Talk about nuts!

Thankfully, Garry South, “a top strategist for [former] Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom,” is on to Brown’s seditious psychosis:

“California Democrats need to ponder very seriously the prospect of putting up a candidate for governor who comes with reams of radio-show rantings like Brown,” he states, sagely adding that “Republicans will put tens of millions of dollars behind making him look like a conspiracy-spouting fringe lunatic to the average voter.”

Good on them! And thank goodness they have tons of money at their disposal, too, which, if scary Jerry had had his way, would have been a vital tool long removed from the political process, thereby denying freedom-loving corporations their constitutional right to buy as many congressmembers, er, as much access as possible. For here’s Brown from his radical radio days waxing wacky about campaign reform: “The way politics is organized… money buys power, even though as a principle, that is condemned.”

“Money buys power”? Well, duh! It also buys patchouli oil, lava lamps and Internet porn (uh, so I’ve heard), and isn’t it interesting how he doesn’t rail against those.

As a dissident DJ, Brown also bashed another beloved American institution: institutions (as in, correctional), knocking locking up druggies and throwing away the key:

“Here’s the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners. There’s a lot of chemicals out there and when certain ones are made illegal, they become a huge profit opportunity and bring violence, crime and more people to imprison.”

So, let me get this straight: Instead of spending bazillions on eons-long prison sentences for adults partaking of intoxicants in the privacy of their homes, activity that causes irrevocable damage to our society, you know, um, somehow, what would Brown have wildly suggested? Legalize drugs, tax them and then blow the dough on school construction and highway maintenance? Earth to Jerry: if we’d wanted to live like namby-pamby socialists, we’d never have revolted against France. Get a clue!

Further cementing his criminal-coddling credentials, here’s Baby-‘Em Brown’s death penalty lowdown: “The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don’t think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.”

Now, I’m sure liberals would insist we ask the 138 people exonerated from death row in the U.S. since 1973 what they think about capital punishment, even though their bias would be obvious. Fine, whatever; but it still doesn’t change this unalterable fact: nobody kills anybody when they’re dead. (Yes, tree huggers, ‘tis true there have been at least eight people executed in recent years even though it was determined a little too late — oops! — they were almost assuredly innocent but, hey, what are you, perfect?)

But the thing that galls me most about Jerry Brown is the Marxist nature of his on-the-record anti-corporatism, for who else but a closet commie would blame Big Business for our great nation’s woes? Everyone knows that banks, insurance companies, the pharmaceuticals industry, weapons manufacturers and other corporate mega-entities have never had anything but our country’s best interests at heart, and anyone who reads ulterior motives into their God-given right to fully service us, check it, provide us full services, is truly an America-hater of the first order.

Personally, I’m couldn’t be happier to donate my tax dollars to help save critically-needed financial institutions in exchange for the privilege of using credit cards with perfectly reasonable 29.99% interest rates. I’m proud as a patriotic peacock to continue supporting the ever-burgeoning defense industry and its half-dozen or however many wars it is they’ve got going now, ‘cause one never knows when the next Iraqi or Afghani — or even the first — will attack us from hating the freedoms we used to have. I’m all for making taxpayer-subsidized health insurance mandatory for every American, and for do-gooders who complain it’s nothing but a backdoor windfall for soulless HMOs and marvel at the chutzpah of fining or even jailing fellow citizens too poor to comply, I’ve only one question: where’s your famous bleeding heart compassion when it comes to shareholders and CEOs, huh? They’re human, too, you know. (Probably.)

Fortunately, time wounds all heels or at least tempers their views, and moderation is apparently what’s happened to Jerry Brown’s extremist ideas from his far-out radio daze. The Bee makes it clear that Brown, in his undeclared desire to regain the governorship, has ratcheted his rebellious rhetoric way down.

That’s fine by me, ‘cause one thing’s for sure: if old Governor Moonbeam’s retro ravings ever came to pass, we’d no doubt have an America that looked radically different from how it looks today.

And who would want that?

… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

Still, the conceiving of a tax-financed single-payer system, let alone a “socialized” one, is nowhere in sight. It still sounds bizzarre to people like myself, who live on the other side of the pond (where systems, it should be pointed out, differ both in terms of organization, financing and quality, but still rest on the principle of free, or almost free health care for all), that the largest economy in the world would choose not to grant what is considered as a right (generally enshrined in the Constitution) in most of the world’s advanced countries. Autocratic Germany passed the Health Insurance Bill in 1883, which was gradually extended to cover the entire population; Britain created the NHS in 1948; Italy officially created its in 1978, to make just a few examples. Too often have I listened to horror stories concerning many Americans (including personal friends) who developed serious illnesses and thanked fate for residing abroad, thus obtaining free health care in their new country of residence.

Now, the way this US bill was elaborated and passed represents, in my opinion, further corroboration of the fact that the US presidential system was devised, more than 200 years ago, to attain a specific goal: that is, preventing “radical” legislation from being passed by the political system. As I argue in my book The Roots of Contemporary Imperialism: The Founding Fathers, the U.S. Constitution, and 200 years of corporate dictatorship, the Founding Fathers were cunning enough to devise a system which would create “a path strewn with obstacles in the belief that it would encourage the kind of slow, deliberate politics that were their ideal,” as Daniel Lazare has argued; or, as Charles Beard has put it, “disintegration of positive action.” The political system they devised aimed at preserving the status quo, that is, domination by an already powerful business elite over the people. Only overwhelming popular pressure, extreme crises and the risk of implosion of the system have led to major legislative breakthroughs (or, rather, “concessions” from the elite), such as, to make just a few examples, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the Minimum Wage Act of 1938 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, as street riots or a widespread popular rebellion directed toward obtaining a national health care system appear as a remote possibility, the vicissitudes of the health care bill show the truthfulness of such assertions.

Constitutional engineering alone does not explain the shortcomings of the presidential system.

There are three additional elements, not strictly related to the US Constitution, which nevertheless overlap and help create a situation in which:

• party nominees are not necessarily their parties’ leaders (as a result of primaries), and thus their political platforms do not necessarily tally with their parties’;
• with very few exceptions, only those “eager to ‘go along to get along,’ ” as William Domhoff has put it, that is, those willing to accept massive corporate donations will win a Congress seat or the presidency, a phenomenon which is obviously not just Republican, but regards Democrats as well, thus further alienating Democratic voters as well as potential ones;
• the electoral system, in joint action with the size of the US territory, stimulates fragmentation and therefore party weakness, thus resulting in lack of party discipline, a situation made even more serious by the influence of corporate interests on elected politicians.

These three elements overlap with constitutional ones, such as the rigid separation of powers: two separate Houses, elected in different ways and at different times; and an executive (that is, the President), elected by a state-based electoral college. Thus, the President is not guaranteed a majority in one House, let alone in both; or, the President might have a majority for a limited time, and then lose it at mid-term elections; or, he may have a majority for his entire term of office, but that does not guarantee party discipline or a common plan on specific issues (with Democrats being a perfect example, supporting, for instance, emancipation in the North and Jim Crow in the South). Also, the President is not even allowed to introduce bills into Congress, and therefore has to rely on Congressmen for that; and Congress is fragmented into countless committees and sub-committees, which in most cases do all the work and leave just the final yea or nay to the whole Chamber. Besides, once a bill is passed by one House, the other House will not vote on the same bill, but present its own and, after voting on it, a conciliation committee will meet to find an agreement between the two Chambers (further delaying as well as watering down legislation). Such a complicated, fragmented system cannot help becoming a prey to lobbies. The same applies to the European Union, where the system is absolutely unintelligible even to experts, and the overlapping of different bodies and levels of governance complicates things, and has paved the way for massive lobbying by corporate interests. In my book, I argue that a parliamentary system might mitigate this phenomenon. That is not to say that lobbying and compromise would disappear, far from that. In many parliamentary systems, committees are very powerful and bills are elaborated in closed committee meetings; filibuster is common practice (for example, by introducing hundreds or thousands of amendments, both within a committee or on the floor of the House, or giving endless speeches on each one of these amendments); there are coalitions and minority governments, which may slow down a government’s action, as this would need to reach compromises with its majority partners or other parties in Parliament; lobbying and electoral financing may be aggressive; and often bills have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament, although often the Upper House can only delay the passing of the bill, but not prevent it, and the government needs the confidence of the Lower House alone). After all, the existence of economic pressures on the part of powerful interests influencing the work of elected bodies is inborn to capitalistic systems, whether they are parliamentary or presidential democracies. However, when a party or coalition of parties presents a clear platform before an election, and wins a majority, and has the power to present a bill, the government’s bill, and defend it on the floor of a House wherein parties, rather than individual MPs, are the leading actors, then, things will be more clear and responsibility for failing to pass a certain piece of legislation will be more easily ascribable.

Now, Obama used to be in favor of single-payer when he was a state Senator. In a Youtube video, apparently dating back to 2003, he claimed that “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.” Apparently, he has changed his mind. Changing one’s own mind is legitimate, obviously. However, what is strange is that Obama became less and less convinced about single payer as his political career went on, first at the US Senate, then as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s primaries, and then as party nominee (source). Obama’s change of heart, however, does not sound too outlandish. Money certainly talks: insurance companies contributed with some $2.3 million for his electoral campaign, and the health sector with almost $19.5 million. In the end, Obama’s platform on health care fully reneged on what he had previously backed as an Illinois senator, that is, single-payer.

The bill’s history is particularly telling in order to show US presidentialism’s shortcomings.

When Bill Clinton was president, the business world was adamantly opposed to health care reform. Thus, Bill’s plan was knocked down even by wide sectors of his own party.

Obama’s plan, however, is not really clear, because the US presidential system does not allow presidents to bring forward a clear and final proposal, “take it or leave it or I’ll ask the President/King/Queen to dissolve Parliament and we’ll go to new elections”, as might be the case in a parliamentary system. Obama made some more or less clear proposals during the electoral campaign, sure. However, the bill, or, better, bills dealing with health care reform have sprouted like mushrooms, in different centers of power. Obama may talk to Congressmen, visit Congress in order to convince recalcitrant Democrats (as he did on 7 November, a pretty unusual move), but still, he can hardly impose his will (if he has one on the issue) on his Congress majority.

The New York Times has given a detailed account of the bill’s history.

Thus, at the end of March 2009, and with the consent of the insurance industry, concerned about the growing costs of health care, the (all) Democratic chairmen of five Congressional committees had reached an agreement on legislation requiring everyone to carry insurance that employers should be required to help pay for, and allowing the government to offer a public health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurance.

However, while House Democratic leaders introduced a bill on 14 June, “which in addition to a public plan included efforts to slow the pace of Medicare spending, a tax on high-income people and penalties for businesses that do not insure their workers,” the seven members of the so-called Blue Dog coalition, consisting “of fiscally conservative Democrats, threatened to block the House bill. After a 10-day impasse, an agreement was reached that would cut the bill’s cost and exempt many small businesses from having to provide health benefits to workers. The bill was passed by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on July 31 by a vote of 31 to 28, with five Democrats joining all the panel’s Republicans in opposition”. The agreement still envisaged the creation by the government of “a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, but would negotiate rates with health care providers instead of using Medicare fee schedules to pay doctors and hospitals. States could, in addition, set up nonprofit cooperatives to offer coverage to individuals, families and small businesses.”

In the meantime, the Senate went its own way, as “the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee worked on a bill with a public insurance plan, while the Senate Finance Committee, led by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, worked on a bill that sought to avoid one, which Mr. Baucus thought was necessary to gain bipartisan support.” The Health Committee’s proposal saw the light of day on 2 July: “employers with 25 or more workers would have to provide coverage or pay the government an annual fee of $750 for each full-time worker and $375 for each part-timer. The government would pay the start-up costs for the public insurance option as a loan to be repaid, and premiums would be set up so that the option was ultimately self-sufficient.” The bill was passed on 15 July. However, Senator Baucus introduced another bill at the end of August, which “did not include a new government insurance plan to compete with private insurers,” and, “unlike the other bills … would impose a new excise tax on insurance companies that sell high-end policies. The bill would not require employers to offer coverage. But employers with more than 50 workers would have to reimburse the government for some or all of the cost of subsidies provided to employees who buy insurance on their own.” This proposal was passed on 14 October.

In the meantime, Obama, the President and therefore Head of the government, limited himself to a speech to a joint session of Congress in September, and to the aforementioned visit to centrist Democrats on 7 November.

So, the bill was passed at the House. However, further compromises had to be reached before the House could actually give its approval. In order to assuage conservative Democrats’ fears of losing their Congress seats, it was decided that the public option plan “will have to negotiate rates just as private insurers do, rather than offering a rate set slightly above what Medicare pays,” and “the plan will also confront strict controls on abortion. After heavy lobbying by Catholic bishops, the measure was amended to tighten restrictions on abortion coverage in subsidized plans bought through the insurance exchanges, to insure that no federal money is used to pay for an abortion. Both changes angered Ms. Pelosi’s base of liberal Democrats, but they chose to support the bill nonetheless.”

What will happen next? Senate majority leader Harry Reid has already “finessed the difference between a health committee bill that included a public option and a Finance Committee bill that favored a system of co-ops by announcing that the merged bill would include a government plan that would let states “opt out.” A Republican filibuster, however, is not too remote an option, as independent Senators such as Joseph Lieberman have already announced opposition to any bill containing a public option, and support from conservative Democrats is not guaranteed. There is widespread fear that the reform will lie dormant in Congress for a long time to come.

The future of the health care reform in the US is therefore still unclear. Anything might happen: a different version might be passed, after further negotiations between the two Chambers; or the reform might even be put off till doomsday. Still, that is exactly the kind of chaos the Founding Fathers wanted in order to preserve order and stability. Whatever happens at the Senate, health care is not the first victim of US presidentialism, nor will it be the last.

Ironically, most wealthy capitalists will themselves be destroyed in this looming Jungle.

Capitalists need government almost as badly as we do, but they will not admit it. As Adam Smith taught long ago, capitalism and capitalists can survive only with a rule of law controlling private property rights and business promises, a government to enforce those laws, and a certain level of morality. He cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit. Capitalist ideology thus prohibits capitalists from protecting their own common good. As we see from the daily news, no capitalist will speak out in support of regulation of Wall Street. Capitalists say that they will discipline themselves, but they have not, can not and do not.

We ordinary citizens and voters cling to an illusory idealistic assumption that we retain the right to govern ourselves, and that if we only work hard enough in the political process, we can change things through the ballot box. We cling to this false deadly assumption despite the vast accumulation of evidence that our political process is totally dominated and controlled by approximately 5000 very wealthy individuals acting through their ownership of their corporations and their mainstream advertising agencies, TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Thus in these desperate times, our government has given Trillions of our tax dollars to the big banks of the wealthy without any conditions, while our government has given little or nothing to create jobs for us. This money controlled government can afford to give Trillions to the wealthy, but this government cannot afford to provide VA hospitals and medical care for everybody. We citizens and voters are kept quiet and non-rebellious because of our own brainwashed state, fueled by our addiction to consumer goods, electronic gadgets, computers and TV.

Part of the trance and delusion is maintained by liberals. My definition of a “liberal” is one who vaguely wants a civilizing government and to make things right, but only if it does not deprive him of his standard of living. Thus a liberal will protest wealth inequality, the corruption of our elected leaders by money, imperialism, wars abroad, torture, rendition, and civilian collateral damage, but a liberal will not rebel, stop work, strike, picket, vigil or boycott. A liberal knows at some level that his material well being depends ultimately on these very evils that he protests against, specifically including torture. A liberal, like a conservative capitalist, cannot face the fact that he himself is in a dangerous suicidal trance. So he does not challenge the trance either.

Even under the best of circumstances, we have limited time and interest in governing ourselves. Our civic impulse is in very short supply. We see this in the low voter turnout and in the superficial slogans that lead many voters make up their minds. We see it also in political parties, local governments, charities, clubs and unions where aggressive individuals rise to power, and the ordinary person does not bother to attend meetings or to vote.

The blunt truth is that we are now ruthlessly governed by these few wealthy individuals who have accumulated their vast fortunes. One might almost say that we are “ungoverned,” but of course we are taxed to benefit these rulers, and to pay for their losses on their risky financial investments. The government is operated and controlled by and for these few wealthy individuals. For all practical purposes, it is if we are ruled by a selfish greedy king who rules us and taxes us for his own pleasure and his own benefit. This “king” has his royalist earls, dukes, nobles and toadies in the form of Presidents, Senators, elected officials, journalists, college professors and economists who fawn around him. These toadies tell the “king” what he wants to hear (however insane and stupid) hoping for his favor and crumbs from his table. President Obama himself is such a toady to the “king.” Obama’s economic advisors, former Harvard President Larry Summers and University of California Professor Christina Romer are perfect examples of such fawning advisors to the “king.” They study and report only what the “king” wants to hear.

The truth is that our capitalism and our self governing democracy are beyond repair or reform. Both are terminal, and dysfunctional. Our material well being is rapidly falling, and it will fall much further. Our trance prevents us from dealing with the death throes of capitalism, with the few wealthy individuals who control democracy with their wealth, with diminishing reserves of oil and gas, and with deadly global warming. This is not to say that we will find it easy to make changes even if we become aware of our trance. We will have to attend meetings and vote. We will have to accept a lower standard of living because of the depletion of oil and live like Cubans. Other civilizations in the past have fallen into dark ages because those in power did not recognize the falsity of their political-economic-cultural ideas, and did not take corrective action in time. Millions of us are destined to starve and those who do survive will be serfs allowed to grow a little food on the estates of the very rich. This is inevitable, unless we awaken and face the truth very soon.

Zelaya is a wealthy businessman, a member of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL), a former National Congress Deputy from 1985-1998, a former PL Minster for Investment, and president from January 27, 2006 to when he was deposed on June 28.

His 2005 presidential campaign was largely on a law-and-order platform with pledges that, if elected, he’d address Honduras’ crime problem with more police programs against and reeducation ones for violent international and local street gang members.

Zelaya also joined Venezuela’s Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA) based on fair, not one-sided “free” trade; complementarity, not competition; solidarity, not domination; cooperation, not exploitation; and respect for each nation’s sovereign freedom from corporate control.

According to supporters like Alejandra Fernandez, a Honduran student, he also: “raised the minimum wage, gave out free school lunches, provided milk for the babies and pensions for the elderly, distributed energy-saving light bulbs, decreased the price of public transportation, (and) made more scholarships available for students.” In addition, he built roads and schools in rural areas. “That’s why the elite classes can’t stand him and why we want him back. This is really a class struggle.” One the Resistance is detemined to win and hardliners aim to crush.

The Coup d’ Etat

On June 28, dozens of Honduran soldiers stormed Zelaya’s residence at night, arrested him in his pajamas at gunpoint, and exiled him to Costa Rica in violation of the 1982 Constitution that states:

“No Honduran may be expatriated nor delivered by the authorities to a foreign state,” nor may a democratically elected leader be deposed.

