The Rag Blog

Here are some excerpts on war from Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution. …

‘I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution.’

Dr. King was not saying that war cannot solve military problems, you will note. He was saying that it cannot solve social problems. He would have scoffed at the Neoconservative idea that you can spread democracy by war or can improve peoples’ economy by war. He thought that the mid twentieth century was witnessing a revolution in human affairs that made war increasingly unacceptable. He probably had in mind nuclear weapons, the use of which normal people consider too horrible to contemplate. He may also have been thinking of Gandhi’s attempt to use non-violent non-cooperation in India to expel the British without resorting to guerrilla war.

President Kennedy said on one occasion, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war. I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord.’

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times—those on the sidelines of history—keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.

We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools—the believers—have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.

Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The time has come to ask the question:

Can it be that our president is not just wrong, not just stubborn, not just acting on sinister but purposeful motives, but mad as a hatter – in the clinical sense? Is the President of the United States of America, mentally ill?

Ever since Bush’s speech Wednesday night I’ve listened carefully as media analysts and members Congress try to make sense out of what Bush proposed. For Congress the effort comes about four years late. But rather than being relieved to hear them finally asking tough questions, I was left scratching my head. It occurred to me everyone was trying to make sense out something that was demonstrably “sense-less.” Not senseless in just the policy, strategic or moral sense, but senseless as in “insane.” (Hell, Bush not only was saying crazy things Wednesday night, but he even “looked” crazy.)

That thought left me wondering if maybe I was the one that was insane. I mean the implications of that, if true, were terrifying. After all, it’s one thing to have guy in the Oval Office who’s a crook — we’ve been there, done that, and survived. But it’s quite another matter to have a certifiable lunatic in that position at a time of war. (Just ask the Germans.)

To find out if there could possibly be a shred of proof for my suspicions I turned off the TV and went online and spent the day searching through the latest psychology papers and texts.

The Turks would need six hundred thousand men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had one hundred thousand men available… The Turk was stupid and would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of absolute warfare. Analogy is fudge, anyhow, and to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
–T.E. Lawrence

Previously, I had likened the upcoming Baghdad operation to the Battle of Hue, but this association is probably not the most appropriate. Hue was a clash of conventional forces in an insurgency or unconventional war that was evolving into the next phase, which was conventional. This analysis is correct even considering the irregular Vietcong units engaged in the city, as they were fighting alongside conventional North Vietnamese forces.

The Warsaw Ghetto battle of 1944, which pitted regular Nazi combat forces against the pitiable Jewish resistance forces confined to the ghetto is probably more apt.

This is not to ignore the obvious disparities. The materiel situation in Warsaw was dire. Obviously, the Baghdad resistance will have been laying in supplies; however, once the fighting begins, they will be cut off.

Although the Iraqi resistance (both Sunni and Shia) is well-armed and organized in the parity of their combat power vis a vis the American forces, they cannot possibly strategically defeat the U.S. forces. The U.S. Army will dominate all the fights, but the war is lost for us before the first shot is fired.

This is not a straight line analogy, to be sure; nothing is.

The White House said today that Iranians are aiding the insurgency in Iraq and that the US has the authority to pursue them because they “put our people at risk.”

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

And said Vice President Dick Cheney: “Iran is fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq.”

Earlier today, the US military in Baghdad said that five Iranians arrested in northern Iraq last week were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

Raids that US President George Bush has approved against Iranian targets in Iraq are part of broad efforts to confront Tehran’s aggression, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday while in Jerusalem.

“We do not want them doing what they can to destabilise the situation inside Iraq,” Cheney said.

President Bush’s revised war strategy seeks to isolate Iran and Syria, which the US has accused of fuelling attacks in Iraq. The president also says that Iran and Syria have not done enough to block terrorists from entering Iraq over their borders.

“We know there are jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq. … We know also that Iran is supplying elements in Iraq that are attacking Iraqis and attacking our forces,” Hadley said.

“Dictators can be popular. [Fidel] Castro has been immensely popular, he has been in power for 50 years, and the same could happen with [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chávez. If he perseveres in his policy to promote his Bolivarian revolution by investing his petro-dollars, he could attain more successes than those achieved so far, which are not just a few.”

These are the words of Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian novelist and literary critic.

