Europe 2012 and America
The so-called “fiscal compacts” being pushed in European capitals, including by the nominal French socialists, are a sure prefigurement of what we will see in America if Barack Obama wins re-election.
![Mario_Monti_2012-06-27](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Mario_Monti_2012-06-27-300x300.jpg)
If Dutch Socialists win, Europeans returning from long summer vacations will receive a lesson about the value of democracy and electoral power, writes Il Manifesto. Europeans will see first hand an alternative to the economic crisis of neoliberalism—extended capitalism that is, capitalism at it deadliest. And not in the economically weak country of Greece where last year the radical left of Syriza came within a hairsbreadth of an electoral majority. This time, the reversal of directions can come about in one of the pillars of neoliberal orthodoxy, Holland, Germany’s most loyal ally. A highly visible and abrupt reversal of a great part of the electorate in this nation of 15 million. At the outbreak of the crisis the Dutch elected, incredibly it now seems, the neoliberal right in alliance with the xenophobic and populist Party of Freedom precisely at the time of the collapse of the capitalist financial-economic system and when the recession of 2009 showed most clearly the disasters of neoliberalism. A left vote at this point today is a defensive measure on the part of Dutch middle classes against the already proven failures of neoliberalist economics. [One wonders if the lessons of history are ever learned or remembered.—Eds)
The thrust toward change which exploded in Greece last year was different. It was born in the desperation of the Greek situation. There, it was the citizens of a country barely touched by the crisis, with a low public debt but a high private debt, which had however long applied liberalist policies of every type such as flexible employment, widespread part-time work, workers who still counted on the welfare state.
Surprisingly, both Athens and The Hague are marked by a strong presence of emergent political forces capable of going beyond the limits of the traditional left (and its divisions), and know how to speak to all citizens and how to offer an alternative at the precisely the same moment that the seats of national and European power insist there is no alternative to cuts, for the most part into the welfare state. That is, they preach, there is no alternative to austerity which translates into cutbacks into the hard-won safety net constructed over a hundred years of social struggles. Though this new left keeps “Europe” in mind, it does not lose its way in improbable and sterile discussions about an exit from the Euro currency system. Nor does it bend to the now famous Greek Memorandum accepting the conditions and austerity measures for economic help to Greece, imposed by the non-elected officials in Brussels also on the rest of European Union members in crisis, measures which consist of such a degree of austerity as to lead Greece and Europe straight into a great depression.
Socialists thus reopen the practice of democracy—both on a national and European level—while the non-elected officials of the European Union in Brussels continue to suffocate it. The road ahead is not an easy one. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party and the Greens have accepted a compromise with the right government of Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats concerning austerity policies of the so-called Fiscal Compact, while the Linke (the real left party) is isolated and itself divided. However the radical left demands a national referendum concerning approval of the Fiscal Compact demand by EU officials and its national leaders..
In France, the Socialist government of François Hollande has accepted the same Fiscal Compact which will soon reach Parliament for approval. Some Greens of Hollande’s government majority will not vote in favor of the measure. Critical voices are also heard from inside Hollande’s own Socialist Party. So in Paris the debate is hot and the reasons for rejection of austerity and the Fiscal Compact have been efficiently presented to French people.
As a variant, Hollande’s government is experimenting with other forms of austerity by cutting salaries for government ministers while raising the minimum wage, limiting retirement cuts imposed by Sarkozy’s former right government and the hiring of an additional 8000 teachers in public schools (excellent schools, by the way) while reducing the armed forces by the same number, the imposition of a 75% tax on salaries of above one million a year, limitations on firings caused by the crisis, and new limits on housing rents. Small steps which however are signs of a desire for a redistribution of wealth against inequalities and in defense of labour, signs that the economic virulent orthodoxy reigning in the capitalist world can at least be moderated.
Italy unfortunately remains distant from even such limited developments. An European Union backed, non-elected government came to power in Rome with promises of austerity, reforms and economic growth. Italians have thus far seen only the first. Unemployment and under-employment rage while taxes (an average of 55%) are the highest in Europe, while wages are among the lowest, more comparable to Greece than The Netherlands. Gasoline prices are now the highest in the European Union, while public transportation is among the worst. Hollande’s measures already introduced in France are absent in the program of the Italian left. The now notorious Fiscal Compact and the balanced budget was approved in the Rome Parliament without any debate on the heels of non-elected Premier Monti’s presentation of his neoliberalist policies as the last stand in the country.
The Italian political class seems incapable of seeking alternatives to defend the interest of 9 Italians of 10—the real losers in this long crisis. The left is unable to aggregate a social bloc that can reach beyond confused populist reactions, to reconstruct policies based on democracy as is happening in Greece and now The Netherlands. Italy could begin with the small steps as today in France: limit the power of finance, tax the rich, re-launch production and defend labour. Instead it is static.
I would note here some general considerations that might help American readers to appreciate more the small steps outlined above (and how they are suggestions for change in America. And also to understand better Europe. When I first arrived in Europe a half century ago, I saw each country as distinct and particular. As time passed I too came to se Europe more as one. I too was fascinated by the idea of a United Europe. Europeans however until not many years ago—even after the birth of the nucleus of the European Union—continued to think in terms of their own countries, separate and distinct. They thought the idea of Europe—like “I’m going to Europe this summer”—as a distinctly American concept. Instead, they were French or German or Italian or Danish. Only in recent years, especially among youth, have people begun to think proudly of themselves as Europeans, with European passports and a single European currency, and passing borders with no complicated controls and customs checks. Yet each still thinks first of himself as first of all Greek or Dutch or Serb, and secondly European. The political differences sketched out above reflect these national differences and reflect also a growing mistrust of the mass of non-elected persons in the European Commission in Brussels and now in some cases, as in Italy, also non-elected governments. The national differences on the one hand and the new pride in the still newborn European-ness create a kind of parallelism, if not a form of political schizophrenia, across this variegated and historically tortured continent which however is part of the American subconscious, our heritage and our forefathers. Therefore, what is happening in Greece and Holland, in France and Italy, in Germany and Serbia are of far-reaching, if not crucial import to us Americans. We could more profitably spend more time learning from them rather than trying to impose Americanism on them. Boot-licker Italy for example had ordered 131 of America’s Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II attack aircraft, the second largest order in Europe after the UK! Its rising cost—an estimated $197 million each in 2013—caused Rome to reduce its order to 90 of this airplane which Italy does NOT need anyway at the same time the Rome neoliberal government was slashing welfare and pensions and raising taxes across the board.
