A Deconstruction (Part 2)

by MUSA al-GHARBI AND ST MCNEIL

Samantha Powers: “The White House has exhausted all non-military options”  Don’t be fooled by the skirts. Liars and accomplices of this criminal empire come in both genders.

In philosophy circles, bullshit is a technical term denoting a claim which is presented as “fact” although its veracity has not been established. The truth value of bullshit is largely irrelevant to its propagators. Bullshit is disseminated in the service of particular ends, typically opaque to the audience. There is no better description for the Obama Administration’s case for intervention in Syria.

What follows is the most direct and systematic refutation of the Administration’s case for war in Syria—deconstructing their justifications one by one. In order to accommodate its comprehensive nature, the essay will be published as a series of three pieces.  God willing, this information can be a wrench in the gears of the war machine:  print this essay and send it as a letter to your Congressmen, disperse these links across your social networks, deploy these arguments in debates one-on-one.  Resist.

If you missed it, read Part One in this series: ‘Flooding the Zone’ with Bullshit on Syria.

Justification #3: A Strike on Syria is Needed to Preserve US Credibility

The notion that a strike on Syria would “preserve US credibility” is severely undermined by its illegality and further damaged by Secretary of State John Kerry’s disingenuous promise future attacks will be “unbelievably small.”

In truth, it is Barack Obama’s credibility tottering on a red line—not that of the United States. And he put himself on this precipice with reckless language throughout the Syrian crisis.

Ego and reputation are not acceptable reasons to go to war.

Regrettably, as a nation, we don’t have much credibility to lose when it comes to weapons of mass destruction. Since the end of the World Wars, the United States has been among the primary actors to deploy these weapons—and on a scale others could scarcely imagine.

Consider the use of chemical agents Agent Orange and napalm during Vietnam, which killed not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands. To this day, Vietnamese are still plagued by birth defects and other health epidemicslinked to these American chemical weapons.

Washington once approved and supported another secular Arab dictator using chemical weapons: Saddam Hussein, then shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld as a key point of stability in the Pentagon’s strategy, gassed Iran. The U.S. would later use depleted uranium shells and white phosphorous on Iraq during the Gulf Wars. The Pentagon only recently admitted to using these horrific chemical weapons,  which in terms of birth defects, cancer, and other long-term health outcomes were deadlier than the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan.

And lest we forget, America’s top regional ally is an apartheid state  which exercises an unyielding disregard for international law. Israel, like Syria, is one of only a handful of nations which failed to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention. The U.S. did not (re)act in the slightest when the Israel deployed chemical weapons in their 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

The international community, and in particular the Arab and Islamic worlds, are well-aware of these facts. After the euphoria of a post-Bush White House, the idea that our planet’s nations look to Washington for moral leadership in upholding humanitarian values is absurd.  Instead, as a result of decades of armed conflict, coups, invasions, and increasing drone strikes, there is widespread international skepticism of the U.S. and its intentions.  America’s credibility and standing around the world would be harmed much more by another unpopular, illegal, indefinite, and ill-fated campaign in the Middle East justified by sketchy intelligence on WMDs than by failing to follow through on words which should have never been spoken.

Do we really think people care more about consistency than hypocrisy?

Justification #4: The Strike on Syria Will Prevent Further Use and Proliferation of Chemical Weapons

On August 20, 2012, President Obama offered up the following fateful remark:

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”

While social media erupted in red line jokes and bad math, please think about these “other players on the ground.” Most likely he was talking about and to the rebels. What, exactly, did Obama’s words about veiled promise of a strike mean to them?

Part of the problem with “red line” talk is that it creates moral hazards, possibly incentivizing “false flag attacks” where chemical weapons are used by the rebels but blamed on the government in the hopes of spurring Western intervention. The regime has repeatedly accused the rebels of attempting this.  We have previously explored evidence suggesting the rebels may have been behind the chemical attacks in April and August.  If they were, United States’ response in both cases would be tantamount to having rewarded the opposition for committing crimes against humanity—encouraging more frequent and more severe future episodes.

