Dan Kovalik: The Colombia story the American press won’t report

Peasants greet us along the highway.

Below we present two reports by Dan Kovalik, a citizen’s journalist with the courage and commitment to cover Colombia, one of the most victimized nations in Latin America, and one of the most dangerous assignments for a working journalist. Today, as has been the case for decades, Colombia is still a badly-disguised client state of the United States dominated by a murderous landowning oligarchy. Since the corporate media—to their eternal damnation—won’t come close to reporting truthfully on Colombia, it is people like Kovalik who has to do the job. —PG

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Dispatch From Catatumbo—

Capitalism, Genocide & Colombia

by DANIEL KOVALIK

I just returned from Catatumbo, Colombia where thousands of peasants are waging a life-and-death struggle against the U.S.-backed Colombian military and its paramilitary allies. For over 60 days, the peasants have been demonstrating against the deplorable living conditions and economic circumstances in which they live, and in support of their proposal for a Peasant Farmer Reserve Zone of 10 million hectares.

Such a zone, which is provided for under the law, would allow the peasants to engage in subsistence farming free of the threat of encroachment by extractive companies desiring to mine or drill on their land. This demand, along with the concomitant demand of the peasants for all mining and oil exploration and extraction in their region to be suspended, is critical to the peasants who are being driven to the verge of extinction.

[pullquote] The grotesquely overpaid media celebrities do not deign to cover such important stories, especially when they reveal the true criminal nature of US foreign policy. [/pullquote]

According to the Luis Carlos Pérez Lawyers’ Collective (CALCP), 11,000 peasants have been killed in this region by state and para-state forces, most of them during the 2002-2010 term of President of Alvaro Uribe, and over 100,000 peasants, out of a total of around 300,000, have been forcibly displaced. At least 32 mass graves containing the bodies of murdered peasant activists have been found in this region in recent years.

And, this mass murder and displacement is being carried out to make way for more oil drilling, African palm cultivation (for biodiesel) and for coal mining by North American companies.

I say that this mayhem is being carried out, in part, in order to make way for more oil drilling because, in fact, much oil drilling has been taking place there for the past 70 years. And, the peasants of this region have nothing to show for this many years of drilling. As we were told a few times during out trip, after 70 years of oil exploration, the rural parts of this region do not even have a paved road. (Our delegation – led by Justice for Colombia and including participants from the USW and Unite the Union UK – found this out the hard way during our 3.5 hour drive over a dirt road from Cucuta to a village outside Tibu near the Venezuelan border).

In addition, there is no sewage system, no running water and no health services. Indeed, peasants injured in their confrontations with the military and police during the two months of demonstrations – with the peasants defending themselves with sticks against the guns, tanks and other U.S.-supplied hardware of the military and police – have been forced to flee into Venezuela for refuge and medical services.

In short, the oil and other extractive companies, beginning with Texaco in the 1930’s, have taken and taken, and left the people with nothing. Now, the companies want even more, and it is the very existence and presence of the peasants which stands in their way. And so, quite logically, the companies, with the help of the U.S.-backed military and paramilitaries, are aiming to literally wipe the peasants off the map. In other words, these forces are engaged in a calculated act of genocide. Indeed, when a number of us remarked upon how almost everyone we saw and met with in our visit to Catatumbo were no more than teenagers, we were told that this was the result of the fact that their parents had either been murdered or displaced. Left behind are villages populated almost entirely by children.

Young Peasants of Catatumbo In Rebellion

The calculated mass killing and displacement that is taking place in Catatumbo is a good example of the phenomenon discussed in the new book, Capitalism: A Structural Genocide by Garry Leech. In that book, Leech argues, and quite forcefully, that capitalism, left to its own devices, will inevitably destroy (1) those who stand in the way of the exploitation of natural resources; and (2) those individuals, such as peasants and subsistent farmers, who are engaged in pursuits which neither contribute towards economic “growth” nor produce surplus value or profit. Of course, the peasants of Catatumbo fall into both of these categories simultaneously, and are therefore a double threat.

Citing Indian physicist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, Leech explains that, under capitalism, “nothing has value until it enters the market. Shiva points out that under capitalism ‘if you consume what you produce, you do not really produce, at least not economically speaking. If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then this does not contribute to GDP, and so does not contribute towards growth.’” Rather, for such subsistence farmers, “’nature exists as a commons.’” The commons, moreover, and those who work on it, are simply not permitted under capitalism.

Young peasants of Catatumbo in rebellion.

As Leech and Shiva explain, those working the commons must either “be incorporated – often through coercion – into the ever-widening spheres of production and circulation,” or they must be simply be destroyed. This process, as Leech explains, is what Karl Marx termed, “primitive accumulation,” and it is quite a nasty process, wherever it is carried out.

Leech explains that, as capitalism was beginning to get into full swing in Britain in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, the British Parliament passed a series of Enclosure Acts which privatized commonly held lands and “prevented much of the generations-old practice of grazing their animals and cultivating their crops on commonly held lands, thereby forcing them to move to the cities in search of jobs.”