Conclusion: it matters whether a rightist government or a truly left party is in power across the continent of Europe. The problem is, while most rightist parties are the real deal, far too many on the left are not.
Veteran journalist and novelist GAITHER STEWART is our European correspondent, with homebase in Rome. His latest novel, Lily Pad Roll, about the cancerous growth of global military bases and the reckless encirclement of Russia, is slated for publication in September by Punto Press.
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Report: A tale of two very different Swedens
Sweden is changing—rapidly—says the author, but much of it is not for the best—or has it always been a mirage?
Report: A tale of two very different Swedens
Dalarna, Sweden
By Ritt Goldstein
Copyright August 2012
The attack came at the afternoon’s end, this making the fourth I would report to the local police. I was on the phone when the sickeningly familiar odor made itself known, known in a way that only nightmares that are real can, its presence followed within minutes by the strong kidney pain accompanying such attacks. And while a toxic agent was responsible for the fumes I was enduring, the most remarkable thing was that I was in my apartment in Falun, Sweden, not some distant battle zone.
Of course, history demonstrates that there are times, places, where some have felt free to abuse minorities and particularly ‘outsiders’. Whether it was the legendary good ol’ boys of America’s Deep South of another era, or European Fascists in the 1930s, from time to time, place to place, there have long existed those where only the passage of time demonstrates to a community its capacity for the monstrous.
Not to be misunderstood, some of those I’ve met in Sweden are among the finest people one might ever encounter; but, others would seem unquestionably among their opposite. For some here, it seems that foreigners, ‘outsiders’, living in Sweden are committing a crime, one demanding ‘punishment’, or at least a bit of abuse, with this seeming particularly true of any victims that might actually object to such ‘special attention’.
Keeping ‘the rabble’ in their place is also an old story, regardless of how ‘the rabble’ is defined and those providing the definition. And in all fairness to the many good folks that do exist here, perhaps the reasons for such changes are similar to those that caused Swedish Radio (SR) to headline this June, “Åtta av tio kommuner misstänker korruption” (Eight of ten municipalities suspect corruption).
While most of the ordinary Swedes I’ve met are quite decent, assorted scandals have been making news. On the local level there have been a number of sordid affairs regarding the privatization of healthcare and education, plus the usual municipal scandals involving officials caught pursuing some difficult to explain ways.
In example, Falun found some of its respected officials had taken trips at the expense of a construction firm, a firm that was awarded a sizable contract for a new ski jump. One local headline read “Peab fick tiomiljonersjobb utan upphandling” (Peab received a ten million job without procurement). But such once unheard of headlines have become a part of today’s life.
As just this June The Local (Sweden’s leading English-language news site) headlined “Man charged for running down refugee boy”, it isn’t hard to imagine how some blame ‘outsiders’ for deteriorating circumstances, the genuine pain that many common people suffer. And, such scapegoating was perhaps even more vividly seen in the recent trial of Peter Mangs.
“Mangs was arrested in November 2010 after a massive manhunt following a string of shootings against people of immigrant origin”, according to The Local ( Malmö sniper Peter Mangs found guilty ), with Mangs convicted in July of two murder counts and four counts of attempted murder. Of course, such troubling conduct may help put the abuse this journalist has suffered in perspective.
The police hadn’t come the first two occasions that someone had previously ‘scented’ my home, the perpetrator entering my apartment in the process on both of those occasions. I actually had to begin to carry anything I couldn’t risk being vandalized with me. The ‘calling card’ left with these ‘unauthorized visits’ smelled noxious, the same sharp odor marking the final three attacks. The quite nasty physical effects became too well known.
It seemed someone felt the need for an ‘upgrade’ after the first assault.
Since the police hadn’t come on the first two occasions, I did invite a medical chemist to visit the flat after the second. There’s no substitute for first-hand experience, not to mention a witness statement.
The fellow was properly surprised when he arrived, the smell of the toxin evident even though I had succeeded in cleaning away most of it. He wrote that its smell reminded one of trichloroethylene, and when the third incident occurred, police did eventually come by to take samples. Earlier, they had first simply suggested I contact my landlord. Following that, they said they were too busy to come for months, again suggesting I contact my landlord (Falun’s municipally owned housing company, Kopparstaden); but, following the witness statement from the chemist, the third time they did come.
The ‘rental office’ of Kopparstaden, now this journalist’s ex-landlord
It was months later when I contacted forensic chemist Jan Andrasko of Statens kriminaltekniska laboratorium – SKL (The Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science), almost his first words to me being, “I thought that they contact you from our Poison Group”. But the Poison Group never had contacted me, though Andrasko had found “acetic acid”, a solvent, in the samples he received. Notably, he also emphasized there were problems with the samples.
When SKL received the material to be analyzed from Falun’s police, “they are placed in just paper bags”, Andrasko complained, adding that due to the improper packaging, if the samples contained volatile compounds “they are away, of course”. So much for the kind of effective crime-fighting shown on TV and in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels.
What’s particularly remarkable is that at the time of the final attack, I was scheduled to leave the flat the very next day (though very few knew so), my landlord having earlier petitioned the local court to force my removal, the Court finding it was not a ‘hardship’ (translated from the Swedish) to immediately move me. Of course, the flat which Falun’s District Court saw no hardship in my relocation to is documented as contaminated by ‘powerfully elevated’ levels of mold, with ‘unusually high levels’ of some nasty chemicals as well. As to what that means, two environmental consultants testified under oath that they had become ill in the apartment after but a brief period – one became ill in twenty minutes, and for only the second time in his career. A third witness noted that he was ill for three to four days following just hours there; yet, the Falun court’s decision was that my living in such an apartment would not be a ‘hardship’.
Falun’s Courthouse
I find myself repeatedly thinking of how the courts in some small towns in Mississippi during the 1950s must have been, how the legal system worked there and then.
