Guernica / Mike Elk: Major Union Victory for Rite Aid Workers Offers Roadmap for Labor Movement
By Mike Elk
By arrangement with Alternet.Org.
On Sunday, 500 Rite Aid workers at the company’s massive Southwest Distribution Center in Lancaster, California signed a three-year tentative agreement with the management of Rite Aid. The contract was a strong one, providing affordable health care, protections against jobs being outsourced to subcontractors (a common practice in the warehousing industry), job safety requirements, and most stunningly, wage increases in each of the next three years. While many unions are making concessions to keep companies open, the Longshoremen Union was actually able to win a wage increase—an extraordinarily rare feat.
“Helping workers win a union contract today usually requires a long struggle, a comprehensive campaign on the outside and strong leadership and rank and file action on the inside, in order to overcome the vicious anti-union attacks by employers, but victories are still possible as the Rite Aid Campaign shows” says ILWU Spokesman Craig Merrilees. “It takes an incredible amount of perseverance, determination and creativity to win, but we can do it.”
The victory is a testament to the resolve of the workers and organizers—it’s a success five years in the making. It reveals how tough the environment for rehabilitating the labor movement is, but also how it is still possible to win through creative, direct action.
Rite Aid engaged in bad faith bargaining known as “surface bargaining“ for over a year before finally bargaining with workers.
“We’re excited about winning this victory, even if it took longer than it should have” said Carlos “Chico” Rubio, a 10-year warehouse worker who was on the union bargaining committee. Unlike many unions that do win a good contract, the union was quick not to praise the boss for agreeing to a contract, but to point out instead that the process was a long and costly one. Workers decided to first start organizing a union in March of 2006 and hoped to have a new contract within several months, not five years.
Rite Aid management responded with the typical toolbox of anti-union tactics.
They hired a team of expensive union busters to hold anti-union intimidation sessions and captive audience meetings. They threatened to fire workers if they supported the union and even fired two workers for wanting to a join a union. They asked a delay of over 18 months from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on scheduling a vote so that they could have more time to run intimidation sessions to make workers wary of joining a union. Finally after two years of organizing and despite massive anti-union attacks, workers voted to join a union 283 to 261 in an NLRB supervised election in June of 2008.
Then when Rite Aid workers finally won a union election, Rite Aid engaged in bad faith bargaining known as “surface bargaining” for over a year before finally bargaining with workers.
“Rite Aid made this process much more difficult on workers and families than it needed to” said ILWU International Vice President Ray Familathe, who helped workers reach their May 1 settlement. Workers though did not give up; they organized a tough and dogged campaign to counter the anti-union efforts of Rite Aid management.
Using a creative campaign Rite Aid workers were able to force management to sit down at the table and bargain with them. Workers started by attending yearly stockholder meetings and opening lines of communications with stockholders and board members. They released detailed reports about how much money the union busting efforts of Rite Aid was costing the company. Workers were able to persuade some stockholders to put pressure on Rite Aid to negotiate a fair and equitable contract.
Likewise, they used their leverage against Rite Aid by expanding the fight across various unions and the country. They formed a coalition of nationwide Rite Aid workers from various unions including UFCW, SEIU, and Teamsters who coordinated their strategy. Workers reached out to powerful community allies with groups like United Students against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice. They held protests in nearly 50 cities across the country against Rite Aid and promised to apply more heat if Rite Aid didn’t settle the contract dispute in California.
Most importantly, the workers union had a strong presence within the distribution center in Lancaster, California. Workers even engaged in “work to rule,” where they purposely slowed down movement in the distribution center in order to put pressure on the company to settle a contract. Even last year, 75 workers walked off the job for a day in Lancaster, California to protest Rite Aid’s lack of good faith bargaining.
Finally, when negotiations seemed to be breaking down at the last second, they launched a “pinpoint” boycott campaign at two Rite Aid workers at two Rite Aid Stores in San Pedro, California on April 1, 2011. They persuaded hundreds of seniors to switch their prescriptions to other pharmacies. The threat of a larger boycott spreading forced Rite Aid to finally settle the contract a month later.
The feat that the Longshoremen’s Union (ILWU) achieved is a rare one in the labor movement. Nearly half of all union drives result in defeats for workers trying to organize a contract. Less than half of the workers who do get a contract are able to get one within the first year. Often failure to reach a contract in the first year can kill a union all together. Overall, fewer than 1 in 6 organizing drives ever results in a union contract for workers in the workplace.
Many unions have now negotiated card checks agreements, wherein the union agrees to weaker, concessionary contracts ahead of time in exchange for the right to organize a workplace without the type of brutal interference from the employer. While these types of agreements can often result in contracts for workers, they are weak contracts—the type of contracts that ultimately the employer wants. It gives all the power to the boss in terms of what type of contract to give workers and very little to the workers. The ILWU campaign at Rite Aid shows that it is still possible for unions to win good first contracts.
Copyright 2011 Mike Elk
________________________________________________________________________
By arrangement with Alternet.Org.
Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who writes for Campaign for America’s Future.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Guernica / Joshua Holland: Did Osama bin Laden Win the “War on Terror”?
Guernica / Joshua Holland: Did Osama bin Laden Win the “War on Terror”?
By Joshua Holland
By arrangement with AlterNet.Org.
We now have conflicting accounts of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of a U.S. special forces team in a tony Pakistani suburb this week.
President Obama, in his address to the nation Sunday night, painted a picture of a perfectly clean, morally unambiguous operation: he said the U.S. was prepared to take the terror leader alive, but a major firefight ensued and, after trying to use his wife as a human shield, bin Laden went down with guns blazing.
The White House “revised” several key details of the raid in the following days. Bin Laden wasn’t armed after all (he still “resisted,” officials say, although it’s unclear how one resists a heavily armed special forces team without a weapon), and he didn’t use a human shield. One official told CNN that there were no armed guards at the compound, another told Reuters that the Navy Seals team had been ordered to kill rather than capture bin Laden and NBC News reported that nobody fired a shot at the SEALs. Bin Laden’s daughter, who was present during the raid, said that U.S. forces first captured their quarry alive and then executed him.
We don’t know what happened that night. But we should at least acknowledge that there were any number of reasons why dumping bin Laden’s corpse in the ocean would have been seen as far less problematic than taking him alive. What, exactly, would they have done with him? The International Criminal Court can only consider cases committed after 2001, and trying him in a domestic court with its evidentiary procedures was never an option. He could have been tried by military commission, but that process hasn’t been widely accepted as legitimate.
On the margins, there has been some debate about the morality—and legality—of such a “kill team” operation, but most Americans, understandably, couldn’t care less. Even if we did assassinate him, so what? Bin Laden was a mass murderer, the bastard got his just rewards, and the U.S. government proved it could still accomplish a major national goal. The country got closure for the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps could now begin to wind down its “war on terror.”
That discussion has overlooked an important question, however. Setting aside the moral and legal implications, and our visceral, emotional satisfaction at seeing an outlaw shot down, would the decision to kill rather than capture him have been in the best interests of the U.S. and the international fight against terrorism?
Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted.
I would argue that it would not have been—that, in fact, the reverse would hold true. Osama bin Laden is widely seen to have become a figurehead without direct operational command of the organization he founded. His importance, at this point in time, was largely symbolic. He served as an inspiration for extremists around the globe. Had he a choice in the matter, I have no doubt that he would have wanted nothing more than to die in a hail of gunfire by foreign troops in a predominantly Muslim country, a martyr to his cause, rather than rot away in a military prison, aging poorly and providing living proof that the world’s most prominent terrorist—a figure who had been elevated to an existential threat—was ultimately impotent in the face of the world’s greatest super-power.
Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted, and, in doing so, we may have inspired others to follow his path to a “glorious” expiration.
This, again, is entirely speculative so long as the details of the raid remain obscure. But it mirrors another argument that is not so: that Osama bin Laden’s attacks provoked the U.S. into a disastrous over-reaction—drawing it into an unwinnable and often hellish ground-war in Afghanistan and ultimately costing us thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars in national wealth, an enormous amount of international prestige and, more importantly, influence over global affairs.
That argument was ably sketched out this week by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, based on an interview he conducted with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As Klein put it, Gartenstein-Ross thinks bin Laden “had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against.” His goal was not some fantasy about establishing a worldwide caliphate or imposing “Sharia law” on Greenwich Village; having seen the Soviet Union decline in large part by bankrupting itself in an arms race with the U.S., with a huge assist from the Mujahadeen fighting them in Afghanistan, his objective was to wage economic war against the United States by drawing it into a similar conflict.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Gartenstein-Ross noted that “the Soviet Union didn’t just withdraw from Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, but the Soviet empire itself collapsed soon thereafter, in late 1991.”
“The campaign [against the Soviets] taught bin Laden a lot,” wrote Klein:
Did it work? Well, that depends on how you look at it. The U.S. economy is far more resilient than the Soviet economy of the 1980s, and we haven’t gone anywhere, so in that sense it did not. But prior to the attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that we’d see budget surpluses throughout the decade. We face a large deficit now, in large part, because of Bush’s decision to declare a “war” on terrorism—and to wage conventional wars against Afghanistan and Iraq—and then pass the first war-time tax cuts in the history of the Republic.
It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.
I would take the analysis a step further. The decision to go to “war” against a tactic also brought with it significant restrictions on our civil liberties; no longer could we credibly claim to be a beacon of freedom that the world ought to emulate.
Finally, we have to consider some geopolitics. University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, one of the world’s foremost experts on suicide terrorism, argues that all such acts have a common goal: to induce Democracies to withdrawal from lands they occupy (either directly or by proxy). The decision to declare “war” on terrorism—and a couple of nation-states—led directly to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, as well as the scandals surrounding Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s secret detention facilities, extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo Bay, and all the rest. And all of those things resulted in a very significant decline in the United States’ global prestige, and our ability to influence global events.