Let us side-step this concern momentarily in favor of another:

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria are desperately trying to get their hands on al-Asad’s vast chemical weapons stockpiles. It is likely that if the government infrastructure is severely weakened as a result of U.S. strikes, these agents would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda. In the aftermath of the Libya invasion, much of Moammar Gaddhafi’s chemical weapons arsenal was seized by militants during and after the NATO campaign (significantly, this included the delivery systems for deploying chemical weapons through artillery rounds, which is how sarin was deployed in Damascus, according to the White House account, perhaps proving the al-Qaeda-linked rebels do have the means to carry out the attack after all).  And despite the grave mismanagement of Gaddhafi’s arsenal, according to former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the challenge of securing Syria’s chemical weapons would be ”100 times worse than what we dealt with in Libya.”

There is no way to secure Syria’s chemical weapons without “boots on the ground.”  In fact, according to Pentagon estimates, it would take more than 75,000 troops to neutralize these weapons. Such an operation would carry a high risk of allied casualties and mission-creep, would be extremely expensive, and would not enjoy a clear “exit strategy.”

Then there is the question of President al-Asad’s “red line.” He has been very clear from the beginning of the conflict that he would never use chemical weapons on his own people. However, he was also unambiguous in asserting that, in the event of direct foreign intervention, he would not hesitate to deploy them on invading and occupying forces.

Any way you slice it, U.S. intervention in Syria would make the proliferation and deployment of chemical weapons more, not less, likely.  Even the architect of the Obama Administration’s Syria war plan has stated that it was not designed for, and is not suitable for the objectives the White House has laid out. Which demands the question: is the U.S. primarily concerned with preventing the use or proliferation of chemical weapons?

On September 9th, Secretary Kerry said the U.S. strike could be canceled if al-Asad surrendered his chemical stockpiles within a week. The Russians and Syrians called the bluff: shortly after Kerry’s remarks, the regime agreed to relinquish its entire stockpile into international custody to be decommissioned, posthaste, potentially putting the Syrians ahead of America in chemical disarmament. Al-Asad further agreed to sign onto the Chemical Weapons Convention—something Benjamin Netanyahu won’t even joke about.

Considering that a military strike would dramatically increase the chances of chemical weapons being proliferated and deployed, why hasn’t the U.S. jumped at this deal? The United Nations did.

Instead, Secretary Kerry insisted his comment was “merely rhetorical” — a fancy way to say bullshit — and that he was not offering any serious policy proposal. Despite the option to achieve America’s supposed objective without violence, Kerry said he saw “no reason” to slow the war machine. Fortunately, the Senate disagreed and tabled the resolution on Syria. This forced the White House to take the proposal seriously: despite the President’s bluffs to the contrary, the War Powers Act does not negate the need for Congressional approval to start a war.

However, the Obama Administration’s bald determination to move forward with the attack despite the potential breakthrough speaks volumes about their intentions. Suddenly the emperor has no clothes.

Of course, it is likely that America will sabotage these disarmament negotiations in much the same way they continually interfere with a negotiated end to the broader crisis. And even if the agreement is successful, the Administration might rustle up another justification for war. After all, the U.S. deposed Gaddhafi even after he abandoned his nuclear program—in fact, sacrificing his nuclear arsenal likely made him an even more attractive target for regime change.

The plans to depose al-Asad have been in the works since 2004–they will not be abandoned so easily.

Sanity may prevail in this particular battle, but the war rages on. This is not the time to rest on one’s laurels, but to press one’s advantage. Perhaps the international community can leverage this moment into pushing America still further towards peace.

Justification #5: The Strike is Necessary to Push al-Asad to the Negotiating Table

Despite the ever-increasing financial, logistical, material and diplomatic assistance the U.S. and its allies have provided to sustain the rebellion over the last two years, the regime stands on the brink of a de facto victory.  It is thus reasonable to assume that had the U.S. not inserted itself into the crisis in Syria, it would have already been resolved.  Clearly, the big problem is al-Asad.

According to Secretary of State Kerry, the regime has refused to negotiate an end to the conflict because al-Asad assumes he can just “shoot his way out of this.” Military intervention is needed to “change Bashar’s calculus.”

Anyone who has followed President al-Asad’s rhetoric closely should know that he is much more willing to reach out to the opposition and to offer concessions when negotiating from a position of strength. As with any leader, when his back is to the wall, he is likely to dig in and become more rigid, more defiant, and more subversive. The US should know this by now, having just had their war plans deflated by al-Asad’s deft maneuvers. If certain international players wish for the Syrian President to resign, they would have been better offering guarantees and incentives rather than threats and coercion.