Equally noteworthy, despite the fact that I called police four times in the hours following the last attack, emphasizing that I would be leaving the apartment the next morning and that any evidence would be lost accordingly, no officer ever came. Apparently, my poisoning wasn’t a priority, though the police report did term it assault (misshandel).
If these events sound far from what one would think appropriate, it should be added that a medical certificate from a local ‘chief physician’ mentioned the ‘furthest negative’ consequences that my health could face from exposure to mold or toxic chemicals. Given this, does the Court’s action, in itself, arguably raise a question of state-sanctioned abuse? As justice system discrimination against those of foreign origins has been documented by governmental reports here, does the failure of those authorities charged with protecting the most basic of rights arguably suggest a further question of state-sanction of wrongful conduct?
It is small wonder that Julian Assange prefers the confines of London’s Ecuadorian Embassy to Stockholm. It is also small wonder that, with an honest evaluation of Assange’s circumstances, Ecuador courageously awarded him asylum. However, while reports and events have highlighted problems within the Swedish justice system, this is not to say that such problems are all-encompassing within it.
On 18 June, a criminal investigation was opened by a Stockholm-based environmental prosecutor that I had sent documentation regarding a flooring practice my now ex-landlord, Kopparstaden, stated it uses. The prosecutor in question, Anders Gustafsson, sent me an email observing: “it is my opinion that at this stage there is reason to believe that a miljöbrott (environmental crime) has been committed.” In replying to my query as regards what suspects are being investigated, Gustafsson said “the company being investigated is, of course, Kopparstaden primarily.”
As for my circumstances, I terminated my tenancy with Kopparstaden rather than try and survive in the troubled flat which Falun’s Court found wouldn’t be a ‘hardship’. If it was not for the courage of some of those here, the simple decency of others, I seriously wonder if I would be alive to write this. But, what is it that such extreme circumstances say?
At a time when so many people in so many supposedly civilized places suffer silently, I cannot but recall Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the comments upon the events surrounding the French Revolution which it so eloquently made. To my eyes, today there seem two Swedens – that of those that exemplify the best of the Progressive state so many yet consider this country, and that of those that recall something far different. As for the latter, Dickens wrote: “’Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend,’ observed the Marquis, ‘will keep the dogs obedient to the whip…’”.
Ongoing events have left me with a new appreciation of Dickens, the words he chose to begin his novel … “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. And, given this, as some in the US and UK hold up Sweden as a model to follow, it perhaps doesn’t seem the best of times to do so.
_____________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ritt Goldstein is a courageous American investigative political journalist living in Sweden. His work has appeared fairly widely, including in America’s Christian Science Monitor, Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, Spain’s El Mundo, Sweden’s Aftonbladet, Austria’s Wiener Zeitung, Hong Kong’s Asia Times, and a number of other global media outlets. He has lived in Sweden since July 1997, officially acquiring permanent residency there in 2006. At present he is about to begin work on a book, one titled “Brave New Sweden”.
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The Return Of The King – Tony Blair And The Magically Disappearing Blood
By David Cromwell, MediaLens
![tonyBlair](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/tonyBlair.jpg)
How many war crimes does a western leader have to commit before he is deemed persona non grata by the corporate media and the establishment? Apparently there is no limit, if we are to judge by the prevailing reaction to Tony Blair’s return to the political stage. On July 11, it was announced that Blair would be ‘contributing ideas and experience’ to Labour leader Ed Miliband’s policy review. He will apparently provide advice on how to ‘maximise’ the economic and sporting legacies of the 2012 London Olympics.
The Guardian described the announcement mildly as a ‘controversial move’; not necessarily in the country at large, the paper claimed, but ‘perhaps especially within the Labour party’. One Guardian headline declared ‘Return of the king’.
The ‘left-wing’ John Harris did his bit in the Guardian to smooth Blair’s path:
‘He’s only 59, the picture of perma-tanned vitality and keen to “make a difference”. Could a fourth stint in No 10 even be on the cards? We shouldn’t rule it out.’
Harris declared ‘that for all his mistakes, transgressions and howling misjudgments, there remains something magnetic about his talents.’
When Blair appeared at a Labour fundraising dinner at Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, Harris noted that:
‘He was greeted by the obligatory crowd of protesters, still furious about his role in the Iraq war.’
That’s the curious thing about peace protesters; endlessly ‘furious’ about the country being dragged into an illegal war that led to the deaths of around one million people, created four million Iraqi refugees, devastated Iraq’s infrastructure, generated untold suffering and burned obscenely huge sums of public money in times of ‘austerity’. Perhaps we Brits should simply display that famed stiff upper lip and move on. Certainly that’s what Richard Beeston, foreign editor of The Times, suggested in 2009:
‘All this happened six years ago. Get over it.’ (‘The war went wrong. Not the build-up. Stop obsessing about the legality of invading Iraq. The campaign itself was the real disaster’, The Times, February 26, 2009.)
A recent Times editorial welcomed Blair’s return:
‘Labour is coming together, drawing on its best available talent and starting to get serious again. (Editorial, ‘A year in politics’, The Times, July 14, 2012)
The second coming of Blair was launched by a friendly chat on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show. Marr, of course, is well-known as a totally impartial political analyst and a ‘congenial and knowlegable [sic] interviewer’ (to quote a cable from the US embassy in London to Hillary Clinton).
The PR onslaught continued when London’s Evening Standard published an interview with the former PM on the day he ‘guest-edited’ the paper. Would he like to be prime minister again one day? ‘Sure’, he replied. A supportive Financial Times interview with editor Lionel Barber proclaimed:
‘Five years after leaving power, Tony Blair wants back in. He is ready for a big new role. But what exactly is driving him? And can he persuade the world to listen?’
Unnamed ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ were quoted, no doubt passing on the Blair-approved message:
‘Friends say he is desperate to play a bigger role, not because he has any ambition to run for high office but because he wants to be part of the argument. “He would really like to be the centre of attention again,” says one long-time ally.’
A Guardian editorial did its bit to help:
‘he seems to have mellowed a touch since his book [‘A Journey’, published in 2011]; maybe he’s even learnt a little respect for international law.’ (‘Unthinkable? Tony Blair for PM again.’)
