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.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the world was a very unstable place, much like today. Not only did the American economy experience during this period inflation and even stagflation, but fear of international communism pulled at the shoulders of nearly everyone. Bunker Hunt believed that silver was undervalued and could only rise in price. In the middle of the 1970s the Hunt brothers owned nearly 10% of all silver
stock and, from then on into the 1980s, they put increasing pressure on the market and caused the price of silver to rise from $2 per ounce to $6 per ounce.

All of their capital was invested into silver. Further, they were salesmen of the stock, doing what they could to convince others to do the same as them. Eventually, they partnered with a group of Arabian investors who were in such a position to purchase voluminous amounts of silver. The Hunts and these Arabs, over time, gained increasing influence over the silver market, allowing them the means to loan more money and buy more silver, creating a feedback loop of manipulated price discovery.

By 1979 the price of silver was $35 per ounce. By then, other investors started looking to silver as a viable investment opportunity, thus giving the price an even larger boost. In the 1980s, the Hunt Brothers had made a market. Inside of one decade they had inflated the price from $2 per ounce to $50 per ounce at the beginning of the 80’s. Some believed that silver would rise to $200/$300.

But, in the early 80’s, the prices of silver started to stall and fall. The market had grown so inflated that the Hunt brothers could not find paper enough to purchase enough silver to keep the market rising. Investors began investing money into bank certificates for higher interest rates. Moreover, the Brothers had taken on massive loans to fund their silver scheme but could not repay the debts. The brokers, who had made the loans, such as Bache, A.G. Edwards, Merrill Lynch and
others, began to protect themselves from a market crash by shorting the price.

The Federal Reserve then changed the rules on speculative silver investments, and the price plunged. A broker demanded a $100 million dollar payment. The Hunts defaulted. Out of desperation, the Hunt brothers tried to counterfeit paper obligations backed by their 200 million ounces of silver. Essentially, they tried to create a new international currency backed by silver. By then, however, silver was linked in the public mind with the unstable situation of the Hunts. On
Blood Thursday — March 27, 1980 — the price hit an all time low. Many of these banks were bailed out by taxpayer money, and investigations found that the Hunts owned considerable stake in Bache.

The banks involved in this silver play had gained insight into the silver market. What they had gained was the ability to suppress the price of silver whenever it began to go up. The price of silver became divorced from supply and demand.

Today, upward pressure on silver stems from somewhat similar circumstances to what the U.S. was experiencing in the mid 1970’s: a lack of confidence in the US economy and therefore the dollar. Not only do such global circumstances and fears of currency devaluation cause the public and institutional buyers—such as central banks—to run to commodities, like gold and silver and agriculture, but increasing
transparency regarding manipulation in the silver market by big players such as JPMorgan and HSBC put the precious metals market in the headlines—and with negative sentiment towards Wall Street right now, silver offers people an exciting way of not only preserving purchasing power, but also exposing big banks to risk.

In short, JPMorgan, HSBC and other international financial institutions have over the long-term bet on the price of silver to fall. The capital expended to ensure the price did act in such a way has “artificially depressed the price of silver dramatically downward.” Thus, class-action lawsuits have been filed against the banks.

The CFTC began investigating the manipulation through its Enforcement Division three years ago after issuing letters in 2004 and 2008. As yet, no findings have been made public. Backed by taxpayer money, as it is, one can imagine it has been a rather expensive investigation.

Western economies are bankrupt. Silver and gold will not meet demand in the coming years, which is why platinum and palladium—historically, for the most part, viewed as only industrial metals—will play large roles as monetary hedges. Today, central banks and other large institutions are net buyers of gold, and many are even scooping up large positions in platinum. They were late to the gold game, entering in a meaningful way in 2007 and 2008, more than five years after the start of the
extraordinary bull market. Tomorrow, these same institutions will be net buyers of silver in a big way. Again, they will be late. Either way, this will cause the price of silver to snowball in a manner similar to what has been seen in gold over the last fifty years.

The US mint has seen periods this year where they sold just as many dollars in silver as gold, despite that gold is priced in dollars around 40 times the price of silver at any given time. In the Spring, world markets bore witness to a rise in silver of near $50, before heavy manipulation — that is, large sell-offs — took advantage of a quiet market on a Sunday night and early Monday morning, when few trades were being made.

Silver works at times as a sort of schizophrenic precious metals. It has moments where the underlying demand for it as a monetary hedge causes the price to run north quickly. Other times, dismal industrial outlook causes it to follow the coattails of platinum and fall. But, as many young people — and not to mention wealthy folks and institutions — are looking to silver as an investment, a hedge or a savings account, demand for the metal as a monetary instrument is sure to drive price discovery.

Silver prices are poised to rise, thus putting pressure on the JPMorgan stock price. As the JPMorgan stock price and the silver price conflate, investors will concern themselves, in regards to the bank’s stock price and derivatives holdings, with their risky short position in silver. Usually a firm will short a stock 8-1, whilst JPMorgan holds a short of about 40-1.

For every ounce of silver sold on the COMEX, JPMorgan sells between twenty to fifty ounces of silver, similar to fractional reserve banking. This is called naked short selling; that is, they sell silver that does not exist. In fact, it is estimated that the bank has sold between one billion and three billion ounces of non-existent silver. They have sold more silver than exists above ground. In terms of derivatives, JPMorgan has about $1.5 trillion in exposure, much of which are silver shorts. Knowing this, large hedge funds can purchase large quantities of silver, and eventually force JPMorgan to go long.

Silver has a myriad of uses today. Not only is it an investment or a hedge, but for many it is a savings account. It also has industrial purposes and, for some, is representative of a political movement to expose too-big-to-fail banks to risk. It is also the jewelry metal of choice among the youth in the US and Europe, for it is more affordable than gold. Many simply like the color.

Just as the gold cartel eventually lost its control over gold in the late sixties, causing its price to begin running upwards from $35 an ounce, the silver cartel sees its days numbered. Today gold is a de facto world reserve currency, and everyday more people catch onto this reality. Silver has historically traded in tandem with the yellow metal. Many analysts see $10,000 an ounce as a given for yellow. At the very feasible 20-1 ratio, that lands silver at roughly $500 an ounce.

Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which sleep had fallen on you/Ye are the many—they the few.

– Percy Shelley

The Occupy Movement, now in myriad cities across the country and, indeed, the globe, is too big to ignore. Many thousands of people, frustrated with the current status quo but hopeful for another, have made their disgruntlement palpable by turning parks, streets, and capitols into a choir of complaint—complaint complimented, however, by a contrapuntal harmony of hope and aspiration. Although the catchy slogan “we are the 99 percent” is not literally correct—it would be more accurate to use the unfortunately cumbersome slogan “we are the 99.9 percent”—it does make clear a simple fact: inequality has exploded in this country and people no longer believe that the coterie of elites who possess much of the wealth earned it fairly or have used it to benefit the rest of the population.¹ Not surprisingly, the growth of the Occupy Movement has caused a concomitant critical reaction, mostly among media members who favor the status quo, plus or minus a few adjustments. This is a predictable pattern. A movement, either political or intellectual, begins and is ignored; it grows and is criticized; finally, it becomes appropriated by the mainstream, and many contend that they were a part of the movement from its inception. (A pattern followed by the civil rights movement, for example.) Although it is not clear if the Occupy Movement will progress to the third stage (and many within the movement would prefer, to one degree or another, that it does not² ), it is clear that it has progressed to the second.

In this article, I would like to briefly respond to a few of the most popular criticisms, criticisms that have almost become platitudes. The criticisms that I will respond to are not drawn from the extreme right (mostly dismissing the movement as a swath of unemployed parasites); but rather, from the mainstream center or left of center. This is useful, I think, because some of the criticisms are probably held or at least sympathetically considered by the populace, a populace that has consistently received a distorted portrait of the world and of the Occupy Movement. I should also note, as a caveat, that I do not—and do not presume to—speak for the Occupy movement. Opinions about the desires of the Occupy Movement are a result of discussions with members of Occupy Tallahassee and of reading and watching interviews. I do not feign to have any special insight into the heart of a diffuse movement.

The most common criticism of the Occupy Movement that I hear and encounter in the media is that it is composed of radical and ignorant people who fancifully believe that the government can be used as kind of magical wish fulfilling machine. Or as Fred Siegel, from the New Republic, put it “… these epigones seem to think of government as a black box: You put your wishes in at one end and a smoothly running government bureaucracy fulfills those wishes at the other end.”³ His evidence is that many in the Occupy Movement desire to live in a country with single-payer universal healthcare, free college education, and are meanwhile ignorant of the minutia of the “298 pages of explication” of the Volcker rule. The protestors, therefore, are oblivious to the labyrinthine complexity of bureaucracies, and to the dangers of the debt, substituting socialist fantasy for hard-headed, fiscally sound, realism. According to Siegel, protests should focus more on the machinations of the government than on the treacheries of Wall Street. An editorial at the Economist,⁴ generally agrees, noting that the protests are aiming for the wrong target because the economic woes of the world have “less to do with the rise of the emerging world than with state interference.” (The idea that protestors want some kind of parochial nationalism and fear globalization is utterly without merit, a point to which I return.)

Siegel’s “government as a black box” argument is fairly common and utterly without merit. Let’s start with the second half of his argument and work backward. He argues that many in the Occupy movement are ignorant of the voluminous details of the Volcker rule and its exceptions. True enough. And many mainstream authors on foreign policy have never read all of the declassified NSC documents that are available. In the case of foreign policy writers, the NSC documents are actually very important. For the Occupy Movement, the exceptions and exceptions to exceptions of the Volcker rule are relatively trivial. Most understand that the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and that the subsequent breakdown of the separation between investment and commercial banking has had deleterious effects on the economy. That is important. If Siegel’s argument is that the 298 page explication of exceptions et cetera indicates how cumbersome government bureaucracies can be, that is also well-known among the Occupy Tallahassee members that I have spoken to, some of whom are intimately involved in the legislative process.

Siegel’s other adduced evidence is that the Occupy movement wants “free education” and “free healthcare,” as if the government can just hand such things out without going broke. This is made clear, later, when he argues that the Occupiers are “oblivious” to our national debt. But precisely the opposite is true. As Siegel should know, two of the chief contributors to our deficits are our horribly inefficient and expensive health care system and our bloated military budget. Most in the Occupy movement would like to carve a significant amount of fat from the military budget; and, as Siegel himself asserted, most also desire single-payer universal health coverage. What Siegel apparently doesn’t know is that according to sound economic analysis by Dean Baker and others, if our health care costs were in line with the rest of the world’s, our deficits would be significantly mitigated.⁵ ,⁶ ,⁷ Finally, it is hardly utopian to believe that a country should have a decent, publically funded education system that runs through college. Nor is it a colossal strain on the budget, especially if properly funded through a reasonable tax system. Many intelligent commentators, including Noam Chomsky, believe that the exorbitant cost of college in the United States has less to do with economic issues than with issues of population control.⁸ ,⁹

Siegel and the Economist both argue that the Occupy Movement is confused about its target. It should be targeting the government, not Wall Street. First, in Tallahassee, we have been “occupying” the Capitol building, so we are “aimed” at the right institution. And second, the argument, although not entirely erroneous (the government’s subservience to financial interests is lamentable), and consistent with standard propaganda, misses a very important point: the government can, and is the only institution that can, provide a check on the power of corporations, a check that is absolutely necessary. Most in the Occupy movement aren’t thrilled about this pragmatic compromise. But, the question for any serious political thinker has to be, “what are the practical consequences of an action?” Reducing the size and power of the government may or may not be a future desideratum; but, as our system currently exists, reducing the size of government means increasing the power of corporations, corporations that are almost entirely impervious to public input (save for public purchasing) and therefore “tyrannical” in the classical liberal sense of the word. Given this state of affairs, it seems wise to protest the corporations, especially the financial corporations that were directly responsible for the economic collapse.

Finally, the Economist paints the Occupy movement as an insular group, a group that, although not as “mindless” and parochial as the Seattle protestors, is still confused and frightened by “the emerging world.” In other words, the Occupy movement is filled with people who fear “global integration.” This is standard propaganda that was perfected during the NAFTA debates. So, if one were against NAFTA, a radically unfree trade agreement,¹⁰ one was against globalization, regardless of whether or not one was in favor of increasing connections across the globe. Many are against unfair, investor rights’ agreements that force laborers to compete against each other while sedulously blocking competition amongst professionals. But the Occupy Movement is probably the most globally interconnected protest movement ever. Last week, Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher, both famous for their courageous stands against the Mubarak regime, came to New York and spoke to the OWS protestors. Signs across the globe declare unity with protest movements in countries far away. The Occupy Movement is not afraid of “global integration,” it is afraid of corrupt, corporate integration. And it is only parochial if one considers humans, as opposed to corporations, irrelevant.

I do not know what the Occupy Movement will accomplish or where its future lies. I do know that it is exciting to witness the aspirations and frustrations of thousands of people finally rise in a conflagration of protest against a corrupt system that is consistently becoming more unjust and more detached from the average citizen. If nothing else, the movement has vivified the souls of thousands, perhaps millions, of people and has contributed to a growing sense of unity among disparate peoples from around the globe.

1. Glenn Greenwald (October 25, 2011). Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land. TomDispatch.com.
2. That is, if being “appropriated” means sacrificing the substance of the movement to the interests the current system.
3. Fred Siegel (October 19, 2011). Occupy Wall Street and the Return of the McGovernites. New Republic.
4. Capitalism and its Critics: Rage Against the Machine. Economist.
5. Dean Baker (October 31, 2008). The Deficit and Health Care Costs. San Diego Union-Tribune.
6. Health Care Budget Calculator. Center for Economic and Policy Research.
7. Congressional Budget Office (June, 2009). The Long-Term Budget Outlook.
8. Noam Chomsky (August 9, 2011). Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault—What’s Next? Guernica Magazine.
9. This video contains a condensed synopsis.
10. Dean Baker (2006). The conservative Nanny State.

Overview

The rise of the OWS movement is in response to Wall Street’s insatiable greed and a corrupt economic/political approach that further undermine: 1) the idea that hard work pays off; and 2) trust in equal justice for all. People are outraged by the unfairness of trillions of dollars in public funds that were committed to bail out Wall Street while Main Street was basically ignored. They are angry that only the public is expected to sacrifice while the people who created the financial crisis make out like bandits.

An Unholy Alliance: Multinational Corporations and Governments

Insatiable greed spurred the financial sector and the rating agencies to commit widespread fraud that almost brought down the world’s financial system. What has happened to us? I remember when rapacious greed was considered a deadly sin. Now some seem to think greed is a virtue.

Unfortunately, Wall Street was abetted by: 1) several presidential administrations and Congresses that enacted laws allowing some of these unethical methods; and 2) several governmental regulatory agencies, led by political appointees, that failed to protect the public’s interest.

Using the pretext of preventing the collapse of the financial system, the private Federal Reserve Bank and the federal government committed trillions of dollars of public money in a bailout of Wall Street. Instead of showing remorse for their roles in creating the financial crisis or gratitude for the bailout they received, the too-big-to-fail banks collectively resumed paying tens of billions in annual bonuses while continuing to foreclose, often illegally, on homeowners and to deny loans to small businesses. In addition, after receiving their gigantic bailout, the financial sector suddenly was concerned about the national debt. The financial sector was okay with greatly increasing the debt through the transfer of tons of money to Wall Street, but providing money for Main Street was suddenly a threat to our long-term financial health. Such hypocrisy!

If this situation weren’t already bad enough, the federal government demonstrated that it thought some institutions in the financial and insurance sectors, besides being too big to fail, were also too big to jail. As a result, almost no one involved in the creation of this crisis has been prosecuted.

Fallout

In 2010, 46 million Americans were living in poverty and 50 million were without health insurance. In 2011, the combined unemployment and underemployment rate is still about 25%. Millions of homeowners face foreclosure, higher education costs are soaring, and college students are graduating with large debts into a lousy job market. The number of homeless and the number of people reliant on food banks are also increasing.

Last but not least, this corrupt economic/political system has failed to prepare for the looming resource crises (water, topsoil, oil, etc.). In addition, there has been little response to the change in climate that has already begun and whose impact will grow over time. Our system’s approach seems to be “don’t worry, be happy.”

Summary

The OWS movement recognizes that following the rules clearly no longer works for many today and the situation is getting worse. They see that special interest monies, especially those from Wall Street and multinational corporations, essentially control our federal government. Those involved in OWS are driven by the desire to change this corrupt and disastrous situation, not by envy of the 1% as some have falsely claimed.

In today’s political universe, progressives have no place to go but Democrat.  So it is for minorities, labor advocates, environmentalists and antiwar protesters.  There is no choice in electoral politics but to side with the milquetoast moderates of the Democratic Party.

In this environment of winner-take-all and take it for granted politics, the most populous state in the union is also the most neglected and under-represented.  That is why a Democratic White House can get away with policies and programs that disregard the interests of California with a callousness that borders on disdain.

Things have gotten so bad in the golden state that even members of the Milquetoast Party are beginning to raise their voices:  Thirty two representatives of the California congressional caucus recently went public with their plea for effective relief from the foreclosure crisis, an ongoing catastrophe that blocks any chance of real recovery from the Great Recession.

