The Rag Blog

Contracting soldiers of fortune is only one example of our recent philosophy of government

Those seeking to pinpoint the date that propelled the private military firm Blackwater into its prominent (and disastrous) position in the U.S. military apparatus might look toward Sept. 11, 2001. Al Clark, one of the company’s co-founders, once remarked, “Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today.” And two weeks after 9/11, Erik Prince, the company’s other co-founder and current CEO, told Bill O’Reilly that, after four years in the business, “I was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security. The phone is ringing off the hook now.”

However, in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein suggests that we should turn the calendar back one day and read the speech that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon staffers on Sept. 10, 2001. The day before 19 hijackers flew passenger flights into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld darkly warned of “a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. … With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Who was this dastardly adversary? “[T]he Pentagon bureaucracy.”

Declaring “an all-out campaign to shift the Pentagon’s resources from bureaucracy to battlefield, from tail to the tooth,” Rumsfeld told his staff to “scour the department for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through commercial outsourcing.” He mentioned healthcare, housing and custodial work, and said that, outside of “warfighting,” “we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively.”

As Jeremy Scahill has reported, the implementation of that plan has been wildly successful, with at least 180,000 private contractors currently employed in Iraq, outnumbering U.S. troops by 20,000, even after the “surge.” (In the first Gulf war, the soldier-to-contractor ratio was 60:1.) But the results have been disastrous, from the deplorable conditions at the recently privatized Walter Reed military hospital, to the contaminated food and fecal-soiled bathing water that Halliburton provided to U.S. troops, to the gung-ho Blackwater contractors who prefer to shoot Iraqi hearts rather than win them.

This outsourcing of the military’s core services is in keeping with the Bush administration’s philosophy of government. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in the IRS, with the agency outsourcing debt collection of back taxes to private companies, which then receive a share of the return for their work.

But to lay the blame solely at the feet of the Bush administration is to overlook the complicity of Democrats in accepting a neoliberal agenda that has gutted government services and redistributed its wealth into the hands of private interests. After all, the Clinton administration first expanded the use of military contractors, deploying them in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti and Colombia.

In fact, in late September, as the most recent Blackwater massacres started to gain mainstream press attention, hundreds of corporate luminaries joined Bill Clinton in New York City to extol the charitable efforts of the Clinton Global Initiative. The former president said his humanitarian endeavor is needed to tackle education, poverty and global warming because these are issues the “government won’t solve, or that government alone can’t solve.”

Wanting everything is not the problem. Always getting what we want is.

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE

Right now I am doing something only someone as fucked up as an American-style lefty could possibly do: waiting for Hurricane Dean to strike my rickety shack and masturbating an indignant essay about “the global class struggle.”

Fatty It seems we Americans as a people are much given to personal indignation, if not national action, excepting perhaps aerial bombing and mass surveillance. But the poor of these Caribbean villages struggling for merest daily sustenance — the money for which is so often doled out by a well-scrubbed white hand much like my own — cannot afford open indignation much less “class struggle.”

Meanwhile, two gecko lizards are staring at one another on the wall above my laptop, as the small TV in my cabana blares an update on approaching Hurricane Dean. But the rain hammers the tin roof so loudly it’s impossible to hear what is being said, even with the sound turned all the way up. So I watch the hot blonde, the satellite pics and blurry shots of storm tortured palms and hope for the best.

Thanks to Hurricane Dean, for the next few days this Garifuna household of six, the Castillos, is sleeping several to a bed with the Rubio family, including this old gringo, who is most grateful to have drawn an older boy, not a little one still pissing on the sheets. The Rubios are a fishing family, evacuees are from the black “bakkatown” (back of town) shacks out on the reefs, which usually get smashed in such storms, even when not struck by the ‘cane itself.

Every plastic jug, pot and pan is filled with fresh water, and we cook the hell out of tortillas, beans, rice and everything else in an already near barren cupboard, stretching food between us and waiting for the power to go out — which also shuts down our meager trickle of a water system — a certainty given that it happens a couple times a week anyway without the help of a storm. So far, there is not a trace of panic. Between the hammering squalls, the sun cracks open brightly, the guy across the road goes back to work on his roof, and the lady of our house, Marzlyn, stands under the mango tree mashing plantains with a 4-foot wooden mortar and pestle. And Hurricane Dean just blew through Jamaica and past the Cayman Islands at 150 miles per hour. Look out, Cancun.

By the second day it’s beginning to look like we’re far enough south to miss the eye of Dean, if not some torrential rains and high winds. With luck we will not get enough rain to blow out the four-mile dirt road to the main highway (3-foot deep stretches forty feet across are not uncommon this time of year), and high winds will not strip our mango, lime, plantain, soursop and breadfruit trees — important staples — of their not yet ripe fruits.

At the same time we may get nothing more than a severe rain storm, severe here being in a whole other league than in the United States. Picture 8 inches in an hour. Such is middle-class life in the hundreds of Caribbean villages you never see on American TV, even when they are wiped off the map by hurricanes, places with names like Seine Bight and Monkey River Town. Places that provide the groundskeepers and table wipers for the destination resorts such as Caye Chapel island golf course ($200 and up to tee off) where the likes of Bill Gates fly in to enjoy ’round the clock concierge, what has got to be the most challenging windage factor in all of golfdom, and disciplined black or Hispanic attendants to their every whim, in a country where the minimum wage is USD $1.50 for those lucky enough to find employment that actually pays it. All this happens without so much as a whisper of the subject of class on anyone’s part, black or white.