The paper continued:
‘Besides, this is no time to fret about the policy details – there is the showbiz to consider. In 2007 John Major likened Mr Blair’s long goodbye to Nellie Melba; the coming comeback must demonstrate he is more like Sinatra and Elvis. There can only be one true heir to Tony Blair, and that is Tony Blair II.’
Could the vanguard of British liberal journalism really be making an editorial call for the return of Blair? It shouldn’t be a total surprise. Recall that even in the wake of the supreme international crime of invading Iraq, the Guardian still called for its readership to re-elect Blair at the 2005 general election.
The Self-Deprecating War Criminal
Last month, the Guardian promoted the diaries of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s warmonger-in-chief, with one extract recounting a meeting with ‘Britain’s famous Swedes’, Sven Göran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson, and another describing the former PM’s liking for olive oil. It was left to John Pilger to make the point that in the diaries:
‘Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all.’
The Guardian’s Andrew Brown, editor of the ‘Belief’ section of Comment is Free, steered clear of the blood to tell readers that at a recent debate with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Blair was ‘funny, and sometimes self-deprecating’. Brown gave an example of Blair’s modest humour:
‘I once wrote a pamphlet about why a human rights act in Britain would be a thoroughly bad idea – then, as prime minister, I introduced one.’
Perhaps it is useful to be reminded that even war criminals can be ‘funny’ and ‘self-deprecating’.
In contrast, Independent columnist Matthew Norman made clear his disdain for Blair:
‘Call it an atrocious strategic misjudgment, a dementedly misguided Neocon experiment, a war crime or whatever, it is perfectly well understood in these child-like terms: Mr Blair did a truly terrible thing, with unspeakably terrible consequences for the people of Iraq, the troops killed and maimed in prosecuting his folly, and those who died and were injured here in retaliatory bombings in July 2005, the morning after the 30th Olympiad was hereby awarded to the city of London.’
He continued:
‘Tony Blair is no wrongly dishonoured prophet but a pariah in his own land. He is a pariah because he colluded in an act of abundant wickedness, and untold hundreds of thousands died and millions more suffered monstrously in consequence.’
Norman rightly noted that Blair is ‘armed with a cabal of loyalist ultras in the press.’ This, coupled with his protection by a largely supportive establishment, means that ‘perhaps no force on earth can penetrate his titanium shell.’
But a vital component of the ‘titanium shell’ protecting Blair is that ‘mainstream’ journalists refrain from describing the actions of the former PM and his co-conspirators as war crimes. Matthew Norman himself floundered when he wrote with loss of nerve:
‘Call it an atrocious strategic misjudgment, a dementedly misguided Neocon experiment, a war crime or whatever.’
As for the ‘cabal of loyalist ultras in the press’, Norman supplied no names. But they include senior editors at Norman’s own newspaper, the Independent; not to mention at least one of his colleagues at the Independent on Sunday, the Blair hagiographer John Rentoul. Just as Matthew Norman will not step over a line in the sand, so too Simon Jenkins of the Guardian when he argues that ‘an act of grovelling atonement would salvage the ex-prime minister’s reputation.’ Glaring by its omission is any call for Blair and his accomplices to stand trial in The Hague and face charges of war crimes.
As Pilger rightly says of the West’s war of aggression against Iraq:
‘recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media were a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain.’
As well as the titanium shell of the corporate media, Blair is also being protected by ‘fierce opposition in Whitehall to the disclosure of key documents relating to the invasion of Iraq, notably records of discussions between himself and George Bush.’ This has meant that the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war will now not publish its report until sometime in 2013. Former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell reportedly told Chilcot that releasing Blair’s notes would damage Britain’s relations with the US and would not be in the public interest. This is code for ‘the establishment must protect itself’.
Fixing Intelligence And Facts For Iran
On The Real News Network, Annie Machon and Ray McGovern remind us that it is almost exactly ten years since Blair met at Downing Street with senior ministers and top military and intelligence officials for a briefing on how the US planned to ‘justify’ attacking Iraq. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had just returned from the US where he had met with his counterpart, CIA Director George Tenet.
The famous ‘Downing Street Memo’, the official minutes of the briefing on July 23 in 2002, reveals what Dearlove told Blair and those present about what he had heard from Tenet; namely, that Bush had decided to remove Saddam Hussein by launching a war that would be ‘justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.’
Dearlove explained how it was being done: ‘The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.’ This followed the agreement in April 2002 between Bush and Blair when the British prime minister stayed at the president’s Texas ranch in Crawford. Blair pledged UK support for invading Iraq.
Machon and McGovern recall the propaganda campaign to which the public was then subjected:
‘In late summer 2002, the synthetic threat from Iraq was “sexed-up” by a well-honed US-UK intelligence-turned-propaganda machine. The spin was endless: headlines screaming “45 minutes from doom”; the lies about Saddam reconstituting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program; and yellow journalism about the “yellowcake” uranium Iran was said to be seeking from darkest Africa.
‘UK citizens were spoon-fed the fake intelligence of the September Dossier and then, just six weeks before the attack on Iraq, the “Dodgy” Dossier, based on a 12-year old PhD thesis culled from the Internet, together with unverified, raw intelligence that turned out to be false — all presented by spy and politician alike as hot, ominous intelligence.
‘So was made the case for war. All lies; hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, maimed, and millions of Iraqi refugees; yet no one held to account.’
Rather than being held to account, some of the perpetrators have been rewarded:
‘Sir Richard Dearlove, who might have prevented all this had he the integrity to speak out, was allowed to retire with full honours and became the Master of a Cambridge college. John Scarlett, who as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee signed off the fraudulent dossiers, was rewarded with the top spy job at MI6 and knighthood. George W. Bush gave George Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian award. Shameless.’
Machon and McGovern argue that intelligence is once again being fixed; this time in support of a possible attack on Iran:
‘Just last week [Sir John] Sawers, who succeeded Scarlett as head of MI6 three years ago, gave a remarkable speech in which he not only bragged about MI6’s operational role in thwarting Iran’s alleged attempt to develop a nuclear weapon, but also asserted that Iran would have the bomb by 2014. Shades of MI6’s pandering to policy in 2002.’
