The Rag Blog

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.

1. Summary

— The United States has committed and sponsored the crime of genocide in Iraq.

— Responsibility for genocide rests on specific intent and given or probable consequences of actions. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was the culmination and intensification of a consistent US policy, spanning over 17 years, of destroying Iraq as a national and state entity.

— The United States attempted and succeeded to destroy the state of Iraq, but has failed and cannot succeed in its attempt to destroy the nation of Iraq.

— The Iraqi people have the legal right to resist occupation, colonialism and genocide by all available means, including armed struggle.

— The national popular resistance in Iraq is combating genocide directly where international law as a preventative and protective mechanism has failed.

— In defence of civilisation, people the world over should rise up in support of the national liberation struggle of the Iraqi people.

— In defence of international law, jurists and law associations should work to bring the charge of genocide against the United States, its leaders and its allies.

15/01/08 “LewRockwell” — – On October 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . . The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.” We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

The U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq, represented by the Bush administration as a critical element in the larger Global War on Terror, began nearly five years ago, and it shows no signs of ending soon. Indeed, if John McCain is elected president and (with help from his successors) carries out the not-so-veiled threat to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years, then we can confidently expect that the war will not end in our lifetime. Such a prospect is so seemingly preposterous, however, that one’s mind does not readily assimilate it.

It is difficult enough to absorb the reality that the United States has now been at war against the Iraqis for almost five years. An engagement sold to the public as a “cakewalk” and represented just six weeks after it began as a “mission accomplished” has now (as I write) continued for 1,760 days. Compare this duration with the time the United States was formally engaged in World War I (589 days) or World War II (1,365 days). In the 1940s, the U.S. forces (with important allies, to be sure) defeated two major economic and military powers in a globe-circling war in less time than the U.S. forces have been engaged in Iraq.

And after all this time, where does the U.S. venture stand? Evidently it is no closer to the “victory” the president has repeatedly said he seeks than it was immediately after the occupation began. The 901 U.S. troops who lost their lives in Iraq during 2007 were the largest number in any calendar year since the war began. As 2008 begins, we read reports of a U.S. air strike on the outskirts of Baghdad in which B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives, an attack described by Major Alayne Conway as “one of the largest airstrikes since the onset of the war.” The attack came only a day after six U.S. soldiers participating in a major ground offensive were reported killed in the “biggest one-day loss in Iraq since May.” These events do not epitomize minor “mopping up” activities. The war obviously has no end in sight.

Notwithstanding these inauspicious developments and Senator McCain’s bizarre pronouncement, we might well think in a more focused way about what will ultimately bring the war to an end, because it almost certainly will end someday. Given its nature, it cannot be ended as each of the world wars was ended, by the formal capitulation of an enemy state. Loosely organized insurgents and guerrillas do not stop fighting in that fashion. In view of the particulars on the ground in Iraq, it would seem that no complete cessation of armed hostilities can occur there until the United States withdraws its military forces. So the question becomes: What will induce a future U.S. president or a future U.S. Congress to act decisively to bring the troops home?

In the abstract, the answer is easy: U.S. authorities will extract their occupation force when they perceive that doing so is in their interest. Note well that I said, “in their interest.” Whether a U.S. withdrawal serves my interest, or yours, or that of 95 percent of the American people is not necessarily important, because government leaders do not act to serve other people’s interests. Anyone who has advanced beyond infancy in his understanding of political affairs knows that despite all the dutiful claptrap that political leaders and their functionaries spout in public, they invariably pursue their own interests. Those interests may be material, political, institutional, or ideological, but in any event they are their own interests, not yours or mine.

It follows directly that up to this point the continued prosecution of the war has served the leaders’ interests. They may say they are trying to end the war. They may have secured their election or reelection, as many of the Democrats now serving in Congress have, by promising to do whatever they can to end the war. Yet the truth is that they’ve sold the public a bill of goods. When the leaders have considered all the personal consequences they expect to follow from acting to end the war, they have concluded that, all things being considered, doing so does not serve their interest, and therefore they have refrained from doing so.

After all, it’s not as though the U.S. war effort has a mind of its own. Whenever the president wants to remove the troops, he can do so; he has the power. Whenever the members of the majority in Congress want to remove the troops, by stopping the funding to support them there, they can do so; they have the power. The posture of powerlessness that our leaders often affect – my goodness, what can I do? my hands are tied – is a disingenuous pose. They can stop the U.S. engagement in the war whenever they want to do so. Thus far, they simply have not wanted to do so.

What might cause them to reach a new conclusion about what serves their personal interest? Several developments might turn the trick. Nearly all of them work by heightening the public’s anger with their leaders’ decisions.

Historically, the decisive development in similar instances has been the cumulation of public costs, especially the costs in life and limb. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the public’s disfavor of the engagement closely tracked the cumulation of casualties. As political scientist John Mueller showed in his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, “every time American casualties increased by a factor of 10, support for the war dropped by about 15 percentage points” in the polls.

One reason the public has continued to tolerate their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war in Iraq is that the casualties have not been nearly so great, by an order of magnitude, as they were in Korea and Vietnam. So far, not quite 4,000 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq. That’s only one death for every 75,000 persons living in the United States, and therefore the loss of life has not cut deeply into the public psyche – most Americans have not been personally acquainted with anyone killed in the war. (The vastly greater loss of Iraqi lives seems to have made even less impression.) Sad to say, the public may not turn decisively against their leaders’ continued prosecution of the war until many more American soldiers have died.

Economic costs have also mounted, and they have loomed relatively much larger in this war than in the earlier wars in Korea and Vietnam. Who says the military leaders never learn? They’ve certainly learned how to increase hugely the financial costs of fighting a war. Estimates of the costs to date vary widely, depending on how one accounts for various joint, indirect, and implied costs, but a total cost to date in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars is not implausible, and later costs, including those associated with decades of care for the war’s legions of physically and mentally disabled, will add enormously to the total.

In earlier wars, even though the costs were relatively greater in blood than in dollars, the public eventually wearied of the economic sacrifices entailed by the financial expenses of continued fighting. Economist Hugh Mosley concluded that the Johnson administration “was reluctant to resort to increased taxes to finance the war for fear of losing public support for its policy of military escalation.” Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote that President Richard Nixon “realized that for economic reasons (the war was simply costing too much) and for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility he had to cut back on the American commitment to Vietnam”; the retrenchment was “forced on [him] by public opinion.”

As the recession that has just begun deepens, the public may well object more strenuously to the government’s squandering of such vast amounts of tax money on a senseless continuation of the war in Iraq. When their purses are not so full, people may resent every additional dollar spent on the war more than they did previously. Ultimately, they may become so angry that they will take actions to punish severely the political leaders who continue to support the war. Serious political challengers may attract a mass following by embracing the example of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who promised in the 1952 campaign to end the enormously unpopular war in Korea and, after he took office, kept his promise expeditiously.

When substantial negative feedback begins to jeopardize the personal job security, not to speak of the respect and fawning, the electorate affords incumbents, they will begin to take notice, and to discount more heavily the contributions from defense contractors, big financial establishments, petrochemical companies, and other high rollers who have encouraged them to stay the hopeless course – though not hopeless for these special interests, of course; for them it has been a bonanza. George W. Bush parlayed a campaign of fear-mongering into his reelection in 2004, but unless another major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, the public will grow increasingly resistant to such appeals and more eager to throw the rascals out as the war’s costs continue to mount.

It is extremely unfortunate that escalating costs in blood and money are the only proven means of bringing the general public to resist strongly their political leaders who are committed to a continuation of unnecessary, unwise, and immoral war. Some of us wish that rational argument, cogent evidence, and humane sentiment would persuade a preponderance of the public to demand an end to the war. History suggests, however, that only personal grief and economic pain will induce the American public to act against their perfidious leaders. Needless to say, if the public remains as passive and as easily bamboozled as it has been during the past seven years, the war will continue, maybe even for the hundred years in which Senator McCain declares that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would be “fine with me.”

Robert Higgs is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

As the news and most bloggers become totally engrossed with the process of selecting the next big kahoona, I received a small check in the mail which reminded me of the original thesis of this blog.

It was a check from my food co-op.

It says, “due to our successful operations this year, the board of directors has authorized a refund of part of our net savings to qualifying member patrons. This check represents a refund of approximately 1.02% of your purchases during the year. This 20% of the total amount allocated in your name, with 80% retained by the co-op to help fund our expansion project. Assuming your purchases were for personal,living, or family expenses, this rebate is not subject to federal income tax.

“Please Cash this Check” and if desired, you can use it on your next shopping trip to the Co-op.

My rebate check is for 12 dollars and 80 cents.

And in all fairness, the 20% return is a pretty good return on my modest investment, not to mention the reductions I enjoyed in all my purchases.

The co-op movement is still very much alive. I also get a small check from my electric co-op membership for my house in the country. In many parts of the country, these electric coops are very important chunks of the electrical infrastructure. In farming areas, large growers band together to own the cotton gin or the grain elevator. Many of these coops such as Pedernales Electric Coop , are large enterprises.

Certainly these organizations can be and often are controlled by a small clique of insiders, but the by-laws and articles of the organization, much like our constitution, are generally inherently democratic.

I started this blog after the Kerry defeat because I felt it was time for us to quit falling for the veneer of democracy that we always fall for every four years. I urged us all to reconsider the amount of energy and money that we invest into a system that has become corrupted and a dangerous diversion from the real work at hand. I urged us all to grow out of our nationalistic tribal cocoons and to emerge as global citizens.

I spoke of giant cyber-coops and of great global aggregations of people and ideas and access. I argued and visioned that someday, in the not so distant future, we would begin to form new inventions of social contract between ourselves and our distant friends and colleagues in cyberspace.

I reasoned that as the world begins to truly grapple with the great issues of the day, that we would do ourselves well by uniting with others in cooperation, rather than counting on the dated idea that competition will most fairly allocate the resources we will seek and require.

True, competition is a pretty good idea in times of wide open spaces, unlimited resources, and a level playing field. But today, we as individuals must compete against the greatest creatures of capital and control that have ever walked on the earth…the multinational corporation. Meanwhile, our finite resources are now recognized to be just that, finite, and our open space is now full of oxydized climate altering carbon.

But don’t fool yourself, the next president (of either party) will represent these corporate leviathons, not the consumers that dutifully stood in the cold and suffered the long lines, and the endless claims of change for a change.

And so now, it is that time again. We are all caught up in the drama. We watch the debates and the returns like a bowl game. We convince ourselves that all we need is a great leader, one who will end the domination of these giant leviathons of wealth.

When, in fact, all we really need is each other cooperating together.

We must flip the system.

Instead of a world of Multinational Corporations and Consumers.

We need a world of Multinational Cooperations and Providers.

Power does not give of itself naturally.

It does not volunteer to distribute itself.

It can be overtaken violently,

or it can be undertaken quietly, steadfastly, bit by bit,

family by family,