On July 3, the Honduran army’s top lawyer, Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, admitted as much in a Miami Herald interview saying: “We know there was a crime there. In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”

He meant protection from the Constitution’s Article 239 (crafted by a military government to subordinate civilians to repressive rule) that states: “No citizen that has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

Also, Article 374 stating:

It is not possible to reform, in any case, the preceding article, the present article, the constitutional articles referring to the form of government, to the national territory, to the presidential period, the prohibition to serve again as President of the Republic, the citizen who has performed under any title in consequence of which she/he cannot be President of the Republic in the subsequent period.

Zelaya didn’t suggest it or break the law in calling for a simple non-binding June 28 “yes” or “no” referendum on one question:

Do you think that the November 2009 general elections should include a fourth ballot box (the other three being for candidates) in order to make a decision about the creation of a National Constituent Assembly that would approve a new Constitution?

The Honduran Congress and military opposed it. The CSJ illegally ruled it unconstitutional, ordered no distribution of ballot boxes, and threatened those doing it with 8-12 years in prison for “abuse of authority.” The High Court and Congress are stacked with right-wing ideologues. In addition, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs calls the CSJ “one of the most corrupt institutions in Latin America.”

So is the military whose officers from captain on up have been trained for decades at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA), renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISEC), where they’re taught the latest ways to kill, maim, torture, oppress, exterminate poor and indigenous people, overthrow democratically elected governments, assassinate targeted leaders, suppress popular resistance when it erupts, and work cooperatively with Washington to solidify hard-right rule, intolerant of progressive change — familiar tactics since June 28.

The day before, the military set off a chain of events. Reports said Zelaya fired Joint Chiefs Head General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez for refusing to distribute ballot boxes. He denied it. Velasquez may have resigned on his own. So did Defense Minister Edmundo Orellana and several military commanders. Nonetheless, the CSJ and Congress called Velasquez’s dismissal illegal. Military forces deployed around Tegucigalpa, surrounded the Presidential Palace, and took over the airport and borders in advance of the planned coup, made in Washington, of course, like numerous others for decades.

Zelaya, nonetheless, ordered ballot boxes distributed. Congress recommended removing him. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office announced that anyone setting up polling stations or promoting the referendum would be prosecuted. Anti-Zelaya forces urged a boycott.

Right-wing media hype called the vote illegal, a ploy to re-elect Zelaya, a way to shift his conservative Liberal Party far-left, a scheme to solidify his Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) membership and let Chavez make Honduras socialist. In a pro forma June 29 pronouncement, the CSJ reinstated Velasquez. The Catholic Church backed the coup government. Months of terror followed, including:

• imposing military rule, martial law, and a state of siege;
• deploying combat troops on city streets;
• suspending civil liberties, including habeas, the right of assembly, free movement and free expression;
• committing thousands of human rights violations;
• thousands more illegal arrests;
• dozens of killings, beatings, kidnappings, and nationwide intimidation;
• according to the human rights NGO Comite de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared – COFADEH), torturing and sodomizing men and gang-raping women;
• reactivating the infamous Battalion 316, the CIA-created death squads that disappeared, tortured, and exterminated regime opponents in the 1980s;
• silencing the independent media; and
• harassing and arresting Honduran and foreign journalists; at least one was murdered, Gabriel Fino Noreiga on July 3.

Barack Obama ignored the worst of state terror in support of coup d’etat rule — no surprise from a president calling the fraudulent Afghan election “a step forward…to advance democracy, peace and justice… in “the interests of the Afghan people (and) a reflection of a commitment to the rule of law.”

Post-coup on Veneuela’s TV Telesur, Zelaya called his ouster a:

kidnapping. An extortion of the Honduran democratic system. And I will ask the presidents of the Americas, including the US president — I want to hear the US Ambassador Hugo Llorens in Tegucigalpa if they are behind this, and if not, clear it up, because if the US is not behind this coup, they won’t be able to stay there forty-eight hours.

For over 100 years, Washington repeatedly intervened in Central and Latin American affairs — by invasions, bombings, occupations, assassinations, countless episodes of destabilization and election rigging, and numerous coup d’etats against leaders it wished to depose.

Zelaya was the latest, confirmed by the Obama administration’s refusal to cut diplomatic ties, halt military aid, impose sanctions as US law requires, or call the ouster a coup.

Announced Deal

On October 30, New York Times writers Ginger Thompson and Elisabeth Malkin headlined, “Deal Set to Restore Ousted Honduran President.” To what given the agreed on terms. On October 29, AP reported that:

“opposing political factions resumed talks (today in hopes of reaching a deal) to end the power crisis that has paralyzed the country” since June 28. “The two sides returned to the negotiating table a day after visiting US diplomats urged both factions to be more flexible and find a solution (ahead of) scheduled” November 29 presidential, parliamentary, and municipal elections.

Terms of the So-Called Agreement/Accord

Signed on October 30, it’s for Congress and the CSJ to approve it. Titled “Accord for National Reconciliation and the Strengthening of Democracy in Democracy,” it’s as Orwellian as “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Post-coup, The Hill.com reported that the far-right Business Council of Latin America (CEAL) hired former Bill Clinton special counsel, Lanny Davis’ firm, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, to lobby Congress and conduct a supportive PR campaign for its leaders. Lobbyist Bennett Ratcliff was enlisted to work with Davis, and according to an unnamed source in the New York Times, the Micheletti government hasn’t made a move without first consulting him.

These men, their associates, and legal staff prepared the Accord, the way business sectors craft all Washington legislation affecting them.

It begins saying:

We, Honduran citizens, men and women, convinced of the need to strengthen the rule of law, protect our Constitution and the laws of our Republic, deepen democracy and ensure a climate of peace and tranquility for our people, have carried out an intense and frank process of political dialogue to seek a peaceful and negotiated solution to the crisis in which our country has been submerged in recent months.

Terms include:

1. Forming a “National Unity and Reconciliation Government.”

Fact Check

Only hardliners need apply, and if reinstated, Zelaya will finish his term as an impotent puppet head of state.

2. Renouncing “a Call for a National Constituent Assembly and Amending the Unamendable Articles of the Constitution.”

Fact Check

According to Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran “Civil Participation Act,” government officials may hold non-binding inquiries (referenda) to determine popular support for proposed measures. Gauging sentiment for a National Constituent Assembly for a new Constitution is legal. Illegally, Washington and Honduran hardliners stopped it.

3. The coup regime calls on Hondurans to “peacefully participate in the coming general election and to avoid any type of demonstrations that oppose the elections of their results, or promote insurrection, unlawful conduct, civil disobedience or other acts that could result in violent confrontations or transgressions of the law.”

Fact Check

Honduran coup opponents called for an election boycott. On September 15, so did Zelaya saying: “One cannot talk about the elections where there are no guarantees that the will of the people is going to be respected.”

On October 24, 300 members of the two dominant parties, the National Party (PL) and Liberal Party (PL), announced they’ll refuse to participate. Will they now after the Accord was signed?

If some reports are accurate, Zelaya capitulated to coup d’etat terms by calling the Accord a democratic “triumph” – even though trade unionist independent candidate and National Resistance Front member Carlos Reyes and legislative deputy Cesar Ham of the small leftist Democratic Unification (UD) party dropped out of the presidential race on September 9. Most of the remaining PN and PL candidates are conservative hardliners who’ll assure no possibility of democratic change.

The elections will fill 2,896 positions, including the presidency, all 128 National Congress deputies, 20 others to represent Honduras in the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), 298 mayors and another 2,000 municipal officials.

4. The Honduran military and police will be “placed at the disposition of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal from one month before the general elections for the purpose of guaranteeing the free exercise of suffrage, the custody, transport and surveillance of electoral materials and other security aspects of the process.”

Fact Check

Hardline security forces will subvert democratic change. Hondurans will be disenfranchised if they back the charade. In betraying his supporters, Zelaya capitulated, meaning he’ll support coup d’etat authority.

5. The CSJ and Congress will “resolve the issue regarding ‘restoring possession of the Executive Power to its status prior to June 28 until conclusion (of) the current governmental period on January 27, 2010.”

Fact Check

Two hard-right bodies will decide IF Zelaya is reinstated and on what terms. He’ll be impotent by agreeing to the charade.

6. A “Verification Commission” will be created “to verify commitments made under this Accord and those deriving from it… composed of two (coup lackey) members of the international community and two members of the national community, the last two to be chosen, one each, by” Micheletti and Zelaya.

Fact Check

Staunch Washington ally, Ricardo Lagos, former Chilean president, and Obama’s Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, will represent the international community along with Jorge Eduardo Idiaquez, Zelaya’s UN ambassador, and coup lackey, Arturo Corrales Alvarez. A three to one edge assures no chance for democratic change.

7. The coup regime calls for “Normalization of Relations between the Republic of Honduras and the International Community” to restore the status quo.

Fact Check

The regime wants international recognition for its illegitimacy, continued hardline policies, and apparently will get it.

8. The Verification Commission will handle “differences regarding interpretation or application of this Accord…”

Fact Check

Hardliners want rubber stamp approval. Commission members chosen will assure it.

9. The Accord is effective on signing. The “following calender for compliance” was agreed on:

(1) On October 30, signing the Accord into effect, delivering it to Congress, and having it rule on Point 5, “Regarding the Executive Power.”

(2) On November 2 or no later than November 5, forming the Verification Commission and establishing the “National Unity and Reconciliation Government.”

(3) On January 27, “celebrating the transfer of government.”

The Accord was agreed to by Micheletti and Zelaya representatives, Thomas Shannon, the former US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and Obama’s yet-to-be confirmed ambassador to Brazil. Ostensibly, it will return Zelaya to office in exchange for international support for subverting democracy and continuity under far-right officials taking over in January.

It also assures his impotence. Hardliners will be empowered. Constitutional change will be prohibited. Democracy will be subverted. Zelaya must distance himself from Hugo Chavez. Perhaps other regional center-leftists as well. Coup plotters will get amnesty, and Zelaya may still be tried for treason for ordering a legitimate referendum.

What’s Next?

With elections in a few weeks, hardliners may stall, obstruct, and from what Micheletti advisor, Marcia Facusse de Villeda, told Bloomberg News maintain the status quo until new officials take office in January.

“Zelaya won’t be restored,” she said. Further, “just by signing this agreement we already have the recognition of the international community for the elections.” From Washington for sure according to Thomas Shannon. On November 4, Al Jazeera reported that he: “told CNN en Espanol (on November 3) that the US will recognise the November 29 elections even if the Honduran congress votes against Zelaya’s return to power before the vote.”

No surprise, and according to Micheletti aide, Arturo Corrales, Congress isn’t in session so approving the Accord will come “after the elections.” Yet, according to hondurasthisweek.com, the congressional Executive Committee (Junta Directiva) met on November 3 to evaluate the Accord, but what’s next is anyone’s guess as Congress president, Jose Alfredo Saavedra, hasn’t convened an extraordinary legislative session to decide on reinstatement. Nor has the CSJ ruled, yet the November 5 midnight deadline came and passed.

Zelaya Reacts

Still holed up at the Brazilian embassy under threat of arrest, Zelaya told Radio Globo: “There’s no sense in deceiving Hondurans.” His negotiator, Jorge Reina, said the Accord is dead because Congress failed to vote by the agreed on date and added:

“The de facto regime has failed to live up to the promise that, by this date (November 5), the national (unity) government would be installed. And by law, it should be presided by the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.” Reina accused Micheletti of arranging “a great electoral fraud this November. We completely do not recognize this electoral process. Elections under a dictatorship are a fraud for the people.”

According to AP: “Shortly before midnight, Micheletti announced that a unity government had been created even though Zelaya had not submitted his own list of members. Micheletti said the new government was composed of candidates proposed by political parties and civic groups.”

In other words, mostly hardliners to solidify coup d’etat rule even though earlier hondurasthisweek.com cited a November 1 Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia report saying Tegucigalpa diplomatic sources told the paper that Thomas Shannon forced Zelaya’s compliance or risk his son, Hector’s, prosecution on drugs trafficking. He lives in America. Zelaya complied, but as of November 6 no longer. Nonetheless, events are fast moving with likely new developments in the hours and days ahead.

At issue is how the international community will react if a fake national unity government is established and elections precede a vote on Zelaya’s reinstatement.

The Organization of American States’ (OAS) Secretary-General, Jose Miguel Insulza, said he’s creating a “mission” to assure compliance, meaning Zelaya must be reinstated once Congress and the CSJ agree. However, no deadlines are set, so hardliners may run out the clock and declare victory. They’ve already won even though The New York Times reported that:

“As news of the agreement spread, residents poured from their homes and workplaces across Tegucigalpa, the capital, to celebrate. Jubilation broke out in streets,” with more likely if Zelaya’s reinstated. It’s not assured. Neither is what’s next if it comes. What if delay and obstruction follow, and what if Venezuelan lawyer, author, and close Chavez confidant, Eva Golinger, is right about more Washington-instigated “coups in Paraguay, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela, where subversion, counterinsurgency and destabilization increase daily.”

Latin America is being more militarized, the result of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe giving the Pentagon access to seven new military bases with US forces currently on nine others, supplemented by the April 2008’s Fourth Fleet’s reactivation after a 60 year hiatus. Now the Honduran coup suggests other regimes outside the US orbit or not enough in it may be targeted. Add Bolivia to Golinger’s list and still more if center-left regimes take over.

The Honduran Resistance Reacts

In an October 1 interview, National Resistance Front leader, Juan Barahona, said:

“We will not stop. We will continue to be against the coup until the last day they are in power. After the June coup, the level of consciousness has greatly risen. There has been a parting of waters. This is a struggle between classes: on one side the exploited people, and on the other the capitalists, the large capitalists that dominate this country. (It’s a) struggle of the poor against the rich….” Overwhelming public sentiment wants a referendum calling for a National Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution.

Will popular resistance demand it? On November 5, two of its leaders appeared in Washington at an event to restore democracy and human rights in Honduras: Bertha Oliva, COFADEH founder, and Jessica Sanchez of the National Alliance of Honduran Feminists in Resistance.

On November 4, a London protest was held at the US Embassy for the same purpose. It also stressed “end(ing) all US economic, political and military support to” the Honduran dictatorship. Speakers included trade unionist leader Tony Burke, other activists, and Jeremy Corbyn MP.

The UK Trades Union Congress (TUC), “the voice of Britain at work (with) 58 affiliated unions representing nearly seven million working people,” called on MP David Miliband, Secretary of State Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, “to increase pressure” on hardliners “to restore democracy and to strongly condemn the series of human rights violations” post-coup.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing 170 million workers in 158 countries, unanimously passed a resolution at its recent Berlin General Council meeting calling for:

– suspending Honduran trade preferences and financial aid and cooperation until democracy is fully restored; and

– not cooperating with the bogus November elections by sending observers.

On October 31, the National Resistance Front told Hondurans:

• “We celebrate the upcoming restoration of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales as a popular victory over the narrow interests of the coup oligarchy;”
• the Accord mandates “returning the holder of executive power to its pre-June 28 state (and assuring) a democratic framework in which the people can exercise their right to transform society;”
• the Accord must “be processed in an expedited fashion by the National Congress; we alert all our comrades….to pressure for the immediate compliance;”
• “We reiterate that a National Constituent Assembly is an unrenounceable aspiration of the Honduran people and a non-negotiable right for which we will continue struggling in the streets, until we achieve the re-founding of our society to convert it into one that is just, egalitarian and truly democratic….(After over four months) of struggle, nobody here surrenders!”

One of its leaders, Rafeal Alegria, told Prensa Latina: “The people will not approve the electoral farce the putschists are preparing. The only solution to the conflict is the restitution of democratic legality and the president elected by the people.”

Key now is follow-through, persistence, and staying mobilized for the long haul. Popular victories come only at great cost after years of struggle the way noted journalist IF Stone explained: “The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins…”

It’s for Hondurans and oppressed people everywhere to understand, persevere, and endure, no matter what.

Obama told reporters Monday that he had emphasised to Karzai in a phone call to congratulate him on his re-election that there would have to be “a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption” and that “the proof is not going to be in words, it’s going to be in deeds”.

The New York Times reported the day after the Obama-Karzai conversation that the Obama administration wants Karzai to prosecute certain high-profile figures who are known to be involved in corruption. The story referred to the president’s brother, Kandahar warlord Ahmed Wali Karzai, former defence minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.

And on Wednesday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Karzai must “take concrete steps to eliminate corruption”, adding it means “you have to rid yourself of those who are corrupt, you have to actually arrest and prosecute them”.

The new public rhetoric and press stories have given the impression that the Obama administration is now pursuing far-reaching reform of Afghanistan’s system of governance. But the sudden intensification of administration pressure on the issue of corruption is aimed less at far-reaching reform of the system than at avoiding a significant worsening of the problem in the wake of Karzai’s fraudulent re-election.

In return for their pledges to guarantee huge majorities for Karzai in the Aug. 20 election, the Afghan president had to make promises to a number of power brokers or warlords in the provinces. Some of those were promised key ministries in the next government, according to Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The main concern in Kabul and Washington in the wake of Karzai’s reelection is how many of the warlords to whom Karzai is indebted will be rewarded with ministries when the new cabinet is announced,

“Everybody who supported Karzai now expects their payback,” said Dorronsoro, who spent the entire month of August in Afghanistan.

It is understood that the Obama administration’s pressure on Karzai over the corruption issue is aimed in large part at heading off the nomination of some of the most incompetent and corrupt warlords to key ministries, and that Karzai is aware of this U.S. concern.

It now seems very likely, however, that some lucrative ministries will be given to warlord allies of Karzai.

Dorronsoro believes the administration’s influence on Karzai’s new government is going to be constrained by Karzai’s dependence on provincial and sub-provincial warlords who control the actual levers of power outside Kabul. The U.S. pressure on Karzai “can only work on a few ministries and a few issues”, he told IPS.

It is understood here that administration officials are well aware of the political constraints on Karzai imposed by the power of warlords in the provinces. They understand that reforming the governance system of Afghanistan cannot be achieved simply by leaning on Karzai.

“There is no Afghan government in the way there is an American government,” counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen observed on a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace last August. “There are only a series of fiefdoms.”

Kilcullen cited those warlord fiefdoms, and the lack of law and order that accompanies them, as the main driver of popular support for the Taliban insurgency.

The power of the warlords, which U.S. policy abetted by providing them with cash, arms and legitimacy in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, poses serious obstacles to any U.S. initiative aimed at reducing corruption.

Although U.S. commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal warned that U.S. ties with regional power brokers have alienated much of the Afghan population from foreign troops, U.S. and NATO military contingents remain heavily dependent on them for provision of perimetre security for their fixed bases and to protect supply convoys, as IPS reported last week.

Even the idea of prosecuting the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai over his role in the drug trade is likely to generate disagreement within the administration, because the CIA’s operations directorate continues to use his paramilitary organisation for intelligence and counterinsurgency operations.

There is no evidence that the administration is moving toward a more aggressive posture toward the warlords in general. Instead, the problem is viewed as one in which U.S. interests in supporting the central government must be balanced with its interests in cooperation with provincial and sub-provincial power holders, IPS has learned.

