Noam Chomsky | Prerogatives of Power

By Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed

(Photo: Travis Dove / The New York Times)

As the year 2013 drew to an end, the BBC reported on the results of the WIN/Gallup International poll on the question: “Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?”

The United States was the champion by a substantial margin, winning three times the votes of second-place Pakistan.

By contrast, the debate in American scholarly and media circles is about whether Iran can be contained, and whether the huge NSA surveillance system is needed to protect U.S. security.

In view of the poll, it would seem that there are more pertinent questions: Can the United States be contained and other nations secured in the face of the U.S. threat?

In some parts of the world the United States ranks even higher as a perceived menace to world peace, notably in the Middle East, where overwhelming majorities regard the U.S. and its close ally Israel as the major threats they face, not the U.S.-Israeli favorite: Iran.

Few Latin Americans are likely to question the judgment of Cuban nationalist hero José Martí, who wrote in 1894 that “The further they draw away from the United States, the freer and more prosperous the [Latin] American people will be.”

Martí’s judgment has been confirmed in recent years, once again by an analysis of poverty by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean, released last month.

The U.N. report shows that far-reaching reforms have sharply reduced poverty in Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and some other countries where U.S. influence is slight, but that it remains abysmal in others – namely, those that have long been under U.S. domination, like Guatemala and Honduras. Even in relatively wealthy Mexico, under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement, poverty is severe, with 1 million added to the numbers of the poor in 2013.

Sometimes the reasons for the world’s concerns are obliquely recognized in the United States, as when former CIA director Michael Hayden, discussing Obama’s drone murder campaign, conceded that “Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.”

A normal country would be concerned by how it is viewed in the world. Certainly that would be true of a country committed to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” to quote the Founding Fathers. But the United States is far from a normal country. It has had the most powerful economy in the world for a century, and has had no real challenge to its global hegemony since World War II, despite some decline, partly self-administered.

The U.S., conscious of “soft power,” undertakes major campaigns of “public diplomacy” (aka propaganda) to create a favorable image, sometimes accompanied by worthwhile policies that are welcomed. But when the world persists in believing that the United States is by far the greatest threat to peace, the American press scarcely reports the fact.

The ability to ignore unwanted facts is one of the prerogatives of unchallenged power. Closely related is the right to radically revise history.

A current example can be seen in the laments about the escalating Sunni-Shiite conflict that is tearing apart the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Syria. The prevailing theme of U.S. commentary is that this strife is a terrible consequence of the withdrawal of American force from the region – a lesson in the dangers of “isolationism.”

The opposite is more nearly correct. The roots of the conflict within Islam are many and varied, but it cannot be seriously denied that the split was significantly exacerbated by the American- and British-led invasion of Iraq. And it cannot be too often repeated that aggression was defined at the Nuremberg Trials as “the supreme international crime,” differing from others in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, including the current catastrophe.

A remarkable illustration of this rapid inversion of history is the American reaction to the current atrocities in Fallujah. The dominant theme is the pain about the sacrifices, in vain, of the American soldiers who fought and died to liberate Fallujah. A look at the news reports of the U.S. assaults on Fallujah in 2004 quickly reveals that these were among the most vicious and disgraceful war crimes of the aggression.

Jonas Savimbi—the onetime Maoist and later professional anticommunist, became a cynical tool of Western imperialists. Savimbi was strongly supported by the influential, conservative Heritage Foundation. Heritage foreign policy analyst Michael Johns and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in Jamba and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government. The African-American Texas State Representative Clay Smothers of Dallas was a strong Savimbi supporter.[12]

Jonas Savimbi—the onetime Maoist and later professional anticommunist, became an effective tool of Western imperialists. Savimbi was strongly supported by the influential, conservative Heritage Foundation. Heritage foreign policy analyst Michael Johns and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in Jamba and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government. The African-American Texas State Representative Clay Smothers of Dallas was a strong Savimbi supporter.[12]

The death of Nelson Mandela provides another occasion for reflection on the remarkable impact of what has been called “historical engineering”: reshaping the facts of history to serve the needs of power.When Mandela at last obtained his freedom, he declared that “During all my years in prison, Cuba was an inspiration and Fidel Castro a tower of strength. . [Cuban victories] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa . a turning point for the liberation of our continent – and of my people – from the scourge of apartheid. . What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”

Today the names of Cubans who died defending Angola from U.S.-backed South African aggression, defying American demands that they leave the country, are inscribed on the “Wall of Names” in Pretoria’s Freedom Park. And the thousands of Cuban aid workers who sustained Angola, largely at Cuban expense, are also not forgotten.