Since its founding, al Qaeda has had two big, fat targets aside from the United States: the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Ten years after 9/11, the regime of Hosni Mubarak is gone, and last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli officials were “urging Washington to make it clear that the U.S. would intervene in Saudi Arabia should the survival of that government be threatened.” It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.
Perhaps this argument gives bin Laden too much credit. But terrorism is ultimately a tactic used by marginal extremist groups against far more powerful enemies. Bin Laden couldn’t have known that we’d invade Iraq, but the idea that the United States under George W. Bush would react to acts of terror with acts of war against at least Afghanistan was not terribly difficult to predict. And the ruinous results of that reaction are apparent. We’re still around, and it’s likely that we have now killed or captured every single human being who was operationally involved in the attacks of 9/11, so perhaps it was a draw. But a superpower spending trillions to fight with a handful of terrorists to a draw may have been the best outcome for which bin Laden realistically could have hoped.
This is important to understand for one reason. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross noted, “bin Laden’s strategic ideas for beating a superpower…have permeated his organization, and are widely shared by al Qaeda’s affiliates.” Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his ideology remains, and we continue to hemorrhage blood and treasure in a futile conflict into which the “terror mastermind” may well have drawn us. It’s time that we stop doing what international terrorists want us to do.
Copyright 2011 Joshua Holland ________________________________________________________________________
This essay originally appeared at AlterNet.Org.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America
By Joshua Holland
By arrangement with AlterNet.Org.
We now have conflicting accounts of Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of a U.S. special forces team in a tony Pakistani suburb this week.
President Obama, in his address to the nation Sunday night, painted a picture of a perfectly clean, morally unambiguous operation: he said the U.S. was prepared to take the terror leader alive, but a major firefight ensued and, after trying to use his wife as a human shield, bin Laden went down with guns blazing.
The White House “revised” several key details of the raid in the following days. Bin Laden wasn’t armed after all (he still “resisted,” officials say, although it’s unclear how one resists a heavily armed special forces team without a weapon), and he didn’t use a human shield. One official told CNN that there were no armed guards at the compound, another told Reuters that the Navy Seals team had been ordered to kill rather than capture bin Laden and NBC News reported that nobody fired a shot at the SEALs. Bin Laden’s daughter, who was present during the raid, said that U.S. forces first captured their quarry alive and then executed him.
We don’t know what happened that night. But we should at least acknowledge that there were any number of reasons why dumping bin Laden’s corpse in the ocean would have been seen as far less problematic than taking him alive. What, exactly, would they have done with him? The International Criminal Court can only consider cases committed after 2001, and trying him in a domestic court with its evidentiary procedures was never an option. He could have been tried by military commission, but that process hasn’t been widely accepted as legitimate.
On the margins, there has been some debate about the morality—and legality—of such a “kill team” operation, but most Americans, understandably, couldn’t care less. Even if we did assassinate him, so what? Bin Laden was a mass murderer, the bastard got his just rewards, and the U.S. government proved it could still accomplish a major national goal. The country got closure for the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps could now begin to wind down its “war on terror.”
That discussion has overlooked an important question, however. Setting aside the moral and legal implications, and our visceral, emotional satisfaction at seeing an outlaw shot down, would the decision to kill rather than capture him have been in the best interests of the U.S. and the international fight against terrorism?
Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted.
I would argue that it would not have been—that, in fact, the reverse would hold true. Osama bin Laden is widely seen to have become a figurehead without direct operational command of the organization he founded. His importance, at this point in time, was largely symbolic. He served as an inspiration for extremists around the globe. Had he a choice in the matter, I have no doubt that he would have wanted nothing more than to die in a hail of gunfire by foreign troops in a predominantly Muslim country, a martyr to his cause, rather than rot away in a military prison, aging poorly and providing living proof that the world’s most prominent terrorist—a figure who had been elevated to an existential threat—was ultimately impotent in the face of the world’s greatest super-power.
Martyrdom has always been a powerful inspiration for others. I certainly don’t blame Americans for rejoicing in the news of bin Laden’s death, but we may have given him the exact ending he would have wanted, and, in doing so, we may have inspired others to follow his path to a “glorious” expiration.
This, again, is entirely speculative so long as the details of the raid remain obscure. But it mirrors another argument that is not so: that Osama bin Laden’s attacks provoked the U.S. into a disastrous over-reaction—drawing it into an unwinnable and often hellish ground-war in Afghanistan and ultimately costing us thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars in national wealth, an enormous amount of international prestige and, more importantly, influence over global affairs.
That argument was ably sketched out this week by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, based on an interview he conducted with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As Klein put it, Gartenstein-Ross thinks bin Laden “had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against.” His goal was not some fantasy about establishing a worldwide caliphate or imposing “Sharia law” on Greenwich Village; having seen the Soviet Union decline in large part by bankrupting itself in an arms race with the U.S., with a huge assist from the Mujahadeen fighting them in Afghanistan, his objective was to wage economic war against the United States by drawing it into a similar conflict.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Gartenstein-Ross noted that “the Soviet Union didn’t just withdraw from Afghanistan in ignominious defeat, but the Soviet empire itself collapsed soon thereafter, in late 1991.”
Thus, bin Laden thought that he hadn’t just bested one of the world’s superpowers on
the battlefield, but had actually played an important role in its demise. It is indisputable
that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan did not directly collapse the Soviet Union;
the most persuasive connection that can be drawn between that war and the Soviet
empire’s dissolution is through the costs imposed by the conflict.
“The campaign [against the Soviets] taught bin Laden a lot,” wrote Klein:
For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re
beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they'll
bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s
plan for the United States, too.
Did it work? Well, that depends on how you look at it. The U.S. economy is far more resilient than the Soviet economy of the 1980s, and we haven’t gone anywhere, so in that sense it did not. But prior to the attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that we’d see budget surpluses throughout the decade. We face a large deficit now, in large part, because of Bush’s decision to declare a “war” on terrorism—and to wage conventional wars against Afghanistan and Iraq—and then pass the first war-time tax cuts in the history of the Republic.
It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.
I would take the analysis a step further. The decision to go to “war” against a tactic also brought with it significant restrictions on our civil liberties; no longer could we credibly claim to be a beacon of freedom that the world ought to emulate.
Finally, we have to consider some geopolitics. University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, one of the world’s foremost experts on suicide terrorism, argues that all such acts have a common goal: to induce Democracies to withdrawal from lands they occupy (either directly or by proxy). The decision to declare “war” on terrorism—and a couple of nation-states—led directly to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, as well as the scandals surrounding Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s secret detention facilities, extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo Bay, and all the rest. And all of those things resulted in a very significant decline in the United States’ global prestige, and our ability to influence global events.
Since its founding, al Qaeda has had two big, fat targets aside from the United States: the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Ten years after 9/11, the regime of Hosni Mubarak is gone, and last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli officials were “urging Washington to make it clear that the U.S. would intervene in Saudi Arabia should the survival of that government be threatened.” It would be a mistake to link the so-called “Arab Spring” directly to the decline of American influence in the Middle East, but it would be equally shortsighted to dismiss it as a contributing factor.
Perhaps this argument gives bin Laden too much credit. But terrorism is ultimately a tactic used by marginal extremist groups against far more powerful enemies. Bin Laden couldn’t have known that we’d invade Iraq, but the idea that the United States under George W. Bush would react to acts of terror with acts of war against at least Afghanistan was not terribly difficult to predict. And the ruinous results of that reaction are apparent. We’re still around, and it’s likely that we have now killed or captured every single human being who was operationally involved in the attacks of 9/11, so perhaps it was a draw. But a superpower spending trillions to fight with a handful of terrorists to a draw may have been the best outcome for which bin Laden realistically could have hoped.
This is important to understand for one reason. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross noted, “bin Laden’s strategic ideas for beating a superpower…have permeated his organization, and are widely shared by al Qaeda’s affiliates.” Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his ideology remains, and we continue to hemorrhage blood and treasure in a futile conflict into which the “terror mastermind” may well have drawn us. It’s time that we stop doing what international terrorists want us to do.
Copyright 2011 Joshua Holland ________________________________________________________________________
This essay originally appeared at AlterNet.Org.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America
Saturday, May 07, 2011
Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 6, 2011
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
By Noam Chomsky
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.
There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.
Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.
Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky
________________________________________________________________________
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.
To read more blog entries from Noam Chomsky click HERE . Read Guernica’s interview with Noam Chomsky here.
Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death
May 6, 2011
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
By Noam Chomsky
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.
There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.
Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”
There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.
Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky
________________________________________________________________________
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.
To read more blog entries from Noam Chomsky click HERE . Read Guernica’s interview with Noam Chomsky here.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
What The Internet Is Hiding From You
What The Internet Is Hiding From You
TED's own Eli Pariser telling you what you're not seeing on the web.
TED's own Eli Pariser telling you what you're not seeing on the web.
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Drug Laws, Prisons and the Economy
The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world’s population.
America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures.
Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.
Under federal law persons with drug convictions are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.
Only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who’ve done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.
America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures.
Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.
Under federal law persons with drug convictions are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.
Only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who’ve done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Jury Awards $82,000 To Oregon Woman Arrested For Asking Police for a Business Card
A Multnomah County jury awarded a 33-year-old woman $82,000 Thursday, saying they wanted to send Portland police a message: Hand over a business card the next time a citizen asks for one.
Several jurors who spoke to The Oregonian after the verdict in Multnomah County Circuit Court said police weren’t dealing with an urgent or dangerous situation on the evening of Feb. 13, 2009 — when Shei’Meka Newmann questioned what she thought was an unnecessarily rough arrest of a fellow MAX rider. It would have taken only a few seconds for an officer to hand Newmann a card, jurors said.
“I think that police need to be reminded that it’s part of their job to de-escalate and defuse situations,” said juror Chris Bolles. Instead, jurors say police overreacted to Newmann’s queries.
