There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?

Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?

We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?

It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.

Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.

This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.

We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.

Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An
equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.

Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.

Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.

Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.

What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces.

The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever
Obama mentions the plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of white corporate culture.

The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare. Where’s the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The sit-ins in congressional offices?

A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the Obama administration’s infamous memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph, a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama’s killer drone strikes. Let’s recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The war had come home.

Where are those protests today?

The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Hurricane season now lasts from June to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.

Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.

How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…

One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.

We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

This is a condensed version of a talk delivered at the University of Oregon.

Nairobi

They tell you ‘peace’, but you know you are living in a warzone. You know it from the start; you’ve sensed it ever since you were a very little boy or a girl. You wake up every morning, not certain whether you will witness another dusk, whether you will experience another sunrise.

A bullet can hit you at any moment while you are walking down the road. If you are a woman, you can be ambushed and dragged into a dark back alley or filthy shack along the way, then raped.

The police are very hard to find, and are hopelessly corrupt. You prefer not to seek their ‘assistance’. You are really on your own: you own no gun, you don’t belong to a gang, and you are extremely poor.

You are exposed.

Around where you live, there are bullets flying and fires burning. Once in a while a gasoline truck explodes, or an entire gangway of some miserable hovels bursts into flames. Loud salvos of sub-machine guns often penetrate the night.

Dreaming in front of burning garbage.

But they tell you ‘peace’. Europeans and North Americans, all those people that are making great incomes running their countless workshops in your dilapidated villages and towns… They are talking about ‘teaching you’ and your fellow slum-dwellers. They are talking about educating you, so that you can continue ‘living in peace’.

The companies and Governments of these ‘noble men and women’, those that are teaching you about peace, are all over your bleeding country. They even use it as a base to invade neighboring lands. They are actually doing many things, while you are eating shit. Well, maybe not literally, but stuff that you aliment yourself on is not really much better.

Gangway in Kariobangi slum in Nairobi.

You have no access to clean water. You stink. If you are a man, you stink. If you are a woman, you are dying from shame, but there is no escape: you stink as well. Chances are you are functionally illiterate. Maybe you can read a few separate words, but the meaning mostly escapes you.

You vote for those who are offering you more ‘bob’, and then you feel proud when you are told, again and again, that you live in a flourishing democracy.

You scream at night. Not every night, of course, but most nights you scream. You are considering ending it all, you often wish you could die, to depart from this world, but you do not dare to kill yourself.

Jitne Watere, former prostitute and victim of sexual abuse.

The more desperate you get, the more you are being told that you live in a ‘peaceful’ country. While everyone actually knows that you live in one of the biggest slums on earth.

You don’t resist. Foreign governments and companies hail you. You are their favorite subject. You are patient and submissive, as almost all people around you are. They kill each other instead of those who drag them into misery: foreign colonialists as well as local elites.

You are constantly publicized as a good example to others, all over the world, especially to those who are opting to fight for justice, dignity and a better society.

***

Kariobangi is a shantytown, near an enormous slum called Mathare, in the middle of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Life is upside down in the slums.

Through the narrow gangways and filthy roads with open sewage, I am being led to a meeting with “Fire”, a fearless gang member who has spent ten out of his thirty years, in various notorious Kenyan jails.

“Fire” is robust, pensive and humble. He left the high-security prison just recently. He wants to start from the scratch, once again, as he did so many times before.

We sit down on a concrete block. Soon there is a crowd of onlookers, mainly children.

“Do you think people here live in peace?” I ask.

“No”, answers “Fire”. “Here people die every day. All my friends are already dead. Men here die before they turn seventeen; most of them die when they are sixteen.”

“How does it feel?” I ask him. “How does it feel to be alive; to be the only one who managed to survive?”

“I am scared!” He looks at me. I know what he means. I have heard similar stories in Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Uganda, in so many other places. He knows that I know and that is why he speaks. He is not afraid of bullets hitting him, of daggers cutting him to pieces, of police torturing him; he is not afraid of dying. But he is scared of staying alive. Alone.

He is not a coward; he is brave. He is bright. He may be a gangster, but he has plenty of dignity. His fear is not animalistic; it is existential.

“How does it all begin here, in Mathare?”

Intoxicated smile from a local drunk.

“Here we start very young; slowly. We start by stealing at home, little by little. Then it gets big. Snatching phones and necklaces, buying guns. Eventually we get caught because we are young and have no experience. We go to prison and prison is both the hell and the university of crime. You enter, you know nothing about crime; you leave and you know everything. You encounter people of all races and trades: bank robbers and serial killers. They tell you: it is better to die robbing a bank than snatching a wrist watch.”

“How bad is the prison, Fire?”

“They rape you. There are no women, so if you are a young boy, you have no chance. Young kids get sodomized. To survive, they have to prostitute themselves. In prison, men rape men. Some marry each other. You get beaten and humiliated; by inmates and by police who are extremely brutal and sadistic. You learn how to get tough. If you survive, you are ready…”

I see a knife, sharp like a razor, shining in the sunlight.

I point at it: “Tell me about this.”

My gangster friend.

“Bila”, he says. “It comes from Somalia. They are made for killing. The way they are shaped, look; you lose so much blood and you die. Here we call them wambe, which in Swahili means razorblade. But no matter how sharp it is; it is still a knife.

“What about guns?” I ask.

“All over the place. They are very cheap. Guns come with the refugees, and the refugees arrive from Somalia and Ethiopia.”

“How do women survive here?”

Ready to kill in Matare slum in Nairobi.

“It is tough for them. Some are forced into prostitution; many join criminal gangs. Their boyfriends force them. Many women are submissive to ‘their men’. They do what they are told. They are told to have sex and they succumb; they get into prostitution, and they even join the gangs. Whatever ‘their men’ order them to do. Women here are scared of losing their men.”
At some point, “Fire” gets quiet. His eyes are fixed at some point in the distance.

“Talk to me” I say. “What is it?”

He looks somewhere else, but eventually he continues speaking. “My generation… I told you… All my friends are dead. All of them… All died… I feel a chill. But I can’t leave the slum… It needs me… I need it… I can’t run away from it, as I can’t run from myself. The slum is the microcosm… it is…”

“Your Kenya?” I suggest.

“Yes”, he nods. “I tell stories… I tell how I survived until this advanced age of thirty. I always tell stories, even to the government people. I tell them how lucky I am to be here… to be alive… I want to be good, but sometimes you can’t sleep three nights on an empty stomach.”

“We both tell stories”, I say.

He does not hear me, anymore. “I wasted so many years… so many years”, he repeats.

***

Those men of the slums, those boys! They play with guns, and they kill and rob. Like in the battlefields, their faces are resolute, serious. Even as they are doing the most insane things, even as they are ravishing and plundering, they look purposeful, as if their actions would have some deep meaning. Here and in wars, the acts of pillage have an almost religious connotation.
Living in slums is like living in a war zone: day after day, year after year, until one is hit, stabbed, burned; until one falls.

But what about the women of the slums, what happens to them? They become mothers at thirteen, prostitutes at fourteen; they get raped before their first period. Some go through an abortion at fifteen; others are dying of AIDS at the age of sixteen. Some throw their unwanted babies into the gutters, out of sheer thorough desperation.

Are the women of Mathare, are the women of Kibera, really living in peace? Are the women in the slums of Jakarta and Mumbai living in peace? Are the women in Haitian slums living in peace?
Ms. Jitne Watere has her ‘boutique’, in the middle of Kariobangi. It is just a small tent, next to a busy road, with some neat white clothes exhibited inside. I don’t ask about her age; such questions are rude. I don’t want to know any details; the most painful ones.

All I want to know: “Is this a war for you? Or is it peace?”

Somali knife ‘bila’ – the deadliest.

She avoids a direct answer. She looks at me straight in the eyes.

“If you are forced to become a prostitute at the age of twelve… If you get infected with HIV… if you are forced to… Can you call it peace?”

She is younger than I, but she looks at me as if I were a child. I have seen a lot in this life and she was told that I had. But I sense that she has seen much more, and I lower my eyes instinctively, as she speaks.

“By the standards of the slum, I became a prostitute at quite a late age – I was sixteen. I lost many friends. One girl after another was falling, dying from AIDS, from ‘bush abortions’, from being beaten to death, even from poisoning. Others had fallen because of overdose.”

We are standing inside her ‘boutique’. This is one of those moments when a writer sometimes cracks and just drops the notepad into the bag, waves his arm in desperation and says: “Let’s go and get some beer… Let’s get drunk… It is all damn screwed up!” But I get hold of myself; I don’t want to hear her stories through some unnatural filter.
And so we keep standing, facing each other.

“Rape”, she says. “It is often not even called rape here… And do you know what a bush abortion is?”

I nod. I know perfectly well what it is. But I don’t want to hear the details. I know I would not be able to put them into the pages of this brave publication. I stop her. I stop her.

“Fine”, she says. “But one thing you have to know about the bush abortion… It’s that sometimes… very often… mostly… it don’t succeed… If it fails, a woman dies. Or she doesn’t die, but she wishes she did. Because if she doesn’t, what comes is…”

Two of my acquaintances, one a local gangster and one a local ambulance worker, both very strong men, are beginning to look away, in shock. My driver is waiting outside.

“The babies are thrown into the garbage”, she says. “Some alive, some dead. They don’t tell you this in the newspapers… You are not supposed to talk about it… It is common here…”
‘In Indonesia, too’, I think. ‘And in Central America.’ I say nothing.

I ask no further questions. There is no point in asking anything else. She said all there is to say, intuitively, and in summary.

But I was wrong: she had not finished, yet. She drills me with her eyes. I came here, I risked my life to come here, and I did more than what she expected: I listened to her. Now she was going to give me her conclusion, her bottom line:

“Do you know why all this? Do you really… really… want to know?”

I know. She knows. I wrote it thousands of times. It is now her turn to say it:

“Because we are all poor! Because we have nothing! We do not matter. That’s why we die young. That’s why our children die…”

***

Then, in the car, Douglas who now works for St. John’s Ambulance Service, begins telling me his story:

“There is nothing local people can count on… They are unprotected, totally on their own. Women suffer the most. 90% of women here are single mothers; there is nothing like marriage or loyalty in the slums. The family system was broken. You go from door to door, you ask; you would be shocked.”

Our car is passing by Mathare. Almost all the children here suffer from malnutrition. Many have been working since an early age; pushing heavy carts, carrying loads, selling things by the curb.

“What is the typical story here?” I ask Douglas.

“Fourteen year old girl gets abused… or forced into prostitution… Mostly they become prostitutes for food. They go for about one dollar, out of desperation. She gets pregnant at the age of thirteen or fourteen, at most fifteen. Then her man leaves her. She is left with nothing; no education and no skills. These are girls who leave their children on the street… Others get abortion…

You were just told… many of them die.”

“Very few men get married”, chips in the driver, Gilbert. “Very few take care of their children and their women. Everything collapsed here. The entire structure is gone.”

“I will tell you a story and then you tell me whether this place is a peace area or a war zone”, continues Douglas. “One night I was forced to help my neighbor to give birth… It happened not far from where we are passing now. I was washing a car… My friend ran to me at 1AM, screaming that a woman who was living on our plot had entered labor. We managed to get her to the car. It was three of us in the vehicle – two boys and one woman with labor pains. The child began coming out. I opened the window and began screaming: “Help!” I was begging for some woman to open a door and come out, to help us, because my friend and I had no idea what to do. Nobody came out; they were all scared. My friend ran away. In the end I dashed into the local store and bought a razor blade… I cut her umbilical cord. Then I drove her home. Her son was born. They both survived, miraculously. Like in a war.”

“Like in a war”, I said, recalling a very similar situation, when an indigenous woman entered labor and gave birth in my car, in the Peruvian Andes, in 1992.

***

In Mathare 4A, the garbage is burning and child-scavengers are performing acrobatic somersaults. The ground is soft, swampy. The entire area consists of metal-sheet shacks, filthy stalls and a fast-moving polluted river. It is not as dirty and hopeless as those slums in Port-Au-Prince or in Jakarta, but it is still filthy to a great extent.

“I grew up here”, says Douglas.“I used to be like those kids. I used to play in the garbage; I used to swim in this river.”

He waves at the kids. They wave back.

“Fortunately, I got some education. Now I do first aid and fire fighting.”

“Douglas, so what are you facing here?” I ask. “What casualties do they bring to the medical posts at night?”

“Victims of all sort of violence”, he replies. “Machete wounds, gunshots… You know, police shoots gangsters and innocent by-standards, while gangsters shoot victims, sometimes police.

Everyday something terrible happens: people are shot, stabbed, and raped.”

I am taking all of this in, then taking notes and photographing somersaulting children.

Tiny and scared in Matare slum.

“We have to go”, says Douglas, abruptly. “They will soon begin closing on us”.

“Wait”, I say. He speaks better here than in the car. It is all flowing well, coming out effortlessly.

“Ok”, he says. “I know what you are trying to prove. And I agree with you a hundred percent. It is a war zone, ok? It is a battleground. But now please listen to me: To me, to us here, it is normal. Totally normal, get it? Violence is normal… I know, I sense it is not good, but it is normal… I buried many friends here. Every day, several people get assaulted, killed, shot. Nothing surprises me, anymore! It is normal! Many of my friends have died… many of “Fire’s” friends died. My cousin was recently killed… He was shot dead, at sixteen! Women… they get raped, brutalized, molested, insulted… At night… almost all of them here experienced some violence, even at home… And at night, only those ‘hardcore’ ones dare to open the door… Men die because they fight back… You know, those gangsters who are assaulting people, they are not as brave as they try to look…Deep inside they are human, scared little kids, boys… They know they can die while stealing, and so they kill, because they are frightened… Despite everything, they want to live… They want to live desperately… and so they kill.”

He said enough. He breathes heavily.

“Normal! All this is normal…” He repeats.

“So why are you crying?” I ask.

He does not reply. He looks around.

“We go!” He shouts at me. “Fast! They are watching us; they are coming. Here they can do anything they want to you… They can take anything…”

“Let’s go”, I agree. “We have photos inside this camera. No matter what, they can’t take this one.”

“We fight?” He asks. “If they come, we fight or we let it go?”

Gilbert, the driver, evaluates the situation. He steps on it, and drives the car towards us through the grass. Our feet are caught in unstable, swampy ground. There are strange movements all around us, several people closing on us. The river is on the left. I am considering my options. The river seems to be one possibility.

“We will fight”, I say at the end.

“Good.”

The car is faster than the gang members. We dive in. Gilbert drives towards the road.

When we are inside, Douglas grunts: “You are tough”.

That’s all that matters here. My color of skin becomes irrelevant and so is my work. The only thing that has value in the slum is whether one has guts.

***

Constable Bobby Ogola is based at Buruburu Police Station. Buruburu is one tough place and Constable is a tough guy who does not seem to like anybody, especially not the gangsters and Somali refugees. Anywhere else his attitude would be questionable, called racist. But it is again normal here, in the war zone called the slum:

“There are too many firearms in the hands of young people aged between sixteen and thirty. Most of the firearms come from Somalia. We have constant cases of car-jacking here, of violent robberies, of rapes and murder. There are also abductions in Eastlands.”

The doctor at the dispensary in the middle of Kiriobangi, calculates that on average, around ten people die a violent death during a weekend, in this slum alone.

The majority of the people in Nairobi live in slums.

As we leave, Gilbert the driver concludes: “You write about these places for years… It is absolutely clear that the people here live in a combat zone. You see their children go hungry everyday. There is no running water, no jobs, and no toilets. But there are bullets and knifes.And there is fear and violent death everywhere.”

“You die if you get sick here”, says “Fire”. “Life is so cheap. Of course people die from cancer and other ‘complicated’ illnesses, because there is no way they would be treated for free. But they also die of easily preventable diseases like malaria. All we can get here are pain killers, sometimes.”

***

Is the system to blame? Everybody thinks so, but there is also that dogged belief that ‘nothing can be done” and “nothing can be changed”.

The elites are too powerful, and they are backed by several Western powers. Corruption is endemic, but corruption is not homegrown; it came from outside, it was imported, and like elsewhere, it entered the ‘culture’ as local elites were encouraged to collaborate with colonial powers.

While the local MPs are enjoying some of the highest government salaries anywhere in the world, almost no funds are allocated for the improvement of life in the slums.

“We have a program here, we formed an organization”, says Ms. Jitne Watere. “We are trying to help abused women. But very few funds from above are allocated. And that little that there is, disappears in corruption. Women meet, they talk and then they ask: ‘What next?’ But there is nothing we can do.”

***

While Venezuela, Bolivia, China, Vietnam and other socialist countries have managed to lift hundreds of millions of people from poverty, those close allies or virtual colonies of the West, including Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia, the Philippines and India, to name just a few, developed and then perfected total spite for most of their own people.

In Kenya, they hold elections, but no major political party represents the interests of the impoverished majority. Extreme capitalism serves only a very small minority of the immoral rulers. Statistics are manipulated and twisted, while the media is subservient to local and foreign regimes.

Nairobi, Kampala, Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, Guatemala City – the same pattern of urban violence. Shopping malls and five star hotels surrounded by barbed wires and war zones.
Now there are organized tours, to the slums. Some Europeans like to see, to feel the thrill. One week in the national parks of Kenya and Tanzania, then few hours in Kibera, watching people starving and dying. It is a complete experience, something to show neighbors at home or spread through social media. I saw this while writing about the Yugoslav War. I saw this recently on several Syrian borders. War tourism…

***

Some time ago, I was filming Kibera from the railway tracks; those that pass through this biggest slum on earth. I put my professional camera on a tripod and began working.
An old man approached me. He was drunk, or he was high on miraa.

“I want your camera”, he said. “I can kill you now, and I don’t give a damn what will happen to me after. I am HIV positive; I have nothing, I am dying.”

But he could not kill me. He was weak, and he could hardly stand on his feet. My friends rushed to my rescue, but I didn’t need any help. The man disappeared under the hill. He was destroyed, shaking, and alone.

After that, it was all totally peaceful. It was peaceful for me, for the Kenyan elites and for the global regime.

But soon, as the sun began setting down, below there, in the middle of the slum, the first fires started burning and the first gunshots began resonating. Another battle was beginning, the battle between the victims and the other victims.

The poor have been obediently dying, as the Global regime has been consolidating its control over the planet.

All photos by Andre Vltchek.

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His critically acclaimed political revolutionary novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear” (Pluto). He just completed feature documentary “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website.

He played the usual word games, defining the situation in self-serving terms like Counter-Terrorism.

You know that song by heart: Counter-Terrorism in general, and drone warfare and facilities like Guantanamo in particular, are moral, legal, and necessary to defend America.

Obama can never say that Counter-Terorism is an aggressive form of political warfare that is necessary to expand and police the American Empire, coerce and weaken strategic enemies (Russia and China), and control the American people by expanding government surveillance, reducing civil liberties, and through the type of propaganda he spewed yesterday, shaping the political attitudes of the American people.

By political attitudes, I do not mean Republican and Democratic Party politics. I mean the politics of the State imposing its will on the people, and how much authority the people grant the State in the name of security.

Obama can never explain that the State has been waging political warfare for 65 years, expanding the empire and warping American minds, as the executive branch incrementally increases its extra-legal powers through the member agencies of the National Security Council, primarily the super secret CIA.

Most importantly, Obama will never say that Counter-Terrorism = Terrorism. That it is pure political violence.

His speeches – indeed, all of stated National Security policy regarding Counter-Terrorism – is designed to deflect attention from the fact that America engages in terrorism and imperial aggression on a massive scale.

I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago I went to the FBI office in Springfield, Massachusetts, about ten minutes from where I live. I asked a Special Agent what constitutes terrorism and support for terrorism. He referred me to Washington, DC. The PR person in DC sent me excerpts from a law book defining terrorism and support for terrorism.

As a follow up question I noted that the Syrian rebels, including associates of Al Qaeda, are engaged in documented acts of terrorism against the Syrian government. I asked the FBI if the CIA, which supports the Syria rebels, is not by definition engaged in support for terrorism?

The FBI said it has no authority over the CIA. It did not dispute that the CIA engages in terrorism.

