11/24/11
11/23/11
Van Jones and Democratic Party Operatives: You Do Not Represent the Occupy Movement
Make Your Own Program Don’t Try to Steal Ours
By Kevin ZeeseOccupy Washington, DC
The corporate media is anointing a false leader of the Occupy Movement in Van Jones of Rebuild the Dream.
The former Obama administration official, who received a golden parachute at Princeton and the Democratic think tank Center for American Progress when he left the administration, is doing what Democrats always do—see the energy of an independent movement, race to the front, then lead it down a dead end and essentially destroy it. Jones is doing the dirty work of a Democratic operative and while he and other Dem front groups pretend to support Occupiers, their real mission is to co-opt it.
Glenn Greenwald says in a recent blog, "White House-aligned groups such as the Center for American Progress have made explicity clear that they are going to try to convert OWS into a vote-producing arm for the Obama 2012 campaign."
Before he ran to the front of the Occupy Movement, Jones' Rebuild the Dream had been saying that its first task was to elect Democrats. Now he is claiming there will be 2000 “99% candidates” in 2012. These Democrats will be re-branded as part of the 99% movement. Democrats will now be re-labeled and marketed as part of the 99% movement. Republican operatives did the same thing to the Tea Party. Tea Party candidates, who often used to be corporate “Club for Growth” candidates, ran in the Republican Party. See, e.g. Senator Pat Toomey – before and after.
Jones is urging the Occupy Movement to “mature" and move on to an electoral phase. This would only make us a sterile part of the very problem we oppose. The electoral system is a corrupt mirage where only corporate-approved candidates are allowed to be considered seriously. At Occupy Washington, DC, we recognize that putting our time, energy and resources into elections will not produce the change we want to see. What we need to do right now is build a dynamic movement supported by independent media that stands in stark contrast to both corporate-bought-and-paid-for
Democratic operatives want to steal the energy of the Occupy Movement because they do not have any of their own. These Dem front groups operate within the confines of the two corrupt parties and their agenda is limited by what big business interests say is politically realistic. Rebuild the Dream is more of the same that has been seen over and over from groups like MoveOn and Campaign for America’s Future – elect Democrats is their mantra. It is their only program. And, it is bankrupt.
Democrats need to derail and co-opt the Occupy Movement because it calls attention to what's really happening. The American people need a real jobs bill, not one that is merely a political tactic for an election year. We also need a truly progressive tax system—one that taxes wealth more and workers less. The poorest Americans pay taxes on necessities like food and clothing, so why is it that neither party urges a tax on the purchase of stocks, bonds and derivatives—a tax that could raise $800 billion over a decade? And finally, we need an end to the wars and militarism maintained and expanded by both parties, bringing huge profits to the arms industry and immense suffering to millions.
The Occupy Movement is not part of either corporate-dominated party and Van Jones is not our leader. It is corporate rule we oppose. The Obama administration and the Democrats as well as the Republicans maintain the rule of Wall Street. Occupiers have organized an independent movement that challenges the rule of the 1% and their Republican and Democratic lackeys. Bought and paid for with millions of dollars from Wall Street, the health insurance industry and big energy interests, Obama and the Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution.
Kevin Zeese is an organizer of Occupy Washington, DC and co-director of Its Our Economy and co-chair of Come Home America.
a Thank you letter i thought I would share for my work repealing sB5
,...But, don't thank me thank the Ohio voters too .Thanks Ohio!!!
-Editor
G.M.Figg
,...But, don't thank me thank the Ohio voters too .Thanks Ohio!!!
-Editor
G.M.Figg
 |
Dear Gregory,
Thanksgiving is a time for family, celebration, and relaxation. As we gather this year to reflect on what makes us grateful, I wanted to take a moment to let you know what I'm thankful for: the support and dedication you have given to the Ohio Democratic Party.
This has been an eventful year to say the least and I deeply appreciate all you have done to aid our fight for Ohio’s middle class. You never faltered as we tackled one obstacle after another. When Senate Bill 5 attacked our public workers and the safety of our communities, it was you who sacrificed your time and resources to ensure it was vetoed by the collective voices of our citizens.
After our right to vote was threatened, you stepped up and gave us the tools necessary to block the Voter Suppression Bill and protect our most cherished freedom.
I can’t thank you enough for all that you do. Whether it’s contributing your hard earned money, collecting signatures in your neighborhood, or simply calling a friend to remind them to vote on Election Day, your unwavering commitment to our shared values is something I could never take for granted.
So on this Thanksgiving Day, I say thank you and I look forward to working with you in the months and years ahead.
Sincerely,
Chris Redfern
Chairman
Chairman
Interview NOAM CHOMSKY
Hopes and prospects from Madison to Cairo
Noam Chomsky is an internationally renowned Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. He is the author of scores of books including Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians (with Ilan Pappe), Failed States, What We Say Goes, and Hopes and Prospects. He was interviewed by David Barsamian on March 31, 2011. David Barsamian is the award-winning founder and director of Alternative Radio, the independent weekly audio series based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of numerous books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said.
I HAVE a classified WikiLeaks document stamped “Top Secret.” “Eyes Only.” It says that you are going to be speaking in Boulder on April 22nd in a benefit for KGNU and celebrating Alternative Radio’s 25th anniversary. Would you care to confirm or deny this report?
(LAUGHTER) YOU can’t trust anything that comes from WikiLeaks. You know that. But even though they reported it, it’s nevertheless true. SO WE’LL be seeing you here in just a couple of weeks.
I HOPE so.
LET’S START off with some easy, softball questions to kind of replicate the corporate media. Formal slavery has long been abolished, but a de facto mental slavery has replaced it. This is reflected in obedience to power and authority. People are reduced to asking, pleading with the masters for favors, a few crumbs here and there: Don’t slash the budget by this amount, or don’t cut this after-school program by this much. How does a person break the chains of submission and subservience?
FIRST OF all, it hasn’t replaced it. It’s always been there. In fact, I think it’s less there after the formal elimination of slavery. How do you break it? By just going on. There is no magic answer to it. You start by asking for reforms that make sense. You see if they can come. If they do, you try to go farther. Or if you hit a brick wall and the power systems won’t relent, then you move on to try to overthrow them. That’s what the history of activism is about. That’s how slavery ended.
IS IT more difficult to do here in the United States than, say, Bolivia?
I THINK it’s a lot easier here. They have far harsher circumstances. What they’ve achieved is remarkable, but the circumstances are much harder. Just as it’s easier to protest here than it is in Tahrir Square. But it has to be done.
TO WHAT extent does the propaganda system induce docility and passivity in the citizenry in the United States?
THAT’S THE point. But that’s the point from time immemorial. It’s part of the function of the reverence for kings, priests, submission to religious authorities. You can’t really call it a propaganda system. These are doctrinal characteristics of power systems that seek to induce passivity. And we have our own ways. In fact, the major propaganda systems that we face now, mostly growing out of the huge public relations industry, were developed quite consciously about a century ago in the freest countries in the world, in Britain and the United States, because of a very clear recognition, articulated recognition, that people have gained so many rights that it’s hard to suppress them by force, so you have to try to control their attitudes and beliefs or try to divert them somehow. As Veblen put it, you have to try to “fabricate consumers.” And we’ve created wants so people will be trapped. It’s a common method.
It was used by the slaveowners. For example, when Britain abolished slavery, it had plantations using slaves all over the West Indies, so in Jamaica, for example, there were big parliamentary debates about how to try to sustain the same regime with official slavery gone. So what would stop a former slave from going up into the hills where there’s plenty of land and just living happily there? They hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered first teasers—easy terms, gifts, and so on. And then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores and so on, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery, from the plantation owners’ point of view, about the same.
The United Fruit Company independently did the same thing in Central America. And the U.S. and British business communities independently hit on the same technique in the early twentieth century. Out of that developed this enormous propaganda system directed towards exactly what Veblen said, fabricating consumers and turning people “to the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption.” That’s a quote from the business press. And, of course, it goes along also with trying to control ideas and beliefs as well. That’s another part of the doctrinal system. These things aren’t new. They’re as old as the hills. But they take new forms as circumstances change. The ones we now see are the planned result of the achievement of earlier generations in gaining a lot more freedom. And I must say, it’s a lot easier to combat the fabrication of consumers than torture chambers.
YOU’VE OFTEN commented as you travel around the United States that communities that have community radio are marginally different from those that don’t. For example, your hometown of Boston does not have a community radio station.
IT’S NOT a scientific conclusion, it’s an impression. But, yes, Boston is a good example. There is no community radio station, and things are very scattered. People don’t know that something is happening in another part of town. There is no interaction, there is no way to get people together. Maybe other means, the Internet or something, but there is no place you can turn to directly to find out what’s happening, even to gain a critical analysis of what’s going on in the world if it’s related to concerns and interests or to intercommunicate. So it does lead to a breakdown of community or, I guess more accurately, an inability to create community.
YOU’RE AN educator. You’ve taught at MIT for decades. A lot of people are concerned about what’s happening to public education. There are announce?ments of layoffs of thousands and thousands of teachers all over the country, larger class sizes, closing of schools, remedial programs being reduced or eliminated altogether, huge budget cuts. This leads to the question, the powers that be, the corporate elites, don’t they need a trained and competent workforce, or will they rely simply on South and East Asians for that?
FIRST OF all, there has been for the last thirty years a substantial program of offshoring of production. It doesn’t mean just manual labor, so also data analysis and so on. You get a much cheaper workforce abroad. In fact, IBM a couple years ago announced inducements—I don’t know how well it’s worked—to try to get their U.S. staff, American citizens, to go to India, where they could live at a much lower level, with smaller salaries. So, sure, what you said is partly true. But I think they assume they can still maintain a workforce with a smaller part of the population.