National security officials tend to believe, for example, that the way to handle the problem of abuses by the militia personnel and police affiliated with individual warlords is not to take on the warlords but to do more to train national police.

Despite the flurry of activity on the corruption issue, the administration still hasn’t decided what approach it should adopt to promote governance and anti-corruption reforms. Several different options are said to be still under discussion.

One of the approaches being proposed by some officials is to get Karzai to agree to a detailed plan of action which would involve both the United States and other states heavily involved in Afghanistan, as reported by McClatchy Monday.

The report referred to the plan as the “Afghanistan Compact” and said the administration had been working with the Karzai government and other allied governments “for months”, according to McClatchy.

But an intelligence official told McClathchy he was doubtful about such a compact, because it would require Karzai to renege on promises he had made to his warlord allies.

A previous “Compact on Afghanistan”, which was agreed to by the Karzai government and 50 other states at a conference in London on Feb. 1, 2006, has been an embarrassing failure.

That document included benchmarks for progress in bringing about the rule of law, human rights, public administration reform and “anti-corruption”, among other areas, by the end of 2010. In those politically sensitive areas, however, the Karzai regime not only did not deliver on the 2006 pledges but has even retrogressed on many of the targets.

Some officials are suggesting that the administration avoid using the term “compact” altogether, because of the well-known fate of the previous effort.

One of the problems associated with trying to get Karzai to do anything about governance and corruption, IPS has learned, is that it has taken months in the past to work out any agreement with Karzai on any politically sensitive issue. There is now a sense in the administration, however, that it may not have that much time to have an impact on Karzai’s behaviour.

Al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar — Washington’s principal enemy leaders in the Afghan war — are not only alive, free and still taunting the White House after all these years, but appear to believe they now have the upper hand in Afghanistan.

Bin-Laden’s purpose has always been to draw the United States ever deeper into armed conflict with Islamic society in order to degrade America’s image, undermine its economy, and gain recruits. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan played directly into al-Qaeda’s hands, as will Washington’s effort to widen the Afghan conflict, especially as it stabs into Pakistan and alienates its masses of people in the process.

So far the two wars launched by President George W. Bush have cost the U.S. the antagonism of much of the Muslim world, serious erosions of its own democracy and reputation, and over a trillion dollars. Even if the wars end soon, says Nobel Prize economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the overall expenditure — including everything from long term care for severely injured troops to interest on the war debt — will exceed $3 trillion, enough to end world poverty and hunger.

Speaking about Afghanistan this summer, President Barack Obama declared: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” Many war opponents argue that it is indeed a war of choice, and that international police work would have been far more successful and just.

We’ll discuss this later in the article, along with the fact that the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, and for that matter the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy, need not have occurred had Washington taken less warlike actions in the key year of 1978, as well as 2001 and 2003. The fact that the U.S. has intervened deeply and for long periods over the past 31 years in a civil war in poverty-stricken, virtually pre-industrial Afghanistan, is probably not understood by many Americans.

Upon assuming office, President Obama instructed the Pentagon to devise a winning strategy for Afghanistan. Within weeks the White House agreed to a new war plan submitted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that was supposed to lead to a U.S. victory. In March, Obama expanded the Afghan war when he heeded a Pentagon request and ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to join the battle.

Several months later, however, McChrystal reported that the situation has deteriorated to the point where the war — ever more clearly displaying its neocolonial aspect — “will likely result in failure” within a year unless his forces increase by a minimum of 45,000 troops and a maximum of 80,000.

Obama has been engaged in “rethinking” war strategy since receiving the general’s verdict several weeks ago. He is expected to soon decide whether to deploy a larger number of additional troops to join 68,000 American fighters already scheduled for Afghanistan and about 50,000 NATO soldiers. This total presumably includes the 13,000 troops Obama also deployed without informing the American people, until the Washington Post broke the story in mid-October.

The White House is investigating two options for continuing the conflict — both of which would intensify the war and spread it more deeply into Pakistan. As briefly summarized by The Economist Oct. 17 they are “manpower-intensive counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by Special Forces.”

McChrystal, who appears to be supported by top Pentagon brass, backs COIN, which includes a counter-terrorism aspect as well as “winning the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, an effort that utterly failed when tried in Vietnam, and will fail in Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and some other administration advisers back the lower intensity counter-terrorism option without greatly expanding the number of troops or engaging in “nation building.”

If McChrystal’s minimum request is accepted it means a combined U.S.-NATO force of over 160,000 troops, not including scores of thousands of “contractors” doing duties previously performed by soldiers until recent years.

Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector who testified before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had this to say about McChrystal’s request for more troops in a Truthdig.com article Oct. 29:

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation.

At this stage the U.S, NATO and their Afghan forces enjoy at least a 12-1 advantage in troop strength against the opposing forces, not to mention air power, drone attacks and an enormous technological, logistics and communications advantage. This increases to 20-1 if McChrystal’s minimum kicks in — and that’s evidently still not enough to defeat the insurgency. The latest word from the White House and Pentagon is that the new strategy may devolve to holding Afghanistan’s 10 largest cities and leaving the countryside to fend for itself, except for air strikes.

Our guess is that Obama will view the issue politically, as well as militarily, and being an inveterate centrist will try to merge both positions, increasing the number of troops but fewer than McChrystal desires. No one knows for sure, but he is intentionally creating suspense to magnify the importance of his eventual plan.

The Washington Post reported Oct. 26 that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently conducted theoretical war games to examine “the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed ‘counterterrorism plus.’”

Complicating the situation, Washington’s hand-picked Afghan leader, President Hamid Karzai, is presiding over a thoroughly corrupt government and an alienated population. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a drug lord and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, who has been on the CIA’s payroll since the beginning of the war, along with innumerable warlords and disreputable officials. The UN has ascertained that last August’s elections were so fraudulent, mainly by far from Karzai’s side, the a run-off election was set for Nov. 7 between the incumbent and his independent rival, Abdullah Abdullah, M.D., who won 30.5% of the vote.

On Nov. 1, Abdullah — who had long been associated with the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance, for which he was a deputy foreign minister at one time — announced his withdrawal from the second round voting. He attributed his decision to the refusal by the government and election commission to accept his recommendations for changing balloting rules to prevent foul play.

The Obama Administration has been far more critical of Karzai than Bush, and it is said to have preferred a Karzai-Abdullah power-sharing arrangement to Karzai alone. Since Abdullah withdrew without calling for an election boycott or public demonstrations on his own behalf, he may yet end up associated with the new government in some fashion.

Even though the election affair has not transpired precisely the way Washington wished, it will have little impact on White House war plans. President Obama, who heretofore identified Afghanistan as the main danger, not Iraq, now says the danger has spread to Pakistan as well — an unanticipated but logical result of the Bush wars. The tribal areas of Pakistan are the target of increased U.S. air power, missile attacks, pilotless drones, and Special Forces engagements.

The Obama Administration is exerting heavy pressure on the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari, and investing another $7.5 billion in new aid, to intensify efforts to crush al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban (which was only formed in 2007) and other groups in the mountainous western section of the country. This has created increasing anti-American sentiment among the masses of people in Pakistan who think Zardari is a virtual puppet of Washington. In a public opinion poll last August, some 60% of the Pakistani people view the U.S. as the greatest threat to their country compared to India or al-Qaeda.

In order to prevail in Afghanistan — or in Af-Pak, as the two-front war is described — President Obama evidently is considering a major compromise with the Taliban. Associated Press reported Oct. 9 that “President Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future,” both locally and in the central government. In addition the White House and Pentagon will seek to bribe the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. troops, as was done with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, by inducing former opponents to get on Washington’s payroll. The Pentagon is putting aside $1.3 billion to pay Taliban effectives who wish to “reintegrate into Afghan society.”

Most Americans have little understanding of what’s going on in Afghanistan, and no knowledge of the complex events that led up to President Bush’s bombardment and invasion in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The fact is that today’s war in Afghanistan is one of several disastrous consequences of U.S. interference in Afghanistan starting in 1978.

Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized with a population of about 29 million, and strategically located where the rich geopolitical resources of the Middle East and Central Asia converge, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this desperately poor country until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April 1978, this time led by left forces and military officers determined to enact reforms to “bring Afghanistan into the 20th century.”

The resulting ruling group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set about introducing modernizing reforms, including laws conferring equality upon the country’s oppressed women, and improving the lot of working people and subsistence farmers. The law granting rights to women was observed in Kabul and some big cities, but usually ignored elsewhere in territory controlled by the warlords and Islamic fundamentalists.

The PDPA’s immediate establishment of closer relations with the neighboring Soviet Union set off alarm bells in Washington, which feared Moscow would gain an important pawn in the Cold War geopolitical chess game. Within months President Jimmy Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to subvert the new leftist regime by “secretly” aiding right-wing warlords and ultra-orthodox religious groups who were beginning an armed struggle to overthrow the PDPA government.

The planning was fully operational by mid-1979. Working with the Pakistani intelligence agency over the years, the CIA poured a minimum of $8 billion into the coffers of warlords and fundamentalist fighting groups. By early 1979, CIA operatives started training the mujahedeen (the collective name of the Muslim fighters) at camps it set up in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan itself. The U.S. also supplied them with sophisticated arms (such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles), military advisers, and logistical information for the next decade.

Writing in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps “became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.” In the words of William Blum in his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, “The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world…. Thousands of veterans of the war… dispersed to many lands to inflame and train a new generation of terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom.”

Among the recipients of U.S. largess and support in the mid-1980s was Osama bin-Laden and his new group of mostly foreign fighters in Afghanistan that by 1988 was formally titled al-Qaeda. (The name means, “the Base,” a reference to their training camp.) Bin Laden — the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family — also received support from Pakistan and from sources in Saudi Arabia.

By the summer of 1979, the right wing rebel forces were becoming a serious threat to the Kabul regime, which eventually requested that Moscow send troops to defend the regime. One year and nine months after the PDPA took power, the Red Army began arriving in December 1979. (We specify the exact time period because the Western mass media often suggest that deep U.S. involvement began after, not at least a half year or more before, the arrival of Soviet troops, and rarely mention their presence was requested by the Kabul government.

As Brzezinski bragged many years later, Washington’s plan from the beginning was to create conditions that would oblige the Soviet Union to become militarily involved in Afghanistan’s civil war, and suffer the same fate as the U.S. in Vietnam in the earlier 1970s. It worked. In time the Red Army found itself sinking in the quagmire that earned Afghanistan the title “Graveyard of Empires.”

For the next several years following the arrival of Soviet troops, the White House — now occupied by the rightist Reagan administration — continued to build up the rebel forces, many of which had fought each other before the 1978 coup. In time they were joined by up to 40,000 jihadist recruits from over 40 countries in the Muslim world. During the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan began to cynically describe the warlords and fundamentalist armies as “freedom fighters.”

Moscow began to withdraw in 1987 and completed the project by early 1989. The left wing government held on until it was brutally crushed in 1992. The subsequent four years of civil war between the various rebel forces — in which up to 65,000 people were killed in Kabul — resulted in a Taliban victory in 1996. The earlier reforms were quickly abolished, particularly those freeing women, and a draconian form of Islam was imposed throughout the country. The Taliban — which is a national organization as opposed to international al-Qaeda, was formed in 1994 by Mullah Omar and consisted of the most orthodox Afghan jihadists. The name Taliban means “religious students.”

The consequences of the Carter/Reagan intervention in Afghanistan made it possible for 19 Al-Qaeda operatives armed with box cutters to hijack four airliners to attack symbols of U.S. military and financial power in Washington and New York in the late summer of 2001.

The political reasons behind 9/11 included opposition to America’s support for the suppression of the Palestinians; anger over the 1991-2003 U.S.-UN sanctions that caused over a million Muslim deaths in Iraq, half of them children; Washington’s manipulative intervention in Middle East since the end of World War II; and the Pentagon’s stationing of troops in Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Even after the 9/11 tragedy, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan need never have occurred. It was a result of Bush’s bizarre decision to define the attack as a declaration of war against the United States instead of a gross criminal act by a small non-state organization of perhaps up to 1,000 active adherents only partially based in Afghanistan and largely composed of non-Afghans.

The rational alternative — worldwide police work, sanctions, homeland defense and other stringent measures — would certainly have been more successful against al-Qaeda, and far less costly for the United States, than eight years of fruitless war. Bush spurned this alternative not because war was a “necessity,” as the Obama Administration alleges, but to pursue neoconservative imperialist objectives for obtaining hegemony in the region under Bush’s banner of an endless “global war on terrorism.”

Further, just before the invasion, Taliban leader Omar told the U.S. he would turn over bin-Laden to a third country if Washington didn’t attack Afghanistan, as Bush was about to do. Mullah Omar had one condition: he asked the White House to provide evidence that the al-Qaeda leader was actually guilty. Bush’s response: “There’s no need to negotiate…. There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

As the American attack started, CIA teams were already on the ground in Afghanistan, once again paying off their old retainers, the warlords, with thick packages of $100 bills to intensify the civil war against the Taliban in concert with the invading Americans. At least $70 million was distributed in the first months of the war, mostly to the Northern Alliance, the big loser for power in Kabul in the ’90s.

Bush followed the Afghan adventure with a second war of choice in March 2003 — the transparently unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq. It turned into a costly stalemate but 120,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, and the Iraqi people continue to suffer mass privation and pain.

Afghanistan is not Washington’s “good war,” though it is now characterized in that fashion not only by the Republican right wing but by President Obama and many Democrats who were critical of “Bush’s” Iraq war. These are often the same “peace” Democrats who supported their own party’s unjust three-month bombardment of Yugoslavia (Serbia) in 1999. Obama was viewed as a peace candidate in the elections because he was critical of the Iraq war, though he nonetheless always voted as a senator to fund both wars, and made it clear he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

Now that a Democratic president is directing the war, Bush’s campaign against Afghanistan for regime-change and long-term U.S. occupation has become a new type of “humanitarian intervention.” This has gravely weakened the American antiwar movement, which is largely based on Democratic voters, but may not be permanent. Many Democrats of the Vietnam era eventually turned on President Lyndon Johnson after two or three years to the extent that he could not run for reelection. Then, again, that was during a decade-long period of mass movements for social change in America, as opposed to the conservative reaction that has basically continued for some 30 years.

In our view, as we wrote in 2001 just after the invasion: “If any brutal right-wing regime deserved to be overthrown by its own people, the Taliban is the perfect choice. But for the imperial superpower to arrogate the task to itself, with its planes, missiles, self-interest and hypocrisy, bodes ill for the long-suffering Afghan masses and the region in general. Indeed, this projection of U.S. military power deeper into strategically important Central Asia brings Washington closer to its goal of hegemony over the neighboring Islamic former Soviet republics, now discovered to be awash in oil and gas reserves.”

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. Speaking to a military audience recently, he sounded rather like his predecessor when he declared that fighting the war was necessary because “those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” So far, Obama’s troop buildup has inspired more attacks from the Taliban and other oppositional forces in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the situation can only get worse in proportion to the number of U.S. troops sent to the region.

What is Washington’s actual mission in the Af-Pak war? In a statement May 19, Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. Central Command, declared that “The mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists.”

This evidently is why President Obama is widening the war in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. But is this necessary? The White House acknowledges that there are at most 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point, but indicates that more have been driven across the border to Pakistan, without specifying how many.

Is it up to 500 perhaps? Could it be high as 1,000 adherents to al-Qaeda and other “transnational” extremists? For some reason the Pentagon doesn’t say, though it certainly must have a good estimate. In Afghanistan there are many thousands who are associated with the Taliban and similar groups, but these organizations operate strictly within their own borders, as does the Pakistani Taliban, and in no way have threatened to attack the United States.

Does it really require the killing of many hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, trillions of American dollars, and the fixated attention of our entire society to deny al-Qaeda a possible safe haven where they can plot to attack the United States? Wouldn’t it be better and far less costly to rely upon international police work, high technology surveillance, tight homeland security, sanctions if absolutely needed, and other means short of war, fair and foul, at Washington’s disposal?

Can it plausibly be denied that this would have been the better alternative in 2001, given the disastrous failure of Bush’s wars? In our opinion the answer is of course not, and it’s the better alternative in 2009 as well. What’s to prevent the Obama Administration from accepting this non-military alternative today, now that the neoconservatives are out of power? Two reasons present themselves: politics and international policy.

In terms of politics: Obama and the Democratic Party would rather wage these self-defeating wars than to be accused by the know-nothings of “cutting and running,” of being “weak on defense,” and of “lacking patriotism.” They fear these right-wing attacks will cost them elections in today’s highly conservative America, so instead of fighting back politically they bend the knee further to militarism and war.

In terms of international policy: Since the end of World War II — and particularly after the implosion of the USSR and the socialist camp two decades ago — the U.S. has functioned as the world’s dominating hegemon based on its willingness to use overwhelming military strength to extend its economic and political parameters throughout the world. A large number of Americans have been duped into believing it’s all being done to spread democracy and to keep people safe from the terrorists.

What has this gotten America lately? The U.S. is a declining superpower in deep economic difficulties. The recession, foreclosures and unemployment are crushing tens of millions of American families. Even without a recession, economic inequality is rampant; government social services are primitive; the civil infrastructure is becoming a shambles; the healthcare system remains a wreck, although a relative improvement may be forthcoming; and our political system, where the choices are confined to the right and center, needs an overhaul.

Meanwhile Washington’s wasting a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars “to save the world” (the $680 billion Pentagon budget Obama just signed is only part of it).

Antiwar critic Andrew Bacevich, a fairly conservative former Army officer and currently a professor and author of several important books on the military and U.S. policy, wrote an article in Commonweal Aug. 15 that contained a couple of paragraphs that fit in here:

“If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: ‘Come home, America.’ The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on ‘the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.’

“Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking — in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.”

We profoundly agree with this quote except for “inexplicable.” Obama has a number of attractive qualities, but he is a centrist in a political party of the center/center-right — an improvement over the competing mass party of the right/neocon-right/far-right, but hardly the politician to lead the struggle Bacevich suggests. Just getting him to avoid widening the unnecessary Af-Pak war any further, much less ending it, is daunting enough.

A majority of the American people want an end to the war, including a large majority of Democratic Party voters — and Obama says he is susceptible to public pressure. The problem is that the Democrats, who constitute the base of the U.S. peace constituency, left the movement in droves after their party won the elections. They don’t want to publicly protest Obama’s actions when he is under continual Republican attack on everything but the war.

This could change as the war continues and casualties mount, but it will have to be a major change with millions of people out in the streets demanding peace. Until then, the informal coalition of Republicans who vigorously uphold the war and “peace” Democrats who won’t stand against it will provide the White House with the public support it needs to continue the war indefinitely.

The U.S. decision to support the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in 1978 ultimately changed history in ways very costly to the peoples of the region and the United States. We dread to imagine the unintended consequences that will emerge from President Obama’s continuing display of American imperial hubris in the Af-Pak war.

Doppelganger theorists point out that Kim suffered a serious stroke in 2008. But since then, North Korean media reported 122 official visits he made to “factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest… to prove, presumably, that Mr. Kim was alive and well and very much in charge.”

