A world without workers is impossible. A world without capitalists is necessary.

– World Federation of Labor

The unemployment rate in the USA is down to just over 8%. This is evidence that we are in a recovery from a recession. But that rate is actually higher than it was when this particular recession began.

The patient’s temperature has gone up, a sure sign that the patient is getting better. Huh?

Living under the rules of a profit and loss religion in a market church controlled by private clergy, almost anything negative can be made to sound positive, especially to those who have not yet felt the full impact of a disintegrating political economy. But those who are experiencing its worst aspects find no relief in academic jargon about structural or cyclical problems, stagnation, supply/demand curves, unemployment blips and market equilibrium. None of this helps them find jobs or borrow enough money to pay their rent, mortgage, food bills, or education loans. As those people are not only in the USA but in the rest of the world, the global nature of the problem makes it more clear that a solution is far beyond a particular nation state and concerns all of humanity.

An old admonition to act local but think global has come to mean far more than was originally intended. Then it had almost nothing to do with economics but now, if we don’t think and act economically we may assure failure for the planet and all its inhabitants. That’s us, whatever market terminology may be used to hide that fact behind national, racial, religious or other divisive identity group labels that help keep power in minority hands. And that minority is doing better than ever, in the short run, amassing more power and money than any past godlike royalty in what were supposed to have been more primitive societies. How much has really changed since ancient times when peasants and slaves were ground underfoot so that royal families and their wealthy sponsors could live lives of luxury? Not much, in essence, though the material standard of living for workers became what was called middle class and assured far more material comfort than previous generations of common people enjoyed. That lasted until the present breakdown began decreasing the income of more people at a faster rate so that the wealth of less people could increase at a greater rate.

What kind of system is this? This kind:

If people are murdered in wars, that is good for the weapons business. If illness and disease run rampant that is good for the medical business. If natural disaster ravages communities and kills people, that is good for the construction industry and the burial business. Such are the realities of the cold blooded economics by which the people of the world have been organized for hundreds of years. A profit for one always means a loss for many. The idea of keeping people healthy, safe, secure and alive is reduced to the private force of doing so only if they are able to create profits for those selling health, safety, security and life itself to the highest bidder in the market. If we can’t afford to buy those things and charity does not exist for us, we can just drop dead.

Millions of us do, and not only in bloody wars which profit the war makers. Many of us starve for lack of food while others have to go on diets because they eat so much. Many of us sleep in doorways, on the street or under bridges, while dogs and cats have their own rooms in comfortable homes. None of this happens because of individuals who are thoughtless or cold hearted or murderous, although such do exist. But in a system which dictates that profit must be created in a market sale, the owner of a private firm that makes band aids can be the nicest person on earth but still only profit and prosper if lots of people are bleeding. The social concept of doing all that is possible to avoid bleeding would be terrible for his private business. That is the case for every single human endeavor in the capital dominated religious belief system of the market, an anti-human, anti-social core of political economics that is threatening the future of all people all over the world.

Criticism and rebellion to such injustice is the history of humanity but today it is growing far beyond the national minorities previously involved in such struggle. People organized to obey authority, work for others to survive, live in physical poverty or shop in moral poverty and vote for employees of wealthy rulers when allowed to and call it democracy, have remained unorganizable for the kind of change now necessary for the survival of humanity. But as the critical conditions grow worse, new methods of communication among the people are helping bring more rebellious response to this old order of great wealth for the few at cost of crippling poverty and debt for the many.

Under the threat of potential social collapse, environmental destruction and radical revolution, those who reap the greatest profits are exploiting, ravaging and murdering at insane rates in mindless desperation to maintain their power and wealth. That cannot continue and is no longer tolerable to billions of human beings nor the planet’s natural support system.

All over the world of capitalist anti-social democracy, the collapsing structure has brought about calls for austerity from the rulers and their paid minions in government. This means further losses absorbed by the majority so that even greater profits can accrue to ruling minorities. Establishment philosophers of mass culture operating through corporate media still have enormous impact as they explain why the present reality is all that exists and must be experienced without substantial question. But when increasingly painful economic conditions for more people combine with increasingly dangerous conditions for much of the natural environment, the complex of events called material reality take on a new meaning well understood by growing numbers who face that reality in all its harshness and are less influenced by misinformation, propaganda and economic fairy tales.

Thus, many world citizens, even while their governing powers continue representing capital, wars and injustice, are rejecting the ugly burdens forced on them by their rich overlords. Elections in some places are small indications of change but far more indicative than the voting process which is still under the control of capital, are the rising multitudes all over the world all aiming for the same goal: a new world based on democratic power exercised by people taking action as members of the one and only human race and not simply as parties, religions, sects, cults or other labeled divisions which serve to keep minorities in control of majority created wealth.

Those tiny minorities are the capitalists who somehow own the fantastic wealth produced by enormous majorities of previously divided people. The divisions still exist and the power still is in the hands of those minorities whose days may be numbered, but so are those of humanity as well if action is not taken to create the world of democratic equality which has been the stuff of wishes and dreams but must become reality. Or else.

Doomsayers and doubters are in abundance and are to be expected, even when they are not on the payroll of the ruling minority. It’s easy to look at the state of the world and surrender to present reality. But that is only possible for those not yet suffering the ever increasing misfortune of dependence on a political economics of profit for a few through loss, pain and misery for most. It is not just time for social change activists but for all citizens of the world’s 99% to heed the words quoted at the beginning. An end to the reign of minority capitalism is necessary to save the earth and all its people so that we can begin a human society offering hope for all and not just some.

The most glaring and obvious question is: why?

Since President Felipe Calderón declared “war” against some of the region’s murderous drug cartels in 2006, some 50,000 Mexicans have been butchered. Activists, journalists, honest law enforcement officials but also ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire, the vast majority of victims, have been the targets of mafia-controlled death squads, corrupt police and the military.

Underscoring the savage nature of another “just war” funded by U.S. taxpayers, last week The Dallas Morning News reported that “23 people were found dead Friday–nine hanging from a bridge and 14 decapitated–across the Texas border in the city of Nuevo Laredo.”

The arcane and highly-ritualized character of the violence, often accompanied by sardonic touches meant to instill fear amongst people already ground underfoot by crushing poverty and official corruption that would make the Borgias blush, convey an unmistakable message: “We rule here!”

“The latest massacres are part of a continuing battle between the paramilitary group known as the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel,” the Morning News averred. “The violence appears to be part of a strategy by the Sinaloa cartel to disrupt one of the most lucrative routes for drug smugglers by bringing increased attention from the federal government.”

According to investigators the “two warring cartels are fighting for control of the corridor that leads into Interstate 35, known as one of the most lucrative routes for smugglers.”

But as Laura Carlsen, the director of the Americas Program pointed out last month in CounterPunch, “In a series of ‘Joint Operations’ between Federal Police and Armed Forces, the Mexican government has deployed more than 45,000 troops into various regions of the country in an unprecedented domestic low-intensity conflict.”

The militarization of Mexican society, as in the “Colossus to the North,” has also seen the expansion of a bloated Surveillance State. Carlsen averred that when the Army and Federal Police are “deployed to communities where civilians are defined as suspected enemies, soldiers and officers have responded too often with arbitrary arrests, personal agendas and corruption, extrajudicial executions, the use of torture, and excessive use of force.”

But expanding the surveillance capabilities of secret state agencies as the State Department proposes in its multimillion dollar gift to the Israeli-founded firm, Verint Systems, far from inhibiting violence by drug gangs and the security apparatus, on the contrary, will only rationalize repression as new “targets” are identified and electronic communications are data-mined for “actionable intelligence.”

Indeed, The New York Times reported last summer that “after months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern Mexican military base.”

Although anonymous “American officials” cited by the Times “declined to provide details about the work being done” by a team of spooks drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and “retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s Northern Command,” they said that “the compound had been modeled after ‘fusion intelligence centers’ that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups.”

Such developments are hardly encouraging considering the role played by “fusion centers” here in the heimat. As the ACLU has amply documented, “Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints, and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

In Mexico, the results will be immeasurably worse; with corruption endemic on both sides of the border, who’s to say authorities won’t sell personal data gleaned from these digital sweeps to the highest bidder?

Only this time, the data scrapped from internet search queries, emails, smartphone chatter or text messages grabbed by bent officials won’t result in annoying targeted ads on your browser but in piles of corpses.

Guns In, Drugs Out: Iran/Contra Redux

While Obama administration officials hypocritically washed their hands of responsibility for failing to clamp-down on what journalist Daniel Hopsicker christened The New American Drug Lords, an old boys club of dodgy bankers, shady investment consultants, defense contractors and other glad handers, the violence following drug flows north like a swarm of locusts is fueled in no small part by arms which federal intelligence and law enforcement allowed to “walk” across the border.

Indeed, as Hopsicker pointed out in MadCow Morning News: “Ten years ago Miami Private Detective Gary McDaniel, a 30-year veteran investigator for both Government prosecutors and attorneys for major drug traffickers, educated me on the basics of the drug trade.”

Every successful drug trafficking organization (DTO) needs four things to be successful,’ he said. He ticked each one off on his fingers: ‘Production, distribution, transportation, and–most important of all–protection’.

To McDaniel’s list we can add a fifth element: intelligence gleaned from the latest advances in communications’ technologies.

If all this sounds familiar, it should.

During the 1980s, as the Reagan administration waged its anticommunist crusade across Central and South America, the CIA forged their now-infamous “Dark Alliance” with far-right terrorists (our “boys,” the Nicaraguan Contras), Argentine, Bolivian and Chilean death-squad generals and the up-and-coming cocaine cartels who had more on their minds than ideological purity.

By the end of that blood-soaked decade, with much encouragement from Washington, including a get-out-of-jail-free card for their dope dealing assets in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department, the region was on its way towards becoming a multibillion dollar growth engine for the well-connected.

Does history repeat? You bet it does!

As Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported:

A top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug organization and his army of assassins in Juarez, Mexico–responsible for a surge in violence in that city that has led to thousands of deaths in recent years–may well have been supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of weapons through an ill-fated US law-enforcement operation known as Fast and Furious.

But which agency has the wherewithal to guarantee that weapon flows from the United States fall into the right hands? More than a few analysts believe that Fast and Furious was an “intelligence” gambit overseen by the CIA.

Indeed, Narco News reported:

When it comes to prime intelligence targets, they don’t come much better than the leaders of Mexican drug organizations, who have their tentacles planted deep inside Latin American governments due to the corrupt reach of the drug trade. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that part of the reason that ATF’s Fast and Furious makes no sense in terms of a law enforcement operation is because it wasn’t one at all. (emphasis added)

“In fact,” Conroy wrote, “it may well have been co-opted and trumped by a covert U.S. intelligence agency operation, such as one run by CIA, that is shielded even from most members of Congress–possibly even the White House, if it was launched under a prior administration and parts of it have since run off the tracks on their own.”

Conroy revealed that enforcer, Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, who was arrested in February by Mexican authorities, “is now the subject of a 14-count US indictment unsealed in late April in San Antonio, Texas, that also charges the alleged leaders of the Sinaloa organization (Joaquin Guzman Loera, or El Chapo; and Ismael Zambada Garcia, or El Mayo) and 21 other individuals with engaging in drug and firearms trafficking, money laundering and murder in ‘furtherance of a criminal enterprise’.”

According to officials, Marrufo was allegedly responsible for the murders of some 18 patients at a Juárez drug treatment center in 2009. However, the significance of the gangster’s arrest may be overshadowed by the additional disclosure that his close associates, Eduardo and Jesus A. Miramontes Varela “worked for the Sinaloa Cartel when they became informants for the FBI in 2009.”

“Under Fast and Furious,” Conroy wrote, “the nation’s federal gun-law enforcer, ATF, in conjunction with a task force composed of several other federal agencies, including the FBI, allowed nearly 2,000 weapons to be smuggled into Mexico.”

Amongst the firearms allowed to “walk,” according to multiple published reports, were AK-47 assault rifles, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers and FN Five-seven automatic pistols. Most of the arms purchased with ATF and Justice Department approval went to the Sinaloa or other drug cartels and have since turned up at some 170 crime scenes in Mexico.

While field level investigators objected to the operation and voiced their opposition to higher-ups in ATF, they were smacked-down by senior supervisors David Voth.

Responding to strong objections from his own agents, Voth wrote a threatening email to disgruntled officers in March 2010:

I will be damned if this case is going to suffer due to petty arguing, rumors, or other adolescent behavior. I don’t know what all the issues are but we are all adults, we are all professionals, and we have an exciting opportunity to use the biggest tool in our law enforcement tool box. If you don’t think this is fun you are in the wrong line of work–period!

Fun? Try telling that to the families of U.S. Border Patrol officer Brian Terry, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata or the families of hundreds of unnamed Mexican victims who turned up dead, murdered with weapons supplied by the U.S. government.

Conroy also informed us that “deadly weapons were allowed to ‘walk’ across the border, where they were put into the clutches of criminal organizations, such as those overseen by alleged Sinaloa enforcer Marrufo, so that US law enforcers could supposedly later trace the trail of those guns to the so-called kingpins of Mexico’s criminal organizations.”

There was just one small catch. “A Feb. 1, 2012, memo drafted by staff for [U.S. Senator Charles] Grassley and [U.S. Rep. Darryl] Issa, thickens the plot, indicating that there were, in fact, two FBI informants involved with purchasing weapons from [Manuel Celis] Acosta, [presumably the "main target" of Fast and Furious] and ATF had no clue that these so-called ‘big fish,’ the high-level targets of Fast and Furious, were, in fact, working for a sister agency.”

According to that Congressional memo:

During the course of this separate investigation, the FBI designated these two cartel associates as national security assets. [essentially foreign-intelligence agents, or informants]. In exchange for one individual’s guilty plea to a minor count of ‘Alien in Possession of a Firearm,’ both became FBI informants and are now considered to be unindictable. This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious–to target these two individuals and bring them to justice–was a failure. ATF’s discovery that the primary targets of their investigation were not indictable was ‘a major disappointment’.

Brilliant, right? If one were to fall for “conspiracy theories,” one would almost believe that U.S. secret state agencies, like their Mexican counterparts, were favoring one narcotrafficking gang (the Sinaloa cartel) over their rivals, the equally violent and sinister group Los Zetas or the Juárez cartel founded by self-described “Lord of the Heavens,” Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In fact, it wasn’t only the ATF-DEA-FBI that allowed guns to “walk” across the border into the hands of state-connected killers. To the list of the clueless, add the Pentagon.

In an earlier report, Conroy disclosed, citing State Department cables published by the secrecy-shredding web site WikiLeaks, that grenades used to attack the Televisa TV station and the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in 2008-2009 “involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico.” A second cable confirms that “U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.”

Narco News also reported that the State Department cables confirm “that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.”

Indeed, “bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Mérida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.”

But what if that is precisely the goal of U.S. policy planners and their masters, corrupt American financial institutions like Wachovia Bank or the defense contractors who reap billions from the slaughter?

In that case then, the so-called “War on Drugs” is really a war over who controls the drug flow and the fabulous profits derived from the illicit trade.

Back to the Future

While Colombia continues to be the principle source of processed cocaine entering Europe and the United States, despite some $7.5 billion dispensed to that country’s repressive military and police apparatus under Plan Colombia, wholesale distribution of narcotics entering the U.S. are now controlled by Mexican DTOs.

It is a demonstrable fact that Plan Colombia failed to stop the tsunami of narcotics entering the U.S. and that “success” or “failure” in that enterprise was besides the point. As multiple analysts and investigative journalists across the decades have documented, U.S. intelligence agencies, principally the CIA, have cultivated ties and operational links to DTOs and their ruling class enablers, favoring cartels that advanced U.S. geopolitical goals whilst targeting those perceived as liabilities.

As researchers Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle pointed out in Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia: “Among the compradores, short-term arrangements were made on coca production that paved the road for longer-term agreements of all kinds, one of which supported the emergence of the narco-bourgeoisie, whose business operations had remained relatively independent.”

Villar and Cottle averred:

Emerging narco-capitalism permeated Colombia’s financial system, creating financial connections throughout the Colombian economy. The active participation of banks in the cocaine industry greatly strengthened financial connections among the narco-bourgeoisie. The Cali cartel metamorphosed into numerous legitimate business enterprises such as pharmaceutical companies and real estate firms to operate the cocaine trade, whereas the Medellín cartel focused on money-laundering.

This production and distribution system was highly unstable however, and “created fierce competition among traffickers with connections to the Colombian ruling class,” Villar and Cottle wrote. “The Medellín cartel waged a desperate battle against enterprises that refused to enter into an alliance with them. All manner of underhanded methods, from blackmail to murder, were employed in this battle. The violent liquidation of rival enterprises, many who collaborated with the CIA, provoked retaliation from the United States which declared a war on drugs that targeted Pablo Escobar.”

As with Plan Colombia, under terms of the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has authorized some $1.6 billion for Mexico and Central American states blown away by the narcotics hurricane. However, much of the funds doled out to Mexican military and police organizations never leave the United States. Instead, as with other “foreign aid” boondoggles these funds flow directly into the coffers of giant U.S. defense firms and will be used to purchase aircraft, surveillance equipment and other hardware produced by the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex.

As in Colombia during the 1990s, a similar consolidation process, accompanied by spectacular levels of violence, is currently wracking Mexican society as drug gangs vie for control over the lucrative distribution market and are said to control 90% of the trafficking routes entering the U.S.

According to some estimates, approximately $49.4 billion annually pour into the accounts of major DTOs, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported back in 2007. However, most studies of global drug trafficking fail to analyze the benefits accrued by major U.S. financial institutions — banks, the stock market, hedge funds, etc. — who have been the direct beneficiaries of the $352 billion in annual drug profits “absorbed into the economic system,” as The Observer reported in 2009.

“In a nutshell,” Villar and Cottle wrote, “the war of drugs and terror is part of a counterrevolutionary strategy designed to maintain rather than eliminate the economic conditions that allow the drug trade to thrive.” That pattern is being replicated today in Mexico. “From Reagan to Obama, U.S. covert intervention has, paradoxically, only accentuated the social violence and systematized the production and distribution of cocaine.”

Corporate grifters, profiting on everything from weapons’ sales to surveillance kit have names. In the context of the Mérida Initiative, one firm stands out, the Israeli-founded spy shop Verint Systems Inc.

Drugs, Terror, War… Whatever

Like the “War on Terror,” the “War on Drugs” is predicated on the fallacy that “persistent situational awareness” obtained through the driftnet surveillance of electronic communications will give secret state agencies a leg-up on their adversaries.

Better think again! As Villar and Cottle pointed out, “the 1994 discovery of a computer owned by members of the Cali cartel offered clues on the complexities of the system and illustrated the technological sophistication of Colombia’s narco-economy.”

Indeed, the $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe “networked with half a dozen terminals and monitors and six technicians overseeing its operations,” and its “custom-written data-mining software cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange’s traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials.”

That network was “set up by a retired Colombian army intelligence officer,” a fact which the Colombian government denied despite strong evidence to the contrary. And when Colombian officials “established a toll-free hotline for information about the Cali cartel leaders,” Villar and Cottle reported that a “former high-level DEA official said: ‘All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed.”

By today’s standards, that IBM mainframe is a throwback to the stone age. With advanced communications and encryption technologies readily available to anyone, and with any number of dodgy spy firms specializing in everything from the mass harvesting of information from social networks to the installation of malware on personal computers and GPS smartphone tracking as the WikiLeaks Spyfiles revealed, only a fool — or a State Department bureaucrat — would believe that a weaponized spy kit won’t fall into the hands of billion dollar organized crime groups. Yet that’s exactly what Washington plans to do.

In the NextGov report cited above, we were informed that the State Department’s “Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in a contract notice published late Friday, said it will fund what it called the Mexico Technical Surveillance System for use by that country’s Public Security Secretariat to ‘continue to help deter, prevent and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism’.”

The contract proposal specifies that “all awards will be based on the following criteria in order of importance for 1) Technical Approach/Understanding/Personnel, 2) Corporate Experience, 3) Past Performance and 4) Price. Technical merit (captured in the three (3) technical evaluation factors enumerated above, taken together) is significantly more important than cost/price.”

But as NextGov reported while the procurement, at least on paper, is “competitive,” the State Department “came close to ruling out any other bidder except Verint with the caveat that ‘the new equipment must function seamlessly with the existing in a single system or be entirely replaced’.”

That pretty much “levels the playing field” for the Israeli firm and the suite of surveillance tools it offers, the Reliant Monitoring System, which “intercepts virtually any wired, wireless or broadband communication network and service.” Indeed, the State Department plans to “triple the capacity of the current Verint system from 30 workstations to 107,” according to NextGov. Given the spooky nature of the company, no doubt El Chapo is drooling over the prospect.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory and in a series of recent articles in Wired Magazine, “Verint was founded in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations.”

As Antifascist Calling disclosed back in 2008 (see: “Thick as Thieves: The Private (and very profitable) World of Corporate Spying”): “When Comverse Infosys [now Verint] founder and CEO Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander fled to Israel and later Namibia in 2006, the former Israeli intelligence officer and entrepreneur took along a little extra cash for his extended ‘vacation’–$57 million to be precise.”

