Chronicles of Inequality TOO MUCH [June 3, 2013]

	June 3, 2013
THIS WEEK
Last week brought disturbing new stats on our unequal times, and we have them all in this week’s Too Much. Last week, on the cheerier side, also brought insightful new commentaries from three of our era’s top inequality analysts.You’ll find all three pieces below in our New Wisdom on Wealth sidebar. And the three certainly do have fresh new wisdom to offer. David Cay Johnson, for instance, helps us see how low taxes on high incomes give our CEOs an ongoing incentive to line their own pockets “at the expense of the enterprises they run.”Chuck Collins, for his part, helps us understand another hidden impact of our top-heavy world, the phenomenon sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of advantage.” Collins walks us through the games the wealthy play to boost their children’s prospects — at the expense of everyone else’s.Chrystia Freeland, the last of our trio, riffs off recent sexist gabbing by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones to reflect upon our gender and income divides. The more our income gaps widen, Freeland notes, the greater “the social and political sway of those at the very, very top.” Societies that let the rich sway away, she reminds us, invite pathologies we’re only now beginning to understand.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
Top U.S. corporate executives are, at last count, averaging 354 times more pay per year than average American workers. These CEOs compete in the same global markets as Norwegian CEOs. How much do big-time CEOs in Norway make? Norwegian CEOs, calculates Norway’s largest daily, average 16 times what their workers earn. Some do make more — and get plenty of grief for making it. Headlines in Norway have recently been bashing Helge Lund, the top exec at Norway’s largest oil company. He’s pulling in $2.4 million a year. That sum strikes Norwegians as outrageous. Lund no doubt considers himself a bargain. Chevron CEO John Watson is pulling in 10 times his compensation . . .No banker in North America, Bloomberg Markets Magazinereported last week, took home more in 2012 than the $26 million that went to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. Blankfein guided Goldman to $7.5 billion in profits last year. Along the way he guided 900 Goldman employees into unemployment. The shedding of bank jobs, industry-wide, has continued on into 2013. In this year’s first quarter, America’s six largest banks announced 21,000 layoffs. But banks aren’t just rewarding execs like Lloyd Blankfein for cutting jobs. They’re hiring like crazy at the executive level. The resulting “competition for business leadership” has headhunter firms doing a bang-up business. At the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, revenues from New York bank clients have jumped 25 percent . . .In the race for global supremacy in dissolute extravagance, the Mediterranean deep-pocket playground of Monaco has now trumped the desert oasis of Las Vegas. Both cities have exclusive night clubs that have been offering up — for a mere $500,000 — a nine-bottle “Dynastie Collection” set of Armand de Brignac champagne. Late last month, at Monaco’s “Billionaire Club,” British financial adviser Charles Shaker became the first club patron anywhere in the world to shell out for the nine-bottle collection. The club crowd, one party-goer later told reporters, “went crazy,” with everyone “trying to take pictures, cheering and clapping.” Another “Dynastie Collection” set remains on sale — and unsold — at Hakkasan Las Vegas, a “nightlife mecca” at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino.	Quote of the Week“In most recessions, societies become more equal. Unemployment may rise and wages stagnate. But the gap between the top and the rest narrows as those with the most to lose lose the most. In our time, the gap is widening, and I am tired of hearing lectures on how we can do nothing about it from supporters of the status quo, who have been wrong about everything for years.” Nick Cohen, The Observer,June 1, 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
Tennessee voters elected Stephen Fincher to Congress in 2010 as a Tea Party Republican, and Fincher, a heavyweight in agribusiness, has not disappointed the small-government crowd. Washington, he told a Memphis audience last month,has gone “out of control,” making moves “to steal money” from some to “give it to others.” Fincher has been especially vocal in this year’s food stamp budget debates. He wants two million poor families cut off from food stamp benefits. But Fincher’s commitment to “small government” doesn’t apparently extend up the income ladder. Between 1999 and 2012, the Environmental Working Group reports, Fincher personally collected $3.48 million in federal farm subsidies.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