The U.S.-approved version is quite different. From the first days after South Africa agreed to withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia in 1988, paving the way for the end of apartheid, the outcome was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as a “splendid achievement” of American diplomacy, “one of the most significant foreign policy achievements of the Reagan administration.”

The reasons why Mandela and South Africans perceive a radically different picture are spelled out in Piero Gleijeses’ masterful scholarly inquiry “Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991.”

As Gleijeses convincingly demonstrates, South Africa’s aggression and terrorism in Angola and its occupation of Namibia were ended by “Cuban military might” accompanied by “fierce black resistance” within South Africa and the courage of Namibian guerrillas. The Namibian liberation forces easily won fair elections as soon as these were possible. Similarly, in elections in Angola, the Cuban-backed government prevailed – while the United States continued to support vicious opposition terrorists there even after South Africa was compelled to back away.

To the end, the Reaganites remained virtually alone in their strong support for the apartheid regime and its murderous depredations in neighboring countries. Though these shameful episodes may be wiped out of internal U.S. history, others are likely to understand Mandela’s words.

In these and all too many other cases, supreme power does provide protection against reality – to a point.

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian. Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.

Let Them Eat Symbols

Obama’s Plan for the Long-Term Unemployed

by AJAMU BARAKA, Black Agenda Report
The Obama – Clinton centrists who make-up the dominant core of the Democratic party, along with a subordinate sliver of liberal reformers, have no substantive policy prescriptions to offer the long-term unemployed or the general U.S. public beyond inchoate policy recommendations framed as representing the elements of an “opportunity agenda.”

“Let them eat empty rhetoric.”

It is a point of historical controversy whether or not when told that French peasants did not have bread to eat, Marie Antoinette uttered the phrase “Let them eat cake,” an even more inaccessible and scarce food for poor people. But what is certain and should be beyond controversy is that in response to the capitalist implosion that shattered so many lives, Obama and the corporate democrats have demonstrated a policy attitude as cavalier as the French queen. Over the last five years, they have offered neither bread nor cake or anything other than false hope and empty symbols.

On the Friday after Obama’s tepid State of the Union Speech – a speech in which he pledged his concern for the long-term unemployed and low-wage workers – the Administration brought members of the corporate and financial elite to the white house to discuss strategies for addressing the plight of the long-term unemployed. Not surprisingly since this meeting was nothing more than one of many events planned as part of the democrats’ media strategy to better position the party for the mid-term elections, the only thing that emerged from this gathering was photo ops and diversionary rhetoric.

Notwithstanding the predictable outcome of this meeting, it did graphically demonstrate once again the incredible cynicism of the Obama administration.

Obama and the corporate democrats have only one primary objective – holding on to power so that they can continue to enjoy the state banquets, media attention and campaign dollars that derive from the benefits of being the “party in charge.” The fact that they are playing with the lives and hopes of millions of people who are desperately looking for some relief from the material and psychological insecurities of life on the edge are of little real concern for these party operatives.

The Obama – Clinton centrists who make-up the dominant core of the Democratic party, along with a subordinate sliver of liberal reformers, have no substantive policy prescriptions to offer the long-term unemployed or the general U.S. public beyond inchoate policy recommendations framed as representing the elements of an “opportunity agenda.”

The references to creating opportunities is an ideological mystification meant to suggest that reversing the decades of economic restructuring, stagnant and declining wages, unemployment and expanding poverty can be easily corrected by simple will and the right mixture of incentives for private sector capital. It is as though these realities are just the result of incorrect policies and not the inherent logic of capitalist processes.

This was the underlining implication of Obama’s business summit on Friday – that the specific issue of the long-term unemployed can be solved by a more focused determination on the part of the private sector to hire those workers.

The shameless appeal to opportunity agendas by Obama and the democrats in the midst of a global capitalist meltdown is even more dishonest than their counterparts on the more extreme right. Because for traditional conservatism, there has never been any pretense toward believing in relatively equal outcomes in the capitalist market. Inequality, and by extension income inequality, unemployment, and “winners and losers” in the market, are all expressions of a natural social order when people are “free” to pursue their self-interests.