The only thing that means anything to the FBI is that the United States government claims that the Syrian government terrorizes Syrians. Thus, CIA aid to the rebels constitutes Counter-Terrorism.

And that’s how Counter-Terrorism = Terrorism.   Always has, always will.

Drone warfare is the ultimate form of terrorism. It is political warfare designed to terrify foreign enemies and American citizens alike. It demonstrates to foreign enemies that the President can kill them and their supporters like a god hurling a lightning bolt from the sky. He knows each and everyone one of them by name and address, and he knows what they’re thinking.   He knows what you’re thinking too. Drone warfare lets Americans know that Obama is omnipotent, remorseless, and above the law.

Despite what Obama says, you know this to be true.

Drone warfare is no longer experimental, either. It’s here to stay, and you have been conditioned to accept it.

Kidnapping people, rendering them, and holding them without due process in torture centers like Guantanamo is also terrorism, designed for all the same psychological reasons as drone warfare.   Like drone warfare, administrative detention is not going away.

You know that too, and you know that you are powerless to do anything about it..

Doesn’t matter that you are more likely to be killed by a bee sting than a terrorist attack.

Doesn’t matter that 30,000 Americans die every year in automobile accidents. You will climb into your car and hurtle down the highway at 80 MPH, heedless of the danger. Fearlessly.

But you will fear Obama.

DOUGLAS VALENTINE is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program and The Strength of the Wolf, which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html . Valentine co-authored a detailed essay on US death squads in the Iraq War for the March issue of CounterPunch magazine. 

Let’s be clear from the outset, the murder of the British soldier was appalling and should be condemned. Whatever the political grievance, there is no justification whatsoever for the attempt to severe the head of a person in broad daylight. Such violence is undoubtedly beyond comprehension to many of us in the Western World. Unfortunately that cannot be said for some places where our military continues to have a lasting presence.

Before all the facts were established, politicians and media alike were quick to declare that the violence “looked like terror”. This justification was made on two counts. Firstly, it was presumed that the target for the violence was a military personal. The second, more compelling at the time, was the footage of an assailant who stated without remorse for the action: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We must fight them”.

Further adding as if to claim that the burden of history left him with no option: “I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.”

The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, immediately responded by declaring that the vicious assault on the soldier was more than an individual crime but an “attack against all of us”. This justification however raises a number of serious questions. Assuming that the violence was politically motivated does that necessarily imply that the attack was on the entire fabric of our society? And what does it mean to collapse the military with the civic so that no distinction can be established?

Not only has the role and function of our militaries been radically transformed beyond “defence” as they have been given the oxymoronic task of fighting for peace, under the auspices of the War on Terror many have been deeply uncomfortable with their interventions and the violence this created. Violence, it must be added, many even in the policy world believe to be the source of the today’s fundamentalism. Moreover, if we are to use the words of the assailant as justification for political motive, should we not take these more seriously and open them up to rigorous scrutiny?

Like the violence witnessed at the Boston Marathon last month, it is evident that this spectacle of violence was markedly different from the horrors of 9/11 and 7/7. No longer purposefully aiming for “mass casualty” shock appeal, the numbers of victims are much less in number. That does not demean the nature of the tragedy. It does however raise the question as to why these localised acts of violence can still be presented as part of a continuum of threat that endangers global security?

Michael Clarke, the director of United Kingdom’s less than impartial think tank the Royal United Services Institute, speaking on the BBC called the perpetrators of the attack “Homicidal exhibitionists”. They represent a handful of individuals – possible lone – who crave the media spot-light and shock through the celebratory nature of violence as a public spectacle. This may well be true, but the question remains why do these particular acts shock us while the comparable events in other parts of the world are barely considered? Indeed, why are we so fixated in the contemporary period on these types of “media-events” instead of the continual violence many suffer on a daily basis which just so happens to occur outside of the spotlight?

Such events continue to be presented to us as random. This is not incidental. Random events strike without warning. They offer in other words no credible foresight. Some even reason that we need to accept their inevitability. Surely, however, if we accept that the violence is political then there is nothing random whatsoever about it occurrence? Political violence is always a process. It always has a history. Its spectacle as such cannot be divorced from the violence which precedes it. Neither can a solution be found unless it faces up to the altogether more difficult political task.

Perhaps one of the more disturbing aspects of the violence was the manner in which the video of the assailant went viral. This should not escape our attentions. Our culture is fascinated by spectacles of violence. From Hollywood movies, video games, to nightly dramas, violence seems to grab our attention more than any other performance. Maybe this alone demands more in depth scrutiny and more ethical consideration?

We must remember that “Terror” by definition is morally and politically loaded. Far from offering to us an objective assessment, it immediately invokes ideas of barbarity and evil, even though the act of violence is deemed to be pre-mediated, rationally calculated, and politically motivated. What is more, neatly setting apart bad guys from good guy, it rightly de-legitimates some forms of violence, yet morally authors others as necessary for the protection of the core values of societies.

Its peculiarity however is that while terror is a political term, once applied it consciously prevents serious politically discussion. Terror offers no compromise. There is nothing to be negotiated. There is no credible politics to be spoken of. More than failing to even entertain that the term may be brought into critical doubt, what remains is a framing of the violence in such a way that militarism reigns supreme. Terror in other-words sanctions the need to meet violence with a violent response.

It is no doubt disturbing to see this type of violence come to our cities streets. It is also deeply unsettling to witness the assailants remaining at the scene and continuing to calmly walk about and justify their actions to a filming public as if the violence was normal. For violence to have any shock value it must appear somehow exceptional. And yet to understand it fully we need to take seriously the claim that its exceptional qualities are wholly dependent upon highly contingent factors. Not least which side of the political divide we just so happen to have simply been born into.

We may remain shocked, angry and outraged by the violence witnessed on our screens. This is an understandable human response. Too often we forget that emotions matter. There is nothing however to be gained by labelling it a “terror attack” other than to perpetuate a climate of fear that fuels hatred and extremist positions on all sides. Dealing instead with it as either a localised form of criminality that should not be dignified with a political response or a politically motivated attack outside of the Terror frame may just allow us to break this tragic cycle of violence.

Brad Evans is director of Histories of Violence, Global Insecurities Centre, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at University of Bristol.

In 1966 Qian supervised China’s first nuclear missile test in the Xinjiang desert. The launch of the first Chinese satellite, the Dong Fang Hong (DFH-1), on 24 April 1970, was his project, too. Qian retired in 1991, garlanded with honours, and died in 2009. He embodied the close links between the PRC’s nuclear and space programmes from their inception. From the first nuclear test in October 1964 to the triumph of 15 October 2003 when Lieutenant-Colonel Yang Liwei, aboard the Shenzhou 5, made China the third nation to launch a manned spacecraft, Beijing has strengthened those links, seeking to optimise its technological, budgetary and strategic resources. Despite the creation in the 1990s of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and plans to commercialise space missions, the People’s Liberation Army has a stronger role than ever in the space programme.

Seeking to maximise the leverage of the nuclear-space-ballistic triangle is not uniquely Chinese: it’s also familiar to specialist engineers in the US and France. But China is noteworthy for having espoused early on the nuclear doctrine of no first use (NFU), plus a solemn assurance — implicit in NFU — that it would never use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation. It also opposed any militarisation of space. It has relatively few means of defence and the viability of its delivery options (bombers carrying missiles and submarines capable of launching nuclear warheads) is questionable: this has made it the most discreet member of the international club of states with both space programmes and nuclear arms: France, the US, the UK, Russia, China and now India.

Discreet thus far, that is: with its economic development bringing growing political and military power, Beijing’s desire to keep a low profile may not be sustainable much longer, as indicated by its latest defence white paper, published on 16 April. The terms of its nuclear equation, long fixed, are changing, and the US has been first to register alarm.

Size of China’s arsenal

“Do we really know how many missiles the Chinese have today?” asked Richard Fisher — a keen, even obsessive China-watcher at the US International Strategy and Assessment Centre — in 2011: he knew that the Pentagon and Congress would take note (2). Uncertainty surrounds the size of China’s arsenal; it’s currently the only country in the P5 group (3) not to declare how many nuclear weapons it possesses. In 2009 SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) put the number of China’s deployed operational nuclear warheads at 186. The International Panel of Fissile Material (IPFM) (4) reckons 240. If you compare these estimates with the thousands of warheads held by Washington and Moscow, US reactions seem oversensitive. In May 2010 the US officially announced that it had 5,000 nuclear warheads (tactical, strategic or non-deployed). Of these, 1,700 are operational, on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) or strategic bombers (5).

A 2011 report from Georgetown University stirred up the small world of western experts on China’s nuclear programme (6). Over three years, under the direction of Professor Philip Karber, a former Pentagon employee, a group of students collated new data in the public domain. Their conclusions shocked the experts: the Chinese apparently had 3,000 nuclear warheads. The study also “revealed” a 5,000-km network of tunnels thought to be for the transport and stationing of nuclear weapons and specialist units. This “underground Great Wall” fired journalists’ imaginations and became the symbolic nuclear centrepiece of China’s naval bases in Asian waters (7).

American advocates of nuclear disarmament, such as Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, accused the Pentagon of fixing the study by involving Karber who, along with Richard Fischer and the gossip columnist William Gertz, is a prominent and insistent critic of “the Chinese threat”. The military rejected the high estimates (8). The question found its way into the political arena and on 14 October 2011 Republican Michael Turner presented the existence of this “unknown” underground labyrinth to Congress: “As we strive to make our nuclear forces more transparent, China is building this underground tunnel system to make its nuclear forces even more opaque”. The European press presented this “staggering network of tunnels” as a surprise, as did the Indian newspapers. This January, Barack Obama yielded to pressure from all sides and commissioned a Pentagon investigation, due to be published in August.

Not a secret after all

But the “underground Great Wall” wasn’t such a secret. In December 2009 the Hong Kong daily Ta Kung Pao published details of this vast construction project, which is thought to have employed tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers for a decade. The Asian public learned that the second division of the People’s Liberation Army — in charge of strategic nuclear forces — decided in 1995 to bury nuclear ballistic missiles more deeply so as to make them less vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike. A network of modernised tunnels is now said to run under the foothills of the mountains of Hebei Province in northeast China, several hundred metres below ground in a landscape of steep cliffs and canyons well suited to housing a geosecured nuclear response system.

It’s especially noteworthy that this revelation originated in a Chinese state TV documentary, in March 2008, which commented on the completion of the tunnel-building programme. Given the strict state control of the media, this announcement — which did not escape the attention of the Indian, American and European militaries — is tantamount to an official declaration. The tunnel programme is not an end in itself for the PLA, but a means of protecting its retaliatory strike capacity.

China is also moving from large, fixed, liquid-propelled missiles, vulnerable to being taken out in a preemptive strike, to lighter missiles with solid-fuel propulsion, which can be quickly relocated on mobile launchers, such as the DF-31A, which has an 11,000-km range. Whether mobile or buried underground, surface-to-surface missiles are the only part of China’s “nuclear triad” (the others being bombers and submarines) with genuine credibility.

China knows it cannot limit itself to protecting its nuclear response capability if it wants to retain credibility as a nuclear power that the US will respect, however reluctantly. It also needs to combat proactively the progress of the US’s antimissile defence, which is capable of neutralising China’s response capability. To escape, the PLA has long had its eyes on an alternative battlefield: space.

During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards (hostile to intellectuals, scientists and engineers) chanted “The higher the satellite, the lower the red flag!” Those days are gone. According to the former air force chief of staff and current vice-president of the powerful Central Military Committee, General Xu Qiliang, “China’s national interests are expanding and the country has entered the age of space” (9). Beijing is showing clear signs of wishing to challenge the US’s hegemony there — including in case of conflict, since, given the increasing dependence of modern armies on space, preventing the enemy having access to it is a priority.

Convinced that negotiations only take place between equals, China, along with Russia, believes that only significant independent progress will allow them to check the Pentagon’s ambitions for space superiority. China and Russia could then force the US to sign an undertaking to make space a militarily neutral zone, which would plug the gaps in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In 2001 recommendations in a report from the Space (or Rumsfeld) Commission exploited this treaty’s shortcomings and concluded that there was nothing preventing the US “placing or using weapons in space, applying force from space to earth or conducting military operations in and through space” (10).

China’s space aims

Kept out of the international space station by NASA, the Chinese are building their own — Tiangong — which will be completed by 2020 and open to scientists of all nations. They are developing a heavy-thrust space rocket and have announced a moon mission for 2025. They dream of outstripping the US and sending a manned craft to Mars after 2030. The second generation of their Beidou Navigation Satellite System will soon have 35 satellites, and offers the same geolocation services as GPS, including military functions.

But the collateral effects of this strategy may have gone beyond its original aims. China destroyed an old FY-1C weather satellite in January 2007 with an SC-19 interceptor to demonstrate its ability to strike in space. The US, with wide international support, immediately condemned China’s action as “space delinquency” and criticised the risk of space debris falling to Earth as well as the departure from its declared policy. In January 2011, in the most recent version of its National Security Space Strategy, the US warned: “We will retain the right and capabilities to respond in self-defense [in space], should deterrence fail” (11).

The American Everett Dolman asserts that “the coming war with China will be fought for control of outer space” (12). In the background there is the nuclear question: US early-warning satellites, which are used to detect ballistic missiles, are now a potential target for China. Without these satellites, US strategic nuclear command and the organisation of forces would be globally handicapped.

The US also has a painful premonition that it risks being outclassed technologically. It has all but forgotten that “Long March” rockets launched 20 or so commercial satellites before the US imposed an embargo on sales of satellite components to China in the 1990s. NASA didn’t get involved, as it still looked down on China. But the atomic clock has moved on. Even if the disparity in capability with the US remains vast, an exponential race to catch up is under way. Although the “major focuses” mentioned in the 2011 Chinese white paper on space are all civil — scientific and peaceful development, innovation, autonomy and opening up internationally — 18 out of 19 Chinese satellite launches that year were defence-related.

In 2012 around 30 Chinese satellites were put into orbit: telecommunication (Zhongxing 10), navigation, surveillance, reconnaissance and data transmission (Tianlian 1). A warning satellite programme is under way and a new satellite launch centre will soon open at Wenchang on Hainan Island. Meanwhile, the US moon programme, Constellation, was cancelled by Obama in 2010. Gregory Kulacki of the Union of Concerned Scientists believes “we [the US] need to get past the idea that the Chinese need us more than we need them” (13). An MIT engineer in 2008 modelled the conditions of a space war and was reassured by his conclusion that the Chinese would undoubtedly lose (14).

Questions over China’s progress

The atavistic reactions of some American journalists to the possible rise of an “equal competitor” at global level should not obscure the fact that Chinese progress in the nuclear and space fields does raise questions. All observers agree that China is the only member of P5 which is currently increasing its warhead stockpile. But how quickly? In the war of statistics, some experts suggest China has 1,800 operational nuclear warheads. But as arms control activists acknowledge, the crucial issue is not whether China is updating its arsenal — it is — but misinformation about the rate of that modernisation.

Nevertheless, given Chinese nuclear ambitions, the strategic balance within the P5 will shift. The UK says it now has fewer than 160 operational warheads. France, which has cut its stockpile by 50% since the end of the cold war, has also reduced its budget for nuclear deterrence by half and currently has around 100 operational warheads. In scarcely 10 years, as a result of what could be called a “space-nuclear symbiosis”, China has overtaken Europe’s two nuclear powers, which may have been its medium-term objective, and has put itself in the same league as the US, though still far from its equal. The US and China may eventually find themselves caught in a repeat of the absurd cold war dialectic and engage in the kind of irrational arms race that led the US and the USSR to stockpile warheads in silos to maintain the “balance of terror”. In the 1960s, the US had up to 31,000 operational warheads.

This maximalist vision of nuclear deterrence contrasts with the French principle of strict sufficiency (in a nuclear-armed world, “you only die once”), a dogma of “rational irrationality” which the French had convinced themselves that the Chinese had espoused since 1964. President Hu Jintao declared in 2009 at the UN that China “reiterated solemnly its firm engagement to a defensive nuclear strategy”.

This February Obama announced a further reduction in the US nuclear arsenal, which may shrink from 1,700 warheads to fewer than 1,000 by 2020. But will this minimal strategic life insurance hold if Chinese advances are confirmed? Will we see the return of the visions of strategist Hermann Kahn, who founded the Hudson Institute in 1961 and declared that the stockpiling of warheads was not so stupid, since a nuclear war could have a “winner” (15)?

The worried reactions of China’s neighbours will also be influential. In theory, the Japanese could relatively easily turn their new solid-fuel Epsilon rocket, which is due to make its maiden flight this year, into a long-range ballistic missile. Vietnam has ambitions in space. India is making progress with anti-satellite technology.

The solution can only be political. Re-establishing the safeguard of the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, unilaterally condemned by the Bush administration in 2002, would have some merit if negotiations included China. Such negotiations would be difficult, but the Chinese would have to examine any such offer, to judge by their official pronouncements on the essential conditions for global nuclear disarmament (16). In the meantime, a new logic of simultaneous modernisation of nuclear and space arsenals seems to be permanently altering the strategic balance in East Asia.

Olivier Zajec is a senior researcher at the Compagnie Européenne d’Intelligence Stratégique and author of La Nouvelle impuissance américaine(America’s New Impotence), L’Œuvre, Paris, 2011.

Notes.

(1) Evan Osnos, “The Two Lives of Qian Xuesen”,The New Yorker, 3 November 2009.

(2) “US worries over China’s underground network”, Agence France-Presse, Paris, 14 October 2011.

(3) The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are the only states with nuclear weapons recognised by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

(4) The IPFM was set up in 2006 by civil experts in non-proliferation from 17 countries. It is headed by Professor R Rajaraman of the University of New Delhi.

(5) “Nuclear Weapons: Who has what at a glance”, Arms Control Association, Washington, DC, November 2012.

(6) “Strategic implications of China’s underground
Great Wall”, Asia Arms Control Project, Georgetown University, 2009.

(7) See “China’s naval ambitions”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2008.

(8) Hans M Kristensen, “Stratcom Commander rejects high estimates for Chinese nuclear arsenal”, Strategic Security Blog, Federation of American Scientists, 22 August 2012.

(9) “China ‘to put weapons in space’”, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 3 November 2009.

(10) “Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization”, 11 January 2001. Its conclusions were later judged too aggressive by subsequent Defence Department reports.

(11) National Security Space Strategy, January 2011.

(12) Everett C Dolman, “New Frontiers, Old Realities”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol 6, no 1, Washington
DC, 2012.

(13) Jeff Foust, “Space Challenges for 2011”, The Space Review, 3 January 2011.

(14) Noah Shachtman, “How China Loses the Coming Space War”, Wired, San Francisco, 1 October 2008.

(15) Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War,Princeton University Press, 1960.

(16) “Statement by the Chinese delegation on nuclear disarmament at the thematic debate at the first committee of the 67th Session of UNGA”, 19 October 2012.

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

But those of us who have consistently struggled to defend the human rights of the victims of the repressive national security state over the last few years have a few very simple questions for the press – where was the outrage or even concern when the target of the State was the “usual suspects” of Black, Brown and poor folks and their ‘radical” sympathizers?   Why was there so little concern expressed by the Press when Obama’s national security apparatus conducted raids on oppositional organizations, expanded the infiltration of lawful organizations and increased domestic electronic and communication surveillance?  And when this administration shamelessly claimed the power to be the judge, jury and executioner of anyone that ended up on one of its kill lists, including U.S. citizens, why didn’t this incredible abuse of State power garner at least some serious concern from the press, let alone outrage?

Of course only the most unprincipled sycophants of the Obama administration would disagree that focusing the repressive state apparatus on working journalists and the outlets they work for is a dramatic abuse of Executive power.  Yet in the run-up to this moment of outrage the press seemed reluctant to seriously consider what was so obvious to many of us. That the Obama Presidency, from the beginning,  was  clearly committed to maintaining  and even building on the trajectory of expanding Executive power which began during the Bush administration that narrowed the range of constitutional and human rights of individuals and groups in the U.S.