The poor cannot afford open indignation, much less class justice. Granted, I tend to see class issues behind every curtain because of the powerless redneck class that shaped me from birth. Anyway, the leopard does not change its spots, so I still smoke, cuss, put too much salt on everything and have enough class anger to burn down every gated community and refurbished Manhattan brownstone and university in the country (sparing maybe Evergreen up there in the Northwest).

But that is because I can afford financially to be angry. Even though I voluntarily live on $4,000 a year, an economic penitent if you will, I am nevertheless among the 6 percent world’s rich and white human beings called Americans. Last week my neighbor, a middle aged barrel-chested man working as a resort security guard, sat on my porch and told of his dream of a national union for resort workers. We both looked down from the porch at his wife and daughter and his yet unpaid for house.

Nobody had to say aloud that the risk was just too great, or that the resort owners, U.S. speculators and the foreign shadow governments such as the U.S., (and increasingly, the Taiwanese buying up Belizean property and investing toward a soft landing when they are finally booted from their island stronghold) will never let that happen. Class struggle does not happen in Belize for the same reasons it does not happen in the U.S.: Fear. The global issue of class is however starting to be dealt with, and not-so-small fires of liberation are breaking out all over in Venezuela, Bolivia, Oaxaca, the Philippines, Indonesia … and other “terrorist states unimpressed by Kevlar-clad GI Joes or the latest or the antics of Paris Hilton. Class will one day be dealt with in America too.

In fact, it’s starting to be discussed by people other than internet socialists and old greybeard Jewish lefties in musty apartments in Paterson, New Jersey. Even the GOP is scouring the bushes for someone among them who can make populist noises into a microphone. And at this point, for reasons too numerous to go into here, they have a better chance of coming up with such a person than the Democrats. Populism is the newest term being used by both parties and the media to avoid the nasty C word, another brilliant cooption of liberal language for conservative purposes. It’s hard to argue with the fact that we are all people (except for Muslim Americans, of course).

The term carries echoes “of the people, for the people and by the people.” You don’t revolt against the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Yet, were there to be a class revolution in the U.S. next week, and the old folks looted the drug stores (I’d be right there with ’em, though probably not for the same drugs) and even if that pack of Gucci whores at the Fed said: “Fuck it, let’s spread all the geet we’ve looted equally among every American,” we still will not have begun to touch the core of our national disease, our uniquely American supersized version of a universal one — individual greed. The national mindset of “I want all I can grab for myself and I want it now, even if it has to be on credit,” constitutes a much bigger crisis than class in and of itself, and is the driver of our unfolding national catastrophe.

Garden variety personal greed may be a human constant in history — and we certainly have our share of it here in Hopkins — but it has been dangerous only on the part of the rich and powerful. After all, when was the last time selling someone a lame camel, a rotten mango or a quarter ounce of ditch weed oppressed millions? But few civilizations have ever upheld greed as the highest common virtue and civic responsibility as the American culture has. We do this under such false labels as self-advancement, opportunity, success, national economic good, or entitlement, but mostly because “I fucking want one of those!” The wanting is not the problem. The problem is that we get what we want. Or more correctly, we get what we are told to want, and are told to want more of everything from Louis Vuitton purses to Gameboys, depending upon our class, while the families such as the two piled into this household tonight are told to expect nothing.

Is American economic culture inherently cruel and oblivious? Well, yes. Are Americans themselves moreover cruel or oblivious? This time last year I would have said that, granting the obvious exceptions to any generalization, yes. I have come to understand that, although we may well be conditioned to obliviousness by our market culture (our culture IS the market), and more recently, kept in a state of fear by a corporately backed criminal leadership, we are by no means especially cruel. In our socially alienated market society, in which we don’t need each other so much as we need money to insulate ourselves from each other (what the fuck, poverty and bad taste might be contagious!), we are simply denied any real opportunity for face-to-face, on-the-ground compassion and service to our fellow man. Instead, our altruism is channeled through BIG BROTHER CHARITY INC, the United Way, the Red Cross, the Sierra Club, or any of the American Christian Syndicate’s save the children rackets. What changed my mind? Living (as much as possible at least) in Hopkins. But before I again inadvertently unleash a flood of email enquiries regarding the Belizean coast as an expat paradise, let me say this: As I write this, I am watching the influx of fairly rich American assholes escaping the coming economic disaster up there in Gringolia. They are building their sterile fortified communities on either end of the village, stealing and bulldozing many Garifuna-owned acres, including the village’s heritage-laden graveyard (illegal as hell, outright brazen theft, but as Old Charlie the Garifuna fisherman told me last night over a beer, “The man has not yet been born in this village who can lead us against this thing that is happening.” We’ve got the same problem, Charlie.

