The Rag Blog

The history of Cuba during the last 140 years is one of struggle to preserve national identity and independence, and the history of the evolution of the American empire, its constant craving to appropriate Cuba and of the horrendous methods that it uses today to hold on to world domination.

Prominent Cuban historians have dealt in depth with these subjects in different periods and in various excellent books which deserve to be readily available to our compatriots. These reflections are addressed especially to the new generations with the aim of helping them learn about very important and decisive events in the destiny of our homeland.

Part I: The Imposition of the Platt Amendment as an appendix to the Neocolonial Cuban Constitution of 1901.

The “ripe fruit doctrine” was formulated in 1823 by Secretary of State and later President John Quincy Adams. The United States would inevitably achieve taking over our country, by the law of political influence, once colonial subordination to Spain had ended.

Under the pretext of blowing up the “Maine” –a still unraveled event of which it took advantage to wage war against Spain, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an event which was demonstrably prefabricated in order to attack North Vietnam –President William McKinley signed the Joint Resolution of April 20, 1898, stating “…that the people on the island of Cuba are and by right ought to be free and independent”, “… that the United States herewith declare that they have no desire or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said island, except for pacification thereof, and they affirm their determination, after this has been accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.” The Joint Resolution entitled the President to use force to remove the Spanish government from Cuba.

Colonel Leonard Wood, chief commander of the Rough Riders, and Theodore Roosevelt, second in command of the expansionist volunteers who landed in our country on the beaches close to Santiago de Cuba, after the brave but poorly utilized Spanish squadron and their Marine infantry on board had been destroyed by the American battleships, requested the support of Cuban insurrectionists who had weakened and defeated the Spanish Colonial Army after enormous sacrifices. The Rough Riders had landed without horses.

Following the defeat of Spain, representatives of the Queen Regent of Spain and of the President of the United States signed the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898 and, without consulting of the Cuban people, agreed that Spain should relinquish all claim of sovereignty over and title to the island and would evacuate it. Cuba would then be occupied by the United States on a temporary basis.

Already appointed U.S. military governor, Army Major General Leonard Wood, issued Military Order 301 of July 25, 1900, which called for a general election to choose delegates to a Constitutional Assembly that would be held in the city of Havana at twelve noon on the first Monday of November in 1900, with the purpose of drafting and adopting a Constitution for the people of Cuba.

On September 15, 1900, elections took place and 31 delegates from the National, Republican and Democratic Union parties were elected. On November 5, 1900, the Constitutional Convention held its opening session at the Irijoa Theatre of Havana which on that occasion received the name of Martí Theatre.

General Wood, representing the President of the United States, declared the Assembly officially installed. Wood advanced the intention of the United States government: “After you have drawn up the relations which, in your opinion, ought to exist between Cuba and the United States, the government of the United States will undoubtedly adopt the measures conducive to a final and authorized treaty between the peoples of both nations, aimed at promoting the growth of their common interests.” The 1901 Constitution provided in its Article 2 that “the territory of the Republic is composed of the Island of Cuba, as well as the islands and neighboring keys which together were under Spanish sovereignty until the ratification of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898”.

Once the Constitution was drafted, the time had come to define political relations between Cuba and the United States. To that end, on February 12, 1901, a committee of five members was appointed and charged with studying and proposing a procedure that would lead to the stated goal.

On February 15, Governor Wood invited the members of the committee to go fishing and hosted a banquet in Batabanó, the main access route to the Isle of Pines, as it was known then, also occupied at that time by the U.S. troops which had intervened in the Cuban War of Independence. It was there in Batabanó that he revealed to them a letter from the Secretary of War, Elihu Root, containing the basic aspects of the future Platt Amendment. According to instructions from Washington, relations between Cuba and the United States were to abide by several aspects. The fifth of these was that, in order to make it easier for the United States to fulfill such tasks as were placed under its responsibility by the above mentioned provisions, and for its own defense, the United States could acquire title, and preserve it, for lands to be used for naval bases and maintain these in certain specific points.

Upon learning of the conditions demanded by the U.S. government, the Cuban Constitutional Assembly, on February 27, 1901, passed a position that was opposed to that of the U.S. Executive, eliminating therein the establishment of naval bases.

The U.S. government made an agreement with Orville H. Platt, Republican Senator from Connecticut, to present an amendment to the proposed Army Appropriations Bill which would make the establishment of American naval bases on Cuban soil a fait accompli.

In the Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate on February 27, 1901 and by the House of Representatives on March 1, and sanctioned by President McKinley the following day, as a rider attached to the “Bill granting credit to the Army for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1902,” the article mentioning the naval bases was drafted as follows:

“Art. VII.- That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.”

Article VIII adds: “…the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States.”

The speedy passage of the Amendment by the U.S. Congress was due to the circumstance of it coming close to the conclusion of the legislative term and to the fact that President McKinley had a clear majority in both Houses so that the Amendment could be passed without any problem. It became a United States Law when, on March 4, McKinley was sworn in for his second presidential term in office.

Some members of the Constitutional Convention maintained the view that they were not empowered to adopt the Amendment requested by the United States since this implied limitations on the independence and sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba. Thus, the military governor Leonard Wood hastened to issue a new Military Order on March 12, 1901 where it was declared that the Convention was empowered to adopt the measures whose constitutionality was in question.

Other Convention members, such as Manuel Sanguily, held the opinion that the Assembly should be dissolved rather than adopt measures that so drastically offended the dignity and sovereignty of the people of Cuba. But during the session of March 7, 1901, a committee was appointed yet again in order to draft an answer to Governor Wood; the presentation of this was entrusted to Juan Gualberto Gómez who recommended, among other things, rejecting the clause concerning the leasing of coaling or naval stations.

Juan Gualberto Gómez maintained the most severe criticism of the Platt Amendment. On April 1, he tabled a debate of the presentation where he challenged the document on the grounds that it contravened the principles of the Treaty of Paris and of the Joint Resolution. But the Convention suspended the debate on Juan Gualberto Gómez’s presentation and decided to send another committee “to ascertain the motives and intentions of the government of the United States about any and all details referring to the establishment of a definitive order to relations, both political and economic, between Cuba and the United States, and to negotiate with the government itself, the bases for agreement on those extremes that would be proposed to the Convention for a final solution.”

Subsequently, a committee was elected that would travel to Washington, made up of Domingo Méndez Capote, Diego Tamayo, Pedro González Llorente, Rafael Portuondo Tamayo and Pedro Betancourt; they arrived in the United States on April 24, 1901. The next day, they met with Root and Wood who had earlier traveled back to his country for this purpose.

The American government hastened to publicly declare that the committee would be visiting Washington on their own initiative, with no invitation or official status.

Root, Secretary of War, met with the committee on April 25 and 26, 1901 and categorically informed them that “the United States’ right to impose the much debated clauses had been proclaimed for three-quarters of a century in the face of the American and European world and they were not willing to give it up to the point of putting their own safety in jeopardy.”

United States officials reiterated that none of the Platt Amendment clauses undermined the sovereignty and independence of Cuba; on the contrary, they would preserve them, and it was clarified that intervention would only occur in the case of severe disturbances, and only with the objective of maintaining order and internal peace.

The committee presented its report in a secret session on May 7, 1901. Within the committee there were severe discrepancies about the Platt Amendment.

On May 28, a paper drafted by Villuendas, Tamayo and Quesada was tabled for debate; it accepted the Amendment with some clarifications and recommended the signing of a treaty on trade reciprocity.

This paper was approved by a vote of 15 to 14, but the United States government didn’t accept that solution. It informed through Governor Wood that it would only accept the Amendment without qualifiers, and warned the Convention with an ultimatum that, since the Platt Amendment was “a statute passed by the Legislature of the United States, the President is obliged to carry it out as it is. He cannot change or alter it, add or take anything out. The executive action demanded by the statute is the withdrawal of the American Army from Cuba, and the statute authorizes this action when, and only when, a Constitutional government has been established which contains, either in its body or in appendices, certain categorical provisions, specified in the statute (…) Then if these provisions are found in the Constitution, the President will be authorized to withdraw the Army; if he does not find them there, then he will not be authorized to withdraw the Army…” The United States Secretary of War sent a letter to the Cuban Constitutional Assembly where he stated that the Platt Amendment should be passed in its entirety with no clarifications, because in that way it would appear as a rider to the Army Appropriations Bill; he indicated that, otherwise, his country’s military forces would not be pulled out of Cuba.

On June 12, 1901, during another secret session of the Constitutional Assembly, the incorporation of the Platt Amendment as an appendix to the Constitution of the Republic passed on February 21 was put to the vote: 16 delegates voted aye and 11 voted nay. Bravo Correoso, Robau, Gener and Rius Rivera were absent from the session, abstaining from voting in favor of such a monstrosity.

The worst thing about the Amendment was the hypocrisy, the deceit, the Machiavellianism and the cynicism with which they concocted the plan to take over Cuba, to the lengths of publicly proclaiming the same arguments made by John Quincy Adams in 1823, about the apple which would fall because of gravity. This apple finally did fall, but it was rotten, just as many Cuban intellectuals had foreseen for almost half a century, from José Martí in the 1880’s right up to Julio Antonio Mella, assassinated in January of 1929.

