We have no interest in occupying your country.'"
5. Foreign Policy in Focus's Phyllis Bennis demolished Obama's attempt to discourage comparisons to Vietnam:
"Near the end of his speech, Obama tried to speak to his antiwar one-time supporters, speaking to the legacy of Vietnam. It was here that the speech’s internal weakness was perhaps most clear. Obama refused to respond to the actual analogy between the quagmire of Vietnam, which led to the collapse of Johnson’s Great Society programs, and the threat to Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda collapsing under the pressure of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he created straw analogies, ignoring the massive challenge of waging an illegitimate, unpopular war at a moment of dire economic crisis."
6. New America Media's Andrew Lam also addressed the Afghanistan-Vietnam parallel:
"On the eve of the second wave of a U.S. invasion in Afghanistan, I wish to tell the American media, as well as President Obama, that the Vietnam syndrome cannot be kicked through acts of war. That only through a view that’s rooted in people, rooted in human kindness, and not historical vehemence, would a country open itself up and stop being a haunting metaphor. That not until human basic needs are addressed and human dignity upheld can we truly pacify our enemies and bring about human liberty. And that more soldiers and bombs and droids in the sky will never appease the haunting ghosts of the past. Quite the opposite. We are in the process of creating more ghosts to haunt future generations."
7. Glenn Greenwald, writing on Salon, addresses Obama's supporters who are going along with his decision to escalate the troops:
"The most bizarre defense of Obama's escalation is also one of the most common: since he promised during the campaign to escalate in Afghanistan, it's unfair to criticize him for it now -- as though policies which are advocated during a campaign are subsequently immunized from criticism. For those invoking this defense: in 2004, Bush ran for re-election by vowing to prosecute the war in Iraq, keep Guantanamo open, and "reform" privatize Social Security. When he won and then did those things (or tried to), did you refrain from criticizing those policies on the grounds that he promised to do them during the campaign? I highly doubt it."
8. AlterNet's Adele Stan noted that Obama also changed the justification for the war:
"If you listened to the subtext of the speech, you might find that the mission has changed. In fact, you might say that the mission in Afghanistan is as much about creating stability in Pakistan -- a nuclear power that NBC's Andrea Mitchell yesterday referred to as a nearly failed state -- as it is about Afghanistan. Last night, a senior administration official confirmed to AlterNet that the U.S. mission to Pakistan has broadened.
From the president's speech:
In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear. America is also providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development. We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting. And going forward, the Pakistani people must know America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed.
9. Rory O' Connor lambasted Obama on MediaChannel.org:
"The Afghan escalation speech was classic Obama. His enigmatic and epigrammatic split the baby in half Yoda/Spock-speak offered something for everyone: good-news-bad-news; back and forth; give and take; get in to get out; speed up to slow down; and in the end, let’s all come together and get along to end the war – by waging the war more intensely…but only for eighteen months, and then we all get to go home."
10. Blogger Digby highlighted that the American public never really gets to discuss the real issues underlying the US military build up in the Mideast and Asia:
"The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the standoff with Iran and all the other obsessions with the Mideast are at least informed, if not entirely motivated, by larger geopolitical efforts to maintain stability at a time of impending competition over resources and access to them -- oil. Sure that's simplistic, but it's at the 'heart' of what's going on in the leadership's 'minds.'

"We don't talk about any of that because it might lead us to get serious about changing our way of life and evidently nobody important thinks that's the right way to deal with the problem. And frankly, among many of our elites, maintaining a military presence everywhere is necessary to preserve American global dominance. Period."

Liberals Are Useless

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/

Posted on Dec 7, 2009

By Chris Hedges
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.
I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Published on Monday, November 30, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
Today's Fanatic, Tomorrow's Saint

It's popular to think that the world gets changed by nice people, but the lives of activists past and present tell us otherwise

by Rebecca Solnit
By fanaticism we usually mean two things. One is that someone is dedicated in the extreme to their cause, belief, or agenda, willing to live and die and maybe kill for it, as John Brown was. The other is that the cause, belief or agenda is not ours, and in 1859 John Brown's beliefs were not those of most Americans. No one calls himself or herself a fanatic. It's what you call people who are weird or threatening, extremists in the defence of something other than your own worldview. I've been around activists all my adult life, and though it's popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people, a lot of the saints and agents of change are obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding, of themselves and of us. That's what it generally takes to change the world. Gandhi knew this when he said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Conventional people give up when they laugh at you. Timid people back off when they fight you. They don't win, and neither do those who prize ease and security. The prize is for those who risk and persevere.
That slavery was an intolerable evil is something slaves have tended to believe all along; a few free men caught up with them in England in the 1770s, as Adam Hochschild's wonderful history Bury the Chains relates, and that handful of Quakers and dissenters persevered until they won, half a century later. I am not so sure about John Brown's means, or that his actions were necessary to start a war that was already brewing, but I am sure that slavery needed to be abolished, and that his general ends were good. The really interesting thing is that in 1839 to be against slavery in the US was an disruptive, extreme position, often seen as an attack on property rights rather than a defence of human rights. Half a century later we held those truths to be self-evident that no one should own anyone else. (Except husbands owning wives, but that's another story that got revised in the 1970s and 1980s when things like domestic violence came to be taken seriously by the legal system of many countries. Sort of.)
Lincoln called John Brown a "misguided fanatic." Thoreau wrote a defence of him in which he remarked, "The only government that I recognise - and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army - is that power that establishes justice in the land." Some 13 years before Brown's bloodyraid on Harper's Ferry , Thoreau went to jail, in a quiet, half-comic way, to protest slavery and the US's territorial war on Mexico. I'm writing this the evening before the global day of climate action, on the 10th anniversary of the Seattle WTO uprisings. I was in Seattle when the mainstream considered us nuts to think corporate globalisation was a bad idea; that perspective is mainstream now; and I can see the world waking up and shifting its sense of what we need to do about climate change. A quick online search reveals quite a lot of people have been called "climate-change fanatics," mostly for believing the change is real and it requires some fairly profound responses. But the baseline of belief is shifting, thanks to the dedicated and unreasonable among us.
Fanatic is a troublesome word. I've written a book about disasters in which I propose throwing out the words panic and looting, because they're incendiary terms more often used to misrepresent and justify authoritarian response than to describe reality on the ground. Maybe fanaticism is another such term, since my hero is your fanatic, and yesterday's fanatic is so often tomorrow's saint. Maybe we should all be a little more - not fanatical, but unreasonable and intransigent in our commitment to truth, to justice, to a better world.

Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?

By Jeff Cohen, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2009, Printed on November 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144210/

With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it’s not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.
There’s another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative “triumph” -- NAFTA -- thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition.
It was 16 years ago this month when Clinton assembled his coalition with the GOP to bulldoze public skepticism about the trade treaty and overpower a stop-NAFTA movement led by unions, environmentalists and consumer rights groups. How did Clinton win his majority in Congress? With the votes of almost 80 percent of GOP senators and nearly 70 percent of House Republicans. Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA by more than 3 to 2, with fierce opponents including the Democratic majority leader and majority whip.
To get a majority today in Congress on Afghanistan, the Obama White House is apparently bent on a strategy replicating the tragic farce that Clinton pulled off: Ignore the informed doubts of your own party while making common cause with extremist Republicans who never accepted your presidency in the first place.
“Deather” conspiracists are not new to the Grand Old Party. Clinton engendered a similar loathing on the right despite his centrist, corporate-friendly policies. When conservative Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey delivered to Clinton (and corporate elites) the NAFTA victory, it didn’t slow down right-wing operatives who circulated wacky videos accusing Clinton death squads of murdering reporters and others.
For those who elected Obama, it’s important to remember the downward spiral that was accelerated by Clinton’s GOP alliance to pass NAFTA. It should set off alarm bells for us today on Afghanistan.
NAFTA was quickly followed by the debacle of Clinton healthcare “reform” largely drafted by giant insurance companies, which was followed by a stunning election defeat for Congressional Democrats in November 1994, as progressive and labor activists were lethargic while rightwing activists in overdrive put Gingrich into the Speaker’s chair.
A year later, advised by his chief political strategist Dick Morris (yes, the Obama-basher now at Fox), Clinton declared: “The era of big government is over.” In the coming years, Clinton proved that the era of big business was far from over -- working with Republican leaders to grant corporate welfare to media conglomerates (1996 Telecom Act) and investment banks (1999 abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act).
Today, it’s crucial to ask where Obama is heading. From the stimulus to healthcare, he’s shown a Clinton-like willingness to roll over progressives in Congress on his way to corrupt legislation and frantic efforts to compromise for the votes of corporate Democrats or “moderate” Republicans. Meanwhile, the incredible shrinking “public option” has become a sick joke.
As he glides from retreats on civil liberties to health reform that appeases corporate interests to his Bush-like pledge this week to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, an Obama reliance on Congressional Republicans to fund his troop escalation could be the final straw in disorienting and demobilizing the progressive activists who elected him a year ago.
Throughout the centuries, no foreign power has been able to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, but President Obama thinks he’s a tough enough Commander-in-Chief to do it. Too bad he hasn’t demonstrated such toughness in the face of obstructionist Republicans and corporate lobbyists. For them, it’s been more like “compromiser-in-chief.”
When you start in the center (on, say, health care or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease right-wing politicians or lobbyists or Generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.
It’s been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008. For some of us who’d scrutinized the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, the buzz was killed days after Obama’s election when he chose his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a top Clinton strategist and architect of the alliance that pushed NAFTA through Congress.
If Obama stands tough on more troops to Afghanistan (as Clinton fought ferociously for NAFTA), only an unprecedented mobilization of progressives -- including many who worked tirelessly to elect Obama -- will be able to stop him. Trust me: The Republicans who yell and scream about Obama budget deficits when they’re obstructing public health care will become deficit doves in spending the estimated $1 million per year per new soldier (not to mention private contractors) headed off to Asia.
The only good news I can see: Maybe it will take a White House/GOP alliance over Afghanistan to wake up the base of liberal groups (like MoveOn) to take a closer and more critical look at President Obama’s policies.
 

Published on Thursday, November 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Call it Ecocide
by Robert C. Koehler
In the cradle of civilization, young women have become terrified about having children.
This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects - about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities, according to the U.K.'s Guardian.
A group of British and Iraqi doctors have petitioned the United Nations to investigate the situation, which is clearly related to the U.S. invasion and occupation. According to their letter: "In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days (and) a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed." In comparison, the letter said, in August 2002 - before the invasion - 530 babies were born; six of them died within the first week, with a single birth defect reported.
Young women in Fallujah, the doctors wrote, "are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs."
What might be causing this nightmare? The most likely factors are chemical or radiation poisoning, according to the Nov. 14 Guardian article, which noted: "Abnormal clusters of infant tumors have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf - areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used."
Finally, this is just another story about ecocide - the murder of a nation's ecosystem, both intentionally and as a predictable consequence of military actions - which is the true name for war. When the New York Times and all other mainstream outlets see the need to write about the future ecocide ventures we are now preparing for, or the current ones we are always in the process of throttling down or up, I wish they'd stop using the romantic word "war." The modern manifestation of this exercise in mutual and collective insanity is so toxic and destructive, its effects cannot simply be absorbed by the human race, the environment in which our lives are possible or even our DNA.
Whatever we think we're doing - defending ourselves, securing our interests, bringing democracy to the Third World - we are first and foremost committing ecocide, in collusion with our enemies, perhaps, but this hardly reduces our own responsibility for such consequences as widespread PTSD and, oh Lord, birth defects.
The craven defense from the military-industrial sector is that there's "no proof" . . . no proof that white phosphorous, for instance, or depleted uranium, two of the prime suspects in the Fallujah nightmare, cause birth defects.
There was also "no proof," for several decades, that Agent Orange, the defoliant containing dioxin, caused harm to American soldiers, much less the Vietnamese (3 million of whom, and/or their offspring, still suffer the consequences of their exposure to it). For 17 years, there was "no proof" that the toxic brew stirred up by Gulf War I - DU, insect repellant, anti-nerve gas medication, smoke from burning oil wells - was responsible for returning troops' array of horrific symptoms that were known as Gulf War Syndrome. And then, after years of study, stonewalling and damage control, lo and behold, proof, as they say, happened.
And proof will happen in regard to the hell being inflicted by the war on terror, but not now, not while its expansion is being debated. For now, there's "no proof" that white phosphorous does anything but burn the enemy's skin off; or that DU munitions, with their extraordinary penetrating prowess and vaporization upon impact, do anything except destroy tanks and promote freedom.
But if we called what we're doing in Iraq ecocide, maybe we could start tallying up the toxic - including the emotionally toxic - substances we're pumping into the country's air and water and earth and sand, and into the psyches of our own soldiers.
There's no controlling force on earth with less accountability and more impunity than the world's various military authorities, because their barbaric mandate is sheer dominance over declared or potential enemies, and all moral, social and ecological compunction is thrown into the breach as they pursue their agendas.
Is the endless movement of military traffic across the fragile desert ecosystem potentially harmful? Excuse me, but there's "no proof" that the ghastly increase in dust storms sweeping across Iraq, turning the Fertile Crescent into the Dust Bowl, as reported in July in the Los Angeles Times, is caused, or even partially caused, by the movement of U.S. military tanks and trucks, which have broken the desert's fragile crust of sand.
And there's "no proof" that the lung-clogging, almost daily dust storms - and the toxic and radioactive substances, including the microscopically fine power of spent depleted uranium ammunition, that are mixed in with the blowing sand - have anything to do with the increase in birth defects and early cancers in Fallujah. So let's wait at least a decade before we call it ecocide.

Published on Thursday, November 26, 2009 by OneWorld.net
Shock over Obama Decision to Reject Landmine Ban
by Jeffrey Allen
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration announced yesterday that it would not be joining a treaty signed by 158 other countries to ban landmines. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the decision "lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense."
The group was also stunned by the manner in which the decision was apparently made and subsequently announced.
Although anti-landmine activists and congressional leaders had been urging the administration to begin reviewing the treaty for months, Obama administration officials never indicated that it had even started the process.
HRW said the review must have been done without consulting experts outside the administration, organizations working on the issue, or lawmakers that have been dealing with landmine concerns for years, like Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy.
Foreign allies were apparently not consulted either, the group noted, adding that the 1997 treaty has already been endorsed by nearly every U.S. military ally.
"The Obama administration's decision to continue the Bush administration's policy of refusing to join the international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines is a reprehensible rejection of the most successful disarmament and humanitarian treaty of the past decade," HRW said.
Report: Treaty Is Saving Lives
The Obama administration announcement came just days after a new report was released demonstrating that the use, production, and trade of antipersonnel mines have dramatically reduced since the treaty entered into force 10 years ago, saving potentially millions of lives.
A significant amount of land has been cleared of mines during that period, and new casualties each year are declining, said the "Landmine Monitor Report" for 2009 produced by theInternational Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) , a coalition of organizations working on the issue worldwide.
More than 2 million antipersonnel mines and a quarter million antivehicle mines have been safely removed from over 90 countries and territories since 1999. An area twice the size of London has been cleared over that time, with last year's operations freeing more land of dangerous unexploded munitions than ever before.
While about 26,000 people were killed or maimed by landmines each year in the 1990s, only 5,197 casualties were recorded last year.
Still, the human and economic costs of landmine use remain too high, say humanitarian workers.
"Landmines are found along roads, in fields and forests, beside power pylons, near wells and riverbanks, in homes and public buildings. As a result they can cause economic paralysis by restricting movement in what are usually agriculture-based economies," explains the U.S.-based nonprofit group Landmines Blow .
Without landmines, agricultural production could more than double in both Afghanistan and Cambodia, the group notes, adding that over one fourth of all the arable land in Libya remains unusable due to mines left behind from World War II.
Seventy countries still have areas in need of mine clearance, noted this month's ICBL report, and little progress has been made on providing aid to the survivors of landmine explosions.
Obama Administration to Attend Landmine Conference
Government ministers, heads of state, UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and hundreds of other experts and survivors will be attending a conference in Cartagena, Colombia next week to discuss the impacts of the treaty and consider how to advance the cause of safety from unexploded munitions worldwide.
The Obama administration announced earlier this month that it would be sending officials to the treaty review conference, marking the first time the U.S. had ever officially participated in the treaty process. That announcement raised hopes within the human rights community that Obama's diplomats would finally begin the process to agree to the treaty.
"Engaging with its allies under the framework of the Mine Ban Treaty is a positive step, but the U.S. should not arrive empty-handed in Cartagena. The U.S. needs to come to the table expressing a sincere commitment to relinquish this weapon and join the treaty," HRW's Steve Goose said in a statement Monday, just 24 hours before the surprise announcement that a decision had indeed been made -- just not the one human rights advocates were hoping for.

In the Shadow of Hoover

The Nation

by WILLIAM GREIDER

November 23, 2009

While he was in China, Barack Obama made a bizarre declaration that the US government must reduce its budget deficits in order to avoid "a double-dip recession." The remark was alarming because it suggests the president may not fully understand the country's economic predicament. Deficit spending is a cure for our troubles, not the cause. If Obama follows through and actually reduces the red ink, the Great Recession could be born again with new fury.
In an interview with Fox News, the president said: "It is important to recognize if we keep on adding to the deficit, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point people could lose confidence in the US economy in a double-dip recession." Maybe he didn't mean it. Or was merely nodding to Chinese leaders, our leading creditor, who had scolded him for profligate spending.
Still, his backward logic gave me a chill. If Obama acts on it, he will be walking in the footsteps of Herbert Hoover, not Franklin Roosevelt, and I fear his presidency could be doomed as a result. I know that sounds too strong and brutally unfair, given the president's energetic vision for the country and his early efforts to stimulate economic recovery. But history is often unfair to leaders who do not get their priorities straight and fail to deliver what they promise.
Hoover was the Republican president from 1929 to 1933 and faced a far more dramatic unwinding of the economy after the 1929 stock market crash. In popular memory, he was blamed, somewhat unfairly, for causing the Great Depression. People came to loathe him personally for the repeated pep talks--"Prosperity is just around the corner"--and Democrats ran against "Hoover" for many years after.
Barack Obama is a towering political talent by comparison, but also has troubling similarities. In an age of limited government, Hoover preached "volunteerism" and worked earnestly to persuade business to cooperate with labor and "do the right thing." Obama's softball approach to the financial crisis reveals a similar reluctance to use government's powers to compel results. Instead of directing bailed-out banks to lend more aggressively, Obama asked them nicely. The bankers blew him off. His economic stimulus was a good start, yet clearly insufficient.
If Herbert Hoover was guilty of anything, it was ambivalence and confusion of purpose. Hoover was a very intelligent technocrat who sincerely tried various sound measures to relieve the general suffering. But Hoover never found the will to follow through decisively. He was pulled in an opposite direction by failed market orthodoxy that was still influential. To his subsequent regret, Hoover heeded the steely advice of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." In other words, let nature takes its course. Clear away the wreckage and capitalism will heal itself.
In the era of big government, Obama is a far more activist president, but he has followed a less brutal version of the same conservative thinking. Pour billions first into restoring the financial system, then it can revive the real economy. That approach was backwards, as nervous members of Congress are beginning to grasp.
Like Hoover, Obama is pulled between opposing imperatives. Deficit hawks demand he get control over the budget deficits to restore confidence among investors (those Chinese creditors who buy our Treasury bonds). Bleeding-heart politicians, on the other hand, want him to focus on rescuing the folks (who need jobs and foreclosure relief and can renew consumer demand for businesses). Obama would like to do both, but hesitates to choose decisively.
Blaming this on his center-right advisors--Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, Rahm Emmanuel--is too easy. Obama picked them. He obviously agrees with their reluctance to go full bore in behalf of the real economy. Geither and Summers, meanwhile, are taking victory laps for saving the country. Ordinary citizens wonder what they are talking about. Obama should tell them to shut up with their self-congratulations (better still, he should replace them with more imaginative policy thinkers).
Piling up more government debt is undesirable and involves risk, but it is not as bad as a low-grade depression that would go on for many years without relief. In this crisis, the United States is astride a fundamental disjuncture that only the federal government can repair by borrowing tons of money and spending it--force-feeding recovery, then cleaning up the balance sheet afterward.
The awkward truth about capitalism is the machine does not function unless someone is borrowing money and spending it. The genius of the capitalist system is that it recycles surplus wealth--savings and profits from past economic activity--by lending the wealth for new production and consumption. When nobody in the private economy can borrow and nobody will lend--neither households nor business and finance--government has to step up to the task. In a crisis like this, if the federal government declines to get things moving again by borrowing and spending, as heavily as necessary, then the economy will stumble along far below its potential (that is, higher unemployment, weaker production, more failures). If Obama decides to curtail the deficits now, he is disarming unilaterally.
In history, even FDR wanted to have it both ways, but New Dealers learned from painful error they could not serve both masters. In 1936, they decided the recovery was complete so they reduced federal spending and raised interest rates. The depression was resumed with new viciousness. Obama and advisers now seem to think they are out of the ditch and can safely tilt toward fiscal responsibility.
The truth is, nobody knows what comes next. Just as plausibly, the trouble is not over but may even get worse. Instead of cresting, unemployment could rise further for another year or more, spreading the suffering and loss more widely. If the "recovery" proves to be an illusion, then another stock market break might follow. Uncertainty is still in the saddle.
Liberal-labor forces, in and out of Congress, are mounting a counter-attack on Obama's timidity and demanding major new spending for direct job creation. The president has agreed to a "jobs summit" to consider the problem.
This is an opening for Obama to announce a major "course correction." If he states the gravity of the situation honestly, people will not be angered by his truth-telling. They already see things are worse than officials acknowledge. If Obama opts instead for half-way measures--too little too late--then he will fall squarely under Hoover's shadow.
Herbert Hoover tried to emphasize the positive as the economy continued to unwind. He expressed his deep faith in the country's future and offered helpful suggestions for coping. Americans were at first reassured, then gradually they became angered as they saw the president's optimism contradicted by events. In the end, Hoover's good intentions frightened people. Hearing from the president, again and again, that things were getting better, when they knew otherwise, told them he was indifferent to their plight or, more frightening, he had lost touch with reality.