The liberal press was so caught-up in this cult of personality that was so much a part of the Obama phenomenon,  it did not see or choose to ignore that the Obama administration’s approach to civil liberties turned his administration into act three of the Bush administration.  So While the Obama administration used the espionage act to clamp down on whistle-blowers,  its’ Department of Homeland Security coordinated the national repression of Occupy Wall street and its’ lawyers defended the Bush administration’s position that opposed allowing individual suites against the government agencies and telecom companies accused of engaging in warrantless electronic surveillance,  the only voices of concern came from the marginalized radical press.

And even though the press was warned that the legal theories advanced by the Obama administration in the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks could be easily applied to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists,  the press choose instead not to defend Julius Assange and Wikileaks.  For the bourgeois press, it appears that they believed that since they gleefully parroted the government line on issues from Libya to the need for deficit reduction, the government would never turn its repressive attention on it.

But now with the attack on Associated Press and the designation of James Rosen as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the government’s persecution of Stephen Kim, some mainstream journalists are finally giving a little more attention to the dangerously expanding power of the national security state. When many of us were attempting to educate the people on the threat posed to civil liberties and human rights by the National Defense Authorization Act, the corporate press never made the connection that under the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans that one day it could apply to members of their profession.

Even today with the new outrage from the press on the abusive use of power by this administration, the  press still does not seem to understand the dangers inherit in the unchecked power of the State.  It gave scant attention to the recent declaration by the administration that it has the right under the morally dubious “Authorization for use of military force” legislation passed by the U.S. congress, to wage global war for a period into infinity. And the press still dutifully presents anonymous government sources in a one-sided, pro-war perspective on the situation in Syria.

It has only been those of us from the margins who have been trying to signal the alarm to the American people that the country is perilously close to normalizing police state practices.  We raise the alarm primarily because we understand and have experienced first-hand the awesome power of the State’s repressive apparatus.  And while we know that we are the first to be targeted – the message communicated with the designation of Assata Shakur as a “most wanted terrorist” was clear for us in the radical Black movement- we also know that we are not going to be the only targets this time around.

So even with all of the limitations, we welcome the questions that are finally being raised by some elements of the corporate press.  We certainly don’t have illusions that the corporate media will help the people to understand the economic and political stakes in play during this period but the increased attention by the press with the imperial Presidency of Barack Obama might reveal to some members of the public the extent to which their democratic and human rights have been undermined over the last decade under President Bush and now President Obama.

Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian educator, reminded us that taking action against oppression is only possible when the people have developed critical consciousness.  In this strange and surreal period that characterizes U.S. politics where right-wing libertarians seem to be aligned with left-wing radicals to defend bourgeois rights against the encroachments of an oppressive state  supported by liberals and traditional conservatives,  the more debate that takes place and information disseminated the more possible that people will be shaken out of the Obama induced fog and recognize that they are living through one of the most repressive periods in the history of this country. Those of us on the frontline of the fight to defend democracy and human rights hope that with this new critical consciousness more people will be prepared to act to defend themselves and their fundamental human rights.

Ajamu Baraka is a long-time human rights activist and veteran of the Black Liberation, anti-war, anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity  Movements  in the United States.  He is currently a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Baraka is currently living in Cali, Colombia. 

Coaching programmes are a popular sub-genre of reality television, and usually they are about life coaching — how to lose weight, dress better, bring up your children, clean, decorate, buy or sell your house. Ramsay is not coaching talented amateurs as in MasterChef, or young beginners as in Top Chef, but working professionals.

More than any other work environment, the restaurant is the perfect theatre for what Everett C Hughes called “the social drama of work” (1). In the theatrical metaphor favoured by interactionist sociologists, the dining room is a stage where professionals and customers perform a well-rehearsed script, while the camera explores backstage in the kitchen. We are presented with a spectacle: every service is a test of technical skill, speed and efficiency. The characters know each other — they use first names, shout, swear — and may be family members, so the coach has a chance to administer a kind of cruel, tear-inducing psychotherapy. The programmes meet the demands of reality television because eating and cooking are universal experiences, with a deep connection to our bodies, likes and dislikes.

A ‘democratic’ assessment

Members of the Writers Guild of America describe on their website how stories are created for reality television, and why a docile public, eager to take part for free, is so useful to the industry (2). In Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the customers/viewers/actors participate by talking to the camera, providing a “democratic” assessment that cannot be argued with.

Each episode has a precise narrative structure, with a linear edit from day to day. In the first sequence, Ramsay/Etchebest sits in the dining room, tastes dishes and identifies the restaurant’s main problems. In the second sequence he has a stormy exchange with the cook or owner. He then follows the preparations, and witnesses the problems — the poor quality of the ingredients and their preparation, inept cooks and waiters, unhappy customers. The fourth sequence is crisis and confrontation: shouting, insults, threats of violence, even tears. Stages three and four are repeated until the restaurateur is broken down, before being rebuilt, or even reborn, and acts on the coach’s advice — showing authority over the staff or being kinder, simplifying the menu, providing service with a smile. The customers/viewers/actors confirm the immediate improvements. The French and US shows complete the transformation by renovating the restaurant. This ending of the cycle is the physical manifestation of the internal metamorphosis of the main players, and repays them for their (often caricatured) performances: the US version features lazy and irresponsible African-Americans, hypocritical Asians and pretentious, cowardly French. In the end, they all hug and thank the coach.

The show is structured as a redemption, a violent exorcism with a happy ending that is a classic of American storytelling (3). It uses both religious and military style indoctrination to serve an ideology of rebirth, and relies on violent techniques, especially humiliation, pushing the protagonists to admit their failings.

Display of virility

Every version of the series depends on a display of virility — Ramsay uses verbal violence, swearing, insults and threats, and changes his shirt at least twice per UK episode to display his torso. In the French version, Etchebest uses his colossal stature, physically intimidating or jostling the protagonists. The moral fibre of the restaurant staff is put to the test through physical games such as boxing, rugby or paintball.

The programmes don’t show much of the chef’s culinary expertise, and what they do show has decreased over the years. Food preparation is shown in short dramatic montages, like in an action film, with ultra-fast chopping and flaming frying pans. We seldom see the drudgery, the menial tasks delegated whenever possible to junior kitchen staff, although their management is decisive to any team (4); if we do see them, it’s because they have become a means of redemption, as when all the staff are set to clean a filthy kitchen.

Professional ability tends only to be referred to over hygiene — a catering-size jar of mayonnaise kept at room temperature, cockroaches behind the fridge, rotting food in the cold store, grease oozing from the oven. The programme appeals to the viewer’s common sense, without ever putting the work in its social context. Fresh ingredients are obviously better than frozen, but their cost or preparation time are not mentioned except euphemistically — “it’s not that expensive or complicated, is it?” — suggesting all that is needed is willingness.

It’s all about attitude

The participants have very different levels of skill, and the series visits a wide range of establishments, from pizza joints and sushi bars to high class restaurants, but the advice is always the same: it’s all about attitude, will, commitment and standards — all down to the individual.

So the restaurant chef/owner is the model of the contemporary worker, trying to meet paradoxical demands: to be both independent and a team player (knowing how to give or take orders), totally committed to work, taking on a huge amount of responsibility, cool under pressure, ready to work long hours for a miserable income in the hope of better times ahead, and able to cope with the coach’s demands for change, while remaining true to him or her self. All this plus technical skills in the kitchen and social skills with customers, plus creativity in the design of the dishes and the venue. The programme’s passionate advocacy of the talented independent promotes the “risk-taker”, the small entrepreneur: wage earners are outdated.

After the first few UK episodes, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares never directly touches on money — debt, wages, the cost of ingredients, the price of dishes — and never asks about the social background of the protagonists, their training or connections. In this enchanted world, open discussion of money or strategy would end the belief system of this game and reveal the real tricks of the restaurant trade. If the industry were shown as it really is, the programme could no longer confine it to a celestial sphere of vocation and individual morality. Instead, everything comes down to the psychology and personality of the participants.

We are presented with an enchanted version of society. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares show work as a series of tests that are alsoepiphanies: work should involve a constant rethinking, and the restaurateur should ceaselessly reaffirm his commitment, integrity and indefatigable desire to dowell. The work is by nature insecure: the programme turns that insecurity into a vocation.

Marc Perrenoud is a sociologist at the University of Lausanne.

NOTES.

(1) Everett C Hughes, The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers, Transaction Publishers, New Jersey, 1971.

(2) J Ryan Stradal, “Unscripted Doesn’t Mean Unwritten”; Charles B Slocum, “The Real History of Reality TV”, Writers Guild of America.

(3) Christian Salmon, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, Verso, 2010.

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

(4) Everett C Hughes, op cit.

Climate engineering, the deliberate altering of the Earth’s climate, with the purpose of preventing the catastrophic effects of climate change, does not function as a solution to high levels of greenhouse gasses. Erecting an enormous space mirror may cool Earth by diverting solar radiation, but it doesn’t solve the problems that caused warming. Equally problematic is how little we know about the effects of altering the Earth’s climate.

Local ecosystems are fragile, and the planet is the most fragile ecosystem of all. Sulfur entered into the atmosphere may offset the warming effects of carbon, but it also causes ozone depletion. Furthermore, with global implications of engineering, who will be implementing and regulating these climate modifications? Any government, corporation, or individual can potentially alter the climate.

American entrepreneur Russ George received widespread attention with a series of unauthorized experiments. Last year he deposited one hundred tons of Iron Sulfate off the coast of British Columbia, causing a ten thousand square kilometer plankton boom.  The plankton then sucks carbon out of the atmosphere. The problem is that this type of climate engineering is unregulated, and the effects on the local ecosystem are unknown. On a global scale, the effects could be disastrous.

Several conservative think tanks and research institutions have come out in favor of climate engineering as more effective that emissions reduction. The CATO Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute have all celebrated the benefits of geo engineering. This is a complete reversal of the standing line that climate change is a fallacy. As climate change becomes harder and harder to deny, those with interests in unregulated emission generation are beginning to shift their tactics. And these shifts begin with the think tanks.

In the 1970s, many conservative think tanks were founded and backed by wealthy donors with the explicit purpose of advocating conservative policies. Right wing foundations, institutes, and publications conducted research and created publications to be marked directly to the public and policy makers.  An alliance of corporate leaders, conservative politicians, and academics used these institutions to popularize many Reagan era policies that assisted these corporate leaders-regressive taxation, monetarism, and hostility to trade unions.

Pay attention to the think tanks! Ideology moves from the top to the bottom. Soon, conservative media will abandon climate change denial and move to geo engineering. This is not a solution to the problem of greenhouse emissions, and serves to protect the current political and economic system. If it finds widespread acceptance, the results could be catastrophic.

Ryan Eustace is a graduate student and an activist. He is optimistic, but he is not sure for how long. 

Stockholm has been the scene of riots this week, to much of the world’s surprise, with the unrest flaring up in immigrant-dominated neighborhoods on the city’s periphery. The Stockholm media reports cars burning in at least fifteen suburbs, stone-throwing against police, firefighters and ambulance personnel, injured police and protesters, and dozens of people arrested.

The capital city of Sweden had been basking in the still-warm glow of the nation’s World Hockey Championship win over Switzerland and the well-staged Eurovision music contest in the southern city of Malmö, which was until now perhaps best known abroad for its immigrant unrest. Most citizens were preoccupied with plans for upcoming Midsommar celebrations and summer vacations. The ABBA museum next door to Gröna Lund amusement park had just opened. Riots and unrest are not items usually found on the tranquil Swedish smörgåsbord.

The fire was sparked literally and figuratively on Sunday night, May 19, in the northwestern suburb of Husby, about 12 kilometers from the city center. A 69-year-old man was seen waving a knife and machete and threatening other people, then went into an apartment after police arrived. One woman, identified as the man’s wife, was known to be in the apartment. After two hours of negotiations, a police SWAT team stormed the residence and shot and killed the man after a distraction grenade failed to do its job. Determined people, these immigrants.

The situation exploded after that, with groups of mostly young men in Husby burning cars and confronting police, who moved into the neighborhood in force. Shades of Paris in the autumn of 2005–a similarity that did not go unnoticed in some media accounts of the current Stockholm troubles. The anger spread to other immigrant-dominated suburbs that ring the city, and soon reports flared up of burning cars, stone-throwing and police-’gang’ confrontations. This morning, the main headline in the online daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) blared, “Yet another night with fires and stones”, including a police station set afire and stones thrown at ambulance personnel. This did not likely go down well with the breakfast of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

Hard-cooked eggs to swallow

Reinfeldt likes nothing better than to blend termite-like into the knotty-pine camouflage image of a Sweden that takes care of its people while still enabling capitalists and entrepreneurs to thrive. His tenure has been distinguished by a Coolidge-like silence behind the humming machinery of Sweden’s  prosperity compared to the dire economic news from other parts of Europe and the world. Now the fires are forcing him out of the woodwork.

At a press conference at the Swedish Parliament after a visit to Husby, Reinfeldt (whose five-o-clock shadow and tv demeanor tend toward the Nixonesque) said, “Sweden as a democracy believes in law that applies equally for all, over all of Sweden.” He went on: “This strides against those who believe in violence as a method. They have the idea that you can do what you want.” And, “If we give in there, then we’re on the way to changing the social model.” He also used the occasion to plug the entrepreneur-driven educational policies of the ruling center-right Alliance, which has championed private for-profit schools over traditional public schools–to the detriment of the latter. “We want to make more efforts to achieve better school results, especially when aimed at schools and the sort of outsider-environment we are now discussing,” said the Prime Minister.

Ethnic slurs aren’t just for Finns any more

The outsiders in Stockholm and Sweden are immigrant and immigrant-descent families who have come to Sweden for economic and political (asylum) reasons. The world’s image of a Sweden filled with blond, blue-eyed, Nordic folk is a stale dish: as many as two million Swedes (out of a population of 9.2 million) have immigrant backgrounds. Immigrants have been part of Sweden for nearly as long as the thousand-year history of the nation: Germans, Walloons and Finns came here in significant numbers from medieval times into the modern age, while the mid-late 1900s saw immigrants from Italy, Greece and other (mostly) European regions coming to fill the worker ranks in Sweden’s highly developed industries. The story changes after that, marked by tens of thousands from former Yugoslavia, notably Bosnia, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, successive waves of immigrants and refugees have come from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Poland and other countries.

Rami Al-Khamsi is a leader of Megaphone, an organization that bills itself as working to end social injustice and has an influential presence in the suburbs. In a DN interview on Tuesday, he put a different spin on the Stockholm fires than Prime Minister Reinfeldt’s. Instead of “law” and “societal model”, the words that resonate from Al-Khamsi are “racism” and societal “structural problems” that politicians have not addressed. Racism and ethnic slurs are part of the everyday Swedish menu, even if they are not advertised as daily specials.

Al-Khamsi zeroed in on this subject in his interview when he was asked if the police at Husby used insulting language: “Yes, we were surprised how the police acted toward people, using dogs and batons against children and parents and expressing themselves with words such as ‘nigger’, ‘blackheads’ and ‘monkeys’”. (The ethnic slur “svartskallar” or “blackheads” is directed often at dark-haired people who are perceived as having Middle Eastern backgrounds).

Al-Khamsi said, “The government chooses to solve social problems by increasing the police presence and militarizing the suburbs. As long as this continues people will rise up and choose something else. It doesn’t create change, but for many people the only way to meet power is with violence.”

Right-wing groups such as the Sweden Democrats political party are accusing Megaphone of inciting violent uprisings. Al-Khamsi demurs: “It doesn’t help to either defend or take a position on what is happening, we can only understand it. Megaphone works for social reparation and has a constructive and peaceful role. It’s the not first time unrest has happened in Husby. …As the (social) gaps become greater, there will unfortunately be people who take out their frustration in this way.”

Flames attract more than moths

The Sweden Democrats (SD), like other political parties, have been quick to seize the unrest as a channel to further their own agenda. The party has its roots in a neo-Nazi movement that did a not-so-extreme makeover into a recognized political entity in the 1990s. SD now gathers almost 9% support in the latest national opinion polls (higher in southern Sweden) and has 20 members seated in the 349-seat Riksdag (Parliament). There, SD can be a deciding bloc playing off the almost evenly-matched Alliance and its opponets from the Social Democrat, Green and Left parties.

An SD leader has now called for martial law, rubber bullets, teargas, and water cannon to deal with unruly elements, along with deportation hearings for immigrants who have not yet obtained citizenship, and police are to be granted the right to “use the tougher measures that are required”. In the long run, SD wants an end to the mass immigration and multi-culturalism policies that have transformed Sweden during the past decades. In the short run, the spokesman added, SD’s proposals for police to take hard-line measures will “make the rioters realize quickly who it is that decides things in this country”.

A sinister tinkle of Kristallnacht 1938 in Germany is easy to discern here, but in this land of Orrefors-KostaBoda art glass and crystal such outright persecution might be difficult to mobilize. Nevertheless, oppression in Sweden exists, whether real (according to many immigrants) or exaggerated (SD and others). One of its forms can be expressed in high unemployment rates for young people as a whole and young immigrant-background men in particular. Unemployment among all Swedes under the age of 25 is over 24% (UN figures, 2013). Among young Swedes who have immigrant backgrounds, estimates range  as high as 40% or more.

The paper ceiling

Many of the jobs that people with immigrant backgrounds do have would be classified as “menial” by some. Swedish employment has a “paper ceiling” instead of a glass one: in general, someone born in Sweden, with a Swedish last name, stands a much better chance of landing a job than someone who is darker and whose name is not Svensson.  If you live in Sweden, the odds are high that the people cleaning your home or office, baking your pizza, dry-cleaning and pressing your clothes, driving your taxi, or running your kebab-and-hot dog stand have immigrated to Sweden or have recent roots in other lands. It’s not unknown for people with non-Swedish names, especially from non-western regions, to change their last names via marriage or legal process: this, they hope and believe, will help them to get a foot in the employment door.

A broader picture of employment and society in general would show that many immigrants and their descendants have succeeded in building good lives for themselves in Sweden, and it would be unfair to exclude this image.

Real integration of immigrants and their descendants into Swedish society is still out on the horizon. Sweden is a country that prides itself, and rightfully so, on its willingness to take in refugees. It is also justly proud of its past efforts to instill equality regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race and other qualities–the multi-culturalism that SD so earnestly opposes.

But legislation cannot force minds and hearts to comply, and many Swedes are reluctant to exchange the enduring values of their traditions for a newer version of Sweden that accommodates non-western elements. Kebabs, pizza and Thai food have become highly appreciated additions to Swedish cuisine, but underneath this acceptance runs a deeper reluctance to embrace more than superficial values from non-Swedish societies. For their part, many immigrants show the same reluctance to embrace Swedish culture and live in ersatz versions of Baghdads or Mogadishu set in the housing projects of outer Stockholm. Both sides exhibit what the other side interprets as indifference, or intolerance, or worse. A synthesis arising from mutual acceptance and tolerance is likely to evolve, but this will likely take several generations or longer.

In the meantime, many young people in this country, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, live with hopelessness as the staple item of their existential diets. As long as that is the case, there will be smoke and probably fire.

S. C. Hahn lives and writes in Stockholm and can be reached at stevencrhahn@gmail.com 

I felt like screaming when I was returning to the place where I was staying, after spending hours watching a documentary on homophobia in Uganda. Uganda is one of the countries in the world, which continuously contributes to nightmares of human in the pages of world’s history. The movie was screened by the Robert F. Kennedy, Centre for Justice and Human Rights, Europe, (RFK Centre) based in Florence. My aim in this article is not to talk about the homophobia in Uganda or reviewing the documentary but to try to understand the common realities that most violence based societies are facing Idi Amin Dada had to run away after he cleaved the human flesh by his tiger teeth; Joshep Koni , the man who destroyed thousands of children’s future has gone hiding somewhere in the hideout in a neighboring  country after contributing the worst of bloody sins to history. Do these make real change? No.

Decrease in the number of killings doesn’t make any difference if the society has to sleep with the ghosts of the old devil. It is an illusion if someone thinks that society will be changed when the enemy has lost his ground. The devil is non-other than the production of the slippery slope which has taken by the current-generation. It is a smokescreen if someone believes that they can make change without identifying root causes which influence social disorder. Like in many countries from Latin America to Asia, Africa and Central Europe, Idi Amin as well as Koni were products of the system.

