The Rag Blog

Once there was an elephant
Who tried to use the telephant-
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone.
-Laura Elizabeth Richards, Eletelphony

It’s only money. And when most of your effort is devoted to making sure that the country is safe from terrorists it’s easy to see how keeping track of money can just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And it’s doubly annoying that whenever there’s the slightest hiccoughing in your financial affairs it becomes national news, as if no one else ever has trouble keeping track of money. It would not be surprising if the Justice Department decided to become secretive about its affairs in order to keep trivia about its finances off the front pages.

In January 2005 the revelation was that the FBI had just discovered that it had made a $170 million mistake on something known as the Virtual Case File that had been in development for 5 years. Its purpose was to create a system that would let FBI agents share information. Describing the need for a better system than then existed, Richard Schmitt of the New York Times said: “The overhaul of the decrepit [FBI] computer system was identified as a priority both by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and by members of Congress, who found that the FBI’s old system prevented agents from sharing information that could have headed off the [9/11] attacks.” When information about this misfortune became public, the FBI hired an expert for $2 million to tell it what went wrong and to tell it whether it was a total loss or whether part of the system could be salvaged.

Although the publicity might have led the casual reader to think the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, a senior FBI official saw the sunny side. He told reporters that the FBI “had a better understanding of its computer needs and limitations as a result of the project” and described the lessons learned as “invaluable.” The last reference was, of course, a poor choice of words since the value of the lesson learned was exactly $170 million.

The FBI is again in the news, not because it has deterred a savage terrorist attack but because it has misplaced its phone bills and, as a result, some of its phones have been disconnected thus compromising some of its investigations. Here’s how it all happened,

Back in 2006 an employee at the FBI pled guilty to stealing more than $25,000 that was supposed to be used to pay phone bills incurred by the FBI for undercover telecommunication services. As a result, the Office of the Inspector General began an investigation into how the FBI was keeping track of money it used to pay its phone bills. (It doesn’t call them phone bills. It calls them “confidential case funds intended for undercover telecommunication services.”) The investigation produced a report about non-payment of phone bills that is 87 pages long but much of it is confidential so the only thing the average reader gets to see is a 5 page summary and all my readers get to see is a few hundred word description of a small part of the 5 page summary. (Readers who want to read the whole thing can find it online.)

Under the heading “The FBI lacks an Effective Confidential Case Fund Financial Management System” it reported that there are no internal controls to make sure the same phone bill isn’t paid twice-once from FBI headquarters funds and again from certain confidential funds. It found that “the lack of strong system controls-coupled with interpersonal professional relationships that invariably develop over time-increases the risk that field division confidential case funds can be misused.” They got that right, of course, as the convicted employee would attest.

Another heading is entitled “The FBI Pays Telecommunication Surveillance Expenses Inefficiently and Untimely.” The Inspector General reported that it analyzed 990 telecommunication surveillance payments “made by 5 field divisions and. . . over half of these payment were not made on time.” The report then observes that as a result of that, phone lines were disconnected and evidence was lost. In one case the lost evidence pertained to intercept information that was required by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order. When the phone line went dead there was no more eavesdropping on that line. Another example offered by the report was $66,000 in unpaid telephone bills sent to one of the field divisions examined by the Inspector General.

The Justice Department was embarrassed by these disclosures. I’m sure we can be confident of one thing, however. The Justice Department has just hired John Ashcroft’s firm to monitor a settlement entered into by a firm that settled criminal proceedings without going to court. Mr. Ashcroft’s firm got the job with no public notice and no bidding. His contract is reportedly worth somewhere between $28 million and $52 million.” John Ashcroft is no telephone company. It is safe to assume he will be paid on time.

BILL MOYERS: From time to time over the next few months we will step outside the election bubble and look at the hard cold facts of power. We’ll have the help of some journalists like Craig Unger, whose reporting raises uncomfortable questions few politicians of either party want to answer. For example: Why do some of the most powerful and privileged people in the country get a free lunch you pay for? You’ll find some of the answers right here in this book by that very name: FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE (AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL.) The author is another of America’s top investigative reporters — David Cay Johnston of THE NEW YORK TIMES. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award and many other accolades over his forty years as a journalist. Welcome to THE JOURNAL.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Thank you for having me.

BILL MOYERS: How did you get interested? I mean, behind FREE LUNCH is a 40-year record of chasing the stories and writing about them in one– the Philadelphia Inquirer, the SAN JOSE MERCURY, the NEW YORK TIMES. What propelled you?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was always interested when I was young in the exercise of power. My father, who grew up in New Orleans and then left it because he couldn’t stand the racism, would stand my brother and I in front of the little 15-minute news in the ’50s. We would see, you know, hoses being turned on demonstrators or whatever and he would say, you know, “There but for the grace of God – go you, you know? You could be black and living in the South and your life would be horrible.” And that got me to seeing around me– things about how people are treated. And then when I became a reporter, I began to realize that you can have a nice life and just report on what the city council said but that there were really interesting things going on if you paid less attention to what the politicians said and more attention to what the government actually did. And it got me to start thinking about how government finance and taxes and government spending are related to the quality of our lives.

BILL MOYERS: But some of your critics have said you’ve gone beyond investigative reporting in this book to become a crusader against the rich. do you object to people getting rich?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, no. I– good grief. I have no objection to that whatsoever. But get rich by working hard, working smarter, coming up with a better mousetrap. Don’t get rich by getting the government to pass a law that sticks the government’s hand into my pocket, takes money out of it, and gives it to you. That’s not right. That’s not a fair playing field. And Adam Smith, you know, warned again and again that it is the nature and tendency of business people to want to put their thumb on the scale, and even better, to get the government to put the thumb on the scale for their benefit. And that’s what we’ve seen going on now in our society for some time.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the theme of the book as I read it is that not that the rich are getting richer but that they’ve got the government rigging the rules to help them do it.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s exactly right. And they’re doing it in a way that I think is very crucial for people to understand. They’re doing it by taking from those with less to give to those with more. So the other moral authority I cite in the book is the Bible, both the Old Testament and the new. And all the way through those two books you can read condemnation after condemnation of taking from the poor to benefit the rich. You will come to ruin, it says in the Old Testament, if you give to the rich and yet that’s what we’re doing. We gave $100 million dollars to Warren Buffett’s company last year, a gift from the taxpayers. We make gifts all over the place to rich people. And yet the way the news media write about it, people are often very unaware of this because we use complicated terms and meaningless language to the average reader so they don’t understand what’s happened.

BILL MOYERS: You mentioned Warren Buffet. I was impressed in the book that you do name names. And so let me mention some of the names that you talk about in the book. Warren Buffet. Everyone respects him as the world’s greatest investor. Yet he’s in your book on free lunches.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: In Several places.

BILL MOYERS: Several places.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: He got a $665 million interest-free loan for the utility he has in the Midwest. Now–

BILL MOYERS: From? He got the loan from?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: From the taxpayers. Now, imagine for a moment that the house you live in today, you bought it 24 years ago and you agreed to pay the price then. And now you’ve got to pay back with no interest half the price in the dollars you agreed to in 1924. You could be rich just from that alone?

BILL MOYERS: But those are the rules. Buffet was doing something legal.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. And that’s always the biggest scandal is what is legal. Steve Jobs. Well, Steve Jobs got $70 million of stock options at a meeting of the board of Apple company directors that never took place.

BILL MOYERS: In fact, you say Steve Jobs arranged to have his fraudulently-issued options exchanged for restricted stock worth hundreds of millions. And the government has yet to take any action.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, not against him.

BILL MOYERS: But not against him.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: They prosecuted two people under him, one of whom said, “I warned Mr. Jobs about this.” Mr. Jobs says, “You know I really didn’t understand the rules.”

BILL MOYERS: Donald Trump.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Donald Trump benefits from a tax specifically levied by the State of New Jersey for the poor. Part of the casino winnings tax in New Jersey is dedicated to help the poor. But $89 million of it is being diverted to subsidize Donald Trump’s casino’s building retail space.

BILL MOYERS: How does that happen?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Political connection, the news media not paying enough attention,

BILL MOYERS: The New York Yankees.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: George Steinbrenner, like almost every owner of a major sports franchise, gets enormous public subsidies. And Steinbrenner is getting more than $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium on-

BILL MOYERS: From the public?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: From the public But, you know, the major sports franchises which are, first of all, exempted from the laws of economic competition. So-

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, a monopoly.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. Irony is not dead. They derive, I show in Free Lunch, 100 percent of their profits from subsidies. In fact, if it weren’t for these subsidies, the baseball, football, hockey, and basketball enterprises as a whole would be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

BILL MOYERS: And the irony, as you say, is that at least 27 billionaires own major sports teams, all of which benefit from public subsidies.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: In one way or another. Some much more than others. But they all benefit.

BILL MOYERS: You remember what Art Modell said back in 1996 when he was manipulating Baltimore and Cleveland into a bidding war for his football team? He was asked how he felt about taking money for his out of– for his own pocket at the very same time library funds were being cut. Remember what he said?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yes. The pride of having a professional baseball team is worth more than 30 libraries.

BILL MOYERS: George W. Bush.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, this is one– this is a great irony. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws to essentially legally cheat other people out of their land for less than it was worth to enrich him and his fellow investors.

BILL MOYERS: By building this stadium in Arlington, Texas

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: For the Texas Rangers.

BILL MOYERS: –baseball team– Texas Rangers.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.

BILL MOYERS: That’s right.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: One of the key sources I quote is a prominent Republican lawyer married to a United States senator who is the expert in Texas on municipal finance. The subsidy, he says, is $202.5 million. And Bush and his partners captured about 168 million of it.

BILL MOYERS: Bush, you say, used eminent domain to claim the land on which the stadium was built, right?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And Bush advised his investors, his co-investors this is a sweet deal …

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yeah. He said that I mean, here’s this money losing team. It’s got this little stadium. It can’t make money. But if we can get a stadium built, it’ll be worth a lot of money. And that’s going on all over the country. All you have to do is get the stadium built and we’ll– you’ll be rich.

BILL MOYERS: One of your most revealing stories in here for me is about the small merchant of a fishing and outdoor gear who’s put out of business by a big competitor who gets $32 million in subsidies from the local government.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, you know, if you walk into many of the big box retailers today, you have to pay sales tax at the cash register on whatever you buy. Well, in many of those stores, the government never gets the money. The owners of the stores get to keep it. And who are the big beneficiaries of that? The Walton family that owns Wal-Mart and the Cabela family who own Cabela’s, which is a fin, feather, and fur outfitting club for fishermen and hunters. And in this little town — in the Poconos, 4,100 people — they came and said, “We want to build the world’s largest outdoor store. $32 million dollars. And the local town fathers went for it because they said all these jobs it’ll create and all this economic benefit. And Jim Weaknecht who runs this little tiny store that makes enough money that his wife can stay home and raise their children.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: He’s outraged. He goes, “Nobody gave me a subsidy. If I had gone to City Hall and said, ‘Give me a million dollars,’ they would have laughed at me.” And, you know, he charged lower prices than Cabela’s. They still ran him out of business. This little town gave the Cabela family the equivalent of about 11 years of the entire city budget for police and fixing the streets and everything else. And this is going on all across America.

BILL MOYERS: Cabela promised jobs and more money flowing through the economy but that hasn’t happened–

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No, it hasn’t happened. And, in fact, that’s the argument made everywhere. What you’re really doing is using this government subsidy to draw business away from the existing local merchants who are effectively being taxed to subsidize the newcomer.

BILL MOYERS: You have a chapter in here about an economics professor who embraced the idea of getting government out of the way of business. And yet then he turned around and made cultivating government his business, quote, leaving behind a trail of death and costs that were shifted onto the taxpayers. And he went on to become our government’s Treasury secretary.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: John Snow was a brilliant young economics professor and lawyer who wrote about how the government system of regulating transportation was inefficient and causing difficult costs. And in the Ford administration– had a prominent role in promoting deregulation of trucking. Then he got a job with the CF– what’s now the CSX Railroad.

BILL MOYERS: And what is CSX?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: It’s one of the largest railroad companies in America. And that railroad, the– his mentor, Hays Watkins, won an award from INDUSTRY WEEK magazine. And the whole reason for the reward was their success at milking the government for favors. And Snow, throughout his career, spent an enormous amount of time going and meeting not with presidents of the United States but with the congressmen and senators and the staff members and the bureaucrats you’re never going to hear about in the Transportation Department and the Appropriation Department to get all the rules and favors that he wanted.

And one of the worst rules is this. If you’re on an Amtrak train and there is an accident and something happens to you, the damages that occur are always paid by the taxpayer, even if, as in the case I tell about in the book, there was a known unsafe condition that CSX caused in its zeal to cut costs and to increase Mr. Snow’s salary.

Even though Snow was warned and warned this is dangerous, we’re not doing enough for safety. There were official investigations. They stuck to their policy. They saved $2.4 billion dollars. Well, people died because of it. One widow pressed her case, got all the way to the Supreme Court with it. Got $50 million in damages awarded by a jury. Couldn’t today ’cause Governor Jeb Bush in Florida signed a law to prevent this from happening again. But got $50 million in damages. Didn’t cost CSX a penny. They just handed the bill to the taxpayers and said, “You get to pay.”

BILL MOYERS: Because this is a law.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s the law.

BILL MOYERS: Passed by Congress.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. And this is a moral hazard. It’s another thing that Adam Smith warned us about. You shouldn’t be able to say, “I get the rewards and you the taxpayer are going to take up all the risks.”

BILL MOYERS: Are you agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government is not the solution; government is the problem?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, there are lots of problems with the government. I’ve spent my life exposing all sorts of problems with government. But government is fundamentally essential. Government is what creates for us civilization.We created this country so that we could be free, so that we could pursue our lives the way that we want to pursue them. And wealth is a byproduct of that. But the government is being turned into a vehicle not to ensure our liberties and create a level playing field but instead into a vehicle to take from the many to enrich the few.

