by MARK HARRIS

The movement for a single-payer health care system in the United States represents a vision of basic access to health care for everyone. As popularly expressed, the demand for “Improved Medicare for All” rightly embraces the idea that health care should be every human being’s right, not a privilege dependent on a person’s income, wealth, or age.

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Corrupt politico Sen. Max Baucus (D) getting his marching orders from Obama. This is essentially what happened, and they know it. In fact, Baucus didn't need to be told what to do by Obama: all establishment politicians know who their masters are and what interests they must serve.

Who could object to such a simple concept of justice, right? Actually, for decades the answer in the United States is just about everyone with money, influence, and power. The historic opponents of health care human rights include the insurance industry, Wall Street, the national leadership of both Republican and Democratic parties, and even the American Medical Association (AMA). All have long stood as obstacles to establishing health care as a human right. In the 1960s, right-wing ideologue Ronald Reagan and others of his persuasion even opposed the establishment of Medicare, likening it to the second coming of Bolshevism.

This is the way it is in ultra-capitalist America, land of for-profit everything.  But this is also a nation with a rich history of social protest that sometimes leads to victories for the people. Indeed, from the eight-hour day to “the weekend,” women’s right to vote, minority civil rights, and the struggle for democracy itself, everything right and just in American life is essentially a product of social and political activism for progressive change.

Unfortunately, while most modern nations long ago established health care systems that make access to care widely available at no or low-cost, the United States remains a provincial backwater of health care reaction, cruelly and stupidly denying the right of society as a whole to the resources of medicine. The establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Health Administration offer only a partial rebuttal to this otherwise underwhelming social history.

Goodbye, Insurance Profiteers 

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday, there’s new popular momentum building for a national single-payer health care system, driven by both the dogged right-wing assaults on the Obama-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the intrinsic structural failures of the current for-profit system. Hopefully, this grassroots single-payer activism will continue to mobilize growing public support for a new health system, one that will permanently oust profiteering insurance industry parasites and similar exploiters from the corporate swamplands.

In today’s volatile political environment, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced new legislation to establish a single-payer system. Notably, Senate Resolution 1804 earned quick endorsement after it was introduced from about one-third of Senate Democrats. In the House of Representatives, Rep. John Conyers’ (D-MI) House Resolution 676 also has support of about half of Democratic representatives. The House legislation (reportedly the better bill) establishes “free health care that includes all medically necessary care, such as primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care.”

But before we get our legislative hopes up too high, a splash of cold water is in order. For years, Democratic Party leaders have done next to nothing on behalf of the single-payer vision. Actually, from the Clinton to the Obama administrations, they’ve actively sabotaged it, despite its long-standing popularity with the public.

In fact, when “health care reform” was on the agenda in 2009, President Obama very quickly knocked single-payer off the table, despite praising it as ideally the best system in years past. Once in power there would be no discussion of this option. The newly elected president’s intention was less genuine reform than to tinker just enough with the “free market” system to essentially strengthen for another generation the existing insurer/investor dominated health care system.

Before we get our legislative hopes up too high, a splash of cold water is in order. For years, Democratic Party leaders have done next to nothing on behalf of the single-payer vision. Actually, from the Clinton to the Obama administrations, they’ve actively sabotaged it, despite its long-standing popularity with the public.

Today, we see the results. Increasingly, the ACA’s marketplace insurance subsidies and protections for pre-existing conditions offer faint protection from the unchecked reality of rising insurance premiums and super-high deductibles. Under the ACA, there are still 28.2 million uninsured adults under the age of 65, some 10.4 percent of the population, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It’s true this is the lowest uninsured rate since 1972. The previous four decades it hovered in the range of 16 percent. But such figures still pose the question: Is a 10 percent uninsured rate, coupled with inadequate, over-priced insurance, really the best this nation can offer? Under mostly private, for-profit health care, with the two major political parties under permanent thrall to corporate interests, the answer is essentially, Yes.

Of course, this is hardly a news flash. The ACA was always a poor solution to issues of access and affordability. To the extent some leading Democrats now attach themselves to the single-payer bandwagon, it’s a sign of the gathering public storm for a better, more just public system. Hopefully, the winds of this storm will be strengthened less by faith in Congress than by ongoing public activism, organizing, and protest.

Cynically, Democratic Party leaders have long proven themselves more than willing to rally around high ideals when those ideals have little immediate chance of succeeding. They’re hack geniuses at taking a great idea and watering it down with endless business-friendly compromises, (e.g. Fight for $15), then asking us to wait years and years until “the vision” can finally be fully implemented. With its proposed four-year implementation, Sanders’ Senate resolution already contains this built-in mechanism to potentially deflate any future legislative victory.

Rendon: No further evidence needed. Mark this toxic Democrat as an enemy of the people. and don't forget it. Gov Jerry Brown was in on this, too. This is the kind of traitor to the public interest that the masses should eventually retire permanently.

In California recently, Democratic State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, offered another lesson in the artful leadership style of blending pleasant liberal rhetoric with practical obstructionism on the road to accomplishing nothing. After the California senate voted in favor of establishing a statewide single-payer system, Rendon, citing cost and other concerns, took steps to block the legislation supported by the California Nurses Association from coming before the entire State Assembly. The bill would have established a state mandate to create a single-payer system, eliminating premiums, copays, and deductibles. Rest assured the Speaker of the Assembly supports more hearings on the issue!

We should expect more of the same tepid “leadership” from Democrats as the popular movement for single-payer grows. It will be a tough battle. From neoliberal Democrats to far-right Republicans and every bought-off political type in-between, the U.S. political establishment with rare exceptions cannot quite imagine the multi-billion-dollar insurance industry releasing its financial death grip on the business of medicine. If the people want a fair, equitable, and affordable health care system—if they want health care justice—they will have to organize a strong, fighting grassroots movement for single-payer. Demonstrations, picket lines, teach-ins, strikes and every form of mass public pressure must make it politically untenable for politicians not to support single-payer, insurance lobbyists be damned.

Access, Yes: But to What Exactly? 

The future of the campaign for single-payer has a lot going for it, starting with the fact that most modern nations already have some form of it. If American leaders were smart, they would learn from the world’s experiences with health care systems. But they are less smart than savants of opportunism, power, and money. For those who do want to learn, however, there’s invariably much detail to consider in any broad comparisons of world health systems, especially as single-payer or national health care systems in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have important organizational differences.

But some lessons are more obvious than others. Today, according to a recent Commonwealth Fund report, U.S. health care performance ranks last among 11 “high-income” nations in measures for access, equity, and outcomes. In administrative efficiency, the United States earns a ranking of next to last, based on reports of providers and patients.

“The United States begins with a challenge: its population is sicker and has higher mortality than those of other high-income countries,” write Eric C. Schneider, MD, and David Squires, MA, two of the report’s co-authors in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Generally, death rates for conditions considered amenable to medical intervention is “far higher than other high-income countries.”

To be fair, not all is bad. The U.S. system performs well for care related to some disease-specific outcomes, such as heart attack, ischemic stroke, colon cancer, and breast cancer. But overall, say Schneider and Squires, “timely access to preventive, acute, and chronic care” is consistently undermined in this country by costs, administrative burdens, and significant social and economic barriers. Nor does the United States rank high in comparative investment in primary care, which is generally the main portal for how most people access health services. Not only is primary care relatively downplayed in the United States, in favor of more specialty care resources, but those who use it routinely face “byzantine layers of administration” that make obtaining and paying for care complex and difficult.

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Obama in photo-op being applauded by accomplices for smoothly betraying the public interest in terms of national health care. Sycophantic mainstream media has no incentive to educate the public about these vital issues, let alone unmask the role of corporatised politicians.

The bureaucratic barriers to care are bad enough, but existing public health challenges are also set against the pervasive spectacle of a society starkly divided by wealth and poverty and what the NEJM authors describe as a “less robust social safety net” than other “high-income” countries. “Other countries achieve better population health by spending relatively more on social services than on medical care,” state Schneider and Squires. For a nation’s health to prosper, people need full and affordable access to the health system, especially primary care, bolstered by social policy that supports stable housing, education, nutritious food, and public transportation. In the health care system, they conclude, such progressive social policy would translate into reduced need for emergency, hospital, and long-term care services.

In terms of social policy, there’s another public health benefit to single-payer rarely mentioned in these discussions. As socialist writer Paul Street notes in a recent commentary, “With improved Medicare for All in place, lower-paid workers no longer would be compelled to take second and third jobs to pay for health insurance and to save up for possible future medical emergencies. At the same time, single-payer would remove a major structural incentive pushing employers to extract as much work as possible out of each of their full-time, benefit-receiving, salaried workers: the high costs of employee health care, equivalent to 40 percent of total compensation of salaried employees.” One result of such changes might be less physical and mental illness among many over-worked, over-stressed American workers.

