Bigelow: The devil often wears seductive masks.

Editor’s Note: This post offers our readers two additional views on the growing debate about Zero Dark Thirty, a film liable to win some Oscars this year. The first is by David Walsh, house critic at wsws.org, a socialist organization, and, for my money,  perhaps one of the most perceptive movie evaluators in the anglophone world. As a socialist, David brings to his readers the advantage of a sophisticated class analysis, a feature that, all by itself, makes his commentary that much more insightful than the rest. The second is by Jonathan Kim, critic for ReThink Reviews and the HuffPo. Here we deal with a liberal, with all the incomprehensible and exasperating myopias of that tribe, a social tier which, while blabbing criticism always strives to keep one foot firmly planted in the system. This posture inevitably leads to confusing statements like this (pay special attention to the bolded part):

Zero Dark Thirty ignores the fact that America’s torture program inspired anti-U.S. sentiment around the world, causing many to vow revenge on the U.S. and its allies. It ignores the fact that torture scandals like Abu Ghraib caused support for the U.S. occupation in Iraq to plummet, inflaming the insurgency, prolonging the fighting, and putting U.S. troops at increased risk. It ignores the possibly irreparable damage to America’s reputation as a country that respects the rule of law. It ignores the damage torture did to America’s relationships with its allies, who became reluctant to hand over possibly valuable detainees to the U.S. for fear of being accomplices to war crimes and were furious when the U.S. detained and tortured their citizens without charge. It ignores the fact that if CIA agents such as Maya and Dan — two of Zero Dark Thirty’s “heroes” — were actual people, they deserve to be tried and convicted as war criminals under international law for their unrepentant participation in the torture of detainees.

You may wonder what I can possibly object to in the above para, which looks and smells like an impeccable call to support the nation’s highest moral standards.  At the risk of sounding picayune, that’s precisely what sticks in my craw, and it happens often when dealing with the liberals’ version of America’s history. Kim does not seem to realise that it’s been a very very long time (if ever) that America truly respected the rule of law, especially in foreign affairs, as opposed to the simulacrum thereof.  While the brainwashed —among which I naturally include liberals, not to mention the countless fucktards that America incubates by the millions— may think that Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Mr Bushoma’s sneaky wars and invasions have done “irreparable damage to the (supposedly) sterling reputation of the United States,” we must offer the following correction: You can’t damage what doesn’t exist. On that basis I must conclude that what Kim is actually deploring is the fact the shocking revelations about torture and other inconvenient subjects have damaged the propaganda image the US ruling circles have carefully cultivated for more than a century. Their dismantlement should be cause for celebration, not concern.

Second, while the debate rages, most critics like Kim continue to take at face value the notion that Pres. Obama ended all torture. This is entirely false. Torture in one form or another continues, and will go on till the rotten but extremely hypocritical imperial system is defeated globally. That will only happen when America finally becomes a real democracy instead of a plutocracy pretending to be one. Third, if the ruling cliques based in Washington are a criminal enterprise, and in my view they are, why should we lament that other countries will now fail to collaborate with it?—P. Greanville

••••••
Director Kathryn Bigelow defends her indefensible Zero Dark Thirty
wsws.org

Director Kathryn Bigelow took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times Tuesday to defend her pro-CIA film Zero Dark Thirty which has provoked opposition inside and outside the film industry. Bigelow’s column, which reveals her as a slavish admirer of the US intelligence and military apparatus, only sinks her—deservedly—deeper in the mire.

The filmmaker and her screenwriter Mark Boal, in their political blindness and misreading of the current state of American public opinion, thought they could get away with murder, as it were. They assumed that wide layers of the population would be as excited as they were by contact with torturers and assassins and would be enthused about a version of events essentially told by the latter. They were mistaken in this.

Bigelow now finds herself in the unenviable position of claiming that her film, which clearly offers a justification for torture and other war crimes, does not advocate torture. One can only conclude from her ludicrous and incoherent LA Times piece that Bigelow was unprepared for criticism and protest.

The filmmaker begins by noting that her goal had been “to make a modern, rigorous film about counter-terrorism, centered on one of the most important and classified missions in American history.” She acknowledges that she started, in other words, by accepting everything that any serious artist would have subjected to criticism and questioning.