Which possibility is less likely? That Kim made a miraculous recovery and adopted a grueling ceremonial schedule? Or that a stand-in cut the ribbons and took the bows? Cynics point out that Mr. Clinton himself has not been real since sometime in the 1980s, when he was replaced by an unprincipled testosterone-driven opportunist.

We should not be surprised that international diplomacy is now the practice of surrogates. Many of our military functions are subcontracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and other branches of Murder, Inc. We outsource torture and invade countries with (often mis) guided missiles. We live in the wondrous age of clones and drones.

Our political discourse is as synthetic as the foods we eat, driven by a demagogic logic that bears scant relation to reality. Our print and broadcast pundits prefer to generate outrageous headlines for a quick ratings spike than to craft helpful or thoughtful commentary. Hence the (oxy)moronic “Fox News” network. Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are as authentic and toxic as Kim Jong-il, alive or dead.

Television substitutes for millions of “personal” lives. Celebrities act as stand-ins for those who would rather watch than live. Sports and movie stars are grotesquely overpaid because mass audiences find it easier and more comforting to cheer and jeer for designated others than to puzzle out their own, less predictable, existences.

Our addictions to chemical additives and fast food in lieu of natural nutrients make us fat. Our addictions to trash talk and the mindless incitements of half-educated pundits and politicians degrade our mental and emotional functions. We are increasingly unable to differentiate garbage calories from natural energy or malignant chat from substantive civil discourse.

Advertisements once cautioned us to “Accept no substitutes.” But substitutes are mostly what we have now. Was the man who ran for president on a platform of positive change and moral responsibility abducted during his pre-inaugural trip to Hawaii? Was he replaced by the business-as-usual guy now in the White House, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Barack Obama?

Birthers who obsess about Obama’s citizenship are sniffing at the wrong fireplug. It’s not where Obama was born that matters, but where he went.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned in the 1830s that a standing army was a threat to democratic society. We now have one of the largest standing armies in world history. Military priorities supersede our increasingly critical social and civic needs. We squander our resources and terrorize innocent human beings by bombing Afghan villages instead of building schools and highways in our own country or providing health care for our citizens.

War is not a valid substitute for rational foreign or domestic policies. Where is the president, the politician or the pundit who will say so?

In a world of surrogates, substitutes and clones, a body-double for Kim Jong-il is not so scandalous. The original dictator – son of another dictator – did not seem all that fabulous a fellow anyway. So it’s hard to mourn his passing, or lament that phonies may be impersonating him.

In fact, maybe whoever’s pulling the strings could design a more humane model of Kim for the coming decades. Then we could follow their lead and improve all the ersatz bull dada which rules our own culture and our own lives.

Our political and military leadership has already encountered the third, fourth and fifth person. All of them say that they must investigate what happened in the “Molten Lead” operation.

They have three options:

- to conduct a real investigation.
- to ignore the demand and proceed as if nothing has happened.
- to conduct a sham inquiry.

It is easy to dismiss the first option: it has not the slightest chance of being adopted. Except for the usual suspects (including myself) who demanded an investigation long before anyone in Israel had heard of a judge called Goldstone, nobody supports it.

Among all the members of our political, military and media establishments who are now suggesting an “inquiry”, there is no one – literally not one – who means by that a real investigation. The aim is to deceive the Goyim and get them to shut up.

Actually, Israeli law lays down clear guidelines for such investigations. The government decides to set up a commission of investigation. The president of the Supreme Court then appoints the members of the commission. The commission can compel witnesses to testify. Anybody who may be damaged by its conclusions must be warned and given the opportunity to defend himself. Its conclusions are binding.

This law has an interesting history. Sometime in the 50s, David Ben-Gurion demanded the appointment of a “judicial committee of inquiry” to decide who gave the orders for the 1954 “security mishap”, also known as the Lavon Affair. (A false flag operation where an espionage network composed of local Jews was activated to bomb American and British offices in Egypt, in order to cause friction between Egypt and the Western powers. The perpetrators were caught.)

Ben-Gurion’s request was denied, under the pretext that there was no law for such a procedure. Furious, Ben-Gurion resigned from the government and left his party. In one of the stormy party sessions, the Minister of Justice, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, called Ben-Gurion a “fascist”. But Shapira, an old Russian Jew, regretted his outburst later. He drafted a special law for the appointment of Commissions of Investigation in the future. After lengthy deliberations in the Knesset (in which I took an active part) the law was adopted and has since been applied, notably in the case of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Now I wholeheartedly support the setting up of a Commission of Investigation according to this law.

The second option is the one proposed by the army Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defense. In America it is called “stonewalling”. Meaning: To hell with it.

The army commanders object to any investigation and any inquiry whatsoever. They probably know why. After all, they know the facts. They know that a dark shadow lies over the very decision to go to war, over the planning of the operation, over the instructions given to the troops, and over many dozens of large and small acts committed during the operation.

In their opinion, even if their refusal has severe international repercussions, the consequences of any investigation, even a phony one, would be far worse.

As long as the Chief of Staff sticks to this position, there will be no investigation outside the army, whatever the attitude of the ministers. The army chief, who attends every cabinet meeting, is the largest figure in the room. When he announces that such and such is the “position of the army”, no mere politician present would dare to object.

In the “Only Democracy in the Middle East”, the law (proposed at the time by Menachem Begin) stipulates that the Government as such is the Commander in Chief of the Israel Defense Forces. That is the theory. In practice, no decision at variance with the “position of the army” has ever been or will ever be adopted.

The army claims to be investigating itself. Ehud Barak represents – willingly or unwillingly – this position. The cabinet has postponed dealing with the matter, and that’s where things stand today.

On this occasion, the spotlight should be turned on the least visible person in Israel: the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, the ultimate Teflon-man. Nothing sticks to him. In this debate, as in all others, he just is not there.

Everybody knows that Ashkenazi is a shy and modest man. He hardly ever speaks, writes or speechifies. On television, he merges into the background.

This is how he looks to the public: an honest soldier, without tricks or ploys, who does his duty quietly, receives his orders from the government and fulfills them loyally. In this he differs from almost all his predecessors, who were boastful, publicity-crazy and loquacious. While most them came from famous elite units or the arrogant Air Force, he is a grey infantry man. The Duke of Wellington, seeing the huge amount of paperwork in his army, once exclaimed: “Soldiers should fight, not write!” He would have liked Ashkenazi.

But reality is not always what it seems. Ashkenazi plays a central role in the decision-making process. He was appointed after his predecessor, Dan Halutz, resigned after the failures of Lebanon War II. Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, new doctrines were formulated and put into action in the “Molten Lead” operation. I defined them (on my own responsibility) as “Zero Losses” and “Better to kill a hundred enemy civilians than to lose one of our own soldiers”. Since the Gaza war did not lead to a single soldier being put on trial, Ashkenazi must bear the responsibility for everything that happened there.

If an indictment were issued by the International Court in The Hague, Ashkenazi would probably be accorded the place of honor as “Defendant No. 1”. No wonder that he objects to any outside investigation, as does Ehud Barak, who would probably occupy the No. 2 place.

The politicians who oppose (ever so quietly) the Chief of Staff’s position believe that it is impossible to withstand international pressure completely, and that some kind of an inquiry will have to be conducted. Since not one of them intends to hold a real investigation, they propose to follow a tried and trusted Israeli method, which has worked wonderfully hundreds of times in the past: the method of sham.

A sham inquiry. Sham conclusions. Sham adherence to international law. Sham civilian control over the military.

Nothing simpler than that. An “inquiry committee” (but not a Commission of Investigation according to the law) will be set up, chaired by a suitably patriotic judge and composed of carefully chosen honorable citizens who are all “one of us”. Testimonies will be heard behind closed doors (for considerations of security, of course). Army lawyers will prove that everything was perfectly legal, the National Whitewasher, Professor Asa Kasher, will laud the ethics of the Most Moral Army in the World. Generals will speak about our inalienable right to self-defense. In the end, two or three junior officers or privates may be found guilty of “irregularities”.

Israel’s friends all over the world will break into an ecstatic chorus: What a lawful state! What a democracy! What morality! Western governments will declare that justice has been done and the case closed. The US veto will see to the rest.

So why don’t the army chiefs accept this proposal? Because they are afraid things might not proceed quite so smoothly. The international community will demand that at least part of the hearings be conducted in open court. There will be a demand for the presence of international observers. And, most importantly: there will be no justifiable way to exclude the testimonies of the Gazans themselves. Things will get complicated. The world will not accept fabricated conclusions. In the end we will be in exactly the same situation. Better to stay put and brave it out, whatever the price.

In the meantime, international pressure on Israel is increasing. Even now it has reached unprecedented proportions.

Russia and China have voted in favor of the endorsement of the Goldstone report by the UN. The UK and France “did not take part in the vote”, but demanded that Israel conduct a real investigation. We have quarreled with Turkey, until now an important military ally. We have altercations with Sweden, Norway and a number of other friendly countries. The French Foreign Minister has been prevented from crossing into the Gaza Strip and is furious. The already cold peace with Egypt and Jordan has become several degrees colder. Israel is boycotted in many forums. Senior army officers are afraid to travel abroad for fear of arrest.

This raises the question once more: can outside pressure have an impact on Israel?

Certainly it can. The question is: what kind of pressure, what kind of impact?

The pressure has indeed convinced several ministers that an inquiry committee for the Goldstone report has to be set up. But no one in the Israeli establishment – no one at all! – has raised the real question: Perhaps Goldstone is right? Except for the usual suspects, no one in the media, the Knesset or the government has asked: Perhaps war crimes have indeed been committed? The outside pressure has not forced such questions to be raised. They must come from the inside, from the public itself.

The kind of pressure must also be considered. The Goldstone report has an impact on the world because it is precise and targeted: a specific operation, for which specific persons are responsible. It raises a specific demand: an investigation. It attacks a clear and well-defined target: war crimes.

If we apply this to the debate about boycotting Israel: the Goldstone report may be compared to a targeted boycott on the settlements and their helpers, not an unlimited boycott of the State of Israel. A targeted boycott can have a positive impact. A comprehensive, unlimited boycott would – in my opinion – achieve the opposite. It would push the Israeli public further into the arms of the extreme Right.

The struggle over the Goldstone report is now at its height. In Jerusalem, the rising energy of the waves can be clearly felt. Does this portend a tsunami?

This ongoing crisis of sovereignty became critically intense when Pakistan, following the September 11 attacks, allowed the United States to conduct military operations in Afghanistan from Pakistani territory and dramatically increased the influence of the United States over national policy making, against the popular will. According to Ajay Behera writing for The Hindu, “Such developments have led to a dilemma regarding a clash between Pakistan’s national security policies and its very sovereignty. This development, however, is entirely self-generated,”¹ as a result of critical foreign policy choices made by the Musharraf regime after 9/11.

Musharraf, flaunting his ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ credentials, wanted a pretext to break free from the country’s ties with the Taliban regime, and , at home, with Islamic groups hitherto supported and sustained by the military and intelligence. 9/11 provided Musharraf with the pretext to achieve this by force and with support from the country’s Western allies and its secular-liberal elite. However, while this was to be done in order to restore sovereignty ‘for the supreme national interest’, in actuality it undermined the internal sovereignty of the state. Pakistan’s engagement in the US-led War on Terror and its operation in Waziristan leading to civilian damage was widely opposed and decried for being done under ‘diktat’ from the United States.

The War on Terror came home, but was seen as America’s war imported to the country by a sell-out pro-Western regime. Regular drone attacks by American spy planes resulting in huge collateral damage reinforced the image of the US as “an ally with a predatory footprint on sovereignty… The US-operated drone has become a powerful symbol of US violation of Pakistan’s territorial integrity.”² A backlash from the fiercely independent tribal areas began, engulfing the entire country, with suicide attacks and targetted hits on security and law enforcement agencies. In the midst of it all, a clumsy, failing government seemed utterly helpless to stem the tide, at best ‘looking Westwards’ for assistance in doing the West’s ‘dirty job’. Pakistan was at war with itself, its very sovereignty and national integrity at stake. It must be added, however, as Ajay Behera wrote in 2002, that the situation is inherently paradoxical, as “Pakistan has been forced into this situation by the Americans, yet it depends on their support to overcome it… While Pakistan tries to restore its internal sovereignty from the militants, it is gradually losing its external sovereignty to the United States… And, as the state is perceived to be losing its external sovereignty to the US, anti-US and anti-ruling class feelings are bound to grow. Pakistan’s self-generated dilemma will persist.”²

The United States needs a rethink on policy vis a vis Pakistan, disassociating it from its strategy in the occupied state of Afghanistan. If the United States truly wants a stable Pakistan, as it has claimed too often, it needs to look for options that respect the sovereignty of the country and take into account public unease against alliance with “a partner that makes a target out of another partner.”² Carrot and stick tactics do not work, and the massive public disapproval of US aid through the Kerry-Lugar bill should send that message to Washington. Washington’s policies have invariably centred around sitting regimes, the military and the intelligence, which is one reason that explains public disquiet over alliance with the United States. With all the frills and flounces of a ‘change’ in policy towards Pakistan, none seems to be on the horizons any time soon: “For now, the broad dynamic of seeking a partnership on strategic goals with reference to terrorism remains the same as under Bush. It remains driven by military tactics and the diplomatic management of negative outcomes… the Pentagon still remains the font of policy planning as well as execution.”² The war in Pakistan, however, is not winnable by military might_ just as it never was winnable in Vietnam, or Iraq, or in Afghanistan.

There are lessons, on the other hand, for policy makers in Pakistan. To rescue diminishing sovereignty, the ‘democratic’ representatives of the people must realize that true sovereignty, (in its temporal aspect), in any democratic state, resides in the people, and that public sentiment must be taken seriously. The spontaneous outpouring of public anger over the government’s role in the War on Terror expressed during the visit of Interior Minister Rehman Malik to the International Islamic University after a terrorist attack should be a wake-up call. Pakistani leaders need to see how the Kerry-Lugar Bill is in fact a litmus-test for the state’s representatives to salvage its threatened sovereignty. They need to rise to the occasion and reject the unpopular Bill with a single voice to “prove their worth as people who are capable of promoting and protecting the interests and dignity of the citizens of the country. Otherwise, whether democracy or dictatorship, Pakistan’s parliament is merely a rubber-stamp which follows the will of a handful of individuals who exercise their authority overlooking constitutionally defined institutional mechanisms.”³

To surmount the challenge to sovereignty, we need to redefine it and see for ourselves where it truly lies. Does it, as Washington’s neo-imperialists would have it, lie with the most powerful in might and main in the global arena, legitimizing military adventurousness and aggrandizement? Or does it, as our own ideological guides would tell us, lie in honouring and living by the ideological premise that defines us, and in empowering the people to whom the nation belongs? It is in reaching our answers through the signposts all along history’s boulevard that hope for winning back true sovereignty lies. We have arrived at the crossroads, where the ‘two roads diverge in the wood’, and the fatal choice confronts us. It is to be Now or Never.

1. Ajay Behera, ‘Pakistans Dilemma’, The Hindu, May 22, 2002.
2. Sherry Rehman, The News, May 14, 2009.
3. Nasim Zehra, ‘Kerry-Lugar Bill: A Critique’, The News, October 17, 2009.

Gilad was recently here for the JZ Festival in Shanghai’s Pudong district and he also taught; I’m assuming, at the JZ school. I can imagine the experience. The JZ Festival went off without a hitch in a beautiful park in the Pudong New Zone. The JZ school is situated in the former French concession among old houses and tree lined lanes. Between the lanes, the Jazz and the skyscrapers of Pudong, it must have been an intoxicating week. But we are supposed to be dissidents and radicals and some parts of Gilad’s article are lazy and dangerous. We need perspective.

Gilad writes, “China is a financial miracle.”

I have lived in Shanghai for eight years and a large part of my life is given to the underground music scene. But before we get to the reality of that we have to address the big problem. The myth of the “economic miracle”. This is not specific to China. This is a global myth. Let us start with a reminder of the state of the global system. According to the World Bank development indicators for 2008, 80% of the world, or 5.15 billion people, live on less than ten dollars a day with 3.14 billion of those, or half the world’s population, living on less than two dollars fifty.² The top 20%, as we are all aware, is divided into the so called middle classes and the super rich.

China is a fair reflection of this global trend. The most recently touted indicator has been the internet usage stats.³ China recently approached the 300 million mark for internet users. Economic commentators foamed at the mouth and noted that was equal to the entire population of the USA. Of course, what it actually represents is the creation of a 20% middle class to go with it’s remaining billion people who are on or below the subsistence mark. Gilad also states, “It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system.” That is simply not true. It is purely hard capitalism. Period. There is no restraint, there is a free for all that is destroying the countryside and resulting in monthly riots across the land.⁴

In any region of the world, a system which enriches a minority of the people while plunging the rest downwards — while destroying their land rights and environment — should never be called a miracle. It should be called a disaster.

It is also dangerous to freely mix ideas of state or government with people or culture. I love to live here and my experiences on the underground rock scene and with local artists have been amazing. However, a little reading or asking around the subject will reveal that writing, music and art has a glass ceiling that is directly imposed by state censorship. For every Jazz Festival that goes on there are a slew of cancelled events.⁵ During the Olympics, the entire music scene was forcibly shut down for a month by the police.⁶ The underground is allowed to exist, as long as it doesn’t try to go public. I might also mention that no word gets published in print media without being first read by the Xinhua Agency.

I love living in China and Shanghai. The people are great and the issues I bring up are not only relevant to China. I myself don’t like ‘China Bashing’ and the countless lazy stereotypes that appear in journalism about this complex country. However, Shanghai is the glossy facade for the rest of the country and it’s our job as radicals to always keep our perspective.

1. ”Autumn in Shanghai” by Gilad Atzmon
2. ”Global Issues Poverty Facts.”
3. ”China has close to 300 million internet users AFP.”
4. ”58,000 mass incidents in China in first quarter as unrest grows to largest ever recorded.”
5. ”Modern Sky Festival 2009” from China Music Radar.
6. ”The Clampdown” from China Music Radar.

We are being told to fear the swine flu virus, and then learn that the vaccine, which was supposed to be available in mid-October, won’t be ready for awhile.

It makes little difference anyhow, since about fifty million Americans don’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford the cost of vaccinations or treatment.

The ogres of health reform, also known as Republicans and the insurance industry, have already frightened Americans by spewing lies and hatreds no costumed kid could ever top.

The teabaggers, thousands of Americans dressed in work clothes but who seem to despise the working class, disgorge even more lies, half-truths, fear, and hatred, along with spurts of poisonous doses of racism and bigotry, since they have to blame someone for their own problems.

The minority party has long since ceased being the loyal opposition and are now just bitter and venomous cogs in the progress of society. These pseudo-patriot reptiles who have taken over the Republican party have further shown just how disloyal they truly are when they hissed at the President of the United States for winning the Nobel Prize and then cheered that Chicago lost the Olympics bid to Rio de Janiero. The increase of hate isn’t likely to level off soon.

