Paul Krassner : Why Firing the General Was an Act of God

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Larson / The Far Side / The Mutt’s Nuts.

Why firing the General
Was an act of God

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2010

  1. The volcano in Iceland was considered an Act of God.
  2. Smoke from the volcano caused countless flights to be canceled.
  3. The Rolling Stone correspondent was stuck in Paris.
  4. Embedded there, he hung around with talkative drinkers.
  5. They revealed stuff while forgetting it was being told to a reporter.
  6. He wrote in his article what they had said.
  7. The fact checkers verified those statements.
  8. The article was shown to Barack Obama.
  9. Whether he fired McChrystal or didn’t, Republicans would criticize.
  10. The president fired the general, ultimately due to an Act of God.

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Posted on June 25, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

From a legal complaint by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo alleging that chip maker Intel has violated antitrust laws, we also learn much about how Dell has been doing business. Dell allegedly accepted $6 million in secret rebates from Intel between 2002 and 2007, and the SEC is apparently looking into the legality of the relationship between the two tech giants. Incidentally, we also note that Dell received $853 million in military contracts in 2009. Story by Bob Feldman.

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Texas Republicans : A Platform for Atilla the Hun

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Texas Gov. Rick Perry welcomes the flock at the first general session of the Republican Party of Texas convention on June 11, 2010, in Dallas. Photo from AP.

A document for the (middle) ages:
Platform of the Texas Republican Party

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2010

The Texas Republican Party held its convention a couple of weeks ago in Dallas. To say the Texas branch of the Republican Party is right wing is a vast understatement. They make Attila the Hun seem like a bleeding-heart liberal. It’ll probably give you some idea of where they stand to know that one of the main speakers at their kick off dinner was Rep. Michele Bachmann, the extremist right-winger from Minnesota.

But to really get the feel of how extreme the Texas Republicans are, one needs to read the Texas Republican Platform. Here are just a few of the things in that platform that these Republicans would like to see (and the comments in parentheses are mine):

  • Want deep-water drilling to continue in the Gulf of Mexico and other places. (A crazy notion in the midst of the current oil disaster, and one that is at odds with the majority of Americans.)
  • Want to abolish the Energy Department. (Makes no sense in light of global climate change and our need to find and develop alternate energy sources.)
  • Want to abolish the Education Department. (This would give fundamentalist-controlled local school boards even more power — creationism anyone?)
  • Want to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and institute a national sales tax. (To protect the rich and put a greater percentage of the tax burden on the poor, working and middle classes.)
  • Want to withdraw this country from the United Nations. (With a military budget like the U.S. has, who needs diplomacy?)
  • Oppose the establishment of time frames for withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. (Because eternal war is good for business and the dead soldiers are mainly poor, working class or minority.)
  • Support the “democratically-elected” governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. (They may be corrupt puppets, but they are our corrupt puppets.)
  • Want to abolish Affirmative Action. (Because the white power structure must be maintained.)
  • Want to eliminate the Endangered Species Act. (Our grandkids wouldn’t want to have those animals around taking up space that can be used by Big Business.)
  • Want to outlaw driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. (Will we be safer if all these drivers are unlicensed and uninsured?)
  • Want to let religious organizations engage in politics without fear of losing their tax-exempt status and want to eliminate the separation of church and state. (Because a theocracy is much better than a democracy.)
  • Want to eliminate the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. (Because businesses should be able to discriminate against anyone they want.)
  • Want to abolish Supreme Court jurisdiction in abortion, religious issues, and the Bill of Rights. (Because rights are only for white Christian males.)
  • Want to require a presidential candidate to submit a birth certificate before they can be placed on the state’s ballot. (The “birthers” are alive and well — and Republican.)
  • Want English adopted as the official language. (Even though Spanish was spoken for hundreds of years in Texas before English was.)
  • Want to abolish “no-fault divorce” laws. (Because it should be difficult for a person to get out of an abusive marriage.)
  • Want to ensure marriage can only be between a “natural man and a natural woman.” (Because equal rights shouldn’t apply to all citizens.)
  • Want to re-institute sodomy laws and deny the Supreme Court the right to review the law. (In spite of the fact that both of these would be unconstitutional.)
  • Want to make it a felony crime to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple. (If they have to force discrimination they are willing to do it.)
  • Want all human life respected from fertilization to natural death. (A fancy way of saying a woman should not have the right to control over her own body.)
  • Support the death penalty and want to extend it to rape cases. (What happened to respect for human life until natural death?)
  • Want to outlaw the sale and use of RU-486 and any other “morning-after pills.” (But you can bet they’ll oppose the government taking care of the unwanted babies this would cause.)
  • Want to eliminate social security and the social security tax and transition to “private pensions.” (Because retirement should only be for those who can afford it — not poor or working class folks.)
  • Want to “defund, repeal and reject” the health care act passed by U.S. Congress and signed by President Obama. (Because health care is a privilege for the rich — not a right for everyone.)
  • Oppose government mandating the vaccination of children. (Because a plague every now and then is a good thing.)
  • Oppose pre-school, kindergarten and any government programs dealing with early childhood development. (Wouldn’t want kids to actually be ready for school or they might learn to think for themselves.)
  • Support “open carry” laws and oppose “Gun Free Zones.” (Because everyone should always be armed, especially in schools, bars, churches, and courthouses.)
  • Support the formation of an armed state militia. (Because you just can’t have too many nuts carrying guns.)
  • Want the Minimum Wage Law to be repealed. (Because workers and families don’t really need to have a decent standard of living.)
  • Oppose the Fourteenth Amendment which gives citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. (Especially brown people who may soon make whites a minority.)
  • Oppose a Palestinian state being carved out of “historical Israel.” (Because that would lead to a two-state solution and peace in the Middle East).

These are just a few of the nutty ideas proposed in the Texas Republican platform. Does this sound like the kind of America you want to live in and leave for your children? I urge you to go read this very scary document in its entirety. The America these people want to create would be a terrible place for anyone not white, male, and rich.

The Republicans don’t just want a return to the 1950s — they want to go all the way back to the 1850s. Is there any remaining doubt that the Republican Party in Texas has been taken over by right-wing extremist fringe elements?

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

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Roger Baker : Karl Marx, the Tea Party, and our Political Economy

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

A Tea Party take on the economy. Photo from the Los Angeles Times.