More recently, as Leech astutely points out, Mexico outlawed communal land titles for indigenous peoples in order to make way for NAFTA. As Leech explains, and as many of us have argued for years, a major raison d’être of NAFTA was in fact the primitive accumulation of the commons of millions of small farmers in Mexico. This primitive accumulation was carried out by NAFTA’s provisions which allowed heavily-subsidized, and therefore cheap, agricultural products from North America to flood the Mexican markets tariff-free. Meanwhile, the IMF rules governing Mexico forbid that country from subsidizing its own agricultural producers.

As Leech explains, the results for 2 million small farmers in Mexico, who could not compete with the subsidized food from the North, was devastating, with these small farmers losing their livelihood and their land and fleeing into the cities, or illegally into the U.S. Finding themselves displaced from their land, many were left with no jobs at all, found themselves exploited in low paying jobs with poor safety and health practices, or turned to the drug trade for employment. The result for Mexico as a whole has been the destruction of the social fabric of the nation and increased violence, with cities like Juarez suffering violence levels comparable to nations at war.

While Leech does not focus on Colombia in his book, he does mention that Colombia itself “has become Latin America’s poster child over the past decade and its economic growth has been driven by the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, particularly oil, coal and gold, by foreign companies.” Colombia now has the largest internally displaced population in the world at over 5 million. As Leech explains, “[m]any have been forced from their lands by direct physical violence related to the country’s armed conflict – often by the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitary groups serving the interests of multinational corporations. However, many others have become economic refugees due to the structural violence inherent in neoliberal policies that has dispossessed them of their lands in order to facilitate capital accumulation for foreign companies.”

Peasants Greet Us Along The Highway

The peasants of Catatumbo have long been the victims of such direct as well as structural violence, but now they are fighting back to defend their land. For 53 days, these peasants, armed only with sticks, blocked the main highway linking the cities of Cucuta and Tibu. Shortly after our visit, the government agreed to negotiate with them directly, and the peasants ended this blockade for now. However, they will begin it anew if talks fail.

Young Luchador in Catatumbo.

While the Colombian Minister of Defense warned us not to travel this highway because of these protests, the peasants freely allowed us to pass. Of course, as all of us understood, what the Colombian government was truly afraid of was that we would witness that it is in fact the peasants who are on the side of right; that it is they who are defending the land, the water and the rainforests for all of us. And, this is why their struggle, and the struggles of others like them, must succeed. In truth, our very lives and future depend on them.

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer and teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

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Also by Dan Kovalik——

The U.S. Empire and Modern Day Christian Martyrs

[Posted originally on: 02/25/2013]

In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman devote a chapter to the media’s unbalanced coverage of the murder of one priest in Poland in 1984 as compared to the coverage of the 72 religious killed throughout Latin America between 1964 and 1978, the killing of 23 religious in Guatemala between 1980 and 1985, the murder of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador in 1980 and the rape and murder of the four U.S. church women in El Salvador in 1980. In short, the murder of the one Polish priest — the perpetrators of which were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison — received significantly more coverage than all of the latter killings, which almost invariably remain unsolved and unpunished, combined.

Meanwhile, there has been almost no media coverage of the killings of the “two bishops, 79 priests, eight men and women religious, as well as three seminarians” killed in Colombia alone between 1984 and 2011 — this, according to the Episcopal Conference of Colombia. The Episcopal Conference of Colombia publicly announced this grim tally in the fall of 2011 upon the murder of the sixth priest killed in 2011 alone. One of the priests killed in 2011 was Father Reynel Restrepo Idarraga, the pastor of the town of Marmato, who was murdered by presumed paramilitaries in retaliation for his vocal defense of Marmato against the attempt of the Canadian mining company, Gran Colombia Gold, which to this day is still attempting to seize the land of the entire town and convert it into a gold mine. The Colombian bishops attributed the rash of killings in 2011 to “the courageous commitment of our priests to the prophetic denunciation of injustice and the cause of the poorest in the country.”

The number of priests killed in Colombia since 1984 just climbed to 80 with the murder of Father Luis Alfredo Suarez Salazar on Feb. 2, 2013 by two unknown assailants in the northern Colombian city of Ocana.

Then, on February 13, 2013, there was an assassination attempt against another Catholic priest. The target of the attack was Father Alberto Franco, a member of the Inter-Church Commission of Justice & Peace (CIJP), an organization created in 1988 pursuant to the resolution of the Conference of Religious Superiors of Colombia which aspired “[t]o promote and encourage the Christian prophetic signs which are present in religious communities, through the creation of a Commission of Justice and Peace which will channel and disseminate information and protests throughout the country.” As Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., a founding member of the CIJP, relates in The Genocidal Democracy, while the Colombian Catholic Conference of Bishops “did not approve of this initiative and placed obstacles in its path,” 25 Catholic provincials nonetheless went ahead with the formation of the CIJP.

As Father Giraldo explains, the first and continuing project of the CIJP has been “to gather and disseminate information about the victims of human rights violations, the right to life, in particular.” Not surprisingly, this project has made the CIJP a constant target of threats and violence, particularly from the Colombian state and its paramilitary allies. Father Alberto Franco himself has been the target of threats and surveillance for some time now, culminating in the attempt upon his life on Februrary 13, in which assailants fired three shots into the windshield of Father Franco’s car. Luckily, Father Franco had not yet entered the car and therefore escaped unharmed. Meanwhile, Father Franco, along with 17 other members of the CIJP, remain, by the Colombian government’s own measures, under “extraordinary risk” of attack.