This is all part of a major effort to undermine public education altogether, basically to privatize it, which would be a big boon to private power. They don’t like public education, for a lot of reasons. One reason is just the principle on which it’s based, which is threatening to power. Public education is based on a principle of solidarity. So, for example, I don’t have children anymore, I had them fifty years ago; nevertheless I feel and I’m supposed to feel that I should pay my taxes so that the kids across the street can go to school. That’s counter to the doctrine that you should just look after yourself and let everyone else fall by the wayside, a basic principle of business rule. Public education is a threat to that because it builds up a sense of solidarity, community, mutual support.
The same is true of Social Security. That’s one of the reasons, I’m convinced, that there is such a passionate attempt to destroy it even though there are no economic reasons to do it, none of any significance at least. But these are all the residues of a dangerous conception that we’re all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you’re trying to maximize profit, that’s the end of life, or just maximize consumer goods, it’s the wrong idea. You have to beat it out of people’s heads. We don’t want to go back to the nineteenth century, when working people took for granted, as they did in their publications, that they condemned what they called the new spirit of the age—this is 1850—“the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” It’s straight out of Ayn Rand and the rest of the business propaganda. But this was 150 years ago. These were widely held views, overwhelmingly supported by working people. And that makes them hard to control. It prevents them from being passive objects of private power.
So, going back to what you said before, you have to have a propaganda system which overcomes these deviations from the principle of subjugation to the power systems. Public schools have that function. They are under severe attack. There are major efforts to replace them with semi-privatized systems which would still be supported by the public, but they would be run more or less privately, like charter schools. There is no evidence that they’re any better. For all we know, they’re even worse. But it does undermine the solidarity, mutual support, dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power. But I don’t think the business world, at least in the short term, is concerned that much about lacking a workforce.
CERTAINLY ONE of the institutions of solidarity historically in the United States has been organized labor unions. From a peak of close to forty percent, the percentage of workers in unions is now down to single digits. Working people, the working class, unions are being hammered. They’re being asked to work longer hours, their wages, benefits are being reduced, they’re losing jobs in many instances. Is capital using the current economic crisis to implement its long-term project to smash the unions?
UNIONS ARE bitterly hated by private power. That’s always been true. The United States is pretty much a business-run society, much more so than comparable ones. Correspondingly, it has a very brutal labor history, much worse than other societies. There are constant efforts to try to destroy unions. By the 1920s, for example, they were almost crushed. Then they came back again in the worker struggles in the 1930s. But it took almost no time for the business world to organize to try to destroy them. Immediately after the war it started in right away: the Taft-Hartley bill, other measures, and immense propaganda campaigns to try to get people to turn against the unions. The churches, schools, cinema, press, everything you can imagine. Major campaigns which have been well studied.
Over time it’s had some success, although we should remember that a large majority of the workforce would prefer to be unionized if they could be. Barriers have been set up by state policy which make it very hard to join a union. The consequence of all this is that, yes, in the private sector unionization is down to about seven percent. The public-sector unions still haven’t been destroyed, but that’s why there is a bitter attack against them going on right now. Wisconsin is a clear example. The issues in Wisconsin didn’t have to do with the deficit. That’s a fraud that’s simply used as a pretext. The issue was the right of collective bargaining, one of the basic principles of union organization. The business world wants to destroy that.
It’s worth remembering that the International Labor Organization has its principles, and theoretically countries are supposed to support them. The basic principle in the ILO is the right of association. The United States is one of the very few countries that have never even ratified it. In fact, it’s considered sort of like a third rail. It never even comes up. That’s now over sixty years. I don’t know how many countries have failed to even ratify a right of association.
RHETORIC ASIDE, has the Democratic Party really been a friend of organized labor and the working class?
COMPARED WITH the Republicans, yes, but that’s not saying much. The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations. But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They’re both nuzzled there quite happily. There are individual members of the Democratic Party who have been friends of labor, but they’re a scattered and diminishing minority.
Take, say, Obama. The lame-duck session of Congress was interesting. He was highly praised, including by his supporters, for his statesman-like attitude during the lame-duck session, bipartisanship and getting legislation through and so on. What did he get through? The main achievement was a huge tax cut for the extremely wealthy. When I say extremely wealthy, I mean extremely. So, for example, I’m pretty well off, but I was below the cutoff point on that. This was a tiny sector of wealth that got a huge gift—plunging another hole in the deficit, but who cares about that? That was his major achievement. Meanwhile, at the same time, he initiated a tax increase on federal workers. Of course, they didn’t call it a tax increase. That doesn’t sound good. They called it a pay freeze. But a pay freeze on public-sector workers is exactly the same thing as a tax increase. So we’ve got to punish public-sector workers and reward the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, who just announced a $17.5 billion compensation package for themselves.
IN A talk that you gave at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last fall called “Human Intelligence and the Environment”—it was broadcast on Alternative Radio and reprinted in the March–April issue of the International Socialist Review—you wrote that the system “is just driving us to disaster.” I note that you said this many months before the current conflagrations. “So is anything going to be done about it?” you ask. And you answer, “The prospects are not very auspicious.” Why not?
THE PROSPECTS are not auspicious because of the general feeling which you described before, that there is nothing we can do. As long as people sit by passively and let things happen to them, the dynamics of the system will drive it in a certain direction, and that direction is toward self-destruction. I don’t think that’s hard to show. But the assumption is just wrong. There is a lot that we can do. In fact, what happened in the last month or so in Madison illustrates that very clearly. They didn’t win, but it was an important demonstration. It’s a basis for going on farther. There’s plenty that we can do, but it’s not going to happen by itself. If people are made to feel helpless, isolated, in a kind of atomized society, then power will win. These issues are pretty severe. Right now, for example, we are really facing for the first time in human history the prospect of something like species destruction.
TURNING TO the Middle East, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, burned himself to death in despair. That led to what seemed to be a spontaneous uprising there in Tunisia and then later in Egypt and in other parts of the Arab Middle East. Your observations about the situation in the Arab Middle East and all of the upheavals?
FIRST OF all, let’s remember that there had been plenty going on for years. It just hadn’t broken through. Take Egypt, the most important country. The demonstrations in Egypt, the January 25 movement, were led by a fairly young, tech-savvy group who called themselves the April 6 Movement. Why April 6? The reason is that a couple years earlier the Egyptian labor movement, which has been quite militant and active, though crushed, had planned to organize on April 6, 2008, major strike actions at the most important industrial center in Egypt, and also solidarity actions, and was crushed by force by Mubarak’s security forces. So that’s April 6. Early this year they named themselves the April 6 Movement. That’s a reflection of the significant tradition of worker struggles. Though there isn’t much reporting of that—in fact, almost nothing—it does seem that the Egyptian labor movement is continuing to take some pretty interesting steps, even as far as to take over factories, so it’s reported.
In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that’s not so unusual. Let’s take our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of Blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.
ECHOING THE comment by Howard Zinn about small acts making a difference.
Right.
CLEARLY, THERE are dangers to Japan and the rest of the world from the nuclear disaster. I’m just going to read a couple of newspaper headlines. “Seawater near the Fukushima plant was found to contain iodine-131,” which is a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, “at more than 4,000 times the safety level.” “Dangerous levels of radioactive isotopes have been found twenty-five miles from the Fukushima reactor.” “Small amounts of radiation detected in Washington State milk.” This is all doubly ironic, because of Hiroshima and what Japan suffered in the first and only atomic military attack, for Fukushima today.
FIRST OF all, it is a horrible tragedy. And, as you say, it’s particularly ironic that it should have struck Japan again. But we should take it as a warning. There aren’t really going to be safe nuclear plants. A lot of the problems in Fukushima now are fuel rods, not the plants themselves, which are not very well protected, and under adverse conditions they can be quite lethal, as we’ve seen. But the same is true here. The fuel rods here are not protected. In fact, the nuclear waste disposal problem has yet to be solved at all. Whether we should go ahead with nuclear energy or not is a debate, but you should recognize that the risk factor is quite extreme. There isn’t going to be a way to calculate in advance any disaster that could take place and compensate for it. Japan is about as well-organized and efficient as any society can be these days, much more than us, but this struck them. And they thought they had it controlled, but they didn’t.
MOVING BACK to the Middle East and again the unintentional uses of irony, when Obama cautioned the various revolutionaries in different countries to “show restraint” and that there was “no place for violence,” Obama spoke of the United States’ “unique capabilities” when it comes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya. Tariq Ali, in a recent article, calls Libya another case of “selective vigilantism by the West.”
FIRST OF all, we should be clear that there was no no-fly zone. UN Resolution 1973 did call for a no-fly zone, but the three traditional imperial countries—Britain, France, and the United States—who are carrying this out immediately disregarded the resolution and instantly turned to participation on the side of the rebels. That’s not a no-fly zone. So they’re not imposing a no-fly zone over the rebel advances. In fact, they’re encouraging them and supporting them.
So we should, first of all, recognize what it is. The United States, Britain, and France determined at once to disregard the UN resolution and to proceed to try to help the rebels overthrow the government. It’s kind of like nuclear energy: You can say it’s right or wrong, but at least face the fact of what’s happening. Is it selective? Sure. But it’s pretty predictable and very familiar. If there is a dictator who has a lot of oil and is obedient and submissive and reliable, then he’s given free rein. The most important is Saudi Arabia. There, there were supposed to be demonstrations, a Day of Rage, but the government crushed it with overwhelming force. In fact, apparently not even a single person was willing to appear in Riyadh. They were terrified. That’s okay. In Kuwait, the same thing.
