Middle East in flames: Egypt, Tunisia, and the fight against US imperialism

Tyrants and exploiters can never learn that gross injustice is the spawning ground of all rebellions.

28 January 2011 | [print_link]

TWO WEEKS after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Arab leaders that their region’s “foundations are sinking into the sand”, the growing revolutionary upsurge of the masses has revealed that the pillars of Washington’s own policy in the Middle East are rotten and crumbling.

The mass uprising that toppled the 23-year rule of Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has now been followed by tens of thousands of young demonstrators in Egypt taking to the streets, defying security forces, and in increasing numbers giving their lives, to demand the downfall of Hosni Mubarak and his nearly three-decade-old regime. Thousands more demonstrated Thursday in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, calling for the ouster of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has ruled the country for more than 30 years.

In every case, masses of youth and workers have risen up against regimes that are synonymous with social inequality, corruption, political repression and torture and which have been firmly aligned with and largely financed by US imperialism. They have been driven to act by the same conditions of unemployment, rising prices and government abuse that led the young Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself ablaze in protest, inspiring the demonstrations that swept his homeland.

These conditions have rendered life increasingly intolerable for millions of people throughout the region, while denying the younger generation any future. They are the legacy of an entire epoch of colonial domination followed by the inability and unwillingness of the bourgeois nationalist movements of the region to forge any independence from imperialism. Now these conditions of mass poverty and oppression have been deepened immensely by a historic crisis of world capitalism that has its center in the United States itself.

It is nearly a decade since the administration of George W. Bush, utilizing the September 11, 2001 attacks as a pretext, launched wars first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, with the aim of exploiting US military supremacy to establish the unchallenged hegemony of American imperialism in the region. Having cost the lives of over a million people and drained the US economy of over a trillion dollars, these continuing wars and occupations have achieved none of their original goals, while deepening the hatred toward Washington throughout the Middle East and internationally.

During the heady days of imperialist triumphalism that accompanied the launching of these wars, the Bush administration proclaimed its support for a “freedom agenda.” It advanced the thesis that a “liberated” Iraq would serve as an inspiration for the masses of the region to embrace “freedom” and “democracy” while aligning themselves with the interests of the United States and Israel.

Washington’s purported support for democracy and free elections in the region was short-lived. A parliamentary election in Palestinian occupied territories delivered a clear victory to the Islamist Hamas movement, which rejected the framework of the US-sponsored “peace process” and the US responded by supporting an attempted coup and then a partition of the West Bank and Gaza, with the Palestinian people subjected to unceasing collective punishment for their choice at the ballot box.

Similarly, the recent coming to office of a government backed by the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, in accordance with the rules of the country’s parliamentary system, has been treated by Washington as an illegitimate coup prompting threats of aid cutoffs and even military aggression.

In an interview on National Public Radio, Thursday, Graeme Bannerman, the former Middle East analyst on the US State Department Policy Planning Staff, voiced the real position of the US government—under both Bush and Obama—hidden by all of the rhetoric about supporting reform and human rights.

“Popular opinion in the Middle East runs so against American policies,” he said, “that any change in any government in the Middle East that becomes more popular will have an anti-American and certainly less friendly direction towards the US which will be a serious political problem for us.”

Nowhere is this more true than in Egypt. For 34 years, ever since Anwar Sadat made his trip to Jerusalem and subsequently signed the Camp David accords with Israel, the US has backed the military dictatorship headed first by Sadat and then his successor, Mubarak.

Egypt has served as the linchpin of US policy in the Middle East. In return, the US has lavished $1.3 billion in military aid upon the Egyptian regime every year. The bullets, tear gas and truncheons employed against the youth and workers demonstrating in Cairo and elsewhere bear the clear stamp of “Made in the USA.”

From the outset of the spreading revolt in the Middle East, official Washington has been taken aback by events. In Tunisia, just three days before Ben Ali boarded an aircraft and fled the wrath of his own people for exile in Saudi Arabia, US Secretary of State Clinton expressed her concern over the “unrest and instability” in the country, while extolling the “very positive aspects of our relationship” with the country’s longtime dictator. She insisted that Washington was “not taking sides,” as US trained and equipped troops were shooting down demonstrators in the streets.

Only after the downfall of its ally Ben Ali, did the Obama administration discover, in the president’s words, “the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people.” In his State of the Union speech he proclaimed that the US “stands with the people of Tunisia.” He extended no such verbal backing to the people of Egypt, where that very day riot squads and secret police thugs had carried out mass arrests and beaten demonstrators and journalists alike.

On Thursday, Vice President Joe Biden made clear the administration’s continued commitment to the hated dictatorship in Egypt. “Mubarak has been an ally of ours on a number of things. And he’s been very responsible … relative to (US) geopolitical interests in the region … to normalizing relationship with Israel,” Biden declared. “I would not refer to him as a dictator,” he added, insisting that Mubarak should not step down.

