Case Closed

by JACK McCARTHY

Hitchens, power fetishist, smirking his way through apostasy. Few enemies of socialism are as dangerous as those who betray the left ideal for the rewards of a corrupt system. Hitchens was in his own league—he attained the rank of George Bush’s amanuensis in his closing years.—PG

In the final decade before his demise, the late Christopher Hitchens had become the Phil Spector of American politics. Ala Spector, even his hair looked crazy.

After injecting himself into the Clinton-Lewinsky affair,  “Hitch 22″ appeared on some network show looking, humorist Harry Shearer hilariously noted on his radio program, “Le Show”, “like he just rolled out of bed at the homeless shelter.”  He was drunk, hair going every which way, and as he angrily ranted about Clinton’s adulterous affair, he couldn’t stop blinking.

Hitchens’ evolution from young Trot, to eloquent dashing columnist for the liberal Nation magazine, to frothing war monger and volunteer mouthpiece and cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney junta’s plot to take the U.S. to war has been well-chronicled from Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books, the website “Hitchenswatch”(which humorously noted, “We watch him so you don’t have to”) to the pages of CounterPunch.

But surely in the future the gold standard  for the deconstrucion of Hitchens will be Richard Seymour’s “Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens.”

The title of course is an ironic reference to Hitchens  book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”
But now, posthumously, it’s Hitchens’ turn in the dock.

Seymour’s book, part of Verso’s “Counterblast,” series,  is a thoroughly documented prosecutors brief and demonstrates why in a fair and just world Hitchens, who conspired with the likes of Ahmed Chalabi to start a most unnecessary war, would stand trial with Bush, Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as an accused war criminal.

Seymour’s meticulous, Chomsky-esh detailing of the Hitchens saga was chided in the Washington Post for lacking “style” and being harshly biased. But, hey, this is a trial and Seymour as the chief prosecutor is supposed to  be biased.

Frankly, my favorite part of the book is the cover photo of Hitchens in mad hatter mode.

One can’t help but wonder what would be going through Hitchens head, were he still amongst the living, reading about  Secretary of State John Kerry warning Iraq to quit allowing Iran to use Iraqi airspace to assist the Assad regime in putting down a rebellion.

My guess is, unlike former Bush speech writer David “Axis of  Evil” Frum, Hitchens would continue to dissemble.

The gifted dissembler at home. Finality was closing in.

According to Glenn Greewald in The Guardian, for March 18, Frum not only laments how things have turned out in Iraq, but also admits in a Newsweek column that previous denials to the contrary, the war was very much about oil.

A newly contrite Frum also reveals that the real “axis of evil” was a secretive meeting between Ahmed Chalabi and Dick Cheney–in the apartment of Christopher Hitchens to discuss strategy for starting a war.

In the final analysis, the best characterization of Hitchens came from the man who knew him best: Alexander Cockburn. In a long ago Nation column, writing even before Hitchens became “just another right -wing porker,” Alex noted that more and more Hitchens had “postures” not “principles.”

The Trial of Christopher Hitchens demonstrates in lush detail that in the matter of Christopher Hitchens it’s case closed.

Jack McCarthy is former managing editor of the Florida Flambeau, contributing editor to Online Journal, and a proud contributor to Counterpunch. Can be reached at jackm32301@yahoo.com

 

 

Andre Damon, wsws.org

Literally partners in crime. Their tug of war is a farce for suckers facilitated by the whoremedia.

US President Barack Obama signed a bill Tuesday that makes permanent $85 billion in sequester cuts, paving the way for the imposition of furloughs on a million or more federal workers as early as next month.

The bill, which funds the federal government through September, was passed with bipartisan support by both houses of Congress.

The sequester includes $9.9 billion in cuts to Medicare, $2 billion in public housing assistance cuts, $840 million in cuts to special education programs, as well as $400 million in cuts to Head Start, the early childhood education program.

The nearly 4 million long-term unemployed who receive federal unemployment benefits will see an 11 percent cut in their benefits, or about $130 per month. A vast portion of the cuts will be implemented through furloughs of federal government employees, resulting in effective pay cuts of 20 to 35 percent. The military, however, announced that it may delay the furlough of some of its civilian employees after the Congressmen inserted language giving it greater flexibility in allocating cuts.

Adding to the devastating impact of the furloughs, the bill freezes federal employees’ pay through the end of this year. This reverses an earlier executive order to end the current pay freeze, which has been in place for two years, and gave federal employees a meager 0.5 percent raise. The pay freeze, even more than the bill itself, has gone largely unreported in the media.

The White House sought to distance itself from the cuts, with Obama spokesman Jay Carney stating in a press conference Tuesday, “There is no question that we believe we should not have come to this point where sequester would be imposed.” He added that “regular folks out there are being unnecessarily harmed by imposition of the sequester, which was designed by Democrats and Republicans purposefully never to become law, to be filled with nonsensical approaches to deficit reduction.”