Also not leveling off are unemployment, bankruptcies, housing foreclosures, and the problems caused by increased homelessness, all of which began increasing more than two years before Barack Obama became president. As long as the Party of No, with the assistance of Blue Dog Democrats, can block reform, don’t look for an eight-year-old wearing a devil’s costume to be the scariest thing around.

American taxpayers have doled out billions to banks, which have figured out new ways to scam their customers and clients. The taxpayers have also bailed out auto manufacturers who had frivolously spent more than a fleet of drunken sailors while not being able to figure out how to get their own operations in ship-shape competition.

Americans, who are struggling just to survive, are being tricked by banking, insurance, and investment portfolio executives who are wearing Cheshire cat grins while they continue to reap in millions in taxpayer-provided bonuses for being incompetent and inefficient.

The fear instilled by the 9/11 attacks led Americans to willingly yield some of their Constitutional rights, while pretending that such laws as the PATRIOT Act would protect them from further harm. The fear of the past eight years that has led to the theft of six Constitutional amendments is scarier than any costumed pirate.

Frightening is also having a mass media that prefer to do play-by-play reporting on the latest celebrity break-up or coupling, real or imagined, rather than looking into critical social issues.

Indeed, ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night don’t stand a chance of competing on Halloween with the fear that now exists in our country.

The Home Ministry has been planning a major offensive, due to start in November 2009, against Naxals, particularly in two Indian states – Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. A plan to deploy more than 70,000 paramilitary personnel has been chalked out. In order to combat Naxals, Chidambaram “favored the Indian Air Force firing on Naxals.” India has also “sought input from American security officials on how to best root out the leftist rebels.”¹ In September 2009 Chidambaram paid a four day visit to US that focused on India-US anti-terror cooperation, assistance in technology, assessment of security situation in South Asia and studying counter-terrorism institutions and structures.

Probably, US with its experience in “war on terror” after 9/11 is considered valuable, particularly its use of corporate media to create momentum for the occupation of Iraq by programming the public mind to go along with the state agenda, and highlight of the “evil of the other” not only to justify its genocidal violence, but also to conceal “real intentions” behind the occupation of Iraq.

Taking the fight against Naxals to a new level, the Home Ministry of India has sought to actively involve the mainstream media directly by issuing advertisements depicting “cold-blooded killings” of innocent citizens by Naxals. “Naxals are nothing but coldblooded murderers” the advertisement screamed across the corporate media. The visual showed a series of men, women and children brutally killed by Naxals. Upping the ante, media has been screaming all along that Naxals have been waging “a guerrilla war on the Indian state.”

The combined voice of the government and corporate media has heightened the threat posed by Naxals in order to rally public support with gripping fear about their own existence. It has drowned dissenting voices, and been trying to program the public mind to go along with the state agenda against Naxals. The corporate media is playing as the chief instrument of state propaganda. It is creating the momentum for the onslaught on Naxals. Josef Goebbels had this dictum: “If you say something often enough, the people will believe it.”²) Herman Goering, a Nazi, said, “People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”³

Naxals’ portrayal as enemies of the state and democracy breaks social link between these enemies and the society. Their status as enemies of the society would not only unite people against them, but also legitimize the “good” violence that exterminates them.

However, the collective violence of “all against one” requires concealment of entire truth. Any act or even any thought of making a victim of another casts a veil over truth. The power of the “scapegoat mechanism” lies in its deception and concealment.

Who Are Naxals?

Naxals belong to varied milieu – disempowered Dalits, destitute Tribals, middle class intellectuals, and privileged rich. They do not believe in parliamentary democracy, as they see power being still concentrated in the hands of the rich, upper class. So the objective of their four decade old struggle is to liberate disempowered and destitute masses from the exploitative and oppressive political system through armed struggle. In their long struggle, Naxals have used brutal tactics to further their cause.⁴ In 2008 there were 1591 Naxal-related violent incidents in which 721 were killed. By August 2009, in 1405 incidents 580 persons have been killed. Recently, on October 8, 2009 they are alleged to have killed seventeen police men in Maharashtra.

Naxals’ struggle has, naturally, drawn mixed reactions from the government and elites, and the marginalized Indian masses. Because of their armed struggle and brutal tactics, they are considered to be security threat to the sovereignty of the state. On the other hand, Naxals enjoy wide support among the marginalized people, who have been ignored by the successive governments for the past sixty years. The October 2008 report of an expert committee, appointed by the Planning Commission, acknowledged that “the main support for the Naxalite movement comes from dalits and adivasi tribals.”⁵ The report identifies “structural violence implicit in our social and economic system” as the main reason for Naxalite violence. Dalits and Tribals comprise one fourth of India’s population.

Condition of the Tribals

In the huge region of mineral rich forest in eastern and central India spreading from West Bengal through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh live indigenous people. These Tribals are the poorest of the poor in India. The mainstream media and the political pundits have not acknowledged that the cause of these people is not served in the largest democracy. The Tribals have no schools, no hospitals, no water, none of the amenities the state is supposed to provide. Successive governments have failed to address the basic needs of people in the poverty-stricken, but mineral rich, region. These places are epitome of neglect, deprivation and government corruption.

The Tribals are ruthlessly exploited by local landlords, traders, officials, mafia and contractors. Local police allegedly supports local mafia, landlords and traders. On January 8, 2009 seventeen Tribals were killed by the police in a fake “encounter”, according to Ramesh Varlyani, Chhattisgarh state Congress general secretary. In its scathing 118 page report “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police”, the Human Rights Watch pointed out “a range of human rights violations committed by police, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and extrajudicial killings.” It notes, “Several police officers admitted to Human Rights Watch that they routinely committed abuses. One officer said that he had been ordered to commit an “encounter killing,” as the practice of taking into custody and extra-judicially executing an individual commonly known. “I am looking for my target,” the officer said. “I will eliminate him…I fear being put in jail, but if I don’t do it, I’ll lose my position.””

The report also documents “the particular vulnerability to police abuse of traditionally marginalized groups in India. They include the poor, women, Dalits (so-called “untouchables”) and religious and sexual minorities. Police often fail to investigate crimes against them because of discrimination, the victims’ inability to pay bribes, or their lack of social status or political connections. Members of these groups are also more vulnerable to arbitrary arrest and torture, especially meted out by police as punishment for alleged crimes.”

Thus, the state has not only ignored to address basic concerns of tribal people, but also tried to destroy the voice and language of their victims by aligning with the exploiters. E.A.S. Sarma, former Commissioner of Tribal Welfare and former secretary, Expenditure and Economic Affairs, says, “Left extremism is a secondary issue. How many Tribals even know there is a government? Their only experience of the State is the police, contractors, and real estate goons. Besides, the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution grants Tribals complete rights over their traditional land and forests and prohibits private companies from mining on their land. This constitutional schedule was upheld by the Samatha judgement of the Supreme Court (1997). If successive governments lived by the spirit of the Constitution and this judgment, tribal discontent would automatically recede.”⁵

By violating their human dignity, value and rights, the state has committed violence against the Tribals. The tribal dissent, as Shoma Chaudhury says, “is a dissent out of desperation for human dignity, value and rights.”⁵ Among these poor, disempowered, and oppressed and exploited Tribals Naxals have wide support due to latter’s struggle for their cause. Prime minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged that “Left wing extremism requires a nuanced strategy, a holistic approach – it cannot be treated simply as a law and order problem. Despite its sanguinary nature, the movement manages to retain the support of a section of the tribal communities and the poorest of the poor in many affected areas. It has influence among certain sections of civil society, the intelligentsia and the youth.”

Criminalization of Politics

What has been missing in the dominant narrative of the government and corporate media is the necessity, in the light of Mumbai terrorist attacks, to have leaders with high level of personal integrity to provide effective leadership to India. It is well known that corruption and criminalization of politics in India are the two biggest hurdles for inclusive development. Shashi Tharoor in his book India: From Midnight to the Millennium sees “bureaucratic corruption and criminalization of politics as two of the most widespread problems facing India.” Bureaucratic corruption is largely a result of “the permit-license-quota Raj”. Tharoor cites as “the most dangerous phenomenon of independent India’s political life, the criminalization of politics, for many a lawbreaker has found it useful to become a lawmaker.”⁶

The controversy in 2004 over granting membership in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a top mafia don D.P. Yadav highlights the extent to which India’s political parties have become criminalized. According to police records D.P. Yadav is a “hardened professional criminal”. He was named in nine murder cases, three attempted murders, two dacoitees, and several cases of kidnapping for extortion. He has been charged under a number of acts, including the Excise Act, Gangsters’ Act, and Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act. His economic and muscle power has been welcomed with open arms by political parties. He entered into politics and was elected in 1989. He even held a ministerial position in the Utter Pradesh state assembly.

In the previous Manmohan Singh government, the Union Coal minister Sibu Soren was forced to step down when he was convicted of murder (though he was later acquitted on appeal). Surprisingly, Singh, who could identify “criminals” among common people, needed a law to define “criminal” in the case of politicians. He suggested that “the country needed a law to define the meaning of “criminal”, and who should and who should not be a minister.”⁷

Criminals enter into politics with their money and muscle power in order to gain influence and political power. This, in turn, ensures that the criminal cases against them may either be dropped or not proceeded with. The Times of India points out, “Indeed, today, far from shrinking at the thought of harboring criminal elements, parties seek them out, judging the muscle and money combination they represent to be emotive value. Rough estimates suggest that in any state election 20 percent of candidates are drawn from criminal backgrounds. For the parties, it means overflowing coffers and unlimited funds to fight elections and for the criminals it means protection from the law and respectability in the eyes of society.” Asia Human Rights Commission also observes that the nexus between criminals and political party benefits both: “Criminals protect the illegitimate interests of politicians and in turn obtain protection from them and their parties.” It further says that this mutually beneficial relationship works against the establishment of the rule of law.

This promising nexus between criminal-political party prompted India’s parliamentarians across party lines to join hands to refrain from passing legislation that would rid politics of criminal and corrupt elements. However, under 2003 Supreme Court ruling, the Election Commission has made it mandatory for candidates to disclose at the time of filing their nominations for election details including their criminal background (if any), and assets. However, the Court order does not disqualify criminal elements.

The disclosure law seemed to have little impact. Asia Human Rights Commission deplores, “Criminalization of politics in India is a growing problem, despite legal attempts to address it.” According to the National Election Watch, in 2004, out of 535 elected members of parliament (MPs), 128 MPs were with criminal records and 55 with serious criminal records. Most experts’ opinion is that the situation is deteriorating. As Himanshu Jha of the National Social Watch Coalition says, “The general opinion is that the influence of criminals in politics is steadily increasing.” This is confirmed by 2009 elections: out of 535 elected MPs 153 MPs were with criminal records and 74 with serious criminal records. That means, there is an increase of 19.5% in MPs with criminal records, and 34.5% in MPs with serious criminal records.

The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution pointed out that criminalization has become a worrying characteristic of India’s politics and electoral system. This tears into the moral fabric of the country and has an impact on governance.

Politicians are aware of “the impunity that is built into the very edifice of Indian politics and law.” The 1984 anti-Sikh riots confirm the impunity enjoyed by law-makers-cum-law-breakers. On April 7, 2009 a Sikh reporter Jarnail Singh hurled a shoe at the home minister Chidambaram in protest against the clean chit given by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to the two Congress leaders Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, prime accused of the riots. Even before they received clean chit, the Congress party gave them tickets to contest in 2009 elections. The gesture of the reporter was sparked by the deep, traumatic pain caused not only by the three day massacre of more than 3000 Sikhs (some were burned alive) during the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but also the impunity enjoyed by the politicians.

The massacre of Sikhs took place in the full public view. But there has been absolutely no accountability for those heinous crimes, because the system has collaborated with politicians to protect the guilty. Commenting on the involvement of the then Congress government in the riots, eminent journalist and writer Khushwant Singh said that probably the government of the day had a hand in it as it was organized violence.⁸ The violent mobs were provided with voters’ lists to identify the homes and business establishments of Sikhs.⁹

“The ’84 killings… were mercilessly planned and executed by the state, with a breathtaking disregard for governance and constitutional rights. After this bloodbath, the state and its partners-in-crime preferred to forget the bloody drama they had enacted.” Patwant Singh wonders, “Are the lives of innocent men, women and children of so little consequence to politicians and men in public office that they can be brutally murdered en masse in the country’s capital for over four days before an effort is made to stop the killings? Does it then have to take over 22 years and 10 inquiry commissions to book the guilty for the chilling inhumanity against the Sikhs.”

One may recall the speech of Rajiv Gandhi, who was immediately sworn in as the prime minister after his mother’s death, justifying the pogrom: “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”¹⁰ A Sikh wondered, “That’s okay. But were there only Sikhs sitting under that big tree?”

“Development” in Tribal Region

There has been a proposal for “development” in the tribal areas. Recently Chidambaram talked about “development” in this region. But he wanted Maoist-controlled areas to be liberated before any development programs could be launched there. Critics argue that it is the lack of development in the tribal inhabited region for the past sixty years that is the cause for their dissent and wide support to Naxals. So there is growing concern about the intentions of the government in taking security-centric strategy without disclosing the development plan for the mineral rich, but poverty stricken region.

In an interview, Chidambaram said that minerals were not meant to be kept buried under Mother Earth, and they have to be put to use. The land inhabited by the Tribals is the mineral heart land. There are huge deposits of iron ore, tin, bauxite, corundum and limestone, which multinational companies want to get their hands on. Government officials and private companies want the Union government to acquire the tribal lands for private investors in order to expedite the development of the states. So, development means displacement of the owners of the land, and mining. “Industrialization is a must for the state’s development since agriculture alone cannot support Jharkhand’s economy. If we stop acquiring land for private investors in Naxal-hit areas, the state will head for a major disaster,” said a state official.

Therefore, security-centric strategy serves the above purpose where major offensive against Naxals not only decimates Naxal control in the tribal region, but also displaces the Tribals from their lands. If Tribals no longer live on that land, the inconvenient Fifth Schedule of the Constitution will not apply.

Conclusion

Weapons and violence will lead us nowhere. Violence begets violence. Therefore, all the forces concerned should give peace a chance and begin dialogue to sort out genuine problems prevailing in Tribal areas. Instead of running democracy only on the strength of weapons and violence against its own citizens, government should aim at inclusive democracy and development.

1. Siddharth Srivastava, “India Plans All-Out Attack on Maoists,” in Asia Times (September 29, 2009).
2. John Pilger, “Lies and More Lies,” ZNet Commentary (September 23, 2003
3. Arundhati Roy, “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy: Buy One, Get One Free,” www.countercurrents.org (May 18, 2003).
4. Shoma Chaudhury, “Weapons of Mass Desperation,” in Tehelka Magazine 6:39, 3 October 2009.
5. Chaudhury, “Weapons of Mass Desperation,” Tehelka.
6. Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), reviewed by C.J.S. Wallia, IndiaStar Review of Books.
7. Seema Chishti, “India’s Love Affair with ‘Tainted’ Politicians,” in BBC News (August 2, 2004).
8. Basharat Peer, “Anti-Sikh Riots a Pogrom: Khushwant.”
9. “1984 Anti-Sikh Riots” in Wikipedia.
10. In 1998 Sonia Gandhi, wife of Rajiv Gandhi, officially apologized for the insensitive remarks.

Venezuela is far from the “dictatorship which has a facade of democracy” described by General Raúl Baduel, who has been accused of corruption. What kind of tyranny oversees a 70% increase of participation in presidential elections, as Chávez has, or the government holding 13 free and fair elections in 10 years?

Of course, Venezuelan society and democracy is imperfect. One example is that corruption remains a very real problem. Opponents have tried to use this issue to disparage the government, though it pre-dates the Chávez era. It is therefore ironic that when measures are taken to tackle it, as is the case in legal prosecutions, these are cited as examples of a clampdown on political freedoms. Many Chávez-supporting politicians are under investigation and it paints a distorted picture to focus only on prosecutions against those opposed to Chávez.

Taking the two most prominent cases of those aligned with the opposition. With Baduel, the military prosecutors investigating the disappearance of more than $18.6m in 2006 and 2007 while he was minister of defence have decided to prosecute. He has had all the rights to a defence lawyer and transparent trial, yet so far his defence has not produced any evidence to counter the charges of corruption.

Manuel Rosales, infamously a signatory to the decree backing the 2002 military coup against Chávez, is one of the most notorious cases. He has allegedly been unable to show the source of millions of dollars in assets both in Venezuela and abroad. He fled to Peru and requested political asylum, but being given asylum by Peru is not proof of innocence. Recently Bolivia nearly broke diplomatic relations with Peru for granting asylum to three ministers from a previous government charged with responsibility for the October 2003 massacre in which 67 people were killed by the Bolivian army.

What cannot be said of Venezuela is that the right to protest is threatened. This year alone, the opposition have staged dozens of marches free from state harassment. On numerous occasions opponents and marchers have been invited to address the nation from the National Assembly.

In contrast, it was only 20 years ago that protests were met by brutal repression in Venezuela, with the Caracazo massacre by state security forces leaving 276 dead according to official figures and up to 3,000, according to claims, once mass graves were uncovered.

The opposition’s hostile views of the Chávez government dominate the Venezuelan media. But that is not the reason why some radio stations were recently closed. These were operating illegally without proper licences and continued to refuse to comply with the law. More than 200 radio stations, most of which identify with the opposition, that were also operating irregularly but did renew their franchises continue to operate freely.

Respect for democracy is intrinsic to the particular model being followed by the Chávez government. It does not resort to violence – it wins elections. In contrast, it is noteworthy that the notable elements of the Venezuelan opposition have broadly sympathised with the illegal de facto government of Micheletti in Honduras. Maybe in Honduras we have a serious glimpse of what “democracy” would have been like in Venezuela had its violent attempts to overthrow Chávez been successful?

Take the case of Elliot Madison. The 41-year-old anarchist was arrested in Pittsburgh September 24 at the height of G20 protests.

Madison, a social worker and volunteer with The People’s Law Collective in New York City, was busted by a combined task force led by the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and Pittsburgh’s “finest.” The activist was charged with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime,” according to The New York Times.

Did the cops uncover a secret anarchist weapons’ cache? Were Madison and codefendant, Michael Wallschlaeger, a producer with the radio talk show “This Week in Radical History” for the A-Infos Radio Project, about to detonate a “weapon of mass destruction” during last month’s capitalist conclave that witnessed the obscene spectacle of our masters avidly conspiring to impoverish billions of the planet’s inhabitants?

Hardly! In fact, Madison and Wallschlaeger’s “crime” was to set up a communications center in a hotel room that alerted demonstrators to movements by the police, who after all, had viciously attacked protesters–and anyone else nearby–with heavy batons, tear gas and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a so-called “non-lethal” weapon.

Kitted-out with police scanners, computers and cell phones, the intrepid activists used a Twitter account to assist protesters eager to elude a thrashing by some 5,000 heavily armed camo-clad cops who had sealed-off downtown Pittsburgh to keep the area safe–from the First Amendment.

