Lamar W. Hankins : Foreign Policy ‘By Any Means Necessary’

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Holding hands: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak welcomes U.S. President George W. Bush to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt on June 2, 2003. Photo from AP.

By any means necessary:
U.S. foreign policy is about getting our way

History is rife with examples of U.S. foreign policy being directed at overthrowing left-wing regimes and favoring military or right-wing dictators.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 10, 2011

The two-week citizen uprising in Egypt has placed the U.S. government in a difficult position. Its support of dictators who will do our bidding always leads to foreign relations problems when those dictators are overthrown.

Recent American and world history is rife with examples of U.S. foreign policy being directed at overthrowing left-wing regimes and favoring military or right-wing dictators. In almost all such cases we are left with the enmity of the people in those countries.

If we go back just 60 years or so, we find our relations in Cuba were endangered by our embrace of Batista. When the revolution in Cuba led by Fidel Castro drove Batista from power, the government that followed was not to our liking, so we have had 60-plus years of embargoes, assassination attempts, and animosity toward Cuba by a succession of U.S. presidents from Eisenhower through Obama.

Our disdain for Cuba’s form of government, which is dominated by the Cuban Communist Party, and the influence of Cuban emigres in the U.S. have prevented normal relations with the country. This impasse has not worked well for either Cuba or the U.S.

While Castro has always been a Communist dictator, the kind we never support, throughout Central America and South America, the U.S. has embraced many right-wing dictators. But perhaps the worst blunder we have committed is to train and fund vicious militaries in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, and elsewhere in the Americas.

And at least seven times in the last century we sent American troops to Honduras to protect the banana plantations of American-owned companies. And we have intervened militarily and covertly in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and elsewhere.

During Ronald Reagan’s administration, the overt attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government by training and arming Contra (anti-Communist) guerrillas located in Honduras was a sorry spectacle. It began as an effort to improve U.S.-Iranian relations by having Israel sell weapons to a select group of Iranians. The U.S. would resupply the weapons to Israel and receive the Israeli payment.

The Iranians promised to try to get the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, who were protected by a military group in Iran. Some of the proceeds from the weapon sales were diverted illegally to fund the Contras. It was never proved that President Reagan understood the details of the arms-for-hostages deal, especially the diversion of funds to support the Contras, an act prohibited by the U.S. Congress.

Our history in South America during roughly the last 60 years reveals more of the same kinds of practices that were carried out in Central America. We backed the ouster of Allende in Chile in 1973, and more recently the ouster or assassination of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

And we supported mostly military dictatorships in Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia, where U.S. policy has focused on stamping out the drug trade. Many of those countries have now elected democratic socialist governments that we are trying to destabilize.

Recent U.S. foreign policy in Asia and the Pacific Rim has seen U.S. military and CIA support for dictators in Indonesia, South Viet Nam, Myanmar/Burma, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

In Africa, military and CIA activities to undermine regimes have followed patterns similar to those in the rest of the world. The countries of Angola, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and others (none more so than the Congo — now Zaire — where its prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by order of the Belgian government with U.S. involvement in 1961), have all suffered from the U.S. pursuit of its economic and geopolitical goals.

The Middle East in recent history has fared no better than the rest of the world, perhaps worse, with overt and covert U.S. activity in Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries.

In almost all of these cases, the United States was interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country to overthrow left-wing regimes or help right-wing regimes rise to power or maintain power. And it hasn’t mattered whether a Democrat or a Republican was president.

With Egypt, we have supported for 30 years the vicious dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, to whom we have given over a billion dollars a year to sustain his regime, largely because he has been willing to cooperate with U.S. policy in the region, especially policy regarding Israel.

Now he may be deposed by his own people, who have risen up to demand his ouster after decades of political corruption, interference with and killing of journalists, torture of prisoners, and the practice of extralegal arrests and disappearances of dissidents. To protect its perceived interests, the U.S. is swinging its support to the architect of many of those atrocities — Omar Suleiman.

Suleiman, Mubarak’s long-time intelligence chief, was named by Mubarak as his vice-president, and the U.S. is pushing to have Suleiman organize a new process for continuing the government after Mubarak’s term ends this coming September. But the demonstrators calling for Mubarak’s ouster, who have been occupying Tahrir Square for two weeks, rightly suspect a plan backed by the United States and directed by Suleiman.

A plan far better than back-room deals regarding the fate of Egypt’s political future was proposed recently by Tarek Masoud, a political scientist and Middle East specialist and an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. It follows Egypt’s Constitution and provides a way for the Egyptian people to have free and fair elections.

Masoud’s plan is for Mubarak to dissolve parliament, a power only an elected president possesses under the Egyptian Constitution, and call for new parliamentary elections (which presumably could be directed by an independent tribunal to assure that they are fair and honestly reflect the will of the Egyptian people). Masoud’s proposal calls also for a new parliament to enact changes in Egypt’s Constitution that makes the selection this fall of a new president more open and assures that another dictator could not come to power and thwart the will of the people.

Of course, the U.S. does not support the will of the Egyptian people any more than it supported the will of the Iranian people, or the Nicaraguan people, or the Chilean people, or the Venezuelan people in times past. The people’s will may not favor U.S. interests, so the U.S. will take action to make sure that we have our way.

When the world does not bend to our will, we do everything we can to get our way, including resorting to violence, either through our military might or through covert means. And our military might is spread around on over 1,000 installations in 177 countries, along with numerous submarines and battleships at the ready throughout the world.

The use of violence has been the foreign policy of the U.S. since the end of World War II, and it is how we enforce the notion that “what we say goes.”

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]

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Danny Schechter : Mummies and Dummies in Egypt

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon from The English Blog.

Mummies and dummies:
The Egyptian crisis will only get deeper
thanks to lurking economic disaster

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / February 9, 2011

The African journalist Nathanial Manheru chose a quote from French icon Andre Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs to understand current events in Egypt: “It is in Egypt that we are reminded that (man) invented the tomb.”

The tomb may be the appropriate metaphor not only for wannabe President-for-forever Hosni Mubarak but also for the 30-plus year neocolonial economic system that he has presided over. Not surprisingly, Frank Wisner Jr, the former U.S. Ambassador and son of a CIA dirty tricksters, wants the President to stick around — in the country’s interest, of course.

And Western countries are now aligning with the people in the suites — not the streets. So much for the bottom-up democracy that President Obama has appeared to support. We want freedom there — but we can wait!

What’s next for Egypt?

The 82 year old President seems stuck in the final stages of his own mummification. At the same time we might consider the decisions he ratified that in a sense “dummified” the world.

  • He didn’t appear to have seen the crisis coming in the same way so-called “intelligence” agencies from the CIA to the Mossad missed it too. as they had the Iranian Revolution before it, and as the wise men of finance missed the financial crisis.