And yet, the consensus – even amongst US and Israeli agencies – is that Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon since its programme came to a halt in 2003. Media professionals seemingly cannot grasp this basic fact. A Robert Fisk article on Syria in the Independent on Sunday yesterday had a subtitle making an unqualified assertion about Iran and ‘its nuclear weapons’. Presumably this was written by one of the paper’s subeditors. Will Fisk go straight to his editor and complain about this misrepresentation?
But Iran’s lack of nuclear weapons has not prevented the country being lined up for western ‘intervention’. It is worth referring once again to the testimony of General Wesley Clark, the former Nato chief, when he recalled a conversation with a Pentagon general in 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks:
‘He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”’
It seems that journalists simply cannot help themselves in ignoring such inconvenient facts. And so, unless the public demands otherwise, corporate editors and journalists will continue to perform their usual obedient role in the service of power.
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Propaganda War on Syria
By Stephen Lendman
Major media scoundrels suppress truth and full disclosure. In times of war or when they’re planned, it dies first. John Pilger calls journalism war’s first casualty. It’s a “weapon of war,” he says. “(V)irulent censorship” by misinformation or “omission” condones imperial lawlessness.
George Seldes once called media scoundrels “the most powerful force against the general welfare of the majority of the people.”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) calls “news” largely “the actions and statements of people in power.” Big media and reporters regurgitate what they say as fact. They “follow Washington’s official line. This is particularly obvious in wartime and in foreign policy coverage….”
What passes for news, information, and commentary is fundamentally unprincipled and duplicitous. “What’s wrong with the news,” asks FAIR? Institutionalized money and political power control it. AJ Liebling (1904 – 1963) said “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” He also explained that “People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers (or see on television) with news.”
Big lies launch wars. Public opinion is manipulated to enlist support. Truth is suppressed. Fear is stoked. Patriotism and democratic values are highlighted. Selling war depends on convincing people it’s about protecting national security, spreading democracy, humanitarian intervention and freedom.
Imperial wars are called good ones. Manipulative PR and scoundrel media reports convince people to go along with policies harming their interests. Sophisticated campaigns are waged. Most people don’t know they’re being had. Real motives and objectives aren’t explained. Selling war effectively depends on convincing people black is white. It plays out the same way every time. Syria reporting reflects it. On July 15, Reuters headlined “UN says Syria killings targeted opposition,” saying:
“United Nations observers found blood, burned homes and signs of artillery fire in the Syrian village of Tremseh on Saturday but were unable to confirm activists’ reports that about 220 people were massacred in an attack that prompted international outrage.”
“Activists” include everyone opposing Assad.
General Robert Mood heads the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS). He wasn’t picked to report independently. Some observers call him a spy. His statements leave much to be desired.
Commenting on the Treimseh massacre, he said:
Attacks targeted “specific groups and houses, mainly of army defectors and activists. There were pools of blood and blood spatters in rooms of several homes together with bullet cases.”
“The UN Team also observed a burned school and damaged houses with signs of internal burning in five of them.” “A wide range of weapons were used, including artillery, mortars and small arms.”
“UNSMIS is deeply concerned about the escalating level of violence in Syria and calls on the Government to cease the use of heavy weapons on population centres and on the Parties to put down their weapons and choose the path of non-violence for the welfare of the Syrian people who have suffered enough.”
Mood largely points fingers the wrong way. Independent eye witness accounts aren’t reported. “Opposition activists” are featured. Most are located far from Treimseh and other massacre sites. Their credibility is sorely lacking. Fake videos portray images unrelated to events. Reuters quoted an unidentified man “on video footage purportedly filmed in Treimseh.” Uploaded online, he said:
“We were surrounded from four sides….with tanks and armored vehicles, and the helicopters were hovering above. They burned people in front of our eyes. They held the men like this and stabbed them. They took out people’s eyes.”
We’ve heard and seen this all before. Manufactured lies conceal what’s really happening. Indeed government forces confronted killer gangs. They overran Treimseh and massacred dozens of civilians before Syria’s military arrived. Independent eyewitnesses report events accurately. Houla and Qubair massacres were replicated. Syrian troops intervened to stop more killing. Assad loyalists were targeted. Mood left these facts unexplained.
So did Reuters. Instead it misreported, saying:
Some people “said rebel fighters rushed to reinforce the village after it came under attack by infantry, artillery and aircraft, leading to a battle that lasted seven hours.”
Pro-Assad shabbiha elements were wrongfully blamed. Those responsible aren’t held accountable. Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi denied false Western reports, saying:
“Government forces did not use planes or helicopters or tanks or artillery. The heaviest weapon(s) used w(ere) RPGs (rocket propelled grenades).”
Security forces killed 37 insurgents and two civilians, he said. Clashes lasted about 90 minutes, not seven hours. Before government troops arrived, terrorists slaughtered over 50 civilians. On July 14, the New York Times headlined “Details of a Battle Challenge Reports of a Syrian Massacre.”
The Times acknowledged previous misreporting. At the same time, it tried explaining events both ways, saying:
“Although what actually happened in Tremseh remains murky, the evidence available suggested that events on Thursday more closely followed the Syrian government account.”
“But Syrian officials colored (it) with their usual terminology of blaming ‘foreign terrorist gangs’ for all violence. The government said the Syrian Army had inflicted ‘heavy losses’ on the ‘terrorists.’ “
“The official report also made the unlikely claim that government forces had killed no civilians, but that the dead civilians found in the town had been killed by the rebel fighters.”
Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said government forces killed two civilians. Dozens were massacred before they arrived. Nothing in The Times report explains this. While partly admitting erroneous reporting, it still points fingers the wrong way.
At the same time, it repeated the same Wall Street Journal propaganda about Syria moving “parts of its huge stockpile of chemical weapons out of storage.”
Unnamed US officials are cited. What’s going on isn’t certain, they claimed. Targeting civilians may be planned. No evidence whatever suggests it.