Alexander, a veteran of Israel’s ultra-secretive Unit 8200, the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency, fled to Namibia because he faced a 32-count indictment by the Justice Department over allegations that he masterminded a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock options which allowed the enterprising corporate grifter to embezzle some $138 million from company shareholders.

As I wrote back then:

Despite alarms raised by a score of federal law enforcement agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fearful that sensitive wiretap information was finding its way into the hands of international narcotrafficking cartels, virtually nothing has been done to halt the outsourcing of America’s surveillance apparatus to firms with intimate ties to foreign intelligence entities. Indeed, as America’s spy system is turned inward against the American people, corporations such as Verint work hand-in-glove with a spooky network of security agencies and their corporatist pals in the telecommunications industry.

But as we know, software and the spy trojans embedded in their code are “neutral.” What can be used by law enforcement agencies such as Mexico’s Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP) and the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI) can also be handed over by corrupt officials to their presumed targets, the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juárez, Knights Templar, Tijuana or Los Zetas narcotrafficking cartels, all of whom have ties to Mexico’s narco-bourgeoisie, police and the military.

It wouldn’t be the first time that “retired” Israeli military officers or “ex” Mossad men were exposed as trainers for some of the drug world’s most notorious killers.

Nearly a decade ago, investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood revealed in Narco News that drug gangster and far-right political actor Carlos Castaño, the future founder of the blood-soaked Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC, “was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called ’562.’ Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.”

Bigwood reported that Castaño’s IDF trainers emphasized instruction in “urban strategies,” which included the use of fragmentation grenades, RPG-7s as well as “complementary courses” on terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Narco News informed us that “not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there–soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.”

A future that encompassed the wholesale massacre of Colombian peasants, union organizers and left-wing activists as the AUC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA-anointed Cali cartel, founded by Iran/Contra drug kingpins, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, engaged in a brutal war to the death with Pablo Escobars’ Medellín cartel in the 1990s.

According to declassified CIA, DEA and State Department documents published by the National Security Archive in 2008, “U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 1993 provided key evidence linking the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.”

Documents published by the Archive “include two heavily-censored CIA memos describing briefings provided by members of a ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ of CIA investigators to members of U.S. congressional intelligence committees and the National Security Council. The Panel–which included personnel from the CIA’s directorate for clandestine intelligence operations–had been investigating the possibility that intelligence shared with the Medellín Task Force in 1993 ended up in the hands of Colombian paramilitaries and narcotraffickers from the Pepes. That investigation concluded on December 3, 1993, the day Escobar was killed.”

“The collaboration between paramilitaries and government security forces evident in the Pepes episode is a direct precursor of today’s ‘para-political’ scandal,” said Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project. “The Pepes affair is the archetype for the pattern of collaboration between drug cartels, paramilitary warlords and Colombian security forces that developed over the next decade into one of the most dangerous threats to Colombian security and U.S. anti-narcotics programs. Evidence still concealed within secret U.S. intelligence files forms a critical part of that hidden history.”

While both the Cali and Medellín cartels have faded into history, cocaine processed on an industrial scale continues to flood out of Colombia and other “legs” of the Crystal Triangle. Control over that distribution network, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, much of which finds its way into U.S. banks, is the source of the bloodshed currently tearing Mexico and Central America to pieces.

Is history repeating itself when it comes to favoring one drug gang over another? The answer is yes. According to a 2010 National Public Radio report, “an NPR News investigation has found strong evidence of collusion between elements of the Mexican army and the Sinaloa cartel in the violent border city of Juarez.”

“Dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement agents, organized crime experts, elected representatives, and victims of violence suggest that the Sinaloans depend on bribes to top government officials to help their leader, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, elude capture, expand his empire and keep his operatives out of jail.”

Sound far-fetched? As Bill Conroy reported last year in Narco News, court pleadings in the case of accused Sinaloa capo Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla “demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.”

“According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the informant [Humberto] Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.”

“The alleged deal,” Conroy averred, “assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition–such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder why, if Zambada Neibla’s allegations are so much hot-air, would U.S. prosecutors invoke “national security” under provisions of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) “in his trial in an attempt to assure certain sensitive and/or embarrassing evidence is not made available to Zambada Niebla’s attorneys”?

As Narco News disclosed, “Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.”

With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and a “drug war” that favors one group of cut-throats over another to obtain leverage over corrupt politicians, along with an endless source of funds for intelligence-connected black operations, the Verint deal seems like a slam-dunk.

After all, with powerful communications’ intercept technologies in the hands of the Mexican secret state, “national security,” on both sides of the border, is little more than code for business as usual.

“In recent days, Israel appears to have begun preparing for military deployments on its southern border,” Tarek Fahmi, head of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies, told IPS.

On April 22, Egypt unilaterally cancelled a 2005 export agreement for the sale of natural gas to Israel, which for the past five years had ensured a steady supply of Egyptian gas from the northern Sinai Peninsula to Israel. Egyptian energy officials attributed the move to Israel’s failure to meet payment deadlines, stressing that the decision was “not politically motivated.”

Israel, which is said to depend on Egyptian gas for some 40 percent of its electricity needs, was quick to register its opposition.

Several Israeli officials warned of the move’s dire implications for the Camp David peace agreement, signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979. Israeli opposition leader Shaul Mofaz called on his country’s chief patron, the United States, to intervene on Israel’s behalf.

The Israeli Finance Ministry went so far as to describe the move as “a dangerous precedent that casts clouds over the peace agreements and the atmosphere of peace between Egypt and Israel.”

While Israeli officials have vowed to take legal action to ensure the supply of Egyptian gas, local energy analysts say Egypt was well within its legal rights to opt out of the deal.

“The Israeli purchasers failed to pay their bills to the tune of some 100 million dollars,” Ibrahim Zahran, Egyptian petroleum expert, told IPS. “The contract clearly states that if either party fails to live up to its obligations, the other has the right to terminate the agreement.”

Egypt first began pumping natural gas to Israel in 2008, based on a deal hammered out three years earlier that allowed Egypt-Israel joint venture East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) to sell Egyptian natural gas to Israeli buyers, including the government-run Israel Electric Corporation.

Given Israel’s broad unpopularity on the Egyptian street, the gas-export deal has met with widespread public opposition since its inception. Critics note that, by providing Israel with Egyptian gas at far below international prices (while Egypt itself suffers from chronic energy shortages), the deal effectively supports — albeit indirectly — Israel’s ongoing occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

Notably, the pipeline that carries the gas across the northern Sinai Peninsula to Israel has been subject to 14 attacks of varying severity — all by as-yet-unidentified culprits — since Egypt’s revolution early last year, often resulting in lengthy supply stoppages. As a result, electricity prices in Israel have reportedly increased by over 20 percent since the beginning of 2011.

Given the export deal’s broad unpopularity, the decision to scrap it was welcomed by Egyptian public figures and groups across the political spectrum.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (which now controls almost half of the seats in parliament), called the decision “excellent,” noting that Egypt “badly needs all of its natural gas to meet its own domestic consumption needs.” The liberal Egyptian Social Democratic Party described the move as “the inevitable fruit of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution.”

Frontrunners in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential polls, slated for May 23/24, likewise hailed the decision. “The move should come as no surprise given the information about the corruption that surrounded the deal,” former Arab League chief and presidential hopeful Amr Moussa told IPS.

Indeed, Sameh Fahmi, Mubarak’s last petroleum minister, is currently on trial — along with six other former officials — on charges of squandering public funds related to the gas-export agreement. According to prosecutors, the deal has so far resulted in over 714 million dollars in losses to the public purse.

While the decision to terminate the agreement was officially attributed to “commercial reasons,” Egyptian analysts believe it was prompted by political and strategic considerations.

“The move transcends mere commercial factors,” said analyst Fahmi. “A decision of this magnitude couldn’t have been taken without the approval of Egypt’s ruling military council.

“The decision has certainly bolstered the popularity of both the military council (which has governed the country since Mubarak’s ouster) and the military-appointed government, both of which had come under increasingly strident popular criticism in recent months.”

Fahmi does not rule out the possibility of military escalations should relations deteriorate further.

Only days before the termination of the gas-export deal, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly described Egypt as a “greater threat than Iran,” calling for the deployment of additional divisions to Israel’s southern border. “We have to be prepared for all possibilities,” Lieberman was quoted as saying in the Hebrew press.

And one day after the deal’s termination, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of Egypt’s ruling military council, warned that Egypt’s border was “perpetually in danger.” In a speech before troops from the Egyptian Second Army — who were conducting exercises in Sinai at the time — Tantawi promised to “break the legs of anyone who dared encroach on our borders.”

According to Fahmi, Tantawi’s statement “sent a message to Israel that Egypt is ready to defend its territory from any aggression.” It was not insignificant, Fahmi went on to point out, that Tantawi’s comments “came as the Egyptian Second Army was holding its first live-fire military drills in Sinai since the signing of the peace agreement.”

In a further apparent escalation last week, reports emerged that Israel planned to deploy at least 22 reserve battalions to its borders with Syria and Egypt due to “growing instability” and possible “security threats” emanating from both countries. Israel’s military has reportedly already approved official requests for the call-up of reserve forces.

“Recent developments point to an Israeli military build-up on the border with Sinai, carried out in order to deal with Egypt from a position of strength,” said Fahmi. “In the absence of a diplomatic resolution of the current crisis in relations, it would be a mistake to dismiss the potential for eventual military conflict.”

The two traditional parties, pillars of the neoliberal policies, lost more than half of their previous vote. Combined together, they make now just a 32% of the electorate, in comparison to 77% they had scored in the 2009 elections. New Democracy has dropped from 33% in 2009 to 19%, while PASOK has sunk even more dramatically from 44% to 13%, losing more than 2.000.000 votes. This was the punishment for their reactionary “Memorandum” policies, which they followed in cooperation with the European Union and the IMF. These policies led to a vast impoverishment of the majority of the people and a mass unemployment officially already at 23%, resulting even to a plethora of suicides by desperate men and women.

The vote of the broad left rose from a modest 12% in 2009 to an impressive 35.5% (17% for SYRIZA, 8.5% for KKE, 1.2% for the anticapitalist left party ANTARSYA and some 6.1% for the Democratic Left and 2.9% for the Greens). However the prospect of a left government is made problematic since the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) is an ultra-Stalinist party, denying beforehand any cooperation with “opportunists”, which it considers to be all other left parties except from itself. Moreover, the Democratic Left and the Greens are moderate center-left parties, which do not differ radically from PASOK and have supported until lately a rather conservative agenda. Even so, the collective result of the three radical left parties, SYRIZA, KKE and ANTARSYA, an impressive 26.5%, makes it possible to have some real hope for the future.

The other significant feature of the elections is the abrupt rise of the ultra-right, jumping together to an astonishing 20.5%. Formerly represented by just one party, LAOS, which had scored a modest 6% 3 years ago, the ultra-right now was able to present three major parties, Independent Greeks, LAOS, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, which took respectively 10.6%, 2.9% and 7%. LAOS paid for its support of the Papadimos government, holding office during the last months in Greece to implement the austerity programs of the Troika, falling just short from the required 3% to enter the parliament.

However, the shocking 7% achieved by Golden Dawn, an openly neo-Nazi and racist anti-immigrant party, marks perhaps more than anything else the result of the Greek elections. It is the first time such a party not only enters the parliament but gains mass support, which the Nazis lacked during the whole political history of Greece, famous for its resistance movement in 1941-45.

This result had been anticipated by left activists and publicists, between others by our group in Marxist Thought, which devoted its whole last issue to the problem of fascism, neo-fascism, and the new ultra-right. There was a mass mobilization by left organizations during the last three weeks calling the attention of the people to the danger of the neo-Nazi gangs. However, all this proved largely ineffective, as they have gained hold during the last years in degraded neighborhoods and within the unemployed youth. The stance of the Stalinist KKE, which not only is doing absolutely nothing to fight the ultra-right but gives shelter to nationalists like the notorious journalist Liana Kanelli, and even went so far as to welcome the Golden Dawn representatives at the Halyvourgiki strike through the local workers’ union it controls, added largely to the problem.

It is true that the ultra-right gathered together “only” 20.5%, in comparison to the radical left’s 26.5%. However, it is also true that it more than tripled its forces, while the radical left “just” doubled them.

The ensuing situation has been utilized by conservative commentators of the media and the Press, to interpret the result as an illogical expression of anger, pushing to extremes, against the demands of logic and caution. According to this reading, people were carried away by the false promises of demagogues, which are impossible to fulfill. The correct way would have been to foster the reactionary “reforms” that would eventually lead to an overcoming of the crisis through development and higher productivity and an improvement of democracy. Dora Bakogianni, the leader of the ultra neo-liberal (and falsely called so) Democratic Alliance, which failed to enter the Parliament by a narrow margin, has many times argued so in the most clear cut way.

This type of argument has in fact a double purpose. On the one hand, it attempts to equate in a tricky way the ultra-right menace and the prospect of left change as two complementary facets of the problem facing Greece, thus presenting the left as a danger too and denying beforehand there can be any radical positive solution. And on the other hand it seeks to embellish the corrupted Greek parliamentary system and make the parties of the establishment look like a guarantee for stability and improvement, while they are in fact the cause of the problem and of the ultra-right menace too. In Greece, corruption of leading politicians and public officials has been extremely widespread, taking enormous proportions with practically no one of them being ever punished. This decay has been one of the main causes that facilitated the rise of ultra-right and neo-Nazism. Yet, we are urged now to believe that these very forces that produced this situation have the magic clue to lead the country out of the crisis, and this by following the recipes that made it so deep. In fact, when reactionary politicians like Bakogianni are talking about “improving productivity” they only mean more layoffs and a new lowering of wages in the public and private sectors, thus making the existing bad situation even more desperate.

SYRIZA has countered these stereotypes in a successful way, by proposing the formation of a government of the left, which attracted much support from the people. The charismatic personality of its president, Alexis Tsipras, played a part in this too. Other radical left parties like KKE and ANTARSYA failed to make an equivalent impression. The KKE insisted on an ultra-sectarian policy, calling for the establishment of a front for the direct overthrow of the system by a “popular power”, connecting every fight for a bettering of the sad lot of the people with this prospect and denying harshly that anything could be done before establishing the “popular power.” This in fact meant condemning itself to passivity and a bureaucratic break with reality under the deceptive guise of fighting for the revolution, as has so often been the case with Stalinism. ANTARSYA had a much better approach and has played a vital role in the fight against the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis during the last years. Yet it paid for its lack of strong bonds with the people and its inability to cooperate with other left forces. This it failed to do not only with SYRIZA, with which it has a number of programmatic differences, but even with the FSO (Front of Solidarity and Overthrow), a small radical left formation led by Alekos Alavanos, a former eminent SYRIZA leader who broke with SYRIZA and kept largely aside in these elections.

The KKE has been accusing SYRIZA for being opportunistic and spreading illusions to the people by proposing a government of the left, since such a government would be no better than the existing ones. Aleka Papariga, the dogmatist General Secretary of the KKE, has even gone so far as to suggest that taking part in such a government would mean to betray the people for some ministerial “chairs” and state that the KKE would give no vote of confidence to it, should it appear before the Greek Parliament. Their political estimate after the elections was that the rise of support for SYRIZA signifies an attempt by the system to thwart the radicalization of the people and channel it to roads acceptable to the ruling classes. Moreover, Papariga has plainly refused even to meet A. Tsipras who took yesterday the mandate to form a government, after A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, failed to do so and resigned his mandate.

All this however and the assertion of the KKE leadership that no change at all can be achieved in a parliamentary way is highly sectarian dogmatism. Of course socialism cannot be finally established in a parliamentary way, to achieve that a revolution by the people is needed. Yet the experience of Chavez in Venezuela shows that with the support of a mass movement big radical changes can be initiated using the parliament as a lever, and there is no real reason that this should be in principle impossible for Greece.

Real problems, however, start from this point on. To enforce such a radical change with the help of a left government based on a parliamentary majority, a mass front is needed, which will lend support to the whole project. This is all the more essential in Greece, to be able to withstand the strong pressure by foreign lenders and the European governments and imperialist institutions. However, neither such a majority, nor a front exists presently. And while numbers might make the government of the left abstractly possible at a later stage, it is not at all certain that it will materialize.

The KKE stance is the main problem to that. This party has the support of a significant part of the industrial working class, the fighting elements of which would strengthen and cement the proposed front. However, the KKE, after a break in 1991, has followed for two decades an increasingly Stalinist course. This has gone to the length of not only rehabilitating recently Nikos Zahariadis, the authoritarian and cynical Stalinist General Secretary of the KKE in 1931-56, but also presenting Stalin as one of the greatest of all Marxists, accepting the validity of the Moscow trials and adopting the accusations that Trotsky, Bukharin, and the other Bolshevik leaders were agents of the Gestapo. A number of hard Stalinist pseudo-theorists like politburo members Makis Mailis and Stefanos Loukas have formed a circle directing the party’s inner political and ideological life, thus lowering the level of its members and making it vulnerable to all kinds of careerists and opportunists.

The KKE has repudiated the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the great movements of the “indignados” in Greece and Europe as being suspect and perhaps even guided by organs of the imperialistic secret services, refusing to take part in them. Instead of that it calls the people to unite in party fabricated “fronts” that are directed from above and have little connection with the people. Recently it has gone so far as to ignore the dramatic suicide of Dimitris Christoulas, a 77 year old man who shot himself at Syntagma and left a moving message to the younger generation, urging it to fight against the corrupt rulers. Christoulas was a member of the “indignados” movement and so “Rizospastis,” the official organ of the KKE, in the few lines it devoted to the incident did not even mention his name (calling him “the 77 year old man”) and shamelessly censored his message, reaching even the point off hurling accusations at him that his action was in the interests of the ruling classes, who want the people to commit suicide. Alekos Halvatzis, the son of Spyros Halvatzis, the KKE spokesman in the parliament, left the KKE one or two years ago, accusing the Papariga leadership of having filled the party with “stowaways.”

The SYRIZA is on the other hand a coalition of various groups including Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, left and moderate reformists, greens, and a number of other tendencies. The party has a genuinely democratic character and this variety of views lends it liveliness, as a center of discussion and production of ideas. However, in the grave situation facing Greece it could also prove a problem, by preventing at a critical moment a unified stance on crucial questions on which the various components hold different views. For the moment, of course, the electoral success strengthens the unity of the party, but this cannot be sure to hold indefinitely in the future.

The KKE, with its usual fanaticism, seems likely to “bet” on the possibility that a balancing of views will not be possible in SYRIZA and after a probable failure of the attempt to set up a left government or pursue it properly in case it is established, in the not very remote future the Greek people might turn to them. Such a hope can be sustained by the fact that SYRIZA does not have strong bonds with the masses that came over to it in the present elections, and its foothold is not in the working class but mainly in civil servants and the youth. It is a vain hope though in the sense that if SYRIZA fails to cope with the difficulties, chaos will be made universal, and in such a situation the ultra-right and not the KKE will be the one most likely to benefit.

The SYRIZA victory has coincided with the victory of Francois Hollande in France. Yet, it should be made clear, these are two events of an entirely different character. Hollande’s success, even if he has gained the support of many left voters, signifies just a shift of policy within the ruling classes and its parties. It may lead to some partial changes and adjustments, a somewhat different tone and orientation, but it will leave the general foundations of European policies untouched. The turn to SYRIZA in Greece however has a potential to challenge the very foundations of the austerity policies and the domination of the markets. It may serve as an example, especially if it is successful, for other countries facing similar problems, like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, and instigate a general and real European movement to the left.

The ruling European elites, as represented by Merkel, Schäuble, Barroso, etc, are fully conscious of this and have reacted nervously, either by intervening shamelessly before the elections to dictate the result, or by simply stating that the country’s obligations, signed by the previous government, must be fulfilled. Their fears are certainly justified, especially in the case that a broader movement to the radical left takes place in Europe. However the really urgent question is: how will SYRIZA cope with their intensified pressure during the following months and what it will strive and be able to achieve at a moment the reactionary forces still remain stronger in Europe as a whole?

SYRIZA’s program aims at a denouncement of the “Memorandum” and a re-negotiation of debt, which will include cancelling a large part of it as odious. It also claims a 3-year period of suspension of debt obligations, which would be an important relief step, if achieved. SYRIZA aims at nationalizing a number of banks, heavier taxation of the rich and improving the situation of the people, to a restoration of their former living standards. After having received the mandate, Tsipras proposed a 5-point program which is a concretization of this.

Other left forces like ANTARSYA argue, however, that this is not enough and that a unilateral repudiation of debt will be needed, which will mean that the country will have to leave the Euro zone and return to its national currency. This position is largely held also by the Left Current, a significant component of SYRIZA headed by its parliamentary spokesman Panagiotis Lafazanis, while a number of influential Greek economists, like Kostas Lapavitsas, have also argued this way. Significantly, the KKE connects the cancelation of debt too with the “popular power” slogan, considering it to be impossible under parliamentary conditions. This, of course, is an absurdity since the repudiation of debt is a reform that concerns the system of distribution leaving untouched the capitalist system of production as such. Thus it is perfectly conceivable under capitalism, as a number of examples show (Ecuador, Russia, etc.).