Democrats and reform liberalism, in contrast, claim to be committed to the rights of labor, social justice, legal equality and a progressive role for the state. Yet, in the era of neoliberalism, which has an ideological component as well as representing conscious policy decisions in the economic sphere, the philosophical and policy differences of those two approaches have almost been obliterated, reduced now to policy differences that are more tactical than substantial, notwithstanding the tea-party critique of the democrat party and Obama.

Obama and the democrats understand and accept that the contemporary logic of global neoliberalism means that the U.S. economy is being restructured and that millions of workers are being shifted into low-wage service sector jobs, for those lucky enough to be employed. Low wages, unequal regional economic development, extreme income inequality, disproportionately high unemployment rates for African Americans and other racialized national groups with astronomical unemployment rates among the youth sector of these groups, are all a structurally determined consequence of neoliberal social policies, and liberals understand this.

Obama knows and understands, like his more conservative counterparts, that capitalist production processes and the market will produce “winners and losers” and that for the most part the financial and corporate elite will always be on the winning side. But as a neoliberal market fundamentalist, he accepts those outcomes as an inevitable outcome of the market that, in the end, benefits enough people to be morally justifiable. That is why at the meeting at the white house on Friday he could praise CEOs for creating 8 million jobs over the last five years while knowing that most of those jobs were low-wage, service sector jobs.

Here, however, is where the historical task of radical intellectuals and activists come in. It should not be surprising that the administration would engage in the kind of vacuous antics we witnessed at the White House’s business summit last week. The ruling elite seems to understand even more clearly than radicals that the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are creating potentially explosive social conditions and are intentionally attempting to divert attention away from capitalism’s contradictions.

Obama’s feel good rhetoric and his Administration’s minimalist program of “promise zones,” corporate funded jobs programs that don’t actually employ anyone and rhetorical concern for income inequality, are preemptive moves geared to mitigate any demands that might emerge for fundamental reforms or radical change.

Today the principle strategic challenge for U.S. radicalism is grounded in the question of whether or not the left can overcome its’ ideological and organizational fragmentation in order to develop a counter-narrative and a minimum program of opposition to neoliberalism.

It is clear that without uncompromisingly radical organizations and a language of opposition that pierces the ideological fog that obscures the class bias of the state and state policies, working people and the poor will continue to be marginalized, ignored and eventually disappeared as they fall through the gaping holes in the social safety net. This is already happening to African Americans in places like Detroit, the South Side of Chicago and other parts of the country as a result of their new status as an economically “redundant” population.

Therefore, giving voice and organized institutional expression to what the system would prefer to be experienced as private, individualized suffering, has to be seen as one of the main tasks of an oppositional movement in the U.S. Until a new movement is developed that gives national expression to the plight of workers and the poor, the millions of people who are struggling to survive without jobs or income support from the government will continue to be silenced. And the Obama Administration and the administrations that follow will content themselves with governing with crude propaganda and symbolism for as long as they can get away with it.

Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist and organizer. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. His latest publications include contributions to two recently published books “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and “Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral.” He can be reached at AjamuBaraka.com

Obama’s Weak Enviro Agenda Is Suicide for Humanity — Here’s the Stark Future We Face

AlterNet [1] / By Tara Lohan [2] comments_image

Apparently it makes no difference to the corrupt Obama regime whether or not the planet goes to hell in a basket due to clear criminal inaction.

Are there any self-respecting environmental organizations out there that are still behind President Obama? After his State of the Union on Tuesday it’s hard to imagine there could be. In his address, Obama proudly declared, “The ‘all the above’ energy strategy I announced a few years ago is working, and today America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades.”

Based what we know from the most recent climate science, Obama’s “all-of-the-above” energy policy is actually suicidal. To say that we’re approaching a dangerous precipice would be too optimistic or simply unrealistic. For a decade we were peering over the edge, but now we’re falling—how long and how hard depends on what we do this year and in the next few years.

The biggest reason for our desperate situation is our failure to address climate change. Obama acknowledges that the problem is real, but his approach to energy issues veers from reality. The more science we understand, the worse the picture looks: ice sheets and glaciers are being depleted and are retreating at faster rates than we first thought; ocean acificiation is on the rise; the last 30 years were the warmest in the last 1,400 years.