So, Mario Vargas Llosa wants to babble or battle ideologically about the popularity of alleged “dictators” and the “successes” of Hugo Chavez.

Vargas Llosa in the early 1960s was something of an admirer of Fidel and the Cuban Revolution. But tragically he later fell under the influence of the reactionary bourgeois US economist Milton Friedman, a leading and half-baked theoretician of neo-liberalism, who advised privatizing of everything in the country; abolishing social security programs for the workers, middle class, and the poor; paying half or more of gross domestic product to imperialist creditors and international financial organizations; and granting abject concessions to lure investment from foreign capitalists. The essence of neo-liberalism is the policy of enriching a few by greatly decreasing the purchasing power of the vast majority of the people.

In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru on an insane neo-liberal platform which was more extreme than the crackpot theories of bourgeois economist Milton Friedman; he lost in a run-off to Alberto Fujimori. In the 2006 presidential elections in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was lavishly paid by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency of International Development (USAID), to support their neo-liberal candidate Lourdes Flores. Flores ran a sorry third in a field of three main candidates — revolutionary patriot Ollanta Humala and bourgeois opportunist Alan Garcia were the other two. In the run-off, Vargas Llosa, in step with the wishes of the US regime, supported Alan Garcia whom Vargas distastefully endorsed as “the lesser of two evils.” Garcia won, amid fraud charges..

During the last twenty years, as the quality and quantity of Mario Vargas Llosa’s artistic work as novelist and literary critic shrunk to pathetic levels, he intensified and expanded his political and ideological services … for handsome fees … to US imperialism. Vargas Llosa, rigid and mechanistic, has no talent for ideological struggle; he merely exploits his prestige as a novelist. Although his artistic gifts are clearly fading, he should stick to art.

Anyway.

A CONCEPT OF DEMOCRACY

Dictatorship, like democracy, admits to a number of definitions. The most widely held definition of dictatorship is some kind of negation of democracy. At the most rudimentary level, democracy, we are sometimes told, is a form of state in which:

1. Supreme power over a territory and people resides in the body of citizens entitled to vote. This sometimes called the sovereignty principle.

2. These citizens elect at least the key representatives who actually exercise power or the so-called electoral principle.

3. These representatives are accountable to the citizens through such institutions like recall elections, reelections, separation of powers, independent judiciary, free press, etc. This of course is the celebrated accountability principle.

4. Finally, these elected representatives exercise power in accordance with the rule of law; obviously this is the often cited and extolled principle of the rule of law.

So, the most widely held definition of dictatorship seems to entail the negation of one or more of these four rudimentary democratic principles.

01/12/07 “Information Clearing House” — – Sometimes you look around and wonder how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. America has become the antithesis of everything she purports to be. We are the greatest purveyors of violence the world has ever known; the largest weapons dealers on earth; and death and misery are our principal exports. Everything is for sale here, even men’s tormented souls—at least, those who still possess them.

Our imperial leader, an impish little man with clear sociopathic symptoms, is incapable of empathy for the struggles of the common people, as those born into wealth and privilege often are. The man with his finger on the nuclear detonator is mentally ill, incapable of remorse — a fact that should terrify every world citizen. I do not say this out of malice or to demean the president; it is simply a statement of fact based upon quantifiable evidence that any student of psychology would easily recognize.

The fact that such a misfit could ascend to the presidency is testimony to the effectiveness of the capital system. Under capitalism, political power is not derived from the people, as would be the case in a democracy; nor does it not flow from the bottom up—it matriculates from the top down. It is really quite simple: The men and women who are in office were put there by people with immense wealth to represent the interests of the wealthy, to make money for them. And that is exactly what they are doing.

In many ways, George W. Bush is the perfect man for the job, if one understands what his real work entails as an emissary of the ruling class. He possesses all of the qualifications the vocation requires: callousness and indifference to the needs of others, the absence of conscience, truncated mental capacity; the inability to reason and to analyze; the incapacity to admit wrong doing; a penchant for cruelty that includes the enjoyment of inflicting pain and torture on others, as well as a powerful sense of nobility and entitlement that stems from being born into wealth and privilege. He is also a pathological liar.