BILL MOYERS: There was a stunning section in your book where you say these new rules that have come about in the last few years help Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, MBNA, that’s the big bank holding company, and Citibank exploit the poor, the unsophisticated, and the foolish because these lenders can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation ago.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: You know, we used to put people to death 500 years ago for loaning money for interest. And for a long time the government regulated the kind of interest that you could charge. And then we had a Supreme Court decision in 1978. And the Supreme Court in that said, you know, ’cause the way the law’s written we’re basically undoing the usury laws in this country. And Congress, pay attention, you need to do something to address this. Well, Congress did. Discovered it was a fabulous way to milk banks and related companies for campaign contributions. And they did for years and years and years and years. Now you turn on your television and there’s Gary Coleman, the former child star-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: –promoting a loan where they’ll put the money right into your bank account over the telephone, calling in on the telephone, at 99.25 percent interest. Almost two points a week. When I wrote that I was thinking about a mob guy who was a loan shark and what he would have thought because he spent some time in prison for loan sharking if he were still alive about these ads where now big corporations are doing what he used to do. Except they don’t break your legs, they just take your house.

BILL MOYERS: But we’ve been through 30 years of deregulation now. And as you yourself point out in Free Lunch, America today is more than twice as wealthy as it was in 1980. And the economy is putting out two thirds more per person. I mean, you even remind us that more than half of the wealth created in this country since the United States began has been created in the past quarter century. What’s to complain about that?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that’s tremendous economic growth. The problem is where it’s going. The increases in income and wealth are all taking place at the very top. In fact 2005 the richest one percent increased their income by far more than the total income of the bottom 20 percent. My contention is that it is government policy that is causing this to happen, that in all sorts of different ways there was a time when government policy was to create and nurture and build a middle class. We have a GI bill. We built an interstate highway system. We invested in education and hospitals. Now we have a government whose policy is to enrich the already rich and make them richer. That’s its focus. And I believe that if we continue down that road you create instability and you don’t create as much wealth.

BILL MOYERS: You point out, by the way, that Bill Clinton as president gave the super rich a larger tax break than George Bush’s tax cuts, right?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah, I love to trot this one out when somebody goes, “Oh, you’re from the New York Times. You must be, you know, pro-Democrat or liberal or whatever.” I’m the guy who broke the story and reported on the fact that Bill Clinton gave the super rich, the 400 highest income people in America a big tax cut. They were paying 30 cents out of each dollar of their income to the federal government when he came into the office. When he left, it was down to 22. Bush has lowered it to 17. Now, first of all, notice you’re probably paying more than 17 cents. May well be paying more than 22. But Bush gave them an eight cent tax cut– I’m sorry. Clinton gave an eight cent tax cut and Bush only gave them five cents.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this quote from one of your critics, Larry Kudlow of NATIONAL REVIEW online and CNBC. He wrote this a couple of years ago after in response to something you had reported in the New York Times about how Bush’s tax cuts on dividends and capital gains had helped people with the highest incomes. Quote: “These entrepreneurs use their God-given talents within the Reagan-esque free market framework that deregulated, slashed tax rates, and provided the first strong dose of economic incentives since the 1920s. A rising economic tide over the last 20 years has lifted living standards, productivity, and employment throughout America. Everyone got richer with a full $39 trillion in new wealth created during this period. Fair?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No. Not accurate either. First of all a rising tide lifts all boats unless you’re in the dinghy tied to the dock. And then you get swamped. The poor America, and it’s not like being poor in the third world, but the poor America are worse off. Most Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline slightly. People have fewer fringe benefits. They have less in retirement. They have an enormous amount of debt. For every additional dollar since 1980 the people have gotten in equity in their homes, they’ve taken on $2 of debt. That’s not a prescription for getting well off.

Entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs are people who are going to perform no matter what. And we had our greatest economic growth when we had much higher tax rates. You want entrepreneurs. You need entrepreneurs to have a good society. I don’t have any problem with entrepreneurs. But we need to have a system that also fairly distributes– and government rules affect the distribution of this; it is not in a vacuum– the burdens of society and the benefits of society. And so when we have people who make billion dollar a year incomes and pay 15 percent taxes and janitors who pay the same tax rate and school teachers who pay a 25 percent tax rate, something’s amiss.

BILL MOYERS: But did you notice what happened when the Democrats briefly toyed with the idea of removing that tax break from the hedge fund and private equity managers Congress thought very briefly about removing it. And then the industry held a big party for– Harry Reid, Senate Democratic majority leader down in Las Vegas, and he came back from that big party and said, “I don’t think we’ll be taking that up anytime soon.”

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The problem of the political donor class’s outsized influence and its grip on Congress is bipartisan. There’s one party in Washington. It’s the party of money. It has different wings and factions. But Washington is the party of money. And the wealthiest people in America, the large corporations in America, are busy milking the government for everything they can get. And you are paying the price of their free lunch.

BILL MOYERS: The book is FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMSELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL. David Cay Johnston, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.

BOSTON (Jan. 17) – Nearly a third of antidepressant drug studies are never published in the medical literature and nearly all happen to show that the drug being tested did not work, researchers reported on Wednesday.

In some of the studies that are published, unfavorable results have been recast to make the medicine appear more effective than it really is, said the research team led by Erick Turner of the Oregon Health & Science University.

Even if not deliberate, this can be bad news for patients, they wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Selective publication can lead doctors to make inappropriate prescribing decisions that may not be in the best interest of their patients and, thus, the public health,” they wrote.

The idea that unfavorable test results are quietly tucked away so nobody will see them — sometimes call the “file drawer effect” — has been around for years.

The Turner team used a U.S. Food and Drug Administration registry in which companies are supposed to log details of their drug tests before the experiments are begun.

“It tells you where they placed their bets before they saw the data,” Turner said in a telephone interview.

Of the 74 studies that started for the 12 antidepressants, 38 produced positive results for the drug. All but one of those studies were published.

REWRITTEN STUDIES

However, only three of the 36 studies with negative or questionable results, as assessed by the FDA, were published and another 11 were written as if the drug had worked.

“Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome,” said the authors.

For example, of the seven negative studies done on GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, five were never published. The researchers found three studies for GSK’s Wellbutrin SR, but the two negative ones never reached print.

There were five studies for Pfizer’s Zoloft, but the three showing the drug to be ineffective were not published. A fourth study, ruled questionable by the FDA, was written and published to make it appear that the drug worked.

A Glaxo spokeswoman said the company posts the data from all of its trials, positive or negative, on the Internet.

“GlaxoSmithKline agrees that public disclosure of clinical trial results for marketed medicines is essential and fully supports registration of all trials in progress,” she said.

“Pfizer is committed to the communication of results of all registered clinical studies, regardless of outcome. More specifically, we have committed to disclose clinical trial results within one year after study completion for all of our marketed products,” Pfizer spokesman Jack Cox said in an e-mail.

Turner and his colleagues did not find out who was to blame for not publishing the studies. He said medical journals may have played a role by deciding they would rather publish favorable results.

“There’s an expectation that if you get a positive result, that’s what you’re supposed to do, and if you get a negative result you have failed,” said Turner. “The first impulse is to say, ‘I was wrong. Maybe I should move on to something more interesting”‘ so the results may never get written up.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and David Wiessler)

After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”

To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by “terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded “terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”

They are terrorists because they don’t receive billions in US military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, backed up by US spy satellites and Israel’s nuclear weapons – although Hezbollah, a small militia, has twice defeated the Israeli army. However, Palestine is so thoroughly under the Israeli heel that Hamas can resist only with suicide bombers and obsolete rockets. It is dishonest to damn the terrorist response but not the policies that provoke the response.

The US is at war in Iraq, because the neoconservatives want to rid Israel of the Muslim governments – Iraq, Iran and Syria – that are not American surrogates and, therefore, are willing to fund Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression. Israel, protected by the US, has disobeyed UN resolutions for four decades and has been methodically squeezing Palestinians out of Palestine.

Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming. Thanks to the power of the Israel Lobby, Americans only know the Israeli side of the story, which is that evil anti-semite Palestinians will not let blameless Israelis live in peace and persist in their unjustified terror attacks on an innocent Israeli state.

The facts differ remarkably from Israel Lobby propaganda. Israel illegally occupies Palestine. Israel sends bulldozers into Palestinian villages and knocks down Palestinian houses, occasionally killing an American protester in the process, and uproots Palestinian olive groves. Israel cuts Palestinian villages off from water, hospitals, farmlands, employment and schools. Israel builds special roads through Palestine on which only Israelis can travel. Israel establishes checkpoints everywhere to hinder Palestinian movement to hospitals, schools and from one enclave or ghetto to another.

Many Palestinians die from the inability to get through checkpoints to medical care. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian lands. Israeli Zionist “settlers” take it upon themselves to evict Palestinians from their villages and towns in order to convert them into Israeli settlements. A huge wall has been built to wall off the stolen Palestinian lands from the remaining isolated ghettoes. Israeli soldiers shoot down Palestinian children in the streets. So do Israeli Zionist “settlers.”

All of this has been documented so many times by so many organizations that it is pathetic that Americans are so ignorant. For example, Israeli peace groups such as Gush Shalom or Jeff Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions provide abundant documentation of Israel’s theft of Palestine and persecution of Palestinians.

Every time the UN passes a resolution condemning Israel for its crimes, the US vetoes it. The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees’ film, The Iron Wall, reveals the enormity of Israel’s crimes against Palestine.

President Jimmy Carter, Israel’s friend, tried to bring peace to the Middle East but was frustrated by Israel. Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for calling, truthfully, the situation that Israel has created “apartheid.”

Historians, including Israel’s finest, such as Ilan Pappe, have documented The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the title of Pappe’s book published in 2006.

Israelis, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of Israel’s Knesset, are stronger critics of Israel’s policies toward Palestine than can be found in America. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is more outspoken in its criticism of Israeli policies than any newspaper would dare to be in North America or Europe.

But it is all to no avail in brainwashed America where Israelis wear white hats and Arabs wear black hats.

The ignorance of Americans commits US foreign policy to the service of Israel. As Uri Avnery wrote recently, a visitor from another planet, attending the recent press conference in Jerusalem, would conclude that Olmert is the leader of the superpower and that Bush is his vassal.

Americans don’t know what terror is. To know terror, you have to be a Palestinian, an Iraqi, or an Afghan.

Layla Anwar, an Iraqi Internet blogger, describes what terror is like. Terror is families attending a wedding being blown to pieces by an American missile or bomb and the survivors being blown to pieces at the funeral of the newly -weds.

Terror is troops breaking down your door in the middle of the night, putting guns to your heads, and carrying off brothers, sons, and husbands with bags over their heads and returning to rape the unprotected women.

Terror is being waterboarded in one of America’s torture dungeons. Terror is “when you run from hospital ward to hospital ward, from prison to prison, from militia to militia looking for your loved one only to recognize them from their teeth fillings in some morgue.”

For people targeted by American hegemony, terror is realizing that Americans have no moral conscience. Terror is the lack of medicines from American embargoes that led to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

When asked by Lesley Stahl if the American policy was worth the children’s deaths, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, said “we think the price is worth it.”

In the feeble minds of the White House Moron and his immoral supporters, the massive deaths for which America is responsible, including those inflicted by Israel, have nothing to do with Muslim enmity toward America. Instead, Muslims hate us for our “freedom and democracy,” the real threat to which comes from Bush’s police state measures and stolen elections.

There is dispute over the number of Iraqis killed or murdered by Bush’s illegal invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, but everyone agrees the number is very large. Many deaths result from American bombing of civilian populations as the Israelis did in Lebanon and do in Gaza.

There is nothing new about these bombings. President Clinton bombed civilians in Serbia in order to dictate policy to Serbia. But when Americans and Israelis bomb other peoples, it is not terror. It is only terror when the US or Israel is attacked in retaliation.

The Israeli assault from the air on Beirut apartment houses is not terror. But when a Palestinian puts on a suicide belt and blows himself up in an Israeli cafe, that’s terror. When Clinton bombs a Serbian passenger train, that’s not terror, but when a buried explosive takes out an American tank somewhere in Iraq, that’s terror. Aggressors always have excuses for their aggression. Hitler was an expert at this. So are the US and Israel.

Unfortunately for the world, there’s little chance for change in America or Israel. The presidential candidates (Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) who would bring change in Washington, without which there will be no change in Israel, are not in the running for their party’s nomination.

As John J. Mearsheimer noted on January 12, the candidates in the running are as much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby as Bush. The candidates are Bush clones as strongly committed as Bush to hegemony, war, Israel and executive power.

The possible exception is Obama. If he is an exception, that makes him a threat to the powers that be, and, as we might have witnessed in the NH primary, the Republican-supplied, Republican-programmed Diebold electronic voting machines can easily be rigged to deny him the Democratic nomination. Hillary will not resist Israel’s wishes, and her husband’s presidency bombed at will his demonized victims.

There is no essential difference between the candidates or between the candidates and George W. Bush. Alabama Governor George Wallace, a surprisingly successful third party candidate for the presidency, said as long ago as 1968, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” Today, four decades later, there’s not a penny’s worth of difference, not an ounce of difference.

Both parties have revealed themselves to be warmonger police state parties. The US Constitution has few friends in the capital city.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review.

He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor.