According to a statement sent in support of the CIJP signed by 130 organizations,

We consider these threats to be a direct result of CIJP’s work on land restitution and their efforts to expose state, military, and business responsibility in illegal land grabs, threats, and the violation of human rights before national and international courts. The most recent threats occurred days after Father Franco informed the press that officials of ex-President Alvaro Uribe’s government were involved in the displacement and illegal occupation of the collective territories of Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó. That same week, there was a hearing on the case of Marino López and others in Cacarica before the Inter-American Human Rights Court.

We have observed that the Afro-descendant, indigenous, and campesino communities that CIJP accompanies are also attacked for defending their land rights. In December 2012, we received first-hand information of the presence of many uniformed and armed paramilitaries in Curvaradó, in addition to the threat of an imminent massacre. On various occasions, we have expressed our concern regarding the attacks and threats against María Ligia Chavera and Enrique Petro, two emblematic leaders in the land restitution process in Curvaradó.

Of course, as I have written about at great length before, the “land grabs” which the CIJP are denouncing are only accelerating due to the free trade agreements between Colombia and the U.S. and Canada which are promoting the increased exploitation of land by multi-national mining and agricultural companies — companies which regularly use the Colombian military and paramilitaries to clear the land they covet of the residents who live there.

However, in the midst of the economic causes of the repression against individuals such as Father Franco, one also cannot forget the very real spiritual and religious convictions which motivate Father Franco and others like him to risk their lives to defend the poor, and one cannot ignore the commitment of those attacking such individuals to eradicate such convictions. Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., has indeed recently published a book (in Spanish only) which details the spiritual aspect of this struggle.

That book, The Deaths That Illuminate Life, sets forth the stories of 35 Colombians — including bishops, priests, nuns, religious laity and even a child — who Father Giraldo considers to be modern Christian martyrs. In Father Giraldo’s words, they were “witnesses of Christian values objectively: men and women who heroically endured torture and death to the save the lives of others, or for refusing to become collaborators with criminal agencies, or because they joined groups and organizations where they sought to realize in some way their militant option for justice and solidarity.”

Comparing these modern martyrs to the early martyrs of the first three centuries of the Church, Father Giraldo does not mince words about their common executioners — the prevailing empires at the time (the Roman and U.S. empires, respectively).

Thus, Father Giraldo explains that, just as in the time of the Roman Empire Christians would naturally find themselves to be “subversives” in that they were compelled to deny the Emperor as their “Lord,” so too must modern Christians in Latin America find themselves at odds with their neo-colonial oppressors. As he writes,

To confess Christ, in this context, has meaning and truth only in the margins of a historic commitment to the liberation of the oppressed which explains an inescapable confrontation with the oppressors, “some of whom are those who say they are Christians,” that is why there are today Christians tortured and killed in the name of “the democratic freedoms”, in the name of the “market economy”, in the name of “Christian western civilization”, in the name of “national security”, on behalf of the “defense of the society against atheistic ideologies”, etc. The Christian label provides no clue in revealing the roots of the conflict, which cause death; these causes can only be discerned through an in-depth review of the practice of the faith, confronted with its challenging context, and taking into account that the Christian character of this praxis, tends to be refused, systematically, by all those that are in some degree of collusion with the interests of the oppressors.Today there is no longer the idol of the Roman Emperor, in whose altars was shed the Blood of the first Christians, but there is the secular idol of the market economy, upon whose altars is sacrificed the life and dignity of millions of human beings…

To this day, I cannot get over the irony, and indeed the shock, at the realization that it is in fact the U.S. — the professed protector of democracy and indeed Christian values in the world — which is the entity so bent on destroying the roots of true Christianity in Latin America, for it is a philosophy that so profoundly calls into question the U.S.’s true values which revolve around the worship of wealth and power. And so, it is the U.S. which, since 1962, has cultivated the very death squads which haunt the Church of the poor in Latin America, and specifically in Colombia.

And indeed, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), which continues to train thousands of repressive Latin American military forces, has, as Noam Chomsky explains, gone so far as to brag about its role in destroying Liberation Theology (the Christian philosophy which advocates “the preferential treatment for the poor”) in Latin America. As Chomsky has explained, “[o]ne of its advertising points is that the U.S. Army [School of the Americas] helped defeat liberation theology, which was a dominant force, and it was an enemy for the same reason that secular nationalism in the Arab world was an enemy – it was working for the poor.” Thankfully, the SOA has not been as thoroughly successful as it has advertised in this regard, and that brave souls like Father Giraldo and Father Franco continue to risk martyrdom in order to defend the poor and dispossessed in Latin America.

In truth, I stopped being a practicing Catholic some time ago, but I continue to hold dear the philosophy of the “preferential treatment of the poor,” and I honor those in Latin America who continue to exhibit the courage — courage I have yet to find in myself — to risk their lives every day in carrying out this key tenet of Liberation Theology. I have concluded that, to be a person of decency by any measure, one must join with these Davids of the Third World who are fighting for independence and economic justice against the Goliath in which we happen to live.Follow Dan Kovalik on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@danielmkovalik

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Kovalik is a human and labor rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh. He has been a peace activist throughout his life and has been deeply involved in the movement for peace and social justice in Colombia and Central America. He is an attorney for Colombian Plaintiffs in cases alleging corporate complicity in egregious human rights violations. Kovalik, a 1993 graduate of Columbia Law School, was a co-recipient of the 2003 Project Censored Award for a story he co-wrote on the murder of trade unionists in Colombia.