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From Sweden to Cuba, Better Ways Exist

If you want a further sense of the crude injustice of social policy in the United States, consider what is possible even in other capitalist nations. In Sweden, the largely government-funded health system is decentralized at the level of county councils and municipalities, and financed through taxes (private health services constitute just a small percentage of the system). There, a primary care visit will cost somewhere in the range of $12 to $37, specialist fees a maximum of about $50, and hospital stays a maximum of about $12 per day. For most Swedes, the ceiling on prescription drug costs is under $300 per year.

With more extensive social support services and long traditions in midwifery, Sweden also has a very low infant mortality rate, 2.4 for every 1,000 live births up until age 1, according to the World Health Organization. By contrast, at 5.7 per 1000 live births, the comparable rate in the United States is more than double Sweden’s.

According to the Swedish government website, pregnant women also receive free or subsidized prenatal care courses during pregnancy. After a child is born or adopted, Swedish parents have the right to 480 days of paid parental leave until the child turns eight, most of it at about 80 percent of their regular pay. By law, parents can also reduce their working hours by 25 percent for a period of time without fear of losing their jobs.

In socialist-oriented Cuba, the health story goes even further. There, despite more limited economic resources, the availability of free, universal public health care combines with generally egalitarian social policies to contribute to impressive public health accomplishments. Cuba’s infant mortality rate of 4.3 per 1000 live births up until age 1 is also lower than the United States. Overall, the average lifespan in Cuba is now 79.1 years, a rate comparable to or exceeding the richest nations.

Notably, with 6.7 physicians per 1,000 people, nearly triple the U.S. rate, Cuba also has the world’s second-highest ratio of physicians serving the public. As Edward W. Campion, M.D., and Stephen Morrissey, PhD, observe in a 2013 NEJM report, “There are too many doctors. Everybody has a family physician. Everything is free, totally free—and not after prior approval or some copay.”

As visitors, Campion and Morrissey describe a system they say can appear almost “unreal” to those from the United States. “The whole system seems turned upside down. It is tightly organized, and the first priority is prevention. Although Cuba has limited economic resources, its health care system has solved some problems that ours has not yet managed to address.”

How is this possible in such a small, relatively poor country? There’s a rich history contained in this question, but it’s significant that the Cuban medical system emphasizes primary and preventive care, free of charge, with delivery organized on a community basis. But what is key is what the Cubans don’t have: the capitalist profit motive to distort how they use the island nation’s resources.

Unlike some Asian nations such as China or Japan, one deficiency of most single-payer/national health systems in the West is their limited support for “complementary and integrative medicine” practices as covered benefits. In contrast, Cuban medical schools with their emphasis on primary care and family medicine also incorporate aspects of natural and traditional medicine, such as acupuncture and herbal medicine, into their core medical curriculum. Such integrative medical practices are not only cost-effective, but provide many patients with an additional complement of treatment options.

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For the People: Integrative, Holistic Medical Care

The United States would be well served to follow Cuba’s lead in these practices. Consider, for example, the current epidemic-level use of opioid drugs in the United States. There is evidence the flames of this public health crisis are being fanned in part by for-profit insurance companies that prefer covering lower-cost, highly addictive pain medications over more costly, but safer medication alternatives.

Actually, there exist many non-drug alternatives for pain treatment. The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) recently began recommending various “nonpharmacologic” treatments as first-line therapy for patients with chronic or acute or sub-acute low-back pain, conditions often linked to potential opioid use. These include use of heat, massage, acupuncture, spinal manipulation, exercise, and other treatments.

There is evidence for the benefits of these generally safer, non-drug alternatives. To cite just one example, the Annals of Internal Medicine reported in 2015 that patients with chronic neck pain experienced “significant reductions” in pain and associated disability when their usual care was combined with either 12 acupuncture sessions or 20 one-to-one Alexander technique sessions. (The latter is a body-oriented therapy that seeks to adjust body postures to relieve physical stress).

In any proposed new single-payer system, the American public would be well served to have greater access to the benefits of such potentially helpful treatments. Notably, the Joint Commission, the accrediting body for many healthcare organizations, agrees. Starting in 2018, the Joint Commission will require accredited hospital organizations to provide acupuncture and other non-pharmacological options to meet pain management standards.

In the democratic spirit, single-payer health care should make available beneficial treatments people are already widely using. This certainly includes care now often inadequately covered by insurance, such as vision, dental, mental health, and long-term care services. But it also should include consideration of complementary or integrative medical practices (as they’re known in the west) commonly used by the public.

According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, U.S. citizens annually spend about $30.2 billion on “complementary health approaches” such as herbal products, chiropractic, yoga, and other resources. A significant portion of these expenditures—$14.7 billion—cover out-of-pocket costs for chiropractic, acupuncture, and body work/massage.

The popularity of so-called alternative or complementary health care is likely derived in part from its generally more humanistic, “hands-on” approach to care. Considering how stressful life is in modern society, this is hardly surprising. Rampant class inequality, cutthroat economic pressures, social isolation and insecurity, set against the backdrop of a violent, militaristic culture, have produced widespread social alienation. In various ways, many people want escape from the soul-destroying predations of our capitalist culture, including the corporate medical culture. An industrial medical system that routinely offers patients 15- or 20-minute visits with overly busy physicians, whose practice largely involves test orders, drug prescriptions, and patients sent away with a hefty bill, is one built to breed public dissatisfaction.

Obviously, patients may need the blood pressure monitor and the stethoscope, the MRI or the prescription, but many also want more holistic, compassionate medicine that touches the heart of their lived human experience. In this sense, the vision of health care as a human right should embrace more than just the medical system’s administrative liberation from capitalist profiteers. The dream of a liberated, just society demands not only full, equal, and affordable access to health care for every person, but also compassionate, patient-centered community health care. The liberation of medicine should also mean a more egalitarian medical culture, where a sense of practitioner-patient partnership prevails over the traditional medical fiefdom ruled by the Gods of the White Coats.

Science: For the People, Not Corporations 

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his more humanistic vision of medicine does not imply an “anti-science” perspective, nor does it disparage the value of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and other modern research tools. But it does offer a counterweight to the “evidence-based” medical focus of recent decades, with its singular claims to medical authority. After all, RCTs as the research gold standard are not applicable to every area of medical practice, both for practical and ethical reasons. Nor is gold the only currency with which to take the measure of medicine. Along with research studies, there is wisdom in clinical encounters and reported patient experiences. There is also the recognition that even evidence-based treatment guidelines must always be individualized to the patient. In the real world, medical knowledge is a stream fed by many sources.

Actually, “the science” in for-profit capitalist health care isn’t necessarily even always that good. In their 2015 book, Ending Medical Reversal, Vinayak K. Prasad, MD, MPH and Adam S. Cifu, MD, respectively of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and the University of Chicago, conclude that as much as 40 percent of what is considered “state-of-the-art” evidence-based medicine eventually turns out to be either unhelpful or even harmful. These researchers also call out the corrupting influence of money on medicine, from clinicians and researchers who take money from Big Pharma to physicians and clinics with vested financial interests in recommending certain tests or procedures.

Unfortunately, for more extreme “science-based medicine” zealots, which is a distinct minority of physicians and researchers in the United States, all traditional or alternative medicine represent a turn to “quackery,” “woo” or whatever other insolent terminology they prefer to use as a cudgel against practices that don’t fit their familiar conceptions. There is a current of western cultural prejudice, a kind of Ugly American medical imperialism, that lurks unstated among such out-of-hand dismissals of all and every so-called alternative practice or older indigenous medical traditions.

Indeed, there is something deeply ignorant (not to mention elitist) in western trained doctors who arbitrarily dismisses the value of Traditional East Asian Medicine (e.g. acupuncture, Qi Qong, herbal medicine, moxibustion, Asian massage, etc.), for example, with its long and profound history as a medical practice. Such narrowly defined “pro-science” dogma has about as much to do with “scientific medicine” as the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under Stalin had to do with “scientific socialism.” Medical science should be a path illuminated by floodlights of creative critical thinking, not some pinched, authoritarian caricature of science that leaves little room for credible medicine much beyond prescription drugs, blood labs, diagnostic tests, and surgical procedures.

Fortunately, the growth of integrative medicine departments at many major U.S. medical centers attests to the fact that more western physicians now reject narrow-minded dogma about what constitutes ‘pro-science” health care. In service to the public, revolutionary single-payer health care should reflect this trend toward integration of indigenous global medical practices. 

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Medicine, Society, and Public Health

Interestingly, Prasad and Cifu in their book remark in passing that national health care systems tend to lend themselves to successful observational cohort studies into the causes of disease. It’s an important point. The more advanced the national infrastructure of health care resources and services, the easier it is to organize and coordinate resources for public health campaigns.