From the Oregonian
Several jurors who spoke to The Oregonian after the verdict in Multnomah County Circuit Court said police weren’t dealing with an urgent or dangerous situation on the evening of Feb. 13, 2009 — when Shei’Meka Newmann questioned what she thought was an unnecessarily rough arrest of a fellow MAX rider. It would have taken only a few seconds for an officer to hand Newmann a card, jurors said.
“I think that police need to be reminded that it’s part of their job to de-escalate and defuse situations,” said juror Chris Bolles. Instead, jurors say police overreacted to Newmann’s queries.
From the Oregonian
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Theft of the Commons
A deceptive term like "austerity program" which makes us feel like sacrifice must be shared equally even when the problem was and is always caused by the private sector, must be ignored by the majority of low and mid-income citizens and "theft of the commons" inserted in its place. The term was recently (ab)used by the compromised Democratic Governor Jerry Brown in regards to his "slash and burn" budget proposal. So much for a party of the people/labor, eh?
Just like in Oregon, corporations who want to make profits in CA should be advised that they will have to pay their fair share in taxes. If this leads to corporations leaving the state, we can rest assured that there are many, many smaller companies ready to pony up for a shot at our citizen/consumers. The same increased tax rate should hold for the extremely wealthy who desire to live here. This would EASILY solve CA's budget problem without starving more women and children.
Just like in Oregon, corporations who want to make profits in CA should be advised that they will have to pay their fair share in taxes. If this leads to corporations leaving the state, we can rest assured that there are many, many smaller companies ready to pony up for a shot at our citizen/consumers. The same increased tax rate should hold for the extremely wealthy who desire to live here. This would EASILY solve CA's budget problem without starving more women and children.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Armchair Dispatch From A Sympathizer With The Egyption Revolution
The word from the ground in Cairo following Mubarak's address to the nation is a bit confused. Early reports today held that the military was making coordinated moves for a transition of power, leading the street to believe that Mubarak had seen the light and was about to abdicate. Spirits were high all day with the opposition groups convinced that the army was on their side, which would make peaceful change much easier. After the president's speech, however, which was the very picture of entitled, arrogant power, the street is absolutely enraged, leading some to predict violent overthrow is deliberately being provoked in order to justify a violent state clampdown in return. There is talk of a march on the nearest military base to insist that the army declare their unity with the people.
Labor across the nation has been on strike for 5 days, virtually shutting down the entire economy. The demands are very clear and simple - Mubarak is out and Suleiman will not be accepted, his having had a large hand in the US "extraordinary rendition" program which essentially outsourced illegal torture tactics for prisoner interrogations. The president seems to be quite out of touch, telling the youth to "go home".
Who allowed this speech to occur? If, in fact, the military sides with the opposition groups, wouldn't they have prevented this state-sponsored and clueless address? To this viewer, it appears that the street may lose patience and make some ill-advised moves if their chosen leadership doesn't strongly make the case for continued coordinated organization.
Labor across the nation has been on strike for 5 days, virtually shutting down the entire economy. The demands are very clear and simple - Mubarak is out and Suleiman will not be accepted, his having had a large hand in the US "extraordinary rendition" program which essentially outsourced illegal torture tactics for prisoner interrogations. The president seems to be quite out of touch, telling the youth to "go home".
Who allowed this speech to occur? If, in fact, the military sides with the opposition groups, wouldn't they have prevented this state-sponsored and clueless address? To this viewer, it appears that the street may lose patience and make some ill-advised moves if their chosen leadership doesn't strongly make the case for continued coordinated organization.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Obama Reneges on Key Agreement with Immigration Advocates
ICE Mutiny?
By STEWART J. LAWRENCE
One of the key provisions of the Obama administration's tough new immigration enforcement strategy is coming under fire again. The program, known as "Secure Communities," allows federal immigration authorities to obtain the fingerprints of any illegal alien booked in the nation's jails, and to have that alien detained for deportation. It's already resulted in an unprecedented number of deportations - some 400,000 in 2009 alone - with an equal number expected this year. And when the program's finally extended nationwide in 2013 – it's currently active in about 30 states, but in only a third of the nation's jails - the annual rate could reach 700,000 or more.
Immigration activists -- furious with the Obama administration for laying the groundwork for what amounts to a mass deportation program -- thought they'd extracted an agreement from the White House and from the Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, to scale back Secure Communities in two ways. First, to refocus the program on hard-core felony offenders, rather than low-level misdemeanor cases, and second, to allow local jurisdictions like San Francisco – still officially a "sanctuary" city - to completely opt out of participating in the program if their citizens objected.
In addition, lobbying by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), chief sponsor of the DREAM Act that would legalize as many as 2 million illegal alien youth, had apparently secured a personal guarantee from President Obama that prospective DREAM beneficiaries would not be processed for deportation until the full Congress had had a chance to vote on his long-stalled bill. Obama, in fact, publicly endorsed DREAM in his first-ever speech on immigration policy at American University last July. It is also strongly supported by Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and other senior Democrats who recently tried to force a floor vote on the bill, to no avail.
But now it appears that the administration has reneged on key parts of its deal with pro-immigration activists. Why? Largely because career Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who are heavily invested in the agency's expanding enforcement empire are refusing to go along. These officials don't want to suspend deportation proceedings against selected classes of immigrants, like the DREAM kids, or even to refocus the program narrowly on "criminal" aliens - no matter what the ICE leadership says. And because of their near-revolt, it appears that senior ICE officials have reversed themselves, and will require that all local jurisdictions participate in Secure Communities, whether they actually want to or not.
News of the internal ICE revolt first came to light in an article published in the Washington Post on August 27, based on investigative reporting by journalist Andrew Beck. Beck found that the center of resistance to Obama policy was from middle level field managers, ICE attorneys and the ICE employee union. The conflict is as old as the agency itself, which for years when it was known as the Immigration and naturalization Service, or INS, frequently found itself torn between directives from the political appointees named to lead the agency, and its career personnel. But because Congress and the country are unusually divided on basic immigration policy issues, the internal conflicts have become especially fierce.
And dissenting career ICE personnel, like federal bureaucrats elsewhere, are known to share information with sympathetic members of Congress to get their point across – and to try to forestall the policies that they object to. That's probably how GOP conservatives obtained a series of internal ICE memos earlier this year that revealed that the Obama administration was reviewing options for how it might use executive authority to legalize selected classes of illegal aliens, circumventing the need for a possible vote by Congress. That prospect – dubbed an "executive amnesty" by critics – has infuriated GOP leaders, and has even caused senior Republicans like Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who otherwise support immigration reform, to break ranks with the White House.
The main options review memo, which was prepared by ICE's chief of policy, Denise Vanson, an Obama appointee, makes for interesting reading. The memo, entitled "Administrative Options to Comprehensive Immigration Reform," reviews a handful of ways that Obama could decide to re-classify prospective deportation cases, including the granting of "temporary protected status" (TPS) or "deferred enforced departure" (DED) to some or even all of the 11 million illegal aliens currently in the US. In addition to focusing on a specific class of aliens like the DREAM kids, the memo discusses the possibility that all illegal aliens present in the country since 1996 – in other words, those with at least 15 years of residency – could be granted "deferred" status.
The memo warns, though, that any attempt to utilize TPS or DED to legalize all 11 million aliens would likely cause enormous and unacceptable public controversy. Anonymous ICE officials who have since commented on the Vanson memo say that Obama has no intention of using TPS or DED to conduct a sweeping amnesty. But despite repeated urgings by Sen. Charles Grassley and other Republican critics, White House officials have steadfastly refused to rule out more selective use of TPS or DED, should Congress fail to pass a legalization bill. No such timetable for doing so has been discussed, however, and it appears that Obama wants to use the threat more as leverage to bring GOP leaders to the table – at least eventually.
It's still unclear whether Napolitano herself change her mind about the opt-out or whether, as appears more likely senior ICE officials are seeking to circumvent her authority, and indeed, by discussing their position off the record, are engaged in what amounts to a bureaucraticmutiny. Immigration advocates were counting on the "opt out" clause as a way or organizing local citizens to pressure their county and city governments to refuse to go along with the program until a legalization bill was passed. In addition to San Francisco, Washington, DC and several other localities have already voted formally not to participate.
But at least one senior ICE official - possibly John Morton, the ICE chief – has made clear to reporters there's nothing dissenting county and local government can actually do to stop Secure Communities. Once the fingerprints of arrested suspects are forwarded to the FBI, to check for outstanding warrants, and past criminal history, the FBI has an agreement to send the same fingerprints to ICE to verify legal status. As I have reported here previously, it doesn't matter whether the suspects are guilty of a crime, let alone a major one. Once ICE gets their fingerprints, and verifies that the suspect is in the country illegally, it asks local officials to detain the suspect for deportation. Under current US law, local officials are obligated to comply.
Immigration activists are reviewing whether it might be possible to administratively sever the link between the FBI and ICE that allows the two agencies to verify the status of arrestees without the compliance of local elected officials, and without the fingerprints being sent to ICE from local jails, which was the established procedure. But ICE and FBI already collaborate in the identification and arrest of fugitive aliens as well as criminal alien smuggling gangs. It might take a special executive order, but in an election year, with Obama already under fire for going "soft" on his own crackdown, and amid fears of an "executive amnesty," the president is unlikely to pursue such an option.
In the final analysis, all of these simmering policy disputes and bureaucratic battles are only a morbid symptom the current federal deadlock on immigration reform. Officially, Obama says he favors a third way between "mass deportation" and "mass amnesty." But mass amnesty is virtually impossible to push through Congress in the current climate, which will only get worse after November. Most of the likely incoming GOP members of the House and Senate are already on record opposing even a partial amnesty like DREAM. Which means all we're left with – failing high-risk executive action, or a different legislative compromise formula, which has yet to emerge – is the current de facto policy of mass deportation.