The shifting currents of
Our political economy

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

Marx used to refer to what we now call the “economy” as “the political economy,” because he realized that economics is really built on the constantly shifting social foundation of culture and politics, and law derived from politics. The latter factor sets the rules and laws for the marketplace to follow. There is no better current proof of the reality of this point of view than the example of the stock dividend take-back that was forced onto BP.

Now it looks like the rules of acceptable economic behavior may be shifting. In this context, maybe Obama should be seen as the political product of the times we are living in, and not as the bold source of change that some had hoped that he would be. Obama was chosen as a leader during a time when a frightened U.S. public wanted to secure and restore and prolong the previously happy economic times of the Greenspan-era long credit bubble expansion.

When times get hard, and when government policies seem ineffective, the populace tends to become angrier and to seek out stronger medicine, usually by demanding a stronger, bolder leader of some kind. In the absence of tangible reform coming from current Democratic Party control, the Tea Party sentiment is dynamic and growing as a sort of a backlash. Here is a rather good social analysis of its internal contradictions.

The Tea Party supporters commonly want the government to stop spending and increasing what they see as their future tax obligations. However, the facts argue that without the current rapidly growing federal deficit, the U.S. economy would fall flat on its face. As we have recently heard, almost all the most recent jobs growth was due to temporary government census jobs, whereas very few jobs were created by private sector investment.

I suspect that many of the Tea Party supporters do not oppose government spending per se, so much as they oppose the current corporate-pandering pattern of public spending, which certainly has various class favoritism implications. To me it looks like an angry, screwed middle class lashing out at a dysfunctional government that is deeply resistant to reform, but thought more likely to lean on the poor than the wealthy when put under pressure.

There is no end to the need for sensible federal government reforms. We should applaud the part of the Tea Party sentiment that is genuinely opposed to the burden of corporate welfare policies that block cost reform. We can decide to disagree on whether we need to spend what we save on corporate welfare for desperately needed emergency shelter, food stamps, and lifeline social services. It is the guys at the top that mostly caused the problem, not the largely minority jobless population at the bottom.

As Monbiot says, there are deep contradictions built into these angry and hard-to-predict political movements. The “drill baby drill” crowd is being forced to confront the naked corporate profit motives of BP in the Gulf (while the environmental policies there might not be as bad as for production in Venezuela or the Nigerian Delta).

Let us shift to the big picture and what might keep the Tea Party and the rest of the U.S. public unhappy, and thus U.S. politics unsettled. Prudent Bear‘s Doug Noland is a fine economic analyst in terms of knowing which official numbers to focus on and where to find them, which is nowadays perhaps the most important skill of a good independent (and properly skeptical) economist.

Here I have cherry-picked a few snips from his recent essay that cite some of the key numbers at the heart of his argument:

…In only 21 months (seven quarters), outstanding federal debt increased $3.274 trillion or, 48.9%, to $9.971 trillion. Over this period, federal debt growth has been running at an unprecedented rate of about 13% of gross domestic product (GDP). As a percentage of annual GDP, federal debt jumped from 46% to 68% in only seven quarters. Of course, the amount of outstanding debt is dwarfed by the federal government’s massive contingent liabilities (ie future healthcare, social security and pension obligations). There is, as well, the festering issue of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)… Massive fiscal stimulus has succeeded — for now — in stabilizing national incomes (and spending!)…

Q1 Federal expenditures were up 13.2% y-o-y to SAAR $3.654 trillion, or 25% of GDP (receipts up 2.2% y-o-y to $2.301 trillion). Keep in mind that annual federal expenditures surpassed $1.8 trillion for the first time in 2000. Less than a decade later, spending is running more than double this level. Federal expenditures were less than 19% of GDP in 2000; less than 20% in years 2001-2002; less than 21% in 2003-2007; 21.6% in 2008; and 24.2% in 2009. In contrast, federal receipts, which began the decade at about 20%, were 15.6% of GDP in 2009 and were running at 15.7% in Q1 2010…

Massive federal borrowings have sustained U.S. financial and economic recoveries. These recoveries have bolstered acutely vulnerable state and local finances. So far, (over-liquefied and speculative) markets have accommodated the ongoing accumulation of government debt at quite low interest rates. Some have compared US governmental finances with those of Greece, while others have dismissed such talk as ludicrous. It is fair to say that the U.S. system has built — and continues to build — enormous risk to rising market yields and/or debt market disruption. I would argue that this risk is more dangerous than previous bubble vulnerabilities to mortgage credit disruptions — risks identifiable during those bubble years right there in the Fed’s “flow of funds” credit data…

What is ultimately at issue here is whether the current classic Keynesian approach of massive and increasing U.S. stimulus spending can restart the engine of private business job growth here in the USA, or elsewhere. The current signs are not very good. There are few signs of U.S. private business expansion yet, for the simple and logical reason that betting on a solid non-inflationary economic recovery does not now look like a smart long range investment risk to take. Peak oil adds doubt.

Wallerstein recently (and as usual) describes the situation plainly. Here he points out that the world’s nations are in essentially lurching from cure to cure in search of economic relief, confronted with rising debt and lower private growth and profits:

Impossible choices in a world depression
By Immanuel Wallerstein / June 15, 2010

“…Of course, there is one big place to reduce expenditures — the military. Military expenditures do provide jobs but far fewer than if the money were used otherwise. This does not apply only to the biggest spenders like the United States. A virtually uncommented aspect of Greece’s debt problems was its heavy expenditure on the military. But are governments ready to reduce significantly military expenditures?
It doesn’t seem too likely.

So, what can the states do? They are trying one thing today, and another thing tomorrow. Last year, it was stimulus. This year, it’s debt reduction. The year after, it will be taxation. In any case, the overall situation will be worse and worse…

The way out of all of this is not some small adjustment here or there — whether of the monetarist or the Keynesian variety. To emerge from the economic box in which the world finds itself requires a fundamental overhaul of the world-system. This will surely have to come, but how soon?

Who has the vision to see what productive U.S. investments, even the obviously needed ones in energy, are profitable over a 10-year time frame, given this unpredictable global investment climate? The current investment climate uncertainty is enough to challenge Warren Buffett and the others.

The bankers, who largely get to decide what happens, can see that most U.S. investment in the production of real consumer goods is risky in the context of a global crisis, and with a debt-ridden, aging U.S. population as investment security. There remains the impossible-to-meet Chinese price competition in producing consumer goods. This means that the dollar must surely shrink in value against the yuan; the best we can probably anticipate from this is a soft landing transition to a lower standard of living for U.S. consumers.