The world’s glitterati descended on Monaco at the end of May for the annual auto Grand Prix race. The engines won’t start roaring again until next May. By that time, realtors hope to have sold the five-floor penthouse now under construction in Monaco’s newest high-rise tower. The expected sale price: $386 million.	Web Gem Genuine Progress/ How do we measure progress in a way that takes inequality into account?
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
In New York, a New Lid on Contractor PayNew York governor Andrew Cuomo can’t seem to figure out whether he wants to wink at inequality or fight it. He’s just proposed an ill-advised initiative that wouldflood the state with special zones that exempt corporate execs from sales, property, and income taxes. On the more sensible side: Starting this July 1 New York will be limiting annual CEO pay at nonprofit and for-profit service providers that collect at least 30 percent of their revenues from state tax dollars. Execs at these providers won’t be allowed to grab over $199,000 a year. The loophole: Agencies can use revenue from non-taxpayer sources to boost pay over $200,000. But they first have to file a waiver to gain approval. CEO paychecks at taxpayer-subsidized service providers in New York have in recent years run as high as $3 million. Corporate pay consultants, predictably, are kvetching over the precedent the governor’s porous but still promising pay cap sets.	Take Action on InequalityHelp bring the film version ofThe Spirit Level, this century’s most important book on inequality, to a theater near you. For starters, watch the film’s just-released two-minute trailer.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the Week Households holding over $1 million worth of stocks, bonds, and other financial assets make up just 0.9 percent of global households,computes the latest annual Boston Consulting Group wealth report.
IN FOCUS
Let’s Talk Taxes, Let’s Talk TrillionsAmerica’s deepest pockets, a new report shows, are saving big bucks from the U.S. tax code’s wide assortment of income tax breaks. They’re saving even more from the absence of a wealth tax.A hundred years ago, in 1913, Congress wrote into law a federal income tax. Lawmakers have been dotting the tax code, almost ever since, with an assortment of “never-minds” that hand most of us, at one time or another, discounts at tax time.These discounts can come in handy. If you buy a home, you get to deduct off your taxes the mortgage interest you pay. If you’re raising a family, you get to claim tax credit for your children. If you retire, you can exclude Social Security income from taxes. And if you make a killing trading on the stock market, you only have to pay taxes on your windfall at half the normal tax rate. How much do all these deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferential tax rates cost the federal treasury? Representative Chris Van Hollen, a lawmaker from Maryland, wanted to know. He asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to calculate exactly how much “tax expenditures” — the wonky label in Washington for tax never-minds — were actually costing. Van Hollen also asked the CBO to calculate which American taxpayers, by income level, were benefiting the most from these tax expenditures. Last week, the CBO reported back — with some big numbers: The top 10 special tax breaks in the federal tax code will cost the federal government $900 billion in 2013 and $12 trillion over the next decade. And most of the benefits from all these trillions in tax savings, the CBO found, are cascading down to America’s most comfortable. If tax expenditures operated on a totally neutral basis, America’s most affluent 1 percent would be receiving just 1 percent of the taxpayer savings that tax expenditures generate. In fact, the CBO calculates, the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers are receiving 17 percent of tax expenditure benefits. Project these numbers over a decade, and the tax savings for America’s most affluent really start to add up. Over the next ten years, if current law remains in effect, tax expenditures will pour $3.6 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 5 percent of income earners — and $1.9 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 1 percent, households that make over $450,000. But the enormity of these trillions only hints at how light a tax burden rests on our rich, suggests another new study released last week, the annual global wealth survey from researchers at the Boston Consulting Group. Just under 5 percent of America’s households, says this new study, now hold at least $1 million each in financial wealth, assets like stocks and other securities, the dollars in savings and checking accounts, and the like. In 2012, the total net worth of these top 5 percent households pumped up America’s total