From the president’s sickly perspective, the admission of failure is equivalent to a declaration of weakness and indecision, which explains his inability to change course, even if it means the destruction of America. Thus he has no guilt about sending thousands more men and women to kill and die in Iraq. You see, the president’s mind is defective. It does not work like the minds of normal human beings.

Corporate America placed George W. Bush in the White House to wage endless war; to bankrupt the federal treasury to the extent that few social programs will survive, and virtually all of our tax dollars will go into supporting the military industrial complex. The people who put him in office intend to end public ownership of the commons, as well as all government programs that do not directly benefit the wealthy.

Let me clarify what this entails. If Bush and his handlers prevail in the class struggle, all social programs of value to the middle class and the poor, including Social Security, will be privatized and run for profit. The National Parks, National Forests, and all public lands will be privatized, and divvied up to private vendors such as the Disney Corporation. The public school system, like the public airwaves, will become for profit entities to serve corporate interests. Educating our children will be of secondary importance to the profitability of the corporations managing the schools. Every public service will be transferred to the private sector in order provide more wealth to corporate America at public expense.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in Ron Ridenour’s wonderful series on his volunteer farm work in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union which left Cuba in dire economic straits. The response of the Cuban people to their devastating losses at that time are not only creative and resourceful, but downright exemplary and inspiring. If you missed the Ridenour’s first report on his work in 1992-1993, we encourage you to read it first as it sets the stage for his second report below. – Les Blough, Editor

Food Distribution

Batabano’s Farm production director, Aldolfo Montalvo, and Contingente Col. Mambi Juan Delgado overall leader biggest headache in achieving the huge and new task of feeding much of the province of Havana was distributing the harvests before they wasted away.

I attended the first national assembly meeting in Havana concerning the progress of plan alimentario, in which distribution was discussed. Candido Palmero, the chief of Contingente Blas Roca, one of the most distinguished contingents, delivered a report to the nation’s leaders. Palmero had recently been named head of all the new agricultural contingents. He told the deputies that the contingents could guarantee the production goals for next year but there was one major problem. The large calloused-handed man paused. He and Fidel looked at one other from across the large hall. The president gestured for Candido to continue.

“What I can’t guarantee is that you will eat all the harvested crops, because we don´t have our own trucks to distribute the goods.”

Palmero now spoke to a hushed assembly. “We recommend that farm-workers should have the responsibility, the authority and the means to do the entire job, from breaking ground to delivery.”

A food truck unloading in Havana. In the early-to-mid nineties old trucks like these were used to distribute food. All that has changed since the Bolivarian Revolution began in Venezuela.

Fidel enthusiastically agreed and so did the deputies, who decided that each state farm would get its own transportation to delivery production. This would first be tried in Havana’s fifteen municipalities. The bureaucratic distribution system is a centralized one in which all harvests are transported to central markets, called Acopios, where they are unloaded. Smaller distribution trucks are then assigned to load the products again and distribute them to smaller neighborhood markets. This process is almost never carried out in a timely fashion. The double work of loading and unloading, and transporting results in constant losses of edible foods.

In 1993, Defense Minister Raúl Castro said that the Farming Production Cooperatives (CPA) were six times more effective than the state collectives. CPAs had been formed in the 1960s as cooperatives of private farmers, owners and usufructaries. Members share in profits from sales and can hire day laborers at peak times. State farm workers received fix wages regardless of production quantity or quality. Raúl proposed that most of the granjas, which held 80% of agricultural lands (four million hectares), be transformed into new usufruct cooperatives with some CPA benefits.

The government then established a new cooperative structure, Basic Unit of Co-operative Production-UBPC, “to simulate greater production”.
Key features of the new UBPC decree-law 142 are:

* Co-operative members have full use of the land without owning it—unlike CPAs where co-operators are full owners.

* UBPC members are owners of production, like the CPAs, in that they are free to work and organize as they choose but must sell their produce to the state at agreed upon prices.

* Farm equipment, seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, petroleum, parts, irrigation and other supplies are provided by the state on credit.

* Labor is paid, in part, by profit-sharing. The state advances an average monthly wage and capital to get started. Credit is repaid from the sale of harvests.

* UBPCs must be cost-accountable, profitable enterprises.

* UBPC members elect their leadership, which is subject to recall. Worker leadership represents all workers before state managers and state investors.

