The 9th and 10th Amendments

The 9th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution alludes to "rights retained by the people"; the 10th Amendment alludes to "powers reserved to the people."

Funny how these unarticulated Constitutional rights have remained unarticulated these 222 years...

What if the people of this nation had retained not only unspecified rights and reserved not only unspecified powers but also a sense of Constitutional entitlement and a political imagination?

I dare to suggest that we wouldn't be floating aimlessly in this ship of fools; but, perhaps, I'm overly optimistic.

Obama's secret war in the Yemen against "al-Qaeda" is just further confirmation of his complete subservience to the Plutocratic Machiocracy that this country has become. Anyone paying attention knows that the Yemeni government has been involved for years in a protracted tribal revolt that has absolutely nothing to do with any part of the world EXCEPT the Yemen.

The stooge who managed to set himself on fire on Northwest flight 253 was just that: a stooge. He does not appear to have any credible connection whatsoever with the ongoing civil war in Yemen.

Obama is entirely complicit with the radical Right's imperialistic war-plan. All of this is just dress rehearsal for Iran--which may have been the "real" target from the very beginning.

Maintaining unemployment levels at 10% should ensure a healthy recruiting pool for the military. Everything is falling into place.

Some of us thought that Obama was going to be the "black Bobby Kennedy." Perhaps he is better thought of as the radical Right's "Manchurian candidate."

What a betrayal.

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Climate Debt, Capitalism, Why He Wants a Tribunal for Climate Justice and Much More

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Climate Debt, Capitalism, Why He Wants a Tribunal for Climate Justice and Much More

Forget Obama! The Real Change President Is Bolivia's Morales

No Surprise Here

U.S. mercenary proxies behind bombings.

A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11

Do you recall that bon mot delivered by Joe Biden against the cynical 9/11 mantra of Rudy Giuliani during the last Presidential race?

Anyone listening to Obama's speech at West Point should have been reminded of that clever line--only this time, it applies to Biden's running mate, Barack Obama.

It's no longer enough that Obama is substantially continuing the criminal policies of his predecessor; he's even employing Bush's speech writers.

"My fellow Amnesians, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Oh, and by the way, did I mention 9/11? Good thing you won't fall for that scare tactic any longer! Thank you and God bless the Orwellian States of Amnesia."

What an arc George W. Obama has traveled in the past 12 months: from the sublime campaign, to the ridiculous sell out of healthcare "reform" to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, to the contemptible fear-mongering with which he introduced his plan to "finish the (undefined) job" in Afghanistan.

The U.S. will increase its troop strength in that beleagured country by at least 30,000 souls. Our stalwart ally, Great Britain, has promised to cough up an additional 500 troops. If I've done the math right, that comes to a commitment on the part of Great Britain that is 1/60th of our own.

The Brits are clearly content to let Obama hang himself on his own pitard. But then, this has always been Halliburton's war, and Blackwater's, and Raytheon's--not the war of the British people, who might take umbrage should their government engage in such a reckless escalation of this U.S.-created conflict.

This is also the Democratic Party's war, what with the 2010 mid-term elections looming and the Obama Administration's duplicity on numerous fronts--campaign promises completely ignored, and with a straight face--threatening the Party's ample seat-advantage in Congress. An advantage that the Administration has squandered from day one of its tenure in office.

And yet, like dogs, we the sheeple of these Orwellian States return to our own vomit.

"Struck me kind of funny/Kind of funny, yes, indeed/How at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe" [Bruce Springsteen].

The Sixth Commandment Campaign

The GKS is embarking upon a campaign to raise the Socratic questions that the craven political Right of this country refuses to ask itself: What is the difference between war and terrorism? How can people who profess to hold the Torah sacred ignore the 6th commandment ("Thou shalt not kill")?

The anti-abortion crowd distributes a bumper sticker that reads:

ABORTION--What part of "Thou shalt not kill" don't you understand?

Our motto:

MILITARISM--What part of "Thou shalt not kill" don't you understand?

For far too long the militarists have gotten a free pass in this country. But they have some 'splainin to do--starting at the top with one Barack Hussein Obama.

Post-Invasion Birth Defects Soar in Iraq

WE SHALL BE LOATHED FOR GENERATIONS.

Post-Invasion Birth Defects Soar on Iraq

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Quick Quiz

Friends don't let friends do which of the following?

a) Drive drunk

b) Patronize Starbucks

c) Vote Republican

d) Join the military

e) All of the above

ANSWER KEY:

The correct answer is (e) all of the above. The reasoning behind this answer is simple: if you love someone, you will give them permission to heed the still, small voice of conscience. Opt out of the conspiracy of silence that gives aid and comfort to the permanent war economy.

"I dreamed last night, I saw Joe Hill..."

The IWW's position on war and militarism!

Where the Revolution Begins

We are told that it takes tremendous courage, true heroism in fact, to put on a uniform and body armor and, with legions likewise attired and equipped with virtually unlimited material resources and the most powerful weaponry ever devised by the black arts of man, descend upon a foreign country and make war upon its civilian population.

But, in our heart of hearts, and in the loneliest depths and quiet of the night, we know better.

We know better and yet we do nothing. Occasionally, someone does step forward--a Nat Turner figure--who can no longer stand the contradictions inherent in our collective state of denial and takes "justice" into his own hands.

We turn on him with fury: for in the face of our impotence, he had the temerity to act. And with his act our own complicity with the murderous affair we call "war" and "occupation" and even "liberation" is permitted to surface and shatter our lives.

We vow that he shall pay for our sins with every last measure of his own life--and then some. We vilify his name, his memory, his family, his community. Our rage is insatiable; but that is because our own guilt mocks us beyond redemption and at every turn.

The President himself may attend the memorial and rise to speak stirring words of valor, of sacrifice, of honor that accrues to unflinching resolve. But, in our heart of hearts, we know that when we essay murder most foul we risk being answered in kind.

And it is there, in our heart of hearts, where appears the faint hint of our true helplessness in the face of the mayhem we ourselves have wrought--in the form of a slight fissure, a fraying of the smooth fabric, something approximating a tear--that the revolution begins.

For it is there, and only there, that we say, "Enough."

Enough. No more. We can no longer hold the wolf by its ears. We had no business taking hold of it that way in the first place, and if it chooses to bite us upon release, so be it. We are done with this. We are done.

Talk about courage, about "true heroism" all you like; but find it there.

Find it there.

Dear NPR:

Tragically, today, I learned of two mass murders: one at Ft. Hood, Texas, the other in Orlando, Florida. Steve Inskeep reported on the Ft. Hood shooting during Morning Edition. I read about the Orlando shooting at NPR's web site this afternoon. What struck me about Mr. Inskeep's report on Ft. Hood was his announcement of the religious affiliation of the alleged shooter (whose name alone, Nidal Hasan, might indicate to the listener a likely religious affiliation). The report about Orlando makes absolutely no mention of the religious affiliation of the alleged shooter in that case (though his name, Jason Rodriguez, may also suggest a likely religious affiliation). I wonder why NPR chose to announce the suspect's religious affiliation in the one case and not the other. Is religious affiliation relevant in either case? If so, say how--and make an explicit argument to support your position. If not, omit irrelevant details that, by their very inclusion, may be understood to suggest that the news agency is in possession of evidence that it does not possess.

The Ghaffar Khan Society Salutes Matthew Hoh, Man of Conscience

Matthew Hoh Resigns: State Department Official Quits Over Afghan War

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This Past Week on the Thomas Jefferson Hour

Professor Clay Jenkinson discussed Jefferson's belief that the U. S. Constitution needs to be torn up and re-written every generation.

Listen up!

Pacifism...

...is not "Passive-ism."

From The Bookshelf

Mark Kurlansky's Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2008).

The Imperial Presidency and the Lessons of History

My mother's side of the family were strong FDR Democrats. My grandfather worked in the Roosevelt Administration, directly under Jim Farley (a close political adviser to FDR and Chair of the DNC from 1932-1940). That said, I think that partisanship must always yield to history: we can fairly trace the beginnings of the Imperial Presidency to FDR's door.