Andrew Tabler was quoted. He’s a pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) senior fellow. He claims chemical weapons are being moved near Homs. Again, no evidence was cited. Without saying so, he implied relocation may reflect planned use in the area. Citing WINEP defense fellow Jeffrey White, The Times said if government forces are given chemical weapons, it “suggest(s) that preparations were being made for their use.” Moving them raises concerns, he added.
These type reports hype fear. They advance the ball closer to war. Media scoundrels promote it. They bear direct responsibility for what happens.
A Final Comment
On July 14, the Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) headlined “Israel advised to brace for Syrian missile attack – conventional or chemical,” saying:
“Western military sources” that Israel and other regional “strategic targets….should prepare for (Assad) to launch surface-to-surface missile attacks.”
Chemical weapons might be used, said DF.
“Western intelligence sources say Assad has a list of targets ready to go.”
DF implied, but didn’t advocate preemptively attacking Syria. Doing so could be called defensive.
Spurious reports like this make war more likely. Nothing suggests Syria threatens neighboring states. Saying so doesn’t wash. Repeating Big Lies often enough gets people believing they’re true. War winds blow stronger. Each day it draws closer.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
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Must Reads: Reflections on the Quadrennial Extravaganza
With pre-approved candidates by the nation’s plutocracy the system allows no true choices to the electorate, a fact that makes American elections something of a broad daylight farce. Yet the masses remain passive about such an imposture or get reliably passionate about the pseudo election in response to the frenzy whipped up by the media. The great stumbling to real democracy, however, remains the Democratic party illusion. Without demolishing it, nothing of positive consequence can be built. “Face it: the reigning U.S. political party and elections system is an epic plutocratic and imperial mind fuck: a corporate-managed fake democracy in which elitism masquerades as populism and state-capitalist authoritarianism wears the clothes of the common good.”—Eds
Three Positions
The presidential election year is here and along with it comes the quadrennial intra-leftist bloodletting on the unpleasant question of how to best respond to the narrow “choices” handed down by the nation’s corporate-managed one-and-a-half party system. I am aware of at least three different, often fiercely held left positions on this issue.
1. Hold your Nose and Vote Democrat to Block Republicans. This position holds that Republicans are so terrible that serious progressives should vote “for” the Democratic incumbent (however “disappointing” he may have been to liberal and progressive supporters) to block the G.O.P. Block the proto-fascistic Republican troglodytes and then work to push the Democrats to be more progressive in the next four years! One variation on the nose-holding counsel articulated by the leading radical intellectual Noam Chomsky in recent elections lets you protest vote for a third party presidential candidate (e.g. Nader) in “uncontested states” – states where one of the major party candidates already has an Electoral College victory sewed up before the election. Chomsky has advised leftists to vote Democratic in contested states on the grounds that the differences between the two leading business and imperial parties are not irrelevant to many disadvantaged people (more on this below). Those differences might seem small to privileged leftists but they matter to millions living at the bottom of concentrated power systems like the United States.
Key Caveat: “Before and After Those Two Minutes”
The Chomsky argument (as I have understood it) comes with a critical caveat. Voting for a left presidential candidate (in an uncontested state) or (in a contested state) for one of the two state-capitalist candidates is, the caveat holds, a tiny part of the deeper and more fundamental struggle for a real peoples’ politics. Chomsky’s longtime friend and ally the radical American historian Howard Zinn put it well in March of 2008, as the “election madness engulf[ed] the entire society, including the left” (Zinn) with special intensity in the year of Barack Obama’s ascendancy:
“The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. …Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes – the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice…. Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore…..”
Chomsky said something similar (and quite a bit more) on the eve of the 2004 elections. By Chomsky’s analysis in October 2004:
“The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses.”
“Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, “That’s politics.” But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics. ..”
“The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years…”
“So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.”
2. “Vote Your Hopes Not Your Fears.” Since both of the dominant parties and their candidates are egregiously capitalist and imperial and we do (in most states) have the option of voting for third party left candidates, this position holds, serious progressives must always (even in contested states) vote outside the corporate duopoly. Always “vote your hopes, not your fears!” So what if this helps the Republicans? What difference would it make? The Democrats are just the other capitalist and imperial party. And they may actually be worse than the G.O.P. because they deceptively cloak the rule of the rich in the clothing of the supposed “party of working people.” There are fewer illusions and less confusion when Republicans hold nominal power, the argument runs. Liberals and progressives are more likely to take to the streets and protest when Republicans hold the White House.
3. Ignore/Boycott. The personalized “quadrennial extravaganzas” (Chomsky) that the masters stage for us are such potent exercises in bamboozling the citizenry and creating the illusion of democracy that the best thing is to ignore or perhaps boycott them. As the early 20th century U.S. left anarchist Emma Goldman once said, “if voting made any difference they’d make it illegal.” Don’t vote, it just feeds the whole dysfunctional spectacle. Again, so what if this helps the Republicans? What difference could it make? (See above, position #2).
Disillusioned With “Left Voting”
For what its worth, I have followed positions #2 and #3, voting for left presidential candidates or voting for nobody in both contested and uncontested states since 1980 (the first year I was old enough to mark a ballot). The fact that my vote or non-vote might indirectly help the Republicans has never exactly kept me up at night. Still, these positions don’t impress me very much at present for four basic reasons.
First, “left” candidates never have the slightest chance of making more than a tiny dent in the big media, big media elections system. That system is powerfully stacked against left contenders. Those contenders’ inevitably pathetic showing ends up reinforcing the false notion that left and progressive policy positions find little favor among the populace.
Second, Chomsky is right, actually, about small differences mattering for millions under systems of concentrated power. The fact that a corporate Republican president will attack the welfare state to a greater degree than a corporate Democratic president might seem like small potatoes to a radical intellectual claiming to advocate workers’ control, but it is not irrelevant to a deeply poor family that cannot afford to lose its Food Stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid or public family cash assistance. The fact that they know this to be true is part, I think, of why leftists who make the “better the enemy you know” argument don’t just take that argument to its ultimate logical conclusion by working actively for G.O.P. candidates.
Third, “serious political action” (Chomsky) is about building rank and file social movement power beneath and beyond staggered election spectacles.[1] The third party candidates I have punched ballot holes for during my two minutes behind the voting curtain in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2008 have left amazingly little behind their campaigns in the way of social movement energy and development.