On the heals of that failure to take effective action, the Obama Justice Department has actively declared war on the one segment of the California economy that shows great promise:  Medical Marijuana.

The Obama administration initially signaled that the federal government would not enforce drug laws against marijuana where voters had sanctioned it for medicinal purposes.  Then, without cause or reason, Attorney General Eric Holder woke up one day with a new religion.  He had seen the enemy and it was not Al Qaeda, it was not Mexican drug lords and the American gun dealers who supply them arms.  No, it was California pot growers, suppliers and anyone associated with the expanding industry, including media outlets that accepted advertisements.

It is time for Californians to unite behind the common interest of economic survival.  It is time for us all to speak out against the White House and its agents in the Justice Department.  It is time to deliver a simple demand:

Cease and desist!

We are already suffering the effects of your failure to bail out the poor, the dispossessed and what remains of a disintegrating middle class.  If you cannot help us and it is clear you have no intention of doing so, then at least get out of the way while we attempt to climb out of the ravine.

We have stood on the sidelines while your administration has churned out one Republican policy after another and called it victory.  We have stood by in near silence as you extended the Bush tax cuts for the elite, rolled back soft-core Wall Street regulation, peddled a health insurance mandate as comprehensive reform and offered up Social Security to the Republican god of deficit reduction.

That you are speaking out for jobs now when you know it has no chance of passing congress is pure political theater.  We know what follows:  Another temporary payroll tax reduction financed by creative cuts to so-called entitlement programs.  It will not be enough.  It will not even be close to enough.  You cannot plug the dam after it is broken.

As the Occupy Wall Street spreads and goes global, accomplishing more for the burgeoning victim class in four weeks than you will have been able to do in four years, what is your answer?  With enthusiastic Republican support and the applause of chief executive officers everywhere, you push through Free Trade agreements with North Korea, Columbia and Panama.

We can almost see the smirk on your face as you confront your critics on the left:  First comes the accusation of ingratitude, then the litany of alleged accomplishments, then the excuses, the endless excuses, a broken government, Republican obstructionism, the Senate filibuster rule, and finally, the ultimate rebuttal:  What are you going to do about it?

We can rebut the former until the cow comes home but until we can answer the ultimate challenge emphatically and decisively, we will never get anywhere with the president, with the Democratic Party or with congress.

What are we going to do about it?

The White House can attack the California economy with absolute impunity.  Wall Street is on the other coast and that is where the real money is.

What are we going to do about it?

Ask the president as he travels the land, his campaign for re-election already fully engaged:  Where do you stand on Occupy Wall Street?

When he gives the standard, patronizing answer full of empathy and passion, ask him:  What are you going to do about it?  Will you refuse to accept contributions from Wall Street power brokers and the corporate elite?  Watch him stammer like Rick Perry on the issue of immigration.

He gave his answer just last week.  A president who could not be bothered to keep his promise to labor in actively supporting the fundamental right to organize the workplace by majority vote (the Employee Free Choice Act), a president who could not spare a moment to oppose Wisconsin’s prohibition of collective bargaining for public employees while it was happening, now signals a return to the Free Trade juggernaut.

We are not fools.  We know what that means.  Whatever the short term gains in certain sectors of the economy, the long-term effect is a continuation of job loss, union busting and lower wages.

What are we going to do about it?

The best immediate answer is Occupy Wall Street.  The best long-term answer is to elect public officials who refuse to accept corporate contributions.  Remove money from the equation and the stench of corruption will slowly abate.

Until we as a people are willing to reject money politics outright, we will have no power, no influence and no control over what happens next.

Being legal, of course, does not make the wrongdoing less consequential. Just the opposite is true, especially when undertaken hand in hand with government, as is the case since the end of WWII with endless covert and overt militarism that has killed countless human beings and devastated countries, not for the sake of protecting and spreading democracy but for the sake of the corpocracy. Our own society has suffered immensely as well. It is because of the corpocracy that among industrialized nations America ranks lowest on all important socioeconomic indicators (e.g., the highest poverty rate). As I have repeatedly said, America’s corpocracy is her own worst enemy.

Rarely are corporations prosecuted for their crimes or given more than token fines (and accepted as “the cost of doing business”) by our hands-off government, which is a big reason why there is so much recidivism among corporate scofflaws. An even bigger reason, but one that would be hotly denied by any corporation, is seven traditional corporate functions that aid and abet corporate wrongdoing by neutralizing or compromising society and thereby gaining tolerance of their wrongdoing. The seven are corporate counsel, marketing and sales, public relations, investor relations, philanthropy, ethics, and corporate social responsibility programs.

Of the seven corporate counsels probably need the least explanation. Corporations have stables of corporate lawyers primed to give advice on what contemplated wrongdoing will likely pass the bar, and when it does not, are armed with legal defense briefs. The PR people get into the act, explaining to the public that everything was kosher, unintentional, or unknowing.

Simply put the marketing and sales functions market and sell corporate products and services. And let’s face it, some of the products and services are not all that bad. Our new home many years ago was equipped with major kitchen appliances from a corporation that we didn’t know at the time was a rogue scofflaw. Very recently we had to replace two of the appliances. We opted for matching appliances from the rogue. I’m a bit ashamed of myself.

As I indicated, the PR function exists to burnish the corporate image and reputation and to rush to the rescue when the corporation stumbles into the slime light. I would guess about right now, for example, the PR people of Koch Industries are working double overtime. No matter how hard their PR people try, my negative opinion of Koch Industries will not change, but on the other hand, I have just looked at a long list of their household products sold in America. One of them is a favorite of mine. Do I no longer buy it?

Investor relations people tout investments in their corporations even though most are cash rich. Constantly trying to increase quarterly earnings is one of the pressures and temptations behind corporate wrongdoing. States initially in our history issued corporate charters that were very strict, but soon, in “a race to the bottom”, liberalized their charters to attract corporate headquartering. One of the consequences is that any chartered corporation gets limited liability, which means, in effect, that state legislators have given shareholders a moral waiver. It limits owner liability in cases of corporate wrongdoing only to the potential loss of their initial investments and does not extend to potential costs of the damage done. Investors are thus free to buy shares in corporations without having to worry about whether increased share value will be gained through corporate wrongdoing and its harmful consequences to individuals or to society at large.

Do you know what the biggest source of corporate “guilt gifts” is? It’s got to be a corporation’s philanthropy program. Take a look at any of the corporations fingered as among the top criminals of a particular year or decade and I bet you won’t find many if any that do not give away millions. Who gets these giveaways? Universities, for one; they might have to shut down some of their schools and/or professorial chairs without corporate funding. Business schools may graduate the biggest supply of corporate crooks. Can you imagine a school so beholden to corporate funding that it would target a rogue patron?

Corporate ethics programs are a big joke that doesn’t neutralize or fool anyone who knows they are primarily facades intended, if not to neutralize people, then to bamboozle them. But how many people know the real workings of corporate ethics programs? I know because I have studied them for years. Take ethics codes, for instance. They are nothing but paper ethics that help a criminal corporation and government contractor get a ”low culpability score” from the easily compromised and (corrupted) federal government, for Pete sakes! Having an ethics training program also lowers the score, but Socrates long ago said no one needed to teach us what ethics is and he was absolutely right. It’s a simple matter to know what’s ethical. It’s much less simple to want to behave ethically, especially when there are so many temptations and pressures to do business unethically.

Lastly, there are corporations’ corporate social responsibility programs. I can’t imagine any corporation worth its soiled salt that doesn’t have one. Corporate social responsibility, or CSR for short, refers to a firm’s accountability for its financial, social, and environmental performance. But CSR is mostly a sham. Corporations give CSR little more than lip service, seeing it as nothing more than an inexpensive propagandizing opportunity to neutralize society’s opposition. CSR, moreover, is a superfluous concept. A firm that is ethically responsible is socially responsible, ipso facto.

I predict that if the corpocracy is ever ended through sweeping political, legislative, judicial, and economic reforms corporations heavily dependent on government’s handouts and laissez-faire policies may very well flounder. To survive they will have to launch what I call a corporate “turn up” strategy that takes a completely different approach to the corporate functions reviewed and, more importantly, requires organizing and operating in a much more democratic way, all of which would give a big boost to the right kind of corporate performance.

Philosophers whose ancestors built the gargantuan computer Deep Thought to calculate an answer to that Ultimate Question were mortified upon learning that their computer spent 7.5 million years to come up with 42. Deep Thought’s response was along the lines of: How do you expect to understand the answer, when you don’t understand the question?

Perhaps a correlation is there regarding Corporatocracy’s denigration of the Wall Street Occupiers for not having a clear message, for not having a tidy answer to Corporatocracy’s question of “What’s the Problem?”

Specific grievances probably outnumber protestors — even counting their rapidly — multiplying allies around the country. When virtually everything has been fouled by Wall Street kinds of casino juju, and corporate criminality in general, how might a single clear message be formulated?

Ultimately, Corporatocracy seems to be asking for an answer to a question they don’t understand — I mean, under the circumstances, if they actually have to be told what the problem is, doesn’t that imply a complete vacuum of understanding?

Of course, their posturing is all lies; they know precisely what evil they propagate and will do everything in their expanding powers to continue to inflict the same upon the “other 99 percent”. Virtually everything they do has roots in some breed of lie.

And since they’ve gotten such a smother of denigration out of the “no clear message” chicanery, maybe it’s time to skin their little pet by pronouncing a clear message in triptych—right off the top?

At least it’s my opinion that the following three demands offer clear initial focus:

1)  End corporate personhood

2)  End the Fed

3)  End military adventurism

Corporate Personhood

Regarding deceit being Corporatocracy’s constant companion, beginnings of corporate personhood represent a fine example. It’s widely believed that a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling in May of 1886 was responsible for bestowing upon corporations all the rights, under the Constitution, of “…all persons born or naturalized in the United States…”

Actually, in that 1886 “Santa Clara County versus Southern Pacific Railroad” case, the SCOTUS carefully avoided the issue of corporate personhood—the “landmark ruling” was birthed by J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad company president turned court reporter. J.C. slipped the ruling into the headnotes of the case—voila! Instant landmark ruling.

Please see the article, Artificial People for a fuller picture.

For us 99 percent, a premier reward of ending corporate personhood would be the invalidation of the SCOTUS ruling in 2010 that removed any restrictions on the amount of money corporations may spend on elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Put another way, denying corporations absolute ownership of elections would be a violation of their free speech as “…persons born or naturalized in the United States”, as guaranteed under the first amendment.

The SCOTUS ruled essentially that the will of voters shall not infringe upon the right of corporations to choose and control American leadership….

Testing the limits of smarminess, Mitt Romney told a maverick in the herd at the Iowa State Fair (birthplace of deep-fried butter on a stick): “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Surely, some of Mitt’s best friends are corporations. But his assertion has as little to do with corporations actually being people as it does with Mitt seeming presidential. His goo-goo condescension is effectively cloaked, apparently; otherwise, people might be more sensitive to his uncanny ability to make babies cry. But, of course, it doesn’t matter now that the SCOTUS gave corporations the keys to elections.

The Federal Reserve

Deceit from the get-go. The Federal Reserve is not federal, and it has no reserves; the name was conjured primarily to fool people into believing the Fed is part of the government, and might somehow appear on the horizon to save us on a rainy day.

Sorry, the Fed creates rainy days so they can steal property for pennies on the dollar, as they did with farms during the Great Depression. Current head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke — he even admitted the Fed caused the Great Depression. Ben apologized, and promised they would never do it again.

The Fed is a private corporation insatiably sucking blood from America with debt money. One thing governments like about debt money is how it makes war easy by eliminating the mess of having to directly raise money for war. Overall, it seems hard to imagine any single private entity inflicting anything even close to the damage the Fed has inflicted, and inflicts, on us 99 percent, our country, and countries with valuable resources, especially oil.

James Madison, fourth president of the United States, called the private international banking cartel of which the Fed is a part, the “Money Changers”. And Madison said, “History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”

Thomas Jefferson said:

I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

Abraham Lincoln:

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarch, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than a bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at the rear is my greatest foe.

Some of America’s most profound history orbits the power of the international banking cartel (some might say Rothschild Bankula) seizing control of the nation’s issuance of money. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof. Seems plenty clear.

We have had three private central banks. The first was born in 1791 as the Bank of the United States, 70% owned by foreigners. Primary opposition focused on the fact that it was unconstitutional, creation of such a bank with a monopoly on issuing money. This first central bank had a 20-year charter; only the vote of Vice President George Clinton in 1811 saved us from renewal of that charter.

Britain (home of the City of London, throne of Bankula) attacked us soon thereafter. Whether or not the War of 1812 was a direct result of non-renewal of the first central bank’s charter, that’s a matter of history, which Napoleon called, “A set of lies agreed upon.” History keeps proving him right.

Anyway, President Monroe signed into law the charter for the Second Bank of the Untied States on April 10, 1816. This bloodletting also came with a twenty-year charter—at the end of which, President Jackson was able to disengage Bankula from America’s throat. Later, when asked what his greatest accomplishment had been during his two terms as President, Andrew Jackson replied “I killed the Bank.”

He stopped charter renewal of the second Rothschild-controlled central bank. Jackson even has “I Killed The Bank” written on his tombstone. Many believe this populist message relating to banking helped to launch the Democratic party.

To the monstrous misfortune of us 99 percent, with utmost deceit and malice aforethought, the Federal Reserve Act was slimed through while most of congress was on Christmas break, 1913. Woodrow Wilson, JP Morgan’s bag man (much of Wilson’s administration were Morgan men), immediately signed it into law. And now, 98 years later, we’ve been all but bled white.

Getting Bankula off our throat this time seems nearly impossible. As proven over the years, a most dangerous thing a president might do is defy private central banking.

In the words of Niall Ferguson, of the House of Rothschild: “There are now only 5 nations on the world left without a Rothschild controlled central bank: Iran; North Korea; Sudan; Cuba; and Libya.”

Joining that tiny elite club might be one of the greatest achievements possible for our 99 percent.

Military Adventurism

It’s conceivable that nobody really knows how much we spend on “defense”. Between the Fed, and the Pentagon—it’s surprising our jar has any cookies left at all.

Black operations, information blackouts for national security, all the “unknown unknowns” the Pentagon is such a black hole that $2.3 trillion are “unaccounted for” and nobody seems to have a clue where it all went. Despite getting double billing in the lengthy list of amazing 9/11 coincidences, the money is still missing.

There was certain scuttlebutt about the issue for months — but then, Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld chose to make a formal public announcement on 9/10/01. And if that’s not an amazing coincidence by itself, making it news the day before 9/11 would bury the story; whatever hit the newly-renovated area of the Pentagon was aimed precisely at the only department so far to settle back into the renovated area. That department was the Army’s Resource Services Washington, consisting of mostly civilian accountants tasked with finding out where the missing $2.3 trillion went. 34 of the department’s 65 employees—over half of the only people that could have been hot on the missing trillions’ trail—were killed, all their work vaporized. Beyond amazing, maybe even an unknown known unknown, the richest kind.

The Pentagon is so out of control they are even inventing new kinds of “defense”, such as the utterly ominous, humanitarian aggression; killing foreign civilians to protect them, mostly from the air.

We currently spend more on “defense” than all the world’s other countries combined. So:

Close our nearly 1,000 military bases on foreign soil. Stop the wars of plunder, whatever they may currently be veiled as. Stop the neocon obsession with taking over the world (“benign global hegemony”). Bring our troops home with a new mission: Defense. Imagine…a whole new mission for the Department of Offense: Defense.

The 1 percent may pretend that offense and defense are the same thing, that a good offense is the best defense. But the world—that other 95 percent of global population—knows the difference quite clearly.

No Leadership?

Is the main reason Corporatocracy denigrates the “occupiers” for having no defined leadership because there’s no clear target for assassination? Who’s to disappear when nobody invites disappearance? Leaders can be lightning rods; lack of leaders makes it impossible to know exactly where to strike. Disappearing the whole lot of those “without a clear message” might be tempting, but even with martial law would be messy, bad for the image.

Power concedes nothing without a fight, never has, never will. We are in the fight of our lives, for our lives. If we turn back now…game over, despite our fantastic advantage in numbers.

Mitt Romney has the audacity to co-opt the term, “occupy” — as in, he’s ready to occupy the White House. “This is dangerous class warfare,” he says, even though his 1 percent has been balls-to-the-wall waging class warfare against our 99 percent at least since the Reagan days. Well, a man like Mitt being the president of the world’s “superpower”, even if it has been so gutted, is so in debt to the Money Changers, and the presidency is fundamentally puppetry, it would still be mace in the face of our 99 percent.

Perhaps Mitt will choose as his running mate, deep-fried butter on a sticK — not to be confused with Palin, and a stick.

The Washington Post reported that “The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.”

According to Post stenographers Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig, those “August 2009 e-mails released exclusively to The Washington Post,” shorthand for a controlled leak by Republican staffers, “show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal.”

In response to White House pressure, “OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.”

Solyndra, a poster-child for the administration’s PR campaign to expand “green jobs” was part of Obama’s lifeless “stimulus package” which White House flacks argued would ameliorate unemployment through tax cuts and other perks to corporations in the wake of the on-going economic meltdown.