To his credit, FDR himself recognized the dangers that his strengthening of Executive power posed to American aspirations towards democracy:

"We have built up new instruments of public power," he wrote. "In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people" (FDR, Public Papers, V, 16).

Since FDR, the political puppets of this country's economic autocracy have been both Democrats and Republicans (what I term Democan-Republicrats). The so-called Reagan Revolution of the 1980's accelerated the conversion of the two party system into a monoparty of plutocratic political puppetry with conservative (the Republican "party") and liberal (the Democratic "party") wings.

This process was somewhat moderated during the tenures of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton--but it would be a mistake to think that, under the Democratic leadership of Clinton, this process was in any way "rolled-back." It was, in fact, advanced (Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, for example).

Eight years of Bush-Cheney put the pedal to the metal. The Bush-Cheney regime was composed of Rightist radicals (neo-Fascists, in my book) who actually "auctioned off" responsibilities of the Federal Government to private corporations (Halliburton, Blackwater)--thereby transferring significant rights heretofore Constitutionally vouchsafed the American people to the management of for-profit business concerns.

The legacy of the rule of Bush-Cheney is, in my view, a radical, right-wing outrage perpetrated against the American people. I am tempted to call it a "coup," but I think it more accurate to regard it as the second accelerating phase of Reaganism.

The seeds of this outrage were planted, however, by our beloved FDR.

The responsibility for destroying the poisonous vines that have grown from FDR's planting have fallen to our equally beloved Barack Obama.

Barack "mistakes were made but let's look forward not back" Obama.

You see, this is the problem. As George Santayana rightly observed: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

By steadfastly refusing to learn from history President Obama is doomed to repeat it and, in repeating it, he becomes complicit with those who have mounted a sustained assault on American democracy.

Since Obama's election last November, the grass-roots "people's movement" that helped him to achieve his victory has lost its place: it no longer plays the role in national politics that it did during the campaign. Instead, Obama receives counsel from his "team of rivals." If that "team" is advising the President to ignore the lessons of history, then that team "rivals" our democratic aspirations as a people.

Advised by democracy's rivals or not, the buck stops with Barack Obama.

In the present circumstances, gentle, liberal, ameliorating measures will not be sufficient to reverse the legacy of the radical, right-wing outrages perpetrated against the American people--and, indeed, against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as against those kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured by agents of the U.S. government in its "War on [read: of] Terror" over the past decade.

What is needed are radical, left-wing, counter-measures specifically designed to address the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Cheney neo-Fascistic tilt of the Imperial Presidency. We need to reverse course.

And once the leftist correction of the Imperial Presidency has proved effective, i.e., once what FDR called a "people's government" has been effectively installed in our nation's capitol, then the final act of the Imperial Presidency can be one thing and one thing only: its self-dismantling. I know it's a lot to ask--of anyone but a true patriot.

Personally, I would like to see a Constitutional convention called and a 21st century document drafted that would place the power of the national government more squarely in the hands of the American people. A multi-party parliamentary social democracy that makes broad use of public referenda would be my preference, but I'm open to other possibilities.

The bottom line for me is that the American experiment in government of, by, and for the people should be renewed--and to do that, we need more than a slight tweak here and a gentle nudge there. We need major re-constructive surgery performed on the body politic and its instruments of government.

The American people must come to recognize the historical moment that they currently occupy and, in the process, admit to themselves that the installation of Barack Hussein Obama upon the throne of the Imperial Presidency will not produce the real change for which they hunger. Chump change is all they can realistically expect. And, at this historical moment, chump change just does not pay the bill.

2012

To Michael Moore, and to all those who say that it is too soon to criticize the Obama Administration's record on a wide range of issues, I ask the following:

It is almost 2010. Obama will spend half of 2011 and all of 2012 campaigning for re-election.

In 2012, when we still have troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the Gitmo gulag is still in operation, when extraordinary rendition is standard operating procedure and the CIA's off-shore torture chambers continue to be used, when it becomes clear that health care "reform" is the same smoke-and-mirrors sham as campaign finance "reform"--is, in fact, a bonanza for health insurance companies, when illegal Israeli settlements continue to be built in the West Bank as the Obama Administration looks the other way, when the FBI continues its covert operations against those who take public exception to war-without-end and capitalist exploitation, what will you say then?

Think about it.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Revisited

From time to time, President Obama sends me little mash notes, just to make me feel special. Here's the note I received from him today:

This morning, Michelle and I awoke to some surprising and humbling news. At 6 a.m., we received word that I'd been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

But I also know that throughout history the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes.

That is why I've said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won't all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.

This award -- and the call to action that comes with it -- does not belong simply to me or my administration; it belongs to all people around the world who have fought for justice and for peace. And most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better.

So today we humbly recommit to the important work that we've begun together. I'm grateful that you've stood with me thus far, and I'm honored to continue our vital work in the years to come.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

From your mouth to God's ear, Mr. President. But enough talk; for talk is cheap.

Back in 2004, then-President Bush's speechwriters inserted the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" into his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Anyone paying attention understood that phrase as code--intended to make the opponents of Affirmative Action feel that they occupy some sort of moral high-ground.

Ironically, however, Bush's eight years in the White House set the bar for Presidential competence and intellect so low that Barack Obama has become the beneficiary of a unique sort of "soft bigotry."

For, unlike his predecessor, Obama is not manifestly stupid. He is, in fact, a delightfully intelligent man. He can put words together to form sentences that actually work in English--a language that Bush struggled with, despite it being his native tongue.

When Obama speaks, he speaks well; and the public, both at home and abroad, is charmed.

The only problem is, Obama says one thing and does another.

And this is where the soft bigotry of low Presidential expectations comes in. For very few among us on the Left seem to be willing or able to hold Barack Obama accountable for his actions.

He speaks, we gush, hug each other, feel great, and look the other way as illegal wars continue to be prosecuted, Constitutional guarantees continue to be trampled under foot by the Federal government, and corporate special interests continue to receive huge government subsidies at the expense of the American people.

So, in reply to Obama's note of this morning, I say:

Forgive me, Mr. President, if I turn a jaundiced eye upon the Nobel Prize Committee's recent decision to honor you as a "man of peace." To date, the track record of your Administration on matters of war and peace surely suggests that the award is, to put it gently, premature.

I hope and pray that you have every intention of proving worthy of the honor that has been bestowed upon you.

You say that you do; but, then, you say a lot things.

When do you plan to begin? I await your decisive, Presidential action as Commander-in-Chief.

End the Empire, restore the republic. End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bring peace with justice to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel-Palestine.

Or admit that this year's Nobel Peace Prize competition was just a beauty contest, and you just happen to have that winning smile.

The Envelope, Please!

This year's Orwellian Peace Prize goes to ... Barack Hussein Obama! President Obama is the person in the past year who has worked the hardest to fulfill Orwell's Newspeak prophecy: War is Peace.

By the way, I am personally thrilled to learn that I am now eligible to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature for a book that I may one day, possibly, write. Sure takes the pressure off; I was worried that I might actually have to DO something to be considered for the award...I mean do something besides give others the hope that I may some day do something...

It's just good news all around! Style over substance!

Meanwhile, Mahatma Gandhi and Gaffar Khan (two individuals who actually DID DO SOMETHING towards the achievement of world peace) are still waiting to be awarded their prestigious prizes.

Marx was so right: the first time around, it's tragedy; the second time around, it's farce.

Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20 Protest in Pittsburgh

Twitter Crackdown: NYC Activist Arrested for Using Social Networking Site during G-20 Protest in Pittsburgh

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IT'S OFFICIAL! USA IS NOW A POLICE STATE! THE OBAMA DEPT. OF JUSTICE IN ACTION!

Every day, a new betrayal.

The Fire Next Time

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time! --James Baldwin

The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order. --Garry Wills

So this is what we are up against: the National Security State. This Leviathan is the enemy of the American experiment in government of, by, and for the people. And all who cooperate with the Leviathan, for whatever reasons, answering to whatever motives, are aiding and abetting the enemy.