  • He hasn’t paid attention to Egypt’s imploding economy, firing an internationally respected finance mister and replacing him with Samir Radwan who is expected to turn the economy around miraculously amidst the chaos and uncertainty.

  • He reacted with a series of self-defeating (and country-destroying) measures from shutting down the Internet and crippling commerce to sending in an army of thugs that revealed just how brutal his critics insisted he always was. Not only is Mubarak still in power but his secret police, the Mukhabarat, are torturing away.

  • His violent overreaction against the world media — the arrests and clubbing of journalists in public — insured more coverage, not less, and made certain that the world would be glued to the dramatic confrontation — the very thing TV cameras live for — as Egypt showcased its own Superbowl of confrontation.

We all saw these events despite the efforts to muzzle the media.

But another scene went largely unseen: the crippling of Egypt’s economy that may prove to be more dangerous for the country’s future.

While Mubarak did not depart on the demonstrators’ stated “day of departure,” something else did — currency and investments. It’s been estimated that the country is losing $310 million a day, and that already adds up to several billion dollars.

Stock Market Digital reports that Egyptians and foreign investors have transferred hundreds of millions, much of it to South East Asia or Australia. Its’ assets are at risk, says John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi. “If it does fail to compress this rioting situation the assets might get depleted soon enough.”

All of this has had a global impact, too, with stock markets battered worldwide and crude prices going up. Many experts fear a run on the banks when they reopen. It is significant that foreign interests now own more than half of Egypt’s banks. They were to open Sunday but fears of a bank run kept most closed. The Egyptian pound was down at its lowest level since 2005.

Former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins writes about this banking sector:

From 2004 to 2008, as the world economic crisis was being stoked by the U.S. banking system and its rapacious toxic asset machine, Mubarak’s regime was participating in a different way. Mubarak wasn’t pushing subprime loans onto Egyptians; instead, he was embarking on an economic strategy that entailed selling large pieces of Egypt’s banks to the highest international bidder. The result was a veritable grab-fest of foreign bank takeovers in the heart of Cairo…

Egypt attracted $42 billion worth of foreign capital into its borders, as one of the top investment “destinations” in the Middle East and Africa. “Hot” money entry was made easy, with no restrictions on foreign investment or repatriation of profits, and no taxes on dividends, capital gains or corporate bond interest…

Not surprisingly, those foreign speculation strategies didn’t bring less poverty or more jobs either. Indeed, the insatiable hunt for great deals, whether by banks, hedge funds, or private equity funds, as it inevitably does, had the opposite effect.

She reveals that Goldman Sachs invested in a major real estate company for the luxury market with millions living on $2 a day.

Now, a financial crisis threatens.

Reuters reports optimistically:

An exodus of foreign investors would probably be manageable. The central bank says its official reserves are $36 billion. Additional assets held with commercial banks — regarded as unofficial reserves — are estimated at around $20 billion. Before the crisis, foreigners held just 7 percent of Egypt’s total public debt, equivalent to a little over $11 billion.

The bigger worry is if Egyptians also take fright. The rich could decide to shift their money into gold, dollars, or overseas markets. The poor, many of whom are relatively new to banking, may choose to stash their life savings under mattresses instead, There is a serious danger of out of control inflation, Robin Amlot, managing editor of Banker Middle East, says people are starting to “run out of the basics, which will feed into inflation.”

Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded Egypt’s government bond ratings to Ba2 from Ba1. Its outlook went to negative from stable. This will cost the country a significant amount of money.

Why is this happening? Clearly, financial institutions put their own interests before the public interest. The U.S. government may want to stabilize Egypt but the private sector and Wall Street have no compunction about destabilizing it if they think that is the best way to profit.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick admitted to a conference in Germany that rising unemployment and food prices are critical to “the instability in the region.” He did not discuss how World Bank policies had made conditions worse over the years.

Mumbarak’s model of economic growth had helped fund a small middle class without dealing with persistently high unemployment, rising food prices, inflation, and deepening poverty.

Canada’s CTV reports that

one-in-five Egyptians lives below the poverty line with little hope of rising above it as unemployment hovers around 10 percent. And those with jobs can do little to combat inflation soaring at a rate of more 12 percent a year.

Egyptian-born Montrealer Mohamed Kamel says when you factor in his homeland’s inadequate healthcare and a neglected education system combined with a rampant culture of corruption it’s easy to see where the frustration is coming from.

The Guardian reports that one person who has not suffered from these policies is none other than Hosni Mubarak.

President Hosni Mubarak’s family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles, and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.

These problems and inequalites have long been urgent issues in Egypt, but in the last weeks they were overshadowed by the high-profile protests to oust the president. These economic issues have been almost invisible in the world media but will not be easily resolved with or without Mubarak.

The West now wants to put the brakes on the campaign to oust what many consider a modern Pharaoh. They want to replace him with someone like him. But as the Lebanese editor Rami Khouri puts it, “Just changing generals is not freedom.”

Any real revolution inevevitibly demands a transformation — not just a transfer of power of the strong man at the top. The Egyptian people’s fight for political and economic justice has a long way to go.

[“News Dissector” Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

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Jim Hightower : Obama is Waltzing With the Devil

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Dancing with the devil. Drawing from Decoded Stuff.

Obama, Inc.:
With Daley and Immelt on board,
our president is waltzing with the devil.

By Jim Hightower / CommonDreams / February 9, 2011

When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you’re leading.

That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall’s congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he’s now filled his White House dance card with them.

First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.

Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to “encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness.” This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric’s CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE’s workers are in our country.

As an AFL-CIO official notes, “Highly globalized companies don’t have the same interests as the United States. There is no company more emblematic of this than GE.”

In his recent State of the Union speech, Obama offered only cold comfort to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or barely employed, saying blandly that “The rules have changed.” Well, yes — and who changed them? Self-serving CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, that’s who.

America’s working families — our endangered middle class — have a right to expect Obama to fight for rules that are fair to them and our country, not meekly accept rules that have been skewed by an elite corporate class to profit them alone. Instead, our president is waltzing with the devil.

He’s rebranding his presidency, all right. It’s becoming Obama, Inc.

[Jim Hightower, a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was posted to OtherWords and distributed by CommonDreams.

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Joan Wile : Calling All Grannies!

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Another grandmother against the war. Photo from cessemi’s photostream / Flickr.

Calling all peace grannies
to get off their fannies

By Joan Wile / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2011

NEW YORK CITY — There we were, last Wednesday as usual, our little straggly group of elderly grandmothers and supporters standing on Fifth Avenue in front of Rockefeller Center chanting, “BRING THEM BACK… FROM AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ! STOP THE KILLING NOW!”

