The Rag Blog

A perfect example of the integrated threat that U.S. foreign policy and federal domestic regulations pose to the freedom, privacy, and well-being of the American people is the current telecommunications controversy.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the feds approached various U.S. telephone companies and asked them to illegally share private information about their customers. The argument, of course, was “national security” and the “war on terror,” the magic words that have come to justify all sorts of federal wrongdoing since 9/11 (e.g., torture, the invasion of Iraq, cancellation of habeas corpus, indefinite incarceration, and denial of due process).

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, the plaintiffs are alleging that some of the telephone companies agreed to cooperate with the feds, illegally and secretly sharing their customers’ private information with them. If the allegations are true, the obvious question arises, Why would these companies choose to become secret informers for the feds rather than fight to protect the rights and interests of their customers?

One possibility, of course, is that they fell for all the “national security, war on terror” nonsense, just as many other Americans did, failing to recognize that such nonsense has always been the time-honored way that governments seduce people into giving up their rights and freedoms for the pretense of security.

But there is another possibility, as former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio can attest. Unlike the other telephone-company CEOs, Nacchio refused to play ball with the feds, deciding, correctly, that the federal request was illegal and deciding, correctly, that he had a duty to protect the privacy of his customers.

What was Nacchio’s reward for such heroic action? The feds indicted him and convicted him of a federal crime, for which he has been sentenced to serve six years in a federal penitentiary. What was the heinous crime that Nacchio was convicted of? Insider trading, that heinous economic crime in which there are no victims.

In other words, the message delivered by the feds to the telephone companies after 9/11, when the federals were feeling the full force of their power, was, “You need to play ball with us, or else.” Some of the other companies, in an act of extreme cowardice, apparently folded, kneeled, kissed the rings of federal officials, and did what the feds wanted them to.

Not Nacchio and Qwest, for which they deserve the praise and accolades of every freedom-loving American.

At Nacchio’s trial, the federal judge refused to permit him to introduce evidence that his prosecution was retaliation for his refusal to go along with the federal request to violate the law and the rights of his customers. (See “Documents: Qwest was targeted,” by Sara Burnett and Jeff Smith, in the Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 2007.) The judge said the evidence wasn’t relevant. All that was relevant, the judge said, was whether Nacchio had sold some of his Qwest stock as a result of insider information he had acquired as a Qwest executive.

There are two important points to note about what is going on here.

First, as we have long pointed out, the real value of the regulated society is not any protection it provides to people. All that protection talk is just a sham. The real purpose of the regulated society is to keep the business and banking community in line — meaning in conformity with federal policy. The real purpose of the rules and regulations is to serve as a Damocles sword, ready to fall on any business or bank that refuses to go along with the feds.

The rationale behind the federal regulated society was best summed up by what a bureaucrat from the State Science Institute said to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged:

“‘Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?’ said Dr. Ferris. ‘We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.'”

Of course, the feds would argue that the law is the law and that Nacchio broke it and therefore has to pay the price. That, of course, is not the point. The point is that in the regulated society, everyone breaks the law, one way or another, which then provides the feds with the option of prosecuting anyone they want whenever they want.

Consider, for example, the IRS code. Despite never-ending railing among political candidates about how complex the code is, the feds love the complexity. Why? Because they know that no one can ever file a perfect income-tax return and especially not wealthy and influential businessmen. If the feds looked hard enough, they could prosecute anyone they wanted at any time for income-tax violations.

It’s the same with insider-trading laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, hiring illegal aliens, or a multitude of other economic crimes. If they hadn’t gotten Nacchio on insider trading, they would have undoubtedly gone after him for other things. The point is, he refused to go along with illegality and wrongdoing, and they went after him for it.

To add insult to injury, President Bush and some of his federal cohorts in Congress are seeking to give civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly chose to become federal informers. They are trying to get Congress to pass a law that would prohibit the customers of the telephone companies from suing for the companies’ allegedly wrongful (and cowardly) misconduct.

In other words, become a federal informer and we’ll protect you. Refuse to do so, and we’ll send you to jail.

What is the difference between neighborhood captains in Castro’s Cuba, who report people’s activities to their government, and U.S. telephone companies who report people’s activities to their government? Don’t they all rationalize their conduct under the same warped sense of “patriotism”?

And why are the telephone companies seeking immunity from civil liability in lawsuits brought by their customers? At trial, wouldn’t they have ample opportunity to show that the only records they turned over to the feds were those of terrorists? Why should they be let off the hook if they have illegally and secretly betrayed their customers in order to ingratiate themselves with the feds?

Another critically important point to note in all this is how U.S. foreign policy is at the root of it all. Follow the logic: With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the feds lose their official enemy — communism. Throughout the 1990s, they poke hornets’ nests in the Middle East, knowing that they are provoking anger and rage among people in that part of the world. That anger and rage ultimately erupts into terrorist blowback. The blowback is used to bludgeon American telephone companies into allegedly selling out the rights and privacy of their customers. Those who refuse are prosecuted for violating domestic rules and regulations.

Thus, while the short-term answer to all this involves a refusal to grant civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly became federal informers as well as dismissal of all charges against Joe Nacchio, there is only one long-term solution to this noxious weed — pull it out by its root by bringing an end to the U.S. government’s overseas empire and its interventionist foreign policy.

What color is your disaster? It makes a difference. A life and death difference.

Dig:

Population of San Diego fire evacuation zone: 500,000
Population of the New Orleans flood evacuation zone: 500,000

White folk as a % of evacuees, San Diego: 66%
Black folk as % of evacuees, New Orleans: 67%

Size counts, too. Size of your wallet, that is:

Evacuees in San Diego, in poverty: 9%
Evacuees in New Orleans, in poverty: 27%

The numbers would be even uglier, though more revealing, if I included evacuees of the celebrity fire in Malibu.