Nobody better than Leonard Wood himself to describe what the Platt Amendment would mean for Cuba in two sections of a confidential letter to his fellow in the adventure, Theodore Roosevelt, dated on October 28, 1901:

“There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment. (…) the only consistent thing to do now is to seek annexation. This, however, will take some time, and during the period which Cuba maintains her own government, it is most desirable that she should be able to maintain such a one as will tend to her advancement and betterment. She cannot make certain treaties without our consent (…) and must maintain certain sanitary conditions (…), from all of which it is quite apparent that she is absolutely in our hands, and I believe that no European government for a moment considers that she is otherwise than a practical dependency of the United States, and as such is certainly entitled to our consideration. (…) With the control which we have over Cuba, a control which will soon undoubtedly become possession, (…) we shall soon practically control the sugar trade of the world. (…) the island will (…) gradually become Americanized and we shall have in time one of the richest and most desirable possessions in the world.”

Part II: The Application of the Platt Amendment and the Establishing of the Guantanamo Naval Base as a Framework for Relations between Cuba and the United States.

By the end of 1901, the electoral process which resulted in the triumph of Tomás Estrada Palma, without opposition and with the support of 47 percent of the electorate, had begun. On April 17, 1902, the President-elect in absentia left the United States for Cuba where he arrived three days later. The inauguration of the new President took place on May 20, 1902 at 12 noon. The Congress of the Republic had already been constituted. Leonard Wood set sail for his country in the battleship “Brooklyn”. In 1902, shortly before the proclamation of the Republic, the United States government informed the newly elected President of the Island about the four sites selected for the establishing of naval bases -Cienfuegos, Bahía Honda, Guantanamo and Nipe – as provided by the Platt Amendment. Not even the Port of Havana escaped consideration since it was contemplated as “the most favorable for the fourth naval base”.

From the beginning, despite its spurious origins, the Government of Cuba, in which many of those who fought for independence participated, was opposed to the concession of four naval bases since it considered two to be more than enough. The situation grew tenser when the Cuban government toughened its stand and demanded the final drafting of the Permanent Agreement on Relations, with the goal of “determining at the same time and not in parts, all the details that were the object of the Platt Amendment and setting the range of their precepts”. President McKinley had died in September 14, 1901 as a result of gunshot wounds he had sustained on the 6th of that month. Theodore Roosevelt had advanced to such a degree in his political career that he was already Vice President of the United States and so he had assumed the presidency after the shooting of his predecessor. Roosevelt, at that time did not deem it to be convenient to specify the scope of the Platt Amendment, so as not to delay the military installation of the Guantanamo Base, given what that would mean for the defense of the Canal whose construction France had begun and later abandoned in the Central American Isthmus, and which the voracious government of the empire intended to complete at all costs. Nor was he interested in defining the legal status of the Isle of Pines. Therefore, he abruptly reduced the number of naval bases under discussion, removed the Port of Havana suggestion and finally agreed to the concession of two bases: Guantanamo and Bahía Honda.

Subsequently, in compliance with Article VII of the constitutional appendix imposed on the Constitutional Convention, the Agreement was signed by the Presidents of Cuba and the United States on February 16 and 23, 1903, respectively:

“Article I. – The Republic of Cuba hereby leases to the United States, for the time required for the purposes of coaling and naval stations, the following described areas of land and water situated in the Island of Cuba:

“1st. In Guantanamo”…(A complete description of the bay and neighboring territory is made.)

“2nd. In Bahia Honda…” (Another similar description is made.)

This Agreement establishes:

“Article III. –While on the one hand the United States recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the above described areas of land and water, on the other hand the Republic of Cuba consents that during the period of the occupation by the United States of said areas under the terms of this agreement the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas with the right to acquire for the public purposes of the United States any land or other property therein by purchase or by exercise of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof.”

On May 28, 1903, surveying began to establish the boundaries of the Guantanamo Naval Station. In the Agreement of July 2, 1903, dealing with the same subject, the “Regulations for the Lease of Naval and Coaling Stations” was passed:

“Article I.- The United States of America agrees and covenants to pay the Republic of Cuba the annual sum of two thousand dollars, in gold coin of the United States, as long as the former shall occupy and use said areas of land by virtue of said agreement.”

“All private lands and other real property within said areas shall be acquired forthwith by the Republic of Cuba.”

“The United States of America agrees to furnish to the Republic of Cuba the sums necessary for the purchase of said private lands and properties and such sums shall be accepted by the Republic of Cuba as advance payment on account of rental due by virtue of said Agreement.”

The Agreement which governed this lease, signed in Havana by representatives of the Presidents of Cuba and the United States respectively, was passed by the Cuban Senate on July 16, 1903, ratified by the President of Cuba a month later on August 16, and by the President of the United States on October 2, and after exchanging ratifications in Washington on October 6, it was published in the Gazette of Cuba on the 12th of the same month and year.

Dated on December 14, 1903, it was informed that four days earlier on the 10th of the same month, the United States had been given possession of the areas of water and land for the establishing of a naval station in Guantanamo. For the United States Government and Navy, the transfer of part of the territory of the largest island in the Antilles was a source of great rejoicing and they intended to celebrate the event. Vessels belonging to the Caribbean Squadron and some battleships from the North Atlantic Fleet converged on Guantanamo.

The Cuban government appointed the Head of Public Works of Santiago de Cuba to deliver that part of the territory over which it technically exercised sovereignty on December 10, 1903, the date chosen by the United States. He would be the only Cuban present at the ceremony and just for a brief time since, once his mission was accomplished, without any toasts or handshakes, he left for the neighboring town of Caimanera.

The Head of Public Works had boarded the battleship “Kearsage”, which was the U.S. flagship, where he met Rear Admiral Barker. At 12:00 hours a 21-gun-salute was given and along with the notes of the Cuban National Anthem, the Cuban flag which had been flying on board that vessel was lowered, and immediately the United States flag was hoisted on land, at the point called Playa del Este, with an equal number of salvos, thus concluding the ceremony.

According to the articles of the Agreement, the United States was to dedicate the leased lands exclusively for public use, not being able to establish any type of business or industry. The U.S. authorities in said territories and the Cuban authorities mutually agreed to surrender fugitives from justice charged with crimes or misdemeanors subject to the laws of each party, as long as it was required by the authorities who would be judging them.

Materials imported into the areas belonging to said naval stations for their own use and consumption would be exempt from customs duties, or any other kind of fees, to the Republic of Cuba.

The lease of these naval stations included the right to use and occupy the waters adjacent to said areas of land and water, to improve and deepen the entrances to them and their anchorages and for anything else that would be necessary for the exclusive use to which they were dedicated.

Even though the United States acknowledged the continuation of Cuba’s definitive sovereignty over those areas of water and land, it would exercise, with Cuba’s consent, “complete jurisdiction and domain” over said areas while they occupied them according to the other already quoted stipulations.

In the so-called Permanent Treaty of May 22, 1903, signed by the governments of the Republic of Cuba and the United States, future relations between both nations were detailed: in other words, what Manuel Márquez Sterling would call “the intolerable yoke of the Platt Amendment” was thus put firmly in place.

The Permanent Treaty, signed by both countries, was approved by the United States Senate on March 22, 1904 and by the Cuban Senate on June 8 of that year, and the ratifications were exchanged in Washington on June 1st, 1904. Therefore, the Platt Amendment is an amendment to an American law, an appendix to the Cuban Constitution of 1901 and a permanent treaty between both countries.

The experiences acquired with the Guantanamo Naval Base were useful to apply measures in Panama that were equal or worse, in the case of the Canal. In the United States Congress, it is customary to introduce amendments, whenever a law which is of urgent necessity for its content and importance is being debated. This frequently obliges legislators to put aside or sacrifice any conflicting criteria. Such amendments have more than once affected the sovereignty for which our people tirelessly struggle.

In 1912, the Cuban Secretary of State, Manuel Sanguily, negotiated a new treaty with the U.S. State Department whereby the United States would relinquish its rights over Bahia Honda in exchange for enlarging the boundaries of the Guantanamo station.

Following a year that witnessed a new generation of young activists adopt the name and legacy of Students for a Democratic Society, the new organization converged upon Detroit for its second national Convention. There are already attempts by both outsiders and a number of members of the organization to augur what meaning to assign to the convention.

To get it out of the way: it’s disingenuous to suggest, as some have, that anyone in SDS came into this Convention with grandiose expectations of taking part in a world-historic event — or at least, that it would be world-historic in the way that, say, the press casts Bono meeting the President as world-historic.

‘Tis not quite the final conflict, but nevertheless — give us no condescending saviors.

This preface aside, there actually was something in the back of everyone’s head or on the tip of their tongue about what would distinguish this Convention from your standard, humdrum Left event. What the membership expected out of this Convention was a delivery upon the commitment made at last year’s inaugural Convention in Chicago: beyond trading on name-brand recognition, the new SDS would commit itself to being a real live organization.

The devil, as with God, is in the details: the general will was to have a body that could embrace a multitude of chapters and members who each with their own character and ideas, but is still capable of issuing clarion calls to action that brings struggles to decisive resolutions. Further, it has been a near universal opinion that SDS can and must remain a independent and self-sustaining organization – powered by the members and chapters who make it work, not by the unseen hand of funders or sponsors who don’t ever want to see that unseen hand get dirty doing the shitwork. There is a lot within these parameters; it took a year of discussion plus a Convention to give it the attention that deserves.

Beyond a recap of the dry and droll minutiae of some of the decisions made, or worse how they were made – matters which those with a knack for “point-of-process”-ing things to death can have entirely to themselves – what is necessary to convey is the political problem which SDS took on by making that commitment last year.

That political problem which the Convention ended up dealing with: how do we lay claim to the future, mindful that we do not wish to merely repeat the past, but also mindful that the present state of things is nothing with which to be content.

On whether we wish to repeat the past, clarification is necessary. It can be taken for granted that the bulk of the members of the current SDS have no qualms about embracing the name of the organization, even with some of the baggage it brings. After all, the bulk of its luminaries have had nothing but encouraging words to say, and those who jealously guard “their” legacy with the first-wave SDS through disparaging the current SDS are those that chose to be sellouts or merely asinine (or merely asinine sellouts).