The difficulty with the unilateral repudiation of debt is that, although being in the long run most beneficial to the people, it will cause in its initial stages significant problems and disorganization. To minimize this and avoid an experience like that of Argentina in 2001, it is essential that the majority of the people are convinced for its necessity and it is pursued in an ordered way by a left government that is determined and conscious of its aims. This means that while the European left is still on the defensive, the attempt to implement the “compromising” program of SYRIZA and reach an agreement with the EU should be made. If, as it is quite possible, the neoliberal EU elites refuse to make any real and significant concessions, then this could convince the Greek people for the necessity of more radical steps. Prospectively, it will be ideal if this course coincides will a general revival of mass movements in Europe, especially in Europe’s south, leading to a “European Spring,” like the Arab one.

This prospect is not so remote as it may seem. The ruling classes in Greece and Europe are taking it seriously and making preparations to face the challenge it will pose to their system. The recent rise of the ultra-right in Greece, openly supported by a part of the media, capitalist circles, and the state security machine, is a part of this.

The breakup of the Greek political system has been compared in this respect with the downfall of the Weimar Republic and it is true that there is a number of striking analogies. Under a similar situation of deep economic crisis, mass unemployment, and poverty, we attend the bankruptcy not only of the formerly leading political parties but of the parliamentary system as well. The Papadimos government was important in this regard, as it signified a first step away from normal democratic government, towards technocratic-bureaucratic administration, reminiscent in many ways of the Brüning government in Weimar. The program of the newly created Independent Greeks party, headed by Panos Kammenos (a former New Democracy minister), contains a number of even more dangerous reactionary points, combining an ultra-privatization plan with proposals of appointing the chiefs of police and the army ministers of security and national defense respectively. This is clearly a Bonapartist plan, which would open up a threat to the very foundations of bourgeois democracy and of the labor movement. For the time being, such measures are supported only by the Kammenos party and those even more to the right (LAOS, Golden Dawn). It is not to be excluded that as the crisis intensifies, the more traditional parties, PASOK and New Democracy, or at least certain groups within them, might turn to similar directions.

The May 6th elections had the important consequence of producing a stalemate, not allowing the formation of any viable government. PASOK and New Democracy together have 149 seats, which do not give the needed parliamentary majority of 151. But even if they possessed this, forming a government would be out of question since it would be weak and without authority. This excludes also the possibility of a government being formed by these two parties together the Democratic Left, which would indeed possess a majority of 168 seats. Democratic Left has wisely excluded this possibility, as it would mean to identify itself with the two formerly big parties which were condemned by the people. The broad left on the other hand cannot form a majority, even if we count together all its disunited components. The possibility of forming a “national government” supported by a broad spectrum of forces except the ultra right, as proposed by PASOK and New Democracy leaders, is also excluded since it would simply mean to involve the left in the memorandum policies.

Greece is heading therefore almost inevitably to new elections, which will take place somewhere in the middle of June. These new elections have the potential to provoke a further impressive restructuring of the political scene.

SYRIZA’s tactics will be to unite around it the other left forces, which failed to enter the parliament (KKE of course has declared it is against unity under all conditions). That includes not only the Greens and ANTARSYA, but possibly some other groups that broke from PASOK like the small (and farily conservative) “Social Agreement” party. SYRIZA may also draw votes from KKE and improve its performance in the agrarian areas, which voted more conservative than the big cities (SYRIZA got more than 20% of the vote in Athens but much less in the countryside). If all this materializes, SYRIZA will almost certainly come first and take advantage of the 50 seats bonus the illogical electoral law grants the first party. This could augment its parliamentary force from 52 seats now to some 120, facilitating greatly the formation of a left government.

However, the ruling class parties have some prospects of countering this. The New Democracy party might be able to unite with the two small ultra-neoliberal parties, Bakogianni’s Democratic Alliance and Action of Stefanos Manos (a Greek big capitalist), which gathered together a respectable 5% of the electorate. Should such a regrouping be achieved, then first place in the coming elections will be a very open issue. However, A. Samaras, the New Democracy leader, is not in good terms with the leaders of the other two parties, so it will be rather difficult to happen (although the New Democracy leader has already made the proposal). Alternatively, it is quite possible that the two ultra-neoliberal parties will make a joint appearance, but this, while ensuring their representation in the new parliament, would not stop SYRIZA from coming first.

There is also a possibility of mass desertions of New Democracy and PASOK voters towards the “Independent Greeks” party, which poses as a patriotic and popular right, defending the interests of the people. This might take big proportions if certain sections of the ruling classes and media, who still supported the traditional parties, decide to move towards Kammenos as their only viable representative. However, there is a 7% difference in favor of SYRIZA now, so this movement would have to be very pronounced to enable the Independent Greeks to take the lead. A convergence between the Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn is not very likely since the Independent Greeks leadership takes pains to dissociate itself from Nazism. It will be very interesting though to see what will be the result of Golden Dawn in these new elections.

One thing is certain. After the next elections, the hour of truth will come for Greece. It will also be the hour of truth for the Greek radical left. Developments will show if it is able to unite, withstand the enormous pressures the EU authorities will apply and open up a new progressive way for Greece and a window of hope for the rest of Europe.

Update

Developments are running fast here in Greece, so that the situation changes abruptly and forecasts may prove wrong or inexact in just a few hours.

After E. Venizelos, the PASOK leader, took the mandate from President Papoulias this day, he had a meeting with Fotis Kouvelis, the leader of the Democratic Left. In it, there was a proposal by Kouvelis of forming an “Ecumenical government” of so-called limited purpose, which will supposedly renegotiate the Memorandum and hold office until the 2014 European parliament elections. Venizelos reacted positively to that, saying that it practically coincides with PASOK’s proposal for a government of “National salvation.”
So it seems that for the first time there is a real prospect of a government being formed after the stalemate of the last days.

This government will in fact be the New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left government, which Kouvelis himself had excluded just a few days ago. SYRIZA almost certainly will not take part in it, as will also be the case with the other parties represented in the Greek parliament. However, for obvious reasons of legitimization, the three parties will try to make it appear as something different, perhaps by appointing Kouvelis as Prime Minister and limiting or even wholly avoiding the participation of PASOK and New Democracy.
If this prospect materializes, it will be a flagrant violation of the will of the people, as expressed in the elections. Its real aim will be to continue the Memorandum policies, albeit in a slightly different manner, by extracting a few rather insignificant concessions from the European Union and make it appear as a great achievement. It will also signify a further step towards political anomaly, as it will be based mainly in the two formerly ruling parties condemned for their policies and will represent just 37% of the total vote.

Alexis Tsipras has justly called this plan an attempt by PASOK and New Democracy to find a “left Karatzaferis” – comparing thus Kouvelis with Giorgos Karatzaferis, the leader of the ultra-right LAOS, who had supported, with PASOK and New Democracy, the former Papadimos government, his party failing to enter the new parliament for that reason. The plan to establish such a government shows how horrified the ruling circles are from the prospect of a new election which might give a clear victory to SYRIZA and the left (some polls having already shown an increase of the support for SYRIZA after the election to the level of 25%). It is also a sign of how much the European Union governments and institutions are worried from the prospect of a left government in Greece and strongly press behind the scene for this kind of solution.

It remains to be seen if during the meeting of the Political Leaders with President Papoulias, which the constitution provides for as an attempt to form a government when the circle of mandates ends, it will become possible to reach this solution. The meeting will take place at most after 3 days, if Venizelos exhausts the duration of his mandate. Even if it is established, however, such a government will be patently weak and will not have any real prospect of solving the grave problems of Greece. It is doubtful therefore – although not impossible – if the three parties will take the risk of appointing it and coming to a total failure which will be blamed upon them after a few months.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.’s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I’ve read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell.  This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11.  She considered it her duty.  Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks.  That’s where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically.  It’s rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and health care who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.

Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to, or working against, U.S. national security.  The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves.  The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity.  Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.

Reams of documents and audio files from before 9-11 had never been translated.  Many more had never been competently or honestly translated.  One afternoon in October 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate verbatim an audio file from July 2001 that had only been translated in summary form.  She discovered that it contained a discussion of skyscraper construction, and in a section from September 12, a celebration of a successful mission.  There was also discussion of possible future attacks.  Edmonds was eager to inform the agents involved, but her supervisor, Mike Feghali, immediately put a halt to the project.

Two other translators, Behrooz Sarshar and Amin (no last name given), told Edmonds this was typical. They told her about an Iranian informant, a former head of SAVAK, the Iranian “intelligence” agency, who had been hired by the FBI in the early 1990s.  He had warned these two interpreters in person in April 2001 of Osama bin Laden planning attacks on U.S. cities with airplanes, and had warned that some of the plotters were already in the United States.  Sarshar and Amin had submitted a report marked VERY URGENT to Special Agent in Charge Thomas Frields, to no apparent effect.  In the end of June they’d again met with the same informant and interpreted for FBI agents meeting with him.  He’d emphatically warned that the attack would come within the next two months and urged them to tell the White House and the CIA.  But the FBI agents, when pressed on this, told their interpreters that Frields was obliged to report everything, so the White House and other agencies no doubt already knew.

One has to wonder what U.S. public opinion would make of an Iranian having tried to prevent 9-11.

Next, a French translator named Mariana informed Edmonds that in late June 2001, French intelligence had contacted the FBI with a warning of the upcoming attacks by airplanes.  The French even provided names of suspects.  The translator had been sent to France, and believed her report had made it to both FBI headquarters and the White House.

Edmonds translated other materials that involved the selling of U.S. nuclear information to foreigners and spotted a connection to a previous case involving the purchase of such information.  The FBI, under pressure from the State Department, Edmonds writes, prevented her from notifying the FBI field offices involved.  Edmonds has testified in a court deposition, naming as part of a broad criminal conspiracy Representatives Dennis Hastert, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz, and Tom Lantos, and the following high-ranking U.S. government officials: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Marc Grossman.

When Edmonds was hired, she was the only fully qualified Turkish translator, and this remained the case.  In November 2001, a woman named Melek Can Dickerson (referred to as “Jan”) was hired.  She did not score well on the English proficiency test, and so was not qualified to sign off on translations, as Edmonds was.  Melek’s husband Doug Dickerson worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency under the procurement logistics division at the Pentagon dealing with Turkey and Central Asia, and for the Office of Special Plans overseeing Central Asian policy.  This couple attempted to recruit Edmonds and her husband into the American Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, offering large financial benefits.  But these were organizations that the FBI was monitoring.  Edmonds reported the Dickersons’ proposal to Feghali, who dismissed it.

Then Edmonds discovered that Jan Dickerson had been forging her (Edmonds’) signature on translations, with Feghali’s approval.  Then Edmonds’ colleagues told her about Jan taking files out of other translators’ desks and carrying them out of the building.  Dickerson attempted to control the translation of all material from particular individuals.  Dennis Saccher, who was above Feghali, discovered that Jan was marking every communication from one important person as being not important for translation. Saccher attempted to address the matter but was shut down by Feghali, by another supervisor named Stephanie Bryan, and by the head of “counterintelligence” for the FBI who said that the Pentagon, White House, State Department, and Congress would not allow an investigation.

Had Edmonds understood the truth of that statement, it might have saved her years of frustration and stress, but it would have denied us the bulk of the revelations in her book.  Dickerson threatened Edmonds’ life and those of her family.  Edmonds lost her job, her reputation, her friends, and contact with most of her family members.  She watched Congress cave in to the President.  She watched the government protect the Dickersons by allowing them to flee the country.  She listened to Congressman Henry Waxman and others in 2005 and 2006 promise a full investigation if the Democrats won a majority, a promise that was immediately broken when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007.  Edmonds was smeared in the media, and her story widely ignored when media outlets got parts of it right.  The Justice Department claimed “States Secrets” and maneuvered for a cooperative judge (Reggie Walton) to have cases filed by Edmonds dismissed.  The government classified as secret all materials related to Edmonds’ case including what was already public.  The Justice Department issued a gag order to the entire Congress.

And Congress bent over and shouted “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

As less confrontational approaches failed, Edmonds became increasingly an activist and an independent media participant and creator.  Her story and others she was familiar with were rejected and avoided by the 9-11 Commission.  She worked with angry 9-11 widows and with other whistleblowers to expose the failures of that commission.  Disgusted with whistleblower support groups that only offered to help her when she was in the news and never when she needed help most desperately, Edmonds started her own group, made up of whistleblowers, called the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.  She started her own website called Boiling Frogs Post.

When an unclassified version of a report on Edmonds’ case by the Justice Department’s Inspector General was finally released, it vindicated her.

Edmonds has received awards and recognition.  Her story has been supported (with rhetoric, not action) by Congress members and backed up by journalists.  It appears in this forthcoming film.

Coleen Rowley, another FBI whistleblower, one who was honored as a Time magazine person of the year along with two others, told me:

What I find so remarkable is Sibel’s persistence in trying every avenue and possible outlet in trying to get the truth out. When going up the chain of command in the executive branch and Inspector General internal mechanisms for investigating fraud, waste, and abuse went nowhere, she sought judicial remedy by filing lawsuits only to be improperly gagged by ‘state secrecy privilege’.  Along the way she also sought congressional assistance, testified to the 9-11 Commission, and engaged with various media and other non-governmental organizations.  It’s somewhat ironic that Sibel herself demonstrated such enormous energy and passion throughout this decade quite the opposite of the ‘boiling frog’ idiom she uses for her website as a warning to others. If her book can inspire readers to summon even 1/100th of the determination and resolve she has modeled, there’s hope for us!

Yet, thus far, no branch of our government has lifted its little finger to fix the problem of secrecy and the corruption it breeds, which Edmonds argues has grown far worse under President Obama.  That’s why this book should be spread far and wide, and read aloud to our misrepresentatives in Congress if necessary.  This book is a masterpiece that reveals both the details and the broader pattern of corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.  Edmonds has not exposed bad apples, but a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all — not just the whistleblowers like Sibel and the thousands of people in our government who see something and dare not say something for fear that we will not have their back.

Let’s have their back.

Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

Financiers that break from the corruption of gluttonous greed can become the conscience of a sector that seems to have no conscience. Let’s hope their courage is contagious and others follow their lead.  We need a revolt from inside big finance that will help radically transform finance from greed to generosity, from gluttony to moderation and from selfishness to community benevolence.

A thorough examination of the corruption of big finance came in a recent shareholder letter from Robert Wilmers, the Chairman and CEO of M&T Bank. He laments that “it is difficult, for one who has spent more than a generation in the field, to recall a time when banking as a profession has been publicly held in such persistently low esteem” noting that polls show “only a quarter of the American public expressed confidence in the integrity of bankers.”  He recognizes that this is something big finance has brought on itself: “Since 2002, the six largest banks have been hit by at least 207 separate fines, sanctions or legal awards totaling $47.8 billion. None of these banks had fewer than 22 infractions; in fact, one had 39 across seven countries, on three different continents.

And, he highlights the salary disparity between bankers and other Americans reminding us that this is a recent development.  Just a few generations ago “the average compensation in the financial services industry was exactly the same as the average income of a non-farm U.S. worker.”  But today:

At a time when the American economy is stuck in the doldrums and so many are unemployed or under-employed, the average compensation for the chief executives of four of the six largest banks in 2010 was $17.3 million – more than 262 times that of the average American worker . . . it is hardly surprising that the public would judge the banking industry harshly – and view Wall Street’s executives and their intentions with skepticism.

How did the finance industry change into this corrupt mass?  Wilmers points to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a law “prudently erected in the wake of the Depression, kept investment banks apart from traditional banks.”  When banks were credible members of the community they “saw public service as part of their obligation” and “played a clear, if limited, role in the economy: to gather savings and to finance industry and commerce. Trading and speculation were nowhere included.”

But, in the 1970s and 80s he describes banking moving away from investing in things they knew as they began investing in areas where they “possessed little knowledge.” This created high risks, so much so that a 1993 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that had “banks truly recognized all the losses inherent in their books in 1984, one major bank would have been insolvent and seven others dangerously close.”

Rather than reducing risk, they sought quick profit by creating “investments they did not understand – and, indeed it seems nobody really understood. In the process, they contorted the overall American economy.”  The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 married investment banks with traditional banks.  Rather than sound investment Wall Street bet on “increasingly opaque financial instruments, built on algorithms rather than underwriting.” This sowed “the seeds of crisis and embodied a broader change that, in important and unfortunate ways, continues today”

Wilmers describes a bigger, systemic problem, “not only bankers but their regulators, not only investors but those paid to advise them, not only private finance but its government-sponsored kin.” The result – “the decimation of public trust in once-respected institutions and their leaders.”  The economic collapse “was orchestrated by so many who should have, instead, been sounding the alarm.”

Unfortunately, “the Wall Street banks continue to fight against regulation that would limit their capacity to trade for their own accounts – while enjoying the backing of deposit insurance – and thus seek to keep in place a system which puts taxpayers at high risk. In 2011, the six largest banks spent $31.5 million on lobbying activities. All told, the six firms employed 234 registered lobbyists.”

Wilmers urges us “to distinguish between Wall Street banks who, in my view, were central to the financial crisis and continue to distort our economy, and Main Street banks who were often victims of the crisis.”  Many activists do see the difference between Wall Street and community banks and credit unions; and therefore, have engaged in the “move your money” campaign.

A second example of divisions in the banking sector comes from the Federal Reserve Board of Dallas which released a report from its chief researcher, Harvey Rosenblum , “Why We Must End Too Big To Fail Now,” cites statistics showing that the five largest U.S. banks hold 52% of all bank assets.  The report points out that “American workers and taxpayers want a broad-based recovery that restores confidence. . . The road back to prosperity will require reform of the financial sector. In particular, a new roadmap must find ways around the potential hazards posed by the financial institutions that the government not all that long ago deemed ‘too big to fail.’” In an introduction to the report, Dallas Fed President Richard W. Fisher calls for “downsizing” these megabanks because the continuing cloud of ‘too big to fail’ hanging over the economy is simply too costly.

Rosenblum, like Wilmers, sees that Americans have lost faith in capitalism as a result of Wall Street’s greed: “Diverse groups ranging from the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Tea Party argue that government-assisted bailouts of reckless financial institutions are sociologically and politically offensive. From an economic perspective, these bailouts are certainly harmful to the efficient workings of the market.” He blames the big banks for the lackluster “recovery” writing that the too-big-to-fail banks “remain a hindrance to full economic recovery.”

In the report, Rosenblaum states that the financial crisis arose because of “failures of the banking, regulatory and political systems.” But, he warns “focusing on faceless institutions glosses over the fundamental fact that human beings, with all their flaws, frailties and foibles, were behind the tumultuous events that few saw coming and that quickly spiraled out of control.”  As the regulatory and political systems failed, the rule of law was not enforced, when this occurs “incentives often turn perverse, and self-interest can turn malevolent. . . Greed led innovative legal minds to push the boundaries of financial integrity. . .”

Rosenblaum sees the too big to fail financial banks, not community banks, as the “primary reason” for the weak recovery: “Many of the biggest banks have sputtered . . . in contrast, the nation’s smaller banks are in somewhat better shape . . . most didn’t make big bets on mortgage-backed securities, derivatives and other highly risky assets whose value imploded.” He concludes: “an economy relatively free from financial crises—won’t be reached until we have the fortitude to break up the giant banks.”

The most highly publicized division among financiers was in mid-March when Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith publicly resigned, with a pointed letter  in the New York Times.  The letter described a “toxic and destructive environment” in Goldman where the entire staff from senior partners to associates, pursued nothing but ever-more sophisticated means of “ripping their clients off.”  At the center of  Smith’s critique is the massive derivatives market, where he was a central player.

What may have been most interesting about the public resignation letter was so many commentators saying – ho hum, Goldman rips off its clients, big surprise.  Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich broadened the discussion describing the history of Goldman rip-offs going back to the 1920s and broadening the rip-off mentality to all of Wall Street’s big banks, not just Goldman. Reich describes this as a problem of “endemic abuse of power and trust.”  This culture of corruption led to “the junk-bond and insider trading scandals of the 1980s, the dot-com scams of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Wall-Street enablers of Enron and other corporate looters, and the wild excesses that led to the crash of 2008.”

What do these emerging cracks mean to people in the United States who want to see radical transformation of finance, democratization of the economy and a participatory democracy where people have real power?  It means, we are seeing the weakening of the pillars that hold the power structure in place – a critical step to people having the power to demand change.

Steve Chrismer, an engineer working with Occupy, describes this in engineering terms; how with the right frequency we can insert our fist, even our arm between rocks:

Did you know that it is possible to insert yourself between rocks that are vibrating at just the right frequency?  When looking for the optimum vibration frequency I increased the frequency by single digits from 0 Hz.  When resonance occurred the situation changed dramatically and as the rocks became ‘fluid’ I was able to insert my hand and then my whole arm into the rocks.  If you went slow enough the rocks flowed around you, not noticing your presence, and did not resist: go too recklessly fast and the rocks would resist.

