These are the themes of his new book, End This Depression Now. In old-fashioned Keynesian style he believes that the solution to insufficient market demand is for the government to run larger budget deficits. It should start by giving revenue-sharing grants of $300 billion annually to states and localities whose budgets are being squeezed by the decline in property taxes and the general economic slowdown.

All this is a good idea as far as it goes. But Mr. Krugman stops there – as if that is all that is needed today. So what he has done is basically get into a fight with intellectual pygmies. Thus dumbs down his argument, and actually distracts attention from what is needed to avoid the financial and fiscal depression he is warning about.

Here’s the problem: To focus the argument against “Austerian” advocates of fiscal balance, Mr. Krugman hopes that economists will stop distracting attention by talking about what he deems not necessary. It seems not necessary to write down debts, for example. All that is needed is to reduce interest rates on existing debts, enabling them to be carried.

Mr. Krugman also does not advocate shifting taxes off labor onto property. The implication is that California can afford its Proposition #13 – the tax freeze on commercial property and homes at long-ago levels, which has fiscally strangled the state and led to an explosion of debt-leveraged housing prices by leaving the site value untaxed and hence free to be pledged to banks for larger and larger mortgage loans instead of being paid to the public authorities. There is no hint in Mr. Krugman’s journalism of a need to reverse the tax shift off real estate and finance (onto income and sales taxes), except to restore a bit more progressive taxation.

The effect of Mr. Krugman’s suggestions is for the government to subsidize the existing financial and tax structures, leaving the debts intact and ignoring the largely regressive, unfair and inefficient system of taxation. It is unfair because the profits of the rich – and even worse, their asset-price (“capital”) gains are taxed at lower rates and riddled with tax loopholes and giveaways. The wealthy benefit from the windfall gains delivered by the public infrastructure investment advocated by Mr. Krugman, but there is not a word about the public recouping this investment. Governments are indeed able to create their own money as an alternative to taxing, but some taxes – above all, on windfall gains, like site value resulting from public investment in roads or other public transportation – are justified simply on grounds of economic fairness.

So it is important to note what Mr. Krugman does not address these issues that once played so important a role in Democratic Party politics, before the Wall Street faction gained control via the campaign financing process – even before the Citizens United case. For over a century, economists have recognized the need for financial and fiscal reform to go together. Failure to proceed with a joint reform has led the banking and financial sector – along with its major client base, the real estate sector – to scale back property taxes and “free” the economy with taxes so that the revenue can be pledged to the banks as interest to carry larger loans. The effect is to load the economy at large down with private and public debt.

In Mr. Krugman’s reading, private debts need not be written down or the tax system made more efficient. It is to be better subsidized – mainly with easier bank credit and more government spending. So I am afraid that his book might as well have been subtitled “How the Economy can Borrow its Way Out of Debt.” That is what budget deficits do: they add to the debt overhead. In Europe, which has no central bank permitted to monetize the deficit spending, this pays interest to transfers to the bondholders (and their descendants). In the United States the Federal Reserve can monetize this indebtedness – but the effect is to subsidize domestic debt service.

Mr. Krugman has become censorial regarding the debt issue over the last month or so. In last Friday’s New York Times column he wrote: “Every time some self-important politician or pundit starts going on about how deficits are a burden on the next generation, remember that the biggest problem facing young Americans today isn’t the future burden of debt.”[1] Unfortunately, Mr. Krugman’s failure to see today’s economic problem as one of debt deflation reflects his failure (suffered by most economists, to be sure) to recognize the need for debt writedowns, for restructuring the banking and financial system, and for shifting taxes off labor back onto property, economic rent and asset-price (“capital”) gains. The effect of his narrow set of recommendations is to defend the status quo – and for my money, despite his reputation as a liberal, that makes Mr. Krugman a conservative. I see little in his logic that would oppose Rubinomics, which has remained the Democratic Party’s program under the Obama administration.

Many of Mr. Krugman’s readers find him the leading hope of opposing even worse Republican politics. But what can be worse than the Rubinomics that Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Rahm Emanuel and other Wall Street holdovers from the Democratic Leadership Committee have embraced?

Perhaps I can prod Mr. Krugman into taking a stronger position on this issue. But what worries me is that he has moved sharply to the “Rubinomics” wing of his party. He insists that debt doesn’t matter. Bank fraud, junk mortgages and casino capitalism are not the problem, or at least not so serious that more deficit spending cannot cure it. Criticizing Republicans for emphasizing structural unemployment, he writes: “authoritative-sounding figures insist that our problems are ‘structural,’ that they can’t be fixed quickly. … What does it mean to say that we have a structural unemployment problem? The usual version involves the claim that American workers are stuck in the wrong industries or with the wrong skills.”[2]

Using neoclassical sleight-of-hand to bait and switch, he narrows the meaning of “structural reform” to refer to Chicago School economists who blame today’s unemployment as being “structural,” in the sense of workers trained for the wrong jobs. This diverts the reader’s attention away from the pressing problems that are genuinely structural.

The word “structural” refers to the systemic imbalances that neoclassical economists dismiss as “institutional”: the debt overhead, the legal system – especially unfair and dysfunctional bankruptcy and foreclosure laws, regulations against financial fraud, and wealth distribution in general. In 1979, for example, I juxtaposed economic structuralism to Chicago School monetarism in my monograph on Canada in the New Monetary Order. I have elaborated that discussion my textbook on Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (new ed. 2010). The tradition is grounded in the Progressive Era’s reform program. Correcting such structural and institutional defects, parasitism and privilege seeking “free lunches” is what classical political economy was all about – and what the neoclassical reaction sought to exclude from the economic curriculum. But from the perspective of neoclassical writers through Rubinomics deregulators, the problem of massive, unpayably high debt expanding inexorably by compound interest (and penalty fees) simply disappears.

So the great problem today is whether to stop the siphoning off of income and wealth to financial institutions at the top of the economic pyramid, or reverse the polarization that has taken place over the past thirty years between creditors and debtors, financial institutions and the rest of the economy. I realize that it is more difficult to criticize someone for an error of omission than for an error of commission. But the distinction was erased a month ago when Mr. Krugman got lost in the black hole of banking, finance and international trade theory that has engulfed so many neoclassical and old-style Keynesian economists. But last month Mr. Krugman insisted that banks do not create credit, except by borrowing reserves that (in his view) merely shifts lending savings from wealthy people to those with a higher propensity to consume. Criticizing Steve Keen (who has just published a second edition of his excellent Debunking Economics to explain the dynamics of endogenous money creation), he wrote:

Keen then goes on to assert that lending is, by definition (at least as I understand it), an addition to aggregate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cases lending is associated with higher demand, because resources are being transferred to people with a higher propensity to spend; but Keen seems to be saying something else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has something to do with the notion that creating money = creating demand, but again that isn’t right in any model I understand.

Keen says that it’s because once you include banks, lending increases the money supply. OK, but why does that matter? He seems to assume that aggregate demand can’t increase unless the money supply rises, but that’s only true if the velocity of money is fixed;[3]

But “velocity” is just a dummy variable to “balance” any given equation – a tautology, not an analytic tool. As a neoclassical economist, Mr. Krugman is unwilling to acknowledge that banks not only create credit; in doing so, they create debt. That is the essence of balance sheet accounting. But writing like a tyro, Mr. Krugman offers the mythology of banks that can only lend out money taken in from depositors (as though these banks were good old-fashioned savings banks or S&Ls, not what Mr. Keen calls “endogenous money creators”). Banks create deposits electronically in the process of making loans.

Mr. Krugman then doubled down on his assertion that bank debt creation doesn’t matter. People decide how much income they want to save, or decide how much to borrow to buy goods that their stagnant wage levels no longer enable them to afford. Everything is a matter of choice, not a necessity (“price-inelastic” is the neoclassical euphemism):

First of all, any individual bank does, in fact, have to lend out the money it receives in deposits. Bank loan officers can’t just issue checks out of thin air; like employees of any financial intermediary, they must buy assets with funds they have on hand.