It was last weekend that media reported that former Argentine dictator Jorge Videla died in prison. Videla was the man responsible for 30,000 killings in the country after he grabbed power in a military coup in which he overthrew Isabel Martinez De Peron.  Over five years of his rule, his ambition was none other than an elimination of the authentic political critiques and those who opposed the dictatorship.  What we are seeing today is how the same scenarios are repeating albeit in different forms.

Blood has flown on and on and on, respect and loyalty of humanity has constantly gone down; personal liberty has been on decline. Killing of an enemy has become common habit of man. Difference between Animal and Human is vanishing. The social disorder which cost us our loved ones lives while gifting us trauma has not changed and perhaps political egoism has risen over everything.

What we can see in most of societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow, nightmares of hopelessness. When man lost touch with his humanity, he had no reason to walk along the higher path. Thus he turns into the status of loopy in the middle and looks around to see where his fellow citizens are. When man lost his meaning of life he can do nothing but scream till his last breath. Victor Frank’s Man Search for Meaning was addressed as follows.  “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible,” Frankl noted.

What we are seeing in many countries categorized as “developing nations”, is the common reality of suffering! Institutional collapse! Loss of hope of life while accepting that “social change” is impossible. This is the most common tragedy that we can observer in our motherlands. In our society, desire to fight against absolute power has been opposed by the culture of silence.

In the few hours before I departed the RFK centre I had quick but rational discussions with my colleagues from Zimbabwe, Burma (Myanmar) and our trainer who from Iran, who lives in Germany. For security reasons I doubt that I can disclose their identities but their thoughts and ground experiences gave me a clearer picture about those countries.  “Problem is not only the regime or the particular party that rules the country, but also the fake dissents who are always sitting in front of the computer and distorting public will, and creating false assumptions of the crisis,” said one participant. “During the referendum in Zimbabwe, there was a man who was an appointed journalist by the BBC. He wanted to tell the world that there is election violence going on; what he did was, to take a few posters from oppositions and burnt them, and filmed it. So couple of minutes later he reported that there is election violence going on in the particular area”, went on to add.  We see similar pattern with   most of the non-governmental organizations.

It is very sad to say, “most of the NGOs, are neither based on freedom nor justice, but contributing to the mafia,” one of my friends from Cuba who is currently based in Serbia said.  We must understand that we need proper discussion on the present trends of NGOs; therefore it’s time to change bad reputation that they have earned in the last decades. It is pretty clear that the person who is engaged in NGO activities is an easy target in most developing countries. “No one called or enquire about me when the police arrested me and kept me in custody for many hours. But if the police arrested top level NGO person it will become a lead story in the country. I do not expect anything but at least there must be a common understanding and respect between those who are engaging in grass root activities”, a colleague from Zimbabwe said.

Enemies within enemies, crisis within crisis, chaos within chaos has been emerging in many countries. We are trying to understand strength of personalities, strength of adversaries and our allies among communities while caged in our own world. Do we really desire to solve the problem? I doubt. It seems that most “activists” want to keep these chaotic problems alive, therefore they fear that they will lose something if the problems were solved.  It is very hard to think about future unless we engage in clinical exercises and deep discussions in the field and its future.

In my interview with Martini Gabriele, a courageous journalist who works for the Lastampa, one of bestselling national dailies in Florence, I touched briefly, about social disorder in Sri Lanka. It was late 80s when the Government of Sri Lanka brutally eliminated the Sinhalese youth rebellion (also known as the JVP second uprising) in which more than 30,000 people disappeared.  It was my childhood experience to see half burnt dead bodies lying down on the roadside while scattering the bad smell of carrions into the air. Later, during the conflict between the State and the Tamil Tigers surfaced the same bitterness of inhuman – uncivilized habits of mankind. Neither the government nor the Tigers can justify their violence through the cause of restoring the country’s peace or achieving dream of homeland  respectively.

On May 19 the Rajapaksa government celebrated the fourth year anniversary of the victory against the Tamil Tigers. During the last four years nothing we earned but few roads and wetland parks from China, and at the same time the president has managed to destroy sovereignty of all the institutions of the state while dragging all forms of power into the folds of his family. Putting in jail former Army general, just because of he was contesting the election from the opposition party, and sacking a first lady Chief Justice from her office just because the lady exercised her judicial powers against injustice are prime examples of that  looter’s desire for power.

When the worm has mud of slum to crawl and hide from enemies, it will be safe as long as it lives. But at certain time hungry kingfisher will understand where worm is. The hungry worm can eat everything around it but will be trapped when the kingfisher sees it. In a same way, the tyrant has power to play as long as he is the master in his surroundings. He will be the tyrant as long as people around him are blindfolded.  As they say in Chinese traditional wisdom, “the water can stabilize or destabilize the ship”.

The days I share with colleagues who honestly reveal themselves and their activities, allow me to think twice about the work that we are engaged in. The RFK centre, a newly born knowledge hub, makes it possible for us to think beyond the boundaries. It has given an opportunity to think, and expand our network globally. The RFK is well respected institution in the country, and it has powerful network to spread their vision globally.

I could do no better than quote serge words of Fredrick Douglas; “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” The RFK has fulfilled the dream of people who desire to earn knowledge. Those who have knowledge will strengthen the desire that community has for freedom. That is how personal liberty originates while giving red alarm to the “unjust” to find its way out.

Who are we? What are we up to?  As late Robert F. Kennady said:  “our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.”

Let us unite, as Gloria Reuben, a well-known Hollywood actress pointed out; to make the world for the people who have no space to raise their voice, whose rights have been buried in the slum of absolute power and injustice. Let us sing our song of rights among the communities where people can come up with fresh ideas to change the society currently controlled by the tyrant. It will wipe out our sorrows, and tears of sadness while generating a hope in hapless souls.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa is journalist and editor of the Sri Lanka Guardian, an online daily news paper based in Colombo Sri Lanka. He can be reached atilangamuwa@gmail.com or editor@srilankaguardian.org

Just as we are trapped in an arcane excuse for democracy (it was never meant to be democratic, it is designed to manage capitalism), we are also trapped in the same paradigm when it comes to figuring out why elections are won or lost. We sit down, list off a half dozen reasons, we agree and disagree, refine the answers and gradually move on to some other disconnected political element of the universe.

It’s not that the reasons aren’t important. So long as politics is done this way the players (98 per cent of citizens are just observers) have to learn how they screwed up the game. For those not already immersed in the tortuous autopsy of the NDP loss here are a few factors.

Vote split. In B.C., if the left vote is split at all, the NDP loses. This time around the Greens were competing vigorously (it is B.C. after all) with the NDP in many progressive ridings and in 13 seats the combined Green and NDP votes would have defeated the Liberal candidate. (The final tally: Libs 50, NDP 33, Greens 1.) But it’s never that simple — not all Green voters have the NDP as their second choice and some wouldn’t vote at all if there was no Green candidate.

Reversal on pipeline process. Another issue related to the Green/NDP contest was possibly the single most damaging to the party. In the final two weeks of the campaign Dix reversed himself on the Kinder Morgan pipeline which would bring more tar sands goop to the port of Vancouver. He came out against it after saying he would wait for a review to be completed. It was meant to take the wind out of the sails of the Greens but instead it put wind in the Liberals’. It played perfectly into Liberal leader Christy Clark’s singular focus: the economy and who would manage it best. It seemed to confirm that Dix could not be trusted and wasn’t concerned about jobs or the economy.

Outcampaigned. But in general, the NDP just ran a lack-lustre campaign with no real vision — just a shopping list of things they would do (some of them very good). “Change for the better” was a deliberately cautious slogan but seemed designed for insomniacs. In this case the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

The Liberals, despite being saddled with an unpopular premier, ran a brilliant campaign — if winning at any cost was the name of the game, which it is. Relentlessly negative messaging and fear mongering ground people down — those who didn’t buy into the fear were equally likely to be disgusted with the process and simply tune out and stay away from the polls. Turnout was a record low. Dix, who I think would have made an excellent premier, was vulnerable on the trust and character issue for the memo back-dating and failure to pay a Skytrain fare. Small stuff in the larger scheme of things, but turned into defining charcteristics by tens of thousands of repetitions on radio and TV.

Combining the trust issue with the decades old right-wing attack on the NDP’s economic “credibility” was enough to make some people doubt that change would be for the better after all. The economy is always the NDP’s Achilles heel. The party tends to stay away from the broad issue out of fear the media will eviscerate it. But ignoring the economy just makes the Liberal attacks a self-fulfilling prophecy: it takes the NDP out of the game and makes people wonder why they don’t talk about it. The facts, of course, suggest the Liberals were criminally irresponsible on the economy — from the BC Rail scandal to the obscene giveaway of hydro resources, to the gutting of government revenue with tax cuts to their friends.

Positively ill-advised. But the NDP barely mentioned those facts and chose instead to turn the other cheek — and become a punching bag for Liberal assaults. The party decided to run a positive campaign and this is really the lesson of the election loss. A friend wrote to me saying running a positive campaign is like “bringing flowers to a gun fight.”

Don’t get me wrong. You can design a campaign that projects a positive vision of the future but two things about the NDP’s approach doomed it failure. First, you can’t run a positive campaign in a month. It takes time to engage people in a vision of the future, even one they agree with. Secondly, the NDP tied one hand behind its back by failing to hold the Liberals to account for the horrible, destructive policies they implemented over twelve long years.

Presumably, the election brain trust, led by Brian Topp the quintessential back-room boy, (now teamed up in a consulting firm with the repugnant Ken Boessenkool, a former Harper confidante) decided that this would be “negative.” Nonsense. It was in fact grossly irresponsible not to put the Liberal record front and centre. If you want to contrast yourself with your opponent how do you do that without talking about what their record is? The Liberals’ vicious attacks on Dix cannot be likened to exposing the Liberals for what they actually did to the province. People have notoriously short memories — and the Liberals rode them to victory.

Party system. Perhaps the real dilemma facing the left is the nature of party politics itself. A tiny percentage of people belong to the NDP and Green parties and even within these parties there is little in the way of continuous engagement, political education, and social activity that is so critical to building community. This is where the failure of the month long, list-of-promises, positive campaign is rooted.

In Saskatchewan where I come from, Tommy Douglas and the left-wing CCF (the precursor of the NDP) won power in 1944 in a province totally dominated for decades by a Liberal, pro-business party machine. It won a landslide victory in a media atmosphere of absolute hysteria (headline: “CCF will seize farms”), fear-mongering and blatant lies. The CCF held power for 20 uninterrupted years. How? It started out as a movement and retained that character for many years afterward. It was deeply rooted in community. People felt ownership of it and its policies and out of that came government programs that met the expressed needs of the people. And that, in turn, brought enormous trust in government.

People’s distrust of government now runs so deep that it will take years of trust-building to regain some democratic equilibrium. That means a totally different kind of politics and a totally different kind of political party. Progressive parties run by brain trusts, engaging in politics as a game, will ultimately lose. For them progressive policies are simply pieces on a chess board, not part of a larger vision. And the longer this style of politics goes on, the more institutionalized and inward looking such parties, including the NDP, become.

When Preston Manning founded the Reform Party in 1989 he said that if it hadn’t achieved power in 20 years he would dissolve it and make room for something else. It actually happened sooner than that, of course. Manning wasn’t married to any political party, even his own. He was committed to changing the world.

Just a thought.

MURRAY DOBBIN, now living in Powell River, BC has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for over forty years.  He now writes a bi-weekly column for the on-line journals the Tyee and rabble.ca. He can be reached at murraydobbin@shaw.ca

In popular discussion of the Senate bill surprisingly little attention has been devoted to scrutinizing these so-called “triggers” – despite their significance to the overall reform effort.  Perhaps this is because many in the immigrant rights movement have come to support the triggers as a “common sense” tradeoff for the more progressive reforms that the bill may include (for example, Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, told the LA times on April 29^th: “Opponents of immigration have used border security as an excuse. This [the triggers] will put pressure on them”). Yet given that so much would ride on accomplishing these measures, it’s important to scrutinize DHS’s past and present failures in pursuit of precisely these objectives, alongside an independent metric for evaluating its operational “success.” This is especially the case given that over the past ten years the size and operating budget of the Border Patrol have more than doubled, with devastating effects on human rights, the environment, and the well being of border communities. In pursuit of the quixotic task of “border security” the Senate proposal would exacerbate these trends, while maintaining a punitive, “enforcement first” approach to immigration policy.

The long, costly saga of border surveillance

To begin to unpack the Senate’s proposed “border security” triggers, let’s consider the concept of “persistent surveillance,” an objective that has long been a vexing challenge for the Border Patrol.

Back in 1994, with the launch of “Operation Gatekeeper,” the Border Patrol began to push unauthorized migration routes away from cities like El Paso and San Diego and into remote desert areas, where the journey has become ever more difficult, dangerous and deadly. According to the logic behind Gatekeeper those who continued to cross would be isolated, and the Border Patrol would enjoy a “tactical advantage” in identifying and apprehending them. Yet the very terrain that was to be used to impede unauthorized migration has also proven a significant challenge to the Border Patrol’s own enforcement effort. For example, in Arizona’s Altar Valley, which since the early 2000s has remained one of the busiest unauthorized migration corridors in the United States, there exist only two paved roads and roughly 900 square miles of mountainous, rugged terrain between the border and common pick-up sites near Tucson. As former Border Patrol Tucson Sector Chief Robert Gilbert stated:

“People challenge us and say, ‘Why aren’t you on the border?’ We are. But you have to realize… the border’s very rugged, it’s very remote, accessibility is difficult. So if there’s [sic] no roads, we can’t get into the border. We build roads. We’re working with the National Guard constantly and improving our road network on the border. That’s a slow process.”

To overcome these challenges the Border Patrol has spent billions of dollars on infrastructure, personnel, and a series of high-tech surveillance initiatives commonly referred to as the “virtual fence.” For example, from 1998-2005 the agency spent $239 million on the “ISIS” system, an assemblage of integrated ground sensors and high-resolution video cameras that would allow agents to gain “situational awareness” of remote, mountainous areas. Yet by 2006 the DHS Office of Inspector General reported that “more than 90 percent of the responses to sensor alerts resulted in false alarms, something other than illegal alien activity, such as local traffic, outbound traffic, a train, or animals. On the southwest border, only two percent of sensor alerts resulted in apprehensions.” This was in fact a lower success rate for the ISIS sensors than obtained under the “legacy” system that ISIS was designed to replace.

In 2006 DHS substituted ISIS with the highly publicized “SBInet” program, designed to integrate ground sensors with 98 foot-high fixed camera towers containing motion-detecting ground radar, infrared and high-resolution imaging capacities. DHS’s stated objective for SBInet was to detect “70 to 85% of incursions” in real-time. With a budgeted price tag of $8 billion (only $1 billion was ever spent), the towers would provide DHS with “a Common Operating Picture, which allows Border Patrol complete situational awareness and increased mission effectiveness.”

Yet despite lofty rhetoric about its technological sophistication, SBInet, in the end, proved an unmitigated failure. Software interface problems slowed communication between various components. Animals and rainstorms triggered radar and ground sensors. And cameras were blocked at various angles and degrees of proximity by southern Arizona’s mountainous, canyon-filled terrain.

After visiting an SBInet demonstration site, U.S. Rep. Chris Carney described one of the system’s shortcomings: “[a]s two immigrants tried to cross in front of a project camera, a technician tried to electronically reposition the camera to track their whereabouts. The picture was out of focus, the camera moved too slowly, and the immigrants got away.” Despite these problems, the Obama administration renewed the program with considerable fanfare, stating in May 2009: “This is the initiation of the no-kidding, real, SBInet system… We understand this a lot better. We’re a lot more sophisticated.” By February 2011, with mounting costs and continuing setbacks, the program was quietly cancelled.

DHS is now invested in mobile surveillance systems and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to accomplish their border security fix. Between 2005 and 2012 the department spent $240.6 million building a fleet of Predator drones for surveillance missions. Yet this program too has been met with considerable challenges and shortcomings. To begin with, each hour of flight costs the agency $3,000, about twice the cost of a “manned” aerial mission.  Yet to refer to the system as “unmanned” is really a misnomer, given that a typical DHS drone mission requires between 20 and 50 support staff – including pilots, technicians, launch and recovery crews, and video analysts, among others. A May 2012 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General criticized Customs and Border Protection for diverting millions of dollars from its other programs to maintain and troubleshoot problems with its drone fleet, concluding: “[DHS] has not achieved its scheduled nor desired levels of flight hours of its unmanned aircraft… resource shortfalls of qualified staff and equipment coupled with restrictions imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration, weather, host airfields, and others have… limited actual flight hours to 37 percent of the unmanned aircraft’s mission availability threshold and 29 percent of its mission availability objective.”

Since 2005, DHS claims that its drone program has contributed to the arrest of 7,500 immigrants and 46,600 pounds of marijuana. Yet as Tom Barry of International Policy Report points out, this amounts to less that .01% of Border Patrol arrests during this period, and a similarly miniscule percentage of marijuana seizures. Meanwhile, if one divides the total cost of the drone program by these enforcement actions, they amount to $32,080 per apprehended migrant and $5,163 per pound of marijuana, if one both a) accepts DHS’s numbers and b) ignores the ground agents and other support personnel needed to actually enact an arrest or seizure (something that the UAVs obviously cannot accomplish on their own). Brian Bennett of the LA Times offers an understated summary of the UAV program as follows: “[the drones] have yet to prove very useful in stopping contraband or illegal immigrants.”

Regardless of the problems with its drone fleet, Homeland Security is fully invested in the technology, with plans to expand its fleet to 24 “Guardian” and “Predator” drones by 2016, at a total cost of $443.1 million, and to incorporate new capabilities like “signal interception receivers” that tap into and monitor cell phone and radio signals. The Senate bill would fund this expansion, with Arizona Senator John McCain, arguing “I am confident that the technology and surveillance capability as well as the drones will allow us to have effective control of the border.” But the Senator is shooting in the dark. As will be shown below, neither DHS nor congress possesses any objective framework for evaluating its technology that could lend support to such a claim.

Measuring “security,” and other quagmires

Over the last decade the U.S. government has spent more than $100 billion on border security, and with an annual budget of $18 billion for immigration and border enforcement the U.S. is spending more on these efforts than all other federal law enforcement combined. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would infuse an additional $6.5 billion to expand the technology, manpower and infrastructure available to the Border Patrol. This would include: 3,500 new agents; a “Southern Border Fencing Strategy” to include double-layer fencing, infrastructure, and technology; and sufficient drones to operate “24 hours per day and for 7 days per week” along the southwest border (though precisely where these drones would be deployed or prioritized along the 1,933-mile-long border remains unspecified).

Yet there is little reason to believe that this mix of agents, walls and UAVs will somehow achieve the capabilities that congress would mandate. Indeed, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in February 2013, “without documentation of the analysis justifying the specific types, quantities, and deployment locations of border surveillance technologies,” DHS itself has no idea how effective any of these technological components or enforcement practices are.

Since 2010, the department has refused to implement a metric that could evaluate its efforts and guide future procurement, decision-making or accountability. Yet this is not for lack of trying. Over the years the Border Patrol has tested or implemented – and subsequently abandoned – various measurement and evaluation schemes. In 2004 the agency issued its second-ever national strategy, which divided the border into five categories of “operational control” – ranging from the highest level, “controlled,” involving “continuous detection and interdiction resources at the immediate border with high probability of apprehension upon entry,” to “remote/low activity,” signifying that “information is lacking to develop a meaningful border control strategy because of inaccessibility or lack of resources.”