18/01/08 “ICH” — – The White House is now in full-panic mode. In fact, the falling stock market has the administration so worried that Bush will deliver a speech later today that will lay out the details of a “stimulus package” designed to rev-up flagging consumer spending. The desperation is palpable. Fed chairman Bernanke’s appearance on Capital Hill on Thursday turned out to be a total bust. Bernanke was supposed to calm jittery investors with promises of rates cuts and easy credit. Instead, his gloomy predictions put the market into a tailspin sending the Dow Jone’s down 306 points by day’s end. Now it’s up to Bush and Co. to pick up the pieces and try to restore confidence in Wall Street.

Since we first reported on the proposed “stimulus package” (Bush’s Voodoo Stimulus Package” informationclearinghouse.info) the size of the rebates have increased dramatically. The Democratic-led Congress was only calling for $250 per taxpayer or $500 per married couple. Under the White House plan, taxpayers could receive rebates of up to $800 per individual or $1,600 per couple. The rebates will accompanied by additional cuts to the Fed Funds rate (estimated 50 basis points) which will provide more liquidity to the banking system and easier credit for consumers.

The administration’s desperate actions should remove all doubt that the main problem facing the economy is inflation. It is not. The moves are intended to forestall a deflationary spiral that is the logical corollary of 7 years of intensive neoliberal policies. Ironically, now that Bush has achieved his goal of crushing the middle class and destroying the foundation of America’s consumer-based economy; he has decided to change directions and shower those same over-extended, subprime people with a $150 billion gift from the government. It makes no sense at all.

The negotiations on the stimulus package have produced the Democrats first victory over Bush. The president has agreed “not to push for a permanent extension of his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.” Whoopee. Unfortunately, the Democrats don’t seem to grasp how dire the economic predicament really is or they would have asked for much more. For example, they could have made the rebates contingent on troop withdrawals from Iraq or the closing Guantanamo Bay. But that would mean that the Dems actually knew something about the state of faltering economy, which they don’t. They’d rather spend their time groveling for campaign contributions or applying tooth-whitener than following the collapse in the housing and stock markets.

Earlier today, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson underlined the urgency of the situation on CBS’s “The Early Show” saying:

“What President Bush believes is that we’ve got to do something that is robust. It’s going to be temporary and get money into the economy quickly. It’s going to be focused on consumers, individuals, families — putting money in their pocket. And it’s going to be focused on giving businesses the incentive to hire people, to create jobs.”

Can you sense the panic?

It’s funny in a way. The Bush administration has been warned repeatedly about the disastrous effects of their supply side theories. Of course, they brushed off their critics and carried on with the plundering until they hit a roadblock. Now they’re running around in circles trying to find some way to stop the bleeding. Good luck.

Remember the $2 trillion wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) that could be paid for with “unfunded” tax cuts to the rich?

Remember the cuts to capital gains and corporate taxes that were supposed to “trickle down” to working class Americans creating more jobs and making us all more prosperous?

Remember the low interest rates that were supposed to create Bush’s “ownership society” that, in fact, generated the greatest speculative frenzy in real estate in American history?

Remember Dick Cheney’s brusque assurance that, “deficits don’t matter”?

Remember the myriad corporate giveaways, the lavish “no bid” contracts, and deregulated subprime shenanigans that were supposed to “grow the economy” and strengthen our markets?

The system is failing because it was designed to fail. The impending economic crisis is no accident, but the predictable outcome of deeply flawed policies that are thrusting the country towards a 1930s-type catastrophe.

Hopkins Village, Belize

I know it’s unpatriotic as hell, but I just cannot get a hard-on about the ’08 American presidential elections. As in, I haven’t read or heard a word about them in a couple of weeks and could not care less whether Hillary showed publicly some emotion, which was the big news when I left the States. The will just isn’t there. And it’s even more difficult from here in this Central American village where so many people have real problems. The kind that that come with being born under one empire, the British one, and living in the shadow of the present American living in the shadow of its walled fortress of armed privilege. One of those problems is who to sell your vote to and for how much.

“I wan too hunred an feefty dollah for my vote,” Marie declares as she chops up bananas to make tapo for dinner. I got feefty for my vote las’ time, but some people got two feefty.”

“Well you’re not gonna get any more than fifty, babe,” I tell her. “You gotta be more important to get two fifty for your vote. Did you bring anyone else to the polls?”

“No. Le’ dem get dey own money.”

“End of story. If you’d brought along some other voters, you might have been up to two fifty by now”

“Den I no vote jus to spite dem.”

Belizean politics works that way. Next February 7 Belizeans will cast their ballots in the national election for candidate of either the liberal People’s United Party (PUP) or the conservative United Democratic Party (UDP). Between now then the People’s United Party will hand out a lot of cash and pay off a lot of voter’s outstanding bills. Once every five years it’s payday for the poor, who consider their ballot a net cash asset worth $50-100 Belizean dollars (USD$$25-50) or more. Here in Hopkins, fifty Belizean dollars pays the village utilities water bill for a year. Then too, voters here often feel that their “vote money” is likely to be all they’ll ever get from what they consider an unresponsive government. It’s hard to argue against this “one in the hand is worth two in the bush” reasoning if you live their lives. There’s certain pragmatism, even ironic fairness in vote bribery here. On the other hand, it’s a sorry system in which the actual voters are monetarily corrupted by the politicians. I’m more accustomed to the American system, where voters are corrupted morally and intellectually by media. In either case, free market politics is the handful of corruptive mud thrown into the fishbowl. We cannot see a damned thing but what is closest to out noses, usually put there by a politician.

It ain’t the Mayo Clinic, but the needles are clean

Indeed, the Belizean government is fucked up, misled, inefficient and corrupt. All things taken into accord however, in some respects Belizeans get back more than Americans get in return from their government, considering how much Americans work and pay (15 times more than Belizeans), beginning with health care. Belizeans at least have free health clinics in the cities and villages, and dirt cheap higher education, about USD$15 a credit hour. These systems may not be as glossy as their profiteering American equivalent, especially the public hospitals here. But it ain’t China, where hospitals do blood transfusions out of Pepsi bottles (according to American media, anyway) and it’s not rural India where poorer patients often sleep under the beds of more heeled patients. In any case Belize does not have 47 million people with no access to health care at all, and a not-so-good hospital beats no hospital. In fact, a not-so-good hospital beats even Johns Hopkins if Johns Hopkins won’t let you in because you cannot pay the freight.

Same goes for public schools. The school system is a wreck. But so is the American system. Both graduate kids who can’t find their own country on a map, the main difference being that Belizean kids don’t demonstrate it on YouTube. As an underdeveloped country, we are also way behind in school shootings, and sexual assaults, and have yet to install a metal detector anywhere, so far as I know, even in airports, much less schools. Hope remains of catching up: U.S. Bloods and Crips moved into Belize City last year and have been shooting up the place.

As for the Belizean trade school and higher educational system, my wife and I are helping a Garifuna boy through one, and I cannot say it is inferior to ours, just less plushly equipped. In fact, I’d say on the average the Belizean kids work much harder once they are in college, simply because it’s harder to get there in the first place. Our guy in trade school over in Dangriga Town, James, is making perfect grades, while working uphill against hardships such as an arduous daily bus ride and seldom even having lunch money. In the end though, American or Belizean, it all depends on the young person’s grasp of reality. James grasps that studying computer science has removed him from the village streets where so many of his peers now languish, and probably will for the rest of their lives — or at least until the gringo resorts hire them as slave wage gardeners and maids. Meanwhile, his mom’s $50 vote bribe buys a fair slug of lunch supplies. Once every five years during national elections.

Buy mi vote, but don’t tief it, mon

The people’s democratic voice may be bought and sold at the voter level, but on the other hand, as a Garifuna friend Harry pointed out yesterday, “This is not the United States. It is impossible to “tief” (steal) an election here.” Which is sure enough true. Combined forces of international and party monitors intensely watch the utterly countable and recountable paper balloting process like frigate birds circling over a pile of fish guts. Voters may arrive at the polls for less than savory reasons, but the vote count, at least until Diebold gets into Belize, is secure as hell. Until then the only way to undermine the power of the vote is to buy it.

When Belize gained independence in 1981 optimism ran high; Election Day was a jubilant one of national pride. Vote bribery was rare if at all, and politics, though yeasty with its own intrigues, was fairly uncorrupted and diverse as hell. Crazy, yes, but straight up as the sick game of politics goes. Before the International Monetary Fund, the DEA, the foreign “investors,” foreign banks, cruise ship lines, and everybody else got Belize by the short hair, there was a leftist vitality not possible today. You had political activists declaring solidarity with the American Black Panthers, indigenous peoples of the planet, human rights and Cuba. Malcolm X and Che were not yet media trivialized into $10 posters and $19 tee shirts. Most of that days’ young Belizean radicals are now silver-haired PUP politicos buying votes today. But back in 1968, even current prime minister Said Musa (a Palestinian blooded Belizean native) was a young firebrand lawyer organizing protests against American imperialism, capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam War. Along with Assad Shoman, who would later become foreign minister, he struck blows for black nationalism in a wary, conservative, British colonial Belize. Which is why it is so disheartening today to hear that over seven million is missing from the passport receipts, which are directly under Mr. Musa.

Both of Belize’s main parties are crooked as a dog’s hind leg. The only difference is where they toss the swag they do not mismanage or steal. A billion dollars seems to be missing from the national kitty as the shadier elements of both parties in the government scam Belize’s oil, tourism and retirement/leisure condo development bucks. To give some idea of scale, a billion dollars would give every household in this tiny country $100 a day for over 140 years. The PUP party tosses more money to the people, recently instituting a social security program worth about USD$40 a month, and most of all, schools. When it comes to throwing money at the nation’s education problems, PUP gets no better results than the U.S. Democrats. After building 1,100 classrooms and improving teacher training, and funding college education for teachers, the country’s student failure rate has jumped to an all time high — 65%. The dropout rate keeps climbing. The conservative UDP, which resists money for education doesn’t miss the opportunity to say “I told you so.” Meanwhile, word is the UDP is coming up with a No Child Left Behind clone. Left behind whom? Where are these public school children who are ahead?

As with the U.S. Democratic Party, PUP is the party of immigrants, and presently that party is rushing to naturalize as many Latin migrants as possible so they can vote PUP. Among the shit storm of problems involved here is that the HIV rate is high among these immigrants, many of whom are single young men of migrant labor. They constitute an increasing strain on the nation’s rickety health care system, which is fighting, rather successfully so far, to stave off a full blown epidemic. Many also feel the immigrants take away too many Belizean jobs, which they certainly do. Moreover, immigration issues stew the same as in America, and like America, it’s politics as usual, but with a few different twists.

One twist is that Belize has some fighting, if partisan, newspapers such as America or Great Britain has not seen in at least 60 years, if then. The newspapers, however partisan, are loaded with the voices of common citizens, not made up of quotes from powerful officialdom like U.S. papers. Whatever can be said about the lack of libel laws here, it enables citizens to name the bastards out loud. And they do. Sadly though, little comes of it unless some big dog in the government wants it to. But the bastards have not yet worn all of the people down.

Whoa hoss, this just in! Marie’s shot at that $250 just got better. Hugo Chavez has dumped $10 million into the PUP government, ostensibly for development, but much of which is being passed out to voters as I write this. That’s a lotta lunch money and water bills. When choosing between such political bullies, best to go with the one who gives you lunch money instead of beating you up and taking it. Go Hugo!

Not being the majority party at the moment, the UDP cannot get its hands into the coffers deep enough to spread around the geet even if it wanted to (nor is Uncle Hugo likely to open his wallet for them in an act of solidarity with their hard liner capitalism). Which makes them somewhat less corrupt for the moment than PUP. This makes some poor voters see them as being more honest. Many poor people vote the same way working class Americans vote Republican, and see the UDP as a force for stability, evidently, like their North American counterparts, mistaking meanness and transference of wealth for stability. The bad news here is that much of the fiscal talent and administrative skill rests in the UDP, a party in which, in violation of Belizean law, every elected member flat out refuses to declare his or her assets and business connections and gets away with it. Now that’s solidarity.

In any case, the UDP is counting on high powered U.S. style media paid for by the Bush administration to do the job on February 7. All TV and radio are owned by the parties or party interests, and while biased, between the two camps you get the real dirt on everybody if you can sift it. Nearly all electronic media here is owned by the parties or their associate interests. Thus the UDP’s Channel 7 mouthpiece has been showing news footage of voters lined up at PUP representative’s offices to get their vote money. Strangely, they do not show the nationwide burst of road improvements, free televisions, deeds and even a few trucks that get distributed. In all likelihood, if they showed the free refrigerators, the PUP lines would stretch from here to the Mexican border.

The news footage of the vote bribe lines flickers on the TV screen at Kibby’s Cool Spot (taverns are “cool spots” here) where I am sucking down Beliken Stout with a small group of older Garifuna plus a few mixed race Creoles and Mayans — Belizeans all. Some for damned sure are paying for drinks with vote money, given that they said so. Yet they are incensed at the vote bribery the lines shown on the screen. The Belizean TV anchor person looks piously concerned as she delivers her script. Now call it a cultural bias if you want, but I have a hard time taking seriously black women with brightly bleached and straightened blonde hair cut like Katie Couric and wearing heels in these soft sandy palmetto scrub lands. But it seems to work for Belizeans. Anyway, the drinkers are indignant about the news of such widespread vote bribery. Am I missing something here?

“Huh? You sell your votes, right?” I ask.

“Jah.”

Then why is it so bad they do?”

They just laugh knowingly.

“So are you going to vote PUP?”

“Jah.”

“Why?”

“Because dey paid de moneh for my vote.”

Thus followed an absolutely serious discussion regarding how it is every person’s patriotic obligation to vote, for the sake of the nation and our village. “In wi hans de fuchah.” Something like that. Caribbean and Creole syntax comes hard for me. Do these people know something I don’t know? Do they care to know anything at all, at least in the way I think I know things?’ Obviously not.