More importantly, it is simply false to claim that al-Asad has been unwilling to negotiate, or that his first instinct is to resort to force. While the security forces were brutally overzealous in attempting to maintain public order (a big factor in the protest movement’s initial growth), President al-Asad had initially hoped that he could reform his way out of the crisis—enacting >a number of significant measures which were met with wide popular support, including a new constitution which would have forced an end to his rule after one more presidential term. Since then, the government has dramatically reformed its security sector, subverting the loathed mukhabarat and prosecuting them if they step out of line or commit crimes against civilians.

As the crisis progressed, al-Asad has consistently endorsed, proposed, and complied with ceasefires. The primary reason these measures have failed is because the opposition’s “leadership” had no control over the disorganized militias. They can agree to ceasefires, but cannot get the rebel forces to comply; this remains the case.

Al-Asad has consistently been at the forefront of pushing for negotiations and dialogue, including recently calling on the BRICS nations to help end the bloodshed in Syria, because Western powers and their regional allies continue to exacerbate the violence. Looking at the casualties per month, there is a direct correlation between the rate of killings and the amount of arms, aid, and training being provided to the rebels.

The primary sticking point to negotiations remains the Syrian National Coalition’s insistence that al-Asad resign as a precondition to any settlement—a condition which is set in defiance of the Geneva Communique. While this insistence serves the geopolitical interests of the SNC’s patrons in the U.S. and the Gulf,  it does not reflect the will or interests of the Syrian people. Since the beginning of the protests, they have overwhelmingly and unambiguously sought a piecemeal, democratic, and then diplomatic solution to the crisis—not an armed revolution.

Why has the U.S. ignored these non-violent aspirations?

It is important to bear in mind that the armed opposition is not representative of the broader opposition movement. Among political forces, while Western media focuses primarily on the SNC, due primarily to their perceived friendliness to Western intentions, this group has never enjoyed legitimacy in Syria itself. They were and remain an expatriate movement stationed outside of Syria. In contrast, there are a number of indigenous civil opposition movements who have from the beginning rejected the armed struggle and continue to call for negotiations with the regime without preconditions. The most significant of these groups is the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC).

In fact, despite the intransigence of the SNC, many of the armed militias have entering into direct negotiations with the regime and laying down their arms in exchange for amnesty and protection from the more malevolent rebel groups.

And even within the over-emphasized SNC, the issues of pressing for an advantage in negotiations through military means is a matter of contention. Shiekh Moaz al-Khatib (in)famously stated that there is no military solution to this conflict, calling upon the SNC to negotiate with the regime immediately, abandoning any preconditions. The fate of Syria, he argued, was far more important than the fate of one man.  Ultimately, the sheikh resigned in disgust from his post as president of the SNC, claiming that neither the opposition nor their international supporters were primarily concerned with saving Syria.

Rather than pushing anyone to the bargaining table, the U.S. strategy of “equalizing force” in Syria is likely to render a negotiated settlement impossible. It will do nothing to address the fact that the rebels have been hitherto unable to solidify into an interlocutor for the state capable of articulating a coherent vision or set of demands. It will do nothing to get the rebels to abandon their non-constructive precondition. Simultaneously, the strike will render the party that has been consistently eager to negotiate less willing and able to do so.

What the U.S. should be forcing peace by any diplomatic means necessary. That would be moral leadership. Working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the EU, American freezing of arms, supplies, and training to the rebels would dramatically reduce civil strife in Syria just as diplomatic pressure keeps al-Asad at the negotiating table working through post-conflict reconciliation and, most likely, his early retirement.

Remember this as Samantha Power insists that the “White House has exhausted all non-military options” in Syria: the one thing they have never tried over the last two years is heeding the U.N.’s advice and working with the international community to de-escalate the conflict.  This does not seem to be on their agenda any time soon, either.

Musa al-Gharbi is a Research Fellow with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC). He has a M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. You can follow him on Twitter @Musa_alGharbi.

ST McNeil is an environmental convergence journalist. He is also a research assistant with the Institute of the Environment’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development grant, contributor and web editor of SISMEC, founder of Los Deportados multimedia hub, and a musician. You can follow him on Twitter @stmcneil.

Breaking From the Muslim Brotherhood
by REZA FIYOUZAT AND SHAMUS COOKE

When the Egyptian army first began its offensive against the Muslim Brotherhood many speculated that such an assault would likely be extended to the same revolutionaries who demanded — in massive demonstrations — that President Morsi be evicted from office.

