Obama’s tonguelashings are just window-dressing—

Financial fraternity flaunts its obscene compensation in the face of widespread unemployment, benefit cutbacks and foreclosures

Dateline: 15 October 2009  [print_link]

By Barry Grey, WSWS

ACCORDING TO THE Wall Street Journal, the major US banks and financial firms are on track to hand out a record $140 billion in compensation this year. This is a 20 percent increase from 2008 and $10 billion more than the previous record, set in 2007.

The stock market celebrated the news, outlined in a front-page Journal article on Wednesday, along with the release of JPMorgan Chase’s third-quarter earnings report, which showed a seven-fold increase in profits from last year to $3.6 billion. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 145 points, closing above the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year.

The record pay being handed out by the 23 largest publicly traded banks, hedge funds, asset management firms and stock and commodity exchanges (the report did not include privately held companies) underscores the class interests being served by the Obama administration and the subordination of the entire political system to a financial aristocracy which essentially dictates government policy.

The American financial elite, aided and abetted by the White House and Congress, is profiting from an economic disaster that is driving hundreds of millions of working people in the US and around the world into poverty—a disaster precipitated by its own methods of financial speculation and fraud and its manic pursuit of personal gain.

One year after the financial crash of 2008, the richer-than-ever compensation packages for bankers give the lie to Obama’s occasional protests against Wall Street “excesses” and talk of tough, new banking regulations. It demonstrates that the administration’s economic policies, including trillions in subsidies to the banks, have been devoted to paying off the bad debts of the bankers at public expense and protecting the wealth of a miniscule section of the population.

There is an element of provocation in the pay awards being doled out by the banks. Far from curbing their avarice, they are flaunting their wealth and power in the midst of soaring unemployment and deepening social misery for millions of Americans.

The Journal based its estimate on an analysis of the financial firms’ earnings reports for the first half of 2009 and projected earnings for the rest of the year. It predicted the firms’ total revenues would hit $437 billion this year, surpassing the $345 billion they recorded in 2007, before the financial crisis erupted.

The projected $140 billion in compensation includes salary, bonuses, health benefits, retirement plans and stock awards. Average compensation for employees at the 23 firms will top out at $143,000, but this figure obscures the eight-digit sums that will go to the top executives and traders, who will receive a disproportionate share of the total outlay.

The Journal projects that Bank of America, which has not paid back the $45 billion in cash it received in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, will award more than $30 billion in compensation, a 64 percent increase over last year. JPMorgan Chase will pay out $29.5 billion, an increase of nearly 30 percent. Goldman Sachs is on track to dispense $21.8 billion, nearly double its pay tab for 2008. The average Goldman employee will receive over $743,000.

While bank pay is reaching new heights, workers’ wages are being systematically slashed. The New York Times reported Wednesday that pay cuts in the US “are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.” It cited Bureau of Labor statistics showing that weekly pay for production workers, representing 80 percent of the workforce, has fallen for nine consecutive months. This is a record for the 44 years since the bureau began tracking weekly pay. The previous record was a two-month period during the 1981-82 recession.

The assault on workers’ pay reflects a deliberate policy of the Obama administration to use mass unemployment to drive down the wages and living standards of the working class and effect a further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top.

While Obama demands that the American people “take responsibility” for the crisis and “live within their means,” he implements policies designed to further enrich the financial elite. Even as he continued and expanded the bank bailout begun under Bush, he intervened last March to scuttle bills in Congress, following the public furor over millions in bonuses awarded by the bailed-out insurance firm AIG, which would have imposed certain restraints on executive pay.

He followed this by rejecting the turnaround plans of General Motors and Chrysler and forcing the auto companies into bankruptcy, in order to impose sweeping layoffs and cuts in pay and benefits for auto workers. This was a sign to big business to launch a wage-cutting drive against the working class as a whole.

The White House is pushing a health care overhaul that will dramatically cut coverage for workers, which is to be a down payment on austerity measures and cuts in basic entitlement programs, such as Medicare, on which tens of millions of people rely.

No government measures are being proposed to create jobs. Nothing is being done to provide relief for millions who are facing foreclosure, the cutoff of utilities, the loss of life savings and the prospect of destitution. The administration has flatly refused to provide additional money to states and localities that are being bankrupted by the fall in tax revenues. As a result, savage cuts are being made in education, health care and other social services across the country, and tens of thousands of public workers are being laid off.

The $140 billion in compensation reported by the Wall Street Journal for a section of the financial industry equals the total amount allocated in the administration’s stimulus plan for aid to the states.