For now, the U.S. government keeps printing and lending, although a big renewed expansion of federal stimulus is in doubt because of the politics. All the while, the top officials in the U.S. government must know that the game has to end at some point, and that interest rates must rise to reflect the true investment risk, and that the dollar must be devalued.

This increasing instability will probably have to become known through some unpredictable event like Greece, panicking an already edgy global finance market. All we can say for sure is that the current policies are making things continually less stable, and encouraging an outcome of that kind.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog.]

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Dick J. Reavis : How Davy Crockett Really Died

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Costumed Klansmen plying their trade. Image from University of North Carolina.

The true story:
David Crockett and the KKK in San Antonio

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

During a bout of recent microfilm reading in the pages of an old and obscure newspaper, I discovered who killed Davy Crockett and how he died. The story reporting it is below. Perhaps history buffs in San Antonio will be able to help me flesh out this startling Texana find:

SAN ANTONIO, Tex.—David Crockett, 24 year-old jobless white worker, is believed to have been “done away with” by Klansmen, following his disappearance and the finding of his bullet-shattered automobile.

“Warning. We are certain you raised the Ku Klux Klan issue in this campaign,” said a note he received the day before his disappearance. “If you want to remain in good health, tend to your own private business and leave us alone.” The note was signed “K.K.K.”

The issue of the right of Negroes to vote in the Democratic primary has again been raised in this present campaign, with many demanding this right following a U.S. supreme court decision supporting upholding it. Negroes are, nevertheless, still barred from the primaries and the Texas supreme court has upheld this rule.

The trick of this story is revealed in its headline: “K.K.K. ‘Gets’ White Texan.” It is from the Sept. 1934 of the Southern Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party in Birmingham, Ala.

It leaves much untold. Who was this David Crockett? A city directory would tell us, and so, too, might copies of the July or August issues of the “boss” dailies in San Antonio. (I am not in Texas. If anyone wants to volunteer to do the library work, I’d be much obliged.)

Maybe David Crockett, the one mentioned here, ought to be a hero for the Left in Texas!

[Dick J. Reavis, a contributor to the original Rag, is a professor in the English department at North Carolina State University. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com .]

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Michael Dell : Did He Violate Texas Antitrust Laws?

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

The artist as a young nerd: Michael Dell at Dell Computers production facility in Austin, 1989. At age 24 he was already a multi-millionaire. Photo by Rebecca McEntee / AP / Academy of Achievement.

Monopolies in Texas

A new era of antitrust regulation in Texas began with the enactment of the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act of 1983 (Texas Business & Commerce Code, ch. 15), which is based on federal antitrust law. Unlawful practices, defined as in the federal statutes, include: “every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce;” to monopolize, or to attempt or conspire to monopolize, “any part of trade or commerce;” and tying arrangements and acquisition of stock or assets that lessen competition substantially…

The legislature… made it clear that the act would apply to Texas activities and conduct even if they also affect interstate commerce… The attorney general may sue for civil fines of up to $1,000,000 against a corporation… District attorneys may bring felony prosecutions against persons who enter into a contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce, or who monopolize, or attempt or conspire to monopolize, any part of trade or commerce. …The attorney general also was authorized to bring civil suits under federal antitrust laws.

— The Handbook of Texas

Did Dell and Intel’s years of collusion
Violate U.S. and Texas antitrust laws?

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

In recent years, Dell Inc. Chairman of the Board Michael Dell has been among the richest of the Texas Rich. Personally worth around $13.5 billion, Dell was ranked by Forbes magazine in 2010 as the 37th-wealthiest billionaire on earth.

Coincidentally, in his November 3, 2009, legal complaint against Intel, which alleges that U.S. antitrust laws were violated by Intel, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo also makes some interesting observations about how executives at Texas billionaire Dell’s firm have allegedly been doing business in recent years. According to the New York Attorney General’s complaint:

…Intel for years paid Dell lump-sum rebates…

…As Dell’s lead negotiator with Intel put it in a Dec. 7, 2004 email to his Intel counterpart, explaining that Michael Dell wanted an additional $400 million rebate payment from Intel. “This is really easy… MSD [Michael Dell] wants $400 M [million] more. I’ve been trying to figure out the structure.”

Dell’s profitability… came to depend on Intel rebate payments. This was dramatically illustrated by internal Intel emails in April 2004, arriving from Dell’s need to finalize its earnings forecast for the coming quarter. Essentially Dell asked Intel for an additional $100 million…

Absent Intel’s anticompetitive acts, prices to consumers would have been lower…

As AMD [Advanced Micro Devices] was beginning to threaten Intel’s dominance, Dell and Intel formed a partnership in which, in exchange for exclusivity, Intel paid Dell billions of dollars, assured it of a preferred supply of chips over its competitors, and collaborated with Dell to submit below-cost bids in strategic contests against AMD’s products…

This arrangement lasted for at least five years, from 2001 to 2006… As Intel’s payments increased, Dell became more and more dependent on Intel for its reported profits…

In pure dollar terms, Dell was far and away the leader in receiving Intel’s largess. For example, over the four year period from February 2002 to January 2007, it received approximately $6 billion in “rebates.” Most of this money was furnished to Dell under programs initially titled “MOAP” and then “MCP.” “MOAP” was an acronym standing for “Mother of all Programs.” The term MOAP was later replaced in the lexicon by another acronym “MCP” which purportedly (and misleadingly) stood for “Meet Competition Payments.” Both generally referred both to Dell’s global percentage based rebates and to lump-sum payments made by Intel to Dell during the relevant period…

Intel also assured Dell of “preferred” supply… Internal Intel emails show that satisfying 100% of Dell’s demand was a top priority for Intel…

In return for exclusivity, Dell sought terms from Intel that were more favorable than those Intel extended to its other largest and most favored customers…

Intel did in fact grant Dell significant financial advantages…

…Intel encouraged Dell to make below-cost bids, with Intel subsidies, when competing against AMD-based server products…

Over the coming years, Intel and Dell fell into a pattern of negotiating the amount of Intel’s subsidies to Dell on a nearly continuous basis… In each successive round of negotiations, the groundwork was usually laid by mid-level executives at both companies tasked with conveying messages and “positioning” to and from the other so that top executives at both firms would know what to expect when they met…