Published on Sunday, November 22, 2009 by the Independent/UK
Corporations: The Real Reason Obama is not Making Much Progress
Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporations
by Johann Hari
Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US - the single biggest emitter of warming gases - will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush - such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras - many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?
A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues - Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties - have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.
Let's start with rape. This story begins in Iraq in 2003. The private military contractors sent by the Bush administration to guard the oil pipelines didn't want to get bogged down in expensive legal cases if anything went wrong. When it came to Iraqis, the Bush team simply exempted them from all Iraqi law, in a move so sweeping one Senator called it "a license to kill". But what about if their employees attacked each other, or other Americans? The private companies insisted all their employees sign contracts saying that, whatever happens to them, they will settle it in in-house, through "arbitration". Why? While representing the company at a real legal trial costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, an arbitration panel costs a few thousand. It saves cash.
This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones - a 20-year-old working for the contractor Halliburton/KBR - was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy - and only then was she released.
In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a climate where it was more likely to happen.
The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate - including John McCain - voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their judgement. No - they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some rape is not pursuable in a court of law.
At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial - as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour.
These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere - from trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual politicians may have to do good - and drags the US government further and further from the will of the people.
Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. Yes, it would save the 17,000 Americans who die every year because they lack insurance but it would depress their profits. Reducing carbon emissions is proving so hard because the oil, coal and gas companies are paying Senators across the spectrum to crush any moves to reduce oil, coal and gas use. And on, and on.
So far, Obama has tried to co-opt the corporations into his agenda by ensuring they will profit from any changes, but this inevitably waters down the proposals, often to the point of uselessness. The Cap and Trade legislation before Congress, for example, will barely limit carbon emissions at all because it has been gutted to please the polluters.
He will only achieve significant progressive change if he reforms the political system itself - to make it accountable to the American people, not the corporations. He needs to change the rules of the game. Ban big business from making political donations, and replace it with state funding. Shut down the lobbying industry. Make a big populist speech announcing you are driving the money-lenders out of the temple of democracy: it'd be surprisingly popular in a country where people can see they're being ripped off every day. The alternative is to become rapidly complicit in a system where defending rape and slavery is seen as just another day's work in Washington DC.

Published on Saturday, November 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Moyers Message to Obama: Study History or Repeat its Mistakes

How LBJ Was Sucked Into Escalation In Vietnam And Why Its Happening Again

by Danny Schechter
Elders are considered wisdom keepers in most of the world's cultures, perhaps just not our own. They are repositories of important lessons, keepers of the collective memory, and as such, usually revered. In our own midst, in our own time, one man deserves all praises due for the role he's chosen to play as the sage of the electronic stage, as our educator in chief, as the voice of the national conscience, as the best journalist on television.
His name is Bill Moyers and he proved again on Friday night why he is such a giant and national treasure.
On the very day that the world's media honored one of their richest and most powerful TV brands, Queen Oprah, who announced "the show was my life" but that she was stepping down two years hence, Bill Moyers delivered one of the most important programs of his career in an effort to call our young President to account, to prevent another similar tragedy in the making. As she reveled in the headlines as a a celebrity goddess, he went back to work.
Alas, like Oprah, Moyers will also be stepping down next year, not in 2011. Who got all the media attention? Ms. O, not Mr. M!
He aired this report on this weekend of the anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination to remind us what happened to the leader who replaced that generation's young prince. I am talking about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the master of the Senate, who succeeded John F Kennedy on that terrible day in Dallas.
LBJ came to office with many heavy burdens, including a war raging in South East Asia. His Presidency would be defined by how he handled it, or failed to handle it. As fate would have it, a 30 year old Bill Moyers was one of Johnson's aides and an eyewitness to the tragedy that followed that original sin.
On his Journal, Moyers went back to the historical record, to selected but revealing tapes of Johnson's own phone calls with his colleagues and appointees-yes he wiretapped himself the way Nixon did years later-and those calls showed how he agonized over whether to escalate the war, a course of action he knew could not succeed. The parallels with the present day, and the upcoming decision by President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan are unmistakable and undeniable.
There was the cunning LBJ boiling down the options to getting out or going in deeper, or perhaps "neutralizing" the situation with trainers and economic aid. He, of course opted for the third choice at first-just as Obama has-until it was clear it was not working and we and that our corrupt client state was losing. As his perceived options narrowed, so did his course of action.
As Republicans then demanded "victory," as the military (The Joint Chiefs) clamored for a higher draft and more troops, LBJ began to fear being accused of tucking tail and running, a big no-no in a culture in which Americans see themselves as perpetual winners, the toughest guys on the block. He could not, in his view, be the President who "lost" Vietnam the way his predecessors were accused of losing China-as if those countries were ours to lose!
And so slowly-as we saw, or rather hear, Johnson escalated, stage by stage, often on the basis of false "intelligence" as in the Tonkin Gulf incident that wasn't. Step by step, the third option was abandoned and the military option was embraced. One infusion of troops was followed by another as the war worsened with tens of thousands of US deaths and casualties and millions of Asian victims.
Trapped by his own limited logic, and cautiously pragmatic style. LBJ gave up his principles, compromised on his convictions, and his "Great Society" and Presidency became a disaster. He later quit politics, a broken man.
Will it happen again?
Moyers clear point in the poorly watched PBS Public Affairs Friday Night Ghetto was clear-it is about to happen again.
"We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson said no," he concluded. "We do know what happened because he said yes."
It was brilliant television, informative journalism of the kind we rarely see, all driven by the words and voice of the man who was once his own "boss." We saw how the logic of escalation supplanted all other logic and, then, logic itself.
This program is being repeated on SUNDAY NIGHT. I think at 7. Check local listings YOU ALSO CAN WATCH IT ON LINE RIGHT NOW AT PBS.ORGPlease watch it as you have watched few other shows. Let us urge Barack Obama to watch it too. Remember history repeats itself as farce.
Moyers himself told me about the subject of the show when I stopped by his office at New York's Channel 13 on Friday afternoon. I was there to comment on Oprah's announcement for the BBC which has its bureau just down the hall. (I also learned, sadly, that BBC will soon be closing the NY bureau and moving staffers to Washington-a big loss!) As it is, I am on the air more in other countries than my own.
Moyers was putting the final touches on the show yesterday but, graceful as usual, took a minute out to say hello. I wrote to him after last night's show ended praising his work.
He responded almost immediately:
"Thanks, Danny. I was pleased to see you, too. You're a brave and gutsy journalist - your columns on the media clear and strong and courageous; they are also true. Why is it our press is immune to criticism? Nothing seems to faze them."
That is a crime as serious as the one The Bill Moyers Journal documented.
FROM THE TRANSCRIPT: Go online to LISTEN to the actual calls.
February 3, 1964 President Johnson has been in office only three months, and is told the situation in Vietnam is deteriorating. Here, Johnson sounds out an old friend's opinion - newspaper publisher John Knight.
May 27, 1964 Beginning in 1959, the North Vietnamese Army moved supplies into South Vietnam using a route along the Cambodian border. In 1964, Johnson approved secret bombing of what was known as the Ho Chi Minh trail.
In Saigon, where there's been another military coup, Defense Secretary McNamara promises the new government that "We'll stay for as long as it takes. We shall provide whatever help is required to win the battle against the Communist insurgents." But he brings back news of an army nearing collapse, and tells the President he needs to increase military assistance quickly. With one eye on that deteriorating situation and another on the coming election, he turns for solace to his old friend and mentor in the Senate, Richard Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee:
May 27, 1964 After speaking with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who inform the President that he has few good options in Vietnam. Johnson discusses the situation with McGeorge Bundy, his special assistant for national security:
June 9, 1964 Congress and the public are increasingly restless about Vietnam. Negative press reports undermine all the positive statements issued by the administration. Below, Johnson and McNamara discuss the bad press and the further deterioration of the situation in Vietnam - Vietcong guerrillas have extended their control of the countryside and South Vietnamese soldiers quit the fight faster than Americans can train them. The president reads McNamara a memo he received from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.
June 11, 1964 The Vietcong continue to gain strength, and a corrupt and incompetent government in South Vietnam is tottering again. The U.S. ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican, is resigning, and the president thinks he may be coming home to campaign against him in the fall. Johnson turns again to his trusted friend Senator Russell. He tells him of advice he received from a his neighbor, a Texas rancher, Judge A.W. Moursund:
U.S. Escalates the War
August 2, 1964 The captain of a navy ship, the U.S.S. Maddox reports that his ship has been fired on and is about to be attacked. On August 4, the captain reports a second attack. Though it would later become clear no August 4 attack actually took place, President Johnson orders retaliatory air strikes against two North Vietnamese naval bases and an oil facility. Two American planes are shot down in the attacks.
In the conversations below, the President plans the American response with Secretary McNamara.
August 3, 1964, 10:30 am President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
August 3, 1964, 1:21 pm President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
August 4, 1964, 11:00 am In the midst of discussing the American response to the August 2 attack, McNamara informs President Johnson that an American ship is under torpedo attack.
August 7, 1964 Congress passes a joint resolution "to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia." The Tonkin Gulf Resolution stated that "Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repeal any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression." In other words, the resolution gave the President the right to pursue military action in Vietnam without a declaration of war. Both Johnson and Nixon would rely on the resolution as legal justification for the war.
Nov 3, 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson defeats Barry Goldwater, and is elected to the Presidency. There are just over 15,000 American troops in Vietnam.
February 13, 1965 President Johnson authorizes Operation Rolling Thunder, a campaign of bombing North Vietnam to force it to cease supporting guerrillas in the south. The raids would persist continually for nearly three years.
April 7, 1965 North Vietnam rejects an American offer of economic aid in exchange for peace.
April 20, 1965 The President's top officials conclude that bombing alone is insufficient. Defense Secretary McNamara explains to President Johnson that the military leaders are requesting additional combat brigades.
June 5, 1965 The American ambassador has called Washington with news that the Saigon government is again in crisis. The Vietcong have launched a new offensive during the monsoon season, making it harder to defend ground forces from the air. The cable is blunt: "It will probably be necessary to commit U.S. ground forces to action." An anxious President calls his secretary of defense:
June 8, 1965 President Johnson calls Senate Majority Leader Mansfield, who has written the president to urge him not to bomb Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam. Wanting to keep Mansfield aboard, he asks him how he should approach Congress:
June 10, 1965 Another cable has arrived from Saigon, this one from General Westmoreland. He wants 41,000 combat troops in Vietnam and 52,000 more later. And he will need "even greater forces" later to "take the war to the enemy." McNamara says "We're in a hell of a mess."
July 2, 1965 In a June 18 coup, South Vietnam formed its l0th government in 20 months. A few days later Vietcong mortars destroy three U.S. aircraft at Danang. During a conversation with Defense Secretary McNamara, Johnson begins to consider what has to happen to get the troops they will need to stay the course:
July 28, 1965 In a press conference, the president announces his decision to commit more troops to the conflict in Vietnam. I have asked the Commanding General, General [William C.] Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. We will meet his needs.
I have today ordered to Vietnam the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested. This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 over a period of time to 35,000 per month, and for us to step up our campaign for voluntary enlistments.
I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle. I have spoken to you today of the divisions and the forces and the battalions and the units. But I know them all, every one. I have seen them in thousand streets, of a hundred towns, in every State in this Union - working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think that I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow. This is the most agonizing and the most painful duty of your President. 1965 to 1973
By year's end there would be 184,000 troops in Vietnam, even as 90,000 South Vietnamese soldiers deserted. In response to the deployment of U.S. ground troops in 1965, North Vietnamese army combat units officially entered the war in support of the Vietcong. By the war's end in 1975, 2.5 million Americans would serve in Vietnam.
Johnson would not seek reelection in 1968.
As American's casualties mounted, public opposition to the war grew at home, and President Nixon began decreasing troop levels in 1969. But the war would continue to grind on until a 1973 cease fire. In 1975, North Vietnamese troops took control of South Vietnam and united the country. Some 59,000 Americans died fighting in Vietnam, and more than 1 million Vietnamese.

Published on Thursday, November 19, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Advice on Afghanistan
by Ralph Nader
Dear President Obama,
You are nearing the day of decision as to whether you order the dispatch of more soldiers to Afghanistan.
Some of your advisors have urged up to 50,000 more soldiers, including several thousand called trainers of the Afghan army.
Other advisors have urged more caution, notably the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and former general, Karl W. Eikenberry, who opposes more soldiers so long as the Afghan government remains grossly dysfunctional.
Beside your own military and civilian advisors, you are receiving disparate counsel from an anemic Congress and your allies abroad.
But are you soliciting advise from stateside civic groups of experience and repute that represent many Americans? Or from genuine experts on that country such as Ashraf Ghani-a former American professor and later respected member of the Karzai government before his departure to other positions in that country?
George W. Bush, in the duplicitous run-up to the invasion of Iraq, insulated himself, closed his mind and refused to meet with civic associations in his own land. Like an autocrat bent on plunging a country into war and occupation, knowingly on false pretenses, he deliberately deprived himself of the information that might have restrained his disastrous, messianic militarism. Disastrous, not to him and Dick Cheney, but to our country, soldiers, and economy, and to the devastated Iraqi people and their ravaged nation.
In the months before the March 20, 2003, undeclared criminal war of aggression that violated our Constitution, statutes, and treaties, a dozen organizations each formally requested a meeting with him.
These organizations represented tens of millions of Americans. They came from the clergy, labor, environmentalists, businesses, students, peace groups, womens' groups, city councils, consumer, veteran, teachers groups, and international security experts. Many also came with first hand experience in Iraq and the Middle East.
They wanted to meet with their president. He never even answered their letters. The letters are available at nader.org.
Who would have thought last year that on assuming the presidency, that you would consider plunging deeper in to this quagmire without an exit strategy? The deeper you plunge, the greater your rejection of the history of occupations fueling insurgencies in that region. The more you insulate yourself from contrary judgments to those you have been receiving from your inner councils. Our country, its people and innocent Afghan people will pay the price.
A recent resignation by Matthew P. Hoh, a former marine combat captain in Iraq and highly regarded foreign service officer in Afghanistan, provides an independent analysis of the grievances afflicting the 42 million Pashtuns. In his words:
The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.
The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government's failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and collars, appear legion and metastatic.
Mr. Hoh proceeds to list these persistent failings and adds his articulate doubts about the strategic purposes of your Administration's military presence in Afghanistan. He ask, "Why and to what end?" His letter of conscience and protest concludes by noting the limitless effects on our foreign and military policy, and on our country and its economy.
Your staff estimates each U.S. soldier is costing $1 million a year, in addition to the horrific toll on these soldiers and the Afghan people. You owe the American people an un-Bush-like explanation. Why are you not receiving these groups of American from varied backgrounds and experience at the White House on this pending Afghan decision?
They may wonder, by contrast, why you have so many White House meetings with major corporate CEOs from Wall Street, from the health insurance companies and the drug companies. Is not the White House the peoples' House? Along with many other citizens in our country, I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Published on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Mother Jones
Mr. President: Time to Quit Fibbing and Spinning
by Mother Jones

I’ll always knock on doors for Obama. But on the climate, we need more than rhetoric and excuses.

by Bill McKibben
Nearly two decades after writing a book that popularized the term "global warming," MoJo contributing writer Bill McKibben founded 350.org . He is chronicling his journey into organizing with a series of columns leading up to the global climate summit in Copenhagen this December. You can find the others here . And you can put yourself on the cover of MoJo's special issue on climate change here.
Two caveats. First, early in the primary season, when I was asked to join Environmentalists for Obama, I signed on immediately. I knocked on doors, made phone calls, gave money, and celebrated his victory-I think he's the best president of my lifetime.
Second, Obama has done much that's right about climate, including surround himself with a stellar staff of advisers. From auto mileage to green stimulus spending , he's done more to deal with global warming than all of the presidents combined in the 20 years that it's been an issue.
But that's a pretty low bar. And the announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month's Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won't be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is-as it has been for the last two decades-the United States.
And in fact none of this should come as a surprise to anyone paying attention. For a year now it's been clear that the president is not particularly focused on applying the political pressure that would have been necessary to reach any kind of pact, much less one that approaches what the science demands. Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year. He talked very little about climate, tending instead to talk about green jobs and energy security, and in the process left the door open for climate deniers to have a field day. And then-as with health care-he left it pretty much entirely up to Congress to write the necessary legislation. That kept him from having to bear the blame for a byzantine bill, but it also meant that the Senate-the body from which he came, and whose culture he had to know-could work in its usual style, without White House pressure. Which at the moment means that Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham are essentially rewriting the legislation, to what end no one really knows.
The real tip-off of Obama's unwillingness to lead, however, has been the endless spinning of his climate negotiators. For 12 months they have been fibbing about the science-reiterating over and over again that their goal is the "scientific standard" of 450 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's no longer scientifically accurate -in the last two years, since the rapid Arctic melt in the summer of 2007, scientists have made it clear that a treaty that aimed at 450 ppm would be a treaty that left the planet free of ice, a planet where many current nations would disappear beneath the waves. We're at 390 now-we're already too high. The 450 number came from the various graphs and tables of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-but Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the IPCC, has said repeatedly in the last year that that science is out of date. Recently, asked why he'd endorsed a 350 target instead, he said, "As a human being, I just couldn't keep quiet in the face of all this overwhelming evidence. I know it's probably not right for me to take a position such as this, but on the other hand, I think it would be totally immoral on my part not to take a position, so I came out and said so."
By contrast, the Obama administration's position has been that a tough treaty is politically unrealistic-that the Senate would never pass it. That's certainly true, at least for the moment. But the White House is starting to use the Senate in the same way that the Bush administration used China-as a scapegoat for doing too little. You don't get to blame the Senate if you haven't pushed the Senate as hard as you possibly can. It would take a huge commitment of presidential leadership, the sacrifice of large amounts of political capital, to change political reality. It would also take a movement of citizens-which we've tried hard to build. Three weeks ago we at 350.org organized what CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history." Many prime ministers, environmental ministers, and foreign ministers participated-heck, the president of the Maldives convened an underwater Cabinet meeting to make the point about how desperate the situation was. We asked the White House if anyone-some spare undersecretary of something-might come to one of the 2,000 demonstrations across the United States. They couldn't find a soul.
They'll have another chance. With groups around the world, 350.org will help organize candlelight vigils across the planet on the weekend of December 12. Many will take place at American embassies and consulates. Not because anyone is anti-American. Because everyone remains hopeful that America will finally help lead to solve the problem that it, far more than any other nation, caused.
None of this is easy. (I haven't even mentioned the obscenely low amounts of money the administration and Congress are talking about appropriating for the foreign aid that will be required to help developing countries adapt to the global warming America has caused.) But all of it is easier than trying to deal with the world that's coming at us faster every day we don't act. Pressuring Senate Republicans (or coal-fired Democrats) is hard; pressuring physics and chemistry is harder still. In fact, it's impossible. That's why this is different than health care reform or financial re-regulation. You have to actually meet the scientific standard, not just do better than George Bush.
And of course, politically, Obama doesn't need to do it. He doesn't need to worry about environmentalists abandoning him for someone else-he'll always be the preferable choice, and I'll always be out there knocking on doors for him. But his legacy won't depend on the shiny medal the Norwegians hang around his neck next month; it will depend, more than anything else, on whether or not he really tackles the biggest problem the planet faces. There is still time for him to make the crucial difference, but not if his administration continues in fib-and-spin mode. At the same meeting in Singapore where he made it clear that Copenhagen would not negotiate a new climate treaty, he invited all the other APEC leaders to meet in 2011 in Hawaii, adding, "I look forward to seeing you all decked out in flowered shirts and grass skirts." Whatever-that sounds more like his giggly, sophomoric predecessor than the leader we desperately need.