Bahrain is particularly important. It hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is the major military force in the region by far, and it’s also right off the coast of eastern Saudi Arabia. Eastern Saudi Arabia is where most of the oil is and, like Bahrain, it’s mostly Shiite, and the Saudi Arabian government is Sunni. Furthermore, just by some weird accident of history and geography, the concentration of the world’s energy resources is right up there in the northern Gulf region, which is mostly Shiite, in a largely Sunni world. It’s been a nightmare for Western planners for a long time, to consider the possibility that there might be some kind of tacit Shiite alliance out of Western control that would possess most of the core of the world’s energy supplies.
So there was barely a tap on the wrist when Saudi Arabia led a military force into Bahrain to crush the protesters pretty violently. They drove them out of Pearl Square, where they had been encamping, and even went so far as to destroy the Bahraini symbol of the country, the pearl in the middle of Pearl Square, which had been appropriated by the demonstrators, so the army forces smashed it. They went into a hospital and drove everyone out. That was okay. Practically no comment here.
On the other hand, when you have a dictator like Qaddafi, who has plenty of oil but is unreliable, it makes sense from an imperial point of view to try to see if you can find a way to replace him with someone more pliable who would be more trustworthy to do the things you want him to do. Therefore, you react differently there.
In cases like, say, Egypt or Tunisia, what comes along is just the traditional game plan. It’s as old as the hills. If there is a dictator whom you support but he’s losing control—
LIKE THE Shah, Suharto, Marcos, and many others.
THERE’S A dozen cases. But it’s always the same. Support him until the end. If he becomes impossible because maybe the army turns against him or whatever, or the business community, if he becomes impossible, shelve him, send him off somewhere, issue dramatic proclamations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime as much as possible. That’s exactly what’s happening. So you can call it selective if you want—that’s what it’s called—but it seems to me pretty rational imperialism. And all pretty familiar.
IN TERMS of these multiple uprisings throughout the Middle East, there is an embedded assumption in all the commentary that somehow the United States must control what is going on.
OH, YES. That’s sometimes said very frankly. The Wall Street Journal, which tends to be franker about such things, its main political commentator, Gerald Seib, said straight out, “The problem is, we haven’t yet learned how to control these new forces.” The implication: we’d better find out a way to control them. And that goes way back. That goes back sixty years to Roosevelt’s planners and advisers. Adolf Berle, one of the leading liberal advisers for many presidents, wrote in, it must have been the late 1940s, that—
WASN’T HE part of FDR’s brain trust?
YES, AND then went on to remain kind of a major figure in the liberal political system. He said straight out, “If we can control Middle East energy, that will provide us with substantial control of the world.” That’s no small thing.
THE WORLD Social Forum declared that, “Another World is Possible.” Might these uprisings in some of the most repressive and tyrannical states in the Middle East indicate that in fact another world is possible?
YES. WHATEVER the outcome in the Arab world, it’s really of historic importance. I can’t really think of a series of events like this. There are major efforts to try to control and restrain them. Even if they work, there’s going to be a legacy of success and dedication that is going to be a basis for going on. I think they’re extremely important, and we don’t know where they’re going to go. We shouldn’t just watch. We should be doing what we can to help them.
Hopes and prospects from Madison to Cairo
Noam Chomsky is an internationally renowned Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. He is the author of scores of books including Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians (with Ilan Pappe), Failed States, What We Say Goes, and Hopes and Prospects. He was interviewed by David Barsamian on March 31, 2011. David Barsamian is the award-winning founder and director of Alternative Radio, the independent weekly audio series based in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of numerous books with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and Edward Said.
I HAVE a classified WikiLeaks document stamped “Top Secret.” “Eyes Only.” It says that you are going to be speaking in Boulder on April 22nd in a benefit for KGNU and celebrating Alternative Radio’s 25th anniversary. Would you care to confirm or deny this report?
(LAUGHTER) YOU can’t trust anything that comes from WikiLeaks. You know that. But even though they reported it, it’s nevertheless true. SO WE’LL be seeing you here in just a couple of weeks.
I HOPE so.
LET’S START off with some easy, softball questions to kind of replicate the corporate media. Formal slavery has long been abolished, but a de facto mental slavery has replaced it. This is reflected in obedience to power and authority. People are reduced to asking, pleading with the masters for favors, a few crumbs here and there: Don’t slash the budget by this amount, or don’t cut this after-school program by this much. How does a person break the chains of submission and subservience?
FIRST OF all, it hasn’t replaced it. It’s always been there. In fact, I think it’s less there after the formal elimination of slavery. How do you break it? By just going on. There is no magic answer to it. You start by asking for reforms that make sense. You see if they can come. If they do, you try to go farther. Or if you hit a brick wall and the power systems won’t relent, then you move on to try to overthrow them. That’s what the history of activism is about. That’s how slavery ended.
IS IT more difficult to do here in the United States than, say, Bolivia?
I THINK it’s a lot easier here. They have far harsher circumstances. What they’ve achieved is remarkable, but the circumstances are much harder. Just as it’s easier to protest here than it is in Tahrir Square. But it has to be done.
TO WHAT extent does the propaganda system induce docility and passivity in the citizenry in the United States?
THAT’S THE point. But that’s the point from time immemorial. It’s part of the function of the reverence for kings, priests, submission to religious authorities. You can’t really call it a propaganda system. These are doctrinal characteristics of power systems that seek to induce passivity. And we have our own ways. In fact, the major propaganda systems that we face now, mostly growing out of the huge public relations industry, were developed quite consciously about a century ago in the freest countries in the world, in Britain and the United States, because of a very clear recognition, articulated recognition, that people have gained so many rights that it’s hard to suppress them by force, so you have to try to control their attitudes and beliefs or try to divert them somehow. As Veblen put it, you have to try to “fabricate consumers.” And we’ve created wants so people will be trapped. It’s a common method.
It was used by the slaveowners. For example, when Britain abolished slavery, it had plantations using slaves all over the West Indies, so in Jamaica, for example, there were big parliamentary debates about how to try to sustain the same regime with official slavery gone. So what would stop a former slave from going up into the hills where there’s plenty of land and just living happily there? They hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered first teasers—easy terms, gifts, and so on. And then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores and so on, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery, from the plantation owners’ point of view, about the same.
The United Fruit Company independently did the same thing in Central America. And the U.S. and British business communities independently hit on the same technique in the early twentieth century. Out of that developed this enormous propaganda system directed towards exactly what Veblen said, fabricating consumers and turning people “to the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption.” That’s a quote from the business press. And, of course, it goes along also with trying to control ideas and beliefs as well. That’s another part of the doctrinal system. These things aren’t new. They’re as old as the hills. But they take new forms as circumstances change. The ones we now see are the planned result of the achievement of earlier generations in gaining a lot more freedom. And I must say, it’s a lot easier to combat the fabrication of consumers than torture chambers.
YOU’VE OFTEN commented as you travel around the United States that communities that have community radio are marginally different from those that don’t. For example, your hometown of Boston does not have a community radio station.
IT’S NOT a scientific conclusion, it’s an impression. But, yes, Boston is a good example. There is no community radio station, and things are very scattered. People don’t know that something is happening in another part of town. There is no interaction, there is no way to get people together. Maybe other means, the Internet or something, but there is no place you can turn to directly to find out what’s happening, even to gain a critical analysis of what’s going on in the world if it’s related to concerns and interests or to intercommunicate. So it does lead to a breakdown of community or, I guess more accurately, an inability to create community.
YOU’RE AN educator. You’ve taught at MIT for decades. A lot of people are concerned about what’s happening to public education. There are announce?ments of layoffs of thousands and thousands of teachers all over the country, larger class sizes, closing of schools, remedial programs being reduced or eliminated altogether, huge budget cuts. This leads to the question, the powers that be, the corporate elites, don’t they need a trained and competent workforce, or will they rely simply on South and East Asians for that?
FIRST OF all, there has been for the last thirty years a substantial program of offshoring of production. It doesn’t mean just manual labor, so also data analysis and so on. You get a much cheaper workforce abroad. In fact, IBM a couple years ago announced inducements—I don’t know how well it’s worked—to try to get their U.S. staff, American citizens, to go to India, where they could live at a much lower level, with smaller salaries. So, sure, what you said is partly true. But I think they assume they can still maintain a workforce with a smaller part of the population.
This is all part of a major effort to undermine public education altogether, basically to privatize it, which would be a big boon to private power. They don’t like public education, for a lot of reasons. One reason is just the principle on which it’s based, which is threatening to power. Public education is based on a principle of solidarity. So, for example, I don’t have children anymore, I had them fifty years ago; nevertheless I feel and I’m supposed to feel that I should pay my taxes so that the kids across the street can go to school. That’s counter to the doctrine that you should just look after yourself and let everyone else fall by the wayside, a basic principle of business rule. Public education is a threat to that because it builds up a sense of solidarity, community, mutual support.
The same is true of Social Security. That’s one of the reasons, I’m convinced, that there is such a passionate attempt to destroy it even though there are no economic reasons to do it, none of any significance at least. But these are all the residues of a dangerous conception that we’re all in this together and we have to work together to create a better life and a better future. If you’re trying to maximize profit, that’s the end of life, or just maximize consumer goods, it’s the wrong idea. You have to beat it out of people’s heads. We don’t want to go back to the nineteenth century, when working people took for granted, as they did in their publications, that they condemned what they called the new spirit of the age—this is 1850—“the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self.” It’s straight out of Ayn Rand and the rest of the business propaganda. But this was 150 years ago. These were widely held views, overwhelmingly supported by working people. And that makes them hard to control. It prevents them from being passive objects of private power.