financial wealth to $39 trillion, a total a trillion dollars higher than the combined financial wealth of Japan, China, and Germany, the world’s next three richest nations. Like this article? Sign up to receive the Too Muchweekly in your email inbox. America’s wealthiest households pay no annual federal taxes on any of these trillions. Why? The United States has no annual federal tax onfinancial wealth. We do, on the other hand, have a tax on property wealth. This property tax — a state and local government levy — essentially amounts to a tax on America’s middle class. That’s because residential property makes up the bulk of American middle class wealth — 66 percent, on average, the latest Fed figures show. For households in America’s richest 1 percent, by contrast, home sweet home accounts for only 9.4 percent of household net worth. In other words, in America today, we tax the wealth of the middle class on an annual basis. We essentially give the wealth of the wealthy a free pass. Other nations do tax the wealth of the rich. One of these nations, France, has just upped the rates on its “wealth tax.” French households with over $21.5 million in wealth are now paying this wealth tax at nearly a 2 percent annual rate. How much would an annual 2 percent wealth tax raise from America’s millionaire households? Research from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services can help us here. Deloitte researchers have calculated that American millionaire households in 2011 held $38.6 trillion in total, not just financial, net worth. In 2020, Deloitte estimates, U.S. households worth at least $1 million will hold $87.1 trillion in wealth, over five times the size of that year’s entire estimated federal debt. A 2 percent annual tax on this $87.1 trillion would raise over $1.7 trillion. Some perspective: In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, the personal income tax bill for all Americans will total $2.16 trillion. The new CBO numbers on tax expenditures, says Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, show clearly that current federal income tax deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferences skew “disproportionately to the highest 1 percent of income earners.” America’s absence of any national annual tax on the wealth of our wealthy skews this lopsided, top-tilting tax picture a good bit more.	New Wisdom on WealthChuck Collins, The Wealthy Kids Are All Right, American Prospect, May 28, 2013. In a tough economy with dwindling social supports, children of privilege have a huge head start.Chrystia Freeland, Sexist Mores of Super-Rich Hurt Us All, Reuters, May 30, 2013. Some deeper reflections on the latest controversy around hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones. David Cay Johnston,Inequality Rising — All Thanks To Government Policies, National Memo, May 31, 2013. How U.S. tax, union bargaining, inheritance, and other rules widen the growing divide between those at the top and everyone else. Learn more about this new history of America’s first triumph over plutocracy.
NEW AND NOTABLE
Behind All Our Global Immigration DebatesBranko Milanovic, Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now: An Overview, New Economic Thinking and Columbia University, February 2013.Location, location, location. That’s all that matters, goes the old real estate agent bromide. That goes double, says economist Branko Milanovic, for understanding global economic inequality.Milanovic, the lead research economist at the World Bank, prepared this analysis for a conference on global income inequality held this past winter. The journal Global Policy will shortly be publishing an updated version, and the wider circulation of this new version will almost certainly recharge the debate over how we address our globe’s staggering economic inequality. The bottom line as Milanovic sees it: What part of the world your birth places you in matters much more to your economic status than ever before. Asks Milanovic: “Is citizenship — belonging to a given country, most often through birth — something that gives us by itself the right to greater income?” Rich countries are so far answering with a resounding “yes.” The amount of aid the world’s wealthy nations currently lay out for development assistance, Milanovic points out, comes to not much over $100 billion a year, “just five times more than the bonus Goldman Sachs paid itself during one crisis year.” If global economic elites continue to allow location to drive global economic inequality, Milanovic concludes, the tensions that mass global migrations create will only escalate enormously over coming decades.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might want to subscribe
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies \| 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 \| (202) 234-9382 \| Editor: Sam