Beyond the name, however, there is relative unease with embracing the legacy of SDS. The traumatic experience of the original SDS folding in 1969, just as the campuses exploded, has left a residue across the activist Left. Underneath a certain veil of nostalgia most reporters barely pierce through, there are for the organization those moments of near-paralyzing fear of anything associated with the demise of the original SDS. Among some members of the current SDS that includes everything up to and including what made the original SDS vital to begin with.

Over the past year, there were the microphones getting jammed in front of SDS’ers faces demanding an answer to every absurd question on 60s movement trivia. There were the parades of Boomers approaching those with SDS pins at rallies, beaming with their air of paternalism and “I saw them live” attitude. Under that sort of microscope, the membership has largely adopted classic Freudian defense mechanisms to handle that unspoken fear of just repeating things over again.

In interviews with the reporters of the mainstream press, there is sarcasm (“Yeah, we took on this name so that we could be accused of blowing up toilets.” Nudge nudge, wink wink). At events, there is some light-hearted kitschiness (a purely nonsensical chant of the old RYM-faction slogan, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” – as a motion to define chapter membership passes). Then there is the sublimation of old movement arguments into the current ones, so that stating which faction of the original SDS you’ve read the most on becomes a referendum upon your politics (and the reverse being true as well: ask for discipline, and you’re Progressive Labor in disguise; demand militancy and you’re a Motherfucker wannabe).

All this pressure from the weight of the past, which thus far can only be expressed in punchlines. Still, the name of SDS wouldn’t be adopted by so many chapters if there were nothing good out of it – or if people didn’t find something amiss in the current state of affairs that made a look back somewhat worthwhile.

That unspoken problem of today: the Left in general finds itself both factionalized and unproductive to the point of neutralization. Responses to crises such as Iraq or Hurricane Katrina that should be sparking greater collaboration on a wider scale have instead been used as opportunities for Left organizations to cut each other off at the knees. Dropping a few key buzzwords substitutes for analysis; one can even come up with a dictionary of activistese-to-plain English. “Autonomy” has been perverted to flipping off anyone not in one’s own target demographic. “Consensus” morphs into a shorthand for speaking exclusively with those who already agrees. A “temporary autonomous zone” is a bohemian enclave with an infoshop and a loaded dumpster behind the Whole Foods supermarket. And so on… Twinkle your fingers if you agree.

We have seen since the 1990s that the model of very loose and informal networks have been great for the planning and execution of militant demos. Yet they can be slaves to pre-existing conditions by their reactive nature, to the extent that they set up activists to become hamsters on a wheel; they thrive on summit-hopping and floundered when the War of Terror commenced. The work of actively changing conditions on the ground – building up the capability to wage further struggle, of uniting disparate struggle together into a common battle, agitating and building up militancy where there was once apathy – these are matters where large scale organization, along with a large-scale commitment, becomes necessary.

The importance of creating and sustaining a large-scale Left movement with large-scale organization is understood by the better part of virtually all Left tendencies from the liberal, to the anarchist, to the reds. The responsibilities and difficulties involved in forming and sustaining a large-scale organization and fostering a larger-scale Left tend to be viewed as the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of being Left in the era of No Alternative.

In this existential dilemma, in which a discomforting past and an all-too-comfortable present act as a pair of blinders, what we required from this Convention was to throw off those blinders, survey all of what is in front of us and not just what is immediate, glamorous, or expected of us by outside forces. After all, we take arms against a whole sea of troubles — not some trickle that will disappear with one demo.

It would indeed be wonderful if we had the luxury of only discussing and executing actions – I should know, I had an action proposal (passed, without discussion unfortunately, but passed nevertheless). To everything there is a season, though, and the pressing matter of this Convention was to determine the organization’s work and settling on a means for handling it; if we did not decide, it is highly likely that outside events or actors would force a decision upon us and we would be likely less than equal to the task.

We have now mostly handled questions of a structure and have made opening gambits on vision documents – it will still be up to the chapters to decide whether to ratify them — but the important thing is that the foundations are in place, and they were placed by us and not the Ford Foundation.

Amman, Jordan — Last month when Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Ray McGovern and I took over 300 people and a petition with over a million signatures to Congressman John Conyers (D-Mi, Chair House Judiciary Committee) demanding impeachment, we believed we were morally correct then. Despite Rep. Conyers’ long record of public service to our nation and several private meetings that went absolutely nowhere, and despite the mild to severe criticism we have received, we believed then and still believe now that impeaching BushCo is a Constitutionally mandated requirement and a necessary tool to reclaim our representative republic, end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (“The troops aren’t coming home while I’m preznit,” GWB), and to hold the monsters accountable who have wreaked havoc on our planet.

I believe what we did on July 23rd was the right thing to do because we are all required to be active participants in our democracy. One of the reasons that all branches of our government are so out of control, Dems or Repugs, is that we have been passive voters who have allowed our elected officials to get away literally with murder for generations. The human element of “We the People” has been suppressed by the fascist elite and all but forgotten by an American public that has been lulled into an uncomfortable apathy by the “vast wasteland” of TV and its byproduct: a seductive, yet destructive consumerism that has us constantly striving not only to “keep up with the Joneses,” but “smash the Joneses” in our quest for more, more, more. We have thousands, if not millions of Susie Soccer moms in their huge SUVs to NASCAR dad Nick watching high performing, gas guzzling cars go round and round in circles wasting precious oil for our dubious entertainment, while people are dying, being injured and displaced and while our troops receive no more support than a yellow magnetic ribbon on Susie’s SUV.

The Rev and I had another dose of reality the other day and our actions in Conyers’ office were confirmed for both of us when we visited Bethena in al Jazeera hospital in Amman.

An American fired mortar shell hit twenty-eight year old, former Baghdad resident, Bethena on June 1st of this year. Her husband was also injured in the abhorrent attack and her mother-in-law and sister-in-law were killed. Due to lack of medical care at first, Bethena still has a large hole in her stomach. She was allowed to stay in an American hospital for 7 days, and then told she had to leave. With a smashed arm, broken leg, and another leg amputated above the knee, Bethena had to make her way to Amman for medical help with her sister. She laid in her bed gazing at us with pain-filled, yet very aware eyes and she graciously allowed us to look at her wounds and record them on film. The entire time we visited with her, I couldn’t help but reflect that Casey would have been the same age as Bethena just three days before she was mortared, if he hadn’t already been killed not too far from where Bethena and her family were hit.

Besides the incontrovertible fact that Bethena was no threat to the USA and we are occupying her country illegally and immorally, her hospital bills are costing the family 750.00 to 1000.00 a day and she still requires two more surgeries. The family had to sell their home in Baghdad and is rapidly going through their savings. Bethena’s sister told us that a woman who suffered a heart attack from fright in the same mortar attack had her bills covered by the US, but we won’t cover Bethena’s bills because she was hit by an American bomb!

We are going to the American Embassy here in Jordan to ask the same simple question: “Why?” Why is the government who harmed her not paying her bills?” and she is just one of thousands. As the war crimes compound in Iraq, the resistance heightens and no one wins in “lose-lose” land.

My campaign for Congress’ slogan “People Before Politics” is the exact opposite of what John Conyers told me and my staff in a meeting prior to the July 23rd sit-in: “It is more important to me (Conyers) to put a Democrat back in the White House in ’08 than to end the war!” (Even if it is Hillary “If Saddam won’t disarm, will we disarm him” Clinton”) I can guarantee him that it is not what’s most important to Bethena, the people of Iraq and the thousands of mothers in our own country who can’t sleep at night, concentrate, eat or do much else for worry of their son or daughter in Iraq for the lies of BushCo and the criminal complicity of Congress, Inc.

I wept in John Conyers’ office that day as I wept over Bethena and her plight.

We the People have also failed our soldiers and Bethena and rest of the innocent citizens of Iraq by allowing the partisan politics of greed and destruction to hijack our country. I wish every American could peer into Bethena’s eyes and have an epiphany that there are many things more important than partisan politics as usual. I wish news cameras would show an American mother falling on the ground screaming in agony for her needlessly killed child. We see the devastation on Jordanian TV caused in Northern Iraq where over 500 people were slaughtered yesterday: we need to see that on our TVs.

Then maybe, just maybe, this monstrosity would end. View Photos of Bethena here.

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official and JetBlue Airways illegally discriminated against an American resident based solely on the Arabic message on his t-shirt and his ethnicity.

JetBlue and the TSA official, identified as “Inspector Harris,” would not let Raed Jarrar board his flight at John F. Kennedy Airport until he agreed to cover his t-shirt, which read “We Will Not Be Silent” in English and Arabic script. According to the complaint, Harris told Jarrar that it is impermissible to wear an Arabic shirt to an airport and equated it to a “person wearing a t-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber.'”

“It is a dangerous and slippery slope when we allow our government to take away a person’s rights because of his speech or ethnic background,” said Reginald Shuford, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. “Racial profiling is illegal and ineffective and has no place in a democratic society.”

Jarrar, an architect and political analyst of Arabic descent, has lived in the United States since 2005 with his wife, who is an American citizen. On August 12, 2006, Jarrar attempted to fly on JetBlue from New York to Oakland, California, where he lived at the time. Although Jarrar successfully cleared two security checkpoints, he was approached by Inspector Harris while waiting at the boarding gate. Harris brought Jarrar to the JetBlue counter and told him that he would have to remove his shirt because other passengers were not comfortable with the Arabic script.