We were into our eighth year of our Grandmothers Against the War weekly late-afternoon one-hour vigil, begun on Jan. 14, 2004 and held continuously until now with hardly a single break, no matter what the elements have thrown at us.

On this particular Wednesday we were down to only seven protesters, a disappointing decrease from our usual approximately 15. Of course, the weather had something to do with the meager turnout — New York City was still recovering from the multiple onslaughts of snow crippling people’s ability to get around.

While standing there (our aging bones making it painful after the first half hour), we began discussing the situation in Egypt. We wondered if there were any way at all for there to be a similar eruption of public discontent here in the U.S.

Sadly, we concluded it was extremely unlikely. Oh, yes, we peace grannies and the Veterans for Peace who join us every week are passionate about our cause. We deplore the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are horrified about the loss of American military and civilian life in both countries (still ongoing in Iraq, despite the perception encouraged by the muted reporting in the media that implies otherwise).

We lament the obscene amounts of money tossed away on unwinnable and unjustified wars as the funds for our domestic needs dwindle away to the point where our citizens are in desperate straits. Yes, we are concerned enough to take to the streets and try to bring awareness to the indifferent masses of people passing by us that we are in critical trouble, that we must end these wars and occupations for our very survival. But, we are so few.

There are always a handful of people walking by who acknowledge us, give us a thumbs up or a “Thank you,” as they smilingly continue on their way. Usually, those sympathizers are from other countries — our sense is that people from abroad absolutely hate our wars. But, mostly, passers-by pretty much ignore us.

We assume that this apathy is wide-spread throughout the United States. We marvel at the fact that the Tea Party has been able to mobilize people to hit the streets, and are displeased that their causes are so antipathetic to our beliefs.

Will the Tea Party be able to foment a revolt similar to Egypt’s? I hope not.

But, why can’t WE even begin to goose our population into demanding we end the wars? It’s a strange dichotomy — the issues that people are really heated about — jobs, inferior education, inadequate health care as prime examples — cannot be solved until we bring the money home along with the troops; yet, the unconscionable conflicts are almost never mentioned in politicians’ speeches or media editorials.

PEOPLE DO NOT SEE THE CONNECTION!

I’ve concluded that the anti-war grandmothers’ job is to make that connection in people’s minds. I’m trying to dream up an action that will gain enough attention to start infiltrating into people’s consciousness.

To that end, I am herewith pleading to all grandmothers everywhere reading this article to contact me — joanwile263@aol.com
— with their ideas and suggestions about how we can create a grandmothers’ movement that will wake up America. And, beyond that, let me know if you will join with me and my peer grannnies to make it happen.

Grandmothers are thought of as wise, nurturing, and balanced. People will listen to us if our message is made available to them. Let us take off our night caps and don our thinking ones. We know what’s at stake — the future of our children and grandchildren. We must do all within our power to end these wars and foster a world of peace for them.

Hurry — we have so little time!

[Joan Wile is the author of Grandmothers Against the War: Getting Off Our Fannies and Standing Up for Peace (Citadel Press, May, 2008).]

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Robert Jensen : When Humans Play God

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

“Human ignorance.” Photo by Lindstol / Crestock.

Technological fundamentalism:
Why bad things happen when humans play God

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2011

If humans were smart, we would bet on our ignorance.

That advice comes early in the Hebrew Bible. Adam and Eve’s banishment in chapters two and three of Genesis can be read as a warning that hubris is our tragic flaw. In the garden, God told them they could eat freely of every tree but the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This need not be understood as a command that people must stay stupid, but only that we resist the temptation to believe that we are godlike and can competently manipulate the complexity of the world.

We aren’t, and we can’t, which is why we should always remember that we are far more ignorant than we are knowledgeable. It’s true that in the past few centuries, we humans have dramatically expanded our understanding of how the world works through modern science. But we would be sensible to listen to plant geneticist Wes Jackson, one of the leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement, who suggest that we adopt “an ignorance-based worldview” that could help us understand these limits.

[Wes Jackson, “Toward an Ignorance-Based Worldview,” The Land Report, Spring 2005, pp. 14-16. See also Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).]

Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute research center, argues that such an approach would help us ask important questions that go beyond the available answers and challenge us to force existing knowledge out of its categories. Putting the focus on what we don’t know can remind us of the need for humility and limit the damage we do.

This call for humility is an antidote to the various fundamentalisms that threaten our world today. I use the term “fundamentalism” to describe any intellectual, political, or theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system.

Fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris — overconfidence not only in one’s beliefs but in the ability of humans to understand complex questions definitively. Fundamentalism isn’t unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in mistaking limited knowledge for wisdom.

In ascending order of threat, these fundamentalisms are religious, national, market, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to democracy and sustainable life on the planet.

Religious fundamentalism is the most contested of the four, and hence is the one most often critiqued. National fundamentalism routinely unleashes violence that leads to critique, though most often the critique focuses on other nations’ hyperpatriotic fundamentalism rather than our own. And as the prophets of neoliberalism’s dream of unrestrained capitalism are exposed as false prophets, criticism of market fundamentalism is moving slowly from the left to the mainstream.

Religious, national, and market fundamentalisms are frightening, but they may turn out to be less dangerous than our society’s technological fundamentalism.

Technological fundamentalists believe that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult.

All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects — predictable and unpredictable — on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly extensive. For example, there’s the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which give us the ability to travel considerable distances with a fair amount of individual autonomy. This technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and smog, while contributing to climate destabilization that threatens the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it.

We haven’t quite figured out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the development of a system geared toward private, individual transportation based on the car, with more attention to potential consequences. [Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown, 1997).]

Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial, commercial, and household applications, including in air conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced in the 1930s — non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive with other chemical compounds.

But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, and overexposure to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune suppression.

But wait, the technological fundamentalists might argue, our experience with CFCs refutes your argument — humans got a handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing.

True enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society didn’t react to the news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a developed world that has become dependent on air conditioning, but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning running. [Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) (New York: New Press, 2010).]

So the reasonable question is: When will the unintended effects of the CFC replacements become visible? If not the ozone hole, what’s next? There’s no way to predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and sensible to assume the worst.

We don’t have to look far for evidence that our hubris is creating the worst. Every measure of the health of the ecosphere — groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity — suggests we may be past the point of restoration.

As Jackson’s example suggests, scientists themselves often recognize the threat and turn away from the hubris of technological fundamentalism. This powerful warning of ecocide came from 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. [Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize physicist and former chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ board of directors, was the primary author of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.”]