When Barack Obama was elected President, I took particular pride in the notion that the baton had been passed from the thick of the Baby-Boomer generation to my own. Sandwiched as the President and I are between the tail end of the post-WW2 pregnancy bubble and the apathetic Gen X-ers, it seemed to me that BHO was in the proverbial "catbird seat": able to see where the Boomers had gone wrong, but with enough Boomer idealism to spare to pick up the fallen McGovernite standard and undertake the non-violent people's revolution that this country so desperately needs.

Instead, BHO is riding on the Beltway carousel, neutralized, going nowhere fast. The revolution has, once again, been averted.

I must congratulate the Plutocratic War Party on yet another successful round: wresting democracy from the grasp of the American people, slipping a Presidential placebo in our mouths, turning up the volume on the Culture of Fear, and changing the subject once again. Welcome to Oceania and Newspeak, our official language. Beware the terrorists (i.e., civilians who fight back): they are everywhere. That swarthy looking guy pushing the fruit cart--he's a wizard with the beauty-products. A little hairspray, a little eye-shadow, a back-pack and cell-phone and KABOOM!

Wait till the terrorists in Iraq (pronounced EYE-RACK) get a hold of that guy's training manual. The IED will be a thing of the past.

Makes me think what a poor ignorant sap Timothy McVeigh must have been--lugging all those sacks of fertilizer around when all he had to do was stop by the local Rite-Aid and pick up the real deal. Just goes to show you how U.S. military training can't stack up to Afghan Jihadist know-how.

I must say: I am so sick of being inundated with bald assertions proffered as evidence. Bald assertions are the coin of the 4th estate's realm. No one has betrayed the American experiment in democracy like our "news" media. For the love of God and country, dis-"embed" yourselves and report on the anti-democratic tyranny of the National Security State!

It appears to me to be 1984--in perpetuity. Which is a good thing, I suppose, for then I am perpetually 24. And, at 24, I have energy to burn. What to do? What to do? I know! Let's go shopping! When all else fails, wouldn't I look good in another new shirt?

Better to shave our heads, don the Mahatma's homespun tunic, and dedicate the rest of our lives to derailing the Imperial juggernaut. Somehow. Some way. Some time. Sooner, rather than later.

For everyone's sake.

Peter Gay on Western Civilization circa 1970:

"Men have been made into accomplices to their own destruction. They have been victimized by shrewd manipulators who give them meaningless concessions--a little more money, a so-called free electoral system, and deafening, soul-destroying entertainment. And what has been the result? Men have been numbed until they demand neither genuine benefits nor real power. They feel pleasure when they should be feeling pain...What good is prosperity if all men have the same taste? What good is a free press if all newspapers print the same opinions?"

--Peter Gay, The Bridge of Criticism (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1970): 147-148.

A Little Old-Fashioned Vituperation...

...does a body good.

Let us begin with Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is a snake-oil salesman, and the son of a snake-oil salesman, who sees himself as a latter day Woodrow Wilson: a liberal idealist who has fought in the trenches of real-world politics in an effort to actualize his ideals.

Frankly, I don't know what sort of a mirror he's looking in; what I see (and have seen since I voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992 Pennsylvania Democratic primary) is a political opportunist whose actions throughout his public life have continually belied his liberal credentials. Granted, next to George W. Bush, Clinton looks like a saint. But then, who wouldn't?

Mrs. Clinton, perhaps. No, Shrillery is no saint. She was, and remains, DLWYR: Daddy's Little Wellesley Young Republican, and the less said about her the better.

Indeed, if the Democratic Party is ever to redeem itself, if it is ever to reassert a valid claim to being the "party of the people," it will have to distance itself from the Clintons and their "New Democrat" cohort.

Which brings me to President Barack Hussein Placebo. President Placebo campaigned on a platform which promised to bring genuine change to the direction of this country after 8 years of neo-con junta rule. But rather than bring that change, he has elected to ignore the will of the people and to continue most of the policies put in place by his recent Democan-Republicrat predecessors: Clinton and Bush.

Indeed, the "team of rivals" with which he has surrounded himself is heavily weighted with Clintonians. So, where is the change we were promised?

As it turns out, he (President Placebo himself) is the "change." You see, he's African-American, and that is an historic change for the aptly named White House--a change that warms the hearts of leftists like yours truly. This is the "change" that the plutocratic war party that runs what Garry Wills has rightly termed the "national security state" has offered the American people in exchange for the cure they began to clamor for in the 2006 mid-term elections.

But leftists like yours truly are not so easily bought off. This is because we were converted years ago to Dr. King's re-vitalized Whitmanian vision of an America where the content of one's character trumps the color of one's skin every time. So the question that the Whitmanian left keeps asking is: "What IS the content of President Placebo's character?" How could he offer himself as the substance of the change in national direction that a solid majority of the people of this country elected him to effect?

This Whitmanian leftist, this "Old Democrat" of the Jefferson-Jackson-McGovern line, hopes and prays that the current occupant of the Oval Office will awaken one fine morning--very, very soon--and re-invent himself as Barack Hussein Obama: the promised agent of change for whom we voted, for whom we volunteered our time, and to whose campaign and cause we contributed money. Because if he doesn't, he will go down in American history as one more snake-oil salesman who joined the plutocratic militarists in their relentless, post-World War 2 assault on the American experiment in government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

Entangled Giant - The New York Review of Books

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You don't have to take my word for it anymore; Wills nails the fix we're in from top to bottom. Read it, and rise up.

And many thanks to Rob for sending this along!

Who Rules America: C. Wright Mills 50 Years Later

Who Rules America: C. Wright Mills 50 Years Later

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In my view, Mills's description of the power structure in the U.S. is far more accurate than the author of this article is willing to allow. That said, everyone who thinks government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" is a good thing ought to be studying The Power Elite and organizing the non-violent people's revolution that alone can render the American reality something close to the American dream of the Whitmanian Republic.

"Scared Selfish," Or, "You Can't Blame The Mess We're In On 9/11 Anymore."

In 2004, the academic journal American Sociologist published a special issue on the "sociology of terrorism." One of the more interesting articles was entitled, "Scared Selfish: A Culture of Fear's Values in the Age of Terrorism."

The argument put forward by the authors of the article depends, in part, upon Barry Glassner's 1999 study (note well the date), The Culture of Fear (COF). Glassner's book describes how certain interest groups in American society consistently employ fear as a tactic to circumvent reasoned debate about crucial issues of public concern. Fear is used because it generates a visceral response that drowns out deliberation and induces a craving for comfort and frantic attempts to silence that craving. In the process, intelligent discussion is silenced as well. When rational deliberation is short-circuited, democracy is rendered dysfunctional.

The claim that those who commit acts of terror are enemies of democracy is hardly controversial; but what about those who engage in the systematic inculcation of a culture of fear through other means? Do they not occupy much of the same moral ground as terrorists? After all, fear-mongers target their appeals to the same portion of the human brain as terrorists: the so-called "reptilian" brain. Perhaps fear-mongers are best thought of as individuals and groups engaged in a form of "soft" terror.

Glassner argues in COF that Americans are frightened of the "wrong things"--e.g., Willie Horton, "Welfare Queens" and, most recently, universal health-care's government-sponsored "death panels." By the way, it does not strike me as merely coincidental that these three examples were put into popular circulation by those who hug the political right. That said, those on the left are certainly not above circumventing rational deliberation when the opportunity arises.

Glassner argues further that even when Americans fear legitimate threats, those threats are systematically exaggerated for tactical advantage. The authors of "Scared Selfish" offer an interesting example: "if an attack like the one on 9/11 occurred every year, a person residing in this country is still 15 times more likely to be murdered by a fellow citizen and has a similar likelihood of dying in a car accident. Clearly, by these objective numbers, the threat of dangerous drivers and homicidal neighbors is greater than the threat of terrorism" (p. 95).

We know (or claim to know) those who constitute the "hard" terror architects of the American "culture of fear." But who are its "soft" terror architects? The authors of "Scared Selfish" suggest several candidates:

Creating and sustaining this fear serves some of the most powerful interests in American society. The media are interested in cultivating fear because it sells more ads and publications. The more afraid people are, the more information they crave. Politicians are interested in cultivating fear because it provides fertile ground to offer solutions. The more afraid people are, the more they crave solutions to the problem. As an added benefit, a political entity can blame the opposition for creating the dreaded conditions and stake out safe political positions against the danger. Commercial interests also benefit as people seek goods and services to make them safer. Finally, various governmental institutions benefit as they receive more funding to take care of the problem (p. 94).