“It was alarming,” Frank Rusco, a program director at the Government Accountability Office, told The New York Times.

GAO auditors found “Energy Department preliminary loan approvals–including the one for Solyndra–were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects.”

“They can’t really evaluate the risks without following the rules,” Rusco said.

But in Washington, the well-connected follow their own rules so it was hardly surprising that Solyndra executives hired Washington lobbyists in early 2009, retaining McBee Strategic Consulting.

“Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra’s behalf,” the Times disclosed, “including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009.”

However, despite intense pressure to approve the loan the firm’s business model in the highly-competitive solar energy market was flawed from the get-go.

Although the unique design of their solar panels may not have relied on silicon, and executives assumed their “competitors would continue to pay a relatively high price for silicon, allowing Solyndra to charge the premium required to turn a profit,” industry experts “outside the federal government, going back to 2008, were predicting silicon prices were headed for a steep fall.”

Between 2008 and 2009 when the loan was approved, sinking demand for solar energy as a result of the economic crisis, drove down the price of silicon from more than a $1000 a pound to less than $100 in the twinkling of an eye.

Despite high-profile investors, loan guarantees, a new factory, and frankly a better made, more efficient product, Solyndra was forced to sell its panels well-below production costs, seriously wounding the company.

Taxpayers and laid-off workers were left holding the bag.

Factor in the collapse of the commercial and home real estate markets, the dearth of new factory construction, and allegations of “unfair-trade complaints against China for out-sized subsidies to its clean-energy companies,” Bloomberg News averred, and the entire renewable-energy sector was in deep trouble.

“China provided $30 billion in credit to its biggest solar manufacturers last year, about 20 times the U.S. effort, Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department’s loan program, told a congressional panel Sept. 14,” Bloomberg reported.

The former socialist republic, which learned a lesson or two from other Asian “tigers” and the United States for that matter when it came to development, “frequently provides both zero-cost financing, occasionally free land and other kinds of incentives and subsidies” to its wind and solar companies, Silver told Congress.

The problem is not that the Chinese state subsidizes manufacturing but that the United States refuses to do so. Witness the near hysteria by rightist troglodytes over modest efforts by the federal government to construct a network of high-speed bullet trains across the United States.

Grifters in Congress, academia and the business press however, in thrall to Reaganite fantasies of “free trade” and “free markets” are willfully blind to the historical role played by the American state, and it was hardly an “invisible” one, in directing national priorities and resources during the period of rapid industrialization.

As readers are well aware, Antifascist Calling does not carry water for the Obama administration, a government as duplicitous as the previous Bush regime. However, there is more than a hint of a manufactured scandal by congressional Republicans over the Solyndra affair. While political blood sport may titillate Washington pundits, something far more sinister than a questionable loan is going on here.

In fact, the targets of the Republican attack machine are two-fold: discredit any government efforts to boost the industrial sector while disparaging renewable energy entirely as a potential, albeit weak threat, to the multinational energy conglomerates who provided 77% of their $18.8 million in campaign contributions to the GOP, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Contrast congressional market fundamentalist zeal here with their deafening silence when it comes to the heavily-subsidized U.S. “defense” industry, where mammoth cost overruns and mega-profits for the Military-Industrial Complex are factored in to the acquisition of weapons systems which have cost the American people trillions of dollars in investments elsewhere.

Deepening Crisis

That Solyndra went belly-up and filed for bankruptcy protection last month, laying off nearly 1,100 workers, is another sign that the global crisis which eviscerated productive sectors of the economy, continues to have disastrous effects for the vast majority of Americans.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, “census bureau figures that came out Tuesday, showing the largest number of Americans living in poverty since records began in 1959, are a damning indictment of American capitalism and the entire political system.”

The manufacturing sector, long the staple of a healthy economy, has undergone a major transformation since the 1970s. As U.S. firms, challenged by stiff competition from their capitalist rivals, sought to lower costs and increase shrinking profit margins, jobs were offloaded to low-wage platforms.

Yankee corporations however, that fled offshore to hide their assets and dodge taxes in so-called “free trade” and other “special” industrial zones where high productivity and low labor costs were guaranteed by repressive, U.S.-allied comprador regimes, made out like proverbial bandits.

As a result, entire industries withered and died, and large swathes of America’s industrial heartland were transformed into economic dead zones.

Those corporatist chickens, demented stepchildren of neoliberal globalization, have now come home to roost.

“In 2010 there were 46.2 million people–almost one out of every six residents–living below the official poverty line, including 16.4 million children,” socialist critic Jerry White wrote. “Of these nearly half, or 20 million, were described as living in deep poverty, subsisting on less than half the income the US government says is needed for basic food, shelter, clothing and utilities.”

Contrast deepening levels of poverty with administration moves to secure a “settlement” with financial elites who profited on both ends of the 2007-2008 crisis. Their reckless, and fraudulent, credit default swaps and brisk trade in worthless mortgage-backed securities have cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars with no end in sight.

But as New York Federal Reserve board member Kathryn Wylde told The New York Times, “Wall Street is our Main Street–love ‘em or hate ‘em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, “In the name of the free market, they slashed taxes on the corporations and the rich, deregulated industry and the banks and backed a corporate offensive against the jobs and living standards of the working class.”

And despite the fact that “corporations and the banks are now sitting on a cash hoard of $2 trillion,” said economic gangsters are “refusing to hire any workers,” thus exacerbating the crisis for average workers through unemployment, wage deflation and the loss of basic social benefits while boosting profits.

In his latest iteration as a “fighter” for “ordinary Americans,” Obama’s budget director told The New York Times that the president’s new “deficit-reduction plan” would impose “a lot of pain,” cutting some $320 billion from Medicare and Medicaid.

That proposal would impose higher premiums and deductibles for beneficiaries while slashing payments to “teaching hospitals and rural hospitals” as well as charging “co-payments to frail homebound older people who receive home health services,” the Times reported.

Under the plan the federal government would also “reduce the growth of federal payments to states for treating low-income people under Medicaid,” effectively telling older citizens and the poor, “hurry-up and die,” the mantra of “libertarian” Tea Party loons who view the lack of affordable health care as “the price of freedom.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s Air Force Secretary Michael Donley “signaled the service is ready for a fight and vowed to ‘protect’ most big-ticket hardware programs from steep budget cuts,” including the cost-overrun-plagued F-35 fighter program, The Hill reported.

As well, Donley “placed the multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new bomber aircraft on his don’t-cut list” saying, “developing the ‘long-range strike family of systems,’ including the new bomber, is essential.”

According to the Secretary, accepting cosmetic reductions in the bloated “defense” budget will mean “we will need to accept greater risk,” if by “risk” Donley means shaving a penny or two off the share price of the largest defense corps.

Grifter’s Ball

The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) enacted by the Bush regime in 2008, and supported by then-candidate Obama and the Democrats, followed by 2009′s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the so-called “stimulus package,” were rushed through Congress under crisis conditions allegedly to “save the economy.”

In practice however, both legislative edicts were fantastic boondoggles that rewarded “too-big-to-fail” investment banks that brought on the crisis in the first place while shortchanging foreclosed homeowners and tens of millions of laid-off workers.

A so-called “stimulus” that disavowed any direct creation of jobs by government action, such as massive spending on public works and infrastructure repair as was done during the Great Depression, was doomed to fail.

This failure is borne out by an official unemployment rate of 9.1% with some 14 million people looking for work. However, the government’s broader, and more accurate index of the jobs crisis, which measures those who either stopped looking for work or are involuntary part-time workers rose to 16.2% in August, a staggering 25.3 million people.

As economist Michael Hudson observed: “From the outset in 2009, the Obama Plan has been to re-inflate the Bubble Economy by providing yet more credit (that is, debt) to bid housing and commercial real estate prices back up to pre-crash levels, not to bring debts down to the economy’s ability to pay. The result is debt deflation for the economy at large and rising unemployment–but enrichment of the wealthiest 1% of the population as economies have become even more financialized.”

How has this played out in the real world?

Marxist economist Richard Wolff wrote scant weeks before Solyndra’s collapse: “As demand for goods and services shrank fast, businesses and the rich stopped investing in production. Their investible funds were idled, and that only aggravated the crisis. The self-regulating, efficient capitalist market system proved to be the myth its critics had mocked. However, the market system did spread the US crisis quickly to Europe and beyond.”

“The bailout of casino capitalists vested a new ruling class with $13 trillion of public IOUs (including the $5.3 trillion rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) added to the national debt,” Hudson noted. “The recipients have paid out much of this gift in salaries and bonuses, and to ‘make themselves whole’ on their bad risks in default to pay off.”

“An alternative,” Hudson wrote, “would have been to prosecute them and recover what they had paid themselves as commissions for loading the economy with debt.”

The result of these reckless policies are plain as day: from rising unemployment to collapsing infrastructure, and from a steady rise in home foreclosures to increased levels of immiseration, Bush-Obama policies have benefited those who wield real power in the capitalist world: the financial oligarchs and militarists who prospered from the bailouts and “War on Terror” military spending.

But the “government could have used its equity ownership and control of the banks to provide credit and credit card services as the ‘public option’,” Hudson noted. In other words, rather than bailing-out the fraudsters, the state could have invested public funds in programs that actually benefit the public, a novel idea rejected out of hand as “socialist tinkering.”

However, Hudson averred, “this is not the agenda that the Bush-Obama administrations chose. Only Wall Street had a plan in place to unwrap when the crisis opportunity erupted.”

“Stockholders were bailed out, counterparties were saved from loss, and managers today are paying themselves bonuses as usual,” Hudson wrote. “The ‘crisis’ was turned into an opportunity to panic politicians into helping their Wall Street patrons.”

But the bailouts did far more than merely enrich the thieves, it actually exacerbated the global meltdown.

“As the crisis flared in 2008,” Wolff observed, “governments unfroze credit markets by pouring money into tottering banks and insurance companies. Governments printed and created new money to pay for part of these policies; to cover the other part governments borrowed.”

And whom, pray tell, were the American people’s new creditors? Why “the banks and insurance companies they had bailed out” of course! “Governments,” Wolff wrote, “also borrowed from the companies and rich individuals who had withheld investing in the production of goods and services and had thereby worsened the crisis.”

Is this a great system, or what!

Ponzi Republic

Not a single top executive of any Wall Street firm has been prosecuted by the federal government for their crimes. Take Goldman Sachs as a prime example, a firm which journalist Matt Taibbi memorably described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

As McClatchy News investigative reporter Greg Gordon revealed, on the cusp of the housing bubble’s collapse, “Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”

Those fraudulent deals “enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.”

“Only later,” Gordon wrote, “did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk” and that “pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses.”

Taibbi recounted last spring for Rolling Stone that the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations mammoth 650-page report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, supplied “a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history–’a million fraud cases a year’ is how one former regulator puts it.”

“But the mountain of evidence,” Taibbi wrote, “collected against Goldman by [Senator Carl] Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators–details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department–stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.”

Contrast Justice Department inaction regarding Goldman Sachs, including ignoring potential perjury by Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein as Taibbi and other investigators revealed, with their zeal to lower the boom on Solyndra.

In connection with the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the FBI “executed a search warrant” on the firm September 8, the Los Angeles Times reported, “but declined to discuss what they were investigating. FBI spokesman Peter D. Lee said documents related to the search had been sealed.”

This is the same secret state agency that is curiously indifferent to far-larger grifts run by the big money boys. Keep in mind, this is the Justice Department satrapy waging covert war against the antiwar movement, illegally spying on Muslim-Americans, ginning-up phony “terror” plots through their employment of paid informants and provocateurs while allowing real terrorists, such as the network which assisted the 9/11 plotters as The Miami Herald recently disclosed, run wild in Florida. Yes, that FBI!

“Republicans,” the Los Angeles Times observed, “have seized on Solyndra’s downfall as a sign that President Obama’s stimulus and ‘green jobs’ campaign were failures.”

“They have also noted that key Obama backer George Kaiser was a major investor in Solyndra, the first company to receive a Department of Energy loan guarantee to boost alternative energy companies.” But then again, so was Madrone Capitol, a private equity fund affiliated with the powerfully-connected Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, long-time GOP supporters.

Kaiser, a Tulsa, Okla. billionaire and head of The George Kaiser Family Foundation, “holds about 35.7 percent of Solyndra, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kaiser made 16 visits to the president’s aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs,” Bloomberg News reported.

A “bundler” for Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, Kaiser raised somewhere between $50,000 to $100,000 for the campaign and contributed some $2,300 personally, according to the Federal Election Commission. What Bloomberg fails to report however, is the more than $7.5 million in campaign contributions made over the last decade by the Walton family to the Republican party and assorted right-wing causes.

While evidence of irregularities may suggest that Solyndra executives were less than forthcoming in their application for federal loans, and that well-connected billionaire donors to the president’s campaign may have helped tip the scales in their favor, their behavior, and potential losses to taxpayers, pale in comparison to the far larger, and more damaging, crimes of Wall Street con artists who continue to thumb their noses at the public and evade justice.

Crony Capitalism Gone Wild: The ‘War on Terror’

While Republican bag men for the superrich point to the Solyndra scandal, and there is something fishy going on here, as evidence of corruption in the White House, the fact is, Obama, like every president who occupied the Oval Office before him, is a wholly-owned creature of the ruling class.

Never mind that Team Obama recently abandoned plans to beef-up national air quality rules to reduce the emission of cancer-causing chemicals in smog. That move followed an intense lobbying campaign by polluters in the chemical, mining and petroleum sectors and their bipartisan congressional pets who alleged that the $90 billion price tag would “kill American jobs.” Or that the “environmental president,” in a course reversal sure to have oil industry executives jumping for joy, will soon approve plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry mega-polluting Canadian tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries.

And never mind that the White House, the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate are conspiring against the American people to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid through a congressional Supercommittee whilst continuing to bailout financial jackals to the tune of some $13 trillion, even as the Securities and Exchange Commission blithely shredded thousands of incriminating documents that let the gangsters off the hook as Rolling Stone revealed in August.

And of course, pay no attention to the expansion of the imperialist Empire’s endless wars and occupations, its extension of outsourced “War on Terror” CIA torture programs into Somalia, or that the Obama administration, as The Washington Post recently reported “is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula,” the on-going assault on civil liberties here in the heimat or mounting evidence that the provocateurs who murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 may have been given a leg up by U.S. secret state agencies as they prepared to slam hijacked passenger airliners into buildings.

What partisan hacks in both corporatist political parties will never acknowledge, let alone investigate or prosecute, are orders of magnitude greater, “War on Terror” boondoggles. Two examples:

• The National Security Agency’s multibillion dollar fiasco, Trailblazer. As The Baltimore Sun revealed, the firm that NSA chose to head the project, Science Applications International Corporation, “forged close ties to several key defense and intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Among those who have served on SAIC’s board of directors are former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Directors John M. Deutch and Robert M. Gates; and former Defense Secretaries Melvin R. Laird and William J. Perry.” As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, “SAIC is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA. SAIC, for example, managed one of the NSA’s largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005.” Indeed, the Sun’s exposure of SAIC’s shoddy work on the project, as journalist Jane Mayer disclosed in The New Yorker, led Obama’s Justice Department to prosecute whistleblower Thomas Drake, not those responsible for ripping off taxpayers or standing-up illegal driftnet spying programs. Congressional action? Zero, but SAIC walked away with the money and continues to be rewarded by the secret state and now ranks No. 6 on Washington Technology’s “Top 100″ list of largest government contractors with some $5.1 billion in Defense Department contracts.

• The Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Borders Initiative or SBInet, a failed project to construct a “virtual electronic fence” along the border with Mexico. When DHS finally pulled the plug earlier this year, SBInet’s lead contractor, Boeing Corporation, held contracts valued between $2 and $8 billion according to estimates by the Government Accountability Office. Boeing is a major “War on Terror” beneficiary, clocking-in at No. 3 on Washington Technology’s “Top 100″ list, with some $8.4 billion in revenue largely from the Defense Department. As the CIA’s torture flight “booking agent,” Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. profited handsomely from illegal Agency programs that secretly kidnapped and transferred “terrorist” suspects to foreign prisons and CIA “black sites.” Victims who tried to litigate their claims against Jeppesen in the federal courts were rebuffed by Obama’s Justice Department which asserted bogus “state secrets privilege” claims, alleging that litigating cases involving CIA kidnapping and torture would endanger “national security.” In 2008, the GAO determined that there were “significant problems” with deployed technologies. Designed to detect a “target” with radar and then use video cameras to locate illegal entries, GAO investigators found that the radars were “too slow” and were often triggered by rain and “other weather phenomena.” Information derived from sensors were to be forwarded to “command centers” where a “common operating picture” would be compiled by Customs and Border Patrol analysts and shared with other agencies. The so-called “common operating picture” would appear on computer screens as a geospatial map where “border entries” could be tracked in “real time.” Despite congressional criticism, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in January 2011, that the agency would be redirecting funding originally intended for SBInet “to a new border security technology effort.” At the time of this writing, Boeing gets to keep the boodle already doled out and will soon rake-in even more. Last month, Defense Systems reported that Boeing’s Phantom Ray, a jet-powered drone that can cruise at more than 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet, is in the running to secure multibillion contracts for the Pentagon’s next generation fleet of killer robots. “Key to its intended role,” Defense Systems informed us, “the Phantom Ray can carry up to 4,500 pounds of ordinance, extra fuel and/or sensors in its payload bays. The bays are large enough to accommodate two 2,000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite guided bombs.” There’s no word yet from the Phantom Ray’s intended targets–Somali herders and Afghan and Pakistani villagers–what they might think about Boeing’s latest technological marvel.