Fourth, while advocates of positions 2 and 3 are right to note that the Democrats are far better than the Republicans at co-opting progressives, they do nothing to disabuse citizens of the notion that the former represent a meaningful left alternative to the more explicitly plutocratic and war-mongering G.O.P. They may actually further that illusion, actually, because having Republicans in power reinforces many liberals’ and progressives’ false belief that the nation’s problems can be reduced largely to the fact that those Insane Evil Republicans are in charge. When the Republican trademark spoils as it did under George W. Bush in his second term, the ruling class remains free to generate the illusion of meaningful progressive change by pulling brand G.O.P from the shelf and putting the Democratic product out front for a while.
”This Policy or That Policy”
Perhaps I should just embrace the Chomsky version of position #1: hold your nose to block the GOP with the Democrat in contested states but do not confuse two minutes of voting with “serious political action.” I fully embrace the dictum about what constitutes “serious action” and “the urgent task” (movement-building beyond elections), but the overall position has its own moral deficiency. As Glenn Greenwald argued at a socialist conference in Chicago last summer, the price of Chomsky’s “small differences that matter in concentrated power systems” is not the only ethical calculus to consider in approaching the quadrennial voting dilemma. We must also weigh the cost of telling the Democrats that they are not the only other party that can actually defeat them (under the rules of the U.S. elections system); they can count on our votes, pretty much no matter what they do. Listen to the following comment from Mark Mellman, a leading Democratic pollster, to the New York Times last spring on how progressive voters will line up with Obama no matter how far the president drifts because of how terrible the G.O.P is: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates. So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.” Democratic operatives know that hatred of the Republicans will calm “whatever qualms” we in the “base” might have about “this policy or that policy” of the current corporatist and imperial killer in the White House, whose conduct was recently described in accurate and scathing terms by the brilliant left commentator John Pilger:
“Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey agent of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in ‘Bugsplat.’ Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.”
“….as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new ‘enemy’ in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.”
“Obama’s most ‘historic’ achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only ‘associate’ with those ‘belligerent’ to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeas corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights…”
“On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to ‘secure territory and populations’ overseas but to fight in the ‘homeland’ and provide ‘support to the civil authorities.’ In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.”
“America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a ‘market’ extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will ‘feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy.’ This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretense of political choice where there is none.”
But so much for “this policy or that policy,” like, you know, the proto-fascistic abolition of habeas corpus or the violation of international laws against murderous and unprovoked aggression on innocent civilians, and the massive taxpayer-funded bailout and re-legitimization of the parasitic financial institutions that crashed the economy while tens of millions of Americans struggle against destitution without adequate assistance and millions languish behind bars in the racist mass incarceration system! “At least the current emperor isn’t a Republican!” Progressives’ less-evil-ism bears some of the blame for the nauseating smugness of people like Mellman, who epitomizes elite Democrats’ basic attitude towards those who stand to the left of their party’s capitalist and imperial behavior: “screw ‘em, they’ve got nowhere else to go.”
The Hope of More Disillusionment
But it happens that there’s another argument that leads us back in a dark and ironic way toward position #1. There’s a different and all-too-rarely heard radical case (it might deserve to be considered position #4) for wanting the Democrats to win that has nothing to do with thinking that they are progressive, nothing to do with the Lesser Evil-ist “battered spouse syndrome,” and everything to do with exposing the corporate and imperial Democrats for what they really are. Left adherents of positions 2 and 3 are absolutely right to worry about the recurrent and longstanding role of the Democratic Party in co-opting independent rank and file social and political movements and folding popular energies back into the dominant order. But how are the Democrats best revealed as agents of the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire? Which is better for development of the “serious political action” (autonomous, democratic, grassroots, and non-co-opt-able citizen and workers activism) beneath and beyond the “quadrennial extravaganzas” (Chomsky) and the “placebo politics” of the major parties, dedicated to “the pretense of political choice where there is none” (Pilger): (A) Republicans holding nominal power or (B) Democrats atop the symbolic ship of state?
The answer for me is B. It would be best, from a Left perspective, to get Obama back for a second term for two key reasons in my opinion. First and (at the risk of sounding insensitive) least significant from my perspective, the intensity of the corporate and social-conservative assault on the U.S. populace will be somewhat less severe under Obama’s second term than under Mitt Romney or New Gingrich’s first term. Second and more important for me (since the main task is to get a serious radical sociopolitical movement underway), the presence of another Republican in the White House will just encourage progressives and others to blame everything wrong in America on those terrible crazy Republicans. And that just leaves the elite power centers free to tamp down the resulting popular anger by bringing the Democrats back in the names of “hope” and “change” (the keywords of both Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and Obama’s 2008 campaign).
I wanted Obama to win the 2008 election for what might strike some as a strange reason. I hoped Obama would triumph at the polls[2] because I thought there was radical potential in Here’s how Henwood put it in the spring of 2008 at the end of an essay that criticized, among other things, Obama’s subservience to big capital, Obama’s militarism, Obama’s disingenuous claims to be against the Iraq War, Obama’s “empty” slogans, Obama’s “fan club” (“he doesn’t really have a movement behind him”), and Obama’s denial of the extent of racial inequality in the U.S:
“Enough critique; the dialectic demands something constructive to induce some forward motion. There’s no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world – more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He’ll deliver little of that – but there’s evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed.”
“There’s great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, [who are] …really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich .are lording it over the rest of us.”
“Never did the possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That’s not what the candidate means by that word, but history can be a great ironist.”
Henwood has been born out by the rise of the Occupy Movement, which fed heavily off of youthful disillusionment with Obama – a bursting of “hope” bubbles that fed disenchantment with the underlying profits system. Obama has been a great object lesson in the wisdom of something that the great American radical historian Howard Zinn used to say: “the really critical thing isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.”
Henwood’s point still holds. Bringing back a Republican to the White House will simply reinforce the longstanding liberal claim that bringing Democrats back is the “cure” to the “national malaise.” We can’t simply avoid the confusion and co-optation created by the Democrats by indirectly voting in Republicans. We can’t dance around the Democrat Party problem. We have to go through it to transcend it.