This is a fraud. The rapid passage of the bill with bipartisan support stands as a repudiation of the official narrative of a vast political divide between the two parties, and exposes the reality that the Democrats and Republicans, far from being at loggerheads, are united in their drive to make the working class pay even as the stock market soars and the corporate and financial elite is wealthier than ever.

While mouthing the obligatory and pro-forma statements of regret, the Democrats did absolutely nothing to stop the passage of the bill, which if blocked would have resulted in a shutdown of the federal government on March 28.

The political “gridlock” in Washington is largely manufactured for public consumption. Behind the supposed bipartisan conflict, both parties are proceeding with a shared agenda. The sequester cuts themselves were the product of this supposed “gridlock.” Originally devised by the White House to ensure the passage of a broader deficit deal, the measure was used to implement unpopular cuts without either party having to claim responsibility for them.

In reality, the sequester cuts are entirely in line with the Obama administration’s earlier policies. In 2009, the administration called for discretionary spending to be lowered to the level imposed by the sequester. On numerous occasions Obama has boasted about slashing spending to the lowest level as a percentage of GDP since the Eisenhower administration.

In an article published this week, “As Obama signs sequestration cuts, his economic goals are at risk,” the Washington Post noted the apparent contradiction between the White House’s claims to defend the “middle class” and the administration’s actual policies.

“Obama has repeatedly championed a set of government investments that he argues would expand the economy and strengthen the middle class, including bolstering early-childhood education, spending more on research and development, and upgrading the nation’s roads and railways… But none of those policies have come close to being enacted,” the newspaper noted. “Instead… Obama is set to sign a government funding measure that leaves in place the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration—a policy that undermines many of the goals he laid out during the 2012 campaign.”

In reality, Obama’s posturing as a defender of the “middle class” is entirely for show. Far from expanding programs like public education, Obama has from the beginning of his term attacked social spending, with over 700,000 state, local, and federal government jobs eliminated since he took office. His principal “economic goal” was to bail out the banks and oversee a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the financial elite.

With the sequester cuts made permanent, the White House plans to turn its attention to slashing basic social programs with the release of the White House’s budget early next month. The Obama administration has made clear to its backers on Wall Street that it intends to slash Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security in its budget proposal, combined with the standard call for “shared sacrifice” through additional revenue.

To the population, which is almost unanimously opposed to cutting these programs, Obama and the Democrats present their support for cuts to the core social programs as an unavoidable compromise in the face of Republican “intransigence.”

The two parties’ budget proposals are a case in point: the Republicans are proposing $5.7 trillion in spending cuts and a far-reaching restructuring of Medicare and Medicaid. The Democrats, by contrast, are proposing about $1 trillion in cuts, including a reduction in Medicare spending.

The result of this process will be the same as before: the Democrats will very consciously work out a deal to make vast cuts in the name of “compromise” with the Republicans. This deal, will, in turn, create the conditions for even further cuts in the future.

Under conditions of the greatest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression, there does not exist within the entire political establishment any constituency for maintaining social programs, let alone expanding them. In the midst of desperate conditions for millions of people, the ruling class is united in its policy of making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism.

Andre Damon is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party.

By Barry Grey, wsws.org

Eric Holder: Easily one of the most compromised and ineffective Attorney Generals in history.

Barely a week after Attorney General Eric Holder admitted to a Senate committee that the Obama administration considered the major Wall Street banks too powerful to prosecute, i.e., that they were above the law, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 300-page report documenting rampant fraud and law-breaking by JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US and the world’s biggest dealer in derivatives.

The report, issued last Thursday, documents systematic deception in connection with over $6.2 billion in losses from high-risk trades in financial derivatives in 2012.

It states: “The Subcommittee’s investigation has determined that, over the course of the first quarter of 2012, JPMorgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office used its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) to engage in high risk derivatives trading; mismarked the SCP book to hide hundreds of millions of dollars of losses; disregarded multiple internal indicators of increasing risk; manipulated models; dodged OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] oversight; and misinformed investors, regulators, and the public about the nature of its risky derivatives trading.”

The report notes that in April of last year, when CEO Jamie Dimon was telling investors that concern over credit default swap bets by the bank’s London-based Chief Investment Office was a “complete tempest in a teapot,” Dimon “was already in possession of information about the…complex and sizeable portfolio, its sustained losses for three straight months, the exponential increase in those losses during March, and the difficulty of exiting the…positions.”

This lie came during a conference call on the day JPMorgan submitted its first-quarter earnings report to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In that report, the bank utilized fraudulent accounting methods to avoid reporting what it knew at the time to be at least $1 billion in losses from bad gambling bets suffered by its Synthetic Credit Portfolio.