The New State Solution

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091116_the_new_state_solution/

Posted on Nov 16, 2009

By Chris Hedges
The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel’s 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state. Israel acted unilaterally when it announced independence in 1948. It is the Palestinians’ turn. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States. Israel will face worldwide censure if it attempts to crush the independent state by force and very likely be subjected to the kind of divestment campaigns and boycotts that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa.
The two-state solution, long held up as the way out of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, flickered and died with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. No Israeli leader since, including Ehud Barack, has shown any interest in its implementation. Israeli governments have instead cynically used the promise of negotiations as a cover to steadily expand settlements, evict Palestinians from their homes, carry out egregious acts of violence and repression against Palestinians and steal huge swathes of the West Bank, including most of the aquifers.
The death of the two-state solution is not news to those of us who have spent years in the Middle East. What is news is the public acknowledgement by the Palestinian leadership. Mahmoud Abbas, the compliant and discredited president of the Palestinian Authority, who has announced he will not run for another term, has uncharacteristically blasted Israel for deceiving the Palestinians. The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who says that the effort to negotiate a solution to the conflict with Israel is dead, has called on Palestinians to declare statehood.
The disarray within the Palestinian Authority has led to the cancellation of the Palestinian elections in January, although the elections were already in jeopardy. The militant group Hamas, which took over Gaza in 2007 after thwarting a coup attempt led by Abbas’ Fatah party, said it would not allow the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza to vote.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is counting on the Obama administration to thwart a declaration of Palestinian independence, will have difficulty finding a Palestinian stooge as complaint as Abbas. Abbas’ time in office has been marked by repeated and humiliating concessions to Israel, including deferring, at Israel’s request, the vote at the United Nations on the Goldstone report, which documented human rights abuses during Israel’s offensive in Gaza last December and January. Israel has shown its appreciation by ignoring Abbas’ protests for a halt on settlements and dismissing his calls for negotiations. It is hard to imagine any Palestinian leader, at least one with a shred of credibility, agreeing to take Abbas’ place. The only alternative left to most Palestinians, unless an independent state is declared, will be endless war and an embrace of Islamic extremism.
A declaration of independence, based on the 1967 demarcation lines between Israel and Palestinian territory, should cover East Jerusalem among other areas and the several hundred thousand Jewish settlers living in settlements in the West Bank. These Israeli settlers would instantly become citizens in the new country, replicating the experience of many Palestinians who suddenly found themselves counted as Israelis in 1948.
“When he declares independence, Abbas should call upon the Jews living in the state of Palestine to preserve the peace and to do their part in building up the new country as full and equal citizens, enjoying fair representation in all of its institutions,” Yossi Sarid, who supports the independence movement, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “David Ben-Gurion would not have been upset by such a pretty act of plagiarism from his Declaration of Independence.”
The Israelis have orchestrated acute misery and poverty in the Palestinian territories over the past two decades in an effort to subdue and ethnically cleanse the captive population. They have reduced Palestinians, many of whom now live on less than $2 a day, to a subsistence level. They have created squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli soldiers, who ring these ghettos, have the ability to instantly shut off food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery. Israel, when the Palestinians grow restive, drops 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs and artillery shells—as they did a year ago in Gaza—on the concrete hovels that pack neighborhoods. The Israeli objective is to turn the Palestinian territories into a hell on earth. This policy has, however, swollen the ranks of radical Islamists in the occupied territories and throughout the Middle East. 
The refusal by the Obama administration and nearly every member of the U.S. Congress to defend the rule of law and basic human rights for the Palestinians exposes our hypocrisy. It also perpetuates the absurd pretence that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened. The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs used on Palestinian civilians are part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid the United States gives to Israel. Palestinians are slaughtered with American-made weapons provided to Israel with taxpayer dollars. Israel, an international pariah, would be unable to carry out these atrocities without our financial and moral support. Mix this toxic brew with the illegal wars we wage in Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States becomes a satanic force in the eyes of many Muslims.
Abbas, in a speechdelivered a few days ago on the fifth anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, announced that the Palestinians would not return to negotiations with Israel without a full halt to settlement building, “including the natural growth”—a term Israel uses to justify construction on the basis of natural population growth in settlements. 
“They are putting obstacles in its way,” he said of promised negotiation. “They are trying to remove this concept. What do they want?”
The anniversary of Arafat’s death is a bitter reminder to many Palestinians that Israel can never be trusted. It is widely believed among Palestinians, as well as Israeli peace activists such as Uri Avnery, that Arafat was poisoned by the Israelis, something Israeli officials deny. Arafat became gravely ill in 2004 as Israeli forces besieged his Ramallah headquarters. He was eventually flown to France for treatment and died at Percy military hospital outside of Paris on Nov. 11, 2004. The French, abiding by an agreement with the Israelis, did not release Arafat’s medical records.
“Each expert we consulted explained that even a simple poison produced by an average scientist would be difficult to identify by the most experienced scientists,” said Arafat’s nephew Nasser al-Kidwa. “I can’t tell for sure that he was murdered by the Israelis. I can’t refute that hypothesis because doctors couldn’t refute it.”
The suspicions around the death of Arafat replicate the feelings of most Palestinians around the death of the two-state solution. Each, in the eyes of Palestinians, was deliberately murdered. The Israelis have ensured that from now on the Palestinians will fall or rise on their own.   
Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

Published on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 by San Jose Mercury News
US Is Doing No Good in Afghanistan
by Malalai Joya
As an Afghan woman who was elected to Parliament, I am in the United States to ask President Barack Obama to immediately end the occupation of my country.
Eight years ago, women's rights were used as one of the excuses to start this war. But today, Afghanistan is still facing a women's rights catastrophe. Life for most Afghan women resembles a type of hell that is never reflected in the Western mainstream media.
In 2001, the U.S. helped return to power the worst misogynist criminals, such as the Northern Alliance warlords and druglords. These men ought to be considered a photocopy of the Taliban. The only difference is that the Northern Alliance warlords wear suits and ties and cover their faces with the mask of democracy while they occupy government positions. But they are responsible for much of the disaster today in Afghanistan, thanks to the U.S. support they enjoy.
The U.S. and its allies are getting ready to offer power to the medieval Taliban by creating an imaginary category called the "moderate Taliban" and inviting them to join the government. A man who was near the top of the list of most-wanted terrorists eight years ago, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been invited to join the government.
Over the past eight years the U.S. has helped turn my country into the drug capital of the world through its support of drug lords. Today, 93 percent of all opium in the world is produced in Afghanistan. Many members of Parliament and high ranking officials openly benefit from the drug trade. President Karzai's own brother is a well known drug trafficker.
Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans are living in destitution. The latest United Nations Human Development Index ranked Afghanistan 181 out of 182 countries. Eighteen million Afghans live on less than $2 a day. Mothers in many parts of Afghanistan are ready to sell their children because they cannot feed them.
Afghanistan has received $36 billion of aid in the past eight years, and the U.S. alone spends $165 million a day on its war. Yet my country remains in the grip of terrorists and criminals. My people have no interest in the current drama of the presidential election since it will change nothing in Afghanistan. Both Karzai and Dr. Abdullah are hated by Afghans for being U.S. puppets.
The worst casualty of this war is truth. Those who stand up and raise their voice against injustice, insecurity and occupation have their lives threatened and are forced to leave Afghanistan, or simply get killed.
We are sandwiched between three powerful enemies: the occupation forces of the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban and the corrupt government of Hamid Karzai.
Now President Obama is considering increasing troops to Afghanistan and simply extending former President Bush's wrong policies. In fact, the worst massacres since 9/11 were during Obama's tenure. My native province of Farah was bombed by the U.S. this past May. A hundred and fifty people were killed, most of them women and children. On Sept. 9, the U.S. bombed Kunduz Province, killing 200 civilians.
My people are fed up. That is why we want an immediate end to the U.S. occupation.
© 2009 San Jose Mercury News
Malalai Joya is an Afghan politician and a former elected member of the Parliament from Farah province. Her last book is Raising My Voice

Published on Sunday, November 15, 2009 by Tikkun Magazine
Just Say “NO” to the War in Afghanistan
by Michael Lerner
Or should we call it "Again-istan?"
Some people never learn. The arrogance of empire? Ignorance of history? Political opportunism? Or cowardice to confront the global challenges we face?
These factors probably all contribute to the current incredible situation, in which the United States is debating whether to escalate its military presence there or maintain a lower-level intensity, relying on mechanical warfare in order to focus the war instead in Pakistan. Neither option makes any sense.
What is absent from the debate (just as it was absent when the United States escalated the war in Vietnam or when it created the war in Iraq) is the perspective of the peace movement and of spiritual progressives.
Instead, President Obama had the audacity and shortsightedness to declare that the fight in Afghanistan is a "war of necessity" that is "fundamental to the defense of our people." Talking about switching the war from Iraq to Afghanistan might have seemed a politically clever way to show that he was not "soft" when he sought the presidency, but restating that rationale now that he is president has boxed him into the same misconceptions that have led the United States into losing wars for the past fifty years.
The narrow argument for war in Afghanistan, based on America's unresolved trauma from September 11, is that if al-Qaida gets control through the Taliban of a country in which it can train militants, it will strike again at America, perhaps this next time with nuclear weapons that it acquires from Pakistan, which has them, or by obtaining homemade or stolen atomic weapons.
It's not that it is impossible to imagine terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon and detonating it in the United States. The scientific knowledge and the means of implementing it are out there in the world. Many countries have already built these weapons, and nuclear proliferation increases the likelihood that they may fall into ever more irresponsible hands.
There is plenty to fear when hundreds of millions of people feel so desperate and angry that they might be willing to use such weapons. The error in the reasoning behind the "war on terror" is that this nightmare scenario cannot be prevented by the United States imposing itself on one country after another in the Middle East and in every other area where terrorists might be able to steal or develop nuclear weapons.
In the short run, the United States needs to improve its defensive capacities through careful scrutiny of the airplanes, boats, and containers that reach this country. Such scrutiny measures, some of which were implemented after September 11, should be given greater attention. But the deep truth is this: there is no way to ensure that a group of terrorists will never obtain and set off an atomic bomb in an American city. As the technology of mass destruction and delivery of bombs becomes more sophisticated, the vulnerability will increase, regardless of what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, or other countries in that region. The solution has to lie with eliminating people's desire to destroy us.
Acknowledge the Causes of Terrorism
The whole notion of a war on terrorism is fundamentally misguided. Terrorism is a tactic used by people who do not have the powerful armies of the world at their disposal, and hence they will use homemade or stolen weapons against those who they believe to be oppressing them. If you have a population of 6.7 billion on the planet, the only way to absolutely control terrorism is to put surveillance devices into every home in the world so that everyone is so terrified of the police and so scared to express their anger that they have no possibility of resorting to terror. In that case -- total fascism -- the solution is far worse than the problem.
The obvious alternative is to address the grievances and problems that lead people to want to strike out against the West in general and the United States in particular. We've mentioned these in past editorials:

1. The Western impact on traditional societies has been destructive. While helping to develop a small middle class, the penetration of American corporations, the Western global media, and the capitalist marketplace have fostered an ethos of individualism, materialism, and selfishness. This is correctly perceived as having partially destroyed the religions and forms of cultural/communal solidarity within which people felt a sense of higher purpose and meaning to their lives. We recognize that many traditional societies have a strong downside, based as they are on authoritarian and patriarchal practices that are themselves oppressive. But the way to challenge those effectively is to support the development of spiritual and religious renewal that educates girls, empowers women, validates individual freedom within (not counterposed to) commitment to a community, and affirms the humanity of others in different spiritual and religious traditions. In short, we should actively support spiritual renewal, rather than attempt to replace traditional religions with the religion of the capitalist marketplace.

We cannot beat fundamentalism through consumer materialism and the ethos of "looking out for number one." This is especially true because of the changes that accompany such materialism and selfishness: the weakening of family ties; the prevalence of pornography and cheapening of sex into another commodity for sale and manipulation in the competitive marketplace; the elimination of any kind of economic safety net provided by people who genuinely care about you; and the obliteration of spiritual consciousness in favor of a one-dimensional version of technocratic rationality in which the accumulation of money and power is seen as the only real value in life. These changes are sure to evoke a powerful, angry, and at times violent response from those who have benefited from living in communities in which caring for each other has been part of their daily lives. If the alternative to fundamentalism is subjugation to Western values and to Western military and economic domination, people will take up arms and they will find a way to reach the United States with terrorist violence. These same concerns play out in a different but potentially just as violent way inside some parts of the United States itself, when right-wingers articulate this anger - ignoring how the social alienation and disintegration they rightly lament is rooted in the capitalist marketplace they champion - and then seek to channel that anger against liberals and enlightenment values, even at times advocating violence against President Obama. 

2. Moreover, even those who are not motivated primarily by a desire to resist Western forms of modernization are moved to violence by the effects of capitalist economic penetration. One need only look at the huge belts of poverty in the ghettos and barrios of major cities around the world to see the degree of hunger and malnutrition, to recognize the growing prostitution of young girls and boys desperately seeking to feed their families, and to witness the hundreds of millions of economic migrants and refugees seeking some place to make a living. These victims of our global economic arrangements are sitting ducks for ideologies that preach anger and violence against those Western powers that are seen as arrogantly ignoring this suffering. The fundamental disrespect and even humiliation that people in traditional societies experience when their own children begin to respond to the ethos of the marketplace, breaking away from traditional families so that they can sell themselves through prostitution or through pursuing self-interest and material gain at the expense of their connections to traditional spiritual communities, cannot be underestimated. Extremist forms of fundamentalist Islam or other forms of religious or political ideologies will spread and provide people with a way to express their anger at the West.
3. While claiming to bring democracy, we've simply imposed governments that agree to protect American corporate power. The Karzai government in Afghanistan tried to steal its recent election and proclaim itself a democracy -- but fooled no one. The Iraqi democracy was imposed under occupation by U.S. troops and is unlikely to sustain itself once the United States really withdraws (not just its combat troops, but also the 80,000 "advisers" and countless independent contractors from the West). So while the West pretends that its mission is humanistic and aimed at spreading democracy and human rights, its hypocrisy becomes evident, thereby fueling people's willingness to engage in violence against those who are perceived as occupiers.

Champions of the war in Afghanistan willfully ignore all this. They imagine that all this anger can be contained by yet another military intervention. They ignore the history of the Afghanis' successful resistance to one foreign occupier after another, including the British and the Soviets. They refuse to acknowledge to themselves that the U.S. occupation of Iraq increased the violence of civil war, providing the weapons that Iraqis might have had no other way to obtain.
A Strategy to Disempower Terrorists
War is not the answer, and certainly not a war run by the United States.
The first step that is needed is to abandon the notion of a "war on terrorism." Drop it. Proclaim it already won. Or more honestly, acknowledge that there never can be a war against terrorism because terrorism is a tactic -- the tactic of attacking civilians to spread fear. And that tactic has been used by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many other places in the world.
The second step is to replace the notion of war with the notion of police actions aimed at protecting people from organized bunches of criminals who seek to terrorize domestic populations or to impose their own religious, political, or economic rule on local communities that do not want that rule. The creation of an international police force of this sort, charged also with protecting development projects to improve the quality of life of people on the village and small-town level, should be given the highest priority. Moreover, representatives of countries that together represent the majority of the citizens of the world must be significantly involved in the formulation of this force. We should try to get this created through the United Nations: not a toothless police force like those which have characterized the UN presence in Sudan, Rwanda, and the Congo, but a force that has a mandate to use all appropriate means to protect citizens against the harassment and oppression imposed by groups like the Taliban. But if there is no such willingness on the part of these countries to participate in creating and financing such a police force, the United States and other Western countries should not step into that space but should instead focus on defending their own borders, while continuing to beg the peoples of the world to step up and share the responsibility for creating an international police force whose sole aim is to protect local communities from the violence of those who seek to impose their rule by force.
The third step is for the nuclear states to eliminate nuclear weapons. A careful global effort to protect every nuclear facility and to govern the creation and production of nuclear power should replace nuclear proliferation - but this will never happen if the nuclear states retain their own nuclear stashes. What, for instance, could possibly induce Arab states or Iran to eliminate the possibility of nuclear weapons when they know that Israel has close to 200 such weapons of its own, which it may rely on in case of war? Or what could induce India or Pakistan to reduce their nuclear arsenals as long as they fear each other's - or China's - nuclear weapons? As long as the current nuclear powers retain their weapons, proliferation is inevitable, and with it comes the danger of crazies obtaining those weapons and using them in terrorist attacks.
The fourth step is for the advanced industrial societies, led by the United States, to launch immediately a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan that would dedicate between 2 percent and 5 percent of their gross domestic product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, and to repair the global environment. We've outlined a way to do this that would avoid the corruption that has bedeviled various aid plans, as well as prevent the mistaken allocation of this aid to ruling elites, thus ensuring that the aid goes toward building the economic, educational, and health infrastructures that could succeed in permanently defeating global poverty. This step must be taken alongside of and with equal priority to the first three steps, and not as an afterthought or delayed till the other steps are shown to be effective, because they will not succeed unless they are accompanied by this step and its explicit articulation of an alternative worldview. Check out this "strategy of generosity" at www.spiritualprogressives.org .
The fifth step is to give public support to the creation and sustenance of those in the religious and spiritual world who are teaching variants of their own religions that insist on the need to respect and actively provide caring for all, including for members of other religions. It should be a high priority to provide training, education, and media support to those who are seeking to renew their own religious traditions in ways that emphasize the equal rights and entitlements of women and girls, the need to acknowledge that there are multiple paths to salvation or to connection with God, and the need to rejoice in the diversity of religious and spiritual approaches and to acknowledge them all as potentially valid to the extent that they themselves are committed to ethical, ecological, and communal values likely to enhance peace, mutual understanding, and deep spiritual connection to the universe.
Finally, step six: the Western countries, starting with the United States, must publicly insist that, although they are adopting a strategy of generosity in part because doing so is in our best interests, having finally come to the understanding that in the twenty-first century our well-being (both individually and as a society) depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet, the deeper reason is because we know generosity to be morally right. We must recognize that the path of arrogant self-interest and self-aggrandizement that has characterized the West's interactions with the rest of the world is morally wrong. For that reason, we must start this new direction with a serious process of repentance, in which we publicly acknowledge the hurts we and other Western countries have imposed on the rest of the world. Using the South African model of Truth and Reconciliation, we should set up tribunals in which we in the United States listen to the testimony of those who have been hurt by the role of Western colonialism and imperialism, including Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrant groups in the United States, and extending this process to all the countries of the world where U.S. or Western economic and political involvement has caused pain and humiliation. This process should become a center of our public discourse. It should be taught in our schools. Any media that uses the public airwaves, publicly supported electricity, public mail, or public-supported streets and highways should be mandated to give some prime time coverage each day to the presentation of this information.
In short, we either pursue the same old ethically, environmentally, and economically destructive policies of war, or we embrace a new path of fundamental change. This new path should be based in part on repentance and atonement for how we have gone wrong. And it should replace the capitalist ethos of looking out for number one and the commitment to "progress" (understood as the endless accumulation of new material goods and electronic gadgets) with a new ethos of love, generosity, ecological sanity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.
What Keeps the United States from Adopting a Rational Strategy in Afghanistan?
There are significant impediments to this transition in American consciousness that constrain Obama and the other very decent people who are running the society at this moment. They include:

1. The military and its worldview. Obama administration officials may know that a military strategy cannot win, but they still ask for more troops because they imagine that they can pacify a country through techniques of sophisticated counter-insurgency. No way will this work. The military lacks the appropriate ideological framework and troops. Military training is all about the most effective way to dominate others, to kill. If you train a pit bull to bite, don't get angry at it for biting. If you train a military to dominate, don't be surprised if it is not the mechanism for building trust, whether that is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Israel/Palestine.
2. The greed and economic interests of America's corporate elite. The elite have convinced themselves that they really are acting in a generous and caring way in the world by spreading the capitalist marketplace. The truth is that business does in fact improve some aspects of life for people: it provides more material goods for some sectors of the population in countries around the world. But it's easy to focus on the improved quality of life for the developing middle classes in many countries while ignoring the increased suffering for other sections of the population that corporate policies have engendered. Corporate leaders have immense power in shaping the American political discourse in ways that tend to reinforce the military option as the only "realistic" possibility. Deeply rooted in a materialist worldview, they are unable to even begin to see how their global system marginalizes other values in other cultures, like the value of connectivity to the land, to community or to God/spiritual life.
3. Public ignorance. The erosion of political culture in the United States, the focus on short-term fixes, and the dumbing-down of the population by the media cause astounding levels of ignorance about the rest of the world and about the suffering of our own neighbors inside the United States
4. Eight years of undermining international law, honesty, reasoned debate, and a sense of the proper and restricted role of the military.

If you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. That's our advice to Obama: say no to the military. Fire McChrystal, Gates, and all his major supporters who helped leak the information about what he thought was necessary, rather than going through you first, Mr. President. Announce the six-point strategy for U.S. security articulated above. Close down the thousand American military bases around the world and use the savings to launch the Domestic and Global Marshall Plan. Act resolutely, without hesitation, and replace those advisers and those military leaders who will not actively embrace this direction. Use your power as commander in chief and ignore the right-wing media barrage you will certainly face, no matter what you do.
Obama could take this path. He is not doing so. Nor is there anyone in the public sphere ready to talk this language. That is why it is so very important for YOU, dear reader, to spread these ideas, to help us develop and refine the articulation of them, and to work with us to bring these ideas into the public arena. And come to our national conference June 11-14, 2010, in Washington, D.C.
God puts it simply enough in the Bible: Behold I have set before you this day life and death. Choose life.

Published on Saturday, November 7, 2009 by In These Times
War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel
by Noam Chomsky
The hopes and prospects for peace aren't well aligned-not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama.
The prize "seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership," Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times.
The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress.
The Nobel committee's concerns were valid. They singled out Obama's rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons.
Right now Iran's nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama's efforts to contain Iran.
Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama's recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack.
Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken.
Amid the furor over Iranian duplicity, the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.
The United States and Europe tried to block the IAEA resolution, but it passed anyway. The media virtually ignored the event.
The United States assured Israel that it would support Israel's rejection of the resolution-reaffirming a secret understanding that has allowed Israel to maintain a nuclear arsenal closed to international inspections, according to officials familiar with the arrangements. Again, the media were silent.
Indian officials greeted U.N. Resolution 1887 by announcing that India "can now build nuclear weapons with the same destructive power as those in the arsenals of the world's major nuclear powers," the Financial Times reported.
Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear weapons programs. They have twice come dangerously close to nuclear war, and the problems that almost ignited this catastrophe are very much alive.
Obama greeted Resolution 1887 differently. The day before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his inspiring commitment to peace, the Pentagon announced it was accelerating delivery of the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal: 13-ton bombs for B-2 and B-52 stealth bombers, designed to destroy deeply hidden bunkers shielded by 10,000 pounds of reinforced concrete.
It's no secret the bunker busters could be deployed against Iran.
Planning for these "massive ordnance penetrators" began in the Bush years but languished until Obama called for developing them rapidly when he came into office.
Passed unanimously, Resolution 1887 calls for the end of threats of force and for all countries to join the NPT, as Iran did long ago. NPT non-signers are India, Israel and Pakistan, all of which developed nuclear weapons with U.S. help, in violation of the NPT.
Iran hasn't invaded another country for hundreds of years-unlike the United States, Israel and India (which occupies Kashmir, brutally).
The threat from Iran is minuscule. If Iran had nuclear weapons and delivery systems and prepared to use them, the country would be vaporized.
To believe Iran would use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, or anyone, "amounts to assuming that Iran's leaders are insane" and that they look forward to being reduced to "radioactive dust," strategic analyst Leonard Weiss observes, adding that Israel's missile-carrying submarines are "virtually impervious to preemptive military attack," not to speak of the immense U.S. arsenal.
In naval maneuvers in July, Israel sent its Dolphin class subs, capable of carrying nuclear missiles, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, sometimes accompanied by warships, to a position from which they could attack Iran-as they have a "sovereign right" to do, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
Not for the first time, what is veiled in silence would receive front-page headlines in societies that valued their freedom and were concerned with the fate of the world.
The Iranian regime is harsh and repressive, and no humane person wants Iran-or anyone else-to have nuclear weapons. But a little honesty would not hurt in addressing these problems.
The Nobel Peace Prize, of course, is not concerned solely with reducing the threat of terminal nuclear war, but rather with war generally, and the preparation for war. In this regard, the selection of Obama raised eyebrows, not least in Iran, surrounded by U.S. occupying armies.
On Iran's borders in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, Obama has escalated Bush's war and is likely to proceed on that course, perhaps sharply.
Obama has made clear that the United States intends to retain a long-term major presence in the region. That much is signaled by the huge city-within-a city called "the Baghdad Embassy," unlike any embassy in the world.
Obama has announced the construction of mega-embassies in Islamabad and Kabul, and huge consulates in Peshawar and elsewhere.
Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive that the "administration's request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that's not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years."
The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai Joya.
This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the warlords under the Karzai government.
Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.
© 2009 New York Times Syndicate
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.