But for every U.S. bloodsucker I’ve encountered here, I have also met an American, usually a young backpacker — but sometimes a retired couple having what they know will be their last ruggedly romantic adventure together — give their last damned dollar to a villager in need. Sometimes they keep back only enough for bus fair for the 35-mile ride into Dangriga to punch the ATM for cash on their Visa cards, knowing it is going to hurt like hell when they get home to pay the tab on a fixed income. They are never the rich, who don’t come into the village, anyway, except to hire a house slave or two.

Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington last night in repsonse to a US Congressional decision to label the First World War-era killings of Armenians as genocide.

Despite intense lobbying by Turkey and a last-gasp intervention by the US President George Bush, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill on Wednesday by a 27-21 vote – in a move seen as an insult by most Turks.

Turkey’s Foreign ministry said the ambassador would return to Turkey for a stay of “a week or 10 days”. “We are not withdrawing our ambassador,” said a ministry spokesman Levent Bilman. “We have asked him to come to Turkey for some consultations.”

In a statement yesterday, the Turkish government condemned the vote: “It is not possible to accept such an accusation of a crime which was never committed by the Turkish nation”.

“27 foolish Americans,” ran the front page of the Turkish daily Vatan, in reference to legislators who voted in favour of the bill. Hurriyet called the resolution a “Bill of hatred”.

President Abdullah Gül said: “Unfortunately, some politicians in the US have once again sacrificed important matters to petty domestic politics despite all calls to common sense.”

Members of the left-wing Workers’ Party laid a black wreath in front of the US Embassy building in Ankara and drew a crescent-and-star on its wall in protest at the resolution.

The vote was a body-blow to attempts by politicians and diplomats behind the scenes in Washington and Ankara to put Turkish-American relations back on a normal footing. The two countries have been on bad terms since March 2003 when a group of rebels in the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) joined with the opposition to thwart government attempts to get authority for Turkey to support the invasion of Iraq from the north. A few months later, parliament reversed its decision but by then the US was no longer interested in support from the Turks.

Over the past three years, hard-line conservatives in the US administration have not forgiven the Turks for not doing what the US expects of an ally. Turkish public opinion, horrified by the nearby violence in Iraq, has been equally uncomplimentary with TV dramas and novels attacking the US enjoying an enthusiastic reception.

Yet in both countries, many politicians have been searching for ways to mend the damage, believing that the two countries need each other. Both Mr Gül, while serving as Foreign minister, and the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have made several visits to Washington.

Apart from leading to a squeeze on US use of the Incirlik base in Turkey and air and surface transit, the resolution could open the way for a Turkish military incursion into Iraq to halt PKK attacks on targets in south-east Turkey creating confrontation between Turkey and the US.

Sixteen Turkish soldiers have died in the past week in south-east Turkey as a result of PKK attacks. Several hundred more have been killed since the US-led invasion of Iraq which was followed by a revival of the PKK’s fortunes.

Against this background, the resolution could be the straw which broke the camel’s back for Turkish-US relations. There are several strands to the Turkish refusal to tolerate even a non-binding Congressional resolution. They include national resentment at what is seen as a climate of institutional prejudice against Turkey in Western societies; anger at the assassination of more than 40 Turkish diplomats by Armenians in the 1970s and 1980s; the expulsion of 800,000 to 1 million Azerbaijani Muslims from their homes in the Caucasus in the 1990s by Armenian nationalist forces; and suspicion that compensation claims may follow some day. Around half of Turkey’s population are the descendants of Muslims forced out of what are now Christian lands and regard Western partiality for Armenians as outrageous.

Attitudes are unlikely to soften. News of the vote coincided with reports that two Turkish Armenians, Arat Dink and Serkis Seropian, had been given one-year suspended jail sentences in in Istanbul for “belittling Turkishness” in an Istanbul Armenian-language newspaper.

The U.S and Iran have been moving towards a head-on collision for the last seven years. The expected collision will most probably take place in the final months of the Bush administration. The course has been set by two irreconcilable goals. Iran is adamant about gaining full mastery over nuclear technology — especially uranium enrichment. The U.S. is equally adamant that Iran should not be allowed this mastery on the grounds that the latter’s real intentions are not to use such knowledge for peaceful purposes — as Iran claims — but for weaponry.

President Bush has also assured the Israeli Prime Minister that he intends to resolve the “Iranian problem” before leaving the White House. Since he has shown little interest in pursuing a diplomatic route, one can conclude that he is aiming to resolve the issue through the military one. In 2003, he turned down in no uncertain terms an Iranian offer for a “grand bargain.” He also turned down an offer made by El-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to explore ways to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program does not expand into a military one. In fact, the administration curtly told El-Baradei to keep out of politics.

Instead on exploring the diplomatic route, the administration has increased its naval and air capabilities in the Gulf and accused Iran of killing Americans by supplying lethal weapons to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also taken hostage a number of Iranian diplomats in Iraqi Kurdestan and ordered the military to hunt down suspected Iranians in Iraq. Close colleagues of the Vice President have gone so far as to claim that the U.S. is already in the midst of a hot war with Iran — describing it as a new World War on par with World War I and II. For its part, Iran has accused the U.S. of harboring Mojahedin guerrillas — whom the U.S. State Department itself has categorized as a “terrorist organization.” It has also accused the U.S. of trying to stir up ethnic animosities in Iranian Kurdestan, Baluchestan, and Azerbaijan. Not surprisingly, many suspect that the Bush administration’s real concern in Iran as in Iraq is not weapons of mass destruction but regime change.