What lessons can we learn from the examples cited above? Not many, if we rely on corporate media.

As part of capitalism’s manufactured “debt crisis,” the Associated Press reported that the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a Washington, D.C. lobby shop which represents America’s Military-Industrial-Security Complex, claimed that cuts to the bloated “defense” budget “would have a devastating impact on a defense industry.”

To meet the challenge, AIA has launched their “Second to None” campaign and a related web site. According to industry flacks, which include usual suspects BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and dozens more, “American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration. The security of our troops, our technological future and our economic stability are all at risk. We must preserve jobs across the nation that keep our nation strong. Join us and act now before it is too late.”

Though there’s little chance AIA’s dire predictions will come to pass, alarmism sells particularly when the target audience are members of Congress.

As the bipartisan congressional Supercommittee prepares to gut the social safety net while leaving imperialism’s war budget virtually untouched, an investigation by Alternet and Salon revealed that “when it comes to the military budget,” Democrats “have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than [Arizona Senator Jon] Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel.”

“Since 2007,” investigative journalist Nick Turse wrote, “Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000.”

Indeed, “panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray … has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the supercommittee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, James Clyburn.”

“An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.”

“Before Thanksgiving,” Turse notes, “Clyburn and his supercommittee colleagues will be forced to make a clear decision for cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid or the type of budgets that have resulted in nearly $8 trillion in national security spending since 2001.”

Any bets on which way the axe will fall?

By the way, what was that $500 million loan flap to Solyndra about?

If nuclear power is so ‘safe,’ why is it that nuclear power stations are not placed where the power is most needed – in or very near large cities? Because they are dangerous. OK, if they’re dangerous, why is it the operators are not terribly interested in safety measures?

– Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog¹

Over six months have passed since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. What progress if any has been made to deal with what is surely one the worst industrial accidents in history?

The situation at the Fukushima No.1 power station site is far from being resolved. Although Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has said a “cold shutdown” of some of the reactors may be “within reach.”² Although a drastic reduction from the trillions of becquerals of radiation that were released during the darkest days of March, retired nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson who has supplied us with a steady source of reliable analyses, roughly estimates that the damaged reactors are still emitting a billion becquerals per day.³ Recently Professor Hiroaki Koide, a radiation metrology and nuclear safety expert at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, relayed the frightening assessment that:

The nuclear disaster is ongoing…. Without accurate information about what’s happening inside the reactors, there’s a need to consider various scenarios. At present, I believe that there is a possibility that massive amounts of radioactive materials will be released into the environment again. At the No. 1 reactor, there’s a chance that melted fuel has burned through the… floor of the reactor building, and has sunk into the ground. From there, radioactive materials may be seeping into the ocean and groundwater…. Recovering the melted nuclear fuel is another huge challenge. I can’t even imagine how that could be done… there is a possibility that nuclear fuel has fallen into the ground, in which case it will take 10 or 20 years to recover it. We are now head to head with a situation that mankind has never faced before.⁴

Could Professor Koide be worried that the corium (melted fuel) may reach the ground water, resulting in the classic China Syndrome?

Some nuclear experts are more optimistic, stating that “[e]fforts seem to be making smooth progress.” But there is still a catch-22 at work here: “Before the Fukushima crisis can be said contained, the holes and cracks from which the water and fuel are escaping must be located and sealed. But this extremely difficult task could take years because the radiation near the reactors is simply too high to let workers get near them.”⁵

The Japanese government has finally decided to take nuclear safety seriously, as evidenced when the Ground Self-Defense Force held a drill within the evacuation site “in preparation for any further large-scale emission of radioactive materials from the plant.”⁶ Could this be in preparation for Professor Koide’s scenario of possible “massive amounts of radioactive materials”?

Although some people have elected to risk their health and stay inside the evacuation zone,⁷ a 30 km up to 100 km radius around the stricken site looks to be dangerous if not uninhabitable for years to come.⁸ Decontaminating the site would cost billions of dollars and disposing of contaminated soil–estimated now to be at least 100 million cubic meters⁹ — a formidable challenge. Recently it was learned that the “Tokyo Metropolitan government has been dumping [radioactive] sludge from its water purification plants and burned ashes from the sewer sludge from the sludge plants in its landfill in Tokyo Bay at least since late May. The huge landfill is right near the Haneda Airport.”¹⁰

Over 100,000 people have been displaced by the accident and have little hope of returning to their homes¹¹ and “[m]ore than a third of residents of Fukushima Prefecture would move to avoid radiation if they could.” But those 600,000 people who would choose to move do not have the economic means to do so, and the government is not offering help.¹² An example of government schizophrenia is how health and economic issues conflict. While ecologists are studying the extent to which heavily forested Fukushima prefecture is contaminated with radioactive fallout,¹³ at the same time “Seiji Maehara, who lost his bid to become the party leader and the prime minister of Japan, has nonetheless landed on a very powerful party position as the chairman of the DPJ’s [Democratic Party of Japan] policy bureau.” Maehara is trying to promote an “eco forestry” scheme so that the stricken region can regain their economy.¹⁴ How the very area, Iitate, that received the lion’s share of radiation is going to sell “green” timber is puzzling, especially given that up to this point the government’s regime for testing of food and other materials has proven to be superficial and unreliable.

There are a number of maps over recent months that have tracked the deposition of radiation, namely cesium. My assessment from studying various charts, maps and readings from a variety of internet sources is that by far the worst is Fukushima, especially the “red band” northwest of the nuclear site. However, the eastern half of Fukushima; along with large swaths in Miyagi to the north; the eastern corner of Yamagata; most of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures have been hard hit; with radiation even spread into the beautiful mountains of Nagano. Yet many of these maps are still incomplete as the most likely contaminated areas are being measured first. There have been any number of hot spots located all over the Kanto region, including Saitama, Chiba and Tokyo, and even further to the south. These assessments do not take into account the considerable amount of radiation that went into the ocean (or to North America), both from the airborne explosions and contaminated water.

Recently I spoke with a Japanese housewife who has a five year old child and closely follows the radiation issue on Japanese internet sites. She believes the entire East Coast of Japan in the Pacific Ocean from Hokkaido well down to Shikoku or Kyushu is now contaminated with radiation. This rings true with what Arnie Gunderson said months ago: Don’t eat the fish if it comes from Japan’s Pacific coastal waters. A recent Greenpeace study found a variety of radioactive elements in seaweed 30 km south of Fukushima.¹⁵

The spread of radiation has been documented by the Japanese-American blog hero, “Ex-SKF (ex-skf.blogspot.com),” who by translating Japanese news stories into English has devoted himself to exposing government corruption. The heading at the website in Japanese translates to: “Good luck Japan, don’t give up! Don’t rely on the government!” A perusal of the archives shows a trend of denial and coverup on the part of Tepco, the government and many businesses. For months we have been jarred by one scandal after another, from radioactive green tea to beef being sold all over the country without proper testing.¹⁶

Just the other day Ex-SKF wrote about a typical story:

The willful ignorance, or the determination to carry on with their lives they knew before March 11, of many Japanese is driving me crazy. A nursery school in Akita Prefecture bought turf from Ibaraki Prefecture, which is located south of Fukushima Prefecture and was doused with radioactive materials by downwind from Fukushima I Nuke Plant creating areas with high radiation, in middle of July. Small children were playing on the freshly installed turf. Then the city came and measured the air radiation level. Guess what. It was high. Duh.¹⁷

The extent of radioactive contamination depends on how you define “contaminated,” but as little as one-seventh¹⁸ up to about half of the entire eastern part of Fukushima prefecture has been doused with radiation.
For example, a “survey of 2,200 locations within a 100-kilometer (62-mile) radius of the crippled plant found that those 33 locations had cesium-137 in excess of 1.48 million becquerels per square meter, the level set by the Soviet Union for forced resettlement after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Another 132 locations had a combined amount of cesium 137/134 over 555,000 becquerels per square meter, the level at which the Soviet authorities called for voluntary evacuation and imposed a ban on farming.”¹⁹

Another source found that “[a]n extensive area of more than 8,000 square kilometers has accumulated cesium 137 levels of 30,000 becquerels per square meter or more…. The affected area is one-18th of about 145,000 square kilometers contaminated with cesium 137 levels of 37,000 becquerels per square meter or more following the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. The contaminated area includes about 6,000 square kilometers in Fukushima Prefecture, or nearly half of the prefecture. Fukushima Prefecture, the third largest in Japan, covers 13,782 square kilometers.”²⁰ Although less extensive damage than from Chernobyl, the future of safe farming in Japan’s narrow bread basket is now in question.²¹ Nevertheless, recent news claims that rice grown this season is “below 10 becquerals/kg” and therefore safe to eat.²² But how proper were the tests, and does anyone in their right mind think rice from northwest Fukushima is advisable to eat? How about a mad cow burger and secret cesium sauce with your coke, sir?

North Americans are also worried about unwelcome radiation traveling by wind and ocean currents as a Swiss map based on computer modeling clearly illustrates.²³ In a recent video Arnold Gunderson points out that a “tent” is being built over reactor no. 1 “to reduce the amount of radiation on site.” However, “[t]he radiation inside that tent is still going to have to go somewhere, or else it is going to build up and become lethal. So what is going to have to happen to that radiation, is it is going to be exhausted up the stack.”²⁴ This means radiation will be guided upwards into the wind where it may travel near or great distances: out of sight is out of mind. Since the winds generally blow to the west, a steady stream (for how many months or years?) is going to land in the ocean or in North America. The philosophy is: The Solution To Pollution Is Dilution, but no one can agree on what a safe dose of radiation really is. Most likely, even small doses are harmful.

Which raises the question as to just how much radiation has been, and, is still being released. As Tokyo University Professor Tatsuhiko Kodama famously testified to the Japanese Diet in late July, the radiation released from the Fukushima reactor explosions was equivalent to 20 Hiroshima atom bombs.²⁵ Estimates as to the amount of radiation that have been released vary widely. One mainstream science source has claimed “5–6% of the total from Chernobyl” yet notes that “ ‘there are still more questions than definite answers’…. High radiation levels make it impossible to directly measure damage to the melted reactor cores. Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is exactly how much radiation was released in the first ten days after the accident, when power outages hampered measurements.”²⁶ Tepco recently admitted that the amount of highly radioactive water released into the sea shortly after the accident was three times higher than previously thought.²⁷

A more realistic estimate would put the total releases at 10-20 percent of Chernobyl.²⁸ Yet for many reasons, researchers such as Arnie Gunderson, a former nuclear engineer, and Chris Busby, radiation expert for the European Union, have both said that based on various criteria: “Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl.” If total releases are not has high as Chernobyl (Busby has suggested they may be much higher), other factors such as that the crisis is ongoing; the huge amount of nuclear fuel stored at the site; the power station’s siting which is not far above the ground water and in close vicinity to the ocean; proneness to further earthquakes/tsunamis; and nearby population density are all reasons for grave concern.

Scientific uncertainty, technological ineptness and political cover-up in the case of most nuclear accidents is par for the course, as anyone who has critically examined the history of the nuclear power industries in both the USA and Japan can attest. But as more people find out the truth, government and industry take actions to prevent the unwashed masses from becoming involved in substantive policy decisions.²⁹ Recently pro-nuke politician “(LDP) Secretary-General Nobuteru Ishihara stated, ‘Geiger counters costing between 40,000 and 50,000 yen ($500-600) provide patchy measurements. We have to try and stop citizens from taking their own radiation measurements.’ ”³⁰ The Global Nuclear Crime Syndicate (GNCS) is on the attack warning that “media coverage” about radiation from Fukushima could upsetting to the public. One conference egghead hooted, “[w]e’ve got to stop these sorts of reports coming out.”³¹ Oh dear me. In other words, don’t worry the people over the fact that they or their children may die an early death from cancer due to the carelessness of the GNCS.

On the other hand, I have seen some wildly inaccurate interpretations on the internet, including that “hundreds of millions of people will die” from Fukushima; that “much of northern Japan” is now uninhabitable (please consult a map); or the most crackpot idea to date — that the situation at the Fukushima power station is so serious that we must literally “nuke it” to terminate the problem. Yet, most coverage of the issue, even from many mainstream sources, has been well intentioned if not always perfectly accurate or is overly self censored.

Tepco would be happy for everyone to forget all about Fukushima so they can get back to the business of making lots of money. Their cover-up of important information was made obvious when a Diet science committee received a “heavily censored [redacted] copy of a nuclear accident operating manual for the Fukushima No. 1 power station.”³² Their message is clear: “Fuck you; we own you people and we can get away with bloody murder.”

That Tepco has huge influence and control over the media and politicians is well documented.³³ Their bribes and payoffs are legion, spending hundreds of millions of dollars “on payments known internally [to the company] as ‘funds to deal with local communities.’ ”³⁴ Tepco arrogance and greed knows no bounds, as this Asahi News editorialist writes: they intend “to raise electricity rates by a uniform 15 percent for three years starting next fiscal year [while] its employees are [only] taking a pay cut of 5 percent… I am appalled that the company is also paying bonuses, although the amount is down by half. Once the period of the rate hike is over, it intends to resume paying bonuses in full.”³⁵

In the meantime, although many folks have volunteered to help in the stricken northeast region, the majority of Japanese people have pushed the issue to the back of their minds. The fate of Fukushima residents is just their tough luck– lifestyle consumerism and self preservation take precedence. If given a choice I don’t think the Japanese would have chosen nuclear power as an energy source, that decision was foisted on them in the post WWII period. There is still a hard core group of a few thousand anti-nuke protesters who consistently make their voices heard, and we keep hearing squeaking noises from top politicians that nuclear power must be phased out and renewables phased in — hopefully the sooner the better.³⁶

1. Tony Boys, Can Do Better Blog
2. No. 3 reactor cooling down: Tepco
3. Nuclear Engineer: Fukushima reactors continue to emit significant quantities of radioactive gases
4. Radiation expert says outcome of nuke crisis hard to predict, warns of further dangers
5. Plugging leaks will end crisis, not cold shutdown: analysts
6. GSDF holds emergency evacuation drill near stricken Fukushima nuclear plant
7. Fukushima man opts to be guinea pig
8. Inside Japan’s nuclear ghost zone
9. Fukushima clean-up may require removal of 100 million cubic meters of soil
10. Radioactive Landfill: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Has Been Doing It Since May
11. Over 100,000 Fukushima Prefecture residents can’t return to hometowns
12. A third of Fukushima residents would move if they could
13. Contamination of Fukushima forests being studied
14. Potentially Radioactive Lumber to Be Promoted with “Eco-Point” Incentive?
15. Radioactive manganese-54, silver-110m and cobalt-60 found in seaweed sample 30km south of Fukushima
16. Ex-SKF blog
17. Radioactive Turf in Nursery School in Akita Prefecture
18. Up to one-seventh of Fukushima may be contaminated
19. Survey Finds Radiation Over Wide Area in Japan
20. Fukushima cesium contamination widespread but less than Chernobyl
21. Cesium absorption through roots may have long-term effect on farming
    Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears
22. Radioactive Rice? ND, Says Fukushima Prefecture
23. “NEW!” atmc.jp now posting Fukushima radiation forecast maps from Swiss Meteorological Bureau
24. New Data Supports Previous Fairewinds Analysis, as Contamination Spreads in Japan and Worldwide
25. Prof. Kodama Angry about Japanese Gov.’s Gross Negligence (Part 1)
26. Fukushima Crisis Is Still Hazy
27. Radioactive release into sea estimated tripled
28. Nuclear Power’s Future In Doubt Amidst Fukushima Crisis
29. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Trial Wraps Up
30. Japanese gov’s trying to stop citizen measuring radiation
31. Fukushima media coverage ‘may be harmful’
32. TEPCO submits heavily redacted copy of Fukushima nuke accident manual
33. Censorship in Japan: The Fukushima Cover-up
34. TEPCO quietly paid 40 billion yen to areas near nuclear plants
35. TEPCO doesn’t deserve to be called a public interest company
36. Japan to reduce reliance on nuclear power?

When Anna Hazare ended his second fast for the JLB in August, his followers and the media claimed that his campaign was an unqualified success. Hazare himself was more circumspect, but his promise that he would move on to campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates suggested that he too felt he had scored a victory. But has he? Most people thronging to demonstrate in support of his demands thought that the campaign was a straightforward one against corruption, but it was both more and less than that. More, because the demand of Team Anna was that parliament should pass their particular bill, the Jan Lokpal Bill, by a particular date; and less, because it defined corruption in a superficial manner.