So, going back to what you said before, you have to have a propaganda system which overcomes these deviations from the principle of subjugation to the power systems. Public schools have that function. They are under severe attack. There are major efforts to replace them with semi-privatized systems which would still be supported by the public, but they would be run more or less privately, like charter schools. There is no evidence that they’re any better. For all we know, they’re even worse. But it does undermine the solidarity, mutual support, dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power. But I don’t think the business world, at least in the short term, is concerned that much about lacking a workforce.
CERTAINLY ONE of the institutions of solidarity historically in the United States has been organized labor unions. From a peak of close to forty percent, the percentage of workers in unions is now down to single digits. Working people, the working class, unions are being hammered. They’re being asked to work longer hours, their wages, benefits are being reduced, they’re losing jobs in many instances. Is capital using the current economic crisis to implement its long-term project to smash the unions?
UNIONS ARE bitterly hated by private power. That’s always been true. The United States is pretty much a business-run society, much more so than comparable ones. Correspondingly, it has a very brutal labor history, much worse than other societies. There are constant efforts to try to destroy unions. By the 1920s, for example, they were almost crushed. Then they came back again in the worker struggles in the 1930s. But it took almost no time for the business world to organize to try to destroy them. Immediately after the war it started in right away: the Taft-Hartley bill, other measures, and immense propaganda campaigns to try to get people to turn against the unions. The churches, schools, cinema, press, everything you can imagine. Major campaigns which have been well studied.
Over time it’s had some success, although we should remember that a large majority of the workforce would prefer to be unionized if they could be. Barriers have been set up by state policy which make it very hard to join a union. The consequence of all this is that, yes, in the private sector unionization is down to about seven percent. The public-sector unions still haven’t been destroyed, but that’s why there is a bitter attack against them going on right now. Wisconsin is a clear example. The issues in Wisconsin didn’t have to do with the deficit. That’s a fraud that’s simply used as a pretext. The issue was the right of collective bargaining, one of the basic principles of union organization. The business world wants to destroy that.
It’s worth remembering that the International Labor Organization has its principles, and theoretically countries are supposed to support them. The basic principle in the ILO is the right of association. The United States is one of the very few countries that have never even ratified it. In fact, it’s considered sort of like a third rail. It never even comes up. That’s now over sixty years. I don’t know how many countries have failed to even ratify a right of association.
RHETORIC ASIDE, has the Democratic Party really been a friend of organized labor and the working class?
COMPARED WITH the Republicans, yes, but that’s not saying much. The studies of Larry Bartels and other political scientists show that working people and the poor tend to do somewhat better under Democratic than Republican administrations. But that just means that the Republicans are deeper in the pockets of the corporate system than the Democrats are. They’re both nuzzled there quite happily. There are individual members of the Democratic Party who have been friends of labor, but they’re a scattered and diminishing minority.
Take, say, Obama. The lame-duck session of Congress was interesting. He was highly praised, including by his supporters, for his statesman-like attitude during the lame-duck session, bipartisanship and getting legislation through and so on. What did he get through? The main achievement was a huge tax cut for the extremely wealthy. When I say extremely wealthy, I mean extremely. So, for example, I’m pretty well off, but I was below the cutoff point on that. This was a tiny sector of wealth that got a huge gift—plunging another hole in the deficit, but who cares about that? That was his major achievement. Meanwhile, at the same time, he initiated a tax increase on federal workers. Of course, they didn’t call it a tax increase. That doesn’t sound good. They called it a pay freeze. But a pay freeze on public-sector workers is exactly the same thing as a tax increase. So we’ve got to punish public-sector workers and reward the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, who just announced a $17.5 billion compensation package for themselves.
IN A talk that you gave at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last fall called “Human Intelligence and the Environment”—it was broadcast on Alternative Radio and reprinted in the March–April issue of the International Socialist Review—you wrote that the system “is just driving us to disaster.” I note that you said this many months before the current conflagrations. “So is anything going to be done about it?” you ask. And you answer, “The prospects are not very auspicious.” Why not?
THE PROSPECTS are not auspicious because of the general feeling which you described before, that there is nothing we can do. As long as people sit by passively and let things happen to them, the dynamics of the system will drive it in a certain direction, and that direction is toward self-destruction. I don’t think that’s hard to show. But the assumption is just wrong. There is a lot that we can do. In fact, what happened in the last month or so in Madison illustrates that very clearly. They didn’t win, but it was an important demonstration. It’s a basis for going on farther. There’s plenty that we can do, but it’s not going to happen by itself. If people are made to feel helpless, isolated, in a kind of atomized society, then power will win. These issues are pretty severe. Right now, for example, we are really facing for the first time in human history the prospect of something like species destruction.
TURNING TO the Middle East, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, burned himself to death in despair. That led to what seemed to be a spontaneous uprising there in Tunisia and then later in Egypt and in other parts of the Arab Middle East. Your observations about the situation in the Arab Middle East and all of the upheavals?
FIRST OF all, let’s remember that there had been plenty going on for years. It just hadn’t broken through. Take Egypt, the most important country. The demonstrations in Egypt, the January 25 movement, were led by a fairly young, tech-savvy group who called themselves the April 6 Movement. Why April 6? The reason is that a couple years earlier the Egyptian labor movement, which has been quite militant and active, though crushed, had planned to organize on April 6, 2008, major strike actions at the most important industrial center in Egypt, and also solidarity actions, and was crushed by force by Mubarak’s security forces. So that’s April 6. Early this year they named themselves the April 6 Movement. That’s a reflection of the significant tradition of worker struggles. Though there isn’t much reporting of that—in fact, almost nothing—it does seem that the Egyptian labor movement is continuing to take some pretty interesting steps, even as far as to take over factories, so it’s reported.
In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that’s not so unusual. Let’s take our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of Blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.
ECHOING THE comment by Howard Zinn about small acts making a difference.
Right.
CLEARLY, THERE are dangers to Japan and the rest of the world from the nuclear disaster. I’m just going to read a couple of newspaper headlines. “Seawater near the Fukushima plant was found to contain iodine-131,” which is a radioactive byproduct of nuclear fission, “at more than 4,000 times the safety level.” “Dangerous levels of radioactive isotopes have been found twenty-five miles from the Fukushima reactor.” “Small amounts of radiation detected in Washington State milk.” This is all doubly ironic, because of Hiroshima and what Japan suffered in the first and only atomic military attack, for Fukushima today.
FIRST OF all, it is a horrible tragedy. And, as you say, it’s particularly ironic that it should have struck Japan again. But we should take it as a warning. There aren’t really going to be safe nuclear plants. A lot of the problems in Fukushima now are fuel rods, not the plants themselves, which are not very well protected, and under adverse conditions they can be quite lethal, as we’ve seen. But the same is true here. The fuel rods here are not protected. In fact, the nuclear waste disposal problem has yet to be solved at all. Whether we should go ahead with nuclear energy or not is a debate, but you should recognize that the risk factor is quite extreme. There isn’t going to be a way to calculate in advance any disaster that could take place and compensate for it. Japan is about as well-organized and efficient as any society can be these days, much more than us, but this struck them. And they thought they had it controlled, but they didn’t.
MOVING BACK to the Middle East and again the unintentional uses of irony, when Obama cautioned the various revolutionaries in different countries to “show restraint” and that there was “no place for violence,” Obama spoke of the United States’ “unique capabilities” when it comes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya. Tariq Ali, in a recent article, calls Libya another case of “selective vigilantism by the West.”
FIRST OF all, we should be clear that there was no no-fly zone. UN Resolution 1973 did call for a no-fly zone, but the three traditional imperial countries—Britain, France, and the United States—who are carrying this out immediately disregarded the resolution and instantly turned to participation on the side of the rebels. That’s not a no-fly zone. So they’re not imposing a no-fly zone over the rebel advances. In fact, they’re encouraging them and supporting them.
So we should, first of all, recognize what it is. The United States, Britain, and France determined at once to disregard the UN resolution and to proceed to try to help the rebels overthrow the government. It’s kind of like nuclear energy: You can say it’s right or wrong, but at least face the fact of what’s happening. Is it selective? Sure. But it’s pretty predictable and very familiar. If there is a dictator who has a lot of oil and is obedient and submissive and reliable, then he’s given free rein. The most important is Saudi Arabia. There, there were supposed to be demonstrations, a Day of Rage, but the government crushed it with overwhelming force. In fact, apparently not even a single person was willing to appear in Riyadh. They were terrified. That’s okay. In Kuwait, the same thing.
Bahrain is particularly important. It hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is the major military force in the region by far, and it’s also right off the coast of eastern Saudi Arabia. Eastern Saudi Arabia is where most of the oil is and, like Bahrain, it’s mostly Shiite, and the Saudi Arabian government is Sunni. Furthermore, just by some weird accident of history and geography, the concentration of the world’s energy resources is right up there in the northern Gulf region, which is mostly Shiite, in a largely Sunni world. It’s been a nightmare for Western planners for a long time, to consider the possibility that there might be some kind of tacit Shiite alliance out of Western control that would possess most of the core of the world’s energy supplies.
So there was barely a tap on the wrist when Saudi Arabia led a military force into Bahrain to crush the protesters pretty violently. They drove them out of Pearl Square, where they had been encamping, and even went so far as to destroy the Bahraini symbol of the country, the pearl in the middle of Pearl Square, which had been appropriated by the demonstrators, so the army forces smashed it. They went into a hospital and drove everyone out. That was okay. Practically no comment here.