After the meeting on July 9, 2002, [former Dell Inc. Chief Operating Officer] Kevin Rollins reported to Michael Dell that the result of the meeting was that Intel was willing to increase payments to Dell and seemed willing to do “whatever it takes” to keep Dell from purchasing from AMD. Rollins wrote “They got the message that we were very serious… and seem to want to do whatever it takes to persuade us… Initial word is that our MOAP should increase from $70 M this qtr to $100 mm.”…

In September 2003, Intel’s then Chairman and CEO Craig Barrett met with Michael Dell to address the basic relationship between the companies. He reported back to his Intel colleagues that he and Michael Dell “shook hands on the deal. MD [Michael Dell] agreed to quarterly mtgs… to make sure we are aligned in our strategic issues and coordinated in spending the monies. He had no issue with the win/win nature of the agreement. I clearly committed our long range support regardless of competition… Nice work you guys!”…

An internal Dell email reported that under the new arrangement, Intel was making a $40 million lump sum payment in order to maintain Dell’s status as an Intel-only CPU [Central Processing Unit] buyer…

…A Dell executive wrote on January 19, 2004: “This is very scary… HP (and IBM) can bracket our server business by using AMD to beat us on price…” Another Dell executive agreed, writing that Intel had “better be down here sucking up with a bag-o-money.”…

Top Dell and Intel executives met and Intel again agreed on substantial increases in rebate levels; Dell would now receive a “base” rebate of 11% of its processor purchases from Intel, up from 7%, for not switching to AMD. In addition, they also agreed on another 3% in “incremental” or “variable” rebates, for a total of up to 14%. Dell’s lead negotiator estimated that the “new MCP” would be worth $400 million to Dell over the twelve month period from April 1, 2004 to March 31, 2005. Indeed, around that time, Intel’s payments to Dell started to reach figures of $100 million per quarter or more.

…Dell’s quarterly profit margins had become dependent on Intel’s payments. A comparison of Dell’s reported net income with the rebates it received from Intel for some quarterly periods show that, by 2004, the rebate payments amounted to more than a third of Dell’s earnings. For the 3 month period between August and October of 2004, Dell received approximately $304 million in rebates from Intel and reported income of $846 million, so that the rebates amounted to 36% of net income. Thereafter, the proportion of rebates to net income rose steeply. In 2006, Dell received approximately $1.9 billion in rebates from Intel, and in two quarterly periods of that year, rebate payments exceeded reported net income. From February to April of 2006, rebates ($805 million) amounted to 104% of net income. The following 3 months, between May and July of 2006, the proportion was even higher, 116% ($554 million of rebates and $480 million in net income).

In one instance, Dell asked Intel to retroactively increase the size of its payment to stabilize Dell’s forecasted earnings. In several early Sunday morning emails in April 2004, Intel’s Austin-based Dell lead negotiator alerted top Intel executives to an urgent Dell request regarding “our meet comp response for Dell considering new data from msd [Michael Dell] on Friday.” Dell needed to finalize its margin forecast for the coming quarter, but needed “direction” from Intel: “dell is finalizing their call the qtr today. They need direction from us. They are asking for $100 upside to old MC deal…”…

Later the same day, another Intel executive clarified Dell’s request in an email directed to [current Intel Chairman of the Board] Paul Otellini who was Intel’s chief operating officer at the time. He informed Otellini that Dell had assumed that its new agreement with Intel for increased subsidies would be retroactive to the beginning of the current fiscal year in February.

In an April 8 email to Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins, Dell’s lead negotiator with Intel described the outcome of Dell’s request to Intel as follows: “…We got what we needed to meet expectations ($60M) in the form of increased MCP and programs… I think we got all we could in one 30 day period.”

As this episode shows, Intel’s payments to Dell did not benefit consumers through better products… or lower prices…

By September 2004, Dell’s tone was becoming strident…

On December 6, 2006, Intel’s Otellini emailed Intel’s Dell account representative about his concern that Dell would defect to AMD… The next day, the Intel executive promptly forwarded this email on to Dell’s lead negotiator with a plea for help in securing “incremental support” for Dell…

…Dell’s lead negotiator emailed back: “This is really easy. MSD [Michael Dell] wants $400 M more. I’ve been trying to figure out the structure…”

…What the payment bought was Dell’s commitment to “maintain” exclusivity…

In fact, Intel’s payments to Dell shot upward, roughly doubling in less than one year…

…Intel subsidized below-cost bids by Dell when it was bidding against competitors selling AMD-based computers and servers to large businesses or other “enterprise” customers…

…Over a period of approximately two years, from approximately mid-2004 to mid-2006, the reports show tens of thousands of bids…

In the summer of 2005, Intel and Dell held another round or rebate negotiations…

…Intel increased its payments to Dell to an unprecedented level. According to figures provided by Dell, Intel’s payments ($471 million) amounted to 78% of Dell’s reported net income ($606 million) for the period August to October of 2005.

…In May [2006], Intel sought a deal with Dell… Under that deal, Intel was to make further payments to Dell in return for continued exclusivity outside the multi-processor server segment. Dell’s Rollins wrote in a June 1, 2006 email that he was trying to get $250 million still from Intel…

Despite this agreement, by September of 2006, Dell… announced further AMD products…

…For February, March and April 2006, Intel had paid Dell approximately $800 million in rebates…

Besides allegedly accepting around $6 billion in secret rebates from Intel between 2002 and 2007 (in apparent violation of U.S. and Texas antitrust and anti-monopolization laws), Texas Billionaire Dell’s firm also was the target of a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General a few years ago, on charges of having violated New York State’s consumer protection laws. As a September 15, 2009 press release of the Office of New York’s Attorney General noted:

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that Dell and its subsidiary, Dell Financial Services (DFS), have agreed to pay the Attorney General’s Office $4 million in restitution, penalties and costs to resolve charges of fraudulent and deceptive business practices that scammed consumers across New York State.

The settlement follows a decision of the New York Supreme Court, Albany County, which sustained Attorney General Cuomo’s claims that Dell had engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices. The court’s decision came as a result of the original lawsuit filed by Cuomo’s Office, which charged that Dell engaged in bait and switch advertising with respect to its “no interest” financing promotions, misled consumers to believe they had qualified for promotional financing, failed to adequately disclose the terms of its “next day” service contracts and failed to provide consumers with warranty service and promised rebates…

According to the Court’s decision upholding the Attorney General’s lawsuit, Dell deprived consumers of the technical support to which they were entitled under their warranty or service contract by: (1) repeatedly failing to provide timely on site repair to consumers who purchased service contracts promising “on site” and expedited service; (2) pressuring consumers, including those who purchased service contracts promising “on site” repair, to remove the external cover of their computer and remove, reinstall, and manipulate hardware components; and (3) discouraging consumers from seeking technical support: those who called Dell’s toll free number were subjected to long wait times, repeated transfers, and frequent disconnections.