“It was clear that Mr. Jarrar was not a security threat and was singled out solely because of his ethnicity and the constitutionally protected speech on his t-shirt,” said Aden Fine, an ACLU senior staff attorney who represents Jarrar. “Rather than censor Raed, the TSA official and Jet Blue should have assured any uncomfortable passengers that there was absolutely no public safety or security risk. We hope this case sends the message to TSA officials and to airlines that they cannot discriminate against passengers because of their race or the content of their speech.”

Jarrar attempted to assert his constitutional right to wear the t-shirt, but became intimidated after he was surrounded by Harris and several JetBlue officials. He worried he would miss his flight or be arrested and detained indefinitely. The lead JetBlue customer service crewmember stated that she would buy Jarrar a new shirt to wear on top of his own t-shirt as a “compromise.” Left with no other choice, Jarrar reluctantly agreed, and was allowed on the plane only after the JetBlue agents ripped up his boarding pass and changed his seat from the front of the plane to the very back of the plane. He was then forced to board the plane first, even before disabled passengers and those traveling with children.

“I believe it is my right and responsibility as a new U.S. resident and taxpayer to fight for my freedoms and for the right of all people in this country to be free of discrimination,” said Jarrar, who is currently employed with the American Friends Service Committee, an organization committed to peace and social justice. “It was not my goal to offend anyone with my t-shirt, but it is a shame that racial profiling and censorship are still rampant in America’s airports.”

The ACLU said Jarrar’s case is part of a disturbing pattern of discriminatory acts at airports against individuals perceived to be Arab, especially those engaged in expressive activities that visibly display their ethnic background or religious faith. According to the Department of Transportation, it has received complaints of discrimination by air carriers every month from January 2002 to June 2007, the last month for which statistics are available. Several of those discrimination complaints have been lodged against JetBlue.

The ACLU filed the complaint today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The complaint charges that TSA Inspector Harris and JetBlue violated Jarrar’s civil rights under the First and Fifth Amendments and federal, state and city anti-discrimination laws.

In addition to Fine and Shuford, attorneys in this case are: Dennis Parker, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, and Palyn Hung of the NYCLU.

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

A peace symbol hangs from a chain around my neck. Soon after I bought the necklace, I decided I wouldn’t take it off until the war ended. On Tuesday afternoon, I sat in a physician’s examining room. The doctor mentioned my peace symbol and said that people who oppose the war fail to acknowledge the successes in Iraq-that northern Iraq is a thriving area of commercial achievement. “Ah, the Kurds,” I said just before he plunged a tongue depressor down my throat. I was hoping to present my position-that I’m not a critic of the G. W. Bush war strategy or lack thereof–you know, one who championed the invasion but believes the war has been mismanaged with insufficient troops to accomplish the job.

I wanted him to know that from the beginning, with the rumblings about weapons of mass destruction and the Bush lies to link Iraq to 9/11, I spoke against an incursion I knew would become an occupation. The truth is that I don’t perceive war as successes and failures. War is tragedy-the ultimate human error and an inability to empathize. Each time I tried to opine, the doc stuck his fingers in my mouth.

Later, at home, I turned on the news to hear that northern Iraq had been hit by a series of almost simultaneous suicide bombings, leaving more than 250 people dead and at least 300 injured. As I write, the number of dead has climbed and could be as high as 500.

Often, I lie awake, wondering about the people who support George Bush and his reign of terror against the Iraqi and Afghan populations. I ask myself if these Bushies are aware of the landscape of destruction. Do they think about Iraqi and Afghan children? Do they look at their own children and imagine what it would be like to be a parent in Iraq or Afghanistan? Do they ever for even a second allow themselves to consider what our sophisticated bombs, depleted uranium, and white phosphorous are doing? Have they convinced themselves that our weaponry targets only those who are poised to kill coalition forces? Are they at all troubled about what our country is doing-committing acts of atrocity against other human beings who did nothing to antagonize us? NOTHING.

Members of the Bush Fan Club don’t just include the Armageddonites who rhapsodize about “The Rapture” and who believe that George Pied Piper Bush was anointed by God to lead in the clash of civilizations. Fellow Bush junkies are those who buy the absurd “if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will follow us home” rather than the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate that the occupation of Iraq has inspired terrorism and that the longer we stay, the less secure we will be.

Meanwhile, we have lost over 3,700 U.S. troops in a catastrophe that George Bush was determined to start and is stubbornly refusing to end despite the advice of experts and, finally, the disapproval of the American public. Iraqis are suffering unfathomable loss. Suicide bombings are not becoming less frequent. Rather, they are becoming more advanced. Those who strap on explosives or fill their vehicles with ammo to kill and maim as many people as possible share certain defining commonalities: they are destructive of themselves and others; they ignore reason; and they are not guided by the normal mores of society.

It is not a leap to say that George Bush fits comfortably into these parameters, with one exception–Bush’s self destruction will come not from an actual detonation that shatters his body but through the judgment of his presidency as the worst in the history of this country.

It’s no coincidence that the American corporate media is the wealthiest communication systems in the world, yet also one of the worst in terms of educating its citizens. Extraordinary riches require extraordinary efforts to divert public attention from extreme inequality and the democratic deficit under which Americans suffer. Despite the abundance of media sources throughout this country, Americans still endure a staggering ignorance regarding the reality of U.S. foreign policy. Horrendous media coverage no doubt accounts for much of this ongoing tragedy. While there may be more information available today than at any time in history (in light of the rise of cable news, the Internet, and other technological developments), the quality of that news leaves much to be desired.

News reports today do not provide the public with the context needed to evaluate the events happening around them in a critical way. This lack of context is of no surprise to those who understand that media coverage is designed to indoctrinate and divert attention, rather than to educate. The prolific comic George Carlin has this insight to share concerning the American media’s commitment to class warfare:

“The real owners [are] the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, the judges. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They spend billions every year lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everyone else. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people. That’s against their interests. They want obedient workers.”

There’s an easy enough way to create apathetic, obedient consumers: simply take away any meaningful content from the media system upon which they rely. This is perhaps best seen in the mass media’s extreme reliance on junk food and fluff “news,” at the expense of real stories that might have some direct relevance to our lives. A brief survey of television news coverage puts this reality into better perspective. A poll done by the Pew Research Center showed that, in the sample period studied (the week of February 12th, 2007), “While 6% of coverage on all media sectors (newspapers, network TV, cable TV, radio and the Internet) was devoted to [Anna Nicole] Smith’s death, fully 20% of cable news focused on this story. At the height of the media’s feeding frenzy (the two day period immediately following Smith’s death), 24% of all coverage and 50% of cable news was devoted to the story.” The effects of such disproportionate coverage did not go unnoticed by viewers or researchers. When asked who they had heard the most about in the news, the “most memorable people” listed in the study was Anna Nicole (recognized by 38% of viewers), followed by George Bush (28%), Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (both 3%), and Nancy Pelosi (1%).

In other words, Anna Nicole Smith had more name recognition than all of the other highest scoring figures combined. This is particularly disturbing for those with even a minimal commitment to democracy, considering that the Anna Nicole story ranked at the very bottom of the list in terms stories viewers felt were “deserving more of my time” (only 3% of viewers felt Anna Nicole deserved more of their time, as opposed to 15% and 12% respectively who felt the Iraq war and the 2008 campaign deserved more time). Viewers can look forward to a deluge of celebrity gossip “news” if they tune into the cable news networks this summer. A brief review of CNN shows that in the 99 days of summer from early May through early August, viewers could find a news feature on one of three celebrities (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie) on average once every other day. That’s a pretty extraordinary frequency considering the stories covered just three people.

While cable news may be the worst medium to follow for those who are interested learning something from the news, this hardly excuses print news, which has also performed pitifully in terms of publishing meaningful stories and information. A summary of the following stories gives us a better picture of how much is missing from print media.

1. Hugo Chavez & Iran

A New York Times story from early August repeated complaints from Argentinean Jews about Chavez’s close ties with their government, in light of Venezuela’s close relationship with Iran. As the story explained, such complaints come at a particularly sensitive time, in light of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supposed promise to “wipe Israel off the map.” Of course, Chavez has also been routinely demonized by American media outlets for his alleged “totalitarian” and “anti-American” disposition, which is thought to justify the Bush administration’s aggressive and belligerent rhetoric and actions against his government and people.

What you won’t hear

Such stories consistently and conveniently leave out the fact that 1. far from an authoritarian, Chavez has been democratically elected twice by the people of Venezuela in heavily monitored elections. Over 72% of Venezuelans voted in the 2006 election, in which Chavez received nearly 63% of the vote – over 20% more than Bush received in 2004 when he claimed to have earned the “political capital” of the American people.

Chavez is quite popular due to his populist disposition and his commitment to redistributive politics, much to the chagrin of America’s corporate and political elites. 2. Chavez is not “anti-American,” at least if we understand “America” to include the 300 million Americans who inhabit it. Far from being a hate-monger, Chavez has actually expressed deep admiration and sympathy for the American people.

It is the Bush administration that originally incited antagonism toward Chavez, not the other way around. It doesn’t take a genius, but rather access to decent news coverage, to understand why. It is now known that the Bush administration conspired with Venezuelan military leaders during a failed 2002 coup that briefly overthrew Chavez, and ordered for the dissolution of the country’s democratically elected National Assembly, its constitution, and Supreme Court. Chavez was quickly returned to power, however, after a popular uprising against the conspirators. Good luck finding such revelations regularly reported in the American press ­ hysterical anti-Chavez rhetoric plays much better with American elites who are more concerned with destroying Venezeula’s democracy than preserving it. Of course, one can only imagine what American reporters would say about Chavez if he had taken part in a coup aimed at overthrowing the Bush administration. At the very least, a military invasion and overthrow against Venezuela would be considered quite legitimate amongst American media reporters, owners, and editors. The equivalent prescription ­ that the Bush administration must be overthrown by Venezuela ­ is considered unthinkable in the minds of America’s politico-media elite. Better to leave such double standards unaddressed though, as they fail to flatter American political and economic elites.