Scientists told us we needed to drop emissions of greenhouse gases drastically to avoid raising global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius, but it’s looking like we’ll hit that level of warming in 30 years, if not sooner. Some new research says even this threshold is too high; that we need more aggressive plans for low-carbon economies—and quickly.

If we continue on our current path set out by Obama and other world leaders we’ll be welcoming the age of catastrophic climate change soon.

The effects will look different depending on where you live, but we know we’ll see an increase in the frequency and severity of storms, floods and droughts, more catastrophic wildfires, sea-level rise, and loss of animal and plant species — we’re already seeing this.

We need policy decisions being made that use the best science we have on climate change as a benchmark, but given the political deadlock in Congress and Obama’s love affair with the natural gas industry, don’t expect much from national lawmakers.

Meaningful change at the international level through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been small even after decades of meetings. What happens at (and leading up to) the annual Conference of Parties in Paris in 2015 will be a good indicator of our future. But based on previous meetings, it’s hard to be optimistic.

The best way to shift to a low-carbon future is to make it an economic imperative. Clean energy simply has to be cheaper than dirty energy. (It already is if you figure in all the externalities, like emergency room visits for asthma thanks to dirty power plants, but we overlook that in our accounting.) In some places it’s happening (like recently in Minnesota [3] where a solar plant beat out a gas plant based on economics). Europe is ahead of the game when it comes to wind in countries like Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Germany. Although even Texas, the heart of the U.S. oil industry, is about to hit 10 percent power from wind. This is great news, but our transition to cleaner energy needs to happen faster and in more places. Leveling the playing field by eliminating subsidies for dirty fossil fuels is a must.

Despite, or maybe because of climate change’s far-reaching impacts on our health, environment, safety, and economy it’s a difficult issue for some people to connect to. It’s too big, or too scary, or not tangible enough, or it’s been dipped in some sort of toxic political potion people don’t want to get near.

But it’s important that we dig in and face the issue… as soon as possible.

Last fall I interviewed Rob Hopkins [4], founder of the Transition Network, which seeks “to support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness.” Hopkins was on a rare trip to the United States from his UK home. He came across the pond to shake Americans out of our complacency after learning that major U.S.. philanthropic organizations were getting ready to shift their resources from funding climate change mitigation to adaptation.

This is a scary premise. While we should be planning for the effects of climate change that are already happening and will be on the way—restoring wetlands, building appropriate infrastructure, rethinking municipal planning in flood areas, etc.—we can’t abandon the work to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.

The quickest way we can try and right this ship is by addressing the way we use energy.

A key part of this is booming oil and gas production enabled by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Despite industry promises and Obama’s cheerleading, we’re a long way from energy independence (we’re still importing 7 million barrels of oil a day). And more importantly, we’ll never get there because energy independence was never the goal of the oil and gas industry and their allies—their goal is to make money. That’s why industry proponents are pushing for liquefied natural gas exports, removing the crude export ban, and fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They want their products going to the most lucrative markets, plain and simple.

But Obama continues to push a false narrative when it comes to natural gas. He said: “If extracted safely, it’s the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.” And he pledged to speed up more fossil fuel burning by cutting “red tape to help states get those factories built.”

I’ve spent enough time in gaslands from California to Colorado to West Virginia to say that the practice is no where near safe, it’s excused from federal regulations that protect our water, and Obama’s EPA has dropped the ball on even studying it when problems have surfaced. His qualifier of “if extracted safely” is completely disingenuous.

Life on the ground in gasland communities tells a different story. We’re seeing the impact on home values, on properties, on threats to water, food, wildlife, health, safety, and jobs. It’s becoming obvious that this is about so much more than whether or not methane (which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) is migrating into water wells; it’s about a vast industrialization that effects the economic and social fabric of communities.

Thankfully, a bold grassroots movement of citizen activists is growing, challenging decision-makers at every level. Nowhere was this more apparent than in four ballot-box wins in the last election to ban or stop fracking in Colorado communities.

The idea of “safe” natural gas sounds a lot like the illusion of “clean coal.” When it comes to coal today, the industry is hobbling along, but it’s not down and out yet. In fact, our use of coal for electricity ticked up slightly last year. But the future of coal rests in how much can be mined here and exported to overseas markets. Coal’s fate will depend on whether or not community pushback against coal export terminals continues to be successful. So far, it has been.