Three major reasons are often given to argue that the Bush administration will shy away from military action. One, that the US military is already over stretched in Iraq. Two, that the U.S. public does not have the stomach to enter another war. Third, that military action will neither end the nuclear program nor bring about regime change. These same arguments have led some Iranian leaders — but not all — to dismiss the threat of military action as mere “psychological warfare.” The Iranian President has consistently insisted that “no man in his right senses would think of attacking Iran.”

Such conclusions would be warranted if politics had anything to do with reason and real substance. Unfortunately, politics has more to do with short-term image and public perceptions than with reason and long-range interest. The U.S public could very well find itself in the midst of a new war as a result of another Tonkin Bay incident — in other words, in a military confrontation presented to the world as initiated by the other side. American people would never be offered the choice of going or not going to war. The U.S. air force and navy, unlike the army and marines, are by no means overstretched in Iraq. They do have the capability to do considerable damage to the nuclear installations. What is more, the Bush administration could present to the American public impressive front-page pictures of these installations lying in ruins. It could then leave office claiming “Mission Accomplished.” It would work — in the short term.

The chickens would come to roast in the following months. Such military action would delay — not scuttle — the nuclear program. Iran would withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and openly strive for nuclear weapons. The regime would not fall — rather it would be strengthened since it would use national emergency to silence all opposition. What is more, air strikes would not close a chapter but would open up a new disaster — on the titanic scale of the Thirty Years’ War. Iran would retaliate where the U.S. is weakest — in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give the green light to local forces itching to take on the U.S. For the last few years, it has used all its influence to restrain the same forces in these two countries.

The change in Iranian policy would be a disaster for the U.S. — but a problem for the next President and future generations of American. The outgoing one could always claim that he left office having solved the problem. He would also claim that future problems were due to mistakes made by his predecessor. The Iraqi experience leads one to believe that Bush would get away with it. After all, how many critics of the Iraqi disaster blame the whole disaster on the initial invasion? Most blame the so-called “mistakes” on actions after the invasion. Since the American public seems to have lost the capacity to link cause and effect, politicians can get away with such disastrous wars.

Some of the most credible testimonies against the Iraq war come from those very American soldiers expected to inflict the horrors of the war on the Iraqi people.

Recently, the Iraq Veterans Against the War listed ten reasons why they oppose the war. These include: “The Iraq war is based on lies and deception;” “The Iraq war violates international law;” and “overwhelming civilian casualties are a daily occurrence in Iraq;”

Significantly, the Iraq Veterans against the War, also list as a principal reason for their opposition to the war the fact that the war dehumanizes the Iraqi people who are “subjected to humiliating and violent checkpoints, searches and home raids on a daily basis.”

This dehumanizing reality of daily life in occupied Iraq was extensively documented in an important investigation published by The Nation (July 30) in which The Nation interviewed fifty American combat veterans of the Iraq War.

The Nation’s investigation, writes the editors, “marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.”

The picture that emerges from the interviews is that of a depraved and brutal colonial war and a deeply oppressive occupation, in sharp contrast to how the Bush administration and the influential media have been portraying the war.

The veterans’ accounts revealed a pattern of behaviour that showed callous disregard for Iraqi civilian lives, and dehumanization of the Iraqi people on a daily basis. “Dozens of those interviewed,” the report states, “witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings…” Although many interviewees said such acts were perpetrated by a minority, they described such acts as common and often go unreported.

Specialist Jeff Englehart from Colorado, who served with the Third Brigade in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, summed up the general attitude towards the Iraqis: “I guess while I was there,” he said, “the general attitude was, A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.”

Specialist Michael Harmon from Brooklyn who served with the 167th Armor Regiment in Al-Rashidiya, near Baghdad, recounted the turning point for him:. ” An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and [a] baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything, it just looked at me like–I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?… I was just like, This is–this is it. This is ridiculous.”

In their search for insurgents, American forces usually raid suspected neighborhoods between midnight and 5 in the morning. More often than not they find nothing but leave behind them a trail of destruction, panic and humiliation.

Sgt. John Bruhns, of Philadelphia, who served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, and participated in raids of nearly 1000 Iraqi homes, describes the routine:

“You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops… will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds…and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda…?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

The humiliation the veterans described was reinforced by the degrading stereotypical and racist cultural notions many soldiers had about the Arabs and Islam:: “Like it was very common,” said Specialist Englehart “for United States soldiers to call them derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger.”

American soldier who took part in neighborhood patrols told the interviewers that they often used aggressive firing. Sgt. Patrick Campbell, of Camarillo, California, who participated in many neighborhood patrols, “said his unit fired often and without much warning on Iraqi civilians in a desperate bid to ward off attacks.”

Interviewees told The Nation that the killing of unarmed Iraqis was common. Such killings were sometimes justified by framing innocents as terrorists. American troops would plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had just killed to make it seem as if the civilians they had just shot were combatants.

Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, of San Diego, who served in the Fourth Cavaly in Ad Dawar, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra, said: “Every good cop carries a throwaway. If you kill someone and they’re unarmed, you just drop one on ’em.” Those who survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents.”