The unmistakable message is that if the Mubarak regime must resort to a bloodbath to prevent being overthrown by the masses in the streets, it will be firmly supported by Washington. All of the talk about urging the regime to carry out self-reform is utterly hollow. The time when the sclerotic Egyptian dictatorship of the 82-year-old Mubarak was even capable of such measures is long past.

Washington fears, above all, the entry into mass political struggle of the tens of millions of Egyptian workers. In a country where 40 percent of the population subsists at the poverty level of $2 a day or less, US-fostered “freedom” has been delivered in the form of “free market” capitalism, which has promoted wholesale privatizations, opening of markets and other measures that have enriched a thin layer at the top, while driving the bulk of the population into deepening misery.

The global capitalist crisis that is fueling the upheavals in the Middle East has its center within the United States itself. The debacle confronting Washington in the region is a telling measure of the deepening decline of US imperialism.

The workers of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria and elsewhere in the region who are entering mass struggles will find their greatest ally in the working class of the United States, which is confronting the deepest attacks on jobs, living standards and basic rights in its history.

The demands of the workers and youth who have taken to the streets of Tunis, Cairo and other Arab cities for jobs, livable wages and democratic rights can only be achieved in a revolutionary struggle to put an end to capitalism, which is incapable of meeting even the most basic needs of the working population in any country.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

Fancy Hollywood Types, Facebook Founders Give Rahm Emanuel Over $11 Million in Campaign Cash

back on the ballot for the Chicago mayoral race, and as it’s been known, he won’t be hurting for dough — the former White House staffer raked in over $11.8 million in the final months of 2010, besting his main competitor Gery Chico by more than a whopping $9 million, Forbes reports. But where did his health coffers come from? That’s where it gets interesting.

published late last week, reads like a who’s who of glammy businesspeople. Trumped up by pals of his brother Ari — you know, the fancy Hollywood agent who inspired Jeremy Piven’s Entourage character — Rahm’s list of supporters includes 14 billionaires, Steve Jobs, tinseltown power-movers Steven Spielberg, Aaron Sorkin and David Geffen and, you know, Donald Trump. In other words — a lot of people who totally do not live in Chicago!

Carol Moseley Braun, who is working with a mere $450,000.

here.

Posted at January 26, 2011, 7:29 am

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ADDENDUM

Emanuel’s billionaire backers include:

Donald Trump, who kicked in $50,000

Joe Mansueto

Steven Spielberg, who gave $75,000

Haim Saban, Emanuel’s biggest supporter; he and his wife gave $500,000 between them

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO (his wife Laurene also donated)

David Geffen

Ken Griffin, who, along with his wife, gave $200,000

Jay and Nicholas

Eli Broad

Mortimer Zuckerman

Nelson Peltz, chairman of fast food chains Wendy’s and Arby’s

Ron Perelman

Marc Lasry

Emanuel’s other big-name backers include two prominent social media billionaires-in-the-making. Chicago-based Eric Lefkofsky, co-founder and 30% owner of web coupon phenomenon Groupon, gave $100,000 via his private equity firm Blue Media LLC. Facebook co-founder Sean Parker also donated $100,000 – the same amount he gave towards his last high-profile political cause, California’s marijuana legalization bill, Prop 19. Emanuel seems to have other friends at Facebook: Sheryl Sandberg, the website COO, gave $25,000. And, in a surreal but telling display of Emanuel’s clout from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, Facebook frenemy Aaron Sorkin — the screenwriter who fictionalized the site’s founding for the big screen — gave $10,000.

Hogwash, Mr. President

“I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes,” Obama said in his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. “A parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries.” At the same time, Obama said the nation cannot afford to make permanent lower tax rates for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. The president has proposed cutting tens of billions of dollars in corporate tax preferences in his first two budgets, and on Tuesday he repeated his call for eliminating what he terms loopholes.—Reuters

What is one to make of the cynicism and plain demagoguery packed in the above performance?

WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE UNION? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening. I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble. He embraced clean air and a faster Internet while ignoring the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible—understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration. He had the effrontery to condemn “a parade of lobbyists” for rigging government after he appointed the top Washington representative of JPMorgan Chase to be his new chief of staff.

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. Instead the president conveyed the insular optimism of his fat-cat associates: “We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.” How convenient to ignore the fact that this bubble of prosperity, which has failed the tens of millions losing their homes and jobs, was floated by enormous government indebtedness now forcing deep cuts in social services including state financial aid for those better-educated students the president claims to be so concerned about.

His references to education provided a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the economy, rather than to blame the actions of the Wall Street hustlers to whom Obama is now sucking up. Yes, it is an obvious good to have better-educated students to compete with other economies, but that is hardly the issue of the moment when all of the world’s economies are suffering grievous harm resulting from the irresponsible behavior of the best and the brightest here at home. It wasn’t the students struggling at community colleges who came up with the financial gimmicks that produced the Great Recession, but rather the super-whiz-kid graduates of the top business and law schools.