When, in 2010, the Border Patrol last reported on its progress using this metric, it stated that only 12% of the southwest border (and less than 2% of the northern border) met its criteria for the highest level of “operational control.” In response, border security hawks pounced, claiming that this figure showed that the Obama administration was unserious about its Homeland Security mission. The Border Patrol countered that those areas not under its full “control” were remote, difficult to access and far from population centers. Nonetheless, due to congressional pushback, the agency abandoned the “operational control” framework, in 2011 proposing instead a “Border Conditions Index” that would incorporate quality of life metrics such as levels of crime and property values in the border region. Within a year, this too was abandoned, replaced in the agency’s 2012-2016 National Strategic Plan with a “risk” and “threat” based approach to border security. Yet, as Tom Barry points out, the agency “gives no indication how it will rank or prioritize risks and threats. Instead, it merely describes the new bureaucratic apparatus that will make these risk assessments.”

The inability to develop or stick with an objective metric to evaluate its practices has been the cause of considerable consternation and criticism from congress, most significantly from Republican border security hawks like Michigan’s Candace Miller, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. Indeed, the invention of border security “triggers” is likely a response to these concerns, forcing a metric on the agency to which congress could then hold them accountable. Yet there is little reason to believe that such a metric would be anything other than arbitrary.

At present, the de facto framework guiding the agency’s strategic reporting and decision-making is structured around what the agency calls its “effectiveness rate.” By counting the number of apprehensions in a given sector and dividing this by the total of “turn backs” (individuals who entered the United States without authorization, but who crossed back to Mexico on their own) and “got aways” (unauthorized entrants who were detected by the Border Patrol but successfully entered the U.S. interior without apprehension), the agency makes a calculation of the percentage of unauthorized entrants they are able to apprehend. Yet, as discussed above, without having accomplished “persistent surveillance” of the border the agency can only, at best, speculate about how many individuals are actually crossing the border at any given time. As the February 2013 GAO report stated, the “effectiveness rate” metric merely “reports on program activity levels and not program results.”

In the Tucson Sector, the Border Patrol’s supposed accomplishment of an “87% effectiveness rate” has lent steam to proponents of the Senate plan, claiming that DHS is on the brink of achieving the 90% effectiveness rate that the bill would mandate (a mandate that, under a May 9^th amendment to the bill, would be extended to all southwest Border Patrol sectors). Yet, as the GAO stated in its February 2013 report, inconsistencies of classification, methodology, data collection and measurement capabilities between sectors render figures such as that reported by the Tucson Sector essentially meaningless. 

The Great Fiction of the Senate’s Immigration Proposal

The Border Patrol claim that the recent border-wide decline in apprehensions is an indication of the success of their enforcement strategy. There is reason to be skeptical of this claim. Research has consistently shown that the volume of unauthorized migration corresponds to the fluctuation of sending and receiving economies, and not at all to the intensity of enforcement efforts. Although the Border Patrol have conducted an unprecedented build-up of personnel, technology and infrastructure over the past ten years, one doesn’t see a dramatic decline in Border Patrol apprehensions until around 2007-2008, the exact same period as the economic downturn. With a gradual recovery has come a gradual increase in the number of undocumented crossings; apprehensions in 2012 went up about 10% (a trajectory that has since continued), and it is likely that the historically low numbers in 2011 will be seen as a nadir rather than the indicator of a broader trend.

Even more important, however, are the percentage of crossers who have strong ties to the United States. Many of these individuals are essentially forced migrants, on the border as a direct outcome the Obama administration’s unprecedented deportation effort (averaging around 400,000 individuals a year). A University of Arizona-Ford Foundation study released in April 2013 reported that 28% of those apprehended by the Border Patrol now consider the U.S. to be their permanent home. As such, DHS is literally producing much of the population of migrants they then claim are a threat to be guarded against. Because these individuals are presently absent from the United States, most will not qualify for relief under the current immigration proposal. And such individuals, separated from homes and loved ones, are likely to cross again no matter what the consequences or technologies deployed against them.

The desperation of people on the border is a direct consequence of an antiquated and punitive immigration system that is unable to accommodate peoples’ increasingly trans-national lives; that refuses to acknowledge the basic economic drivers of migration (including policies like NAFTA); and that then penalizes those whom this very system has uprooted. The Senate immigration proposal includes some positive measures that would address these shortcomings. Yet on the whole it not only entrenches a punitive immigration framework, but even eliminates multiple visa categories that facilitate family reunification, ensuring that even broader categories of individuals will, in the future, be classified as “undocumented.”

The Senate architects are merely asserting – without any objective analysis or basis for their claim – that DHS can accomplish the border security “triggers” that their immigration proposal would establish. By hinging legalization and a pathway to citizenship on accomplishing these arbitrary objectives, such reforms could be postponed indefinitely. This is the great fiction that has thus far largely been ignored in debates about the merits of the Senate bill. And advocates on the left ought to think more carefully and cautiously about what they are being promised.

Geoffrey Boyce is a PhD Candidate in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona.  He is also a long-time affiliate of the Tucson-based No More Deaths, and he writes and blogs on homeland security and immigration-related issues.  He can be reached at gboyce@email.arizona.edu. 

May 17, 2013, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, a mob of more than 10,000 people led by men of the cloth from the Georgian Orthodox Church, attacked 50 gay rights demonstrators marching in downtown Tbilisi, Georgia.   The rally had been moved to a public garden on Tbilisi’s Freedom Square after the crowd of 10,000 made it impossible for the rally to take place at the location that had originally been selected.  The mob was inspired by Patriarch Illya II, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church who said the demonstration by the gay-rights activists should not take place.  In a statement issued May 15, 2013, two days before the demonstrations, he said that homosexuality is an “anomaly and disease”, the gay-pride rally would be “an insult” to Georgian tradition” and was a “violation of the rights of the majority” of Georgians.  Inspired by the beloved prelate’s words, ultraconservative Orthodox believers, said they would disrupt the rally.  They did.

The mob of more than 10,000 met the 50 activists bearing signs saying “no to mental genocide,” “Stop Homosexual Propaganda in Georgia,” “Not in our city” and “No to gays.”  Notwithstanding a heavy security presence the mob broke through police cordons and threw rocks and eggs at the 50 gay-rights activists forcing them to get into minibuses furnished by the police and flee the scene.  Not wanting them to leave the scene unharmed, the mob tried to break the windows of the buses using rocks and trashcans.  Eight or nine of the gay-rights activists were injured.  One of the protestors who had travelled from a distant city to protest the gay-rights demonstration explained that the purpose of the mob’s actions was to “treat their [homosexual’s] illness.”  A well-thrown stone can, of course, completely cure an homosexual’s illness as well as any other inflictions from which the victim was suffering prior to being struck.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, the question was not how to deal with an unpopular minority but how to deal with a corpse.  The corpse belonged to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two infamous Boston marathon bombers.  Few, if any, mourned his death.  Nonetheless, once dead one would have thought the question of his burial would not consume much time or attention.  That was the wrong thing to think.  Although not matching the Georgians in intensity, those who belonged to the “no burial in my backyard” crowd gathered in front of the funeral home in Worcester, Massachusetts, to protest the presence of the corpse in their fair city and to make sure it did not find final repose there lest the city’s reputation be permanently stained.  Protesters said the body should be cremated or thrown in the ocean,  presumably after the fashion of the tea that had been thrown in the ocean some years earlier. Even two cemeteries in Boston that specialize in Muslim burials were unwilling to permit this particular corpse use it as a final place of repose.

The funeral home where the corpse rested while awaiting final disposition is in Worcester and one of the protestors demonstrating in front of the funeral home explained why he opposed burying the corpse in Worcester.  “It’s going to give this neighborhood a bad name. This guy doesn’t belong here.”  It did not occur to him that he and other protestors were also giving the neighborhood a bad name.  Another protester who objected to the fact that Peter Stefan, the director of the funeral home where the corpse lay, was trying to find a local cemetery to accept the corpse, had driven an hour to get to the protest.  She carried a  somewhat respectful sign saying “Shame on you Mr. Stefan.”  Robert Healy, the Cambridge city manager said:  “It is not in the best interest of ‘peace within the city’ to execute a cemetery deed.” Cambridge was Tamerlan’s home as well as the home of such esteemed institutions of higher education as Harvard and MIT.  Its congressman, Edward Markey, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S.  Senate said: “If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil, then it should not be.” Such heroic statements do not mean the United States is like Georgia.  It was not reported that any church leaders participated in the demonstrations in front of the funeral home or that they publicly came out objecting to Tamerlan’s burial nor was it reported that any church leaders objected to the protests.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes for Religion News Service.  He devoted a column to the fact that Christian leaders in Boston had by and large been silent in the face of the controversy.  Joel Anderle, the president of the Massachusetts Council of Churches said:  “This is one of those curious areas where Christianity, and in particular Protestant Christianity, has come to believe that it doesn’t have a voice.”  James Keenan,  a moral theologian at Boston College observed that:  “To say ‘we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric.  It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. … . . I’m talking about this because someone should.”  He got that right.  At least the clergy were not inciting the demonstrators.  That is some, albeit small, consolation.

Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com

So much the need for Benghazis everywhere (along with the vast network of military bases) if America is to remain top dog, or at least think of itself that way—until its fantasies are overtaken by reality, at which time even the militarization of diplomacy can be expected to give way to naked displays of power as such.  We’re almost there.  There is something psychopathological about the current political debate on Benghazi, in which both major parties are squaring off against each other, as meanwhile neither one questions the desirability, profitability, and wisdom of imperialism, that which embassies are intended to serve.  And designed to serve: the more unwanted the American presence in a country, the greater the concrete (as though giant bunkers), the greater the military protection, the hulk announcing and embodying US influence, right down to exempting private contractors (think Blackwater under its new corporate name)  for crimes committed against the laws of the penetrated—in some cases, occupied—country.  In the last three days, an article in the Washington Post (May 21) by Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung and the New York Times editorial (May 23) make clear that Benghazi is but a pawn not only in US domestic politics, but also in spreading America’s  emphasis on paramilitary operations worldwide, beyond what other presidents contemplated, and at one with the program of armed drones for targeted assassination.  Embassies are beachheads for more forward maneuvers, both political and military.

Benghazi was primarily a CIA installation, its “annex” given the cloak of diplomatic immunity.  The Post article details the way David Petraeus, then DCIA, did everything possible to protect the Agency, such as drafting the so-called talking points used by Susan Rice (the present tempest-in-a-teapot fueling inter-party rage) while obfuscating its interventionist mission, while the Times editorial rightly pointed to CIA’s primacy within the consulate, in both cases, although the larger question is not addressed, nailing down that these facilities are often fronts for a range of covert activities.  Politely put—given the role of operatives and mercenaries running loose, itself reason enough for the anger expressed by the crowds, which then turned to violence.  That larger question, still an untouchable (just as drone assassination is untouchable), involves, not cost-benefit analysis, or what others may think of us, or even, the danger of setting precedents which might come home to haunt us, but the intrinsic morality of domination, in its manifold forms, military, economic, political, cultural, ideological, all of which are aided by the Benghazis numbering in the tens if not hundreds.

My Comment on the New York Times editorial, which deserves commendation for its implicit criticisms of the CIA, its presence there, its role in managing the news, follows:

“Reforms are under way,” states the editorial, except the one reform which merits frank discussion: Why these embassies in the first place, because, far from representing traditional diplomatic functions and concerns, they have proven to be the forward edge of US hegemonic intent, such as the massive hulk in Baghdad, or in this case, a CIA outpost? The locals know the score and deeply resent the armed fortresses spread globally, the claims of diplomatic immunity when personnel or the protectors (often private contractors, aka, mercenaries) violate the laws of the country when committing crimes, such as the clearing of intersections when passing through.

Embassies have become instruments of war and/or social control, and, not surprisingly, elicit hostile feelings and attacks. Renounce imperialistic policies, demonstrate good will, keep CIA and related forces out, and I doubt there would be attacks. Nothing is any longer normal, given the total politicization of the American presence  in foreign lands.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

So what’s the problem? People are hungry, and they’re only insects, right? As strange as it may sound, insects play an important role in keeping the forest alive. They are predators and prey, pollinate plants, eat dead trees and creatures, maintain soil fertility and regulate the biodiversity of the forest.

In order for insects to serve as a mainstream food source, they’ll have to be harvested from natural forests.

But if there’s a noticeable dip in the number of insects in a particular forest, then the biodiversity will also take a hit.

Fast-forward to the Distant Future

Harvesting insects has burgeoned into a multibillion dollar industry. But cracks in the perfect scheme have surfaced. A few multinational corporations were accused of illegally harvesting billions of beetles. They’ve denied it all, and have walked away unscathed.

Meanwhile, the UN and other purported proponents have added some unheard of insect group to the endangered list. Fundraisers to raise money for this unheard of endangered insect group are being organized across the globe. But people would much rather tune into a new show on Animal Planet. It’s called Insect Wars. Of course, it’s closely modeled on the lines of the now defunct Whale Wars. Even the lead character in Insect Wars, calls himself as the modern Paul Watson of the jungle. Let’s stay tuned to Animal Planet and cross our fingers for the outcome of the unheard of insect group.

My tree-hugging, overactive imagination has run amuck. Or has it?

The timber logging companies have amply demonstrated their propensity to leave no trade agreement intact and no specie unharmed when it comes to self-enrichment. From the Peruvian Amazon rainforest to the tropical forests in the republic of Congo irreparable damage has been taking place through illegal logging.

Then there are the oily disasters of history to think about. BP’s Gulf oil spill dumped an estimated 2.5 million gallons of oil that poisoned 572 miles of shoreline, and terminated the lives of hundreds of birds and aquatic animals. The damage to the ecosystem is still ongoing, and the oil lords haven’t learned a thing.

Surely, it all began with the innocuous idea of a little drilling here, and a little extra harvesting the cedar there. Voila! The endangered list of species and forests keeps getting longer.

A Way Out

The UN is absolutely right in asserting that food security is a growing concern. Therefore tabling solutions makes sense. But the UN should think twice, maybe thrice before suggesting invasions into endangered lands, which may end up in the hands of dubious corporate giants.

There is always an alternative. The insect industry doesn’t have to thrive. Instead, the UN could advise people to focus on utilizing indigenous plants. Moreover, a comprehensive list should be compiled of edible plants in impoverished regions of the world. Then the research should determine whether those plants can safely serve human needs, while maintaining a harmonious balance in the ecosystem.

Adity Sharma is a writer living in New York.

In November 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama uttered this now all-but-forgotten campaign promise. Since his first election and more-so in the wake of his second victory, President Obama has extended a welcoming hand to corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers to oversee and run the federal “regulatory” agencies that ostensibly protect the public interest.

The President recently nominated Tom Wheeler, a true industry insider, to head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Wheeler is a career water carrier for corporate interests, having previously served as head of the cable and the wireless associations and is now a venture capitalist. Along the way, he has been a longtime Obama fundraiser. He knows how to play the inside-the-Beltway game.

The fix is in. Wheeler is expected to continue the pro big-telecom policies of the current chairman, Julius Genachowski. He will likely move to end net neutrality, further industry consolidation, limit meaningful competition and increase user fees, among other policies. He can be expected to maintain the U.S.’s second-tier communications status. With his appointment, the big losers will be the over-charged and poorly served American public (especially in rural and smaller markets) and U.S. companies facing intensifying international competition.

* * *

Wheeler served as head of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 and 1984, and ran the Cellular Telecom and Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 through 2004. He currently is a managing director at Core Capital Partners.

He has reported investment interests in some 78 companies, including Apple, AT&T, Cablevision, CBS, Clearwire, Comcast, Disney (which owns ABC), Google, Sprint, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. Wheeler promises to sell his stocks if confirmed.

As expected, AT&T, Comcast and the other giant telecom companies championed Wheeler’s nomination. He was their guy; he knows how to play the game. More troubling, Gigi Sohn, head of the “liberal” policy group, Public Knowledge, joined the chorus applauding Wheeler, rationalizing his past lobbying roles: “But his past positions should be seen in light of the times and in the context of his other important experiences and engagement with policy.” Those embracing an inside-the-Beltway mentality share a common perception that their respective “bread” is best buttered by a “liberal” corporatist regime.

Writing on his blog in 2009, Wheeler warned about the future of net neutrality. This is the governing policy that ensures that all data traveling over the Internet is equal, moving at the same speed. He raised doubt about data equality:

Rules that recognize the unique characteristics of a spectrum-based service and allow for reasonable network management would seem to be more important than the philosophical debate over whether there should be rules at all. …

The wireless industry’s initial reaction to net neutrality was to question its need and warn of “unintended consequences.” Accepting the inevitability of the concept, however, and working to maximize its positive effects – from appropriate network management, to flexible pricing and even new spectrum – could be the opportunity for a big win.

Say good-by to net neutrality and the equality of not only Internet data but, in a world of increasingly digitally-mediated communications, all Americans. Corporate interests demand a pay-to-play market and “regulators” do what they are told.

An interesting showdown over the confirmation may take place when Wheeler appears before Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WVA) Commerce Committee. He will surely be grilled over net neutrality, industry consolidation, the “f” word and limited nudity on ever-shrinking broadcast television. Likely unsaid, Rockefeller, along with 36 other senators, backed his former staffer and FCC commissioner, Jessica Rosenworcel, for the chairman’s position. Wheeler will likely be confirmed.

The revolving door at the core of regulatory capture is a two-way street. First, corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers ensure the private interests of specific industrial sectors through contributions of one or the other dominant political parties and by cozying up to agency employees with promises help grease the path to their future employment. Second, agencies craft rules that favor a specific sector.

Over the last few decades, there’s been an increasingly close relationship between the FCC and its corporate clients – to the detriment of the public. This was most graphically displayed in 2011 when Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, shortly following her approval of Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal, took a well-paying position with the cable giant.

This phenomenon is evident in the career paths of the three most recent FCC chairmen. Kevin Martin, a Bush-II appointee, is now with Patton Boggs, a leading Washington, DC, law firm and lobbyist. Michael Powell, Gen. Powell’s son and appointed by Clinton, now heads the cable industry trade association, NCTA; this is Wheeler’s former position. And William Kennard, also appointed by Clinton, had previously been an executive with the banking firm, Carlyle Group, where he specialized telecommunications and media in investments; he now serves as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. One can only wonder where the departing chairman, Genachowski, will end up.

The revolving-door syndrome of corporate-FCC collusion is evident with still other agency functionaries. In 2002, Dorothy Attwood, former head of the FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau, took a position at SBC Communications as – don’t laugh — “senior vice president for federal regulatory strategy.” In 2008, Catherine Bohigian, a close associate of former-FCC chief Martin, signed on with Cablevision. Earlier this year, Edward Lazarus quit his post as the FCC Chairman’s Chief-of-Staff to become the Tribune’s executive vice president and general counsel. Open Secrets details the revolving door experiences of 158 former FCC employees. (It should be noted that former-Com. Michael Kopps is with Common Cause.) Regulatory capture is business as usual.

* * *

Concern over regulatory capture, in one form or another, is as old as the nation. Traditionally, capture was understood in starker, less whitewashed terms, as corruption or influence peddling. Scholars trace concern about it back to the Founding Fathers and James Madison’s famous 10th Federalist Papers.

In it, Madison warns about the influence of factions in “public councils” who pursed the interests of “a majority or a minority of the whole” can adversely affected “the public good,” “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison and others warned that the people’s government could easily be taken over for private gain. Some scholars find capture at the root of Pres. Andrew Jackson’s battle over the 2nd Bank of America. Capture became a distinguishing feature of federal government policy and operations with the rise of the Progressives in the late 19th century.

Half-a-century ago leading government scholars, most notably Samuel Huntington and George Stigler, identified modern state-private corruption as regulatory capture, influence peddling within a system of crony capitalism. They and others point to the disastrous experience of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in the 1880s and how it was taken over by the powerful railroad interests, setting the stage for the birth of modern state-subsidized corporate capitalism.

Under postmodern capitalism, Americans – as citizens and consumers — are required to subsidize corporate gain as well as the private gluttony of the ruling class. As citizens, our taxes subsidize private capital in an increasing number of ways, including the rigged tax structure, government payments, right-offs and tax abatements. As consumers, we are over-charged at the cash register, are hit with exorbitant banking charges for loans and credit cards, and pay all-too-much for inferior telecom services.

The presidency, the Congress and the regulatory agencies – let alone state and local governments — are political marketplaces in which influence is bought and sold. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower identified one post-World War II manifestation of this phenomenon, the military-industrial-political complex. Most Americans know the game is rigged and they have almost no chance of influencing public policy or regulation.