On the other hand, when you have a dictator like Qaddafi, who has plenty of oil but is unreliable, it makes sense from an imperial point of view to try to see if you can find a way to replace him with someone more pliable who would be more trustworthy to do the things you want him to do. Therefore, you react differently there.
In cases like, say, Egypt or Tunisia, what comes along is just the traditional game plan. It’s as old as the hills. If there is a dictator whom you support but he’s losing control—
LIKE THE Shah, Suharto, Marcos, and many others.
THERE’S A dozen cases. But it’s always the same. Support him until the end. If he becomes impossible because maybe the army turns against him or whatever, or the business community, if he becomes impossible, shelve him, send him off somewhere, issue dramatic proclamations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime as much as possible. That’s exactly what’s happening. So you can call it selective if you want—that’s what it’s called—but it seems to me pretty rational imperialism. And all pretty familiar.
IN TERMS of these multiple uprisings throughout the Middle East, there is an embedded assumption in all the commentary that somehow the United States must control what is going on.
OH, YES. That’s sometimes said very frankly. The Wall Street Journal, which tends to be franker about such things, its main political commentator, Gerald Seib, said straight out, “The problem is, we haven’t yet learned how to control these new forces.” The implication: we’d better find out a way to control them. And that goes way back. That goes back sixty years to Roosevelt’s planners and advisers. Adolf Berle, one of the leading liberal advisers for many presidents, wrote in, it must have been the late 1940s, that—
WASN’T HE part of FDR’s brain trust?
YES, AND then went on to remain kind of a major figure in the liberal political system. He said straight out, “If we can control Middle East energy, that will provide us with substantial control of the world.” That’s no small thing.
THE WORLD Social Forum declared that, “Another World is Possible.” Might these uprisings in some of the most repressive and tyrannical states in the Middle East indicate that in fact another world is possible?
YES. WHATEVER the outcome in the Arab world, it’s really of historic importance. I can’t really think of a series of events like this. There are major efforts to try to control and restrain them. Even if they work, there’s going to be a legacy of success and dedication that is going to be a basis for going on. I think they’re extremely important, and we don’t know where they’re going to go. We shouldn’t just watch. We should be doing what we can to help them.
ISR Issue 79, September–October 2011
The politics of famine The United States bears special responsibility for Somalia’s food crisis, writes Lee Wengraf
THE EAST African nation of Somalia is the site of an unfolding humanitarian nightmare—a massive famine that has cost tens of thousands of Somali lives in the past few months, according to the United Nations. Over 3 million people are affected right now, with more than 10 million at risk across the Horn of Africa.
According to the BBC, roughly 640,000 children are acutely malnourished in Somalia, and at least six in every 10,000 children die each day. Antonio Guterres, head of the UN refugee agency, declared in July that Somalia was the “worst humanitarian disaster’’ on the globe. The UN officially designated the crisis a famine, the first time it has adopted that designation since 1984.
Thousands of Somalis have poured into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. The population of the largest refugee camp in Kenya, Dadaab, is growing by more than 1,300 a day—it could reach as high as half a million. According to the BBC, “Parts of the capital, where there are camps for displaced people, were last week among three areas newly declared by the United Nations to be suffering famine.”
The UN also says that more than 4 million Kenyans are threatened by starvation. On August 4, the UN’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit said that famine was “likely to persist until at least December 2011.”
U.S. officials have laid responsibility for the mass starvation at the feet of the al-Shabab rebels who control southern Somalia, including south central Somalia and the Lower Juba region, where the famine is at its worst. Al-Shabab—which has been battling Somalia’s U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government for the past four years—has been labeled a terrorist organization and a wing of al-Qaeda by the United States.
Washington claims the group is responsible for exacerbating drought conditions by blocking aid routes into the most affected areas. The rebels reversed an earlier decision to lift a ban on some international agencies, prompting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to claim on August 4 that al-Shabab was “preventing assistance to the most vulnerable populations in Somalia.”
But there is much more to this story. Blame for the crisis in Somalia lies squarely with the United States. Somalia is suffering from a severe drought that has created much scarcity and hardship—but decades of Western intervention lie at the heart of this crisis.
Skimpy aid, well-funded war
To start with, aid officials have cited a lack of resources—not al-Shabab—as the chief obstacle to reaching famine victims. “The limits on our action are more on the side of logistics than access,” said Anna Schaaf, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Both UNICEF and the Red Cross have listed problems of food purchases and flight scheduling as their main concerns.
“The lack of food stockpiling in Somalia reflects badly on the international humanitarian community,” Tony Burns, director of operations for SAACID, the oldest NGO in Somalia, told Britain’s Guardian.
Al-Shabab may be blocking some escape routes for refugees in the south, but, Burns continued, the rebels “are not monolithic” and may be willing to negotiate. “They are hard core in some places, and very moderate in others. In areas where they are not so strong, it is more [the] clans that make the rules,” Burns said.
Plus, according to the New York Times: “Also hampering the emergency efforts, aid officials contend, are American government rules that prohibit material support to the militants, who often demand ‘taxes’ for allowing aid deliveries to pass through.”
Finally, global food prices—fueled by speculation and the drive for profit—began to soar again in 2010 after a decline from their 2008 peak. Cereal prices in Somalia were 240 percent higher in May over the previous year, further exacerbating the dangers posed by drought.
The UN has requested $1.6 billion to address the crisis, but has received only about half that amount. Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell has sharply criticized the response to the crisis by developed countries as “derisory and dangerously inadequate.”
The United States has pledged a pitiful $28 million in response to the UN request. Hillary Clinton claimed that the United States has already given over $431 million in food and nonfood emergency assistance to Somalia this year alone. Yet a hefty portion of what the United States allocates for Somalia comes in the form of military assistance, both for the Somali government and the 9,000-strong African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) force, composed mainly of troops from Uganda and Burundi. AMISOM’s presence has fueled a civil war that has terrorized millions of ordinary Somalis.
Direct military involvement in counterterrorism is also a major element of U.S. foreign policy in the region, a role that is only intensifying with a widening drone war and other activities. Left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, in a recent visit to Somalia, uncovered a CIA base near Mogadishu airport where victims of renditions from Kenya and Ethiopia are interrogated. The base is also involved in clandestine military strikes. U.S. agents “are here full-time,” a senior Somali intelligence official told Scahill.
As Black Agenda Report points out, the U.S. escalation of the military conflict is directly tied to the famine: “The U.S. has armed an array of militias operating near the Ethiopian and Kenyan borders, making normal agricultural pursuits all but impossible, and the current world-class catastrophe inevitable.”
President Barack Obama has been clear on the strategic risks presented by instability in the Horn of Africa, and the importance of the AFRICOM military command in battling these alleged threats. During his 2009 visit to Ghana, he declared:
When there is genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems, they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response...And let me be clear: our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold on the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.AFRICOM was created under George Bush in 2007. Its budget for the coming year is close to $300 million, an increase of about $20 million over last year. Somalia is a critical component of AFRICOM’s presence. The Obama administration announced in July that it was sending Marines to train African “peacekeepers” there, and earmarking more than $75 million for Somalia counterterrorism assistance alone. A long record of intervention
Western responsibility for the current crisis goes deeper—reaching back decades into the past.
Global austerity and privatization—driven by World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wreaked havoc across the Third World in the era of “structural adjustment” begun in the 1970s. Somalia was food self-sufficient until the late 1970s, despite drought conditions—but global financial policy forced down wages and hiked costs for farmers, helping to pave the way for the civil war the broke out in 1988.
The United States, meanwhile, had long viewed the Horn of Africa as a strategic location, with its proximity to major trade routes through the Suez Canal, and access to the Middle East and South Asia. Global military competition between the United States and USSR played out through Cold War-era proxy battles between the region’s powers.
Militarization, structural adjustment, and the late 1980s civil war produced a horrible famine that by 1991 had taken 300,000 lives. The United States claimed the famine as justification for military intervention and sent in troops in 1992, under the auspices of the UN—although the most severe period of the famine had passed several months before, and the death rate had fallen by 90 percent. U.S. officials estimated that its forces inflicted 6,000 to 10,000 casualties—two-thirds of them women and children—in the summer of 1993 alone.
Intervention dramatically worsened conditions in Somalia, with the nation since then consistently ranking near or at the bottom of nearly all human development measurements, from life expectancy to infant mortality. Since 1991, the country has been wracked by civil wars, fueled by U.S. support for various sides in the conflicts.
In 2006, neighboring Ethiopia invaded Somalia to unseat the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had held power for barely a few months, but managed to bring some small degree of stability to the country. U.S. backing, training, and funding for Ethiopia’s overthrow of the ICU was a barely concealed secret—as was Washington’s support for installing the Transitional Federal Government in place of the ICU.
When Ethiopia pulled out in early 2009, it left an escalated civil war and refugee crisis in its wake: Approximately 10,000 people were killed, and 1.1 million Somalis were turned into refugees.
Human Rights Watch published a report in December 2008, on the eve of Ethiopia’s withdrawal, foretelling the current crisis: more than 3.25 million Somalis—over 40 percent of the population of south-central Somalia—in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. As Alex Thurston of Sahel blog described: “The fall and fragmentation of the ICU, combined with the brutality of the Ethiopian occupation, facilitated the rise of al Shabab, the ICU’s military wing.”
With U.S. Marines moving into position and stepped-up funding for military and counter-terrorism activities, the danger of U.S. intervention in Somalia has returned for the near future, with the current famine—just as in 1992—potentially providing cover for escalating involvement. On August 6, al-Shabab pulled out of the rebel-controlled sections of the capital of Mogadishu—at its height, the organization controlled about a third of the city. But whether the government can continue to hold onto the city is an open question.