This is where Occupy is as a movement: only 6 months old and we are already noticing the weakness of solid walls. To weaken the pillars of power requires that we study these cracks so that we can provide the needed energy to open them non-violently and allow us all to pass through.

Occupy needs to drive wedges through these cracks.  Protests of executive salaries, stopping foreclosures and evictions through Occupy Our Homes, highlighting the failure to loan to small businesses and the hiding of profits offshore to avoid paying taxes, pressuring banks for their investments in private prisons, dirty fuel, for-profit health care and other negative corporate interests need to escalate as we build pressure to break up the Too Big to Fail Banks.  At the same time, we need to build a new finance system which includes developing public banks at the state and city level and building community banks and credit unions by moving our money from the big banks.  Time banks that record volunteer time which is traded for unpaid labor at the community level will avoid the banking system altogether. Expanding the fissures by the combination of protest and building the new economy will result in a finance system that serves the public interest, not private gain.

No doubt many others inside big finance feel the same as those who have spoken out. The courage of the few may embolden more to expose the corrupt practices and unsafe risks that are being taken; and to speak about real solutions to the financial crisis. Up until now, those who see the corruption may have felt alone but now they know they are not, and they can join with others seeking to stop the exploitation of people and the planet.

The more we speak about the fraud and corruption of Wall Street, the more we will empower those in big finance who are questioning the current paradigm. The more we protest at banks and financial institutions, exposing the truth about unethical foreclosures, concentrated wealth and ties to industries that harm people and the planet. the more reasons those inside will have to change their behavior. Using creative conflict and nonviolent tactics, we can draw more people to the movement for social and economic justice and provide a safe place for them to speak the truth of much-needed transformation.

The medics were already sentenced by a military tribunal (a military tribunal!) to up to 15 years in prison after months of being held in illegal detention, denied legal counsel and subjected to torture.

Moving their case to a civilian court is presumably meant to signal a concession by the regime. But what it illustrates is that the Al Khalifa royal rulers of Bahrain are unreconstructed despots who are implacably set against accepting any kind of democratic reform.

The persecution of the majority Shia population – 70 per cent of the island – by an unelected Sunni elite is business as usual as epitomized by the vindictive targeting of medics whose only “crime” was that they treated hundreds of people injured in the state’s brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement.

Recently, Washington has been doing its PR best to present the monarchy in the Persian Gulf kingdom as being belatedly open to reform – this after a year of unrelenting repression against a largely peaceful pro-democracy uprising.

Bahraini grassroots activists are concerned that sections of the official opposition belonging to the Shia Al Wefaq political society are being groomed by the US State Department to accept a “compromise deal” with the royal rulers that would effectively see the monarchy remaining in power and the status quo merely being given a facelift.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has been praised in the US corporate media for overseeing “brave” moves towards political power-sharing and dialogue with the mainly Shia-led opposition.

Washington’s envoy on human rights Michael Posner and former national security advisor Elliott Abrams have talked up “important steps” by the Bahraini regime towards reform.

However, no amount of Washington spinning can conceal the facts of life: that the US-backed Bahraini regime will continue violating human rights and international law in order to maintain its stranglehold hold on political and economic power at the expense of the Shia majority.

For 280 years, the Sunni rulers, who invaded the country from neighbouring Qatar, have sat on the chests of the indigenous Shia, and they are not going to give up their privileged seats of comfort. The Al Khalifa dynasty has enriched itself through graft and corruption while the majority of Bahrainis struggle with unemployment and poverty.

The oil wealth of the tiny island has lined the pockets of the Al Khalifas, but for the ordinary Shia it has brought poverty, pollution and sickness. To add insult to injury, when the mainly Shia-led uprising last February peacefully demanded elected government to replace the unelected venal family dynasty, it was met with batons, bullets and brutality, with thousands incarcerated or fired from their jobs, several tortured to death while in prison.

Historically, to maintain this excruciating state of inequality, the Bahraini rulers developed a system of governance and state security apparatus that is “bullet-proof to reform”. Under American and British tutelage, the Bahraini rulers became adept at presenting the kingdom as a relatively benign monarchy. They may have acquired the modern semantics and appearance of political progressivism, such as referring to the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy with a (rigged) parliament instead of an absolute monarchy as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms. But not far below the surface, Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism was always the dominant reality.

For example, the kingdom’s prime minister is 78-year-old Prince Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the incumbent king. He is the world’s longest sitting prime minister, having first occupied the post in 1971 when Bahrain gained nominal independence from Britain. Prime Minister Khalifa – also known locally as Mr Fifty-Fifty – has never faced an electorate and is notorious for siphoning off Bahrain’s oil wealth to become one of the richest men in the world.

For decades, despite glamorous images of mirrored skyscrapers and Formula One Grand Prix, Bahrain has been run with an ironclad National Security Agency. The agency was, and is, a veritable “torture apparatus” headed up by members of the royal family and assisted in its nefarious conduct by ex-colonial power Britain.

Between 1968-98, the main architect of the NSA and its sectarian methods of repression against the Shia population was British colonel Sir Ian Henderson. Henderson, who had previously gained British government commendation for his role in efficiently, that is brutally, suppressing the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya during the 1950s-60s, oversaw the detention and torture of thousands of Bahrainis held for years without trial in the dungeons of Bahrain.

Former detainees told Global Research that one of Henderson’s sadistic methods of interrogation was to force them to sit naked on upright glass bottles, the necks of which had been roughly broken off to leave protruding jagged points. The detainees told how Henderson personally oversaw the torture of inmates.

Today, the British influence on Bahrain’s NSA continues. One of Bahrain’s senior police chiefs is Briton John Yates, formerly of Scotland Yard; another senior police chief is American John Timoney, who formerly ran the force in Miami, Florida. Both men have reputations of corruption and brutality from their previous commands.

Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism under a family dynasty is backed up with a military and police force whose ranks are filled by foreign expatriate Sunnis recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Jordan. The regime forces serve their Sunni masters with a vicious hatred towards the Shia population.

This fact is attested by the daily and nightly attacks on Shia villages by Saudi-backed regime forces, with massive amounts of tear gas fired into streets and homes. At least 25 people have died from suffocation with tear gas over the past year since Saudi-led forces invaded Bahrain to crush the uprising. The victims range from a five-day-old baby girl to elderly men and women who are too weak or infirmed to escape from their smoke-filled homes.

In the past week, mourners attending the funerals for two men who died from tear gas exposure were themselves attacked by riot police who proceeded to fire more tear gas.

So, on the one hand, we see the Bahraini rulers wearing a velvet glove offering “dialogue” and “reforms”, with Washington and London providing the positive-sounding script; while on the other hand, what is felt is an iron-fist smashing down the doors of homes, firing tear gas into houses, dragging suspects away in the middle of the night, detaining them without trial and torturing to death.

And this is all happening in a supposed new era of reformism and dialogue in Bahrain that Washington assures is underway.

The continued persecution of the Bahraini medics is another fact on the ground to demonstrate the despotic nature of Washington and London’s “important ally” in the Persian Gulf.

The medics were sentenced for up to 15 years by a military court last September on a range of outlandish charges, including “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading defamatory information” about the royal rulers.

That verdict caused international protests from human rights groups, who denounced it as a travesty of legal procedure, not least because the sole basis for the prosecution were the confessions of the defendants – confessions that were obtained under torture.

Then, as now, the response from Washington and other Western governments and media was muted.

The medics include world-renowned surgeons Ali Al Ekri and Ghassan Dhaif and his wife, Zahra, and brother and sister, Bassim and Nada. Also sentenced was Rula Al Suffar, the former head of Bahrain’s Nursing Society. These are individuals of impeccable medical professionalism and ethics, who refused to close the doors of Bahrain’s main public hospital, Al Salmaniya, when the regime began butchering protesters last February-March. Global Research can bear witness to the dedication of these medics and countless others who struggled in the wards and corridors of the hospital to patch people up with the most horrendous wounds as wave after wave of injured were ferried in.

Dr Al Ekri was assaulted while performing surgery and hauled into detention by Saudi-backed forces who had smashed their way into Salmaniya Hospital – a crime against humanity, just one of many following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain that was given the green light by Washington and London.

There was a faint sign that Washington’s recent talk of progress and reform in Bahrain may have somehow sent the hint to its favoured despots to quietly drop the embarrassing show trial against the medics. But with the continuance of the prosecution – albeit in a civilian court instead of a military tribunal – it seems that institutionalized barbarism cannot overcome its tyrannical instincts for power, even at the behest of its more PR-savvy patron in Washington.

One can only imagine the sanctimonious mouth-foaming reaction by Washington, London and the corporate media if such a travesty was perpetrated against medics in Syria.

But Bahrain is not Syria; it is an ally, therefore Western governments and media suddenly develop blindness and speech impediment in the face of blatant crimes against humanity.

In a press conference held on March 15, 2012, Gascon announced that he was “deeply concerned” that Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi might have plead guilty to a crime he did not truly believe he had committed. He explained that his office “is not in the habit of taking a guilty plea from somebody who is not guilty.” He continued: “If the defendant in this case believes he is not guilty then we should go to trial and let a jury decide.”

Anybody who has ever been within two miles of a courtroom would immediately recognize the utter hypocrisy of this statement. Gascon heads an office that accepts pleas from literally hundreds  of criminal defendants every day who are admitting guilt to offenses they did not commit so that they do not run the risk of going to prison for the rest of their lives for crimes they  also did not commit. Gascon’s office so over-charges most criminal defendants and conjures up accusations that are nothing short of ludicrous for the sole purpose of raising the stakes so high that the accused cannot afford to risk trial. Our judicial system not only acknowledges that this is a daily occurrence, but depends upon this coercive process in order to function. If even 10% of those who are arrested demanded a jury trial, the entire judicial system would come to a screeching halt. Courtrooms would be backed up for years within a month or two of the entry of defendants’ not guilty pleas.

That Gascon would dare to make such a disingenuous comment only underscores the daily unspoken collusion between trial courts and prosecutors to assure that innocent people go to prison, rather than fight their unjust arrests and prosecutions.

A few examples should suffice to demonstrate how obvious this is:

1.  In 1991, Franky Carrillo was convicted of murder, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.  His conviction was based upon the testimony of numerous witnesses, who had been coerced by the police, and coached by the District Attorney into giving false testimony to convict Carrillo. After 20 years in prison,  producing a letter from the actual perpetrator of the crime admitting to its commission, and presenting evidence from every witness who testified against him that their testimony was false and coerced, Carrillo’s conviction was overturned, and he was released from prison. The important lesson from this case is that not one police officer was prosecuted for coercing witnesses into testifying against an innocent man, not one District Attorney was disbarred or even disciplined for suborning perjury, and the trial judge who sentenced Carrillo to two life terms in prison has never been questioned as to why and how he could allow such a shameful process to take place in his courtroom.

Has any District Attorney been prosecuted for over-charging a defendant, for cooperating with the police in fabricating false evidence against an individual or for sending obviously mentally ill or innocent defendants to jail? Gascon’s shameful posturing about District Attorneys never accepting guilty pleas from innocent people scrapes the bottom of the bucket!

It would have been impossible for the witnesses who initially testified against Carrillo to get their stories straight in front of the jury unless the D.A. had coached them and worked with them in convicting an innocent man. This is par for the course, not an aberration.

2. Dennis Lawley spent 23 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He thought he was the Beast of Revelations from the Bible, and suffered from raging mental illness. He then killed himself in his cell this year. The trial judge allowed Lawley to represent himself at trial in spite of Lawley’s open and obvious psychosis.

During trial, the District Attorney presented the case to the jury, arguing that Lawley shot his victim with his own .357 gun and was the sole perpetrator of the crime. Lawley explained that the gun he was accused of using in the crime was not the one that killed the victim and was never used in the crime. He explained that his gun was actually buried in a field in Modesto in the Central Valley of California. The D.A. mocked Lawley’s argument, and ultimately obtained a  conviction for the crime. 20 years later, Lawley’s appellate attorney and a series of investigators went to the field and located the missing gun, which was right where Lawley had said it was.

Did the D.A. admit his error, and work to have Lawley released? Of course not, he changed his theory of the case to suggest that there were two guns used in the crime, and that Lawley was guilty under his new explanation for the crime.

Was the D.A., or the Attorney General who fought to keep Lawley in prison until he killed himself punished in any way for their blatant lies and fabrications? Certainly not – our city and state attorneys never are held accountable for their manipulation of the legal system.

Did the trial judge who upheld the jury’s sentence of death ever publicly acknowledge his shameful actions in allowing Lawley to represent himself in spite of his obvious mental illness. Unheard of!

3.  Ross Mirkarimi was elected sheriff of San Francisco County in 2011. He was to be sworn in as sheriff in 2012. But prior to assuming the role of sheriff, Mirkarimi was arrested for having assaulted his wife, an immigrant who swore that he had not abused her, and for intimidating their  two-year old child (Mirkirami, himself, was a serious candidate for the “Hypocrite Award” due to his dual role as S.F. County Sheriff as well as a suspected wife abuser.)

Mirkarimi plead not guilty to the charges, and demanded a jury trial. After weeks of reading about every aspect of the case in the local media, as presented to them by D.A. Gascon, Mirkarimi plead guilty to the misdemeanor offense of false imprisonment. For weeks before the pending trial, the people of San Francisco, from which the jury to try the case would be chosen, were treated to videos and pictures of the victim of the crime, to alleged testimony from numerous other victims of Mirkarimi’s misconduct, and to a daily barrage of information provided by Gascon’s office to assure a conviction in the case. Was this appropriate behavior on the part of the District Attorney? Did he get away with trying the case in the press insead of in the courtroom? Ah, but the District Attorney is an honorable man, who would NEVER accept a plea from an innocent person.

The Mirkirimi case has gone off the charts. District Attorney Gascon graciously shared with the city of San Fancisco, prior to Mirkarimi’s trial, the chronological history of every woman Mirkarimi had dated since the age of eight, along with a description of the inappropriate conduct he engaged in with each of them. The descriptions were bolstered by pictures, declarations and videos of each of his prior transgressions.

4. When Oscar Grant was murdered in cold blood by the BART police in Oakland in the early hours of New Yearve 2009, it was months before anybody could even hear what murderer Mehserle’s defense was. The District Attorney explained that an ongoing investigation was in process, and that it would be “unfair” for Mehserle’s to be tried in the press prematurely. How considerate of the D.A. in that case.

5.  In the case of the Davis police officers who blithely and openly pepper-sprayed non-violent demonstrators sitting on a sidewalk on campus, the District Attorney worked long and hard to protect the privacy rights of the police while an interminable investigation was pursued. Were the policeman’s actions discussed publicly by the D.A. prior to trial or was the case tried in the press? No. Are criminal charges even pending against the offending police officers? No.

When a police officer is the potential defendant, privacy rights come to the fore and foreshadow all other considerations; yet, when a poor person or someone the D.A. dislikes commits a crime, the person is so lambasted in the press that (s)he does not stand a chance if the case were ever to go to court.

The double standard that exists in this country regarding the forces of law ‘n order versus the citizenry, especially for minorities, is so blatant and outrageous as to bring chills to any law-abiding citizen. Gascon’s abuse of the system is only the tip of the iceberg.

As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set their sights on the “prize,” Iran’s vast petrochemical wealth, multiple themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.

Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran’s alleged links to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion calls for “regime change.” It would serve us well however, to explore the recent history of the secret state’s reliance upon the illicit trade and how such dalliances advance America’s wider geopolitical goals.

Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars

In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and “Castro-Communism” who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As money and weapons flowed to “our boys,” the Contras, they repaid the favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that “go-go” decade.

Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: “The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America’s first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s.”

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Argentina’s death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.

Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime syndicates. Both men were billionaires who’s wealth derived from control over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945 for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly stated: “I am the world’s richest fascist.” Both Kodama and Sasakawa operated alongside old “China hands” such as Paul Helliwell, who created CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.

Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind the throne of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup, facts you’re not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.

As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant magazine, “In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia.” In his most recent book, Scott noted:

The members of Helliwell’s small OSS detachment in Kunming (Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug triarchies and the WACL’s history. In addition to Helliwell’s support for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt’s contribution in Mexico, APACL’s formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also involved with WACL death squad patrons … and was eventually indicted himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)

Shortly after WACL’s formation, the organization was joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko, then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state allied with the Third Reich. In the “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Stetsko declared that Ukraine “will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the Vatican’s infamous “ratlines” and took up the anticommunist cudgel for the United States while working alongside European and Latin American fascists connected to global drug networks.

As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by Argentine “dirty war” specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links to both the CIA and NATO’s Gladio network, put his unique “skills” to use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte–’The Fiancés of Death’–as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez, described as the ‘King of Coca,’ overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)

Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry reported that “many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan contras.” By “1981,” Gurvich and Parry wrote, “President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building up the contra army.”

Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the CIA’s underworld “friends” made up to $60 million per month; chump change by today’s standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by 1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.

In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents, when Escobar was run to ground “key evidence” linked “the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive … to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.” According to the Archive, “The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.” They had; a pattern that persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. “war” against Mexico’s powerful Cartels.

As we now know, this great drug war “victory” in practice favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent “claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs.”

“Kent’s memorandum,” journalist Bill Conroy disclosed, “contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

“The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a few ‘bad apples’ who need to be reported to their superiors, these allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up orchestrated by ‘watchdog’ agencies within the Justice Department,” Conroy wrote.

This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.

Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.

When the “Great Triangulator” Bill Clinton took the helm in 1993, it was Slobodan Milošević who reprised the role of the century as Europe’s “new Hitler.” With the Cold War over, the Soviet “menace” a fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic “reforms” all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical anachronism had to go, and so it did.

Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal. Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in “protected” drug operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.

Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began working their magic in the Balkans.

Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany’s close allies, the secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of Western “humanitarian interventionists,” an Islamist fraudster who had expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help “liberate” Bosnia. As with NATO’s current “regime change” ops in Libya and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed into Al Qaeda, the “database,” poured into the region.

While Osama Bin Laden’s minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia, merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing Saudi-financed Wahhabist “charities,” later in the decade they gained entrée into Kosovo where they joined NATO’s newest “best friends forever,” the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and prostitution rackets across Europe.

In 1999, The Montreal Gazette published an exposé reporting that “Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S. authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the drug.”

Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was “no question” that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA’s drug ties.

“They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could,” Levine said. “As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that “While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was ‘preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs’.”

“In order to thrive,” Chossudovsky averred, “the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans ‘cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties’ including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment.”

Following NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign, a template for today’s State Department-fomented “humanitarian interventions,” the former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi’s “boys” had pushed aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.

It was a victory all around.

We should keep Chossudovsky’s point in mind today, as “undercover political lobbies” such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) “cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,” showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars in “speaking fees” from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.

The New ‘Heroin Connection’

If the prospect of a “nuclear-armed” Iran isn’t enough to send red-blooded, God fearin’ Americans into a tizzy, then consider this zinger from RFE/RL: “U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic.”

That’s right, the CIA’s former propaganda mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration “has named a general in Iran’s elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking heroin from Afghanistan.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “General General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force office in Zahedan,” has been designated a “narcotics kingpin.”

We’re told that Baghbani has been accused “of aiding Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well helping send weapons to the Taliban.”

Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO’s Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?

According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:

Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is ‘probably the world’s largest producer of opium for export’ and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.’ U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai’s warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the source of what amount to protected drug rackets–the CIA and NATO–RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive war.

But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that “Russia’s top officials have described the situation as ‘narco-aggression’ against Russia and a new ‘opium war’.”

“The Russian press,” Blagov wrote, “has been even less diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped abroad on US planes.”

Commenting on the “creative destruction” wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail that the West’s “economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.”

According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”

“How can this have happened, and on this scale?” Murray wonders. “The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government–the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

But let’s not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom’s “new Hitlers”!

Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters reported, while Iran “is a main transit route for bringing heroin and opium to Western markets from Asia … the United Nations’ top anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics.”

“Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories (from Iran),” said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).”

“This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate seizures,” he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium, morphine and heroin. “Last year it was 300 tons.”

If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters disclosed, “Iran’s campaign was showing results with the country seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to 5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;” a telling statistic not likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.

Indeed, UNODOC reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan have entered into an agreement “designed to strengthen drug control among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations targeting the major transnational networks.”

“All three parties,” UNODOC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov averred, have launched a “Triangular Initiative” that has already boosted “their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities.” Tellingly, a “joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations.” (emphasis added)

According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell “has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers.”

This is certainly not the message that war planners in Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the Obama administration has the media’s ear and can exert influence over own America’s benighted “War on Drugs”?

When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker’s eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia, pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns “walk” across the border, right into the hands of the CIA’s favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.

In fact, Narco News revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had “entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.”

Conroy disclosed that “US prosecutors do confirm in court filings that another high-level Sinaloa ‘Cartel’ member, Mexican attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10 years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa organization.”

“Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, “acted as the intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings allege.” Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico’s largest drug gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across the Americas, the “US government, in court pleadings filed in September, lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.”

What might threaten America’s “national security,” pray tell?