That statement was issued in 1992, and in the past two decades we have yet to change course and instead pursue ever riskier projects. As the most easily accessible oil is exhausted, we feed our energy/affluence habit by drilling in deep water and processing tar sands, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. We extract more coal through mountain-top removal, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. [Naomi Klein, “Addicted to Risk,” TEDWomen conference, December 8, 2010. ]

And we take technological fundamentalism to new heights by considering large-scale climate engineering projects — known as geo-engineering or planetary engineering, typically involving either carbon-dioxide removal from the atmosphere or solar-radiation management — as a “solution” to climate destabilization.

The technological fundamentalism that animates these delusional plans makes it clear why Wes Jackson’s call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed — out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology — I doubt any of us would ever get a good night’s sleep.

We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for thousands of years, most dramatically in the twentieth century when we ventured with reckless abandon into two places where we had no business going — the atom and the cell.

On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe — such as fossil fuels and, eventually, uranium — is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control.

Likewise, manipulating plants through traditional selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene — the foundational material of life — takes us into places we have no way to understand.

These technological endeavors suggest that the Genesis story was prescient; our taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil appears to have been ill-advised, given where it has led us. We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created.

The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation to determine how to recover from our most dangerous missteps.

A good first step is to adopt an ignorance-based worldview, to heed the warning against hubris that appears in the most foundational stories — religious and secular — of every culture. That would not only increase our chances of survival, but in Jackson’s words, make possible “a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.”

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. This article was also posted at The Progressive Christian.]

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Ted McLaughlin : Drug Dogs Don’t Pass Sniff Test

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Drug-sniffing dog and pal. Image from Adam Carolla Show.

Establishing probable cause?
Drug dogs just don’t cut it

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2011

Here in the Texas Panhandle the Department of Public Safety (Texas’ state police) and sheriff’s departments arrest a lot of people on Interstate 40 for drug possession. It is not unusual for there to be at least one or two of these arrests, usually of people just traveling through the state, every week or two. It’s like the police look for out-of-state license plates and then stop and search those cars.

But how can they legally search the cars? They use drug dogs. If a drug dog “hits” on any part of a car or truck, that is considered to be “probable cause” to search that vehicle (and a search cannot be done without either probable cause or the consent of the owner).

If drugs are then found, the car’s passengers are arrested and charged with smuggling drugs. The case makes the newspaper and everyone is amazed at how good the drug dogs are and what a wonderful law enforcement tool they are. But is that really true?

For one thing, no one knows (except the police) how many times the drug dogs “hit” on a vehicle and nothing is found. That’s because there is no arrest in those cases and therefore no newsworthy story, especially if the driver is from out-of-state and continues his/her journey.

The general public (and the courts) only hear about the incidents where drugs are found, and that gives them a skewed opinion of just how good the drug dogs really are.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis decided to determine just how good the drug dogs are. They performed an experiment using 18 different teams (drug dog and police officer) and it turned out that the dogs had over 200 false “hits” on places where there were no drugs (and never had been any drugs). Here is how the experiment worked:

The researchers took 18 drug dog teams to a church, where it is likely no drugs or explosives had ever been placed in the past. The cops were told there might be up to three target scents in any one of four rooms. If they saw a piece of red construction paper in the room, that indicated where a target scent was placed.

The first room was left untouched. The second room had a piece of red construction paper on a cabinet. The third room had two sausages and two tennis balls placed as decoys. The fourth room had the decoy scents and the red paper. However, none of the rooms had any drugs or explosives.

There shouldn’t have been any alerts, but, in fact, handlers indicated their dog had alerted in every room. There were more alerts in rooms with red paper (which piques the cop’s interest) and no corresponding increase in rooms with sausages and tennis balls (which would pique a dog’s interest).

In other words, at best, dogs are responding to the subtle non-verbal cues of their masters to find drugs or explosives where the human thinks there should be drugs or explosives. The cop suspects you have pot so his body language makes the dog alert. At worst, the cop is purposefully cuing his dog to alert when he wants a handy excuse to violate your Fourth Amendment rights.

I am glad that someone finally performed a test like this. I worked in some branch of law enforcement for most of my working life, and I have believed for a long time now that these dogs are not nearly as good as is advertised by those who use them. They just make too many mistakes.

Years ago, I worked in a juvenile prison. Every few weeks we brought in a drug dog to search for hidden drugs in the institution, and many times it was my duty to accompany the officer and dog on their rounds.

The dog always “hit” on several locations on each trip, but never found any drugs. The officers excuse was always that there had been drugs in the location at one time. After many of these failed excursions, I lost any faith I had in drug dogs.

Probable cause is not established just because an officer suspects something. There must be something more, and in suspected drug stops on the highway, that something else is a “hit” by a drug dog. The courts have been led to believe these dogs are so accurate that they rarely make mistakes, and that is why they take a “hit” by one of these dogs to be worthy of establishing probable cause — thus justifying a legal search. Unfortunately, that is just not true.

Can they sometimes find drugs? Yes. But far too often they are wrong. And they are wrong enough times that they should not be used to establish probable cause. Frankly, if an officer wants to search a car he can always find a dog that will “hit” on that car. That’s not real probable cause, just an excuse that can be used in court to justify the illegal search.

It is time for more research to be done, and then for the courts to stop recognizing a “hit” by a drug dog as probable cause. They simply aren’t reliable enough.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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SPORT / Dave Zirin : Fox Be Damned, It Was a People’s Victory

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Packers fans. Image from D.

Fox be damned:
Why a Packers victory is a people’s victory

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / February 7, 2011

The 2011 Super Bowl was between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers — two squads whose monikers speak to their roots as factory teams in the industrial heartland.

As these teams prepared to face-off in the almighty spectacle that is the Super Bowl, the game’s pre-game show involved a salute to Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday. Considering how Reagan gutted the aforementioned industrial heartland, a more appropriate pre-game show would have been an intimate meeting at the 50 yard line between a Reagan-disguised tackling dummy and fearsome Steeler James Harrison.

The Black Eyed Peas at halftime, however, made me long for another Reagan tribute. It was also Bob Marley’s birthday and I’m going to guess that far more Super Bowl parties in this country reflected Marley’s legacy than Reagan’s.

But it wasn’t just the film tribute that reminded viewers of the Reagan 1980s. The sheer tonnage of militaristic bombast with patriotic trimmings was like Top Gun on steroids and might have seemed over the top to the Gipper himself.

Viewers were treated to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, coupled with Marines marching on the field, coupled with that twit from Glee singing America the Beautiful, coupled with more shots of the troops, coupled with a damaged Christina Aguilera stumbling through the National Anthem.

By the time it was done, I was ready to get an American Flag tattoo and send my taxes to Hosni Mubarak like a Fox-Approved Good American. But fortunately for my sanity, I was watching the game with the DC Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against War at their annual Demilitarized Super Bowl Party.