The court concluded that Dell lured consumers to purchase its products with advertisements that offered attractive “no interest” and/or “no payment” financing promotions. In practice, however, the vast majority of consumers, even those with very good credit scores, were denied these deals. In a classic “bait and switch” scheme, DFS instead offered consumers financing at high interest rates, which often exceeded 20 percent. Dell and DFS frequently failed to clearly inform these consumers that they had not qualified for the promotional terms, leaving many to unwittingly finance their purchase at high interest rates.

The decision also held that DFS incorrectly billed consumers on cancelled orders, returned merchandise, or accounts they did not authorize Dell to open, and then continually harassed these consumers with illegal billing and collection activity. Although many consumers repeatedly contacted Dell and/or DFS to advise them of the errors, DFS did not suspend its collection activity and Dell failed to expeditiously credit consumers’ accounts, even after assuring consumers it would do so. As a result, many consumers have been subjected to harassing collection calls for months on end and have had their credit ratings harmed.

In addition to allegedly accepting $6 billion in secret rebates from Intel (whose board of directors currently includes Harvard Business School Professor David Yoffie, University of California-Berkeley Vice-Chancellor Frank Yeary, Stanford University Professor James Plummer, Dartmouth College Trustee John Donahoe, former Yahoo President Susan Decker, former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, former U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, and members of the Berkshire Hathaway, Estee Lauder, American Express, McKesson corporate boards), Dell also accepted $853 million worth of U.S. War Machine contracts in 2009, making it the 51th-largest recipient of juicy Pentagon contracts these days.

One reason NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, and Time Magazine might not be that eager to broadcast or print many exposes about either Dell’s alleged acceptance of secret rebates from Intel or its violations of U.S. consumer protection laws is that former U.S. Senator and current Dell Inc. board member Sam Nunn also sits on the board of GE — the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC (in addition to also sitting on Chevron/Unocal’s corporate board); and a recent Dell Inc. board member named Michael Miles sits on the board of Time-Warner — the parent company of CNN and Time Magazine.

Yet in recent months the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) has also apparently begun to look into the legality of the relationship between Texas billionaire Dell’s firm and Intel. As the New York Times (6/10/10) recently observed, “the disclosure that the S.E.C. has been investigating aspects of the relationship between the two companies is new, as is its focus on Mr. Dell” and “a person briefed on the case, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential, said that the S.E.C.’s allegations related to how Dell accounted for payments and rebates that it had received from Intel.”

As long ago as 1998, Current Biography noted that Michael Dell owned “about 16 percent of his company’s stock” and was “thus a multi-billionaire and the richest man in Texas.” So it’s not surprising that despite Dell Inc.’s alleged acceptance of rebates from Intel in apparent violation of U.S. anti-trust laws, many U.S. politicians have apparently been accepting a lot of money in campaign contributions from Texas billionaire Dell during the last 16 years.

Since 1994, for example, U.S. politicians have accepted nearly $900,000 in campaign contributions from Michael Dell (and $330,000 in campaign contributions from his wife, Susan), according to the Center for Responsive Politics website.

So it’s not likely that many U.S. politicians are going to ask the Texas Attorney General to look into whether or not Dell Inc.’s alleged acceptance of about $6 billion in secret rebates from Intel between 2002 and 2007 violated state law.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

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Friday in Austin : Free Marilyn Now!

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Join us in Austin this Friday:
Free Marilyn Buck Now!

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

A benefit for Marilyn Buck this Friday, June 25, will raise funds and gather healing energy for the former Austinite. Slated for release on parole this August, Buck was diagnosed with cancer late last year. Her plans for starting life over at age 62 now must be amended to allow for recuperation and healing.

Marilyn Buck, an award-winning poet originally from Austin, was convicted of politically-motivated crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. She has spent 25 years in prison. She earned two college degrees, taught herself Spanish in order to communicate with and for Latina prisoners, and organized AIDS education and literacy classes in prison. She won respect as a principled voice for the rights of oppressed people, especially women, people of color, and other political prisoners.

Benefit organizer Mariann Wizard shared a moving and personal tribute to Marilyn that appeared recently on The Rag Blog. The benefit will bring together those who knew Marilyn when she worked on Austin’s underground newspaper, The Rag (predecessor to The Rag Blog), and those who have only known of her as a political prisoner.

The benefit will feature music by Karen Abrahams and Riders Against the Storm, poetry by Joe P. Carr, and remarks by Robert King of the Angola 3. Benefit hosts include NOKOA, The Rag Blog/New Journalism Project, Resistencia Bookstore, Ex-pinta Support Alliance, Ecology Action, One Love Kitchen, South Austin Popular Culture Center, and YES, Inc/Phogg. Supporters include the Angola 3, Austin Jail Project, Bookwoman, MonkeyWrench Books, Ruby’s Bar-B-Que, Teatro Vivo, Threadgills, and many more.

The benefit will take place 7-11, Friday, June 25th at 3105 E. Cesar Chavez. $10 at the door is requested and advance tickets are available at Resistencia Bookstore and Planet K stores.

If you can’t attend the Austin benefit, you can contribute to Marilyn Buck’s support by sending a check to:

Youth Emergency Service, Inc.
P.O. Box 13549
Austin, TX 78711

Make sure to note “for Marilyn Buck” on the contribution.

Robert King and Mariann Wizard on Rag Radio

Robert King and Mariann Wizard were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, Tuesday, June 22.

King spent 32 years in Louisiana’s Angola prison, 29 of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he didn’t commit. King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace were active in the 1970s with the Black Panther Party while in prison, and came to be known as the Angola 3. An acclaimed BBC documentary, In the Land of the Free, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, was released earlier this year. The film explores the facts surrounding the Angola 3’s incarceration.

Mariann Wizard joined Dreyer and King on the show to discuss Marilyn Buck’s case and the upcoming benefit. Tuesday’s program is now on the Rag Radio archives, and you can listen to it here.

Rag Radio airs every Tuesday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM, and can be streamed live on the internet here.