Stewart J. Lawrence is a Washington, DC-based immigration policy specialist. He can be reached at stewartlawrence81147@gmail.com.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Fallout From the Mesherle Verdict
More Arrests, New Charges
By JESSE STRAUSS
http://www.counterpunch.org/strauss09212010.html
Approximately seventeen people have been charged over the past three weeks with crimes related to the protests against former BART cop Johannes Mehserle's involuntary manslaughter verdict on July 8th. Some of those recently charged were arrested that night, while others have been identified by police in photos, and have been newly arrested. The latest set of arraignments on Monday morning saw three Oaklanders charged with Unlawful Assembly, Remaining at the Scene of a Riot, and Rioting. They are set to reappear in court within the next month.
Five people arrested on July 8th remain in the Santa Rita County Jail, and at least three who were arrested last week remain incarcerated. Accordingto the Oakland 100 Support Committee, one of the earlier arrestees was held for over 30 days before charges were filed against him. He now faces a slew of charges which include failure to disperse, although, again according to the Oakland 100 Support Committee, he was arrested before the order to disperse was given.
Art Jackson, who spent 45 days in jail after being arrested on the night of the protests has been charged with crimes related to the looting of the Footlocker shoe store on Broadway Avenue by 14th Street. In a recent statement, Jackson explained that he did not commit any of the crimes he is being charged with. Among those charges are second degree burglary, petty theft with a prior, and receiving stolen property.
Soon after the protests, the Oakland Police Department issues a press release explaining that some of the people arrested were taking "advantage of a chaotic situation by looting Oakland businesses." While to some extent this appears true, Rachel Lederman and Walter Riley of the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild make it very clear that it was the police forces themselves who made the situation chaotic.
In a statement condemning the police action on that evening, Lederman said that "The aggressive use of police formations, baton beatings and indiscriminate arrests were unnecessary and violated people's constitutional right to protest. To make things even worse, OPD violated state law by jailing people for long periods of time who had been arrested for very minor offenses."
Long time community activist and NLG member Riley agreed that in the protests, which in some cases turned into legal violations, the police, fully clad in riot gear, were not keeping the peace. Soon after the protests he said, "The police were provocative and seemed determined to instigate violence, which of course, served their police contract negotiations with Oakland at a time when they are facing layoffs of 80 officers." He added, "The police helped to perpetuate a narrative of violence by allowing a small number of people to vandalize businesses when they could have stopped it."
On the other hand, however, at a press conference on the day following the verdict, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made a statement praising the OPD for restraining itself and respecting the civil rights of community members. The number of people charged with crimes relating to the protests against Mehserle's verdict continues to increase, apparently in relation to responses the police have gotten to a press release pressing community members to "Please take a moment to review the images [on their website] and help us identfy individuals who looted Oakland businesses"—spelling error and all.
The Oakland 100 Support Committee is calling for support from the community to help in the defense of the people who were arrested during those protests. A list of court dates and locations as well as a way to donate to support court and lawyer fees are available on their website.
Jesse Strauss is an independent journalist, born and raised in Oakland,
Reach him at jstrauss (at) riseup.net.
Approximately seventeen people have been charged over the past three weeks with crimes related to the protests against former BART cop Johannes Mehserle's involuntary manslaughter verdict on July 8th. Some of those recently charged were arrested that night, while others have been identified by police in photos, and have been newly arrested. The latest set of arraignments on Monday morning saw three Oaklanders charged with Unlawful Assembly, Remaining at the Scene of a Riot, and Rioting. They are set to reappear in court within the next month.
Five people arrested on July 8th remain in the Santa Rita County Jail, and at least three who were arrested last week remain incarcerated. Accordingto the Oakland 100 Support Committee, one of the earlier arrestees was held for over 30 days before charges were filed against him. He now faces a slew of charges which include failure to disperse, although, again according to the Oakland 100 Support Committee, he was arrested before the order to disperse was given.
Art Jackson, who spent 45 days in jail after being arrested on the night of the protests has been charged with crimes related to the looting of the Footlocker shoe store on Broadway Avenue by 14th Street. In a recent statement, Jackson explained that he did not commit any of the crimes he is being charged with. Among those charges are second degree burglary, petty theft with a prior, and receiving stolen property.
Soon after the protests, the Oakland Police Department issues a press release explaining that some of the people arrested were taking "advantage of a chaotic situation by looting Oakland businesses." While to some extent this appears true, Rachel Lederman and Walter Riley of the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild make it very clear that it was the police forces themselves who made the situation chaotic.
In a statement condemning the police action on that evening, Lederman said that "The aggressive use of police formations, baton beatings and indiscriminate arrests were unnecessary and violated people's constitutional right to protest. To make things even worse, OPD violated state law by jailing people for long periods of time who had been arrested for very minor offenses."
Long time community activist and NLG member Riley agreed that in the protests, which in some cases turned into legal violations, the police, fully clad in riot gear, were not keeping the peace. Soon after the protests he said, "The police were provocative and seemed determined to instigate violence, which of course, served their police contract negotiations with Oakland at a time when they are facing layoffs of 80 officers." He added, "The police helped to perpetuate a narrative of violence by allowing a small number of people to vandalize businesses when they could have stopped it."
On the other hand, however, at a press conference on the day following the verdict, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums made a statement praising the OPD for restraining itself and respecting the civil rights of community members. The number of people charged with crimes relating to the protests against Mehserle's verdict continues to increase, apparently in relation to responses the police have gotten to a press release pressing community members to "Please take a moment to review the images [on their website] and help us identfy individuals who looted Oakland businesses"—spelling error and all.
The Oakland 100 Support Committee is calling for support from the community to help in the defense of the people who were arrested during those protests. A list of court dates and locations as well as a way to donate to support court and lawyer fees are available on their website.
Jesse Strauss is an independent journalist, born and raised in Oakland,
Reach him at jstrauss (at) riseup.net.
--
Pete
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Autumn of the Driveler
CounterPunch Diary
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09172010.html
Some world leaders mature as they head into the sunset: Jimmy Carter often makes more sense in his eighties than he did as president nearly four decades ago. Others spare the world their midnight thoughts, not always voluntarily. Ronald Reagan succumbed to Alzheimers; Ariel Sharon is still animate, albeit effectively dead to the world. Alas, Fidel Castro just broke an arm and a kneecap when he tripped on that fateful concrete step six years ago. Would that he had bitten off his tongue and thus spared his erstwhile admirers, myself included, the sound of this once great revolutionary plunging into kookdom.
If President Raúl Castro wants to defend Cuba's record on human rights, all he needs to do point to the fact that his brother has not been deposed from his formal position as First Secretary of the Communist Party, and carted off to an isolation ward in the Casa de Dementes, Havana's psychiatric hospital. Instead he has unstinted access to the state radio and the newspaper Granma.
In both of these media Castro, now 84, has spouted a steady stream of drivel.
Memorable among these forays intonutdom was his outburst of conspiracism on the sixth anniversary of the Trade Center/Pentagon attacks with the whole slab of nonsense read out by a Cuban television presenter.
Castro claimed that the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers. "Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice created by the alleged airplane," according to Fidel. "We were deceived as well as the rest of the planet's inhabitants." All nonsense of course. There were remains of the passengers on the plane that hit the Pentagon, in the form of teeth and other bits traced through DNA. Hundreds of people saw the plane -- people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out from the site.
It's logical that maximum leaders like Castro are conspiracists by disposition. Since they are control freaks, the random and the accidental are alien to their frame of reference. If it happened, it happened for a reason. And if a bad thing happened, it was very probably a conspiracy.
More recently, in early August of this year Castro touted to his audience in Cuba and across the world his sympathy with one of the standard mantras of nutdom, which is the belief that the world is run by the Bilderberg Club.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article on August 18, spread across three of the eight pages of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, quoting in extenso from the Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin's 'The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,' (2006) alleging the Bilderbergers control everything, which must mean that they pack a lot in to the three-day session the Club holds each year as its sole public activity. Of course they probably skype each other a lot too and rot out their brains plotting and planning on their cell phones.
Followers of the Alex Jones (Radio) Show, a sanctuary of conspiracism, no doubt remember Estulin's claim in 2007 that he had "received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his burgeoning popularity." The bits of Estulin's book reverently quoted by Castro, who called Estulin honest and well informed, retread some of the doctrines of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most lurid conspiracists in political history, (though I do have affectionate memories of LaRouche's claim in 1984 in a ad running on the CBS network that former vice president Walter Mondale, then running against Ronald Reagan for the Oval Office, was an "agent of influence" of the Soviet Intelligence services. At the time LaRouchies were in close contact with the Reagan White House.)
On the evidence of his quotes from Estulin, Castro is much taken by Estulin's view that members of the Marxist Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who fled to the US from the Nazis before World War Two, had been recruited by the Rockefellers to popularize rock music to "control the masses" by seducing them from the fight for civil rights and social justice. According to Estulin, reverently quoted by Castro, 'The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself.'
So Fidel Castro believes that the Beatles were invented by the Rockefellers, and that Walter Lippmann, the pundit who drafted President Wilson's Fourteen Points in 1918, crowned his literary/political career in 1968 by sending John Lennon the lyrics for "Revolution", with its demobilizing message: "You say you want a revolution /Well, you know /We all want to change the world /… But when you talk about destruction /Don't you know that you can count me out." (In fact I seem to remember that Lennon actually wrote the song as an answer to my friends Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, who as members of New Left Review and the Fourth International had suggested to Lennon that the Beatles pony up some dough to finance the revolutionary cause.)
And now Castro's latest outing into political asininity has been to give an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, of the Atlantic, allowing the man Castro cordially describes as "a great journalist" to cite Castro as saying that the Cuban economic model has been a disaster.