One month later, Dimon suddenly announced that his bank had lost some $2 billion on its so-called “London whale” derivatives trades. That loss has since ballooned to $6.2 billion. The money JPMorgan used to speculate on the credit status of various entities included the federally insured deposits of tens of thousands of customers.

Submitting false reports to federal regulators, deceiving investors and the public, and concealing losses are crimes punishable by fines and jail time. Yet there have been no indictments of the bank, Dimon or any other top JPMorgan executives, let alone convictions or punishment.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the incestuous relationship between the banks and their nominal federal regulators, and the record of the Obama administration in shielding the Wall Street mafia from being held accountable for its crimes.

Despite its own devastating findings, the Senate committee, headed by Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, is an integral part of the institutional collusion and cover-up that allow the financial elite to continue expanding its already obscene wealth by plundering society. Last Friday, the day after the committee issued its report, it held a hearing on the “London whale” scandal at which it took testimony from former and current JPMorgan executives and OCC officials.

Noticeably absent was Dimon, whom the committee did not call to testify—an unmistakable signal that the multimillionaire banker has nothing to fear. He has, after all, friends in high places.

Known as Obama’s “favorite banker,” he was repeatedly invited to the White House during Obama’s first term. Only days after Dimon’s May 10, 2012 announcement of previously concealed trading losses, Obama rushed to personally vouch for Dimon and his bank. He publicly declared that Dimon was “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got” and that JPMorgan was “one of the best managed banks there is.”

JPMorgan is not the exception, however, it is the rule. Two years ago, Levin’s committee issued a 630-page report documenting the illegal activities of major Wall Street banks in the run-up to the financial meltdown of September 2008. The report spelled out as well the complicity of federal regulatory agencies and the credit rating firms.

Levin said at the time that his investigation had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.” In the interim, one bank scandal has unfolded after another, from the subprime racket, to the home foreclosure fraud, to the Libor rate-rigging conspiracy, to the banks’ money laundering for the Mexican drug cartels. The same types of speculation that turned the world economy into a giant gambling casino for the financial elite continue unabated.

Yet not a single bank or top banker has been indicted, let alone tried, convicted and sent to jail. On the contrary, the financial malefactors have been rewarded with ever greater public funds to subsidize record profits, executive bonuses and stock prices. Over and above the trillions handed out to JPMorgan and the other big banks in bailout cash, cheap loans and asset guarantees—with no strings attached—the Federal Reserve is pumping $85 billion every month in virtually free money into the financial system.

This bank bonanza by itself is greater than the annual federal deficit of the United States. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and state and local governments demand ever more savage cuts in social programs, jobs, wages, health care and pensions.

The criminality on Wall Street and in Washington is not some excrescence or aberration. It is integral to the functioning of the capitalist profit system.

The types of activities exposed in the report on JPMorgan are representative of the daily operations of the major banks and hedge funds. This is the face of American capitalism in its decline and dotage, marked by the decay of industry and the productive forces, and the ever-greater role played by parasitic and socially destructive forms of financial manipulation. The political corollary of this process is the pauperization of the working class and dismantling of its democratic rights.

Decades of industrial decay and political reaction have given rise to the unbridled rule of a financial aristocracy, which, like the aristocracies of old, is a law unto itself. It controls, in part through direct bribery, both parties and the entire political system. It is not subject to the rules that bind mere mortals.

This system cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown by the collective and politically conscious action of the working class. The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party propose:

• The expropriation of the wealth of the financial aristocracy and the utilization of the trillions thus obtained to address pressing social needs for decent-paying jobs, education, health care, housing and pensions.

• The criminal prosecution of the bankers and financiers whose illegal activities have caused incalculable social misery and suffering.

• The taxation of all incomes over $1 million at a rate of 90 percent.

• The nationalization of the banks and major corporations, with compensation for small shareholders, and their transformation into public utilities run democratically to meet social needs, not private profit.

To implement this socialist and revolutionary program, a new leadership must be built to arm the coming mass struggles of the working class with a thoroughly worked-out program and strategy for workers’ power. We urge all those who agree with these demands to contact and join the Socialist Equality Party.

Barry Grey is a senior member of the Socialist Equality Party.

Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site – All rights reserved
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/18/pers-m18.html?view=print

By Alex Lantier, wsws.org

His own bioblurb admits, “David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, has covered the CIA and the Middle East for many years. He is the author of the bestsellers Body of Lies and The Increment.” The conflict of interest represented by his open links to the CIA is apparently no reason for the WaPo to exclude this shameless agitator for war from its columns. Indeed, it is that talent which makes him valuable to the Post and its oligarchic clientele. —Eds.