The irrationality of the colonial war enterprise, the humiliation, dehumanization, and loss of life it inflicts on the innocent; the cost in lives lost, lives shattered and the deep emotional scars it inflicts on the perpetrators; these and other incomprehensible realities evoked unanswered questions, poignant in their relevance, trenchant in their simplicity: “Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”

The ruling class in this country would like us to believe that young people are apathetic. But the youths participating in the Sept. 29 demonstration in Washington showed another side entirely.

They were aching to struggle. They were determined not only to demonstrate and to shout, but were ready to get arrested, ready even to put their bodies on the line to stop the war at home and abroad waged against the poor and oppressed of the world. They sat in the street for hours, daring the Washington police to arrest them as they blocked traffic in an important intersection.

That readiness for struggle was a new, important sign. It goes hand in hand with what another section of young people who are in the U.S. Armed Forces are doing: mobilizing to combat the war.

Another aspect of the sit-down was instructive. The Washington police broke with their usual practice and refused to arrest them, instead directing traffic away from the blockage. At times, police have arrested hundreds, even thousands of demonstrators for doing no more than the young people at the Troops Out Now Coalition’s protest were doing. So it begs the question: “Why didn’t the cops handcuff these young people and take them away?”

It was obvious that this was no decision made by the cops on the spot. There was a political decision that instructed the cops what to do.

The most likely reason is that the police were instructed to avoid actions that would give publicity to the demonstration. First of all, it was an exceptional anti-war action in that it united many nationalities, was militant and anti-imperialist, and joined the struggles against the war at home and abroad. Second, the Iraq war has become so unpopular that tens of millions of people—who may not be ready to come into the streets themselves—could be aroused and angered if they see cops roughing up young people protesting that war.

Maybe those giving orders in Washington were having nightmares that the mood against the war was growing angrier, and that the street sit-down of Sept. 29 was simply the dress rehearsal for demonstrations ready to break out in the near future. They didn’t want to accelerate this development by an untimely crackdown.

Alan Greenspan’s new memoir has put his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman on the hot seat, as critics ask whether he bears responsibility for the housing bubble and for his failure to vocally reject the Bush tax cuts. Missing from this criticism is an understanding of what the Federal Reserve System is about. The real job of Mr. Greenspan and his predecessors and successors is to protect the country’s creditors and in the process extend and solidify the ownership and control a tiny minority of extremely rich persons have over profit-generating property. By extension this means that the monetary authorities aim to diminish and weaken the political strength of working people, who through their collective actions have provided the only real counterweight to the power of the wealthy.

Consider the housing bubble and the very low interest rates that brought it about. In our travels my wife Karen and I met a wealthy and prominent man in a Midwestern city. He was a successful professional, and he has used his considerable earnings to buy real estate. During the past few years, his holdings have risen dramatically. Today he is perhaps the largest real estate owner in town.

It occurred to me that a key to this man’s ability to accumulate property was the very low interest rates generated by the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve System that marked the first half decade of the twenty-first century. In 2000, the stock market began a precipitous decline, first in the “dot-com” sector and then, in 2001, the rest of the market. In the late 1990s, there was a sharp run-up in prices, which, as often happens in capitalist economies, had become a bubble, with investors buying stock simply because everyone else was. The stocks of companies that had consistently lost money and had limited prospects for future profits were trading at remarkably inflated prices. When the big traders started to sell, the floodgates opened and prices plummeted. The events of September 11 compounded the bear market, and share prices fell further. As those whose wealth had diminished and whose debts had risen were forced to cut their consumer spending and investment, what economists call aggregate demand for the economy’s output began to fall and threatened a recession.

Presumably to forestall a downturn, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, chaired by Mr. Greenspan, began to implement monetary policies that pressured interest rates sharply downward. According to standard economic wisdom, falling interest rates will stimulate both consumer and capital spending, increasing both output and employment. While these things happened to some extent, the main outcome was that low interest rates (lower than at any time in forty years) encouraged borrowing, not to finance the building of productive capital, but to buy real estate. New home construction boomed (with, by the way, many socially negative but seldom discussed consequences” deforestation, traffic congestion, continuous road construction, air pollution, and erosion of communities by second, third, and fourth home owners.) Sales of existing homes skyrocketed too, as did the refinancing of mortgages, with the latter fueling a burst of home repairing and remodeling.

Because of low interest rates, the businessman we met was able to leverage his existing properties into much larger holdings without incurring high-interest mortgages. As his wealth increased, so too did his political and social influence in the town. And his ability to purchase still more property rose in tandem with the greater wealth the low interest rates made possible. All across the United States there are businessmen like this one; and in cities large and small, they have gained what we might call “class power.” They are not the economic elite, which owns the “commanding heights” of the economy, but they are closely allied with and take direction from them. And of course, those who do control the “commanding heights” acquired property on a scale that makes our businessman look like a piker.