So how much currency does the public choose to hold, as opposed to stashing funds in bank deposits? Well, that’s an economic decision, which responds to things like income, prices, interest rates, etc.. In other words, we’re firmly back in the domain of ordinary economics, in which decisions get made at the margin and all that. Banks are important, but they don’t take us into an alternative economic universe.
As I read various stuff on banking — comments here, but also various writings here and there — I often see the view that banks can create credit out of thin air. There are vehement denials of the proposition that banks’ lending is limited by their deposits, or that the monetary base plays any important role; banks, we’re told, hold hardly any reserves (which is true), so the Fed’s creation or destruction of reserves has no effect.[4]

Not only do banks create new credit – debt, from the vantage point of their customers – but in the absence of government spending and regulation along more progressive lines, this new debt creation is the only way that the economy has avoided a sharp shrinking of consumption as real wages have remained stagnant since the late 1970s. The banks offer is one most people can’t refuse: “Take out a mortgage or go without a home,” or “Take out a student loan or go without an education and try to get a job at McDonald’s.” In other words, “Your money or your life.” It is what banks have been saying through the ages. The difference is that they can now create credit freely – and as Alan Greenspan has pointed out to Senate committees, workers are so debt-burdened (“one check away from homelessness”) that they are afraid that if they complain about working conditions, ask for higher salaries (to say nothing of trying to unionize), they will be fired. If they miss a paycheck their credit-card rates will soar to about 29%. And if they miss a mortgage payment, they may face foreclosure and lose their home. So the banking system has cowed the population with its credit- and debt-creating power.

Mr. Krugman’s blind spot with regard to the debt overhead derails trade theory as well. If Greece leaves the Eurozone and devalues its currency (the drachma), for example, debts denominated in euros or other hard currency will rise proportionally. So Greece cannot leave without repudiating its debts in today’s litigious global economy. Yet Mr. Krugman believes in the old neoclassical nonsense that all that is needed is “devaluation” to lower the cost of domestic labor. It is as if he is indifferent to the suffering that such austerity imposes – as Latin American countries suffered at the hands of IMF austerity plans from the 1970s onward. Costs can “be brought in line by adjusting exchange rates.”[5] The problem thus is simply one of exchange rates (which translates into labor costs in short order). Currency depreciation will (in Mr. Krugman’s trade theory) reduce labor’s cost and other domestic costs to the point where governments can export enough not only to cover their imports, but to pay their foreign-currency debts (which will soar in depreciated local-currency terms).

If this were the case, Germany could have paid its reparations debt by depreciating the mark in 1921. But it did so by a billion-fold, even this did not suffice to pay. Neither neoclassical trade theorists nor Chicago School monetarists get the fact that when public or private debts are denominated in a foreign (hard) currency, devaluation devastates the economy. The past half-century has shown this again and again (most recently in Iceland). Domestic assets are transferred into foreign hands – including those of domestic oligarchies operating out of their offshore dollar or Swiss-franc accounts.

Blindness to the debt issue results in especial nonsense when applied to analysis of why the U.S. economy has lost its export competitiveness. How on earth can American industry be expected to compete when employees must pay about 40 percent of their wages on debt-leveraged housing, about 10 percent more on student loans, credit cards and other bank debt, 15 percent on FICA, and about 10 to 15 percent more in income and sales taxes? Between 75 and 80 percent of the wage payment is absorbed by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector even before employees can start buying goods and services! No wonder the economy is shrinking, sales are falling off, and new investment and hiring have followed suit.

How will the government running a larger deficit cope with today’s dimension of the debt problem – except by taking Mr. Krugman’s suggestion to enable states and localities to spend marginally more revenue and avoid further layoffs, while the military industrial complex steps up its “Pentagon capitalism”? So far, the great increase in recent government debt has been to bail out the banking sector, not to help the “real” economy recover.

Increasing the debt burden of European nations has the same dire consequences. Germany balks at bailing out Greece unless Greece moves to streamline its bloated government and inefficient bureaucracy, stop tax evasion by the wealthy, clean up corruption and, in a word, be more Germanic. The U.S. “Austerian” budget cutters whom Mr. Krugman criticizes likewise can point to wasteful government spending, failing to distinguish positive infrastructure investment from pork-barrel “roads to nowhere” and tax loopholes promoted by Congressional politicians whose campaigns are sponsored by special financial interests, real estate and monopolies.

But I fear that Mr. Krugman is being drawn into the gravitational pull of Rubinomics, the Democratic Party’s black hole from which the light of clarity dealing with the debt issue and bad financial and legal structures simply cannot escape. The only variables he admits are structure-free: The federal government can indeed spend more and reduce interest rates (especially on mortgages) so that the higher mortgage debt, student debt, personal debt and corporate debt overhead can be afforded more easily. No need to write any of these debts down. That seemingly obvious and sensible structural solution lies outside the scope of Mr. Krugman’s neoclassical economics. He fails to recognize that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. This is the immediate problem facing the U.S. and European economies today – and the way in which it is resolved will shape the coming generation.

The problem with Mr. Krugman’s analysis is that bank debt creation plays no analytic role in Mr. Krugman’s proposals to rescue the economy. It is as if the economy operates without wealth or debt, simply on the basis of spending power flowing into the economy from the government, and being spent on consumer goods, investment goods and taxes – not on debt service, pension fund set-asides or asset price inflation. If the government will spend enough – run up a large enough deficit to pump money into the spending stream, Keynesian-style – the economy can revive by enough to “earn its way out of debt.” The assumption is that the government will revive the economy on a broad enough scale to enable the individuals who owe the mortgages, student loans and other debts – and presumably even the states and localities that have fallen behind in their pension plan funding – to “catch up.”

Without recognizing the role of debt and taking into account the magnitude of negative equity and earnings shortfalls, one cannot see that what is preventing American industry from exporting more is the heavy debt overhead that diverts income to pay Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) expenditures. How can U.S. labor compete with foreign labor when employees and their employers are obliged to pay such high mortgage debt for its housing, such high student debt for its education, such high medical insurance and Social Security (FICA withholding), such high credit-card debt – all this even before spending on goods and services?

In fact, how can wage earners even afford to buy what they produce? The problem interfering with the circular flow between producers and consumers (“Say’s Law”) is not “saving” as such. It is debt payment. And unless debts are written down, the U.S. economy will shrink just as will the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Iceland and other countries subjected to the Washington Consensus of neoliberal austerity.

Michael Hudson’s new book summarizing his economic theories, “The Bubble and Beyond,” will be available in a few weeks on Amazon. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

“The question is not whether things will get better — they always do… The question is whether together, we can muster the will — in our own lives, in our common institutions, in our politics — to bring about the changes we need. I’m convinced your generation possesses that will.”

Whatever else they possess, the class of 2012 possesses an enormous amount of debt. Heavy borrowing’s not only for graduate students or drop outs from for-profit colleges any more. It’s also for Barnard alums. Forty eight per cent of those graduating this year from Barnard (where the price tag of an education stands at $58,078 ) have taken out loans to pay for their bachelor’s degree. As the New York Times recently pointed out, “Nationally, ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993.”  For these students things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse.  Their will has nothing to do with it.

Standing at $1 trillion and rising fast, outstanding student debt is a bubble set to burst. The New York Times report compiled shocking numbers: “For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000.”  Not just the students but also their parents are borrowing. Loans to parents for the college education of children have jumped 75 percent since the 2005-2006, according to the Times.

Just like that first home, millions spent on marketing have made a college education seem like an American must-have. Yet ever since the early 1980s, college tuition has risen faster than wages, and public education spending’s been cut back. As the Times reports: “If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years,” even as this year, “state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low.”