CBS: Selfishness central to US society values

Are any of you surprised to hear this? We have been talking about the pervasive selfish “ethic” of American society for eons, always noting in passing that this is inevitable since selfish behavior, praised by the likes of Ayn Rand as a virtue, and defended indirectly by the entire establishment, from corporadoes and politicians to their media whores, and even the churches, is woven deep in the fabric of capitalism. From time to time glimmers of truth bubble to the surface, but they don’t stay long in the public radar, for reasons any of you can understand.—PG

Selfish U.S.?: Study says country becoming more self-centered

A study published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science says that Americans are more focused on themselves than they were 200 years ago. Anne Fulenwider, editor in chief of Marie Claire, and John Tierney, columnist for The New York Times, discuss the findings on “CBS This Morning.”

America’s Descent Into Madness

The Politics of Cruelty

by HENRY GIROUX

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.– John le Carré

America is descending into madness. The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem. The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment. Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism.

Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged. Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games. Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible. And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

The American public needs more than a show of outrage or endless demonstrations. It needs to develop a formative culture for producing a language of critique, possibility, and broad-based political change. Such a project is indispensable for developing an organized politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education, and communities of solidarity and support for young people. At stake here is a politics and vision that informs ongoing educational and political struggles to awaken the inhabitants of neoliberal societies to their current reality and what it means to be educated not only to think outside of a savage market-driven commonsense but also to struggle for those values, hopes, modes of solidarity, power relations, and institutions that infuse democracy with a spirit of egalitarianism and economic and social justice. For this reason, any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of predatory capitalism. As I have argued elsewhere, too many progressives are stuck in the apocalyptic discourse of foreclosure and disaster and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a “sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.” This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities that stretch from Chicago to Athens, and other dead zones of capitalism throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values, and infrastructures that make critical education and community the core of a robust, radical democracy. This is a challenge for young people and all those invested in the promise of a democracy that extends not only the meaning of politics, but also a commitment to economic justice and democratic social change.

The stories we tell about ourselves as Americans no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. There are no towering figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr. whose stories interweave moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough. Stories that once inflamed our imagination now degrade it, overwhelming a populace with nonstop advertisements that reduce our sense of agency to the imperatives of shopping. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, churches, synagogues, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are told by right-wing and liberal media that broadcast the conquests of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of the free market and a permanent war economy.

These neoliberal stories are all the more powerful because they seem to undermine the public’s desire for rigorous accountability, critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue for by right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to fill the content needs of corporate media and educational institutions. Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine both greed and indifference encouraging massive disparities in wealth and income. In addition, they also sanctify the workings of the market, forging a new f political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction version that preached the neoliberal gospel of wealth: there is nothing beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.

The stories that dominate the American landscape embody what stands for commonsense among market and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the poor, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; an ongoing attack on unions, on social provisions, and on the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions incarcerated in our nation’s prisons.

All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.” That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich, but carefully packaged in consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people. Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they inflict on Americans marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.

Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives spun by politicians whose arrogance and quests for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-mindedness, power-hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded in the policies they advocate. The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in politicians such as Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who believes that even assistance to those unemployed, homeless, and working poor suffering the most in his home state should be cut in the name of austerity measures. We hear it in the words of Mike Reynolds, another politician from Oklahoma who insists that government has no responsibility to provide students with access to a college education through a state program “that provides post-secondary education scholarship to qualified low-income students.” We find evidence of a culture of cruelty in numerous policies that make clear that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American society—whether low-income families, poor minorities of color and class, or young, unemployed, and failed consumers—are considered disposable, utterly excluded in terms of ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.

In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted that fall primarily on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the most. For instance, Texas has enacted legislation that refuses to expand its Medicaid program, which provides healthcare for low-income people. As a result, healthcare coverage will be denied to over 1.5 million low-income residents as a result of Governor Perry’s refusal to be part of the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion. This is not merely partisan politics; it is an expression of a new form of cruelty and barbarism now aimed at those considered disposable in a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest society. Not surprisingly, the right-wing appeal to job-killing and provision-slashing austerity now functions as an updated form of medieval torture, gutting myriad of programs that add up to massive human suffering for the many and benefits for only a predatory class of neo-feudal bankers, hedge fund managers, and financiers that feed off the lives of the disadvantaged.

The general response from progressives and liberals does not take seriously the ways in which the extreme right-wing articulates its increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society. For instance, the views of new extremists in Congress are often treated, especially by liberals, as a cruel hoax that is out of touch with reality or a foolhardy attempt to roll back the Obama agenda. On the left, such views are often criticized as a domestic version of the tactics employed by the Taliban—keeping people stupid, oppressing women, living in a circle of certainty, and turning all channels of education into a mass propaganda machine of fundamentalist Americanism. All of these positions touch on elements of a deeply authoritarian agenda. But such commentaries do not go far enough. Tea Party politics is about more than bad policy, policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude. The hidden order of neoliberal politics in this instance represents the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempt to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory, prevent needless human suffering, protect the environment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good. Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from progressive government regulation, they are removed from any considerations of social costs. And where government regulation does exits, it functions primarily to bail out the rich and shore up collapsing financial institutions and for what Noam Chomsky has termed America’s only political party, “the business party.”