Bigelow betrays no interest (in the LA Times or in her movie) in the history of US intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia over the course of decades, of the CIA’s relations with Osama bin Laden and other Islamist elements in Afghanistan and elsewhere from the late 1970s onward, of the first war on Iraq in 1990-91, of Washington’s support for the oppression of the Palestinians, or, for that matter, of the murky events leading up to and surrounding the 9/11 attacks. In general, Bigelow indicates a lack of concern with anything that might disrupt her tale of “counterterrorism” and its courageous warriors.

The award-winning director presents herself in the following manner: “As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.” As a devotee of counterterrorism and classified military-intelligence missions, Bigelow has already indicated that she is a unique sort of “pacifist,” but there is more to come.

She then notes disingenuously, “But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately [?] expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.” As it turns out, although Bigelow apparently hasn’t noticed it, such sentiments have been directed at those who instituted and ordered these criminal US policies for more than a decade.

Bigelow eventually gets to the heart of her argument, which has been echoed by such apologists as filmmaker Michael Moore: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Driving home the point, she asserts that “confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist’s ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of secrecy and government obfuscation.”

Something important is revealed here about a generation or generations of artists and semi-intellectuals nourished on post-structuralism and postmodernism, cold, empty “conceptual art” and social indifference, and made affluent as a by-product of the stock and art market booms and related economic trends of the past several decades.
No, depiction is not endorsement, as though anyone with a brain would ever suggest that it was. However, whether the representation of torture and other inhumane acts amounts to endorsement, on the one hand, or criticism and outrage, on the other, depends on the artistic treatment (context, juxtaposition of images, the artist’s attitude) in the given instance.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the evidence is clear. The film begins, as the WSWS review noted, with “a dark screen and a sound track of fire fighters’ radio calls and frantic cries for help from the upper floors of the Twin Towers on 9/11 … The juxtaposition of the 9/11 soundtrack and the harrowing scenes of torture are presented as cause and effect, with one justifying the other.”

Zero Dark Thirty was created with the intimate collaboration of the CIA, the Defense Department and the Obama White House (including the personal intervention of John Brennan, formerly the chief of the drones assassination program and current nominee for the post of CIA director). It tells its tale from the point of view of a female CIA operative.

As was the case with The Hurt Locker (2008), where the central figures were US soldiers in Iraq, Bigelow concentrates in her latest work on how exhausting and difficult it is to be a victimizer. There is no indication that Jessica Chastain’s Maya seriously questions her work or that she would not preside over the same horrific acts in the future.

The suggestion that critics of her film are not “adult” enough to deal with the world’s unpleasantness or, as Bigelow puts it in her LA Times piece, are “ignoring or denying the role it [torture] played in US counter-terrorism policy and practices,” is another cynical effort to divert attention.

Films dealt with the most nightmarish events in history, including Nazism and the Holocaust, long before Bigelow picked up a film camera.

For instance, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) includes scenes of Gestapo torture of Italian resistance fighters and Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) depicts the torture of Algerians at the hands of the French colonialist military. A more recent work, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) vividly shows the British military torturing Irish republican detainees.

The important difference, of course, is that Rossellini, Pontecorvo and Loach, through their dramas, offered an indictment of the torturers and the forces that stood behind them, whereas Bigelow’s film takes the side, with whatever qualms, of the oppressors.

Other, better films on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have dealt with the brutalities of those conflicts. Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), commented the WSWS, “depicts unflinchingly the simulated drowning technique now known to the entire world as ‘waterboarding,’ as well as the beating and electrocution of the torture victim.” However, Hood’s film, a protest against US policy, met with a generally hostile reception from the media, which criticized the movie for its “slanted” and “one-sided” and “deck-stacking” arguments.

Philip Haas’ The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007) and Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007) were serious efforts that did not shy away from the realities of the US invasions, nor did the documentaries Gunner Palace (2004), The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (2006), How to Fold a Flag (2009), all co-directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), directed by Alex Gibney, and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), directed by Errol Morris. For the most part, the US media saw to it that these films, critical of American policy, were buried.

Bigelow concludes her piece in Tuesday’s LA Times by paying sycophantic tribute (a cruder expression comes to mind) to the American military and CIA. “We should never forget,” she writes, “the brave work of those professionals in the military and intelligence communities who paid the ultimate price in the effort to combat a grave threat to this nation’s safety and security.” Bin Laden, we are told, “was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.”