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby versus Prince Harry and his polo-playing American friends

By David Walsh, wsws.org

Harry on the polo grounds. The stench of decadence follows him everywhere.

Harry Windsor on the polo grounds. The stench of privilege and decadence follows him everywhere.

“Prince Harry rounded off his hugely successful week-long tour of the U.S. today very much in his comfort zone – playing polo. … He was greeted by club founder Peter Brandt [sic] and his model wife, Stephanie Seymour. Brandt, 65, – whose wife is 44 – is an American industrialist and businessman, worth an estimated $2.7 billion.” – Daily Mail, May 15, 2013

“According to the anonymous friend, [Prince] Harry was hoping to see Great Gatsby director Baz Luhrmann, a pal of his father [Prince] Charles, but any Hollywood hobnobbing is forbidden.” – New York Post, May 9, 2013

“Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan ——” After an instant’s hesitation he [Gatsby] added: “the polo player.” …

“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly, “I’d rather look at all these famous people in —— in oblivion.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The visit to America in mid-May by Prince Harry of Wales, third in line of succession to the British throne, coinciding with the release of a new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby(1925), brings into focus a number of issues.

Harry with Brant (grey coat) in Greenwich. Rubbing elbows with old aritos and aping them has been and remains the aspiration of most tycoons.

Harry with Brant (grey coat) in Greenwich. Rubbing elbows with the old nobility and aping them has been and remains the aspiration of most tycoons.

Harry is the younger son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. He is perhaps best, or at least most revealingly, known for wearing a swastika armband and a German Afrika Korps outfit to a fancy dress party in January 2005. The Sun, a British tabloid, published a photograph of the 20-year-old prince under the unflattering headline, “Harry the Nazi.” Four years later, Harry made the headlines again, after referring on a video to a Pakistani member of his British army platoon as “our little Paki friend.”

The prince’s most recent trip to the US had something of the character of an ongoing effort at damage control, after the fiasco of an August 2012 visit to Las Vegas during which Harry was photographed naked while playing a drunken game of strip billiards in a “high roller suite.”

This month’s tour was designed to present Harry as a responsible, caring and sober individual. The visit’s official purpose was to promote the rehabilitation of US and UK troops, “our wounded warriors,” as his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, explained to the media. Harry also traveled to New Jersey, somewhat incongruously, to view the damage caused by last fall’s Hurricane Sandy, in the company of Governor Chris Christie. During his brief visit to the Jersey Shore, the prince commented sagely, “It’s fantastic American spirit, everyone getting together and making things right.”

The final stop on Harry’s trip, however, is what interests us most at the moment. On Wednesday he took part in a charity polo match in Greenwich, Connecticut, hobnobbing with multimillionaires and “celebrities,” America’s aristocracy of sorts.

Feuding Brants—Peter and Stephanie.

And in an appropriate setting. Greenwich, in affluent Fairfield County, is one of the wealthiest communities in the US. Money magazine listed Greenwich number two on its list of “top-earning towns” in 2012 (it has placed first in other years), with a median family income of $167,502 and a median home price $1,901,029. If you want to take up residence there, “a magnet for hedge funds and boutique financial service companies,” the magazine counseled, “Bring your checkbook and your Swiss bank account.”

The match was played at the exclusive Greenwich Polo Club. According to one media report, “Guests at the polo dined on grilled peppered fillet of beef, served with an arugla and spring vegetable salad and crispy warm panisse, followed by vanilla bean creme brule, mixed berry trifle, Lemon Curd tart with mixed berries and truffle brownie squares.

“Just 400 seats were available in all, however, making it literally the hottest ticket in a town, with dozens of elegantly-coiffured ladies—both young and old—trying to beg, borrow or steal an invite.” (The regular fee for attending the club’s seven seasonal polo matches is $1,000, but tickets for Harry’s match were not offered for sale at any price.)