To put this sum in perspective, it is more than twice the federal outlay in 2008 for education ($67 billion), close to three times federal spending that year for highways and mass transit ($53 billion), and far in excess of allocations for unemployment benefits ($37 billion); community and regional development ($27 billion); general science, space and technology ($27 billion); training, employment and social services ($26 billion) and housing and commerce ($7.4 billion). The total federal outlay for homeless assistance programs in 2008 was $2.4 billion.

This $140 billion is greater than the gross domestic product of Egypt, a country of 82 million people, slightly less than the GDP of the Philippines (population—96 million) and nearly three times the GDP of Ecuador (14 million).

This colossal squandering of resources is rooted neither in psychology nor the “culture” of Wall Street, but rather in the capitalist system itself. The profit system subordinates all social needs to the accumulation of personal wealth by the narrow stratum that owns and controls the means of production, dominated by finance capital—the most parasitic and predatory section of the ruling elite.

The social disaster threatening the working class can be reversed only on the basis of a struggle for socialism, in which the productive forces created by the working class are taken out of private hands and developed under democratic control for the benefit of society as a whole.

The working class must break the stranglehold of the financial aristocracy. The ill-gotten gains of the CEOs and financiers must be expropriated, without compensation, and these funds, which add up to trillions of dollars, used to meet the needs of working people for jobs, housing, education and health care, and to rebuild the crumbling social infrastructure.

The books and business dealings of the big banks must be opened to public scrutiny, with criminal investigations undertaken into their illegal practices.

This requires the building of a mass socialist movement directed against the Obama administration, the two-party system and the capitalist system which they defend.

Barry Grey is a senior analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

By Glen Ford, Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report

Dateline 10/06/2009  [print_link]

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Happy Bentley owner. The media cater to the powerful, wilfully neglecting or omitting important news of vital interest to the masses. But this is hardly new. It's in the nature of capitalist communications.

A new study shows the corporate news media behave as if their primary audience is comprised of the rich and powerful. Issues dear to the hearts (sic) of bankers in New York and Washington insiders dominate the “news,” while stories about jobs, housing and consumer prices are few and far between. In the Great Recession, “the rich use their media monopoly to starve the public of the fundamental facts of national economic life.”

“The very rich, through their media, have been holding a conversation among themselves.”

The Great Recession, or the Financial Meltdown of 2008, or whatever history will ultimately wind up calling the unfolding economic debacle we are experiencing, has been “covered” in a highly skewed and selective manner by the media powers-that-be in the United States. That’s the general conclusion of a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism [2]. The Pew study was, of course, centered on news outlets owned and operated by huge corporations, since that is virtually all that has survived for general consumption in the U.S.

The study found that media coverage of the economic disaster – based on numbers of stories and articles – focused overwhelmingly on banking, the economic stimulus, and the fate of the auto industry. The pattern also reveals that the bulk of this narrow band of topics was examined from vantage points in New York and Washington, where the voices of finance capital and its servants in government are located.

It is no wonder, then, that the prevailing narrative on the nature of the crisis, and proposed solutions to the crisis, are informed almost entirely by the corporate view of the world. In essence, the very rich, through their media, have been holding a conversation among themselvesand serving it up as “news.” Their crisis is all that has mattered in this corporate media conversation. It is, therefore, logical that when the stock market rallies the corporate media world is filled with news of “recovery” and “green shoots” sprouting all over the place. But most people experience the economy through the prism of jobs, housing and consumer prices. According to the Pew survey, these fundamental concerns shared by the vast majority of the population rank as very low priorities in the nation’s newsrooms.

“Stories about labor issues and worker layoffs in the auto industry made up an infinitesimal two-tenths of one percent of what passed for news.”

While housing foreclosures climbed through the roof and home prices went into the basement, stories on housing represented only six percent of news coverage. The plight of renters is almost totally absent from the news. Unemployment shot from 8.1 to 9.7 percent between February and August – the highest in a quarter century – but merited only six percent of news coverage. The drama over General Motors and Chrysler corporate reorganization was one of the top three topics of news coverage, but stories about labor issues and worker layoffs in the auto industry made up an infinitesimal two-tenths of one percent of what passed for news in the corporate media. Food prices were of even less interest to corporate journalists, who gave the issue only one-tenth of a percent of news coverage. That’s one story out of every thousand.

Relentless corporate consolidation of media has resulted in a daily menu of news that is worse than useless to the great mass of people. The rich use their media monopoly to starve the public of the fundamental facts of national economic life. In Black America, where Black-oriented radio still reaches 80 to 90 percent of households, the information void is all but total, with the virtual extinction of local news. As a result, the reality of economic disaster comes without warning. It arrives in the form of a pink slip or an eviction or foreclosure notice, while the television anchorperson blathers on about good times on Wall Street.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com [3].

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [4].