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Harvey Wasserman : Fire McChrystal and Get Out of Afghanistan. Now.

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Rolling Stone: The Runaway General. Image from ABC News.

Fire General Stanley McChrystal and
Get out of Afghanistan NOW

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / June 22, 2010

President Obama must fire General Stanley McChrystal and get out of Afghanistan… for starters.

There is much more at stake here than meets the eye.

History is full of generals with deep contempt for democracy.

General McChrystal has a very particular significance. Last year, as Obama weighed the Afghan situation, McChrystal circumvented him entirely. In an act of profound public contempt, the general went directly to the world media with a high-profile campaign that was entirely inappropriate to a civilian democracy.

He should have been fired right then and there.

But McChrystal used the brass on his chest to sell the nation a bill of goods — that the war in Afghanistan could be “won.” It would be “difficult,” of course, requiring “sacrifice.”

But exactly what “victory” meant, and how that would make the United States safer, more just and prosperous, was never clear.

What WAS clear was who would die and who would pay.

But with the corporate media lapping up his every word, McChrystal upstaged the numerous political, strategic, financial, and military experts who disagreed with him.

The plunge into the Graveyard of Great Powers was by no means a consensus decision among either the experts or the public.

McChrystal became to Afghanistan what William Westmoreland was to Vietnam — the go-to guy on the plunge to war. The results have been catastrophic.

Like Westmoreland, McChrystal has been proven dead wrong on just about everything. The war’s only foreseeable “accomplishment” is to drain our treasury and weaken our nation. We hear snippets of “progress” here and insider reports of “victories” there, and lately a recycled old story about vast mineral wealth. But it’s deja vu all over again, a ghastly Southwest Asian rerun of the debacle in Southeast Asia.

Cover of Stars and Stripes, June 22, 2010. Image from SF Gate.

Stanley McChrystal has failed as a general, and as a citizen.

It would be easy to say his comments as they appear in Rolling Stone are an aberration, that he was caught off-guard expressing his contempt for the President, the Vice President and the rest of us.

But in this day and age, that may be naive. We have a volunteer army and a President inclined to avoid definitive decisions. Our rights as civilians were not easily won. To preserve them, as Jefferson said, we must be “eternally vigilant.”

The Roman republic disintegrated when generals began disobeying elected leaders and taking personal control of their armies.

In the midst of our own Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln fired his contemptuous, incompetent General George McClellan and eventually replaced him with Ulysses S. Grant, who won a war worth winning. McClellan ran against Lincoln for the presidency in 1864. He lost. Thankfully, he had no personal army to overturn the decision.

During the Korean War, General Douglass MacArthur contemptuously disobeyed President Harry Truman. Truman resolutely fired him. As he told TIME Magazine at the time:

I fired him [MacArthur] because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President… I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

It took another General, Dwight Eisenhower, to bring finally the troops home. But come they did.

Barack Obama cannot let Stanley McChrystal return to Afghanistan. He needs to fire him immediately, and replace him with someone who will end that war.

The stakes we can see are huge. The ones we can’t may be even greater.

[Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.]

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Posted on June 22, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

“Summer breeze makes me feel fine / blowin’ thru the jasmine of my mind.” Kat Braun tells us that the Summer Solstice — the longest day and shortest night of the year — is a time for contemplating Mother Earth’s year-round balancing act. Providing advice about how to best celebrate the Solstice, she informs us that Magick will surely be afoot.

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Robert Jensen : The Vultures and the Hawks

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

And the empire was off and running: The first atomic bomb (“Little Boy”) on trailer cradle in pit. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Think outside the bomb:
No nukes? No empire.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2010

[A version of this essay was delivered to the “Think outside the Bomb” event in Austin, Texas, on June 14, 2010.]

If we are serious about the abolition of nuclear weapons, we have to place the abolition of the U.S. empire at the center of our politics.

That means working toward a world free of nuclear weapons demands we not only critique the reactionary wing of the U.S. power structure, the Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds — call them the reckless hawks. A serious commitment to a future free of nuclear weapons demands critique of moderate wing, the Obamas and Bidens and Clintons — call them the reasonable hawks.

The former group is psychotic, while the latter is merely cynical. After eight years of reckless reactionary psychotics, it’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by reasonable moderate cynics. But we should remember that a hawk is a hawk.

The next step is asking whose interests are advanced by the hawks. Even though in the post-World War II era the hawks have sometimes differed on strategy and tactics, they have defended the same economic system: a predatory corporate capitalism. Let’s call those folks the vultures.

Different groupings of hawks might be associated with different groupings of vultures, giving the appearance of serious political conflict within the elite, but what they have in common is much more important than their differences. The political empire of the contemporary United States serves the corporate empires that dominate not only the domestic but the global economy, and it all depends on U.S. military power, of which the nuclear arsenal is one component.

George W. Bush was the smirking frat-boy face of the U.S. empire. Barack Obama is the smiling smart-guy face of the U.S. empire. Whoever is at the helm, the U.S. political/economic/military empire remains in place, shaky at the moment, but still the single greatest threat to justice and peace on the planet. Any serious project to rid the world of the particular threat of nuclear weapons has to come to terms with the more general threat of the empire.

We shouldn’t expect our leaders, Republican or Democrat, to agree with that assessment of course. And they don’t. Here’s a paragraph from the Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review:

The conditions that would ultimately permit the United States and others to give up their nuclear weapons without risking greater international instability and insecurity are very demanding. Among those conditions are success in halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, much greater transparency into the programs and capabilities of key countries of concern, verification methods and technologies capable of detecting violations of disarmament obligations, enforcement measures strong and credible enough to deter such violations, and ultimately the resolution of regional disputes that can motivate rival states to acquire and maintain nuclear weapons. Clearly, such conditions do not exist today.

Nowhere on the list is a recognition of a more crucial fact: nuclear abolition depends on the death of the American empire.

The reason that is not on the list is because nuclear weapons are a key component of U.S. empire-building. That is as true today as it was when Harry S. Truman dropped the first nuclear weapon to end World War II and begin the Cold War. Although tonight we want to focus on the present, it’s useful to return to that moment to remind ourselves of the harsh reality of empires.

Though the culture can’t come to terms with this history, the consensus of historians is that the U.S. decision to drop atomic weapons on Japan had little to do with ending WWII and everything to do with sending a message to the Soviet Union. The barbaric act that ended the barbarism of WWII opened up a new chapter in the tragedy of empire, leading to more barbarism in the U.S. assault on the developing world over the past six decades.