These are all fairly obvious candidates and, in my view, are all rightly implicated. But we can provide more specific identification of the culprits involved: individual by individual, corporation by corporation, government agency by government agency. Fear, though naturally occurring in every culture, is present in unnatural quantities in American culture and, as Glassner's book demonstrates by its publication date, this is not a post-9/11 phenomenon. Just as major brand name cigarette manufacturers raised levels of nicotine in their products in order to addict their victims, the architects of what Seymour Melman once named the Permanent War Economy (the Pentagon, the Congress, Presidential Administrations stretching from at least Truman to Obama, defense contractors and weapons manufacturers) and their allies in this country's news and communications media are not anonymous. They have names, addresses (physical and electronic), and phone numbers. A minority of these individuals have jobs that depend upon public elections for their tenure—only a very small minority.

This brings up the widely suppressed fact that our “democracy” is largely controlled by individuals and organizations not held directly accountable to the people; consequently, to describe the American government as “democratic” is an unwarranted conceit. Even so, the term “democracy” ought to be retained by Americans as a prescription, so long as we do not trick ourselves into believing that it is adequate as a description. That said, the “soft” terror enemies of our democratic aspirations can be, and should be, specifically identified and held publically accountable for every contribution that they make towards the continued inculcation of the culture of fear. We must drive them from power and take our economy and our government from their grip.

On October 31, 1963, then Sen. George S. McGovern attempted to do this very thing. For on that long ago date, Sen. McGovern introduced a bill on the floor of the Senate entitled the Economic Conversion Act. That bill was designed to facilitate the conversion of this country’s economy from its basis in non-productive warfare industries to productive peace-time industries. McGovern introduced this bill in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and, therefore, at (or near) one of the high water marks of the Cold War. In other words, he attempted to prepare the country to abandon the culture of fear despite the fact that it was, even then, deep in fear’s embrace. The provisions of the Act were designed to reassure the large numbers of people employed in the so-called “defense” industry that the Federal government would actively supervise their transition to employment in new and productive peace-time industries. McGovern hoped to counter the (fear-driven) objections to dismantling the Permanent War Economy: too many people will lose their jobs, our entire way of life will collapse.

The bill went nowhere, of course. I believe it received a total of two votes. I don’t know who voted for it besides McGovern himself. Within a month, President Kennedy was shot dead and Lyndon Johnson entered the Oval office and began to escalate the United States’ utterly unwarranted aggression against the people of Viet Nam. The tyranny of the monied warrior class (the de facto Plutocratic War Party that runs this country) had triumphed again and McGovern’s attempt to use the machinery of government to undermine the culture of fear was delayed. Nine years later, when McGovern’s populist campaign for the Presidency took the Democratic Party establishment by surprise, powerful figures within that establishment (we can name names: Hubert Humphrey, George Meany, and Richard Daley) worked to deprive McGovern of the support of organized labor, the Chicago party machine and, in the case of Humphrey, attempted to publicly discredit McGovern by insinuating that he had ties to the Communist Party.

It isn't much, but we can point fingers. We can name names. We can refuse direct participation in the Permanent War Economy. We can resist the culture of fear and renounce those who appeal to our reptilian brains and trade on our insecurities.

Let 9/11/09 be just another day. Or let it be the first day that we begin to assert our right as a people to be free from the purveyors of “soft” terror. Let us at least act as free women and men, pledging to one another that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Perhaps if we begin to act in that way, we will eventually come to believe that we deserve to live free from the manufactured culture of fear and the Permanent War Economy that is its sole beneficiary.

That Was Fast!

Barack Obama entered office making concessions to the Plutocratic War Party and, in record time, rendered himself and his presidency practically irrelevant. How so? The task that faces the present generation of Americans is to take our country back from the plutocratic militarists who are strangling our economy at home and murdering innocents abroad.

Where's old George McGovern when you need him? The late Seymour Melman was one of Sen. McGovern's economic advisors. His thinking should be the new centerpiece of the next phase of the historic Jefferson-Jackson-McGovern movement to liberate the American people from the tyranny of the monied warrior class.

I invite President Obama to join us--or get out of the way.

When Did This Basic Principle of Jeffersonian Democracy Vanish from the Consciousness of the American People?

Against Standing Armies

"There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army." --Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1789. ME 7:323

"I do not like [in the new Federal Constitution] the omission of a Bill of Rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for... protection against standing armies." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. ME 6:387

"Nor is it conceived needful or safe that a standing army should be kept up in time of peace for [defense against invasion]." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Annual Message, 1801. ME 3:334

"Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people's] freedom and subversive of their quiet." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Lord North's Proposition, 1775. Papers 1:231

"The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force." --Thomas Jefferson to Chandler Price, 1807. ME 11:160

"A distinction between the civil and military [is one] which it would be for the good of the whole to obliterate as soon as possible." --Thomas Jefferson: Answers to de Meusnier Questions, 1786. ME 17:90

"It is nonsense to talk of regulars. They are not to be had among a people so easy and happy at home as ours. We might as well rely on calling down an army of angels from heaven." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1814. ME 14:207

"There shall be no standing army but in time of actual war." --Thomas Jefferson: Draft Virginia Constitution, 1776. Papers 1:363

"The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:184

"Bonaparte... transferred the destinies of the republic from the civil to the military arm. Some will use this as a lesson against the practicability of republican government. I read it as a lesson against the danger of standing armies." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Adams, 1800. ME 10:154

Today's conservatives regard themselves as the "keepers of the flame" of lower-case "r" republicanism. THEY have not forgotten Jefferson's admonitions against standing armies. The way that they get around the principle that a standing army is antithetical to a democratic republic is to declare that we are constantly at war. Hence, the Cold War followed World War II and, hard on the heels of the Cold War, the "War On [read: Of] Terror."

The Military Industrial Complex gets away with this War-Without-End only because we the people have forgotten what it means to be free.

Military Bases in the Continental United States

Military Bases in the Continental United States

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FEEL SAFE YET???

A case study in how to squander political momentum

That is how I would describe the trajectory of the Obama administration to date.

Or maybe this way: a colossal waste of personal charisma.

It was Obama's alleged left-leaning political convictions and his personal charm that led many of us to place our bets on his promise to effect real change in this country. But as the course of the health-care "debate" has unfolded (I put "debate" in scare quotes because there is no genuine debate, and there never has been; what we have been treated to is just more political theater--what I like to call the "theater of the corrupt"--that passes for debate in the era of manufactured consent), it has become painfully obvious that something is terribly wrong with the picture Obama painted for us of himself during the Presidential campaign.

Perhaps he really is one of the "best" among us--and as one of the "best" lacks all conviction (as Yeats profoundly noted in "The Second Coming"); or, perhaps, he is hamstrung by an almost pathological desire to please...But who does he desire to please? That, it seems to me, is the $ 64 Billion question...

Certainly not the "people" who continue under the illusion that they actually elected him; there must be someone else: those to whom he owes his political career and his present "historical" position as a person of color in the otherwise solidly White House.

As his tenure in the presidency has evolved, this "historical" position has been celebrated time and time again--no one mentioning the fact that Obama is not descended from Africans enslaved in the Americas--it's all about his complexion.

Well, OK. That is historical. And that appears to be the role he was assigned to play. A handsome black face in a high place to keep the liberals at bay.

Meanwhile, nothing really changes.

When I think of American political figures who have possessed real charisma--the kind that could galvanize public opinion and potentially force the plutocracy to grant concessions--I think of the Kennedy brothers (Jack and Bobby), Martin and Malcolm, and Barack Hussein Obama...

Hmmmm. Perhaps what really stands between BHO and his convictions is his completely understandable desire to see old age.

As Cindy Sheehan has argued, it is time for the "left" (if there is such a thing in this country) to wake up from the drowse of "hope-nosis" and take to the streets demanding real change.

They can't shoot us all.

In any event, it is time that we accept the fact that Obama has been effectively side-lined for the remainder of his term. We can no longer look to him for leadership but must cultivate leadership from the ground up. And we must find a way to do this en masse. Otherwise we will be ignored.