2. The Anti-War Movement

An August 7th story in the Chicago Tribune reported on the activities of anti-war protestors throughout America’s heartland. The article focused on the activities of two protestors, Ashley Casale and Michael Israel, who are traveling to towns and cities across the country spreading their message against the occupation of Iraq.

What you won’t hear

Don’t expect to actually hear anything substantive about why Casale and Israel are protesting the war ­ those reasons are nowhere to be found in the Tribune piece. While the story is full of references to various anti-war banners carried by the protestors reading “Peace,” “Bring the Troops Home,” and “War is not the Answer,” there is not a single coherent argument against the war visible throughout the 1,000-word piece. The lack of a context for understanding anti-war arguments is not isolated to the Tribune’s coverage. A content analysis of articles printed in 2007 (from January to July) in the New York Times discussing withdrawal from Iraq reveals a similar pattern. At a time when the majority of Americans are opposed to the occupation and favor withdrawal within a year, there are virtually no criticisms of the war (from quoted sources) reflected in the New York Times coverage. Criticisms of the occupation as driven by imperialism or a desire to control Iraqi oil are not mentioned a single time in the coverage. Neither is the challenge that the U.S. is conducting an illegal occupation. No source is cited arguing for withdrawal on grounds condemning U.S. terrorism and American responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Majority Iraqi public opposition to the occupation is never mentioned by a quoted source in a single story either. Concern with excess American military casualties is also left out of quoted sources entirely. Even pragmatic assessments that the war is unwinnable or too costly are not mentioned at all. In fact, the only criticisms that appear at all amongst quoted sources in 2007 coverage include just one mention of Iraqi nationalism as a motivating force for rebellion (in a story on Iraqi political leader Moqtada al-Sadr), and three references to American public opposition to the war. These four quoted sources arguing for withdrawal throughout 2007 can hardly be characterized as fulfilling the requirements of a robust debate over the reasons for staying in or leaving Iraq.

On the other hand, arguments for the war from quoted sources are well represented in the New York Times coverage. Sources who oppose withdrawal are cited regularly arguing that Iraq faces civil war in light of current conditions or withdrawal (a claim that shows up in 23% of stories). In addition, those who oppose withdrawal cite the threat of Iraqi terrorists and Iraqi militias/insurgents in 19% and 8% respectively in the Times articles. Far and away, the largest number of justifications for remaining in Iraq come from those who reference the importance of supporting the troops. References to the troops show up in 51% of all the Times stories. It is perhaps fitting that the “support the troops” rationale is the most commonly appearing defense of the war in stories on withdrawal, at least if the point of media coverage is to deter meaningful public policy debate. The “support the troops” claim is clearly the most vacuous of all the pro-war arguments. In-and-of-itself, the claim doesn’t constitute a serious defense of the occupation, considering that both pro and anti-war critics cite the need to “support the troops” when arguing in favor of, and in opposition to, withdrawal. Even President Bush has admitted that both pro-and anti-war advocates support the troops. Such references, then, can hardly serve as the crux of a substantive pro-war argument.

3. Iran, the U.S., & the Nuclear “Threat”

Iran’s alleged nuclear threat to the United States and its allies has been a mainstay of American media coverage for at least the last four years. This is clearly the case when reviewing major media coverage. A content analysis of the Washington Post’s news stories, editorials, and op-ed coverage of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons shows a pattern of deception, one-sidedness, and manipulation. A review of over 230 Post news stories, 31 editorials, and 58 op-eds from 2003 through 2007 shows that assertions suggesting Iran may or is developing nuclear weapons appeared twice as often as claims or assertions that Iran is not or may not be developing such weapons. The paper’s op-eds and editorials are even more slanted, as 90% of editorials and 93% of op-eds suggest Iran is developing nuclear weapons, as opposed to o% of editorials and 16% of op-eds suggesting Iran may not be developing such weapons. Belligerent rhetoric is also used far more often in regards to the Iranian “threat” (of which there is no evidence of to date) than to the far larger U.S. and Israeli military threat to Iran (which has been announced vocally and shamelessly over and over throughout the American and Israeli press). Belligerent terms are applied twice as often in regards to Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Such terms, portray Iran as a “threat,” and discuss the “fear” invoked by a potentially nuclear armed Iran, as well as the “danger” of such a development ­ as contrasted with similar references to a U.S. “threat,” to the “fear” of a U.S. or Israeli attack, or the “danger” both countries pose to Iran.

What you won’t hear

While there is plenty of vilification featured throughout the stories on Iranian WMD, you can forget about reading a level-headed review of the actual intelligence available discussing whether Iran is actually developing such weapons. While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is referenced in 61% of the Post’s editorials and 29% of its op-eds, the IAEA’s actual conclusion that there is “no evidence” Iran is developing nuclear weapons is referenced in just 1 editorial (3% of all editorials) and in only 1 op-ed (2% of all op-eds). Similarly, the IAEA is cited in 73% of all the Post’s news stories on Iranian weapons, despite the fact that the paper tilts by a ratio of 2:1 in favor of assertions that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. It appears that the IAEA itself, rather than its actual conclusions, has propaganda value for U.S. media and political elites.

Don’t bother looking for damning evidence implicating the U.S. for double standards and hypocrisy in dealing with Iran either ­ you won’t find them. References to the fact that it was the U.S. itself that originally supported Iranian uranium enrichment show up in just 1% of the Post’s news stories, and in just 3% of all op-eds, and none of the paper’s editorials. The same goes for admissions that the United States is undertaking a similar project of enriching its own uranium for use in a new generation of American nuclear weapons (the major distinction, however, is that the U.S. openly admits to its project, while Iran has admitted to no such program). The very activity that U.S. leaders are condemning Iran for secretly pursuing is arrogantly advocated and pursued by the United States (the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons on civilians), although one wouldn’t know any of this from looking at the coverage. U.S. enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear weapons receives not a single mention in Post editorials and op-eds, and receives only fleeting mention in the paper’s news stories.

Similarly, while the global nuclear non-proliferation treaty (preventing its signatories from developing nuclear weapons) is mentioned in regards to Iran in 38% of the Post’s news stories, 39% of editorials, and 14% of op-eds, the treaty is not brought up in a single news story, and appears in only 3% of editorials and 2% of all op-eds in terms of it its application to the United States. The conclusion couldn’t be more obvious to the astute reader ­ though both the U.S. and Iran have both signed the agreement, it only realistically applies to the U.S. International non-proliferation law is meant only for American enemies: the United States is bound by no such rules, even when it has ratified them.

Any honest reading of the results above can lead to no other conclusion: U.S. media coverage has reached appalling levels. Short of conducting a major research project like one of those undertaken above, it is very difficult for citizens to acquire the critical information needed to arrive at realistic assessments of what is going on in the world. How can citizens make informed decisions regarding public policy when they are subject to systematically skewed, propagandistic news coverage?

America’s parochial press is not designed to promote debate or to educate, but rather to repeat the official line. Citizens (outside the intellectual, political, and business elite) are expected to conform to the ideal of the apathetic consumers who know little about international affairs, and care even less. Such ignorance is encouraged in a mass media more concerned with selling products than engaging citizens. As Noam Chomsky cogently argues: in a democracy, “You can no longer control people by violence. You can’t just throw them into a torture chamber. You have to find other means. One means is propaganda. Another means is rabid consumerism, to try to drive people into massive consumption. In the United States the economy has suffered under the neoliberal policies, as has been the case worldwide, and is maintained to a high extent by consumer spendingFrom infancy children are deluged by propaganda telling them: buy, buy, buy, and so onThese are devices to try to control the populations and ensure that the private tyrannies endure.” The American press is not producing enlightened citizens, but rather alienated consumers. Whether the public will stand up and rebel against such contempt, however, is a question yet to be answered.

08/17/07 “ICH” — — At a time when even the Wall Street Journal has disappeared into the maw of a huge media conglomerate, the New York Times remains an independent newspaper. But it doesn’t show any independence in reporting or in thought.

The Times issued a mea culpa for letting its reporter, Judith Miller, misinform readers about Iraq, thus helping the neoconservatives set the stage for their invasion. Now the Times’ reporting on Iran seems to be repeating the mistake. After the US commits another senseless act of naked aggression by bombing Iran, will the Times publish another mea culpa?

The Times editorials also serve as conduits for propaganda. On August 13, a Times editorial jumped on China for “irresponsible threats” that threaten free trade. The Times’ editorialists do not understand that the offshoring of American jobs, which the Times mistakenly thinks is free trade, is a far greater threat to America than a reminder from the Chinese, who are tired of US bullying, that China is America’s banker.

Let’s briefly review the “China threat” and then turn to the real problem.

Members of the US government believe, as do many Americans, that the Chinese currency is undervalued relative to the US dollar and that this is the reason for America’s large trade deficit with China. Pressure continues to be applied to China to revalue its currency in order to reduce its trade advantage over goods made in the US.

The pressure put on China is misdirected. The exchange rate is not the main cause of the US trade deficit with China. The costs of labor, regulation and harassment are far lower in China, and US corporations have offshored their production to China in order to benefit from these lower costs. When a company shifts its production from the US to a foreign country, it transforms US GDP into imports. Every time a US company offshores goods and services, it adds to the US trade deficit.

Clearly, it is a mistake for the US government and economists to think of the imbalance as if it were produced by Chinese companies underselling goods produced by US companies in America. The imbalance is the result of US companies producing their goods in China and selling them in America.