For working people, low interest rates meant something different. Some were able to refinance mortgages and reduce their monthly payments, but for most the money saved was simply spent on consumer goods. If money was borrowed against houses that had appreciated in value, the result was still more debt. If new homes were bought, there was a good chance, especially for minority borrowers, that the interest rate was not the low one given to richer borrowers. Instead banks gave so-called subprime loans, with higher rates and thousands of dollars of hidden charges. As real estate growth degenerated into a “bubble,” financial institutions engaged in an orgy of dishonest advertising, urging everyone to become a home owner. Thousands of poorer, working-class people were sucked into a bevy of mortgage schemes that promise years of debt dependency, bankruptcy, and foreclosure.

Alan Greenspan’s low-interest-rate-fueled real estate boom was in essence a form of class warfare, strengthening the power of large property holders while reducing that of working persons. Recent Fed actions confirm this. The interest rate cuts will not help homeowners now in trouble. The banks will not cut deals with them, and prospective buyers will not get lower rate mortgages. The banks and other creditors, however, now have the liquidity necessary to help them ride out the crisis. And should the economy slip into recession, so what? Those on top will buy up those without enough ready cash to withstand a downturn, concentrating economic power still further. Workers will lose their jobs, and there will be more foreclosures. But they are too disorganized and demoralized to do anything about it.

Low interest rates used to be a rallying cry of American populists like William Jennings Bryan. Farmers and small business owners needed low rates, they said, to compete with their larger rivals. Workers joined them in great political upheavals. But in a society marked by large income and wealth inequalities and a moribund labor movement, low interest rates only served to make such disparities wider. They made the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is difficult to believe that at least some of this wasn’t intentional. During the Greenspan years, we have witnessed a rush of money flowing from the bottom to the top of the income distribution, now more unequal than at any time since the 1920s. Economic “and political” power are firmly entrenched at the top too. Alan Greenspan did his job well.

This essay is adapted from Yates’ new book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate.

Iraqi refugess are unwanted in their own land as provinces bar them from entering, the UN refugee agency warns.

Provincial authorities, unable to cope with the influx, are refusing entry to refugees fleeing violence, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said.

”In many parts of the country refugees are being stopped at roadblocks and told they cannot go any further,” Andrew Harper, the UNHCR Iraq Support Unit chief, said.
Authorities in 16 of the 18 Iraqi provinces have sealed off access to refugees and if they do manage to get into the province then food and other vital services are denied, Harper said.

”Local authorities are also restricting access to food, health care and education. So not only are they being stopped but aid to them is also being halted. Iraqi authorities are simply overwhelmed.”

Two governorates (Ninewa and Baghdad) do not limit refugee access or registration, Harper said.

There could be up to 100,000 Iraqis leaving their homes every month, Harper believes. This translates into a daily average of more than 3,000 refugees on the move.

It is difficult to gauge the exact number of internal refugees but the UNHCR believes the figure is in the region of 2.2 million.
Another 2.2 million Iraqis are estimated to have fled to neighbouring countries such as Syria and Jordan which in turn are finding that their own social services are stretched to the limit.

The UNHCR estimates that at least 12 per cent of Iraqis have fled their homes due to the violence that has spread through the country since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Even when they manage to go to other countries their plight is nothing more than miserable.

In Syria, almost a third of Iraqi refugee children do not go to school. There have been reports form a number of countries, according to the UN, that Iraqi women are forced to turn to prostitution to feed their families.

The flight of Iraqis is the biggest movement of people in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians from what became Israel in 1948

The difficulties faced by Iraqis in neighbouring countries is not a matter of ill will or an uncaring attitude. They are just unable to cope.

Iraq had a total population of about 26.8 million in 2003.

Refugees within Iraq’s borders could reach more than 2.5 million by the end of 2007.

Blackwater USA is the private American security company whose tactics are under scrutiny following a series of high-profile shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians. The company is just one of many such mercenary outfits that provide bodyguard details for foreign (and, sometimes, Iraqi) VIPs. Such contractors are immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. Only recently did the U.S. House pass a bill that put Blackwater and the like under the jurisdiction of U.S. criminal law.

A number of Iraqis I know could fill this blog with harrowing tales of their encounters with Blackwater and other security contractors. These are only my recollections:

You couldn’t miss the Blackwater contractors who lived in our hotel in Baghdad in summer 2003. They were living and breathing action figures, a band of GI Joe-looking guys who favored cargo pants, microfiber shirts, hunting knives and foldable machine guns that fit into discreet black carrying cases.

They were nice enough, at first. They hit on all the female journalists; they drank with our male colleagues. They sunned themselves by the hotel pool, showing off their washboard abs and recounting war stories from stints in the Marines or Navy SEALs. I recall them as young, good-looking thrill-seekers – as harmless as the enlisted guys I knew from back home in Oklahoma. While their leers grew tiresome, I admit there was something comforting in having the heavily armed X-Men around in case the stuff hit the fan.

Over time, however, our Blackwater pals wore out their welcome. I can’t pinpoint when it happened. Was it one too many beer-drenched party that upset the Iraqi families who lived in neighboring homes? Was it the parade of young Iraqi prostitutes that crept out of their rooms when the sun rose? Was it when their speeding SUV convoys began cutting down any Iraqi with the misfortune to block their path?

Our own security adviser, an older Brit who sneered at what he considered Blackwater’s unprofessional behavior, was conducting his rounds late one night when he noticed shadowy figures lurking about the hotel. From his balcony, he later told me, he observed the fully armed, camouflaged men creeping around corners as if ready to attack. Alarmed, our guard took the safety lock off his weapon and prepared to fire.