As Scahill described the situation in the Nation:
In the battle against the Shabab, the United States does not, in fact, appear to have cast its lot with the Somali government. The emerging U.S. strategy on Somalia—borne out in stated policy, expanded covert presence and funding plans—is two-pronged: On the one hand, the CIA is training, paying and at times directing Somali intelligence agents who are not firmly under the control of the Somali government, while JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] conducts unilateral strikes without the prior knowledge of the government; on the other, the Pentagon is increasing its support for and arming of the counterterrorism operations of non-Somali African military forces.Meanwhile, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a firm U.S. ally, has called for a no-fly zone to be established over southern Somalia. In Washington, Republican Representative Peter King is helping to fuel the push for intervention by raising the specter of terrorism in the United States—through al-Shabab recruiting Somali-Americans. For the many of us who want to see an end to war and hunger in Somalia, United Nations peacekeepers are no solution. UN troops follow the dictates of U.S. priorities, just as they did during the “humanitarian intervention” of 1993.
The United States is concerned, above all, with ensuring its dominance over a strategically critical region. A devastating famine and thousands of deaths is no small price for them to pay to secure this goal. Antiwar and social justice activists must raise their voices urgently: Ending the country’s misery means U.S. hands off of Somalia now. Lee Wengraf is a regular contributor to the ISR. She is the author of “Somalia’s ‘Operation Restore Hope,’ 1992–1994” in the May–June 2011 issue.
Members of Occupy Washington, DC and Occupy the Highway (occupiers who walked to DC from NYC) are in the Hart Building protesting the super committee. They are mic-checking the failure of the committee and demonstrating how the deficit problem can be easily solved by taxing the rich and cutting the military. Further they call for rebuilding the economy, creating millions of jobs and strengthening the social safety net. Occupiers are inside and outside the Hart Building.
According to the 99%'s Deficit Reduction Plan the American people need a real jobs bill, not one that is merely a political tactic for an election year. We also need a truly progressive tax system—one that taxes wealth more and workers less. The poorest Americans pay taxes on necessities like food and clothing, so why is it that neither party urges a tax on the purchase of stocks, bonds and derivatives—a tax that could raise $800 billion over a decade? And finally, we need an end to the wars and militarism maintained and expanded by both parties, bringing huge profits to the arms industry and immense suffering to millions.
Via : Naked Capitalism/Yves Smith
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled
A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber) I’ve checked this out with our friend in Athens, reporter Kostas Kallergis (who runs the local blog “When The Crisis Hits The Fan”), and he confirmed it–Linda Katehi really is the worst of all possible chancellors imaginable, the worst for us, and the worst for her native Greece.
First, some background: Last week, The eXiled published two pieces on Greece’s doomed struggle against global financial institutions—an article on how the EU and Western bankers essentially overthrew the nearly-uppity government of prime minister George Papandreou, and replaced it with a banker-friendly “technocratic” government that includes real-life, no-bullshit neo-Nazis and fascists from the LAOS party, fascists with a banker-friendly fetish for imposing austerity measures. One of those fascists, Makis “Hammer” Voridis, spent his early 20s “hammering” non-fascist students for sport. Voridis was booted out of Athens University law school after ax-bashing fellow law students who didn’t share his fascist ideology. Today, Mikaes Voridis is the Minister for Infrastructure in the “technocratic” government. Imagine Lt. John Pike in leather and an 80s hairdo, carrying a homemade ax rather than a pepper spray weapon, and you have Makis “Hammer” Voridis.
We also published a powerful and necessary history primer by Greek journalist Kostas Kallergis on the almost-holy significance of the date November 17 in contemporary Greek history. On that day in 1973, pro-democracy students at the Athens Polytechnic university were crushed by tanks and soldiers sent in by the ruling junta dictatorship, which collapsed less than a year later, returning democracy to Greece. With CIA backing, the generals in the junta overthrew Greece’s democracy in 1967, jailed and tortured suspected leftists (meaning students and union leaders), and even went the extra-weird-fascist mile by banning the Beatles, mini-skirts, long hair, along with Mark Twain and Sophocles. The student rebellion at the Polytechnic, and its martyrdom, became the symbol for Greeks of their fight against fascism and tyranny, something like the briefcase man at Tiananmen Square, or the slaughtered rebels of the Boston Tea Party. That is why, as soon as the junta was overthrown and democracy restored in 1974, Greece immediately banned the presence of army, police or state security forces on university campuses. This so-called “university asylum” law turned Greece’s university campuses into cop-free zones of “political asylum,” where no one could interfere in the students’ rights to dissent against the government.
Here’s the sordid back-story: Linda Katehi was born in Athens in 1954 and got her undergraduate degree at the famous Athens Polytechnic. She just happened to be the right age to be a student at the Polytechnic university on the very day, November 17, 1973, when the junta sent in tanks and soldiers to crush her fellow pro-democracy students. It was only after democracy was restored in 1974–and Greek university campuses were turned into police-free “asylum zones”–that Linda Katehi eventually moved to the USA, earning her PhD at UCLA.
Earlier this year, Linda Katehi served on an “International Committee On Higher Education In Greece,” along with a handful of American, European and Asian academics. The ostensible goal was to “reform” Greece’s university system. The real problem, from the real powers behind the scenes (banksters and the EU), was how to get Greece under control as the austerity-screws tightened. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that squeezing more money from Greece’s beleaguered citizens would mean clamping down on Greece’s democracy and doing something about those pesky Greek university students. And that meant taking away the universities’ “amnesty” protection, in place for nearly four decades, so that no one, nowhere, would be safe from police truncheons, gas, or bullets.
Thanks to the EU, bankers, and UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, university freedom for Greece’s students has taken a huge, dark step backwards.
Here you can read a translation of the report co-authored by UC Davis’ Linda Katehi–the report which brought about the end of Greece’s “university asylum” law.What’s particularly disturbing is that Linda Katehi was the only Greek on that commission. Presumably that would give her a certain amount of extra sway–both because of her inside knowledge, and because of her moral authority among the other non-Greek committee members. And yet, Linda Katehi signed off on a report that provided the rationale for repealing Greece’s long-standing “university asylum” law. She basically helped undo the very heart and soul of Greece’s pro-democracy uprising against the junta.
And perfect timing too, now that one of Greece’s most notorious pro-junta fascists is a member of the new austerity government.
The interview in Greek with Linda Katehi can be found here at this American Greek site. Our man in Athens, Kostas Kallergis, picked out two specific questions about November 17, 1973, and Linda Katehi’s answers–if you can call these answers. Here are the questions and answers, with Kallergis’ translations and comments, which he provided to The eXiled:
Σπουδάσατε σε περίοδο έντονης πόλωσης στην πολιτική στην Ελλάδα και πολλοί συμφοιτητές σας δεν έμειναν αδρανείς. Εσείς αναμειχθήκατε στα πολιτικά πράγματα;
-Φυσικά, όπως όλοι άλλωστε. Πως να σε αφήσουν αδιάφορο όλες αυτές οι αναταραχές;
Second question:
Δραστηριοποιείστε πολιτικά;
-Ποτέ δεν έχω αναμειχθεί στα πολιτικά.
She’s the right goon for the right time: As Yasha Levine reported two years ago, UC students have been battling against rapacious austerity measures jacking up their fees in order to pay back Wall Street bankers who bet and lost UC pension funds. That’s a big reason why UC students are fed up and Going Occupy. And “Chemical” Katehi’s answer is the sort of answer banksters like hearing: Stomp out dissent and squeeze every last drop of juice out of them that you can.
You always expect your monsters to look like monsters and talk like monsters; but the best, most effective vehicles for evil are always these anti-matter humans, these hollow voids, the “nothing person” that the great Russian writer Yuri Trifonov described so mercilessly and perfectly in House on the Embankment.
For more on “Chemical” Linda Katehi, watch this stunning silent protest by UC Davis students (H/T Lee Fang):
Also, watch Linda Katehi telling ABC’s Good Morning America that she refuses to resign, claiming, “The university needs me.”
Indeed, just like Greece. How can anyone live without you people.
Posted: 23 Nov 2011 01:15 AM PST
Yves here. Reader sidelarge raised the issue yesterday in comments, of UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi’s role in abolition of university asylum in Greece. The story is even uglier than the link he provided suggests.By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled
A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber) I’ve checked this out with our friend in Athens, reporter Kostas Kallergis (who runs the local blog “When The Crisis Hits The Fan”), and he confirmed it–Linda Katehi really is the worst of all possible chancellors imaginable, the worst for us, and the worst for her native Greece.
First, some background: Last week, The eXiled published two pieces on Greece’s doomed struggle against global financial institutions—an article on how the EU and Western bankers essentially overthrew the nearly-uppity government of prime minister George Papandreou, and replaced it with a banker-friendly “technocratic” government that includes real-life, no-bullshit neo-Nazis and fascists from the LAOS party, fascists with a banker-friendly fetish for imposing austerity measures. One of those fascists, Makis “Hammer” Voridis, spent his early 20s “hammering” non-fascist students for sport. Voridis was booted out of Athens University law school after ax-bashing fellow law students who didn’t share his fascist ideology. Today, Mikaes Voridis is the Minister for Infrastructure in the “technocratic” government. Imagine Lt. John Pike in leather and an 80s hairdo, carrying a homemade ax rather than a pepper spray weapon, and you have Makis “Hammer” Voridis.