[pullquote] “America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, and their hangers-on, envy Britain’s ‘legitimate’ royalty and dregs of a nobility, long for such rank themselves and despise the ‘common people’ with as much fervor as the aristocrats of an earlier age.” —F.S. Fitzgerald [/pullquote]

The prince’s host at the polo club was its founder, Peter Brant, who inherited a paper company and is now reputedly worth several billion dollars. He currently owns White Birch Paper, one of the largest pulp and paper companies in North America, and Brant Publications. Brant, the owner of a 53-acre estate in Greenwich, is known for his extensive art collection, worth tens of millions of dollars, and his marriage to former model Stephanie Seymour. The couple filed for divorce in 2010 and their nasty relations were fought out in public, with accusations of drug abuse and art theft filling the air. They later reconciled. Also, in 1990, Brant served 84 days in federal prison for tax evasion.

In February 2010 White Birch sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time it employed 1,300 workers at its Stadacona paper mill in Quebec City, Quebec. In January 2012, the company announced it was closing the mill “for good,” after workers rejected a proposal that would have slashed wages and pension benefits. “The union,” noted a CBC report, “said workers over the age of 55 would lose 45 per cent of the value of their pensions under White Birch’s final offer and younger employees would lose 65 per cent.”

The Brant kids with mother. By marrying supermodels some of the rich assure access to good genetics, but the inside remains empty of moral worth.

The Brant kids with mother. By marrying supermodels some of the rich assure access to good genes, but the exterior beauty cannot hide the squalid interior.

The New York Times, in June 2012, dubbed Brant’s sons Peter II and Harry (!) “The New Princes of the City,” in a sycophantic piece in the newspaper’s Fashion & Style section. The piece described the pair as “the well-spoken product of cross-pollination of the Übermenschen. … Despite their youth, the boys are omnipresent on the social scene and staples of Patrick McMullan party photographs. Their every move is tracked on assorted fashion blogs.”

One of these uncrowned princes, Peter, made his way into the news in November 2012 because of a text he sent to a friend, Andrew Warren, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s reelection. The conversation went like this, reported the Greenwich Time :

“Guess were [sic] poor now,” grouses Warren.

“I have a contingency plan,” Brant replies. “Kill Obama hahaha.”

Warren then wrote: “HAHA well Atleast (sic) women have rights. Oh wait I don’t care.”

Brant replied: “Hahahaahaha exactly.”

Needless to say, neither Brant nor Warren were run in for making terrorist threats.

Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby come into the story of this sordid crowd through the following connections.

First, it was intriguing to learn that the New York Post considers Baz Luhrmann, the Australian-born director, “a pal” of Harry’s father, Prince Charles, and that the young prince hoped to meet up with the filmmaker while in the US. Charles made a well-publicized appearance at the premiere of Luhrmann’s dreadful Moulin Rouge (2001).

It could be proven, and it would not take much effort, that no one enjoying the personal acquaintance of a member of the British royal family has any business tackling Fitzgerald’s novel, which expresses a thorough-going disgust for the idle rich.

One of racketeer Jay Gatsby’s efforts to reinvent himself as a man of wealth and breeding involves his brief period at Oxford and a photograph he always carries. The photo, Gatsby explains, “was taken in Trinity Quad—the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster.”

The narrator continues: “It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger–with a cricket bat in his hand.” The novel hardly has to spell out what the author thinks of the Earl of Dorcaster and his parasitic ilk.

Polo, at which both Prince Harry and Brant apparently excel, is an important social motif in Gatsby. The game is used as something of a synonym for the uselessness and worthlessness of the old moneyed classes and is closely identified with the book’s vilest figure, Tom Buchanan.

The novel’s opening chapter observes that Buchanan’s family “were enormously wealthy … but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”

Describing Tom and his wife Daisy, the book goes on: “They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Wonderful phrase: “Wherever people played polo and were rich together”!

In Chapter Four, Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby’s extravagant parties and the host, in a subtle effort to humiliate Buchanan, as he is in love with the man’s wife and has been for five years, insists on introducing his rival in the manner noted at the top of this article, as “the polo player.” This is a not so subtle means of presenting Tom as a mere idler.