As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed last summer, when “embattled” acting ATF director Kenneth Melson testified before Congress he refused “to go down for a program [Fast and Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating.”

Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Melson told congressional grifters that “the evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”

As Hopsicker pointed out, those “shadowy other government agencies” is “the very definition of the CIA.”

Hopsicker asked: “If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?”

“Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF’s Operation Gunwalker?”

As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, “a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)” Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped “terrorist” suspects on CIA “ghost flights.”

But that’s all the past, we should “look forward, not backward.” Why bother with “ancient history” when there’s a new war to gin-up?

According to the Treasury Department press release, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official.”

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen.

If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and given Cohen’s role as Obama’s point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the charges reek to high-heaven. “General Baghbani,” we’re told, “allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into Iran.”

Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal, charge that “Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its operatives into Afghanistan.”

We’re told that “several [unnamed] Taliban commanders based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda operatives en route to Afghanistan.”

LWJ’s “proof”? Why none other than a 2010 statement from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that “Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons”! Case closed, right?

But as with last year’s discredited Iranian “Qods Force” plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri, has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.

Mehr News Agency reported that “Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government’s involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).”

According to Mehr, “Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based.”

Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that “the person in question has been travelling to different countries under the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number was K10295631.”

As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of Mexico’s violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.

As journalist Gareth Porter noted in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, “the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to ‘attack’ the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped ‘in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,’ according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.”

Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure, cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of America’s shadow war.

With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug scourge.

And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in 2009, “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.

The U.S. Congress has an approval rating of less than 10%. Greedy, unprincipled billionaires own virtually all of the wealth of the nation, and pay a lower percentage for taxes than the poorest worker. We imprison a greater percent of our population than any nation on earth. We spend more on vicious, unwarranted wars than the 15 top military spending countries combined. We are the greatest purveyor of murder and destruction internationally than anyone else.

Our public school system is under attack, and becoming obsolete. A college degree has become so expensive as to be unavailable to middle class families. The safety net for the old and infirm is being torn asunder. Our immigration policies are so degrading and inhumane that there is a mass exodus from the U.S. by peoples who used to flock here. Health care is a national disgrace, and is fast becoming unaffordable to any person in need of hospitalization. Homeland Security looks more like the German Gestapo every day.

The list of failures and problems facing the country is unparalleled, and the public knows it. Everything from cartoons to serious news shows bemoan the catastrophic decline in this country’s standard of living, and recognize the incompetence and inhumanity of those in power. This is so, even though the public media is little more than a propaganda tool for the oligarchy.

What is the most astonishing fact, though, is that there are no candidates or possibilities for new leadership on the horizon anywhere! Obama is the best of the pack of wolves and thieves who are actively destroying this nation. 95% of those in Congress who are running for re-election are are  certain to retain their status. How in the world is that possible? Any rational person would expect the electorate to throw these pandering,  posturing politicians  out on their keesters, and elect a set of representatives who would radically change the picture. But instead, we are about to re-affirm the failed, dying programs that have transformed this country into a  violent, disrespected second-rate nation. What a contradiction in logic and reality!

What kind of national pathology is causing the electorate to allow the oligarchy to engage in this unadulterated rush to destroy everything of value in this country? Like lemmings, rushing into the sea to commit suicide, the voters will once again endorse the same fools who have immobilized Congress for decades, will do nothing to control a run-away Pentagon, and its maniacal weapons manufacturers, and will accept Wall Street’s unregulated destruction of our wealth and resources. There is simply no rational explanation for the inability of the American people to find alternatives to the elected gangsters who bow to every billionaire that comes before them.

It is apparent that the voting public in the U.S. feels so disenfranchised from the process that it has for all intents left the spoils to the thieves. By abandoning any process by which there can be meaningful change in the policies of this government, the people have accepted the fact that there are no meaningful differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. The wars will continue, the repression will expand, the rich will get richer, and the rest of us are on our own.

However, the spark was lit. The eruption of popular protest against the neoliberal corporate agenda that most of the world had already experienced by the winter of 2011 had finally reached the nation most responsible for that agenda — the United States. The rest of the year would see the expansion of that protest across the United States grow in dimension and breadth. From further State Capitol occupations to the occupations of city parks, the masterminds and profiteers of the neoliberal economy were put on notice. Meanwhile, protest from like minded citizens of the rest of the world also continued to spread. Politicians scrambled as they figured out how to respond to what was clearly a left-oriented popular movement against those who had bought and sold them long ago.

Naturally, there have been millions of words written and published about this wave of people power. A very recent collection of some of those words edited by Wisconsinites Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, is titled It Started In Wisconsin. Essentially a collection of essays written by various participants and organizers of the Wisconsin protests, It Started In Wisconsin provides a reasonable and objective look at the movement. By discussing its structures and organizational strategies, the politics of the movement are also examined. Like the Wisconsin movement itself, the parameters of the discussion tend to remain limited to the parameters of the liberal-progressive spectrum.

The book begins with the first essayist attempting to place the protests firmly in the tradition of the great Progressive Robert LaFollette. However, the very fact that the movement ended up being confined to the traditional Democrat-Republican contest made even the more left elements of the Progressive philosophy irrelevant in the final outcome. It Started In Wisconsin tends to examine the uprising and its politics from a generally anti-corporate perspective but, like the movement itself, never truly challenges capitalism at its roots as an essentially unequal system that by its nature requires growing levels of inequality.

There is one essay that stands out from the rest of those that analyze the movement in that it does look beyond the façade of neoliberalism. That essay, titled “The Role of Corporations” by Roger Bybee, is the most radical in the book. Radical, that is, in the fundamental definition of the word: “of or going to the root or origin.” The essay is a clear and straightforward description of how neoliberal capitalism works, who it benefits and, to put it bluntly, who it screws. No other analytical piece between these covers quite approaches the clarity and depth of analysis like Bybee’s.

Yet, this book is not really about analysis. It is a collection of stories from those that participated in one of the most inspiring movements to erupt in the US heartland in decades. Those stories provide the observer from afar with a fairly universal and nuanced look at the daily lives of those involved in organizing, occupying, reporting and otherwise participating in those weeks of popular democracy. Interspersed between the tales of the workers, students, farmers and other protesters are a number of photographs and comics. The inclusion of these graphics truly enhances the overall effect.

One of the last two essays in It Started In Wisconsin discusses the position of the Wisconsin uprising in the global insurrections of the past eighteen months. The authors of this short essay, Ashok Kumar and Simon Hardy, briefly discuss the possibilities and take a quick look at the lessons they see to be learned. In addition, and most importantly, they broach the subject of the differences between the radical grassroots and the more conservative entrenched union and political leadership. It is here, they hint, that the real direction of this global movement will be determined. In Wisconsin that outcome has already taken one turn with the shifting of the uprising’s momentum into the recall efforts against Governor Scott Walker. The outcome of this turn to electoral politics is still being hotly debated by many of the uprising’s organizers, with some of them refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate opposing Walker because they see him as just more of the same.

Moving from the local to the global, let us consider another recently published text that takes a look at the international manifestations of this movement. This book, titled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is authored by journalist Paul Mason. Like the Buhle’s effort, Mason’s book describes the movements against neoliberal intolerance and authoritarianism that have become part of the collective imagination this past year. Likewise, Mason’s text examines the politics of the movement from what can only be termed a new left viewpoint. What this means is that he places the emphasis on the cry for freedom implicit in these protests while under-emphasizing the economic nature of the oppression the protesters are rebelling against.

Given the broader scope of Mason’s text, there is also a broader discussion. Several different manifestations of the movement — from Greece to London to Cairo to Spain and other points in between — are reported on. These reports are good journalism. One feels as if they are present at the rallies, occupations and riots that Mason describes. The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events. These are the stuff that makes one join such movements.

When it comes to analysis, Mason’s text provides some interesting possibilities. He spends a fair number of words discussing the desire for freedom this global movement represents. The Egyptian opposed to the harshness of the Mubarak authoritarian regime and the British student fearing the limitations a life without affordable education will create are examined through what Mason calls the social laboratory of the self. He emphasizes the role of social networking and the existence of a new dimension in organizing directly related to the existence of networking technology. He rightly questions the validity of the Left, but does not really examine what he means by the Left, choosing instead to adopt the mainstream media’s definition that the Left is composed of political parties like Labour in Britain, various elements of the Democratic Party in the United States, and numerous sects espousing various versions of Leninism.

By dismissing the Left, even in its current splintered formation, Mason is also dismissing a more radical analysis of the true culprit in the global economic catastrophe. It is true, as Mason makes clear, that neoliberal policies are responsible for the numerous maladies the global uprising sprang from. However, what is unexplored in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is why neoliberal capitalism is the dominant economic regime on the planet. That explanation can only come from an understanding of the economic works of Marx and his theoretical successors like Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and even Lenin. It was these thinkers and revolutionaries, after all, that studied and explained the stages of capitalism in the industrial world and how they would come about. So far, they have been pretty damn accurate.

Mason has it right when he places the search for freedom against the authoritarianism of a Mubarak or of neoliberalism in the context of Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the human spirit under capitalism. However, by not taking a similar look at the analysis Marxist economics provides regarding the trajectory of capitalism, the analysis he provides falls short. It would be useful for Mason and the protesters he writes about if they knew that a Marxist anti-imperialist analysis does not mean that a Leninist solution is the necessary result.

Yet, Mason is not much different from the movements he describes. Rightly opposed to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (which is merely another phase of monopoly capitalism as described by Luxembourg, et al), the current movement runs the risk of merely removing the worst of those excesses. If this is the result, it will only be a few decades before an even harsher manifestation of capitalist greed subordinates the world. Unless, that is, the current movement undertakes a truly radical analysis that places the existence of capitalism itself at the core of the problem.

I don’t expect that capitalism will be removed from the planet. However, without an understanding that it is capitalism that is the root of the problems of inequality and sustainability we are currently facing, there can be no substantive change in the future we face. Then, again, the very fact that many elements of the movement don’t seem too concerned about the Left’s role is a call to those on the Left to get active and make it clear that what passes for the Left in today’s world is for the most part nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is a rejection of the Left’s important and earth-changing history.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, these two publications are worthwhile and provocative reads. The authors and editors present the primary actors in the global uprising — students, workers and the marginalized — and describe their passion, joy and fears. They also begin to explain where the global movement against neoliberalism came from and where it is now. Reading them in this context will certainly help guide us through that movement’s next metamorphosis.

— Associated Press, February 3, 2012

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the run-up to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

Long overweight, he has always sought to expand his eating horizon. Starting with the blasé turkey, he moved on to spicy Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino and Okinawan, etc. Lately he’s been stuffing his face with all-you-can-eat helpings of hummus, sharwama and sheikh mahshi. Yummm! But no earth is big enough to satisfy this infinite growth appetite, so with his overseas options dwindling, the fat man is consuming his own body. America is eating up its own young and future.

What to do? When a country is this sick, how do you go about curing it? And what should we tend to first? Among presidential candidates, the only one with anything like a sensible platform is Ron Paul, who insists on bringing all the troops home, restoring our raped Constitution, and lopping off the Federal Reserve, thus castrating our thieving banksters, but since Paul threatens the beast so directly, there’s no way our military/banking complex will allow him to win.

American electoral politics is modeled after game shows, sit-coms, professional wrestling and Jerry Springer, with everything well-orchestrated and media sculpted, but should the masses fail to cheer, laugh, tear up or become indignant on cues, there’s still the Diebold voting machine to yield a preordained result. Even with a fair shake, however, voters may still reject Ron Paul because of his opposition to social programs and abortion, as well as his laissez-faire stance towards big business.

As for third party candidates, the last one to have even the remotest chance of winning was Ross Perot, in 1992, but he ended up with zero Electoral College vote! As for Ralph Nader, his best showing was 2.74% of the popular vote, in 2000. In short, we don’t have a viable candidate to lever us from this quicksand. The system simply won’t allow it.

It won’t allow it because it’s not there to serve us, silly. This is no government for the people. Where have you been? While we had a brief moment occupying a few plazas, dusty lots and parks, they continued to occupy everything else. With their nonstop media pollution, they occupy your very mind. So what are you going to do about it?

Many of us just want to get off this death train. In 2008, a Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” A growing number would rather be a citizen of the Second Vermont Republic or Cascadia, etc., and in Wyoming, lawmakers just narrowly voted down a “doomsday bill” that would have prepared the state to function independently of Washington. Though it was posed as an emergency measure, it sounded suspiciously like a secession plan, what with the state having its own currency, army and even aircraft carrier.

Aspiring Cascadians chafe having “to put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power,” but you can live in Washington DC itself and feel exactly the same way. Just ask the many homeless sprawling on the sidewalks within sight of the US Capitol, or the people of Adams Morgan or Anacostia. Like those in Bagdad or Kabul, they are not being served by the war criminals who huddle daily on that hill. So the distance is ideological and not necessarily physical. In the latest poll, released three weeks ago, 86% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Some may see their “representatives” as incompetent, but many Americans already know that they are being ruled by an alien government that only got elected through a rigged system and lying.

The more illegitimate they become, the more flags they display, and the bigger the flags, though they care nothing about what the flag stands for. To them, the American flag is just something to drape over your coffin, after they’ve sent you to commit mass murder for Big Oil, Big Banks and Israel, after they’ve used you thoroughly to enrich themselves. Isn’t it time we bury this grotesquely corrupt and bloodthirsty cabal? The big question is how?

Strategies, strategies. Recognizing that one-day protests accomplish nothing, the Occupy Movement sought to disrupt the system by occupying Wall Street. It didn’t happen that way, of course, because hundreds of cops were brought in to protect the New York Stock Exchange for months on end.

Thwarted, the occupiers moved to a park, and that became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. As you sleep outside and become symbolically homeless, your sneering masters will continue to ruin lives by starting wars and ripping people off in plain sight.

And so the first stage of our rebellion is over, and though I fully applaud the courage and sacrifice of those who endured prolonged discomfort or police brutality to rouse America from its slumber, we must now aim for tangible results and not symbolic victories. Since time is short, we must get deadly serious. No more hedges.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

Without substantial social reform and redistribution of economic assets, representative institutions – no matter how ‘democratic’ in form – will simply mirror the undemocratic power relations of society. Democracy requires a change in the balance of forces in society. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a small elite is a structural obstacle to democracy. It must be displaced if democracy is to emerge.¹

All reformers, no matter how radical they thought themselves to be, could be (and have been) caught up in reform structures whose underlying purpose is to reduce the inharmonics of the existing social system.²

Even as attempts to curb protests through evictions and violence are conducted across the country, the movement is spreading – every day, more and more flock to their local  parks and city centers, rallying under the banner of “Occupy!” First it was Occupy Wall Street, a call put out by Adbusters, a quasi-Situationist organization that has been at the forefront of the “culture jamming” ethos since 1989. From there, it was Occupy Chicago, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Boston, Occupy Omaha. The movement has gone global, with protestors catching the Zeitgeist in London and Rome. Regionalized discontent led to international solidarity in Greece, as further austerity measures loom on the horizon – imposed by none other than a government that dares to call itself socialist.

The central concept of the OWS movement is populist in nature, harking back to those that resisted capitalism’s harsh realities in the earlier parts of the 1900s: there is a major disconnect between the 99% of the population and the 1% that acts as the center of wealth and power. At the core, this division is rooted in Marxist terminology, the proletariat versus the bourgeois and their exploitation. We demand democracy, the multitude is saying, from Lexington, Kentucky to Madrid, Spain. We demand freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from indentured servitude to the moneyed class, freedom to live our lives with a higher degree of autonomy than has been allowed by those who seek to manipulate and oppress for their own material gain. Be they students in the universities, underpaid workers who need government aid to live, or citizens horrified that a piece of every paycheck is going to bail-out reckless firms and to support foreign wars, the multitude is gradually realizing that they are the engine of this world, and that it is time for them to sit in the driver seat. But all is not right in the movement. It is in times of unrest and cries to social change that hegemony rears its ugly head. Since time immemorial, overt repression has been swapped for the far more subtle process of assimilation – the system acknowledges its defects, and then harnesses people power and guides it by hand into compromises that leave the primary mechanisms of domination intact. Radical change is exchanged for the more “mature” approach of working within the system. This is a very real threat to the Occupy movement, one that needs to be acknowledged and resisted by any member who truly believes in striving for a better tomorrow.

Egypt: The Inspiration

OWS’s genesis lies not just in Adbusters, but in the Spanish Indignants movement, a coalition advocating grassroots democracy in reaction to the impact of the international financial crisis on their nation. Leading the coalition is a group by the name of ¡Democracia Real YA! (Real Democracy NOW!), which called for international solidarity and protests on October 15th. Adbusters responded with a poster portraying a dancer atop the Wall Street bull, and request for people to join together to occupy the “second capital” of wealth and power in the United States – Wall Street.

¡Democracia Real YA!’s initial inspiration for the international protest was the shocking success of Arab Spring,³ the multi-country revolt that succeeded in toppling one of the world’s worst dictators, the US-backed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. The opposing coalition, consisting mainly of tech-savy youth organizations such as the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution and the 6 April Youth Movement, has been a consistent icon and inspiration for the Occupy movement, and rightfully so – it is one of the rare examples of people pushing for social change and getting it. So often we see revolt being crushed under the wheels of power, organization shattered, and violence suppressing hope. But even with Egypt, questions must be asked.

Ideological solidarity is giving way now to direct ties being formed between these desperate threads that are disrupting the international order. Egyptian activist Mohammed Ezzeldin gave a rousing speech to protestors in NYC’s Washington Square Park, discussing the direct lineage between the two revolts. “”I am coming from there — from the Arab Spring. From the Arab Spring to the fall of Wall Street,” he said. “From Liberation Square to Washington Square, to the fall of Wall Street and market domination, and capitalist domination.”⁴

Wired magazine has also reported that Ahmed Maher, one of the founding members of the 6 April Youth Movement, has traveled from Egypt to Washington D.C.’s McPherson Square to directly interact with the Occupiers there and advise them on courses of action. For sometime now Maher has been communicating with the protestors in the multitude’s medium of choice – “We talk on the internet about what happened in Egypt, about our structure, about our organization, how to organize a flash mob, how to organize a sit-in, how to be non-violent with police”⁵ – but this will mark the first time that he has come face to face with the people he refers to as his “brothers.”

Behind and Below the Masses: the revolution factory

The Egyptian revolt, much like its counterparts in Tunisia and Libya, was a direct fall-out from the processes of globalization; namely, the domestic impact of US policies that were driving high the price of essential living commodities. As reported in the McClatchy Newspapers:

The Fed [Federal Reserve Bank] has been engaged in what economists call “quantitative easing,” buying U.S. Treasury bonds to attack the threat of deflation — the phenomenon of falling prices across an economy.

Quantitative easing has the effect of raising asset prices, whether they’re the prices of stocks or what traders are willing to pay for commodities such as wheat or corn. One of the side effects of this policy is that the dollar weakens against other currencies, and that’s helped push up the global prices of commodities.⁶

As the article notes, the Fed’s quantitative easing has led to wheat prices rising 70% over the past year, certainly bad news for the country of Egypt, which stands as the US’s eight largest export market. With an economy pried open by the International Monetary Fund to a flood of international products under the banner of benevolent “structural adjustments,” the skyrocketing prices in the US means skyrocketing prices in Egypt. With an oppressive leader under the thumb of the United States military, the stage was ripe for revolution. In other words, Egypt, like the other countries involved in Arab Spring, was on the surface revolting against domestic policies; at its core; however, the revolt was against the structures of Late Capitalism, the mechanics of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to as “Empire” – the international monetary system that is rapidly rendering the concept of the “nation-state” obsolete.