The stories that attempt to cover over America’s embrace of historical and social amnesia at the same time justify authoritarianism with a soft-edge and weakens democracy through a thousand cuts to the body politic. How else to explain the Obama administration’s willingness to assassinate American citizens allegedly allied with terrorists, secretly monitor the email messages and text messages of its citizens, use the NDAA to arrest and detain indefinitely American citizens without charge or trial, subject alleged spies to an unjust military tribunal system, use drones as part of a global assassination campaign to arbitrarily kill innocent people, and then dismiss such acts as collateral damage. As Jonathan Turley points out, “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”

At the heart of neoliberal narratives are ideologies, modes of governance, and policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness both to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to homelessness. In the end, these are stories about disposability in which growing numbers of groups are considered dispensable and a drain on the body politic, the economy, and the sensibilities of the rich and powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now work simply to survive in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting ahead and accumulating capital, especially for the ruling elite, is the only game in town. In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or redundant. But what is new about the politics of disposability that has become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which such anti-democratic practices have become normalized in the existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty soaked in blood, humiliation, and misery. Private injuries not only are separated from public considerations such narratives, but narratives of poverty and exclusion have become objects of scorn. Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such stories might get heard are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that produce them. This suggests a critical analysis of how various educational forces in American society are distracting and miseducating the public. Dominant political and cultural responses to current events—such as the ongoing economic crisis, income inequality, health care reform, Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the crisis of public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities—represent flashpoints that reveal a growing disregard for people’s democratic rights, public accountability, and civic values. As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them. From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these criminogenc and death-saturated forces in everyday life is undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social supports and restricting opportunities for democratic resistance. Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the neoliberal machinery of social death effectively weakens public supports and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and speaking about politics in the twenty-first century. But even more than neutralizing collective opposition to the growing control and wealth of predatory financial elites—which now wield power across all spheres of U.S. society—responses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of marginalized groups as disposable populations. All the while zones of abandonment accelerate the technologies and mechanisms of disposability. One consequence is the spread of a culture of cruelty in which human suffering is not only tolerated, but viewed as part of the natural order of things.

Before this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It will not be enough only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. We also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Why are millions not protesting in the streets over these barbaric policies that deprive them of life, liberty, justice, equality, and dignity? What are the pedagogical technologies and practices at work that create the conditions for people to act against their own sense of dignity, agency, and collective possibilities? Progressives and others need to make education central to any viable sense of politics so as to make matters of remembrance and consciousness central elements of what it means to be critical and engaged citizens.

There is also a need for social movements that invoke stories as a form of public memory, stories that have the potential to move people to invest in their own sense of individual and collective agency, stories that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. If democracy is to once again inspire a populist politics, it is crucial to develop a number of social movements in which the stories told are never completed, but are always open to self- and social reflection, capable of pushing ever further the boundaries of our collective imagination and struggles against injustice wherever they might be. Only then will the stories that now cripple our imaginations, politics, and democracy be challenged and hopefully overcome.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent book is The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), His web site is www.henryagiroux.com

8 Signs the Rich Have WAY Too Much Money

Economy

AlterNet / By RJ Eskow

Our country is increasingly being turned into a plaything for the ultra-rich.

The statistics about wealth inequality in this country are both astonishing and alarming. But statistics can’t tell the entire story if they’re presented in isolation. Our country is increasingly being turned into a plaything for the ultra-rich.

Here are seven signs that the ultra-wealthy Americans have way too much money.

1. Jeff Bezos bought the second most influential newspaper in the country—and it barely dented his net worth.

Two things always get a lot of coverage from reporters in this country—what billionaires do with their money, and anything that affects reporters. When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, we got both.

[pullquote] Meanwhile, besides all the lying and covering up they do for their masters, the media have now taken to showing off the abodes of the rich and powerful, and their lives of banal excess, which is like counting money before the poor…How concerned can they be about the great unwashed ever rising up? Apparently not much. ⁽¹⁾[/pullquote]

There’s been a lot of speculation about what the Amazon founder might do with his new personal acquisition. Here’s an aspect of the story that’s gotten much less attention: The Post’s $250 million sale price is roughly 1/100th of Bezos’ reported net worth, which is said to be in excess of $22 billion.

That’s a lot of net worth for one individual. Granted, Bezos is much smarter than most of his peers. He’s got skills and he’s worked hard. Why shouldn’t he be rich? It’s the American way, after all. But does he need to be that rich? He didn’t get all that money on merit alone. Bezos has accumulated his massive fortune in part because tax policy has coddled him and his fellow billionaires, while most of the country is mired an ongoing financial struggle.

2. They literally don’t know what to do with their money.

A new study shows that the wealthy are holding on to far more of their money than before: 37 percent of their income goes unspent, a figure which is three times as large as it was in 2007. What’s more, they have more cash on hand, and 60 percent say they don’t plan to spend or invest it.

In other words, they’re getting more of out national income than ever before—and they’re hanging on to it, which means it isn’t creating jobs or economic growth.