Catching on to the barb, Buchanan tries to reject the appellation. “‘Oh no,’ objected Tom quickly, ‘not me.’ But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby, for Tom remained ‘the polo player’ for the rest of the evening.”

Fitzgerald was fascinated by the very rich throughout his life, and it would be false to suggest that his attitude was free from ambiguities. However, when he was clear- and cold-eyed, no American author has ever written so directly, thoughtfully and unsparingly about the wealthy.

Famously, in The Rich Boy (1926), he wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” The narrator goes on to observe that the only way he can describe his protagonist, the rich boy of the title, “is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view.”

In 1938, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter: “That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton … I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.”

In her autobiographical College of One, Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion for the last several years of his life, recalls that “Scott’s library contained two large volumes of [Marx’s] Das Kapital .” Marx’s comment about “The unity of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists, stock-exchange wolves and shopkeepers, protectionists and free traders, government and opposition, priest and free thinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry, For the Salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society,” elicited from Fitzgerald: “Grand prose.”

Graham further notes that the writer “was always so vehemently on the side of the poor and oppressed. He detested people like [heiresses] Barbara Hutton, [Mary] Woolworth Donahue, and especially business tycoons. ‘I don’t know any businessman I’d want to meet in the next world—if there is a next world,’ said Scott.”

It is clear what Fitzgerald would have thought of “Harry the Nazi” and Mr. Brant “the polo player.” And it is improbable he would have had much time either for Luhrmann, a friend of the man next in line to become king of England.

As for the ever-increasing obsession of the super-rich in America with British royalty, this has unmistakable social roots, as we noted in December 2012: “The United States is ruled today by a financial-corporate aristocracy, with infinitely more in common with George III and Jefferson Davis than with [Tom] Paine, [Thomas] Jefferson, [Abraham] Lincoln, the abolitionists, [Mark] Twain and any progressive figure in US history. …

“America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, and their hangers-on, envy Britain’s ‘legitimate’ royalty and dregs of a nobility, long for such rank themselves and despise the ‘common people’ with as much fervor as the aristocrats of an earlier age.”

Hence, the intermingling in Greenwich of the human waste of the two countries.

DAVID WALSH, wsws.org’s film critic, is one of the most astute cinema and culture commentators in the US.

The same motive for anti-US ‘terrorism’ is cited over and over

Ignoring the role played by US actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional

By Glenn Greenwald | guardian.co.uk

A banner reading ‘United We Stand For Peace on Earth’ outside the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Allen Breed/AP

(updated below – Update II – Update III)

News reports purporting to describe what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told US interrogators should, for several reasons, be taken with a huge grain of salt. The sources for this information are anonymous, they work for the US government, the statements were obtained with no lawyer present and no Miranda warnings given, and Tsarnaev is “grievously wounded”, presumably quite medicated, and barely able to speak.

That the motives for these attacks are still unclear has been acknowledged even by Alan Dershowitz last week (“It’s not even clear under the federal terrorism statute that this qualifies as an act of terrorism”) and Jeffrey Goldberg on Friday (“it is not yet clear, despite preliminary indications, that these men were, in fact, motivated by radical Islam”).

Those caveats to the side, the reports about what motivated the Boston suspects are entirely unsurprising and, by now, quite familiar:

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world – violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children:

Attempted “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab upon pleading guilty:

Attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the first Pakistani-American involved in such a plot, upon pleading guilty:

When he was asked by the federal judge presiding over his case how he could possibly have been willing to detonate bombs that would kill innocent children, he replied:

Emails and other communications obtained by the US document how Shahzad transformed from law-abiding, middle-class naturalized American into someone who felt compelled to engage in violence as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone attacks, Israeli violence against Palestinians and Muslims generally, Guantanamo and torture, at one point asking a friend: “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”

:

“Your Honor, during the spring and summer of 2008, I conspired with others to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. military and its allies. . . . During the training, Al Qaeda leaders asked us to return to the United States and conduct martyrdom operation. We agreed to this plan. I did so because of my feelings about what the United States was doing in Afghanistan.”

Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan:

“Part of his disenchantment was his deep and public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stance shared by some medical colleagues but shaped for him by a growing religious fervor. The strands of religion and antiwar sentiment seemed to weave together in a PowerPoint presentation he made at Walter Reed in June 2007. . . . For a master’s program in public health, Major Hasan gave another presentation to his environmental health class titled ‘Why The War on Terror is a War on Islam.'”

Meanwhile, the American-Yemeni preacher accused (with no due process) of inspiring both Abdulmutallab and Hasan – Anwar al-Awalaki – was once considered such a moderate American Muslim imam that the Pentagon included him in post-9/11 events and the Washington Post invited him to write a column on Islam. But, by all accounts, he became increasingly radicalized in anti-American sentiment by the attack on Iraq and continuous killing of innocent Muslims by the US, including in Yemen. And, of course, Osama bin Laden, when justifying violence against Americans, cited US military bases in Saudi Arabia, US support for Israeli aggression against its neighbors, and the 1990s US sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, while Iranians who took over the US embassy in 1979 cited decades of brutal tyranny from the US-implanted-and-enabled Shah.

It should go without saying that the issue here is causation, not justification or even fault. It is inherently unjustifiable to target innocent civilians with violence, no matter the cause (just as it is unjustifiable to recklessly kill civilians with violence). But it is nonetheless vital to understand why there are so many people who want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Peru, or South Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Japan, or Portugal. It’s vital for two separate reasons.

First, some leading American opinion-makers love to delude themselves and mislead others into believing that the US is attacked despite the fact that it is peaceful, peace-loving, freedom-giving and innocent. As these myth-makers would have it, we don’t bother anyone; we just mind our own business (except when we’re helping and liberating everyone), so why would anyone possibly want to attack us?

With that deceitful premise in place, so many Americans, westerners, Christians and Jews love to run around insisting that the only real cause for Muslim attacks on the US is that the attackers have this primitive, brutal, savage, uncivilized religion (Islam) that makes them do it. Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan favorably cited Sam Harris as saying that “Islamic doctrines … still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society” and then himself added: “All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But Islam’s fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most.”

These same people often love to accuse Muslims of being tribal without realizing the irony that what they are saying – Our Side is Superior and They are Inferior – is the ultimate expression of rank tribalism. They also don’t seem ever to acknowledge the irony of Americans and westerners of all people accusing others of being uniquely prone to violence, militarism and aggression (Juan Cole yesterday, using indisputable statistics, utterly destroyed the claim that Muslims are uniquely violent, including by noting the massive body count piled up by predominantly Christian nations and the fact that “murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States”).

As the attackers themselves make as clear as they can, it’s not religious fanaticism but rather political grievance that motivates these attacks. Religious conviction may make them more willing to fight (as it does for many in the west), but the motive is anger over what is being done by the US and its allies to Muslims. Those who claim otherwise are essentially saying: gosh, these Muslims sure do have this strange, primitive, inscrutable religion whereby they seem to get angry when they’re invaded, occupied, bombed, killed, and have dictators externally imposed on them. It’s vital to understand this causal relationship simply in order to prevent patent, tribalistic, self-glorifying falsehoods from taking hold.

[pullquote]”I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”[/pullquote]

Second, it’s crucial to understand this causation because it’s often asked “what can we do to stop Terrorism?” The answer is right in front of our faces: we could stop embracing the polices in that part of the world which fuel anti-American hatred and trigger the desire for vengeance and return violence. Yesterday at a Senate hearing on drones, a young Yemeni citizen whose village was bombed by US drones last week (despite the fact that the targets could easily have been arrested), Farea Al-Muslimi,testified. Al-Muslimi has always been pro-American in the extreme, having spent a year in the US due to a State Department award, but he was brilliant in explaining these key points:

He added that anti-American hatred is now so high as a result of this drone strike that “I personally don’t even know if it is safe for me to go back to Wessab because I am someone who people in my village associate with America and its values.” And he said that whereas he never knew any Yemenis who were sympathetic to al-Qaida before the drone attacks, now:

He added that drone strikes in Yemen “make people fear the US more than al-Qaida”.