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/media-tell-rich-mans-story-starve-people-real-news

Links:
[1] http://media.libsyn.com/media/blackagendareport/20091007_gf_MediaSurvey.mp3
[2] http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/story_lines_banks_stimulus_and_detroit_dominate_narrative
[3] http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com/
[4] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/media-tell-rich-mans-story-starve-people-real-news

The Myth of “America”

by Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola [print_link]
October 12th, 2009 | T r u t h o u t

Happy Columbus Day

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two …
May the spirit of adventure and discovery always be with you.
Wishing you a great Columbus Day
–Columbus Day greeting card

But does it?

“They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells,” Christopher Columbus wrote in his logbook in 1495. “They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas, in the multi-volume “History of the Indies” published in 1875, wrote, “… Slaves were the primary source of income for the Admiral (Columbus) with that income he intended to repay the money the Kings were spending in support of Spaniards on the Island. They provide profit and income to the Kings. (The Spaniards were driven by) insatiable greed … killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples … with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.” This systematic violence was aimed at preventing “Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings. (The Spaniards) thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades…. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”

Father Fray Antonio de Montesino, a Dominican preacher, in December 1511 said this in a sermon that implicated Christopher Columbus and the colonists in the genocide of the native peoples:

“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before …”

In 1992, the National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, is known to have exhorted Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others.”  Yet America continues to celebrate “Columbus Day.”

That Americans do so in the face of all evidence that there is little in the Columbian legacy that merits applause makes it easier for them to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, or the actions of their government. Perhaps there is good reason. In “Columbus Day: A Clash of Myth and History,” journalist and media critic Norman Solomon discusses how historians who deal with recorded evidence are frequently depicted as “politically correct” revisionists while the general populace is manipulated into holding onto myths that brazenly applaud inconceivable acts of violence of men against fellow humans.

For those of us who are willing to ask how it becomes possible to manipulate the population of a country into accepting atrocity, the answer is not hard to find. It requires normalizing the inconceivable and drumming it in via the socio-cultural environment until it is internalized and embedded in the individual and collective consciousness. The combined or singular deployment of the media, the entertainment industry, mainstream education or any other agency, can achieve the desired result of convincing people that wars can be just, and strikes can be surgical, as long as it is the US that is doing it.

Never has this process been as blatant and overt as in recent years when the time has come for America to legitimize the idea of global domination. A Department of Defense report titled Joint Vision 2020 calls for the US military to be capable of “full spectrum dominance” of the entire planet. That means total domination and control of all land, sea, air, space and information.

That’s a lot of control.

How might this become accepted as “Policy” and remain unquestioned by almost an entire population?

The one word key to that is: Myths. The explanation is that the myths the United States is built upon have paved the way for the perpetuation of all manner of violations. Among the first of these is that of Christopher Columbus. In school we were taught of his bravery, courage and perseverance. In a speech in 1989, George H.W. Bush proclaimed: “Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith.”

Never mind that the monumental feats mainly comprised part butchery, part exploitation and the largest part betrayal of host populations of the “New World.”  On their second arrival in Hispaniola, Haiti, Columbus’s crew took captive roughly two thousand local villagers who had arrived to greet them. Miguel Cuneo, a literate crew member, wrote, “When our caravels … were to leave for Spain, we gathered … one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495…. For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island’s fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done.”

Such original “monumental feats” as were accomplished by our nation’s heroes and role models were somewhat primitive. Local inhabitants who resisted Columbus and his crew had their ears or nose cut off, were attacked by dogs, skewered with pikes and shot. Reprisals were so severe that many of the natives committed mass suicide and women began practicing abortions in order not to leave children enslaved. The population of Haiti at the time of Columbus’s arrival was between 1.5 million and 3 million. Sixty years later, every single native had been murdered.

Today, “perseverance and faith” allow us to accomplish much more and with far greater impunity. The US continues to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan with 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas and purge Pakistan via drone attacks on weddings. Neither case is of isolated whimsy. It was and remains policy.

Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain. Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.  Columbus needed more than mere slaves to sell, and Zinn’s account informs us, “… desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, (he) had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

As a younger priest, the aforementioned De las Casas had participated in the conquest of Cuba and owned a plantation where natives worked as slaves before he found his conscience and gave it up. His first-person accounts reveal that the Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: ‘Wriggle, you litle perisher.’ They slaughtered anyone on their path …”

Full Spectrum Dominance

In a letter to the Spanish court dated February 15, 1492, Columbus presented his version of full spectrum dominance: “to conquer the world, spread the Christian faith and regain the Holy Land and the Temple Mount.”  With this radical ideology, Las Casas records, “They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burned them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”

About incorporating these accounts in his book, Zinn explained to Truthout, “My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present … but I do remember a statement I once read: The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

Author journalist Chris Hedges believes that glorification of (the atrocities of) Columbus is one of several myths that sustain the illusions that justify the imperial visions of the United States.  In conversation with Truthout, he said, “It’s really easy to build a holocaust museum that condemns Germans. It’s another issue to build a museum that confronts our own genocide, the genocide that was perpetrated by our own ancestors towards Native Americans or towards African-Americans. I am all for documenting and remembering the [World War II] Holocaust, but the disparity between the reality of the [World War II] Holocaust or the reality of the genocide as illustrated in the [World War II] Holocaust museum and the utter historical amnesia in the Native American museum in Washington is really frightening and shows a complete inability in a public arena for us to examine who we are and what we’ve done.”