There have been several signs that this has already begun, though most notably the government repression against striking workers at Suez Steel and the Scimitar Petroleum company, where the striking workers were accused of being influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Two recent terrorist bombings in Cairo that targeted top government officials–as well as increased violence in the Sinai region — could portend a Syria scenario for Egypt, unless revolutionaries are able to assert themselves again with the intention of out maneuvering the Egyptian military and Muslim Brotherhood, saving Egypt in the process.

The power of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has been weakened significantly, at least for the moment. The recent protests called by the MB after the break up of their sit-ins have been met with insufficient support in the streets, though especially from the broader population beyond the MB base.

A recent opinion poll showed that 67 percent of Egyptians approved of the brutal way that the MB sit-ins were broken up. The Brotherhood’s leadership is in jail, its rank and file fearful, and the much of the broader population apparently wants them out of public sight and mind.

The latest move by the military regime against the Brotherhood was an Egyptian judicial panel supporting the removal of the legal status of the organization as an NGO. This came in the aftermath of a bomb attack on a police station in central Cairo on Monday, September 2.

The still-chaotic happenings in Egypt make sense only in a broader context, requiring that we look back at recent events, at which point an understanding may emerge that can help shed light on what to do next.

Reducing politics to condemning violence explains very little, especially when one considers why most Egyptians didn’t feel the way the international community did about the internal battles raging in Egypt.  The revolutionary process in Egypt has been especially contradictory, requiring that a proper analysis untangle all of the political knots.

In 2011, the initial revolutionary wave of protests led to the removal — not the overthrow, but the removal by the military — of the dictator Mubarak. The social conditions that led to Mubarak’s downfall were a general sense of desperation about the conditions of daily life by the majority of the Egyptian people, most of them working class and poor, but including also the economically devastated middle classes.

The Egyptian people did not take to the streets with a clear platform that would address their abject misery. They thus expressed their frustration by denouncing their existing conditions in general terms. The complex system oppressing them thus became crystallized in the symbolic person of Mubarak — so the people in the streets demanded his removal. This, thought the masses, would address their many social-economic problems.

At this adolescent stage of the revolution anybody who had a large organization — and was out of power but wanted to be in power — could say, “YES! Mubarak should go, and our organization will do anything to make that happen.” The Brotherhood was such a group, and it used its vast organizational capabilities — in Egypt every mosque in every village is a de-facto organization — and belatedly joined the revolution under the “Mubarak must go!” slogan.

It was the youth section of the Brotherhood that forced their leadership to join the revolution, and after becoming “revolutionaries” the MB worked to limit the further deepening of the politics of the revolution, freezing the movement in its generalized, adolescent stage, which was too immature to question the regime behind Mubarak. “Islam is the answer” remained the MB’s slogan, which, after being put into government policy, offered Egyptians no answer at all.

After the fall of Mubarak, the MB hurried to join the regime that had propped up Mubarak — with all its policies, security apparatus linked to the U.S. government, with all its ties to the neoliberal agenda of the imperialists of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and western banks — in short, the MB completely immersed itself with the old regime, while slapping on a thick coat of Islamist veneer to make the surface seem “Islamic” to the MB rank and file. The rest of Egyptian society was completely ignored, revolution be damned.

Through a farce of an electoral system the MB joined the military regime — an alliance deemed necessary at the time by the ruling elites, though with clear internal contradictions — ensuring that the two maintained joint control while working to coerce the revolution into submission. All the while the broader social and economic discontent that led to the revolution would be — as it was under Mubarak — completely neglected, and even denied any legitimacy.

By most standards, real democracy is not merely having elections or some form of parliamentary rule. If any elected government refuses to govern in the interests of the population, it is by definition ”undemocratic.”

True democracy also involves the rights of the working class to organize and exact concessions from the employers and the elite in general, as well as to have a real say — through independent representative organizations — in the economic and political decisions that affect their lives. Based on these indicators, we can see that the political direction taken by the military-Muslim Brotherhood coalition was clearly anti-democratic, regardless of MB’s protestations to the contrary.

New independent labor unions started springing up immediately after the fall of Mubarak, quite naturally, as the working class saw the onset of the revolution as a perfect time to exercise their democratic rights to assert their power through the collective bargaining process for better working and living conditions. The number of these new unions began rising sharply as a result of the newly opened up political space.