Team Anna certainly won the first round, given the government’s inability to read the public mood. By first presenting a bill so weak that it made a mockery of the idea of curbing corruption, and then resorting to preventive arrests of Anna and his close associates, it helped to mobilise massive crowds against itself. At this point in the proceedings, it was easy for a casual observer to feel that the campaign was standing up not only for a strong law against corruption but also for freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly, which were being crushed by a government bent on negating all democratic rights and freedoms. Indeed, this is what many people out on the streets believed. Who would want to oppose such a campaign? But, ironically, as the government backtracked, giving permission for the fast and initiating a public consultation on the Lokpal Bill, it regained some legitimacy, while the Hazare campaign, as it became increasingly aggressive, lost it. The government wisely agreed to a formula that would allow Hazare to break his fast without losing face, but even a cursory examination of the terms of that agreement make it clear that it was a major retreat for India Against Corruption (IAC) from their earlier hardline stand. Why were they forced to back down?

An authoritarian bill backed by the extreme Right

Questions were raised about the dangerously authoritarian character of the bill they were backing, with its creation of an unaccountable, unelected body that would have the power to tap phones, intercept emails, and remove every government functionary from the Prime Minister and Chief Justice to the lowest cleaner.¹ Access to judicial review for those targeted by this all-powerful body would be meaningless, given its power to remove judges it did not like. By defining corruption as the disease rather than seeing it as merely a symptom of a deeper disease – power without accountability, power to commit crimes with impunity – the JLB was a formula to introduce a new source of corruption rather than eliminating it. It was also, potentially, an assault on India’s democratic institutions, one heightened by the demand that either the law should be passed by parliament by August 30, or the government should quit. This ultimatum ruled out any possibility of pre-legislative discussion and debate of the two bills, or consideration of other proposals like those of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), which had successfully campaigned for what has turned out to be the country’s most effective tool of transparency to date, the Right to Information (RTI) Act. And the demand that a parliament elected by hundreds of millions should quit because a few hundred thousand people claiming to represent ‘civil society’ were demanding it mocked the conception of democracy. Where the RTI Act had put power to combat corruption into the hands of ordinary citizens, the JLB seeks to concentrate this power in the hands of a super-powerful state institution.

The enthusiastic participation of the extreme Right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other members of the ‘family’ of organisations affiliated to it (the Sangh Parivar), also disturbed many. During the second fast in August, the backdrop of Bharat Mata (Mother India as a Hindu goddess) was replaced by Mahatma Gandhi and RSS members were kept away from the dais, but their cries of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ continued to be as frequent as before. Sushma Swaraj claimed openly that the RSS was mobilising for the protest² and the VHP told the media it provided free food – a major crowd-puller – for 20,000 protesters. These proclamations are discounted by some on the Left, who argue that the RSS would naturally try to claim credit for any mass movement. However, this isn’t true. Bigger crowds were reported at the protests against the nuclear tests in 1998, hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in protests against attacks on labour rights, but the Sangh Parivar did not try to claim credit for them because they did not identify with the cause. In this case they did, and the reason is not hard to find. A campaign against narrowly-defined corruption in a government not controlled by them, a demand that the government should either pass a law setting up a super-state they could easily control or else quit, suited them perfectly. They were not trying to capture the movement: it was tailor-made for them.

Both the authoritarian character of the bill and RSS backing for the IAC can be explained by the characteristics of the leadership of the movement and the movement itself.

The leaders

The ‘civil society’ panel that drafted and negotiated with the government over the Jan Lokpal Bill consisted of Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal, Santosh Hegde, Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan. Anna Hazare himself, projected as the leader of the campaign, hails from Ralegan Siddhi, a village in Maharashtra. As a detailed study of his village by Mukul Sharma reveals, he holds absolute power in it: there have been no gram panchayat elections for the last 24 years, nor even elections to cooperatives, and no campaigning is allowed during state or national elections. Just as a mother is entitled to slap her child (according to him), he feels he is entitled to use coercion or violence against those who infringe his rules. Alcohol is banned, and anyone taking it is tied to a pole and flogged. Although he opposes untouchability, dalits are supposed to follow the occupation dictated by their caste, and have been forced to adopt vegetarianism. In a streak of puritanism reminiscent of the Taliban, satellite dishes, cable TV and any music other than religious songs are banned.³ The comparison with Gandhi by dim-witted mediapersons is belied by Anna’s bloodthirsty calls for the death penalty.⁴

None of these journalists thought it fit to ask how he could campaign for the right to reject and recall candidates if he doesn’t recognise the right to elect candidates in the first place, and contemptuously dismisses the average voter as prone to being bought by liquor, saris or cash! Nor did they think to ask: If he is so keen on electoral reform, why not implement it in his village as an experiment? Why not propose reform in electoral funding, so that the disgruntled 10 percent can put up their own candidate, instead of rejecting all candidates and disrupting elections time and again at enormous cost to the tax-payer and political stability? What exactly should be the conditions under which candidates can be recalled?

The striking authoritarianism of Hazare’s outlook, the lack of any whiff of democracy in the village he rules as an absolute dictator, and his belief in caste hierarchy, all make him amenable to the politics of the Sangh Parivar. But the relationship goes much deeper. Some of his staunchest supporters were shocked when he held up Narendra Modi as a model for other chief ministers to emulate. He later clarified he was opposed to communalism, but this does not explain why he chose to praise a man who orchestrated the massacre of thousands of innocents. Bribery need not always take the form of money; it can also take the form of promotions, appointments to sinecures, etc. The promotion of police officers who had participated in the Gujarat pogroms and victimisation of those who had done their job by trying to prevent the slaughter are among the worst forms of corruption.

Even in the narrower sense of corruption adopted by Team Anna, Gujarat has a shameful record. As Mallika Sarabai pointed out in her letter to Hazare, ‘irrigated farmlands have been stealthily taken by the government and sold off at ridiculous prices to a small club of industrialists. There has been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for nearly seven years so hundreds of complaints against corruption are lying unheard. From the Sujalam Sufalam scam of 1700 crores to the NREGS boribund scam of 109 crores, the fisheries scam of 600 crores, every department is involved in thousands of crores of scams…The state is in terrible debt because of his largess to industry while 21 lakh farmers wait for compensation.’⁵

So what made Anna give Modi such a glowing character-reference? This cannot be explained simply by any apparent naivety. If Hazare was so effusive about Modi, it was because their world-views and agendas converged. Two points in particular are worth noting. One is the extremely complimentary comments by top RSS leaders about Ralegan Siddhi, likening it to Ram Rajya and organising tours of it for their activists, as well as organising programmes in support of him; and the other is the decision taken by the RSS in its all-India leaders’ meeting in March 2011 – before Anna’s fast in April – to launch a campaign against corruption.⁶ The impression of converging agendas is confirmed by L.K.Advani’s announcement of a rath yatra against corruption⁷ and Team Anna’s deafening silence concerning Modi’s patently corrupt attempt to appoint a Lokayukta who had acquitted all the accused in the Best Bakery massacre, and therefore could be trusted to toe the state government line.⁸

Two other members of the drafting team also have relationships with the Sangh Parivar. Arvind Kejriwal maintained close links with BJP MPs during the agitation as well as drawing in Hindutva gurus like Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. His association with the anti-reservationist Youth for Equality created revulsion among Dalits, as did his dismissal of their suggestion that there should be a Dalit on the drafting committee on the grounds that legal specialists were needed to draft a law (as though Dalits were incapable of drafting laws, regardless of the fact that the Indian Constitution was drafted by one!).⁹ And Justice Santosh Hegde, whose father was all-India vice-President of the BJP, just last year referred to L.K.Advani (of the infamous Ram Janmabhoomi rath yatra that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and slaughter of thousands of Muslims) as a ‘father figure.’¹⁰

The Right-wing bias of these three members of the JLB drafting committee explains why it leaves out NGOs from its ambit, since inclusion of NGOs would be a blow to massive outfits like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living (already accused of illegal land acquisition¹¹ ) and Baba Ramdev’s offshore financial transactions. It also explains why most Dalit, Adivasi and minority-rights activists stayed away from the movement, fearing that the JLB’s definition of ‘corruption’ would target the beneficiaries of affirmative action as well as members of the legislature and judiciary who supported attempts to level the playing field for sections of the population suffering discrimination.

The fourth member of the team, Shanti Bhushan, is a corporate lawyer whose most high-profile case in recent years has been that of Novartis versus the Cancer Patients Aid Association.¹² Novartis is attempting to prevent the production of generic versions of imatinib mesylate (an anti-leukemia drug) beyond the period of its original patent by a process called ‘ever-greening,’ whereby a minor change in the form of a drug is used to renew its patent. This particular case has attracted worldwide attention, because it would mean that the life-saving drug would only be available at the Novartis price of Rs 120,000 per month instead of being made available by Indian companies for Rs 8,000 per month: obviously a death sentence for all leukemia patients other than the super-rich. In other words, Shanti Bhushan was hired by Novartis to argue that a company’s right to profit trumps the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution.¹³

Bhushan Sr.’s professional dealings with his corporate clients explains why corporates are left out of the Jan Lokpal Bill. This curious omission is also why companies like Jindal Aluminium, a company that tried to silence critics of its illegal mining activities with a false defamation suit,¹⁴ are willing to back the Anna movement with substantial donations.¹⁵ It is also why the corporate media could abandon any pretence of objectivity and play an active role in promoting the movement.¹⁶ . For all of these power elites (big business, mass media), the solution to corruption is to privatise everything, minimise state regulation of private capital, and terminate even inadequate social security and welfare schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. They would like to secure their privileges (for which they now have to pay bribes) without paying bribes. Anything that cuts into their right to make money constitutes ‘corruption.’

These neoliberal underpinnings of the JLB have been criticised by many left-wing commentators and one important trade union federation. As the New Trade Union Initiative points out, ‘the fight against corruption must include demands for legislation and effective implementation of the laws that govern capital alongside rigorous and stringent implementation of the laws that govern work, the provision of social security and social protection, and all laws that provide working people access to their basic needs. Corruption necessarily flows from above and is deeply rooted in how capital seeks to maximize profits and not merely a product of corrupt civil servants or a grasping political class.’¹⁷ While it might not be feasible for the Lokpal to monitor all NGOs and companies, in cases where a politician or bureaucrat has colluded with a company or NGO to rob the public (of land, revenue, etc.), it makes no sense to nab the junior partner-in-crime (the politician or bureaucrat) while allowing the major beneficiary of corruption (the company or NGO) to get away with it. In such cases, as suggested by the NCPRI, the Lokpal or Lokayukta should have power to investigate and prosecute any other person who is co-accused in the case before it.¹⁸

The involvement of the fifth member of the team, Prashant Bhushan, caused consternation among some of his former admirers, since he has been associated with social justice causes. But his fundamental similarity to the other members of the drafting team in terms of elitism and authoritarianism are evident in his vehement arguments that the issue of the JLB should be resolved by a referendum.¹⁹ If a referendum were held on each and every clause of the bill, it would cost the earth and take forever, so that is clearly not feasible. Instead, the bill will be (in fact has been) drafted by ‘experts’, and the public will only have the right to vote for one bill or the other. Ironically, far from being an expansion of participatory democracy, as he claims, this constitutes a much less democratic procedure than pre-legislative public debate on a bill, with the possibility of the public feeding into the drafting process.

Apart from leaving out the people who will be affected by the bill from the deliberations on it, a referendum can be framed in a way that elicits the result that is desired. In this case, for example, Bhushan Jr. made it clear that there would be only two options, the government Lokpal Bill or the JLB: no possibility of voting for the NCPRI or other proposals, and not even the option of rejecting both bills! (The hypocrisy of demanding the right to reject in elections while leaving it out in the proposed referendum is truly stunning!) Even if the intention is to get feedback on the JLB, there are two different ways in which a referendum could be framed. If the choice is between the government bill and JLB, as Bhushan wants, those who reject both would have to abstain; then it is possible that the majority of those who vote, knowing only that the latter is stronger, would vote for it. But if the choice is ‘the JLB: Yes or No’, many more are likely to vote, and the ‘No’ vote is likely to predominate, given the deep suspicion on the part of Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and workers that the JLB is designed to rob them of their rights.²⁰ No wonder referendums are favoured by dictators!

The JLB is marked by the elitist and authoritarian outlook of its drafters. While some of these features have been diluted since the first draft was put out, the marks of its parentage are still all too evident.

The followers

There has been a great deal of debate on the class composition of the crowds that came out in support of the JLB, but what is more relevant is the political character of the crowds; after all, there was a significant presence of plebeian elements in the mobs that brought down the Babri Masjid as well as the crowds that flocked to Hitler’s speeches, but this did not make them any less fascist.

Kiran Bedi’s slogan of ‘Anna is India and India is Anna’, with its disturbing echoes of the Emergency (‘Indira is India and India is Indira’) as well as Nazism (‘Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler’), was abandoned, but its spirit haunted the speeches of Team Anna, who repeatedly claimed that they spoke for ‘the people’ or ‘civil society’ as a whole. Equally revealing was the ubiquitous slogan ‘I am Anna’. What this conveyed was blind faith in Anna’s leadership, and a promise to follow wherever he went, do whatever he ordered. This abdication of the responsibility to think for oneself in favour of blind faith in a charismatic leader is typical of fascist movements. This does not mean that all those who wore ‘I am Anna’ caps or T-shirts were fascists, but that they could easily be manipulated by fascists.

If blind obedience to a leader is one side of the coin, the other side is intolerance of dissent or questioning of the stated goal. This too was very much in evidence. The good-natured and non-violent character of the assembly, noted by some who visited Ramlila Maidan, lasted only so long as questions were confined to ‘Where have you come from?’ and ‘What do you do?’As soon as even mildly probing questions were asked about the JLB, good nature vanished and the strong undercurrent of violence beneath the sanctimonious appearance of non-violence came to the surface.²¹ The most horrifying report of such violence was that of a student who was chased into a river by fellow-students and pelted with stones until he drowned because he refused to participate in the anti-corruption protests.²²

Finally, the aggressive waving of the national flag and frequent chants of ‘Vande Mataram!’ and ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ conveyed a great deal about the character of the movement. As one journalist said, ‘Never in India’s history, not even during the freedom movement or war-time, has such aggressively patriotic fervour been unleashed… Democratic plurality, ideological diversity and argumentativeness were integral to our freedom movement… So here is the quibble. Once you produce the national flag, and Bharat Mata, all arguments cease… A democratic movement has to give space for disagreement, argue with those who have a different point of view, not wave the national flag and shut them up.’²³

All these characteristics – blindly following a leader, crushing dissent, and ultra-nationalism – are characteristics of fascism. Nothing could be more different from mass organisations of the labouring poor, with their openness to often heated argument and debate.²⁴

Some conclusions

Put together, these characteristics of the goal of the campaign, its leadership, and its mass following suggest that IAC, if it can be called a mass movement at all, is a populist movement which is similar in many ways to the völkisch (populist) movements that fed into the rise of Nazism. Norwegian right-wing mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had advised the Sangh Parivar that instead of attacking Muslims, they should focus their attacks on those whom he bizarrely described as ‘the Indian cultural Marxists’ – namely the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, with its commitment to the protection of minorities – and seek to overthrow it.²⁵ But it is the Sangh Parivar that could give some lessons to Breivik. It knew that the slaughter of Muslims, as in Gujarat in 2002, could gain votes for it; that this may be changing, hence their switch-over to carrying out terrorist attacks that are blamed on Muslims; and that a massacre of, say, young members of the Congress Party (analogous to the massacre carried out by Breivik) would simply backfire against it. Instead, its assault on the UPA is far more subtle, cashing in on the public revulsion that has built up over issues like rampant inflation and corruption. In the past, campaigns against corruption by Jaiprakash Narayan and V.P.Singh have been used by the Sangh Parivar to boost its popularity and bring it to power, and it is entirely possible that the Anna Hazare campaign could have the same result.

Whether regime change will result depends to a great extent on the reaction of the UPA government. Harping on about the supremacy of parliament in order to discredit popular protest is simply not convincing, because the legitimacy of parliament depends on the degree to which it upholds the fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Why would the Constitution guarantee rights like freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly if democracy meant only the right to vote every five years? Obviously, these are also means by which citizens achieve some measure of control over their own lives, as well as communicate what they want from their representatives. If the UPA had taken more trouble to listen, rather than ignoring protests or all too often crushing them, it would not be facing a crisis.

It is not too late to start listening, beginning with the issue of corruption in the narrow sense. Some action against it has been taken, but belatedly and not enough. The best features of all the Lokpal proposals should be brought together and a strong set of laws enacted and implemented. If the government demonstrates that it is serious about taking action – and not just against its enemies – some of the damage done in the last six months could be reversed.

However, it is far more important to tackle the underlying disease that results in corruption: untrammelled power and impunity. For example, Anna’s fast unintentionally drew attention to Irom Sharmila’s decade-long fast against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Every time the repeal or even amendment of this law is mooted, Army chiefs (who seem to believe that the army cannot do its work without raping, torturing and killing innocents) objects. Yet this law is patently unconstitutional, since it violates the right to equal protection of the law (which is denied to the victims) and to equality before the law (since the perpetrators are effectively above the law). Armed insurgency is admittedly a serious problem, but impunity for state security forces only makes it worse by alienating civilians. AFSPA and other laws that allow security force personnel to commit crimes with impunity need to be repealed or radically amended if the most blatant and corrupt abuse of power is to be curbed.