Many believe the solution is to force China to revalue its currency, thereby driving up the prices of 70% of the goods on Wal-Mart shelves. Mysteriously, members of the US government believe that it would help the US consumer, who is as dependent on imported manufactured goods as he is on imported energy, to be charged higher prices.

China believes that the exchange rate is not the cause of US offshoring and opposes any rapid change in its currency’s value. In a message issued in order to tell the US to ease off the public bullying, China reminded Washington that the US doesn’t hold all the cards.

The NYT editorial expresses the concern that China’s “threat” will cause protectionist US lawmakers to stick on tariffs and start a trade war. “Free trade, free market” economists rush to tell us how bad this would be for US consumers: A tariff would raise the price of consumer goods.

The free market economists don’t tell us that dollar depreciation would have the same effect. Goods made in China would go up 30 percent in price if a 30 percent tariff was placed on them, and the goods would go up 30 percent in price if the value of the Chinese currency rises 30 percent against the dollar.

So, why all the fuss about tariffs?

The fuss about tariffs makes even less sense once one realizes that the purpose of tariffs is to protect domestically produced goods from cheaper imports. However, US tariffs today would be imposed on the offshored production of US firms. In the era of offshoring, corporations are not a constituency for tariffs.

Tariffs would benefit American labor, something that the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Republican Party would strongly oppose. A wage equalization tariff would wipe out much of the advantage of offshoring. Profits would come down, and with lower profits would come lower CEO compensation and shareholder returns.

Obviously, the corporate interests and Wall Street do not want any tariffs.

The NYT and “free trade” economists haven’t caught on, because they mistakenly think that offshoring is trade. In fact, offshoring is labor arbitrage. US labor is simply removed from production functions that produce goods and services for US markets and replaced with foreign labor. No trade is involved. Instead of being produced in America, US brand names sold in America are produced in China.

It is not China’s fault that American corporations have so little regard for their employees and fellow citizens that they destroy their economic opportunities and give them to foreigners instead.

It is paradoxical that everyone is blaming China for the behavior of American firms. What is China supposed to do, close its borders to foreign capital?

When free market economists align, as they have done, with foreigners against American citizens, they destroy their credibility and the future of economic freedom. Recently the Independent Institute, with which I am associated, stressed that free market associations “have defended completely open immigration and free markets in labor,” emphasizing that 500 economists signed the Independent Institute’s Open Letter on Immigration in behalf of open immigration.

Such a policy is satisfying to some in its ideological purity. But what it means in practice is that the Americans, who are displaced in their professional and manufacturing jobs by offshoring and work visas for foreigners, also cannot find work in the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs taken over by illegal immigrants. A free market policy that gives the bird to American labor is not going to win acceptance by the population. Such a policy serves only the owners of capital and its senior managers.

Free market economists will dispute this conclusion. They claim that offshoring and unrestricted immigration provide consumers with cheaper prices in the market place. What the free market economists do not say is that offshoring and unrestricted immigration also provide US citizens with lower incomes, fewer job opportunities, and less satisfying jobs. There is no evidence that consumer prices fall by more than incomes so that US citizens can be said to benefit materially. The psychological experience of a citizen losing his career to a foreigner is alienating.

The free market economists ignore that a country that offshores its production also offshores its jobs. It becomes dependent on goods and services made in foreign countries, but lacks sufficient export earnings with which to pay for them. A country whose workforce is being reallocated, under pressure of offshoring, to domestic services has nothing to trade for its imports. That is why the US trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion annually.

Among all the countries of the world, only the US can get away with exploding trade deficits. The reason is that the US inherited from Great Britain, exhausted by two world wars, the reserve currency role. To be the reserve currency country means that your currency is the accepted means of payment to settle international accounts. Countries pay their oil import bills in dollars and settle the deficits in their trade accounts in dollars.

The enormous and continuing US deficits are wearing out the US dollar as reserve currency. A time will come when the US cannot pay for the imports, on which it has become ever more dependent, by flooding the world with ever more dollars.

Offshoring and free market ideology are turning the US into a third world country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-quarter of all new US jobs created between June 2006 and June 2007 were for waitresses and bartenders. Almost all of the net new US jobs in the 21st century have been in domestic services.

Democracy and hope in Latin America have been revived by Venezuela’s leader. But the forces allied against him are formidable

I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. “This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”

Thousands of “the detained and the disappeared” were imprisoned in the stadium following the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy of Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. For the majority people of Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of the first “9/11” have never been forgotten. “In the Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph,” said Roberto. “But in Latin America those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they approach true fascism. People who are well-dressed, whose houses are full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don’t have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what we see in Venezuela today. It is as if Chávez is Allende. It is so evocative for me.”

In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent.

The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet’s horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America’s leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a “threat” to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government “absolutely endorsed” US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government – “remarkable by any standards” – in favour of the falsehood of “the threat of a communist takeover”.

The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Chávez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a “middle class” in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La Línea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school. “I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers,” she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time.

More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.

It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”. Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,” said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

Yet, as in Nicaragua, the “treatment” of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of Chávez, whom they smear as “power crazed” and a “tyrant”. That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a “radical socialist”, usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain’s Labour party were once proud to wear.

In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges Chávez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela’s oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as “the envy of the banking world” is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said “people don’t give a shit”. However much they play the man, Chávez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau’s idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and “the hope of the human spirit”, of which Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned.

Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the “mainstream media in the United States” to Just Foreign Policy’s ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.

Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the “Lancet study” alive. The “Lancet study,” you’ll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published – and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion – so it’s little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.

The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey. Its principal deficit for understanding the current situation is that the survey it was based on is now a year old, so that when people want to invoke the Lancet study to describe the death toll, they are likely to say, “a year ago the death toll was over 600,000” – leaving out what has happened since. Since the Lancet study is “old news,” it’s progressively easier to ignore it over time. It was this problem that gave us the idea of constructing an ongoing, rough update.

The tally of deaths reported in the Western media by Iraq Body Count, although it gives an inaccurate picture of the overall death toll, does have the advantage that it is regularly updated. So while the Iraq Body Count tally, by itself, doesn’t help us understand the overall death toll, it does give us some information about the trend over time, because one can compare, for example, the Iraq Body Count tally today with the Iraq Body Count tally from July 2006.

Thus, we constructed our ongoing online estimate – for which we provide the code so you can include it on your own web page – by extrapolating from the Lancet estimate using the trend provided by Iraq Body Count.

Our extrapolation assumes that Iraq Body Count is capturing a fixed proportion of the true level of deaths over time. This is a conservative assumption, because it is likely that Iraq Body Count is capturing a smaller share of the true death toll over time, as reporting from Iraq becomes progressively more difficult. By assuming that Iraq Body Count captures a constant share, we will tend to underestimate the true death toll.

Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Note further that a straight-line extrapolation from the Lancet study – ignoring any increase in the death rate in the last year from the average between March, 2003 and July, 2006 – an average that includes the first year of the occupation, when by all accounts the death rate was lower – would still result in more than 750,000 excess deaths due to violence.

Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war – or civil wars – that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable – and predicted – result of the U.S. invasion. Everything is predicted if one searches enough, but in this case, for example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn’t go to Baghdad in 1991, so it’s absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by [vastly – The Rag] underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.

WASHINGTON – When a top U.S. commander in Iraq reported last week that attacks by Shiite militias with links to Iran had risen to 73 percent of all July attacks that had killed or wounded U.S. forces in Baghdad, he claimed it was because of an effort by Iran to oust the United States from Iraq, referring to “intelligence reports” of a “surge” in Iranian assistance.

But the obvious reason for the rise in Shiite-related U.S. casualties, — ignored in U.S. media coverage of Lt. General Raymond Odierno’s charge — is that the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr was defending itself against a rising tempo of attacks by U.S. forces at the same time attacks by al-Qaeda forces had fallen.

In his press briefing on Aug. 5, Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, blamed the rise in the proportion of U.S. casualties attributable to Shiite militias on Iran “surging their support to these groups based on the September report” — a reference to the much-anticipated report by General David Petraeus on the U.S.’s own surge strategy.

Odierno claimed intelligence reports supported his contention of an Iranian effort to influence public perceptions of the surge strategy. “They’re sending more money in, they’re training more individuals and they’re sending more weapons in.”

He repeated the charge in an interview with Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published on its front page Aug. 8 under the headline, “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq.” In that interview, he declared of Iran, “I think they want to influence the decision potentially coming up in September.”

What Odierno framed in terms of an Iranian policy, however, can be explained much more simply by the fact that the U.S. military mounted more operations on Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army during the spring and summer.

The U.S. command has not provided any statistics on the targets of its operations in recent months, but news reports on those operations reveal a pattern of rising U.S. attacks on Mahdi Army personnel since March 2007.

Between Apr. 26 and Jun. 30, the U.S. command in Baghdad announced dozens of military operations in Baghdad — the vast majority in Sadr City — solely for the purpose of capturing or killing Shiites belonging to what were called “secret cells” — a term used to describe Mahdi Army units alleged to be supported by Iran.

In July the Mahdi Army resisted these raids in many cases. On Jul. 9, for example, U.S. troops cordoned off an area in Sadr City and began searching for members of what the U.S. command called a “criminal militia” accused of planting roadside bombs. According to the official military press release, the U.S. troops were “engaged by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire from numerous locations.”

In short, the rise in deaths of U.S. troops in Baghdad in July reflected the increased pace of U.S. operations against the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army’s military response.

Odierno conceded as much in the same press conference: “Because of the effect we’ve had on al-Qaeda in Iraq and the success against them and the Sunni insurgency,” he said, “we are focusing very much more on the special groups of the Jaish al-Mahdi [Mahdi Army] here in Baghdad.”