National Lawyers Guild on-scene legal observers reported an “unwarranted display and use of force by police in residential neighborhoods, often far from any protest activity.” According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group:

Police deployed chemical irritants, including CS gas, and long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) in residential neighborhoods on narrow streets where families and small children were exposed. Scores of riot police formed barricades at many intersections throughout neighborhoods miles away from the downtown area and the David Lawrence Convention Center. Outside the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside, police deployed smoke bombs in the absence of protest activity, forcing bystanders and hotel residents to flee the area.

Later, while some protests were ending, riot-clad officers surrounded an area at the University of Pittsburgh, creating an ominous spectacle that some described as akin to Kent State. Guild legal observers witnessed police chasing and arresting many uninvolved students.

Among other questionable tactics, officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies lacked easily-identifiable badges, impeding citizens’ ability to register complaints. (National Lawyers Guild, “National Lawyers Guild Observes Improper Use of Force by Law Enforcement at the G-20,” Press Release, September 25, 2009)

The Times reported that after his arrest the FBI raided the home that Madison shared with his wife, Elena, and conducted an exhaustive 16-hour search of the premises seizing computers, books and a poster (horror of horrors!) of the old mole himself, Karl Marx.

Criminalizing the First Amendment

“Anyone can tweet, but the truth is, sometimes speech can be criminal,” John Burkoff, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

By that standard, anyone who has the temerity to question the legitimacy of a system that drives millions into poverty, wages preemptive war to secure (steal) other people’s resources, destroys the environment or uses “speech” to oppose said crimes against humanity–and cheekily urges others to do the same–is, by definition, guilty, in “new normal” America.

Witold Walczak however, the legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union told the Post-Gazette, “investigating the government and broadcasting information about it would seem to be a constitutionally protected communication.”

The ACLU director elaborated, “If the police want to communicate privately, there are certainly ways to do that, and police radios are not one of those. How can it be a crime? It’s not a secure communication.”

The good professor had another take on the matter and told the Post-Gazette, “Were they sending it to people simply to protest, or to commit further crimes?”

“Further crimes”? What crime? Oh yes, legally protesting the depredations of the capitalist system, that crime!

That such a statement can be uttered by a purported legal expert is rather rich with unintended irony. Burkhoff’s maneuver to cast the best possible light on repressive police operations is all the more absurd given the fact that none other than the Obama administration’s State Department had stepped-in and pressured Twitter to forego a service upgrade, and downtime, just scant months earlier.

But context as they say, is everything. Champions of other people’s freedom (particularly when they are geopolitical rivals), the State Department intervened and told the instant messaging service in no uncertain terms that Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to monitor police movements in Tehran and other cities as protests over disputed elections took center stage in the Islamic Republic.

The New York Times reported back in June that the U.S. State Department “e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.”

According to Reuters, “Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.”

Twitter said in a blog post it had delayed the firm’s planned upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”

A day earlier, President Obama had said he believed “people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed”–in Iran.

Message to the American people: Official enemy: Twitter good! Official friend (grifting multinational corporations and the criminals who do their bidding in Washington): Twitter bad! How’s that for an imaginative interpretation of the “new media paradigm”!

“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not”

Echoing the execrable logic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, America’s premier political police force, the FBI, executed a search warrant on Madison that authorized agents to look “for violations of federal rioting laws,” according to the Times.

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the Times that “he and a friend were part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20.” Denouncing the raid, Stolar averred that “there’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability.”

On October 2, Stolar argued in Federal District Court in Brooklyn “that the warrant was vague and overly broad. Judge Dora L. Irizarry ordered the authorities to stop examining the seized materials until Oct. 16, pending further orders,” the Times reported.

This is not the first time however, that the secret state has sought to curtail text messaging by activists during large-scale demonstrations.

In 2008, as a result of the heavy repression of legal protests–and subsequent lawsuits by victims–during the far-right Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, lawyers representing N.Y.’s “finest” demanded that M.I.T. graduate student Tad Hirsch and the Institute of Applied Autonomy, the inventors of TXTmob, turn over all “text messages sent via TXTmob during the convention, the date and time of the messages, information about people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used the service,” The New York Times reported last year.

The FBI however, already possess the technological ability to hack into Wi-fi and computer networks as Wired revealed in April, citing internal Bureau documents released to the magazine under a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to a follow-up story by the publication, the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit, CEAU, has deployed software called a computer and internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, that is “designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia.”

Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, that when a whistleblower, security consultant Babak Pasdar, stepped forward and blew the lid off the Bureau’s massive telecommunications’ surveillance network, the agency’s so-called “Quantico circuit” in Virginia, he revealed that major wireless providers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, had handed the state “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless networks, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

According to Pasdar’s sworn affidavit, Verizon provided the FBI with with real-time access to who is speaking to whom, the time and duration of each call as well as the locations of those so targeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the San Francisco-based civil liberties’ watchdog group, has posted Madison’s motion and his attorney’s supporting declaration on their web site. It makes for very interesting reading indeed! According to the search warrant obtained by FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin from the U.S. District Court, the FBI were allowed to seize:

Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key locks (or combination locks) of various kinds. (Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky, Magistrate Judge to FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Search Warrant, Case Number M-09-962, September 26, 2009)

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar averred that “a number of documents and other properties” seized by the FBI have “nothing to do with the governments investigation into what the search warrant characterizes as violations of ‘federal rioting laws’.”

According to Stolar “the seized items include political writings, notes, political associates and ideas, materials protected by the attorney-client and social work privileges, as well as property belonging to other persons residing in the premises which have no connection to any pending or contemplated criminal investigation.” Stolar declared that “the illegality of the search is in the overbreadth of the seizures and the vagueness of the term ‘federal rioting laws’.”

In other words, driftnet surveillance of American citizens is the norm for our secret state minders; an unambiguous sign of America’s slide into an extra-constitutional police state.

Fusion Centers: Leading the Charge

While Madison and Wallschlaeger’s arrest came as a result of actions undertaken by the Pennsylvania State Police, one cannot rule out that (a) informants had tipped off the cops to the pair’s activities, (b) CEAU had penetrated protest organizer’s computer net and therefore, were well aware of what the duo were up to, or (c) through some combination of the above, the FBI and presumably, their local fusion center allies, alerted PSP who then conducted the raid and shut the anarchist’s communications center down.

Federal Computer Week noted September 30, that the Department of Homeland Security “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers,” and that the secret state’s new “Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis.”

Among other things, the publication revealed that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new office will:

• Develop ways to assess threats and trends by gathering, analyzing and sharing local and national information and intelligence through fusion centers.

• Coordinate with state, local and tribal law enforcement leaders to ensure that DHS is providing the correct resources to fusion centers.

• Promote a sense of common mission and purpose at fusion centers through training and other support. (Ben Bain, “DHS established new office for intelligence-sharing centers,” Federal Computer Week, September 30, 2009)

Since Bushist–and now, Obama–securocrats designated fusion centers “a central node for the federal government’s efforts for sharing terrorism-related information with state and local officials,” the federal government has pumped some $327 million in taxpayer-funded largesse into these spooky “public-private partnerships.”

In Pennsylvania for example, the Criminal Intelligence Center (PaCIC), is described by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as a “component of the Pennsylvania State Police.”

Washington Post investigative journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr., the author of No Place to Hide, revealed that “Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos” and have “subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.”

One can only wonder whether these or other intrusive surveillance tools, including the CEAU’s CIPAV software were deployed against Madison and Wallschlaeger prior to their Pittsburgh arrest.

But gathering information on fusion centers is often an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. Investigative journalist G.W. Schulz reported that when the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) attempted to obtain information from the Colorado Information Analysis Center on that state’s fusion center, they ran into a brick wall.

CIAC spokesperson Lance Clem refused to release what should be public documents to CIR claiming that releasing the records would be “contrary to the public interest” and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.”

As of this writing, it cannot be determined with any certainty what role the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center played in repressing G20 protests. However, if past fusion center practices in Denver and St. Paul during last year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions are any guide, their management of pre-G20 intelligence along with their federal partners, was in all probability considerable.

One lesson that can be gleaned however, from the federal witch hunt targeting activists Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, is that dissent in post-9/11 America, as during the COINTELPRO-era of the 1960s and ’70s, has been criminalized.

New Unionism: The union movement is the largest democratic force in the world today, by far. However, too many union members complain about bureaucratic behaviour at leadership level. Do you accept this is a problem, and, if so, what do you think are the root causes?

Dan Gallin: First, let’s get the problem in perspective. The level of bureaucracy in unions is constantly overstated. We have much less difficulty in this area than corporations do, for instance. Of course corporations are, by their very nature, top-down power structures – what could be less democratic than your average workplace? – and I cannot imagine anything as wasteful as some management bureaucracies. Similarly, think about bureaucracy in government, or in tri-partite bodies, or in non-governmental organisations. The difference is that unions, by their very structure and purpose, are consciously committed to internal democracy, and so failures are clearly seen as such. The basic structures of unionism are democratic and the internal struggle to assert and reassert democracy is always there. Trade unions have to deliver; there is a very short time span between demand and the delivery. Think of collective bargaining, for instance. Unions are constantly being held to account by their members.

NU: Are you trying to tell us there’s no real problem, then?

DG: No. I am not trying to minimize the problem. What I am saying is that bureaucracy is a pervasive feature of all institutional and organizational life. What, after all, is a bureaucracy? It is an administration, and all organizations need an administration. The problem arises when this administration develops a collective interest of its own, separate and eventually even opposed to the interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

This is serious enough in government, where the civil service constitutes a bureaucracy that can easily overreach its authority. In a democracy, the civil service is supposed to be the servant of the people. When it starts to act as its master, democracy is in danger.

In the trade union movement, the problem is even more serious because its administration, its own civil service if you wish, must represent people who have no other source of power than their organization. If this organization ceases to be responsive to their needs, they lose everything. An administration that builds its own power at the expense of the membership is betraying its trust – that is treason.

NU: If, as you say, trade unionism is inherently democratic, why is it that we hear these complaints about unions being run as dictatorships and/or oligarchies?

DG: Actually, there are not so many cases of this, in proportion. What happens is that we have some spectacular examples of organizations which degenerate and then become notorious. They are falsely represented as typical of the movement, most often in anti-union propaganda. But there is never any guarantee against an organization, even with the best democratic traditions, being hijacked by anti-democratic cliques or personalities.

The hijacking of the Russian revolution by the Communist bureaucracy led by Stalin is a classical example. After four or five short years, a vibrant, radically democratic, revolutionary mass movement started giving way to the rule of a bureaucracy which first asserted, then consolidated power by means of terror, police and military terror against its own people, on a scale not seen before in modern times. A whole new society with a bureaucratic ruling class!

How do these things happen? In order to work, democracy needs the active support of large masses of people at all times. In a union, this means the active participation of most of the membership. Democracy is not a state of being, it is an activity, it is in fact hard work, and it is a constant work in progress. You might say the same thing about freedom.

Most people are not able to maintain a high level of commitment over time. They are not organization professionals, they need to get on with their lives, as they should, so “democracy fatigue” might set in; especially after periods of great social stress. They might not pay attention to what happens in the organization for a time, routine sets in and the professionals take over. If the leaders are not trained in the right kind of politics, if they are not persons of the highest individual integrity, and if they are not supervised and controlled, they may start treating the organization as if it were their own property.

This is why it is the responsibility of every progressive and democratic trade union leadership to maintain constitutional and practical conditions in which membership participation and control is ensured and welcomed, without making conditions of participation too onerous for ordinary members.

NU: Just by way of clarification, can you explain what you mean by “trained in the right kind of politics”?

DG: Socialist politics, of course. And by that I mean the kind of politics based on the values that were at the origins of the labour movement and that made it great: solidarity, selflessness, respect for people, a sense of honour, and the modesty that comes with the awareness of being a soldier in the service of a great cause, a contempt for self-promotion, or “le refus de parvenir” as Monatte¹ called it.

NU: Do you think the Cold War contributed to bureaucratizing the movement?

DG: It certainly did. In a situation of extreme political polarization by outside forces, it is easy to lose sight of the original purpose of the exercise.

First, let us be clear what we are talking about. The Cold War was a conflict between States, between two blocs of States, led by the two superpowers of the time: the United States and the USSR, more or less from 1949 to 1989.

However, this conflict had nothing to do with a much older conflict within the labour movement. This earlier conflict arose after the October Revolution, when the Russian Communist Party created an International of its own and declared war on all other movements of the Left unless they accepted total subordination to its dictates.² That conflict became unbridgeable once the Communist leadership had moved to imprison and execute activists of other Left tendencies in the territory under its control, including its own opponents and dissidents. Under Stalin, this became a systematic campaign of extermination, with hit men spreading out all over the world to assassinate opponents.

It is small wonder that a majority of the Left, of all tendencies, became “anti-Communist”, meaning that they organized to defend themselves as best as they could against Communist claims of hegemony and terror.

When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, breaking the treaty it had signed two years previously, the USSR found itself part of the anti-fascist war-time alliance. Despite past history and experience, much of the Western trade-union movement, which was predominantly social-democratic, was ready for organizational unity with Soviet bloc labour organizations. The result was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was founded in 1945. However, it lasted only four years as an inclusive organization of the world’s labour movement (though it continued, and still exists, as a Communist rump).

The unity on which the WFTU had been founded was the temporary unity of governments, not a unity of labour – none of the contentious issues between the Communists and everyone else on the Left had been resolved. When the unity of governments gave way to the rivalry between the US and the USSR for world power, the artificial top-down unity of the WFTU also broke apart.

What happened then was a race between the two blocs to secure the support – in fact, the control – of civil society organizations (labour, youth, students, women, etc.), with trade unions as prime targets.

And now comes the complicated part, which must be clearly understood. The Western governments and the non-Communist Left suddenly had the same enemy. The conflict between governments – the “Cold War” – and that earlier conflict within the labour movement, became superimposed. For some, they became indistinguishable.

This is how the war-time relationships which some socialists – and others – had formed with the political services of the US or UK governments (among others) to fight the Nazis continued seamlessly into the fight for a “free world”, against the new totalitarian menace.

In reality, we were of course still dealing with two different conflicts and two distinct interests. One was fighting Stalinism to defend working class interests, the other was fighting the USSR as a rival imperialism to that of the US. These are hardly compatible positions, but the most difficult thing to comprehend in politics, especially if you have the knife at your throat, is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

Despite the apparent symmetry of the situation of the trade union movement within the two blocs, the reality was quite different. In the Soviet bloc, the trade union apparatus was part of the government structures of a police state, and a fairly subordinate structure at that. Dissidence was treated as a criminal offence or as a mental disorder. So in that context, the bureaucracy issue does not even arise in connection with the Cold War — the whole system had been thoroughly bureaucratized long before. In its first decades, that system was impossible to crack from within.

The situation in the West was much different: here a three-way battle was being fought between the advocates of an alignment on pro-American policies, the advocates and apologists for Soviet policies, and those who kept saying that neither option represented working class interests and that the labour movement should refuse to be aligned with either side.

Those of us who held the latter position believed that the lines of cleavage that mattered most in the world were not the vertical ones separating the two blocs, but the horizontal ones between the working class and the rulers of both systems, a fundamental division cutting across both blocs.

This was not an easy position to hold. The pressures to align and to conform were very strong. Having been put in charge of the AFL-CIO’s International Department by George Meany,³ Jay Lovestone⁴) — the Dr. Strangelove⁵ of the labour movement — with his acolyte Irving Brown⁶ and the various AFL-CIO Institutes, were running around the world buying unions with US government money, in close cooperation with the CIA , and trying to destroy any organization or individuals that did not accept their line, whether Communist or not. They were not looking for allies, they were recruiting agents.

The Soviet bloc operators were doing the same for the other side, also backed by considerable diplomatic and financial resources. The result of this competition is not difficult to guess: it spread a culture of corruption, especially in Africa where the movement was weakest and most vulnerable, but also in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States itself, where some labour leaders were co-opted into Cold War politics, although most had no idea what the International Department was up to, and did not much care until all these operations were exposed in the mid-1960s.

In that sense the Cold War was a very powerful factor of bureaucratization in the West: it created and strengthened corrupt leaderships who no longer had to take their memberships into account, it enforced political conformity, stifled discussion, suppressed dissent and isolated all radical opposition through ‘red baiting’.

NU: Some labour writers contend that the acceptance of Cold War politics, and anti-Communist purges by the leadership of the American labour movement, contributed to its paralysis during the conservative onslaught of recent years.

DG: Yes and no. It’s not that simple. True enough, after the anti-Communist purges in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955, the conservative elements of the AFL prevailed in the merged AFL-CIO. These people would later prove totally at a loss in the face of globalization and the conservative onslaught launched by Reagan, and continued by his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

But the problem with this story is that it exonerates the American Communist Party of any responsibility in these developments. The CP and its trade union activists are cast in the role of innocent victims. This overlooks the war the CP waged against all of the Left from its earliest days: first against the IWW and the socialists, then against the Trotskyists and against every other kind of radical group it didn’t control, and of course against most union leaderships, progressive or not. The CP did what it could to destroy the American Left and, like in Niemöller’s poem,⁷ when they came to get it there was nobody left to defend it.

This said, most conservative labour leaders didn’t need the Cold War in order to be ferociously anti-radical, super-patriotic and, eventually, helpless before the anti-labour campaigns of the Right. You have to remember that we’re dealing here with very stupid people. They may have been street-wise and cunning, but they knew nothing about the world and couldn’t think strategically. The roots of conservatism in the American union movement are very perceptively described by authors such as Daniel Fusfeld and Patricia Cayo Sexton.⁸) What the Cold War situation did, was to give people like Lovestone the opportunity to organize the right-wing of the American trade union bureaucracy as a base for a major international operation, and to isolate leaders of the labour Left, like Walter Reuther,⁹ Ralph Helstein¹⁰ and Pat Gorman,¹¹ as well as some good unions with a Communist history, like the ILWU and the UE.

NU: Did the Communists not at least denounce the clandestine right-wing operations the American unions were involved in?

DG: Not at all. Of course they would denounce operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, or of Goulart in Brazil, as examples of American imperialism in action, but there was never any exposure of the union involvement. The CIA and British government operations in the labour movement were blown open by Trotskyists and independent radicals in the mid-1960s. Then the New York Times picked up the story and it became a major scandal. But the CP had nothing to do with it at any stage. Afterwards, of course, everyone started writing about it.

NU: While all of this was happening in the US, bureaucratization must surely have been a growing problem in the European trade union movement as well?

DG: In Europe and elsewhere, for instance in Japan, the polarized politics of the Cold War also enforced political conformity and stifled dissent, but Europe is a complicated place with many political and trade union cultures, so generalizations are not very useful. In some countries Cold War politics played a major role in the labour movement, in others hardly at all.

Far more pervasive and general were the consequences of the war. Today it is hard to imagine the extent to which the historical labour movement had been destroyed, first by the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, then by the war itself, with the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazi armies and police. In most of Europe, the structures of the labour movement were wiped out, parties and unions of course, but also the entire institutional network that rooted the movement in society: welfare institutions, credit unions, co-ops, cultural and leisure time activities – everything.