There are other issues on which the UPA needs to listen to protesters rather than using its majority in parliament to ram through policies that are not only unpopular but also violate fundamental rights. The programme to provide biometric identity numbers to all residents and the nuclear power programme come to mind. The former is being pushed through without a proper debate and in the face of powerful arguments against it. And with wind and solar energy already cheaper than nuclear power and rapidly getting cheaper, the argument for nuclear power, which is hazardous, expensive, and will leave a deadly legacy of nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years, is extremely questionable. These policies reek of corruption, because they benefit a tiny elite while the rest of the population pays the price, either as taxpayers or because their human rights are violated. Unless they are put on hold while an informed, transparent public debate on their pros and cons takes place, the UPA is likely to suffer in the next elections.
More generally, the disease of untrammelled power, of which corruption is merely a symptom, needs to be tackled. If bureaucrats have the power to formulate or interpret legislation in a manner that deprives people of their rights or entitlements, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the bribes they take from desperate people who have no other way of obtaining those rights or entitlements. If police have the power to torture innocents and threaten to kill them unless they confess to crimes they have not committed, then it is their power that must be curbed, not just the fact that they routinely use it to extort bribes. Responding to social movements by enacting legislation and carrying out measures that empower ordinary working people would be one way of tackling corruption at its roots; a massive increase in transparency, which is already mandated by the RTI Act, would be another.

The Left – both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – also has an important role to play. Most sections of the Left in India have little or no understanding of fascism; they do not seem to know, for example, that fascism is a mass movement before it seizes power. These sections are so intent on training their guns on the centre that they are often oblivious of the fact that they are doing it in a manner that strengthens the extreme Right. They have yet to develop the political skill of being critical of the government when it violates human rights or colludes in corruption, without providing support to Right-wing forces engaged in subverting democracy.

Postscript

If the IAC and the Sangh Parivar won the first round of this struggle, the second round was won by the legal experts, Left intellectuals and social justice activists who stayed out of the campaign and criticised both the government’s Lokpal Bill and the JLB. The third round has now been launched by Team Anna. In their press conference on September 11, there was no mention of Modi’s attempt to appoint a Lokayukta in Gujarat in violation of the core principles of the JLB, no mention of the murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood in Bharatiya-Janata-Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh; but Anna did promise to campaign in forthcoming elections against candidates who oppose the JLB.²⁶ In a subsequent interview, he said that he would not be campaigning for any party, and suggested that Advani should ensure that all BJP Chief Ministers appoint Lokayuktas before starting his yatra. However, given that the BJP has pledged support to the JLB, it has already gained from Anna’s campaign and would undoubtedly gain more in future. It remains to be seen who will win the third round.

1. Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘At the risk of heresy: why I am not celebrating with Anna Hazare,’ Kafila, 9 April 2011.
2. Iftikar Gilani, ‘Is RSS running the Anna show?’ Tehelka, 18 August 2011.
3. Mukul Sharma, ‘The making of an authority: Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi,’ Kafila, 14 April 2011.
4. ‘Corrupt MPs should be hanged till death: Anna Hazare,’ News X.
5. ‘Mallika Sarabai’s letter of warning to Anna Hazare,’ NDTV, 14 April 2011.
6. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘India: The communal character of Anna Hazare’s movement,’ South Asia Citizens Web, 5 September 2011.
7. ‘Advani plans Rath Yatra against corruption,’ Zeenews, 8 September 2011.
8. ‘Why did Modi prefer Justice (retd) J R Vora for Lokayukta post?’ TwoCircles.net, 5 September 2011.
9. Bhanwar Megwanshi, ‘This is why Team Anna makes me nervous,’ Tehelka, 1 September 2011.
10. ‘Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde withdraws resignation,’ NDTV, 4 July 2010.
11. Imran Khan, ‘The Art of Living Illegally’, Tehelka, 10 September 2011.
12. ‘Novartis and Bayer appeals to be heard by the Supreme Court in the next 30 days’, Spicy IP, 5 July 2010.
13. Reghu Balakrishnan, ‘Novartis changes tack in patent law challenge’, DNA, 5 March 2007.
14. ‘Nelson Fernandes vs Jindal Aluminium Limited’, Human Rights Law Network.
15. ‘Hazare’s Lokpal Campaign cost over Rs 50 Lakh, Jindal Aluminium contributed 20 Lakh.’
16. Anil Dharkar, ‘The Topiwala Camera,’ Outlook India, 5 September 2011.
17. ‘NTUI statement on the fight against corruption’, 24 August 2011.
18. ‘Collective and concurrent Lokpal anti-corruption and grievance redressal measures.’
19. ‘Team Anna seeks referendum on Lokpal Bill’, CNN-IBN, 8 June 2011.
20. Seema Chishti, ‘Why the Ramlila surge worries minorities and those on margins,’ Jantantra, 14 September 2011.
21. Jay Mazoomdaar, ‘Everybody loves a good protest’, OPEN Magazine, 14 September 2011.
22. A.Selvaraj, ‘Student drowns after campus gang chases him into river’, Times of India, 31 August 2011.
23. Shekhar Gupta, ‘Annationalism’, Indian Express, 3 September 2011.
24. Anurag Modi, ‘Metro-Middle class, NGO and media: Trio at the crossroads’, Countercurrents, 22 August 2011.
25. ‘Norwegian mass killer Breivik’s manifesto hails Hindutva’, sify news,26 July 2011.
26. ‘Hazare asks people not to elect MPs who oppose Jan Lokpal Bill’, IBNLive, 11 September 2011.

A secret State Department cable published by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, 06TUNIS2424, “Microsoft Inks Agreement with GOT,” 22 September 2006, noted that “during the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in South Africa July 11-12, the GOT and the Microsoft Corporation signed a partnership agreement that provides for Microsoft investment in training, research, and development, but also commits the GOT to using licensed Microsoft software.”

The export of high-tech products, included software suites employed for spying on political dissidents, are said to be closely regulated under U.S. law to prevent abuse by repressive governments.

However, as Amnesty International disclosed nearly a decade ago, “There are almost no legal or regulatory requirements amongst the G8 states for the inclusion of international human rights or humanitarian law content in the various military, security, and police force training services that they provide to states in all world regions.”

According to investigators, “Even where human rights criteria are referred to in laws governing arms export and foreign military and security aid, they are often loosely interpreted.”

“Instead,” analysts averred, “it is short term profit making and political advantage that guide the bulk of the international arms trade,” and as noted above in the Bahraini example, the transfer of dual-use surveillance kit figured prominently in the suppression of of pro-democracy protests. (emphasis added)

Not much has changed since 2003 when that report was issued. Indeed, sweetheart deals which hand over source code in exclusive arrangements with human rights abusers are the norm, not the exception, especially where it concerns America’s “War on Terror” allies.

In January, during the opening round of the Arab Spring, a pro-democracy uprising by Tunisian citizens overturned the U.S.-allied dictatorship of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali who was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.

With high unemployment, staggering state corruption, repression and police violence, the long-simmering revolt was kick-started when an unemployed university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, an itinerant vegetable seller, set himself on fire in front of a government office to protest the confiscation of his stock by local police. Bouazizi died January 4. Authorities later claimed he did not have a “permit” to sell vegetables.

Initially caught off guard by events, the U.S. government had been fully apprised of this state of affairs by diplomats. A 17 July 2009 cable, 09TUNIS492, “Troubled Tunisia: What Should We Do?,” informed us that “many Tunisians are frustrated by the lack of political freedom and angered by First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities.”

An autocratic though nominally “secular” regime, “the GOT brooks no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Instead, it seeks to impose ever greater control, often using the police.”

“Despite Tunisia’s economic and social progress,” the State Department cheekily observed, “its record on political freedoms is poor. Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”

A “police state” tailor made for CIA “War on Terror” operations.

As Amnesty International pointed out in 2008, “Abdellah al-Hajji and Lotfi Lagha, two of 12 Tunisians held by the US authorities in Guantánamo Bay, were returned to Tunisia in June. They were arrested on arrival and detained at the State Security Department of the Interior Ministry, where they alleged they were ill-treated and forced to sign statements” claiming they belonged to a “terrorist organization.”

Al-Hajji told human rights’ investigators that “he was deprived of sleep, slapped in the face and threatened that his wife and daughters would be raped.” This of course, is standard operating procedure for close U.S. allies.

While claiming the Tunisian government “can point to some progress … for every step forward there has been another back, for example the recent takeover of important private media outlets by individuals close to President Ben Ali.”

Despite misgivings, the Obama administration, like the Bush government before it, recommended “a more pragmatic approach … whereby we would speak to the Tunisians very clearly and at a very high level about our concerns regarding Tunisia’s democracy and human rights practices, but dial back the public criticism.”

Noting the set-up in Tunis and the dim prospects for democratic transformation, “of greatest interest to the GOT would be increased engagement on economic issues, i.e., on increasing bilateral trade and investment, as well as the provision of technical assistance, especially involving technology transfer.”

Bingo! Nothing like advancing U.S. interests by fattening the bottom line of American corporations eager to sell high-tech spy gear, and provide the requisite training to spooks–just as they do here in the heimat.

And if said U.S. corps, like their European counterparts (can you say BAE) need to sweeten the deal with generous dollops of cash to officials from special, i.e., untraceable accounts on Gibraltar, Latvia or Malta, well, there’s an app for that too!

A 06 June 2008 cable, 08TUNIS679, “Corruption in Tunisia: What’s Yours Is Mine,” informed us: “According to Transparency International’s annual survey and Embassy contacts’ observations, corruption in Tunisia is getting worse. Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. Beyond the stories of the First Family’s shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries.”

Continuing, the secret cable averred that “President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption.” As with other close U.S. regional allies, including rulers of the former president’s new “home,” Saudi Arabia, the Ben Ali entourage was “often referred to as a quasi-mafia.”

“An oblique mention of ‘the Family’ is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.”

Apparently, so too did Microsoft; the 2006 cable noted that “the agreement is a win-win for Microsoft.”

As part of the deal, “Microsoft will help the GOT to upgrade and modernize its computers and networking capabilities. In turn, the GOT agreed to purchase twelve thousand licenses to update government computers with official Microsoft software, rather than the pirated versions that have been commonly used, according to one Microsoft employee.”

But the agreement did far more than “normalize” business relations between the Redmond, Washington software giant and the Tunisian government.

“The agreement also touches on internet security. Through a program on cyber criminality, Microsoft will train government officials in the Ministries of Justice and Interior on how to use computers and the internet to fight crime.”

But as Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed in their Bahrain investigation, overt references to “cyber criminality” more often than not mean delivering political dissidents straight into the clutches of state security thought police.

“As part of this program,” the cable reads, “Microsoft will provide the GOT with original source codes for its programs.”

“When asked by EconOff whether Microsoft had any concerns about releasing its source codes, [Microsoft Tunisia Director General Salwa] Smaoui replied that the source codes would only be available to a small number of officials.”

Which ones? Why “Justice” and “Interior” ministry officials of course, securocrats charged with spying upon Tunisian citizens. Those deemed insufficiently “loyal” would face the grim prospect of detention and torture for having the temerity to cross swords with the country’s “quasi-mafia.”

Agreements such as those struck by Microsoft however, were neither “mistakes” nor a misguided strategy stitched together by an over-eager sales department. Rather, insider deals between giant corporations and authoritarian regimes are part and parcel of a business model which strives to increase all-important market share come hell or high water.

Examples abound. While Bloomberg Markets lifted the sheet on Siemens dirty deals with Bahrain, Narus (an Israeli firm founded by veterans of Israel’s secretive signals intelligence Unit 8200, and later bought by Boeing), sold highly-intrusive deep packet inspection tools to the state-owned Telecom Egypt.

Back in January, Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Carr disclosed that when the Mubarak regime pulled the plug on internet and cell phone service earlier this year, Egypt’s security services also had “the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents.”

“Narus,” Carr wrote, provided “Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.”

As civil liberties watchdogs, researchers and whistleblowers revealed, Narus is the same shadowy firm that sold it’s internet “Semantic Traffic Analyzer,” the Narus STA 6400, to the National Security Agency.

AT&T whistleblower Mark Kline first revealed in documents he handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that Narus equipment was installed in “secret rooms” co-managed by AT&T and the NSA across the United States and powered illegal driftnet spying programs by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory, “at the heart of the Intercept Suite is the NarusInsight computer, an enormously powerful machine capable of scanning the fastest transmission lines of the Internet, OC-192 cables that carry 10 gigabytes per second–10 billion bits of information per second.”

“It can also carry,” Bamford wrote, almost 130,000 simultaneous telephone conversations.”

According to a sales pitch by the firm, “NarusInsight is the leading traffic intelligence system for capturing, analyzing and correlating IP traffic in real time.”

“In all cases and for all solutions,” we’re told that “Narus employs a four-phase approach to traffic intelligence: 1. Monitor traffic from the network through the application layer. 2. Create actionable knowledge. 3. Analyze at macro or micro level. 4. Take informed action based on business and operational policies.”

Indeed, “any number of links, at any speed, with any routing architecture, can be simultaneously monitored.”

Undeterred by charges of widespread corruption and police violence, Cablegate file 10TUNIS104, “Tunisia: Communication Technologies Minister,” penned 09 February 2010 by U.S. Ambassador Gordon Gray, tells us that “In a February 5 courtesy call by the Ambassador, Minister of Communication Technologies Mohamed Naceur Ammar explained the central role of information and communications technology (ICT) in Tunisia’s development strategy.”

“The Minister made a pitch,” Gray averred, “for greater U.S. investment in Tunisia’s ICT sector and was pleased to learn details of the imminent visit of a U.S. trade delegation to Tunisia that will include major U.S. ICT firm Motorola.”

“Tunisia intends to become an ICT platform for the Mediterranean region by attracting investment, boosting education, and liberalizing the sector,” Gray wrote. Critically, “Tunisia’s investment code, he said, provides incentives to potential investors, while its education system is linked to a growing number of techno-parks that match research to market needs.”

As readers are well aware, market “liberalization” is code for the sell-off of public assets, often at fire sale prices that enrich corrupt officials whilst gouging the public as prices for basic commodities, including telecommunication products, skyrocket.

“In response to the Ambassador’s question on how the United States and Tunisia could deepen ICT cooperation, Ammar highlighted the need for business investment in Tunisia’s ICT sector.”

Gray replied “that in addition to the U.S. companies already active in the sector, including Microsoft, Cisco, HP, and IBM, a U.S. trade delegation scheduled for February 15 would include representatives from Motorola.”

“On the internet,” the Ambassador wrote, “his appointment was greeted with some irony among Tunisian dissident bloggers: ‘Ammar’ is the nickname, analogous to ‘Big Brother,’ long used by bloggers in referring the Government of Tunisia’s wide-ranging internet censorship apparatus, headed by the Ministry of Communications Technologies.”

Nonetheless, Ambassador Gray said that “university exchanges and training programs for Tunisian officials … could fall under the 2004 U.S.-Tunisia Science and Technology Agreement.”

Similar exchanges and training programs at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (rebranded the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001), led to widespread human rights abuses across Latin America.

As SOA Watch points out, amongst those targeted by graduates schooled in the dark arts of “military intelligence and interrogation tactics” are the usual suspects: “educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor.”

In the Middle East, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) disclosed that the International Military Education and Training (IMET) and the Joint Combined Exercises and Training (JCET) programs “may be improving the ability of a government or army to repress its own civilian population.”

Indeed, “training foreign militaries in lethal tactics in order to gain access to these countries, sometimes called buying influence, is presumably thought to be in the realm of ‘national security interests’.”

Today, such training entails the use of highly-intrusive technologies sold to repressive states by Western companies for the maintenance of the capitalist status quo, tasks eagerly sought by technology giants such as Microsoft.

Between 2000-2010, the Government Contracts Won web portal reported that Microsoft pulled down some 284 contracts worth a total of $230,656,233 from the Defense Department.

While small potatoes in comparison to Narus’s parent company, Boeing Corporation’s $8,400,115,000 in government contracts according to Washington Technology, the firm’s commercial products figure prominently in National Security State depredations.

As CNET News reported earlier this month, “Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software can transmit your location without your explicit permission.”

“An analysis by Samy Kamkar says that the Camera application sends the device’s location–complete with latitude and longitude, a unique ID, and nearby Wi-Fi access points–to Microsoft even when the user has not given the app permission to do so.”

In July, CNET News disclosed that “Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web.”

According to researchers, “the vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones, Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.”

Moves by the secret state to compile geolocational directories of cell phone users, ready made databases perfect for hauling in political dissidents as was done in Bahrain, are not solely the province of repressive, Middle Eastern governments.

Is any wonder then, that Western high-tech firms do their part to “keep us safe” by throttling our privacy or fail to notice the screams of those victimized by the brutal efficiency of their products?

It certainly can’t hurt when the U.S. Fifth Fleet has the back of those doing the killing, or when the killers are pampered ne’er-do-wells, a fabulously wealthy clique of hereditary princes for whom the word “medieval” was invented, who just so happen to lord over one of the planet’s financial bolt holes.