Outside the open doorway of Kibby’s, silhouetted against the glaring subtropical light, three Garifuna girls float by, tall and crane like, a mirage of brilliant headscarves and parasols, all Giacometti elbows and necks, seemingly without feet. They nod and bob, as if in suspension over the deep purple black spots that are their noon shadows. The oldest cannot be more than 18, and already they are as inscrutably African as the Mother Continent herself.

From Malcolm X to MasterCard

Looking back on earlier visits to Belize, I think it’s safe to say there was a time here when a common man’s vote directly affected national policy, what there was of it, and directed the nation’s finances, what little there were. Perhaps in America too. Almost nobody believes that today. Not in Belize or America. Oh sure, “national progress” has been made here, roads are sort of better, folks are healthier, there are more “jobs.” The people are swimming in knockoff symbols of affluence, Chinese made duds, styrene plastic washing machines that fly apart after a couple of months, crappy cell phones that sort of work and. In fact, for most Belizean citizens, everything is “sort of.” There is a sort of middle class emerging, based mostly on the Chinese bling and sort of usurious home loans. But the majority of citizens are poorer today in real quality of life terms. Most of the housing stock, especially in Belize City, consists of the rotting structures of the British slave era. Bank credit cards, hawked night and day in the media, are causing people to lose the free land granted to them as citizens of Belize — particularly if it has beachfront. The kids are getting dumber, quick payday loan offices are springing up everywhere, and even with gas now at $12 a gallon, more people are driving. We are all Americans now.

In Belize or in the U.S., the business of local and state politics is the business of turning virgins into whores. The business of national politics is polishing up whores to look like virgins. Of course some whores are nicer than others, but in the high stakes back room poker game of power politics one does not get to play by being nice. One comes to the table with a lot of dough, a good cover story and a knife stashed in the boot. And even if you win, the really big guys running the game still own the country where it is being played. In Belize it’s the shadow governments such as land development, tourism and drug trafficking. In the U.S. it’s the financial corporations, Big Pharma, the war making industries, energy companies, etc, who don’t even have to do the shadow government act; they run the joint openly and if you don’t like it and refuse to pay taxes to support them, well, they are in the privatized prison business too, buddy! Hence, while a guy like Obama, who presumably does not take corporate campaign dough, may win, you’ll never hear him call for the complete dismantling of the rapacious big health care or financial corporations, or big media corporations who own our consciousness and awareness of our nation and the world, and upon which he must ultimately depend to gain access to the public at all. In America every player has some smaller player by the balls under the table. In Belize they just divvy the money up without even dealing the cards.

“In America, there is food to eat,
No more runnin’ through the jungle scuffin’ up your feet …
— Randy Newman, “Sail Away”

Belizeans love the hell out of Obama, mostly because he is black, or somewhat so. When I remind them that nearly all their own politicians are black, they are not impressed. Poor Belizeans follow the U.S. presidential race more as entertainment than anything else. And so as long as Obama can buy TV ads and deliver greeting card platitudes that have a sort of righteous sound, he has entertainment, emotional and dramatic value here, as well as to liberal couch taters up there in the Nembutal Republic. As for Hillary, entertaining she ain’t. (“A hard an’ sour wooman,” agree the Kibby’s drinkers, “like de green orange.”) Frankly, I’d like to see Clinton wear Lewinsky’s blue dress on American Idol and sing “A Man Ain’t Nothin’ But A Man” as a campaign ad, or maybe deliver Lady Macbeth’s “Out damned spot!” lines in an episode of American Housewives. But I suppose that’s asking too much, even from the rancid freak show of American politics.

As Lady Macbeth quipped, “Hell is a murky place.” Politics is even more so. The capability for any president to make big progressive changes has become nil in the U.S., and maybe here too, although the capability to fuck things up remains boundless — to wit, Sparky the Chimp. If all of the U.S. Congress cannot effect change because they are owned men, no candidate sucking down corn soup on the Iowa campaign trail is gonna either. And besides, America is dead broke and in hock up to her eyeballs. Even little changes in America country cost big money because there must be big profit in it for Big Corp or big dough to slosh around inside the gullet of big government bureaucracy. For instance, a Katrina victim reader of mine, who happens to be a cost accountant, tells me that it cost the U.S. government $38,000 NOT to get his family into one of those emergency FEMA trailer homes, hundreds of which are still sitting in storage areas unoccupied. He moved to Panama and swears the quality of life there is much cheaper and far better, and that despite inefficiencies and fixes, it is more bearable. Which is rather the way I feel about this country.

I dunno. Come November ’08, assuming I can find the stomach for it, I will vote. My choices are not even as good as in Belize, where the candidates are flesh and blood people, not holographic media illusions. In November I can cast a vote for the manufactured candidate of my manufactured choice, vote Democratic as they vote PUP, on the grounds that at least some of the national swag will land in poor people’s laps, after it passes through the innards of bureaucratic waste, the fraud of government contractors and privatization. I can write-in vote my conscience as I have traditionally done, which would necessarily mean Kucinich. That’s assuming I don’t get cut from the voter list through fraudulent voter caging tactics (not too likely, since I am white and few felons are likely to be named Bageant). I’ll be punching a touch screen voting machine with no accountability because no recount is possible. And my vote will legally be reduced to a set of digits that instantly become the undisclosed intellectual property of Diebold.

18/01/08 “ICH” — — Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.’ The Lincolns have got to go – and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.

Those bills in your billfold aren’t yours anymore. The landlords of our currency – Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud – are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.

It’s mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah’s camel.

Let’s begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain’t there to promote ‘Democracy’ nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn’t go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.

What’s really behind Bush’s hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.

Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That’s $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.

Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah’s stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude.

Bush needs the Saudis to charge us big bucks for oil. The Saudis can’t lend the US Treasury and Citibank hundreds of billions of US dollars unless they first get these US dollars from the US. The high price of oil is, in effect, a tax levied by Bush but collected by the oil industry and the Gulf kingdoms to fund our multi-trillion dollar governmental and private debt-load.

The US Treasury is not alone in its frightening dependency on Arabian loot. America’s private financial institutions are also begging for foreign treasure. Yesterday, King Abdullah’s nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, already the top individual owner of Citibank, joined the Kuwait government’s Investment Authority and others to mainline a $12.5 billion injection of capital into the New York bank. Also this week, the Abu Dhabi government and the Saudi Olayan Group are taking a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill-Lynch. It’s no mere coincidence that Bush is in Abdullah’s tent when the money-changers made the deal just outside it.

Bush is there to assure Abdullah that, unlike Dubai’s ports purchase debacle, there will be no political impediment to the Saudi’s buying up Citibank nor the isle of Manhattan.

So what? I mean, for the average American about to lose their job and their bungalow it doesn’t matter a twit whether it’s Sheik bin Alwaleed who owns Citibank or Sheik Sanford Weill, Citi’s past Chairman.

It’s the price paid to buy back our money from abroad that’s killing us. Despite the Koranic prohibition on charging interest, the Gulf princes demand their pound of flesh, exacting a 7% payment from Citibank and 9% from Merrill. That hefty interest bill then pushes adjustable rate mortgages into the stratosphere and pushes manufacturing into China by making borrowing and energy costs impossible to overcome. Forget the cost of health care: General Motors’ interest burden quintupled in just two years.

As the great economist Paddy Chayefsky wrote in the film The Network:

“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. … It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity…. There are no nations, there are no peoples. There is only one vast and immense, interwoven, multi-national dominion of petro-dollars. … There is no America. There is no ‘democracy.’ The world is a business, one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work.”

In 2005, the US consumer paid Arab and OPEC nations a quarter trillion dollars ($252 billion) for oil – and the USA received back 100% of it – and then some ($311 billion) via Gulf nations’ investment in US Treasury bills and purchases of US businesses and property. Bush’s trip to Abdullah’s tent is all about this vast business of keeping this petro-dollar treadmill spinning.

The Bush Administration, rather than tax Americans to cover our deficits or make the banks suffer the consequences of their predatory lending practices, is allowing the Saudis to charge us big time at the pump with the understanding they will lend it all back to us – so the party never has to stop.

It has been reported that the President’s Secret Service men traveling with him seemed embarrassed by the eye-popping loads of diamond and gold gifts which they have to carry back for President Bush. They need not feel they have taken too much from their hosts: Bush has assured Abdullah that the King can suck it back out through our gas tanks.

Peak Oil started as a story about geology. It was once relatively simple. After 150 years of pumping up oil, the easy-to-find kind was gone and from here on out it was going to be much more difficult to find and eventually prohibitively expensive.

In recent years, however, the peak oil story took on new facets such as rapidly increasing consumption of oil in Asia and producing countries, concentration of most production in the hands of a few governments, unstable world finances, rapidly increasing cost of production and a growing inability or unwillingness to export oil to other countries.

Of all the reasons that gas prices are going up, only the geologic constraint – “supplies are running out” – has an air of finality. There is nothing anybody can do about it.

Other constraints on unlimited oil flows sometimes called “above ground factors” carry with them the subtle implication that there is something that can and just might be done to set things right. A war on top of your oilfield? Stop it! Getting too expensive to produce the necessary oil? Invest more. Government failing to step up production? Change the government! You get the idea. Peaking of world oil production by definition implies that the oil age is on the way out. Almost any other reason for restricted oil flows implies there is a “fix” which will allow us to continue on for awhile without any great disruption.

For over 25 years now, nobody in America has had to think much about oil. It was cheap, hardly taxed at all (by European standards), and available in unlimited quantities. In the last few years, this has started to change with gasoline circa $3 a gallon, oil in the $90s and, thanks to the ethanol craze, food prices going through the roof. Our newspapers are starting to take notice. The problem has become too big to ignore.

Three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal took a stab at explaining what was happening and came up with the notion that world oil production was only “plateauing,” not peaking [“Oil officials see limit” Wall Street Journal November 19, 2007]. Plateauing carries the implication that life as we know it can go on for awhile. All the oil we import today will continue to be available and, if only the Chinese economy would stop growing so fast, all will be well.

Last Sunday, the New York Times came at the high gas price problem from a different direction – availability of imports [“Oil-Rich Nations Use More Energy, Cutting Exports” New York Times December 9, 2007]. Drawing on the combined wisdom of no less than seven of their reporters strung out around the earth, the Times boldly concluded that “The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad.”

The Times then told its readers some very scary stuff. “Experts say the sharp growth, if it continues, means several of the world’s most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.” I particularly like the “if it continues” clause which suggests that the Russians, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Iranians and all those incredibly rich Persian Gulf Arabs might just stop buying new cars, building themselves places to live, and buying flat screen TV’s so they can export their oil to their good friends in America instead.

After more scary talk about world oil exports dropping by 2.5 million barrels a day in the next three years and how a drop of this size could lead to major economic problems, the Times switches to a reassuring mode. “The trend, though increasingly important, does not necessarily mean there will be oil shortages. More likely, experts say, it will mean big market shifts, with the number of exporting countries shrinking and unconventional sources like Canadian tar sands becoming more important, especially for the United States. And there is likely to be more pressure to open areas now closed to oil production.”

They even go so far as to suggest that an era of peace and friendship might just break out in the next few years. ”Greater political stability and increased drilling in some important oil states, notably Iraq, Iran and Venezuela, could help offset the rising demand from other oil exporters.”

After reassuring us that all is not necessarily lost, the Times concludes by reinforcing its basic point by saying “Internal oil consumption by the five biggest oil exporters — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — grew 5.9 percent in 2006 over 2005, according to government data. Exports declined more than 3 percent. By contrast, oil demand is essentially flat in the United States. CIBC’s demand projections suggest that for many oil countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya, internal oil demand will double in a decade.”

The Times and the Journal have taken a major step forward by admitting for essentially the first time in front-page stories that the U.S. is going to face a big problem in the next few years. Neither however has connected the dots.

Nowhere does the Times remind us that the U.S. is now importing two-thirds of its oil consumption each day and that a drop of a few percent in daily flow is likely to cause pandemonium at the pumps as it did back in the 1970’s. Neither paper has as yet mustered the editorial courage to discuss the 800-pound gorilla, oil depletion, which every year quietly eats away 4 or 5 percent of our oil supply – the life blood of modern civilization.

18/01/08 — OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) – An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally.

The document mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

CTV said the document was part of a course on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats to help them determine whether prisoners they visited abroad had been mistreated.

It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as “forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation.”

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran and Afghanistan, CTV said.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document.

“The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government,” he said.

The mention of Guantanamo Bay is particularly sensitive, since the Canadian government rejects allegations that a citizen may have been mistreated there.

Omar Khadr has been in the facility for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Right groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Ottawa firmly rejects.

A spokeswoman at the U.S. embassy said she was looking into the report. No one was immediately available for comment at the Israeli embassy.

The torture awareness course started after Ottawa was strongly criticised for the way it handled the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused.

Noam Chomsky is a steadfast effective critic of United States imperial foreign policy and the corporate global empire, and is probably the most influential single voice against those twin towers (1). His prodigious and prolific life as political analyst-commentator and renowned linguist has been an inspiration for untold thousands of peoples in many countries. Moreover, his dialogues with student youths have encouraged many to organize against the CGE.

Chomsky has led a useful life, one of progressive benefit for those who wish to shape a world in peace and for those billions who suffer under the heel of the CGE and its national comprador lackeys (2). And I consider him a friend, albeit I met him only once, in the mid-1980s, in Nicaragua where we were separately assisting the Sandinista government in its sovereign efforts to survive against the invading CGE (3).

I write this now after long considering its purpose and potential impact. My heart has procrastinated about making a critique of some of Chomsky’s views. We on the left are plagued with destructive criticism and lack of cooperation with one another—to the glee of our common enemy, the CGE. When Chomsky and I were activists against the US aggressive war against Southeast Asians there were two umbrella anti-war coalitions, which could rarely manage a joint action. Today, there are four such contentious umbrella coalitions in the US against the war on terrorism. We have not learned. So, I do not want to contribute to more splitting.