So Mubarak is toppled and the Egyptian people seemingly liberate themselves. And what is the result? The country comes under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Led by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi (a man described as “Mubarak’s poodle” for his loyalty to the disposed leader⁷ the Council has declared to honor all existing political treaties and agreements, as well as maintaining the neoliberal stance of its predecessor. “We are not moving back to a socialist past,” Egypt’s temporary government has declared,⁸ as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the European Investment Bank plan to descend upon the country with an “action plan” for foreign investment and “sustainable growth.⁹

Thus, Washington and the IMF’s program will go unchanged as it moves from Mubarak’s dictatorship to the new parliamentary democracy. How did it happen? How did we get from point A (the masses, infused with revolutionary potential) to point B (a cosmetic facelift of the prevailing economic system)? An analogous situation can be found in South Africa, where the spirit of the revolution was laid down in a document known as the Freedom Charter. In this document we can find declarations such as “the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people… the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.¹⁰ Yet when the dust settled after 1994, a radically different picture emerged: the apartheid-era finance minister, Derek Keyes, remained in his position as head of the South African bank; the ANC signed onto the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the World Bank was free to impose restrictions on socialized business models; and the IMF exerted authority over the approach to issues such as minimum wage. In the words of one activist, “they never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it around our ankles.”¹¹

The dominant system will always resist widespread structural change, and the most common method of doing this is through the power of non-governmental institutions. Foundations constitute a main apparatus of this process – “everything the Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government,” said McGeorge Bundy, the long-time president of the Ford Foundation.¹² There is also the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a brainchild of the Reagan administration that seeks to provide a capitalist economic framework for developing nations, and ease former left-wing states into a financial and militaristic stance in line with Washington’s key values. The NED receives its funding from the State Department through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and in turn funnels the money into four subsidiary organizations: the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). The NDI and IRI are allied with their respective American political parties, while the CIPE is affiliated with the US Chamber of Commerce. The Solidarity Center, on the other hand, is a program of the AFL-CIO labor union consortium. Other NED funds flow into Freedom House, a US-based human rights organization that has been described as a “Who’s Who of neoconservatives from government, business, academia, labor, and the press.”¹³ American libertarian politician Ron Paul has provided an excellent analysis and critique of the whole “democracy promoting” apparatus:

The misnamed National Endowment for Democracy is nothing more than a costly program that takes US taxpayer funds to promote favored politicians and political parties abroad. What the NED does in foreign countries, through its recipient organizations the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (would be rightly illegal in the United States. The NED injects “soft money” into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call US manipulation of foreign elections “promoting democracy.” How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?¹⁴

After playing a role in the “color revolutions” of Georgia and the Ukraine, the NED’s attention then turned to Egypt. A recent New York Times article has revealed, citing WikiLeaks cables, that the disparate bands of dissident groups have been receiving “training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House.”¹⁵ Verification independent of the New York Times article can be found as well. Madeleine Albright, former Clinton-era Secretary of State and chairman of the NDI, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to give her analysis of the events in Egypt. “You mentioned that I was chairman of the board of the National Democratic Institute,” Albright says to Maddow in the interview, responding to the pundit’s questions concerning the post-Mubarak government. “We have been working within Egypt for a very long time, in terms of developing various aspects of civil society, and dealing with various and talking to opposition groups who are prepared to participate in a fair and free election.”

Freedom House also openly admits their role in fomenting the unrest. In a May 2009 report, the organization discusses their “New Generation Project” within Egypt, seeking to empower the nation’s “Youtube generation” by “promoting exchange” between “democracy advocates” and “emerging democracies” to “share best practices,” “providing advanced training on civil mobilization” and helping them understand the benefits of “new media.”¹⁶ In 2008, representatives from the organization attended the “Alliance of Youth Movements,” an activist summit funded by the State Department, Facebook, MTV, Google, and Youtube to provide a fertile meeting ground for ‘digital activists’ and the corporate leaders behind “new media.” The summit has subsequently been the topic of a set of leaked WikiLeaks cables, describing an ‘unnamed activist’ who there presented “his movement’s goals for democratic change in Egypt.”  This same unnamed activist then met with a series of US Congressmen, discussing with them an “unwritten plan for democratic transition” of Egypt into a parliamentary democracy, a plan that had been accepted by “several opposition parties and movements.”¹⁷

Disturbingly, this is the same milieu that Ahmed Maher, now an adviser to OWS, travelled in. As researcher Tony Cartalucci has reported:

This of course  isn’t Maher’s first trip to the United States. Years before the Egyptian revolution, the United States was quietly preparing a global army of youth cannon fodder to fuel region wide conflagrations throughout the world, both politically and literally. Maher’s April 6 organization had been in New York City for the US State Department’s first ‘Alliance for Youth Movements Summit’ in 2008. His group then traveled to Serbia to train under the US-funded ‘CANVAS’ organization before returning to Egypt in 2010 with US International Crisis Group (ICG) operative Mohamed ElBaradei to spend the next year building up for the ‘Arab Spring.¹⁸

CANVAS (Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies) was founded in 2003 by the Serbian youth organization Optor! (Resistance!), which utilized nonviolent methods of revolt to bring down Slobodan Milošević. Not surprisingly in the least, the organization had received millions of dollars in funding from both the NED and IRI¹⁹ while CANVAS itself has worked closely with Freedom House.²⁰ Given the close ties between these youth-based activist organizations and US State Department’s bureaucracy, perhaps it is distressing to note that former Optor! Member and leader of CANVAS, Ivan Marovic, has given talks at the OWS rallies in NYC.²¹

The Right’s Favorite Boogeyman – and a useful opportunity

Perhaps the centerpiece of the Egyptian Revolution was the individual Mohamed ElBaradei, a director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and presidential hopeful for Egypt’s parliamentary democracy. ElBaradei, however, has ties of his own to suspicious Western interests – he sits on the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group, which has been described by Madeleine Albright as a “full-service conflict prevention organization.” Despite this astute observation, the membership rosters of the Crisis Group’s various chairmen, trustees, and directors shows a significant overlap with affiliates of the National Endowment for Democracy: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton I. Abramowitz, and Stephen Solarz are just a handful of Crisis Group members who represent the interests of both. Here we can find the favorite whipping boy of the right-wing media, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Vilified as some sort of a socialist by the likes of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, Soros, in truth, is far from that sort of ideology. A key figure in the transition of former Soviet states into the world of globalized capitalism, Soros helped engineer the economic ‘shock therapy’ that thrust Poland into a financial tail spin as extensive structural adjustments rattled the already crumbling economy.²²

Soros, despite being a clear member of the 1%, has publicly stated his support of OWS:

Billionaire financier George Soros says he sympathizes with protesters speaking out against corporate greed in ongoing protests on Wall Street… Soros says he understands the frustrations of small business owners, for instance those who have seen credit card charges soar during the current crisis.²³

There are ties, albeit indirect ones, that can tie Soros to the fledgling Occupy movement. MoveOn.org, a regular recipient of Soros funding, has thrown its weight behind the protestors in an apparent sign of solidarity. As TruthOut’s Steve Horn writes:

On October 5, Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, MoveOn.org sent out an email calling on clicktivists (as opposed to activists) to “Join the Virtual March on Wall Street.” “The 99% are both an inspiration and a call that needs to be answered. So we’re answering it today, in a nationwide Virtual March on Wall Street to support their demand for an economy that serves the many, not the few … Join in the virtual march by doing what hundreds have done spontaneously across the web: Take your picture holding a sign that tells your story, along with the words ‘I am the 99%,’” wrote Daniel Mintz of MoveOn.org.²⁴

MoveOn.org has a long history of left-wing co-option; as people flooded the streets of American cities in protest of the Iraq War, the online institution dove right into the populist fervor and proceeded to utilize people’s discontent with the Bush administration to garner support for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The same process was repeated just a handful of years later, with MoveOn.org acting the second largest lobbying organization for Barack Obama (aside from the President’s own Organizing for America). Through a strategic ad campaign – one of MoveOn’s personnel is John Hlinko, a “social media marketing expert” – the organization managed to create a literal army of voters for Obama, reinforcing that the same “hope and change” imagery that was being pumped out by the campaign itself. Both MoveOn and Organizing America’s methodology was a foreshadow to the systems of new media utilized by the Arab Spring protestors; this tool is now being called “netroots,” the transporting of traditional grassroots activities into the virtual sphere.

MoveOn.org is not the only group chiming in to support for OWS. Rebuild the Dream, a progressive-style organization founded by former Obama White House adviser Van Jones, has championed the protestors – “Let’s all support Occupy Wall St.” reads a blurb on their website homepage. During an MSNBC interview, Van Jones directly linked the OWS movement to the Arab Spring, stating “you are going to see an American Fall, an American Autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring.”

However, the institution changes that OWS is calling for contrast sharply with Jones’ vision of how to take America back: “We’re talking about U.S. senators who want to run as American Dream candidates – soon to be announced. We’ve reached out to the House Democratic Caucus; there are House members who want to run as American Dream candidates.²⁵ Simply put, Rebuild the Dream is an unofficial organ of the Democrat Party, much like how MoveOn.org utilized, mobilized anti-war protestors to generate a large sector of the Democrat’s voting base. In actuality the ties run closer than that – Jones had worked hand in hand with MoveOn.org to initially launch Rebuild the Dream. Furthermore, he had been a senior fellow at Center for American Progress; the progressive institution has received funding from both George Soros²⁶ and the Democracy Alliance organization, where Soros sits on the board of directors.

Co-option of social activism has always been the modus operandi of the Democrat Party. They play “’the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially radical] segments of the electorate’” by posing as ‘the party of the people.²⁷ President Obama, riding the crest of the MoveOn.orgs of the country – and not to mention a well orchestrated propaganda campaign – has fit this concept to a T, something that has even been noted by members of the liberal establishment:

Two and a half weeks after Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the president-elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical analogy. Obama, Rothkopf told the New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.²⁷

Liberal commentator Thomas Frank has observed the process of “voting for one thing, getting another” at work in the Republican Party:

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialization … Vote to get governments off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking … Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.²⁸

Is it really any different for the Democrat Party? Vote to end wars, receive troop escalation and change only years after the fact. Vote to allow workers to retain their rights, receive trade agreements that export jobs overseas. Vote to reign in the power of Wall Street, receive taxpayer-funded bail-outs that create moral hazards and prop up corrupt financial regimes. From the left to the right, the story is the same – the great violin keeps playing cheerfully as the world burns. It’s only the hands grasping it, not the system that change.

One of the clearest portraits of co-option in recent history would be the history of the conservative Tea Party Movement. In its infancy, the Tea Party was a movement launched by libertarian politician Ron Paul, a staunch opponent of the government’s infringement on civil liberties, its use of military force on foreign soil, the monopolization of the financial market by entities such as the Federal Reserve Bank, and the crony capitalism that eventually erupted into the bail-outs. Aside from certain economics view, there is certainly a great deal in Ron Paul’s – and the early Tea Party Movement’s – agenda that is entirely compatible with the demands of the Occupy Movement; it is for this very reason that libertarians have begun to reach out and join in solidarity with the protestors. Furthermore, given the anti-foreign aid and anti-Federal Reserve stance of the early Tea Party Movement, there can perhaps be observed an unspoken lineage between the Tea Party and the uprisings in Egypt and surrounding countries, triggered by Western support of the people’s oppressors and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

Just as Soros controls the purse strings to disrupt and redirect leftist movements into positions aligned with the Democrat Party, the right can find his counterpart in the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of the little-known Koch Industries. With their money bankrolling organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, David and Charles Koch were able to train torrents of so-called Tea Party activists whose espoused viewpoints far more in line with typical Republican dialogue than with Ron Paul’s libertarian ethos. The focus was shifted from attacking the Fed and ending the wars and towards union-busting, securing borders, and more often than not, reinforcing unequivocal US support for Israel – a direct clash with stance that Paul has taken on the topic.

This “astro-turfing” of grassroots movements, of course, requires multiple organizations and front groups to create the veneer of a unified public opinion, and operating alongside Americans for Prosperity is FreedomWorks. Perhaps it is worthy to take into consideration that when the organization was created from a 2004 merger between the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy and the neoconservative Empower America, several prominent NED officials sat on the board of directors of the former – including Vin Weber (an adviser to Mitt Romney’s ill-fated 2008 presidential campaign), Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (one of the most prominent of Cold War-era hardliners), and Michael Novak (an expert at the neoconservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute).

The Tea Party’s assimilation into the broader spectrum of the Republican political arena was marked by the establishment of the Tea Party Caucus, a coalition of House of Representatives and Senate members that represents perhaps the most powerful political body sitting in the US government – this consortium of leaders are essentially calling the shots when it comes to the right-wing of the American political system. Its members show utter disregard for the original protests of the Tea Party: Louie Gohmert has been a strong and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Steve King has openly supported the lobbying industry for their “effective and useful job[s]²⁹ and Dennis A. Ross was a member of the United States House Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs. Joe Barton eviscerated any ideological tie between himself and the early stages of the movement that he claims to rally behind (not to mention a disregard for any allegiance to the notion of really existing free markets) by arguing that the removal of subsidies to oil companies would act as a “disincentive” and result in the corporations going out of business.³⁰

Curiously, the place where this whole process of right-wing co-option began – the corporate-financed milieu of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks – was intended to be a “powerful answer to the challenge presented by the Left and groups like America Coming Together (ACT), MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund.³¹ All three of these organizations are Soros-financed, revealing the hidden irony that ultimately, these seemingly opposing institutions are simply moving potentially disruptive individuals into an entirely compatible paradigm of power that sits in the dual capitals of Washington D.C. and Wall Street. However, this odd dialectic can be entirely useful. Realizing this process will allow individuals who yearn for legitimate change on either side of the aisle to separate themselves from the system, and hopefully, discover the disparate strands that are ideologically compatible between them and their counterparts. It is a rare opportunity for the discontents of “left” and the “right” to shake off the labels applied to them and create an open dialogue and eventual solidarity with one another.

Conclusions and Other Thoughts

Though it may certainly seem like it, this essay was not written to belittle the OWS movement, or attack the actions of those who stood in opposition to Milosevic, apartheid, or Mubarak. However, it was my intention to acknowledge the shortcomings in the aftermath of these fights – Serbia and South Africa both jumped into bed with the IMF, imposing austerity measures in their nations that allowed persistent poverty to fester and even continue to grow. Egypt is certainly following suit now, so even though the brutal fist of the American-backed regime is gone, the slow-burning fires of neoliberalism continue to carry on the torch. For Serbia and Egypt, their revolts, though brilliant displays of the potential of people power, were in no small part shaped by the technicians in State Department, operating through the long arm of the NED. For South Africa, money from George Soros ended up in the coffers of activist groups who quickly changed their tune from the ANC’s quasi-socialist demands to jump starting South African neoliberalism.³²  Not surprisingly, these same groups showed a willingness to work closely with the NED.³³

The NED, much like Soros’ civil society empowering programs, promotes a little known methodology called low-intensity democracy.

Low-intensity democracies are limited democracies in that they achieve important political changes, such as the formal reduction of the military’s former institutional power or greater individual freedoms, but stop short in addressing the extreme social inequalities within… societies. …they provide a more transparent and secure environment for the investments of transnational capital… these regimes function as legitimizing institutions for capitalist states, effectively co-opting the social opposition that arises from the destructive consequences of neoliberal austerity, or as Cyrus Vance and Henry Kissinger have argued, the promotion of “pre-emptive” reform in order to co-opt popular movements that may press for more radical, or even revolutionary, change.³⁴

Thus, it can be considered to be worrisome that individuals who were trained under institutions that implement this system are turning up at OWS rallies. While the NED’s agenda is to establish low-intensity democracies around the world, this is precisely the type of governance that we are dealing with in the United States, the very system that produced the antagonism found in both the Tea Party and OWS. To consent to it would be a rejection of the spirit of the protest and an embrace of what is opposes.

It is the Democrat Party that could possibly represent this system even more so than the Republicans. It is the party of Social Security, government-provided medical care, and other welfare programs. Does this function of the party not dim and obfuscate the fact that it is also the party of bail-outs and NAFTA? Realizing this simple fact is paramount to creating a movement of legitimate change in the world; we must seek deconstruct low-intensity democracy and replace it with Really Existing Democracy. We have already seen this functioning in a micro-sense at OWS rallies, where leadership positions are voluntary and voted in by the whole of the people. Decisions are made in a similar matter, putting the course of action and the direction of the movement in its entirety in the hands of the protestors, not in bureaucrats and moneymen with agendas of their own. It is organic and autonomous, and on an international level holds to be what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to as a ‘rhizome’ – “a nonhierarchal and noncentered network structure.³⁵

There are further reasons to be optimistic about the movement’s direction. The official OWS website hosts a petition with a “formal demand that MoveOn.org leaves” – “this is OUR movement and it is NOT Obama’s personal reelection campaign,” it reads.³⁶ The leftist online newspaper TruthOut has called attention MoveOn.Org and Rebuild the Dream’s attempts to cozy up to the protestors, while Michel Chossudovsky, the professor emeritus of the economics department at the University of Ottowa, has published a piece for his Centre for Research on Globalization detailing the arrival of NED associates at OWS rallies.

There is an opportunity here. We live in a time marked by crisis, catastrophe, poverty, and war, but it is in times of disruption like these that rifts open in the landscapes of the global system, providing people with a chance to take the wheel, if they so choose. For America, this time arises from the great disappointments of our so-called democratic process – the hookwinking of the masses by the left-right one-two punch by the back to back presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama has led more people to step back, reconsider their presumptions about the world’s machinery, and begin to demand that their voices be heard. What happens from here, with the choices marked by the path to liberation or the well-worn roads of hegemony, is entirely contingent on the will of the people.

1. Barry Gills, Joen Rocamora, and Richard Wilson, Low Intensity Democracy: Political Power in the New World Order Pluto Press, 1993, quoted in Michael Barker “Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1 of 2)” Znet, September 4th, 2007.>
2. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 Beacon Press, 1968, pg. 254, quoted in Michael Barker, “Liberal Elites and the Pacification of Workers,” State of Nature.>
3. Lauren Frayer “Inspired by Arab Protests, Spain’s Unemployed Rally for Change,” Voice of America May 19, 2011.
4. Matt Sledge “Occupy Wall Street Egyptian Activist Goes ‘From Liberation Square To Washington Square’,” Huffington Post, October 8, 2011.
5. Spencer Ackerman “Egypt’s Top ‘Facebook Revolutionary’ Now Advising Occupy Wall Street,” Wired, October 18, 2011.
6. Kevin G. Hall “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, U.S. Fed Policy” McClatchy Newspapers, January 31, 2011.
7. “‘Mubarak’s Poodle’ at Head of Egypt’s Transition,” CBS News, February 16, 2011.
8. Emad Mekay, “http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54544″>Egypt takes a step back from IMF ways,” Inter Press Service, February 20, 2011.
9. “Multilateral banks join forces to aid Arab nations,” Yahoo! News, April 14, 2011.
10. Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Picador, 2007, p. 247-248.
11. Ibid., p. 256-257
12. Quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, “Manufacturing Dissent” Center for Research on Globalization, September 20, 2010.
13. Diana Barahona, “The Freedom House Files,” Monthly Review, January 3, 2007.
14. Ron Paul “National Endowment for Democracy: Paying to Make Enemies of America,” October 11, 2003.
15. Ron Nixon, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” New York Times, April 14, 2011.
16. Freedom House, “New Generation of Advocates: Empower Civil Society in Egypt.”>
17. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters,” The Telegraph, April 23, 2011.
18. Tony Cartalucci “US State Department Funded Agitator in DC Advising #OWS,” Land Destroyer Report, October 18, 2011.
19. Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York Times November 26, 2000.
20. Peter Ackerman, “Skills or Conditions: What Key Factors Shape the Success or Failure of Civil Resistance?” Conference on Civil Resistance & Power Politics, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 15-18 March 2007.
21. Michel Chossudovsky, “Occupy Wall Street and ‘The American Autumn’: Is It a ‘Colored Revolution?’” Centre for Research on Globalization, October 13, 2011.
22. This topic is covered extensively in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 215-229 and 241-243
23. “George Soros Says He Sympathizes With Occupy Wall Street Protesters,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2011.>
24. Steve Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement,” TruthOut.
25. Horn, “MoveOn.Org and Friends Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Movement”
26. Laura Blumenfeld “Soros’s Deep Pockets vs. Bush,” Washington Post, November 11, 2003.
27. Paul Street, “Obama’s Violin: Populist rage and the uncertain containment of change,” ZCommunications May 2009.
28. Thomas Frank What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Henry Holt & Company, 2004 pg. 7
29. Bara Vaida “Rep. King: “Lobbyists Are Useful,” The National Journal’s Under the Influence Monday, March 1, 2010.
30. Brian Beutler “Barton: Govt Subsidies Necessary To Keep Exxon From Going Out Of Business,” Talking Points Memo March 10, 2011.
31. “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” Media release, undated, archived from July 25, 2004.
32. This topic is covered in Michael Barker, “George Soros And South Africa’s Elite Transition,” Swans Commentary May 31, 2010.
33. This is not the only case of NED/Soros collaboration; I have covered the role of both in fomenting unrest in Iran in “Soros and the State Department: Moving Iran towards the Open Society,” Foreign Policy Journal May 14, 2011.
34. William Avilés Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Columbia State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 18-19.
35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000 p. 299.
36. “Formally demand that Moveon.org leave,” October 16, 2011.

The second half of the essay will detail the politics of CTD, the regime which has moved furthest from the notion of a sovereign representative democracy. We will clarify the differences and similarities between traditional military-civilian and fascist dictatorships and the up-to-date CTD, focusing on the ideology of apolitical expertise and technocratic rule as a preliminary to an exploration of the profoundly colonial hierarchical chain of decision making.

The penultimate section will highlight the reason why the imperial ruling classes and their national collaborators have overturned the pre-existing “democratic” oligarchical ruling formulas of “indirect rule” in favor of a naked power grab. The turn to direct colonial rule (a coup by any other name) was consumated by the major financial ruling classes of Europe and the US.

We will evaluate the socio-economic impact of rule by imperial appointed colonial technocrats, the reason for rule by fiat and force over the previous process of persuasion, manipulation and co-optation.

In the concluding section we will evaluate the polarization of the class struggle in a time of colonial dictatorship, in the context of hollowed out electoral institutions and radical regressive social policies. The essay will address the twin issues of struggle for political freedom and social justice in the face of fiat rule by emerging technocratic colonial rulers.

What is at stake goes beyond the current regime changes to identifying the most basic institutional configurations which will define the life chances, personal and political freedoms of future generations, for decades to come.