Last month, Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed that when “Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses” beat 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar in a windowless dungeon in Manama, his jailers were armed “with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations.”

“It was amazing,” Al Khanjar told investigative journalists Vernon Silver and Ben Elgin. “How did they know about these?”

The answer is simple: from computers loaded with spy kit sold to Bahraini royals “by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations.”

Back in February, political floodgates opened across the Middle East as American-allied dictators were toppled by enraged citizens in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatened to do the same in Bahrain when pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets across the island nation.

The Al Khalifa clan responded as royals are wont to do: with brute force and considerable help from U.S. and Saudi “friends.” Scores were killed and many hundreds of others, including medical personnel, were seized and “disappeared” into regime black holes.

As The Guardian reported, while “Bahrain’s security forces are the backbone of the Al Khalifa regime,” in recent years “large numbers of their personnel are recruited from other countries, including Jordan, Pakistan and Yemen” and “are reviled as mercenaries by Bahrainis.”

But what of the gaggle of Western firms who hit the “sweet spot” selling despotic potentates everything from high-tech spy gear to machine guns and lethal gases: will they be “reviled as mercenaries” by media in the “democratic” West?

‘Institutionalized Corruption’

It’s hardly surprising that one of Siemens offloaded intelligence units, Trovicor, did a brisk business with Bahrain’s secret state. After all, considering the firm’s dubious track record and a corporate culture where “bribery was just a line item” according to The New York Times, why wouldn’t they?

More than two years ago when a spate of corruption prosecutions were settled, Siemens wound up paying some $1.6 billion to the U.S. government under provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, “the largest fine for bribery in modern corporate history.”

Former mid-level executive, Reinhard Siekaczek, told reporters Siri Schubert and T. Christian Miller that “he was one of several people who arranged a torrent of payments that eventually streamed to well-placed officials around the globe, from Vietnam to Venezuela and from Italy to Israel.”

“What is striking about Mr. Siekaczek’s and prosecutors’ accounts of those dealings,” the Times averred, “which flowed through a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants, is how entrenched corruption had become at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”

The former executive said that between “2002 to 2006 he oversaw an annual bribery budget of about $40 million to $50 million at Siemens. Company managers and sales staff used the slush fund to cozy up to corrupt government officials worldwide.”

“Bribery was Siemens’s business model,” Uwe Dolata, the spokesman for the association of federal criminal investigators in Germany told the Times. “Siemens had institutionalized corruption.”

Such lucrative inducements to officials were meant to maintain the firm’s “competitive edge” overseas in the branch Siekaczek oversaw, “which sold telecommunications equipment.”

High-tech accouterments which ended up in the hands of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar’s torturers.

Ahmed Aldoseri, the director of information and communications technologies at Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority told Bloomberg Markets, “If they have a transcript of an SMS message, it’s because the security organ was monitoring the user at their monitoring center.”

Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder: did black euros flowing through one of Siemens slush funds grease the palms of corrupt interior ministry officials and then quietly vanish into an offshore bank controlled by cronies of Bahrain’s hereditary royals?

A Global Hidey-Hole

Faced with depleting oil and gas reserves, Bahrain’s industrial base has expanded rapidly over the past two decades and includes petrochemical, aluminum, oil refining, ship repairing and light manufacturing; it’s share of GDP from these sectors, compared to other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), is the highest in the region.

However, “liberal” banking regulations, secrecy laws and a sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure have attracted major Asian and Western institutional investors and investment banks. Drawn by the country’s reputation as a no tax zone for foreigners and a freewheeling “no questions asked” regulatory climate, Bahrain is a haven for hot money.

A secret embassy cable published by WikiLeaks, 06MANAMA2003, informs us that “Bahrain has one of the most diversified economies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).”

Accordingly, “Bahrain has promoted itself as an international financial center in the Gulf region. It hosts a mix of: 375 diverse financial institutions, including 187 banks, of which 51 are wholesale banks (formerly referred to as off-shore banks or OBUs); 39 investment banks; and 25 commercial banks, of which 17 are foreign-owned. There are 31 representative offices of international banks.”

Situated in the heart of the Middle East where the global oil trade recycles regional wealth into liquidity for financial markets, Bahrain and the other Gulf monarchies as they diversify into offshore finance, intersect and capture enormous outflows of cash hemorrhaging out of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, steering hot money into hidey-holes for those in the know. Therefore, mass mobilizations in favor of messy things like democracy would hardly inspire confidence in the global owning class.

Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, tells us that offshore tax havens such as Bahrain’s “are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs [black marketeers], celebrities or Mafiosi–but banks.”

“Tax havens aren’t just about tax,” Shaxson writes. “They are about escape–escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation–above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do.”

“The vast network of Bahrain’s banking system,” the State Department informs us, “along with its geographical location in the Middle East as a transit point along the Gulf and into Southwest Asia, may attract money laundering activities. It is thought that the greatest risk of money laundering stems from questionable foreign proceeds that transit Bahrain.”

And, like Siemens, which “had joined the international convention banning foreign bribery” in 1999, according to the State Department, “in 2001, the Government of Bahrain (GOB) enacted an anti-money laundering law that criminalizes the laundering of proceeds derived from any predicate offense.”

Presumably that law, and a 2006 amendment which criminalized “the undeclared transfer of money across international borders for the purpose of money laundering or in support of terrorism,” would also cover bribing state officials for purposes, let’s say, of sweetening the pot for purchases of “telecommunications equipment,” including surveillance suites targeting dissident Bahrainis.

Also in 2006, Bahrain implemented a Free Trade Agreement with the United States to go along with its status as a global offshore financial center. As a result, the organized workers’ movement has been targeted by the government.

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), “authorities in Bahrain are stepping up repression of the country’s trade union movement, with further suspensions and sackings of workers due to their actual or suspected participation in trade union and political actions earlier this year.”

Since the pro-democracy uprising began, BCHR informs us that “some 2,600 workers” affiliated with the General Federation of Bahraini Trade Unions (GFBTU), “in both the public and private sector have been fired, with an additional 361 workers suspended. Despite numerous promises to the contrary, the government has largely failed to reinstate workers illegally dismissed.”

It’s a sure bet that the same surveillance gear used in wholesale raids against human rights’ campaigners have also been trained upon Bahraini workers’ organizations, proving once again that “free trade” means “freedom” to smash trade unions.

U.S. and Bahraini Intelligence: Thick as Thieves

Bahrain is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the proverbial tip of imperialism’s nautical spear responsible for naval operations in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the east coast of Africa as far south as Kenya.

And should the Obama administration, their Israeli pit bulls, or both, decide to up the ante with Iran, the Fifth Fleet would be called upon, as they were at the start of Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign which destroyed Iraq, to launch air strikes and impose a naval blockade against that oil-rich nation.

Given Bahrain’s strategic importance to Washington, and the regime’s close links to the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, Madame Clinton’s expression of “deep concern” when security forces attacked unarmed protesters was the emptiest of gestures meant to divert the public’s gaze from the criminal role played by the U.S. government during Bahrain’s targeting of the pro-democracy movement.

This is borne out by secret embassy cables published by WikiLeaks. A December 2, 2009 communiqué from the American Embassy in Manama to former CIA Director Leon Panetta and then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, 09MANAMA681, informs us that “Director of BNSA [Bahrain National Security Agency] Sheikh Khalifa bin Abdallah Al Khalifa figures prominently into the King’s efforts on reform and stability.”

According to U.S. Ambassador J. Adam Ereli, “charged by the King to ‘Bahrainize’ and professionalize BNSA, Sheikh Khalifa is determined to rid BNSA of the last vestiges of British influence and grow BNSA into a world-class intelligence and security service with global reach.”

“The secret police–the Bahrain national security agency, known in Arabic as the Mukhabarat–has undergone a process of ‘Bahrainisation’ in recent years after being dominated by the British until long after independence in 1971,” The Guardian disclosed.

“Ian Henderson, who retired as its director in 1998, is still remembered as the ‘Butcher of Bahrain’ because of his alleged use of torture. A Jordanian official is currently described as the organisation’s ‘master torturer’.”

“Sheikh Khalifa” according to the State Department, “understands well that if he is to fulfill his mandate of protecting Bahrain, he must ‘go deep’ and develop robust intelligence liaison relationships with partners around the world.”

“To that end,” Ereli writes, “he has embarked on a program to establish and strengthen intelligence ties abroad, with a central focus on counterterrorism. Against this backdrop, Sheikh Khalifa unabashedly positions his relationship with the U.S. Intelligence Community above all others, insisting that his key lieutenants communicate openly with their U.S. liaison partners and actively seek new avenues for cooperation.”

Would an imperative to “communicate openly” and jointly pursue “new areas for cooperation” extend to U.S. training of Bahraini spooks in myriad aspects of electronic and signals intelligence, the better to more fully exploit technologies supplied by America’s NATO partner, Germany?

Exporting Repression

Three years ago, I reported on a highly-intrusive communications intelligence system which New Scientist drolly dubbed “surveillance in a box.” (See: “New Spy Software Coming On-Line: ‘Surveillance in a Box’ Makes its Debut,” Antifascist Calling, August 28, 2008)

According to reporter Laura Margottini, Siemens had developed software capable of integrating “tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”.

“In Bahrain,” Bloomberg Markets reported, “officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.”

Rajab told Silver and Elgin that “he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.”

“Everyone was interrogated based on telephone calls that were checked–and not only us, the activists,” Rajab said. “Even our children, our wives, our sisters are being monitored.”

We learned that Siemens had already sold the devilish system to more than 60 Asian, European and Middle Eastern nations, including world-class human rights abusers. Which countries? Well, Siemens won’t say.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the European privacy watchdog group Quintessenz, published a series of leaked internal documents and presentations made by Siemens for prospective customers.

And while those documents and are startling, in the three years since they were first published, these products have become far more invasive.

Specifically designed for “fusion centers” or their Asian, European and Middle Eastern equivalents, the Intelligence Platform claims it can deliver “real time” intelligence for the hot “lawful interception” market.

As Bloomberg Markets reported, the use of the system by Bahraini police “illustrates how Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents–and silence them.”

“Some industry insiders,” Silver and Elgin wrote, “now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.”

One such insider, Nikhil Gyamlani, told reporters that when he worked as a consultant for Trovicor and Nokia Siemens, the firm “had developed monitoring systems and sold them to some of the countries” on the cutting edge of the Arab Spring.

“Besides Bahrain,” Bloomberg Markets reports, “several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year–including Egypt, Syria and Yemen–also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor.”

And “Trovicor equipment,” Silver and Elgin averred, “plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.”

During the Bahraini uprising, “authorities jammed or restricted communications to stymie gatherings and knew where to send riot police before a protest could even start, according to eyewitness reports.”

“For that to happen,” Gyamlani told Bloomberg, “government officials had to have some means of figuring out where to go or whom to target to nip protests in the bud.”

“Across the Middle East in recent years,” Silver and Elgin averred, “sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear.”

Since Nokia Siemens first unveiled the system, updates “allow more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype.”

“The monitoring systems,” Silver and Elgin wrote, “can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.”

According to Bloomberg Markets, “some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones.”

In other words, not only can Trovicor’s Intelligence Platform spy on political dissidents, it can also fabricate communications thereby setting-up activists for more serious charges, particularly when authorities (falsely) accuse protest organizers of “fomenting violence” through messages they’ve artfully invented themselves.

One no longer need insert agents provocateurs into proscribed groups. With the Intelligence Platform one can spread disinformation or incite violence from the safety and security of a monitoring center. Think of the savings to security budgets in these deficit conscious times!

“Offshoring” the Security World

As Bloomberg Markets revealed, when Siemens and Nokia unloaded their spy unit, they turned to the offshore world and found an eager buyer in “the Guernsey-based Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP” who “renamed the business Trovicor, coined from the Latin and Esperanto words for find and heart.”

Perusa Partners Fund 1 LP is an odd duck to say the least. Their web site informs us that “the fund we counsel is not listed on the stock exchange and is thus able to act independently from quarterly reports and analyses.” Founded in 2007 with headquarters in St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Perusa tells us that “we think globally and act locally.”

The Fund does not list the identities of key investors since disclosure is “regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission under the Protection of Investors (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law, 1987 (as amended).”

However, Christian Hollenberg, a founder of Perusa GmbH, says that Trovicor’s owners “only invest in ethical businesses” including Trovicor “which the fund owns in its entirety.”

Hollenberg told Silver and Elgin that Trovicor is “a legal business, and it’s part of every communications network in the civilized world.”

But as author Nicholas Shaxson told New Left Project in a wide-ranging interview, “Crown Dependencies” such as “Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man … have old histories as tax havens and have played an offshore role for decades, even centuries. They also got in on this game of attracting money by offering secrecy, zero taxes, and escape from laws.”

And with “partners and investors … based in the most important financial centers worldwide,” the Fund is inclined to invest “in smaller companies, in companies with faint profitability or with operative problems. We are flexible and always prepared for various situations.”

Perusa’s investment portfolio is a diverse, if strange mix. With interests ranging from the Swedish-based Dynasafe International, which offers “a comprehensive range of explosion containment and munitions destruction equipment as well as off gas treatment systems to customers all over the world,” to the medical implant firm GB Implantat-Technologie GmbH in Essen, Germany, and from Belgian-based Flamingo N.V., described as “a leading international company in the domestic pet sector” (!) to Trovicor, Guernsey-based Perusa certainly covers a wide range of investment opportunities.

Accordingly, “the fund we advise invests in companies that are confronted with dramatic change.” Trovicor, the firm which snapped-up Siemens Intelligence Platform fits the bill. “Do you want to spin off a business division from a larger organization and become independent?” Well, according to Perusa, “via the fund we advise, we can provide you with fresh capital and new and additional management respectively.”

But why would a multibillion euro firm such as Siemens find it necessary, or even desirable, to “spin-off” a profitable unit, one with unlimited growth potential in the über-lucrative “lawful interception” niche market”?

After all, this sector is worth some $3 billion annually, Jerry Lucas, the president of the McLean, Virginia-based TeleStrategies Inc., the organizers of ISS World trade shows for spooky companies servicing the secret state told Bloomberg Markets.

If we’re to believe statements from Nokia Siemens Networks spokesperson Ben Roome, “the elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business.”

Quick to absolve the firm of any liability for designing and selling products to autocratic regimes that torture their citizens, Roome told Silver and Elgin that “ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.”

And with ISS World Americas conference in Washington, D.C., right around the corner, enterprising security officials will learn “methodologies and tools to bridge the chasms of lawful intercept data gathering to information creation to investigator knowledge to actionable intelligence.”

One shudders to think what “knowledge” was shared last year amongst Middle Eastern spooks who attended ISS World MEA conclave in Dubai or what tips of the dirty trade Trovicor’s head of consulting, Jesper Mathiesen, gave his eager hosts.

Amongst the “tools” which Trovicor supplies, at a steep price rest assured, are spy kit for “intelligence mining;” “pattern recognition;” “behaviour profiling;” “indexing-text search,” that performs “in the background” on “contents of emails, web pages, Word documents, SMS, database records etc.;” “mobile location tracking” suites equipped with a “geographical information system,” an “ideal solution to track, record, extrapolate, and anticipate the movements of mobile devices;” “speaker recognition” and of course, “link analysis” tools which can be used “to find and graphically display correlating data of intercepted targets.”

And should current spy toys prove insufficient, additional “add-on applications are being developed to allow for maximum use of the information contained in the database of the Monitoring Center.”

Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar is in hiding today. He told Bloomberg Markets that “he took up the anti-torture cause after being detained and interrogated for six days in 2000. His jailers handcuffed him, hung him from a stick ‘like a goat’ and beat the soles of his feet.”

And when the activist returned from London in August 2010, after testifying about Bahraini human rights abuses before a committee at the House of Lords, plainclothes police took him away.

“For his first 85 days or so in custody,” Bloomberg Markets reported, “Al Khanjar saw no one from the outside.”

“For one agonizing stretch,” Silver and Elgin averred, “his jailers forced him to stand without sleeping for five days. At other times they beat him with hoses and their hands and threatened him with sexual abuse.”

“I’m hidden somewhere,” he says. “I’m unfortunately in Bahrain. They’re going to kill me. What to do? What to do?”

This raises an inevitable question: what will we do to bring down repressive, authoritarian governments, beginning with those in the West, which profit handsomely from screams dying in soundproof rooms?

That man’s name?

Dick Cheney.

On “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Thursday, the former Vice President claimed that the intelligence used to invade Iraq had been sound and accurate; the faulty intelligence was all Bill Clinton’s fault; the invasion didn’t do any damage but rather it was the Iraqis who damaged Iraq; and any invasion causes horrific things to happen, that just comes with the territory.

This incoherence was interspersed with gossip about Cheney’s marriage and his friends and his whole lovable social self. That lie may have overshadowed the more serious ones. When in the hell did Cheney become respectable, much less lovable? But that’s a distraction. Cheney’s crimes have long been catalogued.