Urgent Tasks Beyond the Electoral Mind Game
Whatever you decide, fellow left progressive, keep your eyes on the social movement prize. What you do or don’t do on Election Day is a tiny matter compared to what we can and must do together to build left movement capacity and presence beneath and beyond the major party, candidate-centered, and mass-marketed election spectacles. And please resist the temptation to engage in bitter, shame-based, lefter-than-thou finger-pointing with other progressives who do not agree with you on whichever of the three (or perhaps it is four) positions I have developed in this essay. Face it: the reigning U.S. political party and elections system is an epic plutocratic and imperial mind fuck: a corporate-managed fake democracy in which elitism masquerades as populism and state-capitalist authoritarianism wears the clothes of the common good. It is no simple matter to know exactly how to respond to the whole thing. It’s kind of like trying to determine which lane will get you the furthest in a crowded highway at the peak of rush hour. The system is set up to frustrate, marginalize, depress, and confuse. That’s the point. Whatever position you take, keep in mind that serious progressives struggle also for a different political highway altogether.[3] The changes they seek include fundamental transformation in the prevailing party and elections systems – changes that would (among other things) make it possible to vote someday for seriously progressive candidates without having to fear that doing so will absurdly redound to the benefit of the most explicitly reactionary wing of the Property Party.
Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many books and studies, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010), Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2005), and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Paradigm, 2011). Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com
[1] Who of the following two hypothetical citizens is the more praiseworthy progressive American: Person A, who read the many warnings a few other Left intellectuals and I penned on the pro-business and pro-military nature of Obama and who then voted for Ralph Nader (in either a contested or uncontested state) in November 2008, but who has done little since beyond preening on Facebook to make fun of “stupid liberals” and saying “Hey, don’t blame me, I voted for Nader…I knew Obama sucked from the start” …or Person B, who clings to foolish dreams of Obama and other Democrats as progressive actors but who nonetheless consistently also engages in serious activism through antiwar organizations, anti-foreclosure campaigns, the Occupy Movement and/or other substantive activities consistent with Zinn and Chomsky’s advice? I’ll pick person B every time. I am an atheist, but I’d much rather spend my time with God-fearing Christians who work consistently for peace and justice than with fellow atheists for whom life seems to be all about bitching and moaning, “clicky-clacking 24/7 on Facebook” (to quote a friend of mine on the self-destructive all-day behavior of certain ridiculous “online activists”) and other childish pursuits.
[2] Thankfully I did not have to act on this ironic hope in the voting booth. A look at the relevant Des Moines Register polling data in late October of 2008 showed that my voting state of Iowa was already “safely” blue (Democratic), leaving me free to rcast one of the six votes that Ralph Nader got in the “progressive” 24th precinct of Iowa City.
[3] A progressive Democracy Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would include provisions for the full public financing of elections (on the principle of “no money private money in public elections”), free television advertising, open and multi-party candidate and issue debates, proportional representation (so that, say, 20 percent of the vote for the House of Representatives might translate into 20 percent of the elected positions in that body), shortened election seasons, strict regulation if not abolition of lobbyists, the end of gerrymandering, instant run off voting in presidential (and other) elections, and much more to bring the political process more closely in line with the core democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” .
Comment On This Commentary (Selected thread)
The conclusion: what we do all year, 4 yearsBy Aronson, Sanda at Jan 30, 2012 13:10 PM |
Yes to the conclusion, which Howard Zinn often stated. I miss Howard Zinn. Thanks, Paul Street, for quoting him again.
I think the Democratic party is nearly dead. Obama’s win in 2008 delayed it. As to the oft-said by some on the Left that it’s good when things get bad because people will then “rise up” — I don’t see when that has happened in the U.S. in my lifetime. I think that’s also the reasoning, if there is any, as stated by some in U.S. gov’t for making things terrible in many countries abroad: the hope that folks will overthrow their gov’t, making the U.S. gov’t happy.
Sometimes fiction holds up a mirror in which to view the present. I am just finishing “The Lacuna” by Barbara Kingsolver, 2009, novel. Comparisons of the highlights of the dramas of the mid20th century make for useful comparisons with now. she invents a fictional character caught up in the dramas. I got interested in the book because it uses Frida Kahlo, the heart and spirit of women artists who are disabled, as a character. I’m delaying the end, audio cassette edition from the NLS library, as a reward for after I work in my studio today, -but here I am, chuckle, as I work on an art project(s) to mark my 18th Leap Year Birthday at 72 (I hope) on February 29, 2012.
Right now, I think I am deciding what name to write in for President on my ballot in Nov. 2012. I read this article and shall reread it. I like the listing of the options.
It takes time…By Brussel, Morton k. at Jan 30, 2012 04:24 AM |
It takes time and special conditions to solve the problems we now face—injustice, inequality, and the attack on the globe’s resources. In fact, there may well be no satisfactory solution at hand. None of the electoral alternatives discussed here seem desirable. I for one could never in good conscience vote for the murderous militaristic corporate driven Obama administration. And I agree that a vote for a weak third party (as per Chomsky’s strategy) in the current state of our rigged electoral system would be futile. I believe that conditions will have to get much more dire before any mass popular awakening can occur. How remote this is I don’t know. Something cataclysmic might trigger it. What one wants of course is to convince others that they are truly suffering due to the present system, in the hope that an ever greater enlightened majority can upset that system with something far better.
Is the OWS movement a step in the right direction? Yes, but it will have to stay the course and become much more organized and massive to “change the course of human events”. The forces against it are formidable. How it will affect the coming elections is uncertain.
Hello Mort. Your comment was very wise and astute.
I especially noted this part, ” What one wants of course is to convince others that they are truly suffering due to the present system, in the hope that an ever greater enlightened majority can upset that system with something far better.” That is a key point, and sadly it is very difficult to do. It’s very hard to have the majority see that identified problem is the system itself. I think your assessment is spot on– but how to move to greater enlightenment is very difficult — if not impossible. The corporate media and their great power of manipulation is a powerful accomplice in maintaining the system horrors. |
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