The major briefing by the U.S. command on alleged Iranian support for Iraqi Shiite militias in recent weeks appears to contradict Odierno’s claim that intelligence showed increased Iranian assistance to those militias. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters on Aug. 2 — after a “surge” in Iranian assistance had allegedly taken place — that the rate of training of militia groups in Iran had remained stable for a long time.

The transcript of the briefing also shows that Bergner did not claim any recent increase in financial assistance to the Mahdi Army.

Odierno’s reference to “sending more weapons in” continued the practice of the George W. Bush administration to claim that Iranian officials actually ship weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, despite the fact that no evidence of such a role has been found after four years of trying.

Odierno told the New York Times that explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) accounted for one-third of combat deaths suffered by “U.S.-led forces” — including Iraqi and British forces — in July. But he said nothing about the proportion of total U.S. troops killed or wounded by them.

The Bush administration continues to assert that EFPs are provided by the Iranian government, despite numerous discoveries by U.S. forces of workshops manufacturing such devices in Iraq.

Odierno’s charges are the latest addition to an ongoing Bush administration narrative about developments in Iraq that treats all Shiite activity outside the Iraqi government as reflecting Iranian policy.

Its central theme of an Iranian policy to drive the U.S. out of Iraq by killing U.S. troops, first introduced in January, has branched out into several sub-themes, one of which is that Sadr has lost control over the Mahdi Army. The U.S. command has been claiming it has broken up into “rogue units” — also called “special groups” or “secret cells”. Those “rogue units” in turn are said to have become instruments of Iranian policy.

Although the Mahdi Army operates on a highly decentralised basis, and some units have been involved in sectarian activities that Sadr did not approve, the U.S. military has never produced evidence that a significant number of units are no longer loyal to Sadr.

The “rogue units” line has been used to suggest that those units that were loyal to Sadr were cooperating with the United States and to justify U.S. attacks on the Mahdi Army both in Baghdad and in Southern Iraq.

Gen. Petraeus claimed publicly that Sadr had agreed in talks with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to the deployment of U.S. troops to Baghdad’s Sadr City district in return for assurances that searches and raids would be conducted in a “respectable manner”.

Sadr’s spokesman in parliament said, however, that the understanding had been that Iraqi forces would conduct searches and that U.S. troops would intervene only if they faced resistance. The spokesman said U.S. troops had violated the understanding.

At first, Sadr’s troops stayed off the streets and did not resist U.S. troops. But in March Sadr’s office denounced the U.S. troop deployment in Sadr City and called on people to take to the streets in protest. And a Shiite cleric loyal to Sadr exhorted followers at Friday prayers not to cooperate with the U.S. occupation of Sadr City.

On Apr. 8, Sadr issued a statement urged the Iraqi army and police to stop cooperating with the United States and told his guerrilla fighters to concentrate on pushing U.S. forces out of the country.

Thus it requires no Iranian hand to explain the escalation of the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military that accounts for the changing pattern of U.S. casualties in Baghdad.

WASHINGTON — As President Bush escalates the United States’ confrontation with Iran across a broad front, U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East are growing worried that the steps will achieve little, but will undercut diplomacy and increase the chances of war.

In the latest step, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are considering designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves as the guardian of Iran’s Islamic state, as a foreign terrorist organization.

News of the decision was leaked to newspapers in what a senior State Department official and Washington-based diplomats said was a sign of an intensifying internal struggle within the U.S. government between proponents of military action and opponents, led by Rice.

State Department officials and foreign diplomats see Rice’s push for the declaration against the Revolutionary Guards as an effort to blunt arguments by Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies for air strikes on Iran. By making the declaration, they feel, Rice can strike out at a key Iranian institution without resorting to military action while still pushing for sanctions in the United Nations.

Partisans of military force argue that Rice’s strategy has failed to change Tehran’s behavior.

“It really does seem this is more tied to the internal debate that is going on in the administration on Iran, rather than a serious attempt to influence Iranian behavior,” said an Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“How that debate will play out is what’s concerning” Arab and European countries, he said.

Designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group “is the State Department trying to do something short of war,” said former U.S. diplomat Charles Dunbar, a professor of international relations at Boston University.

“What else can we do?” said Dunbar, who worked for the State Department in Tehran from 1963 to 1967.

The Revolutionary Guard would be the first military unit of a sovereign government ever placed on the department’s list of terrorist organizations. The move would allow the Treasury Department to go after the group’s finances and those of its reputed business network inside and outside Iran.

The Bush administration has been engaging Iran in a increasingly strident war of words since the spring, when the Bush administration demanded tougher U.N. sanctions over Iran’s nuclear energy program. The White House says that Bush remains committed to diplomatic and financial actions to persuade Iran to stop enriching nuclear fuel, which the U.S. says can be made into a bomb but that Iran insists is intended only for electricity generation.

Recently, the administration has stepped up the rhetoric, accusing Iran of providing Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq with particularly deadly roadside bombs that have killed dozens of U.S. service members.

“We are confronting Iranian behavior across a variety of different fronts on a number of different, quote- unquote, battlefields, if you will,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon temporarily moved an additional aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran. U.S. commanders in Iraq have also highlighted intelligence they say shows that the Revolutionary Guard’s Qods force is shipping sophisticated road-side bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq.

Bush and his aides also have accused Iran of playing an unhelpful role in Afghanistan — although some State Department officials say the reality is much more complicated.

Finally, Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to the Middle East in late July and early August, bearing promises of billions in weapons sales to friendly Arab states and a $30 billlion, 10-year military aid package to Israel. The rationale: Iran.

What remains unclear is what the administration will do if none of those steps has an impact on Iran, whose leaders seem confident as they see Bush unpopular at home and bogged down in Iraq.

“The coercion … undermines diplomacy. And once diplomacy is undermined, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By early 2008, “You’re in a position where you have a series of escalatory measures … And then the military option becomes something you can consider,” Takeyh said.

On the nuclear front, since taking office in 2005, Rice has backed a European-led effort to persuade Iran to stop enriching uranium in exchange for economic, political and security benefits.

The U.N. Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran for its nuclear work. But negotiations on a third have stalled and a September deadline for enacting new sanctions will likely be missed, say State Department officials and diplomats.

Critics say that designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group could further undermine the effort, and also scuttle U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad on Iraq’s security. Those talks have achieved little.

On Iran’s role in Iraq, U.S. ground commanders in Iraq oppose proposals from Cheney and his allies to counter-attack inside Iran itself, saying they believe they can contain Iran’s growing influence without acting outside Iraq.

Privately, some are hostile to suggestions that the military strike another country, saying they are mired in Iraq.

“Let them put on the uniform and go there then,” said one military official in Baghdad who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, said Friday that Shi’ite factions, backed by Iranian groups, are now responsible for nearly half the attacks in Iraq, compared to 30 percent in January.

Odierno said he could deal with the problem inside Iraq, without going over the border into Iran. But he conceded that the military still is learning about how Iranian networks run through Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: The State Department is coming under criticism this week for refusing to allow a prominent South African social scientist to enter the country. Adam Habib was scheduled to speak at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York this past weekend, but the government refused to give him a visa.

Ironically, the theme of this year’s sociology conference was “Is Another World Possible?” At the conference, the ASA planned a series of sessions to assess the potential for progressive social change both in the US and in the world and to invite a serious discussion of “economic globalization” and its consequences.

One of the most highly anticipated sessions was to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally known economist and a former special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The theme of her talk was “Lost Worlds.” This is Naomi Klein.

NAOMI KLEIN: As we think about reaching this other possible world, I want to be very clear that I don’t believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.

I don’t think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at the risk of being accused of economic populism, I would just point out that in this city, the employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. It seems to me that there’s clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net. We don’t lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.

And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don’t believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don’t think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations — no offense — that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe we could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a (Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a (Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a (Product) Red iPhone, I still don’t think they would listen. That’s because elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas aren’t the problem, and money is not the problem, and I don’t think political will is ever the problem.

The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. That’s what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? What drains us of our conviction at crucial moments when we are tested? At the root, I think it’s the notion that we have accepted, which is that our ideas have already been tried and found wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the alternatives that we deserve and long for and that the world needs so desperately, like a healthcare system that doesn’t sicken us when we see it portrayed on film, like the ability to rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid profit-making for politically connected contractors, the right to have bridges that don’t collapse and subways that don’t flood when it rains. I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn’t the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

What was failing and collapsing when history was declared over was something very specific in 1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous declaration, and when the Washington Consensus was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing was centralized state communism, authoritarian, anti-democratic, repressive. Something very specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own. Now, this was the Fukuyama chutzpah, when he actually said — and it seems so strange to read it now — in his famous 1989 speech, that the significance of that moment was not that we were reaching an end of ideology, as some were suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it was not that ideology had ended, but that history as such had ended. He argued that deregulated markets in the economic sphere combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere represented the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government.

Now, what was interesting and never quite stated in this formulation was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn’t use your vote, you couldn’t use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only — it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn’t use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.

Now, I was drawn to the slogan that was chosen for this year’s ASA gathering, because I think, as many of you know and have read in the program, it comes from the World Social Forum. And I was at the first World Social Forum six-and-a-half years ago — more than six-and-a-half years ago in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was one of only a handful of North Americans who attended. And we gathered under that same slogan, but I think it’s significant and interesting that it wasn’t posed as a question back then. There was a proud exclamation mark at the end of the sentence: “Another world is possible!”