The “brave professionals” in the CIA and military, the “defense of the nation”! Who writes and speaks in this manner? This is the language of the extreme right. Bigelow is appealing to and aligning herself with quasi-fascistic elements.

But this is the trajectory of the social element she speaks for and to. Perhaps not entirely happy about torture and assassination, which may even disturb its sleep for an hour or two, this upper middle class layer instinctively identifies the defense of its wealth and privilege with US military operations around the globe. There is no other way to explain a work as repugnant as Zero Dark Thirty or a “defense of the indefensible” as crude and transparent as Bigelow’s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
wsws.org site is an information arm of the Socialist Equality Party.

••••

Take Two

Jonathan Kim, Film Critic for ReThink Reviews and the Uprising Show
A Response to Kathryn Bigelow’s Latest Statement on Zero Dark Thirty and Torture

Dear Kathryn Bigelow,

I read your January 15 response in the Los Angeles Times to people like myself who have said that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture. I would like to address it.

1. Do you believe that torture is an effective way to obtain accurate information?
2.    Do you believe torture was used to gain accurate information that led to finding Osama bin Laden? If so, who told you that? Did they provide any evidence?

5.    Do you feel that if characters such as Maya and Dan were real people that they should be charged as war criminals for torturing detainees?

7.    How do you define torture?

9.    What is your response to pro-torture pundits like Sean Hannity who cite Zero Dark Thirty as evidence that information obtained through torture helped find bin Laden, and that the U.S. should be free to torture in the future for reasons of national security?

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Follow Jonathan Kim on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ReThinkReviews

It is entirely to his credit that Clennon has made this statement, and spoken out against Bigelow’s film, which has received almost universal, shameful praise from the US media and its so-called “film critics.”

(Photo : Reuters) Cast members Jessica Chastain and Edgar Ramirez greet each other at the premiere of “Zero Dark Thirty”at the Dolby theatre in Hollywood, California December 10, 2012.

Voices of protest have been raised in Hollywood against Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, an account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which endorses the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, the US military and the systematic use of torture.

In a statement published January 9 in Truthout (“And the Academy Award for the Promotion of Torture Goes to …”), actor David Clennon explains, “I’m a member of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy. At the risk of being expelled for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for Zero Dark Thirty—in any Academy Awards category.”

Clennon goes on, “Everyone who contributes skill and energy to a motion picture—including actors—shares responsibility for the impressions the picture makes and the ideas it expresses. … So Jessica Chastain won’t get my vote for Best Actress. With her beauty and her tough-but-vulnerable posturing, she almost succeeds in making extreme brutality look weirdly heroic.”

The Emmy-award winning actor (best known for his role on television’s thirtysomething) writes, “If, in fact, torture is a crime (a mortal sin, if you will)—a signal of a nation’s descent into depravity—then it doesn’t matter whether it ‘works’ or not. Zero Dark Thirty condones torture. … If the deeply racist Birth of a Nation was released today, would we vote to honor it? Would we give an award to [German filmmaker] Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant pro-Nazi documentary, Triumph of the Will?”

Clennon: A rare stance that deserves applause and wide recognition. How many actors are willing to put principle ahead of their careers? Or even consider the implications of their work?

It is entirely to his credit that Clennon (left) has made this statement, and spoken out against Bigelow’s film, which has received almost universal, shameful praise from the US media and its so-called “film critics.”

According to CBS’s Los Angeles affiliate station, veteran actors Martin Sheen and Ed Asner have also appealed “to other actors to vote their conscience on whether to reward the movie [Zero Dark Thirty] with a win on Oscar night.”

Sony Chairman Amy Pascal issued a defensive statement in support of her studio’s film, asserting, “Zero Dark Thirty does not advocate torture. To not include that part of history would have been irresponsible and inaccurate. We fully support Kathryn Bigelow and [screenwriter] Mark Boal and stand behind this extraordinary movie.”

Only a multi-millionaire Hollywood film executive, who thinks she can make up reality as she goes along, could have added this preposterous and hypocritical comment: “We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda. … To punish an Artist’s right of expression is abhorrent. This community, more than any other, should know how reprehensible that is.”

One feels safe in suggesting that if a new version of the Hollywood anticommunist blacklist were to be launched tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of studio chiefs would sign up without a moment’s hesitation.