Decaying Democracies and the Transition to Oligarchical Democracies

The decay of democracy is evident in every sphere of politics. Corruption is all pervasive, as parties and leaders vie for financial contributions from the wealthy and powerful; congressional and executive positions have a price tag; each piece of legislation is influenced by powerful corporate “lobbies” which spend millions writing the laws and engineering their approval. Prominent influence peddlers like the US felon Jack Abramoff boast that “every congressperson has their price.” The vote of citizens counts for nothing: the politician’s campaign promises have no relation to their behavior in office. Lies and deceptions are considered “normal” in the political process. The exercise of political rights are increasingly under police surveillance and active citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest. The political elite depletes the public treasury subsidizing colonial wars and pays for their military adventures by eliminating basic social programs, public agencies and services.

Legislators engage in vitriolic demagogy in virtual Punch and Judy puppet conflicts as public displays of partisanship while in private they feast together at the public trough. In the face of the discredited legislative institutions and the overt, gross buying and selling of public office, executive officials, elected and appointed, seize legislative and judicial powers.

Decaying democracy evolves into an “oligarchical democracy” as executive officials rule by fiat; overriding democratic rules and ignoring the interests of the majority. An executive junta, of elected and non-elected officials, resolves questions of war and peace, allocates billions of dollars or euros to a financial oligarchy, and reduces living standards of millions of citizens via class-biased “austerity packages.” The legislature abdicates its legislative and oversight function and submits to the executive junta’s “accomplished facts.” The citizenry is assigned the role of passive spectators – even as anger, disgust and hostility spreads and deepens. Isolated voices of dissenting representatives are drowned out by the cacophony of mass media contracted prestigious “experts” and academics shilling for the financial oligarchy and advising the executive junta. No longer do citizens look to the legislatures for relief or redress from the executive siezure and abuse of power. To fortify their absolute power, the oligarchies emasculate the constitutions, citing economic catastrophes and all pervasive “terrorist” threats. A vast and growing police state apparatus, with unlimited powers, enforces constraints on civic and political opposition. As legislative powers are sapped and executive authorities enlarge their sphere of action, the remaining democratic freedoms are curtailed via “bureaucratic restrictions” on time, place, and forms of political action. The purpose is to minimize the critical minority from mobilizing a sympathetic majority. As the economic crises worsen and the bondholders and investors demand higher interest rates, the oligarchy extends and deepens their austerity measures. Inequalities widen, exposing the oligarchical nature of the executive junta. The social bases of the regime narrows. The well-paid skilled workers and middle class employees and professionals begin to feel the acute erosion of wages, salaries, pensions, working conditions, and future career prospects. The narrowing of social support undermines the junta’s claim to democratic legitimacy. Faced with mass discontent and discredit and with strategic sections of the civil bureaucracy in revolt, factional strife breaks out among rival cliques within the “official parties” of government. The “democratic oligarchy” is pushed and pulled in several directions: it decrees social cuts but can only find limited support in implementing them. It decrees regressive taxes but cannot collect them. It launches colonial wars but cannot win them. The executive junta alternates between force and compromise; robust promises to the international bankers and then, under mass pressure, backsliding.

Over time oligarchical democracy is no longer useful as to the financial elite. Its democratic pretensions no longer can deceive the masses. Prolonged elite factional warfare erodes its willingness to impose the financial oligarchy’s full agenda. At this point oligarchical democracy as a political formula has run its course.

The financial elite are ready and willing to discard all pretenses of ruling via democratic oligarchs. They are seen as willing but too weak; too subject to domestic pressure from factional rivals and not willing to proceed to savage cuts in social budgets, even greater reductions in living standards and working conditions.

The real power behind the executive juntas comes to the fore. The international bankers discard the “native junta” and impose non-elected bankers to rule – dubbing their private bankers as technocrats.

The Transition to a Colonial “Technocratic” Dictatorship

The naked rule by foreign bankers is disguised by an ideology which describes it as rule by technocrats who are experts, apolitical and above private interests. The reality behind the technocratic rhetoric is that the officials appointed have a career of working with and for big financial private and international interests. Lucas Papdemos, the appointed Greek Prime Minister, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and, as head of the Greek Central Bank, was responsible for cooking the books covering up the fraudulent budgetary accounts leading Greece to financial disaster. Mario Monti, the appointed Prime Minister of Italy was employed by the European Union and Goldman Sachs. These appointments by the banks are based on their total loyalty and unstinting commitments to impose the harshest regressive policies on the working populations of Greece and Italy. The so-called technocrats are not subject to party factions, nor remotely responsive to any social protests. They are free of all political commitments … except one, to secure the payment of the debt to foreign bondholders – especially the loans owed to major European and North American financial institutions. The technocrats are totally dependent on the foreign banks for their appointments and tenure in office. They have not a smattering of a political organizational base in the countries they govern. They rule because, foreign bankers threatened to bankrupt the countries if they were not appointed. They have zero independence, in the sense that the “technocrats” are merely instruments and direct representatives of the Euro-American bankers.

The “technocrats” by the nature of their appointments are colonial officials explicitly appointed at the behest of imperial bankers and sustained by them. Secondly, neither they nor their colonial mentors were elected by the people over whom they govern. They are imposed by economic coercion and political blackmail. Thirdly, the measures they adopt are designed to inflict the maximum pain by totally altering the basic relation-between labor and capital, by maximizing the power of the latter to hire, fire, fix salaries and working conditions. In other words, the technocratic agenda imposes a political and economic dictatorship.

The social institutions and political processes associated with a democratic-capitalist welfare state, corrupted by decadent democracies, eroded by oligarchical democracies are threatened with total demolition by the emerging colonial technocratic dictatorships (CTD). The language of social regression is full of euphemisms but the substance is clear. Social programs regarding public health, education, pensions, and disabilities are slashed or eliminated and the “savings” transferred into tributary payments to foreign bondholders (banks).

Public employees are fired, their retirement age extended and their salaries reduced and their tenure eliminated. Public enterprises are sold to foreign and domestic capitalist oligarchs with services curtailed and employees shed. Employers shred collective bargaining agreements. Workers are fired and hired at the whim of the owners. Vacations, severance pay, starting salaries and overtime pay are drastically reduced. These pro-capitalist regressive policies are dubbed “structural reforms.” Consultative processes are replaced by the dictatorial powers of capital – “legislated” and implemented by the appointed technocrats. Not since the time of Mussolini and fascist rule and the Greek military junta (1967-1973) has such a regressive assault on popular organizations and democratic rights taken place.

Comparing Fascist and Technocratic Dictatorships

The earlier fascist and military dictatorships have much in common with the current technocratic despots regarding the capitalist interests they defend and the social classes they oppress. But there are important differences which disguise the continuities.

The military junta in Greece and Mussolini in Italy seized power by force and violence, outlawed all opposition parties, press trade unions and closed the elected parliament. The current “technocratic” dictatorship is handed power by the political elites of the oligarchical democracy – a “peaceful” transition at least in its initial phase. In contrast to the earlier dictatorships, the current despotic regimes retain the hollowed out and emasculated electoral facades, as rubber stamp entities to provide a kind of “pseudo-legitimacy,” which beguiles the financial press but fools few public citizens.

From the very first day of technocratic rule the key slogans of the organized movements in Italy was, “No to a government of bankers”; while in Greece the slogan that greeted the puppet pragmatist Papdemos was “European Union, IMF, Get Out.”

The earlier dictatorships began as full blown police states, arresting pro-democracy movement activists and trade unionists before pursuing their pro-capitalist policies. The current technocrats first launch their vicious all-out assault on living and working conditions, with parliamentary assent and then in the face of sustained and determined resistance by the “parliaments of the street”, proceed to escalate police state repression by degree … practicing incremental police state rule.

Policies of the Technocratic Dictatorships: Scope, Depth and Method

The dictatorial organization of a technocratic regime is derived from its policies and political mission. In order to impose policies that result in massive transfers of wealth, power and legal rights from labor and households to capital, especially foreign capital, an authoritarian regime is essential, especially in anticipation of sustained resistance. The international financial oligarchy cannot secure “stable and sustainable” long term extraction of wealth with any semblance of democratic governance, even a decaying oligarchic democracy. Hence the last resort for the bankers in the EU and USA is to directly appoint one of their own to push, shove and impose a sequence of comprehensive large scale, long-term regressive changes. The mission of the technocrats is to impose an enduring institutional framework which will guarantee long-term, high interest payments based on decades of impoverishment and popular exclusion.

The mission of the “technocratic dictatorship” is not to put in place a single regressive policy of short duration, such as a salary freeze or dismissal of a few thousand school teachers. Their intent is to convert the entire state apparatus into an efficient press to continuously extract and transfer tax revenues and income from workers and employees to bond holders. To maximize the power and profits of capital over labor, the technocrats grant the capitalists absolute power to fix the terms of labor contracts, as far as hiring, firing, longevity, hours and working conditions.

The technocrats “method of rule” is to have an ear only for the foreign bankers, bondholders and private investors. The decision process is closed and limited to the coterie of bankers and technocrats without the least transparency. Above all, under colonial rules the technocrats must ignore the protestors if possible or, if necessary break heads. Under pressure from the banks, there is no time for mediation, compromise or delays as was the case under decaying and oligarchical democracies.

Ten historic transformations dominate the agenda of the technocratic dictatorships and their colonial mentors.

1) Massive shifts in budgetary allocations from welfare to bond and bank payments.

2) Large scale changes in income policies from wages to profits, interest payments and rents.

3) Highly regressive tax policies, increasing consumer (VAT) and wage taxes and lowering taxes on bondholders and investors.

4) Eliminating employment security (“labor flexibility”), increasing the reserve army of unemployed to lower wages, intensifying the exploitation of employed labor (“higher productivity”).

5) Rewriting labor codes, undermining the balance of power between organized labor and capital. Wages, working conditions and health issues are taken out of the hands of rank and file unionists and put in the hands of technocratic “corporate commissions.”

6) The dismantling of a half century of public enterprises and institutions and privatizing telecommunications, energy, health, education and pension funds. Trillion dollar privatizations are windfall profits on a world historic scale. Private monopolies replace public and provide fewer jobs and services without adding any new productive capacity.

7) The economic axis shifts from production and services for mass consumption in the domestic market, to exports of specialized goods and services to overseas markets. This new dynamic requires lower wages to “compete” internationally but shrinks the domestic market. The new strategy translates into an increase in hard currency earnings from exports to pay the debt to the bondholders but results in greater misery and unemployment for domestic labor. Under the technocratic “model,” prosperity accrues to vulture investors buying lucrative but financially strapped local producers and real estate on the cheap.

8) The technocratic dictatorship by design and policy aims at a “bipolar class structure” in which the bulk of the skilled workers and the middle class is impoverished and suffers downward mobility while enriching a strata of local bondholders and business owners who cash in on interest payments and the low cost of labor.

9) Deregulation of capital, privatization and the centrality of financial capital leads to greater colonial (foreign) ownership of land, banks, strategic economic sectors and “social” services. National sovereignty is replaced by imperial sovereignty in the economy as well as politics.

10) The unified power of colonial technocrats and imperial bondholders dictating policy concentrates power in a non-elected power elite. They rule with a narrow social base and no popular legitimacy. They are politically vulnerable, therefore, constantly dependent on economic threats or physical force.

Three Stages of Technocratic Dictatorial Rule

The historic task of the technocratic dictatorship is to roll-back the political, social and economic advances gained by the working class, public employees and pensioners since the defeat of fascist capitalism in 1945. The unmaking of over sixty years of history is no easy task, least of all in the midst of a deep ongoing socio-economic crises, in which the working class has already experienced severe cuts in wages and benefits and the number of young unemployed (18-30 years) throughout the EU and North America ranges between 25 to 50 percent.

The proposed agenda of the “technocrats” – parroting their colonial mentors in the banks – is ever more severe reductions in living and working conditions.The proposed “austerity” occurs in the face of growing economic inequalities between the wealthy 5% and the bottom 60% between Southern Europe and Northern Europe. Faced with downward mobility and heavy indebtedness, the middle class and especially their ‘educated children’, are outraged by the technocrats call for even greater social cuts. Outrage spreads from the lower middle class to business and professionals on the verge of bankruptcy and loss of status.

The technocratic rulers, constantly play on mass insecurity and fear of a “catastrophic collapse” if their ‘bitter medicine’ is not swallowed by the anguished middle classes who fear the prospect of sinking into the working class or worse.

The technocrats call on the present generation to sacrifice, to commit virtual suicide, to save future generations. With gravity and humble posturing they speak of “equal sacrifices”, a message belied by the firing of tens of thousands of employees and the selling of billions of euros/dollars of the national patrimony to foreign bankers and investors. Lowering public expenditures to pay bondholders and entice private investors erodes any appeal for “national unity” and “equal sacrifice” ..The technocratic regime strives to act decisively and quickly to impose its brutal regressive agenda, the rollback of sixty years of history before the masses have time rise up and bring them down.

To preclude political opposition the technocrats demand “national unity”, (the unity of bankers and oligarchs), the backing of the decadent electoral parties and their leaders and their total submission to the colonial bankers’ demands.

The technocrats’ political trajectory will be short lived given the draconian systemic changes and repressive structures they propose, the best they can accomplish is to dictate and implement policies and then return to their lucrative sanctuaries in the overseas banks.

Technocratic Rule: Stage One

With the unanimous backing of the mass media and the full backing of the powerful bankers, the technocrats take advantage of the downfall of the despised and discredited politicians of the past electoral regimes. They project a clean government image which speaks to a regime which is efficient and competent, capable of decisive action. They promise to put an end to deteriorating living conditions and partisan political paralyses. At the onset of their rule the technocratic dictators exploit the justified popular disgust with privileged “do-nothing” politicians to secure a measure of popular consent or at least passive acquiescence from the majority of the citizens drowning in debt and in search of a “savior.”

It should be noted that among the most politically aware and social conscious minority, the bankers resort to a colonized “technocratic regime” cuts no ice: they immediately identify the technocratic regime as illegitimate deriving powers from foreign bankers. They affirm the rights of citizens and national sovereignty. From the beginning, even under the cloak of emergency powers, the technocrats face a core of mass opposition.

The bankers realistically recognize the technocrats must move quickly and decisively.

Stage Two: Technocrats’ Shock Policies

The technocrats launch 100 days of the most egregious class warfare against the working class since the military/fascist regimes. In the name of the Free Markets, the Bondholder and the Unholy Alliance of political oligarchs and bankers dictate edicts, and laws are passed, immediately firing tens of thousands of public employees. Scores of public enterprises are rushed to the auction block. Job security is abolished and firing without cause becomes the law of the land. Regressive taxes are decreed and households are impoverished. The entire income pyramid is turned on its head. The technocrats widen inequalities and deepen immiseration.

The initial euphoria greeting technocratic rule is replaced by bitter reproaches. The lower middle class looking for a paternal dictatorial resolution of their condition, recognize “another political swindle”. As the technocratic regime races to fulfill its mission to the foreign bankers, the popular mood sours, bitterness spreads even among its ‘passive collaborators’. There are no crumbs from the table of a colonial regime empowered to maximize the outflow of state revenues to bondholders.

The compromised political oligarchy tries to revive their fortunes and “questions” the particularities of the technocratic “tsunami” smashing the social fabric of society. The scale and scope of the dictatorship’s extremist agenda and the ongoing build-up of mass frustrations frightens the political party collaborators, while the bankers urge them on to bigger and deeper social cuts. The technocrats in the face of the burgeoning popular storm begin to cower.

The bankers call for greater backbone and offer new loans for “keeping the course.” The technocrats bunker down – alternating between pleas for time and sacrifice with promises of prosperity “around the corner.” Mostly they rely on constant police mobilization and de facto militarization of civil society.

Mission Accomplished: Civil War or the Return of Oligarchical Democracy?

The outcome of the “experiment” with a colonial dictatorial technocratic regime is difficult to predict. One reason is because the measures adopted are so extreme and extensive, that they unify almost all important social classes (except the top 5%) against them at the same time. The concentration of power in an “appointed” elite further isolates them and unifies most citizens in favor of democracy against colonial submission and unelected rulers. The measures approved by the technocrats face the unlikely prospect of full implementation, especially by civil servants and public employees facing firings, pay cuts and reduced pensions. The across the board cuts undermine “divide and conquer” tactics. Given the scope and depth of the downgrading of the public sector and the indignity of serving a regime clearly under colonial tutelage, it is possible that breaks and fissures will take place in the military and police apparatus especially if they provoke popular uprisings which turn violent. The technocratic juntas cannot ensure that their policies will be implemented. If not, revenues will falter; strikes and protests will scare off predator buyers of public firms. The big squeeze will undermine local business, production will decline the recession will deepen.

Technocratic rule is by its nature transitory. Under threat of a mass revolt the new rulers will flee to their overseas financial sanctuaries. Local oligarchical collaboraters will hasten to augment their billion dollar euro overseas bank accounts in London, New York and Zurich.

The technocratic dictatorship will make every effort to hand power back to the oligarchical democratic politicians with the proviso that they retain the regressive changes in place. Technocratic rule will end up with “paper victories” unless the overseas bankers insist the “return to democracy” operates within the “new order.”

The application of force could boomerang. The technocrats and democratic oligarchs renewed threats of an economic catastrophe for non-compliance will be counter-manded by the reality of real existing misery and mass unemployment. For millions the living catastrophe resulting from technocratic policies will outweigh any future threats. The rebellious majority may choose to rise up and overthrow the old order and take its chances in an independent democratic socialist republic. One of the unforeseen consequences of imposing radical colonial appointed technocratic dictatorship is that it clears the political landscape of parasitic political oligarchies and lays the groundwork for a clean break. It facilitates renouncing the debt and reconstituting the social fabric of an independent democratic republic.

The serious danger is that the discredited politicians of the old order will demagogically attempt to seize the democratic banners of the “anti-dictatorial anti-technocrat” struggle to bring back what Marx called “the old crap of the previous order.” The recycled political oligarchs will adapt to the “restructured” new order of eternal debt payments as part of a deal to maintain the ongoing process of unending social regression. The revolutionary struggle against the colonial technocratic rulers must continue and deepen, to block the restoration of the democratic oligarchs.

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators.  This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity” remains to be seen.

We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures which set the context for the “rethinking” of the Bush-Obama policies in mid-2011. We will then point out the ‘reality principle’ – the deep crises and rising pressures – which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare.  Obama’s changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies.  The third section will describe these changes as they have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature – improvised – as unfavorable circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.

The final section will critically evaluate Obama’s new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.

The Bush-Obama Continuum 2009-2011

Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it.  He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied US air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya.  As a result the budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion; the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels and the recession deepened.  Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted. Parallel to Obama’s skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars in dozens of internal security agencies further depleting the treasury.  Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while 10 million homes were foreclosed and  unemployment reached double digits.

Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federal funded medical programs and education.  Despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory.  By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the US Empire was under siege.

The Reality Principle

The reality of massive expenditures in losing wars and faltering support at home and abroad, finally penetrated even the most dogmatic and intransigent militarist ideologues in the Obama regime.  Nationalist Islamists were a “shadow” government throughout Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in the capital, Kabul.  In Iraq even the puppet regime rejected a minimum US military presence, as warring factions sharpened their knives, preparing for a post-colonial showdown between willing colonial collaborators, resistance fighters, sects, tribes, death squads, ethnic separatists and mercenaries.  Despite US military threats and Zionist designed economic sanctions, Iran gained influence throughout the region, eroding US influence in Iraq, Syria, western Afghanistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine (especially Gaza).

The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (Mubarak and Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets in Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain finally forced the Obama regime to acknowledge that the Israeli ‘model’ of war, occupation and colonial rule via puppet regimes was not viable.  The reality principle finally penetrated even the densest fog surrounding imperial advisers and strategists:  the US empire was in retreat, Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding empire, but the masters of imperial defeats. The  empire-building project of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by Clinton, expanded by Bush junior and multiplied by Obama was a total and unmitigated failure by any imperial standards.

Prolonged losing wars were accompanied by a vast wave of pro-democracy uprisings dumping prized imperial clients. As colonial wars depleted the imperial treasury, impoverished citizens and undermined the “will to sacrifice” for the chimera of Global Greatness.  The national mood was deeply disturbed by the cost of empire but also by the loss of global markets to new Asian competitors in China, India and elsewhere.  Nowhere was the decline of the US more evident than in Latin America where new nationalist reform and developmental regimes, secured divergent policies on key foreign policy issues, generated high growth, collaborated with new trading partners, decisively rejected several US backed coups and repudiated Geithner’s recycled free market dogma. There was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory, economic success or greater political influence.

As the reality of the deficits, losses and discontent entered the consciousness of key policymakers, a new imperial policy agenda took shape, not fully elaborated but improvised as circumstances dictated.

The Making of the “Obama Doctrine”

The first and foremost “recognition of reality” among the Obamites was that in a world of sovereign states, colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation were not viable.  They led to prolonged resistance, extended budget over-runs, continuing casualties and were definitely not “self-financing” as the Zionist geniuses in the Pentagon once claimed.  New forms of imperial warfare were needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.