The vets, who booed every time Fox tried to use the troops to build its brand, made it clear that real war in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what the broadcast was selling. As Geoff Millard of Iraq Vets Against the War said to me, “We love sports but hate the way it’s used and hate the way the soldiers are used to sell war.”

According to Rolling Stone, Super Bowl XLV hosted “The Ghastliest Half-Time Show in Sports History.”

And yet somewhere amidst the noise, the smoke, the Reagans, and the Black Eyed Peas, a football game actually broke out and it was a dandy. In no Super Bowl has a team ever come back from more than a 10-point deficit — and before you could blink the Steelers were down 18, 21-3. This was thanks to two costly interceptions by Pittsburgh quarterback and twice-accused rapist Ben Roethlisberger. An electric interception return for a touchdown by Green Bay safety Nick Collins reminded a lot of us why we love this game in the first place.

But Pittsburgh is a team with two dozen players who were part of their Super Bowl championship team two years ago and they refused to quit. The game winded down with Green Bay leading 31-25 and Pittsburgh having the ball with just two minutes to play. Green Bay’s defense held and a fantastic game ended as the Pack came away with the win. Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers was absolutely brilliant, completing 24-of-39 passes for 304 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions, and winning the MVP.

Yet for all the celebration of the Packers and their history, there was one brazen decision made by the show’s producers and announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman that was an insult to everything the team stands for.

Super Bowl coverage often includes numerous shots of the two teams’ owners fretting in their luxury boxes like neurotic Julius Caesars. But the Packers are a team without an owner. They’re a community-run non-profit owned by 112,000 fans. Rather than celebrate that fact, Fox didn’t mention the Pack’s unique ownership structure once. They also then didn’t include shots of the Rooney family, the most celebrated ownership family in the NFL.

After the game, during the traditional passing of the Lombardi Trophy to the winning team’s owner, the award was handed to the Packers’ “CEO and Chief Executive Officer” Mike Murphy who barely looks old enough to shave. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, as he threatens to lock the players out, clearly wants to hide the truth that the Packers have no single billionaire owner.

They want it hidden because the team from Green Bay stands as a living, breathing example that if you take the profit motive out of sports, you can get more than a team to be proud of: you can get a Super Bowl Champion.

It ain’t Tahrir Square, but it’s something — in our over-corporatized and hyper-commercialized sports world — to cheer. It is reason enough to celebrate the fact that the Lombardi Trophy has finally come home to Titletown.

[Dave Zirin is the author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. This article was also posted to The Notion, The Nation‘s group blog.]

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VERSE / Mike Davis : A R I Z O N A

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Arizona’s Sheriff Joe. Image from The News Junkie.

ARIZONA

1.

Cochise, son of the oak,
(Guchiish)
Arise
The desert cries for justice

(We must scalp Sheriff Joe)

Lt. Bascom hung your brother and nephews
Fed their eyes to the ravens
And their feet to the coyotes

Cochise of the lance
Call your blood, Mangus Colorado,
(Gandazislichiidn)
Tall as a mountain and unyielding

Johnson massacred 400 Apache women and children
So Mangus, in his grief,
made the white moon scream

Cochise, you craved peace,
But the invaders murdered your children
for gold, copper and real estate

(We must scalp Sheriff Joe)

2.

Arizona is one of God’s great poems
But the pale mad ants
Want only to spill water, asphalt, and hate

Cochise, brother to the Black man,
You defeated the slave owners’ invasion at Dragoon Mountain
But Lincoln sent no congratulations

Instead from Washington came soldiers,
Railroads, pox, and slander
Dams, jails, and ultimately Goldwater

Cochise, Last Poet of free people,
You asked these questions:
“Why do the Apache carry their lives on their fingernails?
Why is it that the Apaches wait to die?”

“Why shut me up on a reservation?
We will make peace; we will keep it faithfully.
But let us go around free as Americans do.
Let us go wherever we please.”

3.

The Secretary of War replied:

“My dear Cochise,
your aboriginal freedom is a disease
that we will cure with gallows,
howitzers, and cheap whiskey

We’re coming to build fences,
make borders, dig holes
Put men’s sweat to work under the earth
Feeding bankers in distant cities

Your people are vagabonds
who drift like clouds in the sky
But the future is already written
In the Prospectus of the Arizona Copper Corporation

If you complain about the reservation,
your starving cattle and sick children
We’ll exile you to a land without mountains
Where, like the Jews, you’ll weep for centuries.”

4.

Great-great grandfather,

They say it has been forever
But your people know it’s only been a day
Since you came down from the Dragoon Mountains

Still, the sky has exploded
And the locusts have eaten our dreams

Syndicates took the ore
And then sold the dirt
To shriveled people craving heat

Millions of lights blind the valleys
The Land can no longer see
Or remember its name

The whites have a new God
Stranger than the last
Who goes by the name
‘No Trespass’

He wears guns to school
And wants to deport
all the children to Mexico

He’s chiseled off the First Commandment
from the church doors
And replaced it with the Second Amendment

5.

Cochise,

Robespierre of the saguaro

Your pony is ready,
Painted for war,

The young girls have finished
Your medicine shirt

Here’s your father’s talisman
Of lightning-struck oak

Cochise,

The people are chanting
And we must go

To take the scalp of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Mike Davis / The Rag Blog
February 3, 2011

[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist and a social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.]

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David McReynolds : Egypt, Beyond the Pyramids

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Mystic Journey.

Egypt, Beyond the Pyramids

Now we are seeing one of the rarest of things — a moment when the people lose their fear of the State.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / February 2, 2011

This is not really about Egypt but about revolution, something we have just seen in Tunisia and are certainly seeing in Egypt. Revolutions are baffling things because while we can “explain them” after the event, we can’t predict them before they arrive.

They have uncertain beginnings, and uncertain endings. I remember, in high school, reading Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography (which is probably still in print). In it he discussed the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution. (Steffens is remembered for his quote, after his return from the Soviet Union in the early days of the revolution, when he said “I have seen the future and it works.”)

He was concerned with the issue of “Thermidor,” a term that comes from the French Revolution, when on July 27, 1794 — “9 Thermidor” under the revolutionary calendar — the deputies, weary of mass executions (1,300 in June of that year), ordered the arrest of Robespierre and other members of the “Committee of Public Safety,” and had them guillotined, marking the end of the Revolution and the consolidation of at least part of the old order.

The revolutions in the United States, Russia, and Cuba share one thing in common — those against whom the revolt was carried out generally were driven out of the country. In the U.S. the loyalists (perfectly decent folks, for the most part) fled to Canada, the British West Indies, or back to the home country. In Russia the Civil War killed a great many of the White Russians, and those who did not die, fled into exile.