Noam Chomsky holds a similar view. “We have [World War II] Holocaust museums all over the place about what the Germans did,” Chomsky told Truthout. “Do we have one about what we did? I mean about slavery, about the Native American population? It’s not that the people involved didn’t know about it. John Quincy Adams, a great grand strategist, who had a major role in these atrocities, in his later years when he reflected on them, referred to that hapless race of North Americans, which we are exterminating with such insidious cruelty. They knew exactly what they were doing. But it doesn’t matter. It’s us.”

Explaining how the mythology of a country becomes its historic reality, Chomsky stated, “If you are well-educated, you can internalize that and it. That’s part of what a good education is about, enabling people to live with those contradictions. And you see it very consistently. In the case of, say, the Iraq war, try to find somebody who had a principled objection. Actually you can, occasionally, but it’s suppressed.”

Historical revisionism and amnesia are critical for nation-building, opines Paul Woodward, the writer and author of the blog “War In Context“. He elaborates, “Every nation is subject to its own particular form of historical amnesia. Likewise, imperial powers have their own grandiose revisionist tendencies. Yet there is another form of historical denial particular to recently invented nations whose myth-making efforts are inextricably bound together with the process of the nation’s birth …

Robert Jensen is an author and teaches media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas. In an essay where he justifies his decision to not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, he says, “Imagine that Germany won World War II and that a Nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology. Imagine that a century later Germans celebrated a holiday offering a whitewashed version of German/Jewish history that ignored that holocaust and the deep anti-Semitism of the culture. Imagine that the holiday provided a welcomed time for families and friends to gather and enjoy food and conversation. Imagine that businesses, schools and government offices closed on this day. What would we say about such a holiday? Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration? Would we not demand a more accurate historical account? Would we not, in fact, denounce such a holiday as grotesque?”

Of course we would.

But our story is different, and once again this year, on October 12, we will once again “Hail Columbus.”

———

ABOUT THE AUTHOR  In late 2003, weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to the Middle East to report on the war himself.  Since then, he has become world renowned for documenting the human cost of the Iraq war: the everyday violence and terror, the deterioration of the healthcare system, the shortages of clean water and the resulting rise in sickness, the lack of jobs and economic opportunity, the refugee crisis, and the detention and torture of civilians and resistance fighters. Through his uncompromised reporting and news photos, Dahr reveals a map of Iraq’s misery and resistance, politics and everyday survival in the face of overwhelming military destruction. His website offers a forum where readers discover realities of the war not found in the conventional press.  Dahr’s reporting has earned him numerous awards, including the prestigious 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism, The Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, and four Project Censored awards.

Bhaswati Sengupta contributed to this report.

CROSSPOSTED WITH COUNTERPUNCH

October 9-11, 2009

Upside Down World

Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS  [print_link]

Predictably, the faux humble leader gravelly intoned the prize was an "affirmation for American leadership".

It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.

“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”

I would add, “Lie is Truth.”

The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.

The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples.

The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

The Nobel committee has placed all its hopes on a bit of skin color.

“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink.

Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Meanwhile in La-La Land…

Nobel Jury Defends Obama Peace Prize Decision

By IAN MacDOUGALL and KARL RITTER

The Associated Press

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

OSLO — Members of the Norwegian committee that gave Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize are strongly defending their choice against a storm of criticism that the award was premature and a potential liability for the U.S. president.

Asked to comment on the uproar following Friday’s announcement, four members of the five-seat panel told The Associated Press that they had expected the decision to generate both surprise and criticism.

Three of them rejected the notion that Obama hadn’t accomplished anything to deserve the award, while the fourth declined to answer that question. A fifth member didn’t answer calls seeking comment.

“We simply disagree that he has done nothing,” committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told the AP on Tuesday. “He got the prize for what he has done.”

The dismaying gift of the Nobel prize puts Barack Obama on the list of its winners who promised peace but prosecuted war

By Howard Zinn [print_link]

Nixon and Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger

I WAS DISMAYED WHEN I HEARD Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon’s expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

HOWARD ZINN is a well known progressive historian and author of People’s History of the United States.