Clennon’s public statement and related events no doubt indicate revulsion against Bigelow’s film within sections of the industry. That she was left out of the Academy Awards best director nominations, announced last week, was an indication of some degree of opposition. Bigelow was hailed as the first woman to win an Oscar for best director for The Hurt Locker in 2010. At the time, entirely false claims were made as to that work’s “anti-war” credentials.

This time around, with even less to go on, various liberal and “left” figures insist that Bigelow is being subjected to unfair attacks.

Scott Mendelson, for example, on the Huffington Post website, writes that Bigelow has “been called a warmonger, an apologist, and yes, a Nazi. … All because Bigelow and Boal didn’t spoon-feed their opinions to the audience in a way that made for easy digestion. They didn’t have a fictionalized scene where a character explicitly explains to the audience how they got each piece of vital information over the eight years during which the film takes place. They trusted the audience to make the connections.”

The political miasma that controls the mind of so many liberals, and which makes them unreliable allies in important causes, may explain Moore’s disgraceful opinions on this issue.

Filmmaker Michael Moore has chimed in, disgracefully, with support for Bigelow as part of a wider and equally disgraceful defense of the Obama administration. On Twitter January 9, Moore asserted, “I’m sorry, but anyone who claims that Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture either hasn’t seen the movie or wasn’t paying attention.

“Zero Dark 30 makes it clear: 7 yrs of torture under [George W.] Bush doesn’t find Osama bin Laden. [Barack] Obama elected, torture stops, guess what? WE FIND BIN LADEN.”

Moore’s statement fully accepts the so-called “war on terror,” which his own Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) associated with the American elite’s drive for global domination. His miserable comments help explain how and why the official anti-war movement has folded up its tent and gone away under Obama.

Moore went on to say, “Also, this is a MOVIE. It is a work of art & tells a great story. ‘Depiction does not imply endorsement,’ says the director & she’s right.”

He was paraphrasing Bigelow’s comment at the New York Film Critics Award ceremony earlier this month: “I thankfully want to say that I’m standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement.”

It is difficult to conceive of a more dishonest or self-deluded comment. Mendelson, Moore and Bigelow, first of all, leave out one minor detail: Zero Dark Thirty (which borrows its very title from the US military) was developed and made with the fullest cooperation of the military, the CIA and the highest echelons of the American government. Is it likely that the latter would have facilitated a work that offered criticism of their activities?

As we reported last May, Bigelow and screenwriter Boal, a former “embedded reporter” in Iraq in 2004, were given “top-level access” to those involved in the bin Laden killing. They were even offered the opportunity, which they jumped at, to meet with a member of the US Navy Seal death squad involved in the assassination.

Right-wing media watchdog Judicial Watch, for its own purposes, obtained hundreds of pages of emails and transcripts of conversations, including a July 14, 2011 meeting attended by Bigelow, Boal, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers and other Defense Department officials. The transcript reveals that Boal had previously held discussions with top administration officials, including Obama’s Chief Counterterrorism Advisor John O. Brennan and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. Brennan, the man in charge of the murderous drone program, has recently been nominated as CIA director.

The transcripts and emails reveal Bigelow and Boal as accomplices of these top murderers in the US military and intelligence apparatus.

In an email to Vickers on June 9, 2011, for example, Pentagon media official Robert Mehal spoke glowingly of Boal, who had promised not to reveal any military secrets, adding “that he [Boal] was proud of not giving anything away in Hurt Locker.” Furthermore, the screenwriter had explained that he wanted “to highlight the great cooperation/coordination between CIA/DoD [Department of Defense] and the extensive Intel work (decade) that culminated in the OP.” Boal told Mehal that assassinating bin Laden was a “gutsy decision” by Obama.

When Vickers, at the July 14, 2011 meeting, told Bigelow and Boal that the military would make available to them “a guy … who was involved from the beginning as a planner, a SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander,” Boal responded, “That’s dynamite,” and Bigelow put in, “That’s incredible.” At the end of the conversation, Bigelow told Vickers, “So wonderful meeting you.”

Bigelow, supported by Moore and others, claims Zero Dark Thirty is neutral in relation to the events it depicts. “The film doesn’t have an agenda and it doesn’t judge,” she told the media. “I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience.”