If you liked the mortgage crisis, you’re going to love the education debacle.  College admissions officers, like mortgage  loan officers, tend to urge borrowers not to worry about the costs. Students have always defaulted. The federal government’s pre-approved the bail-out.  Today, nearly one in ten students default within two years –  about twice what it was five years back. Consumer bankruptcy lawyers have been raising an alarm for a while.

“Take it from those of us on the frontline of economic distress in America,” said William E. Brewer Jr. of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys earlier this year.  “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.”

Except it’s a different sort of debt bomb. It the sort that individuals have to carry about. Thanks to federal law, there’s no declaring bankruptcy on student loans and there’s no debt relief. There’s no getting a refund for an education that did you no good. At the end of the day those payments can be drawn directly out of your social security check. Pam Brown, a Columbia college graduate student, is working with the OWS based group, Occupy Student Debt. “The system is a predatory one,” she says. “There’s an assumption students won’t be able to pay their debts. Refinance, take out an expensive private loan and the interest rates compound fast.”  As Brown says: “the government and the banks both had their hands in this pot.”

This particular bubble doesn’t burst on Wall St. “It oozes over a generation,” says Brown. “In a sense it’s a pre-approved government bailout. The government protects the college, but each debtor is paying so much throughout their lives that it’s impossible to live a regular life.” Says Brown.

One last turn of the knife: predatory lending patterns are re-inscribing the racial divides that President Obama’s happy talk about social change would let so many Americans forget.

“Whenever you feel that creeping cynicism, whenever you hear those voices say you can’t make a difference, whenever somebody tells you to set your sights lower — the trajectory of this country should give you hope.” Said the president.

The reality is, today’s trajectory is towards ever greater divergence, rural from urban, the very rich from the rest, but especially black from white.

ColorLines fills in what the New York Times leaves out: whereas about one in four white Americans graduate with debt less than $12,000; one in three African Americans owes more than $38,000. (The Barnard graduating class is just 4.5 percent African American.) The same phenomenon we saw in the housing crisis prevails in education: it’s perilous to be “borrowing while Black.”

Just as black borrowers were more likely than whites to be offered risky, sub-prime mortgages (even when they could afford regular sort) so too, Black students are more likely than any other group to take out high-risk private loans for college. Private loans (which are on the rise) come with none of the deferments for unemployment, income-based repayment, or loan forgiveness options attached to federal student debt. According to the Project on Student Debt the percentage of African-American undergraduates who took out private loans quadrupled between 2003-04 and 2007-08, from 4% to 17%. The next batch of numbers are sure to be worse. Suffice to say, having lost all the wealth they gained subsequent to the Civil War in the housing disaster, the options for the next African American generation are quite literally being cut off.

Barack Obama said at Barnard:

“If you’re willing to do your part now, if you’re willing to reach up and close that gap between what America is and what America should be, I want you to know that I will be right there with you. If you are ready to fight for that brilliant, radically simple idea of America that no matter who you are or what you look like, no matter who you love or what God you worship, you can still pursue your own happiness, I will join you every step of the way.”

Sometimes commencement cliches are just dull. At other times they hurt.  “Joining with” today’s graduating class requires forgiving student debt. For all our sakes. Nothing else counts.

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura. 

Today’s awesomely affluent are just as transient – by choice.

Take Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. This billionaire renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2011, a move perfectly timed to potentially save him hundreds of millions in taxes when Facebook goes public.

Saverin has plenty of company. The number of Americans who formally renounced their U.S. citizenship soared to 1,780 last year from 235 in 2008.

The spark for this surge? U.S. tax officials ave been clamping down on overseas tax evasion. This bit of unpleasantness has some wealthy Americans, such as the Brazilian-born Saverin, cutting their ties to dear old Uncle Sam. They simply pay a $450 paperwork fee and an “exit tax” on unrealized capital gains, if they hold assets worth over $2 million or have paid over $151,000 to the IRS in any recent year.

But the affluent who’ve formally renounced their citizenship comprise just a tiny share of what the Financial Times has labeled the “stateless super rich.” These uber-wealthy folks shy from the notoriety of citizenship spurned. They just live their lives as if they have no nation to call their own.

The most famous member of this stateless-by-choice community may be Nicolas
Berggruen, a 52 year-old “homeless billionaire” worth over $2.3 billion who has spent the last decade hopping the world from one five-star hotel to another.

But few of the stateless super rich settle for hotel suites. Most of the vagabonding wealthy own personal residences. Lots of them. Typically, the Financial Times reported last month, a stateless super-rich household will have one or two properties in their “country of principal residence,” another in London, New York, or some other “global city,” a “holiday home” in a warm climate, and maybe another pad somewhere snowy.

Among the super rich, this perpetual-motion existence has become almost de rigueur, notes Jeremy Davidson, a London realtor who handles properties that run at least £10 million, the equivalent of over $16 million.

“The more money you have,” explains Davidson, “the more rootless you become because everything is possible.”

That rootlessness is keeping the price of luxury real estate soaring. So far this year, in Manhattan alone, four luxury co-op apartments have sold for over $30 million each, notes Crain’s New York Business.

Just how many potential stateless super rich are currently roaming the world? Late last year, the Singapore-based Wealth-X consulting firm put the overall global number of people worth at least $500 million at about 4,650. These super rich together hold an estimated $6.25 trillion in assets.

That’s more than enough, note urban planners, to create havoc in the hotspots where the stateless super rich most often gather. Their gentrification on steroids supersizes prices for local products and services – and prices out local residents in the process.

The massive mansions and apartments belonging to these homeless billionaires can also exacerbate local housing shortages and constitute an assault on any healthy sense of urban community. The super rich, as they flit about, leave their properties unoccupied most of the year. The resulting emptiness, notes Columbia University sociologist Saskia Sassen, sucks the neighborhood vitality out of great urban centers.

The super rich don’t notice. Or care. They have no interest in putting down roots. During their brief seasonal sojourns, they live in isolation from the greater community around them. They venture out into local public life only long enough to corrupt it with trinkets for local pols who promise to keep tax rates toothless.

The stateless protagonist in the classic short story Edward Everett Hale penned nearly 150 years ago desperately yearns to rejoin the society he so treasonously spurned. Today’s stateless super rich don’t figure to display any similar yearning. They’re having too grand a time. At our expense.

Sam Pizzigati is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, editor of the journal Too Much and author of The Rich Don’t Always Win, Seven Stories Press, New York, forthcoming 2012.

This column is distributed by OtherWords.

Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, stated “Look, I support that position. We support it as the labor movement because of discrimination.” He explained, “There are 1,128 obligations and benefits you get from being married, responsibilities and obligations, as well as some benefits. We think that everybody ought to be treated equally. So it’s marriage equality we’re looking at, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against.”

While many union members likely disagree with Trumka’s stance, support of same sex marriage and all civil rights is the only position that is consistent with the interests of working people as a whole. Though unions are generally focused on better wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, they cannot take effective action for these needs without building broad unity among all workers regardless of race, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. Consequently, since the mass efforts of the LGBT community have galvanized around the issue of marriage equality, the union movement needs to get behind it. For LGBT workers, this issue is as central to their lives as their working conditions. For those workers who are currently opposed to same sex marriage, they need to learn that they are better able to struggle for improvements in their lives if they are united with their gay brothers and sisters. Given the bipartisan attacks against workers, they cannot afford to let their prejudices get in the way.

Nevertheless, the uncritical praise for President Obama’s remarks create the impression that they have been more motivated to getting him re-elected than as commitment to LGBT equality. This is because Obama’s remarks fell far short from the step forward for which they are being touted. In fact, politically they are a step backwards. The President did not say he considered marriage equality a civil right. Moreover, he made it a point of stating that he considered the matter of same sex marriage best decided on a state-by-state basis. This has been the fall back position for every two-faced faker in civil rights’ struggles from the days of slavery and Jim Crow to Roe v. Wade. In other words this means that Obama condones discrimination where bigots have the political upper hand.