It’s a point also implicitly in contrast to the ideological nonsense of right-wing conservatives, for whom “there is no such thing as society,” as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared in the 1980s. For her there were just individuals and families and the brutal “right” of each to succeed or fail. But if it’s true that epidemics, hurricanes, and earthquakes (or opioid abuse epidemics) strike individuals and families, it is also true that it takes a society to respond to such public health crises.

Contrary to the conservative mind-set, emergency rooms or “GoFundMe” pages are not an alternative to a universal, non-profit public health care system. Single-payer health care is a sensible reform in terms of patient access, affordability, and organizational efficiency. But even more, it is desirable because it expresses the essential idea that human needs, not private profit, should define and inform political and social policy.

Today, we need a broad-based mass movement for single-payer, rooted in street power, grassroots activism, and independent leadership. With strong mass support, it’s in time a winnable political campaign. Our ideal should be a health care system revamped as a free national public service, union-based and democratically run, and working in unison with the neighborhoods and communities it serves. With such a system in place, health care as a human right could acquire a richer, more fulfilled definition in terms of the holistic practice of medicine itself.

“The practice of medicine has long been dominated by science,” writes Suzanne Koven, MD, for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “But in recent decades patients, and many physicians, have been coming to the conclusion that evidence-based treatments by specialists (and sub- and sub-subspecialists) don’t necessarily supply what people need to heal.” A writer in residence at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Koven observes that it’s not unusual now for physicians and nurses to routinely “team up” with mental health professionals, alternative practitioners, social workers, and chaplains to provide more holistic medical care for patients.

It’s a valuable approach, she says, but she also notes that even this may not be enough. “I’m not sure that even holistic medicine fully acknowledges the difficult-to-measure therapeutic effects of empathy, attentiveness, humor, intuitive reasoning, the ability to inspire hope, and other qualities sometimes called ‘soft skills’ (or, more appreciatively, ‘the art of medicine’) and which are as useful in my practice as penicillin, if not more so,” concludes Koven.

With such a philosophy in mind, one that recognizes both the science and the art of medicine, a single-payer health care system could empower itself to best meet the challenges involved to cure illness, ease suffering, and promote a healthy, nurturing environment for all human beings.  

If you don’t already understand that headline, you are missing the primary goal of neoliberal capitalism over the past nearly 40 years.

Stop assuming the 1% wants growth economies…please. Just stop.

The 1%’s interest is only in supporting the “keep all I got” model. Accept this as a rule and you are halfway to enlightenment, and you will pierce the technocratic lie that “economics is too hard to understand”.

Merkel: Still juggling Neoliberal recipes while the Titanic heads straight for the ice.

Yet the fundamental misconception that high finance actually wants a “high-growth” model - but just can't figure the darn thing out - is likely to persist. This is fostered by the mainstream media’s longtime deification of economic growth rates; but the recent twist is their newfound insistence that the 1.7% predicted 2017 Eurozone growth rate constitutes a turnaround, recovery, success story, blah blah blah. ⁽¹⁾

Talk to the man on the street and they don't know what recovery is being bandied about. Heck, Cuba does better than 1.7%, even with an international blockade!

This growth rate deification was never preordained - other alternatives were rejected: real unemployment rate (which includes underemployment), poverty rate, purchasing power index, etc.

Let's play their game: surely they have been able to win according to their fixed rules?

Obviously…no. Or as they like to say: “Not just yet.”

So when are France and the Eurozone going to experience serious, broad growth? As the world’s largest macro-economy their stagnation is, after all, slowing the economies of the entire (non-socialist planning) globe.

In a nutshell, I can guarantee you that the Eurozone’s current near-depression/recession will not relent until wages and working conditions are drastically reduced, as is the collective ability to demand the minor redistributions of wealth permitted under capitalism.

My two guarantees are, after all, essentially what Juncker, Merkel, Schauble, Macron, Draghi, Dijsselbloem (Who? Exactly.) and other Eurozone leaders have repeatedly admitted…people just don’t want to believe it (or re-broadcast it). Economics, you see, are not forced by economic imperatives, but by political and cultural choices.

I would like to return to a quote by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis - I have used his 2016 book, “And The Poor Suffer What They Must?” as the jumping-off point for this 7-part series, which is now concluding. The first article of this series lambasted him for preferring to be a rock star instead of a true leftist. The second article replaced his fake-leftist analysis of the formation of the Eurozone with a truly leftist one. But, for the most part, the rest of the series has commended, re-broadcast and expanded upon his admirable whistleblowing regarding the appallingly corrupt and dangerously precarious nature of the Eurozone today.

Varoufakis related a discussion he had with an ECB & IMF interlocutor on the economically self-defeating nature of raising the value-added tax (sales tax) on a country like Greece. I place it here to show that the introduction of clearly counterproductive and ineffective economics - the policies of austerity - is by design. But what is the design?

“’Someone whose views matter here wants to demonstrate to Paris what is in store for France if they refuse to enact structural reforms.’”

To take a timely quote from the essential modern economist Michael Hudson - from his new, superb, comprehensive article on The Saker, “Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 compared to 1917”:

"The word ‘reform’ as used by today’s neoliberal media means undoing Progressive Era reforms, dismantling public regulation and government power – except for control by finance and its allied vested interests.” (emphasis added)

This series was to be a call to arms in France, but the war is already over

This series was mostly written at the end of August, when the news is always slow.

It was expected that France would return from summer vacation and demonstrate like hell against the labor code “reforms” of the neoliberal concoction Emmanuel Macron. But it is early November and the fight is long over. “For now, he’s winning the game, no point in hiding it,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France's most famous leftist politician, last weekend.

Macron signed his labor code rollback into law by decree in late September. Not only was it not approved by the legislative branch, it was not even debated there. But some in the French government media would not completely hold their tongue regarding the phony claim that unions and grassroots groups helped write the law: “…the ‘social partners’ had just two hours to read the final 159-page version of 36 changes to French labour law.”

Macron had moved extremely swiftly. It was quite intelligent…but not so intelligent that I wasn't asking everybody in August: “Why are the unions and leftist groups and Mélenchon waiting until late September to schedule their protests? It will obviously be too late!”

So either I'm a genius, or they are incompetent, or there is collusion, or the French have decided to be content with only ending the multi-decade reign of the Socialist and conservative parties, and only had the political energy to throw themselves on the mercy of Macron.

Bad idea….Despite constant polling showing significant majority opposition to the changes, Macron grinned in our face as he signed them into law even earlier than anticipated and on live TV.

So…anyway…back to part 7 - the true goal of “reforms”.

Varoufakis’ “structural reforms” have not been invented in France, of course. I think we all already have a very good idea about the pro-neoliberal capitalist/anti-socialist nature regarding the measures which have been implemented across the Eurozone in recent years despite massive democratic opposition.

So there's no point to get into explaining them - after six years of results in France we have a big enough data set to draw solid conclusions: These reforms and austerity measures are self-defeating in terms of creating growth, and even the future achieved growth will necessarily be limited: you cannot make firing people easier and not expect that to offset some of your planned job gains, no?

My two proposed conditions for ending austerity - the gutting of worker wages/conditions and the assured inability to renegotiate - combined with the inability to democratically discontinue this policy, make it inevitable that the Eurozone will soon achieve a “Lost Decade”. And then also a “Lost Score”, just as Japan did.

In both of these major economic regions, recession has been fabricated in order to wage a social war against the 99%. Return to Dr. Hudson's quotation above for a more in-depth explanation.

Why does the West believe that Japan is on another planet?

Another of our very few truly indispensable modern economists is Richard Werner. He is known for having developed the term Quantitative Easing, but his greatest contribution is in bridging the gap between Europe and Japan, two economic giants. His book “Princes of the Yen” is a first-hand account of Japan's sudden shift from economic powerhouse to economic sick man - they went from being poised to buy the entire world, to perpetual stagnation. The 2001 book is so good that it did the impossible: it was an economics book that went to #1 on the sales charts (in Japan).

Perhaps it is because I am Iranian and am used to hearing about to hearing about the glories of 500 BC, but I feel that even an era as long as 16 years ago may still have things to teach us today….

But Varoufakis does not mention Werner; does not appear to have an international view of capitalism, socialism or economics; even evinces a Eurocentric prejudice. In his book he mentions the Bank of Japan just twice:

“From the late 1990s onwards, Europe’s banks copied the practices of the Anglosphere’s all-singing, all-dancing financial sector without having the safety net of a Federal reserve, a Bank of England or even a Bank of Japan to catch them when the inevitable fall from grace occurred.”