Goldberg is an appalling journalist, whose most notable achievement was to run an enormous piece in the New Yorker in the run-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003, which was one of the most effective exercises in disinformation designed to stoke up the Congress and public opinion in favor of the war. The piece was billed as containing disclosures of "Saddam Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just shot down the war party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word article was an interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail about his activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling arms and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon by the Administration as proof of The Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's credibility came on February 9, 2003 in the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter. Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and confecting his fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison sentence. Needless to say, Burke's demolition was not picked up in the U.S. press, nor has the New Yorker ever apologized for Goldberg's story, certainly as pernicious as anything offered by Judy Miller in the New York Times.
Since Castro has been sounding tremendous alarums about a possible attack on Iran, it's bizarre to find him lofting Goldberg, a former member of the Israeli Defense Force, to the journalistic pantheon and taking pains to paint his fellow 9/11 conspiracist, president Ahmadinejad of Iran, as an anti-Semite.
Some on the left see Castro's deprecating remarks about the failure of the Cuban economic model as part of a tactical maneuver to help his brother institute the "reforms" that will see somewhere between half a million and million Cubans lose their jobs. I see it as a spectacularly foolish misjudgement by Castro, who told Goldberg "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" and later said he was misinterpreted and that he meant the exact opposite, which is obvious nonsense.
Then Castro took Goldberg to – of all disgusting things – a dolphin exhibition. Lock the old fool up I say, free the dolphins and turn the exhibition into a theme park for all the CIA's efforts to kill Castro, including booby-trapping a coral reef. The ironies of history: the CIA failed, and here's Castro taking up the task, methodically assassinating his reputation, week after week.
Some world leaders mature as they head into the sunset: Jimmy Carter often makes more sense in his eighties than he did as president nearly four decades ago. Others spare the world their midnight thoughts, not always voluntarily. Ronald Reagan succumbed to Alzheimers; Ariel Sharon is still animate, albeit effectively dead to the world. Alas, Fidel Castro just broke an arm and a kneecap when he tripped on that fateful concrete step six years ago. Would that he had bitten off his tongue and thus spared his erstwhile admirers, myself included, the sound of this once great revolutionary plunging into kookdom.
If President Raúl Castro wants to defend Cuba's record on human rights, all he needs to do point to the fact that his brother has not been deposed from his formal position as First Secretary of the Communist Party, and carted off to an isolation ward in the Casa de Dementes, Havana's psychiatric hospital. Instead he has unstinted access to the state radio and the newspaper Granma.
In both of these media Castro, now 84, has spouted a steady stream of drivel.
Memorable among these forays intonutdom was his outburst of conspiracism on the sixth anniversary of the Trade Center/Pentagon attacks with the whole slab of nonsense read out by a Cuban television presenter.
Castro claimed that the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers. "Only a projectile could have created the geometrically round orifice created by the alleged airplane," according to Fidel. "We were deceived as well as the rest of the planet's inhabitants." All nonsense of course. There were remains of the passengers on the plane that hit the Pentagon, in the form of teeth and other bits traced through DNA. Hundreds of people saw the plane -- people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out from the site.
It's logical that maximum leaders like Castro are conspiracists by disposition. Since they are control freaks, the random and the accidental are alien to their frame of reference. If it happened, it happened for a reason. And if a bad thing happened, it was very probably a conspiracy.
More recently, in early August of this year Castro touted to his audience in Cuba and across the world his sympathy with one of the standard mantras of nutdom, which is the belief that the world is run by the Bilderberg Club.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article on August 18, spread across three of the eight pages of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, quoting in extenso from the Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin's 'The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,' (2006) alleging the Bilderbergers control everything, which must mean that they pack a lot in to the three-day session the Club holds each year as its sole public activity. Of course they probably skype each other a lot too and rot out their brains plotting and planning on their cell phones.
Followers of the Alex Jones (Radio) Show, a sanctuary of conspiracism, no doubt remember Estulin's claim in 2007 that he had "received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his burgeoning popularity." The bits of Estulin's book reverently quoted by Castro, who called Estulin honest and well informed, retread some of the doctrines of Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most lurid conspiracists in political history, (though I do have affectionate memories of LaRouche's claim in 1984 in a ad running on the CBS network that former vice president Walter Mondale, then running against Ronald Reagan for the Oval Office, was an "agent of influence" of the Soviet Intelligence services. At the time LaRouchies were in close contact with the Reagan White House.)
On the evidence of his quotes from Estulin, Castro is much taken by Estulin's view that members of the Marxist Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who fled to the US from the Nazis before World War Two, had been recruited by the Rockefellers to popularize rock music to "control the masses" by seducing them from the fight for civil rights and social justice. According to Estulin, reverently quoted by Castro, 'The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself.'
So Fidel Castro believes that the Beatles were invented by the Rockefellers, and that Walter Lippmann, the pundit who drafted President Wilson's Fourteen Points in 1918, crowned his literary/political career in 1968 by sending John Lennon the lyrics for "Revolution", with its demobilizing message: "You say you want a revolution /Well, you know /We all want to change the world /… But when you talk about destruction /Don't you know that you can count me out." (In fact I seem to remember that Lennon actually wrote the song as an answer to my friends Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, who as members of New Left Review and the Fourth International had suggested to Lennon that the Beatles pony up some dough to finance the revolutionary cause.)
And now Castro's latest outing into political asininity has been to give an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, of the Atlantic, allowing the man Castro cordially describes as "a great journalist" to cite Castro as saying that the Cuban economic model has been a disaster.
Goldberg is an appalling journalist, whose most notable achievement was to run an enormous piece in the New Yorker in the run-up to the attack on Iraq in 2003, which was one of the most effective exercises in disinformation designed to stoke up the Congress and public opinion in favor of the war. The piece was billed as containing disclosures of "Saddam Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just shot down the war party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word article was an interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail about his activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling arms and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon by the Administration as proof of The Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's credibility came on February 9, 2003 in the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter. Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and confecting his fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison sentence. Needless to say, Burke's demolition was not picked up in the U.S. press, nor has the New Yorker ever apologized for Goldberg's story, certainly as pernicious as anything offered by Judy Miller in the New York Times.
Since Castro has been sounding tremendous alarums about a possible attack on Iran, it's bizarre to find him lofting Goldberg, a former member of the Israeli Defense Force, to the journalistic pantheon and taking pains to paint his fellow 9/11 conspiracist, president Ahmadinejad of Iran, as an anti-Semite.
Some on the left see Castro's deprecating remarks about the failure of the Cuban economic model as part of a tactical maneuver to help his brother institute the "reforms" that will see somewhere between half a million and million Cubans lose their jobs. I see it as a spectacularly foolish misjudgement by Castro, who told Goldberg "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" and later said he was misinterpreted and that he meant the exact opposite, which is obvious nonsense.
Then Castro took Goldberg to – of all disgusting things – a dolphin exhibition. Lock the old fool up I say, free the dolphins and turn the exhibition into a theme park for all the CIA's efforts to kill Castro, including booby-trapping a coral reef. The ironies of history: the CIA failed, and here's Castro taking up the task, methodically assassinating his reputation, week after week.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Glenn Beck Channels Lunatic, Disassociated Rage Into a Quasi-Movement...
By Wallace C. Turbeville, NewDeal 2.0
http://www.alternet.org/story/148126/
A little over a week ago we were treated to Glenn Beck's quasi-religious extravaganza on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. I have had a gnawing sense that there was some greater meaning to this event, despite the absence of any apparent substance in the messages delivered.
Then it hit me: I recalled that, in a 2009 New York Times interview, Glenn Beck compared himself with Howard Beale, the character portrayed magnificently by Peter Finch in the 1976 film "Network." The metamorphosis of Beck into a self-proclaimed prophet of an ideologically conservative God suddenly made complete sense.
In Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay, Beale was a newscaster who suffered a psychological break when informed that he was to be fired because of low ratings. He wandered into the studio wearing his pajamas, drenched from walking in a thunderstorm, and delivered the famous speech urging viewers to throw open their windows and scream, "I'm as mad as hell, and I am not going to take it any more." Of course, the viewers complied en masse and Beale was given his own show that featured his lunatic rants. Ratings soared.
Before his famous exhortation, Beale recounted a list of problems plaguing society and admitted that he was totally clueless as to any solutions. Chayefsky was unsympathetic with Beale's audience. He brilliantly described the mass insanity of a public willing to follow a prophet with no inkling of a way to address problems, based only lunatic, disassociated anger. Chayefsky intended that "mad" be read as having both of its meanings. He was appalled by the public's self-indulgent eagerness to transform the immediate gratification of a primal scream into a social movement.
It is instructive to recall how Beale met his end. Network management found it necessary to restrain Beale when his rants put corporate strategy at risk. In redirecting Beale, they inadvertently reattached his mind, however tenuously, with rationality. Beale started speaking (quite eloquently) about the dehumanization of society, advising his viewers to make the best of the situation because the trend was irreversible. Ratings plummeted, not because the public disagreed, but because they became bored. As the film's narrator put it, "No one particularly cared to hear that his life was utterly valueless." The amoral head of programming, Diana Christensen, arranged to have Beale gunned down on live TV by the Ecumenical Liberation Army (they also had a prime time reality show, "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour"). That final show was a great success for the Network, if not for Beale.
Glenn Beck proves that Paddy Chayefsky's observations of American society in the 1970's are just as valid today.
I have often wondered whether Beck is a lunatic, exploited by Fox News and deserving of our sympathy. After all, he suffers from macular dystrophy, an inability to focus vision on the real world. (Chayefsky would have loved the irony.) But I now believe that he is sane (and I suppose deserving of no sympathy). He understands that disassociated anger is cathartic for today's public. Nonsensical conspiracy theories and baseless ridicule are entertaining fillers, but his real stock-in-trade is the public's rage at a "system" that must have betrayed them because their dreams have not been fulfilled. People are angry because they feel powerless to change conditions that they dislike. They cannot even describe what the problem is because no leader has articulated it. A rational explanation would at least mitigate the rage by calming anxieties. But no progressive leader has the courage to try it, and it is not in the conservatives' interest to do so. You might say that the public's experience is dehumanizing (but if you did, you would bore the audience).