But if coal does finally go the way of the dinosaurs, what we replace it with will be of the utmost importance. If it means more gas power plants, we’re just trading one problem for another.

If it means more pipelines carrying dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, we’re really in trouble. Obama fast-tracked the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, which opened earlier this month, throwing Texas and Oklahoma under the bus, but the fate of the northern portion that crosses the U.S-Canadian border is still undecided. Each day that goes by that Obama allows this question to hang in the air is another day he loses any remaining credibility when he talks about facing climate issues.

It’s not just energy that’s linked to climate change—water is intertwined as well. Where I live in the West, we talk about something called the “new normal.” Droughts are normal, fire seasons that rage harder and longer are normal, too. My home state of California just declared a drought… in January, our rainy season, as wildfires are burning in Southern California and Oregon.

What precious water resources we do have are further threatened by aging infrastructure, mismanagement, unsustainable development, thirsty resource extraction of fossil fuels, and weak-to-nonexistent regulation of safe drinking water (thanks, West Virginia for the unfortunate reminder).

These are the realities that we face — our problems are tough, but perhaps not insurmountable. We won’t get there with “all of the above” or platitudes about America’s greatness. This story doesn’t end well unless we shift the narrative. It will take real leadership, at every level, and a resuscitation of civic participation. Let’s work to make sure that Obama’s next State of the Union isn’t meant to make sure that industry CEOs are sleeping easy at night, but it meant to wake us from our slumber and get fighting for real change.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/state-environment

Blum’s Anti-Empire Report—Media’s stealthy biases, demythologising JFK

By William Blum – Published February 4th, 2014 / AE Report #125

Assange: None dare call him a hero. Which he is.

“Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.” – Michael Parenti

An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:

Dear Mr. Farhi,

Now that you’ve done a study of al-Jazeera’s political bias in supporting Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, is it perhaps now time for a study of the US mass media’s bias on US foreign policy? And if you doubt the extent and depth of this bias, consider this:

There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Can you name a single paper, or a single TV network, that was unequivocally opposed to the American wars carried out against Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam? Or even opposed to any two of these wars? How about one? In 1968, six years into the Vietnam war, the Boston Globe surveyed the editorial positions of 39 leading US papers concerning the war and found that “none advocated a pull-out”.

Now, can you name an American daily newspaper or TV network that more or less gives any support to any US government ODE (Officially Designated Enemy)? Like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or his successor, Nicolás Maduro; Fidel or Raúl Castro of Cuba; Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran; Rafael Correa of Ecuador; or Evo Morales of Bolivia? I mean that presents the ODE’s point of view in a reasonably fair manner most of the time? Or any ODE of the recent past like Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Moammar Gaddafi of Libya, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, or Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti?

Who in the mainstream media supports Hamas of Gaza? Or Hezbollah of Lebanon? Who in the mainstream media is outspokenly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians? And keeps his or her job?

Who in the mainstream media treats Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning as the heroes they are?

And this same mainstream media tell us that Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, et al. do not have a real opposition media.

The ideology of the American mainstream media is the belief that they don’t have any ideology; that they are instead what they call “objective”. I submit that there is something more important in journalism than objectivity. It is capturing the essence, or the truth, if you will, with the proper context and history. This can, as well, serve as “enlightenment”.

It’s been said that the political spectrum concerning US foreign policy in the America mainstream media “runs the gamut from A to B”.

Sincerely, William Blum, Washington, DC

(followed by some of my writing credentials)

–

Reply from Paul Farhi:

I think you’re conflating news coverage with editorial policy. They are not the same. What a newspaper advocates on its editorial page (the Vietnam example you cite) isn’t the same as what or how the story is covered in the news columns. News MAY have some advocacy in it, but it’s not supposed to, and not nearly as overt or blatant as an editorial or opinion column. Go back over all of your ODE examples and ask yourself if the news coverage was the same as the opinions about those ODEs. In most cases. I doubt it was.

–

Dear Mr. Farhi,

Thank you for your remarkably prompt answer.

Your point about the difference between news coverage and editorial policy is important, but the fact is, as a daily, and careful, reader of the Post for the past 20 years I can attest to the extensive bias in its foreign policy coverage in the areas I listed. Juan Ferrero in Latin America and Kathy Lally in the Mideast are but two prime examples. The bias, most commonly, is one of omission more than commission; which is to say it’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. My Anti-Empire Report contains many examples of these omissions, as well as some errors of commission.