This is spurious. Zero Dark Thirty tells its “great story” from the point of view of the CIA and its torturers. Its supposed objectivity is a self-conscious aesthetic stance. Bigelow has long been fascinated with violence and brutality and those bold enough to carry it out, without regard for commonplace concerns. (For example, this bit of sophomoric dialogue from anti-hero Bodhi [Patrick Swayze] in Bigelow’s 1991 Point Break: “See, we exist on a higher plane, you and I. We make our own rules. Why be a servant of the law … when you can be its master?”)

We noted in regard to The Hurt Locker that the film “glories in and glamorizes violence, which the filmmaker associates with ‘heightened emotional responses.’ All of this, including its element of half-baked Nietzscheanism, is quite unhealthy and even sinister, but corresponds to definite moods within sections of what passes for a ‘radical’ intelligentsia in the US.” The Hurt Locker, we pointed out, “merely pauses now and then to meditate on the heavy price American soldiers pay for slaughtering Iraqi insurgents and citizens. As long as they pull long faces and show signs of fatigue and stress, US forces, as far as Bigelow is apparently concerned, can go right on killing and wreaking havoc.”

The same can be said, in spades, for the new film, with its pro-imperialist storyline and fascistic overtones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Walsh is wsws.org’s senior art & cinema critic. He is one of the best and most incisive political film critics in the US and probably in the entire anglophone world.

MIKE INGLES

Huckabee: He knows what he’s doing. But he’s shameless.

Economists, like proctologists, tend to hold a narrow view of things. And, a viewpoint is a powerful thing. We all know that statistics are malleable, that what is an asset in one column is often a liability in another. When an economist, with a narrow viewpoint, hooks a politician, with a voracious appetite, you get broken government—you get Mike

“Last month, the Senate Budget Committee reports that in fiscal year 2011, between food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid and other benefits, the average US household below the poverty line received $168 a day in government support. What’s the problem with that much support? Well, the median household income in America is just over $50,000, which averages out to $137.13 a day. To put it another way, being on welfare now pays the equivalent of $30 an hour for a 40-hour week, while the average job pays $25 an hour. And the person who works also has to pay taxes, which drops his pay to $21 an hour. It’s no wonder that welfare is now the biggest part of the budget, more than Social Security or defense. And why would anyone want to get off welfare when working pays $9 an hour less?”

Huckabee, is no dummy; he understands the reality behind these numbers. No, Huckabee is not a dummy—he’s a demagogue. If it is true that all these poor people are doing so well, why do they chose to live in dilapidated homes and in neighborhoods where the most common reason for death is by murder. And, why send your well-fed and well-tailored children to sub-standard schools—with that kind of money, their kids should be in private schools.

You and I know that these statistics are skewed. You and I know that these poor families are not on each government program for an extended amount of time. You and I know that these statistics include children with terminal illnesses being treated in hospitals and poor people who have been injured in some terrible accident, or shot in their deluxe living quarters by an errant bullet from a weapon with 30-in-the-clip. Huckabee knows that too.

But he also knows that the guy and gal who works hard, 8-10 hours a day, and are getting nowhere for all their labors, who knows something broken but not sure what or why, who go to church each Sunday and listen but do not hear—they want to blame someone. Who better to blame, than the blameless, the indigent,the Samaritans.

The demagogue who wrote those words knows full-well that folks on welfare don’t average 30 bucks an hour, while sitting on their hams watching Dr. Phil, and drivin’ dem Cadillacs ’round town. But, it’s a great image for Fox T.V., if you want to protect the status-quo and deflect the real-world problems of poverty and stagnation of real wages and unemployment and broken capitalism. Hunckabee offers no solutions but carefully frames the debate to reach his audience with code.

I too have a proctology problem; my vision is also skewed. I have this vision of Ma and Pa drinking a beer, sittin’ in a barcalounger cheering-on the opaque image of a former Southern governor, capped teeth, spewing carefully laid out statistics to a gullible people ready to lap up any nonsense, simply because that particular demagogue also believes that automatic weapons protect people, and women should be forced to have babies that they don’t want and can’t afford, and poor people are lazy.

As long as these two visions exist equally, nothing can be done to fix what is broken. Liberals counter with their own television programming over at MSMBC, with self-righteous commentators who vilify the opposition with their own Ivy-league sly code references, and can never relate to that guy and gal in the barcalounger, because, deep inside, somewhere where they don’t want to go, they don’t like Ma and Pa very much. Deep down, they don’t think blue-collar workers should have that enormous power to vote and so set the direction of this most powerful nation. I know who they are because, often, I am one of them. And so, every once in a while, I have to write a column like this to remind myself that it takes two to demagogue an issue. That Samaritans walk on both sides of the road.