Labor strikes and direct actions had been on an upward spiral for years preceding Mubarak’s fall: for example, in 2008 there was a general strike.  The Middle East Research and Information Project reports:

“Despite the limited capacity of [newly created independent unions] to mobilize at the national level, for the last two and a half years, workers have escalated the protest movement that began in the late 1990s. In the decade before Mubarak’s ouster well over 2 million workers participated in some 3,400 strikes and other collective actions. The total number of workers collective actions in 2011 was 1,400; in 2012 it reached 1,969. According to the Egyptian Center for Social Rights(ECESR), in the first quarter of 2013 there were 2,400 social and economic protests. At least half involved workers and publicly employed professionals — doctors, engineers and teachers.”

The MB government took a very clear stance against the demands of the resurgent labor movement that was trying to further open up the political and economic social dialogue, and gains some basic rights.

In fact, public pronouncements by the MB, the military and elite media outlets were unanimous in their characterization of the labor direct actions as petty and selfish, thereby de-legitimizing those demands and refusing to allow for any new rights for collective bargaining by workers.

MB members and spokespersons even went so far as to characterize such workers’ demands as “counter revolutionary.” In other words, the MB-military coalition arrogated to themselves the title of true revolutionaries while the very demands that fueled the revolution were now characterized as counter-revolutionary!

However, not all segments of the ruling elites were as overtly antagonistic to the working class economic demands. Some in the ruling coalition clearly recognized that they would not be able to stop the tide of workers raising their demands in such a revolutionary period. Therefore, they opted to choose to co-opt some of the labor union leaders by integrating them into the government.

The fundamental mistake made by the MB was joining the old regime during a revolutionary upsurge, the time that the wrath of the people had just found its public expression. Decades of bottled up resentment had now found a voice, and while Egyptians gave the MB some time to address it, revolutionary energy would not be so easily stifled.

Instead of tackling the crisis of youth unemployment in Egypt by revolutionary means, the MB ignored it, and overall unemployment has been rising from 9 percent in 2011 to 13 percent, with youth unemployment at 25 percent. The MB thought that they could take the helm of a revolution while taking zero revolutionary action to address the structural issues that gave rise to it. In fact, the MB worked hard to maintain those conditions.

It was inevitable, then, that a revolution on the scale of Egypt’s would not lie dormant in the face of such flagrant neglect. In fact, during the MB’s reign there was activity across all social strata, as Egyptians learned to use their new voice. Labor unions continued to strike, student groups and others continued to organize, and all the while the dignity that all these groups continued to demand was never granted. This process placed the revolutionary movement, once again, in direct opposition to the state apparatus, this time led by the MB.

Since the new face of the state had acquired a religious covering — on top of the old economic and political miseries still firmly in place — it was natural that the most vociferous oppositions would be directed against this newly added feature of the revamped dictatorship. Hence, the main demand of the massive June 30th-July 3rd demonstrations was for the ouster of the MB, personified by Morsi. The revolutionary energy re-found its focus and targeted a new obstacle to be overcome in its path towards social and economic dignity.

The fact that the military used the MB as the scapegoat and threw them out so swiftly, of course, creates a critical dilemma. The fight for political power in Egypt is now a three-sided brawl: the military, the MB, and the real revolutionaries, who are trying to express the broader population’s economic and social demands. In this power struggle, the forces of counterrevolution have two dogs in the fight: the military and the MB.

The fact that these two mongrels have gone from uneasy allies to savage enemies — even if temporarily — makes no difference as far as their political attitude towards the revolution goes. Their anti-revolutionary perspective is, of course, tied to their economic interests, which are existentially tied to the existing economic system, from which the overwhelming majority of Egyptians gain absolutely nothing but misery.

The military had to discard their MB short-term partnership because they saw that this partnership had not managed to halt the revolution, and that, in fact, the movement was finding more depth — digging deeper would be dangerous for the military. The military had to throw out the MB and then provoke them into reactive violence, which the MB did resort to via burning churches, killing a 100 plus police/military personnel, etc. This enabled and “justified” the generals’ unleashing massive military might to crush the MB, and if left unchecked, eventually the revolution.

It would be a crucial mistake to join the Muslim Brotherhood’s side in the ongoing fratricidal conflict between them and the military, as many liberal-minded people are doing. It’s of course natural to side with a group under attack from a stronger adversary, and it was perfectly acceptable to demand an immediate end to the military’s offensive. But to demand the return of Morsi to power is to place oneself on the wrong side of the barricades.