Cuba wisely permitted dissenters to leave — the Mariel boatlift being an example of how the regime nonviolently eliminated a chunk of opponents. In France, despite the violence of the revolution, most of the opposition survived and in some ways France has suffered from this division to the present day.

We shall see, certainly, a longing in Egypt for order. Revolutions are great fun during their early days. (Despite the violence, there is an extraordinary exhilaration to them. Those who have seen Before Night Falls, which is generally seen as an anti‐Cuban film, as it tells the story of the poet, Reinaldo Arenas, will have to concede that it captures the early excitement of the revolution very well.)

Then food runs short, there is disorder (as we see in Egypt), travel is disrupted, the economy grinds to a halt, and there is a longing for a return to a sense of order. Even Lenin had to reverse course early in the Soviet Revolution, introducing his New Economic Policy (NEP) to save a foundering economy.

But for now we are seeing one of the rarest of things — a moment when the people lose their fear of the State, when, as the Chinese say, “the mandate of heaven has fallen” and it is only a matter of time before the old regime must yield. We saw this for a few days in France in 1968, when it seemed as if a true revolution was about to sweep the country. Those my age who were active in the Vietnam anti‐war movement saw it for a brief moment after Kent State.

I remember being at a meeting of the anti‐war leadership at Cora Weiss’ house in Manhattan when the news broke that the U.S. had invaded Cambodia. We knew we had to make an immediate response, there was no time for a mass demonstration, and so we decided to go to Lafayette Park in front of the White House where, even though we could only rally a few hundred people, we would be sure to be arrested under the rules then in place, which limited the number of demonstrators.

We sent out the call to our networks. But between the time we met, which I think was on a Friday, and May 4th, which was Monday, the students at Kent State were shot dead by the National Guard.

This led to a general strike of students all across the nation. Campuses simply closed down spontaneously. So, on that Saturday we didn’t have a few hundred people — we had close to 100,000 in Washington D.C., rallied in a week’s time.

We were nervous, not knowing if Nixon would give the order to shoot. He was nervous too — Lafayette Park was ringed with buses, nose to nose so that no one could get in. But Nixon permitted the demonstrators to gather on the great lawn behind the White House for a “legal rally.” The end of the war was still five years in the future, but in a sense that day marked the end of the legitimacy of the war in the eyes of the majority of Americans.

In Vietnam there were open revolts within the armed forces. It was an exciting time to live through… but of course it was not a revolution. Nixon was allowed to resign and Henry Kissinger is still able to appear on TV news channels as a foreign policy adviser, when he belongs in prison.

A far more important and genuine revolution was that in Iran, where a general strike in October of 1978 led, first, to efforts to control the people by firing live ammunition into crowds of youth surging the streets (those youth wore sheets of white, symbolic of death, meaning they were prepared for burial), until the police finally abandoned their posts, and in January the Shah had to flee for his life.

The violence of the Iranian Revolution was almost entirely on one side — the Shah’s military. Ironically, despite massive U.S. military aid, the Shah had few of the standard crowd control weapons, such as tear gas. So secure did the regime feel, that the last place it expected a revolt was in the streets of Teheran.

The Russian Revolution is called the October Revolution, because the Bolsheviks took power on October 25 of 1917, but it actually began in April of that year. We may expect the Egyptian Revolution — if, as I expect, it succeeds — to follow a similar uncertain path.

To sum up thus far: no one knew in advance that Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt would be swept by revolutionary fervor this winter. And no one can be sure, at this writing, what is going to happen in North Africa and Egypt. We can, however, note several things. One is that the U.S., while it doesn’t know which way to turn at the moment, had been pressuring for change — some of the U.S. aid funds had been going to pro‐democracy contacts in Egypt.

This doesn’t mean the U.S. favors democracy in Egypt; it doesn’t. It means that at least some in the State Department and the CIA knew that Mubarak’s situation was not stable. U.S. policy, not only in the Middle East but around the world, has been to favor “stable” regimes, which has meant military dictatorships. Egypt has been notorious for its authoritarian ways, its lavish use of torture (as was the Iran of the late Shah). But the U.S. has been happy to pour billions of dollars into Egypt to buy a secure alliance.

Israel has also had a strong interest in discouraging democracy in Egypt — since Mubarak has kept the Muslim Brotherhood under control, and acted to establish peace with Israel.

Democracy has never been a favored choice of the U.S. leaders. During the Cold War we were happy to support Franco, the Fascist dictator in Spain. We engineered the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Iran in order to install the Shah. We, and Israel, had urged democratic elections in the Gaza strip, on the assumption the Palestinian Authority would win; unhappily, Hamas won and Gaza has been on the shit list of both the U.S. and Israeli governments ever since.

I remember the painful lesson I got in how “liberals” view free elections during the struggle of the Vietnamese. Robert Pickus, who had had financial backing from the War Resisters League to set up a group in Berkeley in 1958 called “Acts for Peace,” before Vietnam was on the agenda, opposed those of us who called for unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam, on the grounds this wasn’t fair to the Vietnamese, because it would leave them “at the mercy of the Communists.”

We pointed out that it was the U.S. that had blocked the free elections Vietnam had been promised in 1956. Pickus argued that we had to insist on a peace settlement which would guarantee not one, but two free elections. He knew that Ho Chi Minh would win the first; he hoped that with time and U.S. funding of the opposition, the Communists might lose the second.

The Establishment is never in favor of free elections if it thinks it might lose. If one looks back at the U.S. policy (and that of Israel) in the Middle East for the past 50 years it has been a series of gambles that did not pay off. In Israel’s case, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 lead directly to the creation of Hezbollah, which is currently taking control of the government of Lebanon, thus extending Syrian influence further into Lebanon.

The U.S.managed to block Iranian control of Iran, but in the end lost out to the radical Muslims, who now play a key role in Iraq (the invasion of which was among the most remarkable blunders the U.S. has ever made).

We do not know what will happen tomorrow or next month. But we do know that the map of the Middle East is going to be very different by the end of the year. The U.S. is almost certain to lose its long‐term alliance with Egypt. It is very uncertain what will happen in Tunisia or Yemen, but in all cases U.S. influence will be greatly weakened. In Iraq the latest political developments insure that Iran will have more influence there than the U.S. In Lebanon, Syrian influence has been strengthened.

Whether any of this will induce Israel to make peace is hard to say. But a look at the range of events in the past six months strongly suggests that, once more, the brightest and best can win many short‐term victories but achieve major long‐term losses.

The most serious question is what we do here — since neither you nor I have any influence on the events in Egypt. And what we need to do is to give our strong public support to the democratic forces in Egypt, even though we cannot know how long they will be democratic. One thing, however, is quite certain: we cannot determine the policies of those nations. We can only wish them luck, and reach out to them now.