3. Corporate profits and wealthy income.

Corporate profits are capturing more of the nation’s income than they have for more than half a century. They stood at 14.2 percent as of the third quarter of 2012, which is higher than they’ve been since 1950, and their after-tax performance has stayed just as robust since then.

At the same time, the portion of our national income which goes to employees is the lowest it’s been in nearly half a century. (More here.)

Wall Street greed and criminality caused the crisis of 2008, but government efforts since then have concentrated on rescuing banks, and on boosting stock market performance and other forms of profitability for corporations. And it shows: Corporate earnings have risen by more than 20 percent each year on average since then, while disposable income has only risen by a meager 1.4 percent on average.

And even that isn’t equitably distributed. A recent study showed that the top 1 percent of earners has capture 121 percent of income gains since 2008, while the rest of the country fell behind. The top 10 percent’s share of income is the highest it’s been since 1917—and maybe longer. This imbalance isn’t an act of God or a force of nature. It’s the result of a series of bad policy decisions, about workplace rights, taxation, and where we expend our government’s resources.

Napster billionaire Parker and bride. Living in a gilded bubble, infantile, too.

Napster billionaire Parker and bride. Living in a gilded bubble, and acting infantile, too.

4. Internet billionaire Sean Parker had a multimillion-dollar “Lord of the Rings”-style wedding, and trashed a beautiful public glade to do it.

Sean Parker is the Internet tycoon who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, probably to his everlasting regret. He was recently married, and wedding party caused quite a stir after it was written up on the Atlantic’s website as “the perfect parable for Internet excess.”

The Atlantic piece came after the California Coastal Commission wrote a scathing report claiming that Parker trashed an ecologically sensitive campground with a multi-million-dollar fantasy bash. The report said that bulldozers flattened part of the area, fake ruins were built, and other irreversible damage was done to the area, including a space that was set aside for public use.

Parker makes some decent points in his rebuttal, reminding people of his charitable good works and claiming that great care was taken to preserve the site. But what’s not in dispute is that Parker spent $4.5 million on the party and paid $2.5 million in fines as the result of the party’s environmental impact. (“We made some mistakes,” Parker acknowledges.)

It’s also not in dispute the party’s design was intended to “evoke” the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, that Parker sang a song from The Little Mermaid to his bride—“Look at this trove, treasures untold / How many wonders can one cavern hold?”—which is actually kind of sweet, when you think about it, or that Sting stood up to sing one of his songs a capella. The costume designer for Lord of the Rings designed outfits for all 354 guests at the party.

What Sean Parker doesn’t seem to understand is that, at its heart, this wasn’t about trashing Sean Parker. People were reacting about the unreal – and often deeply insensitive – world in which Sean Parker lives.

As Andrew Leonard wrote in an excellent piece, this “extravagant wedding was a slap in the face to anyone struggling to make ends meet in the United States. It was the perfect snapshot of 1 percent entitlement, as is the shock and anger that anyone would dare criticize it.”

Sean, best wishes to you and your bride on the occasion of your wedding. But you need to understand that other people fall in love, too, and have kids, and do all the things you do—but lots of them are struggling just to survive. They’re going to be a little touchy about something like this. So seriously, man: Have a little empathy—and a lot of gratitude.

5. Just 400 families have more money than 60 percent of the entire country.

Sean Parker and his friends might do well to ponder the inequality which allows them to live so well while so many suffer. They could start by considering this:

A mere 400 households have more net worth among them than is held by more than 60 percent of all US households. That comes to more than 60 million households, who among them possess less than these few families.

Americans are accustomed to feeling horrified at South American countries or medieval principalities in which a few powerful families rule over a struggling population. Guess what? In today’s USA, ancient feudalism lives again.

6. Billionaires frequently aren’t ‘the best and the brightest.’

Billionaires love to believe our society is a meritocracy, where the most talented become the most wealthy and successful. Of course, they would say that.

There’s no doubt that Mark Zuckerberg or the guys who created YouTube are smart and energetic. But do their accomplishments really deserve billions in compensation? Consider:

Zuckerberg didn’t foresee what Facebook would become. If he had, it wouldn’t be called “Facebook,” which is what they called the printed books Ivy League colleges used to print up with students’ pictures so they could get to know one another. Facebook.com was going to do that digitally—a cute idea, but not an especially profound one.

The users were the ones who turned it into a more flexible type of “social media.” It’s true that Zuckerberg & Co. were aggressive in capitalizing on that, but they weren’t visionaries.

The same is true of YouTube. While its three founders don’t entirely agree about its origin, the most plausible story is that it’s called “YouTube” because they thought people would make videos of themselves and upload them – a lame idea which pretty much nobody wanted to do. Instead they figured out how to grab other media and put them up. (Another founder says it was supposed to be a video dating service.) The billions followed shortly thereafter.

[pullquote]

[/pullquote]

You can list on one hand the Internet billionaires who have truly combined both vision and execution: Google. Amazon. eBay … we’re not even out of fingers yet.

There’s “You didn’t build that,” and now we can add “You didn’t think of that.” And even the brightest billionaire’s success includes a lot of lucky accidents. (And we haven’t even begun to talk about the heirs and heiresses yet.) So why do they have all that money?

We’re not saying they can’t be rich. But how much money do a few people need—or deserve?

