The Rule of Law Has Been Lost


January 19, 2010 [print_link]

By Paul Craig Roberts

cass-sunstein

Cass Sunstein: a fractured personality with progressive and reactionary pieces.

Sir William Patey told the inquiry that President Bush began talking about invading Iraq six or seven months prior to September 11, 2001. A devastating official memo has come to light from Lord Goldsmith, Prime Minister Blair’s top law official, advising Blair that an invasion of Iraq would be in breach of international law.

Now a secret and personal letter to Prime Minister Blair from his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has surfaced. In the letter, the Foreign Secretary warned the Prime Minister that his case for military invasion of Iraq was of dubious legality and was likely as false as the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would bring Iraqis a better life.

Blair himself must now testify. He has the reputation, whether deserved or not, as one of the slickest liars in the world. But some accountability seems to be heading his way. The Sunday Times (London) reported on January 17 that the latest poll indicates that 52 percent of the British people believe that Blair deliberately misled his country in order to take Britain to war for the Americans. About one quarter of the British people think Blair should be put on trial as a war criminal.

As our Founding Fathers warned, fools who give up liberty for security will have neither.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Most improbably, and proof (we suppose) that redemption is possible, Paul Craig Roberts, is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury under criminal Ronald Reagan, and a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008.

January 19, 2010
The Rule of Law Has Been Lost
By Paul Craig Roberts
“Never in its history have the American people faced such danger to their constitutional protections as they face today from those in the government who hold the reins of power and from elements of the legal profession and the federal judiciary that support “energy in the executive.’ 

An assertive executive backed by an aggressive U.S. Department of Justice (sic) and unobstructed by a supine Congress and an intimidated corporate media has demonstrated an ability to ignore statutory law and public opinion. The precedents that have been set during the opening years of the twenty-first century bode ill for the future of American liberty.”

What is the greatest human achievement? Many would answer in terms of some architectural or engineering feat: The Great Pyramids, skyscrapers, a bridge span, or sending men to the moon. Others might say the subduing of some deadly disease or Einstein’s theory of relativity. 

The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century. 

The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world. 

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.

As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, “The Tyranny of Good Intentions” (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the 20th century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.

Government lawyers told President Bush that he did not have to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibits the government from spying on citizens without a warrant, thus destroying the right to privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the President did not have to obey U.S. law prohibiting torture or the Geneva Conventions. Habeas corpus protection, a Constitutional right, was stripped from U.S. citizens. Medieval dungeons, torture, and the windowless cells of Stalin’s Lubyanka Prison reappeared under American government auspices. 

The American people’s elected representatives in Congress endorsed the executive branch’s overthrow of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Law schools and bar associations were essentially silent in the face of this overthrow of mankind’s greatest achievement. Some parts of the federal judiciary voted with the executive branch; other parts made a feeble resistance. Today in the name of “the war on terror,” the executive branch does whatever it wants. There is no accountability.

The First Amendment has been abridged and may soon be criminalized. Protests against, and criticisms of, the U.S. government’s illegal invasions of Muslim countries and war crimes against civilian populations have been construed by executive branch officials as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” As American citizens have been imprisoned for giving aid to Muslim charities that the executive branch has decreed, without proof in a court of law, to be under the control of “terrorists,” any form of opposition to the government’s wars and criminal actions can also be construed as aiding terrorists and be cause for arrest and indefinite detention. 

One Obama appointee, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, advocates that the U.S. government create a cadre of covert agents to infiltrate anti-war groups and groups opposed to U.S.government policies in order to provoke them into actions or statements for which they can be discredited and even arrested. 

Sunstein defines those who criticize the government’s increasingly lawless behavior as “extremists,” which, to the general public, sounds much like “terrorists.” In essence, Sunstein wants to generalize the F.B.I.’s practice of infiltrating dissidents and organizing them around a “terrorist plot” in order to arrest them. That this proposal comes from a Harvard Law School professor demonstrates the collapse of respect for law among American law professors themselves, ranging from John Yoo at Berkeley, the advocate of torture, to Sunstein at Harvard, a totalitarian who advocates war on the First Amendment.

The U.S. Department of State has taken up Sunstein’s idea. Last month Eva Golinger reported in the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, that the State Department plans to organize youth in “Twitter Revolutions” to destabilize countries and bring about regime change in order to achieve more American puppet states, such as the ones in Egypt, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, Britain, and Western and Eastern Europe.

The First Amendment is being closed down. Its place is being taken by propaganda in behalf of whatever government does. As Stratton and I wrote in the second edition of our book documenting the destruction of law in the United States:
“Similar assaults on the rule of law can be observed in England. However, the British have not completely given up on accountable government. The Chilcot Inquiry is looking into how Britain was deceived into participating in the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq. President Obama, of course, has blocked any inquiry into how the U.S. was deceived into attacking Iraq in violation of law.”
Much damning information has come out about Blair’s deception of the British government and people. Sir David Manning, foreign policy advisor to Blair, told the Chilcot Inquiry that Blair had promised Bush support for the invasion almost a year in advance. Blair had told his country that it was a last-minute call based on proof of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Sir William Patey told the inquiry that President Bush began talking about invading Iraq six or seven months prior to September 11, 2001. A devastating official memo has come to light from Lord Goldsmith, Prime Minister Blair’s top law official, advising Blair that an invasion of Iraq would be in breach of international law.
Now a secret and personal letter to Prime Minister Blair from his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, has surfaced. In the letter, the Foreign Secretary warned the Prime Minister that his case for military invasion of Iraq was of dubious legality and was likely as false as the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would bring Iraqis a better life.
Blair himself must now testify. He has the reputation, whether deserved or not, as one of the slickest liars in the world. But some accountability seems to be heading his way. The Sunday Times (London) reported on January 17 that the latest poll indicates that 52 percent of the British people believe that Blair deliberately misled his country in order to take Britain to war for the Americans. About one quarter of the British people think Blair should be put on trial as a war criminal.
Unlike the U.S., which takes care to keep the government unaccountable to law, Britain is a member of the International Criminal Court, so Blair does stand some risk of being held accountable for the war crimes of President George W. Bush’s regime and the U.S. Congress.
In contrast, insouciant Americans are content for their government to behave illegally. A majority supports torture despite its illegality, and a McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 51 percent of Americans agree that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.”
As our Founding Fathers warned, fools who give up liberty for security will have neither.
Author’s Bio: Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008.


Democratic debacle: Reaping the fruits of cowardice and chicanery

January 19, 2010

Blame Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi for Coakley’s Defeat

I say that Coakley faced her difficult situation because the leadership of the Democratic party decided to forget who elected them. They decided to treat corporations better than constituents. They decided to become more corporatist than populist.

By Rob Kall, Editor in Chief, OpedNews.com [print_link]

RAHM-large

RAHM EMANUEL, emblematic of the unprincipled scum running the Democratic party since Bill Clinton days.

Coakley has lost the seat long held by Teddy Kennedy to a far right extremist and pundits will spin the reasons it happened.

Will Obama see the problem? Will the congressional Democrats face reality and dump Reid and Pelosi? Not likely. That means we will see a massive rejection of the Democrats in November.

Thinking about which countries will be affordable once the US dollar collapses, anyone?

inventor. He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com With his experience as architect and founder of a technorati top 200 blog, he is also a new media / social media consultant and trainer for corporations, non-profits, entrepreneurs and authors.

Obama, Democrats in crisis over Massachusetts Senate race

They had it coming…even in the absence of a legitimate opposition, the treacherous Democrats are liable to get whipped.

Obama, Democrats in crisis over Massachusetts Senate race
By Patrick Martin 
19 January 2010
Senior Democratic Party leaders, from President Obama on down, were mobilized over the weekend in a last-ditch effort to prevent an upset Republican victory in the special election January 19 to fill the US Senate vacancy in Massachusetts.
Democrat Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, is tied with Republican Scott Brown or even trailing in many recent polls in the contest to fill the seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for 47 years. The seat has been in Democratic hands continuously for the past 58 years, since John F. Kennedy won election in 1952.
The state of Massachusetts is most heavily Democratic, in electoral terms, of the 50 states, with a Democratic governor, a state legislature with a greater than two-thirds majority for the Democrats in both houses, and not a single Republican in Congress.
The last time a Massachusetts Republican won election to the House of Representatives was 1994. No Republican has won a Massachusetts seat in the US Senate since 1972.
Massachusetts voted for the last three Democratic presidential candidates by margins over 60 percent. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans three-to-one in the state.
The outcome of Tuesday’s election remains in doubt, but the very fact that Brown, an obscure state senator, could take the lead in some pre-election polls testifies to the mounting crisis of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat would send shockwaves through the party and stoke mounting fears of a debacle in this year’s congressional elections in November.
In a symptom of this political trend, Congressman Vic Snyder, an Arkansas Democrat, announced last week that he would not seek reelection. Snyder was facing a heavily funded Republican challenger in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. Snyder is the fifth conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat in the House to announce his premature retirement, although there are still more Republicans than Democrats who have opted not to run for reelection in the House.
As recently as six weeks ago, when Coakley won an easy victory in the Democratic primary on December 8, it was conventional wisdom that she would win the special election easily. Some 668,000 people voted in the contested Democratic primary, compared to 165,000 who took part in the Republican contest, where Brown was the consensus candidate of the party establishment.
Brown has waged a campaign of demagogic pseudo-populism, presenting himself as a “common man” who drives a pickup truck (he is a well-heeled lawyer and state legislator), while portraying Coakley as the personification of the Democratic Party “elite.” He has capitalized on the widespread disillusionment with the Obama administration’s policies, above all the recognition that the government has bailed out Wall Street while doing nothing for working people faced with unemployment and wage-cutting. The rising unemployment rate and the evident failure of the Obama administration to do anything to provide jobs has been a major theme in the campaign.
The pre-election polls show a collapse in support for the Democrats, rather than any upsurge in support for the ultra-right nostrums of the Republicans (Brown, for instance, reportedly does not believe in evolution—in a state with more institutions of higher education than any other). Polls suggest that the turnout among Democrats and those who voted for Obama in 2008 will be far lower on a percentage basis than among Republicans and McCain voters.
The poll numbers also reveal a growing understanding that the healthcare reform program making its way through Congress threatens the benefits of working people and Medicare recipients, while protecting the insurance companies, drug manufacturers and other large corporate interests.
Obama’s support for taxing so-called “Cadillac” healthcare benefits—which could affect hundreds of thousands of union members in Massachusetts—has hurt the Democratic campaign. One poll showed that while union leaders unanimously backed Coakley, union members planning to vote were supporting Brown by 53 percent to 45 percent.
Brown has sought to exploit popular disillusionment and anger, presenting his campaign as a referendum on the Obama healthcare program and promising to be the “41st vote” in the Senate to defeat it. The bill passed the Senate by a 60-40 vote, the bare minimum needed to overcome the Republican filibuster, including the vote of Senator Paul Kirk, who was appointed to temporarily fill the vacancy left by Kennedy’s death.
Some of those voting for Brown are doing so out of fear that the Obama healthcare plan, which calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare spending cuts, will reduce their benefits. A 76-year-old woman told theWashington Post, “The health care has got me really worried.” A single mother who raised eight children on welfare and always voted Democratic, Jeanne Jekanowski told the Post, “I’m scared to death they’re going to reduce my Medicare.”
Brown has attacked Coakley from the right on issues of national security. A lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard, he denounced Coakley for her opposition to Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He also criticized Obama for the decision to try Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab in a civilian court instead of before a military tribunal.
After initially deciding not to campaign in Massachusetts, Obama reversed himself and appeared with Coakley at a rally Sunday at Northeastern University in Boston, where he launched a demagogic attack on Brown as the candidate of Wall Street.
Citing the proposal from his administration to impose a minimal surtax on major banks that received bailout funds, Obama declared, “Martha’s opponent already is walking in lockstep with Washington Republicans. She’s got your back; her opponent’s got Wall Street’s back.”
In another applause line to the crowd that jammed a basketball arena, Obama said, “Bankers don’t need another vote in the United States Senate. They’ve got plenty.”
If Obama were to speak the truth, he would have to say that the banks have 100 votes in the US Senate, as well as 435 in the House of Representatives and the all-out backing of the White House. The Obama administration is responsible for loans, cash infusions and guarantees totaling up to $23.7 trillion for the financial aristocracy which both the Democrats and the Republicans serve.
In the Massachusetts campaign, Obama and the Democrats are reaping what they have sowed over the past two years. The 2008 presidential campaign was a fraud, organized by powerful sections of the ruling elite who wanted a new face to pursue essentially the same policies as those pursued by Bush, albeit with some important tactical modifications. Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, of new politics, of a progressive but deliberately vague “reform” agenda. Once in office—and even before, in the case of the bank bailout—his administration has been one of Wall Street, the military and the intelligence-security apparatus.
Under the undemocratic US two-party system, there is no reflection of the leftward-moving views and aspirations of the broad masses. If the people of Massachusetts were actually voting in a referendum on an even minimally progressive healthcare program—say, the expansion of Medicare to cover every American—there is little doubt they would approve it by a massive majority. Obama gives them no such choice.
The cynicism of Obama’s latest effort at false populism—featured in his Wall Street-bashing radio speech Saturday as well as his remarks in Massachusetts—was admitted by a liberal supporter, columnist Robert Kuttner, in remarks on Huffington Post. He noted that he had received numerous robo-calls at his home in Massachusetts, including one from Obama.
He wrote: “In Obama’s call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, ‘because I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care.’ Let’s see, would that be the same insurance industry that [White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel] was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama’s bill as sensible reform? If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.”
At least in the short term, the mass disappointment and growing anger toward Obama and the Democrats redounds to the advantage of the Republicans. The perverse peculiarity of the US two-party system is that no matter how often voters express their desire for progressive change, the candidates once in office discard their campaign promises and ignore the views of the voters, in order to serve the interests of the financial-corporate elite. However bitter the internecine rivalry between the two parties, there is little in the way of substantive differences dividing them.
The fact that the Democrats have so much difficulty beating, and could even lose to a run-of-the-mill right-wing politician in the most liberal US state is a testimony to their bankruptcy and political duplicity.

By Patrick Martin 
19 January 2010 [print_link]

scottBrown-Mass

Challenger Scott Brown (R) trying to out-demagogue the Democrats.

Democrat Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, is tied with Republican Scott Brown or even trailing in many recent polls in the contest to fill the seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy for 47 years. The seat has been in Democratic hands continuously for the past 58 years, since John F. Kennedy won election in 1952.

The state of Massachusetts is most heavily Democratic, in electoral terms, of the 50 states, with a Democratic governor, a state legislature with a greater than two-thirds majority for the Democrats in both houses, and not a single Republican in Congress.

The last time a Massachusetts Republican won election to the House of Representatives was 1994. No Republican has won a Massachusetts seat in the US Senate since 1972.

Massachusetts voted for the last three Democratic presidential candidates by margins over 60 percent. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans three-to-one in the state.

The outcome of Tuesday’s election remains in doubt, but the very fact that Brown, an obscure state senator, could take the lead in some pre-election polls testifies to the mounting crisis of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat would send shockwaves through the party and stoke mounting fears of a debacle in this year’s congressional elections in November.

In a symptom of this political trend, Congressman Vic Snyder, an Arkansas Democrat, announced last week that he would not seek reelection. Snyder was facing a heavily funded Republican challenger in a district that voted overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. Snyder is the fifth conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat in the House to announce his premature retirement, although there are still more Republicans than Democrats who have opted not to run for reelection in the House.

As recently as six weeks ago, when Coakley won an easy victory in the Democratic primary on December 8, it was conventional wisdom that she would win the special election easily. Some 668,000 people voted in the contested Democratic primary, compared to 165,000 who took part in the Republican contest, where Brown was the consensus candidate of the party establishment.

Brown has waged a campaign of demagogic pseudo-populism, presenting himself as a “common man” who drives a pickup truck (he is a well-heeled lawyer and state legislator), while portraying Coakley as the personification of the Democratic Party “elite.” He has capitalized on the widespread disillusionment with the Obama administration’s policies, above all the recognition that the government has bailed out Wall Street while doing nothing for working people faced with unemployment and wage-cutting. The rising unemployment rate and the evident failure of the Obama administration to do anything to provide jobs has been a major theme in the campaign.

The pre-election polls show a collapse in support for the Democrats, rather than any upsurge in support for the ultra-right nostrums of the Republicans (Brown, for instance, reportedly does not believe in evolution—in a state with more institutions of higher education than any other). Polls suggest that the turnout among Democrats and those who voted for Obama in 2008 will be far lower on a percentage basis than among Republicans and McCain voters.

The poll numbers also reveal a growing understanding that the healthcare reform program making its way through Congress threatens the benefits of working people and Medicare recipients, while protecting the insurance companies, drug manufacturers and other large corporate interests.

Obama’s support for taxing so-called “Cadillac” healthcare benefits—which could affect hundreds of thousands of union members in Massachusetts—has hurt the Democratic campaign. One poll showed that while union leaders unanimously backed Coakley, union members planning to vote were supporting Brown by 53 percent to 45 percent.

Brown has sought to exploit popular disillusionment and anger, presenting his campaign as a referendum on the Obama healthcare program and promising to be the “41st vote” in the Senate to defeat it. The bill passed the Senate by a 60-40 vote, the bare minimum needed to overcome the Republican filibuster, including the vote of Senator Paul Kirk, who was appointed to temporarily fill the vacancy left by Kennedy’s death.

Some of those voting for Brown are doing so out of fear that the Obama healthcare plan, which calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare spending cuts, will reduce their benefits. A 76-year-old woman told theWashington Post, “The health care has got me really worried.” A single mother who raised eight children on welfare and always voted Democratic, Jeanne Jekanowski told the Post, “I’m scared to death they’re going to reduce my Medicare.”

Brown has attacked Coakley from the right on issues of national security. A lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard, he denounced Coakley for her opposition to Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He also criticized Obama for the decision to try Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab in a civilian court instead of before a military tribunal.

After initially deciding not to campaign in Massachusetts, Obama reversed himself and appeared with Coakley at a rally Sunday at Northeastern University in Boston, where he launched a demagogic attack on Brown as the candidate of Wall Street.

In another applause line to the crowd that jammed a basketball arena, Obama said, “Bankers don’t need another vote in the United States Senate. They’ve got plenty.”

If Obama were to speak the truth, he would have to say that the banks have 100 votes in the US Senate, as well as 435 in the House of Representatives and the all-out backing of the White House. The Obama administration is responsible for loans, cash infusions and guarantees totaling up to $23.7 trillion for the financial aristocracy which both the Democrats and the Republicans serve.

In the Massachusetts campaign, Obama and the Democrats are reaping what they have sowed over the past two years. The 2008 presidential campaign was a fraud, organized by powerful sections of the ruling elite who wanted a new face to pursue essentially the same policies as those pursued by Bush, albeit with some important tactical modifications. Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, of new politics, of a progressive but deliberately vague “reform” agenda. Once in office—and even before, in the case of the bank bailout—his administration has been one of Wall Street, the military and the intelligence-security apparatus.

Under the undemocratic US two-party system, there is no reflection of the leftward-moving views and aspirations of the broad masses. If the people of Massachusetts were actually voting in a referendum on an even minimally progressive healthcare program—say, the expansion of Medicare to cover every American—there is little doubt they would approve it by a massive majority. Obama gives them no such choice.

The cynicism of Obama’s latest effort at false populism—featured in his Wall Street-bashing radio speech Saturday as well as his remarks in Massachusetts—was admitted by a liberal supporter, columnist Robert Kuttner, in remarks on Huffington Post. He noted that he had received numerous robo-calls at his home in Massachusetts, including one from Obama.

He wrote: “In Obama’s call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, ‘because I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care.’ Let’s see, would that be the same insurance industry that [White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel] was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama’s bill as sensible reform? If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.”

At least in the short term, the mass disappointment and growing anger toward Obama and the Democrats redounds to the advantage of the Republicans. The perverse peculiarity of the US two-party system is that no matter how often voters express their desire for progressive change, the candidates once in office discard their campaign promises and ignore the views of the voters, in order to serve the interests of the financial-corporate elite. However bitter the internecine rivalry between the two parties, there is little in the way of substantive differences dividing them.

The fact that the Democrats have so much difficulty beating, and could even lose to a run-of-the-mill right-wing politician in the most liberal US state is a testimony to their bankruptcy and political duplicity.

PATRICK MARTIN is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.



Liberalism and Wall Street

SPECIAL—

Liberalism and Wall Street
By Barry Grey 
16 January 2010
In an op-ed piece published January 10 entitled “The Other Plot to Wreck America,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich denounces the criminal actions of Wall Street executives and the official cover-up of their operations. He correctly asserts that the havoc created by the bankers poses a threat to the American people “on a more devastating scale than any Al Qaeda attack.”
He writes: “Americans must be told how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin.”
He accuses both parties and, by implication, the Obama administration of aiding and abetting the looting of the country by the banks. He points out, for example, the key role played by Clinton’s treasury secretary and former Citigroup executive, Robert Rubin, in dismantling the last vestiges of the Roosevelt-era bank reforms, and the complicity of Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in secretly funneling tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street banks in the government bailout of the insurance giant AIG.
Rich paints an accurate picture of the American political system, “where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.”
Among liberal commentators, including fellow columnists at the New York Times, Rich is unusual. A talented writer, he has the ability, no doubt related to his past career as the newspaper’s drama critic, to make acute observations.
Yet when it comes to drawing political conclusions from his portrait of a society dominated by a financial oligarchy, his analysis collapses into banality.
What is his answer to the irresponsible and destructive tyranny of the banks? It is to entrust his hopes, and the fate of the American people, to the deliberations of the latest bipartisan congressional panel set up to carry out an official whitewash. “It is against this backdrop,” he writes, “that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical.”
No serious observer can place the slightest confidence in this body, set up almost as an afterthought last May by the Democratic leadership of Congress, after they had authorized the doubling of both the federal budget deficit and the national debt to rescue Wall Street. Rich admits that the panel’s funding is derisory. Its $8 million budget, he points out, is less than the combined amount spent by three of the major banks in the first nine months of 2009 to lobby Congress against any genuine banking reform.
In the event, the commission’s first hearing, held Wednesday, provided yet another occasion for the bankers to equivocate, lie and lord it over their servile inquisitors. (See: “Wall Street CEOs testify before financial crisis commission”).
The strange and obvious contrast between Rich’s ability to make astute observations about American society and the intellectually and politically impoverished conclusions he draws reflects more than his personal limitations. It reflects the fate of liberal thought in America.
A hundred years ago, it was widely accepted that the roots of poverty, exploitation and political corruption lay in the nature of the capitalist system. There was any number of liberal and left thinkers who clearly understood that the profit system was fundamentally at odds with socially progressive and democratic values. Muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, while by no means revolutionaries, contributed to the development of a socialist movement through their brilliant exposures of the crimes of big business.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the liberal philosopher and educator John Dewey argued that liberalism had to disassociate itself from capitalist private ownership and production for profit. He insisted that liberal values were incompatible with capitalist economics.
Dewey criticized Roosevelt’s New Deal from the left, correctly characterizing it as a palliative that did not fundamentally alter the structure of American society. He sought to develop, on the basis of liberal thought, a perspective for socialism to be achieved by reformist means.
In his 1935 essay, “The Crisis in Liberalism,” Dewey wrote: “Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”
The following year, he wrote: “Humane liberalism in order to save itself must cease to deal with symptoms and go to the causes of which inequalities and oppressions are but the symptoms. In order to endure under present conditions, liberalism must become radical in the sense that, instead of using social power to ameliorate the evil consequences of the existing system, it shall use social power to change the system.”
The radical strand of liberalism associated with Dewey was fundamentally flawed and unviable. As a leading exponent of pragmatism, a branch of idealist philosophy, Dewey rejected a materialist conception of history as well as the class struggle. His ideal of a non-revolutionary transition to a form of socialism through legislation, etc., had already been overtaken by historical events by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II.
Even the most principled representatives of American liberalism could not theoretically or programmatically go beyond the limits of a petty-bourgeois perspective. This prepared the ground for the post-war embrace by American liberalism of US imperialism.
When the United States emerged from the war as the dominant world power, American liberals for the most part lined up behind the global hegemonic aims of the ruling class, which took the most reactionary forms within the US. American liberalism backed the establishment of the national security state and supported the ferocious assault on socialist thought that accompanied the launching of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Leading liberals supplied the “democratic” rationalizations for the anti-communist witch-hunt and supported the purge of socialists and leftists from the trade unions, the film and entertainment industry, the schools and academia.
The damage to American political, intellectual and cultural life from the post-war alliance of the liberals with the most reactionary forces within the US ruling elite was immense, and its legacy continues to play a destructive and suffocating role.
The 1960s saw the beginnings of a rebellion against the stultifying and repressive legacy of McCarthyism. This was bound up with the emergence of revolutionary struggles of the working class internationally beginning in the late 1960s—most notably, the French General Strike of 1968—and the upsurge of the American working class and student youth during the same period.
The betrayal of these struggles by the Stalinist, social democratic and trade union bureaucracies enabled capitalism to stabilize itself and go on the offensive against the working class in the late 1970s and 1980s. Substantial sections of liberals saw their personal wealth rise considerably as a result of the policies associated with Reagan and his successors, and this change in social position was reflected in an accelerated turn to the right politically.
American liberalism accommodated itself to the free market nostrums of the right wing and the rapid growth of social inequality, and repudiated any serious program for social reform.
Rich is a product of this historical process. The banal political prescriptions that he offers are, in an objective sense, a reflection of the bankruptcy of liberalism.
There is no solution to the crisis of American society outside of the mobilization of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary program to abolish private ownership of the means of production and put an end to the socially destructive accumulation of personal wealth by the financial oligarchy.

Editor’s Note: As we have said many times in these pages, liberalism is a mirage, at best a self-delusion, at worst an implicit surrender to the system, and in all cases a big obstacle to the coalescing of a genuine anti-capitalist left in America and elsewhere. Liberals are good at denouncing the symptoms of the disease, but laughable when it comes to suggesting real cures.

By Barry Grey 
16 January 2010  [print_link]

Frank.rich-190

Frank Rich

He writes: “Americans must be told how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin.”

He accuses both parties and, by implication, the Obama administration of aiding and abetting the looting of the country by the banks. He points out, for example, the key role played by Clinton’s treasury secretary and former Citigroup executive, Robert Rubin, in dismantling the last vestiges of the Roosevelt-era bank reforms, and the complicity of Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in secretly funneling tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street banks in the government bailout of the insurance giant AIG.

Rich paints an accurate picture of the American political system, “where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.”

Among liberal commentators, including fellow columnists at the New York Times, Rich is unusual. A talented writer, he has the ability, no doubt related to his past career as the newspaper’s drama critic, to make acute observations.

Yet when it comes to drawing political conclusions from his portrait of a society dominated by a financial oligarchy, his analysis collapses into banality.

What is his answer to the irresponsible and destructive tyranny of the banks? It is to entrust his hopes, and the fate of the American people, to the deliberations of the latest bipartisan congressional panel set up to carry out an official whitewash. “It is against this backdrop,” he writes, “that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical.”

No serious observer can place the slightest confidence in this body, set up almost as an afterthought last May by the Democratic leadership of Congress, after they had authorized the doubling of both the federal budget deficit and the national debt to rescue Wall Street. Rich admits that the panel’s funding is derisory. Its $8 million budget, he points out, is less than the combined amount spent by three of the major banks in the first nine months of 2009 to lobby Congress against any genuine banking reform.

In the event, the commission’s first hearing, held Wednesday, provided yet another occasion for the bankers to equivocate, lie and lord it over their servile inquisitors. (See: “Wall Street CEOs testify before financial crisis commission”).

The strange and obvious contrast between Rich’s ability to make astute observations about American society and the intellectually and politically impoverished conclusions he draws reflects more than his personal limitations. It reflects the fate of liberal thought in America.

A hundred years ago, it was widely accepted that the roots of poverty, exploitation and political corruption lay in the nature of the capitalist system. There was any number of liberal and left thinkers who clearly understood that the profit system was fundamentally at odds with socially progressive and democratic values. Muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, while by no means revolutionaries, contributed to the development of a socialist movement through their brilliant exposures of the crimes of big business.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the liberal philosopher and educator John Dewey argued that liberalism had to disassociate itself from capitalist private ownership and production for profit. He insisted that liberal values were incompatible with capitalist economics.

Dewey criticized Roosevelt’s New Deal from the left, correctly characterizing it as a palliative that did not fundamentally alter the structure of American society. He sought to develop, on the basis of liberal thought, a perspective for socialism to be achieved by reformist means.

In his 1935 essay, “The Crisis in Liberalism,” Dewey wrote: “Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”

The following year, he wrote: “Humane liberalism in order to save itself must cease to deal with symptoms and go to the causes of which inequalities and oppressions are but the symptoms. In order to endure under present conditions, liberalism must become radical in the sense that, instead of using social power to ameliorate the evil consequences of the existing system, it shall use social power to change the system.”

The radical strand of liberalism associated with Dewey was fundamentally flawed and unviable. As a leading exponent of pragmatism, a branch of idealist philosophy, Dewey rejected a materialist conception of history as well as the class struggle. His ideal of a non-revolutionary transition to a form of socialism through legislation, etc., had already been overtaken by historical events by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II.

Even the most principled representatives of American liberalism could not theoretically or programmatically go beyond the limits of a petty-bourgeois perspective. This prepared the ground for the post-war embrace by American liberalism of US imperialism.

When the United States emerged from the war as the dominant world power, American liberals for the most part lined up behind the global hegemonic aims of the ruling class, which took the most reactionary forms within the US. American liberalism backed the establishment of the national security state and supported the ferocious assault on socialist thought that accompanied the launching of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Leading liberals supplied the “democratic” rationalizations for the anti-communist witch-hunt and supported the purge of socialists and leftists from the trade unions, the film and entertainment industry, the schools and academia.

The damage to American political, intellectual and cultural life from the post-war alliance of the liberals with the most reactionary forces within the US ruling elite was immense, and its legacy continues to play a destructive and suffocating role.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of a rebellion against the stultifying and repressive legacy of McCarthyism. This was bound up with the emergence of revolutionary struggles of the working class internationally beginning in the late 1960s—most notably, the French General Strike of 1968—and the upsurge of the American working class and student youth during the same period.

The betrayal of these struggles by the [statist], social democratic and trade union bureaucracies enabled capitalism to stabilize itself and go on the offensive against the working class in the late 1970s and 1980s. Substantial sections of liberals saw their personal wealth rise considerably as a result of the policies associated with Reagan and his successors, and this change in social position was reflected in an accelerated turn to the right politically.

American liberalism accommodated itself to the free market nostrums of the right wing and the rapid growth of social inequality, and repudiated any serious program for social reform.

Rich is a product of this historical process. The banal political prescriptions that he offers are, in an objective sense, a reflection of the bankruptcy of liberalism.

There is no solution to the crisis of American society outside of the mobilization of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary program to abolish private ownership of the means of production and put an end to the socially destructive accumulation of personal wealth by the financial oligarchy.

BARRY GREY is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.



Naked Empire

Happy New Year … Take to the Streets

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By SAUL LANDAU

Millions of Americans drink “unhealthy” water; military suicides escalate; schools erode and health programs collapse.The Senate passed a $626 billion “defense” budget without discussion. Since 1947, when the War Department became the Defense Department, Congress has allocated trillions of dollars, but all for offense and with dubious results: Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1964-74), Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those countries attacked or threatened us.

In Copenhagen, Obama reflected the denial mood of Congress, banks and corporations and offered platitudes to reduce global warming while admitting the perils of growing climate change. Raising unpleasant future scenarios signifies unacceptable political pessimism. The press, predictably, abdicated on all issues not connected to celebrity scandal.

Last September, Fidel Castro said modern media’s main message was “Buy this, buy that.” After watching CNN International, a network whose founder, Ted Turner, attributed to Fidel the idea of fashioning a global news network, he called such “news” a purveyor of “universal disorientation.”

Mass confusion also derives from priorities. As unemployment grew and war raged, newspaper headlines and TV news shows featured Tiger Woods’ women. Even George Orwell didn’t imagine how incessant visual shock images and audio babble could combine with the blur of newsprint to immerse the public in depths of muddle.

Misdirected U.S. residents also entered the second decade of the Century as victims because of scams and con jobs perpetrated by CEOs. Ruses perpetrated by the country’s highest officials which led to the U.S. military’s reduction of parts of Iraq and Afghanistan to rubble – with massive death and injury.

The Century itself began with a sham election. Bush’s presidential qualifications equaled mine as a religious icon painter. No matter. The Supreme Court established that democracy did not include counting votes in Florida.

Shortly after, Bush’s buddy and campaign contributor, ENRON chief “Kenny-Boy” Lay, stood naked as his company defrauded the public — billions of dollars of losses hidden by fraudulent accounting – we learned the new meaning of “innovative.” For six consecutive years Fortune named ENRON its “most innovative company.”

Some ENRON executives made billions by helping cause and then profit from a California power shortage; others guided creative accountants through courses in numerical book-cooking so as to create the façade of profitability. Other monster-sized corporations with high ratings also collapsed (Adelphia and WorldCom) thanks to dubious profiteering and speculating by top executives.

Despite warning signs that “prosperity” included phony accounting, Fed Chairs offered rosy predictions of an eternal housing boom. The U.S. economy would perpetually rise.

The venerable Bernie Madoff assured clients, with phony assets statements, that they would enjoy ever larger fortunes by investing pension and endowment funds in his licensed ponzi scheme of $64 billion. Bernie’s good times lasted more than a decade.

Bush had done nothing of note until Osama’s crew struck. Bush’s National Security neocons then pushed their aggressive agenda through a terrified Congress and an un-skeptical media. Invading Afghanistan would somehow retaliate for the 9/11 outrage, rid the country of the hated Taliban and, most importantly, capture the evil Osama bin Laden. Without fear or fact, neo con ideologues manipulated publics in the U.S. and England. In record time, we had a new war, and a hastily drafted Patriot Act to curtail our liberties for the purpose of stopping bin Laden, who wanted to curtail our freedom.

After no opposition to war in Afghanistan emerged, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “conned” the media and Congress, with British collusion, into war in Iraq (see the film “In the Loop”). Over six plus years, hundreds of thousands died. Iraq’s integrity got shattered. No weapons of mass destruction were found; nor ties between Saddam’s Iraq’s and Al-Qaeda. Bush and Blair shrugged: “It’s a better world without Saddam.” Relatives of the dead shouldn’t complain because their loved ones died “for a better world.”

Scandal also struck religion – again. Ultra religious megapreacher Ted Haggard liked getting speed inserted into his stimulant-craving booty according to his masseuse who followed the drugged-up Ted’s nether orifice with his own you know what. Like the fictional Elmer Gantry, Ted preached fidelity while imagining kinky scenarios. After his “outing,” Ted “cured” “homoerotica” by spending two weeks in Christian rehab. Now happily reunited with wife and kids, Ted counsels others with similar “problems.”

In November 2008, Americans, recoiling from the Bush nightmare, voted for “hope” and “change.” Obama then appointed the same old perpetrators as top economic bosses (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Economic Adviser-in-Chief Summers) and continued Bush’s Afghan war with more troops. Our rotting infrastructure will somehow take care of itself and the unemployed and foreclosed should have faith.

Happy New Year and Take to the Streets!

Saul Landau’s A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD was published by CounterPunch / AK Press.