The hard choice facing the Obama regime with regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that the US can not retain a colonial presence and will leave behind an unreliable military and political configuration expanding tieswith Iran and hostile to Israel), or to claim “victory´ in the sense of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and weakening Iraq’s role in the Middle East.  The retreat and defeat reality is now rationalized as a “repositioning” of 20,000 troops in the tiny city states run by despotic Gulf monarchies and the posting of war vessels in the Persian Gulf.  Obama-Clinton claim the troops, warships and aircraft carriers would re-enter Iraq if the current regime falls and a new nationalist movement comes to power.  This is a doubtful proposition – as any “re-entry” would return the US to a prolonged, costly war.  The main purpose of the repositioning is to protect the Gulf client dictatorships from their internal pro-democracy movements and to launch a joint US-Israeli air and sea attack on Iran.  In other words, troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is replaced by a build-up and concentration of air and sea power for attack and destruction of military and economic bases of the Iranian state.

The US retreat is a product of defeat; a departure under duress.  The relocation of troops to petrol-despot mini-states is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable corrupt clan-based despots.  The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is a move to small, safe, sanctuaries from a highly volatile conflictual major state, with a history of resistance and independence.  Since the US can no longer afford an unending large troop presence and cannot secure a ‘residual force’ its retreat to the Gulf states is making a virtue of necessity, a fall-back position to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.

The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula for retaining Obama’s imperial pretensions.  The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated.   A UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to “protect civilians” was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy.  Obama’s Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers; the use of a mercenary army and client ex-pats as the ‘new leaders’; a multi-lateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs.  In contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a large invasion army.  Already Obama’s military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new “Obama doctrine” for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements.  Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary ‘rebels’, the fact is that Gaddafi loyalists were only defeated by the combined air power of the NATO military command.

Obama-Clinton’s celebration of the Libyan victory is premature:  the means to victory involved the thorough destruction of the economy, from ports to irrigation systems, to roads and hospitals; the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals.  In other words, it was a “pyrrhic victory”. Washington defeated an adversary it has not won a viable state.

Even more serious, Washington’s client mercenary ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common. And all are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms.  The parallel is with Afghanistan where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime.  Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilization against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama’s Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gaddafi’s arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north.

In a word, the volatile social and military conflicts among the collaborator “rulers” in Libya has all the markings of a failed regime. Neither NATO bases nor oil companies can pretend to establish firm bases of operation and exploitation.

The resort to missile warfare, especially the drone attacks on insurgents challenging US client regimes which figure so prominently in the “Obama doctrine” have succeeded in killing a few local commanders, but at a cost of alienating entire clans, villagers, townspeople and the general public in targeted countries.  Drones’ missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and ethnic kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after three years of intensified “missile air warfare” the Obama regime has not secured a single major triumph over any of the targeted insurgencies.  The data available demonstrates the opposite.  In Pakistan not only has the entire northwest tribal areas embraced the Islamic resistance but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80%) resent US drone violations of national sovereignty, forcing even otherwise docile officials to call into question their military ties with Washington.  In Somalia and Yemen, drone and Special Forces’ operations have had no impact in weakening the mass opposition to incumbent client regimes.  Obama’s long distance, high tech warfare has been an ineffective substitute for failed large scale land wars.

The third dimension of the Obama doctrine, the heavy reliance on “third party” military intervention and/or multi-lateral armed interventions, was not successful in Afghanistan and Iraq and was of limited effectiveness in Libya.  The  European multi-lateral forces retired early on in Iraq, unwilling to continue to spend on a war with no end and with virtual no support on the home front.  The same process of short-term low level military multi-lateralism took place in Afghanistan. Most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws.  The Libyan experience with “multi-lateral” air force collaboration in defeating Libya’s armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction for decades.  Moreover, “aerial multi-lateralism” followed the formula of “easy entry and fast exit” – leaving the mercenary predators in control on the ground with a documented record of excelling in rape, pillage, torture and summary executions.  Only a brainless and morally depraved Hilary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig celebrating the victory of a knife wielding sodomist, torturing a captured President as “a victory for democracy”.

The fourth dimension of the “Obama doctrine” the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces.  The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship’s armed invasion of Somalia to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.  After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces  performed no better. They were followed by the entry of the US-backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance. These third party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.

US backed “Third Party” mercenary armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass movements.

The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine is to use highly trained heavily armed “Special Forces” (SF) contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize their rural supporters and to “give backbone” to the local military officials.  Obama’s dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point.  Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country.  The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements, and only as a “complement” to local standing armies.

The final and probably most important element in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffle of elite figures to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order  to derail them from ending their countries’ client relationship to Washington.

Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian nationalist Assad regime in Syria.  Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and nationalist armed forces backing Basher Assad.  Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual “regime change”.

Parallel to the “outsider” political strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist-pro-democracy-pro-workers social upheavals in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover and rule by an autocratic military junta which follows the basic foreign and domestic policies sustaining the economic structures under the Mubarak dictatorship.  While cynically evoking the “spirit” of the Arab spring, Obama and Clinton, have backed the military tribunals which prosecute, torture and jail thousands of pro-democracy activists.  A similar process of “internal subversion” financed by the EU has put in place a coalition of “Islamic free marketers” and pro-NATO politicos who have more in common with the White House then they have with the original pro-democracy mass movements.

In the immediate period the Obama doctrines’ use of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ civilian-military subversion has succeeded in derailing the promising anti-imperial movements that erupted in the early months of 2011.  However, the great gulf that has opened between the recycled new client rulers and the pro-democracy movements has already led to calls for a ‘second round’ of uprisings to oust the opportunists “who have stolen the revolt” and betrayed the democratic principles of those who sacrificed to oust the client dictators.  All the conditions which underlay the “Arab spring” are in place or have been exacerbated: unemployment, police repression, crony capitalism, inequalities and corruption.  The experience of successful rebellion is still fresh and alive among the increasingly disenchanted youth.  Like all of the new Obama imperial policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation of empire.

Conclusion:  The “Obama Doctrine”

Reactive, improvised policies, with no overarching strategic framework, the so-called “Obama doctrine” shows few signs of reversing the decline of the US Empire.  The deterioration of US “forward positions” in the Arab heartland is not linear nor without tactical advances, especially in light of the Obama regimes’ co-optation of several Islamic leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling of Mubarak era generals in Egypt.

Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama regime understates the scale and significance of its political and diplomatic losses: the forced withdrawal from Iraq is presented as a “successful mission in regime change”, notwithstanding the burgeoning civil and regime violence between rival sectarian and secular factions.  The US “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, is, in reality, a military retreat as the Taliban and related forces form a shadow government throughout the country and the huge mercenary army funded by billions of Pentagon dollars is infiltrated by Islamic Nationalist militants.

The “drone attacks” presented as a successful new counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers is hyped as an effective cost-effective alternative to large scale ground invasions subject to prolonged armed resistance.  In fact, the “drones” and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public relations successes – having little impact revising the larger defeatist political reality.

On the diplomatic front US imperial decline is even more dramatic. The UN General Assembly votes against the US on Cuba, and the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine are overwhelmingly hostile to the Obama regime.  Totally isolated, Washington’s “retaliatory” posture of cutting off financial resources further reduces US institutional leverage.

As Obama submits to greater subservience to Israel’s political arm in the US, the 52 “Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations”, and prepares a joint military attack on Iran, even NATO refuses to follow suit.

The great danger of the “Obama doctrine” is that it looks at short term ‘local’ consequences. Air and sea power can successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head of the Israeli ruling junta and guarantee American Zionist financial backing for Obama’s re-election campaign.  What is overlooked is the military capacity of Iran to close the world’s most important waterway (the Strait of Hormuz) shipping oil to Europe, Asia and the US.

Obama’s air war successes in Iran would be overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks of US forces throughout the Gulf.  All US petrol allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack.  Long range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israeli’s scurrying for bomb shelters, even before Obama’s Zionist advisers uncork their champagne to celebrate their “air victory” over Teheran.

The ‘Obama doctrine’ of extra territorial air wars with impunity turned against Iran would provoke a catastrophic conflagration, which would far surpass the disastrous outcome of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “Obama doctrine” is, in reality, a set of improvised policies designed to deal with specific sets of circumstances based on a common overall problem:  how to retain imperial domination in the face of failed colonial-occupation policies.  The tactical success in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened by a Muslim led uprising in Syria has given rise to the need to formulate a new overall strategy.  Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional power base (Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in civil society (Islamic movements in Syria).

The attempt to generalize these ‘tactical’ gains into a general offensive strategy, however, flounder on the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”.  Iran is not Libya:  it has the military power, geographic proximity and economic resources to demolish the weak and vulnerable ‘peripheral’ US client states.  Israel can start a US war against the Islamic world – but it cannot win it. Netanyahu’s losses in the UN cannot be explained away as 193 “anti-semitic” countries.  The Zionist-US-Israeli troika are mutually masturbating in a closet.  They can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war, but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margin of world changes. Their policies are impotent reactions to popular movements envisioning historical transformations, which have even began to enter into the center of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv. Ultimately the “Obama doctrine” is doomed to failure as it is incapable of recognizing that the problem of decline is not simply a problem of ‘tactics’ but a basic systemic breakdown of empire building: the cracks and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.

1. Thomas Shanker and Steven Lee Myers “US Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit from Iraq”, New York Times, October 29, 2011.

America has, in recent years, altered its strategy in Pakistan in the direction of destabilization. In short, Pakistan is an American target. The reason: Pakistan’s growing military and strategic ties to China, America’s primary global strategic rival. In the ‘Great Game’ for global hegemony, any country that impedes America’s world primacy – even one as historically significant to America as Pakistan – may be sacrificed upon the altar of war…. Pakistan will very likely continue to be destabilized and ultimately collapse. What is not mentioned in these assessments, however, is the role of the military and intelligence communities in making this a reality; a veritable self-fulfilling prophecy.¹

American friendship is more dangerous than its publicly defined animosity. Rejecting cynicism but pondering on the US rationale of “war on terrorism”, there are ample similarities of the blueprint what happened in Iraq, the same fate could be waiting for Pakistan.

Pakistani masses appear to be daydreaming about a political future out of the ballot box, not being fully aware of what is happening around and within them. With massive presence of the US led forces on the Pak-Afghan border, daily drone attacks on the civilians killing innocent people, and the bought and bribed Pakistani intelligentsia (news media, ruling PPP party under Zardari and the Generals), all playing their roles as did the three Pakistani cricketers in London (shown in the BBC secret videos) to undermine the integrity and moral and political standing of the Muslim nation. Cricket was an inherited cultural norm of Pakistan, but what disgrace the few egomaniac players brought brought upon morally conscientious Pakistanis. One could not imagine that Pakistani sportsmen would be so mean and intellectually corrupt to accept money to throw a game. How could you blame them when the whole country is operating in a culture of institutionalized corruption, asked the BBC reporter in Pakistan.

When people live in darkness, they lose their sense of direction. Corruption could be synonymous to human activities outcome of ignorance, greed and mismanagement. No so, there is an emerging awareness of the changing realities of the landscape – masses coming out of the slumber and questioning the incompetent and corrupt politicians. But politicians are part of the problems and cannot be part of any rational solutions. Over half of a century of continued military rule has incapacitated the body politics of the nation by dismantling all public institutions. The only institution that works is the corruption and corruption across the board. One wonders, who is not corrupt in that nation? Could the institution of corruption be wiped out by the verdicts of the Supreme Court alone? The people of Pakistan need to and understand the problems as they are without illusions. Pakistan faces manifold problems within and outside for its survival. The immediate one is to disconnect its affiliation with the US led bogus “war on terrorism” and to restore a sense of normalcy by facilitating a new non-partisan government under new leadership.

The US led war has transformed its egoistic urge into a monstrous situation of unwarranted deaths and killings of the civilian population under the bogus guise of terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. American policy makers follow a double-edged strategy: they classify “Pakistan as the most dangerous state breeding terrorism,”² and continue to accelerate the terrorism of war on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan to create more terrorism as substance for the policy rationale.

At the end of the 2010, the US’s failed strategies and military losses in Afghanistan look for face-lifting measures. The New York Times reported (12/21/2010) that senior American military commanders – meaning Gen. David Petraeus and his colleagues at ISAF – are pushing for raids into Pakistan aimed at capturing Taliban commanders and bringing them back to Afghanistan for interrogation. The intensification of drone attacks inside Pakistan has devastated the civilian lives in the border region. The corrupt Pakistani regime under Zardari has allowed the US forces to invade and kill its own people. One of the major aims of the US policy (as indicated by the NY Times), is to “disrupt the whole enterprise in Pakistan, including the civilian government.” Political opponents of the existing government would be “screaming for blood,” and the military would feel that it had to act against the government. The global news media and the NY Times (07/2007) made it known, “Pakistani Generals are paid to do the job.” These assignments included killings of their own people and destruction of the institutions and infrastructure to seek insane justification that US friends are doing the job in return for cash payments.

One of the major beneficiaries of this cruel scheme of things was General Pervaz Musharaf and some of his military-political comrades working agents of influence to counteract the US-British engineered “Islamic terrorism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Former President Bush claimed to have invested $10 billion in General Musharaf to contain the Islamic militancy. If Condoleezza Rice (the former US Secretary of States in Bush administration), is to be believed, General Musharaf provided vital secret information on the Pakistani nuclear arsenals to the US Government. The US needed these preemptive measures to guard their short-long terms political and military interests and enhance the failing economy with new wars. General Musharaf now lives in $1.4 million bungalow in London protected by the British security services.

American friendship is more dangerous than its publicly defined animosity. Rejecting cynicism but pondering on the US rationale of “war of terrorism,” there are ample similarities of the blueprint what happened in Iraq, the same fate could be waiting for Pakistan. Saddam Hussein was a paid FBI agent for over two decades but once he challenged the US policy orientations and interests, a friend became an enemy and the US attacked Iraq under the pretext of possession of WMD, occupied its wealth of natural resources, massacred more than three million civilian Iraqis and destroyed the social and political habitat across Iraq. Isn’t the same blueprint in place working for Pakistan?

Recall, there were 22 Iraqi Generals with families (friends of the US and conspirators of Iraq) that the US occupation forces airlifted from Baghdad airport and gave asylum in the US. Now, under the Obama administration, the US government has intensified its strategy to engulf the Pakistani nation with military and psychological terrorist activities. There is Blackwater Security (now Xe) and other phony NGOs death squads active in many parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the NY Times (12/21/2010), the policy being pursued by the Obama administration, tends to insulate it from such warnings of potentially disastrous consequences of an aggressive U.S. military role in Pakistan. The administration increased the number of CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan over that of the Bush administration – a policy requiring that it discount the political fallout of the drone campaign in Pakistan. The CIA has also set up “fusion centres” with the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, aimed at making the Pakistani military more dependent on U.S. intelligence and less likely to be responsive to public opposition to U.S. military activities in Pakistan. The Petraeus proposal as quoted by a “senior American officer” stating, “We’ve never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across.”

Andrew Gavin Marshall states that “in December of 2000, the CIA released a report of global trends to the year 2015, which stated that by 2015, “Pakistan will be more fractious, isolated, and dependent on international financial assistance.”¹ Further, it was predicted, Pakistan:

… will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction. Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties.

Andrew Gavin Marshall puts the emerging realities in context. “The war in Afghanistan is inherently related to the situation in Pakistan… In September of 2008, the editor of Indian Defence Review wrote an article explaining that a stable Pakistan is not in India’s interests: ‘With Pakistan on the brink of collapse due to massive internal as well as international contradictions, it is matter of time before it ceases to exist.’” He explained that Pakistan’s collapse would bring “multiple benefits” to India, including preventing China from gaining a major port in the Indian Ocean, which is in the mutual interest of the United States. The author explained that this would be a “severe jolt” to China’s expansionist aims, and further, “India’s access to Central Asian energy routes will open up.”

Zardari operates in close cooperation with the leader of MQM – Altaf Husain – most Pakistanis would define him as an agent of the Indian Secret police working against Pakistan. No wonder, how Zardari’s PPP and MQM are realigned to stand together in a future political election. The PPP Government comprises of several indicted criminals who continue to hold high offices in the country. General Musharaf even dismissed the Chief Justice of Pakistan to ensure his own power and survival. The common folks of Pakistan were dealt a cruel blow to their hopes for change and a promising future. None of these perverted rulers feel any sense of guilt in their public behavior. In 2009, the international media reported that 12,900 people were killed in Pakistan for the insane satisfaction of the US led warmongering. In 2010, 3,000 innocent civilians are known to have been killed because of the US drone attacks in North-South Waziristan. The real figures could be multiplied as no credible data is maintained by the aggressive parties. The war on terrorism has crippled the nation across the board in social, economic, political and public life. The net beneficiaries are the Generals, Bhuttos, and Zardari while the Pakistani nation is entrapped and being strangulated by the few.

The Pakistani nation wants to hold these criminals to accountability in a court of law. The recent Wikileaks documents reveal how some of the Generals and the PPP politicians conspired against the interest of the people of Pakistan. Their mindset and behavior belong to draconian age full of poisonous backdoor conspiracies for continued power sharing governance. The PPP operated democracy does not have roots in Pakistani society; it is a mere foreign illusion to destroy the nation by it sown agents. The political gangsterism has ruined the life of ordinary Pakistanis. These agents of foreign rule have no sense of fear and shame that emboldens them to commit any wicked and cruel crime against the freedom and security of Pakistan.

Andrew Gavin Marshall quotes David Kilcullen, advisor to President Obama, who warned in April of 2009, of a possible collapse of Pakistan within months: “We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we’re calling the war on terror now.” The adviser explained that this would be unlike the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which each had a population of over 30 million, whereas “Pakistan has [187] million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control.”

Conscientious and thinking people of Pakistan must strive to workout freedom from exploitation and death squads operated by these so called democrats. A dire sense of reality would ask for change and reformation of the cancerous political governance. Pakistan desperately needs a new government of non-partisan people to disengage its status-quo of collaborative warmongering and to determine a new policy to end the collaboration with the US War and demand immediate withdrawals of the US-British troops from neighboring Afghanistan and to stop drone attacks and incursions into the Pakistani tribal belts of Waziristan and Baluchistan province. The war engagement is killing the people of Pakistan and eliminating its future as a stable nation. This is a clear conspiracy to dismantle the Muslim nation from within. The rulers have lost the sense of reality and accountability to the people. It is a problem of institutionalized corrupt political governance and betrayal to the principles of Islamic system of life –the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. There are superficial tensions guised under the “war of terrorism” to engage the citizens of Pakistan toward bloodshed and continuous animosity to kill each other. The US drone attacks in Waziristan are linked to this goal of domestic strife and collapse of the nation. If there is a new non-partisan government under new and intelligent leadership dedicated to the service of the people of Pakistan, these problems can be addressed based on the strategic interest of Pakistan and with favorable outcomes.

Plato noted that “thinking is man’s natural instrument for problem solving… any problem could be solved by thought.” The thinking people of new and educated generation must have opportunities to perceive, plan and play a defining role in the rebuilding the future of Pakistan. So far, the young generations have been deprived by the influential feudal lords dominating the political landscape. The bogus set-up of the National Assembly and Senate and federal governance is disconnected joint of Pakistani politics. They reflect a burden on people’s conscience. There is no honorable role for Bhuttos, Zardaris, military Generals and Sharifs to be part of Pakistan’s future. They are all dead entries with no relevance to the prevalent realities of living Islamic Pakistan. Pakistan NEEDS a new government under new and intelligent proactive leadership having confidence of the people and a foreign policy to detach itself from the US warmongering and show publicly a shifting metaphor of freedom from the foreign dictates. Pakistani nation looks for change and new and politically responsible leadership and the answer rests with the vision and honest commitment of the new educated generation to serve the people of Pakistan and safeguard its future.

To make a new future, it is important that General Musharaf, Zardari, Geelani, Sharifs and so many other monsters must face legal justice. They must be held accountable for their crimes against the people of Pakistan. Looking at the current events, the dead politicians are again raising slogans to serve the interests of the people of Pakistan. There are multiple psychodramas on screens these days. Could the dead Bhuttos, Zardaris, Sharifs, and the Generals be a reference point or a changing force for the future of Pakistan? Pakistani politics is synonymous to corruption. None of the political establishments or independent politicians have the credibility to move the masses from a crippled present into a politically sustainable future. The answer rests with the new generation of educated and intelligent people to assume this vital role. A change would facilitate new opportunities, new ideas and engage competent people to THINK and workout rational and realistic remedies for a new future. Pakistan needs to get of the neo-colonial clutches and hegemony of the few corrupt families. The outcome of any near future ballot box under the present circumstances will not change the strategic status-quo but will continue to waste time and resources and defy the logic of time and necessity for a navigational change — that is, a new government under new leadership to arrange a new constitution and a new political system of institutions and governance to be evolved to serve the best interests of the people of Pakistan.

1. Andrew Gavin Marshall “Imperial Eye on Pakistan- Pakistan in Pieces, Part 1″ Global Research, 5/30/2011
2. Foreign Policy, 01.2011.