The facts suggest that Beck is more Diana Christensen than Howard Beale. Like her, he understands that news, in the sense of events and public policies, cannot contend with entertainment in a world dominated by fear and uncertainty. He has simply chosen to be his own prophet. His claim to be a mouthpiece of God appears cynically calculated to complete the construction of a modern-day equivalent of Chayefsky's Network. As Max Schumacher, the only principled character in the film said of Christensen: "You are television incarnate, Diana [read, Glenn] — indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality."
This is all far more important than Glenn Beck. I believe that this disassociated rage has been an important characteristic of American society for at least 40 years. It is a product of the self-important and self-indulgent baby boomers (like me), who have always been susceptible to the message that they should hold on to their own money rather than sharing it, in the form of taxes, in pursuit of the greater good. The anger and cynicism, initially directed at the "system," was eventually turned on the government. The only leader whose message resonated in this era was Ronald Reagan — "Government cannot solve the problem; it is the problem."
Ideological conservatism has ruled the day for 40 years. The genius of the New Deal, in retreat throughout this period, was not ideology. It was the pragmatic observation that the only way to achieve long-term prosperity is for the government to draw the weak and less wealthy into participation in the economy. Left to their own devices, the strong and wealthy will rationally act in their own short-term interests. Only government can act in the collective long-term interest. The unbridled free enterprise and deregulation advocated by conservative ideologues can make a few people wealthy in the short-run, but it is unsustainable because middle- and lower- income families will inevitably be left behind.
What has been missing is a progressive leader willing to risk telling the public the truth. The middle- and lower-classes have been getting poorer. The quality of their employment in good times has deteriorated; and progressively, in each downturn, unemployment persists for longer and longer periods after the economy improves. As high school and college graduation rates have stagnated, the American dream of boundless opportunity has withered away, even for their children. Even the apparent success of the wealthiest is unsustainable unless increasing income disparity is reversed.
What an opportunity for progressives to redirect this anger toward conservative ideologies that have decimated the American Dream! For Mr. Obama, the path to a transformational presidency was, and hopefully still is, to channel this energy into an all-out effort to restore balance to the economy.
Chayefsky also created a character, Arthur Jensen, who was the head of the Network. Assuming his best voice-of-God tone, he tried to convince Beale to proclaim a utopian world view in which businesses roamed free of government interference, his "corporate cosmology." When Beale nervously asked why he should be the chosen prophet for this new world order, Jensen answered: "Because you are on the television, you dummy." Glenn Beck needs to be reminded that Arthur Jensen was not God; he was just a character in a movie.
Wallace C. Turbeville is the former CEO of VMAC LLC and a former Vice President of Goldman, Sachs & Co. He is Visiting Scholar at the Roosevelt Institute.
Monday, September 13, 2010
SUPREME COURT RULING ALLOWS CORPORATIONS TO LEGALLY BRIBE JUDGES
William K. Black, Naked Capitalism - The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allows businesses to make unlimited political contributions to judges and politicians. When judges are elected, the need for these contributions inherently turns judges into politicians. Sympathetic judges are corrupt businesses' most valuable allies. Corporations and their senior officials can commit civil or criminal wrongs with impunity if their case is assigned to a friendly judge. The Robber Barons often had judges on their payrolls. Judges can serve a corporation as both a shield and a sword. They can declare statutes and regulations unlawful. They can issue favorable decisions when corporations sue their critics, which can intimidate, tie up, or even bankrupt the critics.
The fact that corporations are "investing" so heavily in getting pro-business judges elected demonstrates that their CEOs believe that the election of friendly judges will increase their incomes and decrease the risk that they will ever be sanctioned.
The fact that corporations are "investing" so heavily in getting pro-business judges elected demonstrates that their CEOs believe that the election of friendly judges will increase their incomes and decrease the risk that they will ever be sanctioned.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Heart of Corporate Darkness
By STEPHEN MARTIN, Counterpunch
'Mistah Kurtz, he dead'
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
It really is so very difficult to attempt to understand what is going on in the World today, though perhaps the point as made by Karl Marx; that the priority is not to understand the World but to change it is valid - and we certainly live in time of change - sense of 'Sic Transit Gloria Mundi'?
This small article seeks to examine what amounts to Political horror; that horror which is Corporatism become synonymous with 'Ecocide', and describable as 'Heart of Darkness'.
These small quarters write as a 'Prole', sense of George Orwell's abbreviation of 'Proletariat'; and it is certainly the case that Orwell had a sublime consciousness. His concept of 'Inner Party, Outer Party and Prole' holds approximate sense of Gini Co-efficient today in most parts of the Western World - as does his vision of 'Geopolitical Power Block' as 'supra National'; sense of 'Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania', express prescience?
The Proletariat, and indeed the 'Lumpenproletariat' or 'Proletariat in rags', are growing in number daily in the Western World given the shrinkage of the middle classes under the onslaught of Economic Depression - and are increasingly liable to be viewed as 'superfluous' accordant the growth of power of 'Inner Party' as 'Masters of the Universe' or '?bermenschen'?
'Population Control' is a euphemism as can be employed by 'Philanthropists' who see themselves as '?bermenschen', and to whom 'Genocide' concerning the elimination of 'Prole' as '?ntermenschen' is but only a further step along the Corporate line in an Orthodoxy demanding seeing others as less worthy of Life - and as to be so 'constrained'?
So it goes.
It is a questionable proposition that the engineering of an Economic Depression constitutes Population Control?
The horror!
These small quarters write expressive of a psychophysical consciousness which is reflective of a neurophysiological integration, involving an 'anamnesis' as put by Socrates, and within context of a 'Paradigm' as would be determined by Empiricism. It is ultimately through Empiricism that Corporatism as an Orthodoxy has been spawned, much along the lines of 'Dialectic' as enumerated by Marx concerning relationship to means of Production determined by Science as a fruit of Empiricism - as it is also through same Empiricism as paradigm Corporate that a mere Prole is not 'meant' to use words such as 'psychophysical' or 'neurophysiological' - as Orwell in his concept of 'Newspeak' acknowledged?
The point being made is that the 'Heart of Darkness' is not only 'out there' in Cartesian sense of particular best laid scheme being played with 'matter', but is also 'in here' sense of best laid scheme being played with 'mind'?
The point is also that the 'Inner Party' as Stateless Bastards imposing Orthodoxy for gain 'Utilitarian' have a variety of ways of 'grinding' Man down through the imposition of illusion directed at destroying Hope; or at the very least rendering it capable of being described as 'audacious'?
Asking the 'right questions' in a Panopticon comes with the risk of being 'unintelligible' or labelled 'derogatory' - such the control as they who would have wrong questions asked have attained – never mind the truth that 'hope springs eternal in the human breast' as Pope stated?
The pragmatism of the Corporatist Age in which we currently 'live' will surely be viewed in the future as being 'Dark' as Lichtenberg proposed; and in such illumination the Horror of the Age as illusion imposed will necessarily be faced and recognised for the denial it was?
'Grundrisse' as outlines critique of Political Economy is Marx's prescience concerning the inevitable effects of concentration of wealth as a polarisation of power- and the degeneration of Capitalist Democracy to Corporatism?
That 'History is written by the 'Victorious' was illustrated through alternative interpretation expressing a transcendence of such 'paradigm' by Howard Zinn - as an iconoclast concerning Orthodox American History?
For as there are certain Men as cannot be 'ground down' sense of Illegitimum non carborundum, and who retainthe right to have own opinions, idiosyncratic or offensive as they may be, but whose consciousness constitutes the attempt at 'CounterPunch' against Corporatist illusion in the denial of denial; so there is orthodox propaganda founded in a cynical pragmatic of the materialism which Corporatism has come to represent at the level of hegemony?
Squeezed out to the margins through technologically enhanced Hegemony of Orthodoxy; the narrative of those as are able to refuse reduction to the cynicism of pragmatism and deny imprisonment within the paradigm of illusion yet remains a vital sign of 'Political Life on the Planet' -though there exists an ongoing effort to render such not only 'illegitimate' but 'unintelligible'? Corporatism 'works' by means of invisible restraint as of 'unwritten rule' concerning what is palatable, what is acceptable, what will be 'rewarded' - and in the final analysis what is comprehensible?
As Orwell put sublimely in 1984:
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
For we all exist in a 'cage' do we not, such as 'Yellow Submarine' as song sung of represents 'imprisonment' of sensibilities, and for some such a 'tubular cage' is more constraining, and not just in the singularity of 'One Dimensional Man', as Marcuse put, but also by way of multiplicity; as in the context of 'Realpolitik' the imperative exists of division, as of by way of the Roman maxim which has rationale of 'conquering', by way of illusion become as between 'Republican' or 'Democrat' concerning the power of 'Inner Party' - and as there can be 'cages within a cage'?
The Corporatist Orthodoxy demands a uniformity which has the inevitable developmental line of marginalising Humanity through abrogation of Life as denial of Truth in the propagation of Death - as the acceptance of Lie as an unconsciousness; as in 'no need to think'?
The tragedy of such Darkness' as would be even at 'Noon' sense of Koestler, is that such cage will become ever more confining but yet would be 'unseen' under the illusion which is expressive of 'power of mind over mind'.
The tragedy of America contemporaneous is of the Darkness of a Panopticon, such as the Heart of Corporatism would 'pump up the volume' to point of incapacitating level; as in where Man cannot hear himself or herself think – and so gives up the ghost' concerning the imperative of consciousness?
Concerning Politics as 'moral economics', there is a Manichean aspect; given the acknowledgement of 'morality'?