The President didn’t do a photo-strafing of the scene from 1700 feet this time. Instead, we have the photo op of George, feet on the ground, hanging with Arnold the Action Man. (However, I’m informed that the President was a bit disappointed that he didn’t get to wear one of those neat fireman hats like Rudi G got at Ground Zero.)

In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did,” he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter much coveted by speculators.

But as this week’s flames spread, no Republican Congressman cried, “Burn baby burn!” to praise the Lord for cleaning up the ‘Boo, the sin-and-surf playground of Hollywood luvvies.

In New Orleans, God’s covenant with real estate developers has been very profitable. Over 70,000 families remain, two years after the waters receded, in mobile home concentration centers far away from the N.O. re-building boom. Let’s see how long it takes to get Tom Hanks back on his beach towel.

Standing next to Governor Schwarzenegger, a smug little Bush said, “It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead” – a snide attack on the former Democratic Governor of Louisiana on whom the White House successfully dumped the blame for the horror show in New Orleans.

Mr. Bush never mentioned – and the media would never give away his secret – that 15 hours before the levees broke, the White House and FEMA knew the flood barriers were cracking, yet failed to inform the Governor and state police. Nor did Mr. Bush mention that his Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA trolls took away evacuation planning from the state and gave it to a crew of crony contractors who, for a million bucks, came up with a plan that came down to, “If a hurricane comes, get in your car and drive like hell.”

In California, plans were in place, money poured down with the flame retardant, and no one is suggesting that Mel Gibson move his swastika collection to a FEMA trailer.

Not comparable, the ‘Boo and the N.O.? You can say that again. But as a kid who grew up in the ass end of Los Angeles, I can tell you that disaster apartheid applies on the local scale as well. Look at the tarry filth of Compton and Long Beach shores versus the panicked reaction when a bit of garbage or oil sheen hits Malibu sands. (I remember, standing on the crude-covered shore of an Alaska Native village in March, 1991, the day Exxon announced it would end the clean-up from the Exxon Valdez spill. That same day, the papers showed the careful scouring that week of every pebble on Malibu beaches hit by dinky spill incident.)

Please don’t get the idea I’m slap-happy about the California inferno. My parents live in San Diego – and one of my favorite Air America hosts had to evacuate from her Del Mar hot tub, poor dear. (I’ve heard, however, that billionaires well done taste just like chicken.)

What I’m saying is: Besides the flames, there’s a class war raging in America. Or, should I say, Class Massacre. Because only one side is taking all the bullets. Malibu, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica are “incorporated communities” – islands of privilege politically fenced off from the riff-raff sea of Los Angeles. These self-incorporated Bantustans of the wealthy have their own fire departments and schools. The money islands are relieved of having to pay for the schools and hospitals of the city where their gardeners live. (I can’t tell which is the worst disaster that can befall an Angelino – a fire, an earthquake or the LA public school system.)

Now, it’s easy to say it’s just George Bush who’s the class clown of the class war. But it’s an old story. When a flood took out the tony homes at Westhampton Dunes, the Clinton Administration picked up the full tab for rebuilding these summer hideaways of investment bankers. While today, death-by-poison stalks the environment of Black townships of Louisiana (the FEMA ‘guests’ are parked in a zone called Cancer Ally), Al Gore can’t be found. But when speaking of rising sea levels that can take out the homes of his buddies in ‘Boo or the Hamptons, Gore goes ga-ga.

The one thing I’ll say in favor of that vile little Louisiana Republican cheering the drowning of public housing residents, at least he’s honest about how the system works. He’s not afraid to remind us of the gods’-honest truth: disaster response is class war by other means.

So let me not forget to report the war’s body count:

New Orleans flood deaths: 1,577.
California celebrity fire deaths: 5.

Tonight and this weekend, listen to “The Fire Next Time,” on the Palast Report, aired each week on Air America’s Clout with Richard Greene, on the Nova M network with Cynthia Black (from KPHX), on the Solution Zone with Christiane Brown (KJFK) – and live, in Chicago, this weekend, for Buzzflash.com, The Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and WCPT, Chicago’s Progressive Talk – and, on this Sunday morning on the Bree Show, KTLK Los Angeles, with host/evacuee Bree Walker, slightly charred (or is that a tan?) but undaunted.

It’s not quite signing statements, where President George W. Bush used legal means to “interpret” laws, allowing him to avoid Congressional directives, but the White House is now planning to implement as much new policy “as it can” by administrative order “after concluding that President Bush cannot do much business with the Democratic leadership.”

According to officials who spoke to the Washington Post, Bush blames Democrats for the holdup of Judge Michael Muskasey’s nomination as attorney general, the failure to pass budget bills and an inability to reach compromise on child healthcare.

Bush vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, saying Democrats hadn’t found a way to offset spending for the expansion of the program. Democrats have reservations about Mukasey because he has refused to denounce the president’s policy on waterboarding.

“White House aides say the only way Bush seems to be able to influence the process is by vetoing legislation or by issuing administrative orders, as he has in recent weeks on veterans’ health care, air-traffic congestion, protecting endangered fish and immigration,” the Post authors write. “They say they expect Bush to issue more of such orders in the next several months, even as he speaks out on the need to limit spending and resist any tax increases.”

House Democrats disagree with Bush’s assessments.

The article gave little information about Bush’s plans for administrative orders, focusing mostly on Congressional infighting and legislative disagreements between the White House and Congress.