Afghanistan’s Sham Army

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091109_afghanistans_sham_army/

Posted on Nov 9, 2009

By Chris Hedges
Success in Afghanistan is measured in Washington by the ability to create an indigenous army that will battle the Taliban, provide security and stability for Afghan civilians and remain loyal to the puppet government of Hamid Karzai. A similar task eluded the Red Army, although the Soviets spent a decade attempting to pacify the country. It eluded the British a century earlier. And the United States, too, will fail.
American military advisers who work with the Afghan National Army, or ANA, speak of poorly trained and unmotivated Afghan soldiers who have little stomach for military discipline and even less for fighting. They describe many ANA units as being filled with brigands who terrorize local populations, exacting payments and engaging in intimidation, rape and theft. They contend that the ANA is riddled with Taliban sympathizers. And when there are combined American and Afghan operations against the Taliban insurgents, ANA soldiers are fickle and unreliable combatants, the U.S. advisers say. 
American military commanders in Afghanistan, rather than pump out statistics about enemy body counts, measure progress by the swelling size of the ANA. The bigger the ANA, the better we are supposedly doing. The pressure on trainers to increase the numbers of the ANA means that training and vetting of incoming Afghan recruits is nearly nonexistent.
The process of induction for Afghan soldiers begins at the Kabul Military Training Center. American instructors at the Kabul center routinely complain of shortages of school supplies such as whiteboards, markers and paper. They often have to go to markets and pay for these supplies on their own or do without them. Instructors are pressured to pass all recruits and graduate many who have been absent for a third to half the training time. Most are inducted into the ANA without having mastered rudimentary military skills.
“I served the first half of my tour at the Kabul Military Training Center, where I was part of a small team working closely with the ANA to set up the country’s first officer basic course for newly commissioned Afghan lieutenants,” a U.S. Army first lieutenant who was deployed last year and who asked not to be identified by name told me. “During the second half of my tour, I left Kabul’s military schoolhouse and was reassigned to an embedded tactical training team, or ETT team, to help stand up a new Afghan logistics battalion in Herat.”
“Afghan soldiers leave the KMTC grossly unqualified,” this lieutenant, who remains on active duty, said. “American mentors do what they can to try and fix these problems, but their efforts are blocked by pressure from higher, both in Afghan and American chains of command, to pump out as many soldiers as fast as possible.”
Afghan soldiers are sent from the Kabul Military Training Center directly to active-duty ANA units. The units always have American trainers, know as a “mentoring team,” attached to them. The rapid increase in ANA soldiers has outstripped the ability of the American military to provide trained mentoring teams. The teams, normally comprised of members of the Army Special Forces, are now formed by plucking American soldiers, more or less at random, from units all over Afghanistan.
“This is how my entire team was selected during the middle of my tour: a random group of people from all over Kabul—Air Force, Navy, Army, active-duty and National Guard—pulled from their previous assignments, thrown together and expected to do a job that none of us were trained in any meaningful way to do,” the officer said. “We are expected, by virtue of time-in-grade and membership in the U.S. military, to be able to train a foreign force in military operations, an extremely irresponsible policy that is ethnocentric at its core and which assumes some sort of natural superiority in which an untrained American soldier has everything to teach the Afghans, but nothing to learn.”
“You’re lucky enough if you had any mentorship training at all, something the Army provides in a limited capacity at pre-mobilization training at Fort Riley, but having none is the norm,” he said. “Soldiers who receive their pre-mobilization training at Fort Bragg learn absolutely nothing about mentoring foreign forces aside from being given a booklet on the subject, and yet soldiers who go through Bragg before being shipped to Afghanistan are just as likely to be assigned to mentoring teams as anyone else.”
The differences between the Afghan military structure and the American military structure are substantial. The ANA handles logistics differently. Its rank structure is not the same. Its administration uses different military terms. It rarely works with the aid of computers or basic technology. The cultural divide leaves most trainers, who do not speak Dari, struggling to figure out how things work in the ANA.
“The majority of my time spent as a mentor involved trying to understand what the Afghans were doing and how they were expected to do it, and only then could I even begin to advise anyone on the problems they were facing,” this officer said. “In other words, American military advisers aren’t immediately helpful to Afghans. There is a major learning curve involved that is sometimes never overcome. Some advisers play a pivotal role, but many have little or no effect as mentors.”
The real purpose of American advisers assigned to ANA units, however, is not ultimately to train Afghans but to function as a liaison between Afghan units and American firepower and logistics. The ANA is unable to integrate ground units with artillery and air support. It has no functioning supply system. It depends on the American military to do basic tasks. The United States even pays the bulk of ANA salaries.
“In the unit I was helping to mentor, orders for mission-essential equipment such as five-ton trucks went unfilled for months, and winter clothes came late due to national shortages,” the officer told me. “Many soldiers in the unit had to make do for the first few weeks of Afghanistan’s winter without jackets or other cold-weather items.”
But what disturbs advisers most is the widespread corruption within the ANA which has enraged and alienated local Afghans and proved to be a potent recruiting tool for the Taliban.
“In the Afghan logistics battalion I was embedded with, the commander himself was extorting a local shopkeeper, and his staff routinely stole from the local store,” the adviser said. “In Kabul, on one humanitarian aid mission I was on, we handed out school supplies to children, and in an attempt to lend validity to the ANA we had them [ANA members] distribute the supplies. As it turns out, we received intelligence reports that that very same group of ANA had been extorting money from the villagers under threat of violence. In essence, we teamed up with well-known criminals and local thugs to distribute aid in the very village they had been terrorizing, and that was the face of American charity.”
We have pumped billions of dollars into Afghanistan and occupied the country for eight years. We currently spend some $4 billion a month on Afghanistan. But we are unable to pay for whiteboards and markers for instructors at the Kabul Military Training Center. Afghan soldiers lack winter jackets. Kabul is still in ruins. Unemployment is estimated at about 40 percent. And Afghanistan is one of the most food-insecure countries on the planet.
What are we doing? Where is this money going? 
Look to the civilian contractors. These contractors dominate the lucrative jobs in Afghanistan. The American military, along with the ANA, is considered a poor relation.
“When I arrived in theater, one of the things I was shocked to see was how many civilians were there,” the U.S. officer said. “Americans and foreign nationals from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia were holding jobs in great numbers in Kabul. There are a ton of corporations in Afghanistan performing labor that was once exclusively in the realm of the military. If you’re a [military] cook, someone from Kellogg Brown & Root has taken your spot. If you’re a logistician or military adviser, someone from MPRI, Military Professional Resources Inc., will probably take over your job soon. If you’re a technician or a mechanic, there are civilians from Harris Corp. and other companies there who are taking over more and more of your responsibilities.”
“I deployed with a small unit of about 100 or so military advisers and mentors,” he went on. “When we arrived in Afghanistan, nearly half our unit had to be reassigned because their jobs had been taken over by civilians from MPRI. It seems that even in a war zone, soldiers are at risk of losing their jobs to outsourcing. And if you’re a reservist, the situation is even more unfortunate. You are torn from your life to serve a yearlong tour of duty away from your civilian job, your friends and family only to end up in Afghanistan with nothing to do because your military duty was passed on to a civilian contractor. Eventually you are thrown onto a mentoring team somewhere, or some [other] responsibility is created for you. It becomes evident that the corporate presence in Afghanistan has a direct effect on combat operations.”
The American military has been largely privatized, although Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, has still recommended a 40,000-troop increase. The Army’s basic functions have been outsourced to no-bid contractors. What was once done by the military with concern for tactical and strategic advancement is done by war profiteers concerned solely about profit. The aims of the military and the contractors are in conflict. A scaling down of the war or a withdrawal is viewed by these corporations as bad for business. But expansion of the war, as many veterans will attest, is only making the situation more precarious.
“American and Afghan soldiers are putting their lives at risk, Afghan civilians are dying, and yet there’s this underlying system in place that gains more from keeping all of them in harm’s way rather than taking them out of it,” the officer complained. “If we bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not contribute to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradictory forces at work in Afghanistan.”
The wells that are dug, the schools that are built, the roads that are paved and the food distributed in Afghan villages by the occupation forces are used to obscure the huge profits made by contractors. Only an estimated 10 percent of the money poured into Afghanistan is used to ameliorate the suffering of Afghan civilians. The remainder is swallowed by contractors who siphon the money out of Afghanistan and into foreign bank accounts. This misguided allocation of funds is compounded in Afghanistan because the highest-paying jobs for Afghans go to those who can act as interpreters for the American military and foreign contractors. The best-educated Afghans are enticed away from Afghan institutions that desperately need their skills and education.
“It is this system that has broken the logistics of Afghanistan,” the officer said. “It is this system of waste and private profit from public funds that keeps Kabul in ruins. It is this system that manages to feed Westerners all across the country steak and lobster once a week while an estimated 8.4 million Afghans—the entire population of New York City, the five boroughs—suffer from chronic food insecurity and starvation every day. When you go to Bagram Air Base, or Camp Phoenix, or Camp Eggers, it’s clear to see that the problem does not lie in getting supplies into the country. The question becomes who gets them. And we wonder why there’s an insurgency.”
The problem in Afghanistan is not ultimately a military problem. It is a political and social problem. The real threat to stability in Afghanistan is not the Taliban, but widespread hunger and food shortages, crippling poverty, rape, corruption and a staggering rate of unemployment that mounts as foreign companies take jobs away from the local workers and businesses. The corruption and abuse by the Karzai government and the ANA, along with the presence of foreign contractors, are the central impediments to peace. The more we empower these forces, the worse the war will become. The plan to escalate the number of American soldiers and Marines, and to swell the ranks of the Afghan National Army, will not or defeat or pacify the Taliban.
“What good are a quarter-million well-trained Afghan troops to a nation slipping into famine?” the officer asked. “What purpose does a strong military serve with a corrupt and inept government in place? What hope do we have for peace if the best jobs for the Afghans involve working for the military? What is the point of getting rid of the Taliban if it means killing civilians with airstrikes and supporting a government of misogynist warlords and criminals?
“We as Americans do not help the Afghans by sending in more troops, by increasing military spending, by adding chaos to disorder,” he said. “What little help we do provide is only useful in the short term and is clearly unsustainable in the face of our own economic crisis. In the end, no one benefits from this war, not America, not Afghans. Only the CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find satisfactory returns on their investments.”
Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

Published on Saturday, October 31, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
The Heart of India Is Under Attack
by The Guardian/UK

To justify enforcing a corporate land grab, the state needs an enemy – and it has chosen the Maoists