American liberals might be swayed by Juan Cole’s description of the Muslim Brotherhood, correctly labeling them as the Egyptian equivalent of the American Tea Party movement, a grouping that is on the political right of the Republican Party, and at times in conflict with the Republicans. Like the MB, the Tea Party relies on neo-liberal economics combined with religious fundamentalism.

“But even so,” some liberals may claim, “the Muslim Brotherhood was elected, and we must protect democracy.” But democracy also takes place in the streets, and the massive demonstrations that led to Morsi’s ouster were at least as large as the revolutionary demonstrations that ousted Mubarak, when no one questioned whether or not a revolution was afoot.

Furthermore, the demonstrations called by the Muslim Brotherhood did not find a broader echo beyond their rank and file: the only large demonstrations occurred in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Nasser City and parts of Alexandria. Thus, the MB knew that their demand — the reinstatement of Morsi — could not be achieved by the current balance of forces; they purposely provoked a crisis to remain politically relevant, perhaps to use as a bargaining chip against the military. But the MB leadership underestimated the military’s audacity, and now the MB is facing decapitation.

The MB belatedly realized the politics of revolution; after the masses were ignored and even antagonized by the MB, the people refused to rally to their defense when the military attacked. The masses rallied instead to the side of the attackers, which, under the circumstances, seemed to many as the only way to keep the MB from retaining state power.

This is where some Egyptian revolutionaries stumbled. So eager were they to overcome the immediate obstacle of the Muslim Brotherhood that they gave unconditional support to the military to remove this obstacle for them. It seemed practical to overcome the revolution’s most immediate problem — the MB — by using another enemy of the revolution, the generals. But a policy of pragmatism isn’t suited for the complex issues that the revolution is facing.

The Egyptian left and labor movement failed to put forth a united, independent solution in the face of the July 3rd “popular coup” and the crisis provoked by the MB’s militant civil disobedience response. Some on the left even gave their public blessing and a blank check to the military to “deal with” the Brotherhood, akin to bringing a tiger into the home to deal with a rat infestation.

The military was thus allowed to take the initiative, and during times of crisis the will to act is a major ingredient for victory. The revolutionaries had a valid fear of the Muslim Brotherhood since they represent a major threat to the revolution, but now another foe of the revolution, the military, is stronger than it’s been in years, and has quickly regained its position as the revolution’s primary obstacle.

Overcoming obstacles is a constant feature of all revolutions. After overcoming the obstacles of Mubarak and Morsi, the revolution will seek to steamroll over the next hurdle in its path; the millions of people who demanded Morsi’s removal have not disappeared, nor have they been cowed into silence.

Many analysts view each obstacle as insurmountable and have thus declared the revolution dead after every stage. When Morsi was elected, the revolution was declared dead; and when the revolution flared by the millions to oust Morsi, the revolution was quickly declared dead again when the generals used terror against the Brotherhood.

But the current support for the military is inevitably temporary, since the demands that continue to fuel the revolution will soon become the focus. This is why the military is eager to put forth a new face to their regime in the form of another set of speedy elections or “national salvation government” that was cobbled together on July 3rd. The military itself remains incapable of directly confronting the revolution, whose is strength is growing.

But after each obstacle is overcome, the revolution deepens its analysis and strengthens its morale, since nothing fuels revolution like success. The July 3rd “popular coup” still resonates as a major victory of the revolution, regardless of the bloodshed that followed. Every time the people exert their power in the streets and win their demands, the revolution gains immense strength, since the power of the people is re-affirmed.

The ultimate goal of the revolution is resolving the fundamental social and economic issues that gave birth to it; these are the problems that prevent the majority of Egyptians from living a dignified life, while these same problems enrich a tiny minority of Egyptians — and foreigners — at the expense of everybody else. This is the focus that Egyptian revolutionaries must unite under, and it must be done soon.

Egyptians must unite around a set of necessary and revolutionary measures, such as the reversal of the privatization of public industries that have resulted in layoffs, lower wages, and factory closures; the end to all IMF and World Bank dictated policies — a demand that would include Egypt refusing to repay any more of the debts that Mubarak and his cronies racked up. A crucial demand is for a national jobs program to create new — and reinforce older — public works projects. Such a jobs program could be funded by re-nationalizing Egypt’s previously privatized public banks, such as the Bank of Alexandria that was sold to Italy in 2006.