Regulatory capture is most glaringly evident within the financial sector. Much influence peddling surrounded the 2010 Dodd-Frank law designed to police banks “too big to fail.” Similar cozy relations between a regulatory agency and the sector it oversees is business-as-usual at the SEC and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, influence peddling operates within much more mundane aspects of state-corporate life. Randall Holcombe points out that in 2010 the sugar industry made about $5 million in political contributions and spent $7 million in lobbying. And the pay back? The Agriculture Department is expected to pay $862 million to cover government loans to sugar farmers who will likely default on some 400,000 tons of sugar.

The fix is in and little can be expected from Congress to contain — if not outlaw — influence peddling and the revolving-door syndrome. Efforts by progressive Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse should be supported. And for those wishing to raise their voices in opposition to Tom Wheeler’s likely appointment to head the FCC, check out the grassroots opposition within the public interest community and sign the petition opposing his nomination.

David Rosen writes the “Media Current” column for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to AlterNet, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail.  Check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

Jeez, I’ve written more than 600 articles. And I’ve received many reader comments, both supportive and critical. Then there’s the OTHER category, hate mail. One among the venomous provided a friendly subject line greeting, “HELLO.” I opened this to read, “Fuck you, cunt.” There’s also Mark, mjsontag@yahoo.com, who wrote, “Thanks CUNT” (popular term of offense) with boasts that he’s “The 1 Percent,” I’m a “pathetic loser,” and that he drinks Dom Pérignon. In March, he wrote, “I hear Bradley Manning has AIDS!”

Another reader responded to one of my widow articles. His paragraph of stunningly executed hillbilly dialect was sexual and disturbing—really a visual of what he could do for me. I was visiting son H at the time. Showed him. With a little Google search of the man’s email, H discovered a website, photograph, and a bio. Wow, a watershed conservationist. H asked if he should handle this for me. I told him no. We ignored.

This week, while sorting through papers, I found feedback I’d printed, from Stephen, with the subject line: “Missy, look what you have done.” This was followed by:

You have robbed us of the benefit of dealing with the lesser of two evils. Your actions and the actions of all those like you have placed us in the hands of the greatest of two evils. The Democratic win has emboldened the Islamofascist terrorists.

Missy, that is the threat we face. The Islamofascists can destroy our economy. That is our threat, and you have put into power the party that will remove every obstacle between us and the terrorist’s ambitions to detonate a nuclear bomb in some strategic area that is certain to destroy our economy.

I lived in NYC then, and he referenced this in his reproach:

Think of that, Missy, You live in NY. Think Manhattan. Imagine one square mile of downtown New York vaporized. Missy, guess what?

That will destroy our economy. That will end freedom for all. That will negate our ‘liberties.’ That will render null and void our constitutional protections. I suggest that you rent a storage unit and fill it with rice, beans, cornmeal, and gasoline. Thanks to all your essays and the people you have affected by them, you just might need it.

This was cyber’d in late 2006, after the election and just before Democrats took control of the House in 2007—when there was a smidge of hope that Iraq war critic Nancy Pelosi, soon to be Madam Speaker, would use her influence to end war. Many thought she might possibly hold George Bush accountable even though she’d told The Washington Post that Democrats wouldn’t impeach Bush. But she’d teased a bit with “you never know where” investigations might lead.

Obviously, Stephen was unaware that the Democrats and Republicans are on the same blood sport team owned by multinational corporations. That they conspire to fund actions inspiring acts of hatred. And that it is now passé to speak of the lesser or greater of two evils, when it’s the system itself that’s depraved, has ruined the economy for the majority, has destroyed our rights with the establishment of a surveillance state. And that the crimes committed by Christo-fascists and Zionists against human beings in Muslim-majority countries have produced a cycle of violence and fear.

But Stephen also gave me credit that’s undeserved. My words have influenced few. Here’s recent proof from Tony, responding to my last article:

You don’t get it. No one is reading you. You’re [sic] words aren’t… look, I love you. Give your money away. Live as I do. Be broke.

You’ll love murder and rape and theft. You’re a rich white woman.

No one cares what you say. Stop being the problem.

I may have defended myself to Stephen. Don’t remember. I didn’t reply to Tony, and not because I am apart from the problem. There’s just something creepy about his message. I could have told him I admit my complicity. That I think about this, look for answers that include withholding taxes that fund war and donating that portion to peace and justice organizations (something I’m exploring as an act of conscience). BIG GREED however will continue to mortgage imperial carnage.

I also could tell Tony that since he sent his repudiation and advice from an Android, he’s part of the problem, too.

Missy Beattie can be reached at: missybeat@gmail.com

Writing about Italian noir for World Literature Today critic Madison J. Davis noted :

The traditional mystery, deriving from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and evolving through Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to contemporary practitioners like Carolyn G. Hart and Simon Brett, requires a certain faith in the legal system—or at least in a measure of justice parceled out to those who commit crimes. We live, however, in a skeptical world, in which even those who enjoy the puzzles and deductions of the traditional whodunit cannot see them as realistic. The events of the twentieth century have cracked, often splintered, our faith in the legal system and the triumph of justice, even in the good ole U. S. of A.

I would argue that the twenty-first century has brought us beyond even the skepticism Davis acknowledges.  Indeed, skepticism seems almost quaint, when we read about hundreds of men being released from prison because they were jailed they for crimes they did not commit.  Their incarceration was not due to a mistake, but a conscious decision by authorities to match a crime to the victim they chose.  Every time news like this comes out, the credibility of the police as protectors of society diminishes.  When working people see their friends and children going to prison for drug offenses while the wealthy usually avoid doing time, their perception of the legal system being rigged in favor of the wealthy and powerful is reinforced.  Since the police are the most obvious representatives of that system (and the individuals most citizens encounter) they are no longer perceived as much more than enforcers of the rights of the wealthy and powerful.  This perception, long held by those considered The Other in society, is now part of the common parlance.  Indeed, television crime shows assume this in their portrayals of police departments and individual cops.  Certain series, most notably David Simon’s depressingly exquisite take on the corruption rampant in an entire city’s political and legal system called The Wire, create a world where the incorruptible individual has no place.

This does not mean that the police don’t enjoy at least tacit support by a majority of the population; it does mean that the number of people who believe the police are not above criminality is much diminished from just a few decades ago.  The abuse of power by police during the protests of the 1960s and onwards; the revelations of individual cops like New York’s Serpico regarding corruption and illegal arrests (among other things); the militarization of most police forces in cities and towns large and small; and the continued abrogation of civil liberties in the name of the war on drugs and the war on terrorism.  All of these make the line between the police and the criminals they supposedly oppose very thin.  Despite the multitude of cop shows on television attempting to present police as protectors of order and the innocent and even the presence of movies like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series (which serve as propaganda for authoritarianism), many residents of modern society are convinced the police are not there for their sake.

Nor is the legal system.  Occasionally a clever lawyer is able to keep an innocent person out of prison — in real life and in fiction.  Indeed, certain authors have made a good living writing legal thrillers that feature these kinds of stories.  More often than not, however, the police and the courts conspire to convict the person in the docket no matter what.  It’s not that the conspiracy is intentional; it’s just how the system works.  Police arrest a person for a crime and the courts do the rest.  Without a good attorney — something very few can afford — the suspect’s options are very limited.  If one adds a cop with a grudge, a judge with an agenda, or a politician with a law and order platform to the equation, that person in the docket does not stand a chance.

A few decades ago I was charged with “possession with the intent to sell” because I was sitting in an automobile when an acquaintance sold a small amount of marijuana to an undercover cop.  This all went down not long after the state I was living in had passed a law that rendered the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure null and void.  Anyone who was in the vicinity of anything having to do with illegal drugs was as culpable as the person actually involved with the drugs.  So, since I was in the car when the drug deal occurred, I was also involved in the sale.  When I showed up at court on the charge, I asked my public defender if I should challenge the charge and plead not guilty.  His response was simple.  If I challenged the charge I would not win.  He advised me to take a plea deal and do community service.  I took his advice.  The law was not interested in justice, just in throwing people in jail.

Much anti-capitalist and antiwar activity is already labeled criminal in an imperial society.  This in itself means that characters participating in activities that fall into this category are already suspect.  Meanwhile, the forces of law and order trying to stifle such characters have a leeway not provided the citizen, no matter what he or she is involved in.  The often violent reaction of the authorities to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Fall 2011 provides a recent example of this fact.  A greater contradiction occurs when the forces of authority engage in criminal behavior in the pursuit of the forces aligned against the rulers the police are hired to protect.  A further complication comes into play when criminal actions by the police are ignored or sanctioned while criminal acts by the targets of the authorities are not.  In a line quite familiar to most rock and roll fans (especially those who listen to the Rolling Stones) that calls every cop a criminal, this contradiction is even clearer.

Back to that incorruptible individual.  Most noir features a private investigator.  Like the accused, he or she is an individual who lives on the edges of the law. In a world where the law itself can be unjust, only those not in debt to the system designed to bring justice can find that justice.  Most often the investigator is one who works for hire with a set of morals that are immutable. In certain cases, like two of the novels in my 1970s trilogy, the investigators are regular folks determined to help a friend.  Still, they are not without faults.  Alcohol is often a vice these characters deal with.  Most recently, in Thomas Pynchon’s foray into the genre with a book titled Inherent Vice, his private eye smokes a lot of marijuana.  Early on, many of the so-called tough guys like Mike Hammer were sexist and racist.  As the genre has evolved, so have the investigators.  Like the society they operate in, today’s investigators include Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and women.

Today’s noir fiction is the story of a system and society in decline.  Marxist Ernest Mandel published a book on crime fiction in 1986 titled Delightful Murder.  In this book, Mandel looks at the genesis and development of crime fiction.  We see the development of the criminal from a lone individual whose exploits shock and dismay, but whom heroic police agents can capture.  As capitalism moves into its monopoly phase, the lone criminal remains a problem, yet the real problem developing is an entire class of criminals.  These are what Marx labeled the lumpenproletariat: that part of society whose sole task is surviving no matter what it takes.  Usually extremely poor, only occasionally employed in conventional jobs, and existing literally outside of society, the lumpen are the truly dangerous ones in the bourgeoisie’s midst.  They provide respectable society with their entertainments such as illegal drugs and sex, but must be controlled at all cost.  The investigator’s position in society is closer to that of the lumpen than to any other stratum.  He or she understands the justice of the streets is often not the justice of the courtroom.  Of course, this position outside of society means there is nothing to lose in fighting the wealthy and powerful.

Mandel published his book before capitalism’s latest phase was truly underway.  That is, neoliberalism.  This stage of monopoly capitalism is the nightmare that Rosa Luxembourg warned us about.  Financiers who produce no product run the world.  Instead of creating work, their actions profit from the destruction of jobs and the impoverishment of millions. They launder the millions made by international drug lords while financing politicians who want to build more prisons and lock up those who use the drugs.  As far as the financiers are concerned, the working class itself is now a criminal class.  Yet, we know better.  It is the financiers and their class that are the true criminals.  Still, they go free while workers go to jail for the crime of being poor.  The conspiracy of the super rich is not an accident.  They built the world that way.

Writers can choose to point this out or they can go along with the status quo.  Good crime fiction on a neoliberal planet chooses the former.  The task of those who write these tales is to point the finger at the true criminals.  The police are only heroes when they bust the big guys.  The system can only be just when it turns on its own.  At this juncture in time, this only seems to happen in stories.  Unfortunately.

This essay appears as a foreword to all three novels in Jacobs’ “Seventies Series.”(Fomite Press) It first appeared in the March 2013 CounterPunch magazine.

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden.  His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

Repression has also been high in rural settings for unions such as the Colombian Federation of Educators, or Fecode, and for human rights defenders.  It is troubling that this overlaps with the current peace process and with more than two years of the Labor Action Plan (LAP).  The LAP was enacted in April 2011, calling on the Colombian government to fulfill a series of commitments in order for the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement to be passed.  Only one month later, in May, 2011, the US Trade Representative’s office announced ahead of schedule that the Colombian government had fulfilled these commitments and the FTA went into full effect.

The rising repression seems to be motivated by two primary factors:  1)  the desire of the Colombian oligarchy and transnational corporate interests to augment and consolidate the appropriation of peasant land in the event of a successful peace process and land reform; and, 2) an attempt to  prevent the emergence of a strong Left political bloc.

The reality for rural workers has not been one of improved labor or basic human rights.  Besides the repression against labor organizers and human rights advocates, forced displacement has increased by 83% over the past year according to  CODHES (the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement).  Colombia already has the world’s highest number of internally displaced, as many as 6 million, and more than 60% of these are from farming communities.  Also hard hit are indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, with Afro-Colombians disproportionately affected the past year.  Of course, farming communities can also be indigenous or Afro-Colombian, so there is much overlap.

Peasant farmers provide 70% of the food that Colombians eat.  But over the past 15 years of Plan Colombia, the US and Colombia’s “war plan”, Colombians have been dispossessed of 20 million hectares of land and half the country’s land is now in the hands of 1% of the population, , according to Virginia Bouvier of the United States Institute of Peace.  If one looks at the places where farmers are displaced from, without exception the areas are in or near sites wanted for the development of extractive industries, hydroelectric projects built for the export of electricity, or big agribusinesses with operations carried out by foreign corporations.

Regarding the Marcha Patriótica, many fear that this repression portends a possible repeat of the genocide against the Patriotic Union.  The Patriotic Union was a Left political party founded as part of a previous peace process that was derailed when some 5,000 of its leaders, candidates and elected officials were systematically assassinated over a period of ten years.

Over the past three months:

* Two Fensuagro organizers, Alonso Lozano and Gustavo Adolfo Pizo, have been assassinated, both of these leaders of the Fensuagro affiliate in Cauca, Sinpeagric (Union of Small Farmers of Cauca);

* One, Maribel Oviedo, of the Tolima Fensuagro affiliate, Astracatol (Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima) has been threatened with execution and illegally held hostage by members of the Colombian Armed Forces, her release secured when word was leaked to the local community about what was happening, and a national and international campaign was mobilized on her behalf;

* Eight Fensuagro unionists and Marcha Patriótica representatives have been arrested in the Department of Tolima just days after attending the Forum on Political Participation organized by the National University and a United Nations agency.  Among those arrested is Guillermo Cano, Human Rights Coordinator for Astracatol and member of the Executive Board for Fensuagro.

* Seven Fensuagro unionists have been killed in the first year following the installation of the Marcha Patriótica in April 2011.

It is often said that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union member.  It follows, then, that Fensuagro is one of the most targeted unions on the planet.  Over the past 30 years there have been more than 3,000 unionists murdered in Colombia.  In the 37 years of Fensuagro’s existence, it has lost over 1,500 of its members. Because Fensuagro represents rural farmers and farm workers, they represent the population hardest hit by forced displacement.

Fecode has also suffered a great deal of repression, and most of that has been targeted against teachers in rural areas.  Teachers are often one of only a few literate adults in many peasant villages, and play an integral role in community cohesion and the flow of information.  Since 1986, Fecode has lost 972 of its members to assassinations, and last year, according to Fecode Pres. Zenen Nino, members of the union received in excess of 500 threats.

Another indicator of the repression aimed at rural populations is the persecution sustained by human rights advocates in rural settings.  According to Somos Defensores (We Are Defenders), 2012 saw the most threats and attacks against human rights advocates in ten years, with an advocate being assaulted every 20 hours and one being killed every five days.  There was a 49% increase in individual assaults over 2011.  Somos Defenores reports that 97% of assassinated human rights advocates are from rural zones.

Despite this heavy repression, solidarity between US unions and Fensuagro is a recent phenomenon, and solidarity with Fecode has been intermittent.  When the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), which is not a labor organization, began its Colombia working group in August 2008, AfGJ was the only US organization with an ongoing program of solidarity with Fensuagro.  That situation began to change when the United Steelworkers (USW) opened official channels of communication with the agricultural union in 2011.  Since that time a series of resolutions of solidarity with Fensuagro have been passed by various labor federations and union bodies, beginning with the South Bay Labor Federation in California and spreading to the statewide California Labor Federation, the Long Island (New York) Labor Federation, the Pima County (Arizona) Labor Federation and the New York State United Auto Workers.  It should be noted that the USW is the largest industrial union in the US and the California Labor Federation represents one out of six US unionists—so this new solidarity is not insignificant.

One can only hope that the USW and/or one of these resolution-sponsoring bodies will take the next step and carry a resolution forward to the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in September 2013.  However, despite these hopeful developments, the momentum seems to have stopped right when it is most needed.  Rather than official labor delegations, efforts to broaden such solidarity via the entire AFL-CIO, and union-approved denunciations and alerts regarding the escalating repression of the past three months against Fensuagro, this new solidarity seems to have dissipated into silence.

In 2009, the Solidarity Center actually intervened to stop a nascent relationship between Fensuagro and the USW.  The Solidarity Center is associated with the AFL-CIO, but receives more than 90% of its funding from the federal government, and its programs generally reflect US government priorities, rather than those of rank and file unionists.  We do not know if there has been any recent intervention by the Solidarity Center, however, with Fensuagro’s strong criticisms of the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and its association with the political opposition, and given that the escalation of violence against this and other unions stands in sharp contrast to the passing grade the USTR gave Colombia regarding labor rights, one can well imagine that those who hold the purse strings of the Solidarity Center in the State Department and USAID might be concerned with high profile solidarity given to Fensuagro.

It has been suggested that certain leaders of the AFL-CIO are taking a step backwards from solidarity with Colombian unions that are not in step with US government goals.  The situation is further exacerbated by the particular reluctance of the AFL-CIO to be in direct contradiction to an administration affiliated with the Democratic Party.  There is some precedence for this concern.  There are 2008 and 2009 Wikileaks cables that reveal that at the very same time that the AFL-CIO was undertaking a campaign to defeat the FTA, the Solidarity Center’s Bogotá office was meeting with the US Embassy to discuss efforts to support the FTA.

There are perhaps internal struggles going on within the AFL-CIO regarding Free Trade Agreements, generally.  In November of 2012, I attended a Labor Caucus at the annual Fort Benning, Georgia protests against the School of the Americas.  At that meeting, I heard Cathy Feingold, the Director of International Affairs for the AFL-CIO, call passionately for a movement to defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would be the largest FTA in the world, including the US, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Japan,Vietnam and New Zealand. However, if one today visits the AFL-CIO website page on the TPP, one encounters a far different tone:

This trade agreement presents the Obama administration with an opportunity to reform U.S. trade policy so it helps U.S. businesses export goods, rather than outsource jobs. The president and his team have an opportunity to deliver a new trade model for the 21st century that creates jobs, protects the environment and ensures safe imports. Negotiations must include provisions that will benefit U.S. workers, not simply the largest global corporations.

In other words, the AFL-CIO is now calling for tinkering with the TPP, rather than defeating it.

There is no such confusion about FTA’s among union families.  According to two separate polls in 2010, one by NBC/Wall Street Journal and one by the Pew Research Center, more than 60% of union families oppose new FTAs.

Besides the simple discomfort that some in the AFL-CIO must feel in regards to opposing the trade positions of the Obama administration, there is the added issue of the thumbs-up the Obama administration gave Colombia about labor rights in order to implement the FTA.

According to the National Labor School in Colombia, there were 20 assassinations of unionists in 2012, while the International Trade Union Confederation reported 35.  These numbers are lower than the previous years, but, as noted in an article by Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, of WOLA, and Dan Kovalik, of the USW (who, among USW leaders, has been especially committed to Colombia solidarity),

While this is an improvement from prior years…Colombia still remains number one in the world for total number of trade unionists killed.  Moreover…one should keep in mind the fact, as previously observed by Colombia’s Jesuit Father Javier Giraldo, that after years of killing unionist in the hundreds—for a total of well over 3,000 since 1986—there are simply less unionists in Colombia to kill and killing tens of unionists a year now still elicits the requisite terror in the hearts and minds of Colombian workers to deter them from union activity.