On Wednesday, a diarist at the liberal blog Daily Kos noted that administrative orders differ from executive orders and directives, citing a University of Tulsa research document on executive power.

“Administrative Orders include numbered documents called determinations, and notices or memorandum designated by date,” the document states. “These orders often concern foreign policy decisions but may also include management decisions made by the President that concern Executive Departments.”

Recent examples of such documents, as listed by the National Archives, include “Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Narcotics Traffickers Centered in Colombia,” “Memorandum on Waiver and Certification of Statutory Provisions Regarding the Palestine Liberation Organization Office,” and “Memorandum on Waiver of Limitation on Obligation and Expenditure of $1,051.6 Million in Fiscal Year 2007 Economic Support Funds for Iraq.”

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Calling it “a potential death sentence,” several hundred diplomats expressed their resentment Wednesday over a new State Department policy that could force them to serve in Iraq or risk losing their jobs.

Some diplomats may be forced to serve in the new U.S. embassy complex under construction in Baghdad, Iraq.

Some at the hourlong town hall-style meeting questioned why they were not told of the policy change directly, learning about it instead from news organizations last week.

Others pointed out the risks of such a rule, considering the dangers of a war zone, lack of security and regular rocket attacks on U.S. personnel.

One State Department worker complained she was not provided medical treatment for her post-traumatic stress disorder after she voluntarily served in Iraq.

The session was marked by angry exchanges, according to an audio recording of the meeting held at the State Department.

The sharpest comments came from Jack Croddy, a 36-year veteran of the Foreign Service.

Gary Corseri: I want to focus on your book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, with its exposition of policy-making during the Vietnam War—and we’ll consider how that process applies today. I’ll ask you about current world crises—Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel/Palestine. But first, I’d like to know how you come to have the authority to write about the policy-making process?

Gareth Porter: I don’t know that I have the authority—that’s subjective. I think I have the right background, though: the curiosity of the historian to figure out what actually happened—to solve mysteries or puzzles—in terms of American policy, specifically, policy towards war; and then, International Politics. I have an interest in policy on a theoretical level. I studied under Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago. Morgenthau had turned against the Vietnam War by then. I considered myself a realist, taking the idea of the Balance of Power seriously—that nation-states act in terms of power relationships. That was really the only way to understand the behavior of states in international politics. Obviously, that played a role in the way I looked at, in retrospect, the Vietnam War.

GC: Perils was published in 2005. Would you describe the theme, or themes?

GP: There are really two interrelated themes.

When I began my research, I understood that power relations had something to do with the road to war in Vietnam. But, it seemed, the pertinent literature had ignored that. I had a strong sense from my reading of Cold War history, specifically of Vietnam, and particularly my editing of a two-volume documentary history of the Vietnam War back in the late 70s—I had an intuition that the Communist world was much weaker than had been reflected in the history of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. I began my research convinced that was a key to understanding how and why the US stumbled into war. That was my first theme: that power relations matter, that there was not a real balance of power between the US and Soviet Union during this critical period from 1954 to 1965, but, rather, a profound imbalance in which the US strategically dominated the Soviet Union. It’s clear that the Soviet Union was very much on the defensive. And the US, on the offensive, had a freedom of action the Soviets didn’t have. And that played a key role in shaping US decision-making on Vietnam.

The second theme, which I discovered as I read the documents, is that there was a big difference in the responses to Vietnam between Johnson and Kennedy on the one hand and their national security advisers on the other. I go back to Eisenhower and I concluded that he was totally opposed to intervention, but that a number of people in his administration were pro-military intervention. So, there was a conflict there as well.

GC: But Ike handled it better?

GP: Eisenhower was very strong dealing with national security issues, very self-confident. He was able to quash any pressures for war. But, in the case of Kennedy and Johnson, there were inexorable pressures from the key national security officials of their administrations to commit US forces in Vietnam.

GC: What accounts for this difference between the perspectives of the president and his own advisers?

GP: National security advisers define their role as managing US power. That’s the main thing they do, whereas the president, inevitably, has a broader range of issues. He has to put the advancement of US power interests alongside other issues. He’s much more sensitive to the costs of committing forces.

GC: And the president is always balancing his own perception of domestic politics.

GP: That, of course, is true, and it can cut both ways. In fact, what I conclude with both Kennedy and Johnson is that domestic politics was part of the pressure on them to make an accommodation with their national security advisers in taking steps towards war.

GC: Your book depicts the tension between policy-making on the one hand, and “reality” on the other. I’m not talking about the kind of reality some Bush administration hack told reporter Ron Suskind that the U.S., as an empire, had the power to define; rather, about the kind that can bite us on the ass when we’re not paying attention. For example, after 14 months of struggle with his own advisers, Johnson agrees to bomb North Vietnam. But, in the interval, two new realities had emerged which would change the outcome. Can you tell us what happened?

GP: Between the beginning of the bombing and the build-up of ground forces, the Viet Cong had become much stronger than the national security advisers had anticipated; they were able to advance much farther and faster against the South Vietnamese army. Our advisers had assumed that the Communist forces in the south were not strong enough to advance dramatically without help from the north.

Second, when the U.S. began its build-up of ground forces, the assumption was that the threat of even heavier bombing, including the threat of the use of nuclear weapons, would deter the North Vietnamese from countering. That again was a profound under-estimation of the determination and capabilities of the North Vietnamese. Basically, there were two fundamental miscalculations, based on the notion that US supremacy, at the strategic and at the conventional power level, would ensure that the United States could fight a low-level war and keep it from getting out of control.