Organizing around such concrete socio-economic issues takes away from the importance of whether or not one is a Muslim — or of what particular denomination — and focuses the struggle on the real class issues that underlie the revolution and continue to breathe life into it.

Such organizing will also help to put an abrupt end to the possibility of a prolonged civil war, which would benefit both sides of the counter-revolution by hiding the political issues that the Muslim Brotherhood and the generals refuse to address. A civil war — perhaps of the Syrian variety — would bolster the Muslim Brotherhood in that they would retain their cadre — and possibly new foreign fighters to wage jihad against the military. In such a scenario, the military would retain the allegiance of many Egyptians who simply want their safety protected.

The only way to prevent this is by directing the revolutionary energy towards solving the actual social problems of Egyptians, which would attract both the rank and file soldier and rank and file Muslim Brother. One of the original slogans of the revolution was: “They are eating pigeon and chicken, but we eat beans everyday.”

To prevent the possibility of a civil war between the Islamists and the military regime, the Egyptian revolutionaries must take the initiative. If the rank and file of the Nasserite Party, the Tamaroud movement, the April 6th movement, socialist and trade union groups, and others put forth a united set of demands to resolve the economic crisis by taking revolutionary action, the true voice of the revolution will have found a common platform, a potent expression, and the power of the generals and the Muslim Brotherhood will instantly be weakened, since the rank and file of both groups would be natural recruits and would most likely be drawn to such demands.

These concrete demands would finally expose the class regime behind Mubarak and Morsi, leading the people to eventually demand that the regime itself be targeted, resulting in a more conscious revolutionary movement that the military would be unable to control.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Shamus Cooke is a social service worker and an elected officer of SEIU 503. He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

Reza Fiyouzat can be reached at: rfiyouzat@yahoo.com

If the state of things has gotten you down, this may pick you up.

If the state of things has gotten you down, this may pick you up.

(Iraq war hawk Peter Beinart has been far from my favorite pundit over the years, but he’s written two extraordinarily excellent pieces lately, so I guess redemption is never off the table. The other piece is here.)  

Millennials, he says, are going to upend the established political spectrum entirely over the next two decades, including the Democrats’ current “pro-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, Reaganized liberalism.”

A political generation is more than the rough categories of 20-year blocks given names like Baby Boomers, Generation X, or Millennials. It’s one forged by major disruptive events during the years of people’s young adulthood.

The current political generation – including both the Tea Party Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Democrats like Barack Obama and Cory Booker – is playing on that ideologically defined field.

Millennials have come of age at a time when the government safety net is far more threadbare for the young than for the middle-aged and old.

As the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, younger Americans are less likely than their elders to qualify for unemployment insurance, food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Not to mention Medicare and Social Security.)

Hard times have frequently let the Right woo disaffected voters with calls to racial, ethnic, and religious populism, but research shows that Millennials will be far less susceptible to those old tricks. For one thing, they are far less white, Christian, straight, and native-born than previous generations. Perhaps after growing up in the bath of lies that is PR- and advertising-mediated capitalist culture, they are much better equipped than their elders with highly attuned BS detectors.

They are more liberal, less supportive of war, less likely to accept trampling of their civil liberties, more pro-labor, and more in favor of expanded government services.

Oh, and they favor socialism over capitalism by a significant margin.

I can’t wait until they’re of an age to take the reins of power from the Third Way Democrats we’ve been forced to support for lack of a better alternative.

The only thing I’d like to change about them is their views on privacy. I don’t think they understand it or its value. Perhaps it’s impossible to appreciate privacy if you’ve grown up with the perniciousness of Facebook. They’ll need to get a handle on that if they’re going to get the NSA’s damn Panopticon off our necks.
______________

SOURCE:  Daily kos
Reprinted from dailykos.com by th0rn

Recently released figures document the growth of social inequality in America to levels not seen in nearly a century.

Hard-faced agents for the corporate super-rich. Their expression tells it all. They know whose side they are on and its’ not ours.

According to a new report by University of California Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez, the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of society has sharply expanded under Obama. The richest one percent now monopolize more than 22 percent of all household income in America. The richest ten percent of the population now control more than half of the nation’s income, 50.4 percent—the highest proportion since the government began collecting income statistics in 1917.

Since 2009, the richest one percent has captured a staggering 95 percent of all income gains. The class war policies of the government—including bank bailouts, “quantitative easing” and an attack on wages and benefits for the working class—have led to a 31.4 percent rise in income for the top one percent. The wealthy have more than recovered the losses that came from the Wall Street collapse of 2008.