Even though it was clear that after WWII the United States could have lived relatively secure in the world with its considerable wealth and extensive resources, the greed that drives empire demanded that U.S. policy-makers pursue a policy not of peace but of domination, as seen in this conclusion of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1947: “To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. Preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy.”[1]

Preponderant power means: We run the world. We dictate the terms of the global economy. Others find a place in that structure or they risk annihilation. No challenge from another system or another state is acceptable.

In service of this quest, elites created the mythology of the Cold War — that we were defending ourselves against a Soviet empire bent on destroying us — which was grafted easily onto the deeper U.S. mythology about a shining city upon the hill and Manifest Destiny, about the divine right of the United States to dominate.

As a result, much of the U.S. public is easily convinced of the righteousness of the U.S. imperial project and persuaded to believe the lie that we maintain nuclear weapons only as a deterrent. The reality should blunt the self-congratulatory instinct: U.S. nuclear weapons were created to project power, not protect people.

In his book Empire and the Bomb, Joseph Gerson lists 39 incidences of “nuclear blackmail,” of which 33 were made by U.S. officials.[2] That helps explain the subtitle of his book, “How the U.S. Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World.”

Not surprisingly, Obama has said he does not envision abolition in the foreseeable future. In his famous Prague speech in April 2009, he said:

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.”

Yes, the world can change — if the dominant military power in the world, the United States, can change. If the United States could give up the quest to consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources and disavow its reliance on securing that unjust distribution of wealth through the largest and most destructive military in the history of the world, things could change.

That’s why most U.S. elites are interested in non-proliferation, not abolition. The goal of abolition will remain safely out of reach, on the horizon, just beyond our ability to accomplish in the near future — while the United States continues to imagine a future in which the rest of the world accepts U.S. domination.

Since countries threatened by the empire won’t accept non-proliferation unless there is a meaningful commitment to abolition and a scaling back of imperial designs, the U.S. policy will fail. That’s because it’s designed to fail. U.S. policy is designed to keep a hold on power and wealth, and the people running the country believe nuclear weapons are useful in that quest.

That’s why the Nuclear Posture Review of the Obama administration is not all that different from the Bush administration’s, as Zia Mian (an analyst at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security) pointed out at a gathering of activists preceding the May 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. That’s why Obama’s policy includes a commitment to nuclear weapons, conventional missile defense, and modernization of the nuclear complex. That’s why Obama is increasing expenditures on nuclear weapons, now over $50 billion a year, for modernization.

Our task is to make sure we aren’t conned by politicians, either those who push the fear button or pull on our hope strings. When we take up questions of military strategy and weapons, our task is to understand the underlying political and economic systems, name the pathologies of those systems, identify the key institutions in those systems, withhold our support from those institutions when possible, create alternative institutions when possible, and tell the truth. We may support cynical politicians and inadequate policy initiatives at times, but in offering such support we should continue to tell the truth.

This commitment to telling the truth about our leaders, Republican and Democrat alike, also means telling the truth about ourselves. I have argued that any call for the elimination of nuclear weapons that does not come with an equally vociferous call for the elimination of the U.S. empire is empty rhetoric, and that a call for the end of an empire also must come with a deep critique of our economic system.

I want to end by taking the argument one step further: Such critiques ring hollow if we don’t engage in critical self-reflection about how many of us in the United States have grown comfortable in these systems. We decry injustice but spend little time talking about how our own material comfort is made possible by that injustice. A serious commitment to the end of nuclear weapons, the end of empire, the end of a predatory corporate capitalist system demands that we also commit to changing the way we live.

We cannot wake up tomorrow and extract ourselves from all these systems. There are no rituals of purification available to cleanse us. But we can look in the mirror, honestly, and start the hard work of reconfiguring 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); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). 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.]

Notes:

[1] Quoted in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 18-19.

[2] Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb: How the US Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 37-38.

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Posted on June 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

In 1970, a jury convicted Robert Hillary King of a crime he did not commit and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He became a member of the Black Panther Party while in Angola State Penitentiary, successfully organizing prisoners to improve conditions. In return, prison authorities beat him, starved him, and gave him life without parole after framing him for a second crime. He was thrown into solitary confinement, where he remained in a six by nine foot cell for 29 years as one of the Angola 3. In 2001, the state grudgingly acknowledged his innocence and set him free.

Robert King has been featured in numerous print, media and film articles and interviews worldwide including: CNN, National Public Radio, NBC, BBC and ITN as well as two films, Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation and Land of the Free. He is the author of ” From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of a Black Panther”

“After his exoneration in 2001, [King] emerged from prison a vital, socially conscious, and very caring leader.” – Terry A. Kupers, M.D., M.S.P., Institute Professor The Wright Institute

After his release, Louisiana native Robert King worked with the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans. He now lives in Austin where he works tirelessly for the freedom of Angola 3 defendants Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. And where he has gained fame as a candy maker. King now makes and sells “freelines” to support his social activism. He made pralines in prison while in solitary confinement. He burned paper in soda cans to cook the candies and gathered ingredients from other prisoners and guards.

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Korea : ‘Our Forgotten War’ (And our Annual Fantasy)

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

The Korean War “became a war against an entire nation.” Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Seeds of an imperial policy:
‘Our Forgotten War’ in Korea

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2010

“If we stand up to them [the communists] . . . they won’t take any next steps. There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.”

— President Harry Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010

“On June 25, 1950, communist-backed troops from North Korea invaded a hopelessly overmatched South Korea. American-led U.N. forces quickly came to the aid of South Korea, but the war unexpectedly escalated five months later when China, in support of North Korea, launched a massive attack on U.N. forces near the Yalu River.

“Three years of brutal fighting followed as both armies hurled each other up and down the Korean peninsula. More than 54,000 U.S. soldiers died during the war, which technically has never officially ended but has been in a prolonged cease-fire since 1953.

“North Korea often states that it is still at war, but the reality is that tenacious fighting by U.S. and U.N. soldiers successfully repelled the invading communist forces and pushed them back across the 38th Parallel border. South Korea remains a free nation, one of the most prosperous in Asia, while North Korea is one of the most repressive.”