I wrote a feature article for The Nation when I came back from Brazil, trying to explain to readers in the US — the event wasn’t covered at all in this country, although it was covered very heavily in the international press — what it felt like to be there with 10,000 other people. And a lot of people were saying that they felt like we were making history. And what I wrote was that what it really felt like was the end of the end of history. That’s what it felt like to be in that room. It was this powerful gust of wind that you could suddenly breathe more deeply. You were free to imagine. Our minds were unleashed.

And it wasn’t just Porto Alegre, because Porto Alegre was the culmination of these types of spontaneous — often spontaneous uprisings that were happening around the world whenever world leaders were gathering to advance the so-called Washington Consensus, whether it was in Seattle at the WTO meeting in 1999, whether it was the IMF/World Bank meetings a few years later in Washington, then in Genoa during the G8. And, of course, the Zapatistas and the MST in Brazil were at the forefront.

And the theme in Porto Alegre was democracy. That was the — it was about redefining democracy to include the economy: deep democracy, participatory democracy. And it was a challenge to this idea that these two streams could not intersect. The right to land as a form of democracy, the right to biodiversity, to independent media. But what was most extraordinary about Porto Alegre was that — you know, certainly there were some politicians there, there were some big NGOs there, but the people who were at the podiums, who were shaping the discussion, were the people who were the casualties of this economic model, who were themselves discarded, made landless, forced to occupy pieces of land, chop down fences and plant food and make decisions democratically.

So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these model villages that he’s building in Africa. And many of them, you know, are making tremendous progress. But I can’t help thinking back to these field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST villages, where it was the people themselves, the landless people themselves, who were showing us their own model villages and were asking for our solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you understand this key distinction, that it was the actors who were the protagonists of their history, and that was what was historic. It was breaking the charity model in a very real way.

Now, I look at where we are now, six-and-a-half years later, and it does feel that we have moved backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos — now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the Davos Summit every year in January. This was the anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and now solving the world’s problems appears to be a matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And the idea that we don’t need to challenge these mass disparities, what we need is sort of noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.

Now, we know what closed that window of possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001, and it was September 11th in this country. And the window didn’t close everywhere, but it did close, at least temporarily, in North America, that sense of possibility, that putting these issues and the people affected by these policies at the center of the political debate. Now, the shock of those attacks, I think we can see with some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this country and their allies around the world to abruptly end the discussion of global justice that was exploding around the world. There was a door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11 changes everything. And one of the first things we were told that it had changed was that trade, privatization, labor rates, all the things we were fighting for just so recently no longer mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean. And it was another one of these rebooting history moments. History was apparently starting all over again from scratch, and nothing we knew before mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.

Now, the Bush administration justified this by saying that all that mattered was security and the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told that — by the US ambassador — that security trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove the US administration, but post-9/11 the only thing that mattered was security. So talk of economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.

Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while denying the importance of this economic project, the Bush administration used the dislocation of 9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance, under the cover of war and natural disasters. So forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the battlefields of his preemptive war. He didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote the country’s entire economic architecture in one swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war had anything to do with economics, you were dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam.

Meanwhile, at home the administration quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through a radical vision of hollow government, in which everything from waging wars to reconstructing from those wars to disaster response became an entirely for-profit venture. This was a bold evolution of market logic. Rather than the ’90s approach of selling off existing public companies, like water and electricity, the Bush team was creating a whole new framework for its actions. That framework was and is the war on terror, which was built to be private, privately managed from the start. The Bush administration played the role of a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup security companies, and they created an economic boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. But we didn’t talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security.

Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage process, which was using 9/11, of course, to radically increase the surveillance and security powers of the state, concentrated in the executive branch, but at the same time to take those powers and outsource them to a web of private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing, AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group. Now, in the ’80s, the goal of privatization — and in the ’90s — was devouring the appendages of the state. But what was happening now is it was the core that was being devoured, because what is more central to the very definition of a state of a government than security and disaster response? Now, this is one of the great ironies of the war on terror, is that it proved such an effective weapon to furthering the corporate agenda precisely because it denied that it has, and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.

Now, it had another benefit, too, which was the ability to pay anyone who opposed this system as aligned with potential terrorists and so on. So our movement, which was already facing extreme repression before 9/11, was put on notice as traitorous. Looking back, it’s clear that the shock, the disorientation caused by the attacks, was used to reassert this economic agenda, to reassert that consensus that never really was. The window that was opened at the end of the ’90s in the movement known as the anti-globalization movement, but which was always a pro-democracy movement, was slammed shut, at least in North America. And it was terror that slammed it shut. The alternatives started to disappear.

Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this — if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair’s third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

Now, this kind of preemptive attack on our democratic alternatives, the persistent dream of a third way, of a real third way, has come up again and again. And this is what I discuss at length in the book, but I want to mention a couple of examples — unless I’m totally out of time? OK — examples of moments where there was a similar sense of effervescent possibility of being able to breathe more and dream more fully.

One of them was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was the day of the historic elections in Poland that elected Solidarity as the new government. They hadn’t had elections there in decades. And this was the event that really set off the domino — what’s now referred to as the domino effect in Eastern Bloc countries — and ultimately resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet Union. But it’s worth remembering what it actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland, people didn’t think that history was over, because they had just elected Solidarity as their government. They thought that history was just beginning and that they were finally going to be able to implement what the movement, which was a labor movement, had always seen as the third way, the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity’s vision was not a rejection of socialism. They said that they were calling for “real socialism,” as socialists often do, and it was a rejection of the Communist party. They were everything that the party was not: dispersed where it was centralized, democratic where it was authoritarian, participatory where it was bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state.

So when people went to the polls and elected a Solidarity government, what were they voting for? What did they think they were voting for? Did they think that they were voting to become a free market economy on the model that Francis Fukuyama was talking about? No, they didn’t. They thought they were voting for the labor party that they had helped to build.

And I just want to read you a short passage from Solidarity’s economic program, which was passed democratically in 1981. They said, “The socialized enterprise should be the basic organizational unit in the economy. It should be controlled by the workers’ council representing the collective” and should be operated — cooperatively run by a director appointed through competition, recalled by the council, workers’ cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party out of control of the economy, to decentralize it and have the people who were doing the work actually control their workplaces. And they believed that they could make them more sustainable.

Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as the centerpiece of the economy, to have democratic elections but still have socialism? Did they get that chance when they voted for Solidarity? No, they didn’t. What they got was an inherited debt, and they were told that the only way that they would get any relief from that debt and any aid is if they followed a very radical shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the person who prescribed that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And I — no, I say that because I really had hoped that we could debate these different worlds, because there are differences, there are real differences that we must not smooth over.

Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were unemployed, 40%, last year. That’s twice the EU average. And Poland is often held up as a great success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the Poland’s population was living below the poverty line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the line. That’s that opening of that gap. That’s what these economic policies do. And then, we can say we’re very, very worried about the people at the bottom, let’s bring them up, but let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. These jarring levels of inequality and economic exclusion are now feeding a resurgence of chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, rampant homophobia in Poland. And I think we can see, actually, that it’s inevitable that this would be the case, because they tried communism, they tried capitalism, they tried democratic socialism, but they got shock therapy instead. After you’ve tried all that, there really isn’t a whole lot left but fascism. It’s dangerous to suppress democratic alternatives when people invest their dreams in them. It’s risky business.

Another one of these powerful dreams was Tiananmen Square, and it’s a sort of a very sad fluke of history that on the same day that Solidarity won those historic elections and that dream was betrayed, what they voted for was betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989. It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility.

Now, the way those protests were always reported on in the West was that students in Beijing just wanted to live like in the United States. And they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-American–style democracy protests.

But in recent years, an alternative analysis of those events has emerged. And what we’re starting to hear from what’s being called China’s New Left, and people like Wang Hui, who’s a wonderful academic, is that this was a vast oversimplification of what was driving the pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was driving it was that the government of Deng Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy along with the lines that had been prescribed by Milton Friedman — economic shock therapy — and people were seeing their quality of life devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And they were taking to the streets and demanding democratic control over the economic transition.

So democracy wasn’t an abstract idea. It wasn’t just “We want to vote.” It was, “We want to control this transition. We want to have a say in it.” It was a direct challenge to the Fukuyama formulation, which, by the way, was made that same year: the idea that you would have these two streams and that they wouldn’t intersect.

I just want to read one other thing, which is another one of these paths not taken, because we know how that one ended in Tiananmen Square: that dream was crushed. Another historic moment of possibility, when we look back on our recent history, was 1994, when the ANC government won landslide elections in South Africa. That was a victory for people power. That was one of the most hopeful days that I can remember.

I think we should remember what South Africans thought they were voting for in those historic elections. You know, it was just portrayed as something very simple: it was an end to apartheid. But what did an end to apartheid mean to South Africans? And we can get an answer from that actually from Nelson Mandela, who wrote a little note two weeks before he was released from prison. And he wrote this note because there was a growing concern that he had been in prison so long that he had forgotten the promise of liberation, which was not just to have elections, but to change the economy of the country and redistribute the wealth. And Mandela was under so much pressure that he had to release this very short statement just to clarify this point. And what he said was, “The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy of the ANC and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable in our situation. State control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.” And this was a reiteration of South Africa’s Freedom Charter, which is the platform of the ANC, which calls for the national wealth of South Africa, the heritage of the country, to be restored for the people, the mineral wealth and so on.

Now, I say this because this was one of those worlds that wasn’t chosen, one of those paths that wasn’t chosen. And I spent the past four years pulling these stolen and betrayed alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent history, because I think it matters. I think it matters that we had ideas all along, that there were always alternatives to the free market. And we need to retell our own history and understand that history, and we have to have all the shocks and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that story, because history didn’t end. There were alternatives. They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.