MIKE INGLES writes a regular column on national affairs.

BARRY GREY, wsws.org

Miniscule differences to fool the gullible.

The bill passed by Congress averting tax increases and spending cuts dubbed the “fiscal cliff” sets the stage for a campaign by both parties and the US media for sweeping attacks on social programs that provide health coverage and retirement income for the elderly, the disabled and the poor.

A small increase in the income tax rate on the top 0.7 percent of households in the bill passed Tuesday will serve as window dressing for an assault on the basic social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s. The bipartisan deal worked out between the Obama White House and Democratic and Republican congressional leaders delays for two months $110 billion in military and domestic spending cuts. This sets up a new crisis deadline in March that coincides with the legal need to raise the federal debt limit and the expiration of a “continuing resolution” funding the operations of the federal government.

With the tax side of the issue having been resolved in the fiscal cliff bill, the corporate-controlled media will demand that the “debt limit cliff” be averted by massive cuts in social spending, targeting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The use of artificial deadlines and phony crises to manipulate the public has become a basic modus operandi for managing the political affairs of the American ruling elite. The so-called fiscal cliff debate was from the start a cynical and stage-managed exercise, reflecting the inability of the political system to address the concerns of the masses and its complete servility to the financial aristocracy.

Part of the process is the creation by the media of a synthetic “public opinion” that has nothing to do with the real concerns and views of the population. Already on Wednesday, the morning news programs were speaking of a groundswell of popular anger over the failure of Congress to enact “real” deficit-reduction measures and serious cuts in social programs—this in the face of repeated polls that show a large majority of the population opposed to such cuts.

Obama exemplified the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party in his remarks Tuesday night following passage of the bill by the House of Representatives. “A central promise of my campaign for president,” he declared, “was to change the tax code that was too skewed towards the wealthy at the expense of working middle-class Americans. Tonight we’ve done that.”

This is a lie. The bill actually makes permanent the income tax cuts for the rich instituted under Bush, with the exception of a modest increase in the rate for households making more than $450,000 a year. It permanently sets the tax rate for capital gains and dividends at 20 percent, and keeps the threshold for estate taxes at $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples, with an inflation adjustment that will raise the minimum to $15 million by the end of the decade.

These rates are very low by historical standards, in most cases lower than those that existed prior to 2001. They constitute a massive windfall for the wealthy.

At the same time, the fiscal cliff bill raises taxes on 77 percent of households by allowing a 2 percent cut in the Social Security payroll tax to expire. A typical family earning $50,000 will pay an additional $1,000 in federal taxes in 2013.

Obama reiterated his commitment to attacking entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Calling Medicare “the biggest contributor to our deficit,” he pledged to “reform that program.” He went on to speak of “further unnecessary spending in government that we can eliminate.”

The Congressional Budget Office issued a report estimating that the fiscal cliff agreement would add $4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, as compared to what would have happened had the spending cuts and tax increases set for the New Year been allowed to take effect. Who is to pay for this “extravagance?”

A column by New York Times commentator David Brooks published Monday, entitled “Another Fiscal Flop,” makes clear the thinking within the ruling class. Brooks begins by declaring that the American “welfare state” has become “unaffordable.”

He places the blame on retirees, who have the effrontery to expect decent medical care and then use it to live longer. “Obligations to the elderly are already squeezing programs for the young and the needy,” he writes, demanding “deep structural reforms” of Medicare, including turning it into a poverty program by introducing means-testing.
“Ultimately,” he writes, “we should blame the American voters,” who have “decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren.” A prime example of this greed is the “average Medicare couple,” who consume “$234,000 in free money” above what they pay into the system.

This calumny against the American people provides a hint of the savagery that animates the US corporate-financial elite, which will stop at nothing to reverse the social reforms of the last century and reduce the working class to poverty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Grey is a senior political analyst with WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization affiliated with the 4th International.

Susan Rice: This contemptible criminal could have happily served on the Reagan foreign policy team. No wonder she was picked by Obama. —Eds

by Black AGenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Hold the author blameless: All insults, rants and captions by the editors.