GC: Others have written about the bureaucratic nightmare that endures through changes of administration and/or party. But, I don’t think anyone has documented the twists and turns as well. Your 403-page book has over 120 pages of notes, bibliography and index. And I think the vital role of your book lies not only in helping us to understand that murky and parlous era, but in providing a template for understanding our present crises … Can you talk a little more about how politics enters into policy-making? I’m thinking about the notion of collective responsibility.

GP: Right. That’s an idea I feel strongly about.

The assumption that diplomatic historians of the US have shared–I would say almost universally–in writing about Vietnam is that the Constitutional power of the president is absolute in making war. The idea that the president does not make the definitive decision to go to war is so outside the realm of possibility that it’s dismissed. I think there’s a perfectly logical explanation for that: diplomatic historians write within a paradigm in which it’s assumed that policy-making is guided by the Constitution, that there’s a logical relationship between legal responsibilities on the one hand and political reality on the other. That’s why it’s so difficult for them to imagine that the president is really not the critical force in powering the US towards war.

In 1962, before the Cuban missile crisis, but after Kennedy had failed to take strong action against Castro and the Soviet Union when it was discovered that there were Soviet military personnel in Cuba, the Republicans then mounted a very politically effective campaign, through the media and through Republican spokespeople to attack Kennedy for being soft on Communism and weak in the face of this alleged threat from the Soviet power on our doorstep. And, there’s no doubt that Kennedy was chastened by this. And that played a role in his taking such strong measures in the Cuban missile crisis, in a sense to risk nuclear war (although we now know that he had taken steps to make sure that would not result). Kennedy felt strong political pressure, he felt his presidency could be weakened by Republicans in a situation where they could attack him on a key issue of national security. I think that caused him to feel he had to have his own national security advisers fully on board to impress the public that he was not making any policy moves to avoid the use of force in Vietnam that did not have the full support of his top national security advisers. The same thing was true, even more so, for Johnson because he was even deeper into a situation where choices were either to face the “Who lost South Vietnam?” syndrome, or to send troops. In that situation, he felt the need, even more than Kennedy, to have his top national security advisers—the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—at least neutralized if not supporting him.

GC: That’s how politics works vis-a-vis the two-party system. But, you describe another phenomenon—the way politics are internalized inside an administration, so that Kennedy had to worry about his own people; you cite examples where Averill Harriman, for example, was practically sabotaging some of Kennedy’s efforts to open new channels of communication with the North Vietnamese. So, I wonder if you could focus on the role of the national security bureaucracy. Where do they come from? What are the origins, the operation and evolution? Most Americans do not perceive that our government works this way. How did it happen?

GP: This is the reality that dawned on me as I was researching this book. We have been virtually unaware of the extent to which the national security bureaucracy has taken on a crucial degree of power over policy; in effect, over issues of war and peace. It’s both military and civilian in character. Both are extremely important to the power we’re talking about. They’re both able to maneuver, to use methods to pressure the president, to narrow his options so it’s more likely he’ll accept their options.

We know that there are historical cases where the military leadership has been against using force—more so than civilian leadership. But in the case of Vietnam, it’s very clear: the military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the top officials in the State Department and National Security Council officials were all leaning towards military intervention. The question is precisely the one you ask: What’s the character of this political entity which developed during the Cold War, which has sprung up as a major power center that did not exist before the Cold War and which exercises so much influence over policy? My key concern is that the national security bureaucracy does not act in the abstract interest of the US, or the American people–although I think it believes it does—but, rather, in ways that further the personal and institutional interests of the advisers themselves.

GC: The implications of which are enormous, illusion-shattering …

GP: It means that the military services are concerned with maintaining and adding to their missions in a war; and when there’s an opportunity to fight a war where they feel they can accomplish those ends, they will do so. For individuals who are heads of bureaucracies—the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security staff of the White House—they have a personal agenda to advance or expand the power of the US and to thereby add to their own status, their own prestige, their own political positions, their career c.v.’s, and various personal interests. That causes officials to push American power forward.

GC: We think that we have a balanced system, that we have checks and balances between the three branches of our government. But, in fact, the balance within the executive branch, which has become the most powerful, the most important in this age of the imperial presidency—that balance is very tenuous.

GP: Very tenuous, indeed. And, this is one of those occasions when we can skip forward, and note how the relationship between the president and his key national security advisers under the Bush administration represents a caricature of a president who is under pressure from his advisers to go to war.

Now, Bush, of course, is not Kennedy and he’s not Johnson. He’s much more willing to be manipulated. He’s a man who has no experience in foreign policy, who knows nothing about foreign policy and is really not interested in learning; therefore, he leans on his advisers far more heavily. So, even though Bush is ideologically attuned to the neo-conservatives, he is nevertheless subject to the manipulation of these officials who have their own agendas. And, we see in the case of the neo-conservatives the clearest example of a group of national security advisers who came into office with their own idea of what they wanted to accomplish—a very ambitious goal. And we have an exaggerated version of the kind of dynamics that I describe in our march to war in Vietnam.

GC: I’d like to continue to probe this bureaucratic nightmare, this meta-government. You said this began with the Cold War. I might put it back even further in the Roosevelt Administration; but, a long time ago I read that Truman had established the National Security State, and that we were no longer a republic. Do you care to dive into that?