President Obama’s advocating of a state-by-state approach towards marriage equality undermines the efforts of those who are fighting for it as a constitutional civil rights issue. Jim Cook, in his article “Barack Obama’s Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement” explains:

“There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women — the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California’s ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and women from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages. Obama’s Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson’s constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.”

Experience has shown that this president’s “support” for progressive measures results in, at best, political inaction. Union leaders certainly must remember Obama’s “support” for the Employee Free Choice Act (card check) and other pro-worker measures he promised during his campaign and dropped once elected. For them to uncritically line up behind Obama’s comments on same sex marriage, without clarifying that they consider it a civil rights issue in opposition to the President’s state-by-state approach, makes them look, at best, foolish, at worst, insincere.

It is perhaps hoped by those moved to uncritical support of Obama’s comments to encourage his “evolution” on same sex marriage towards political action that he currently opposes. However, in the realm of politics, such changes are more determined by the movement of social forces than by personal appeals and clever statesmanship. In other words, the LGBT community and their supporters in Labor must not blunt their struggle for marriage equality in the hope of appealing to the good conscience of corporate politicians and not making too much trouble. They must continue the fight through independent mass action and educating their worker brothers and sisters who currently do not understand the issue of marriage equality.

The best way of educating on a mass level is through common struggle. This was vividly demonstrated in 1974 in a Teamster Local 888 conflict with Coors Brewing Company. After settling a five-month strike, Coors remained the sole distributor that refused to sign the new contract. Local 888 President Allan Baird realized that his union did not have the ability to win on their own without the active support of the LGBT community in San Francisco. He met with Harvey Milk, who was a rising openly gay activist in the city, hoping to get support for a boycott of Coors. Milk’s only condition was that the Teamsters begin to hire openly gay drivers. Baird agreed and the union began to hold true to its promise within a week, beginning a city-wide boycott that lasted three years, uniting the interests of the Teamsters and the San Francisco LGBT working class community.

This struggle demonstrates how workers are educated in mass action about the need to overcome anti-gay prejudices in order to win as a class. It also suggests, in miniature, the approach labor leaders can take today that will strengthen the fight for marriage equality. In 1974 the main issue for the Teamsters was to settle the contract fight with Coors. This lead them to start a form of union-conducted affirmative action in the hiring of openly gay workers. Today, the main issues workers are facing are the need for a real jobs program and the need to stop cuts to such public services as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and education by taxing the rich. If the labor movement conducts such a struggle through mass action, independent of the corporate two party system, the need for unity will become apparent. This will create more fertile ground for winning marriage equality for the LGBT community than any presidential campaign statements.

Mark Vorpahl is an union steward, social justice activist, and writer for Workers’ Action - www.workerscompass.org. He can be reached atPortland@workerscompass.org.

Serious lies have brought down many a politician, and Walker’s duplicity in his remarks to “divide & conquer” Wisconsin that was caught live with a new documentary about the decline of industrial America, may yet prove his undoing.

Many observers, such as former chief counsel to Richard Nixon, John Dean, have referenced what some hold to be Walker’s mendacity, asserting that the Governor’s “lying is notorious” with a style even “more Nixonian than even Richard Nixon himself.”  The implications are significant as Walker’s credibility diminishes with his former top aides immersed in scandal and under investigation by the District Attorney with computers seized by the FBI.

Politicians are famous for being taken down by their vanity. In this case Scott Walker permitted a documentary filmmaker to tail him, and as with so many who came before him eventually dropped his guard. In the process we discovered the different language and messages the Governor delivers to the public and his billionaire backers.

The two recordings of Walker, one with his billionaire and one in his televised address to the public following the outbreak of the 2011 protests shows a “bilingual” Walker deploying two entirely different “languages”: one for his billionaire backer, and one for the public that contradicts the message of the former.  The video with his billionaire funder has the Governor receiving an affectionate, bordering on amorous, hug from his Wisconsin patroness, Diane Hendricks, which surely will displease Mrs. Walker.  Ms. Hendricks is Walker’s biggest Wisconsin backer, having already given him $519,000 and permitting Walker to avail himself of her private plane for campaigning.

This encounter, and a recording of the Governor last year where he thought he was speaking about strategy with one of America’s notorious Right Wing funders, the Koch brothers, shows a sort of bilingual character to Walker, with a folksy, populist language deployed for the public, and another that is Machiavellian and servile with America’s power elite. These languages differ not only in style, but also in substance.

On the one hand, with the billionairess, Walker is asked if “we can work on these unions and become a ‘right to work state.’”  The Governor responds with “we are going to start in a couple of weeks with our budget adjustment bill” and the “first step” with labor will be to “divide and conquer” public and private sector workers.

Walker, to his word, then followed on his promise to Ms. Hendricks by removing the right of public employees to bargain on wages and benefits.  Additionally, were requirements for public unions to annually re-certify. What Walker failed to anticipate are the now famous/infamous (depending on one’s politics) Wisconsin protests that emerged in the winter and spring of 2011. Walker, quick to do damage control, made a televised address to the public after the protests erupted, then asserting that his budget adjustment bill “is not aimed at state workers and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions.”  Then reflecting his previously mentioned “divide & conquer” strategy to his billionaire backer, Walker states we are “not going after the private sector unions.”

This recent incident may be too much for Midwesterners, who although notorious for a German frugality also pride themselves on honesty and straightforwardness in their politicians.  In the video Walker comes off as sneaky, telling a billionaire that his strategy is “divide and conquer” while in public he had claimed the budget bill was about balancing the budget.  His utterance may stick in the craw of a public craving bipartisanship and solution-based politics given the turbulence that has emerged since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010.

Wisconsin, the state that spearheaded both progressivism and McCarthyism, has always been a bellwether for the nation. It reflected the 2010 national right turn with an election that brought Walker and a strong majority of Tea Party Republicans to the state house.  In power they have cut taxes for the rich, curtailed most collective bargaining rights for public employees, cut education at all levels and have declared the state “open for business.”  The policies have created a serious reaction, with unprecedented mass demonstrations and a wave of rarely used recall elections, a process by which elected officials can be made to stand for election before their term expires.  Yet, just as quickly as the fortunes of the radical rightwing Tea Party have risen, they seem to be just as rapidly falling.  The recall of Walker echoes this national trend as well; where polls for the Tea Party American Congress show record low levels of support for that institution.

There are only three weeks to go in this battle that nationally is being billed as a contest between big labor and big money.  Yet, the race is more nuanced, with only 13.3 percent of the Wisconsin workforce unionized, thus suggesting big labor no longer even exists.  Indeed, a majority of Walker’s opposition comes from non-union workers that are simply appalled by the corrupting influence of big money in politics that for them Walker has come to embody.  Conversely, not all Walker supporters are rich.  Many feel he mirrors their fiscal concerns as taxpayers under stress in a time of declining wages for the middle class.

As the race enters the final stretch Walker is neck and neck in a dead heat with his old rival, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a centrist who has sparred plenty with unions, but who is perceived as honest, even by many Walker supporters. Barrett is running on moderation and bringing an end to Wisconsin’s “civil war,” to use his term, along with a modest record of economic success the past fifteen months that follows much decline in the previous three decades of Wisconsin’s biggest city. Yet, Walker’s suburban and rural supporters see Barrett as too much reflecting ‘urban’ Milwaukee.  The recall’s symbolic importance is immense. If Walker prevails, his rightwing funders will maintain it as a victory encouraging them to go for a coup de grace against the labor movement.  Meanwhile, Walker’s opposition believes his defeat will be seen as a repudiation of politics reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, placed on the steroids of billionaire money in the present.  The electoral outcome of the June 5^th recall will do much to inform campaign narratives in the United States generally as the country advances toward its Presidential election in November and thus is being closely watched by all.