[David McReynolds is a former chair of War Resisters International, and was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives with two cats on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

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Posted on February 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

http://www.tpcmagazine.org/article/technological-fundamentalism

Technological fundamentalism: Why bad things happen when humans play God

by Robert Jensen

If humans were smart, we would bet on our ignorance.

That advice comes early in the Hebrew Bible. Adam and Eve’s banishment in chapters two and three of Genesis can be read as a warning that hubris is our tragic flaw. In the garden, God told them they could eat freely of every tree but the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This need not be understood as a command that people must stay stupid, but only that we resist the temptation to believe that we are godlike and can competently manipulate the complexity of the world.

We aren’t, and we can’t, which is why we should always remember that we are far more ignorant than we are knowledgeable. It’s true that in the past few centuries, we humans have dramatically expanded our understanding of how the world works through modern science. But we would be sensible to listen to plant geneticist Wes Jackson, one of the leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement, who suggest that we adopt “an ignorance-based worldview” that could help us understand these limits. [Wes Jackson, “Toward an Ignorance-Based Worldview,” The Land Report, Spring 2005, pp. 14-16. http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/03/42c0db19e37f4 See also Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).] Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute research center, argues that such an approach would help us ask important questions that go beyond the available answers and challenge us to force existing knowledge out of its categories. Putting the focus on what we don’t know can remind us of the need for humility and limit the damage we do.

This call for humility is an antidote to the various fundamentalisms that threaten our world today. I use the term “fundamentalism” to describe any intellectual, political, or theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris—overconfidence not only in one’s beliefs but in the ability of humans to understand complex questions definitively. Fundamentalism isn’t unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in mistaking limited knowledge for wisdom.

In ascending order of threat, these fundamentalisms are religious, national, market, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to democracy and sustainable life on the planet.

Religious fundamentalism is the most contested of the four, and hence is the one most often critiqued. National fundamentalism routinely unleashes violence that leads to critique, though most often the critique focuses on other nations’ hyperpatriotic fundamentalism rather than our own. And as the prophets of neoliberalism’s dream of unrestrained capitalism are exposed as false prophets, criticism of market fundamentalism is moving slowly from the left to the mainstream.

Religious, national, and market fundamentalisms are frightening, but they may turn out to be less dangerous than our society’s technological fundamentalism.

Technological fundamentalists believe that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects—predictable and unpredictable—on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly extensive. For example, there’s the case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which give us the ability to travel considerable distances with a fair amount of individual autonomy. This technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and smog, while contributing to climate destabilization that threatens the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it. We haven’t quite figured out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the development of a system geared toward private, individual transportation based on the car, with more attention to potential consequences. [Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (New York: Crown, 1997).]

Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial, commercial, and household applications, including in air conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical when introduced in the 1930s—non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, and overexposure to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune suppression.

But wait, the technological fundamentalists might argue, our experience with CFCs refutes your argument—humans got a handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is closing. True enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society didn’t react to the news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from a developed world that has become dependent on air conditioning, but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning running. [Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer (New York: New Press, 2010).] So the reasonable question is: When will the unintended effects of the CFC replacements become visible? If not the ozone hole, what’s next? There’s no way to predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and sensible to assume the worst.

We don’t have to look far for evidence that our hubris is creating the worst. Every measure of the health of the ecosphere—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity—suggests we may be past the point of restoration. As Jackson’s example suggests, scientists themselves often recognize the threat and turn away from the hubris of technological fundamentalism. This powerful warning of ecocide came from 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. [Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize physicist and former chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ board of directors, was the primary author of the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/1992-world-scientists-warning-to-humanity.html]

That statement was issued in 1992, and in the past two decades we have yet to change course and instead pursue ever riskier projects. As the most easily accessible oil is exhausted, we feed our energy/affluence habit by drilling in deep water and processing tar sands, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. We extract more coal through mountain-top removal, guaranteeing the destruction of more ecosystems. [Naomi Klein, “Addicted to Risk,” TEDWomen conference, December 8, 2010. http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2010/12/on-precaution] And we take technological fundamentalism to new heights by considering large-scale climate engineering projects—known as geo-engineering or planetary engineering, typically involving either carbon-dioxide removal from the atmosphere and solar-radiation management—as a “solution” to climate destabilization.

The technological fundamentalism that animates these delusional plans makes it clear why Wes Jackson’s call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed—out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology—I doubt any of us would ever get a good night’s sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for thousands of years, most dramatically in the twentieth century when we ventured with reckless abandon into two places where we had no business going—the atom and the cell.

On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe—such as fossil fuels and, eventually, uranium—is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through traditional selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene—the foundational material of life—takes us into places we have no way to understand.

These technological endeavors suggest that the Genesis story was prescient; our taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil appears to have been ill-advised, given where it has led us. We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation to determine how to recover from our most dangerous missteps.

A good first step is to adopt an ignorance-based worldview, to heed the warning against hubris that appears in the most foundational stories—religious and secular—of every culture. That would not only increase our chances of survival, but in Jackson’s words, make possible “a more joyful participation in our engagement with the world.”

Type rest of the post here

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Richard Flacks : Beyond Barack Obama

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Barack Obama. Image from Portlandart.

Beyond Barack Obama

Lefty focusing on the president and his shortcomings distracts us from the work we need to do.

By Richard Flacks / In These Times / February 2, 2011

The growing progressive drumbeat about President Barack Obama’s failed presidency, coupled now with fantasies about opposing his renomination, or with anguished hand-wringing about his failure to communicate, to lead, etc. etc., dismays me.

This hysteria is rooted in fear and anger over the intransigence of the corporate plutocracy we are up against. But the answer to corporate dictatorship and kleptocracy has to come from social movements — not the White House. History strongly suggests that grassroots disruption that threatens to unravel the social fabric is the fundamental impetus to real reform.

Yet the loudest voices on the left keep wishing that Obama would lead such a movement. It’s a natural wish — since the work of movement-building is hard, risky and costly for those who take it on. But to wish for The Leader and to cry when he seems to abandon us is childish, and it bespeaks impotence.

Let’s start by giving up a lot of BS about “principle.” There is no history of Democratic Party or liberal principle that Obama is betraying. FDR’s compromises to achieve Social Security and labor legislation abandoned African Americans with effects still strongly felt in our social order. No Democratic president was able to pass universal healthcare and all bargained away any chance of achieving it.

It was FDR who gave J. Edgar Hoover the authority to spy on the Left, and JFK who gave him the same to spy on Martin Luther King. Bill Clinton’s abandonment of welfare and his other ‘triangulations’ were larger and more cynical betrayals than Obama’s (so far). Obama’s record of accomplishment, leadership, and betrayal stacks up well against all his predecessors.