Did Susan Rice step down on her own or did she do so at the insistence of the White House. Did Republican oppostion doom her nomination, or was the Obama administration too afraid to have such a bare knuckled champion of disaster capitalism and African dictators as Secretary of State, lest its real Africa policy be more closely examined?

The conventional wisdom is that UN Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew herself from consideration as US Secretary of State due to some combination of Republican opposition and the president’s unwillingness to go to the mat for her. Like a lot of conventional wisdom, it’s dead wrong on multiple levels.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: THE PERFECT IMPERSONATION OF THE MORAL AND POLITICAL IMBECILITY REPRESENTED BY BOURGEOIS FEMINISM. —Eds

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry devoted the first half hour of her December 16 [2] show to an extended defense of Ambassador Rice, who she deemed the latest casualty in the GOP’s war on women. She wondered why President Obama did not defend Susan Rice more vigorously. But one of Harris-Perry’s guests, Chloe Angel of Feministing.Com [3] called the idea that Rice withdrew on her own “ludicrous”. Rice had after all, been working toward this professional goal — the post of top US diplomat, her whole career. It wasn’t a line of inquiry that interested the host, who turned the rest of the half hour into a “stand by a sisa” moment for Susan Rice. Harris-Perry’s position on that was pretty much the unanimous stand of the elite black political class. To them, Rice was just anotha strong hard-working black woman done wrong maybe by the president, but certainly and most of all by misogynist white Republican senators, an old and familiar story, if not a true or complete one.

The whole story is that Susan Rice was and is a professional diplomat for empire, a high level policymaker whose significance cannot be grasped apart from the policies she built her career conceiving and carrying out. In his 2003 essay, Barefoot, Sick, Hungry and Afraid: The Real US Policy in Africa [4], Glen Ford outlined in broad strokes US policy on the continent as

“…a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African development at every opportunity and by all possible means – including the death of millions…

“To thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa, the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African Strong Man… Their function is to smother civil society, to render the people helpless…

“The Strong Man’s job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and demoralized societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the fortunes of the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose little threat to foreign capital….

“…a chaotic Africa, barely governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least troublesome environment for Western purposes.  The extraction corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are insecure… “

The best examples of this insecurity-by-design are Congo and Somalia. In the Congo, the entire eastern region of the country has been depopulated, turned into a free-fire zone by the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and minor parts played by several other African nations. Seven million Congolese have died since 1996 and two million women raped in two major invasions and a ceaseless orgy of terrorism by a shifting cast of militia formations that routinely employ child soldiers and mass rape. The militia formations are supplied by the armies of US client states, most notably Uganda and Rwanda who are in turn totally dependent on the Pentagon for their training and supplies. At the same time, the Congo’s gold and timber, its diamonds and its coltan, a vital material present in every cell phone, every computer, every aircraft on earth continue to flow mostly to the West.

In Somalia, the US fears that a united national government will deny Western access to the lake of oil underneath the country. Hence Uncle Sam branded Somalis it fears “Al Qaeda affiliates” and decreeing there will be no national government till times change, bankrolled Ethiopian [5] and Ugandan troops to conduct multiple invasions. Since the late 1990s, more than a million Somalis have perished in the fighting, raping and blockading and starving.

Africa is the poorest and most war-torn region on earth [6], with US military aid going to 52 out of 54 African countries. It’s the only place where US military and civilian diplomatic functions are combined under the auspices of AFRICOM, the US military command on the continent. It’s a monstrous legacy, and Susan Rice has been one of its leading architects and managers.

Rice joined the Clinton administration’s National Security team and was deeply involved, both in supporting the side that came out on top of the Rwandan civil war while she stalled and wondered aloud whether the killing of 800,000 Rwandan civilians amounted to genocide. She served as Undersecretary of African Affairs in the Clinton administration, and when Democrats were not in the White House joined the lobbying firm that represented Ugandan and Ethiopian dictators in Washington DC. A top policy advisor since the beginning of the Obama administration, she now serves as UN Ambassador, in which capacity she repeatedly tried to suppress UN sponsored studies that laid the blame for mass murders and atrocities at the feet of Rwanda and Uganda.

“US policy in the region has been a disastrous record of supporting brutal strongmen like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni,” Maurice Carney, executive director at Friends of the Congo [7] explained to Black Agenda Report. “The conflict in the Congo alone is responsible for millions of deaths, more than any other conflict since World War 2, and two million rapes. It’s particularly disturbing that two women of African American descent, Democrat Susan Rice and Republican Jendayi Frazer, both as Undersecretary for State for African Affairs and in Rice’s case later as UN Ambassador were the point people in constructing and carrying out these awful policies. There needs to be some accountability.”