Incidentally, since 1995 I have written dozens of letters to the Post pointing out errors in foreign-policy coverage. Not one has been printed.

Happy New Year

–

I present here an extreme example of bias by omission, in the entire American mainstream media: In my last report I wrote of the committee appointed by the president to study NSA abuses – Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies – which actually came up with a few unexpected recommendations in its report presented December 13, the most interesting of which perhaps are these two:

“Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry secrets to advantage their domestic industry.”

“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate the financial systems.”

So what do we have here? The NSA being used to steal industrial secrets; nothing to do with fighting terrorism. And the NSA stealing money and otherwise sabotaging unnamed financial systems, which may also represent gaining industrial advantage for the United States.

Long-time readers of this report may have come to the realization that I’m not an ecstatic admirer of US foreign policy. But this stuff shocks even me. It’s the gross pettiness of “The World’s Only Superpower”.

A careful search of the extensive Lexis-Nexis database failed to turn up a single American mainstream media source, print or broadcast, that mentioned this revelation. I found it only on those websites which carried my report, plus three other sites: Techdirt, Lawfare, and Crikey (First Digital Media).

For another very interesting and extreme example of bias by omission, as well as commission, very typical of US foreign policy coverage in the mainstream media: First read the January 31, page one, Washington Post article making fun of socialism in Venezuela and Cuba.

Then read the response from two Americans who have spent a lot of time in Venezuela, are fluent in Spanish, and whose opinions about the article I solicited.

I lived in Chile during the 1972-73 period under Salvador Allende and his Socialist Party. The conservative Chilean media’s sarcastic claims at the time about shortages and socialist incompetence were identical to what we’ve been seeing for years in the United States concerning Venezuela and Cuba. The Washington Post article on Venezuela referred to above could have been lifted out of Chile’s El Mercurio, 1973.

[Note to readers: Please do not send me the usual complaints about my using the name “America(n)” to refer to “The United States”. I find it to be a meaningless issue, if not plain silly.]

JFK, RFK, and some myths about US foreign policy

RFK/JFK: Undiluted imperial corporatists. Are you listening Oliver Stone? Liberal infatuations die hard.

RFK/JFK: Undiluted imperial corporatists, both. Are you listening Oliver Stone? Liberal infatuations die hard.

On April 30, 1964, five months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was interviewed by John B. Martin in one of a series of oral history sessions with RFK. Part of the interview appears in the book “JFK Conservative” by Ira Stoll, published three months ago. (pages 192-3)

RFK: The president … had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam.

MARTIN: What was the overwhelming reason?

RFK: Just the loss of all of Southeast Asia if you lost Vietnam. I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.

MARTIN: What if it did?

RFK: Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world. Also it would affect what happened in India, of course, which in turn has an effect on the Middle East. Just as it would have, everybody felt, a very adverse effect. It would have an effect on Indonesia, hundred million population. All of those countries would be affected by the fall of Vietnam to the Communists.

MARTIN: There was never any consideration given to pulling out?

RFK: No.

MARTIN: … The president was convinced that we had to keep, had to stay in there …

RFK: Yes.

MARTIN: … And couldn’t lose it.

RFK: Yes.

These remarks are rather instructive from several points of view:

Robert Kennedy contradicts the many people who are convinced that, had he lived, JFK would have brought the US involvement in Vietnam to a fairly prompt end, instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years. The author, Stoll, quotes a few of these people. And these other statements are just as convincing as RFK’s statements presented here. And if that is not confusing enough, Stoll then quotes RFK himself in 1967 speaking unmistakably in support of the war.It appears that we’ll never know with any kind of certainty what would have happened if JFK had not been assassinated, but I still go by his Cold War record in concluding that US foreign policy would have continued along its imperial, anti-communist path. In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States unleashed many different types of hostility, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat; with one or more of these occurring in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil.
“Just have profound effects as far as our position throughout the world, and our position in a rather vital part of the world.”Ah yes, a vital part of the world. Has there ever been any part of the world, or any country, that the US has intervened in that was not vital? Vital to American interests? Vital to our national security? Of great strategic importance? Here’s President Carter in his 1980 State of the Union Address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America”.