The demand for a single-payer health care program (not option--screw that "option" business--we want single payer health care like the rest of the civilized world) is a good place to begin.

In late 2006, I had the good fortune (if you can call it that) to require medical attention while on a research trip to Holland. Since I am not a Dutch citizen, I had some difficulty gaining access to the level of care my symptoms suggested that I needed. But I was befriended by a Dutch family who took me under their wing and saw to it that I was examined by a specialist. Once I had been admitted into the system, I saw first-hand what "socialized medicine" is all about. I received the absolute best medical care I have ever received in my life.

Fortunately, my symptoms were far worse than the underlying medical condition that caused them. The Dutch physicians who examined me made certain that that was the case before releasing me from their care. They were smart, multi-lingual, good-humored, caring, and conducted themselves with matchless professionalism. The hospital I was admitted to for testing was shockingly clean and the nursing staff and other professionals with whom I had to interact throughout the administration of a battery of tests were wonderfully kind to me and unfailingly attentive.

When I returned to the United States I sought follow-up treatment at a University Hospital (per the instructions of my Dutch physicians). The medical personnel refused to accept any of the findings of the Dutch doctors and proceeded to subject me to the same battery of tests that the Dutch had administered, plus some, yielding the same negative results. The tests were conducted in facilities that were dirty and shabby in comparison with what I had experienced in Holland. But the doctors and the hospital got what they wanted: about $10,000.

We must turn our backs on the theater of the corrupt that the media has been show-casing in its coverage of "town hall" meetings--the media is largely in the pocket of the plutocrats--and demand a SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE system, and nothing less.

If we cannot do this one thing for ourselves, then I suppose we get what we deserve; but how dare we foist this pathetic excuse for a health care system on the children we claim to love?

Issa Bagayogo

Last night, I saw the Malian musician Issa Bagayogo and his band perform in a free concert. They were truly superb. It made me marvel again at all the great music that comes out of Mali. And as I watched how he could make those over-fed white people in the audience get up and dance, it occurred to me that here was the solution to all of our problems: Mali must invade the U.S. and take it over...Just think about this...Rush Limbaugh (speaking of over-fed white people)--the man's addicted to pain-killers, right? It makes perfect sense. If you were Rush Limbaugh, wouldn't you be addicted to pain-killers? The pain is caused by the fear that white people (or their surrogates) may not always rule the world as they have for the last 500 years. Well, here's the remedy: let Mali take over and let Issa Bagayogo teach that miserable son of a bitch how to dance.

EXCLUSIVE: John Walker Lindh's Parents Discuss Their Son's Story, from Joining the US-Backed Taliban Army to Surviving a Northern Alliance Massacre, to His Abuse at the Hands of US Forces

EXCLUSIVE: John Walker Lindh's Parents Discuss Their Son's Story, from Joining the US-Backed Taliban Army to Surviving a Northern Alliance Massacre, to His Abuse at the Hands of US Forces

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In the immortal words of Bob Dylan: "Don't it make you feel ashamed/To live in a land/Where justice is a game?"

Newspeak Dictionary: Definition of a Terrorist

A civilian who fights back.

Synonym: extremist.

Unless and Until...

Unless and until we, as a people, decide that the maintenance of our health and the treatment of disease are too important to be left to the mercy of market forces, to decisions made with an eye to the for-profit bottom-line; unless and until we are able to muster the self-respect necessary to demand the complete reorganization (and/or dismantling) of for-profit insurance corporations, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, elder care facilities, and medical practices, we will never witness the revolution in health care that we want and, frankly, that we deserve.

The Obama Administration is presently colluding with the for-profit status quo to arrange our evacuation from one sinking ship into another--because that's the American Way. You don't want Coke? No worries. Here, have a Pepsi instead. Frying pan too hot for you? Not a problem. Just jump over here--into the fire.

We, the people, subscribe to the fiction that we have delegated the responsibility for our lives and welfare to democratically elected officials but, in fact, we have delegated that responsibility to the unelected individuals and organizations those elected officials depend upon and answer to: lobbyists for special interests, career bureaucrats, the Pentagon and its corporate welfare allies in the so-called defense industry.

We like sheep have gone astray and there is no help for us--unless and until we wake up and gain insight into the true nature of our predicament. The health care debacle is merely symptomatic of a far more pernicious affliction: a disease of the will. The will of the people that makes for a functioning democracy.

The American experiment in freedom has always been an under-realized ideal; under-realized because we sold our birthright as free women and men for a mess of commodification. Though our national mythology continues to look to the pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock as the commencement of our spiritual journey as a people, it is in fact the Jamestown settlement that was and remains the authentic emblem of the state of our national soul. We live and die by mercantilism.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. One believes himself the others' master, and yet is more a slave than they... J. J. Rousseau.

What Is To Be Done?

Leo Tolstoy, the last Christian.



Read Tolstoy's still timely Letter to Russian Liberals at the wonderful Anarchy Archives.

News Item

The White House has recently disclosed that double digit unemployment will soon be upon us (if it is not upon us already).

What an unexpected boon for military recruiters at a time when the project of U.S.-based Capitalist imperialism is struggling to enter a new phase.

This recession really is the answer to militarist prayers. How fortuitous! Who could have foreseen it?

The pressing need to find an exit strategy for Iraq has suddenly eased. The Obama Administration's commitment to increase U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan is no longer regarded as untenable.

Suicide bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan continue apace, but no one is minding the body count.

Yes we can! Yes we can!

Reality Check

For a reality check (after being lulled by the major news media and the handful of billionaires that own it into the false belief that the U.S. actually functions as a democratic republic), check out Democracy Now! and also the good people at the WSWS:
Then ask yourself why Iraq's petroleum industry is being divvied up among foreign oil companies and why the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of promotional tests that consistently (and, as I understand it, exclusively) favor white firefighters over their African American and Latino co-workers.

Capitalist Imperialism abroad and the Angry White Man Revanchement at home. Looks like it's back to business as usual in the U. S. of A.

Yes we can!

Change we can believe in!

November 2008 seems like such a long, long, time ago in a land far, far, away.

Incisive Commentary on the Recent Elections in Iran

From the World Socialist Web Site:

Iran, the media and the World Socialist Web Site
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play," Joseph Goebbels once declared. In the case of the American media, it is hardly necessary for the government to play. The keyboard plays itself.
This is certainly true of the media's treatment of the recent elections in Iran.
No sooner was the election over than the media settled on the desired interpretation of events: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was carrying out a "coup d'etat" through a "rigged" election. The opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, enjoyed overwhelming support and was leading a "green revolution" for freedom and democracy.
This analysis has been presented without even the pretense of objectivity. The possibility that there might be different sides to the story, other interpretations of the election results, is completely ignored. Facts that contradict or call into question the desired conclusion are ignored.
The various TV commentators and print reporters--to say nothing of the newspaper columnists--have become open partisans of the oppositional candidate, who happens to be the candidate favored by the United States.
The role of the New York Times, the mouthpiece of American liberalism, is particularly brazen. In retrospect, it is clear that the newspaper had prepared well in advance to assist the US government in a destabilization operation aimed at changing the top personnel and shifting the Tehran regime in a manner favorable to American economic and geostrategic interests. It sent chief foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen and Executive Editor Bill Keller to Tehran to cover developments, along with many other journalists and staff.
The Times has to this day presented no independent analysis of the actual election results. It has not acknowledged, let alone refuted, those establishment think tanks and commentators who have argued that the election results were by and large accurate.
In none of its articles has the "newspaper of record" referred, for example, to the analysis of Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, who conducted a poll showing that in the run-up to the election, Ahmadinejad was leading by a 2-to-1 margin. Instead, it has from day one accepted uncritically and promoted as fact the claims of Mousavi and his supporters.
The New York Times set the tone for the rest of the print media. Meanwhile, on television, the cable news stations carried non-stop and highly slanted coverage of the anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations.
The media has devoted a great deal of coverage to the tragic death of one young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, who has been proclaimed a martyr to the cause of democracy, even though the circumstances of her death are unclear and she was apparently a bystander, not a protester. The scale of Iranian state violence is inflated, while virtually nothing is said about US drone attacks on civilians in neighboring Pakistan that this week alone killed more than 80 people. Do the lives of these Pakistanis not count?
One does not need to be a supporter of the Iranian clerical regime--and the WSWS is the most consistent and principled opponent of this government--to recognize the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the American media.
There appears to be an inverse relationship between the resources the media devotes to a story and the reliable and serious information it provides. None of the more fundamental issues in Iran are ever addressed.
Nowhere in the mass media has there been a serious analysis of Iranian history (let alone the reactionary role of the US in that history) or the class dynamics of Iranian society. The actual program of Mousavi and his chief backer, the multimillionaire veteran of the regime, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, remains a blank page, as does Mousavi's role in repressing left-wing opposition in the 1980s.
There has been no analysis of the geopolitical interests at stake, above all the interests of the United States. The fact that Iran borders three countries that are presently subject to US military intervention--Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan--is not considered relevant in understanding what is taking place in the country. The long record of US provocation in Iran, including the CIA-organized overthrow of a popular nationalist government and Washington's support for the brutal dictatorship of the Shah, are mentioned in passing, if at all.
Propaganda in the guise of news and analysis has not been confined to the mainstream media. The major "left" publications--the Nation, Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, and many others--have fallen in line as well.
The standard-bearer of left-liberal politics in the US, the Nation, sent its chief foreign policy commentator, Robert Dreyfuss, to Iran to serve as an advocate of the "color revolution." As the WSWS revealed, Dreyfuss was once a prominent figure in the fascistic Lyndon LaRouche organization. He wrote a book denouncing the overthrow of the Shah.
Under his byline, the Nation published an interview, for the purpose of placing the election crisis in "perspective," with former foreign minister Ibrahim Yazdi. In his book, Dreyfuss had identified Yazdi as the CIA's contact within the clerical regime.
Supposedly "socialist" publications are no different. A recent post on the web site of Socialist Worker, the publication of the International Socialist Organization, declares approvingly that even forces "on the political right, who months ago would have agreed with a US strike against Iran, stood with Iranians"--that is, with supporters of Mousavi. That the ISO has aligned itself with neoconservative supporters of a war against Iran does not give the organization pause.
The Obama administration has become the vehicle for these middle-class groups to make their peace with American imperialism. They now have the "space" they so long desired. One senses relief, if not outright glee, that they can politically rub shoulders with the most reactionary forces.
Under these conditions, the World Socialist Web Site plays an absolutely critical role. It is a force of rationality and objectivity, a counterweight to the pressure of the bourgeois media, right and "left."
The WSWS is not just one of many online news sources. It is unique, not only in the quality and breadth of its coverage, but above all in its clear political perspective and orientation, based on the heritage of the Marxist movement. It is precisely this grounding that enables the WSWS to develop a correct analysis of unfolding political events and provide the working class in Iran and internationally with an independent revolutionary perspective.
To carry forward this critical work, we appeal to our readers to support the WSWS financially. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, our tasks become larger, more complex and more costly.
In making the decision to support the WSWS, you are not simply helping us. More fundamentally, you are aiding in the development of the most important instrument for the liberation of the international working class.
Joe Kishore

Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore

Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore

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WILL WE EVER RECOVER FROM WHAT RONNIE WROUGHT???

Iran, or What Happens In Vegas...

Back in 2000, when Bush-Cheney, Inc. stole the election in Florida, remember how Americans took to the streets demanding that their votes be counted or that Floridians be sent back to the polls? And remember how near bedlam broke out in cities all across this great land when, in 2004, Bush-Cheney, Inc., reprised the Florida scenario in southern Ohio?

No, no, that's right...Those protests didn't happen. Not here, not anymore. The spirit of democracy, of lower case "r" republican entitlement, fled these shores sometime in the early 1970's. Or maybe it simply retired to Vegas.

I was just there (Las Vegas, that is), taking in the so-called "Fremont Street Experience."

Yeah, baby!

This summer the Fremont Street Experience invites you to "re-live" the Summer of '69. There's a light show and black-jack dealers dressed in tie-dye and as I strolled into the lobby of the Fitz I was greeted with the Dead's "Uncle John's Band" blaring from loud-speakers...

This is capitalism in high gear: the social, political, and cultural unrest that made the 1960's a time of promise, hope, and deep anxieties has been commodified by the entertainment industry and sold back to the American people as so much kitsch and farce. Bread and circuses (though nowadays, it seems, many Americans had best not count on the bread).

I cannot help but recall Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; were he to try to write that book today, the correct title would read: The Capitalist Ethic and the Mere Spirit of Protestantism. But why bother with that? Cozy up with a copy of Tacitus's Annals and watch your future unfold from the past.

If you want to know where people take their republic seriously, look to Iran.

The Time Has Come to Be Militantly Anti-Military-Industrial-Complex

Like Eduardo Galeano. Here is an excerpt from his recent interview on Democracy Now!, one of only a handful of news outlets worth paying attention to...

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about President Obama, a little more about him. We recently had on the Pan-Africanist scholar Ali Mazrui, who’s a Kenyan scholar, a chancellor at a Kenyan school and also at Binghamton University in New York. He said Barack Obama has become “the most powerful single black individual in the history of civilization.” What about the significance of Barack Obama becoming president?

EDUARDO GALEANO: Well, it’s a very important—a very important victory in a long, long and difficult and painful fight against racism, especially in this country, in the United States.

Here in the book, I tell some stories, unknown or almost unknown, happened fifteen minutes ago in historical terms. For instance, in 1942, 1942, the Pentagon, when the United States was entered in the Second World War, the Pentagon forbade, prohibited the transfusions of black blood. And at that time, the director of the plasma bank in the Red Cross was a scientific called Charles Drew, and he denied the order. He denied to obey it, saying it’s stupid. Such a thing, such a thing, black blood, does not exist. Blood is red; it’s not black. Blood is red. And he knew what it was he was speaking about. He was almost the inventor of the plasma, or at least the scientific who made it possible. He saved million of lives in the Second World War. But besides being a scientific of very high reputation, he was black. And he was black. And so, he was not—he knew perfectly well what he was speaking about, and that’s why he resigned or was resigned. And this happened just a while ago, it’s yesterday.

So it’s very important, the fact that Obama is now president of the United States, being, as he is, black or half-black, no? The problem is that nobody is better or worse for being black or white, like—this book also, Mirrors, contains a lot of stories about women, this half of humanity. I don’t know why called a minority. I’m not strong in mathematics, but how half of humanity may be a minority? And I tell a lot of stories that are badly known or unknown. Then, my friends—I have some terribly perverse friends, saying, “Well, now the system gave you as a gift that wonderful woman called Condoleezza Rice.” And I say, “Well, yes, it’s true, because a woman is not better than a man or a man better than a woman. We are all made, you know, half-garbage and half-marble, half-beauty and half-[expletive].” But we should have the same opportunities. And that’s a problem. The discrimination have condemned so many people to be invisible. And this book tries to recover their memories and to recover their presence.

The fact that Obama is black is very important in the fight against racism, but it’s also a challenge. I mean, he should prove that blacks can do it better than whites, like women in power, which is unfortunately not the case of Margaret Thatcher, for instance. But they are at least—at least Margaret Thatcher had the opportunity to show it. And sometimes I think Obama is doing it well, and sometimes not. But it must be very difficult for him.

Yesterday I said perhaps he’s lost in the bush, and meaning that there is all this war machine, for instance. He improved the war budget. He improved it. In the campaign, he was promising a quite different attitude. But he ended raising the war budget, which is mysteriously named in the United States “defense budget.” I don’t know defense against who, because the last time this country was invaded was in 1812. Well, later there was a short invasion by Pancho Villa, but this was almost nothing, I mean. And I believe we should—we should propose a new model of world, not consecrated to this human passion of killing each other. We are the only animal specialized in mutual extermination.