Then he realized it was the Blackwater boys, apparently drunk and playing war games after dark. Our security adviser was livid and lodged complaints with the hotel. I don’t remember whether he also contacted Blackwater. In any case, this wasn’t the first time managers had received such gripes and the Blackwater team was kicked out.

Some of the Blackwater contractors had moved into the hotel next door. Among them was Jerko Zovco, one of the four guards killed in a brutal ambush of a Blackwater convoy in Fallujah in March 2004. Some of my journalist friends knew Zovco quite well and were devastated at images of the four charred and mutilated corpses dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates.

Blackwater finally moved out of our neighborhood and into the Green Zone, but the company remained a daily part of our lives – and the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

I ran into the contractors escorting U.S. officials to the Bank of Baghdad, where Blackwater commandeered the entrance and ordered Iraqi patrons out of the bank. I saw them guarding American diplomats in Najaf, where I teased a Blackwater contractor for carrying nunchucks and sporting black greasepaint under his eyes. (He told me he was in Iraq for the six-figure paycheck and the chance to be assigned to guard Victoria’s Secret models at the lingerie company’s annual fashion show.)

“They think they’re bloody Rambo!” our exasperated British security adviser would say.

Tuesday was ladies-only day at the pool of the nearby Babylon Hotel – the only time when middle-class Iraqi women could strip off their modest cloaks to swim and sunbathe within the privacy of the hotel’s tall walls. On more than one occasion, Blackwater interrupted a serene ladies’ day at the Babylon. The company’s tiny helicopters with gunners dangling out the sides would dip perilously close to the outdoor pool, presumably for a rare glimpse of Iraqi women in bikinis. The Muslim women screamed and reached for towels to cover themselves.

One day, when it was still safe enough for me to drive around Baghdad, I was behind the wheel of a borrowed car with a couple of Iraqi girlfriends. We were returning to the hotel from a shopping trip, happy and with the music turned up so loud that we failed to hear the warning honks until a private security convoy was running us off the road so it could pass. I panicked and froze as the guards trained their guns on us and forced us on to the shoulder. Long after they sped off, we sat in the car shaken and grateful that the guards had “allowed” us to live.

Were they from Blackwater? I can’t say for sure, but in subsequent conversations we always referenced “the time Blackwater almost shot us to death for listening to music.” By then, Blackwater had become the symbol of out-of-control security contractors, the American cowboys who terrorized Baghdad streets with impunity.

A few months later, I was dropped off at the gates of the Green Zone to meet a security contractor friend who worked for a Blackwater rival. I sat in the car with my Iraqi driver, waiting for my American friend to show up and escort me into the Green Zone, when a convoy of SUVs suddenly blazed onto the scene. Gunners hung out the windows, shouting for the Iraqi civilians to “move!” An Iraqi man failed to get out of the way in time. My driver and I watched as the security guards fired a single shot through his windshield.

The convoy was gone by the time the Iraqi man’s car door opened. He stumbled out, clutching his bleeding chest, and collapsed on the street. Other Iraqis loaded the shooting victim into a car and left for the hospital just as my American friend showed up. My friend shared my outrage and made it his personal mission to track down the convoy and force the contractors to file an incident report.

We raced through the Green Zone, ignoring the posted speed limits, until I spotted the same convoy pulling into parking spaces outside the Republican Palace. The contractors poured out of their SUVs, stripping off body armor and wiping sweat from their foreheads.

“That’s them,” I told my friend, who identified the guards as Blackwater employees.

He urged me to go confront them, and I begged him to accompany me. Minutes before, I had seen them shoot a man and leave him for dead in the street. I wasn’t about to march up to them on my own. My friend refused to get involved; he’d tracked them down, he told me, and it was up to me to approach them. I chickened out. In the end, we took down details of the convoy and my friend turned our notes over to the U.S. embassy.

WASHINGTON (Oct. 10) — The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Carter said Wednesday.

“I don’t think it. I know it,” Carter told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

“Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights,” Carter said. “We’ve said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused.”

Carter also said President Bush creates his own definition of human rights.

Carter’s comments come on the heels of an October 4 article in The New York Times disclosing the existence of secret Justice Department memorandums supporting the use of “harsh interrogation techniques.” These include “head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures,” according to the Times.

The White House last week confirmed the existence of the documents but would not make them public.

Responding to the newspaper report Friday, Bush defended the techniques used, saying, “This government does not torture people.”

Asked about Bush’s comments, Carter said, “That’s not an accurate statement if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored — certainly in the last 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated.

WASHINGTON, DC–The indigenous North American hippie population has expanded to the point that its teeming herds are endangering the planet’s fragile freakosystem, warned a Department of the Interior report released Monday.

According to the report, over the past 20 years, the wide-ranging, largely migratory hippies have more than tripled in population, insidiously infiltrating nearly every other U.S. subculture while venturing far beyond their natural Vermont and Colorado habitats.

“Due to the species’ lack of predators, willingness to live almost anywhere and rabbit-like breeding habits, the hippie has become the most prevalent feature on the American countercultural landscape,” Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said. “If we do not soon find a way to thin their herds, they will overwhelm every other subculture on the continent, potentially leading to freakological disaster on a mass global scale.”