7. Lucky or not, they’ve got a lot of control over our government.

“Of the people, by the people, and for the people”? That’s still true—for a few very rich people. The Sunlight Foundation offers these staggering statistics:

A mere 31,385 people – less than 0.01 percent of the nation’s population – contributed 28 percent of the country’s total political contributions. Nobody was elected to the House or Senate without their money.

As the Sunlight Foundation also notes, this elite group contributed at least $1.62 billion to political campaigns in 2012. (They probably also contributed the lion’s share of the $350 million in “dark money” which was spent that year.) Their median donation of $26,584 is larger than the average household income in this country.

84 percent of Congress took in more from the 0.01 percent than they did from all other donors combined.

They’re also spending like crazy at the state level. State candidates collected nearly $2.8 billion in 2012. It’s money well-spent, and not just for the influence it gives donors at the state level. This spending has also allowed them to gerrymander Congressional districts.

Gerrymandering has turned the House of Representatives into such an unrepresentative body that Republicans now control it despite a 1.4 million loss to Democrats in the popular vote. It’s like they say: You get what you pay for.

8. They control the media, too, which means they control what we see and hear as ‘news.’

The sale of the Washington Post barely scratches the surface of our media problem. There’s a reason why revolutionaries from 1919 onward have always gone for the radio stations (and later, the television stations) first. They understand that the media hold enormous power.

Thirty years ago, 50 companies controlled 90 percent of all the media in this country. Today it’s six companies.

Those six companies include GE, owner of serial corporate criminal GE Capital, and Newscorp, owned by the scandal-plagued Rupert Murdoch. (The others are Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS)

Americans rightfully despise totalitarian nations’ “state-controlled media.” But what happens when the same few people hold undue influence over the state and the media?

The ultra-rich don’t even understand why people resent them or think they’re detached from real-world problems.

The ultra-rich have used the wealth and political influence to promote policies which allow them to capture an ever-increasing share of our national income. That’s an unjust but self-perpetuating spiral that endangers our democracy, our financial security, even the free exchange of news and information.

And yet, one of their defining characteristics is their deep and abiding rage at the rest of the country. They resent the resentment of others. This fury was exemplified by Mitt Romney’s bitter but heartfelt “47 percent” rant, an outburst that echoed others from the group we’ve called “the radical rich.”

Even a relatively benign billionaire like Sean Parker isn’t immune to this affliction, as his angry rebuttals to the wedding criticism attest. Parker wrote of his wedding, “Our guests reached a beautiful gate in a clearing, just prior to entering the forest. Through that threshold, they left the ordinary world behind and entered an extraordinary world imagined as a kind of collaborative art project between me and my wife-to-be, Alexandra.”

That’s pretty much the problem in a nutshell: Billionaires increasingly control our world. But they don’t live here. They dwell in a Hobbit-like fantasy, far from our worries and fears, where our nation is becoming “a collaborative art project,” a media-made myth, a post-middle-class theme park – call it “AmericaLand” – complete with a make-believe middle class and an animatronic democracy.

But the rest of us are suffering the effects of growing wealth inequality: joblessness, soaring poverty rates, lack of access to education or municipal services. The ultra-wealthy may have passed through “a beautiful gate in clearing,” but the rest of us stand on the “threshold” of an increasingly grim world.

Forgive us for not willingly joining in the make-believe, but we have a nation to rebuild.

RJ Eskow is a writer, business person, and songwriter/musician. He has worked as a consultant in public policy, technology, and finance, specializing in healthcare issues.

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(1) the Bravo network (NBC-owned) seems to specialize in ultra-bourgeois shows, for the most part exercises in voyeurism of the lives of the rich and nouveau rich. Their “Housewives” franchises, and the real estate and decoration franchises concentrate on showing the palatial digs and cushy way of life of the country’s 0.001%. (In the case of the Housewives, they are merely touching the underbelly of the real bourgeoisie, since only a handful of these people exceed $20MM in net worth, peanuts by the standard of real tycoons with tens of billions of dollars and entire industries in their portfolios.)

SHOWS depicting “La Dolce Vita”—a small sampler

Real Housewives: Miami, New York, Beverly Hills, Atlanta, New Jersey, Orange County (CA) (Bravo)
Property Envy (Bravo)
Million Dollar Decorators
Multimillion Dollar Listing (New York)
Multimillion Dollar Listing (L.A.)
Plus both CBS and NBC have developed real estate segments in their regular daytime news shows depicting enormous mansions in the most expensive locales around the nation.

Lon Snowden defends son’s actions in TV interview

By Thomas Gaist, wsws.org

Lon Snowden, father of NSA whistleblower.

In an interview Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week” program, Lon Snowden, the father of National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, strongly defended the younger Snowden’s actions and criticized President Obama and the congressional leadership.

Snowden and Fein said they were not open to a plea deal. “The only deal will be true justice,” Snowden said.

Snowden said he wanted the issue to be “vetted in open court,” adding that “what I’ve seen is much political theater.” Referring to Obama’s Friday press conference, at which the president defended the illegal spying programs exposed by Edward Snowden and accused the whistle-blower of breaking the law and jeopardizing national security, Lon Snowden said, “I was disappointed in the president’s press conference.”

At the press conference, Obama said, “If, in fact, he [Edward Snowden] believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court, with a lawyer, and make his case.”