At present, Scott Walker’s big money machine is outspending his opponent Tom Barrett by estimates of 3-5 to 1.  Walker’s billionaires are also outspending labor 20 to 1.  Meanwhile, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) seems to be taking a laissez faire approach to support of the recall that is at all odds with the urgency of the situation.  To be ungenerous, it reminds one of Stalin abandoning the Polish resistance to the Germans at Warsaw at the end of World War II.  For anyone wishing to add their voice (think Lincoln Brigade of Spanish Civil War) to the cause, please call the DNC at 202-863-8000 and request they send cash (reinforcements!) NOW!

Thank you!

JEFFREY SOMMERS is an associate professor of political economy & public in Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.  He publishes regularly in outlets such as CounterPunch and the Guardian, and routinely appears as an expert guest in global news programs, most recently on Peter Lavelle’s CrossTalk.  He can be reached at: Jeffrey.sommers@fulbrightmail.org

CHRISTOPHER FONS is a Social Studies teacher in Milwaukee and executive board member of the Milwaukee Teacher’s Education Association (MTEA). He can be reached at fonsca@gmail.com

I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home. I grew up in the southern city of Be’er-Sheva, which is just a few kilometres from several unrecognised Bedouin villages that, today, are home to thousands of residents who were displaced in 1948. I now know that the vast majority of the Negev’s Bedouin population was not as lucky, and that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most Bedouin either fled or were expelled from their ancestral lands to Jordan or Gaza.
How is it possible that a left-leaning Israeli teenager who was living in the Negev during the early 1980s (I graduated from high-school in 1983) had never heard the word “Nakba”?

How, in other words, is collective amnesia engendered?

There are many explanations of how master narratives are created and how they suppress and marginalise competing historical accounts. In addition to the work carried out by state institutions and apparata, this careful erasure also demands the ongoing mobilisation of scholars, novelists and artists – as well as other producers of popular culture.

When I was growing up, the history depicted in Israeli high-school textbooks, as well as the historical narrative promulgated by the mass media (there was only one television channel in Israel at the time, which was government run), was validated by famous novelists and public intellectuals. According to a PhD thesis written by Alon Gan from Tel Aviv University, Amos Oz, for example, interviewed soldiers after the 1967 war and used his editorial prerogative to excise descriptions of abuse in order to produce an image of the moral Israeli combatant.

Thinking back to the days when I was involved in Peace Now, I now realise that, even for most Israeli doves at the time, a conflicted history only emerged post-1967 – with the occupation of the Sinai, West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Accordingly, the solution offered by Peace Now addressed the wrongs created in 1967, but had nothing to say about 1948. Indeed, I do not recall any reference to the Palestinian refugees in their publications. The seamless way in which the state had managed to completely suture the happenings of 1948, even among the Israeli peace camp, was indeed remarkable.

To be sure, the Nakba existed in the landscape. There are hundreds of ruined Palestinian villages throughout Israel, many of which are still surrounded by the sabra cactus. The Nakba also emerged in a handful of literary works. S Yizhar’s novella Khirbet Khizehre counts, for instance, how a group of Israeli soldiers laid siege to a Palestinian village and how they meticulously followed their “operation orders” by clearing the area of “hostile forces”. The unnamed narrator details how they “assemble the inhabitants of the area … load them onto transports, and convey them across [the] lines”, and, finally, they “blow up the stone houses, and burn the huts”. Published a few months after the 1948 war, the novella aroused a public debate, but for some reason neither the novella nor the ruins of villages across the countryside managed to register among the Jewish Israeli population.

Despite the Nakba’s immediacy, many tactics have been successfully deployed to hide its traces. Often critics mention in this context Israel’s ongoing scheme of planting forests on ruined Palestinian villages, but in my view the severe segregation characterising Israeli society has a much more profound impact. The actual geographical distance separating me from Bedouin youth my age was negligible, but the social spaces we occupied were worlds apart. The segregation was so intense that I never actually met, needless to say, played with, Bedouin children. I accordingly did not have any opportunity to hear their stories.

After all, history often emerges from quotidian details, like where one’s grandparents came from. Mine emigrated to Mandate Palestine from Russia and Poland and I went to visit them at their kibbutz on most school vacations. Tragically, Jewish and Bedouin youth never had the occasion to share such information with each other.

Palestinian rights

The Nakba, both as a word and as a historical phenomenon, began to surface among Jews in Israel – and indeed in the international arena – following a series of publications by the “new historians”, whose writings spurred ferocious debates about Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Perhaps the most influential of these was Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which appeared in 1987 – almost four decades after Yizhar’s novella.

Other historians such as Ilan Pappe, sociologists such as Baruch Kimmerling and geographers such as Oren Yiftachel took part in this debate, and, despite harsh attacks (often of a personal nature), they began to disrupt Israel’s master narrative – which, until then, had placed all of the blame on Arab leaders. These Israeli academics were following in the footsteps of Palestinian intellectuals such as Walid Khalidi, Sami Hadawi, Ghassan Kanafani and Lebanon’s Elias Khoury. But, because the claims were being made by Israeli Jews, their impact in Israel and abroad was much greater.

At around the same time, the first intifada erupted (December 1987). Images of brutal repression of nonviolent resistance prompted a discussion of Palestinian human and national rights in Israeli society. Within a period of four years (1988-1991), numerous Israeli NGOs were established in order to help protect different Palestinian rights. The Jewish Israeli rights practitioners then had the occasion to meet thousands of Palestinians who had suffered abuse at the hands of the Israeli military; they heard their stories about the present, but from these stories, alternative narratives of the past also emerged. In Gaza, after all, 75 per cent of the residents are refugees from the 1948 war.

During the Oslo years, new textbooks, which discussed the Palestinian refugee problem and mentioned, even if in passing, Israel’s role in its creation, began to appear. In 2002, a group of Israelis created Zochrot (remembering), whose goal was to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, and to create a place for the Nakba in the intellectual environment. As one of its founders explained: “This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture. But the Nakba, I believe, is also our story, the story of the Jews who live in Israel, who enjoy the privileges of being the ‘winners’.”

These developments have led to a profound change in awareness among the Jewish Israeli public, so that, over the years more and more Israeli Jews have become familiar with the word “Nakba” and the historical events which it denotes. I see the difference among my students today. When I used to say the word “Nakba” in class in the late 1990s, hardly anyone knew what I was talking about; however, if I were to say “Nakba” today, there is hardly a student who would not know what I was referring to. This, it is important to emphasise, does not reflect a change in the views of Israelis towards the conflict, but the understanding of its historical origins is, nonetheless, less naive.
 
Nakba backlash

It is precisely within this context that one should understand the state’s decision to reassert itself in an attempt to silence, once again, all talk of the Nakba. One strategy it adopted was the passing of the Nakba law, which was approved by the Knesset in March 2011. The law is actually an amendment to the Budget Foundation Law, and states that the minister of finance is entitled to reduce funds to any public institution, such as a school or university, if it commemorates “Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning… ”

The legislation process itself was covered by the media, provoking a lively discussion, which in effect rendered the Nakba visible to a much wider audience than ever before. Furthermore, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Adalah (The Legal Center for the Arab Minority in Israel) immediately filed a petition with the supreme court, arguing that the new law constituted a grave violation of the freedom of speech and was part of “a political persecution campaign that aims to de-legitimise an entire population of Israel’s citizenry”.

The two rights groups went on to claim that the commemoration of Nakba Day in no way denies the existence of the state of Israel, as the language of the bill attempts to suggest. Moreover, according to these organisations, the bill blatantly violates the rights of a minority to preserve its history and culture as well as to determine the stories it wants to tell about itself. They further argued that the bill seeks to single out and mark Israel’s Arab citizens as dangerous and disloyal to the state, in that they seek to express their own narrative and interpretation of historical events (Independence Day/Nakba Day), a narrative that is frowned upon by certain political groups in the country.

This is a clear example of a “tyranny of the majority”, where the political majority would violate the basic rights of the minority – in this case their freedom of speech – and consequently also their cultural freedom and freedom to interpret history in ways that offend the majority.

On January 5, 2012, the Supreme Court published its ruling, rejecting the appeal, and upholding the Nakba Law. President Dorit Beinisch and Justices Eliezer Rivlin and Miriam Naor concluded: “The declarative level of the law does indeed raise difficult and complex questions. However, from the outset, the constitutionality of the law depends largely upon the interpretation given to the law’s directives.” In other words, the court refrained from judging the constitutionality of the law before it was implemented in a concrete case.

In this way, as Dan Yakir from the Association for Civil Rights stated: “The court completely ignored the claims regarding the chilling effect of this law, which forces state-supported entities to risk a significant reduction in their budgets before the law will be considered for judicial review. In this, it limits free speech.” Yakir’s point was that the law harms both the freedom of expression and the civil rights of Arab citizens, even before its implementation, because the law’s formulation is so broad and vague, many institutions have already begun to censor themselves so as not to risk incurring penalties.

Truth goes both ways

Despite the legal setback with respect to the Nakba Law, as well as the well-orchestrated attack against organisations like Zochrot, the Israeli government’s concerted effort to reinitiate national amnesia is futile. As the great Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt once put it, the fact that Leon Trotsky does not appear in Soviet Russian history books does not mean that he did not exist. “The trouble with lying and deceiving,” Arendt explains, “is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”

The Nakba is a truth, and while the efforts to expose the unfolding historical events have recently experienced a fierce legal assault, its primacy over falsehoods guarantees that it will prevail. Jewish Israeli society needs to confront the Nakba for what it was, as well as its ongoing ramifications, whether in the refugee camps across the Levant or in the hills of south Hebron, where Palestinians are under constant threat of expulsion; we need to recognise that the Palestinians have suffered – and still suffer – and that they have been stripped of basic rights by successive Israeli governments for more than half a century. This recognition is the condition of possibility for a better future.

But if there is any hope for this region, the recognition must be reciprocal. The Palestinians, who have no doubt been wronged, must concede, as the late Edward Said urged them to do, that two wrongs do not make a right. Only once there is mutual recognition of the two historical narratives will an opportunity for reconciliation truly emerge.

Neve Gordon is an Israeli activist and the author of and author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008). He can be contacted through his website www.israelsoccupation.info

Why would nurses get mixed up in an issue like that?

RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, says there’s a simple explanation: “The big banks, investment firms and other financial institutions, which ruined the economy with trillion-dollar trades on people’s homes and pensions and similar reckless gambling, should pay for the recovery.”

Nurses have been on the front lines of the crisis, seeing firsthand the health impacts of skyrocketing poverty and record high rates of uninsured Americans.

Their specific tax proposal: a small fee on each trade of stocks, derivatives and other financial instruments. Even at a rate of 0.5 percent or less, such taxes could generate massive revenues to pay for things ordinary people in Chicago and elsewhere urgently need, such as affordable health care and decent schools.

Endorsers of their Friday rally in Daley Center Plaza include 100 union, environmental, and global health groups.

What these groups see as a practical way to meet society’s basic needs is unlikely to be embraced by Chicago’s trading industry, however. The city has become a Mecca for “high-frequency traders.”

These firms’ computers make thousands of trades per second to exploit fleeting stock price discrepancies.

Because what the nurses are calling a “Robin Hood tax” would apply to each trade, high-frequency traders would be hardest hit. For long-term investors, the cost would be negligible.

One firm with a lot to lose is Citadel. The hedge fund has claimed to account for as much as 10 percent of global equities trading in a single day. Their annual profits from speed strategies have been as much as $1 billion.

Dozens of small high-frequency trading houses have also popped up around the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Thirty of 35 members of the industry’s national lobby, the Principal Traders Group, are based in the Chicago area.

An example is Infinium Capital, a firm notorious for rocking world oil prices by sending thousands of erroneous buy orders to oil markets in a few seconds. It was fined $850,000.

Like many in its industry, Infinium can run circles around ordinary investors because its computers are located next to exchange servers. Those on the same floor as the Merc’s servers can transmit up to 5,000 orders per second with less than 10 milliseconds of lag time.

As support for the Robin Hood tax gains momentum, lobbyists for the trading houses will surely turn their sights on it. The Financial Services Forum has already urged the Obama administration to block such taxes, not just in the United States, but also in Europe.

One of the speed traders’ arguments is that such taxes would make it hard for them to provide the liquidity that oils our nation’s financial machine. But many traditional investors point out that during crises, speed traders drain liquidity just when it’s needed most.

They’re also concerned that the lightning-speed computers could go haywire and trigger another crash.

Nurses vs. high-speed traders. Now there’s a match-up you probably never thought you’d see playing out in the streets of Chicago.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

This column is distributed by OtherWords.

Greek efforts to form a government have so far failed, and the Germans are getting agitated.  High up on the list of points that have been discussed between the freshly elected François Hollande and Merkel in their first meeting in Berlin is seeking a unified stance on rectifying the problem.  The issue is how far Merkel will budge, and how far Hollande is happy to yield to Berlin’s hardline approach on such matters as the fiscal compact.

Before audiences, and before the electorate, Hollande has adopted a stance that flies in the face of Merkel’s harsh program of economic medicine and no-frills accounting.  On French television, when asked what gifts he would be taking to Berlin, his response was general: ‘The gift of growth, jobs and economic activity.’  This on its own says nothing, and nor is it designed to.  Hollande is confident, and is carrying a powerful baggage of sentiments with him.

Hollande’s party spokesman Benoît Hamon has given a clue on Hollande’s position.  After complaining that Europeans were simply not buying anything any more, Hamon explained that Merkel’s primacy, and that of Germany in Europe, had to be stood up to.  ‘We didn’t have an election to get a European president called Mrs Merkel who has the power to decide everyone else’s fate’ (Guardian, May 14).  Scratch the surface further, and the unpopularity of the German position becomes clearer.

In Berlin both leaders have, unsurprisingly, given little hint that they are at loggerheads.  For Merkel, ‘We are aware of our responsibility, as Germany and France, for a good development of Europe.’ For Hollande, ‘everything that can contribute to growth must be put on the table by everyone.’  That is all to the good, till you realise that Merkel opposes the joint issue of Eurobonds while embracing the ideal of improving competition.

On the face of it, Hollande’s position mirrors that of the Syriza party in Greece – one can hardly repay a debt when there is nothing to draw upon.  Accounts can hardly be balanced in times of economic contraction.  Growth is the mandatory pre-requisite, though how that growth will be feasibly achieved is a difficult prospect.  France stands a better prospect to grow than Greece, and being competitive is fine if you have something to be competitive about.

Merkel herself may be facing a revolt at home, despite polls in Germany saying that as many as 61 percent of Germans approve of her austerity stance.  For one, the finger is being pointed in her direction, notably amongst members of the SPD party, that Greek nationalist extremism is due, in part, to her refusal to bend.  The emergence of a neo-Nazi movement in Greece has German voters concerned.  Harsh economics can often engender extreme politics.

Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, returned the Hannelore Kraft led SPD-Greens to power in a thumping result, suggesting that the austerity brand is losing its appeal amongst some local German voters.  The Christian Democrats, led by Merkel’s environment minister Norbert Röttgen, barely had a look in, getting their worst result since 1949 in securing a mere 26 percent of the vote.  This follows defeat for them in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.  Attempts to label the SPD-Green coalition as a ‘pro-debt’ party did little to turn voters away.  With considerable effect, government campaigners have sought to underline the poor level of investment in parts of Germany.  The emphasis, at least at the state level, is growth rather than belt tightening, notably in depressed areas.

The anti-austerity platform Hollande embraced was largely an anti-Sarkozy one, electorally expedient, necessary to distinguish himself from a deeply unpopular opponent.  But populism doesn’t necessarily translate into coherent policy. Whether it becomes one that reflects an anti-German position is making too strong a contention.  Both Merkel and Hollande have made it clear that balancing the books is a priority for both their governments, though their means may differ at points.  The Greeks will be wondering whether the French-German position will fracture.  That said, disunion will be avoided, though each leader will have a different audience to pander to.

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

It seems that for the better part of 4 years President Obama has been missing in action from Hollywood, but with Super Pacs weighing in for Mitt Romney, Obama is back in town.

Indeed, what a show the US political and economic systems are! Just as the “hope and change” marketing scheme of 2008 paid off for Obama, so can Hollywood deftly inject fear into the hearts of movie buffs with voracious man-eating sharks; place the comfortably seated in the heat of battle in war; or immerse viewers in the ecstasy and loss of love and life. The dream-making machine in Hollywood is as effective as the political machine in the U.S. In the case of the political system, however, there’s no need to materially reward faithful constituencies as Obama quickly learned following his 2008 election to the Presidency.

Recently, Hollywood made a striking turnaround after being shunned by Obama. Obama was able to raise over $6 million at a fund-raiser at the home of George Clooney where there was no room at the dinner table after $40,000 tickets to the event sold out.

Another Hollywood legend, Rob Reiner states: “I felt that he tried to accommodate the other side too much,” but Reiner concluded, “that it’s virtually impossible,” speaking of the President’s failed attempts to accommodate Republicans in Congress.

After criticisms by talk show host Bill Maher about Obama’s record on defense spending and lack of tax policy that would tax the wealthy, Maher muted his criticisms and wrote a one million dollar check to a Super pac for the President when he realized that “You just run back into his arms,” when a possible Romney presidency is considered. In “Democracy in the Streets” (CounterPunch, April 23, 2012), I make the point that the Democratic Party has foisted the banner of being the only show in town (and many voters are driven to conclude that Democrats are the lesser of two evils every four years), with the result of bringing progressives, liberals, and union members into the fold where those groups have been most often rewarded with absolutely nothing in return for their allegiance to Democrats over the past 35 years.

Now with Hollywood’s dream factory cheering Obama on, many voters may forget the $8.2 trillion that has been lost in home equity since the housing bubble burst in 2007. That’s more than a 60 percent loss in home equity noted in a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“Home Equity Declines More than 60% During Great Recession,” Reverse Mortgage Daily, February 13, 2011). Much of the money from the President’s stimulus package of $787 billion could have gone to homeowners who were most damaged by the housing bust. Instead, that money went to Wall Street where banks like JP Morgan Chase are still playing fast and loose with derivatives while hindering any attempts to regulate investment banks.

And war, which seems to be on no one’s mind (along with the decaying environment), has cost taxpayers $3.7 trillion according to the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (“Cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting,” Reuters, June 29, 2011). The cost of war may reach a whopping  $4.4 trillion soon according to the same study.

Both Hollywood and the political system are good at entertaining both movie buffs and voters alike. The political system, war, and big business, are often the stuff of an ugly reality that can shock, just as the moviegoer is shocked back into reality when the theater or room lights come back on.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com. 

Dedicated to the students of the Southwest Detroit Freedom School, for taking personal responsibility! 

“…the more you have, the more you can have.”

- Arundhati Roy, “Capitalism, a Ghost Story”

“… money is the right to have rights.”

- Raj Patel, “The Value of Nothing; How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy”

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to do…”

- Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee”

The World of “There Is No Alternative!”

In a recent article, the brilliant essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy describes current political economic trends in her native India.  “Capitalism, a Ghost Story”[i] focuses on the role of corporate-funded foundations.  It has much to teach us about our world beyond India, as well as the strange humanitarian colonialism of philanthropy.  What do concepts like freedom, democracy, and social justice even mean in today’s world?    With a full-on global corporate push to grab and hold all the riches and power everywhere, regardless of consequences for “the 99%” or even for the fate of the Earth, what choices, dreams and terrain may still be available for us to survive and fulfill our humanity?  Big questions she’s not afraid to address.

“Capitalism, a Ghost Story” portrays an incredibly confusing new phase in social evolution: a toxified, bioengineered, robotic precariat, ruled by the privatized neoliberal Corporate State; irredeemably corrupt; immune to grassroots democratic advocacy from below; colonizer of the popular mind; and techno-logical arbiter of reality itself.  The ideological, spiritual and psychic consequences are revealed in a passage that echoes throughout our planet’s shrunken spaces for thinking, feeling and acting on any impulse to genuine human freedom: 

“Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonised ordinariness, and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative’. ” 

Restructuring Detroit, a Ghost Story

Meanwhile here in the heart of the Great Lakes bioregion of North America, leading corporate and government figures bloviate endlessly about “running government like a business” (a sneaky, demonic program for demoting “citizens” and “People” with civil and human rights to mere “consumers”).  Consequently, the ordinary working People of Detroit have, once again, been going thru a very tuff time.

In the face of the city’s longstanding disinvestment, racialized poverty and post-industrial blight, Michigan’s new Republican Governor Rick Snyder has a plan.  He’s applying a unique version of his “Emergency Manager” statute to Michigan’s largest city.  A straight takeover of this historically crucial community would bite off much more political and social backlash than Snyder can chew.  So he did the next best thing.  While Arundhati Roy was publishing “Capitalism, a Ghost Story,” in March and early April he strong-armed local officials into accepting what the Emergency Manager law calls a “Consent Agreement.”

Detroit’s version of this document (which lacks actual “consent,” and is not really an “agreement”) is entitled a “Fiscal Stability Agreement.”  The underlying digitally archived file itself, that went thru various revisions and negotiations in March before being signed and approved by Mayor  Dave Bing and a narrow 5-4 majority of Detroit City Council, is somewhat more accurately labeled the “Master City Restructuring” document.

Detroit’s “restructuring” will begin with state oversight of its local government, by a powerful Financial Advisory Board, Program Management Director, and Chief Financial Officer, jointly appointed by state and local officials.  They have the (far more than merely “advisory”) power to take over city government programs, if “reforms” and “restructuring” are not being pursued to their satisfaction.

“Restructuring” the political, social, and economic life of Detroit, a city which, in spite of its vibrant culture and political life, has long been plagued by ills associated with mass poverty, official corruption, physical blight, and bitter racial conflict, would arguably be a good thing.  But by whom and in whose interests?  How?  With what consequences for Detroit’s People, especially the most vulnerable victims of poverty and racism?

“Restructuring” without accountability to, or respect for human rights of the primary victims of social injustices, in favor of members of the elite corporate community (who view the city’s deep and severe crisis as offering opportunities for profit), is quite another matter.  So is doing it thru the backroom mechanisms illegitimately conceived by “Emergency Manager” legislation.

Detroit’s reality is already the neoliberal nightmare; relentless cutbacks in education, health, and other social services.  What seems inevitable is that “restructuring Detroit” (unless resistance can prevent it – as I have previously argued elsewhere[ii]), will look an awful lot like the now-notorious “structural adjustment” programs imposed on the developing world by the major multilateral financial institutions – the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank – throughout the neoliberal era.  Systematic privatization of common public resources; deregulation of corporate power; savage attacks on social services, working standards and basic quality of life for ordinary People; all as a way to even further enrich and empower elites.  The infamous “Shock Doctrine,” in Motown rhythm.  This is the noxious, authoritarian political reality of “restructuring.”  No wonder they hide the term behind comforting lies like “consent” and “fiscal stability.”