Furthermore, a Public Citizen report on the aftermath of two years of the Labor Action Plan shows that “…union members in Colombia received 471 death threats—exactly the same number as the average annual level of death threats in the two years before the Plan….”  And, as mentioned earlier, Fecode reports that it alone has received 500 threats in just the last year.  Today the rate of unionization in Colombia is 4%, one of the lowest rates in the world, even below the rate of unionization in countries where labor unions are considered illegal.

It is well known that the Solidarity Center actively discourages political activity by labor unions.  This position is, of course, selective.  Anyone familiar with labor unions in the US knows how thoroughly allied the AFL-CIO is with the Democratic Party, and that it devotes huge resources in funds and people power to campaigning for chosen candidates.

On an international basis, the Solidarity Center showed little restraint when it acted as a conduit for US political interference in Venezuela in 2002. The Solidarity Center funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) while they were plotting a failed coup against the elected government of Pres. Hugo Chávez.  Curiously, a month before the coup actually took place, the Caracas office moved its operations to Bogotá, Colombia, where it remains today, continuing to coordinate activities in both Colombia and Venezuela.  To this day the AFL-CIO still has posted on its website a defense not only of Carlos Ortega, the former President of the CTV who helped plan the 2002 coup attempt, but also of Carlos Fernandez, former President of Fedecamaras, the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, and Ortega’s partner in the failed overthrow.   The CTV and Fedecamaras not only worked together toward the coup attempt of April , 2002, but in a lockout of oil workers in December, 2002 designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy.  This is one of the few examples in international labor history where a  labor union took its orders from a bosses organization in helping keep workers from their jobs.

In Haiti, we see an example of how the Solidarity Center rewards behavior in accordance with US government designs, and withholds solidarity from workers most in need, based on political reasons.  The country’s largest union, the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH), was brutally persecuted during and after the US sponsored coup against the elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide.  During this period, the Solidarity Center did nothing to support the CTH, but rather gave over $300,000 to a small labor organization that in the midst of the coup was calling for the resignation of Pres. Aristide.

However, when I went to Haiti in 2010, I found out that not only had the CTH been “rehabilitated”, but that its President was now part of the National Electoral Council that had prohibited Lavalas, Haiti’s largest political party, from participating in elections.  The CTH had formerly been associated with Lavalas. The CTH had also dropped its objection to the development of a free trade zone employing factory workers for wages significantly below the minimum wage.  Suddenly, the Solidarity Center started giving the CTH hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants.

The Solidarity Center is a core institute of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).  NED co-founder Alan Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1999 that, “A lot of what we do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA.”  So we can see clearly that the Solidarity Center concern about union political activity is thoroughly selective and based on US government priorities.

But in regards to unions associated with Left political orientations, the mantra of the Solidarity Center is almost endless, calling on unions to focus on particular labor struggles rather than political objectives.  A September 14, 2004 cable from the US Embassy in Colombia speaks of a US Department of Labor (DOL) funded study conducted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Colombia.  The title of the cable was REMOVING POLITCS FROM LABOR RELATIONS REDUCES VIOLENCE AND STRENGTHENS DIALOGUE.   The cable notes that,

…removing politics from labor relations can play an important role in…reducing levels of violence against trade unionists and management.…The ILO study does more than support our conclusions about the nature of labor violence in Colombia [the emphasis is mine] ….The ILO study provides models for future action through which unions may be convinced to leave politics to Colombia’s political parties and focus instead on labor relations and the promotion of traditional labor priorities….We urge that serious consideration be given to extending this program or funding other programs — perhaps under FTA-related capacity building assistance….

By the time we get to August 11, 2008, we find another Embassy cable describing meetings that include Rhett Doumitt of the Solidarity Center’s Bogotá Office.  The cable notes that, “Doumitt complains that the politics of the labor movement in Colombia impede positive, practical advances on labor issues.”  It was during this same period that the Bogotá office of the Solidarity Center was participating in meetings with the Embassy to discuss the founding of a Colombian labor federation that would promote the US-Colombia FTA, despite a clear majority of unions in both Colombia and the US opposed to the FTA.

On April 9, 2013, I observed more than one million people marching in Bogotá, Colombia in support of the peace process.  It is of some note that most Colombian unions did not endorse the march, although thousands of unionists participated in it.  One labor activist told me it is because of the growing perception that unions should focus on specific labor issues and not on larger political struggles.  With a major increase over the past year in Solidarity Center and US Department of Labor funding and activity in Colombia,  one can only wonder what role they are playing today in efforts to de-politicize Colombian unions.  (http://tinyurl.com/6ovnt85 and http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/ilab/ILAB20122522.htm )

Three unions did endorse the march:  Fensuagro, Fecode and USO.  Fecode and USO have received some limited support from the Solidarity Center.  Fensuagro has been summarily ignored or, worse, undermined.

The reality is that for these unions, it is simply impossible and unrealistic to divorce labor from political struggle.  To suggest that it is political struggle that is the reason that these unions are targeted is an example of blaming the victim.  Workers in Colombia have the same right to organize around their political interests as the AFL-CIO has to endorse and work for Democratic Party candidates.  The problem is not that these unions are politically involved.  The problem is that there is a political climate of violent repression for those who get involved in opposition activities.

The idea that Colombian labor unions should “leave politics to Colombia’s political parties and focus instead on labor relations” is especially cynical, given not only the ineffectiveness of Colombia’s traditional parties in protecting unionists, but, worse, the fact that they are the very ones who have ordered so many unionists to be put in jail, and given that the Colombian Armed Forces continue to be implicated in the repression of rural labor unionists and human rights advocates.  For instance, in Tolima and Cauca, two of the Departments where Fensuagro unions are most targeted, the majority of threats and attacks against unionists are committed by the Colombian military.

We also hear of transnational corporations such as Drummond Coal, Coca-Cola, Chiquita Banana, Dole and others literally paying paramilitaries and looking the other way when these death squads intimidate and kill unionists.  The idea that labor should isolate from political struggle is tantamount to saying that labor unions should not defend themselves from what constitutes a frontal assault by corporate supported paramilitaries and from the repression of the state.  Whether one agrees or disagrees with the political orientation of unions like Fensuagro or of movements such as the Marcha Patriótica, any defender of civil liberties and labor rights and any proponent of peace must recognize that there is no just peace when nonviolent political dissent is violently crushed and workers are denied a voice in the nation’s affairs.

Let me make clear that the AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center have also both acted at various times to defend Colombian unionists from repression.  However, that defense was sharper during the Bush administration than during the Obama one.  And there have indeed been some examples of US labor solidarity over the years with unions such as Fecode and USO.  But there can be no doubt that the lion’s share of US labor solidarity has been reserved for union bodies that have refrained from active participation in political activities at odds with US government objectives.  These have included labor organizations such as the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) and the National Union of Workers in the Agricultural Industry , or Sintrainagro, both supporters of the US-Colombia FTA.  In fact, Sintrainagro in 2010 even offered to accompany the Colombian government in FTA negotiations.

Certainly, any union repressed for its organizing activities deserves international solidarity, including the CGT and Sintrainagro.  Sintrainagro, which represents sugar cane workers, has recently endured its own share of threats and violence.  But Fensuagro, Fecode and USO merit solidarity as well.  Instead, what we are witnessing is the “Haiti model”, aka “carrot and stick approach”, already discussed: selected application of US labor solidarity not to meet the greatest need, but to reward practices that are in line with official US government policies.  Thus, the Solidarity Center is acting as an arm not of labor, but of the US government.  This has been the concern for pro-union critics of the Solidarity Center all along—not that we oppose the idea of a Solidarity Center, but that we want a Solidarity Center that proceeds from the ground up, from the locals to the halls of the AFL-CIO offices in DC, a Solidarity Center that reflects the international concerns of its membership, rather than the policy dictates of the federal government.

Fortunately, there is a movement afoot in US labor  that is standing up in solidarity with Fensuagro, as well as with other targeted unions.  Whether intentionally or unintentionally, it represents a new wind of labor independence in world affairs.

The USW deserves much credit for developing this new form of union to union, worker to worker solidarity.  The USW’s official relationship with Fensuagro comes about as a result of its membership in Workers Uniting, a partnership with the largest unions in the United Kingdom and Ireland.  These unions already had an established relationship with Fensuagro when the USW joined with them.  The USW is also a union that includes not only US but Canadian workers.  Thus the basis of the USW’s solidarity reflects its own increasingly global character.  And while the USW is fully participant in the Solidarity Center, it must be noted that the avenue of this particular solidarity is via an independent and alternative route.  The relationship established by the USW with Fensuagro has opened up the space for other important labor organizations to step forward and declare their solidarity with the embattled union.

All this can be seen as an extension of a process begun in 2005, when the AFL-CIO passed a resolution criticizing the war in Iraq and calling for the “rapid” return home of US troops.  According to a press release by US Labor Against the War (USLAW), “Adoption of this resolution represents the first time in its 50 year history that the federation [AFL-CIO] has taken a position squarely in opposition to a major U.S. foreign policy or military action.”

The majority of the pro-Fensuagro resolutions have also explicitly mentioned Fensuagro’s membership in the Marcha Patriótica as a main reason it is targeted, and thus call for the safety not only of the union, but of the popular movement it is part of.  Even before the peace process had begun, and when both the US and Colombian governments were rejecting the idea of negotiations in favor of a military-only solution, the Marcha Patriótica had been demanding a peace process.  These resolutions  are therefore implicitly critical of US policies that support war and repression in Colombia.

For labor activists in the US, there is another especially historic aspect:  Solidarity with Fensuagro represents a break with the Solidarity Center status quo.

These resolutions actually give the Solidarity Center itself the chance to signal that changes may be taking place within its own structures.  The Solidarity Center was formed in 1997 as part of a reform movement that was in contrast to the history of the AFL-CIO as a front for the CIA in its international relations.  Nevertheless, it was headed formany years by Harry Kamberis, who came to the Solidarity Center not from the ranks of unionists, but from his position at the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI), from 1986 to 1997.  Kamberis’ main background was originally not with labor, but as a former foreign service officer and international business person.  Kamberis was at AAFLI at a time of bloody repression of unionists in South Korea, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia—with those most repressed also the most ignored by US labor.  It was under Kamberis that money was funded to coup plotters in Venezuela in 2002.  Kamberis also spoke supportively of Bush administration policies in Iraq.

Kamberis stepped down from his position in September, 2005.  Since then, the Solidarity Center has been less likely to be directly involved in the kinds of questionable activities seen under Kamberis—although it could be that they are just better at hiding them.  One of the most negative aspects of the Solidarity Center is that other than vague descriptions of certain programs, their books are not open for review by the public or by union members.

Nevertheless, there are many new faces at the Solidarity Center and some of these do come out of more progressive labor solidarity movements.  But in Colombia and Venezuela, we still see an “old guard”  in charge.  If the Solidarity Center really wants to show unionists around the world that it is a new and different kind of organization, one thing that it can do is to welcome the USW relationship with Fensuagro, and the pro-Fensuagro resolutions that have been passed, and it can not stand in the way or undermine any efforts to bring a pro-Fensuagro resolution to the AFL-CIO convention this September.

But for the Solidarity Center to ever truly be trusted in Colombia and elsewhere, and if it is to win the confidence of labor’s rank and file and of the international solidarity and peace movements in the US, it must do three things:

1. Open its books on its operations past, present and future;

2. Ween itself off of State Department and USAID funding and fund itself via union monies and independent revenues;

3. Base its policies on actual need and with direction that comes from the bottom up, involving union locals and rank and file unionists, and thus representing the desires and mandates of the union movement itself, rather than that of the federal government.

Meanwhile, for those unions and labor organizations that have taken stands in favor of Fensuagro, we must call on them to stay active and to not back off.  It is a disturbing trend  that even those labor bodies that have publicly expressed their solidarity have slipped back into silence when the need is most acute.  It is time for US labor to show clearly that it is ready to stand up for Fensuagro, stand up for Colombian unionists and, above all, to stand up for peace and justice in Colombia.

James Jordan is National Co-Coordinator for the Alliance for Global Justice.

“The US kill rate in the 1950-53 Korean War equaled more than one 9-11 every day… for the whole 1,100 day war…The US may have killed 20% of the population of Korea, said General Curtis Lemay, who was involved in the US air war on Korea. If so, that is a higher rate of genocidal slaughter than what the Nazis inflicted on Poland or the Soviet Union.”

– Stansfield Smith, “North Korea’s Justifiable Anger“,  CounterPunch

North Korea’s military remains on hair-trigger alert following joint-military exercises that were conducted by the United States and South Korea in April. Barack Obama, who promised to negotiate directly with the DPRK during his 2008 presidential campaign, has reneged on his promise and taken a  more belligerent approach to the crisis than his predecessor, George W Bush.  Obama’s war games, which were the largest of their kind, were deliberately provocative and designed to test the North’s new leader Kim Jong Un.  Pyongyang responded to Obama’s incitement by cutting off all ties with the South, closing Kaesong Industrial Complex, and by launching six missiles into the sea off it’s East coast. The North Korean Committee for Peaceful Reunification also released this statement:

“The joint naval drill involving the latest weaponry including the nuclear aircraft carrier is a wanton blackmail against us and demonstrates that the (US and South Korea) attempt to invade us has reached an extremely reckless level.  The risk of a nuclear war in the peninsula has risen further due to the madcap nuclear war practice by the US and the South’s enemy forces.”

It’s clear that Obama’s “rollback strategy” has merely escalated tensions and increased the likelihood of a conflagration. It has also given Pyongyang the excuse it needs to divert more of its dwindling resources into nuclear weapons. How does this advance US geopolitical interests or improve  regional security? It doesn’t. The policy is a complete disaster. By antagonizing the North with these pointless military maneuvers, Obama is forcing them to build nukes. Why is that so hard to grasp?

The Korean people know their history even if their counterparts in the United States of Amnesia do not. More than 2 million people were killed in the Korean War,  the vast majority of them Chinese and North Koreans. In contrast, the number of US combat troops that were killed is quite small, just 36,000.  While every death is deeply felt by friends and family, it’s hard to imagine the impact of seeing 20 percent of your countrymen wiped out by a foreign army.  Pyongyang understands the costs of war  which is why their why official communiques are always so blustery and hyperbolic. It’s because they don’t want to look weak,  because weakness encourages adventurism.  The DPRK’s incendiary rhetoric is a contrivance that’s crafted with one purpose in mind, to avoid another war with the United States.

Here’s a short blurb from an article at Global Research that provides a glimpse of the how the war was prosecuted by the US military:

 ”US General MacArthur instructed his bombers “to destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city and village” in North Korea except for hydroelectric plants and the city of Rashin, which bordered China and the Soviet Union, respectively….

“The blanket fire bombing of North Korean cities, the destruction of dams and the resulting devastation of the food supply and an unremitting aerial bombardment were more intensive than anything experienced during the Second World War.

At one point the Americans gave up bombing targets in the North when their intelligence reported that there were no more buildings over one story high left standing in the entire country … the overall death toll was staggering: possibly as many as four million people. About three million were civilians… Even to a world that had just begun to recover from the vast devastation of the Second World War, Korea was a man-made hell with a place among the most violent excesses of the 20th century.”

US forces killed millions, leveled the North, and left the country in ruins. Why? Because policymakers in Washington decided that US interests were at stake.

In a recent article at Consortium News, UC Santa Cruz professor Christine Hong explained the whimsical way that Korea was divided by US post WW2. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“If you go back to 1945, you see that scarcely three days after the bombing of Nagasaki, two junior U.S. army officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel retired to a small room armed with nothing more than a National Geographic map of the Korean peninsula, through which, in a 30-minute session, with absolutely no consultation of any Korean, divided the Korean peninsula. This division of the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel into north and south, and the creation of a southern government, had no popular legitimacy.”

How do you like that; 30 minutes with felt-tip pen, and Pentagon warplanners created the rationale for killing over two million people and laying the peninsula to waste.  It’s astonishing. And what’s more astonishing is the fact that our Nobel Peace prize-winning president, Barack Obama, has been ratcheting up the pressure on the North by leading the charge for tighter sanctions (on banking and trade),  increasing the range of missiles in the South (to hit targets in the North), and staging massive war-games  aimed at further isolating the North and exacerbating regional tensions. The joint-maneuvers anticipated a scenario in which the present regime in the Pyongyang collapses. Here’s a bit of background from the same article:

 ”In a recent Pentagon press conference, [Defense Secretary] Chuck Hagel was asked whether or not the U.S. sending D2 stealth bombers from Missouri to fly and conduct a sortie over South Korea and drop what the DOD calls inert munitions in a simulated run against North Korea could be understood as provocative. He said no, they can’t be understood as provocative.”

So simulated nuclear attacks on a foreign capital are “not provocative”? Obviously, Hagel doesn’t worry too much about his credibility.  Here’s more from the same article:

“It’s almost impossible for us in the United States to imagine Mexico and the historic foe of the U.S., Russia, conducting joint exercises that simulate an invasion of the United States and a foreign occupation of the United States.  That is precisely what North Korea has been enduring for several decades.”

While it is factually true that the DPRK faces incitements that the US would never tolerate on its own borders; it’s also true that the rules do not apply to the United States. Everyone knows this.

According to an op-ed in the Washington Post by ex-president Jimmy Carter, the North seeks a “denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a permanent cease-fire”, but insist that it be ”based on the 1994 agreements”. (The US never fulfilled its end of the bargain in the so called 1994 Agreed Framework. Obama refuses to do so today.) The DPRK leaders have promised that their nuclear facilities and their “array of centrifuges would be ‘on the table’ for discussions with the United States.”  In other words, the North is ready for bi-lateral talks with United States provided there are no conditions. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has rejected such talks unless there is concrete evidence of  ”denuclearization”. Pyongyang must agree to concessions (tantamount to nuclear disarmament) before the administration will even negotiate.  If the North agreed to Obama’s terms,  then the same incriminating farce that took place in Iraq prior to the war would be repeated on the Korean Peninsula.

It makes no sense for the DPRK to comply with rules which undermine its bargaining position and pose a threat to its national sovereignty. Nor does it make sense for the US to create conditions which lead to nuclear proliferation.  Sanctions, isolation and belligerence have backfired and increased the prospect of a miscalculation that could precipitate a nuclear war.   It’s time for Obama to lower the temperature, tone down the saber rattling, and abandon the failed policy of regime change. As journalist Stansfield Smith said, If we want North Korea to change “then we should stop pointing a gun at their head.”

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on how the banks targeted blacks for toxic subprime mortgages appears in the May issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

All of this has amounted to a “terror” attack.  It took place in the south-east London area of Woolwich yesterday.  Police were called to the scene of the incident on John Wilson Street at 2.20 p.m.  But London has been witness to violent crimes before, as it will continue to be. The descriptions of this event have propelled an event of terrible violence into another category: one of terrorism.  Yet hardly anything has actually been said to warrant the term.  Then again, as Cicero claimed in his second oration against Verres, O tempora! O mores!

While the misuse of political terminology has become standard, tolerated fare in the twenty-four hour news cycle, it is worth looking at these unfolding events again to heed how terms of security can be misused.  The “framing” of an event can have significant implications for policy.  It doesn’t require the ponderings of cognitive linguist George Lakoff to remind us how effective those tactics can be.  Don’t call it tax evasion.  Call it tax minimisation.  Don’t call it a criminal act – call it a “terrorist act” before all the facts are known.  The agenda is dictated in advance.

Then come the fundamental problems for those dealing in the business of defining terrorism, a field marked as much by charlatanism as it is by usefulness – practitioners cannot agree on any specific term.  Dozens are floating about in the spectrum of terminology.

The eyewitness accounts that are coming in suggest that a brutal crime may have taken place, a theatrically bloody act of public spectacle. James Heneghan told radio LBC 97.3 that he and his wife saw two men (yes, he did say black) “hacking this poor guy, hacking him, chopping him.”  The assailants “were oblivious to anything, they were more worried about having their photo taken, running up and down the road” (Metro, May 22).

Identification evidence is notorious, and tends to provide defence lawyers with ample grist to a busy mill. It may well be that another such case may be forming.  According to another eyewitness, this time Fred Oyat, living in a high-rise near the location of the attack, there were four gun shots, and “four knives on the ground – big kitchen knives.  The knives were very bloody” (Time, May 22).