The idea for this interjection comes from a fan of Chomsky’s and a left-wing critic. What I seek to do is to illuminate what appears to me to be incongruities and even contradictions in some of Chomsky’s views about domestic laws, political policy and practice of the US government. There are also some discrepancies in his anti-imperialist stance in some instances—such as what he means about Cuba’s revolution as a vital political-economic system, and liberation/resistance fighters in various parts of the world—but I will limit my critique herein to some of his views about the monster internally.

I have sometimes made changes in my analytical perceptions and tactics when confronted with friendly, constructive criticism. My hope, then, is to offer such criticism, which might lead to changes in some of Chomsky’s conceptions.

The conceptions under scrutiny are: is the United States an “open society,” “more civilized”, “more democratic” than ever before and more so than much of the world; did the US give up using repression under the Woodrow Wilson government and since—including Chomsky’s thesis that McCarthyism wasn’t “that repressive”—by substituting the use of force with “manufacturing consent”.

1. Chomsky positions

In preparing for this essay, I have viewed eight documentaries, mostly You Tube productions, made of several Chomsky speeches (4), read many of his books, articles and speeches, and interviews with him, as well as articles about his views.

What follows are excerpts of his statements regarding the critical themes:

“Mid-19th century press was most free in US and UK, a lively popular press, widely read and very diverse reflecting public concerns. The way to eliminate free press was to start advertising and concentrate capital. In time dissent could be marginalized by refusing advertising…

“Advertising is part of the [now] huge public relations industry developing around World War 1. This replaces repression, the use of force to control…

“Actually, there’s a reason why the Wilsonian intellectuals [Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, 1913-21] had to turn to propaganda as a technique of manipulation and control, because force wasn’t available any longer…People were winning the franchise so you couldn’t shut them up anymore by force” (5).

“I don’t think there was that much repression in the 1950s. I think it was internalized [within individuals, presumably]. The actual repression associated with McCarthyism was not very much. The people who didn’t want to submit to it just laughed at it.”

“You could do what you wanted; nothing happened to you. There was no repression. [Mc Carthyism] was powerful because people accepted it. In the 1960s, they tried it again. People laughed at them and it collapsed” (g).

“The US is a very open society…” “The country is more civilized because of popular movements”… “The country is a lot more civilized—constant improvement since the Vietnam War…”(a) (b) (g).

“The government has no influence over the media” (b).

“We have an enormous amount of freedom…more opportunities than most people in the world; there’s no problem in carrying out activities” [presumably meaning protests, dissent] (g).

Finally I quote from an interview conducted in Havana, his only trip to Cuba (October 27-31, 2003), and printed in Counterpunch, November 3, 2003. He told Bernie Dwyer that in the United States there is “virtually no repression; its an unusually free country by comparative standards.”

2. Chomsky discrepancies

I now cite Chomsky’s statements to show inconsistencies in his own position that the US is a “very open society”, “more civilized, more democratic than ever before…” Sometimes he contradicts this position in the same speech.

“Manufacturing consent was [is] substituted to control opinion and attitude, both on the job and on off-time…They made [make] people into passive obedient consumers…trapping them, isolating them from one another….turning people into creatures who max out their five credit cards and not pay attention to what’s going on in the world ” (g)

“The government wants to silence critics…That’s the job of intellectuals…The objectors are put in jail…such as Eugene Debs for raising mild protest to World War 1…Others were repressed because they didn’t go along…Critics are not allowed to exist. They have to join the parade…We’ve gone beyond putting them in jail in the west; vilification, lies are used instead…You can not report what protestors are saying (a).”

“The public can’t react when they don’t know…” “National Security Strategy since September 2002 [launched] a huge propaganda campaign reflected in the media. Most of the public saw what the US government wanted, that Hussein and Iraq was a threat to the US and the world [thus creating] misperceptions” (e).

“In the US, you don’t murder [dissidents, drug dealers], you put them in jail”. The government uses “internal counter-intelligence campaigns against blacks and the poor” (e).

“Democracy, human rights, human beings are “endangered species” thanks to the US and its handling of 11/9”…”The US is one of the worst terrorist states in the world” (b).

“The US protects terrorists” inside the US such as Cuban exile terrorists in many organizations, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles among many (e).

“Democracy requires free access to information and opinion. By manufacturing consent, the public is kept on course for the elite…” About 80% of the population “follows orders”, and do “not think.” “The media is owned by large corporations—its purpose is to dull people’s brains…keep people from being aware and concerned about what the corporations and governments are doing.” The role of “sports is the same” to fabricate “irrational attitudes of submission to authority” (f).

In order to go into war, the United States government “uses the media to prepare for it”. “Reagan scared people by having them believe the Sandinistas would march into Texas, that Khadafi would invade, that Hussein would invade” (g).

In Chomsky’s now famous book, thanks to Hugo Chavez, “Hegemony or Survival”, and in his most recent “Failed States”, I find other discrepancies regarding the “open society”. Part of his analysis for the success of US’s efforts to dominate the world are based upon its governments and its corporate media ally’s success in manufacturing “intentional ignorance”, creating a sense of “hopelessness” especially among the masses of US Americans.

In the alternative newspaper “Georgia Straight” article (October 5, 2006) writer Brian Lynch quoted Chomsky for contending that, “This is a very frightened country…Actually, it’s been a frightened country all through its history, where it’s been very easy to mobilize people in fear. That’s true of many countries, but particularly true here.”

A significant difference between Bush 11 regime and previous ones is a “new strain”. It has succeeded in producing “a feeling of hopelessness. I mean, we have every possible opportunity, and an incomparable legacy of freedom, of privilege, of opportunity, and there’s numbers that I’ve never seen involved, engaged and concerned. But they feel they can’t do anything. They feel hopeless.”

Chomsky’s explanation for this obvious contradiction is “the deliberate erosion of key institutional and organization structures, such as unions, in which people used to get together and form opinions and prepare actions.” He adds to that the rising tide of materialism, the “fabrication of consumers”.

Now, if the government and its boss, the CGE, is doing all this, if the media is not free and manipulates—whether encouraged or manipulated to do so by the government and/or because it is in the financial interests of capitalist media corporations—then how can the society be “open” and “democratic”?

If people are “trapped”, “dulled, passive”, if dissidents are jailed then they are not free and they are not able to benefit from an “open, democratic, civilized society”.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) defines repress(ion) thusly:

(1) “To keep under control, check, or suppress desires, feelings, actions, tears, etc; (3) To keep down or quell (sedition, disorder, etc.); synonyms: bridle, control, subdue, quash, crush.”

It seems obvious to me that that is exactly what Chomsky also means the US government and its fourth estate is all about. On the one hand the society is open, on the other it subdues; on the one hand the government does not intervene in media affairs, on the other hand it does. I am confused.

3. The facts of the repressive governments and society?

The second United States government administration established the first alien & sedition acts in 1798, in order to incarcerate President John Adams democratic enemies, the then Republican Party, including many newspaper editors who criticized his policies. The Republican Party became the Democratic Party and under its President Woodrow Wilson used these laws to incarcerate his left-wing critics.

Worried by the socialist revolution in Russia, Wilson appointed Mitchell Palmer as Attorney General with instructions to stop strikes and prevent unions and the left-wing from growing. Palmer recruited J. Edgar Hoover as his special assistant to launch the campaign. In one day in 1919 four thousand leftists were rounded up across the country. Within a short time, 10,000 were arrested during these Palmer Raids. Most of them were union members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). They could be “detained” indefinitely without due process as required under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Many told of being tortured. As many as 500 legal aliens were deported, among them Emma Goldman.

Hoover used the renewed subversion laws (Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918) to register 150,000 American citizens on a special left-wing index. These persons were placed under surveillance and would be rounded up whenever it seemed appropriate. For Hoover’s diligent efforts to save democracy he became the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in 1924, and remained the head boss of “law and order” until his death in 1972.

This “Red Scare” occurred mid in the Wilsonian period, which is when Chomsky claims repression, the use of force to control citizens, was discarded—“no longer available”—and replaced with “manufacturing consent”.

In the next decade, the great depression caused the capitalist class and its politicians to worry that radical ideas, even revolutionary ones, might take hold of the working class and encourage them to overthrow their profit-making system and replace it with a more equalitarian one.

Unionists and would-be unionists were systematically fired, blacklisted, beaten and jailed by cops and some were murdered. There are many records of this reality, including novels and films. Perhaps the most famous is John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”.

Manufacturing consent was obviously not the only tool that the ruling class was using to quell the population.

During the Second World War, the working class and the left-wing were engaged in fighting fascism and not bourgeois democracy, and there were few protests when 110,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated in concentration camps. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, considered one of few “progressive” presidents in US history, issued Executive Order No. 9066 for that purpose. This also led to the loss of these citizens’ homes, jobs and businesses.
Yet even before the US entered the war, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act, in 1940, making it a crime to “advocate, abet, advise or teach” (that means speech) “the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States”.

The suppressive law was first used against Trotskyists in Minnesota. Even before the US was at war, on June 27, 1941, members of the Socialist Workers Party, active in the Teamsters union, and other union activists were arrested for advocating strikes, which was interpreted as plotting to overthrow the US government. Twenty-three were convicted and sentenced to from 12 to 16 months in prison.

The Communist Party supported the bourgeois government and its anti-democratic law. Apparently, the SWP was a greater enemy. Maybe they thought their class collaboration would protect them against the Smith Act. But, in 1949, eleven leaders of the Communist Party were charged under the Smith Act. The accusation was that “they conspired . . . to organize as the Communist Party and willfully to advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism,” which was equated with meaning “overthrowing and destroying the government of the United States by force and violence”. They were also accused of conspiring to “publish and circulate . . . books, articles, magazines, and newspapers advocating the principles of Marxism-Leninism.” Books by Marx and Engels, Lenin’ and Stalin were introduced as evidence against them.

Communists were convicted and sentenced to several years in prison. Many served five years plus being fined up to $10,000. Hundreds of socialists and communists were prosecuted under this law until 1957 when the Supreme Court overturned some convictions on the basis of freedom of speech. Nevertheless, the law is still on the books as are many others, which do prohibit advocacy and or acts to establish a socialist economy and government.

Immediately following WW11, the United States started the Cold War. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act (ISA, also known as the McCarran Act), which required communists (widely defined) to register with the Attorney General, who established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate “un-American” activities. Non-citizen members of groups so deemed by SACB could not become citizens. If one did not register, one could be jailed for “disloyalty” as some were.

Although Truman had decreed the “Loyalty Order”, in 1947, he vetoed the ISA for being “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien & Sedition laws of 1798”. Nevertheless, Congress overrode his veto. The Senate then created the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), which was used to investigate the enforcement of the ISA. It was the Senate’s counter-part to the more infamous and widely used House Committee on Un-American Activities established in 1938 and abolished in 1975.

The term McCarthyism became the catch-all term for anti-communism hysteria and for anti-democratic methods used to suppress opinions and ideologies in opposition to capitalism and its political rule known as parliamentary democracy or bourgeois democracy. “McCarthyism” already began with the use of the Smith Act in 1940. It was also that year that HUAC tried to intimidate Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart and writer John Howard Lawson by subpoenaing them for allegedly having communist views.

HUAC first looked into Nazi subversion but soon became a permanent committee (1945) against leftists. In 1947, it began the witch hunt into Hollywood by subpoenaing ten writers and directors. Over the next few years, it interrogated hundreds of Hollywood workers. The studios boycotted 300 Hollywood stars, writers and directors. Some were unable to find work; a few committed suicide. After McCarthyism lost its intimidating powers, only about ten percent of those Hollywood workers boycotted succeeded in reestablishing careers.

One of McCarthyism’s targets was writer Lillian Hellman. She wrote in “Scoundrel Times”, 1976:

“Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help.”

McCarthy also attacked homosexuals despite the fact that his chief aide, Roy Cohn, was a homosexual and a Jew. He was also a prosecutor of Ethel Rosenberg, which is portrayed in the film “Citizen Cohn”. Anti-communism/McCarthyism condemned strong women, feminists with a political cause. Red purges punished deviant behavior, reinforcing the need for “patriarchal emblems of masculinity” in the “fight against communism” (6).

McCarthyism murdered the Rosenbergs. It also punished strong union organizers and leaders, such as Harry Bridges and the west coast-based International Longshoremen & Warehouse Union, and other militant unions, which the AFL or CIO expelled from their coalitions of unions.

Progressive-minded educators were also a target. Hundreds of professors, especially in the California bay area, were fired. At least one subpoenaed witness from Stanford University, William K. Sherwood, killed himself, in 1957, rather than testify before HUAC.

McCarthyism also had a “long-lasting influence on domestic social policies and the development of the social work profession…It led organized social work to retreat from the progressive and reformist orientation it adopted during the New Deal and World War5 11,” said Sigmund Freud’s grand-daughter Sophie Freud (6).

I can not find definitive statistics but the “Second Red Scare” caused the loss of livelihood of thousands and the jailing of hundreds of persons cited for contempt or perjury or for advocating other forms of economy and government than considered legitimate by capitalist politicians. McCarthyism also resulted in the deportation of several foreign-born Communists, and had the affect of reducing the Communist Party USA’s membership from 50,000 at the end of the war to around 20,000 by the mid-50s.

Running parallel to McCarthyism was federal government assistance to its capitalist class by making it difficult to organize work places and struggle for collective bargaining and contracts. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was (is) a major tool for employers, allowing them to express anti-union views, even allowing then to require workers to attend anti-union meetings without equal time for pro-union workers. If employers violate some aspect of that law or the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations for most of the private sector, there are no punitive damages.

According to union lawyer Andrew Storm, these laws have aided the capitalist class in reducing the numbers of workers organized in 1947 from 40% to under 10%. The United States has fewer organized workers than any other first world country (7).

Post-McCarthyism Repression

In the 1960s, McCarthyism was tried again. Chomsky said it disappeared under laughter. Ridicule was an effective tool but McCarthyism was merely substituted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program (1956) used extensively throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

The FBI’s counter-intelligence program “became the extra-constitutional vehicle by which social activist organizations such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panthers, Lesbian/Gay Liberation Movement and the broad organized opposition to the Viet Nam War were targeted for espionage, infiltration and disruption by the U.S. government” (8).

I use myself as a concrete example of how repression was used by the federal government and the Los Angeles Police Department red squad, in conjunction with capitalist enterprises.

My first run-in with government interference in my economic life was in the summer of 1962 when I took a temporary job as a mail clerk at the Aerospace Industry, in El Segundo, California. I had to fill out a “security questionnaire”, which included six loyalty questions and a list of 47 organizations considered subversive. Association with any one would prevent my employment. I wrote no to their questions and stated I was not a member of anything “subversive”. I was hired on July 25 pending final clearance. On August 31, I was summarily fired. In 1977, when I received about 1,000 pages of various national security agencies dossiers on me, I would learn for the first time why I had been fired. An internal FBI report stated that I had “misrepresented” myself on the questionnaire. It did not state specifically what I had “misrepresented”.

One could say that being fired from a job is not repression and is something that happens to millions of people. Well taken, albeit we must have an income to live. The FBI placed me on its “rabble rouser” and “agitator” lists, and a February 15, 1963 FBI report shows that I was placed on its Security Index priority one. It was later revealed that Nixon was prepared to round up thousands of us radical-revolutionaries and even some academic and media critics and incarcerate us in concentration camps a lá Japanese-Americans. But the Watergate caper and scandal got to him before employing that repression.

When I returned from being jailed for a week in Costa Rica, because I had participated in a demonstration protesting raises in electric rates by the US-UK electric company, my passport was confiscated by federal agents. I was unable to travel for five years until 1968.

The FBI later got me fired from my employment as an editor of the California daily newspaper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise. I had just been praised and promoted by the publisher. However, when two FBI agents visited him to let him know that I was a “subversive”, that I supported the Black Panther Party and that I was also trying to organize the newspaper, I was summarily fired. I was then banned from employment by the newspaper employers association.

I was one of tens of thousands beaten and jailed for anti-Vietnam war and civil rights activities. Sometimes federal agents assisted local police; sometimes National Guards were used. At least seven students were murdered and 21 wounded by guards and police at Ohio and Mississippi state colleges and at People’s Park of Berkeley.

Like thousands more, I was subject to false imprisonment. The first time was in Mississippi during the 1964 “long hot summer” organizational drive to force the state to allow black people the simple right to vote. I was swept up from my host’s lawn by local police and beaten in the local jail. This was the same time that other Mississippi policemen-KKK members were murdering three of our co-workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Throughout the 1950s-60s civil rights movement, police and their civilian racist allies beat, jailed and murdered untold numbers of black people and some whites. The FBI often helped them especially under its director J. Edgar Hoover. I recount one horrible example.

I take from an Untied Press International dispatch about the September 15, 1963 Birmingham, Alabama murders of four girls: Denise McNair (11 years old); Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins (all 14).

“A bomb hurled from a passing car blasted a crowded Negro church, killing four girls in their Sunday school classes and triggering outbreaks of violence that left two more dead in the streets.”

Four hundred persons, including 80 children, were in church when the bomb exploded. This was the fourth racist-motivated bombing in four weeks in Birmingham and the 21st in eight years. Several members of the KKK, including a key leader, Robert Chambliss, were picked up and interrogated by police and FBI agents but were let free. One of the KKK members in the area associated with racist attacks was an FBI informer, Gary Rowe. Hoover once described Rowe as “the best undercover agent we’ve ever seen”.

Rowe wrote an autobiography in which he reported that he was approached, in 1960, to be an informer in the Klan. He agreed. In 1963, he killed an unidentified black man in Birmingham. His handlers told him to be quiet about it. Rowe also transported guns to be used to prevent integration in schools. His KKK superior was Robert Chambliss. FBI records, and the 1980 Justice Department investigation, reveal that the FBI knew about and covered up Rowe’s criminal actions and fatal attacks upon black people. Hoover specifically hid evidence about the KKK execution of these children. He thought it more important to hide the identity of his informer.

Only after Hoover died could Alabama authorities acquire FBI records that allowed them to bring Chambliss to court for those murders, and this was a unique event. Most murders of black people don’t even get investigated and almost never are there any convictions or substantial punishments for such racist crimes. From 1882 to 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of ending school segregation, the Brown decision to which Hoover objected, 4,500 murders by lynching alone were registered by authorities. Many more went unregistered. During Hoover’s tenure as the nation’s number one law enforcement agency director over 2,000 lynching took place. Almost no charges or convictions were forthcoming.

But such racist crimes are not limited to the south or to local police and their racist allies. When the black power movement grew out of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, Hoover declared war on the Black Panther Party (BPP) and made it “enemy number one”. The BPP, and other blacks asserting the right to self defense, the right to bear arms, which tens of millions of white men demand and maintain, were to be eliminated.

I was a supporter of the BPP and kept abreast of their program and repression against them. Much of their activities were social, educational and food programs in ghettoes. This threat to the Establishment was such that police and FBI killed many and helped create an atmosphere of distrust so that internecine warfare occurred. During a two-year period (1969-71), more than 30 Panthers were killed by police or due to internal warfare.

The FBI and the CIA use the terms: “bad-jacketing” or “snitch-jacketing” when referring to their practice of creating suspicion by spreading disinformation and manufacturing evidence that their enemies are the perpetrators of terror and other crimes that the CIA-FBI themselves perform. The CIA (Operation Chaos) and FBI (COINTELPRO) did precisely that against the Black Panther Party, the Student National Coordinating Committee, the Martin Luther King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the American Indian Movement and other ethnic liberationists. They also performed such political crimes against anti-Vietnam war dissidents and some unions, such as the United Farmworkers.

I was subject to “snitch-jacketing” when I worked for the LA Free Press. Some government agency, perhaps the local police red squad, circulated information sent from “a friend” that I was a military agent infiltrated in the left. They sent a falsified income tax report I supposedly had filled out, indicating that I had received money from military intelligence, to a competitive alternative newspaper and to anti-war groups. Fortunately, I was able to convince the newspaper that the evidence was false and prevented an article “exposing” me from being published.

I call this kind of activity repression.

The Los Angeles Police Department had several departments devoted to repressing different political groups: the traditional Communist left, the new left (mainly white), civil rights and black power groups, brown berets and other Chicano groups. Many of us were set up for imprisonment, others were murdered. In the period 1966-70, there were 55 known killings of blacks by police, mainly in the Watts ghetto, “and not one police officer has been prosecuted for them,” said Marge Buckley, Peace and Freedom Party candidate for Attorney General, in a L.A. Free Press interview, October 30, 1970.

The same can be said for many major cities throughout the US. When police murder blacks nothing happens, and the FBI backs this up. That is federal complicity with local authority repression. Many black people killed are petty criminals, some are innocent by-standers and others are politically active people. Political activists not killed are often falsely imprisoned, falsely convicted because of planted evidence, racist prosecutions and racist jurors and judges.

Sometimes political police arrest white activists on false charges as well and fabricate evidence for convictions. Lying against innocent defendants is endemic to the job of “law enforcement”. I offer a couple personal examples.

When picketing a sweat-shop employer in Los Angeles, Chic Lingerie Company, which was hiring scabs to replace workers trying to organize a union, I was jumped by four plain-clothed, unidentified police as I explained, in Spanish, to Mexicans just brought across the border to become scabs, that a strike was on. That use of free speech cost me six months in jail.

In 1972, I was arrested while photographing two plain-clothes policemen—Joe Robinson and Mike Moran, who had pretended to be demonstrators and were then beating paraplegic Ron Kovic with blackjacks as he sat in his wheelchair protesting Richard Nixon’s reelection in Los Angeles (9). No matter that I was a reporter for the weekly “Los Angeles Free Press” covering the demonstration in front of a Nixon campaign office.

A Los Angeles undercover cop, Stanley Frugard, alias Bob Burns, was in the crowd and gave the order for my arrest. My film was also confiscated. I was convicted of the usual false charge—interfering with an arrest—one of the charges against me in the Chic Lingerie protest.

“They beat me because I represented the undeniable truth of the war. I represented war, the crimes of this war. They couldn’t understand somebody losing three-fourths of his body and still coming out so outspoken against the war. It’s absurd that you [me] should get one year in jail for taking pictures of me being beaten,” Ron Kovic said.

My sentence was overturned on appeal. Testimony by Frugard’s estranged wife was helpful.

So repression is still a major policy and practice. Manufacturing consent is a major tool of the capitalist class but the government does intervene to assist its capitalist allies in the media empire, contrary to what Chomsky says. I give one personal example.

During the democratically elected Salvador Allende’s term in government, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote the book, “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic”.

They showed how Disneyworld was used ideologically against social democracy and for US imperialist interests. A comic book in “their arsenal of psychological warfare” was Disneylandia, December 1971. Its publication coincided with “the first mass rallies of native fascism, the so-called `march of the empty pots and pans´”. The point was to “conquer the minds”, in the words of General Pinochet. So, the affable Donald Duck advocated the need to “restore the king”.

After the US-backed fascist coup succeeded, the book was translated into English and 4000 copies were sent to New York for distribution. But the US government intervened against the First Amendment rights of free speech and press on the side of private enterprise. As Dorfman later wrote:

“The English edition of this book was banned by the US Customs. Almost 4000 copies of the book were seized by the US government (1976)…It can be assumed [the government acted] in the interests of the Walt Disney Corporation, which did not approve of this academic critique of its comic book characters.”

At that time, I was an editor of the weekly “Los Angeles Vanguard”. We obtained a smuggled copy of the subversive book and printed a four-page pullout of some chapters. Our May 21-28, 1976 front-page headline read:

“How to Read Donald Duck: The book denounced by Disney, Banned by Customs and Printed Exclusively in the Vanguard”.

We actually received a threatening letter from the United States Customs but no action was taken against this small weekly. Had we been taken to court, the costs of defense in this “open society” would probably have caused our bankruptcy.

I end this section on repression by citing from a book about the crimes of U.S. intelligence agencies. One of the four authors of “The Lawless State” is Morton Halperin, a former national security aide to Henry Kissinger (10).

“By 1952, the FBI had checked over 6.6 million citizens for possible `disloyalty´ to determine whether they should retain their government position or were fit to serve…Individuals were tried [in disloyalty hearings] without being able to confront their accusers,” in violation of the bill of rights.

The authors show that the FBI’s authority to monitor “subversive activities” was not curtailed following Joseph Mc Carthy’s censure in 1954.

“The FBI COINTELPRO…transformed McCarthyism into an underground operation. Under COINTELPRO, however, the FBI had even more leeway to disrupt the political activity of citizens and organizations for it could conduct its war in secret, unhindered by the law.”

The Security Index list “had top priority in case of national crisis” with 11,982 names cited for “preventive detention”. I was one of those.

“FBI agents conducted anonymous letter operations to have `subversive´ fired from their jobs.”

“The bureau planted so-called `snitch jackets´…to make it appear that they were police informers…The FBI invaded the privacy of political associations to provoke paranoia inside groups…While this is the stock-in-trade of foreign intelligence agencies, the FBI was plying it against American citizens.”

“President Nixon authorized the Huston Plan in 1970, a joint FBI, CIA, NSA and military program to collect intelligence on the antiwar and black protest movements by using informers, illegal burglaries, and mail opening…Hundreds of agents used every available technique…Each year, the [CIA] opened over 10,000 letters. Most of the information was sent to the FBI. The FBI and the CIA opened private correspondence without warrants or probable cause, and in violation of Untied States statutes.”

The authors say that many of the records of their crimes conducted have been destroyed but it is known that “the FBI conducted at least 239 `black-bag jobs´ aimed at `fifteen domestic groups´ and over ninety burglaries against the Socialist Workers party” in a relatively short period of time.

“Agents even `roughed up´ radical antiwar activists to frighten them or to disrupt protest rallies.”

“The CIA became involved in disrupting demonstrations in Washington D.C. The military, also sharing information with the bureau, conducted photographic surveillance of demonstrators to let them know they were being watched…America was on the verge of acquiring a full-scale secret police with the FBI at its center.”

Even after the intense years of protest and congressional hearings into national security agency “discrepancies”, the “FBI still conducts surveillance of Americans engaged in lawful political activity”

Anti-communism/McCarthyism laid the ideological-propaganda basis for the aggressive imperial foreign policy during the Reagan years—the dark 1980s-90s. Reagan is considered the United States’ most popular president because he “defeated communism”. The fall of state socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe was hailed not only by the capitalist class and its governments but by the vast majority of citizens in the “First World”. This reality ushered in the Bush years with its open bravado for terror wars to gain energy resources and dominate the entire world.

2000+ Patriot Act

Once the “neo-cons” got their wish—a catastrophe as great as Pearl Harbor—their imperial program (Project for a New American Century) was guaranteed. The first step was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF, in September 2001). The attack on Afghanistan was on. A key objective was to use its territory for an oil pipeline, under contract with the Texas oil firm Unocal. This will allow cheaper transport of oil from Turkmenistan into Pakistan, a key US military dictatorship ally. There is enough oil to fulfill US needs for 30 years. The Taliban regime, which the US had earlier installed, had not accepted Unocal’s conditions for the pipeline.

With their war underway, the neo-cons rammed the PA through a complacent congress. Most lawmakers admittedly didn’t even read it. With the nation gripped in fear, Bush declared himself Protector Against Terrorism (PAT) and his PA gave him enabling characteristics never before held by presidents.

That is the distinction between this law and the many laws already on the books against terror and subversion.

“Put simply, the criminal statutes, investigative rules and court procedures which safeguarded our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties in previous anti-terror legislation were stripped away by the Patriot Act. They have been replaced by a system of Executive Branch fiat, now institutionalized in the department of Homeland Security” (8).

I’m certain that Chomsky and most readers of this essay realize how the Patriotic Act does limit US Americans civil liberties, even the abolition by presidential fiat of basic constitutional rights granted upon the very creation of the United States of America, and how it is used to jail alien residents and foreign visitors without the minimal of due process. What is not evident to me is why Chomsky does not view the post-9/11 attacks upon basic democratic rights as use of force, as repression.

Under the umber of “uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to obstruct terrorism”, the United States created a torture chamber on the illegally occupied territory of Cuba at Guantánamo. It imprisons in secret locations within the US, or anywhere in the world, thousands of non-US citizens suspected of some terrorist connection thus abrogating the basic liberty of habeas corpus, Article four of the US constitution.

The principle of habeas corpus, “you should have the body”, which allows a prisoner the right to be brought before a judge and to make a “writ” requiring such, no longer exists for non-citizens. They can be held in total darkness and tortured in other ways for the rest of their lives.

With the fear of terrorism, the US has installed 30 million surveillance cameras inside the US. www.look-themovie.com concludes that the average person in the US is watched 200 times a day.

Co-author of “The Case for Impeachment”, Dave Lindorff, recently wrote that the multitude of government spying agencies have come up with lists of 325,000 “suspected terrorists” (11). He reports that some of the “suspects” are actually US citizens and are held without any rights of counsel and held without any visitations rights.

Indefinite detention in new concentration camps is once again being planned. Vice-President Richard Cheney’s favorite CGE corporation, Halliburton was granted $385 million to build secret concentration camps inside the US, which can hold 400,000 people.

Lindorff also wrote that a Pentagon document, dated June 1, 2007, declares that there is an “insurgency” developing within the US. This judgment leads the Pentagon to lay out “a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent”. Therewith, Lindorff concludes, “you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States”.

The Patriotic Act provision known as “National Security Letters” allows the search of telephones, emails, access to business records, including library and financial records. And the persons so subject are forced, under pain of incarceration, not to reveal that they are subject to such. Recently, federal courts have determined that the NSL is unconstitutional. But that doesn’t stop this anti-terror terrorist government.

The Justice Department’s own Inspector General placed the number of NSL’s issued between 2003 and 2005 at 143,000 (12).

Definitions of terrorism and support for it are so broad that US citizens can be imprisoned for ten years for doing solidarity work with alleged terrorists. Liberation organizations—such as FARC in Colombia, PFLP in Palestine, or wherever in the world where people take up arms against US-backed brutal governments—are no longer considered legitimate but terrorists. This means that support for the African National Congress would have led to imprisonment today. Of course, Israel is not considered a terrorist state and thus support for it is quite admirable.

At least 1,000 US citizens have been placed on a “no-fly” list. Several anti-war activists have been “flagged” and refused the right to travel outside the US. Even the last of the Kennedy brothers, Senator Ted Kennedy, was flagged five times in March 2004. It took this powerful member of congress and his staff three weeks to convince “Homeland Security” that he should be able to fly without being stopped, frisked and interrogated (13).

Under the Military Commission Act of 2006, congress extended most of the above mentioned provisions. A few were altered. But regardless of some positive court cases rejecting parts of the laws, the essence of these police state laws and enforcement practices continue, just as Bush defied the Supreme Court decision that prisoners at Guantánamo should have rights of due process.

Pete Seegar has said that the current repression is far worse than under McCarthyism, and has had the impact of preventing protests against the war in Afghanistan. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney is worried that the laws suppress unionist rights, curb collective bargaining and are a hindrance to striking. Bush has prevented some strikes using the PA.

Tom Engelhardt captured the essence of how repressive the Patriotic Act is in his article, “The Bush Legacy (Take One”). Here are excerpts (14):

“This is what `homeland security´ means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation.”

“A new Pentagon term came into use in the Bush era. With the invasion of Iraq, reporters were said to be `embedded´ in U.S. military units. That term – so close in sound to be `in bed with´ – should have wider uses. You could, for instance, say that Americans have, since September 2001, been `embedded´, largely willingly, in a new lockdown universe defined by a general acceptance of widespread acts of torture and abuse, as well as of the right to kidnap (known as “extraordinary rendition”), and the creation and expansion of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, all based on the principle that a human being is guilty unless proven (sometimes even if proven) innocent. What might originally have seemed like emergency measures in a moment of crisis is now an institutionalized way of life. Whether we like it or not, these methods increasingly define what it means to be an American.”

“And yet, don’t for a second think that nothing has changed. Part of the Bush legacy lies in a new ethos in this country. In my childhood in the 1950s, for example, we knew just who the torturers were. We saw them in the movies. They were the sadistic Japanese in their prison camps, the Gestapo in their prisons, and the Soviet Secret police, the KGB, in their gulags (even if that name hadn’t yet entered our world). As the President now says at every opportunity, and as we then knew, Americans did not torture.

“Today, and it’s a measure of our changing American world, a child turning on the TV serial `24´ or heading for the nearest hot, new action flick at the local multiplex knows that Americans do torture and that torture, once the cultural province of our most evil enemies, is now a practice that is 100% all-American and perfectly justifiable (normally by the ticking-bomb scenario). And few even blink. In lockdown America, it computes. The snarl at the border fits well enough with what our Vice President has termed a `no-brainer´, a `dunk in the water´ in the torture chamber. There is no deniability left in the movies – and little enough of it in real life” (14).

Chomsky is right in saying that all this has not stopped protests. I contend, however, that that does not mean that real repression is not used. It may well be that the protests against the governments’ wars, against its very repression are not as strong and all-encompassing as otherwise had these laws and practices not been adopted. For instance, there is hardly a voice lifted, even within the left and anti-war groups, in support of liberation fighters, especially not the resistance movement fighting for their sovereign rights in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such expression could easily lead one into prison, at least repercussions at work and socially. And lockdown, dulled Americans are not inclined to protest so our numbers and importance is less meaningful than without PAT and PA.

Chomsky wrote in his book “9/11” that such “terrorist atrocities are a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides…(and will) accelerate the agenda of militarization, regimentation, reversal of social democratic programs, transfer of wealth to narrow sectors, and undermining democracy in any meaningful form.”

So, why does he not recognize that the state still uses repression, which he says is “no longer available since Wilsonian times”?

On page 35, he seems to provide an answer:

“I do not think it will lead to a long-term restriction of rights internally in any serious sense.”

I contend that the restrictions I cite—and many more not listed here—show the contrary.

Even the state legislature of Vermont seems to agree with me in its declaration that the Patriotic Act is “the greatest challenge to civil liberties since the passage of the Alien & Sedition Acts” of 1798.

Patriotic Act and war is good for business

What can be better for big business than waging wars? Profits rise for the weapons and aircraft industry, for the metal industry, for the reconstruction-of-war ruins industry. And there is the special reward for the capitalist class of dividing the working class. Several millions of workers in those industries are singled out for good wages for producing the means to murder their ideological brethren. These workers identify with imperialism. They see no material interest in acting in solidarity with oppressed and militarily invaded workers.

There are many other economic and ideological interests achieved from this “war on terror”, which I call the “Permanent War Age”.

In the first months following the terror war, the US profit rate growth was the world’s greatest. It has since dropped but war is still profitable for sectors of the capitalist class. Yankee bases and soldiers are now stationed around Russia in the previous USSR. The US got removed the irritating, independent general director from the UN/OPCW position. José Bustani had proposed checking all powers for chemical weapons. The US has the world’s largest amount. It also got removed Mary Robinson as UN high commissioner for Human Rights. She criticized the violation of international law regarding US prisoners at Guantánamo base and criticized Israel for racism.
The list of advantages is long. Nothing on this list indicates to me that the United States is “more civilized”, “more democratic” than before. I think that this contention can mislead many of his admirers and can curb their development as revolutionary thinkers and actors.

The dictionary states that “civilize” means: to “enlighten”, to “refine”; “the civilized world must fight ignorance”.

It is not civilized that so many US Americans are dulled and do not think. It is not civilized to torture people and do so quite openly, even proudly, for many US Americans today. It is not a civilized society that incarcerates people in greater numbers proportionately than any other country in the world, which executes more prisoners than any other country in the world—many of them proven to be innocent post-mortem? It is not a civilized society that incarcerates people for many years for having smoked a marijuana cigarette? It is not a civilized society when prison guards and police torture people without rebuke, and not infrequently kill them even though their own lives are not threatened.

How can Chomsky call the United States the greatest terror state in the world on the one hand, and then deem it one of the most “civilized”? Does he mean it is uncivilized outside its borders but civilized inside its borders? Is it not both? One can not murder people and starve people to death on a systematic daily basis and be “civilized”.

My calculations–based upon reading US government documents and many books and websites (one example is www.krysstal.com/democracy )–are that the US has intervened with barrels of money, with damaging sanctions, with bombs and other conventional weapons, and or with chemical, biological or radioactive weaponry, with military troops and killer mercenaries, or directly invaded 66 countries a total of 159 times since 1947.

That includes arranging 35 coups in 28 lands. Six of those countries’ governments were toppled two or three times since WW11: Greece in 1949, 1967; Guatemala in 1954, 1963; South Vietnam in 1955, 1963; Laos in 1958, 1959, 1960; South Korea in 1960, 1979; Bolivia in 1964, 1970. It failed in Venezuela in 2002.

Direct military invasions have been justified “in the interests of national security”, that is to say for “civilization and democracy”, against 15 countries since WW11: Korea 1950-53; Cuba 1961; Vietnam from 1962 to 1975; Dominican Republic 1965; Laos between 1965 and 1972; Cambodia 1969-73; Lebanon 1982-3; Nicaragua 1982-88; Panama 1989; Iraq 1991, followed by severe bombings and sanctions until the 2003 reinvasion; Somalia in 1992 and 2007; Sudan 1998; Afghanistan 2001.

And before WW11, the US performed in the same manner but mainly against its “backyard”, Latin America, and in 100 wars against Native Americans.

And when the war machine is so gigantic and gruesome many of the “civilized” society’s soldiers and its highly paid private mercenaries are understandably reduced to murderers. Some of them become fascist Minute Men, common murderers or serial murderers, and rapists. It is this mentality that leads to murdering poor Mexican workers in the hundreds each year simply because they seek work across the US-imposed border. That “patriotic” mentality breeds racism so extreme that it legitimizes murdering and torturing people because of their skin color, culture or religion, even because they abort fetuses. This “civilized” society creates sub-human, anesthetized, violent citizens.

It embarrasses me to note all this, because Chomsky knows it all. What I don’t understand is how he can conclude that despite this conduct the United States is still an “open”, “democratic”, “civilized society”. There is no significant difference between a rich white man being president than a rich or upper-middle-class black woman or a Mexican-American being elected or appointed into the capitalist class’ government. What does it matter that women, or minority Uncle Toms, use their equal rights to become exploiting, profit-gauging bank directors, war ministers or war presidents, or boxers glorifying violence?

The only way that the people can achieve power and exercise it is by taking it and demolishing the structures of capitalist economy and government. And they can’t do that unless there are tens of millions of them prepared to struggle to their death. And that can’t happen unless they are conscious of the need to do so. And they can’t be conscious as long as they are “trapped, dulled feeling hopeless”.

Therefore, repression—and not merely manufacturing consent—is used to limit advocacy and action oriented at reforming the system or aimed at creating a system of economy and governing that is distinct from capitalism and bourgeois democracy, which means a form of parliamentarianism ruled by a minority: the capitalist class.

© Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com

READ BIO AND MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR, RON RIDENOUR

NOTES

1. Chomsky refers to the United States monopoly capitalist system as the global corporate empire. As a columnist for axisoflogic.com, I will use the initials CGE for the term its editors coined: Corporate Global Empire. Both terms mean the same thing: the transnational hegemonist capitalist economic system and its imperialist state allies under the lead of the United States government, and which includes most political parties in the world.

2. Intermediaries in “Third World” countries serving the interests of foreign businesses and/or foreign governments. They are business go-betweens or local and national political leaders, often dictators and militarists but also “democratic” governments, who betray traditional native cultures and egalitarian economies for coins tossed to them by CGE and its “First World” political leaders. History is filled with such lackeys, from 18th century Chinese factotums to the current CGE-imposed governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, including the so-called Iraq Communist Party.

3. Chomsky wrote an inscription to my book, “Yankee Sandinistas: interviews with North Americans living & working in the new Nicaragua”, and one for “Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn”, about Cuban double agents fighting CIA subversion.

4. Pepe Crespo of Almería, Spain encouraged this essay. He makes DVDs with political themes. He transcribes and translates from the English into Spanish. His twelve DVD is a compilation of seven documentaries of Chomsky’s speeches and interviews. I have taken Chomsky’s own words from these: (a) Power, Dissidence and Racism; (b) Power and Terror; (c) Chomsky on Iraq; (d) Distorted Morality; (e) The Grand Imperial Strategy and Latin America; (f) Manufacturing Consent; and (g) Rebel without a Pause. Crespo’s DVD title is: Historia, Mentiras y Guerras—Noam Chomsky. See: Producciones Porcinas Crespo 2007

5. These quotes are taken from (g) “Rebel without a Pause” and (f) “Manufacturing Consent”. I could make a word or punctuation error given that I transcribed from viewing the documentaries and do not have original texts. This will be the case for most of my Chomsky quotes. I regret any errors but I am certain that there are no errors of content or meaning.

6. From “An Absent Presence” by Caroline Chung Simpson, who cites Wendy Kozol, a professor in gender and women’s studies.

7. “U.S. Labor Law”, Dollars & Sense magazine, September/October 2003.

8. “What is the USA Patriot Act?” by Kellie Gasnik & William Pleasant of the Green Party in Savannah, Georgia.

9. Ron Kovics became a well-known activist against the war. He had been seriously wounded in Vietnam where he was a soldier. He wrote the book, “Born on the Fourth of July”, which became a film.

10. “The Bureau (FBI) in War and Peace” excerpted from the book, “The Lawless State”, Penguin, 1976.

It is sometimes unclear to me if I cite the direct words of the book’s authors or of the excerpter. I trust that whether my citations are the direct words of the authors or of the excerpters that the facts are accurate. See also: “Agents of Repression” by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, 1988.

11. I take here from his article, “Martial law threat is real”, July 31, 2007. Dave is a former colleague of mine at the “Los Angeles Vanguard” and an award-winning journalist and co-author of “The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.”

12. American Civil Liberties Union reported

13. The August 20, 2004 Washington Post ran a story about Senator Kennedy being “stopped and questioned” five times in March of that year, because he was on the “no-fly” list.

As most know, and as he said himself, speaking out against the war in Vietnam was for Martin Luther King, a breakthrough. It’s not that he wasn’t aware of war’s immorality prior to that point, but that he was concerned that his speaking out against the war might jeopardize the civil rights movement in which he was a part and a leader.

In other words, he feared he might lose the support of those who he’d struggled so deeply to gather by broadening his stance, by speaking true to his conscience. So he compromised. And I’m not talking about the good kind of compromise, the cooperating with your fellow human-being kind of compromise. I’m talking about the kind of compromise that dissolves the essence of your self.

He felt the dissolution. And finally, he came to a point where he could no longer watch his soul torn apart, because after all, it was the human soul that Martin Luther King most vigorously pursued—the soul, complete and true. And he stood up and he said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

I know something about compromise myself. Compromise is a definitive element of any large institution such as a the military. The instincts and proclivities of an institution so often run counter to the individuals that make it up, and so often run counter to any common sense at all, that its members are left shaking their heads in bewilderment.

Like the day my unit flew to Iraq, and we had to turn in our cuticle scissors at the security gate as we boarded the plane with automatic rifles and machine guns slung over our shoulders. But we shrugged and smiled and tossed our scissors in a box and we moved on. In that case, only scissors were lost. In many others, however, we lost much more.

I went to war on the notion that we, the United States military, were going to do good for the Iraqi people, that we were going to help. And so when we rendered more misery than relief, when I saw my own head and hands playing into all the killing, I felt distinctly saddened. Yet I did nothing. I said nothing. I pressed on with the fight. Why?

I made a deal with myself. I compromised. “Hang in there boy,” I urged myself. “Hang in there until you can take command, until you’re in control. Then you’ll do it better. Then you’ll make good on your word.” I don’t know an officer in any outfit, in any clime or place, who hasn’t made that same promise many times throughout his or her life.

There are a few careerists out there, running around in hot pursuit of individual glory, but in my experience, most officers wanted deeply to do the right thing. And I thought earnestly that through those harmless compromises that popped up incidentally here and there, I could mitigate any harm done by doing some real good.

In Iraq, it was no different. I’ll make good, I told myself. But I never did. I let all those gray episodes of lethality whither into the silence. Our silence. My silence. Iraqi men were shot for walking outside past curfews we imposed. Others were shot for skulking in the darkness near roads we patrolled. And still others were shot for driving their cars near checkpoints we established.

None of them were armed. But they “could have been the enemy” we reasoned. And so I wrote down in our operations log that they were. That is how they will go down in history—as the enemy. That’s how they’ll be remembered.

When I finally took command of my own rifle company, I was happy and proud. And I was gloomy at the same time. It finally struck me that one cannot compromise one’s morality in a bargain today to achieve some greater morality on some later date. It doesn’t work. So I resigned. And from that point forward I vowed never to compromise what I believed in.

That is why I now say no, in response to those who suggest I should vote for this popular candidate, or that one, because they are the only ones who have any chance of winning. No, I say, to them. No, I will not vote for a candidate just to be on the winning side. I’ve done that before and it pays no dividends to the conscience. I will vote as I believe, and in doing so I will be complete and true to myself—even in losing.

That, I think, is what Martin Luther King was saying on April 4, 1967. That is what he meant when he said, “Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. But we must move on.”

Any doubts as to the president’s sincerity in committing himself to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were increased, not dispelled, by his performance once he left Israel for Abu Dhabi. There he delivered a speech portrayed by his aides as the “centerpiece” of his Middle East trip. It focused on Iran as the threat to peace and attempted to reassert his commitment to democratic trends in the region. No mention was made of Israel or the Palestinians, a serious disconnect from the reality perceived by his hosts who consider the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli issue, not Iran, as a far greater threat to regional stability and their own security against popular unrest.

Were there any good signs from Bush’s visit to Israel and the West Bank? Upon arriving at Ben-Gurion airport he immediately lambasted Hamas for undermining the Gazan economy, spurring CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman to post a story on babies dying in Gaza hospitals because of the American-backed Israeli blockade of most goods in and out of the area; no similar story appeared in the mainstream media. But Bush’s Israeli hosts were concerned. Prime Minister Olmert’s airport welcome was so effusive that many winced. Olmert had himself given an interview a week before where he had said that many “painful decisions” would be necessary regarding withdrawal from West Bank settlements. The question remains whether the pain Olmert forsees for Israelis by confronting settlers will be sufficient to meet minimum Palestinian expectations regarding the borders of a viable Palestinian state.

To his credit, Bush did speak openly of the need for Israel to end its “occupation” of Arab land. Israelis bristled at the word “occupation.” He referred to a “viable, contiguous, and sovereign” state, indicating that the Israeli right of oversight of Palestinian movements would be curtailed. He also called for the end of settlement building and removal of unauthorized outposts. But much of this can be reinterpreted to mean something quite different than what one might expect.

What does the word “contiguous” signify? Ariel Sharon referred to “transportational contiguity” for Palestinians on the West Bank. He meant that Israeli settlements and bypass roads would remain, some such as Maale Adumim virtually cutting the West Bank in half. Palestinians could connect between the northern and southern areas by means of tunnels under the Israeli bypass roads, overseen by Israeli troops on the roads above. That’s not exactly what contiguity usually means. Olmert himself has referred to contiguity with the idea that Gaza and the West Bank must be connected to form one Palestinian state; no mention of West Bank contiguity that could only be assured by removal of Malae Adumim. Olmert is adamant that that settlement will remain part of Israel.

Indeed, Israel officials can rely on Bush’s April 2004 letter, written with the aid of Elliott Abrams of the NSC, assuring Sharon that the “facts on the ground,” major population areas in the West Bank, could remain part of Israel. But where some might think that referred only to the Etzion and similar blocs close to Jerusalem, Israeli officials appear to have other towns in mind, including Ariel, an town that thrusts well into the northern West Bank and around which the security barrier is being extended. Once Bush had left, Israeli officials said with assurance that major settlement expansion would continue.

In such circumstances, we should not expect that any Palestinian leader, however conciliatory he might wish to be, could accept such a process where the “painful concessions” amounted to very little from a Palestinian perspective. Olmert may fear his settler constituency and civil war if required to abandon many settlements, but Abbas’s position depends on achieving nearly the maximum possible with respect to Israeli-occupied land across the 1967 Green Line.

Interestingly, Secretary of State Condalezza Rice appears more determined to confront the issues than President Bush. She has been cited in the Israeli press as saying that Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank reminds her of her childhood as a black woman in the American south. Strong stuff. But if Olmert feels he can bypass her and rely on Abrams to get to Bush, he may not feel too threatened.

Under the circumstances, with Bush far more focused on Iran than the Palestinians, we should not expect too much for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Bush has strong emotional ties to Israel, fueled by his helicopter survey of the West Bank with Ariel Sharon in 1998. As the Washington Post reported, Bush viewed the ten-mile width of Israel within its 1967 borders and quipped that there were driveways in Texas longer than that. What the Post did not note was that Bush made that remark at the AIPAC convention in spring 2000 as he appealed for Jewish support in the election campaign.

As Olmert noted in his Jerusalem Post interview, Israel faced the quandary of either withdrawing from much of the West Bank, to ensure a Jewish state, or retaining hold and taking on governance of the Palestinian population, denying the possibility of a Jewish state. Recognizing the dilemma and doing something about it are two different things. It is more likely that Olmert may hope that Palestinian rejection of a supposedly generous offer -recall the fictional narrative of what happened at Camp David 2000- will enable him to evade confrontation with the settlers. But such evasion threatens rather than ensures Israel’s security in the long term. Mahmud Abbas, on his part, must demand almost full Israeli withdrawal or be forced out of office. In such circumstances, what Olmert views as necessary for his political survival, which includes escaping assassination by settlers, will likely be what Abbas cannot accept if he himself wishes to survive.

Serious discussions of these matters may await a new administration. If Democratic, it will likely include Dennis Ross overseeing the supposed peace process. That is not encouraging. Ross essentially falsified the information he gave the American public on the Oslo process and Camp David. He willingly acknowledged to a European audience in Charles Enderlin’s Shattered Dreams [now in English] that Israel was as responsible for the failure of the peace process as the Palestinians. He specifically mentioned Israeli settlement building from 1993 onward to 2000. In his memoir for Americans, The Missing Peace, he never mentions Israeli settlements after the year 1993, thus evading the 1993-2000 period he mentions in Enderlin.

So Many Americans Support False Change Agents, Securing the Political Status Quo

The good news is the huge pent up public demand for political change. The bad news is that presidential candidates have made a mockery of the concept of change while ignoring true political reforms. Missing are details about fixing the corrupt, dysfunctional political system and restoring balance among the three branches of government and between the states and the federal government.

So what kind of change do people want? The Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey last month of both Democrats and Republicans found 24 percent of voters favor “small adjustments” in America, 29 percent want “moderate corrections,” but 46 percent thankfully seek “major reforms” and a “brand-new” approach.

When people rally behind false change agents something worse than being disappointed and having their hopes killed happens: the national energy for real change is wasted. In the end, false change agents protect the status quo political establishment. Hope is replaced by despair for disaffected anti-establishment masses. The worst false change agent is Ron Paul.

An early sign of trouble was that Paul supporters seemed to worship him as if he is the long-awaited savior for America, akin to one of our Founding Fathers. In their writing and behavior they seem like members of a cult, not thoughtful political activists open to new information. They don’t appreciate the need to have disagreements without being disagreeable. Though their hero speaks of persuasion, his supporters express obnoxious in-your-face anger, disparagement, and intimidation. They show disdain for others that want major political change but do not support Paul.

For years before he became a Republican presidential candidate I had admired Paul for his maverick behavior in Congress and had a very pleasant meeting with him. But I had doubts about most of his policy goals, and his use of pork spending earmarks to get billions of dollars for his district was troubling. Paul remains a change talker, not a change agent.

The more I examined what he wanted to do as president the more he looked like the emperor with no clothes. He never produced detailed plans on how he would use new legislation, presidential actions or constitutional amendments. This is especially important for his drastic changes, such as eliminating much of the federal government and putting the country’s currency back on the gold standard. His supporters never seem to demand details. Paul and his supporters exhibit therapeutic activism: activism that makes them feel good but lacks details necessary to convince others.

Yes, I have advocated a Second American Revolution and Paul’s supporters also want a revolution. But a revolution requires leaders that can communicate so effectively with diverse Americans that massive public support results. Paul and his supporters give freedom their highest priority, but do not welcome the exercise of freedom by Americans to reject their beliefs. As Gary Wood, a Paul supporter correctly observed: “You will create more damage to our cause than good if you continue to spew hatred and poisonous venom rather than reason and kindness. Threats and nasty vile hatred will not spread our message; only detract from the importance of liberty and freedom.”

Paul, the professed champion of the Constitution, brings it up in virtually every public statement and claims to believe in a strict reading of it. But he refuses to honor what is in Article V: the option the Founders gave us to have state delegates in a convention consider proposals for constitutional amendments. The one and only numeric requirement in Article V has been more than satisfied, as explained at www.foavc.org. Yet Paul has not demanded that members of Congress obey Article V and their oath of office to obey the Constitution. This is no trivial matter.

You would think he would honor the purpose of the Article V convention option: a way to circumvent an ineffective federal government and restore balance between it and the states. Paul should use his candidacy to make a public commitment to get the nation’s first Article V convention. That would be revolutionary.

Nor has Paul not forcefully criticized the two-party stranglehold on the political system, despite once losing as a Libertarian Party presidential candidate pushing the same policy ideas. Nor has he clamored for the impeachment of George W. Bush, whose foreign policies contradict Paul’s isolationist beliefs. No reason for Paul to be concerned about Bush supporters, only 4 percent of Republicans support Paul. And thankfully, citizens in Iowa, Wyoming, New Hampshire (a Libertarian stronghold), and now Michigan have not succumbed to Paul’s demonology. Despite having considerable money Paul has won no delegates.

Whether other candidates are true reformers remains doubtful. Obama’s glib talk of more bipartisanship smacks of protecting the status quo political establishment. Huckabee’s religiosity and Romney’s automaton personality are plain frightening, as are McCain’s and Giuliani’s bellicose beliefs. Edwards looks like the real thing, but like Kucinich has been out spent by Obama and the ever phony Clinton whose change priority is moving back into the White House.