Meanwhile, the bottom 99 percent has seen a negligible 0.4 percent rise in income. Tens of millions of workers—who never recovered from the record household income drop of 2007 to 2009—continue to reel from the effects of mass job losses, falling wages, home foreclosures, indebtedness and social service cuts.

This social chasm is the source of the immense class tensions simmering just below the surface of American society. It is also behind the increasing drive towards police-state dictatorship, as the financial elite seeks to impose its will against an increasingly resistant population.

The new report on social inequality emerged as the American ruling class set out to launch another war in the Middle East. As the Obama administration sought to mobilize the propaganda apparatus for war, it encountered something that had not been expected: overwhelming opposition from the American people. Amidst a media propaganda blitz, opinion polls show that the percentage of the population that supports war ranges from a third to merely 10 percent.

The two phenomena are connected. The conflict that has emerged between, on the one hand, the drive by the ruling class to launch a new war with incalculable consequences and, on the other, the sentiments of the American people, is an initial political expression of the vast social gulf revealed in the report by Saez.

The current levels of social inequality are a culmination of a decades-long social counterrevolution. From the late 1970s onward, the American ruling class has responded to the decline in its world position through militarism abroad and class war at home.

Wealth has been redistributed from the working class to the rich through a policy of deindustrialization, accompanied by the most parasitic forms of financial speculation. From 1980 to the present, the share of income going to the top one percent has more than doubled, from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent. This process has only accelerated since 2008.

The working class as a whole faces a future of mass unemployment and poverty-level wages, with the younger generation hit particularly hard. Between 2000 and 2011, inflation-adjusted wages fell 13 percent for recent high school graduates and 8 percent among recent college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The percentage of recent college graduates with employer-paid health care also dropped by half between 1989 and 2011.

The growth of social inequality is producing a profound political differentiation. Not only have workers and young people passed through the experience of the Iraq war, there is a growing consciousness that unending war is of a piece with the attack on every social right of the working class within the United States. The oft-utilized methods of channeling social discontent outward through war and calls for “national defense” and “national unity” have fallen on suspicious if not deaf ears.

As Saez’s study shows, it has not been just the top one percent that has enriched itself over the last three-and-a-half decades. A broader layer, constituting the top 5 or 10 percent of the American population, and made up of higher-paid professionals, tenured professors, journalists and trade union functionaries, form the basis of the Democratic Party’s “liberal” and “left” supporters of imperialist war.

Unlike 2003, when a section of the Democratic Party postured as anti-war opponents, there is a virtual consensus for war across the political establishment. This includes various pseudo-left groups like the International Socialist Organization, which were involved in organizing anti-war protests in 2003 and are now aligned with US imperialism’s aims in Syria.

Opposition to war shifts decisively to the working class. The deep opposition to Obama’s war plans, though still passive and not fully conscious, shows the enormous potential for the building of a mass, anti-war movement. This opposition must be given conscious political form. It must be rooted in a political struggle to mobilize the working class—the only genuine constituency for peace, equality and democracy—to break with the two capitalist parties and replace the outmoded profit system with socialism.

The development of such a movement requires building a new, revolutionary leadership of the American and international working class—the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

—Jerry White is an editorial writer with wsws.org, mobilization instrument of the Social Equality Party (SEP).

Editor’s Note: Just a reminder of how rotten things are in our wonderful country. Great concentration, disgusting, but, as I have argued elsewhere, did we really have more diversity of opinion and better news quality when 50 or 100 private media corporations played the field? My view is that it is the class nature of the ownership and control of the media that stamps its programming bias, not just the number of owners. In the 1950s-1960s, we had a lot less concentration than today, but, at the end of the day, American media was as rotten as today, give or take a few iotas. We had Korea.  We had Vietnam.  We had coups in scores of nations. Labor was beginning to be quietly repressed.  If the media had been doing their job none of that could have happened. But it did.

Something to think about. —P. Greanville

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By ASHLEY LUTZ (june 14, 2012) | Business Insider

This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes from the same six sources.

That’s consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.

NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn’t own AOL, so Huffington Post isn’t affiliated with them.

But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates “the illusion of choice,” Frugal Dad says. While some big sites, like Digg and Reddit aren’t owned by any of the corporations, Time Warner owns news sites read by millions of Americans every year.

Here’s the graphic: