By Case Wagenvoord [print_link]

When a country’s past is fable, the present veers towards unreality.  The past is not static.  It changes as we change, as we become more perceptive with the passage of time.  Often times, this change is painful as we are forced to confront the ghosts of the past we have kept hidden.

Fable becomes a refuge from the pain of self discovery.  Once we have exchanged the dynamic of an ever-changing past for a static world of make believe, the past ceases to be a source of growth and becomes frozen in amber, thus dooming the present to repeat the sins of the past over and over again.

America’s past became frozen with our victory in World War II, a victory that has turned out to be democracy’s swan song.

At one time our wars saw the mobilization of the citizenry followed by its demobilization once victory was achieved.  World War II was different.  There was no demobilization as we slowly morphed from a republic to a militarized security state.

Victory in World War II gave rise to the fable that we were a military superpower. From this, it followed that we made the error of equating hardware with strength and equating strength with nobility of purpose.  Just as the Spanish believed they were saving Indian souls by enslaving and slaughtering them, so we believe that we are bringing democracy to the Third World by raining Hellfire missiles on mud huts.

In order to keep a dead past alive, the mind needs a constant stream of delusions that protect it from the truth.  This is why we need al Qaeda and terrorism.  They protect us from the harsh reality that we are a hollowed-out shell.  This delusion is abetted by Wall Street with its constant stream of asset bubbles, which maintain the illusion that we are the richest nation on earth when, in fact, we are broke.

We are like the aged dowager, living a life of genteel poverty, who maintains the illusion of wealth by plunging further and further into debt in the belief that her children will deal with it after she is gone.

Now, as we sink even deeper into the quicksand of delusion, we are being told that there is now a link between Colombia’s rebels and al Qaeda to smuggle cocaine into Europe via West Africa.

How wonderful!  Now we have more countries we can “intervene” in as we continue with our Eternal War of the Empty Policy.  Nothing shores up a bully’s ego like beating up on a kid smaller than he is.  Each blow hides his fear and his weakness.  His redemption is found in the blood of his victim.

Like the bully, we seek our redemption in the blood of innocent women and children as we continue to beat up on the weak.  It’s a feel-good thing, especially for the bureaucrat bored to tears by endless meetings and reams of policy papers.  What a thrill it is to order wholesale slaughter and destruction with a nod of the head knowing full well that no blood will splatter his expensive wingtips.

This is what happens when our leaders try to drag a fabulist past kicking and screaming into the present , thus corrupting the future as they do so.

Frequent contributor to TGP Case Wagenvoord blogs at http://rightwingstoner.blogspot.com and welcomes comments at Wagenvoord@msn.com. His essays focus primarily on history, culture and politics.

“My fellow Americans, tonight I’m going to talk frankly about a pesky little nation called Israel … “

CounterPunch Diary Weekend Edition
March 19 – 21, 2010  [print_link]

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Don’t get excited. It’ll never happen. Is there really a crisis in US-Israeli relations?  Yes and No. Yes, because the world’s premier power doesn’t care to have its vice president publicly humiliated by a midget of a nation whose entire population is smaller than that of Los Angeles county. No, because the elected politicians nominally running the government of the world’s premier power live in mortal fear of the Israel lobby in the United States. This time, as always, No will carry the day. (You can find a detailed narrative by Jeffrey Blankfort on this site today, from which much of this Diary is drawn.)

Consider Biden’s reaction the day after Interior Minister Eli Yishai, probably with Netanyahu’s foreknowledge, announced the scheduled building of 1600 apartments – Jews only – in East Jerusalem, right at the moment Biden was trying to breathe life into the  “peace process”

So here’s the vice president of the United States of America,standing with all the injured dignity of a man who has just had a bucket of sewage dumped over his head and who amid his discomfiture, actually did use the word “condemn” and “Israel” in the same paragraph. The next day Biden heads for Tel Aviv university and confides to the audience that he is a Zionist and that, “throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States.” Get that: “the center of my work.” This mission statement is not quoted in the U.S. press.

Then Biden repeats the nonsense he spouted when he arrived in Jerusalem: that “there is no space — this is what they [the world] must know, every time progress is made, it’s made when the rest of the world knows there is absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space.  That’s the only time when progress has been made.”

Of course, if any “progress” can be identified across the past forty years – a debatable claim – it’s only because an American president has nerved himself to briefly lay down the agenda with threats and menaces, all duly retracted when the Lobby regroups and commences its counter-attack.

Finally Biden sidles up the “crisis”. “I appreciate… the response your Prime Minister today announced this morning that he is putting in place a process to prevent the recurrence of that sort of that sort of events [sic] and who clarified that the beginning of actual construction on this particular project would likely take several years … That’s significant, because it gives negotiations the time to resolve this, as well as other outstanding issues. Because when it was announced, I was on the West Bank. Everyone there thought it had meant immediately the resumption of the construction of 1,600 new units.”

Yes, that’s exactly what it did mean, the resumption of the construction of the 1600 units. And as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz points out, those projected 1600 units are part of 50,000 units planned for the eastern part of the city. Natanyahu has said these are non-negotiable, whatever Washington might say, let alone the pitiful Palestinian Authority.

Amid the anguished cries of the Arab princes and emirs that Israel’s brazen conduct towards Biden made it that much harder for them to sell the Palestinians down the river, Obama’s chief political aide, David Axelrod, undoubtedly with clearance from his boss, told NBC News that not only was Israel’s conduct an “insult” to the United States but “destructive” of the Middle East peace process.

Hillary Clinton let it be known she’d read the riot act to Netanhayu down the phone for 43 minutes. Her spokesman claimed she’d described the planned units in East Jerusalem as sending a “deeply negative signal about Israel’s approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president’s trip” and that “this action had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America’s interests.”  Meanwhile, special envoy George Mitchell cancelled his trip to the region.

So, yes, we can call it a crisis, but not one that will be prolonged.  Obama is not the first president to have lost patience with Israel for messing up Uncle Sam’s larger plans. Mrs Clinton is not the first Secretary of State to shout angrily down the phone to Tel Aviv.

Blankfort, historian of the Lobby, reels off other crises, all satisfactorily resolved in Israel’s favor.  In 1975 President Gerald Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations with Egypt over withdrawing from the Sinai.  Ford said he was going to tell the American people that US-Isarel relations should be recast.  Prodded by AIPAC, 76 US  senators signed a letter to Ford telling him to lay off Israel. He did.

In March, 1980, President Carter was forced to apologize after US UN representative Donald McHenry voted for a resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied territories including East Jerusalem and which called on Israel to dismantle them.

In June of the same year, after Carter requested a halt to Jewish settlements and his Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, called the Jewish settlements an obstacle to peace, Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced plans to construct 10 new ones.

In August, 1982, the day after Reagan requested that Ariel Sharon end the bombing of Beirut, Ariel Sharon responded by ordering bombing runs over the city at precisely 2:42 and 3:38 in the afternoon, the times coinciding with the two UN resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

In March, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker complained to Congress that “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process.., I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activity… It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process, and creates quite a predicament.” In 1990, he had become so disgusted with Israel’s intransigence on the settlements that he publicly gave out the phone number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”

On September 12, 1991 President George Bush, Sr got sufficiently infuriated by AIPAC’s success in  getting enough votes in both houses of Congress to override his veto of Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan guarantees, that he declared to the television cameras, “I’m up against some powerful forces. They’ve got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy here doing it.” A national poll taken immediately afterward gave the president an 85 per cent approval rating. The Lobby blinked but not for long. Not only did the loan guarantees ultimately go through, but Jewish voters turned strongly against Bush in the ’92 elections, a fact which Bush Jr never forgot.

As Blankfort also recalls, in January 2009, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly boasted that he had “shamed” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by getting President Bush to prevent her from voting for a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the last moment that she herself had worked on for several days with Arab and European diplomats at the United Nations.

Olmert bragged to an Israeli audience that he pulled Bush off a stage during a speech to take his call when he learned about the pending vote and demanded that the president intervene.

“I have no problem with what Olmert did,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Forward. “I think the mistake was to talk about it in public.”

I should note that this list does not reach into the dark backward of time and such ringing affirmations of the relationship as Israel’s assault on the USS Liberty in June of 1967 killing 34 and wounding 171, all covered up by the Johnson administration, most notably LBJ and Robert McNamara.

In sum, as Stephen Green wrote in “Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with Militant Israel” (Morrow, 1984) a quarter century ago, “Since 1953, Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues.”

There are powerful forces in America that wish that this was not so, starting with the US military. Before Biden’s trip no less  a prominent and widely admired commander as  General David Petraeus wrote a memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with its sentiments reduplicated in testimony last Tuesday before a US Senate Armed Services Committee.

In his prepared statement to Congress, Petraeus described the Israeli-Arab conflict as the first “cross cutting challenge to security and stability” in the CENTCOM area of responsibility [AOR]. “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR.”

Petraeus then told the Senate committee that “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”  Not long before, Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned the Israelis publicly that an attack on Iran would be a “big, big, big problem for all of us.”

In Israel the widely-read Yediot Ahronoth reported that privately Biden had echoed Petraeus’s sentiments, telling Netanyahu that Israel’s conduct was  “starting to get dangerous for us.” “What you’re doing here,” Biden reportedly said, “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”

Would not the charge that Israel is putting harm’s way the lives of Americans battling terror on the front lines be devastating if toughly presented by a capable politician to the American people? Yes it would. Honestly conducted polls, without weasel wording, would probably give the politician making such a charge ratings as higher or higher than Bush got in 1991.

So will Gen. Petraeus, assuming he embarks on a political run in 2012 or 2016, make such a move? First of all, one can make the assumption that after his memo and testimony it won’t be long before we’re reading some investigative story about the “questionable claims”, associated with Gen. Petraeus’ numerous medals, maybe even disclosures of Flashmanesque prudence on the field of battle.  Secondly, any Republican candidate has to court the Republican ultra-Christians, passionate in support of Israel, by reason of doctrinal scheduling of the ultimate Rapture. Thirdly, why scare all Jewish campaign money back into the Democratic Party?

As Blankfort remarks, shortly before the first time  he met with President Obama, 76 US senators, led by Christopher Dodd and Evan Bayh, plus  330 members of the House, sent AIPAC-crafted letters to the president calling on him not to put pressure on the Israeli prime minister when they met. The House, do not forget, cheered on Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and by  334 to 36 condemned the Goldstone Report.

The Democrat Party is heavily reliant on major Jewish political funders, up to 60 per cent of the top tier of contributors, according to Blankfort.  Soon AIPAC has its convention (at which Tony Blair will be a minor attraction). Here will come all major politicians to fawn and pay tribute. On June 3, 2008, right after he had finally prevailed in the race for the nomination against Hilary Clinton, Obama addressed the  AIPAC crowd, some 7,000 strong: “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran,” he assured AIPAC.” I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.”  He swore he wouldn’t talk to the elected representatives Palestinians, Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The next day,  Obama’s foreign policy advisors, aghast at this outburst, issued some corrections.

As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist expostulated furiously in the wake of this last sentence: “Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan ‘Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity’. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process…. The fear of AIPAC is so terrible, that even this candidate, who promises change in all matters, does not dare. In this matter he accepts the worst old-style Washington routine. He is prepared to sacrifice the most basic American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the Muslim world and mortgaged his future – if and when he is elected president… If he sticks to them, once elected, he will be obliged to say, as far as peace between the two peoples of this country is concerned: ‘No, I can’t!’

So yes, the crisis will soon be over, and no, there is no new era in US-Israel relations in the offing.

The Fight Against Corporate Power

In his important special report in our latest newsletter, Mason Gaffney addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious January 21, 2010, ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, that a corporation may contribute unlimited funds advertising its views for and against political candidates of its choice – in practice, the choice of its CEO or directors. “The United States was born in rebellion against corporations,” Gaffney writes. “The U.S. Supreme Court soon began restoring their power. When it overreached, strong executives and popular movements set it back: under Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR.  Today it has overreached again; it remains to see if a new movement or leader will arise to set it back again.”

Gaffney assays the best political strategies for popular counter-attack. As he concludes, “Will ‘ordinary’ taxpayers rebel, as they did in the American Revolution, Emancipation, the Progressive Age of Reform, and the New Deal, or will corporate power wax unchecked until it replaces democracy altogether? Cyclical theory says we will have another anti-corporate reaction, but history also records tipping points in the decline of nations, from which they do not recover for generations, if ever. This one may be a squeaker.”

Back to FDR, I say.  Pack the Supreme Court!

In the same bumper newsletter JoAnn Wypijewski has a truly terrific piece about the “cargo chain” as described  at a recent conference of radical dockworkers from around the world, meeting in Charleston, S.C.:

“The people who move the world can also stop it,’ radical dockworkers like to say, and that captures the essential fragility of a global production and distribution system that depends on the precise coordination of hundreds of thousands of moving parts. If some of those moving parts—workers at a major trucking hub, a major rail switching network or, especially, a strategic string of ports—refuse to do their part, the whole system gets jammed up. Refuse long enough and broadly enough, and the system would be in crisis.“

Read her powerful reporting from the front lines of the world class struggle.

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How the Economy Was Lost

We’re now proud to publish How the Economy Was Lost, Roberts’ searing, succinct history of how the US economy has been captured by a gangster elite.  Roberts gives us the shortest, sharpest outline of economics for the new century ever put between covers.

Go to our bookstore. Buy it now!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

 

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Media By David Swanson [print_link]  March 22, 2010 Les Moonves, one of CBS' Big Wigs. These usually invisible top executives are the real puppetmasters behind all the lies, imbecilities and waste dished out by the corporate media. We need independent media. Is that not yet crystal clear? The strongest grassroots community organization in the country, ACORN, has been swatted away like a fly through the endless airing of fraudulent, badly edited, and irrelevant, but salacious video clips. Elected officials or electoral candidates succeed or fail at the whim of the media cartel. And the biggest lies of all are buried so deeply beneath the hot news stories that they’re almost impossible to see. Does or does not Iran possess nuclear weapons? That question hides the insidious assumption that if a nation possesses nuclear weapons, then our nation can and should launch an illegal war of aggression against it. Or at least our nation should have a debate over how best to take action against our “enemy,” a debate that will represent us all because it will include two political parties. This is the biggest lie of them all: the system works. Vote for this corporatist war party or that warmongering corporate party, and you will have played your role well. The system works. The president makes the laws. The Congress gets in the way. The two parties are significantly different from each other and represent our views. News stories that include the views of both parties are complete and admirable journalism. The journalism itself has no viewpoint at all. The role of a citizen is to support politicians and parties. Imagine if Bush wanted to try alleged terrorists in court (as in fact he did). All the Republicanites would have cheered (as in fact they did). Imagine if Bush had pushed a health insurance bill written by the industry and had cut deals with the insurance and drug companies. Imagine if Republicans had called a private program for 3% of Americans a “public option”. All the Democratites in the country would have denounced the whole thing as a scam. The problem with “balanced” reporting is that those who consume it pick one of the two partisan positions presented and follow it as if they’d thought of it themselves. This mindless obedience is going to destroy us all. We need independent media, meaning sources of news that are independent of either political party. We could easily find the money to create it right now if we chose to make that a priority. We will do so or we, and this republic, and the world as we know it will perish . . . in horrible pain, with a grin on our face. Author’s Bio: by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to “The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush” published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, and chair of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee.

By Chris Hedges

Posted on Mar 8, 2010  [print_link]

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair.

The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as “liberals.” They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country.

“We are going to be poorer,” David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill,” a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism. “Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America.”

“If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life,” said Johnston. “Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. This is not the idea on which the United States was founded.”

It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d’état from the right,” Johnston said. “We have already had an economic coup d’état. It will not take much to go further.”

How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort. Why not us?

Camus

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority. “There is beauty and there are the humiliated,” Camus wrote. “Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first.”

Mario Savio said in 1964. “And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that God rewards the just and the good. “Oh my soul,” the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.” We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love. And in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that “existence is an act of rebellion.” Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

Crossposted with http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_rebels_20100308/

Capitalism is indeed dying in our midst, but, regrettably, political systems do not leave the stage of history (and power) without struggle. They have to be pushed off the centerstage.  And that’s the task for the planet’s revolutionists. To act as the midwife for a new, far more just and rational global paradigm.

March 16, 2010 [print_link]

The curtain is going down on the lone-superpower world we know and it is now a most urgent question if and when and how forces for true democracy, human rights, peace and civilization can come out and dissipate the cloud that has spread over what was once an almost decent way of life.

The long-time descent into totalitarian capitalism and neglect for anything but corporate profit has just about finished its course. The party is over. Bankruptcy is next. What we don’t know yet is how far-reaching this economic freefall is going to be.

Predecessors such as the German Reich are brought to mind, but the similarities are far from parallel. The inhumanity is on the same scale but the hypocrisy is even worse than in the worst fascist regime. Hypocrisy rules the world. No slogans the rulers of the United States or the rest of the Western world pronounce as their ideologies and goals can be taken for their face value. Lies are the only things that come out of the mouths of our so-called leaders and that is the way they have set up the sordid game to their own advantage.

We the people are not supposed to be aware of how we are being treated like dregs to be discarded. The powers that be imagine that, as long as we are not told the truth about how we are being cheated out of our birth rights, we will lie down like whipped dogs and lick the feet of our torturers.

How far we have come from the somewhat civilized society that the Founding Fathers had in mind for the people of the thirteen states can only be measured if we consider the abysmal lack of basic needs and basic rights that is now the norm in the United States. In fact, there are no areas left in the year 2010 that have been spared from the general decline, cultural, economic or humane. Human rights are in tatters, the standard of living for the vast majority of American families can go nowhere but further downhill, the voices of the people are left unheard, the standard of cultural institutions, quality education and all the privileges that are linked to it are being starved out of existence.

The prostitutes of the mainstream media [with their right-wing confreres leading the way] are making the utmost possible din so as to effectively drown the voices of reason. The general sluggishness of people is being enhanced by the non-stop propaganda fed them through the mass media, the fake view of the world as a place where satisfaction can only be had from over-consumption and from participating in the violence that is constantly displayed to us as a model of life via these mass media, the artificial uppers and downers that are offered to us by the entertainment industry to fill in the void of our souls.

The environment is being plundered savagely with no concern whatsoever for the survival of mankind, the survival of the planet and all its millions of different species. Biodiversity is a forgotten concept, except for the rare rebels who go against the stream and try to make their life-saving voices heard over the din of the machines of the killer corporations. Those predators are clearly only out to maximize their profits without the slightest concern for the catastrophic effects on the environment.

The majority of people never see what the real world is all about. How can they? The distorted “values’ that money can buy are the only ones that are real to them.

A sunrise over the ocean, a maple leaf swirling in clear spring water, the little hand touching your cheek, the beauty of words coming from a writer’s soul what happened to the marvels of life? What happened to the real world?

So how did this Ersatz world come about?

Capitalism, the way it is playing out today, is incompatible with true democracy. This insanity, this absurd form of capitalism is altogether negating a humane system of running the world with any consideration at all for the people on the planet.

Free Market capitalism, the Chicago School of Economics professor, Milton Friedman’s brainchild[1], globalization, the catchword for the Empire’s total domination over the rest of the world, Washington’s New World Order, enriching the very few and strangling the masses call it what you like but it’s a fantasy that is now finally crumbling. It all amounts to “screw the people’ and “greed is the power that makes the world go round’. The religion in the U.S.A. is greed and it’s the only true religion there is.

However, the giant is crumbling. A fast-spreading gangrene is eating away at the interior of the nation, its elite-oriented and half-starved educational system, its sad excuse for a working healthcare system, its decaying infrastructure. The very souls of the people are withering away, as their jobs are lost, their homes are foreclosed, their constitutional freedoms no longer respected, civil rights being increasingly downplayed by the police and federal authorities.

All this is adding to and interacting with the economic meltdown and the destruction of the environment, which at this point doesn’t even guarantee a livable future for the coming generations.

A multi-lateral world can not be stopped, as the giant is playing out its last trumps in case it has any left. Emerging countries are becoming emerged countries. There have not been many signs of awareness of this evolution of the geopolitical reality from President Obama, but rather a continuation of the Neocon imperialism, which will, if allowed a free rein, lead the planet to disaster. It will render the environment unlivable and thus destroy the way of life of the billions of people all over the world. With the environment in ruins, there is just no way back. The corporations whose greed is responsible for the current situation do not seem to realize or care about the direction in which they are steering our planet.

Countries which had previously enjoyed a fairly good standard of living, but had gotten squeezed by the Free Market economy, free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA [2] and bilateral agreements, saw their relatively comfortable lives wither away, such as many Asian nations in the nineties during the Asian financial crisis [3]. Poor 3^rdWorld nations were suddenly rendered more impoverished than ever before, having their national resources taken over by the multinational hydras. Wherever the heavy boots of the IMF and the World Bank get a foothold in a financially troubled nation, they manage to suck the blood out of the nation’s resources and their financial independence.

Free-market capitalism can not possibly go along with true democracy. The concepts represent opposite poles in the running of the economic systems of the world. The most outstanding mark of run-away capitalism is its denial of any civic and human rights to the working people. Privatization, which is the principal gospel of this decadent world order will eventually make us pay for the air we breathe and the polluted water we drink.

If national elections are allowed to survive in order to make for a semblance of democracy, it is only because they have no real meaning the way they are run today. They constitute no real danger to the system that is running the world since they are strictly controlled by corporations that are hand in glove with the imperialists. They are part of the system.

And yet, a majority of U.S. citizens are under the impression that their votes count for something in the running of internal and external politics. They seem to be slowly waking up, however, to the fact that their opposition to the ongoing wars and the tax cuts for the wealthy count for nothing.

The creation of the lone superpower

At the end of World War II, with Europe exhausted and virtually powerless as a commercial partner, the U.S government saw clearly that they would have to shore up the war-damaged European countries in order to create a market place for their newfound wealth. The Great Depression was over at last thanks to the boost to the economy that the war had brought to the nation. Now the U.S. needed commercial partners. So the Marshall Plan was born. Later on came the Hollywood Superman Ronald Reagan and as his megalomaniac and expansionist plans for the country were set in motion, the kernel of the Neoconservative movement was simultaneously taking shape.

During all this time a handy bogeyman was created in the Communist fiend. From the McCarthy era in the fifties to the Kennedy fiasco of the Bay of Pigs attempt to invade Southern Cuba in 1961, to the horror of the Vietnam war, to the criminal meddling in various Central American and Latin American countries, it was always the Communist threat that served as a pretext for invasions of countries that stood in the way for U.S. power and expansionism. Those countries that could not be bought up or propagandized into cooperating with the Empire were simply invaded and taken over. A blaring exception was of course the great embarrassment of the Vietnam War, when no country was ever taken over. But that didn’t even teach the imperialists a lesson. The people, yes, but the psychotic neocons, no. If anything, the lesson drawn by the neocons from that insane war was on the contrary that the U.S. had to show the world that it was still the Lord of the planet, including outer space.

Invade, crush, kill and take over national resources was the trademark of U.S. foreign policies. Until the Soviet Union imploded and the vastly overblown propaganda about the giant in the east that was threatening to end the supremacy of the number one superpower finally became open for all to see. Ever since the end of World War II, with a powerful boost given to it by the Kennedy brothers, the Communist scare has been hovering over the Western world, based on a minimum of reality but above all hysterical propaganda. It was the octopus that was spreading its tentacles all over the world. If the Soviet military power was in fact impressive, it was because they put all their rubles into the arms industry and neglected the well-being of their people.

Fear and eternal war are the capitalist tools

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the U.S. suddenly found itself bereft of a handy target to blame the evils of the world on. A new enemy had to be created and we all know how the “War on Terror’ came about, based on the absurd theory, touted hysterically, that the Muslims were now all set to take over the Western world. Al Qaeda may well have been a creation by Washington but, as could be expected, it then became a reality [4]. Continuous war is of the essence to a superpower to sustain the fear that is necessary to keep the people in blinders. Hysteria and ignorance are the sine qua non for an eternal war. Non-stop propaganda is also a major tool without which the slogan “Pax Americana’ would have been a laughing stock from its very creation. And of course the mass media played the game since they were being paid to do so.

Fear was the tool that was needed in order to fool the people of the world and draw a veil of emotional blindness over their minds. What made the creation of this visceral fear and anger at all possible was of course the attack on the World Trade Center and the following 9/11 hysteria. Without this enormous propaganda tool, the major wars that have followed, the total contempt for U.S. citizens’ constitutional rights and the U.S. Constitution in general would have been just wishful thinking by the neocon thugs.

Of course we can’t know how much longer the “lone superpower’ is still going to be breathing. It is now on life support and we can only vaguely guess what the world is going to be like after the colossus stops breathing. No words of reconciliation to the rest of the world by President Obama will save the shipwreck that is the United States of America.

What arrogance, what hubris, to believe that the United States would be able to create the millenary Reich where all other nations would be willing allies, due to the propagandized “cultural, moral and military superiority’ of the Master behemoth. If not allies, they would become subdued and subservient because they would have lost their internal strength, as was the intention with Iraq, Afghanistan and probably now also with Pakistan. The Empire was going to appear so unbeatable that no other nation would ever be able to go against their formidable power. They were to be God on earth and everybody who looked into the shining light of their claim to divine power was going to see that resistance would be useless.

Wait a minute haven’t we seen this before? It seems to be a lesson never learned that even an Empire is bound for a swift fall when the winds turn and the scales fall from the eyes of the people in the rest of the world. And, as is perfectly obvious, the hubris was not born with the Neocons plotting in the underground during the Reagan presidency. It goes all the way back to the cruel near wiping-out of the native American population. Nobody can stand against the superpower. It is the bearer of God-given authority to rule the continent, to rule over war-torn Europe, to rule over the Americas, to rule over the resource-rich countries, to rule the world.

The psychopaths who created this absurd fantasy should by all rights be the first victims of the downfall of the Empire. In the long row of history’s empires, has there ever been one that so misjudged the power of national pride and the firm decision by the invaded people to go on running their own nation, running their own lives on territories that had been theirs for millennia?

Asia is coming together

The world is changing however. We will find out one day if it is already too late or if there is still a chance that people and the environment might be saved.

Asia is organizing to become increasingly independent of the West. They are creating their own economic cooperation organizations, such as AFTA [5] (ASEAN Free Trade Area), born out of ASEAN, the “Association of Southeast Asian Nations’, a”geo-politicaland economic organization of ten countries located in Southeast Asia, which was formed on 8 August 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, thePhilippines, SingaporeandThailand”. This organization now includes ten countries located in Southeast Asia.[6]

The AFTA project was launched in 1993 with the objective of creating a Free Trade Area in eastern Asia. It undertook some bold measures during the Asian financial crisis in the nineties, which clearly showed up the need for mutual economic interdependence between Southeast and Northeast Asia.

In November 2001 an ambitious plan was submitted to create a regional bloc. It recommended that East Asia would move from a region of nations to a cohesive regional community where collective efforts would be made for peace, prosperity, and progress. They identified the following sectors for cooperation: economic, financial, security, environmental, social and cultural. [7]

China, the next superpower?

China’s economy is the third-largest in the world and it is the biggest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds. It is the top owner of U.S. government debt and it is also one of the “emerging nations’ that can be said to have already emerged. It is now in a full-fledged position to become a superpower. The day the United States of America declares bankruptcy, China will probably be ready to take over in conjunction with other developed nations.

Right now, China is giving Obama the cold shoulder. It is a fact that trade with the U.S. has recently picked up, but basically China is economically so much ahead of the former superpower that they can well shrug their shoulders at the hypocritical demands that Washington puts forth. Who is to urge China to respect civil rights and to diminish pollution to save the environment? Or to convince China that there should be more equality of living conditions? Washington’s hypocrisy knows no limits.

Obviously we can not be looking forward to a world where one inhuman superpower would be replaced by another one. We are not blind to the kind of life we would be living under Chinese rule. But such a thought seems so far from realistic that the solution we have to look forward to as a new World Order would rather be a multi-lateral organization where no one power would have too much influence over the rest of the world.

As for the other emerging nations, such as India and Brazil, they still have a way to go. A low quality of education, an average low standard of living, faulty healthcare, a sadly insufficient fight against pollution and contempt for human rights are among the major problems for these countries, as well as for China. However, the United States could well be pointed to as equally lacking in every one of these areas. There is also a horrifying lack of equality in all these countries, but then again, the richest country of them all, the U.S. of A. shares the guilt of these only relatively wealthy countries.

Latin America Is Gathering Strength

In another part of the world, there is Latin America that is currently fighting for its independence from the Empire. The birth of Mercosur, the Common Market of the South, took place on March 26, 1991. Since its creation including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, Venezuela also joined on 17 June 2006. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru currently have associate member status.

Panama and Mexico have also announced their intention to join Mercosur.

On the other hand, Venezuela has also initiated ALBA (a symbolic acronym since alba means dawn), Venezueal’s answer to imperialist free trade agreements (“Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas’ or “Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América’), which, to begin with, comprised Venezuela and Cuba. Later, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined the alliance. Some islands in the Caribbean are also members. Honduras became a member in August 2008, but, interestingly enough, after the coup in June 2009 to overthrow President Manuel Zelaya, its membership was withdrawn.

“On December 16, 2009, the Honduran congress met to withdraw the country from theALBA, claiming a “lack of respect” from Venezuela since the country’s joining in 2008, citing in particular Hugo Chavez’ remarks about a potential invasion of Honduras to restore Manuel Zelaya to office, after he was removed on 28 June 2009 in the2009 Honduran coup d’état. Withdrawal from ALBA was ratified by the Honduran Congresson January 13, 2010. Economic relations with Venezuela continue, including viaPetrocaribe.

Mercosur and ALBA are the Latin American answer to NAFTA, CAFTA and FTAA, the U.S.- sponsored so-called free trade agreements, which are for anything but free trade, constantly raising trade barriers against foreign nations for the profit of the United States.

Conclusion

The United States, the lone superpower is no more. The sooner the leaders realize this, the softer will be the fall when the giant finally breaks down. Barack Obama gave Europeans and many others some kind of hope for a change of path by the callous behemoth. But no such thing has happened and no such thing will happen. Only the downfall of the Empire can now save the world. Unless it is already too late.

Are we seeing the emergence of another kind of New World Order, one of less arrogance, one of multi-lateral cooperation? The world is crying out for a new order where life-and-death issues will be handled by all the world’s nations and not trampled on by one greedy colossus that imagines it is the monarch of the planet.

••••

[1] “Friedman‘s political philosophy, which he considered classically liberal and libertarian, emphasized the advantages of free market economics and the disadvantages of government intervention and regulation, strongly influencing the opinions of American conservatives and libertarians.” His influential bookCapitalism and Freedom was published in 1962.

[2] La Riva/Puryear: Abolish NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, WTO, IMF, World Bank. Also see NAFTA/FTAA/CAFTApage

[3]Asia’s financial crisis – There is no basis for the claim that the Asian financial crisis was due to a lack of sound economic fundamentals. The currencies of the affected countries were forcibly devalued and their financial systems were brought to ruin by the activities of speculators. The crisis has, however, revealed one glaring weakness: the absence of a lender of last resort for the region. (by Chandra Hardy)

More about the Asian financial crisis at Third World Network

[4] The name “is now just a loose label for a movement that seems to ta rget the west”, says Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist who has long studied terrorism networks. “There is no umbrella organisation. We like to create a mythical entity called [al-Qaeda] in our minds but that is not the reality we are dealing with.” (The Financial Times)

[5] “From the inception of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 to 1991 economic cooperation among its members was virtually non-existent. However, in January 1992 the leaders of the member states agreed to work towards an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA). Following an uncertain initial phase the leaders rededicated themselves in 1995 to an accelerated implementation of the AFTA agreement.”

[6] More about this geo-political and economic organization at Wikipedia

[7] More information about ASEAN and AFTA at What Is Integration

Siv O’Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y. and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the U.S. and other continents, mainly several trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France, first Paris, then Lyon, for 30 years. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.

 

CROSSPOSTED WITH ORIGINAL SOURCE, AXIS OF LOGIC AT http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_58901.shtml