by Arundhati Roy
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain . For the Kondh it's as though god had been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It's one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Agarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.
If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed, too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.
In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, "So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress." Some even say, "Let's face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country – Europe, the US, Australia – they all have a 'past'." Indeed they do. So why shouldn't "we"?
In keeping with this line of thought, the government has announced Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the "Maoist" rebels headquartered in the jungles of central India. Of course, the Maoists are by no means the only ones rebelling. There is a whole spectrum of struggles all over the country that people are engaged in–the landless, the Dalits, the homeless, workers, peasants, weavers. They're pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people's land and resources. However, it is the Maoists that the government has singled out as being the biggest threat.
Two years ago, when things were nowhere near as bad as they are now, the prime minister described the Maoists as the "single largest internal security threat" to the country. This will probably go down as the most popular and often repeated thing he ever said. For some reason, the comment he made on 6 January, 2009, at a meeting of state chief ministers, when he described the Maoists as having only "modest capabilities", doesn't seem to have had the same raw appeal. He revealed his government's real concern on 18 June, 2009, when he told parliament: "If left-wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected."
Who are the Maoists? They are members of the banned Communist party of India (Maoist) – CPI (Maoist) – one of the several descendants of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which led the 1969 Naxalite uprising and was subsequently liquidated by the Indian government. The Maoists believe that the innate, structural inequality of Indian society can only be redressed by the violent overthrow of the Indian state. In its earlier avatars as the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in Jharkhand and Bihar, and the People's War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh, the Maoists had tremendous popular support. (When the ban on them was briefly lifted in 2004, 1.5 million people attended their rally in Warangal.)
But eventually their intercession in Andhra Pradesh ended badly. They left a violent legacy that turned some of their staunchest supporters into harsh critics. After a paroxysm of killing and counter-killing by the Andhra police as well as the Maoists, the PWG was decimated. Those who managed to survive fled Andhra Pradesh into neighbouring Chhattisgarh. There, deep in the heart of the forest, they joined colleagues who had already been working there for decades.
Not many "outsiders" have any first-hand experience of the real nature of the Maoist movement in the forest. A recent interview with one of its top leaders, Comrade Ganapathy, in Open magazine, didn't do much to change the minds of those who view the Maoists as a party with an unforgiving, totalitarian vision, which countenances no dissent whatsoever. Comrade Ganapathy said nothing that would persuade people that, were the Maoists ever to come to power, they would be equipped to properly address the almost insane diversity of India's caste-ridden society. His casual approval of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of Sri Lanka was enough to send a shiver down even the most sympathetic of spines, not just because of the brutal ways in which the LTTE chose to wage its war, but also because of the cataclysmic tragedy that has befallen the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, who it claimed to represent, and for whom it surely must take some responsibility.
Right now in central India, the Maoists' guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. They are people who, even after 60 years of India's so-called independence, have not had access to education, healthcare or legal redress. They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.
If the tribals have taken up arms, they have done so because a government which has given them nothing but violence and neglect now wants to snatch away the last thing they have – their land. Clearly, they do not believe the government when it says it only wants to "develop" their region. Clearly, they do not believe that the roads as wide and flat as aircraft runways that are being built through their forests in Dantewada by the National Mineral Development Corporation are being built for them to walk their children to school on. They believe that if they do not fight for their land, they will be annihilated. That is why they have taken up arms.
Even if the ideologues of the Maoist movement are fighting to eventually overthrow the Indian state, right now even they know that their ragged, malnutritioned army, the bulk of whose soldiers have never seen a train or a bus or even a small town, are fighting only for survival.
In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called "Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas". It said, "the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development." A very far cry from the "single-largest internal security threat".
Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st-century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist "terrorism". But they're only speaking to themselves.
The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to ... They're out there. They're fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.
In order to keep its better-off citizens absolutely safe from these dangerous people, the government has declared war on them. A war, which it tells us, may take between three and five years to win. Odd, isn't it, that even after the Mumbai attacks of 26/11, the government was prepared to talk with Pakistan? It's prepared to talk to China. But when it comes to waging war against the poor, it's playing hard.
It's not enough that special police with totemic names like Greyhounds, Cobras and Scorpions are scouring the forests with a licence to kill. It's not enough that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), the Border Security Force (BSF) and the notorious Naga Battalion have already wreaked havoc and committed unconscionable atrocities in remote forest villages. It's not enough that the government supports and arms the Salwa Judum, the "people's militia" that has killed and raped and burned its way through the forests of Dantewada leaving 300,000 people homeless or on the run. Now the government is going to deploy the Indo-Tibetan border police and tens of thousands of paramilitary troops. It plans to set up a brigade headquarters in Bilaspur (which will displace nine villages) and an air base in Rajnandgaon (which will displace seven). Obviously, these decisions were taken a while ago. Surveys have been done, sites chosen. Interesting. War has been in the offing for a while. And now the helicopters of the Indian air force have been given the right to fire in "self-defence", the very right that the government denies its poorest citizens.
Fire at whom? How will the security forces be able to distinguish a Maoist from an ordinary person who is running terrified through the jungle? Will adivasis carrying the bows and arrows they have carried for centuries now count as Maoists too? Are non-combatant Maoist sympathisers valid targets? When I was in Dantewada, the superintendent of police showed me pictures of 19 "Maoists" that "his boys" had killed. I asked him how I was supposed to tell they were Maoists. He said, "See Ma'am, they have malaria medicines, Dettol bottles, all these things from outside."
What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever know? Not much news comes out of the forests. Lalgarh in West Bengal has been cordoned off. Those who try to go in are being beaten and arrested. And called Maoists, of course. In Dantewada, the Vanvasi Chetana Ashram, a Gandhian ashram run by Himanshu Kumar, was bulldozed in a few hours. It was the last neutral outpost before the war zone begins, a place where journalists, activists, researchers and fact-finding teams could stay while they worked in the area.
Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about "Islamist terrorism" with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about "Red terrorism". In the midst of this racket, at ground zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened. The "Sri Lanka solution" could very well be on the cards. It's not for nothing that the Indian government blocked a European move in the UN asking for an international probe into war crimes committed by the government of Sri Lanka in its recent offensive against the Tamil Tigers.
The first move in that direction is the concerted campaign that has been orchestrated to shoehorn the myriad forms of resistance taking place in this country into a simple George Bush binary: If you are not with us, you are with the Maoists. The deliberate exaggeration of the Maoist "threat" helps the state justify militarisation. (And surely does no harm to the Maoists. Which political party would be unhappy to be singled out for such attention?) While all the oxygen is being used up by this new doppelganger of the "war on terror", the state will use the opportunity to mop up the hundreds of other resistance movements in the sweep of its military operation, calling them all Maoist sympathisers.
I use the future tense, but this process is well under way. The West Bengal government tried to do this in Nandigram and Singur but failed. Right now in Lalgarh, the Pulishi Santrash Birodhi Janasadharaner Committee or the People's Committee Against Police Atrocities – which is a people's movement that is separate from, though sympathetic to, the Maoists – is routinely referred to as an overground wing of the CPI (Maoist). Its leader, Chhatradhar Mahato, now arrested and being held without bail, is always called a "Maoist leader". We all know the story of Dr Binayak Sen, a medical doctor and a civil liberties activist, who spent two years in jail on the absolutely facile charge of being a courier for the Maoists. While the light shines brightly on Operation Green Hunt, in other parts of India, away from the theatre of war, the assault on the rights of the poor, of workers, of the landless, of those whose lands the government wishes to acquire for "public purpose", will pick up pace. Their suffering will deepen and it will be that much harder for them to get a hearing.
Once the war begins, like all wars, it will develop a momentum, a logic and an economics of its own. It will become a way of life, almost impossible to reverse. The police will be expected to behave like an army, a ruthless killing machine. The paramilitary will be expected to become like the police, a corrupt, bloated administrative force. We've seen it happen in Nagaland, Manipur and Kashmir. The only difference in the "heartland" will be that it'll become obvious very quickly to the security forces that they're only a little less wretched than the people they're fighting. In time, the divide between the people and the law enforcers will become porous. Guns and ammunition will be bought and sold. In fact, it's already happening. Whether it's the security forces or the Maoists or noncombatant civilians, the poorest people will die in this rich people's war. However, if anybody believes that this war will leave them unaffected, they should think again. The resources it'll consume will cripple the economy of this country.
Last week, civil liberties groups from all over the country organised a series of meetings in Delhi to discuss what could be done to turn the tide and stop the war. The absence of Dr Balagopal, one of the best-known civil rights activists of Andhra Pradesh, who died two weeks ago, closed around us like a physical pain. He was one of the bravest, wisest political thinkers of our time and left us just when we needed him most. Still, I'm sure he would have been reassured to hear speaker after speaker displaying the vision, the depth, the experience, the wisdom, the political acuity and, above all, the real humanity of the community of activists, academics, lawyers, judges and a range of other people who make up the civil liberties community in India. Their presence in the capital signalled that outside the arclights of our TV studios and beyond the drumbeat of media hysteria, even among India's middle classes, a humane heart still beats. Small wonder then that these are the people who the Union home minister recently accused of creating an "intellectual climate" that was conducive to "terrorism". If that charge was meant to frighten people, it had the opposite effect.
The speakers represented a range of opinion from the liberal to the radical left. Though none of those who spoke would describe themselves as Maoist, few were opposed in principle to the idea that people have a right to defend themselves against state violence. Many were uncomfortable about Maoist violence, about the "people's courts" that delivered summary justice, about the authoritarianism that was bound to permeate an armed struggle and marginalise those who did not have arms. But even as they expressed their discomfort, they knew that people's courts only existed because India's courts are out of the reach of ordinary people and that the armed struggle that has broken out in the heartland is not the first, but the very last option of a desperate people pushed to the very brink of existence. The speakers were aware of the dangers of trying to extract a simple morality out of individual incidents of heinous violence, in a situation that had already begun to look very much like war. Everybody had graduated long ago from equating the structural violence of the state with the violence of the armed resistance. In fact, retired Justice PB Sawant went so far as to thank the Maoists for forcing the establishment of this country to pay attention to the egregious injustice of the system. Hargopal from Andhra Pradesh spoke of his experience as a civil rights activist through the years of the Maoist interlude in his state. He mentioned in passing the fact that in a few days in Gujarat in 2002, Hindu mobs led by the Bajrang Dal and the VHP had killed more people than the Maoists ever had even in their bloodiest days in Andhra Pradesh.
People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the police repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that they sometimes seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the often dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people – anyone who was seen to be a dissenter – were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the 50 million people who had been displaced by "development" projects was suddenly able to identify 1,40,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists for more than 300 Special Economic Zones, India's onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the supreme court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of "public purpose" in the land acquisition act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of "public purpose" to give to private corporations. They asked why when the government says that "the writ of the state must run", it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing, or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police – anything that would make people's lives a little easier. They asked why the "writ of the state" could never be taken to mean justice.
There was a time, perhaps 10 years ago, when in meetings like these, people were still debating the model of "development" that was being thrust on them by the New Economic Policy. Now the rejection of that model is complete. It is absolute. Everyone from the Gandhians to the Maoists agree on that. The only question now is, what is the most effective way to dismantle it?
An old college friend of a friend, a big noise in the corporate world, had come along for one of the meetings out of morbid curiosity about a world he knew very little about. Even though he had disguised himself in a Fabindia kurta, he couldn't help looking (and smelling) expensive. At one point, he leaned across to me and said, "Someone should tell them not to bother. They won't win this one. They have no idea what they're up against. With the kind of money that's involved here, these companies can buy ministers and media barons and policy wonks, they can run their own NGOs, their own militias, they can buy whole governments. They'll even buy the Maoists. These good people here should save their breath and find something better to do."
When people are being brutalised, what "better" thing is there for them to do than to fight back? It's not as though anyone's offering them a choice, unless it's to commit suicide, like some of the farmers caught in a spiral of debt have done. (Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the Indian establishment and its representatives in the media are far more comfortable with the idea of poor people killing themselves in despair than with the idea of them fighting back?)
For several years, people in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal – some of them Maoists, many not – have managed to hold off the big corporations. The question now is, how will Operation Green Hunt change the nature of their struggle? What exactly are the fighting people up against?
It's true that, historically, mining companies have often won their battles against local people. Of all corporations, leaving aside the ones that make weapons, they probably have the most merciless past. They are cynical, battle-hardened campaigners and when people say, "Jaan denge par jameen nahin denge" (We'll give away our lives, but never our land), it probably bounces off them like a light drizzle on a bomb shelter. They've heard it before, in a thousand different languages, in a hundred different countries.
Right now in India, many of them are still in the first class arrivals lounge, ordering cocktails, blinking slowly like lazy predators, waiting for the Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) they have signed – some as far back as 2005 – to materialise into real money. But four years in a first class lounge is enough to test the patience of even the truly tolerant: the elaborate, if increasingly empty, rituals of democratic practice: the (sometimes rigged) public hearings, the (sometimes fake) environmental impact assessments, the (often purchased) clearances from various ministries, the long drawn-out court cases. Even phony democracy is time-consuming. And time is money.
So what kind of money are we talking about? In their seminal, soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is $2.27 trillion (more than twice India's GDP). That was at 2004 prices. At today's prices it would be about $4 trillion.
Of this, officially the government gets a royalty of less than 7%. Quite often, if the mining company is a known and recognised one, the chances are that, even though the ore is still in the mountain, it will have already been traded on the futures market. So, while for the adivasis the mountain is still a living deity, the fountainhead of life and faith, the keystone of the ecological health of the region, for the corporation, it's just a cheap storage facility. Goods in storage have to be accessible. From the corporation's point of view, the bauxite will have to come out of the mountain. Such are the pressures and the exigencies of the free market.
That's just the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the $4 trillion to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral resources, including uranium, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble, copper, diamond, gold, quartzite, corundum, beryl, alexandrite, silica, fluorite and garnet. Add to that the power plants, the dams, the highways, the steel and cement factories, the aluminium smelters, and all the other infrastructure projects that are part of the hundreds of MoUs (more than 90 in Jharkhand alone) that have been signed. That gives us a rough outline of the scale of the operation and the desperation of the stakeholders.
The forest once known as the Dandakaranya, which stretches from West Bengal through Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, parts of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, is home to millions of India's tribal people. The media has taken to calling it the Red corridor or the Maoist corridor. It could just as accurately be called the MoUist corridor. It doesn't seem to matter at all that the fifth schedule of the constitution provides protection to adivasi people and disallows the alienation of their land. It looks as though the clause is there only to make the constitution look good – a bit of window-dressing, a slash of make-up. Scores of corporations, from relatively unknown ones to the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate adivasi homelands – the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.
There's an MoU on every mountain, river and forest glade. We're talking about social and environmental engineering on an unimaginable scale. And most of this is secret. It's not in the public domain. Somehow I don't think that the plans afoot that would destroy one of the world's most pristine forests and ecosystems, as well as the people who live in it, will be discussed at the climate change conference in Copenhagen. Our 24-hour news channels that are so busy hunting for macabre stories of Maoist violence – and making them up when they run out of the real thing – seem to have no interest at all in this side of the story. I wonder why?
Perhaps it's because the development lobby to which they are so much in thrall says the mining industry will ratchet up the rate of GDP growth dramatically and provide employment to the people it displaces. This does not take into account the catastrophic costs of environmental damage. But even on its own narrow terms, it is simply untrue. Most of the money goes into the bank accounts of the mining corporations. Less than 10% comes to the public exchequer. A very tiny percentage of the displaced people get jobs, and those who do, earn slave-wages to do humiliating, backbreaking work. By caving in to this paroxysm of greed, we are bolstering other countries' economies with our ecology.
When the scale of money involved is what it is, the stakeholders are not always easy to identify. Between the CEOs in their private jets and the wretched tribal special police officers in the "people's" militias – who for a couple of thousand rupees a month fight their own people, rape, kill and burn down whole villages in an effort to clear the ground for mining to begin – there is an entire universe of primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders.
These people don't have to declare their interests, but they're allowed to use their positions and good offices to further them. How will we ever know which political party, which ministers, which MPs, which politicians, which judges, which NGOs, which expert consultants, which police officers, have a direct or indirect stake in the booty? How will we know which newspapers reporting the latest Maoist "atrocity", which TV channels "reporting directly from ground zero" – or, more accurately, making it a point not to report from ground zero, or even more accurately, lying blatantly from ground zero – are stakeholders?
What is the provenance of the billions of dollars (several times more than India's GDP) secretly stashed away by Indian citizens in Swiss bank accounts? Where did the $2bn spent on the last general elections come from? Where do the hundreds of millions of rupees that politicians and parties pay the media for the "high-end", "low-end" and "live" pre-election "coverage packages" that P Sainath recently wrote about come from? (The next time you see a TV anchor haranguing a numb studio guest, shouting, "Why don't the Maoists stand for elections? Why don't they come in to the mainstream?", do SMS the channel saying, "Because they can't afford your rates.")
Too many questions about conflicts of interest and cronyism remain unanswered. What are we to make of the fact that the Union home minister, P Chidambaram, the chief of Operation Green Hunt, has, in his career as a corporate lawyer, represented several mining corporations? What are we to make of the fact that he was a non-executive director of Vedanta – a position from which he resigned the day he became finance minister in 2004? What are we to make of the fact that, when he became finance minister, one of the first clearances he gave for FDI was to Twinstar Holdings, a Mauritius-based company, to buy shares in Sterlite, a part of the Vedanta group?
What are we to make of the fact that, when activists from Orissa filed a case against Vedanta in the supreme court, citing its violations of government guidelines and pointing out that the Norwegian Pension Fund had withdrawn its investment from the company alleging gross environmental damage and human rights violations committed by the company, Justice Kapadia suggested that Vedanta be substituted with Sterlite, a sister company of the same group? He then blithely announced in an open court that he, too, had shares in Sterlite. He gave forest clearance to Sterlite to go ahead with the mining, despite the fact that the supreme court's own expert committee had explicitly said that permission should be denied and that mining would ruin the forests, water sources, environment and the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of tribals living there. Justice Kapadia gave this clearance without rebutting the report of the supreme court's own committee.
What are we to make of the fact that the Salwa Judum, the brutal ground-clearing operation disguised as a "spontaneous" people's militia in Dantewada, was formally inaugurated in 2005, just days after the MoU with the Tatas was signed? And that the Jungle Warfare Training School in Bastar was set up just around then?
What are we to make of the fact that two weeks ago, on 12 October, the mandatory public hearing for Tata Steel's steel project in Lohandiguda, Dantewada, was held in a small hall inside the collectorate, cordoned off with massive security, with an audience of 50 tribal people brought in from two Bastar villages in a convoy of government jeeps? (The public hearing was declared a success and the district collector congratulated the people of Bastar for their co-operation.)
What are we to make of the fact that just around the time the prime minister began to call the Maoists the "single largest internal security threat" (which was a signal that the government was getting ready to go after them), the share prices of many of the mining companies in the region skyrocketed?
The mining companies desperately need this "war". They will be the beneficiaries if the impact of the violence drives out the people who have so far managed to resist the attempts that have been made to evict them. Whether this will indeed be the outcome, or whether it'll simply swell the ranks of the Maoists remains to be seen.
Reversing this argument, Dr Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal, in an article called "The Phantom Enemy", argues that the "grisly serial murders" that the Maoists are committing are a classic tactic, learned from guerrilla warfare textbooks. He suggests that they have built and trained a guerrilla army that is now ready to take on the Indian state, and that the Maoist "rampage" is a deliberate attempt on their part to invite the wrath of a blundering, angry Indian state which the Maoists hope will commit acts of cruelty that will enrage the adivasis. That rage, Dr Mitra says, is what the Maoists hope can be harvested and transformed into an insurrection.
This, of course, is the charge of "adventurism" that several currents of the left have always levelled at the Maoists. It suggests that Maoist ideologues are not above inviting destruction on the very people they claim to represent in order to bring about a revolution that will bring them to power. Ashok Mitra is an old Communist who had a ringside seat during the Naxalite uprising of the 60s and 70s in West Bengal. His views cannot be summarily dismissed. But it's worth keeping in mind that the adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them a disservice.
Presumably Dr Mitra is talking about the situation in Lalgarh where, up to now, there has been no talk of mineral wealth. (Lest we forget – the current uprising in Lalgarh was sparked off over the chief minister's visit to inaugurate a Jindal Steel factory. And where there's a steel factory, can the iron ore be very far away?) The people's anger has to do with their desperate poverty, and the decades of suffering at the hands of the police and the Harmads, the armed militia of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that has ruled West Bengal for more than 30 years.
Even if, for argument's sake, we don't ask what tens of thousands of police and paramilitary troops are doing in Lalgarh, and we accept the theory of Maoist "adventurism", it would still be only a very small part of the picture.
The real problem is that the flagship of India's miraculous "growth" story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there's unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it's beginning to look as though the 10% growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible.
To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85% of India's people off their land and into the cities (which is what Chidambaram says he'd like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists. (Is there a fraternity of fundamentalists? Is that why the RSS has expressed open admiration for Chidambaram?)
It would be a grave mistake to imagine that the paramilitary troops, the Rajnandgaon air base, the Bilaspur brigade headquarters, the unlawful activities act, the Chhattisgarh special public security act and Operation Green Hunt are all being put in place just to flush out a few thousand Maoists from the forests. In all the talk of Operation Green Hunt, whether or not Chidambaram goes ahead and "presses the button", I detect the kernel of a coming state of emergency. (Here's a maths question: If it takes 600,000 soldiers to hold down the tiny valley of Kashmir, how many will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?)
Instead of narco-analysing Kobad Ghandy, the recently arrested Maoist leader, it might be a better idea to talk to him.
In the meanwhile, will someone who's going to the climate change conference in Copenhagen later this year please ask the only question worth asking: Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?

After the Billionaires Plundered Alabama Town, Troops Were Called in ... Illegally

By Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on October 24, 2009, Printed on October 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143485/

Editor's Note: The shocking transfer of public wealth to Wall Street's pockets is illustrated vividly in Mark Ames' article below, which covers some very disturbing recent events in Alabama, where billionaires and banks are squeezing the locals so hard that they're literally going bankrupt just for flushing their toilets, where violence and the threat of violence are reaching a boiling point and where even the Posse Comitatus Act is under threat. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all," said one Goldman Sachs vice-chairmanrecently. Well, here's a tale of the kind of inequality the finance industry expects citizens to tolerate.
One of this year's more disturbing stories that were ignored was the illegal Army occupation of Samson, Alab., in March following a shooting spree that raged across two towns by a disgruntled worker, leaving 11 people dead.
As I wrote at the time, Michael McLendon, 27, went on a killing rampage following years of relentless corporate exploitation and harassment against him, his mother (whom he mercy-killed), and the entire rural Alabama region, which suffered like so many parts of rural America at the hands of billionaire goons like chicken oligarch Bo Pilgrim of Pilgrim's Pride notoriety.
One of the creepiest details to emerge in the shooting rampage were reports that troops from nearby Fort Rucker were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets. This is a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare.
And now, finally, the Army officially agrees that its occupation of the Alabama streets was illegal, according to an internal report the Associated Press got a hold of, following a Freedom of Information Act filing:
An Army investigation found that soldiers should not have been sent to man traffic stops in a small Alabama town after 11 people were killed in March during a shooting spree.
An Army report released to the Associated Press on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request said the decision to dispatch military police to Samson from nearby Fort Rucker broke the law. But an Army spokesman said no charges have been filed following the Aug. 10 report.
The report from the Department of Army Inspector General found the use of military personnel in Samson violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from performing law-enforcement actions. The names of those involved were redacted from the report.
According to the report, the officer's "intent was to be a good Army neighbor and help local civilian authorities facing a difficult, unique tragedy affecting the local community. There were no apparent adverse collateral effects to the support provided."
Indeed. For a lot of Americans, the sight of troops occupying their towns is their worst nightmare come true -- part of the reason that America came into existence was to create a country where this sort of thing would never happen, even if the Army's sole intent was to be a good neighbor and help old ladies cross the streets.
Strangely enough, there was almost no media coverage of the occupation -- you had to rely on various right-wing outlets like CNSNews.com, whose article I blogged at the time, or the left-wing Democratic Underground.
But what even the right-wing anti-government people won't report is the true reason why the Army was called out in the first place, something that goes right back to the cause of the shooting rampage: billionaire exploitation of the local Alabamans, not just by the chicken oligarch, but from higher up the predator food chain -- Wall Street banking behemoth JP Morgan Chase.
You see, thanks to a combination of corporate-tax holidays (which reduce local revenues), billionaire greed like the sort that bankrupted Pilgrim's Pride, and Wall Street investment-banking scams on places like Alabama that result in corrupted local officials and bankrupted municipalities, counties and states -- now, there's no money left to fund local police forces, as the U.S. Army report reveals:
The soldiers arrived in the hours after the shootings, which stretched the town's tiny police force and county officers to the limit with several different crime scenes. The report said troops were dispatched after the Geneva County Sheriff's Office and Samson Police requested assistance from Fort Rucker to relieve law enforcement at traffic checkpoints around the crime-scene area.
As I wrote earlier this year, Pilgrim's Pride hooked up with Wall Street to leverage itself into bankruptcy while enriching the executives' family and a handful of insiders at the expense of tens of thousands of Americans workers:
In 2006, Pilgrim's Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who's been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation's No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.
That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: it made the workforce pay for the executives' bonuses.
That meant squeezing lower-middle-class workers for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim's case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim's Pride accusing it of grossly undercompensating its employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim's Pride employees launched a class-actionlawsuit demanding compensation for their work.
The damage extended well beyond Pilgrim's Pride's plants. With bankruptcy came huge unpaid local tax bills, leading to further layoffs and reduced services for thealready-beleaguered locals:
Suwannee County could be out about $2 million if Pilgrim's Pride doesn't pay its property-tax bill, according to property appraiser Lamar Jenkins.
The biggest taxpayer in the county filed for bankruptcy protection Dec. 1. Now it's not clear when -- or if -- the bill will be paid.
"It's certainly going to put a hurt on the budget of the county," Jenkins told the [Suwanee] Democrat by phone Thursday. Jenkins said the unpaid bill represents 7.4 percent of the money local schools get from property taxes; 5.3 percent of county funds from that source; and 8 percent of the money the Suwannee River Water Management District receives from local property-tax revenues.
A spokesman for Pilgrim's did not respond to a request for comment.
Bo Pilgrim, the head of Pilgrim's Pride, once told his Texas church that he was worth over $1 billion before the market crash, and he's still worth hundreds of millions.  His rapacity was boundless, and in the end it was the undoing of Pilgrim's Pride -- not the Pilgrim family, mind you, which is still filthy disgusting rich, but the company is through.
Last month, 64 percent of Pilgrim's Pride was sold to JBS, a Brazilian beef giant, making it the largest meat company in the world, topping America's Tyson. The American cattle industry tried to block the deal, which it says could result in the destruction of the American beef industry, but the Justice Department already approved JBS' takeover.
In the billionaires' Third World model for America, it makes awful sense that a Brazilian meat company would take control of a bankrupt, corrupt American chicken company. For Wall Street and the billionaires, the more they destroy in America, the richer they get, consequences be damned. And anyway, it's not like Pilgrim's Pride was a model of corporate responsibility while under American ownership; just read some of the comments on this recent Reuters article:
Gilmer, Texas, Sep. 8, 2009 -- working as a supervisor in mt pleasant plant use to be injoyable, but lately they expect you to work 50/70 hours for no extra pay. pilgrims pride does not care about family life just their money. Everyone is afraid to say anything, because upper management may let you go with no warnning because you voiced your oppion
robert, Carrollton, Ga. -- i work carrollton,ga former goldkist plant we were goldkist 1 plant now we fill like we in pure hell working for pilgrim pride these people want you to kiss there ass and work three times hard for same money no rasied in two years old chicken farmer
Doddridge, Ark. -- While I was raising chickens for Pilgrim's Pride, I became friends with many lower management employees of the company. The manner in which they were terminated was just simply unmerciful. While the growers had the brunt of the financial devastion, many that were nearing retirement were left with no prospects of employment in the near future. I know some that have had to uproot their families and settle for a considerable more modest lifestyle with their retirement benefits in doubt after a number of years of employment. It is just a shame that Bo Pilgrim has pocketed the money of many hard working people. I still believe Bo needs to be in the jail cell next to Bernie Madoff.
The comments section is where you'll find the real, unvarnished, ungrammatical rage among America's cheated majority, because for the most part, people are too desperate and afraid to complain in public.
But here's the rub: Selling Pilgrim's Pride to a Brazilian meat monopoly doesn't mean things will get better for Alabamans. Just weeks after the buyout was announced, Pilgrim's Pride closed another plant, this one in northern Alabama. According to theAP:
A chicken-processing plant owned by Pilgrim's Pride Corp. is shutting down this week after almost six decades, putting more than 600 people out of work and creating ripples that will be felt all over town.
The city of almost 20,000 is preparing for the end of a relationship that began in 1952 when James Beasley founded Sweet Sue Poultry, which originally ran the plant. Owners included Beatrice Foods and ConAgra before Pilgrim's Pride purchased the business in 2003.
Which looks a lot like an even more depressing Pilgrim's Pride story from a few months earlier, this from rural Arkansas. The town of Clinton filed a lawsuit in June against Pilgrim's Pride, accusing it of turning the town into a "ghost town":
"With its largest and sole remaining employer, Pilgrim's, now evacuated, the city faces a crisis of revenue, bond payments and economic devastation, and as a result of the Pilgrim's evacuation is threatened with becoming a modern-day ghost town," the lawsuit filed by the city said. "This serious economic situation is, however, a direct consequence of Pilgrim's illegal purpose in shuttering the Clinton plant and operations."
This story is repeated all over the rural South. So guess who put together the deal that bankrupted Pilgrim's Pride? Lehman Bros., the king of bankruptcy.
On the other side of the deal, serving Gold Kist, was Merrill Lynch, which also collapsed last year. But Merrill's banker in the Pilgrim's Pride acquisition is still doing well, thank you very much. In fact, he was recently hired by JPMorgan Chase as vice chairman of mergers and acquisitions.
Which makes perfect sense, because JPMorgan Chase has been laying waste to Alabama on a level that makes Pilgrim's Pride's destruction look downright humanitarian. JP Morgan Chase has plundered so much wealth from one county in Alabama, using a complex derivatives scheme and old-fashioned bribery, that some locals are calling it "Armageddon." According to Bloomberg:
In its 190-year history, Jefferson County, Ala., has endured a cholera epidemic, a pounding in the Civil War, gunslingers, labor riots and terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Now this namesake of Thomas Jefferson, anchored by Birmingham, is staring at what one local politician calls financial "Armageddon."
The spectacle -- a tax struck down, about 1,000 county employees furloughed, a politician indicted over $3 billion in sewer debt that may lead to the largest municipal bankruptcy in history -- has elbowed its way up the ladder of county lore.
"People want to kill somebody, but they don't know who to shoot at," says Russell Cunningham, past president of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Jefferson County's debacle is a parable for billions of dollars lost by state and local governments from Florida to California in transactions done behind closed doors. Selling debt without requiring competition made public officials vulnerable to bankers' sales pitches, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for borrowing gone awry.
[T]he county bet on interest-rate swaps, agreements that a representative of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. told commissioners could reduce their interest costs. Instead, the swaps -- covering more than $5 billion in all -- blew up during the credit crisis after ratings for the county's bond insurers fell.
JPMorgan, through spokeswoman Christine Holevas, declined to comment for this story.
Yeah, why bother commenting to the public when you own the bastards? JPMorgan, which took $25 billion in direct bailout money and tens of billions more in backdoor subsidies and handouts, just posted a massive $3.6 billion quarterly profit, and has set aside at least $11.1 billion for management bonuses. Meanwhile, Alabamans can't afford to flush their toilets.
This is what inequality looks like. From Wall Street, it must look extremely appealing; for the rest of America, it's a nightmare that's only getting worse.
So far, it's clear that Birmingham and the entire Jefferson County are following the wretched script of a typical Third World scenario, where the Wall Street bankers corrupt the politicians and eventually bankrupt the place and then, while the corpse is still warm and the bankruptcy deals are cut, Wall Street makes sure it's first in line to profit off the chaos it created, while its corrupt local shill (in this case Birmingham's mayor) takes the fall for the crime of accepting the JP Morgan bribes … and the locals get screwed worst of all, paying off the bill for years or decades.
Just this week, it emerged that Goldman Sachs, employer of Brian "Inequality Is Good" Griffiths, bilked the state of New Jersey using a similar scheme involving interest-rate swaps on bonds that don't even exist. According to Bloomberg, New Jersey is considering raising its gasoline tax to pay the $1 million a month they have to pay out to Goldman for the scam -- a regressive tax that once again takes from the struggling middle class and poor, and puts in thepockets of the billionaires.
Meanwhile, over in Jefferson County, Ala., there's so little left to steal from the impoverished locals that Wall Street has been forced to come up with a new, grotesquely evil plan to line their pockets: taxing the local residents for taking a shit:
In August, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., as trustee for owners of about $3 billion in sewer warrants, filed suit in Jefferson County Circuit Court seeking an appointed receiver for the sewer system. The receiver should have authority to raise rates enough to meet the debt service, the bank said in the complaint, which is pending. The sewer system is already charging customers about 300 percent more to drain bathtubs or flush toilets than a dozen years ago.
By one county estimate, average annual bills are now about $750, compared with the national average of $331, according to a 2007 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Clean Water Agencies, a coalition of utilities.
It's impossible to boost them enough without putting them beyond the means of many residents, County CommissionerJim Carns says. "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a $1 million mortgage."
In Wall Street's eyes, Alabamans really do shit gold.
The thing now will be to convince the locals to use their toilets rather than, say, gas to heat their homes.
As I wrote a few months ago, Jefferson County residents have become so desperate that they're being forced to choose between water and heating, as this article shows:
As nighttime temperatures plunged in Birmingham, Ala., last October, Dora Bonner had a choice: either pay the gas bill so she could heat the home she shares with four grandchildren, or send the Birmingham Water Works a $250 check for her water and sewer bill.
Bonner, who is 73 and lives on Social Security, decided to keep the house from freezing.
"I couldn't afford the water, so they shut it off," she says.
Bonner's sewer bills have risen more than fourfold in the past decade. So have those of others in Jefferson County, which has 659,000 residents and includes Birmingham, the state's largest city.
The logical outcome of the billionaires' plundering of Alabama is the same thing that happens all over the Third World: violence, fear and calling in the troops, the only way to secure the billionaires' dirty profits:
In August and September … Jefferson County residents got a taste of what bankruptcy might look like. As the county began putting about 1,000 workers on leave without pay, one disgruntled employee allegedly e-mailed bomb threats to officials and was promptly arrested, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office.
Lines soon formed outside the courthouse as such tasks as renewing driver's licenses slowed.
A kind of legal civil war broke out when three county agencies -- the sheriff's department, an indigent-care hospital and the tax-assessor's office -- sued the county commission to stop the budget cuts on the grounds that they posed a danger to public safety.
Bettye Fine Collins, the commission president, declared the situation, "our Armageddon."
The state's response is right out of the Central America banana republic playbook: When there's no money left for the people, send in the troops.
The cuts in the sheriff's department budget were so severe that he was planning to call in the National Guard to keep order:
The sheriff in Alabama's most populous county may call for the National Guard to help maintain order, a spokesman said Tuesday, as a judge cleared the way for cuts in the sheriff's budget, and lawmakers reached a compromise they hope will end the budget crisis.
In light of all of this, the Army's brief, illegal occupation of a string of towns in Alabama this past spring no longer looks like a freak one-off, but rather a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America.
It gives new meaning to what MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan is calling "corporate communism." Not only are banking billionaires on permanent state wealthfare, but even worse, as the wealth available becomes increasingly scarce and there isn't enough left to satisfy the billionaires' grotesque appetites and regular citizens' needs to flush their toilets or heat their homes, we're heading to the point that all Third World countries come to -- calling out the troops to ensure that the peasants pay their tithes to their absentee masters in New York and Connecticut and don't get all uppity like those Europeans.
Now you can see why Alabamans are loading up on so many weapons. That makes sense. Now they need to understand who the real enemy is. Not the make-believe liberal bogeymen of their nightmares. Rather, Alabamans should focus their anger on the real-world billionaires who are making this country a living hell.
Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

Obama Is Keeping Bush's Worst "War on Terror" Policies Firmly In Place

By Julian Sanchez, The Nation
Posted on October 24, 2009, Printed on October 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143400/

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.
Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to abandon hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. A lopsided and depressingly bipartisan majority approved legislation that would reauthorize a series of expanded surveillance powers set to expire at the end of the year. Several senators had proposed that reauthorization be wedded to safeguards designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans from indiscriminate data dragnets -- but behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Obama administration ensured that even the most modest of these were stripped from the final bill now being sent to the full Senate.
In September the Senate got off to a promising start. Only three provisions are actually slated for "sunset" this year: "lone wolf" authority to wiretap terror suspects unconnected with any foreign terror group; "roving" wiretaps that can follow a suspect across an indefinite number of phone lines and Internet accounts; and "Section 215" orders that can be used to compel third parties to turn over any "tangible thing" investigators believe may be relevant to a terrorism investigation. Yet several Democrats had signaled a desire to use the renewal process to undertake a muchbroader review of the post-9/11 surveillance architecture, including National Security Letters (NSLs) -- a controversial tool that permits the mass acquisition of financial and telecommunications records without court order -- and last year's sweeping amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permit the executive branch to authorize broad interception of Americans' international communications with minimal court oversight. Democratic Senator Russ Feingold proposed an ambitious and comprehensive reform bill called the JUSTICE Act -- which still would have reauthorized roving wiretaps and 215 orders -- while Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy offered a more modest bill that nevertheless sought to narrow the nearly unlimited scope of NSLs and Section 215.
The renewal of the expiring provisions was always a fait accompli, though Fox Newsand some conservative columnists falsely claimed that Democrats were scheming to eliminate them entirely. Feingold had recommended permitting the as-yet-unused "lone wolf" provision to lapse, but at hearings on renewal last month Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse didn't believe there was "any doubt" about the reapproval of all three. Rather, Whitehouse explained, the question was whether any "further refinements" might be needed to check potential abuses.
In public, the administration declared its openness to such "modifications." As well one might expect, considering that President Obama himself had co- sponsored legislation in 2005 containing many of the very same safeguards now in Feingold's bill. Even when, during the campaign, Obama had disappointed many of his supporters by voting for the very FISA Amendments Act he pledged to filibuster, hereassured them that as president he would revisit that "imperfect" bill. Civil libertarians understood that the more limited Leahy bill would provide the template for reform but had reason to hope some of the key provisions of Feingold's JUSTICE Act might be incorporated during markup.
It was not to be. When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened at the beginning of the month to start work on legislation, it became clear that the Obama administration had been waging a campaign behind the scenes to oppose any significant modifications to NSL or 215 authority -- in particular, any requirement that investigators have "specific and articulable facts" tying records sought to terror suspects or their associates. In a last-minute switcheroo, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein swooped in with a substitute bill that gutted the core reforms of Leahy's modest bill. And it got worse. A week later, a series of further amendments offered by Republican Jeff Sessions watered down the final bill reported out of committee still further. Remarkably, the arch-conservative Sessions appears to have been taking dictation from the Obama administration, presumably to spare committee Democrats the indignity of further overt capitulation: the New York Times reported that his changes were "a verbatim transfer of the text of amendments the Obama administration had privately sent to Congress on Wednesday." An attempt by Feingold to amend the FISA Amendments Act -- perhaps the most egregious of the post-9/11 expansions of executive branch surveillance authority -- was promptly torpedoed by Leahy on procedural grounds.
The supposed rationale for rejecting these changes -- many of which the very same Judiciary Committee had unanimously favored just four years earlier -- was that any new limitations on broad search powers might interfere with an "ongoing investigation." During hearings, one Justice Department official had alluded to an "important, sensitive collection program" involving 215 orders, and Attorney General Eric Holder publicly implied -- though he did not state outright -- that the new powers had played a crucial role in the capture of alleged bomb plotter Najibullah Zazi.
But there is ample reason for doubt. According to a report on National Public Radio, intelligence officers became aware of Zazi thanks to a tip from Pakistani intelligence indicating that he had trained with Al Qaeda. Such a tip should have provided grounds for a full-blown FISA wiretap warrant, and would have far surpassed the mere "reasonable basis" to suspect a terror link that even the most aggressive reform proposals required for NSLs or 215 orders. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin complained that "the real reason for resisting this obvious, common-sense modification of Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy," and worried that posterity would look unkindly on his colleagues once that cloak was lifted. Feingold, too, disputed that his reforms would hamper investigations, and hinted that classified briefings had revealed uses of Section 215 that he considered abuses of the power.
While it's impossible to know precisely which tools were pivotal in the Zazi investigation, or what difference the proposed reforms would have made, the intelligence community has recently shown it has few qualms about making strained claims of necessity to support expansion of its powers.
That power to spy on "lone wolf" terror suspects under the looser standards of FISA was originally justified by the claim that FBI agents were unable to search "twentieth hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop before 9/11 for want of such power. Yet in 2003 a bipartisan Senate report concluded that this was untrue: in reality, FBI supervisors had "failed miserably" by misunderstanding the fully sufficient powers they already enjoyed under FISA. The law as written in September 2001 would have permitted them to obtain a warrant; and in fact, investigators later used precisely the same evidence they'd already gathered to obtain an ordinary criminal warrant on Moussaoui.
Or consider the 2005 investigation of Magdy Mahmoud Mostafa el-Nashar, a former acquaintance of the London transit bombers (later cleared of wrongdoing). An FBI agent had gone to obtain records from North Carolina State University, where el-Nashar had done a stint as a graduate student. With the records in hand, however, the agent got a call from FBI headquarters instructing him to return them and instead obtain the same documents using a National Security Letter. As anyone even remotely acquainted with NSLs would have known, however, they cannot be used for educational records -- and indeed, agents had to improvise a form to make their request. The perplexed university properly denied the request, and another subpoena was obtained.
Though any such misuse of an NSL is supposed to be reported to an oversight board promptly, no such report was filed for more than a year. Yet within a week of the incident, it had somehow come to the attention of FBI Director Robert Mueller, who cited the "delay" as evidence that the Bureau's current NSL powers were inadequate.
The FISA Amendments Act is the successor to an even broader bill called the Protect America Act, which similarly gave the attorney general and director of national intelligence extraordinary power to authorize sweeping interception of Americans' international communications. It was hastily passed in 2007 amid claims that the secret FISA Court had issued a ruling that prevented investigators from intercepting wholly foreign communications that traveled across US wires. Former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell even claimed that FISA's restrictions had rendered it impossible to immediately eavesdrop on Iraqi insurgents who had captured several American soldiers. The New York Post quoted tearful parents of the captured men expressing their horror at the situation and a senior Congressional staffer who alleged that "the intelligence community was forced to abandon our soldiers because of the law."
Yet as a Justice Department official later admitted, the FISA law clearly placed no such broad restriction on foreign wire communications passing through the United States; rather, there had been a far more narrow problem involving e-mails for which the recipient's location could not be determined. And as James Bamford explained in his essential 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, the delay in getting wiretaps running on the suspected kidnappers was the result of a series of missteps at the Justice Department, not the limits of FISA -- no surprise, since even when FISA does require a warrant, surveillance may begin immediately in emergencies if a warrant is sought later. (The suspected kidnappers, by the way, turned out not to have been the actual kidnappers.) Yet on the basis of such claims, a panicked Congress signed off on almost limitless authority to vacuum up international communications -- authority thatwe already know has resulted in systematic "overcollection" of purely domestic conversations, and even resulted in the interception of former President Bill Clinton's e-mails.
In theory, the purpose of building "sunset" provisions into these new powers was to allow -- indeed, to force -- Congress to consider what changes might be needed in the event of such misuse. Given the incredible secrecy of intelligence investigations, this would be a dubious check even under ideal circumstances. But what's truly astonishing is that even known abuses don't seem to have given legislators second thoughts about resisting administration demands.
Among the reforms in Feingold's JUSTICE Act was a measure requiring targets of "roving" wiretaps to be identified, as is required under criminal wiretap statutes, rather than merely described. Unlike criminal taps, FISA eavesdropping tends to be extraordinarily broad, with any innocent communications picked up "minimized" later. Yet "minimization," the legal procedures meant to protect the privacy of innocent Americans when their communications are swept up in a FISA wiretap, does not mean deletion. In a 2003 case, US v. Sattar, prosecutors submitted 5,175 recordings made under FISA that had not been "minimized." Yet, faced with disclosure obligations at trial, it turned out that they were able to produce a far greater volume of recordings: more than 85,000 audio files.
Given that breadth, the risks inherent in "John Doe" warrants, which neither name a specific phone line or Internet account in advance nor identify a target, are obvious. Indeed, a 2005 Inspector General report on the FBI's translation backlogs revealed that among the eighty-seven years' worth of foreign language material recorded FISA in 2004 alone -- a tiny fraction of what the NSA collects -- there were an undisclosed number of "collections of materials from the wrong sources due to technical problems." Feingold's proposed change was not even publicly debated.
Still harder to justify is the unwillingness to rein in NSLs, now issued by the tens of thousands annually -- the majority of which are for the records of US persons. The Senate did see fit to make some modest changes to the NSL gag orders that prohibit recipients from talking about them -- orders federal courts had already found unconstitutional in their present form. But there seemed little concern that the massive expansion in the scope of NSL authority under the Patriot Act and subsequent legislation had given rise to the endemic misuse of the letters discovered in two Inspector General reports. As IG Glenn Fine testified in September, two years after that first report, the FBI has still not produced the new internal guidelines his office recommended.
Fortunately, not all legislators are quite so willing to accept the "trust us" standard of the Bush years. Several House Democrats are requesting more public information about the use of 215 orders in particular, and there is still plenty of time to fix the flaccid bill produced by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It will take courage to push back against glib assurances that we can be made safe from terror only if Americans' private records can be vacuumed into vast databases with few limits. But if Democrats want to project real toughness in the national security arena, this would be a good place to start.
Julian Sanchez is an assistant editor of Reason. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Presidential Power Has Gone Way Too Far

By David Swanson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 23, 2009, Printed on October 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143441/

When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S. military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.
While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This might have been driven home recently -- had anyone noticed -- when, in the midst of the Washington debate over the Afghan War, a forgotten front in President Bush's Global War on Terror, the Philippines, popped back into the news. On September 25th, New York Timescorrespondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:

"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan remains unsafe."
In attempting to explain the uneven progress of U.S. counterinsurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy assessment of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the same island -- 100 years earlier:

"Detachments of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Infantry, with constabulary and armed launches assisting, are engaged in disarming the Moros on Basilan Island. The troops are distributed around the coast and are co-operating in a series of closing-in movements."
Days after Onishi's report appeared, two American soldiers were killed on nearby Jolo Island. As a Reuters story noted, it "was the first deadly strike against U.S. forces deployed in the southern Philippines since a soldier in a restaurant was killed in 2002..." As in Basilan, however, the U.S. counterinsurgency story in Jolo actually goes back a long way. In early January 1905, to cite just one example, two members of the U.S. military -- the 14th Cavalry to be exact -- were killed during pacification operations on that same island.
That U.S. forces are attempting to defeat Muslim guerrillas on the same two tiny islands a century later should perhaps give President Obama pause as he weighs his options in Afghanistan and considers his recent award. It might also be worth his time to assess the military's record of success in conflicts since World War II, starting with the stalemate war in Korea that began in June 1950 and has yet to end in peace, let alone victory. That quiescent but unsettled conflict provides a ready-made opportunity for the president to achieve a triumph that has long escaped the U.S. military. He could help make a lasting peace on a de-nuclearized Korean peninsula and so begin earning his recent award.
Vietnam and Beyond
At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon, many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to the weakness of public support in the U.S., pessimistic reporting by the media, and politicians without backbones.
Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple reason: bluntly put, the U.S.-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a U.S.-funded effort to set up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally, the U.S. military's full-scale, years' long effort to destroy the Vietnamese forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally -- and not in the cities and towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but in the hamlets of South Vietnam. U.S. efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos similarly crashed and burned.
Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered, significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives, which kill and maim villagers to this day.
In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less muscular foreign policy -- embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces," in total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the U.S. ground troops in the invading force) -- and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.
The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" President George H.W. Bush triumphantly exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War -- and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son, George W. Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.
Following a lightning-fast march on Baghdad in 2003, much like the speedy pseudo-victory in Kuwait in Gulf War I, U.S. forces again proved unable to seal the deal. Bush administration efforts to dominate the country politically by writing Iraq's constitution, while circumventing real elections, were quickly laid low by Iraq's most powerful religious leader, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Then, the U.S. military was sent reeling for years by a Sunni insurgency. Though violence is currently tamped down to what is often called "an acceptable level," Iraq remains a war zone and Barack Obama is the fourth president to preside over a seemingly never-ending, irresolvable set of conflicts in that country. (The U.S.-allied Iraqi government has already proclaimed the U.S. a loser, announcing a "great victory" over the U.S. occupation in June 2009 and comparing the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the country's cities to a historic 1920 Iraqi revolt against British forces. American officials have not disagreed.)
During the 1980s, U.S. proxies in Afghanistan, Muslim mujahideen guerrillas, fought the Soviet occupation. Today, U.S. troops are the occupiers, fighting some of those same mujahidin and in the ninth year of this latest war in Afghanistan, victory still appears to be nowhere on the mountainous horizon, while failure, according to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal, is once again a possibility.
Late last year, at the 26th Army Science Conference, I listened to one of the top-ranking enlisted men in the Army, a highly decorated veteran of the Global War on Terror, and a draftee during America's losing war in Vietnam, candidly admit that U.S. troops in Afghanistan simply could not keep up with enemy forces. The lightly-armed, body-armor-less guerrillas were too mobile and too agile, he said, for up-armored, heavily weighed-down American troops. When I asked him about the comment later, a colleague of the same rank and fellow Global War on Terror veteran quickly jumped to his defense, declaring, "Yeah, I can't run the mountain with them, but I'll still get them -- eventually." Almost a year later, the better part of a decade into the fight, the unanswered question remains, "When?"
Peace President
The U.S. military is unquestionably powerful and has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to mete out tremendous amounts of destruction and death. From Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy fighters and unfortunate civilians, military base camps and people's homes have been laid waste by U.S. forces in decade after decade of conflict. Yet sealing the deal has been another matter entirely. Victory has repeatedly slipped through the fingers of American presidents, no matter how much technology and ordnance has been unleashed on the poor, sometimes pre-industrial populations of America's war zones.
Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It's an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It's also the president's chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his -- and all Americans' -- hands.
More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?
The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.
Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.
David Swanson served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004, runs theAfterDowningStreet.org website, and is the creator of Impeachbybee.org. His new book is Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). He is now touring the country for the book. You can find out when the tour will be in your town by clicking here.

Columbia Medical School's 200 Dirty Little Secrets

By Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, The Huffington Post Investigative Fund
Posted on October 9, 2009, Printed on October 12, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143163/

NEW YORK -- The man who would be known as Patient No. 1 emerged from routine open-heart surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in stable condition. Then he began to bleed uncontrollably. Surgeons rushed him back to the operating room to reopen his chest, but by the time they could stop the hemorrhaging, Patient No. 1 was barely breathing and in a coma.

On Aug. 15, 2000, shortly before he was discharged on his way to a nursing home, a physician wrote a terse final diagnosis in his chart: "Medical disaster."

Patient No. 1, along with more than 200 other open-heart surgery patients, was part of a two-year medical study at Columbia that government regulators now say was carried out with ethical and regulatory mistakes and may have caused harm to some patients. The study was testing a commonly used intravenous surgical fluid that previous studies had shown could cause hemorrhaging at high doses. At least two patients in the study died shortly after receiving the fluid and more than two dozen others required transfusions, according to documents submitted to the federal government by the hospital and obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

In the past decade, Columbia has conducted three separate internal reviews of the study. The reviews raised serious questions about the drug trial’s design, management and oversight. But they concluded that there was no evidence that the fluid caused deaths or other medical problems for the patients and that there was no need to provide the patients with additional information about the study.

Now federal regulators have decided not to accept that conclusion. They have taken the rare action of demanding that Columbia track down the patients and their families, and acknowledge that they never were informed about the "true nature" of the drug study, the risks they faced or the consequences of their participation.

New information shows that "at least some of the subjects appear to have suffered harms that were a function of the design and procedures of the study," the federal Office of Human Research Protections wrote to the hospital in a June 8, 2009, letter obtained by the Investigative Fund.

Federal officials also demanded that Columbia turn over a newly completed internal analysis of how the patients fared in the study.

The issues raised by the Columbia study, which was indirectly funded by a pharmaceutical company, reflect the ongoing national debate over flaws in the system designed to protect people who participate in medical research. The federal oversight office has cited more than 40 hospitals and academic medical centers in the past two decades for falling short. The Columbia case stands out for the bitter controversy it has engendered for years inside the hospital, the courts and the federal government – reported here for the first time – and for the hospital’s failure to contact patients even after federal investigators recommended it do so in 2003.

The study, conducted between December 1999 and February 2001 in the famed heart surgery unit at what is now called New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, involved four blood expanders approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The fluids are generally administered by anesthesiologists and combat medics when patients or soldiers have lost significant quantities of blood.

Two of the blood expanders in the study contained a substance known as hetastarch, a clear fluid made of a starch and salt solution. Published studies dating back to 1981 showed that hetastarch can prevent blood from clotting properly, especially when used at higher doses. According to documents filed by the hospital in New York state court, one purpose of the Columbia trial was to test whether a new formulation of hetastarch, manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, was less likely to trigger serious bleeding at high doses than the other fluids. It was largely funded from a $150,000 unrestricted grant given by the drug company to the hospital and lead researcher, records show.

In the consent form used in the study, patients were told that they would receive one of four fluids approved by the FDA and routinely "used to replace blood and fluid lost during surgery." The consent form stated that the researchers would extract a few tablespoons of blood from the patient to test a machine that monitors clotting. Patients were not told that they could be given high doses of the fluids or that they faced a risk of serious bleeding, according to a copy of the consent form obtained by the Investigative Fund.

Documents later filed in court show that about half of the 215 people who agreed to participate were given hetastarch, and some received up to three times the level recommended by the manufacturers. Some of the subjects were Spanish-speaking patients who lived in low-income neighborhoods near the hospital and were admitted through the emergency room, according to people who worked at the hospital at the time. The names of the patients and details about their cases have not been made public because of medical privacy rules.