Experts say the hippie-related environmental damage has largely been the result of their sheer numbers. Long regarded as a mere nuisance species, the hippies have grown over the past 10 years into one of the most populous in North America, numbering close to 20 million. Further, because of the hippie herds’ normal daily cycle of waking, bongo-playing and large-scale grass consumption, followed by a brief period of torpor and then aggressive nutritive replenishment, their freakological impact is enormous.

“Each summer, the hippie herds migrate north to Boulder, wiping out 80 to 90 percent of the hummus supply of the regions through which they pass,” National Park Service director Roger Kennedy said. “In certain parts of Colorado, by mid-August, the patchouli reservoirs are entirely drained.”

The burgeoning herds–identifiable by their dreadlocked hair, hemp jewelry and distinctive tie-dyed markings–have greatly affected the quality of life of people living in these areas of high hippie concentration.

“They’re everywhere,” said Linda Hewson of Albany, NY. “Last night, when I went to take out the trash, I found one of them foraging through my garbage cans for Dead bootlegs. I shooed it away, but a bunch more came by later scavenging for discarded twirling sticks.”

2006: A noose is hung from a “Whites Only” tree in a Jena, Louisiana high school.

September 20th, 2007: tens of thousands descend on Jena in an outraged and joyful protest.

October 9, 2007: a noose is hung at Columbia Teacher’s College as part of a spate of nooses, racist threats and brutality lashing back across the country. A white supremacist website has published the home addresses of the Jena Six, encouraging people to take “justice” into their own hands.

TODAY: Time for everyone who refuses to go backwards and worse to stand up, resist, and take the future into OUR hands!

What are NOOSES?

NOOSES — are an open threat of racist terror rooted in generations of slavery: children auctioned out of their mother’s arms, feet mutilated to prevent against escape, backs scarred with welts from whips.

NOOSES–are in line with a whole system of white supremacy enforced by courts that have warehoused nearly a million Black people into prison, carried out by brutal police who see “driving while Black” as a crime punishable by death, and reinforced through countless daily insults and discrimination large and small.

NOOSES–are a message to Black people as a whole, but particularly Black youth, that the U.S., the so-called “leader of the free world,” has no future for them other than massive criminalization, gangs, dead-end and disappearing jobs, imprisonment, early death or know-nothing-bible-banging.

The hanging of this noose at Columbia also takes place after the appearance of racist graffiti lashing out at communists and advocating “nuk[ing] Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa,” and a whole atmosphere of fascist intimidation and thuggery being whipped up and mobilized in the upcoming “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” October 22–26th initiated by David Horowitz. This week involves over 100 campuses, speakers like Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum and is ominously being called “the biggest conservative protest ever.” Invoking progressive themes like “free-speech” and combating “the oppression of women in Islam” as a cover, they plan to harass Muslim Student Associations and Women’s Studies departments, and silence anyone that questions the Bush regime’s official narrative, including even those concerned about global warming.

The people planning this week are the ideological foot-soldiers of a whole fascist clamp-down on society right at a time when the Bush regime is neck-deep into a deeply unpopular and genocidal war in Iraq and is preparing a new potential war against Iran. David Horowitz himself waged a campaign against reparations by crowing that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz is planning to come and speak at Columbia, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity on October 26th.

This fascist assault will not “just go away” and cannot be ignored. It must be exposed, confronted with the truth about who the real fascists are, and politically defeated.

If anything cried out with urgency for a revolutionary movement and massive political resistance it is the world today: the nooses, the legalized torture, the wars for empire, the moves towards a dark ages theocracy for women and gays and science, and the massive grinding up of human lives and human potential in the vast sweatshops, swelling shanty-towns slums, and whole regions left to waste in disease and disaster.

We have learned from the righteous history of rising up and fighting against the oppression of Black people, against unjust wars, the oppression of women and from revolutionary struggles for emancipation the world over–power concedes nothing without a struggle!

Two futures are being posed for this generation…what will you do? The direction of the whole world is being fought over–campus life cannot go back to normal.

It is time for a new generation to wake up and fight for a whole different world!
What could be more important than that?

Who Is David Horowitz?

It is worth reprinting this description from Revolution Newspaper:

Horowitz is a self-described “battering ram” against any thinking in academia that challenges a whole range of lies this system has perpetrated. He’s played a major role in slandering, hounding, and even ending the careers of progressive teachers. Horowitz established his credentials with the ruling class by renouncing his involvement in the 1960s movements for social change in a series of slanderous articles, books and conferences. He “made his bones” in the ’90s, by waging a high-profile campaign against reparations for African-Americans, with the theme that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz took out huge ads in campus newspapers proclaiming this vicious lie and to this day makes it a major part of his attack. He wrote a book on the “art of political war” that Karl Rove distributed to key Republican campaign operatives. He is a vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way. And, bankrolled from the ruling class, he has organized the falsely named “Students for Academic Freedom,” which literally takes notes on lectures and rips things out of context in an attempt to get professors who do not sufficiently bow down to the Bush agenda fired. The modern-day Nazi-type student groups inspired by Horowitz organize so-called “games” like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” on campus. In short, Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.