Most of the leadership of the movement, right down to local level, had to go into exile, or into concentration camps, or died in the war. Many of the best people were lost. One of the important parties of the Socialist International, the Jewish Labour Bund,¹² was destroyed entirely, together with the population that supported it. No one had imagined anything like this could happen, and those who had hoped that the end of WWII would usher in another period of social revolution, a re-play of 1918, had lost touch with reality.

Superficially, the unions emerged in a strong position – after all we were on the side of the victors, whereas big business had collaborated with fascism throughout Europe and had much to be forgiven for. In fact, labour was far weaker than it appeared, and far more dependent on the State than before the war. That too did not seem to be a problem at first, since most post-war governments were pro-labour in one way or another, but it did eventually lead to the loss of the political and material independence of the movement and, yes, it did promote bureaucratization.

Whereas the pre-war movement conceived of itself as a counter-culture and an alternative society, at least in principle, the post-war movement made its peace with the “social market economy” and demanded no more than a better life within the system (full employment, welfare, social protection, good wages and working conditions).

In that situation, the leadership of the movement became increasingly unwilling to maintain a whole network of flanking institutions. If you don’t want to change society then you don’t need to build an alternative counter-culture or an alternative economy. Think of all the money you can save. So the unions concentrated on their presumed “core business” – collective bargaining with “social partners” – the parties concentrated on elections, and the movement lost its roots in society, lost many of its think tanks and educational institutions, and lost its periphery, a sphere of influence and protection.

At the same time, you had the surge of prosperity in post-war Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. An exhausted working class, after the deprivation and the sufferings of the war, started to get its life back and became gradually more comfortable over the next thirty years. And why not? But as it played out, as a major political factor, it created a problem the movement couldn’t cope with, because it also coincided with the rise of media empires, with television, financed largely by advertising. Our movement was not ready to compete at that level. This is where we lost the communications war. We lost our press and any independent expressions of working class culture, with the long-term effect of losing the culture wars in the 1990s.

Many of the issues of the vanished civil society of labour eventually got taken over by others (feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, etc.), but that’s another story.

Then, in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the CP was dominant in the labour movement, the working class became hostage to Cold War politics and political positions, as well as labour alignments. They were frozen for about thirty or forty years. In some other countries, notably Germany, Cold War polarization also contributed to deadening the political debate and distorting trade union priorities.

Finally, European unions have become accustomed to State subsidies, in general for specific activities, such as education or participation in a host of official and quasi-official institutions and meetings. Today, in many countries, unions would be unable to function without the government subsidies they have become accustomed to.

So what do you get? A heavily bureaucratized and passive movement, initially led by survivors, then rapidly replaced by complacent and arrogant careerists who are happy to depend on the State. They administer the gains of past struggles but are unwilling to conduct any new ones, opposing any ideas they have not thought of themselves and believing that nothing must ever happen for the first time. That kind of leadership educates union members to be passive consumers of union services, not participants in struggle.

NU: You said before that, as far as Europe was concerned, generalizations were not very useful. Should we take that to include what you just said?

DG: You got me there. I think what I have tried to do is draw a common denominator, a composite picture which applies in general but not exactly in any one country. For example, in the Nordic countries, except for a short-lived split in Finland, the Cold War had hardly any impact at all. In Spain, where the labour movement emerged from a fascist regime only in the 1970s, rank-and-file democracy is a strongly-felt aspiration. All of Eastern Europe is a different situation again, and a very complicated situation, with many cross-currents. And of course there are always exceptions. There have been outstanding labour leaders like Otto Brenner,¹³ Wilhelm Gefeller¹⁴ in Germany, Jack Jones¹⁵ in Britain, André Renard¹⁶ in Belgium. So, one has to fine-tune every national situation. But some will recognize my descriptions and, as the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Neither do I want to idealize the pre-war labour movement in Europe. There were too many entirely avoidable and disastrous defeats. The leading labour parties of Germany and Austria had armed militias ready to fight which were awaiting orders that never came. The French Popular Front government refused to support the Spanish Republicans in the civil war, who, had they won, would have changed the course of history. Not to speak of the catastrophic Communist policies, in Germany, in Spain, all over. One needs to reflect on these defeats and learn from them. But even so, the level of ambition in those days was higher.

NU: You were general secretary of the IUF for many years, and active in the international union movement. How does the international movement cope with the problem of bureaucratism?

DG: With difficulty. You have to realize that the international movement is yet another level removed from the rank-and-file: the actual members of international trade union organizations, in a statutory sense, are national unions, not individual workers, so the international organization will reflect to a very large extent the culture and practices of its affiliated unions, particularly the large affiliates.

So, structurally, it is almost inevitably bureaucratic. The politics of the leadership, basically the secretariat and the governing bodies, makes a big difference. You can have an organization with a deeply rooted culture of militancy and a democratic culture, which will do two things: first, ensure that democratic practices are respected and encouraged in the way it operates, within its own governing bodies, and, second, encourage democratic participation within its affiliates wherever it can, for example through its educational programs, in its publications, etc.

NU: And then you have the others…

DG: Indeed. Again, it is a question of politics, of how you interpret the situation and, consequently, how you evaluate the union response required. If you believe that “social partnership” is an accurate description of labour/management relations, and that social change occurs through conversations between political leaders and experts – “social dialogue” – then you will invest your resources and energies in a lobbying operation. The privileged counterparts in these conversations will be the bureaucrats of government organizations and of employers’ organizations. In meeting after meeting, you will be bargaining about words, and you will believe you have won a significant victory when you have changed a sentence in a statement. This can go on forever, and no one will ever know the difference. The workers who are members of such organizations don’t even know they exist.

NU: How can workers, at rank-and-file level, learn to tell the difference between useful and useless organizations? Where does usefulness become apparent?

DG: Very simple: workers certainly can tell the difference when they become involved in a conflict. When it comes to conflict, the differences are very quickly apparent. And whether our international sell-out artists like it or not, unions are about conflict. Either the international organization pulls out all stops and the saying “one for all, all for one”, (especially the second part) becomes a concrete reality, for as long as it takes, or else the international organization starts mediating instead of fighting, tries to minimize and kill the conflict, even sides with the employer just to be rid of the problem.

NU: How does this relate back to the issue of bureaucratism? Are you suggesting that bureaucracy and politics are related?

DG: They are, very much so. However, the relationship is not a mechanical one. For instance it would be simplistic and wrong to say that left-wing politics protects us against bureaucracy. If we are talking about the Communist tradition, the opposite is true, almost always, and this includes Maoism, which is actually an extreme form of Stalinism. People who come out of that school are often dangerous authoritarians. Even when they change their politics, they don’t necessarily change their methods.

And of course social-democracy has its own awesome bureaucratic traditions; even anarchist and syndicalist organizations, contrary to legend, can be run in extremely authoritarian and bureaucratic ways.

No, the only form of politics which is an effective antidote to bureaucratism is the kind of socialist politics that contains a strong element of radical democracy. This goes back to Marx himself, but despite appearances, this current was never dominant in the socialist movement. It surfaces from time to time, a person like Rosa Luxemburg would be fairly typical, there were others within the political families of the Left. Eugene Debs in the United States would be another example.

NU: That’s not a very broad political base. If that’s all we have, is the struggle against bureaucratism lost in advance?

DG: No, because in fact we have very much more. The politics of radical democracy respond to a very deep and fundamental need felt by workers. They keep coming back to this on their own, and they very often spontaneously develop democratic forms of organizing, of conducting struggles, of running their organizations. Rosa Luxemburg understood this. This aspiration is very strong. That is the basic reason why the labour movement has such a democratic culture, despite all the pressures to the contrary from the society that surrounds it… the “old shit”, as Marx called it.¹⁷

NU: Do you see workers’ desire for deeper forms of democracy extending from union HQ all the way down into the workplace?

DG: Yes, except I would put it the other way around, from the workplace – the “point of production”, as the IWW used to say – to union HQ. It has to start at the point of production. As I said, this is a very fundamental need of workers, and actually very often of people in general. Think of women’s movements or peasant’s movements – in all progressive mass movements there is this demand for transparency and accountability in the leadership.

The point is to nurture and strengthen the politics of radical democracy, the particular strand of socialist politics which I believe is the authentic Marxism, which insists that power, where it matters, always has to remain in the hands of the workers. Today this means almost all of society, since nearly everybody is part of the working class, whether they know it or not. To get there, you have to start from the bottom, the point of production, and then build democratic institutions, like democratic unions, impose democratic procedures at every level, democratize the decision-making mechanism in public administration. We don’t want to abolish bureaucracy if bureaucracy means administration, we all need administration and we want it to be honest, transparent and efficient, in our own organizations to start with, then in society at large. We want an administration built on our key values: justice and freedom. These will be the values of the society of the future – if we make it that far.

1. Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) A proofreader by profession, he was a leader of the French CGT when it was a revolutionary syndicalist organization and, in 1909, founded its journal, La vie Ouvrière. He was an anti-war internationalist during World War I., joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and was expelled in 1924 for opposing its bureaucratization. He then returned to revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1925 he founded La Révolution Prolétarienne, which is still being published. “Le refus de parvenir” means: “the refusal of social climbing”.
2. The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 agreed on ‘Twenty One Conditions‘, which formalised the beginning of ‘the great split’: a split which was to divide the labour movement for the rest of the century. Note in particular: ‘In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly.’
3. George Meany (1894-1980), president of the American Federation of Labor from 1952 to 1955, then, following its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, president of the united AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979.
4. Jay Lovestone (1906-1989), a founder of the American Communist Party, later leader of the Right-Wing opposition group (the pro-Bukharin faction) which dissolved in 1941. In 1943 Lovestone became international affairs director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and, in 1963, director of the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO. He held that position until 1974 and as the main architect of the collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the CIA. For more on Lovestone, see: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999
5. Dr. Strangelove: the 1964 black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick, featuring a paranoiac American general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water. The US president in the film is advised by a “mad scientist” type: Dr. Strangelove.
6. Irving Brown (1911-1989) , chief lieutenant and hatchet man for Lovestone since the 1930s, set ujp”anti-Communist” operations in the trade union movement, mostly in Europe, including the notorious Mediterranean Committee, organized with the help of gangsters in French, Italian and Greek ports.
7. Friedrich Niemöller (1892-1984), prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the following lines (and variations thereof):
   “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
   
8. Daniel Fusfeld: The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor 1877-1918, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1980 (ISBN 088286050X) and Patricia Cayo Sexton: The War on Labor and the Left – Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1991 (ISBN 0813310636
9. Walter Reuther (1907-1970), leading organizer and after 1946 president of the United Auto Workers’ union, a Socialist Party member until 1939, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, negotiated the merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, eventually clashed with Meany over the conservative policies of the AFL-CIO and formed a short-lived alternative center, the Alliance for Labor Action (1958–1972) with the Teamsters and a few smaller unions. On May 9, 1970, Reuther and his wife May were killed when their chartered plane crashed while on final approach to the airstrip near the union’s recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.”
10. Ralph Helstein (1908-1985), president of the United Pckinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) from 1946 to 1968. Under his leadership, the union, a CIO affiliate, became one of the most militant and democratic unions in the US. It organized the meat packing industry in the US and Canada and played a leading role in fighting for minority and women’s rights. When the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968, Helstein became vice president and special counsel. He worked with the union until 1972 and died in Chicago in 1985.
11. Patrick Emmet Gorman (1882-1980), a life-long socialist, International Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AFL) from 1942 to 1976 (the Meat Cutters were an old socialist union which had a European constitution, where the secretary-treasurer, not the president, was the chief executive officer). Gorman opposed Meany on the Vietnam war and on many other political issues.
12. The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, generally called the Bund (from German: Bund, meaning federation or union) or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a Jewish political party and trade union in several European countries operating predominantly between the 1890s and the 1930s with remnants of the party still active in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom. The Bund opposed Zionism and fought for the recognition of Jews as an autonomous cultural community within European countries. In this and in other respects, it was strongly influenced by the Austro-Marxist school of socialism, and was a left-socialist party in the context of the Labour and Socialist International. In WWII it was active in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation in Poland and in Lithuania, one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and later of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement. Two leaders of the Bund, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, who had sought refuge in the USSR after the German invasion, were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin’s orders.
13. Otto Brenner (1907-1972), president of the German metal workers’ union IG Metall from 1956 to 1972. In 1931 Brenner left the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which he had joined as a youth to join the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded by Left Socialists and dissident Communists, too late to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler. Brenner became active in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in 1933, sentenced to two years’ prison and kept under police supervision until the end of the war. In 1945 Brenner re-joined the SPD and became active in the reconstruction of the trade union movement. At the head of the IG Metall he played a leading tole in the defense of democratic rights and against rearmament. In 1961, he was elected president of the International Metalworkers’ Federation.
14. Wilhelm Gefeller (1906-1983), president of the German chemical workers’ union IG Chemie from 1949 to 1969, one of the founders of the post-war German trade union movement, active in the SPD. Strong advocate of co-determination in German industry and at international level, and of democratic rights. President of the International Chemical and General Workers’ Unions (ICF) in the late 1960s.
15. James Larkin (Jack) Jones (1913-2009), general secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (UK) from 1968 to 1978. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and was wounded in 1938. Jones was also Vice-President of the International Transport Workers Federation and, after his retirement, was a campaigner for pensioners’ rights. His autobiography, Union Man, was published in 1986.
16. André Renard (1911-1962), Belgian trade unionist, active in the resistance under Nazi occupation,created an illegal united trade union movement independent of political parties and advocated its extension to the entire country at liberation, but could not overcome the split between socialist and Catholic unions. Deputy General-Secretary of the socialist trade union center FGTB, leader of the six-week general strike in 1960-1961 against the austerity policies of the conservative government. A strong advocate for the autonomy of Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium).
17. ”…revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old shit and become fitted to found society anew.” Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook 1845.

Whatever goes to President Obama for his signature will probably do very little to curb the countless excesses by the health insurance industry and, therefore, do next to nothing to curb personal and national health spending. It will almost certainly impose some new taxes that ultimately will impact a large fraction of the population, possibly by taxes on health insurance benefits or through higher insurance premiums and/or co-payments and deductibles, or even worse coverage. Even if there is some type of government option, which does not now seem likely, it would likely be constructed so cleverly that few would take advantage of it.

This and more deceptive actions will result because of the huge amount of money spent by the health insurance industry and its allies on both lobbying and countless ways of funneling money to members of Congress.

This much is now obvious. Even many Democrats, especially in the Senate, have been thoroughly corrupted by health industry money. Brain dead and callous Republicans, of course, have behaved as badly as they possibly could to protect their industry friends.

So it comes down to this: Considering his lackluster behavior during the reform debate, if the long awaited but disastrous health reform law reaches the White House will President Obama have the courage to veto it? Will his thirst for health care reform and unbounded desire for accomplishing what others have failed to do overwhelm the inescapable truth that next to meaningless reform is worse than no reform? Will he be brave enough to tell not just the millions that supported him to begin with but the whole population that Congress failed to do what justice demanded? Will he have the moral determination to tell the truth that corruption of Congress by industry wrecked the democratic process and failed to give Americans what they sorely need?

At this point I am betting that Obama will not have the courage to do any of this. No, I think Obama will behave like all the other lying politicians and claim victory and find all kinds of ways to eloquently describe how the stinking congressional action moves the nation in the right direction. He will look right into the camera and tell his fellow Americans that he has not given up the fight for all necessary health care reforms, but right now this is the best and most that can be done.

If my prediction is correct, then I can only hope that many, many Americans will see the ugly, disappointing truth and become committed to not reelect Obama to a second term, especially progressives and liberals and especially those that know in their hearts that real health care reform would have produced a single payer government insurance plan open to all Americans, like Medicare for everyone.

There should be a limit to what compromises are embraced when it comes to something as deeply personal and critical as health care. Health care reform really should be seen as the ultimate test for President Obama and whether he gives us the change we have been waiting for and what millions believed he would deliver. If genuine health care reform is not produced by Congress, then it should become crystal clear to even the most distracted, devoted and dumb Americans that our democracy is definitely delusional. That’s what President Obama should think about. A corporate-owned democracy is no democracy at all.

The military-civil coup in Honduras was the first in Latin America since the region re-democratization in the 80s-90s (aside from Alberto Fujimori’s proclaimed autogolpe in Peru in 1992) and has faced unanimous condemnation. The continent’s historical tradition of military takeovers has been challenged for the first time ever. After the “leaning leftwards” of the early 2000s, current governments in the region consider it to be shameful and humiliating to be deposed by means of force. It’s a natural fear for them that, if they tolerate this, they themselves can be next.

On Sunday night (27 September), the ‘de facto’ administration, headed by former speaker Roberto Micheletti, threatened to remove the status of embassy from the building where Zelaya is sheltered since last Monday. This would make way for storming the place, but attacking a diplomatic building is a severe rupture of international law – every embassy is considered to be territory of its parent country. Micheletti gave Brazil an ultimatum to either hand over Zelaya or grant him political asylum. And, at the same time, suspended civil rights, restored curfew, banned demonstrations, and threatened to shut down media outlets which broadcast or print speeches by the opposition. If there was still any doubt Honduras is under a dictatorship these days, they are now all gone.

Although the United States of Barack Obama have publicly joined the hemispherical unanimity to condemn the coup, word that the State Department and the CIA gave their support to overthrowing Zelaya spread throughout Latin American nations, ranging from suspicion to strong conviction. Although no evidence of U.S. interference has been found so far, the century-old history of Washington’s logistical and financial support to “breaches of constitutional order,” to be euphemistic, is a witness for the prosecution.

On the other hand, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has emerged as the leading voice among Latin American governments calling for immediate restoration of Honduras’ democratically-elected president to his dutiful post. This time, it wasn’t theatrical Hugo Chávez denouncing the U.S. as the geopolitical Devil, nor timid center-left Chilean diplomats, who took the lead in tackling the reactionary forces of the region. It was the president of a rising star: the Brazilian one.

With its economy quickly recovering from the capitalist crisis, and practically returning the nearly one-million jobs lost since 2008, Brazil is presenting itself as the next best thing in the global scenario. The country is now an active voice in developing nations fora like the G20, BRIC (with Russia, India and China) and IBAS (with India and South Africa), while calls for South-South cooperation are finally materializing with crossed investments and united lobby in the World Trade Organization (WTO). But, historically, the diplomats of Brazil (long dubbed as “the sleeping-giant”) were vacillating about turning the economy high tide into political power in international relations.

It seems the self-confidence problems are being solved now. The “Itamaraty,” as the Brazilian foreign office is called, has decided to take a firm stance against the coup and to help Zelaya to get back to office. Brazil is sheltering the ousted president within its embassy in Tegucigalpa, where he claims he got “by his own means” – although we know it’s highly unlikely that Brasília was fully unaware of his coming, something the Itamataty will never admit. Besides that, Lula used his opening speech in the General Assembly to demand the immediate return of Zelaya into his elected post and an emergency meeting of the Security Council. Even other international entities like the Organization of American States and the World Monetary Fund, both formerly supportive of authoritarian regimes, joined the condemnation after pushed by Brazilian initiative.