Two hospital doctors raised concerns about the study with hospital authorities in 2000, triggering the internal Columbia reviews. The hospital decided in 2002 to  discipline the study’s lead researcher because, Columbia alleged, he had not properly disclosed the nature of the drug study to the hospital or the patients and had failed to report promptly a "substantial number" of medical complications among the participants, according to court papers. The researcher, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero, an anesthesiologist, subsequently  filed a lawsuit against the hospital and its officials that vigorously challenged their claims and decision. The lawsuit ended with a confidential settlement in 2003, court records show, and Bennett-Guerrero left Columbia for another hospital.

Columbia hospital officials declined requests for interviews and would not discuss the recent findings by federal regulators that some patients appear to have been harmed or the government’s demand that the hospital notify the study’s participants.

In a statement to the Investigative Fund, Columbia said its internal reviews had concluded that neither patients nor the hospital board that approves clinical trials “were adequately informed of the risks posed by one of the treatments in the study.” Nevertheless, the hospital said, its most recent review completed in 2008 -- which included outside experts -- analyzed patient records and concluded that the medical outcomes did not meet the definition of "harm."

Columbia also said that as a result of its investigations it had made “substantial improvements” in its procedures for overseeing research on humans.

KEY DOCUMENTS »
Inside Columbia University's investigation
of the drug study.

In the  lawsuit he filed against Columbia in 2003, Bennett-Guerrero said that proper consent was obtained from all the patients in the study. He said there was no misrepresentation of the study’s design or purpose, that hospital officials had been fully informed and had approved every aspect. He contended that their actions against him were meant to hide weaknesses in their own hospital procedures.

Bennett-Guerrero, who joined Duke University Health System in 2003, declined a request for an interview. He said in e-mails: "It is hard to imagine that an unbiased expert in cardiac surgery clinical trials could conclude that subjects were harmed in this study, since with only 50 patients per group the study was not designed or powered to prove any differences in major complications including death."

Bennett-Guerrero wrote that the study proposal and consent form "were approved by Columbia’s Institutional Review Board. The Columbia IRB sought comments from members of the Departments of Surgery, Anesthesiology, and Medicine and the IRB had before it the package inserts for each of the four FDA approved fluids, as well as the protocol and the consent form."

He added: "Please understand that I am, and have throughout my entire professional career been, committed to patient safety and improving patient outcomes. Indeed, as a practicing anesthesiologist who takes care of high risk patients, my primary focus in the operating room is patient safety and reducing pain and suffering."

An Unrestricted Grant

The Columbia study came at a time when Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer of one of the blood expanders, was looking to boost its share of the business. The fluids were often needed during more than half a million cardiac surgeries each year and in the late 1990s the market for blood expanders containing hetastarch was growing due to a shortage of albumin, one of the older, more commonly-used products.

In 1999, Bennett-Guerrero, then 34, was recruited to serve as clinical director of Columbia’s division of cardiothoracic anesthesiology. Within two years, records show, he was simultaneously running 25 clinical trials. He received approximately $150,000 in the form of an unrestricted grant from Abbott Laboratories as reimbursement for the comparative study of blood expanders, according to his statements in his lawsuit against the hospital. Medical centers welcome such grants, since they typically can take a portion for overhead.

Several previous studies had shown that the original hetastarch product could sometimes trigger excessive bleeding during surgery. If Abbott’s new formulation of hetastarch – called Hextend -- turned out to be safer in high doses, anesthesiologists might be persuaded to switch, even though Abbott’s price was about 40 percent higher.

Before the study could begin, it had to pass muster inside the hospital. Under federal regulations, every clinical trial must be approved by an institutional review board, or IRB -- a panel of doctors, other medical professionals and at least one non-medical professional from outside the hospital -- that is charged with protecting human test subjects and ensuring that they are fully informed of the potential risks. The board must also ensure that studies are properly designed.

According to court documents, half of the open-heart patients in the study were slated to receive one of the two hetastarch solutions. The other half would get either albumin or a salt solution.

The original proposal requested a waiver from the standard requirement of obtaining written patient consent, on the grounds that participation in the trial "will not increase the likelihood of patients requiring blood transfusions . . . [or] any additional discomfort or risk."

The study proposal and request for a waiver was reviewed in 1999 by the IRB, whose approximately 12 members met once a month. But there was no expert in blood expanders on the board and no member examined the published studies about the risks of high levels of hetastarch, according to court documents.

The review board did insist that patients sign a written consent form. Columbia investigators later concluded that the consent form failed to inform patients of the risk of bleeding. They also found that the IRB was unaware of those risks, in part because the panel “failed to adequately use data provided” by the hospital’s departments of surgery and anesthesia, which also reviewed the proposed study. A surgeon on the review board told the investigators that the board’s members, 11 of whom had other full-time duties in the hospital, didn’t have enough time to probe. "When we do these reviews we are presented with the investigator’s stack of IRB stuff," he said, according to the court papers. "Most of us barely get to read the birthday cards from our kids . . ."

‘A Very Common Deficiency’

In November 2000, two Columbia anesthesiologists – Marc Dickstein and Mark Heath– sought out the head of the institutional review board, Paul Papagni, a lawyer. They told Papagni that they had been in the operating room when a number of patients had hemorrhaged. They feared the study’s design virtually guaranteed that there would be more who would suffer hemorrhaging, according to Heath’s statements to hospital investigators, included in court filings.

Dickstein would later tell Columbia investigators that he and Heath assumed the study would be suspended and reviewed since they had alerted the board. In court documents, he said, "We were two reasonably senior members of the cardiac anesthesia team coming in saying patients are being harmed. . . . [we thought] anyone who actually would look at the literature [on blood expanders] . . . would come to the same conclusion." But the IRB did not suspend the study.

Heath and Dickstein declined to comment for this article. Attempts to contact Papagni were unsuccessful.

Court records show that Bennett-Guerrero and his department head, Margaret Wood, disagreed with the assessments of Heath and Dickstein. Columbia investigators later suggested that the concerns raised by Heath and Dickstein may have been initially cast aside as rooted in professional rivalry with Bennett-Guerrero.

Five months after the study ended, Heath and Dickstein wrote to Gerald Fischbach, dean of Columbia’s medical school, with their concerns. According to court documents, Fischbach soon ordered Bennett-Guerrero to  stop enrolling patients in studies, pending the results of an investigation.

Fischbach later removed Bennett-Guerrero as clinical director of the division of cardiothoracic anesthesiology, according to court records. The university took him off tenure track in 2002, barred him from conducting research, and told him in a letter that he could not publish the results of the blood expander study.

In September 2002 Columbia sent a letter about the matter to the federal Office of Human Research Protections, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The letter, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, affirmed the chief complaints that Dickstein and Heath had raised. Columbia alleged that Bennett-Guerrero “failed to convey” the purpose of the study to the review board and patients, had not informed the patients of the risks and did not appropriately report serious medical complications. The letter also faulted the manner in which fluids were prepared for the study (they were allegedly mixed in an unsanitary, blood-spattered room). Columbia also assured federal regulators in the letter that it was overhauling its review process.

But hospital officials stated that patients had not suffered harm as a result of participating in the study. Columbia’s investigation, said the letter, "failed to show a causal relationship" between the fluids and the two deaths. It also added that there was "no evidence of harm to any particular patient that could be attributed to the study."

What the letter did not say was how Columbia investigators calculated harm. Columbia reviewed only 14 patient charts of the more than 200 in the study, according to court documents. The investigators looked for kidney damage, another potential side-effect of blood expanders, but at that point did not report on bleeding.

Fischbach, who retired as dean in 2006, declined requests for an interview.

Federal officials responded to Columbia in a letter dated January 2003. They suggested that the university "re-consent patients," which meant finding them or their survivors and informing them that the study may have put them at greater risk than they had been told when they gave informed consent. But the federal regulators didn’t force the issue. Columbia decided, as it had the year before, that there was no need to tell the patients.

That same month, Bennett-Guerrero filed suit against Columbia and Fischbach in New York Supreme Court, claiming the university had harmed his reputation and wrongly stripped him of his ability to conduct and publish research. Bennett-Guerrero attacked the university’s findings about the study and denied that he acted improperly in any way. The settlement, reached in June 2003, is confidential but the court file remains public.

E-mails obtained through a public records request from the Office of Human Research Protections show that Heath and Dickstein continued to ask the government to re-examine the study and its outcomes. In July 2006, a compliance officer responded that the federal agency would not challenge Columbia again. Failing to disclose risks to subjects in completed research was "a very common deficiency," the officer wrote in an e-mail, adding that the agency "is not inclined, at this time, to investigate this matter further."

Then in early 2007, for reasons that are not apparent from any documents, Columbia initiated yet another internal examination of the blood expander study. It was completed in the fall of 2008 and the hospital contacted federal regulators and acknowledged some deficiencies in a letter dated March 31, 2009. In the letter, the hospital again concluded that "the conditions necessary for a finding of patient harm had not been met."

This time, federal regulators balked. In its letter to Columbia on June 8, the oversight office wrote that "new information" provided by the hospital now showed that among study participants who received hetastarch there was "a statistically significant higher rate" of "negative clinical outcomes, including bleeding events (requiring use of transfusions) and decreases in renal [kidney] function. Beyond that, there was the trend toward increased need for re-operation." The letter said that the analysis "supports the hypothesis" that patients who received hetastarch did worse than the others.

The federal office instructed the hospital to draft a letter explaining the study to its former patients. Regulators also asked Columbia to hand over a full accounting of what happened to the patients who agreed to be part of its study. The federal agency has issued such a directive only three other times since 2000. Although the office has no direct authority to enforce its demands, it can cut off federal research funding to institutions that fail to comply.

This week, neither Columbia nor the federal government would say when the patients and families will learn the whole story behind the heart operations they underwent 10 years ago.

Jeanne Lenzer is an independent medical investigative journalist and a frequent contributor to the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). She can be reached at jeanne.lenzer@gmail.com. Shannon Brownlee is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. She can be reached at shannon.brownlee@comcast.net.

© 2009 The Huffington Post Investigative Fund

Published on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 by The Guardian/UK
America's Failed Model for the World

Europeans keep asking me, has America lost its mind? From healthcare to its economy, the US is looking merely average

by Steven Hill
Europeans are shaking their heads over their American friends again. Whether talking to people in the street, in the cafés or to journalists or political leaders, everyone here asks me the same question: Has America lost its mind? Town halls filled with angry citizens , shouting at their elected leaders, some of them armed with guns and threatening signs ? Besides the media spectacle of these neo-1776 revolutionaries, what is doubly perplexing to Europeans is the focus of the protests: healthcare.
What's strange to a European is that everyone here already has healthcare. The place that Donald Rumsdfeld once sneeringly called "old Europe" long ago solved this dilemma, producing quality healthcare for a fraction of the price that Americans pay. Many Europeans are astonished when they find out that 47 million Americans - larger than the populations of most European nations - don't have any healthcare at all except a hospital emergency room.
Contrary to stereotype, most of Europe doesn't use single payer, with France, Germany and others having evolved a "third way" that combines individual choice with private, nonprofit insurance companies and Medicare-like cost controls. Even countries like Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia, with per capita incomes only a fraction of that in the United States , have healthcare for all their people. Europeans simply don't understand how a wealthy United States could remain the last advanced nation that does not have universal healthcare.
Lounging one evening in one of Budapest's elegant thermal baths larger than an Olympic swimming pool, with Europeans of all ages and nationalities soaking their limbs in relaxed leisure, I was treated to a dose of the common wisdom that is taking hold here. Introducing myself as an American evinced a swift reaction from one sweating sauna companion:
"I don't understand you Americans. You blow billions on a useless war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and billions more to bail out banks that nearly bankrupted the world economy, but you don't ensure healthcare for your own people. Even Obama can't make a difference. It's as if your democracy doesn't work anymore."
He was Austrian but spoke in a near-perfect English that was as good grammatically as that spoken by some of my relatives.
And his reaction was typical. As Europeans watch the United States flailing about over something as basic as healthcare, they are reminded once again of the impotent US response following Hurricane Katrina. TV images of stranded, poor, black people in New Orleans have been melded to those of this new healthcare insurgency with pitch forks, leaving an indelible impression. The last remaining superpower is not looking so super anymore, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, healthcare, the economy - not anywhere.
The global economic collapse, largely blamed on out-of-control Wall Street capitalism, is stinging here as well, though in most regions Europe has not suffered as much as America has. In my informal polling of small business and shop owners, they said the downtown had hurt, but only a little bit. Since the crisis, Europe has employed clever strategies - some of them since copied by the Obama administration, such as the popular "cash for clunkers " auto rebate programme - that have prevented it from suffering the doubling of unemployment that the US is enduring.
Indeed, Europe, once looked down upon by American pundits as the land of double-digit unemployment, currently has lower unemployment than the United States. Contrary to Europe's reputation as having a sick, sclerotic economy, its per capita economic growth rate actually was slightly higher than America's in the 10 years leading up to the economic crisis.
Still, a number of people fear that the worst is yet to come. And so Europeans appear both angry and perplexed by America's deregulated capitalism run amok, which has further served to undermine the American brand. As one Slovenian acquaintance, a representative of a consortium of small businesses said to me: "The US used to lecture us in Europe about just about everything, but what does America have to teach now? Maybe America should learn something from Europe."
Indeed, with Germany and France becoming the first major western economies to emerge from recession into positive growth, perhaps the US should learn something from our transatlantic cousins. But what might we learn?
Here's a clue, say some Europeans. German chancellor Angela Merkel once was asked by then-British prime minister Tony Blair what the secret was of her country's economic success, which includes being the world's largest exporter nation and running substantial trade surpluses. She famously replied: "Mr Blair, we still make things."
Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, says the European way of running the economy "is fundamentally about firms that emphasise high-quality products and long-term relationships between suppliers and customers". Company managers set long-term policies, while market pressures for short-term profits are held in check. Gunter Verheugen, vice-president of the European Commission, echoed the virtues of Europe's strong, competitive industrial base, succinctly stating Europe's recipe for success: "Don't try to be cheaper. Try to be better."
But in the United States, for decades under the sway of the Reagan revolution's economic philosophy, which favoured corporate finance over manufacturing, the economy has seen a stark decline in manufacturing . Since the second world war, the financial sector in the United States has tripled in size as a percentage of the overall economy and of corporate profits. That increase accelerated during the eight years of the Bush administration, even as the US lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs.
European capitalism for the most part didn't succumb to the financialisation that swept the United States in the 1980s, and which paved the way for the speculative bubbles that have now caused economic collapses in both 2001 and in 2008 (with notable exceptions in Britain, Spain and Ireland, similarly plagued by a collapsed housing bubble).
So from the other side of the pond, the city on the hill is looking pretty average these days. America is still a leader, but not the leader. That's a post-post-cold war concept that the world is still getting used to, and that Americans don't want to admit. But the evidence is everywhere, and especially obvious when you step outside the American bubble.
As one Viennese politician told me: "If the American model no longer is the blueprint for the world, what comes next?" Some Europeans think they have the answer, and much of the world is paying attention, even if most Americans still are not.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Steven Hill is Director of the political reform programme at the New America Foundation

Obama White House Has Secret Plan To Harvest Personal Data From Social Networking Websites

By Ken Boehm
NATIONAL LEGAL & POLICY CENTER  08/31/2009 - 19:07
NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.
The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”
In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003, it is posted [1] at FedBizzOps.com. Click here to download a 51-page pdf of the solicitation [2].
While the solicitation specifies a 12-month contract, it allows for seven one-year extensions. It specifies no dollar cap. Other troubling issues include:
extremely broad secrecy terms preventing the vendor from disclosing to the public or the media what information is being captured and archived (page 7, “Restriction Against Disclosure”)
wholesale capturing of comments by non-White House staff on publicly accessible sites
capturing of content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video)
capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.
This is the third controversy involving the White House internet operations in less than a month. First, Obama’s New Media operation asked supporters to send information about critics of the White House health care effort to a White House email. This provoked a storm of criticism and the White House retreated. Then large number of people complained of getting email spam from the White House supporting the President’s health care position.  Again the White House was forced to back down.
Now the same people at the White House are at it again with an ambitious plan to harvest huge amounts of information from the web and specifically social networking sites.  

Given the White House’s recent abuse of its New Media operations, this huge, new secretive program is yet another sign that this Administration is at best indifferent to privacy rights and at worst prepared to violate civil liberties for political purposes.
Perhaps anticipating negative reaction to the invasiveness of the plan, a justification is provided in a Q&A. section of the solicitation. Question #9 reads:
The Presidential Records Act does not require the storage or archiving of non-EOP content, as such is there a specific reason as to why the content provided on EOP related websites in the form of comments is included in these archiving procedures?
Answer: The PRA includes in its definition of presidential records content ―received by PRA components and personnel. Out of an abundance of caution, we are treating comments made by non-PRA personnel on sites on which a PRA component has a presence as presidential records, requiring them to be captured or sampled.
Of course, this interpretation of the Presidential Records Act is so expansive that virtually any communication mentioning the president or the Administration could become subject to collection and archiving under the Act. This is not out of an “abundance of caution,” but out of an over-abundance of power. President Obama should make sure that this plan goes no further.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle

Wednesday 02 September 2009
by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment - a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?
    Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform's public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism - one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers - there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.
    The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks." [1]
    A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes. Glenn Beck, the alleged voice of the common man, appearing on the "Fox & Friends" morning show, calls President Obama a "racist" and then accuses him of "having a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." [2] Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor, [3] while his counterpart in right-wing hate, talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children." [4] He also claims that Obama is "surrounded by terrorists" and is "raping America." This is a variation of a crude theme established by Ann Coulter, who refers to Bill Clinton as a "very good rapist." [5] Even worse, Obama is a "neo-Marxist fascist dictator in the making," who plans to "force children into a paramilitary domestic army." [6] And this is just a small sampling of the kind of hate talk that permeates right-wing media. This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk. [7]On the contrary, while it may be idiocy, it reveals a powerful set of political, economic and educational forces at work in miseducating the American public while at the same time extending the culture of cruelty. One central task of any viable form of politics is to analyze the culture of cruelty and its overt and covert dimensions of violence, often parading as entertainment.
    Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice. But if a legal culture emerged that made violence and human suffering socially acceptable, popular culture rendered such violence pleasurable by commodifying, aestheticizing and spectacularizing it. Rather than being unspoken and unseen, violence in American life had become both visible in its pervasiveness and normalized as a central feature of dominant and popular culture. Americans had grown accustomed to luxuriating in a warm bath of cinematic blood, as young people and adults alike were seduced with commercial and military video games such as "Grand Theft Auto" and "America's Army," [8] the television series "24" and its ongoing Bacchanalian fête of torture, the crude violence on display in World Wrestling Entertainment and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and an endless series of vigilante films such as "The Brave One" (2007) and "Death Sentence" (2007), in which the rule of law is suspended by the viscerally satisfying images of men and women seeking revenge as laudable killing machines - a nod to the permanent state of emergency and war in the United States. Symptomatically, there is the mindless glorification and aestheticization of brutal violence in the most celebrated Hollywood films, including many of Quentin Tarantino's films, especially the recent "Death Proof" (2007), "Kill Bill" 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), and "Inglorious Bastards" (2009). With the release of Tarantino's 2009 bloody war film, in fact, the press reported that Dianne Kruger, the co-star of "Inglorious Bastards," claimed that she "loved being tortured by Brad Pitt [though] she was frustrated she didn't get an opportunity to get frisky with her co-star, but admits being beaten by Pitt was a satisfying experience." [9] This is more than the aestheticization of violence, it is the normalization and glorification of torture itself.
    If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a hundred." [10] Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the villains, but the heroes of prime-time television. The most celebrated is, of course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," [11] but Bauer is portrayed as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a television celebrity.[12] The show has over 15 million viewers, and its glamorization of torture has proven so successful that it appears to have not only numbed the public's reaction to the horrors of torture, but it is so overwhelmingly influential among the US military that the Pentagon sent Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan to California to meet with the producers of the show. "He told them that promoting illegal behavior in the series ... was having a damaging effect on young troops." [13]The pornographic glorification of gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a sympathetic, even lovable, character. Visual spectacles steeped in degradation and violence permeate the culture and can be found in various reality TV shows, professional wrestling and the infamous Jerry Springer Show. These programs all trade in fantasy, glamorized violence and escapism. And they share similar values. As Chris Hedges points out in his analysis of professional wrestling, they all mirror the worse dimensions of an unchecked and unregulated market society in which "winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant.... It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood." [14]
    The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other." [15] The culture of cruelty mimics cinematic violence as the agents of abuse both indulge in actual forms of violence and then further celebrate the barbarity by posting it on the web, mimicking the desire for fame and recognition, while voyeuristically consuming their own violent cultural productions. The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008." [16] Rather than problematize violence, popular culture increasingly normalizes it, often in ways that border on criminal intent. For instance, a recent issue of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'" [17] In this context, violence is not simply being transformed into an utterly distasteful form of adolescent entertainment or spectacularized to attract readers and boost profits, it becomes a powerful pedagogical force in the culture of cruelty by both aligning itself and becoming complicit with the very real surge of violence against the homeless, often committed by young men and teenage boys looking for a thrill. Spurred on by the ever reassuring presence of violence and dehumanization in the wider culture, these young "thrill offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society." [19] All of these elements of popular culture speak stylishly and sadistically to new ways in which to maximize the pleasure of violence, giving it its hip (if fascist) edginess.
    Needless to say, neither violent video games and television series nor Hollywood films and the Internet (or for that matter popular culture) cause in any direct sense real world violence and suffering, but they do not leave the real world behind either. That is too simplistic. What they do achieve is the execution of a well-funded and highly seductive public pedagogical enterprise that sexualizes and stylizes representations of violence, investing them with an intense pleasure quotient. I don't believe it is an exaggeration to claim that the violence of screen culture entertains and cleanses young people of the burden of ethical considerations when they, for instance, play video games that enabled them to "casually kill the simulated human beings whose world they control." [20] Hollywood films such as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty. No warnings appear on the labels of these violent videos and films, suggesting that the line between catharsis and desensitization may become blurred, making it more difficult for them to raise questions about what it means "to live in a society that produces, markets, and supports such products." [21] But these hyper-violent cultural products also form part of a corrupt pedagogical assemblage that makes it all the more difficult to recognize the hard realities of power and material violence at work through militarism, a winner-take-all economy marked by punishing inequalities and a national security state that exhibits an utter disregard for human suffering. Even the suffering of children, we must note, as when government officials reduce the lives of babies and young children lost in Iraq and Afghanistan to collateral damage. Tragically, the crime here is much more than symbolic.
    The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a "symbiosis of suffering and spectacle." [22] As Chris Hedges argues,
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs ... through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick. [23]
    Bailouts are not going to address the ways in which individual desires, values and identities are endlessly produced in the service of a culture of cruelty and inequality. Power is not merely material, it is also symbolic and is distributed through a society in ways we have never seen before. No longer is education about schooling. It now functions through the educational force of the larger culture in the media, Internet, electronic media and through a wide range of technologies and sites endlessly working to undo democratic values, compassion and any viable notion of justice and its accompanying social relations. What this suggests is a redefinition of both literacy and education. We need, as a society, to educate students and others to be literate in multiple ways, to reclaim the high ground of civic courage, and to be able to name, engage and transform those forms of public pedagogy that produce hate and cruelty as part of the discourse of common sense. Otherwise, democracy will lose the supportive institutions, social relations and culture that make it not only possible but even thinkable.
--------    
    Notes:
    [1] Barbara Ehrenreich, "Is It now a Crime to Be Poor?," New York Times (August 9, 2009), p. wk9.
    [2] David Bauder, "Fox's Glenn Beck: President Obama is a Racist," Associated Press (July 28, 2009). 
    Online at:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5imGTdQH8JbOAWo_yKxNHpAMTCq_gD99NO3TG0
    [3] Limbaugh cited in Casey Gane-McCalla, "Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes," NewsOne (October 20, 2008). 
    Online at: http://newsone.com/obama/top-10-racist-limbaugh-quotes/
    [4] Savage quoted in Thinkers and Jokers (July 2, 2007). 
    Online at: http://thinkersandjokers.com/thinker.php?id=2688
    [5] Coulter quoted in Don Hazen, "The Tall Blonde Woman in the Short Skirt With the Big Mouth," AlterNet (June 6, 2006). 
    Online at: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/37162
    [6] These quotes are taken from an excellent article by Eric Boehlert in which he criticizes the soft peddling that many in the press give to right-wing fanatics such as Michael Savage. See Eric Boehlert, "The New Yorker raises a toast to birther nut Michael Savage," Media Matters for America (August 3, 2009). 
    Online at: http://mediamatters.org/print/columns/200908030038
    [7] See Chris Hedges, "America the Illiterate," CommonDreams (November 10, 2008). 
    Online at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/10-6
    Terrence McNally, "How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America," AlterNet (August 15, 2008). 
    Online at: http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/95109
    [8] For an excellent collection on military video games, see Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds. "Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games" (New York: Routledge, 2010).
    [9] Arts and Entertainment, "Torture Will Just Have to Do," The Hamilton Spectator (August 12, 2009), p. Go 3.
    [10] Jane Mayer, "Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind 24," The New Yorker (February 26, 2007), p. 68.
    [11] Alessandra Stanley, "Suicide Bombers Strike, and America Is in Turmoil. Just Another Day in the Life of Jack Bauer," New York Times (January 12, 2007), p. B1.
    [12] See Judith Butler, "Frames of War." Also, Slavoj Zizek, "The Depraved Heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood," The Guardian (January 10, 2006). 
    Online at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/10/usnews.comment
    [13] Faiz Shaker, "US Military: Television Series '24' is Promoting Torture in the Ranks," Think Progress (February 3, 2007). 
    Online at: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/13/torture-on-24/
    [14] Chris Hedges, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (New York: Knopf Canada, 2009). p. 10.
    [15] Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring Push on Hate Crime Laws," New York Times (August 8, 2009), p. A1.
    [16] National Coalition of the Homeless, "Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street," 2008, (Washington, DC, National Coalition of the Homeless, 2009). 
    Online at:http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/hatecrimes/hate_report_2008.pdf, p. 34.
    [17] Ibid., Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring Push on Hate Crime Laws."
    [18] National Coalition of the Homeless, "Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street," 2008, (Washington, D. C., National Coalition of the Homeless, 2009). 
    Online at:http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/hatecrimes/hate_report_2008.pdf
    [19] Ibid., Eric Lichtblau, "Attacks on Homeless Bring Push on Hate Crime Laws."
    [20] Mark Slouka, "Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School," Harper's Magazine (September 5, 2009), p. 40.
    [21] Ibid., Mark Slouka, "Dehumanized," p. 40.
    [22] Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, "Traffic in Pain," in "Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain," ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.9.
    [23] Chris Hedges, "America Is in Need of Moral Bailout," Truthdig (March 23, 2009). 
    Online at:http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/
»
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.

How on Earth Can We Feed 8 Billion People?

By Lester R. Brown, TreeHugger
Posted on August 28, 2009, Printed on September 4, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142293/

In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world's third largest food aid donor.
The key to China's success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China's rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.
As we note at Earth Policy Institute, while hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.
Dealing with this problem requires addressing the long-term trends leading to growth in demand for food outpacing growth in supply. One key to the threefold expansion in the world grain harvest since 1950 was the rapid adoption in some developing countries of high-yielding wheats and rices (originally developed in Japan) and hybrid corn (from the United States). The spread of these highly productive seeds, combined with a tripling of irrigated area and an 11-fold increase in world fertilizer use, tripled the world grain harvest. Growth in irrigation and fertilizer use essentially removed soil moisture and nutrient constraints on much of the world's cropland.
Now the outlook is changing. Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to non-farm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

This calls for fresh thinking on how to raise cropland productivity. One way is to breed crops that are more tolerant of drought and cold. U.S. corn breeders have developed corn varieties that are more drought-tolerant, enabling corn production to move westward into Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Kansas, the leading U.S. wheat-producing state, has used a combination of drought-resistant varieties in some areas and irrigation in others to expand corn planting to where the state now produces more corn than wheat.
Another way of raising land productivity, where soil moisture permits, is to increase the area of multicropped land that produces more than one crop per year. Indeed, the tripling in the world grain harvest since 1950 is due in part to impressive increases in multiple cropping in Asia. Some of the more common combinations are wheat and corn in northern China, wheat and rice in northern India, and the double or triple cropping of rice in southern China and southern India.
The spread in double cropping of winter wheat and corn on the North China Plain helped boost China's grain production to where it rivaled that of the United States. Winter wheat grown there yields 5 tons per hectare. Corn also averages 5 tons. Together these two crops, grown in rotation, can yield 10 tons per hectare per year. China's double cropped rice annually yields 8 tons per hectare.
Forty years ago, North India produced only wheat, but with the advent of the earlier maturing high-yielding wheats and rices, wheat could be harvested in time to plant rice. This wheat/rice combination is now widely used throughout the Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. This practice yields a combined 5 tons of grain per hectare, helping to feed India's 1.2 billion people.
A concerted U.S. effort to both breed earlier maturing varieties and develop cultural practices that would facilitate multiple cropping could substantially boost crop output. If China's farmers can extensively double crop wheat and corn, then U.S. farmers could do the same if agricultural research and farm policy were reoriented to support it.
Elsewhere, Western Europe, with its mild winters and high-yielding winter wheat, might also be able to double crop more with a summer grain, such as corn, or with a winter oilseed crop. Brazil and Argentina have an extended frost-free growing season that supports extensive multicropping, often wheat or corn with soybeans.
In many countries, including the United States, most of those in Western Europe, and Japan, fertilizer use has reached a level where using more has little effect on crop yields. There are still some places, however, such as most of Africa, where additional fertilizer would help boost yields. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure to transport fertilizer economically to the villages where it is needed. As a result of nutrient depletion, grain yields in much of sub-Saharan Africa are stagnating.
One encouraging response to this situation in Africa is the simultaneous planting of grain and leguminous trees. At first the trees grow slowly, permitting the grain crop to mature and be harvested; then the saplings grow quickly to several feet in height, dropping leaves that provide nitrogen and organic matter, both sorely needed in African soils. The wood is then cut and used for fuel. This simple, locally adapted technology, developed by scientists at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, has enabled farmers to double their grain yields within a matter of years as soil fertility builds.
Despite local advances, the overall loss of momentum in expanding food production is unmistakable. It will force us to think more seriously about stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and using the existing harvest more productively. Achieving an acceptable worldwide balance between food and people may now depend on stabilizing population as soon as possible, reducing the unhealthily high consumption of animal products among the affluent, and restricting the conversion of food crops to automotive fuels. It also calls for a concerted effort to raise water use productivity, similar to the gains achieved for land use, and to stabilize climate to avoid crop-withering temperatures and more frequent droughts. These efforts combined can help put us on the path to ensuring enough food for all.
For more on this subject, see Chapter 9, “Feeding Eight Billion Well,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free downloading.
Lester R. Brown is the founder and President of Earth Policy Institute, has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers."He is the author of numerous books, including "Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble."

It Could Be the End of Our Democracy as We Know It

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_it_could_be_the_end_of_our_democracy_as_we_know_it/

Posted on Sep 6, 2009

By E.J. Dionne
President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday will be only the second most consequential political moment of the week.
Judged by the standard of an event’s potential long-term impact on our public life, the most important will be the argument before the Supreme Court (on the same day, as it happens) about a case that, if decided wrongly, could surrender control of our democracy to corporate interests.
This sounds melodramatic. It’s not. The court is considering eviscerating laws that have been on the books since 1907 in one case and 1947 in the other, banning direct contributions and spending by corporations in federal election campaigns. Doing so would obliterate precedents that go back two and three decades.
The full impact of what the court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Even the word radical does not capture the extent to which the justices could turn our political system upside down. Will the high court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?
Citizens United, a conservative group, brought suit arguing that it should be exempt from the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie it made that was sharply critical of Hillary Clinton. The organization said it should not have to disclose who financed the film.
Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday’s big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.
I don’t have the space to cite all the precedents the court would have to set aside, going back to the Buckley campaign finance ruling of 1976, if it threw out the prohibition on corporate money. Suffice it to say that there is one member of the court who has spoken eloquently about the dangers of ignoring precedents.
“I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said. “Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough—and the court has emphasized this on several occasions—it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn’t answer the question, it just poses the question.”
This careful jurist continued: “And you do look at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments.”
He learnedly cited Alexander Hamilton,  who wrote in Federalist 78: “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, the likely swing vote in this case, was exactly right when he said these things during his 2005 confirmation hearings. If he uses his own standards, it is impossible to see how he can justify the use of “arbitrary discretion” to discard a well-established system whose construction began with the Tillman Act of 1907.
Were the courts that set the earlier precedents “legitimate”? This ban was upheld over many years by justices of a variety of philosophical leanings. We are not talking about overturning a single decision by a bunch of activists in robes seizing a temporary court majority.
Are the precedents “workable”? The answer is clearly yes, which is why there is absolutely no popular demand to let corporate cash loose into our politics. Our system would be less “workable” if the court abruptly changed the law.
Has the precedent been “eroded”? Absolutely not. In case after case, no matter where particular court majorities stood on particular campaign finance provisions, the ban on corporate contributions was taken for granted. As the court stated just six years ago, Congress’ power to prohibit direct corporate and union contributions “has been firmly embedded in our law.” That’s what you call “settled expectations.”
This case is the clearest test Justice Roberts has faced so far as to whether he meant what he said to Congress in 2005. I truly hope he passes it. If he doesn’t, he will unleash havoc in our political system and greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court he leads.
    
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

Progressives Pay the Price for Confusing a Party With a Movement

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090903_progressives_pay_the_price_for_confusing_a_party_with_a_movement/

Posted on Sep 3, 2009

By David Sirota
The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive “movement” have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.
Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, anti-war and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor—specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.
The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members—janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other “regular folks”—to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).
This wasn’t totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed that Democratic Party promotion was key to progressive movement causes. And anyway, during the Bush era, many of those causes automatically helped Democrats by indicting Republicans.
But after the 2008 election, the strategy’s bankruptcy is undeniable.
As we now see, union dues underwrote Democratic leaders who today obstruct serious labor law reform and ignore past promises to fix NAFTA. Green groups’ resources helped elect a government that pretends sham “cap and trade” bills represent environmental progress. Health care groups promising to push a single-payer system got a president not only dropping his own single-payer promises, but also backing off a “public option” to compete with private insurance. And anti-war funding delivered a Congress that refuses to stop financing the Iraq mess, and an administration preparing to escalate the Afghanistan conflict.
Of course, frustrated progressives might be able to forgive the groups that promised different results, had these postelection failures prompted course corrections.
For example, had the left’s pre-eminent groups responded to Democrats’ health care capitulations by immediately announcing campaigns against these Democrats, progressives could feel confident that these groups were back to prioritizing a movement agenda. Likewise, had the big anti-war organizations reacted to Obama’s Afghanistan escalation plans with promises of electoral retribution, we would know those organizations were steadfastly loyal to their anti-war brand.
But that hasn’t happened. Despite the president’s health care retreat, most major progressive groups continue to cheer him on, afraid to lose their White House access and, thus, their Beltway status. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Moveon.org has “yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan” while VoteVets’ leader all but genuflected to Obama, saying, “People [read: professional political operatives] do not want to take on the administration.”
In this vacuum, movement building has been left to underfunded (but stunningly successful) projects like Firedoglake.com, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and local organizations. And that’s the lesson: True grass-roots movements that deliver concrete legislative results are not steered by marble-columned institutions, wealthy benefactors or celebrity politicians—and they are rarely ever run from Washington. They are almost always far-flung efforts by those organized around real-world results—those who don’t care about party conventions, congressional cocktail parties or White House soirees they were never invited to in the first place.
Only when enough progressives realize that truism will any movement—and any change—finally commence.
David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

5 Reasons Why Van Jones and Progressives are Better Off With Jones Out of the White House

By Don Hazen, AlterNet
Posted on September 7, 2009, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142460/

The end of Van Jones' brief career as a White House insider, in the semi-obscure position of special adviser for green jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality, is likely good for Van Jones and very good for progressives.
Yes, currently it seems as if Fox News' Glenn Beck -- who spent the past few weeks viciously smearing Jones -- has won one. In fact, Beck has done Jones, and all of us, amitzvah.
And considering that the White House, and for that matter Washington's liberal establishment, failed to come to his defense in the face of relentless attacks by the right-wingers at Fox (very similar to what Fox did to Barack Obama leading up to the election), Jones's liberation should make him a happy camper.
Early Skepticism
Much of Jones' broad base of fans was excited when word spread that he would be taking his prodigious talents to the White House, working on the inside to spread the gospel of green jobs. Many were surprised and pleased to see Obama, ever the centrist, willing to bring in a firebrand like Jones to shake things up.
But more than a few wondered, "Jeez, how is that going to work?" They knew that Jones, arguably the most effective communicator in Democratic and progressive politics -- and yes, that includes  Obama -- was going to have to control his tongue, and in many cases shut his mouth.
Part of what made Jones popular was telling it like it is. Jones inspired audiences, especially young people, with the notion that a radical vision, combined with innovative ideas and fundamental organizing, could work in tandem with our political system.
And some also wondered, was green jobs enough when it was health care, the banks and economic crisis, the escalation in Afghanistan, and the battles with the right, that were dominating the national discourse. We knew he was the "green jobs czar," but there were 30 czars in the White House -- so many that Obama was known to joke about a show called "Dancing with the Czars."
Why was Jones going indoors, when there were big fights outdoors, all across the country?
As it turns out, the White House may have taken him in with open arms, but apparently was glad to see him go.
FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher wrote: "Now he's been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35 percent of all Democrats believed as of 2007 -- that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11. Well, that and calling Republicans 'assholes.' "
So where are all the statements defending Van Jones by those who were willing to exploit him when it served their purpose? Why aren't they standing up and defending one of their own, who has done nothing that probably the majority of people in the Democratic Party haven't done at one time or another? Is he no longer "one of their own?"
So yes, Jones tried the inside, but now he's back on the outside. Here are five reasons why we are all better off:
1. Now a He's Household Name: Beck has increased Jones' visibility and name recognition immeasurably. Although he has been wildly popular in progressive circles, and a headliner at progressive conferences like Take Back America and the Netroots Nation, Jones was still a relative unknown for the population at large. Now he has a national stage.

2. He's Been Rescued From Obscurity: Special adviser to the Council for Environmental Quality. Hmm. That doesn't quite have the ring of power and influence. Jones took one for the team by taking an obscure position in the first place. And he took another one for the team by realizing quickly that the right-wing smear campaign against him was going to be a distraction.
Now Jones is free to climb to a much higher level of visibility and influence millions of people in ways he couldn't at that White House job.
3. He's the Leader Progressives Need: Let's face it. For reasons not altogether clear, there is no single powerful, articulate leader of progressive forces, which include many millions of Americans. It's time we have such a leader.
With key elements of the union movement squandering enormous resources and time fighting each other, and many issues competing for air space, a credible, charismatic strategic leader like Jones could help to give direction, set priorities and generally give shape to what has so far been an anemic progressive presence in the Obama era.
Those with the most popularity and name recognition among progressives -- Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers and Robert Reich to mention a few -- can't do what Jones can do. Donna Edwards and Keith Ellison are emerging in Congress as national leaders, and they will be strong complements to Jones -- in fact, the three represent a new progressive generation, one less lily white than the one that preceded it. But Van is the Man. 

4. He Has a Renewed Charge to Speak the Truth: Jones was attacked by the right for basically saying what is true: that Republicans are assholes (but he also said: "I, Van Jones can be one, too."); that green-jobs organizing has to go far beyond solar panels; that African Americans are victimized by environmental racism by "white polluters, and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color's communities because they don't have a racial justice frame"; and the biggie -- that the Bush administration had to be challenged on 9/11.
At a minimum, given all the information they had, Bush, Cheney and Co. were colossally, and perhaps criminally, inept leading up to 9/11, and no doubt there is much more to be told about their story.

5. He Can Provide Real Vision and Organizing Framework: Jones' book: The Green Collar Economy, was briefly a New York Times best-seller, and now it just might make it back on the list (just as Jeremy Scahill's book on Blackwater has reappeared on the N.Y. Times extended list for the third time due to Blackwater staying in the news).
The liberation of Van Jones will give him the opportunity to fully explain his blueprint on green jobs, but also connect it to the political economy and the need for resources to train young people in the skills needed to bring a green economy to the U.S.
But perhaps even better is that Jones will be free to draw out the complex connections between various issues, such as the huge waste of resources and lives in the war on Afghanistan and how that affects jobs and the environment -- here in the U.S. and in that war-torn, abysmally poor country.

And Jones will be free to mobilize people in support of climate-change protection. As my colleague Addie Stan notes:
The right-wing attacks on Jones may well be linked to organizing against Obama and the Democrats' plans on the environment. GOP Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, who lends his endorsement to Grassfire, an organization that organizes members of the armed patriot movement through its ResistNet site, called on Jones to resign, saying, "His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.
Grassfire is currently organizing ground-level opposition to the clean-energy legislation -- especially its cap-and-trade mechanism -- supported by the White House."
Jones Will Be Stronger
Some may think that the relentless red-baiting and piling up of distortions and lies by the right-wing media machine might leave Jones politically wounded. I doubt it.
Fame is a valuable commodity in our society. And now, it is clear that Jones is a celebrity. In a short time, people will have a hard time remembering exactly what made Jones famous, but famous he will be. And he will have a major pulpit -- thanks to his oratory gifts and to how the media treats notorious celebs.
There is a long history of political resurrection in America. Remember that the Rev. Al Sharpton was sued for slander and ordered to pay $345,000 in damages after he was deemed guilty for making defamatory statements about the Dutchess County, N.Y., prosecutor, Steve Pagones, after Sharpton insisted in the infamous Tawana Brawley case that Brawley's fabricated story of rape was true.
And according to Wikipedia, on May 9, 2008, the Associated Press reported that Sharpton and his businesses owed almost $1.5 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. Sharpton owed $931,000 in federal income tax and $366,000 to New York, and his for-profit company, Rev. Al Communications, owed $176,000 to the state. Yet few would disagree that Sharpton is currently one of the 10 most influential African Americans in America.
Consistently, fame seems to trump radicalism and scandal.
Yes, Jones was a leader in the retro-named, radical group STORM: Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement. But that is nothing compared to Germany's Joschka Fischer. Fisher was able to become foreign minister, despite the fact that Fischer was a leader of a radical group called the Putzgruppe, which had fought in several violent street battles with the police.
A series of photographs taken at a street battle in 1973 clearly show Fischer clubbing a policeman, to whom Fischer later apologized. This was but one of a range of politically radical acts by Fischer.
Seeing what happens next in the trajectory of Jones will be very interesting. But the betting on this end is that Jones will return to his role as visionary leader of progressive forces, and he will be in a stronger position to promote change, provide inspiration and rally the troops.

Van Jones' Resignation: A Moment of Truth For Liberal Institutions in the Veal Pen

By Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake
Posted on September 6, 2009, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142457/

I first met Van Jones when he was honored last year by the Campaign for America's Future at their gala dinner.  He was being swarmed by all of the liberal institutional elite, who just could not be more full of praise for the impressive environmental leader and prison reform organizer.  Everybody wanted Van Jones on their board.  Everyone wanted him at their fundraisers.  Everyone wanted a piece of his formidable limelight.
Now he's been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 -- that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.  Well, that and calling Republicans "assholes."  I'm pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.
So where are all the statements defending Van Jones by those who were willing to exploit him when it served their purpose?  Why aren't they standing up  and defending one of their own, who has done nothing that probably the majority of people in the Democratic party haven't done at one time or another?  Is he no longer "one of their own?"
Someon