Multiple car bombs hit Shiite targets across Iraq yesterday, the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, killing 65 and wounding 200. It was a bloody reminder of the effects of the neo-colonial US occupation of Iraq, including Washington’s inflaming of ethno-sectarian conflict and of the escalating Syrian war.

Yesterday’s bombings came after a series of anti-Shiite attacks by affiliates of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group tied to the Al Nusra Front—currently the leading force in the US-backed Syrian opposition fighting to topple President Bashar al Assad.

Against the backdrop of these continuing atrocities, one can only be disgusted by the US media’s deceitful and perfunctory retrospectives on the Iraq war. They present the war as safely in the past, after the election of an Iraqi government and the formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in December 2011. The lies and criminality with which US imperialism prosecuted the war—which devastated Iraq, leading to the deaths of an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers, and costing $2 trillion—are either ignored or dismissed as “intelligence failures.”

The American population was railroaded into an unpopular war, despite mass protests, based on lies for which no one has been held accountable. Evidence to show Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was fabricated by US officials, including in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 presentation at the UN. US President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney falsely claimed that the US had to attack Iraq to prevent it from allying itself with Al Qaeda—which now serves as a US proxy force in Syria.

Given the scale of the crimes and the devastation wrought by the Iraq war, the reaction of the American media has an Orwellian character. Ten years after a massive media campaign to pressure the public to support a war of aggression, there is not one serious review of the events that led to this catastrophe. The story is consigned to two-minute news spots and brief articles.

The New York Times carried a list of brief comments by US academics and state officials, titled “Was it Worth It?” Harvard University professor and former Deputy National Security Advisor Meghan O’Sullivan made the filthy argument, “Believe it or not, we’re safer now” after the war. Reprising the WMD lies, she argued that without invading Iraq, “It is at least conceivable that [former Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] would have a nuclear weapon today.”

The Washington Post wrote that Iraq is “teetering between progress and chaos,” acknowledging ongoing sectarian warfare but citing Najaf Governor Adnan Zurfi’s comment that, “Most people now have a good job and lots of opportunities.” Besides the fact that this is a lie, even if it were true, it would not justify a US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The pundits who most prominently promoted the war—including the New York Times ’ Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen and David Ignatius of the Washington Post —did not comment on the anniversary. Friedman felt no obligation to give any accounting for his infamous statement that he had “no problem with a war for oil” in Iraq.

The Post columnists were for their part too busy calling for war with Syria to write on their record in Iraq. Welcoming the sending of anti-aircraft missiles to Syrian opposition fighters, Ignatius advocated a US-led occupation of Syria, writing, “Let’s be honest: when Assad is gone and Syria is finally rebuilding its state, it will need massive foreign economic and military assistance—probably including peacekeeping troops from the Arab League or even a NATO country such as Turkey.”

In 2003, Cohen enthused that Colin Powell’s lies on Iraqi WMD at the UN were “a reasonable man making a reasonable case”—a judgment that, as the WSWS noted, he made while “typing away before Powell even finished speaking” in a rush meet his newspaper deadline. He is again rushing to dismiss concerns, this time about “blowback” or unintended consequences from arming Al Qaeda in Syria.

The US should just get on with attacking Assad, Cohen writes. “Blowback is now a given. There is no sure way to avoid it, only to contain it. That can be done only by swiftly arming the moderates and pressing for as quick an end to the war as possible.”

Cohen’s warmongering remarks reflects the emergence of an enthusiastic pro-war constituency in the former liberal, pro-Democratic Party press.

The media’s promotion of aggressive war, now the unquestioned basis of American Middle East policy, is open to the same condemnations as those issued against top operatives of the Nazi propaganda machine. UN Resolution 110, passed after the Nuremburg trials, censured “all forms of propaganda in whatsoever country conducted, which is either designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breech of the peace, or act of aggression.”

Despite the untold human and financial costs of the war, some have done very well from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The war bankrupted the United States and devastated Iraq, whose oil fields are now looted by Western firms—including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and Cheney’s firm, Halliburton. Iraq even faces an energy shortage, with many Iraqi civilians still lacking electricity and running water, as 80 percent of Iraq’s oil is exported by foreign firms. They work closely with the massive US embassy, hidden in Baghdad’s still-fortified Green Zone, to oversee Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

US war plans in Iran and Syria flowed inevitably from the initial crime in Iraq. Concerned that its installation of a Shiite regime in Iraq tilted the regional balance of power too far towards Iran, the US let the Persian Gulf monarchies arm right-wing Sunni forces led by Al Nusra against Syria, a key Iranian ally. As yesterday’s bombing showed, Iraq again finds itself in the middle of these war plans.

Ten years after the Iraq war began, US imperialist wars in the Middle East continue, new ones are being prepared, and the political criminals responsible for the wars and their media propagandists go unpunished.

Alex Lantier is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, the informational arm of the Social Equality Party.