GP: I think it’s true that the beginning of a policy of exploitation of a power advantage began in the Truman Administration. It was not so self-evident as it was during the Eisenhower Administration, where I show that in the first Indochina crisis of 1954, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were acutely aware of the great advantage that they had over the Soviet Union and China, and very clearly exploited that to pressure the Communist side—the Soviets, Chinese and Viet Minh—to accept a settlement at the Geneva Conference of 1954 that certainly did not reflect the local power balance within Indochina. But, I would say that it was during the Truman administration that we had this huge military build-up which put an enormous distance between the US and Soviet Union. It was that obvious power gap that gave the US an incentive to act more aggressively.

I think what you’re referring to is that the institutions—the military structure, the military bases network—existed essentially by the end of World War II, that we were already in most of these bases, particularly in East Asia then. So it was a result of that war that the US was able to exert the kind of power it did—particularly in East Asia, where the Pacific Ocean became virtually an “American Lake”. I agree that the problem began even before the Cold War, but then it was exacerbated as soon as the US carried out the first major military build-up before the Korean War, which accelerated during that war.

GC: If the process you describe is correct, concerning this government by bureaucracy, what does that tell us about our democracy? Is our president anything but a figurehead?

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became the first woman elected to the presidency of Argentina on Sunday. Her victory is not difficult to explain. Her political party, under President Nestor Kirchner (her husband), led a dramatic economic turnaround that made Argentina the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere over the last five and a half years. More than 11 million people, or 28 percent of the population, were pulled over the poverty line as the economy grew by over 50 percent.

This 8.2 percent annual growth was more than twice the average for Latin America – it is more like the fastest-growing countries of Asia.

Unemployment has dropped from 21.5 percent to 8.5 percent, and real (inflation-adjusted) wages have grown by more than 40 percent.

Cristina Fernandez’s victory was thus predictable and relatively easy. But the economic recovery that drove it was not so simple, and the people who led it deserve more credit than they have generally received. They had to take on not only the conventional wisdom of the economics profession, but powerful international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Their success may have some important implications for other developing countries.

When Argentina defaulted on a record $100 billion of debt at the end of 2001, almost all of the experts predicted that this would be the beginning of a long period of punishment. The country would be shunned by international financial markets and by foreign investors, they said, and this would be very damaging. The government had better reach an agreement with the IMF, and follow its advice. And it had better play nice with the defaulted foreign creditors.

The experts could hardly have been more wrong. The economy contracted for just three months after the default, and then began to grow. It hasn’t stopped since.

Contrary to a common belief, Argentina’s expansion was not based on exports or high commodity prices: only about 13 percent of the growth during the whole expansion was due to exports.

What did Argentina do right? Most importantly, the government got its basic macroeconomic policies right. After years of seeing its domestic economy crippled by an overvalued currency that made imports artificially cheap, the Argentine central bank targeted a “stable and competitive real exchange rate.”

In other words, the authorities made sure that their currency didn’t rise too high, and didn’t swing wildly as a result of movements in financial markets. (Here in the U.S., where we have shed more than three million manufacturing jobs since 2001 – the bulk of them lost due to an overvalued dollar – we might take note.) They also kept interest rates low and made growth, rather than the lowest possible inflation, the top priority.

These policies are mostly a no-no among central bankers and economists, and Argentina had a few showdowns with the IMF, including a brief temporary default to the Fund in September 2003. But the Fund backed down, and the most of the defaulted international creditors ended up settling for 35 cents on the dollar in 2005.

Of course Argentina hasn’t gotten a lot of foreign direct investment in the last five years and it cannot directly borrow on international bond markets. But these handicaps – which if you read the business press should spell doom – turned out not to be all that important. Nor are they permanent: in time, foreign investors and lenders will find their way back to a fast-growing economy.

The lesson: just as “all politics are local,” so, too, are the most important economic policies for most countries. Getting the basic macroeconomic policies right for your own economy is a lot more important than pleasing international financial markets. That goes double for failed, unaccountable international financial institutions like the IMF. The Fund not only oversaw the train wreck that collapsed Argentina’s economy from 1998-2002, it opposed the most important policies that drove Argentina’s remarkable recovery.

The new government will face challenges, of the kind brought about by a fast-growing economy: keeping inflation in check and assuring adequate supplies of energy. But these problems are manageable. Of course there are some analysts who argue otherwise – but their forecasts over the last five years have not been very accurate.

Feminism is finished. Kaput. Outdated. Irrelevant. Didn’t you get the memo?

But wait a minute. What about the estimated 30,000 women who are sacked, made redundant, or leave their jobs every year because of pregnancy discrimination?[1] Or the 4,000 women that are estimated to be trafficked in to the UK annually to feed the growing sex industry?[2] And let’s not forget the increasing number of women being imprisoned, women’s gross under representation in parliament, the judiciary and the higher echelons of business and the fact women still continue to do the majority of domestic labour.[3]

However, while all these facts are pertinent to the continuing subjection of women, perhaps the most shocking issue facing women today is the level of violence that is directed against them, something Amnesty International have been highlighting since 2005 with their ongoing Stop Violence Against Women campaign.[4]

The cold statistics are sobering. In England and Wales one in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime, while one in twenty women have been the victim of rape.[5] Rather than an aberration, it is clear violence against women is widespread, common in all communities, regardless of class, ethnic or generational differences.

We need a wholesale re-imagining of the threats women face. While the mainstream media persistently focus on stranger danger, in fact the most dangerous place for a woman is her own home. Often, this supposed cosy, secure haven, is actually a place of fear, injury, and for some, death, with two women killed by their male partner or former partner every week in the UK. Gill Hague, Director of the Violence Against Women Research Group at the University of Bristol, notes “the home is after all behind closed doors, away from the public’s eye, protected by the spoken and unspoken rules about privacy, about not interfering in other people’s business”.[6] Regarding sexual assault, women are also most likely to be attacked by men they know – again partners or acquaintances are the most common perpetrators.

Dismayingly violence directed at women continues to be seen as acceptable by many people. For example, a 2003 BBC Online/ ICM survey of men and women found that while 78 per cent of respondents said they would report to the police or RSPCA if someone was kicking or mistreating their dog, only 53 per cent would intervene by going to the police if they knew someone was kicking or mistreating their partner.[7] Mind blowing as this statistic is, it dovetails with previous research such as a 2005 NSPCC survey of 2,000 teenagers which found 43 per cent of respondents (both boys and girls) believed it was acceptable for a boyfriend to get aggressive in certain circumstances – if a girl cheated on him, flirted with someone else or “dressed outrageously”.[8]

Underpinning this general acceptance of violence against women is the widespread attitude that women are partly to blame for the crimes committed against them, with a 2005 Amnesty International survey finding 26 per cent of interviewees thought a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, and 22 per cent holding the same view if the woman had many sexual partners.[9]

Rape convictions today are at an all-time low with approximately six per cent of reported rape offences resulting in a conviction (this compares with conviction rates of up to 32 per cent in the 1970s).[10] “Rapists who end up being convicted in a court of law must regard themselves as exceptionally unlucky“, Joanna Bourke wryly notes in her new book Rape: a history from 1860 to the present.[11] Furthermore services for victims of violence remain underfunded and inadequate, with just 32 rape crisis centres in England and Wales (compared to 84 in 1985).[12] Just how mixed up society’s priorities are is highlighted by Liz Kelly, Professor of Sexualised Violence at London Metropolitan University, who points out there are now three times as many pole dancing clubs than rape crisis centres in the UK.[13]

Depressing though all this is, it is important to remember significant progress has been made already, specifically because the second wave feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s successfully campaigned for services, legal protection and to get domestic violence seen as a crime. Prior to this the plight of women who were abused was largely ignored by healthcare practitioners, and a man was within his legal right to rape his wife and beat her as long as he used a reasonable degree of chastisement.[14]

Feminist scholars have also focussed attention on the perpetrators of the majority of violence directed at women – men – insisting they take responsibility for their actions. Indeed, with its elevation of toughness, aggression, control, power, dominance and humiliation of much that’s considered female, for the violence to end surely the popular form of masculinity needs to be challenged and, eventually, phased out? It is this line of thinking that lead Michael Kimmel and Michael Messner, authors of the influential reader Men’s Lives, to suggest that, “The man who batters women and/or children should not be viewed as a ‘deviant’ from some healthy ‘norm’, but rather as an ‘over conformist’ to mainstream male norms.”[15]

In conclusion, while there continues to be wide ranging debate among feminists and researchers regarding the causes of violence against women, most agree it arises out of the continuing unequal position of women in society. This damaging status quo will only be changed by women (and concerned men) coming together and pressuring those who hold the reigns of power. In short, we need a new wave of feminist activism. Those who deny this and insist feminism is a historical dinosaur would do well to ponder author and activist David Edwards thought provoking truism that “there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained.”[16]

* An edited version of this article was recently published in the Morning Star. ian_js@hotmail.com.

ASK Ralf Pietras why the Left Party is growing in Duisburg and he offers a ready answer. The coal mines are exhausted, steel is forged by machine and old folk scavenge for bottles to reclaim the deposits. Duisburg, a gritty town at the junction of the Rhine and the Ruhr, has lost 35,000 good jobs in 15 years. In such adversity, the Left Party thrives. Its local membership has quintupled since it began in 2005, to 330. Mr Pietras, spokesman of the Duisburg branch, dreams of 1,000. The local Social Democratic Party (SPD), which ruled the city for 56 years until 2004, has lost half its membership in two decades.

Frighteningly for the SPD, this is a national trend. It has been governing in Berlin, from 1998 to 2005 under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, since then as the junior partner in Angela Merkel’s “grand coalition”. But as the Left Party gnaws away at its working-class base, the SPD is starting to panic. The clearest sign is a call by the SPD’s boss, Kurt Beck, to extend the period for paying unemployment benefit to older workers. Franz Muentefering, the SPD vice-chancellor under Ms Merkel, has denounced the idea as a “U-turn” from reforms enacted by the Schroeder government. The press is speculating that his resignation may be imminent. Mr Beck threatens the foundations of the grand coalition, the Christian Democrats claim.

Why is a small party founded by east German former communists causing national ructions? One reason is that the economic upswing has left so many Germans behind. Unemployment is at its lowest level since the early 1990s, thanks partly to the reforms that Mr Beck now wants to roll back. But many of the new jobs offer lower pay and less security than those lost during the downturn, notes Markus Grabka of DIW, a research institute in Berlin. Relative poverty has jumped, with 17% of Germans earning less than 60% of the median in 2005, up from 12% in 1999. Income-tax cuts have helped the rich; the middle class has shrunk.

On these matters the Left Party is saying what most Germans seem to be thinking. According to one recent poll, 82% of Germans want to lower the retirement age from 67 (reversing another reform), two-thirds want a minimum wage and 72% think the grand coalition should do more to promote social justice. Half want German troops out of Afghanistan, but the Left Party is the only one that unqualifiedly agrees. Unlike the Greens and the Free Democrats, it has no reason to flirt with either party in the grand coalition (the SPD refuses to consider it as a potential partner at federal level).

It likes to claim it is Germany’s only real opposition party.

This has come about mostly by luck. The Left Party is the third incarnation of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party, which had 2.3m members when the regime collapsed in 1989. It struggled back to life as the Party of Democratic Socialism, trying to be a normal party by catering to Ossis who felt swamped by unification. The Left Party is still strongest in the east: it wins almost a quarter of votes in the six eastern states, has been in a coalition in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and is now the SPD’s partner in the city of Berlin.

It was a bust-up within the SPD that gave the Left Party its purchase in the west. Social Democrats dismayed by Mr Schroeder’s reforms broke away to form Alternative Labour and Social Justice (WASG), which fought alongside the PDS in the 2005 election. Between them they took almost 9% of the vote. They formally merged into the Left Party in June.

This hybrid works mainly because there is no risk of its assuming national responsibilities anytime soon. It has two leaders: Lothar Bisky, a film-studies professor from Brandenburg (though Gregor Gysi is the party’s true eastern star), and Oskar Lafontaine, a firebrand from Saarland given to populist rhetoric, who was once SPD chairman. The SPD loathes Mr Lafontaine for abruptly quitting as Mr Schroeder’s finance minister in 1999. It has just published “Oskar’s World”, a supposedly incriminating compendium of remarks by and about him.

The Left Party’s policy documents drip with hostility to capitalism. It leans toward pacifism in foreign policy and against the hawkish European Central Bank.

The long-term goal, says Dietmar Bartsch, its general secretary, is “another society” to be achieved by “evolution, not revolution”. Higher taxes and lower defence spending would bring greater equality.

The party’s eastern wing has communist remnants (and a libertarian strain, exemplified by Saxony’s Julia Bonk, who favours a “right to get high”). But its leaders have been sobered by proximity to power. In the city of Berlin, the Left Party has abetted austerity measures such as pay cuts for public workers that would be deemed heresy in parts of the SPD. Such decisions show that “we are not merely a fair-weather party,” says Harald Wolf, Berlin’s economy minister.

Pragmatism is less evident in the former WASG, which is dominated by the politics of protest. Though less inclined to call themselves socialists, the westerners care less about fiscal responsibility. Lacking experience in power, they are unwilling to get it by compromise. AndrA(c) Brie, an eastern moderniser, recently warned westerners (and some easterners) against “black and white thinking” reminiscent of communist times. The Left Party’s democratic credentials are often questioned, but Dan Hough says in a new book* that its leaders are all democrats. The main obstacles to co-operation with the SPD in the west are Mr Lafontaine and the stigma of the party’s communist past.

The Left Party’s short-term aims are thus modest. In most western states its vote is close to the 5% level needed to get into the legislature. It has already cracked Bremen’s and could enter up to three more next year. Even in fertile Duisburg, the SPD’s shrunken membership still dwarfs that of the Left Party and it dominates the local media, complains Mr Pietras. Hence the immediate ambition, says Mr Bartsch, “to shift the axis of politics to the left.”

The SPD’s troubles suggest this may be happening. That does not guarantee the Left Party a bright future. It could be hurt by a more populist SPD, by greater prosperity (incomes have picked up during the revival of the past two years) or by its own internal contradictions. But it could also evolve into a permanent candidate for coalition with the SPD (and perhaps the Greens), including at federal level. The risk then would be of losing what makes it distinctive.

But the SPD’s panic may not truly subside until the Left Party becomes a potential partner, not a competitor.

All Things Considered, October 30, 2007 · By all accounts, Colby Vokey is a model officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, at one point helping command an artillery unit in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991.

For the past four years, Vokey has served as chief of all the Corps’ defense lawyers in the western United States — and he’s played a key role in some of the military’s most sensitive legal issues, including the murder investigation in Haditha, Iraq, and in the debate about detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

“Colby Vokey?” muses retired Col. Jane Siegel “Integrity almost seems like a word too small to describe him.”

Says Lt. Col. Matthew Cord, “He’s just one of the best.”

So when Vokey announced recently that he wanted to leave the Corps, it said something troubling about the military system of justice that he’s served for almost 20 years. Vokey charges that some commanders and officials in the Bush administration have abused the system of justice, and he’s going to retire from the Corps May 1, 2008.

People who know him say that privately, Vokey has acknowledged he is “angry” and “bitter.” Publicly, Vokey describes himself as “fed up.”

“I think changes to the system are well-overdue,” he told NPR. “And it’s a little frustrating when you see problems are highlighted time and time and again.”

Turning Points

So how did Vokey, who’s stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, evolve from a gung-ho warrior helping command an artillery unit in Desert Storm to a disillusioned officer?

Vokey says he can remember the exact moments that he decided to become a Marine, and then later, a Marine lawyer.

Just after he arrived as a freshman at Texas A&M, he met an officer in the Corps. “He was in his Marine uniform — the green trousers, the tan shirt, the ribbons, the rank, his hat,” Vokey said. “Every time he made a movement it was sharp, it was crisp. You knew who was in charge. And it was him. He looked like he was one of the best. And I wanted to be one of the best.”

Years later, after he had enlisted and fought in Desert Storm, Vokey got called to jury duty in a court-martial.

Vokey said it was a routine case against a Marine accused of writing bad checks. On the surface, he said, it resembled any trial in the civilian world — there was a military judge, a military prosecutor and a military defense lawyer, which the Corps always provides to defendants for free. But Vokey said when he and the other jurors began deliberating, he saw one of the biggest potential problems that can prevent service members from getting a fair trial: the senior officer on the jury tried to order everybody else how to decide the verdict.

“We walked into the deliberation room, closed the door, sat down and he said, ‘All right, let’s convict this guy. Let’s get out of here’,” Vokey said. “I said, ‘Whoa, sir, I think we’re supposed to talk about the evidence first.’ And he said, ‘Jesus Christ, you think this guy’s not guilty?'”

Battles in the Courtroom

Vokey said that’s when he decided to fight his battles in the courtroom — to make sure that commanders never manipulate the system of justice.

Commanders have the power to do just that, if they wanted: The same commander who accuses a Marine of breaking the law might also pick the members of the jury, which will decide if the commander is right. And that same commander might supervise the lawyer who defends the Marine against his accusations.

But Vokey teaches his defense lawyers that they have to fight commanders with every legal weapon they’ve got, even if it makes the commanders angry.

When he trains young Marine defense lawyers, he tells them “you have one loyalty, and that’s to the client,” Vokey said.

Top commanders said they appreciate and need courageous defense lawyers like Vokey.

“We are an American military,” said Tom Hemingway, who retired earlier this year as Brigadier General and legal advisor at the Pentagon. “We’re here to support American values, and one of the things that we have in our disciplinary system, as a requirement, is that the trial system be fair.”

Hemingway said that if troops believed that commanders manipulate the system of justice, “it would destroy morale. You want people in an all-volunteer force to serve willingly. If they think the system is unfair, then they’re not going to re-enlist.”

Cases in Point

But Vokey says that is one reason he’s feeling demoralized: he has fought cases in the past few years where officials have tried to sway the system.

For example, after officials filed criminal charges against eight Marines on the grounds that they were involved in massacring 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Corps assembled one of the biggest legal teams in recent history to prosecute the men. But Vokey says officials told him he had to use a much smaller team to defend them. “It made me very angry,” Vokey says. “We didn’t have the people and the tools that we needed to adequately defend these Marines. It really sends a message that the Marine Corp’s trying to railroad these guys.”

The prosecution argued that the Marines went on a senseless rampage; Vokey argued that the men fought against insurgents as they were trained to do and when civilians tragically got caught in the way, officials decided to turn the troops into scapegoats.

After Vokey fought fellow officers over the issue, a key general gave him permission to organize a much bigger military defense team, which has persuaded military investigators to drop many of the original charges.

Vokey has also watched thousands of Marines come back to Camp Pendleton from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some have developed post-traumatic stress disorder or other serious mental health problems, and then taken illegal drugs or refused to show up at the base. To punish them, commanders have kicked them out of the service, with few or no benefits.

Vokey says he agrees that commanders must punish soldiers who break the rules or discipline would fall apart. But he says the system is too rigid and should blend discipline with compassion.

“What’s upsetting is we’ve created the situation” by sending the Marines to war, Vokey said. “They fought for their country. And if we broke them, we should fix them.”

Guantanamo Bay

The U.S. has imprisoned hundreds of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay in a military legal system that Vokey denounces as “horrific.” Vokey saw the system first-hand when he agreed two years ago to defend a teenager there who had been charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Vokey said he knew the case would be difficult, but he discovered that the legal system at Guantanamo is a “sham.”

Vokey said the military staff constantly harassed him and interfered with his defense work by making it difficult even to meet with his client or show his client the government’s evidence against him. The teenager confessed to killing the soldier, but he told Vokey he confessed after being shackled for hours in excruciating positions and bombarded by screeching music and flashing lights.

FBI agents have reported seeing detainees treated in similar ways and investigators at human rights groups have reported evidence suggesting that detainees are routinely abused.

Vokey calls the system “disgraceful.”

“Anytime you want to subvert the rule of law to the power of a government, you’ve got a very bad thing brewing,” Vokey told NPR. “As an officer in the Marine Corps I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And now we are perpetrating something that if any other country in the world was doing, we would likely step in and stop it.”

Hemingway, who until recently was the top lawyer advising U.S. officials on how to handle detainees at Guantanamo, dismisses those charges. Hemingway said he has asked the staff to investigate complaints by detainees, including Vokey’s client, and “we have found absolutely nothing to substantiate that.” He added, “I know of no one in uniform who signed up to embarrass the United States of America by running a system that doesn’t meet what we consider to be appropriate standards.”

Vokey, undeterred, said the legal system at Guantanamo has left him feeling “disgusted.”

‘A Chilling Message’

When asked to identify exactly which officials in the military and the Bush administration he believes have abused the system of justice, Vokey avoids giving an answer. When pressed, Vokey went to his bookshelf, pulled out the Manual for Courts-Martial, and read from Article 88: “‘Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress'” and a list of other officials, he said, “‘shall be punished as a court martial may direct.'”

“I need to be careful,” Vokey said.

Given that he speaks out like that, Vokey said he was not completely surprised when an official at USMC headquarters called him recently to her office in Washington and fired him as chief of defense counsels in the western United States.

Officials at the Corps would not give NPR an interview despite repeated requests.

But when former Marine Corps lawyers heard about Vokey’s firing, they were incensed. Siegel said Vokey’s firing sent a chilling message that some officials don’t want military lawyers to defend the Constitution too vigorously.

“I believe that Colby Vokey was pulled out of his position because he’s doing too good a job,” Siegel said. “I think that the people in Washington, D.C., don’t like that.”

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich questioned President Bush’s mental health in light of comments he made about a nuclear Iran precipitating World War III.

“I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health,” Kucinich, an Ohio congressman, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board on Tuesday. “There’s something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact.”

Kucinich, known for his liberal views, trails far behind the leading candidates in most Democratic polls. He was in Philadelphia for a debate at Drexel University.

Bush made the remarks at a news conference earlier this month.

He said: “I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

Kucinich said he doesn’t believe his comments about the president’s mental health are irresponsible, according to a story posted on the newspaper’s Web site.