Joe Scarborough began his Cheney interview by asking, not why did you commit so many crimes and abuses, but how did you, dear Dick, suffer from having the image of Darth Vader imposed on you? Cheney replies that he had fun wearing a Darth Vader mask. But listen carefully for the Freudian slip: he says he wore it in the President’s office, not the VICE President’s office.

Cheney claims he didn’t transform into Darth Vader, and, of course, he didn’t. Cheney was an immoral power-mad neocon for decades who consistently favored presidential prerogatives and aggressive militarism. But Cheney claims that what changed was that a terrorist act became an act of war rather than a crime. Did it do that all on its own?

Cheney slips in his usual baseless defense of torture and related abuses as having served some useful purpose. Scarborough does not follow up on that claim. Instead, he asks about Colin Powell’s comments on Cheney’s book. Nice and gossipy. But Lawrence Wilkerson’s more serious comments on the same topic, including his expression of willingness to testify against Cheney in court, go unmentioned.

Cheney then claims the Iraq lies were well-intended mistakes and basically accurate at the same time. Content with this, Scarborough focuses in on DC social scene changes over the decades. That’s journalism!

Mike Barnicle, a SERIOUS journalist, then asks Cheney if he regrets the death of a U.S. soldier in a humvee that was operating in Iraq without proper armor. This is a question along the lines of “Why did the military waste $60 billion in Iraq?” These talking heads are not 60 seconds from the topic of the lies that launched an illegal and immoral war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, almost none of them Americans, and Barnicle wants to know why the humvees weren’t better armored. Wednesday’s news of U.S. troops having murdered Iraqi children gets no mention. This is breakfast table reporting for goodness sake! And yet, even with the softball question about the humvee armor, Cheney makes excuses and points out that things like that just happen in wars.

Well, exactly. But why do the wars happen?

Finally Scarborough asks Cheney why the U.S. military invaded Iraq, and Cheney says it was the right thing to do. He paints it as defensive. We attacked an unarmed impoverished nation halfway around the globe IN DEFENSE. Cheney even regurgitates a long-debunked claim about Mohamed Atta meeting with Iraqi officials. Next, Mika Brzezinski asks Cheney about the war lies, and Cheney blames Clinton. Now, I’m no fan of Clinton, and he told plenty of his own lies and engaged in plenty of power abuses tied to wars and military actions, but the fixing of the facts around the policy on Iraq was a major operation created after Clinton was gone. On this, Scarborough and Brzezinski had no follow up questions.

Instead, Barnicle helpfully turned to the topic of moving troops early out of Afghanistan and into preparation for war in Iraq. Cheney dishonestly suggested that no troops were moved to Iraq until a year and a half later. Then Cheney claims the Iraqis are the ones who did all the damage in Iraq. And on that note, Scarborough insists on chattering about Cheney’s marriage, while Brzezinski insists on hearing about Cheney’s sedated dreams of Italian villas.

Cheney admitted in this interview that his vice presidential role was unique. But that’s not actually an argument for buying his book. It’s an argument for amending our Constitution to include a ban on vice presidents exercising executive, as opposed to legislative, power.

The trouble is that there’s little point in amending our laws until we start enforcing them. Dick Cheney is a human advertisement for the absence of the rule of law in the United States. Wilkerson thinks Cheney is bluffing because he is scared of being prosecuted. I think Cheney knows that could only happen abroad. He is safe here because the Justice Department answers to Obama, and Obama is protecting Cheney because Obama is continuing similar crimes and abuses.

If Obama were to allow Attorney General Eric Holder to enforce our laws against Dick Cheney, Obama might very well save his own electoral prospects. But he would put himself at risk of future prosecution. The question of whether we will have the rule of law becomes the question of whether Obama wants to trade four years of power for decades in prison. That’s not how it is supposed to work.

The larger story of Canaraan is tightly linked to its neighbor, camp Corail, once touted as the very model for the international community’s humanitarian effort in Haiti.  The Corail experiment, and its dismal consequences, is well documented in a recent Rolling Stone article: In short, several thousand earthquake victims were relocated from urban Port-au-Prince to temporary shelters planted in an empty wasteland some distance north of the city.  Marked by the inefficiency, confusion, and high-handedness emblematic of Haiti’s stalled reconstruction effort, the Corail ‘model camp’ did not go as planned, leaving transplanted families far from economic activity and at the mercy of flooding, landslides, and hurricanes.  It is widely recognized as a failure.

Yet any major building project, even an ultimately unsuccessful one such as Corail, offers hope of something to those who have nothing, and soon enough Corail was surrounded by the sprawling series of unplanned settlements now known collectively as Canaan or Canaraan.  Like Corail, Canaraan residents are vulnerable to wind and water and find themselves cut off from the economic life of the city.  But lacking Corail’s official designation as a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), Canaraan residents are routinely dismissed as mere ‘squatters’ unworthy of assistance however pressing their need.  Ignored by both the Haitian government itself, and the 3,000+ international NGOs which function like a de facto shadow government, President Martelly’s visit to Canaraan was thus both a validation of  resident’s existence and a sign that perhaps their luck was about to change.

So far, at least, it has not.  Months after the visit, Canaraan is without signs of progress or construction, and residents’ former optimism is increasingly guarded, if not abandoned outright.  The future of textile factories in Canaraan remains a question without an answer, but it is worth asking why powerful actors, both Haitian and international, continually present them as a cure-all for Haiti’s many ills.  Factory projects have been a staple of USAID projects for a generation, and enjoy the prominent and high-profile support of figures such as Bill Clinton and Ban Ki Moon.  The Factory Solution predates the earthquake, and has not been shaken by it.  It now represents the single most significant international effort to impact the economic lives of Haitian people.

One need not dig too deep to find the dark side to this proposed answer to Haiti’s problems.  To make way for construction, for example, Canaraan families would be displaced from the flatlands into uncertain housing on the same treeless hills where landslides killed 23 people just two months ago.  It is unclear how many of the residents of the sprawling camp will find employment in the proposed industrial complex, but certainly fewer than the many tens of thousands of  people who currently live there. Even for those fortunate enough to obtain work, foreign owned textile factories in Haiti have developed a notorious reputation for unsafe conditions, workplace intimidation, union-busting, and wages so shockingly low that it is virtually impossible for even a small family to rely on them for survival. (Wages amount to approximately US $3 a day for textile labor, an in depth report on labor conditions in Haiti can be found here).  In this environment of kickbacks and sexual harassment, where nearly all employees labor without benefit of union representation or health insurance, the prospects for Canaraan residents will likely remain grim even if the President’s promises come true.

This is not to condemn all factories out of hand. Factory work is not inherently a social evil.  In many societies, including our own, factory labor has provided a pathway out of poverty.  For their part, residents in Canaraan express a desire for jobs above all else, and are even willing to accept eviction from their homes for factories that everyone knows will refuse to pay a subsistence wage.

Yet Canaraan residents’ desire for factory work must be understood against a backdrop of economic and political forces which have left Haiti’s poor strikingly boxed-in on all sides by bad options.  Physically, the choice between overcrowded slums, flood-prone plains, and denuded hillsides have left Canaraan residents perilously exposed to danger, whether they decide to remain in the city or flee to its outskirts.  Likewise, decades of US-driven trade policy has left families with few meaningful economic choices except factory work, effectively selling their labor to northern businesses at bargain basement prices.

Such a narrowing of options is not an accident.  It is the intentional result of express U.S. foreign policy.  It may come as a surprise to many Americans that the weight and prestige of their nation’s diplomacy was thrown into an effort to thwart raising Haiti’s minimum wage above 31¢ an hour, but this is precisely the sort of foreign machination that Haitians have been forced to live with for decades.  U.S. diplomatic cables, recently exposed by the group Wikileaks, detail the extent of this meddling, in which US muscle was engaged to sabotage parliamentary efforts to raise wages to a level capable of supporting dignified existence.

Against this backdrop, Canaraan residents’ approval of their President’s message emerges as a rational response to a set of artificially constrained options.  A house on a landslide-prone hill is preferable to a tarp on a flood-prone plain; likewise, a factory’s starvation wages are preferable to none at all.  And what other options are there?  Flooded with highly subsidized foreign food products, Haitians have watched the decimation of their agricultural sector.  Forced to open borders to ravenous (and sometimes predatory) foreign competitors, Haiti has seen its domestic enterprises left stunted.  As a result, the economic policies of the world’s powerful have effectively pushed Haiti’s poor into an ever narrowing chute — the only escape being into the arms of US, Canadian, or Korean textile corporations and their cut-rate sub-contractors in Haiti.  And with the wage increase successfully neutralized, it’s now impossible to earn a living even at that.

Yet beneath that surface enthusiasm, Canaraan residents voice a complex mix of hope and resignation, stoicism and anger, which is every bit as complicated as the geopolitical forces presently at work upon them.  Derided by the powerful as opportunists and squatters, Canaraan residents’ most simple acts of daily life — planting seeds for a dozen stalks of corn on a small plot of land, rebuilding the tarp roof of a Lutheran church, selling goods at market to send children to school — seem like acts of defiance against a global economic order determined to reduce people to a state of dependence.

No one, perhaps not even President Martelly himself, really knows whether the factory project will ever actually materialize, whether its promised employment will allow an escape from poverty, or if, instead, it will prove as illusory as countless other promises made to camp residents by politicians, diplomats, NGOs, and the international community.  But one thing is clear, until the powerful actors presuming to decide Haiti’s future put the autonomy, dignity, and well-being of Haiti’s poor majority at the center of reconstruction efforts, instead of simply instrumentalizing them as a pool of cheap labor, Canaraan families will not be able to break out of the trap of poverty, foreign factories or not.

Politics continues to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For some, the city is a crime scene of corporate profiteering and the mass displacement of African Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way for other cities.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of citizens. They self-identify as YURPs – Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals – and they work in architecture, urban planning, education, and related fields. While the city was still mostly empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public comment. Working with local and national political and business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s education system, public housing, health care, and nonprofit sector.

Along the way, the face of elected government changed in the city and state. Among the offices that switched from black to white were mayor, police chief, district attorney, and representatives on the school board and city council, which both switched to white majorities for the first time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a state with several statewide elected Democrats, to having only one — Senator Mary Landrieu.

While black community leaders have said that the displacement after the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic representation, another narrative has also taken shape. Many in the media and business elite have said that a new political class – which happens to be mostly white – is reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial era. “Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in the past, Landrieu — who was the first mayor in modern memory elected with the support of a majority of both black and white voters — added that “We’re going to rediscipline ourselves in this city.”

The changes in the public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the storm, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents, students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to charters. “The reorganization of the public schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and most of the city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida Finger.

In many ways, the changes in New Orleans school system, initiated almost six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey and other states where teachers and their unions were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal reformers such as the filmmakers behind Waiting for Superman. Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public housing — which was torn down and replaced by new units built in public-private partnerships that house a small percentage of the former residents — prefigured national battles over government’s role in solving problems related to poverty.

The anger at the changes in New Orleans’ black community is palpable. It comes out at city council meetings, on local black talk radio station WBOK, and in protests. “Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option,” adds Juakali.

Resistance to the dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s criminal justice system. But this reform is very different from the others, with leadership coming from African-American residents at the grassroots, including those most affected by both crime and policing.

In the aftermath of Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on hold because of the violence. In response, the second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the governor announced that she had given the National Guard orders to shoot to kill.

Over the following days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police sniper wounded a young African American named Henry Glover, and other officers took and burned his body behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield, Sr. was shot in the back in front of his family outside the New Orleans convention center. Two black families – the Madisons and Bartholomews – walking across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a hail of gunfire from a group of officers. “We had more incidents of police misconduct than civilian misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who pursued charges against officers but had the charges thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it pales next to what the police did.”

District Attorney Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment when he brought charges against officers and was forced to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed. For years, family members of the victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”

Finally after more than three years of protests, press conferences, and lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive investigations of the Glover, Brumfield, and Danziger cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers were convicted in the Glover killing (although one conviction was overturned), two were convicted in beating a man to death just before the storm, and ten officers either plead guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up. In the Danziger case, the jury found that officers had not only killed two civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses, and secret meetings.

The Justice Department has at least seven more open investigations on New Orleans police killings, and has indicated their plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading the way – in a remarkable change from Justice Department policy during the Bush Administration, the DOJ is also looking at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver, and Seattle.

In the national struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of official silence, and now have begun to win justice. “This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push for a much more democratic system of policing in the city.”

In the closing arguments of the Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.” The jury apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on all 25 counts.

*  This article first appeared in Root magazine.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother. He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church. Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium. They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months. The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice. They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011. Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation. Where did the 514 families go? No one knows for sure. About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias. Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food. The rest? No one knows. No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said:

The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life. Our human rights are not respected. No institutions are taking care of us, we are the forgotten. We want people to remember us and help us to have the human life we should have. It’s not our choice to live this way. The situation of life bring us here. We hope to have a normal life. But the hope is very far from us.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported August 19, 2011 that there are about 594,800 people living in about 1000 displacement camps in Haiti. Most want to leave but have nowhere to go. Nearly 8000 people have been evicted in the last three months. Their report concludes by saying “With nearly 600,000 internally displaced persons still in camps, the scale of Haiti’s homeless problem remains daunting.”

Complicating the problem is the increasing wave of forced evictions happening in Haiti. These are evictions without any legal process, often by police, frequently accompanied by violence.

Landowners use armed police and private security to carry out evictions and scare people away. They rarely go to court because they usually cannot prove they own the land. So they resort to brute force to overwhelm the families. Police and private security use guns, machetes, batons and bulldozers to push people out.

The administration of President Michel Martelly has apparently given a green light to widespread violent demolition of camps without any legal process. Though the administration announced plans to relocate families from six camps, nothing has happened.

The Haitian human rights law firm Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) reports that before June they were receiving several threats of forced evictions per month. Since June, the threats increased to several per week. Now they are receiving several reports of forced evictions every day.

Dozens of human rights activists called on the United Nations to condemn these illegal evictions and to make Haiti impose a moratorium on illegal evictions until there are realistic plans to house the families being uprooted.

These evictions are in defiance of a ruling by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights which issued precautionary measures asking Haiti to cease illegal evictions. On November 18, 2010, the IACHR expressed concern over forced evictions of the displaced and sexual violence against women and girls. Specifically, the IACHR wrote Haiti asking the government to “offer those who have been illegally expelled from the camps a transfer to places that have minimum health and security conditions, and then transfer them if they so agree; guarantee that internally displaced persons have access to effective recourse before a court and before other competent authorities; implement effective security measures to safeguard the physical integrity of the inhabitants of the camps, guaranteeing especially the protection of women and children; train the security forces in the rights of displaced persons, especially their right not to be forcibly expelled from the camps; and ensure that international cooperation agencies have access to the camps.”

Residents recently surveyed by BAI and the University of San Francisco said money given them upon eviction was insufficient to relocate or pay rent anywhere. Small grants worth about $250 are not enough to build even the most basic 12×10 shack with plywood walls, a corrugated metal roof and concrete floor – leaving many of those evicted without any shelter except to go put up a tarp in another displacement camp. No wonder that 35 percent of them reported being the victims of physical harm or threats of physical harm.

The following are recent examples of illegal forced evictions, all have occurred since Martelly became President.

On May 27, 2011, at 6am, Haitian National Police wielding machetes and knives stormed a camp in the Delmas 3 neighborhood destroying about 200 makeshift tents, and forcing people to flee, according to Jacqueline Charles of the Miami Herald. There was no court order of eviction.

In early June, Haitian National Police showed up and began destroying tarps and tents of hundreds of families camped at the intersection of Delmas and Airport Roads. The police fired shots and swung batons as people protested in front of their camp. This was done without legal authority.

Later in June, at another camp in Delmas 3, truckloads of agents armed with machetes descended on another camp and dismantled it. After the tents were destroyed a bulldozer showed up and leveled what was left. This too was without any legal process.

In a midnight raid on July 3, 2011, police and private security forces completely destroyed tents of about 30 families in Camp Eric Jean-Baptiste in the Port au Prince suburb of Carrefour.

On July 18, 2011, Haitian National Police entered the displacement camp in the parking lot of Sylvio Cator sports stadium and destroyed the tents and belongings of 514 families. There was no lawful process. People were given about $250 to pay for new shelters. Many told human rights monitors that they did not want the money, they wanted to stay but accepted the money as they had no other options. These illegal evictions were condemned by the UN Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On July 27, 2011, members of the Haitian National Police arrested, assaulted and ransacked tents of internally displaced people protesting against the illegal eviction of dozens of families at Camp Django. Camp residents were given about $125 for their destroyed shelters.

So, what should be happening?

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton, just pledged $78 million to fund a housing plan for 16 districts in Haiti. But, as Haiti Grassroots Watch reports, even if all the planned repairs and construction of 68,025 units takes place, that is only 22 percent of what is needed since there are over 300,000 families and 600,000 people living in camps.

It is time for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the UN, The US and the international community to stand up for the human rights of the hundreds of thousands of people like Mathias. Housing is a human right. Using force to evict homeless survivors of Haiti’s earthquake from one spot to make them homeless in another place is illegal, senseless and violent. Mathias and his family deserve much more.

• Vladimir Laguerre helped with this article.