That’s a fine quote, but what on earth is “even a Bank of Japan”? Since when is being the longtime 2^nd-largest economy small potatoes? It’s no shame to get passed by China, and the BoJ is certainly far more powerful than the Bank of England. The only reason for this casual dismissal of Japan that I can think of is - Eurocentrism. And this casual dismissal is from an alleged Marxist…and an alleged economist!

But if all of us would study Japan’s recent economic choices it gives us no doubt about two key issues: The Eurozone is following in Japan’s foolish footsteps, and that bankers are the same everywhere. Yes, those 1917-era caricatures are still correct….

The rise, replacement & decline of the Japanese model

I must repeat: these “reforms” were not invented in Europe. Instead, Europe is enacting/ has enacted the same reforms with the same ideology, goals and tools as in “Lost Score” Japan - the only differences are in skin color, eye shape and per capita rice consumption.

Much like postwar Germany, Japan was tapped as the US’s choice for regional manufacturing powerhouse…even though both nations wreaked such immoral, imperialist havoc during decades of suffering and repression. But both were defeated and thus easy to manipulate; both countries still host the highest number of American forces in the world today, even more than an “occupied” nation like Afghanistan.

Until 1985 Japan’s industrial/banking system worked superbly, with well-known results. It was a stronger version of France’s “mixed economy” model, with even more government direction about where, to whom and how much money to lend in order to create broad growth.

What changed was the decline of the dollar’s dominance, the end of Bretton Woods and the US’s creation of neoliberal economics in order to maintain American domination.

With the Plaza Accord of 1985, Japan adopted the US-orchestrated neoliberal changes that were designed to suck the surpluses from Japan back into the United States. ((West) Germany, France, the US & the UK also signed, but Japan had accumulated the most to lose.) From a capitalist, 1% point of view it made perfect sense and worked perfectly well, which is why Japan’s 1% adopted it. But from a nationalist or 99% point of view it was economic suicide.

As Michael Hudson related in 2008, Japan was, “acting as the Thirteenth Federal Reserve District and Republican Re-Election Committee” by going along with a plan which was clearly against its own national interests and sovereignty. Such an assessment should inflame our Japanese readers, as well as the victims of American imperialism worldwide. But it is textbook communism that the 1% cares more for money than their hometown neighbors, whether the 1% is in Japan or elsewhere.

What was the biggest specific change (and mistake) Japan made? Making the Bank of Japan “independent” from the Ministry of Finance, i.e. from the government…i.e. from accountability, oversight, The People, law, justice, morality, the influence of democratic votes, etc.

Deride communism as ‘government domination’, but examine the opposite

The core foundation of neoliberal capitalism means one thing which we will all agree on: government stands in the way of money (its power, and the ability for individuals to make it).

Therefore, the surest system to aid big money is to have a government which is politicians and not bureaucrats/civil servants.

You may have heard a lot of bad things about government workers, but they often actually know their limited terrain better than any ivory tower technocrat or special interest lobbyist/researcher. And - crucially - at least they aren’t in it only for the money. Can anyone say that about the revolving door of “politics/lobby/business” of Western politics?

Nobody will honestly or justifiably claim that that ALL socialist civil servants are “corrupt”, of course. The mainstream narrative is that socialism produces endemic corruption, but especially at the highest level.

But (and I assume we all know this but just won’t discuss it) in Western capitalism it is only not called “corruption” because the vices of capitalism - unilateralism (personal initiative), greed, “creative” destruction, a mafia-inspired “family over society” which is the barest exception to untrammeled individualism, ignoring the weak and the old, and too many other sins to name - are hailed as virtues. All we gotta do is unleash those “animal energies” of the economy, right…?

The core foundation of finance capitalism which cannot be denied is: shareholders and bankers rule (central bankers, too).

That’s why getting rid of independent finance ministers is a real goal - the good ones are not working for profit, but for the People. Bankers can be certain of what motivates other bankers; they are not sure where people like Varoufakis are coming from (to his great credit).

So we all know that the decoupling of finance/lending banking in the US took a major step forward with the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, and that reduction of government oversight caused the subprime housing crisis in the US. 

But how many remember this “ancient history” a few years further back and across the Pacific? What happened when Japan divorced government oversight from banking following the Plaza Accord? Japanese bankers created the Asian Tiger Boom and the Asian Tiger Bust.

How? They flooded the area with easy credit, and then revoked it. Not being able to pay your bills is indeed a crisis….

And who organized the European Sovereign Debt crisis in the PIGS countries? Northern European bankers: by flooding the area with credit and then revoking it.

Many are saying the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis is over, despite all the evidence to the contrary. (The previous six parts of the series have tried to marshal as much proof as possible for that thesis.)

So the multinational, regional parallels between the Southeast Asian and European crises are unmistakable.

But now we must add in the US: they have flooded their own market with housing debt, then car and appliance debt, and then credit card debt in order to cannibalize within its own rich borders.

So one would think that the lesson should be clear by now, because we clearly see the same results in all three regions which are the outgrowth of the same motivations - neoliberal capitalism.

In all three the government could have used its powers to end the crisis, but did/are not. The reason is encapsulated in my headline: Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99%, or, enacting “reforms”.

Call the end goal whatever you like - modern debt peonage, new serfdom, the Modern Manor System - it is undeniable that Westerners live (suffer) at the apex of capitalism’s global dominance.

But the Eurozone is far, far worse off than Japan, and getting worse

This is because the European Central Bank, created amid the heyday of American neoliberalism and the death of the USSR, unfortunately has independence enshrined in its charter. LOL, given what I have related - you have to laugh to keep from crying!

The ECB cannot be constrained by any national parliament, nor can their offices be searched – they are totally above the law…so like the UN, minus the internationalist solidarity. The future of the Eurozone is so hopeless because the ECB is more purely controlled by bankers - and by foreign bankers - than Japan or the US ever was.

Thanks to Varoufakis’ whistle-blowing, praised in part 3 of this series, that horrendously undemocratic bankers’ cabal called the Eurogroup has been pushed into the light.

So we should now understand that those at the helm in Brussels/Eurogroup have always had the resources, the potential, and the will to be even more purposely destructive in a capitalist fashion as their colleagues in New York City and Tokyo.

And this is what they have done with that power:

(As the next section will illustrate further) Exactly like Japan, the Eurozone’s nearly decade-long failure of its austerity policies is now producing enough apathy, fear, desperation, and acquiescence to force through major “reforms” to Europe's hard-won postwar social safety net and societal/labor structure:

Workers’ and trades unions’ rights will not be increased while mass dismissals have been made easier; workers will not have confidence to demand their fair share of the profits produced when they can't even get a full week of work; when “full unemployment” (the mainstream never mentions “underemployment”) does return it will be without the stability of long-term contracts, the norm in places like France; the knowledge that refugees will be happy to leave their tent and take your job - when combined with anti-socialist racism - will be another divisive card for the bosses to play; and how can the standard of living “fall” when the 99% is all falling together? All of this will be the new “normal” and, of course, a success…for the 1%.

It does get even worse: Yet another crisis is coming for Europe - a political crisis. A multi-speed Europe has already been announced by the four major economies in a major betrayal of the 1991-era promises. The lender countries will simply take their money, go home, start sending monthly bills, and I recount this indisputable trajectory in part five of this series, “The Eurozone has likely entered its final calendar year, contraction coming”.

At some point Asia is going to re-decouple from the West

But not yet. I guess it's because socialist China is still not strong enough to offer a better partner? Japan should realize that with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Japan’s Shinzo Abe can be seen as a clear precursor to Macron: after 15 years of near-recession, a beaten, desperate and misled populace voted in Abenomics, which is based on quantitative easing and structural “reforms” of the type of the French had resisted for so long.

Abe has just been reelected as Prime Minister this week. QE has, just like in Europe today, been celebrated as a champion merely by achieving the pathetic goal of “avoiding recession”. He also benefited from the recent manufactured North Korea crisis to gain a typical election bump in highly nationalist Japan. He only won power in 2012 when the long-dominant “fake-leftist” party was finally punished for continuing the conservative, regressive and despised post-Plaza Accord economic choices.

The results of Abenomics are clear: dismal by capitalist standards, criminal by socialist standards.

Abe’s QE - putting aside the accompanying societal changes to the labor structure - is astronomical when compared with the ECB and Fed: as a percentage of the country's GDP it is three times larger than that of his Western counterparts, nearing 100%.

But if you were thinking that Japan is worse off than Europe you are mistaken - the reason is economic nationalism, perhaps the only defense left against globalization (assuming you foolishly reject Socialism, the solution):

The fact is that Japanese people own Japanese debt. 95% of government debt is owned by Japanese citizens; capital flight is thus not a risk; citizens are not going to dump their bonds; you cannot foreclose on both your grandmas because then you have nowhere to spend your holidays; Japan’s government thus has tremendous flexibility to print its way out of a problem (the problem is they are not printing for productive investments); Germany, the US or China cannot impose their will on Tokyo like they did with Athens.