That the financial meltdown at the heart of our economic crisis was “avoidable” and not the result of long-run economic problems related to education and foreign competition is detailed in a sweeping report by the Democratic majority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to be released as a 576-page book on Thursday. In a preview reported in The New York Times, the commission concluded: “The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”

Obama appointed as his top economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who as Clinton’s treasury secretary was the key architect of that “turning point,” and Summers protégé Timothy Geithner as his own treasury secretary. The unanimous finding of the 10 Democrats on the commission is that Geithner, who had been president of the New York Fed before Obama appointed him, “could have clamped down” on excesses by Citigroup, the subprime mortgage leader that Geithner and the Fed bailed out along with other unworthy banking supplicants.

Profligate behavior that has hobbled the economy while running up an enormous debt that Obama now uses as an excuse for a five-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending cuts that small part of the budget that might actually help ordinary people. Speaking of our legacy of deficit spending, Obama stated, “… in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people’s pockets. But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in.”

Why now? It is an absurd demarcation to freeze spending when so many remain unemployed just because corporate profits, and therefore stock market valuations, seem firm. Ours is a union divided between those who agree with Obama that “the worst of the recession is over” and the far larger number in deep pain that this president is bent on ignoring.

Where Liberals Go to Feel Good

We are now in Act IV, the one where the liberal class postures like the cowardly policemen in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Liberals promise battle. They talk of glory and honor. They vow not to abandon their core liberal values. They rouse themselves, like the terrified policemen who have no intention of fighting the pirates, with the bugle call of “Tarantara!” This scene is the most painful to watch. It is a window into how hollow, vacuous and powerless liberals and liberal institutions including labor, the liberal church, the press, the arts, universities and the Democratic Party have become. They fight for nothing. They stand for nothing. And at a moment when we desperately need citizens and institutions willing to stand up against corporate forces for the core liberal values, values that make a democracy possible, we get the ridiculous chatter and noise of the liberal class.

The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative—as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.

The liberal class’ solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression. Conferences, whether organized by Left Forum, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun or figures such as Ted Glick—who is touting a plan to lure progressives, including members of the Democratic Party, into something he calls a “third force”—are where liberals go to feel good about themselves again. These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best—applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.

“What we need is an alliance which consciously incorporates elected Democrats as well as elected Greens and independents, as well as groups, or individual leaders and members of groups, like Progressive Democrats of America and the Green Party,” Glick proposes. “More than that, this alliance eventually needs to support and work to elect candidates running both as Democrats and progressive independents, and maybe even an occasional Republican.”

The Tikkun Conference held in Washington last June was another pathetic display of liberal apologists begging Obama to be Obama. The organizers called on those participating to “Support Obama to BE the Obama We Voted For—Not the Inside-the-Beltway Pragmatist/Realist whose compromises have led to a decrease in his popularity and opened the door for a revival of the just-recently-discredited Right wing.”

Good luck.

The organizers of the Left Forum conference scheduled for this March at Pace University in New York City also communicate in the amorphous, high-blown moral rhetoric that is unmoored from the actual and real. The upcoming Left Forum conference, which has the vacuous title “Towards a Politics of Solidarity,” promises to “focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working-class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.” The organizers posit that “the potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.” The conference “will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.”

The conference agenda, which sounds like a parody of a course catalogue description, includes the requisite academic jargon of “moral act of imagination” and “chains of solidarity.” This language gives to the enterprise a lofty but undefined purpose. And this is a specialty of the liberal class—to grandly say nothing. The last thing the liberal class intends to do is fight back. Left Forum brings in a few titans, including Noam Chomsky, who is always worth hearing, but it contributes as well to the lethargy and turpitude that have made the liberal class impotent.

The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience, which is why I will be at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., at noon March 19 to protest the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Veterans groups on March 19 will also carry out street protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. You can link to the protests at AnswerCoalition.org. Save your bus fare and your energy for events like this one.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.” He writes a column for Truthdig that appears here every Monday.

Vermont Is Gearing Up to Strike a Major Blow to Corporate Personhood

By Christopher Ketcham [print_link]
Posted on January 22, 2011, Printed on January 22, 2011
Crossposted with AlterNet at http://www.alternet.org/story/149620/

A YEAR AGO today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.” Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet earth and basic common sense.

BELOW: USC Justice A. Scalia, one of the reactionaries behind the United decision.

Fortunately, movements are afoot to reverse a century of accumulated powers and protections granted to corporations by wacky judicial decisions.

voted 26-4 to do it, demonstrating the level of political will of the state’s politicians to stand up to corporate power.

The Total Weirdness of Corporate Personhood

Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, the Nation, Mother Jones, and many other publications. He can be contacted at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149620/

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