These small quarters seeing the trend contemporaneous in Western World as being primarily evil, as evident in the infliction of sufferance epitomised by Corporatism.
At present these small quarters can only speak as a 'mushroom' kept in a particular darkness the intent of power of mind over mind. In such darkness there exists as 'foodstuff' a certain kind of 'shit' which defines the demanded illusion of 'geopolitical power block'. The unity of such power block is expressed in the currency, or money which is believed in, and controlled as of the exercise of a hidden taxation - to the 'wetting of the beak' in Mafia parlance by the 'Inner Party' as International Financier?
That 'The Heart of Corporate Darkness' is to be found within a 'Continuity of Memoranda' relating to identifiable horrors is the proposition of this small article.
In mind here is the 'Ford Pinto Memo' as real and demonstrable - and a Memorandum as must exist somewhere concerning the 'Gulf of Mexico', which summates the mechanics of deliberation concerning disaster as a series of pragmatic calculations within an obscene and warped Orthodoxy, realised in the denial of Life?
Increasingly mere 'Proles' such as these small quarters are being 'asked' to 'suspend disbelief' in the face of a crafted illusion which is wreaking 'havoc!', given 'unleashing' of the Corporatist 'Dogs of War'; where 'War', as in the multiplicity concerning context of restraint apropos 'cage' above, is a polymorphous horror: ranging from a wrought Economic Depression with its 'collateral damage' of millions impoverished, to the abuse of military force against Nation with its 'collateral damage' of millions killed, to the destruction of Ecosystem with its 'collateral damage' of millions of lives lost - as considered across a wondrous diversity of species.
America, Iraq and the Gulf of Mexico exemplify respectively.
The horror!, the horror!, the horror!
Yet the manifold forms of Warfare as 'Racket' are not just for Mind, they are ultimately for Soul, such the 'what it is all about' concerning the pump of the Heart of Darkness - as every beat of dark bastard heart leads to further sufferance reflecting breakdown of 'Life'; which in the case of America means making a mockery, to point of tragedy, of the best Political Constitution which the World has yet seen, through the destruction of 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness' evident through impoverishment of the Citizenry - and the diversion, under Orthodoxy, of precious resources to a Military Industrial Complex which projects 'Empire' fearful to point of 'shock and awe' under such pitifully perverse illusion as the imposition of Democracy by force in an Irony far from sublime as the grubby racket it represents by way of expropriation?
The horror!
Americans need not look far to see what such horror as irony means; for every American Citizen reliant on Food Stamp to survive, every American Citizen under threat of foreclosure and homelessness, every American Citizen living in fear of losing livelihood, is a testimony to the Obscenity of the Orthodoxy of Corporatism which would continue to propagate cruel illusion denying the horror of such actuality?
Welcome to the 'Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave' - such the 'Doublethink'?
It is not without meaning that the last two published articles by these small quarters this exemplary Journal of Democracy have ended with one particular extract from the Political Constitution of the United States of America as an understanding of what Corporatism represents way of what it can deny - and what is held to be self evident.
For what is held as self evident these small quarters is the destruction of America by an enemy within as would be unseen; the takeover of power to issue money as a 'permit' being as a fatal blow to Democracy, as cannot be hidden despite the truly expensive efforts of Corporatist illusion to deny what is become so clear as it is so tragic, - and given awareness of the concept of 'opportunity cost'?
It is become inevitable, such the Dialectic as reflecting the mechanics of deliberation as can be epitomised in a Memorandum; and as continuity demands consideration of Memoranda, that in America today there is a tragedy of homelessness, a tragedy of businesses closing, a tragedy of immiseration through impoverishment as unemployment and dependency upon food stamp represents; a tragedy which is of the 'cages within cage' of Corporatism - given the prevalence of fear, almost Universal such context as the beat of a 'Heart of Darkness' inevitably pumps out sufferance form of the destruction of Constitution by way of a Panopticon condemned to destroy Truth?
The horror!
It is a tragedy as would be unseen, unmentionable to the pathological state of 'mind' become dominant which is as Corporatism representing the 'ascendancy' of an Orthodoxy through which an Oligarchic Collective 'survives', as within such 'Gutenbergian Galaxy' become digitised, as per McLuhan, such medium contains a message indeed, and it is fearful as it arises from 'Darkness' - as of 'enough never being enough', such the greed as driven maniacal as abrogative of Humanity - or as Satanic as would destroy the Joy which the 'Gift of Life' represents?
'Less than Zero' such the 'Luciferian Burn' as the avoidable death of People in a Ford Pinto become magnified in the avoidable death of Life in the Gulf of Mexico as vehicle of the 'buy in' to illusion - form of trust extended or as permit granted? It is a tragedy of continuity as in a denouement expressive of the degeneration of 'Citizenry' and 'Democracy' by a 'Coterie' as constitutes Oligarchic Collective; it is a tragedy of the slow but sure strangulation of the breath of Life to the point beyond whimper whence last gasp of despair concerning materialism exists; at the end of the 'day' sense of the termination of the period of sunlight direct, such tragedy is of 'cide' can be summative; as in the ascending scale of obscenity represented by, 'sui, ethno, geno, eco' to such suffix.
Rather than 'side' as within humane context of debate as prefix of 'for' or 'against', the ubiquity of 'cide' as a suffix context of inhumane Warfare is a tragedy of expropriation, arrogation and abrogation, such the sadness that mere Corporatism can eliminate Democracy in the marginalisation of Humanity to point of 'hollow man' become dominant - such the 'patter of rat's feet over broken glass'. -T.S. Eliot was in his own way above and beyond the mechanics of deliberation?
Corporatism is a tragedy because it is unnecessary; because it is an avoidable abrogation of potentiality, because as simply put in colloquial vernacular: 'it don't have to be this way'?
The challenge for Corporatism is to sustain and perpetuate a life denying illusion which calls into ever greater question the ability of Man to refuse to believe the evidence of his or her own eyes. The dynamic or dialectic is of the suspension of disbelief given a growing disparity between the illusion as would be imposed, and the day to day reality for the ever growing Majority as truly suffer 'impoverishment Utilitarian'. Orwell saw within such challenge a form of illusion he described as 'Doublethink', encapsulated within the slogans:
'War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, andIgnorance is Strength.'
The motivation for adoption of life denying illusion is as simple as the biological 'rationale' for the diversity of parasitical life; it is material gain and the occupation of a comfortable niche with minimal expenditure of effort and provision of return. It is 'survival' as an imperative experienced as 'superseding' the need to speak up, sense of as Neimöller wrote - for all those who give up the right to 'speak up' experience an inevitable execution through joining the 'chorus' of a Moritaten, or 'Ballad of Death' concerning 'consciousness'?
If humble parasites such as leeches could speak and dream, such would tell of Corporatism as a 'rise' above mere hematophagy and the feed upon lifeblood of an individual host; such would tell of money and power and corruption, and control and manipulation towards the end of ever greater expropriation from a greater diversity - as of all other life become as 'host'?
Such a horror of the Necrotrophy as has destroyed the American Dream?
The Ford Pinto Memorandum is a testimony to the mechanics of deliberation which epitomises Corporatism as Orthodoxy. ' It is 'Life', Jim, and just as we have come to know it'' more the horror, such as a 'Trek amongst the Stars' it is not; but closer to the scatological ravings of perverse degenerates such as coprophagiacs become as Hegemony; such the 'existence' for Man when lunatics take over an asylum. Because the reduction of any life to mere dollars and cents in concept of 'worth' is obscene, and reflects a level of perversity to which the sadness of Coprophagia as a state of perverse degeneracy could represent 'improvement'?
The irony being that Corporatists exist on the premise of People 'eating' the shit of Propaganda; sense of illusion being swallowed as Orthodoxy accepted - and evidence of Man as has own eyes denied?
The Ford Pinto Memorandum concerned Corporate product as designed, built, marketed and branded which had a design flaw which meant an increased risk of the product bursting in to flames in a collision. Given recognition of this flaw, some sad bastard of Corporatist Orthodoxy sat down and ran calculations of contingency within margins of levels of confidence, ultimately expressed in levels of 'bottom line' of dollars and cents reaching a conclusion in terms of 'EMV' or 'Expected Monetary Value' concerning 'recall and replace' or 'recompense for fatality/injury' as part of a 'decision tree'. The answer being as History demonstrates, such the discovery of what 'life' can mean in a paradigm of Obscene Orthodoxy.
Every person burned to death - or lucky enough to escape with 'degree of burn' - in such a product of Corporatism contributed to a profit as would be maximised under costs minimised - so the Orthodoxy goes.
The hypothetical 'Gulf of Mexico Memorandum' posits a development of the above horrific obscenity, written by an even sadder bastard than the author of the Ford Pinto Memorandum.
Why sadder?
Because the calculations concerning the ongoing tragedy of 'Deepwater Horizon' would have to reflect an even greater 'incorporation' of diversity of life denied, evidenced in bigger figures concerning dollars and cents, such the scale of obscenity as 'Homicide' can be represented as 'mere' when it comes to 'Ecocide'; such the failure, such the Denial. We are not just talking of children as passengers or drivers as parents burned alive as the Ford Pinto Memorandum 'incorporated'; we are talking of the diversity of species encompassed by an ecosystem 'incorporated' as a cost, sense of dollars and cents, and as can determine the choice between a number of courses of action -where 'denial' is the inevitable outcome of obscene Orthodoxy.
The hypothetical Gulf of Mexico Memorandum represents the 'Big League' of Corporatist Orthodoxy; commensurate with resonance of the illusion as to 'Where has all the money gone?' realising Genocide in an Economic Depression as disastrous illusion become 'Where has all the Oil gone? in an Environmental Catastrophe of Ecocide as illusion would seek to deny – such the 'Too big to fail' premise as the illusion of Corporatism demands the inevitable imposition of sufferance and denial, variant only the prefix of the 'cide', such the obscenity.