Therefore, Japan's problem is not international capitalists, but national capitalists; if they could ever subdue their 1%, the world would be following their lead just as much as many are following Beijing’s.

Japan, it has often been written since they were “opened” to the West in the late 19th-century, apparently still has some sort of inferiority complex regarding the West: they have chosen to pathetically ape it for the benefit of their 1%, only. They should be reading Franz Fanon to understand the psychology of the colonized, which they are culturally even if not economically.

Back to the point of this series - the Eurozone’s near-future outlook: Japan provides a clear model of expectation:

Japan’s growth rate since 1990 is nearly the same as France’s since 2010 – always around 1%. That’s enough to avoid the bad-press headline of “recession” but not enough to produce genuine growth. It is enough for clueless politicians to say that good times are “just around the corner”, and enough for “ever busier putting food on the table” citizens to pray they are finally right.

Whether in Japanese or French, the capitalist media and official government responses are the same. The common thread is that they have all embraced 1980s style neoliberal capitalism, the worst form of capitalism implemented in the post-industrial era. This is also known as “the American way,” or globalization.

So has the European sovereign debt crisis been solved or postponed by Draghi?

This entire series is based around the idea that Draghi has to end QE sometime, and that when he does the bond markets will go back to the crisis of 2012 because nothing has fundamentally improved since 2012.

On October 25 the ECB’s Mario Draghi gave his long-awaited speech. So was it more “free money” to the 1%, or will they start looking for other ruthless, capitalist, speculative investments?

So….drumroll please…

Postponed!

Draghi refused to use the scary word “tapering”, but the ECB is doing just that by going from €60 billion to €30 billion in bond-buying per month, for nine months. This will bring the total holdings of the ECB to approximately €2.6 trillion. Draghi really had no choice as far as the length of nine months - QE must end because there are almost no more national bonds to buy under the current rules.

So this is just a postponement, and an admission that the Eurozone economy is still not prepared to stand alone without government banker bailouts, daily. But make no mistake - nothing has been delivered for the 99%.

When they run out of national bonds, maybe they will change the rules in order to buy more…? Unlikely, because die-hard capitalist (West) Germany is tired of postponing the obvious - an oh-so-profitable Troika-led gutting of more than just Greece.

Or, the ECB might move on to buying corporate bonds? Maybe that will appease the speculators temporarily, but it will not change the fact that the Eurozone’s national bond markets - totally uncoupled from each other despite living in a multinational project - will be back to where they were in 2012 by next September. Governments will still need to sell bonds….

So Draghi’s announcement did not rattle the bond markets because the status quo has not been changed - the can has been kicked down the road again.

But nothing changes the crucial fact that five years of QE has gone towards the 1%, the stock market, and assets like real estate, jewelry and artwork, instead of productive investment geared towards producing jobs, growth and prosperity for the 99%… or anything which would have improved the “real economy” and thus reduced the chances for another crisis.

Voila….That is where the Eurozone stands today - as the biggest link in the global economy, and still the weakest link.

Thanks for reading this series and let's postpone our rendezvous.

See you next September, Mario! You may be hoping for a miracle, but high finance will not grow a conscience by then. Buy Bitcoin while it’s still in 4 figures!

Sorry to add here that I have not even discussed how the three Western regions of the United States, the Eurozone and Japan have no viable plan to sell all of this massive QE debt to the private sector. They will flood the market at the same time, where enough demand cannot possibly exist, and thus will have real difficulties getting these debts off their books. Somebody is taking a haircut - under capitalism it is always the People. But…because the People have already bailed out the banks, the haircut is coming from your wages and stability.

So where does this “unloading QE haircut” come from, then? You tell me….

Planned mistakes aren’t ‘mistakes’ - thus socialist economic governance is needed

In the end, there is no way out: government spending is the only way. We will always collect taxes, after all.

But there is government spending in capitalist countries (where bankers decide where the money goes - their pockets), and then there is government spending in socialist countries (where elected/appointed/recallable/imprisonable bureaucrats decide where the money goes): you decide which is better.

Both Werner and Hudson (with his vital modern critique of the FIRE sector that is usuriously bleeding the West dry, just as they did it in 500 BC, 500 AD, 1500 AD and at all points in between) do not denounce quantitative easing per se - they denounce that it is being used to benefit only the 1%. That is simple economics and simple economic history….

Regarding political history and the pan-European project: It is common knowledge that Europe’s founding fathers hoped that a monetary union would lead to a political union, in order to support said monetary union. It is also clear they hoped that an economic crisis would provoke efforts towards a closer political union.

But this is not a democratic plan in the slightest! This is blackmail of the European People!

This is the undiscussed, undemocratic secret at the foundation of the pan-European project, akin to slavery in the US, imperialism in the French Republic, and perhaps foot binding in modern Imperial China. Only one of these regions has forced a modern peoples’ revolution to throw off this sinful system….

And you can call it hostage-taking, opportunism, and just plain sadistic cruelty, because Europe’s capitalist elite knew that when the next financial crisis inevitably came along in capitalism, great suffering would be produced worldwide by the ill-prepared monetary union.

Perhaps the one point of this series is to prove that nothing has changed in the Eurozone since 2012, and that Spain and Italy still remain on the edge of a punishing Troika bailout. Just as the Asian Tigers and Greece were busted out - the bankers’/Troika’s toll is terrible, so terrible that “reforms” are being accepted in places like France in a plea for preventative mercy.

Which is why there is resistance: Brexit has been followed by Catalonia, which will be followed by the departure of Central Europe when “multi-speed Europe” arrives, which will be followed by some other -exit for as long as this atrocious status quo exists in Europe.

Communism is, after all, an entire cultural system and not just an economic point of view. Because the current aim of this particular pan-European project is so ruthlessly capitalist and yet has been so imbibed unthinkingly, it will take many years of re-education to learn what is true, harmonious pan-European solidarity.

The jury is out as to which will come first: solidarity or breakup.

Conclusion: You either aspire to the imperialist 1% or dare the socialist dream

I recently interviewed a prominent investment fund, as a part of my work for Press TV. After our 15-minute interview, I left thinking that I disagreed with everything the investment banker said - not surprising given my adherence to communism. We chatted afterwards as he smoked, and he rattled off a clichéd national stereotype to explain the economy of every global region. We needed to film his office to get some extra footage for our report and, probably because he saw that I was reading his investment magazines to pass the time, he printed out a 10-page article he had recently written. I turned the last page to read his conclusion, and here is his third to last sentence:

“When taking into account the level of stock market valuations, we find that the momentum can be found to firmly install the fiscal reforms which will - finally - put in place the American system.”

And this guy is French….I don't think “the American system” is what de Gaulle expected, or what the French fought the Germans for and, most crucially, what the French people want? That last point, due to the dictates of national sovereignty, may be more important than the key fact that the American model does not even work for the average person.

I think the investment banker’s final sentence reveals the obvious, ongoing collusion between high finance and central banks:

“It seems necessary to have a greater clarity on the monetary politics of the two central banks (US Fed & ECB) not only in the direction in which it is leading, but on the timing and amplitude of the direction.”

Rest assured that nobody in the investment, banker, or central banker community is reading this series.

If they even caught a whiff of it they would drop it immediately, as it would produce immediate and painful cognitive dissonance due to their false assumptions and self-serving conclusions.

Because they cannot tolerate different ideas, they live in a little insulated bubble, and they don't want anything to touch them physically or even intellectually. They seem to hope to earn a lot of money quickly, in order to escape the daily grind, the sweating masses, the idea that all labor is equal.

I will end this 7-part series with a quote from Varoufakis because, despite my on-the-ground experience as a daily, hack journalist (where breadth and urgency confer real virtues, although certainly not the only ones), people will take his (fake-leftist) word over mine.

“To believe that Europe’s problem was debt. Not the architectural design of the Eurozone. Not its unenforceable rules. But debt. Debt was never Europe’s problem. It was a symptom of an awful institutional design.”

The tragedy of the European austerity I have reported on and am living through is that it ensures that the indebted will never be able to repay: Greece will never ever pay off what they owe – believing that is just proof that you have been misled by the media.

They are being told “no bailout, and no bankruptcy”…this can only end in revolution or a stay of execution by their monetary masters. The Third World knows that the governor never calls in time….

European imperialism has finally turned inward. The lessons must be learned. The People must demand new rules. These rules cannot be capitalist. Socialism remains our only option.

***********************************

This is the final article I have written in a 7-part series on today’s Eurozone which will combine some of Varoufakis’ ideas with my 8 years of covering the crisis first-hand from Paris.

Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Varoufakis book review: Rock star economist but fake-leftist politician

Why no Petroeuro? or France’s historic effort to create a permanently anti-austerity Eurozone

The hopelessly corrupt structure of the Eurozone & the Eurogroup

The Eurozone: still as primed for collapse as ever

The Eurozone has likely entered its final calendar year, contraction coming

The English-speaking world’s fear of calling communism, ‘communism’

Forced recession as a tool of social war against the 99%

I somehow thought he would last forever, charming as always, joking, teasing, mocking, prickling, criticizing so wittily that the target of his pungent irony thought he was kidding, praising so ambiguously that those he loved thought he was criticizing, throwing mud pies in the faces of the powerful and calling them names, and boasting to one and all that he made lots of money being impolite.

“I most certainly am a member of the establishment,” Vonnegut told me that day over twenty years ago, I think it was the fall of 1985, in his town house on the East Side in Manhattan. An Amsterdam magazine had sent me to New York to interview the light of a “certain” American literature who so titillated, amused and charmed Europeans by ridiculing the ridiculous sides of America, by his playful lack of reverence for institutions and authority and for all the things that too many people take too seriously.

“No one is more in its center than me but I don’t maintain contacts with the other members. Though I don’t feel solidarity with it, I admit membership and I don’t like establishment people who play at the false role of rebels. Then the establishment needs people like me— however I’m a member only because I have money, otherwise they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

At the appearance of his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, in the same year that Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck brought out East of Eden, Kurt Vonnegut was thirty and still widely considered an underground writer, despite Graham Greene’s labeling him “one of the best living American writers.”

Kurt Vonnegut (born 1922 in Indianapolis, died in New York, April 11, 2007 from the consequences of a fall two weeks earlier) was a very humorous man, so entertaining that he was deceptive, marked by broad grins, soft delivery and false modesty. I wondered, as his co-establishment members must have wondered, too, where the creative artist ends and the performer begins. Or vice-versa. Was he a real social critic or simply a cynic?

“No one is more in its center than me but I don’t maintain contacts with the other members. Though I don’t feel solidarity with it, I admit membership and I don’t like establishment people who play at the false role of rebels. Then the establishment needs people like me— however I’m a member only because I have money, otherwise they wouldn’t even talk to me.”

After he became widely known in the sixties Vonnegut was identified with the revolt against realism and traditional forms of writing. Though he most certainly was a “social writer” from beginning to end, he was also more experimental than his contemporaries like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Barth, more fascinated by the absurd and the ridiculous. His science fiction and short stories that had appeared in the best magazines in the post-war years, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, were marked by parody and experimental ridicule. A cult grew around him, especially among youth, so that he remained “mysterious” even after he no longer belonged to the underground. The appearance of each of his subsequent books was an event and he remained a fresh writer.

Things got underway in earnest already in that first novel. Vonnegut’s admiration for the marvels of technology had resulted in his early bent for science fiction, which he wrote a lot of. In Player Piano he was “fascinated by the wonderfully sane engineers who could process anything … do anything on their own horizontal level. Miraculous what the engineers could do. They were brilliant but didn’t seem to do anything brilliant. ” Drawn on Huxley’s Brave New World and science fiction in general, Vonnegut’s concern was that these specialists, each working in his own field, would soon produce their own leaders, a caste created by a technocracy barren of leaders capable of working on a vertical level and devoid of fresh humanistic ideas.

“Precisely this scientific system created our leaders. The problem is they brought little ideology into the factories. In general there is so little ideology left … if we ever had any at all. It’s good that we at least appeal to justice. On the other hand, I have found that one can behave ideologically within a small group related by profession or interests. I’m fascinated by the Paris Commune for example, especially its branch of anarchism. People tend to hang onto natural anarchy. The life of Bakunin is useful. Seen as useful people, anarchists offer a fascinating alternative to big government today. When I was a prisoner of war in Germany my small labor unit was left to fend for itself in destroyed Dresden. (One of his most famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five.) We dealt effectively with the thieves among us without being ferocious. We did that intuitively.”

That was Vonnegut.

One of his contorted Americas is controlled by one enormous corporation-state under the guidance of an ugly old girl whose weighty signature is her fingerprints (Jailbird). In this society the poor spend their time squirting chemicals into their bodies for the simple reason that “on this planet they don’t have doodley-squat.” That was the society that concerned the writer, Kurt Vonnegut, searching for a place for the individual. Like himself his characters are amusing, entertaining and sympathetic … and rebels all.

Yet his conclusions are seldom humorous.

“Big government is like the weather, you can’t do anything about it. People are moving away from central authority and its ineffective bureaucracy, which has created too many artificial jobs in Washington to accommodate our children. Then, let’s face it, leadership is so poor.”

In fact, Vonnegut spent his later years attacking that bureaucracy, especially the George W. Bush administration.

His artistic family background—his father and grandfather were architects, his daughters painters—and his association with painters and musicians engendered yearnings in him for the image of the Renaissance man. The day I spent the afternoon and early evening with him he invited me along to check in at the Greenwich Village gallery that was showing fifty of his book illustrations that he called “doodles with a felt-tip pen.” At the vernissage the vain writer-illustrator was as nervous as a Broadway musical star on opening night.

But not to worry! His fans snapped them up at one thousand dollars each.

He must have chuckled all the time to himself. That exhibit was the stuff of a typical Vonnegut literary vignette as in Breakfast of Champions in which he pokes fun at the art world, phony artists and gullible consumers in a mixture of ambivalence and pity. His fictional artist Karabekian has been paid $50,000 by the town for sticking a yellow strip of tape vertically on a piece of canvas. The whole town hates him for the swindle until he explains that it was an unwavering band of light, like each of them, like Saint Anthony.

“All you had to do was explain,” say the relieved people to their cultural hero, now convinced they have acquired one of the world’s masterpieces. “If artists would explain more people would like art more.”

Though Vonnegut repeats that workers simply want an explanation, the cynic suspects cynicism in him too.

“Sometimes I think the people of the world are begging to understand. And to be understood by the United States. They want to be understood more than they want to be ‘freed’ by America. Actually the US encourages not seeing other peoples. Disregard for other peoples is a matter of education. Making money is the point. Don’t waste your time. Conserve your resources. Withhold your time from people who can’t reward you. This started when Reagan came along and did away with social help using tax monies that Roosevelt’s New Deal had introduced. So the poor are now up the creek! (This was 1985, remember, before Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq and East Africa and the war on terrorism.)

“And our intellectuals didn’t react at all to his re-election,” says the self-proclaimed Socialist-anarchist. “He ran unopposed.”

In Deadeye Dick a neutron bomb being transported along the Interstate goes off, killing 100,000 people of the town but leaving everything else intact. After the dead are buried under the parking lot for sanitary reasons, the question is what to do with the contaminated area. Someone proposes moving Haitian immigrants there. The point is that Vonnegut’s technological society needs the workers but it cares even less for non-Americans than for its own citizens.

“I’m convinced that slavery will come back, and Haitians were after all once slaves. With all the automation, society needs slaves. One will perhaps have the option of selling one’s services for long periods, thirty years, or for life. There will be many takers. Like the Asians and Mexicans who work here now for less than minimum wages.”

Americans who make their lives abroad see this generalized blindness to other peoples in their fellow Americans quite clearly, though they themselves are apparently unconscious of the neglect. I think Vonnegut must be right: it’s education … and some brainwash, too. Tourism and travels to Europe and Asia and South America to photograph the natives don’t really correct the blindness; sometimes it reinforces it.

We’re drinking scotch and black coffee and chain smoking in the kitchen of his unpretentious but large and expensive townhouse—four stories, with garden—in a swanky pretentious area of Manhattan. A cold wind is blowing down from among new high-rise buildings. Long Vonnegut in baggy pants and wool shirt is sprawled on an iron garden chair, drawling out his witticisms, descriptions and pronouncements, candid and down-to-earth, having fun at the expense of everyone—himself, me, us and them—the artist and social critic and performer, too. He runs his slim delicate fingers through long reddish hair and pulls nervously at his mustache. His talk has the quality of being quiet and breath-taking simultaneously. He seemed and acted younger than his years.

“I am successful,” he stresses, returning again and again to the money thing. “Privileged! When I was young and working for General Electric I was a hostage of society because I had six children. Now I’m free because I have money. I don’t like the privileged class, in the same way I will always resent the officer class. I was a private during the war and saw an infantry division wiped out its first time in combat because it was poorly led. Like America is poorly led today.” (Reading the write-ups of the two interviews I did with him in 1980 and again in 1985 is a curious experience; much of what he had to say then he could have said this year.)