By the way, advertising, I’m a member of a vast movement working for a big giant march for peace and against violence on October 2 in all countries, in all countries. And I hope we may have millions and millions of feet walking in the whole planet, in all cities, in all parts of the world, against the war, against this crazy mad world living against itself, this big factory of death that the world is nowadays. Each minute, each minute, the last official figures say, each minute, the world gives, each minute, $3 million to military expenses, $3 million per minute for military expenses, for the industry of death. And each minute, fifteen children die from hunger or curable diseases. So we’ll march against it, because we believe another world is possible.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Eduardo Galeano, and we’re going to be back with him in a minute.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE!

The Real Enemy Among Us

Since President Obama took office and set up his big tent (having learned nothing from the Gingrich-led debacle of the Clinton years), the bottom-feeders from the Reagan-Bush neo-fascist revanchement have returned in force: and they are taking to the airwaves in defense of torture and the various other projects that putrify in the fetid bigotries of their fear-and-thing-ridden imaginations.

I, for one, have had enough. We've been more than polite and gracious to these thugs. It is time to show them the way back under the rocks from whence they have crawled.

Let's see now: we have the military-industrial-evangelical-complex (check); then we have the CIA engaged in para-military operations (check); and then we have private corporations who contract out the services of mercenaries to the government (check); then there's the FBI, National Guard units, state and local police (check, check, check, check). I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody...

I can hardly wait for the return of the East India Company, with its private army and navy to open "free markets" wherever the locals don't seem to understand the importance of buying what we have to sell them.

And still we fear the turbaned bogeyman in the night; armed to the teeth and hyper-vigilant and we just don't feel safe. Maybe it's all that under-the-table arms trading we've been doing for decades that has some people in government legitmately worried...

Blow-back is a bitch.

Centrism in a time of neo-fascist revanchement is just pissing in the flames. To put out the fire, the Left (if we have a viable one in this country, which is doubtful at this point) had better start organizing bucket brigades.

Obama is not ready to take on the real enemy among us: ourselves.

I Am A Chomskian Left Libertarian; Get Over It.

Noam Chomsky’s recent book “Failed States” is about the many ways in which the U.S. falls into that category—while reserving for itself the authority to name other states as “failed” and to intervene in their domestic affairs in order to keep their “failures” from spreading.

Noam points out that we have moved beyond the mere hypocrisy of a “double-standard” to the hyper-hypocrisy of a single standard: “our way” as defined by powerful elites, or “the highway.” The highway is the ever-present military option.

The militarism that pervades our society is no longer regarded as problematic (recall Eisenhower’s coining of the term “military-industrial-complex”); in fact, it isn’t even regarded at all. And that’s exactly the way the boys in the Pentagon like it. They would prefer that we stay tuned to professional sporting extravaganzas and “American Idol” and let them quietly massacre the Afghan women and children that we claim to be liberating. Whenever anyone questions the outcomes of their nefarious activities, they chant “Al-Qaeda”—allegedly a global shadow-network of religion-mad evil-doers and freedom-haters bent upon our destruction (when, in fact, it is largely the brand-name that the CIA concocted to apply to the DISORGANIZED perpetrators of occasional crimes against the United States’ self-proclaimed “interests” around the world).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the CIA and Pentagon felt compelled to justify their outrageously disproportionate claim upon U.S. tax revenues. Remember the so-called “peace-dividend” that was bandied about during the Clinton Administration? If the American people had ever gotten a taste of that, the military-industrial-complex would have hit hard times.

These days, I don’t just read Chomsky. The "Annals" of Tacitus are never far from my hands. In Book 2, Tacitus recounts the wiles of a certain slave by the name of Clemons who, after the murder of his master, Postumus Agrippa, attempted to pass himself off as the latter. “In age and figure he was not unlike his master,” Tacitus explains. So he spread the rumor that Agrippa was alive and then went about in disguise, keeping a low profile, for “he knew that truth gains strength by notoriety and time, falsehood by precipitancy and vagueness.”

This is the genius of the so-called “war on terror”: by definition, there can be no enemy who can be exposed by notoriety and time. Precipitancy and vagueness are therefore the order of the day. No democratic process is permitted to penetrate the veil of secrecy with which the “war on terror” is conducted. National security is at stake. We wouldn’t want another 9/11, now would we?

Because the American people have been cowed by the rumored threat of the "Green Menace" (the new color-code for the now outdated "Red Menace" that paved the way for the present dominance of the military-industrial complex), Clemons rules our country; his former master, the democratic prerogatives of the American people, lies murdered by his slave.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

An American Athenaeum

Break out the bubbly: a new siblogling has emerged!

Planned Obsolescence in the Warfare Economy

This is a story about the public-private partnerships that manage the U. S. economy on behalf of the Plutocratic War Party (aka the Democan-Republicrats).

For years prior to the revelations of the current economic crisis, the media in this country ran story after story on the shortage of U.S. troops and the hardships that this was causing those currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This story was run repeatedly, long after it was "news."

The reason for this repetition was that these stories were not "news," they were attempts by the Pentagon to use the (predictably supine) news media for further recruitment. That is to say, these "news stories" were attempts to appeal to Americans' sense of patriotism. "Uncle Sam Wants You!"

Fortunately, the Plutocratic War Party does not have to depend entirely upon appeals to patriotism for military recruitment. When such appeals fail to produce the necessary numbers, other options are resorted to.

This simple fact was recognized in the early years of the 20th century by Emma Goldman. In her insightful essay "Patriotism," Ms. Goldman wrote:

“… the greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism. The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter. True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force—necessity. Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments? The trade of militarism may not be either lucrative or honorable, but it is better than tramping the country in search of work, standing in the bread line, or sleeping in municipal lodging houses…” Emma Goldman, “Patriotism,” Anarchism and Other Essays, New York: Dover Publications (1969/original pub. 1917), pp. 141-142.

The cycles of boom and bust in a warfare economy such as our own are not random. Neither was the Federal Government's rapid aid for Wall Street when the crisis was first announced. Nor is the fact that the jobs being lost due to this crisis are largely in construction and manufacturing: for job losses in those sectors assuredly produce the able-bodied young men (mostly) and women with which the military fills its lower ranks.

If you have asked yourself how it is that this economic crisis could have happened, given the extremely business-friendly environment of the past eight years, not to mention the impressive brain-trust that Wall Street cultivates and maintains on its own behalf, consider the type of economy we have (guns over butter) and the basic needs of the U.S. military for perpetuating its present projects around the world.

Then ask yourself a more difficult question: what is the Obama Administration doing to address the fundamental issues involved with this country's maintenance of a warfare economy?

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

Killers for Christ

As if the entire enterprise of the War on Terror weren't illegitimate enough...

A Message From the War Resisters League on Afghanistan

Beyond Afghanistan: Choosing Nonviolence

As we approach the April 4 anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s great 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech in New York City's Riverside Church, the War Resisters League reiterates King's urgent cry for nonviolence-and nonviolent resistance. The parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. war against Vietnam fill us with foreboding. While we adamantly oppose continued U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we also call upon people of conscience to think beyond Afghanistan and challenge, as King did, "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism."

Others have laid out reasons-from Afghanistan's topography to the U.S. economic crisis-that would make an expanded war in Afghanistan "unwinnable." But WRL does not base our opposition on such arguments. While they may be correct, we challenge the very idea of a "winnable" war and oppose this one as we oppose all war: not solely for practical and strategic reasons, but because of our, and King's, decades-long commitment to nonviolence.

Purveyor of Violence
Much has changed in the 40-plus years since King made that speech, yet the United States remains, as he named it then, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." WRL stands, as he did, against that violence, which is not only wrong in itself, but cures nothing and rebounds on its perpetrators.

King declared that the people of Vietnam "must see Americans as strange liberators." The assessment applies today to the people of Afghanistan. Afghanistan has lost more than two million civilian lives to war in the last 30 years alone, and the toll is rising again, in a dreadful example of the ways in which violence boomerangs and warfare begets only devastation and more warfare (including attacks by groups like Al Qaeda). For centuries that battered land has been subject to imperial aggression and intervention. The Taliban rose to power with the support of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, intervening against the USSR's invasion. Today, Afghanistan's infrastructure is destroyed. Each year, pregnancy and childbirth kill 25,000 women, and diarrhea kills 85,000 children. Landmines planted in turn by troops of the Soviet Union, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban kill 600 people per year and maim so many that manufacturing artificial limbs is a major industry. The infamous U.S. "detention center" at Bagram continues to hold more prisoners than Guantanamo. Rather than bombing and shelling Afghanistan-and maintaining a prison there-the United States could promote economic development, public health, education, food security, women's empowerment, and de-mining efforts.