What cynicism! Obama personally ordered the extra-judicial drone assassination in Yemen of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, on September 30, 2011. In the same attack, another US citizen, Samir Kahn, was also killed. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in Denver, was killed in another US drone strike in Yemen.

Lon Snowden said that Obama’s hollow talk of reforming the NSA surveillance apparatus was “driven by his clear understanding that the American people are absolutely unhappy with what they’ve learned, and that more is going to be forthcoming.”

Fein rejected Obama’s assertion at the press conference that Snowden is not a patriot, pointing out, “It was the voice of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, who defined a patriot as someone who saves his country from his government.”

When the host of “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos, raised the president’s claim that legal avenues were available to Snowden to express his opposition to the surveillance programs and suggested that he should have gone to the congressional oversight committees instead of theGuardian newspaper, Fein remarked, “The congressional oversight committees have gone on record, [Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman] Dianne Feinstein, saying he’s guilty of treason. These were the committees that knew for seven years what was going on and refused to disclose it to the American people…

“And Edward Snowden is supposed to go to them? That seems rather implausible, because they were the ones who were responsible for the secrecy.”

Along similar lines, Lon Snowden commented, “Let’s say he got on an airline in Honolulu and he chose to fly to Washington, DC, lands at Dulles, and he actually gets an audience with, oh, let’s say, [New York Republican Congressman] Peter King or Dianne Feinstein. How do we think that he would have been received if he had a private audience with them? We have seen how they reacted, even when the truth comes out, they spin the truth, they try to hide it from the American people. He would have been buried under the Capitol. And we would have never known the truth.”

Responding to statements by US officials that Edward Snowden should have remained in the United States to “face justice,” Lon Snowden said that “when you consider many of the statements made by our leaders, leaders in Congress, they are absolutely irresponsible and inconsistent with our system of justice. They have poisoned the well, so to speak, in terms of a potential jury pool.”

Asked about the “traitor versus patriot” debate, Snowden said he considered his son a truth-teller. “What I would say is that my son has spoken the truth,” he said. “He has sacrificed more than either the president of the United States or Peter King has ever in their political careers or their American lives.”

Lon Snowden also suggested that reporters should have pressed the president during the press conference about “the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] Special Operations Division” and “his treatment of whistle-blowers.” Obama’s assertion that whistle-blower legislation would have protected Edward Snowden was “absolutely untrue,” said Lon Snowden. “Either the president is being misled by his advisers, or he is intentionally misleading the American people.”

Stephanopoulos then asked directly, “You don’t think he would have been protected by the whistle-blower status?” to which Snowden replied, “Absolutely not.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke out Sunday in response to Obama’s claim at the press conference that he had “called for a thorough review of our surveillance operations before Mr. Snowden made these leaks.” Assange ridiculed Obama’s premise that the government would be talking about surveillance reform if Snowden has not released the documents, saying that “rather than thank Edward Snowden, the president laughably attempted to criticize him while claiming that there was a plan all along, ‘before Edward Snowden.’”

In a segment immediately following the interview with Lon Snowden and Bruce Fein, Senator Robert Menendez (Democrat of New Jersey) spouted the line of virtually the entire US political establishment, saying: “In my view, Ed Snowden is a fugitive and deserves to be in an American courtroom, not in asylum in Russia.”

Menendez played the terrorism card, saying that “it’s easy since we have not, thank God, had an attack on American soil since September 11th, to deminimize [sic] the threat, but the threat is real.” Such abstract invocations of a terrorist threat and references to 9/11 are now routinely used by politicians of both parties in an attempt to create a climate of fear and justify wholesale violations of the US Constitution.

Despite the months-long smear campaign against Edward Snowden and propaganda offensive in defense of the NSA surveillance programs, opinion polls show strong support for Snowden and widespread skepticism toward the government claim that democratic rights must be sacrificed for the sake of “security.” A chasm is opening up between ordinary people the world over, for whom Snowden is a hero, and the ruling elites, who view him as a traitor and a threat to their privileges.

At the same time, Lon Snowden’s extended appearance on national television Sunday and the generally respectful treatment he received from host Stephanopoulos may indicate disquiet and tactical disagreements within the ruling elite and the state over the manner in which the Snowden affair has been handled to this point.

In contrast to previous appearances by defenders of Edward Snowden, such as journalist Glenn Greenwald, the mainstream media host was notably restrained on Sunday. There may be growing concerns that the heavy-handed attack on Snowden has only increased popular support for him and further discredited the Obama administration and the political system as a whole.

No doubt there are also elements within the intelligence and military apparatus, eager to bring Snowden back to the US so as to extract information from him, who are open to pursuing more subtle and devious methods for achieving that aim. They have questions they want to ask the whistle-blower. What else does he have in his files? What has he given the Russians?

Whatever the tactical nuances, however, all sections of the ruling class are agreed that Snowden’s remaining at large is intolerable. He must be captured by whatever means necessary and interrogated with extreme prejudice.

Lon Snowden and Bruce Fein will be traveling to Russia in the coming week, with the tacit approval of the US government. They have stated that they will encourage Edward Snowden to consider returning to the US for a “fair trial.”

Snowden and Fein must understand: official guarantees of Snowden’s safety and a fair trial are worthless. No assurances given by the government on this matter can be given any credence.

About the author
The writer works with wsws.org, informational arm of the Social Equality Party.