“Accountability” for US Africa policy though, is not what our black political elite is about. Like Melissa Harris-Perry they chose to ignore the specific international policies Susan Rice designed and implemented. They chose to ignore the continuing genocide in the Congo, the impending interventions in Mali, the ongoing bloodshed in Somalia and Sudan, the whole panoply of US policy and consequences that is Rice’s career legacy, and reduce the entire affair to a domestic “stand by a sista” moment. It was, in the opinion of TransAfrica Forum [8] President Nicole Lee, a colossal missed opportunity.

“We disagreed with the Republican senators… around their reading of the Benghazi incident and Rice’s involvement in it, and we can understand the concern of civil rights organizations over seeing her unfairly targeted and blamed. But there’s a whole separate issue around Susan Rice’s career and the particular policy prescriptions she’s been identified with. Those policies have had a deeply damaging effect on the African world, and we would have preferred to see a lot more discussion and education around that.

We have a new dynamic ‘African American’ constituency growing up in this country. Many of their parents were not born in the US, or their forbears not enslaved in the US. Their experience has been severely effected by policies Susan Rice has been involved in… We are not going to be able to build this dynamic constituency if we sweep under the rug real concerns these communities have around leaders, even if they are African American. I really think it’s important for us to be self-critical when there is a problematic approach to someone like Susan Rice…. and to actually call for real change instead of just backing her… African American communities need to take up policy concerns as it relates to Africa with the same amount of fervor as we take up other policy measures domestically… (The job of Secretary of State) focuses solely on international issues, yet there was very little work done to understand what her policies were around international issues. We brought it completely into our own domestic context with no interest or understanding of where she had been in the past. That’s dangerous, and in the long term that is not going to benefit the African American community.”

The anemic state of US journalism, and the near absence of black journalism about Africa US make it possible for African American political leaders to feign ignorance of the real effects of US empire in Africa, as long as the subject isn’t brought up too often. But making a long time bloody handed bare-knuckles “diplomat” like Susan Rice Secretary of State means that questions about her hands-on role in protecting African strongmen and directing attention away from the genocide still in progress in Congo would be tempting targets for reporters around the world. It might be, that when the Obama administration took Susan Rice behind closed doors to rehearse some of the hostile questions she might be asked, the fig leaf covering genocidal US policies of militarization and resource extraction was so thin, and Rice’s involvement in those policies so impossible to downplay, that she was judged a liability for that reason. Already some reporters are asking about her role in Rwanda [9] and the Congo [10], and beginning to connect obvious dots.

These aren’t just questions that Susan Rice dare not answer. There are many lines of inquiry which easily reveal the real nature of US policy in Africa the last two decades — arming African strongmen to the teeth to keep the continent barefoot, hungry, sick and afraid, the better to plunder the resources, to extract the wealth of a rich continent full of poor people. Rice has an awful [11] reputation as well, among African journalists and civil society activists on the wrong side of the local dictators she supports. The facts of her career are well known and widely acknowledged, everywhere except in the black political class of the United States.

Was she targeted by Republican senators? Sure. But the Benghazi noise is leftover venom from the presidential campaign. Republicans hoped to embarrass the president with Benghazi on the eve of the November 2012 election. That didn’t work out for them, and Rice is on the other team and genuinely disliked by some of them. So they went after her. They’re wrong. But the black political class is wrong on a far bigger scale, in fact is complicit in Rice’s crimes by not examining the policies she built her career on, and how they have affected millions across the African continent. John Kerry is thought to be the next runner up for the position of Secretary of State. If he is confirmed there will be an open senate seat in Massachusetts, and he’ll be the first white man to hold that post since Warren Christopher in the 1990s.

“Her hands are bloody. She’s been no friend of Africa,” Kwame Wilburg of Atlanta Friends of the Congo told us. “But we have to separate the picture of Susan Rice under Republican attack from that of Susan Rice the architect of disaster in Africa. She’s one more proof that black faces in those high places don’t always mean anything good for Africans on either side of the water.”

Keeping those bloody hands and their indefensible record in a less prominent place might have been the Obama administration’s best bet to defending her awful handiwork.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page or at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

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