— Chris Gibbons, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2010

The annual fantasy

Americans relive and debate the Vietnam War. Analysts discuss “the Vietnam Syndrome,” the “albatross” that shackled every president, and/or claims about where every candidate for public office was during Vietnam. To the contrary, the Korean War, which in the words of the U.S. government was launched by the aggressive invasion of North Korean armies below the 38th parallel into South Korea 60 years ago on June 25, 1950, is beyond question.

As newspapers often title Korea, “Our Forgotten War,” the story is simple: Communist aggressors (inspired by Moscow) invaded a free nation (South Korea). The Americans mobilized United Nations support and boldly counter-attacked forcing the Communist aggressors back North.

Then, the story goes, the US-led army of the free people went north of the 38th parallel to liberate North Korea from its dictatorship. This invasion was foiled by a massive Chinese Communist military response. While a ceasefire was established in 1953, conflict on the peninsula remains between the prosperous and free South Korea and the poor and totalitarian North Korea.

Key facts

This fantasy, created in 1950, set the stage for a 60-year rationalization for trillions of dollars of military spending, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded, and the deaths of millions of people, largely from the Global South, who were unwilling hosts of wars, interventions, and domestic violence related to the Cold War.

Just a brief examination of the history of the Far East suggests that the fantasy is just that. The Korean Peninsula was colonized by the Japanese before World War I. At the end of World War II, with their defeat, Koreans all across the peninsula believed that they, at last, would be able to establish their own independent government. “Peoples Assemblies” began to meet to plan for a post-war Korean government. However, at the urging of the United States, it and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the peninsula at the 38th parallel until such time as an independent government, desirable to the victorious powers could be established.

The United States government over the next three years brought exiled Korean Syngman Rhee back to the country to establish a government in the U.S. occupied zone. Rhee, an émigré with ties to large landowners, was not popular with South Korean farmers, many of whom rebelled against the new government imposed by Washington. In areas where rebellions were stifled, the United Nations held “elections” for a new government. Rhee and his party were victorious. And in the North, a regime allied with the Soviet Union was established, led by Kim Il Sung, long-time Korean Communist party organizer.

In 1948 Soviet troops were withdrawn from the North and in 1949 U.S. troops from the South. Both leaders, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, declared their commitments to liberate the other half to establish one Korean government. Some U.S. congressmen began to balk at Truman’s requests to continue funding the corrupt Rhee government in the South.

In May 1950 Republican spokesman on foreign policy John Foster Dulles visited South Korea and spoke in support of Syngman Rhee, whose domestic support was faltering, and then Rhee and Dulles flew off to the Tokyo headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur, overseer of post-war Japan. It is important to note that shots had been fired both ways across the 38th parallel for months before these events.

Finally, as the official story suggests, North Korean troops invaded the South on June 25, 1950. South Korean military forces, heavily subsidized and trained by the United States, fled South and within a month much of the country below the 38th parallel was occupied by Northern armies.

Then the U.S., with UN support, launched a counter-assault in September 1950, led by General MacArthur, who already had declared his vision of creating a Christian and anti-Communist Asia. North Korean armies were forced back north of the 38th parallel and with the urging of MacArthur and other virulent Cold Warriors in the Truman administration an apocryphal decision was made to take the war to the North. The Chinese, fearful of an invasion of their own land, entered the war on the side of North Korean armies. The Korean War was extended until 1953 and a troubled ceasefire was established that still prevails today.

What the real history suggests

First, as historian Robert Simmons wrote: “There were constant and sizable armed clashes and border incursions between the North and South for over a year before the final crisis… the Seoul regime enjoyed little popular support… it had announced its intention to invade the North and appeared to be preparing to do so…”

Second, the division of Korea in 1945 defied the wishes of the Korean people, Communist and non-Communist alike. In the South, Syngman Rhee was regarded as an outsider and representative of the small land-owning class of Koreans (a character similar to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam).

Third, the Korean War was in fact a civil war which the Truman administration chose to define as the first great conflagration in the global struggle against worldwide Communism. Many scholars suggest to the contrary that North Korean Kim Il Sung’s decision to invade the South was made by him without approval or support from the Soviet Union.

In fact, the Soviet delegate at the United Nations was boycotting the Security Council at the time the Council voted to condemn the invasion of the South. If the Soviet delegate was aware of the planned invasion he probably would have attended the Security Council session to veto the U.S. resolution condemning the North Korean invasion.

Consequences of ‘Our Forgotten War’

The decision by the Truman administration to enter the war to “save” the Rhee regime in the South signified a permanent commitment to an imperial policy that continues to this day. As political scientist Hans Morgenthau once wrote, after the Korean War started reversing U.S./Soviet conflicts and the militarization of the world was no longer possible.

The Korean War gave support to those Truman administration advocates for the full militarization of United States foreign policy and U.S. society. National Security Council Document 68 had been circulating inside the administration at that time. It called for a dramatic increase in annual military spending based on the proposition that each president should give the military all it wanted before any other expenditures for government programs were adopted. Specifically it called for an immediate four-fold increase in military spending, a proposal that some fiscal conservatives had opposed. After Korea virtually all restrictions on military spending were lifted.

Additional byproducts of the new U.S. commitment to a Korean War included the following: finalizing the construction of an anti-Communist Japanese economy to balance the new Chinese Communist regime; making permanent the U.S. financial commitment to the French in Indochina (a prelude to the next big war, in Vietnam); circulating the idea of an Asian military alliance to be called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and stimulating anti-Communist repression domestically.

As we reflect on the limited economic development in the North and the dramatic growth in the South, both products of the Cold War, the impacts of “Our Forgotten War” on the Korean people should be recalled. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko wrote:

“The United States air force had completely destroyed all usual strategic bombing targets in North Korea within three months time, and by the end of the first year of combat it had dropped 97,000 tons of bombs and 7.8 million gallons of napalm, destroying 125,000 buildings that might ‘shelter’ the enemy. In mid-1952 it turned to the systematic destruction of mines and cement plants…” and the “…Suihu hydroelectric complex on the Yalu.”

They added that Syngman Rhee rounded up 400,000 South Koreans who were put in concentration camps. The authors wrote: “The Korean War, in effect, became a war against an entire nation, civilians and soldiers, Communists and anti-Communists alike. Everything — from villages to military targets — the United States considered a legitimate target for attack.” At least four million Koreans, North and South died, were wounded, or were made homeless (Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-54).

So despite the fact that the Korean War has become “Our Forgotten War,” the decision to enter Korea globalized, militarized, and institutionalized a U.S. policy that has rationalized wars on entire populations ever since.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. His blog is Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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