“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.” – Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher

If the US lost Vietnam “everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall.”As I once wrote:

Thus it was that the worst of Washington’s fears had come to pass: All of Indochina – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – had fallen to the Communists. During the initial period of US involvement in Indochina in the 1950s, John Foster Dulles, Dwight Eisenhower and other American officials regularly issued doomsday pronouncements of the type known as the “Domino Theory”, warning that if Indochina should fall, other nations in Asia would topple over as well. In one instance, President Eisenhower listed no less than Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia amongst the anticipated “falling dominos”.

Such warnings were repeated periodically over the next decade by succeeding administrations and other supporters of US policy in Indochina as a key argument in defense of such policy. The fact that these ominous predictions turned out to have no basis in reality did not deter Washington officialdom from promulgating the same dogma up until the 1990s about almost each new world “trouble-spot”, testimony to their unshakable faith in the existence and inter-workings of the International Communist Conspiracy.

Killing suicide

Suicide bombers have become an international tragedy. One cannot sit in a restaurant or wait for a bus or go for a walk downtown, in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Russia or Syria and elsewhere without fearing for one’s life from a person walking innocently by or a car that just quietly parked nearby. The Pentagon has been working for years to devise a means of countering this powerful weapon.

As far as we know, they haven’t come up with anything. So I’d like to suggest a possible solution. Go to the very source. Flood selected Islamic societies with this message: “There is no heavenly reward for dying a martyr. There are no 72 beautiful virgins waiting to reward you for giving your life for jihad. No virgins at all. No sex at all.”

Using every means of communication, from Facebook to skywriting, from billboards to television, plant the seed of doubt, perhaps the very first such seed the young men have ever experienced. As some wise anonymous soul once wrote:

A person is unambivalent only with regard to those few beliefs, attitudes and characteristics which are truly universal in his experience. Thus a man might believe that the world is flat without really being aware that he did so – if everyone in his society shared the assumption. The flatness of the world would be simply a “self-evident” fact. But if he once became conscious of thinking that the world is flat, he would be capable of conceiving that it might be otherwise. He might then be spurred to invent elaborate proofs of its flatness, but he would have lost the innocence of absolute and unambivalent belief.

We have to capture the minds of these suicide bombers. At the same time we can work on our own soldiers. Making them fully conscious of their belief, their precious belief, that their government means well, that they’re fighting for freedom and democracy, and for that thing called “American exceptionalism”. It could save them from committing their own form of suicide.

Notes

Boston Globe, February 18, 1968, p.2-A
New York Times, April 8, 1954

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

NY Times calls JPMorgan CEO’s pay raise “laudable”

By Andre Damon and Barry Grey, wsws.org

Dimon: a perfect example of the 0.0001% sucking the life out the nation and the world. But a media favorite.

The New York Times published a commentary last Friday in which the author called a 74 percent pay increase announced last week for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon “laudable.”

Dimon’s pay increase, which brought his 2013 payout to $20 million, followed a year in which his bank agreed to pay over $20 billion in fines to settle charges related to an extraordinary array of crimes, ranging from securities fraud, to forging foreclosure documents, to lying to regulators.

The Times felt compelled to go into print in defense of Dimon after news of his pay increase raised eyebrows in the media and fueled popular outrage over the avarice and criminality of Wall Street.

The author of the Times article, James, B. Stewart, wrote, “[I]n the world of executive compensation, especially when viewed from the rarefied perspective of other chief executives, and more broadly on Wall Street, Mr. Dimon’s pay—and how it was determined—is not only defensible, but laudable.”

Over the past several years, America’s biggest bank has been fined in connection with illegal actions that have had catastrophic social consequences. Less than a month ago, on January 7, the bank agreed to pay $2.05 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it was an accomplice in the multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme operated by Bernie Madoff, who is currently serving a 150-year prison term. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was the largest in world history. When it collapsed in 2008, it wiped out the life savings of thousands of retirees and threw a number of charitable organizations into bankruptcy.

The Obama Justice Department, in line with its policy of not prosecuting Wall Street banks or their top executives, offered Dimon a “deferred prosecution” deal in which the bank agreed to the facts presented by the government, but avoided a criminal indictment.

That settlement followed a year in which JPMorgan agreed to pay $13 billion to settle charges that it defrauded investors by selling toxic mortgage-backed securities on false pretences in the run-up to the 2007-2008 collapse of the housing bubble. The same year, the bank paid nearly $1 billion to settle charges arising from its concealment of nearly $6 billion of derivatives losses in the so-called “London Whale” scandal.