Anything more than that would be interfering in a foreign nation’s internal affairs. Lula has repeatedly stated he will not cross this line, but at the same time refused to sit on his own hands. However, that’s exactly what the conservative elites of Brazil are already claiming. This Saturday (26 September), Brazilian ultra-rightist weekly magazine Veja ran a cover story accusing Brazil of ‘megalomaniac imperialism’ – while no line was ever dedicated to the U.S. centennial imperialist tradition. The opposition parties, PSDB and Democrats, are criticizing the Itamaraty for hosting the lawful president. And the daily prime-time newscast of Globo TV, on Friday, aired an appalling report to argue that what happened in Honduras in June “was technically not a coup d’état,” quoting lines from the country’s constitution. Its article 239 says any president who proposes to alter the ban on reelection would be automatically removed, but the broadcasters omitted that Zelaya never did that – only called for a discretionary referendum.

What they all omit, however, is that Brazil has no other interests in Honduras but to assert is political strength in the region, something that cannot be seen as undermining in any way, but rather as a matter of state interest. Moreover, Brazil is acting not on its own behalf, but on behalf of the global South as a whole. This is the first time poor nations are rising a single voice against the use of brute force in politics. And the isolation which the regional governments have imposed on the ‘de facto’ government in Honduras is unprecedented, even if we count what happened to Cuba in the early 1960s.

With Fidel Castro old and officially out of power, the antagonistic role in the geopolitical script of the Americas has been performed by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. But perhaps Chávez’s bombastic style might be counterproductive for his own foreign policy and for the left in general, while Lula’s more discrete – albeit straightforward – approach has proven successful in other regional crisis like Bolivia, Ecuador and Haiti, where Brazil keeps 1,200 troops under UN peacekeeping blue helmets since 2004.

Let it be clear: Zelaya is by no means an ideological leftist, but rather a populist leader in the very same shape the Latin Americans are used to. But ideology is really not the central matter here; it’s about sending a message to military to stay in the barracks. Had it happened to a liberal or elite-backed conservative government, the cry against the unlawful removal of an elected head of State would be done all the same – perhaps only less loud.

Even if the threats by the de facto administration are met, or any setback in the next days would prevent Manuel Zelaya from leaving the Brazilian embassy and walking in triumph to his lawful chair at the presidential palace of Tegucigalpa, the bridge is crossed already when it comes to the shift in regional powers. Any defeat of Zelaya now would not exactly be a defeat to the Itamaraty, but rather enforce its moral victory: that it achieved to forge an unprecedented unity in the continent and made it clear that the age of military takeovers in Latin America is over.

In unveiling an unclassified version of the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), Blair asserts he is seeking to break down “this old distinction between military and nonmilitary intelligence,” stating that the “traditional fault line” separating secretive military programs from overall intelligence activities “is no longer relevant.”

As if to emphasize the sweeping nature of Blair’s remarks, Federal Computer Week reported September 17 that “some non-federal officials with the necessary clearances who work at intelligence fusion centers around the country will soon have limited access to classified terrorism-related information that resides in the Defense Department’s classified network.” According to the publication:

Under the program, authorized state, local or tribal officials will be able to access pre-approved data on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. However, they won’t have the ability to upload data or edit existing content, officials said. They also will not have access to all classified information, only the information that federal officials make available to them.

The non-federal officials will get access via the Homeland Security department’s secret-level Homeland Security Data Network. That network is currently deployed at 27 of the more than 70 fusion centers located around the country, according to DHS. Officials from different levels of government share homeland security-related information through the fusion centers. (Ben Bain, “DOD opens some classified information to non-federal officials,” Federal Computer Week, September 17, 2009)

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has encouraged the explosive growth of fusion centers. As envisaged by securocrats, these hybrid institutions have expanded information collection and sharing practices from a wide variety of sources, including commercial databases, among state and local law enforcement agencies, the private sector and federal security agencies, including military intelligence.

But early on, fusion centers like the notorious “red squads” of the 1960s and ’70s, morphed into national security shopping malls where officials monitor not only alleged terrorists but also left-wing and environmental activists deemed threats to the existing corporate order.

It is currently unknown how many military intelligence analysts are stationed at fusion centers, what their roles are and whether or not they are engaged in domestic surveillance.

If past practices are an indication of where current moves by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will lead, in breaking down the “traditional fault line” that prohibits the military from engaging in civilian policing, then another troubling step along the dark road of militarizing American society will have been taken.

U.S. Northern Command: Feeding the Domestic Surveillance Beast

Since its 2002 stand-up, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and associated military intelligence outfits such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the now-defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) have participated in widespread surveillance of antiwar and other activist groups, tapping into Pentagon and commercial databases in a quixotic search for “suspicious patterns.”

As they currently exist, fusion centers are largely unaccountable entities that function without proper oversight and have been involved in egregious civil rights violations such as the compilation of national security dossiers that have landed activists on various terrorist watch-lists.

Antifascist Calling reported last year on the strange case of Marine Gunnery Sgt. Gary Maziarz and Col. Larry Richards, Marine reservists stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. Maziarz, Richards, and a group of fellow Marines, including the cofounder of the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center (LACTEW), stole secret files from the Strategic Technical Operations Center (STOC).

When they worked at STOC, the private spy ring absconded with hundreds of classified files, including those marked “Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information,” the highest U.S. Government classification. The files included surveillance dossiers on the Muslim community and antiwar activists in Southern California.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune which broke the story in 2007, before being run to ground Maziarz, Richards and reserve Navy Commander Lauren Martin, a civilian intelligence contractor at USNORTHCOM, acquired information illegally obtained from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). This is the same classified system which fusion centers will have access to under the DoD’s new proposal.

Claiming they were acting out of “patriotic motives,” the Marine spies shared this classified counterterrorism information with private contractors in the hope of obtaining future employment. Although they failed to land plush private sector counterterrorism jobs, one cannot rule out that less than scrupulous security firms might be willing to take in the bait in the future in order to have a leg up on the competition.

So far, only lower level conspirators have been charged. According to the Union-Tribune “Marine Cols. Larry Richards and David Litaker, Marine Maj. Mark Lowe and Navy Cmdr. Lauren Martin also have been mentioned in connection with the case, but none has been charged.” One codefendant’s attorney, Kevin McDermott, told the paper, “This is the classic situation that if you have more rank, the better your chance of not getting charged.”

Sound familiar? Call it standard operating procedure in post-constitutional America where high-level officials and senior officers walk away scott-free while grunts bear the burden, and do hard time, for the crimes of their superiors.

Fusion Centers and Military Intelligence: Best Friends Forever!

Another case which is emblematic of the close cooperation among fusion centers and military intelligence is the case of John J. Towery, a Ft. Lewis, Washington civilian contractor who worked for the Army’s Fort Lewis Force Protection Unit.

In July, The Olympian and Democracy Now! broke the story of how Towery had infiltrated and spied on the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR), an antiwar group, and shared this information with police.

Since 2006, the group has staged protests at Washington ports and has sought to block military cargo from being shipped to Iraq. According to The Olympian:

OlyPMR member Brendan Maslauskas Dunn said in an interview Monday that he received a copy of the e-mail from the city of Olympia in response to a public records request asking for any information the city had about “anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), or Industrial Workers of the World.” (Jeremy Pawloski, “Fort Lewis investigates claims employee infiltrated Olympia peace group,” The Olympian, July 27, 2009)

What Dunn discovered was highly disturbing to say the least. Towery, who posed as an anarchist under the name “John Jacob,” had infiltrated OlyPMR and was one of several listserv administrators that had control over the group’s electronic communications.

The civilian intelligence agent admitted to Dunn that he had spied on the group but claimed that no one paid him and that he didn’t report to the military; a statement that turned out to be false.

Joseph Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesperson confirmed to The Olympian that Towery was a contract employee and that the infiltrator “performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community,” but “it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media.”

In September, The Olympian obtained thousands of pages of emails from the City of Olympia in response to that publication’s public-records requests. The newspaper revealed that the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WJAC), a fusion center, had copied messages to Towery on the activities of OlyPMR in the run-up to the group’s November 2007 port protests. According to the paper,

The WJAC is a clearinghouse of sorts of anti-terrorism information and sensitive intelligence that is gathered and disseminated to law enforcement agencies across the state. The WJAC receives money from the federal government.

The substance of nearly all of the WJAC’s e-mails to Olympia police officials had been blacked out in the copies provided to The Olympian. (Jeremy Pawloski, “Army e-mail sent to police and accused spy,” The Olympian, September 12, 2009)

Also in July, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a 1525 page file on WJAC’s activities.

Housed at the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, one document described WJAC as an agency that “builds on existing intelligence efforts by local, regional, and federal agencies by organizing and disseminating threat information and other intelligence efforts to law enforcement agencies, first responders, and key decision makers throughout the state.”

Fusion centers are also lucrative cash cows for enterprising security grifters. Wikileaks investigations editor Julian Assange described the revolving-door that exists among Pentagon spy agencies and the private security firms who reap millions by placing interrogators and analysts inside outfits such as WJAC. Assange wrote,

There has been extensive political debate in the United States on how safe it would be to move Guantánamo’s detainees to US soil–but what about their interrogators?

One intelligence officer, Kia Grapham, is hawked by her contracting company to the Washington State Patrol. Grapham’s confidential resume boasts of assisting in over 100 interrogations of “high value human intelligence targets” at Guantánamo. She goes on, saying how she is trained and certified to employ Restricted Interrogation Technique: Separation as specified by FM 2-22.3 Appendix M.

Others, like, Neoma Syke, managed to repeatedly flip between the military and contractor intelligence work–without even leaving the building.

The file details the placement of six intelligence contractors inside the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) on behalf of the Washington State Patrol at a cost of around $110,000 per year each.

Such intelligence “fusion” centers, which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population. (Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, July 29, 2009)

The Wikileaks documents provide startling details on how firms such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), The Sytex Group and Operational Applications Inc. routinely place operatives within military intelligence and civilian fusion centers at a premium price.

Assange wonders whether these job placements are not simply evidence of corruption but rather, are “designed to evade a raft of hard won oversight laws which apply to the military and the police but not to contractors? Is it to keep selected personnel out of the Inspector General’s eye?” The available evidence strongly suggests that it is.

As the American Civil Liberties Union documented in their 2007 and 2008 reports on fusion center abuses, one motivation is precisely to subvert oversight laws which do not apply to private mercenary contractors.

The civil liberties’ watchdog characterized the rapid expansion of fusion centers as a threat to our constitutional rights and cited specific areas of concern: “their ambiguous lines of authority, the troubling role of private corporations, the participation of the military, the use of data mining and their excessive secrecy.”

And speaking of private security contractors outsourced to a gaggle on intelligence agencies, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book Spies For Hire, that since 9/11 “the Central Intelligence Agency has been spending 50 to 60 percent of its budget on for-profit contractors, or about $2.5 billion a year, and its number of contract employees now exceeds the agency’s full-time workforce of 17,500.”

Indeed, Shorrock learned that “no less than 70 percent of the nation’s intelligence budget was being spent on contracts.” However, the sharp spike in intelligence outsourcing to well-heeled security corporations comes with very little in the way of effective oversight.

The House Intelligence Committee reported in 2007 that the Bush, and now, the Obama administrations have failed to develop a “clear definition of what functions are ‘inherently governmental’;” meaning in practice, that much in the way of systematic abuses can be concealed behind veils of “proprietary commercial information.”

As we have seen when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in 2004, and The New York Times belatedly blew the whistle on widespread illegal surveillance of the private electronic communications of Americans in 2005, cosy government relationships with security contractors, including those embedded within secretive fusion centers, will continue to serve as a “safe harbor” for concealing and facilitating state crimes against the American people.

After all, $75 billion buys a lot of silence.

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd and longest-serving US president

This great and powerful force—the accumulated wealth of the United States—has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property.

Senator Richard Pettigrew, Triumphant Plutocracy, 1922

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826), 3rd US President, 1802

The U.S. national debt clock is clicking and it is fast approaching the $12 trillion mark, all the while the Fed (less a central bank than the banks’ Bank) is printing new money like crazy and lending it to its client banks at close to zero interest rates (i.e. at negative interest rates). What is wrong with this picture? It simply means that most Americans are losing big at this game, but a handful of mega-banks and their affiliates are raking in tremendous amounts of money in easily made profits.

Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has more than doubled since August 2007, going from $870 billion to more than $2 trillion. It is expected to keep growing as banks avail themselves of the cheap funds the Fed made available to them. The Fed, indeed, has the unique ability to create new dollars (paper currency) for the accounts of assets (good or bad) that it buys from banks, the Treasury, or other entities. This increases the monetary base (the sum of currency plus total banking reserves), and banks through their lending can expand this money supply even further.

And the Fed has been extraordinarily generous to the banks, the largest of them are in fact owners of the twelve regional Fed banks.

In fact, the Fed has broken practically every central banking rule in order to provide cheap funds to the banks. First, it has pushed the fed funds rate to close to zero so banks could have credit at close to zero cost to them. Second, it has expanded the range and quality of assets it stood ready to accept as collateral for its loans to the banks, so much so that it can be said that the U.S. Fed is presently creating new money backed by the shakiest of assets, some being called “toxic waste.” This is reminiscent of the eighteenth century (beginning in 1789) practice of the French revolutionary government of creating new money (the assignats) backed by the seized properties of the Catholic Church.

Let’s summarize quickly the numerous ways the Fed (and to a certain extent, the U.S. Treasury) have found to channel cheap funds to the banks and to brokers. In September 2008, some investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, officially became commercial banks in order to profit from the Fed’s new generosity.

• The Term Auction Facility (TAF);
• The Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF);
• The Foreign Exchange Swap programs (the currency swap lines);
• The Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF);
• The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF);
• The Agency debt, Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury purchase programs;
• The Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP);
• The payment of interest on the banks’ excess reserves at the Fed.

The last disposition is worthy of attention. Because of the easy and cheap lending to the banks, the latter piled up tremendous amounts of excess reserves at the Fed, reaching more than $700 billion. Normally, banks would quickly lend these non-interest paying excess reserves to the economy. But, in October 2008, the Fed got imaginative and obtained the authority to pay interest on the banks’ reserves, including excess reserves, at a risk-free rate (the IOER rate). Since then, the banks have been earning interest on their excess reserve holdings, and therefore had little inclination to lend those reserves out to creditworthy but nevertheless risky borrowers in the rest of the economy. With this practice, the circle has been closed, and the Fed was able to provide needed funds to the banks, at close to zero cost, and enable them to rid themselves of their bad investments, without risking creating inflation. That’s quite a banking salvage operation that will be studied by economists in detail in the future.

Indeed, it was well understood after the onset of the financial crisis in August 2007, that public capital would be needed to refinance the American banking system. Private capital was too risk adverse to do that. What was less understood was the fact that the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration that continues this policy, intended to provide this capital at close to no cost to the banks and with very scant conditions.

But who really paid and has continued to pay for this imaginative recapitalization of American banks, and who profits the most?

First of all, of course, bank profits, specially those profits by big international banks, have exploded. Bank stocks have followed suit with tremendous gains. That’s why I say the stock market rally since March 5 (2009) has been a liquidity-driven rally, engineered by the Fed.

And it is easy to see why banks raked in so much money: They have been borrowing funds at close to zero cost to themselves and either were paid by the Fed to leave these funds unused or they have used them, with leverage through their hedge fund like activities, to buy interest-paying assets in the U.S. or abroad. In essence, the large “too big to fail” have been allowed to make various trading bets with the cheap public capital provided by the Fed. They gorged themselves with near free public money and used it to enrich themselves, and very little to finance the real economy.

One profitable trade, among others, that large international banks and other operators are found to embrace is a form of arbitrage: They borrow and sell the currency of the country that has the lowest possible short-term funding costs and invest the proceeds in countries whose currency and asset markets yield the most. This has the consequence of depreciating further the currency with low interest rates and of appreciating the other currencies.

During the 1990s, the Japanese economy was in the doldrums. Its short-term interest rates, just as in the U.S. today, were close to zero. International banks and hedge funds would then borrow yens in Japan, sell them for dollars or euros and invest the proceeds in high-yielding financial assets in the U.S. or in Europe. Provided the interest rate environment does not change suddenly, this sort of “carry trade” is an easy way to make money. The result, however, is a more depressed currency than necessary for the low interest rate country and more imported inflation as the price of imported goods (oil, food, commodities…) increases.

The U.S. is presently in that predicament. The U.S. Fed and Treasury have abandoned the U.S. dollar and the large international banks have depressed it further at the same time they fill their coffers. That is why we can say that, besides the profitable carry currency trade that banks and other operators employ to dump the U.S. dollar on foreign exchange markets, this currency will remain under pressure for as long as the spread of short-term interest rates favors other currencies and as long as the spread of expected inflation rates and of expected economic growth remain stable. Paradoxically, longer-term interest rates have only increased marginally. This is because banks and other Fed borrowers, when they do not leave their low interest-paying excess reserves dormant at the Fed, can buy risk-free Treasury bonds. This has the consequence of depressing longer-term interest rates and of boosting stock market prices, even as inflation expectations are on the rise.

What is to be understood is that the weak dollar is the direct consequence of the Fed’s extraordinary cheap money policy. To summarize, the average American household is being hit from all sides with this policy. First, if it is a net creditor (as most retirees are), its savings are earning paltry returns (most likely negative after inflation and taxes). Second, the U.S. dollar keeps falling in value, raising the cost of traveling abroad and of everything that is imported. Third, real incomes fall with rising prices as the purchasing power of stable or declining money incomes contracts. Fourth, the exploding public debt will translate sooner or later into higher taxes, thus reducing private disposable incomes. All in all, the standard of living of most people falls.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not question the need to inject liquidity into the banking system after the onset of the financial crisis in August 2007. What I question is the way this was done and how the public interest was sacrificed in favor of narrow private interests. Indeed it was done in the worst possible social way, with private gains and social costs. They (the Bush and Obama administrations) recapitalized the banks to the benefit of a small class of bankers, while taxing the entire population in a multitude of ways to finance the public subsidy.

There were other ways to attain the same end without taxing the many for the benefit of a few. The U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Fed, both under the Bush administration and the Obama administration discarded these solutions. That’s where the scandal lies. But since it is likely that only a handful of senators and congressmen understand what has happened, I would not be too confident in expecting that there would ever be a public investigation of the scandal, beginning with Congress auditing the Federal Reserve’s subsidized banking loans to large banks and its lack of needed regulatory activities. Kudos, however, to the Manhattan Chief U.S. District Court Judge who has ordered the Fed to make public its lending records.

Similarly, at least, some timid steps are being taken in the U.S. and in Europe to impose some limits or restrictions on the discretionary and exorbitant bankers’ bonuses. This comes a bit late, and we shall see if this is merely some political window-dressing to deflect criticism or if it is a structural step to curb oligopolistic and abusive banking practices.