Like many writers Vonnegut said that writing for him was a way to rebel against his parents’ life style. He claimed he chose writing because he wrote better than he painted, and because you have to do something to make your mark. He liked writing for newspapers because of the immediate feedback, which plays an enormous role among journalists I have known. Journalists are as vain as novelists and find it rewarding to write an article in the evening and see it in print the next day. I liked, appreciated and agreed with his social stance but he was his most entertaining and I believe most in earnest speaking of the arts.

“You can’t help but look back wistfully to the days of Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci who worked in many arts. But today there are so many things to do that we don’t have the time to dedicate ourselves wholly to the arts. Still, I believe in the arts. My children say I dance well. I can shag and that’s mysterious to the young. I can jitterbug and that impresses them. And I play the clarinette lovingly. In general the arts have held up well in catastrophic situations. Yet there are preferences. It’s true that painters like to paint and writers hate to write. Putting paint on a canvas is fun and is easy. You don’t even have to finish it. After six strokes you have a painting. At that point you can frame it and hang it. Maybe that’s why writers like to paint and draw. Norman Mailer is a good drawer. Tennessee Williams does good watercolors. Henry Miller is the best writer-painter I have known. Poetry too is fast. That’s why poets have so much time to sit around cafès and talk. But the novelist is always busy, sitting at a typewriter like a stenographer, which is boring and lonely.

“My book, Breakfast of Champions, is about art. I think art should be refreshing to everyone. But many artists are in league with the rich to make the poor feel dumb, like all the galleries downtown with walls covered in dots and blank whites. The rich organize art in such a way as to prove they have different souls from the poor, to give a biological justification to their status. Mystification is the secret. Ruling classes find it politically useful that workers can’t understand the pictures in the galleries. Inaccessible art grew out of industrialization. In the Renaissance art was of the people.”

Vonnegut’s heroes are outsiders, the rebels in big organizations who think the system is wrong and maybe want to change it. In a wacky and comical way he depicts the hopeless and sad human condition. His heroes care about involvement. Yet they are helpless. They have little power to decide anything.

“No man is in control,” he murmurs. “People are just born on this planet and are immediately hit over the head and yelled at. Ten per cent of the world’s children are abused. So what chance does man have? My own success is like an American dream. My growth graph is perfect. I’m prosperous. I can see clearly how it worked for me. I’m convinced we’re all programmed in a certain way. Still, big bureaucracy appalls me. Gore Vidal was right that this is the only country in the world that does nothing for its citizens. Jobs don’t go around. The auto industry is laying people off (that was twenty-two years ago and it still is!). Still, I have to say that working on the assembly line is better than doing nothing at all. But the problem is we’re just not useful anymore. We need to find new uses for man, find a simpler way of life.”

The backdrop of Vonnegut’s stage is this: While the people lament gasoline prices and call for small cars, Detroit turns out bigger cars and lays off workers. The people eat macrobiotic foods and squirt chemicals up their assholes and swallow exotic anti-hemorrhoid salves. It’s the people! But not people in his beloved New York! His settings are the wide expanses of America. Where the really funny, mad things happen. A world so far from Europe as to be incredible. A world that baffles Europeans.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t a certain point, still in the kitchen, and after his wife had glanced in a couple times, I think to check on the scotch level, and after he told me he never gave interviews to the American press, only to Europeans, and pouring more scotch said that interviews were hard work, and after he admitted he neglected his German heritage and the Vonnegut family tree in Münster, I asked him about his statement in a recent book—I don’t remember which—that people and nations have their story that ends, after which it’s all epilogue, and he intimated that the US story ended after World War II.

“That was only a joke,” he said wryly, smiling sheepishly.

“It didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded quite serious.”

“Well” (reluctantly, perhaps not wanting to appear too critical of the USA to the European public), “the United States story will become epilogue unless it succeeds in renewing itself. Like a play peters out if it slows down and has nothing else to say. One must invent new themes for development. Economic justice is one such theme that would make our first two hundred years seem like only Act I. That would become Act II. If that theme is not developed, then our story peters out. Our legal justice would then become mere mockery. Remember the old quip: ‘It’s no disgrace to be poor but it might as well be.’

“In the Constitution there is nothing about economic justice, only the legal utopia. The Bill of Rights is a utopia. We have laws that violate the Constitution. It’s now time to start thinking about social fairness. Our superstar government leaders deal with billions of dollars and we have individuals richer than the whole state of Wyoming. The military-industrial complex is robbing us blind, building their bizarre weapons that costs $40,000 a shot to use. Sensitive weapons that don’t work in the dark or under 50°. We can’t possibly understand all that crap. Compare the arms manufacturers to the salesmen of snake eye in the frontier days. The miracle medicine. In the 1930s we had Eugene Debs who labeled arms manufacturers ‘merchants of death.’ Then the crooks took over the labor unions and we have nothing left today so that I don’t have a banner to which I can adhere. And the same type of people are on top in our society today, selling their quack remedies, to protect us against the dread disease of Communism. (I’m certain he said the same about terrorism in later years!) And that’s what I say in my annual lectures at ten universities. I would like to see that change.

“Yet people don’t give a damn about anything. Few care what we pour into the world everyday. Few care if we go to war. People are embarrassed about life and don’t care if it all ends. Humans have decided that the experiment of life is a failure.”

One of his characters speaks of being born like a disease: “I have caught life. I have come down with life.” Speaking about experiencing the destruction of Dresden, a city of beauty like Paris, Vonnegut said he was the only there who found it remarkable that it all went up in smoke. “Not even the Germans seemed to care.”

The scotch flowed. The kitchen was blue with smoke. Thank God I was recording our talk or little would have remained. At some point one of us said “doodley-squat.” He loved those sounds, spicing his novels liberally with skeedee wah, skeedee wo. At critical moments his heroes mumble in skat talk of the jazz era, skeedee beep, zang reepa dop, singing a few bars to chase the blues away. Then, yump-yump, tiddle-taddle, ra-a-a-a, yump-yump-boom. And abbreviations Ramjac, epicac and euphic. Onomatopeic or symbolic nonsense. Doodley-squat for the nothing at all the poor don’t have.

It all sounded OK in the smoky blue kitchen over scotch but what do those sounds mean? Futuristic concepts? Or sounds of joy or despair? The voice of truth? Or just social chatter? Escape or mere foolishness? Is he writer or entertainer?

“Any agreement on the basis of friendliness obliterates ideas and thinking. What about that?”

“Yes, I wrote that. The stupid performance of man and his degeneration are possible because no one is thinking. There has been a warm brotherhood of stupidity. What do words mean anyway? The old Hollywood joke is expressive:

Question: How do you say, ‘fuck yourself?’

Answer: ‘Trust me.’”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] took the following information from various websites, Dutch, German and Italian, of countries where Vonnegut was immensely popular, simply in order to round out his life story. After his last novel in 1997 he left fiction writing and became a senior editor for In These Times. The magazine is dedicated to informing and analyzing popular movements for social, environmental and economic justice; to providing a forum for discussing the politics that shape our lives; and to producing a magazine that is read by the broadest and most diverse audience possible. Vonnegut wrote that if the magazine didn’t exist he would be a man without a country.

In his columns there he began a blistering attack on the administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.  "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

In “A Man without a Country” he wrote that "George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography." He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."

In 2005, Vonnegut was interviewed by David Nason for The Australian. During the course of the interview Vonnegut was asked his opinion of modern terrorists, to which he replied "I regard them as very brave people." When pressed further Vonnegut also said that "They [suicide bombers] are dying for their own self-respect. It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing ... It is sweet and noble — sweet and honorable I guess it is — to die for what you believe in."

Vonnegut’s Novels

• Player Piano (1952)
• The Sirens of Titan (1959)
• Mother Night (1961)
• Cat's Cradle (1963)
• God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, of Pearls Before Swine (1965)
• Slaughterhouse-Five, of The Children's Crusade (1969)
• Breakfast of Champions, of Goodbye, Blue Monday (1973)
• Slapstick, of Lonesome No More (1976)
• Jailbird (1979)
• Deadeye Dick (1982)
• Galápagos (1985)
• Bluebeard (1987)
• Hocus Pocus (1990)
• Timequake (1997)

Short Story Collections

• Canary in a Cathouse (1961)
• Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)
• Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Essays

• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974)
• Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut, An Autobiographical Collage (1981)
• Fates Worse than Death (1991)
• God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)
• A Man Without a Country (2005)

Theater works

• Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970)
• Between Time and Timbuktu, of Prometheus Five (introduction by Vonnegut) (1972)
• Make Up Your Mind (1993)
• Miss Temptation (1993)

© Gaither Stewart

This is a crosspost with Southern Cross Review 

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

"The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven..."