The bank was also part of a cash settlement with the top five US mortgage lenders, which had been caught forging and fraudulently processing home foreclosure documents. Untold thousands, or perhaps millions, of families were illegally forced out of their homes as a result.

Also in 2013, JPMorgan paid $4.5 billion to settle charges that it defrauded pension funds and other institutional investors to whom it sold mortgage bonds. The bank paid a separate fine to settle charges that it defrauded credit card customers.

JPMorgan is one of more than a dozen major international banks under investigation for illegally manipulating Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate), the world’s benchmark interest rate, used to set the rates for $300 trillion worth of financial contracts, including rates on mortgage loans, credit cards, auto loans and derivatives. The rigging of Libor by itself has cost state and local governments, pension funds and retirees, home owners and hundreds of millions of other people untold billions in losses.

These criminal practices—which are epidemic throughout the financial industry—triggered the deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, causing millions of people to lose their jobs, their retirement savings, their homes and a large part of their incomes. The number of people who have suffered hunger, homelessness, poverty and disease as a result of the actions of Dimon and his fellow Wall Street crooks, if calculated, would run into the hundreds of millions.

Bailed out and shielded from prosecution by the Obama administration and governments all over the world, those responsible for the crisis, such as Dimon, have been allowed to further enrich themselves by continuing essentially the same practices that precipitated the disaster.

The Times article fails to mention any of the multiple charges against Dimon’s bank, or the long list of settlements into which Dimon has entered with regulators. For the so-called “newspaper of record,” illegal activity is perfectly acceptable so long as the culprits belong to the financial aristocracy.

There is a very different standard when it comes to ordinary people, especially those who expose the crimes of the American government. This is the same newspaper that viciously attacked Julian Assange, smeared Bradley Manning, and sanctimoniously demands that Edward Snowden acknowledge his “guilt” and return to the United States to face a show trial and decades in prison, if not worse.

According to the Times, JPMorgan’s compensation committee was entirely justified in giving Dimon a raise because he succeeded in driving up the company’s share price. As Stewart’s piece notes, “shares gained 37 percent in 2013, and with Mr. Dimon as chief executive, its shares have outpaced both the financials index and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over one-, three- and five-year periods.”

Stewart quotes David Larcker, a business professor at Stanford University, who says, “It’s not like he’s taking home $20 million in cash… His incentives are aligned with shareholders. There’s risk imposed on him. That’s called pay for performance, and it’s a good thing.”

Larcker stressed, the articles notes, that “the board’s duty was to shareholders, not the public at large.”

In an attempt to give his defense of Dimon and his pay increase a fig leaf of objectivity, Stewart purports to present the views of those who are opposed to the raise. But he exudes contempt for what he obviously considers the naïve notion that a corporate swindler should not be rewarded with a multi-million-dollar pay increase. One academic quoted in his piece refers dismissively to a “populist backlash.”

Stewart writes: “Although much of the country may feel that Wall Street executives have largely escaped accountability for the financial crisis, on Wall Street itself, the opposite view prevails, which is that banking executives in general, and Mr. Dimon especially, have been made scapegoats by overzealous regulators.”

When it comes to both criminality and obscene compensation levels, JPMorgan and Dimon are not exceptions; they are the rule among top Wall Street firms and their executives. In his article,Times columnist Stewart points out—not at all critically—that just last week, Morgan Stanley announced that its chief executive, James P. Gorman, will receive an 86 percent increase in his bonus, to $4.9 million, on top of a doubling of his base salary to $1.5 million. In all, his pay for 2013 will significantly exceed the $9.75 million he received in 2012.

Similarly, the article notes that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is set to receive a big raise for 2013 from the $21 million he took in the previous year. However, Stewart argues, given the $40.3 million Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson was paid in 2012, the $62.2 million CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves took in, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s $96.12 million, Dimon’s $20 million “looked modest.”

Defending financial criminals is nothing new for the Times. In 2009, the newspaper vociferously defended Steven Rattner when the private equity firm he co-founded was under investigation for carrying out a kickback scheme involving the New York State retirement pension fund, forcing Rattner to resign as head of Obama’s Auto Task Force. The next year, Rattner settled the charges for $7 million. He is now a regular commentator for theTimes.