And let’s stop using ideological yardsticks to judge politicians. Is Obama “really” a progressive? Whatever he tells us he is, he must be a pragmatist in the real world he works in. And we should appreciate and even welcome that!

Ideology is a very poor predictor of integrity or action. Ideology is not what determines the political assessments that most Americans make. This is a big topic, but one advantage the Left has over the Right these days is that the latter is driven by narrow ideological thinking and therefore inevitably going to fail to connect with the American majority.

A big reason we aren’t yet in the midst of a movement on the Left has to do with the faults of the leadership in the national progressive organizational world. For example, it took months for the national organizations to call for a march on Washington for jobs. The One Nation event turned out to be a good start toward some kind of national agenda — and yet I don’t see much evidence of a concerted follow-up to it.

Many of the national leaders are now saying that they intend to be more assertive and independent. But even with a will to mobilize, strategies for effective action have to be grasped — and defining these is not an easy matter. Equally important, there is a loss of “vision” — an absence of articulate expression of how a better world might look.

Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do.

What progressives have to try is to implement strategies that directly challenge corporate and financial domination. These have to include direct action that disrupts the institutional order. One essential theme: The costs and burdens of economic contraction and austerity must not be borne by the weakest and poorest.

The disgusting cycle, perpetuated by the Obama tax deal, that gives virtually all economic gain to the very top of the income pyramid has to be disrupted.

The wars, which hugely drain the public budget, have to be resisted.

Demands that might actually help people materially — and help the economy as well — need to be voiced and acted on — a massive mortgage write-down being one obvious example. Movement-based organizing on such issues needs to find targets that can be seen and addressed. For example, make locally accessible banks and their executives responsible for the mortgage crisis.

A final suggestion: Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing. Instead of seeing students just as election time fodder, we need to consider that the campus is the primary space for generating deep, extensive discussion and debate about the social future. It’s also the place where human energy for bold and creative action can be generated.

Back in the early 1960’s, a few unions and older liberals more or less recognized their own political staleness, and put a little money and encouragement behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committeee and Students for a Democratic Society — even as these upstart groups made them nervous because they weren’t “disciplined.”

Once again, the progressive side needs activist energy that isn’t controlled by big organizational practices and perspectives — energy and thinking that can break molds and invent new modes. But if we spend a lot of our energy in anguish and attacks on Obama, our own cynicism may ruin the chance to spark new possibilities.

[Richard Flacks, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Cultural Politics and Social Movements (co-editor, 1995); Beyond the Barricades: The ’60s Generation Grows Up (1989); Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (1988), and many articles on social movements, left culture and strategy. This article was originally published at In These Times.]

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Ted McLaughlin : CBO Says Republican Policies Will Increase Debt, Deficit

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Matt Yglesias refers to politicians who use deficits for short-term political gains (like Republicans whose tax cuts for the rich added $4 trillion to the deficit), as “deficit peacocks.” Illustration by Mario Piperni from mariopiperni.com.

CBO projections:
Republican economic policies
will expand debt, increase deficit

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 1, 2011

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is the nonpartisan organization that both parties use to see the effect of their bills and economic policies on the American economy. While politicians might throw out unsubstantiated numbers glorifying their own bills, the CBO is tasked to look beneath and behind the rhetoric to determine the actual effects of those bills.

Lately, the Republicans have been ignoring many of the CBO projections, and after hearing the latest, it is easy to see why. The Republican “trickle down” giveaways to the rich are responsible for much of our ballooning national debt and the continuing national deficit — a deficit and debt that might be understandable if they creating jobs, but they are not.

For 2011, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf says that the deficit will be about $1.5 trillion (nearly one-third of which will be due to the massive Republican tax breaks for the richest 2% of Americans — projected to be over $400 billion a year). So while complaining about the deficit, the Republicans actually increased it by nearly 50%. They promised in the last campaign to cut $100 billion, but now are only talking about cutting a little over $50 billion for 2011 (a drop in the bucket compared to the huge increase they created).

In spite of this, the CBO says that if current laws and policies are followed the deficit will fall in the next few years. While the deficit for 2011 will be about 9.8% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), they expect the deficit to fall to $1.1 trillion in 2012 (7.0% of GDP), about $704 billion in 2013 (about 4.3% of GDP) and $533 billion in 2014 (about 3.1% of GDP). They then expect the deficit for 2015 through 2021 to range between 2.9% and 3.4% of GDP.

However, these figures will be true only if current law is allowed to continue. If, for example, the cuts in Medicare Advantage mandated in the health care law were not to take place (like the Republicans want), and the tax cuts currently in place were not allowed to expire at the end of 2012 as scheduled (and the Republicans are sure to want to extend them), then the baseline projection for 2015 through 2021 would at least double, and the total debt held by the public would reach 97% of GDP (the most since 1945).

From these numbers it’s easy to see that a the Republican policy of repealing health care and continuing the cutting of taxes for the rich would be a disaster for the national deficit, and even worse for the national debt. Republicans like to claim they are the party of fiscal responsibility, but a review of their recent actions and a look back at Republican administrations shows something different. The truth is that the Republican “trickle down” policies have consistently added to both the deficit and the debt — not decreased them.

The CBO does warn that if current law were continued, although deficits would come down in the next few years, the national debt would continue to grow. Either further cuts in government spending would be needed (including no more Republican giveaways to the rich) or an increase in taxes, or both. There is no way to bring down the national debt without doing this. The obvious solution would be to cut the military some (the most bloated area of the American budget) and raise taxes on the richest Americans (beyond letting the current cuts expire). But Republican policy would not allow either of these things to happen.

The CBO also paints a rather dark picture for employment. They say that if the economy produces 2.5 million jobs each year between now and 2016, the unemployment rate will finally fall below 6% in 2016. Even this dismal projection seems to me to be overly optimistic. Remember, only 1.1 million jobs were created in 2010 — a figure that barely kept up with the number of new people entering the work force.

Unless the increasing amount of job outsourcing is stopped (something the Republicans oppose and recently blocked in Congress), it is unlikely that the 2.5 million jobs a year figure can be reached. While they may be created (since the corporations and the rich are doing very well), the sad fact is that far too many of them will be shipped abroad (where good-paying jobs can be turned into poverty-wage jobs).

After viewing this latest CBO projection, it becomes even clearer that the Republican policies of giveaways to the rich and outsourcing of jobs are the biggest impediments to bringing this country out of the recession. Ordinary Americans are still hurting and still feeling the full effects of the recession, but the Republicans are only interested in helping the rich — the only people doing well right now.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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