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified. [In this Pinter is himself falling prey to the US propaganda canon of grotesque hyperbole about Soviet crimes, especially in the repression of "dissidents".—Eds.)

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

Reagan: two-bit actor but 20-dollar malignant propagandist. 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.' Indeed, Ronnie, indeed.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the realtruth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

SOURCE: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.  

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
EDITOR IN CHIEF, COUNTERPUNCH

Americans love nothing more than a tantalizing fall-from-grace story. Yet, they seem curiously unmoved by the unfolding tragedy of Paul Manafort. Perhaps because Manfort, like so many of the other young Republican zealots trained in the House of Reagan, was from the beginning a man unadorned by any detectable sheen of grace.

Manafort is what might rather antiseptically be called “a fixer.” Someone you call when you’re in political trouble. Someone who’ll only answer the phone if you’re in deep trouble and you’ve got deep pockets. As far as anyone can tell, this career as an influence peddler was what Manafort intended for himself when he set off for Georgetown University in 1967. When other students were mobilizing against the war, Manafort was already plotting ways to capitalize on global slaughter. Any war, anywhere.

Where there are war crimes being committed, there’s money to be made.  It’s a lesson that Manafort learned early on and propelled him to run point for some of the world’s top rank butchers, including Mobutu Sese Seko, Ferdinand Marcos and Jonas Savimbi.  He took the calls few others had the fortitude to answer. Manafort knew that most of his high-risk clients weren’t long for the world. He could cash their checks until they were deposed or killed, deposit the blood money in some off-shore account and then walk away without looking back.  There will always be new clients. The world isn’t running short of despots in crisis.

Swathed in $5,000 suits and $1,500 cap-toe dress shoes from the trendy Brion boutique in Los Angeles, Manafort has always worked the dark side of K Street. In the 1980s, Manafort made his mark whitewashing the reputations of thuggish subcontractors of American imperial foreign policy during Reagantime, often for a fee of a cool million a year. He once impersonated a CNN reporter, of all occupations, as part of project to obscure Pakistan’s funding of terrorist groups, a contract that was reportedly financed by the ISI, Pakistan’s grim intelligence agency.

As his global operations expanded over the years, Manafort amassed multiple passports, off-shore bank accounts, cut-outs, overseas apartments and shell companies. These are all elementary parts of a spy’s toolkit and there’s been buzz in DC for some time about Manafort’s possible dalliances in spookworld. Perhaps he learned these tradecraft techniques from a close reading of John Le Carré’s The Honorable Schoolboy, but it’s worth noting that many of Manafort’s most notorious clients were on the Agency’s payroll for decades. Did some of that dark money end up in his accounts?

Manafort was never the slickest operator around, but he has a keen sense for the financial opportunities presented during times of political tumult and distress. When the Soviet Union splintered apart, Manafort was quick to circle the wreckage with predacious intent, seeking ways to profit from the shock privatization of the former socialist economies. After prudently assessing the state of play in Eastern Europe and Caucasia, Manafort wasted little time. He cut deals in Estonia, Latvia, the Republic of Georgia, Russia and, most lucratively, Ukraine, where he may have walked off with more than $50 million in payouts for his feats of influence. Recall that the average per-capita income in Ukraine is less than $9,000 a year. That’s neoliberalism for you.

Manafort was never the slickest operator around, but he has a keen sense for the financial opportunities presented during times of political tumult and distress. When the Soviet Union splintered apart, Manafort was quick to circle the wreckage with predacious intent, seeking ways to profit from the shock privatization of the former socialist economies.

Still, the money flowed in. Enough to set up offices in Moscow and Kiev. Enough to buy a house in the Hamptons and a condo in DC. Enough to purchase a $3.7 million apartment in Trump Tower, where he and Trump gossiped and plotted during rides on the lurid skyscraper’s VIP elevator.

If we are to believe Robert Mueller’s briskly written 31-page indictment of Manafort and his underling Rick Gates, the fixer laundered more than $18 million dollars through a variety of shell companies and accounts in the oligarch-friendly banks of Cyprus. The money came largely from his work for the government of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was paying Manafort $600,000 a month for his services. In their years of labor for the embattled Ukrainian regime, Manafort and Gates failed to register themselves as foreign agents, as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA. In order to evade paying taxes on their enormous earnings, the payments were moved through a labyrinth of account so as to conceal the loot from IRS scrutiny and then brought back into the US through purchases of high-ticket luxury items, including a $950,000 rug (a carpet not a new hairpiece for Trump), $1.5 million on clothes, $800,000 to landscape his rather tiny yard in the Hamptons, $420,000 to renovate his pool and $1.3 million on lighting and a home entertainment system at his home in Palm Springs.

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Manafort: Poster boy for the "swamp creatures" Trump was supposed to get rid of. Carrier of the capitalist sociopathic DNA that has finally mortally wounded the United States and which threatens the world with extinction. Unfortunately the norm in America's "power circles".

All of this is pretty much standard operating procedure for the Beltway’s elite tribe of lobbyists, fixers and consultants. FARA is one of those high-minded laws that almost everyone ignores, even the prosecutorial class in the hopes that they too will one day be able to evade its strictures for their own advantage. While schlepping for a dictator-on-the-ropes might burnish your secret resumé, it’s not necessarily a credential you want open for public inspection. Everyone in the game understands that.

Imagine, then, Manafort’s surprise when armed FBI agents invaded his condo in Alexandria in the pre-dawn hours of July 26, 2017, packing a search warrant for his computers, documents, cellphones, data drives and bank accounts. The impunity he had enjoyed for decades when servicing the needs of global tyrants had abruptly ended. Three months later he would be hauled before a federal judge in Virginia facing stacked charges of conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud and violating of the rarely enforced FARA. Manafort, who had been safely mining a rich tradition of corruption, wealth and power, was finally ensnared, largely because of his fateful relationship with Donald Trump.

Manafort’s arrest also sent a sharp shiver of panic down K Street. Had the old rules suddenly changed? Did this mean the gig was up? It didn’t take long for Democratic fixer Tony Podesta, brother of HRC’s campaign manager John, to step down from his position as head of the Podesta Group, fearing the exposure of similar shell games from his firm’s work in Ukraine.

Given the frothy hysteria over Russia these days, there’s some juicy irony in the fact that Manafort was apparently introduced to Trump by the maestro of McCarthyism, Roy Cohn. Cohn encouraged Trump to hire Manafort’s lobbying shop, which he co-ran with Roger Stone, to get Trump an exemption from federal environmental laws allowing Trump to dredge the marina channel at Atlantic City so that he could dock his mammoth yacht, the Trump Princess. A few months later, Trump was flirting with the idea of running for president and consulted with Manafort about what it would take to run. Trump demurred, but kept Manafort on retainer to smooth the political ground for some of Trump’s more grandiose real estate schemes.

The fact that Roy Cohn mentored both Trump and Manafort, who years later saw themselves as commercial envoys to the former USSR and its breakaway republics, illustrates how much both the American right and Russia have changed in the last 30 years. Yet, the indictment of Manafort is refreshingly free of any wearisome references to the grand Russian conspiracy to humiliate Hillary Clinton and elect President Bonespur. Instead, we have been presented with one of the ripest inside accounts of the sinister practices and profligate habits of a Washington swamp creature since the arrest of Jack Abramoff. And we should note, even if Mueller does not, that Manafort, like Abramoff, sharpened his claws as a young fixer by exploiting tribal casinos, often on behalf of his former client Donald Trump.

The question is why Manafort pressed so hard to step out of his customary shadows to work in the spotlight for Trump’s campaign, first as a top advisor for the convention and later as campaign manager. By all accounts begged for the job, using Trump’s pal Tom Barrack as intermediary. Even a man as arrogant as Manafort must have sensed the risk. After all, the FBI had been sniffing around some of his firm’s more pungent enterprises since 2014.  The reason seems to be that Manafort was desperate. He had ruptured his relationship with the Russian aluminum tycoon, Oleg Deripaska, and was anxious to exploit his position in the Trump campaign to repair the damage and cancel his $17 million debt to the testy oligarch. Or, as Manafort put it in an email, “get whole.” To sweeten the pot, Manafort offered to give OVD, as he called him, private briefings on the progress of the campaign. As always with Manafort, his motives were transactional, not political. Like Trump, Manafort’s politics is guided solely by his own self-interest.

It’s hard to summon much sympathy for Paul Manafort, who so concisely encapsulates the debased political culture of the Beltway, except, that is, for the obligatory solicitude we owe to any prey of a merciless prosecutorial machine that is using him as bait for other targets.  But who are the more fearsome beasts here? In Trumpworld’s gallery of villains few, if any, have as much blood on their hands as Manafort. Could it be that Mueller is starting at the top and working his way down?

Live at the whim of the despot, die at the whim of the despot.