The Enemy of the Poor
War wreaks its devastation within our own country as well. In this period of increased global instability and recession, the world is undergoing a tectonic shift in its assumptions about the institutions of capitalism. That re-evaluation must include its assumptions about the institution of war.

"I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube," King said in 1967. Substitute "Iraq and Afghanistan" for Vietnam, and the sentence is equally, terribly true today.

Here as abroad, war remains, as King called it, the "enemy of the poor." While the Pentagon pours billions of tax dollars into implements of destruction and rains down bombs on poor civilians in Afghanistan, our own infrastructure crumbles, and our own people are struggling without decent schools, healthcare, and employment. The funds that we need to provide housing and care at home end up diverted into killing people thousands of miles away, and people of color, immigrants, and lower-income whites are targeted by military recruiters to do the killing. Massive bailouts line the pockets of bankers, unemployment skyrockets, and military recruiters are having the easiest time meeting their quotas in years.

Nonviolence in Afghanistan and at Home
Despite the monumental obstacles they face, many in Afghanistan and Pakistan are working nonviolently for peace and to repair the ravages of war and warmaking. In Afghanistan, Parliamentarian Malalai Joya-despite illegal suspension from Parliament and assassination attempts-has continued to denounce the warlords and call for human rights, women's rights, and governmental accountability. Thousands of peace advocates in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have met in the assemblies called jirgas to imagine and formulate peace and reconstruction initiatives. The lawyers' campaign in Pakistan has mobilized thousands, despite beatings and arrests, to reverse the military's control over the courts. Others are building schools and countering the bitter legacy of violence against women. U.S. peace advocates should be promoting and publicizing these nonviolent actions to rebuild Afghan and Pakistani society in the midst of war, devastation, warlordism, and patriarchal control.

In our own country as well, there are increasingly loud voices against war and for a reordering of our priorities-for affordable housing, universal healthcare, gender justice, disability rights, clean energy, quality education, restorative justice, fair food, and an anti-racist society. Among these allies are newcomers to the United States, people who have survived and resisted wars and challenged immigration policies that facilitate the extraction of profits from cheap labor, even while being criminalized, imprisoned, deported, and denied citizenship. Some of those most forsaken by the U.S. government have continued to build organizations and networks for those with no safety net.

The Choice
The War Resisters League urges everyone to join us in organizing, protesting, and demanding the closing of Bagram prison (and all such "detention centers") and an end to military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and across the globe. Organize against military recruitment-the military is preying on those most affected by the battered economy. Support the voices and actions of the survivors of war. Listen to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; create space for their heartbreaking stories of remorse and harrowing accounts of the worst kinds of violence and dehumanization. Stop funding war-become a war tax resister. Instead of paying to train men and women to kill, foster ways to help all of us rebuild our communities.

The so-called "war on terrorism," with its occupations and detentions, its torture and carnage, has failed because military action can never lead to security. We don't have easy answers, but we know that the cycle of violence has to end, and we have to help end it. While thousands of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are finding the courage to risk their lives to work for nonviolent solutions, we have a responsibility to lift our voices. We must reject the notions of good wars and bad wars, legal or illegal wars, winnable and unwinnable wars. We must decide whether our identity as a nation will be based on a culture of cultivating life or dealing death. As King declared, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. ... We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation." Together, let's choose the path of nonviolence.

April 2009

When We Were Children, We Loved Without Question

Allen Ginsberg was no Hart Crane. As a poet, he didn't hold a candle to his heroes, Walter Whitman and Dr. Williams. Nevertheless, in this early poem ("Song") he got something right: the weight of the world is love.

As children, we know this. In our journey to adulthood, we manage to shed this knowledge. Or we translate it into something else: "love" is limited to an idealized romantic relationship between two individuals, or the circle of love is tightly circumscribed to include those who are related to us, or who are most like us, who fit certain criteria that allow us to clearly delineate who's with us and who's against us.

Leo Tolstoy, in his "The Gospel in Brief" and numerous other writings, argued that no one follows Jesus until s/he accepts and practices what he argued was the essence of Christ's teaching: Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

In this most Christian of countries, we plow billions of dollars each year into the manufacture and deployment of weapons designed to kill those whom we deem to be our enemies.Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition...

In Mark's gospel we encounter a Jesus who instructs his disciples to "Suffer the little children to come unto me..."

Ginsberg's "Song" closes with the erotically charged discovery that bearing the weight of the world (love) returns one "to the body/where I was born."

Somehow we have to each find our way back to a state in which we can once again love without question. If we do this, we can end the government-sponsored homicidal madness that transfers our nation's wealth into the coffers of a select few, robs us of loved ones, and spatters us all with the blood of those we do not see, do not know, but consider our enemies--in direct contradiction to the religious teachings that many of us claim to hold sacred.

Song

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.





Allen Ginsberg
San Jose, 1954

Fun Facts to Know and Share

From the April 6, 2009 issue of The Nation (p.5):

The cost of the Iraq War: $656 billion in funds allocated.

Documented civilian deaths: 91,121-99,500.

Estimated Iraqi deaths due to U.S. invasion: 1,320,110 (not even Saddam was this murderous).

Iraqi civilians killed in February 2009: 346 (including 11 children--now repeat after me: "The surge is working...the surge is working...the surge is working...").

US Casualties: 4,259 dead, 31,131 wounded in action.

Estimated number of Iraqis displaced since 2003: 5 million (nearly 20% of the total population).

I think old Dick Cheney said in an interview recently that he felt that the Bush Administration had achieved all of its goals in Iraq.

No doubt.

How to Solve the Financial Crisis

Whenever I meet members of the U.S. military, I am invariably impressed by their dedication, loyalty, penchant for hard work, discipline, and pragmatic idealism. Military people tend to be good, decent folk. So I cannot help but ask myself, why are these people government employees? They have all the necessary qualities for stunning success in any endeavor they should undertake. Government employment for such individuals is under-employment.

Rather than waste this pool of extraordinary talent, these fine individuals should be turned loose in the private sector where they can produce something constructive for the nation and financially reward themselves. Imagine the boost they could give to our faltering economy in private sector employment! And think about the huge bonus the U.S. Treasury would receive if it could re-direct the monies that are currently being spent (at least 30% of the 2009 fiscal year budget according to WRL--see www.warresisters.org) to under-employ this accomplished segment of the population.

People enlist in the military to serve their country; well, their country needs them now to revitalize its economy. Friends in the military! Attention! Can we count on you to do your duty and leave government employment? Your country calls you!

Obama's Attempts to Effect REAL CHANGE...

...are being neutralized every step of the way. This is from Democracy Now! (Wednesday March 12, 2009):

Intel Pick Withdraws Nomination, Blasts Israel Lobby

The Obama administration’s pick to become the nation’s top intelligence analyst has withdrawn his nomination after an intense lobbying campaign by backers of Israeli government policies. Former US Ambassador Charles “Chas” Freeman had come under Republican-led opposition over his comments criticizing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Freeman has years of diplomatic experience, including stints as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and assistant secretary of defense. Some Democrats joined in on the opposition to Freeman’s appointment. In a statement, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer took credit for Freeman’s withdrawal, saying, “I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.” In a statement, Freeman blasted lobby groups, lawmakers and pundits who support Israeli government policies for forcing his withdrawal. Freeman wrote, “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency…The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.” Freeman continued, “I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.”

BHO concedes ground to the Plutocratic War Party at every turn, and then when he tries to do something that might actually result in REAL CHANGE, they shoot him down.

The election of Barack Obama does not appear to have been the first step in the NON-VIOLENT PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION this country desperately needs. I'm afraid that it is time to take to the streets.

Obama's Recovery Plan

President Obama's plan for economic recovery must somehow reckon with the incubus that is the Pentagon and its corporate welfare dependents, euphemistically known as the "defense industry."

Get a load of this!

If It Weren't for This Modern World...

I swear I might lose my mind...