But yet the failure of Corporatist Orthodoxy is all too evident, sense of the loss of life, sense of the magnification of expenditure of resources gone in to the support of illusion, sense of the Depression being as denial of Life - and of the Joy which it is as a wondrous gift.
The horror!
To reiterate a point made in a recent article by these small quarters, the drill of Corporatism as an Orthodoxy died in the Gulf of Mexico, and that is not tragic, but long overdue. What is truly tragic is the horror of the sacrifice it has taken to bring about the death of such Orthodoxy as an assassin of consciousness; for it is a sacrifice which many lives, and not just of Man, have yet to 'enumerate' - sense of acknowledgement of Truth as the absence of denial?
Citizens as People of America, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, are beginning to open their eyes to what this current 'evolutionary trajectory' represents - as they are beginning to see the illusion of Corporatism for what it represents as the denial of Life?
At a pragmatic level given sense of horror reflected in ability to hypothesize, concerning the continuity as of 'Memoranda', what this means for Orthodoxy is that People have to be eliminated – and for People read Citizenry; read Majority; read 'Prole'?
To parallel of a journey to the Heart of Darkness, way of the river of the Mississippi rather than the Congo as in Conrad's Novella, and as in a Memorandum as somewhere exists as parallels 'Ford Pinto Memorandum':
'The Gulf of Mexico. It Dead'
-How such horror expressive of an Obscene Orthodoxy such as Corporatism has come to prevail in a Nation which has a Constitution enshrining:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
is a right question, as 'they', sense of Inner Party, would have not asked – as they indeed would not have the consequences of such truths as above find meaning in 'Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'?
As a fact becoming increasingly self evident, such the horror of the pump of the Heart of Corporate Darkness.
The horror! The horror!
-Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is available here, superb example of consciousness concerning horror still unfolding as 'slow violence' of Orthodoxy revealed concerning the Gulf of Mexico is to be found here.
Stephen Martin can be reached at: stephenmarti@yahoo.com
--
Pete
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Dear Tea Partiers, Let's Get Mad Together
Disturbing Truths About Our Government
By PAUL BUCHHEIT, COUNTERPUNCH
Not because the government does too much. But because it's done too little.
Consider a few disturbing truths:
-- We cry 'socialism!' at the mention of higher taxes, but we allow a
businessman to make enough money to pay the salaries of every police
officer, firefighter, and public school teacher in the city of Chicago.
-- The richest 1% had a big slice of the American income pie in 1980.
Since that time, they've cut a second piece of the same size for
themselves, and then a THIRD piece! Three times as much in 25 years. They
got this extra pie not from being good hard-working little boys, but from
tax cuts and deregulation.
-- As Howard Zinn argued, low-income people go to jail for thefts of a few
hundred dollars. The people who take BILLIONS from society by calling
their income "carried interest" instead of income are considered shrewd
capitalists.
-- And how about corporations, the driving force of a 'revitalized'
economy? Right now the 500 largest non-financial corporations are sitting
on $1.8 trillion in cash instead of investing in people. And they're not
paying much in taxes. The portion of federal revenue derived from
corporate income tax decreased from 33% in the 1950s to 12% in 2005.
Companies have saved billions by moving their headquarters to tax havens
such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. Business-backers claim that the
U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates among OECD countries, but
the U.S. is actually the fourth lowest among OECD countries in the
collection of corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP.
Tea Partiers, we should get mad together at government, because they've
done too little to correct these injustices. It is not in their own best
interests to raise taxes on the rich.
And we should get mad together at the mainstream media for not reporting
on the abuses of the small percentage of very wealthy people who make it
so hard on the rest of us.
Paul Buchheit teaches in the School for New Learning at DePaul University.
--
Pete
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
By PAUL BUCHHEIT, COUNTERPUNCH
Not because the government does too much. But because it's done too little.
Consider a few disturbing truths:
-- We cry 'socialism!' at the mention of higher taxes, but we allow a
businessman to make enough money to pay the salaries of every police
officer, firefighter, and public school teacher in the city of Chicago.
-- The richest 1% had a big slice of the American income pie in 1980.
Since that time, they've cut a second piece of the same size for
themselves, and then a THIRD piece! Three times as much in 25 years. They
got this extra pie not from being good hard-working little boys, but from
tax cuts and deregulation.
-- As Howard Zinn argued, low-income people go to jail for thefts of a few
hundred dollars. The people who take BILLIONS from society by calling
their income "carried interest" instead of income are considered shrewd
capitalists.
-- And how about corporations, the driving force of a 'revitalized'
economy? Right now the 500 largest non-financial corporations are sitting
on $1.8 trillion in cash instead of investing in people. And they're not
paying much in taxes. The portion of federal revenue derived from
corporate income tax decreased from 33% in the 1950s to 12% in 2005.
Companies have saved billions by moving their headquarters to tax havens
such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. Business-backers claim that the
U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates among OECD countries, but
the U.S. is actually the fourth lowest among OECD countries in the
collection of corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP.
Tea Partiers, we should get mad together at government, because they've
done too little to correct these injustices. It is not in their own best
interests to raise taxes on the rich.
And we should get mad together at the mainstream media for not reporting
on the abuses of the small percentage of very wealthy people who make it
so hard on the rest of us.
Paul Buchheit teaches in the School for New Learning at DePaul University.
--
Pete
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
History According to Beck and Palin
The Myth of the Founding Fathers
By TOM TURNIPSEED
Led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, Tea Party worshippers of the Founding
Fathers want to return to the "good ol' days" of 1787, when most
African-Americans were slaves, many poor whites were indentured servants,
and women couldn't vote. At the time the Founding Fathers wrote the
Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Native Americans were being
slaughtered for their land, and Mexicans who were indigenous to the
Southwest and the West coast of what became the United States were
included in the genocide.
None of the ancestors of the African American, Native American, or Latino
speakers addressing the mostly white Tea Partiers at the Lincoln Memorial
on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech
would have been among the Founding Fathers. No women, Jews, Muslims, poor
people or non-land owners were numbered amongst the Founders who were rich
white men.
Conservatives have trouble seeking sensible solutions to our present-day
problems of poverty, violence, and perpetual war that make rich folks
richer while poor people suffer and weapons makers and war profiteers make
big bucks while killing and injuring innumerable innocent people. The
problems are caused by big moneyed interests with the help of simple
minded sycophants like Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers. Their
answer is to look backward to the wealthy Founding Fathers for guidance.
The Tea Partiers believe the mythologized Founding Fathers are more
intelligent and moral than anyone today except maybe radical right-wingers
like Beck and Palin.
While hosting the Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio
show and the Glenn Beck Show on Fox News Channel, Beck has been promoting
conspiracy theories and delivering incoherent diatribes against socialists
and environmentalists. Beck has called President Obama a Marxist,
communist, and socialist who is taking America down the road to fascism.
He has accused Obama of being a racist with a "hatred for whites", and
alleged that the Obama Presidency is like evil gorillas, endangering
humankind and compared Obama's America to "the Planet of the Apes". He
said that Al Gore wants to create a new "Hitler youth" because he promotes
environmental awareness among young people. Beck doesn't believe in global
warming, but loves guns and militarism.
In Washington Beck did not mention Obama or Gore, but rather, assumed the
role of an evangelist, presenting a religious theme of "Faith, Hope and
Charity" which was a lame attempt to mask his worship of Mammon, the God
of big business. Beck's big show "just happened" to be at the Lincoln
Memorial where Martin Luther King II made his iconic speech 47 years ago
to the day. Beck said he was totally unaware it was the anniversary of
King's address when he scheduled his event and he believes the Lord led
him to schedule the event at that time and place. He also boasted that the
right wing rally had "reclaimed the civil rights movement." Beck said he
heard the voice of God while addressing his flock, a symptom
characteristic of schizophrenia. He and his far right friend and probable
Republican Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin repeatedly mentioned King's
legacy, as giant screens carried King's image and brief excerpts of his
1963 address. Earlier this year Beck denounced King as a "radical
socialist" and questioned why a national holiday had been named in his
honor. Beck was born in a Roman Catholic family, but converted to
Mormonism. He says he "found the Lord" who saved him from his alcohol and
drug addiction and his channeling the voice of God sounds like the faith
required in a 12 steps effort to stay on the wagon.
In his rambling speech Beck gave several quotes from the Declaration of
Independence, recited the Gettysburg Address, invoked trite clichés of
Americana and read bible verses. Palin said she was the mother of a
"combat vet" and led a chant of "USA, USA, USA."
In the past other extremist populist movements in America also wrapped
themselves in the cross and the flag, but espoused some social and
economic policies that appealed to the common man. Father Charles Coughlin
and Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith were demagogic leaders in the depression days
of the 1930s, who at least talked about the dangers of capitalism, with
Coughlin advocating a guaranteed annual wage and nationalization of some
industries and Smith calling for income limits for the wealthy and old age
pensions for everyone.
When he announced the rally, Beck promised to present a plan which would
provide "specific policies and action steps" to found "a new national
movement to restore our great country." Instead, in his speech on
Saturday, he said he decided to not reveal the plan, because of a
conversation he had with God. Rather than explaining his plan "to restore
our great country", Beck said that people should turn to the Lord by
praying on their knees and leaving their doors open so their children
could see them doing so. Could it be that the billionaires and corporate
entities who fund the tea party movement nixed the plan that might help
poor and working class people at their expense?
Beck, Palin and their fellow Tea Partiers worship the rich white men and
moneyed interests who fund their movement and their politics. Their gods
are 21st century manifestations of the rich white men who were the
Founding Fathers.
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and peace activist in Columbia, SC.
His blog is http://tomandjudyonablog.blogspot.com
--
Pete
Belief is the death of intelligence--Robert Anton Wilson
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