We also published a powerful and necessary history primer by Greek journalist Kostas Kallergis on the almost-holy significance of the date November 17 in contemporary Greek history. On that day in 1973, pro-democracy students at the Athens Polytechnic university were crushed by tanks and soldiers sent in by the ruling junta dictatorship, which collapsed less than a year later, returning democracy to Greece. With CIA backing, the generals in the junta overthrew Greece’s democracy in 1967, jailed and tortured suspected leftists (meaning students and union leaders), and even went the extra-weird-fascist mile by banning the Beatles, mini-skirts, long hair, along with Mark Twain and Sophocles. The student rebellion at the Polytechnic, and its martyrdom, became the symbol for Greeks of their fight against fascism and tyranny, something like the briefcase man at Tiananmen Square, or the slaughtered rebels of the Boston Tea Party. That is why, as soon as the junta was overthrown and democracy restored in 1974, Greece immediately banned the presence of army, police or state security forces on university campuses. This so-called “university asylum” law turned Greece’s university campuses into cop-free zones of “political asylum,” where no one could interfere in the students’ rights to dissent against the government.
Athens Polytechnic uprising against junta: Try to find Linda Katehi in this photo
Today, thanks in part to UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, Greek university campuses are no longer protected from state security forces. She helped undo her native country’s “university asylum” laws just in time for the latest austerity measures to kick in. Incredibly, Katehi attacked university campus freedom despite the fact that she was once a student at the very center of Greece’s anti-junta, pro-democracy rebellion–although what she was doing there, if anything at all, no one really knows.Here’s the sordid back-story: Linda Katehi was born in Athens in 1954 and got her undergraduate degree at the famous Athens Polytechnic. She just happened to be the right age to be a student at the Polytechnic university on the very day, November 17, 1973, when the junta sent in tanks and soldiers to crush her fellow pro-democracy students. It was only after democracy was restored in 1974–and Greek university campuses were turned into police-free “asylum zones”–that Linda Katehi eventually moved to the USA, earning her PhD at UCLA.
Earlier this year, Linda Katehi served on an “International Committee On Higher Education In Greece,” along with a handful of American, European and Asian academics. The ostensible goal was to “reform” Greece’s university system. The real problem, from the real powers behind the scenes (banksters and the EU), was how to get Greece under control as the austerity-screws tightened. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that squeezing more money from Greece’s beleaguered citizens would mean clamping down on Greece’s democracy and doing something about those pesky Greek university students. And that meant taking away the universities’ “amnesty” protection, in place for nearly four decades, so that no one, nowhere, would be safe from police truncheons, gas, or bullets.
Thanks to the EU, bankers, and UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, university freedom for Greece’s students has taken a huge, dark step backwards.
Here you can read a translation of the report co-authored by UC Davis’ Linda Katehi–the report which brought about the end of Greece’s “university asylum” law.What’s particularly disturbing is that Linda Katehi was the only Greek on that commission. Presumably that would give her a certain amount of extra sway–both because of her inside knowledge, and because of her moral authority among the other non-Greek committee members. And yet, Linda Katehi signed off on a report that provided the rationale for repealing Greece’s long-standing “university asylum” law. She basically helped undo the very heart and soul of Greece’s pro-democracy uprising against the junta.
And perfect timing too, now that one of Greece’s most notorious pro-junta fascists is a member of the new austerity government.
Popular Greek cyber-graphic: “Bread. Education. Freedom*”
One more thing: Kallergis did a search in the Greek language of Linda Katehi’s interviews to see what she had to say about her experience at the Polytechnic in 1973, what she remembered of it, and how it affected her. What he found was troubling to say the least.The interview in Greek with Linda Katehi can be found here at this American Greek site. Our man in Athens, Kostas Kallergis, picked out two specific questions about November 17, 1973, and Linda Katehi’s answers–if you can call these answers. Here are the questions and answers, with Kallergis’ translations and comments, which he provided to The eXiled:
Σπουδάσατε σε περίοδο έντονης πόλωσης στην πολιτική στην Ελλάδα και πολλοί συμφοιτητές σας δεν έμειναν αδρανείς. Εσείς αναμειχθήκατε στα πολιτικά πράγματα;
-Φυσικά, όπως όλοι άλλωστε. Πως να σε αφήσουν αδιάφορο όλες αυτές οι αναταραχές;
Q: “You studied during a very politically polarized period in Greece and many of your fellow students did not stay still/dormant. Did you get involved in the political developments?”Kallergis comments: “Katehi is offered an opportunity to give an account of her political activities of that time, and yet she only replies with a vague, very general answer. It seems very odd.”
Linda Katehi: “Of course, as everybody else. How could that upheavel leave you indifferent?”
Second question:
Δραστηριοποιείστε πολιτικά;
-Ποτέ δεν έχω αναμειχθεί στα πολιτικά.
Q: Are you involved in politics now?Kallergis comments: “I guess you can see the contradiction… they are both from the same single interview.”
Linda Katehi: I have never been involved in politics.
She’s the right goon for the right time: As Yasha Levine reported two years ago, UC students have been battling against rapacious austerity measures jacking up their fees in order to pay back Wall Street bankers who bet and lost UC pension funds. That’s a big reason why UC students are fed up and Going Occupy. And “Chemical” Katehi’s answer is the sort of answer banksters like hearing: Stomp out dissent and squeeze every last drop of juice out of them that you can.
You always expect your monsters to look like monsters and talk like monsters; but the best, most effective vehicles for evil are always these anti-matter humans, these hollow voids, the “nothing person” that the great Russian writer Yuri Trifonov described so mercilessly and perfectly in House on the Embankment.
For more on “Chemical” Linda Katehi, watch this stunning silent protest by UC Davis students (H/T Lee Fang):
Also, watch Linda Katehi telling ABC’s Good Morning America that she refuses to resign, claiming, “The university needs me.”
Indeed, just like Greece. How can anyone live without you people.
11/22/11
Posted: 21 Nov 2011 02:59 PM PST
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled
Another Monday, another “deficit crisis” panic. If you haven’t got the feeling yet that you’re being played like a sucker over this alleged “deficit crisis,” then let me help you cross that cognitive bridge to dissonance. It comes in the figure of the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip. Niskanen was an advisor to Ronald Reagan throughout the 1970s; a board director for the Koch-founded Reason Foundation; a member and chairman of Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers from 1981-85; and he moved directly from Reagan’s side back to the Koch brothers’ side, as chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute from 1985 until 2008.
This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.”
First, let’s go back to December, 1981, and news is leaking out that Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts for the rich, combined with huge increases in defense spending, caused an explosion in the deficit to unimaginable levels, from Carter’s projected deficit of $27 billion to a real deficit of $109 billion and climbing fast–this, despite the fact that Reagan ran as a “responsible” deficit hawk. Someone needed to rationalize that deficit away, and the job fell to none other than CEA director and future Cato Institute chairman Niskanen, as reported in the AP on December 9, 1981:
Faced with record-smashing deficits that could top $100 billion a year, the Reagan administration now says it can live with a torrent of red ink without reversing its strategy against inflation and high interest rates.
In a turnaround from President Reagan’s longstanding assertion that deficits are a cause of inflation, senior White House economic advisers yesterday sought to downplay that relationship. One member of the Council of Economic Advisers, William A. Niskanen, suggested the connection is virtually nonexistent.
…Rudolph G. Penner, a budget official during Gerald Ford’s administration, said there is a “certain irony” that the record deficit of $66.4 billion, which occurred in 1976, “was set by a conservative president (Ford), and the record will be broken by another conservative president.”
Actually, what Niskanen said was this: “The simple relationship between deficits and inflation is as close to being empty as can be perceived.”
And this: “There are no necessary relationships between the deficit and money growth.”
And this: “Evidence doesn’t support” the assertion that deficits crowd out private borrowers.
And finally, William Niskanen, one of the leading libertarian figures of the past four decades, said this about deficits: “The economic community has reinforced an unfortunate perspective on the deficit which is not consistent with the historical evidence…It is preferable to tolerate deficits of these magnitudes either to reinflating [the money supply] or to raise taxes. Other things being equal, I would like to see lower deficits too, but other things are not equal.”*
William Niskanen looks back on a malevolent life well spent (by the Koch brothers)Hardy-har-har. Such a charming guy.
Even Der Austerity-führer himself, Friedrich von Hayek, bragged in 1985 that the deficit scare was purely political–you can almost see the little troll rubbing his troll hands together gleefully as he brags about his master plan’s success:
After remarking that his work had influenced by Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher of Great Britain, that many of the president’s advisers had come from “circles I am acquainted with,” and that he was wearing a set of cuff links given to him by Reagan, the economist [von Hayek] commented:The way von Hayek brags that he and his little circle of free-market Nazis swindled the world is just stunning–really stunning, as in it’s almost impossible to respond to it’s so vile. But as Yasha Levine and I reported in The Nation in September, swindling the public and shameless hypocrisy–that’s how Friedrich von Hayek, and his sponsor Charles Koch, roll:
“I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man. His politics? When the government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings in the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the world world. That’s a problem.”
But, von Hayek continued, “You see, one of Reagan’s advisers told me why the president has permitted that to happen, which makes the matter partly excusable: Reagan thinks it is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.”
Thus, the economist said, Reagan “hopes to persuade Congress of the necessity of spending reductions by means of an immense deficit. Unfortunately, he has not succeeded.”
Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor [Koch], the other the mandarin [Hayek]—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.Like typical Randroid libertarians, they find the public’s gullibility and good faith contemptible. This is something that Americans still can’t get their heads around about the free-market libertarians who’ve ruled us and ruined us over the past three decades. Here, for example, is how a middle-of-the-road guy, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, described von Hayek’s cynical boasting about the big deficit swindle back in 1985:
But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.