The attacks of September 11 2001 were treated as the singular events of their time.  In many ways, this was a disservice to history.  Previous eras of terrorism have befallen the tottering human race, mostly inflicted by governments rather than two-bit revolutionaries.  The specific attacks of 9/11 have been deemed everything from “acts of war” to “acts of terror”.  They have also been regarded as criminal acts, though this view was rapidly swept under the carpet when the dots were joined.

Many are wishing that the latter view might have held sway – the “war on terror” remains one of the most lexically nonsensical creations in the last twenty years.  It has produced extra-judicial solutions, legal fantasies and a security culture tolerant of torture (oh, apologies, enhanced interrogation – every occasion deserves it term).  It has also produced the atmosphere that transforms a violent act with a machete (or machetes) in a London suburb into terrorism.  The only term that comes closer in absurdity is that lamentable construct, the “war on drugs”, that other abused reference that suggests you can wage war against an inert object or a tactic.

The material here for this conversion from alleged criminal act to actual act of terrorism is sketchy but important to note.  Heneghan’s observations bolster the designation of terrorism – the assailants “were waiting for the police to arrive to be shot by the police.  That’s the only thing I can think.” There were supposedly cries of “AlIah Akbar” before the attack (Birmingham Mail, May 22).  Instantly, one thinks of the rhetoric of martyrdom – these religiously intoxicated assailants wanting to perish at the hands of the security establishment.  Not quite as dramatic as your standard car bomb, but necessity is the mother of invention.

The individual who lost his life was a British soldier – another box to be ticked in the security chart.  He was allegedly wearing a Help for Heroes t-shirt, a military charity for wounded British soldiers.

The location was just a few blocks from the Royal Artillery Barracks.  Another box, another tick.  There was political speculation over the incident – from local MP Nick Raynsford and even, if this can be verified, French President François Hollande.

To round this off, British Prime Minister David Cameron has joined the speculation, suggesting that there are “strong indications” that this was a terrorist attack.  “We have suffered these attacks before, we have always beaten them back.  We will not be cowed, we will never buckle.”  And whatever happened to that good old fashioned term of a violent crime (actual or alleged), whatever the motivation?

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures in politics and law at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

On May 22^nd, Weiner threw his proverbial hat into the New York City mayoral race, one of a half-dozen Democratic candidates seeking to replace Michael Bloomberg in the upcoming election.  In a well-plotted campaign, he’s back in the game.  He harbors a war chest estimated at $5 million and was required to announce his run or forfeit public matching funds.

In a professionally produced video that launched his campaign, he lays out a profile of his life – his childhood in Brooklyn, his Congressional accomplishments and his “middle class” agenda for the city.  Most telling in terms of the scandal that will likely dog his campaign, Weiner opens and closes the video accompanied with his wife, Huma Abedin, an aide to Hillary Clinton.

Weiner’s reemergence on the political scene comes just a couple of weeks after another political figure who was forced from office following a sex scandal, Mark Sanford.  The former governor of South Carolina won a race for a House seat against Elizabeth Colbert Busch.

These two races — involving a Democrat and a Republican, in a blue and a red state — signal the further erosion of the culture wars.  The Christian right remains absolutist with regard to a woman’s right to an abortion.  But some within the Republican right have given ground with regard to gay rights, immigration, teen sex ed and the morning-after pill.

An increasing number of states have legalized marriage equality and the Senate is advancing a somewhat “bipartisan” immigration bill.  These efforts signal the emergence of a new right-of-center “moderate” faction within the Republican Party.

The new Republican moderates seem to recognize that the 2012 election signed a profound shift in the electoral climate.   They seem to acknowledge that the message of Tea Party activists is getting shriller, more fundamentalists.  More insightful, they see Republicans as a shrinking political force due to demographics and as capitalist recovery takes place.  They wonder how to hold – if not gain – ground in the 2014 Congressional elections.  Can it be a replay of what happened in 2010?

* * *

Americans love a scandal involving the high-and-mighty, whether a politician, celebrity or grandee.  It represents all-American schadenfreude, the satisfaction or pleasure that comes from someone else’s misfortune.  U.S. history is rich with political scandals, many involving sex.  More interesting, time — and changing moral values –has led to the rehabilitation of pols and others brought down by a sex scandal.

This shifting value system is personified by former-President Bill Clinton.  His illicit Oval Office tryst with Monica Lewinsky was the grounds for his Impeachment by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives led by Newt Gingrich.  Clinton’s value position has been significantly enhanced by the subsequent revelations about Gingrich, who, while leading the charge against the sitting president, was involved in an out-of-wedlock affair with Callista Gingrich, his current wife.

Today, Clinton has been fully rehabilitated.  He runs the prestigious Clinton Foundation and his wife, Hillary, who stuck with him through the scandal, served as Secretary of State and has a shot at becoming the next president.  One can only wonder whether Weiner, his wife and political confidants reflected on this possibly parallel scenario.

Other pols have not fared so well.  Gingrich flubbed the 2012 election. Al Gore, a well-meaning if inept politician – whatever happened to the “Information Superhighway”? – was deflated after his divorce.  New York’s former governor, Eliot Spitzer, kept his marriage but has floundered as an entertainment figure, jumping from an online columnist, to talk-show personality, to whatever gives him visibility.

Weiner seems to be taking a more strategic – and carefully plotted – play for political rehabilitation.  He reportedly paid $100,000 to David Binder, who worked as an Obama pollster, to determine his political viability.  Binder framed the question in stark terms: “Are voters willing to give him a second chance or not, regardless of what race or what contest?”  According to a New York Times’ story about the poll, “There was this sense of ‘Yeah, he made a mistake. Let’s give him a second chance. …  They want to know that they’ve put it behind them.”

Weiner has plotted a well-crafted campaign that involved a series of steppingstones, each one leading to his formal declaration as a candidate on May 22^nd.  The cornerstone of the pre-announcement campaign was a feature spread in the Sunday, April 10^thNew York Times magazine.  The puff piece, written by Jonathan Van Meter, reports that Weiner was truly remorseful about the pain and suffer he caused his wife.  This may well be the case, but offered – in a heartfelt declaration – in an influential, primary public-media source, seemed calculated, a steppingstone in a well-crafted campaign.

One can only wonder what was the strategic significance of our oh-so-contrite pol’s appearance a month earlier on NY-1, a local cable news program.  He declared, “I think I’ll be spending a lot of time, here on out, saying I’m sorry.”

It’s still a long way to the Democratic primary and one can only wonder whether he will release his game plan?

David Rosen writes the “Media Current” column for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to AlterNet, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail.  Check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net. 

We are in a golden age of exposés, detailed revelations about out-of-control polluters, corporate tax escapees, corruption of government, cheating of consumers, abandonment of workers, freezing or reduction of wages, and a general hijacking of America for perpetual wars, militarism and profiteering. Even from mainstream television, newspapers and magazines, these exposés pour out in numbers that far exceed our weakened democracy’s ability to respond.

Why does so little change when the truths, the facts and the grim realities are available on request? In the past more prosecutors, legislators, and regulators would be informed and goaded by exposés. The wider media would echo such responses which further encouraged these enforcers to challenge wrongdoing. A cycle of public agitation and official responses kept things moving.

But there were fewer exposés and therefore less information overload. Today, exposés are running into each other and receiving smaller audiences. The shrinking mass media does not give the authors and producers the time that was afforded their predecessors.

Nothing has replaced the Phil Donahue Show that reveled in showcasing injustices. The Today Show and Good Morning America have fewer authors on their stages. Charlie Rose is heavily into entertainers, favored columnist Tom Friedman, and business celebrities. Once welcoming radio talk show hosts are off the air, replaced by curled lip ideologues or soft, fluffy commentators. Local daily city television talk shows that made author tours successful and often would jump-start investigative reports are nearly extinct, replaced by syndicated programs featuring touchy-feely or sadomasochistic fare.

This new media landscape is more hostile to the civic community and discourages the younger generation from believing that change is truly within our grasp. As the years pass, our examples of national re-directions, as if people matter, come from the 1960s and ’70s. There are dwindling illustrations from more variously-troubled, recent decades, even as the information revolution should have accelerated the pace of change.

There may be proportionately as much civic activism today, though the smaller marches and rallies and much less mass media coverage do not demonstrate that there is as much public protest. What is certain is that there are now far more problems, declines in livelihoods, and other deprivations and lockouts from participating in our legislative and executive governments and courts. It doesn’t help that there are far fewer differences between the two major parties and far more gridlocks, garnished by far more campaign cash, resulting in chronic avoidance or postponements of remedies.

Let’s go back to the exposés. What can documentary film makers, for example, do beyond putting out a fine product for theater audiences and DVD purchasers?

An ongoing development pushing the envelope toward change comes from Eugene Jarecki’s documentary “The House I Live In.” Saturating the country with his public and private showings, action meetings with prison wardens and lawmakers – urban and rural – and continuing media coverage, he seeks to make his film “a widely-recognized and galvanizing tool for a national rethinking of America’s drug control policies.” His two-year plan of coalition building and direct legislative pressure is breathtaking in its scope, depth, agility and strategic thinking (for more information visit the website here).

Mr. Jarecki is plowing new ground through relentless follow-through – an extension more authors, capable of doing so, should undertake. After all they have proven themselves as knowledgeable, interesting communicators.

Another contemporary documentary receiving serious follow-up by its production team is “The Invisible War” – the story of rape and other sexual assaults within the U.S. military. This film, directed and written by Kirby Dick, is being taken seriously by the Pentagon which is showing it to commanders and high-ranking military leaders. Attendance is often required thanks to a few enlisted commanders and constant prodding from the filmmakers.

Realistically, many reporters and producers are unable to pursue their findings into the realms of action. Often they are onto their next investigative project and are economically hard-pressed. Here is where some farseeing foundations or enlightened wealthy persons can make a difference by funding small civic groups taking the findings and recommendations into the public policy arenas backed by civic mobilization. After all, civic advocates have proven their worth over the long run.

Or existing groups, such as the anti-nuclear steadfast organizations – Beyond Nuclear and Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) – can be the beneficiaries of funders viewing documentaries such “Knocking on the Devil’s Door: Our Deadly Nuclear Legacy.”

Maybe we need a 24/7 documentary cable channel with a citizen action focus so that fortuitous rendezvous can occur among all these parties at any given time around the ticking clock.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

The mainstream media’s coverage of the tornado in Moore, Oklahoma will be predictable. Politicians will recite their liturgy of solemn condolences and deepest gratitudes. The more ostentatious ones will flatter the community of Moore with condescending talk about how tough they are and how they’ll move past this—as Obama did to Boston following the Marathon bombing. Amidst all these helpful remarks, no politician will discuss how to prevent future natural disasters.

At best there will be a critique of FEMA’s response to the tragedy. To be fair, critiques of this sort are not totally insignificant. Rigid, hierarchical relief organizations like FEMA perform far worse in crises compared with less authoritarian, horizontal approaches, like that of Occupy to Hurricane Sandy. In a recent book titled “Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies,” two establishment Harvard professors concede that FEMA’s bureaucratic (i.e. hierarchical) structure was an important flaw causing its failed response to Hurricane Katrina.

Though disaster response may be discussed, disaster prevention will not. For the only known way to prevent extreme weather events is to prevent climate change, which is a taboo subject in mainstream media. I do not mean to say that these media forbid discussion of climate change, or even proposals of solutions. What are instead forbidden are serious solutions. One example of this would be reducing consumption, which is, of course, blasphemous to the establishment, because it’s incompatible with capitalism. Given our present system, growth (and hence consumption) is necessary for prosperity, or even subsistence. This would seem to be self-evidently problematic. To mainstream economists, however, it is the bedrock of their profession. It is all well and good to bombard ordinary Americans with tiresome iterations of how we must ‘live within our means’; the managers of the economy, on the other hand, are free to believe in the magic of infinite growth. Establishment economists essentially believe that they have discovered the first perpetual motion machine: the global economy.

The impact of increasing growth is remarkably evident, even by the crudest measures. Consider the EPA’s graph of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. From 1990 onward it increases with almost zero deviation—until 2007-8. The reason that emissions drop off so sharply here is because that was when the global financial crisis occurred. And the decline in carbon emissions was not limited to the U.S.: according to the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, emissions from heavy industry they analyzed fell 3.1 percent in 2008 compared with 2007. Their view, paraphrased by Reuters, is that “This was due to falling industrial output from the global economic slowdown.” Therefore, given the present configuration of the economy, what is good for the economy is bad for the environment.

Another example of a serious solution to climate change is installing a high-speed transit system, which did in fact exist in the U.S. for some time. The only reason it doesn’t exist in any serious measure today is because a bunch of corporations like GM, Firestone, Standard Oil Of California, and others got together and bought the existing streetcars and electric train systems, and junked them all. This monopolistic move was so flagrant that the corporations responsible were tried and sentenced for conspiracy. (Incidentally the paltry fine was not great enough to seriously hamper their efforts.) Now we have the interstate highway system, the construction and maintenance of which is extremely oil intensive. The much-romanticized ‘freeway’ (a nice Orwellian term) does leave those of us who can afford cars to drive however we please—well, within a few yards or so of the vehicles in front of and behind us.

Solutions like reducing consumption and installing high-speed transit systems would not only prevent extreme weather events like the tornado in Oklahoma, it would also diminish their severity. This was the conclusion of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In a recent interview with Scientific American about the tornado in Moore, he states that, while “the climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10 percent effect in terms of the instability…it translates into up to a 33 percent effect in terms of damage.” In other words, under conditions of less carbon emissions, even if the tornado had still occurred, it would have been less likely to cause as much damage as it did. But don’t expect to hear that in the mainstream media: they are too busy emphasizing our helplessness in the face of such ‘acts of god’—a god whose supremacy was usurped by industrial capitalism years ago.

Ken Klippenstein lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he edits the left issues website whiterosereader.org He can be reached at reader246@gmail.com

Those limitations are palpable in both language and action. A political and military vacuum created by past US failures and forced retreats after the Iraq war made it possible for countries like Russia to reemerge on the scene as an effective player.

It is most telling that over two years after the Syrian uprising-turned bloody civil war, the US continues to curb its involvement by indirectly assisting anti-Bashar al-Assad regime opposition forces, through its Arab allies and Turkey. Even its political discourse is indecisive and often times inconsistent.

Concurrently, Russia’s position remains unswerving and constantly advancing while the US is pushed into a corner, demonstrating incapacity to react except for condemnations and mere statements. This is to the displeasure of its Arab allies. Russia’s recent delivery of sophisticated anti-ship missiles and its own buildup of warships in the eastern Mediterranean is a case in point. The move was condemned by the Obama administration as one that is “ill-timed and very unfortunate,” according to a statement by Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported in the LA Times on May 17.

But this American attitude in the region is fairly new. Behind it stands a history so bloody and filled with imprudent foreign policy. Regardless of how the US decides to move on Syria, the chances are that a return to its old dominant approach is no longer an option.

Indeed, the current American political impotence in the Middle East is unprecedented, at least since the rapid disintegration of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990’s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union had ushered in the rise of a unipolar world, wholly managed by the United States. The rise of the uncontested American hegemony represented a shift in historical dialectics, where great powers found their match and the rest of the world, more or less, accommodated the ensuing competition.

Then, the US acted quickly to assert its dominance starting with hasty military adventures such as the invasion of Panama in 1989. A much more calculated move followed with a devastating war against Iraq in 1990-91. In Panama the objective was to remind the US’s southern neighbors that the region’s cop was still on duty and was capable of intervening at a moment’s notice to rearrange the entire political paradigm in any way that Washington deemed necessary – As this has been the case since the CIA-orchestrated coup and war in Guatemala in 1954 and even earlier.

The US’s massive military involvement in Iraq, however, was that of a conqueror who arrived with an entourage of many countries – regional and western allies – to claim the spoils resulting from the end of the protracted Cold War. It was an arrogant show of force since the target was a single Arab country with humble military and economic means vs. major military powers from near and far. The war devastated Iraq, as its initial aerial bombing campaign alone involved the dropping of 88,500 tons of bombs. Many new weapons were used and tested, while the US media and public celebrated the prowess of their military. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died or were wounded as a result of one of the most asymmetrical wars in history.

Trying to capitalize on its military triumph, Washington quickly pushed for a political settlement between its closest ally, Israel, and Arab countries. The logic behind the Madrid Conference in 1991 was achieving pseudo peace that catered to Israel’s interests, while opening up the gate of normalization between Israel and its neighbors. Moreover, the US hoped to achieve some sort of ‘stability’ that would allow it to manage the Middle East region and its ample resources in a less hostile environment. Eventually, Israel managed to negotiate its own political deal with the Palestinians, thus dividing Arab ranks and ensuring that the ‘peace talks’ outcome was entirely consistent with Israel’s colonial ambitions.

As years passed, the US and Israeli political visions moved even closer, but with Washington eventually becoming a mere conduit to Israeli colonial objectives. This fact was underscored repeatedly under the George W. Bush administration, which compounded US failure in the region with even more disastrous and dangerous wars.

A major fault in US foreign policy is that it is almost entirely reliant on military power – as in the ability to blow things up. The US war on Iraq which, in various forms, extended from 1990 to 2011, included a devastating blockade and ended with a brutal invasion. This long war was as unscrupulous as it was very violent. Aside from its overwhelming human toll, it was placed within a horrid political strategy aimed at exploiting the country’s existing sectarian and other fault lines, therefore triggering a civil war and sectarian hatred from which Iraq is unlikely to cover for many years.

But limitations of US military power became quite obvious in later years. The empire was no longer able to bridge the divide between translating its dominance on the ground – itself increasingly challenged by local resistance groups – into a level of political progress required to achieve the minimum amount of ‘stability’. Moreover, an economic recession, coupled with the Iraqi retreat and an equally costly debacle in Afghanistan – forced the new administration in Washington, under the leadership of President Barack Obama to rethink Bush’s earlier quest for global hegemony. Massive military cuts were soon to follow. Concurrently, the imbalance of global power was slowly, quietly but surely being equalized with the rise of China as a new possible contender.

In the midst of the US transition and policy rethink, an upheaval struck the Middle East. Its manifestations – revolutions, civil wars, regional mayhem and conflicts of all sorts – reverberated beyond the Middle East. Shrinking and rising empires alike took notice. Fault lines were quickly determined and exploited. Players changed positions or jockeyed for advanced ones, as a new Great Game was about to begin. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ was rapidly becoming a game-changer in a region that seemed resistant to transformations of any kind.

The transformation of the Middle East – promising at times, very gory and bloody at others – arrived at a time when the US was making forced adjustments in its military priorities. Putting greater focus on the Pacific region and the South China Sea are such examples. Without much notice, it was forced to reengage with the Middle East, as a whole – not a country at a time. Only then, its weaknesses were seriously exposed and its lack of influence became palpable.

Bankrupt is maybe an appropriate term to use in describing the current US policy in the Middle East. Imprudent military adventures devastated the region but achieved no long term objectives. Reckless policies that are predicated on trying to exploit, as opposed to understand the Middle East and its complex political and historical formation and the insistence on keeping Israel a main priority in its approach to the vastly shifting political lines, will unlikely to bode well for US interests.

However, unlike the early 1990’s, when the US moved to reshape the entire region and established permanent military presence, new dynamics are forcing US hands to change tactics. In this new reality, the US is incapable of reshaping reality but merely trying to offset or control its unfavorable outcomes.

“What the United States (and western Europe) want to do is ‘control’ the situation,’ Immanuel Wallerstein argued. “They will not be able to do it. Hence the screams of the ‘interventionists’ and the foot-dragging of the ‘prudent.’ It is a lose-lose for the west, while not being at the same time a ‘win’ for people in the Middle East.”

This ‘lose-lose’ scenario might not necessarily translate to a complete American foreign policy meltdown in the near future, but will certainly open the possibility for new/old players to main serious gains, Russia being a lead example. This will likely compel the US to change tactics, despite the incessant objections of neoconservative forces and the Israeli lobby.

Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle  and  “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).