There seems to be this pervasive belief in the US that we can invade, bomb, drone, kill, occupy, and tyrannize whomever we want, and that they will never respond. That isn’t how human affairs function and it never has been. If you believe all that militarism and aggression are justified, then fine: make that argument. But don’t walk around acting surprised and bewildered and confounded (why do they hate us??) when violence is brought to US soil as well. It’s the inevitable outcome of these choices, and that’s not because Islam is some sort of bizarre or intrinsically violent and uncivilized religion. It’s because no group in the world is willing to sit by and be targeted with violence and aggression of that sort without also engaging in it (just look at the massive and ongoing violence unleashed by the US in response to a single one-day attack on its soil 12 years ago: imagine how Americans would react to a series of relentless attacks on US soil over the course of more than a decade, to say nothing of having their children put in prison indefinitely with no charges, tortured, kidnapped, and otherwise brutalized by a foreign power).

Being targeted with violence is a major cost of war and aggression. It’s a reason not do it. If one consciously decides to incur that cost, then that’s one thing. But pretending that this is all due to some primitive and irrational religious response and not our own actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional. Just listen to what the people who are doing these attacks are saying about why they are doing them. Or listen to the people who live in the places devastated by US violence about the results. None of it is unclear, and it’s long past time that we stop pretending that all this evidence does not exist.

Dirty Wars

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the soon-to-be-released film, “Dirty Wars”, that chronicles journalist Jeremy Scahill’s investigation of US violence under President Obama in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. That film makes many of the same points here (including the fact that many Yemenis never knew of any fellow citizens who were sympathetic to al-Qaida until the US began drone-bombing them with regularity). Scahill’s book by the same title was just released yesterday and it is truly stunning and vital: easily the best account of covert US militarism under Obama. I highly recommend it. See Scahill here on Democracy Now yesterday discussing it, with a focus on Obama’s killing of both Anwar Awlaki and, separately, his 16-year-son Abdulrahman in Yemen. He also discussed his book this week with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Morning Joe (where he argued that Obama has made assassinations standard US policy).

UPDATE

The incorrect day was originally cited for Goldberg’s column. It has now been edited to reflect that it was published on Friday.

UPDATE II

I was interviewed at length this week by the legendary Bill Moyers about Boston, US foreign policy, government secrecy and a variety of related matters. The program will air repeatedly on PBS, beginning this Friday night (see here for local listings). You can see a preview for the show they released today – here – as well as one short excerpt from the interview on the recorder below:

UPDATE III

Here’s one more excerpt released today by the Moyers show, this one pertaining to exactly the questions raised in today’s column:

Glenda Jackson launches tirade against Thatcher in tribute debate

OpEds: Gandhi on the creation of Israel

By Ruth Eisenbud

Gandhi understood the fallacy of creating the religious state of one people at the expense of another.

These are some of the words of Gandhiji on the creation of Israel…They are from a book called Soul Force – Gandhi’s Writings on Peace. (pages 373-386). They also appear as noted below:

“No wonder that my sympathy goes out to the Jews in their unenviably sad plight. But one would have thought adversity would teach them lessons of peace.Why should they depend on American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land. Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?…”

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs… Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”

“But my sympathy [with the Jews in Germany] does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me.The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French.
[…]
And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs.
[…]
They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart, who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown in to the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in the their favor in their religious aspiration. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.
[…]
_{Ruth Eisenbud is a cultural critic and ecoanimal activist.}