While some Americans may agree that a shrunken government makes a deliberately created deficit “partly excusable,” such a deficit still reflects a reckless deception with worldwide consequences yet to be calculated. And congressional Democrats should realize the source of the pressure they’re under to sell their political birthright.Poor earnest Tom Wicker’s problem here, we all know now, is his lack of rank cynicism; he still believes that these people care about “consequences” for anyone but themselves; he still believes in fantasy-Democrats who will “wake up” or get wise to the swindle. Keep waiting, Mr. Wicker. Yep, they’ll get wise all right.
A couple more things I want to say about Niskanen, who just died a few weeks ago of a stroke (he was still chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute up to his last breath). He not only was a cynical bastard who helped screw this country over, but he also had that other nauseating libertard trait: The faux-maverick contrarian dickhead trait.
In October 1984, just weeks before the election between Reagan-Bush and Mondale-Ferraro, libertarian economics adviser William Niskanen spoke before a meeting of women’s groups to tell them that the wage gap was all their own fault, if it even existed at all:
Wage Plan Is Labeled As “Crazy”Mondale’s response when he heard what Niskanen said is poignant, because it’s pretty much every sane American’s response to every batshit crazy, pernicious idea and “maverick” poison that Republicans and libertarians have been puking on this country–like that spitting dinosaur in Jurassic Park–for lo these past few decades. Here’s Mondale’s reaction:
(AP) — White House economist William Niskanen, tackling a sensitive political issue, yesterday criticized Walter Mondale’s support for the concept of comparable pay for men and women and said it was “a truly crazy proposal.”
Niskanen, a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, also told a meeting of Women in Government Relations that the wage gap between the sexes was largely due to women interrupting their careers for marriage and children.
…Niskanen was asked for elaboration by one woman in the audience who said his remark had caused “bristling in the back of the room.”
“Comparable worth is an idea whose time, I think, has long passed,” he responded, adding it was based on the “rather medieval concept of a just pay and a just wage.”
“He said that?” Mondale asked incredulously.Yep, he sure did.
You know what makes Niskanen so cool? He’s not “politically correct.” Nosiree, he’s a mavericky maverick (when he isn’t pushing his nose deep up Charles Kochs’ ass, that is)And within a year, chief pus-humper himself, William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, was attacking Catholic bishops for daring to allege that Christianity is not all about free-markets and enriching the 1-percent:
A former economic adviser to President Reagan says the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are ignoring the Bible as well as sound economics in their call for more government help for the poor.Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.
…In a lengthy teaching letter approved last month, the bishops declared that significant poverty in such a rich nation is “a moral and social scandal that must not be ignored.” They said government as well as individuals and businesses should do much more to help the poor and powerless take part in economic life.
Niskanen, identifying himself as “an economist and a Protestant,” said, “one has reason to question the moral authority of a letter that has little apparent basis in the Scriptures of our shared religious heritage. The letter seeks to provide an agenda for the state. The New Testament is a message of individual salvation through Christ,” he said. “The bishops encourage us to seek justice through political action. Jesus counsels us that the Kingdom of God is not of this world.’ The central theme of the letter is economic justice. The New Testament provides no concept of secular justice, economic or otherwise,” he said.
May the bastard writhe in pain.
* Source: Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top 100 Officials by Nina Easton and Ron Brownstein.
Posted: 22 Nov 2011 12:08 AM PST
By Mitch Green, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic PerspectivesThe following letter reflects my view on the subject of civil disobedience…I offer my opinion as an Army veteran, student of the economy, and critic of an ongoing effort to wage economic war on the vast majority the population. If these words move you, I urge you to consider honestly the consequences if you decide to act.
As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?
If history is our guide then we know that story all too well. Behind a thin veil of red, white and blue stands a nation that has used its military might to respond forcefully to any public contempt for the very institutions which bind us in exclusion from the liberty those colors evoke. Just as a training collar keeps a dog in check, a highly militarized police force responds mercilessly, sharply, and without hesitation with an array of chemical warfare and thuggish brutality. And where they fail, divisions of soldiers stand ready to deliver a serious and painful lesson to all who demonstrate their unwillingness to wait for democracy.
This has been the history of democracy in America. The ink on the pages that chronicle the use of state violence towards an unruly citizenry is dry. We cannot rewrite them. We read them in lament. But for each new day history waits; at the dawn of each morning we are presented with the gift of creation. The prevailing thought woven into the fabric of our society today, threaded through both patterns of conservative and liberal ideology, remains the recognition that something is very wrong with the world. Naturally, we form the question: Can we do things differently? Once we animate that thought and present it to society as a question demanding an answer, we begin to sketch out our draft of the world in the pages of history.
I call upon my brothers and sisters in the armed forces to ink their pens and help us write these next few, and most important pages in the history of our social life. Soon, it is quite likely that you will be mobilized to aid the police in their effort to contain or disperse what their bosses see as an imminent threat to the sanctity of their authority. As that day draws near, I remind you of these familiar words:
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.Those that take this oath seriously are faced with a terrible conflict. You must battle internally between the affirmation that you will place your body between the social contract embedded in the Constitution and those that seek its destruction, while maintaining your loyalty to the government you serve and the orders issued by its officers. Sadly, society has placed a twin tax upon you by asking that you sacrifice both your body and your morality. This tax has been levied solely upon you overseas, and soon they’ll come to collect domestically. Your government in its expression of corporate interests relies upon your tenacity to endure, and your relentless willingness to sacrifice. And so you do.
Now, more than ever we need your sacrifice. But, I’m asking you to soldier in a different way. If called upon to deny the people of their first amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievance, disregard the order. Abstain from service. Or if you are so bold, join us. Make no mistake: The consequences for such decisions are severe. You will be prosecuted under the full extent of the law. But sacrifice is your watch word.
Thomas Paine wrote in 1776:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.Today we are faced with a new revolution. This time we are fighting to preserve our democracy, rather than to establish a new one. And just as a grateful nation relied upon the Winter Soldier to deliver us from the colonial yoke of oppression, we ask that you aid us in our struggle to be free from the bonds of debt peonage and false representation. In return we will stand in your defense as the elite, who have gained so much from your service, attempt to strip you of your hard won honor.
http://current.com/shows/upstream/93551398_i-want-my-senators-healthcare-if-they-voted-to-cut-medicare-medicaid.htm
I want my Senator's healthcare,... if they voted to cut Medicare & Medicaid
In April, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Even Democrats on the so-called Super Committee are talking about cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
Essentially Congress is telling senior citizens and the poor that tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires are more important than providing a health care safety net for our most vulnerable.
But did you know that members of Congress get great taxpayer funded healthcare? In fact, they get one of the best health care plans in the world.
It strikes us as the height of hypocrisy to be accepting government-provided, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance while denying seniors, the disabled and the poor the basic coverage that Medicare and Medicaid provide.
That’s why we’re circulating this petition demanding that members of Congress who voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid stop accepting taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for themselves. If they beli eve our most vulnerable citizens should buy insurance on the corporate, for-profit market, shouldn’t they do the same?
Sign the petition. Tell Congress: If you don’t believe in publicly-funded health coverage, don’t accept it.
That's why I signed a petition to The United States House of Representatives, which says:
"If you voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid, you must stop accepting taxpayer-funded healthcare for yourself and your family."
Will you sign the petition too? Click here to add your name:
http://signon.org/sign/congress-if-you-voted?source=s.fwd&r_by=329768
Essentially Congress is telling senior citizens and the poor that tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires are more important than providing a health care safety net for our most vulnerable.
But did you know that members of Congress get great taxpayer funded healthcare? In fact, they get one of the best health care plans in the world.
It strikes us as the height of hypocrisy to be accepting government-provided, taxpayer-subsidized health insurance while denying seniors, the disabled and the poor the basic coverage that Medicare and Medicaid provide.
That’s why we’re circulating this petition demanding that members of Congress who voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid stop accepting taxpayer-subsidized health insurance for themselves. If they beli eve our most vulnerable citizens should buy insurance on the corporate, for-profit market, shouldn’t they do the same?
Sign the petition. Tell Congress: If you don’t believe in publicly-funded health coverage, don’t accept it.
That's why I signed a petition to The United States House of Representatives, which says:
"If you voted to cut Medicare and Medicaid, you must stop accepting taxpayer-funded healthcare for yourself and your family."
Will you sign the petition too? Click here to add your name:
http://signon.org/sign/congress-if-you-voted?source=s.fwd&r_by=329768
11/20/11
No Robots on My Phone
By Josh Levy, November 15, 2011
If a new bill gets through Congress, marketing robots will invade your cellphone.
The bill, called the “Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011” (H.R. 3035), would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to allow marketers and bill collectors to make endless calls to your mobile phone — just like they currently can on your landline, but this time using minutes that you are paying for.
Sponsored by corporate interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association, the bill shows a blatant disregard for our privacy and our rights as mobile phone users.
And to make matters worse, you’ll likely opt in to this new robocalling regime without even realizing it.
While the bill requires that mobile phone users give “prior express consent” for telemarketers to start hitting them up, its definition of consent is incredibly loose. Giving out your number when you’re buying anything — clothes, groceries, a pack of gum — gives merchants (and the companies that own them) full license to robocall you into oblivion.
The kicker? Most mobile plans include a limited number of minutes, so we’ll be the ones footing the bill every time a robo-dialer picks up his robo-phone and robo-calls us.
Right now a House committee is reviewing the bill. We need to stop it before it goes any further. Take action now to tell Congress to abandon any bill that lets marketers invade our cellphones.
Josh is associate campaign director for Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund. He was formerly the managing editor of Change.org, a social action site, and was a frequent commentator on the use of technology in the 2008 election as associate editor of techPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum.
Read Josh's full bio »
Read Josh's full bio »
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