Hidden behind the smoke of firing guns and chaotic scenes in Iraq is the greedy face of Multinational Corporations and their political patrons, who have been waiting to make a killing in the oil fields of Iraq. Oil exploration and extraction used to be a state enterprise of Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s rule. With Saddam Hussein through the gallows, one obstruction is cleared.

Oil, the “Black-Blood” of Global Economy, is an Iraqi natural resource. But the draft legislation is on the table to be presented to the Iraqi parliament to sign it into a law. It is currently being termed as “Hydrocarbon Law”. This law will allow oil-hawks to take a bigger bite out of the energy resource in the war ridden and collapsed state of Iraq. It is going to be called Production Sharing Agreement (PSA). Common practice for investments is to offers rights for extraction for 10-15 year whereas in case of Iraq it may be up to 30 years. Until the costs of a project have been recovered oil companies would be allowed to keep 70% of the profit. Elsewhere 40% would be a standard. Once the costs are recouped the companies’ share falls to 20%, which is still double other comparable agreement.

There were prophetic voices in the world alarming about greed for oil when WMD-danger was being moved as an argument for invasion of Iraq. British and the US high officials, at that time, had vehemently denied any intentions of controlling Iraqi oil. Tony Blair went to the extent of saying that Iraqi oil should be put into a trust fund to be run by UN for Iraqis. Obviously, it seems that the promises made before the war have been conveniently forgotten.

There are vast oil reserves in many parts of the world. Iraq has about 115 billion barrels, the second largest in the world. Despite the present violence there, it appears to be most promising for future profits. Elsewhere there are hindrances like tight controls of states, limitations on extraction of oil as in Venezuela by Hugo Chavez, and high cost of drilling out of North America etc. These are few factors for looking at huge oil fields in Iraq where the oil geological stratum is not too far deep under the surface. It will translate into the lowest cost of extraction in the whole world.

In a scenario where cost of extraction remains the same as the selling price is not a viable business strategy, to state the obvious; projections in case of Iraq are that there will be high yield with good profit margins. Oil corporations have always been aware of this fact. This fact alone makes the core of US Middle East foreign policy that was turning progressively hawkish against Iraq over the decades, partly due to the absence of polarity in the world that former Soviet Union provided and partly due to Saddam Hussein’s nationalism-based opposition to opening oil fields to private corporations for extraction of oil.

Here we have one branch of the Traditional Media reporting the true facts on the ground only to have the elite crew in the White House press corps ignore it when the president lies about these same facts to the very uniformed military personnel he intends to send into harm’s way.

If I’m lying, you’re dying: Pres. Bush was caught rewriting recent history in a speech he gave Thursday to the troops at Ft. Benning, Georgia, some of whom are preparing for their third deployment to Iraq. Here is the transcript of the president’s load of bull:

“The [Iraqi] Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we’ve got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work. . . .

“The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to — by the way, that’s what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don’t want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won’t work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence. . . .

“And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr. President, it’s not going to work until — unless we support — provide more troops. And so last night I told the country that I’ve committed an additional — a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad.”

Meanwhile, back in reality, the facts are quite different. The strategy of escalating the war came from the West Wing, not the Iraqi leadership or Bush’s generals:

[A Washington Post story Wednesday] made it abundantly clear that adding U.S. troops was not an idea that emerged from the American commanders — nor, for that matter, from the Iraqis.

And, as it turns out, two stories in this morning’s New York Times add to the evidence: “A narrative pieced together from interviews with participants and from public testimony suggests that through much of the process, generals who had been on the ground in Iraq during the past year had favored that the new strategy begin with a substantially smaller force than the one that President Bush announced to the nation on Wednesday night. In the end, it was Mr. Bush who appeared to drive his commanders along to the conclusion that more troops were needed.”

Not only were the Iraqis not involved in creating the plan, they are not happy about it, according to another Times report:

So, not surprisingly: “Iraq’s Shiite-led government offered only a grudging endorsement on Thursday of President Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. The tepid response immediately raised questions about whether the government would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan.”

Where was the White House press corps on this? Didn’t anyone in that elite corps of journalists know the facts about the origins of the escalation?

Or maybe the president lies so often, they’re inured to it.