It’s bitterly contentious, highly emotional and utterly perplexing when powerful white elites move aggressively to implement their neocolonial agenda against poor, people of color communities that are virtually defenseless.

Inspired by Arundhati Roy then, presented for your consideration; a tragicomic treatment of 21^st century Detroit.  It features (with sincere apologies for appropriation, outright theft and license) diverse human spirits and voices, attempting for real to face our issues and challenges: 

Dramatis Personae:

Other characters to be developed by Detroiters and to enter the action as it goes forward…

Settings: Streets, parks, union halls, church basements, civic and neighborhood groups, living rooms, government agencies, cyberspace, anywhere and everywhere Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is “working well together” with his supporters, as he vapidly puts it, on their version of “development.”

The action begins with a CHORUS of Detroiters milling about discussing: the new “Consent Agreement;” the latest mass school closings; the suburban takeover of the city’s water system; the lack of decent job opportunities; continual reductions in bus transit; rising violent crime rates; burnt-out vacant houses and weed- and garbage-strewn fields salting neighborhoods everywhere in Detroit’s enormous 139-square mile footprint; repeated uncorrected odor violations produced by the world’s largest trash incinerator in the middle of the city; privatization of the corrupt Detroit Department of Human Services; “austerity” budget cuts to already-inadequate city services (including police, fire and ambulance); the state elections board of canvassers’ refusal to place a popular referendum against the “Emergency Manager” law on the ballot (by a straight party-line vote, on the ridiculous pretext that  a portion of the petitions’ typeface allegedly bears the wrong font size); foolish government officials and unscrupulous corporate special interests conspiring together against the general welfare; and other matters of injustice experienced as stressful daily reality…

CRAZY HORSE:[iii] We live in the shadow of the real world!  In the darkest shadow of this shadow, the white government authorities scheme to take away what’s left of our freedoms.  They talk endlessly about the “invisible hand of the market,” while they lie, cheat and steal in these dark shadows.  And they get away with it because we’ve forgotten the nature of our relationship to power.

My People learned long ago that nothing White Fathers sign their names to on papers is worth anything when they are after our land, resources and community.  Then when they take away the land we lived on in common, the White Chiefs divide it up and use it to dominate, oppress, and serve themselves at the expense of all others.

I was stabbed in the back and killed when I agreed to come to their fort and talk with them.  My People took my heart away and buried it in secret.  I live on as a symbol of spiritual freedom and physical resistance to racist attack.

Somehow the owners of a sexually oriented business in suburban Dearborn put my name on their sign.  Malt liquor manufacturers put my name on 40-ounce alcohol beverage containers.  At least the rock band they named after me isn’t half bad.

When it comes to foreign invaders annihilating and using you for their selfish, destructive purposes, I believe I may have some things to teach the People of Detroit.  In life I was never at the strait formed by the river between Lakes Huron, St. Clair and Erie, that the French called “détroit.”  If not for my “red” tinge, perhaps I would be a suitable candidate for the new “Financial Advisory Board,” which seems to be open only to non-Detroiters!

CHORUS: “No Justice, No Peace!”

HARRIET TUBMAN: Before People can become free, they have to realize that they aren’t free.  I freed thousands of slaves, and could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.   I told them, “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”  That seems like pretty good advice for today as well!

I see an incredible amount of confusion in Detroit about what it could mean to be free.  This group wants industrial jobs to come back and support a so-called “middle class” lifestyle.  Other groups want a revolution, whatever that would mean to each of them.  Yet others want African-American self-determination and –government.  Some are working toward building the new world to come, while others are fighting against the injustices of today.  Most are numbed by glowing screens portraying the world as an oppressive farce. It reminds me of slavery.

Many social movements and changes followed the times of human slavery and abolition when I lived.  There are complicated, interrelated issues: education, violence, work, nature, relationships between women and men, parents and children, different races and classes and nations.  None of it’s covered by what they call “education” today.  It’s impossible to imagine all these people in their different groups and tribes, beset by corporate propaganda and electronic thought control as they are, agreeing on everything.

Can you get a taste of what you want most, by refusing to stop in front of glowing screens or boasting, self-important leaders, by continually moving toward goals you identify and define for yourselves?  If you understand that you are modern versions of slaves, you can begin to identify and define the things that could set you free!

CHORUS: “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”

GANDHI:  Decolonization is about People first remembering what it means to be human beings, and then acting on that knowledge.  Whether it’s India or the United States, government or education or spirituality or the environment; the basic dynamic is the same.  We have to take responsibility for our lives in order to experience what we call “freedom.”

Saying “no” to the “restructuring” program of leaders in Detroit and Michigan, from the deepest conviction, is better than saying “yes” merely to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.  This question of saying “yes” or “no” to the Governor’s “Consent Agreement” is the superficial one.  The real question is whether or not our human spiritual principles and moral convictions have a place in our political economic life, and the public affairs of our society.  Answering “no” to this question leads to the rule of “Emergency Managers” and the imperial privatization of life.   Answering “yes” is the next step on the road to freedom.

That’s why Governor Snyder and his State Treasurer Andy Dillon confused the issue by pushing a so-called “Consent Agreement.” Instead of taking the city over via an “Emergency Manager,” they needed officially designated local leaders to say “yes” to their program for “working together” to “restructure” Detroit.  The distinction has no actual substance for People, but they can claim they have “consent” for what they want to do anyway.

The violence of poverty; the injustice of racist, patriarchal and class oppression; the impunity of official elites who lack anything even resembling a realistic program for change and reform; these are the evils today, the rotten heart of colonialist social relations and political domination, slowly killing a great city and its people who suffer the highest concentration of childhood poverty in North America.  The single “no” to these evils leads to many, many “yeses” for the city and its People!

CHORUS: “The People United Will Never Be defeated!”

EMMA GOLDMAN:[iv]  They called me an “anarchist,” and it’s a label I wear proudly.  But what is this “debate” about politics, really?  One is called a communist, another is a conservative, yet another is a liberal or some other superficial label for ideas spoon-fed to powerless children.  Think for yourselves!

What matters is the living essence of things.  During the very same six months when Michigan’s Governor and his business cronies devised their “restructuring” of this city, a new surge of popular resistance rose up – claiming kinship of “99%” of the People against the rich and powerful “1%” all over the world!  This after decades of corporate domination of People’s communities, your livelihoods, your very thoughts!  How clear at times like these that the accepted, official version of reality is false, and that all self-proclaimed authority is based on fraud!  What an opportunity to really live, and to do so in entirely different ways, if we seize it!

They call it “restructuring:” It is merely paranoia, rooted in the impulse towards centralization—the absurd, unjust idea that one decision-making structure should be legitimized at the cost of all others; that difficult conversations about social structure and conflict should be avoided at virtually any cost; that all decisions need to be approved by a higher power; that ordinary working people cannot be trusted to organize themselves in decentralized networks.

The old fraud of the State demands a concentration of power, exclusion, elitism, and repression.  The scientific basis for the idea of centralization has long been undermined, in complexity theory, in economics, computer science, the understanding of collective intelligence and emergent behaviors, and even in military strategy.  After the “Occupy Everywhere” phenomenon of 2011, it should be dead.  But the ghost of self-interested Hobbesian myths about “needing” a single, strong leader to keep everything from falling apart persists, as long as that power continues to exist.  Thanks to its control over education and media, even those who claim to oppose it have been indoctrinated in its values and lies!

CHORUS: “Smash the State!”

COLEMAN YOUNG:  Who let her in here?

Most People remember me as the first African-American big city mayor in Detroit in 1974.  But I got my start as a public figure in the Red Scare in the ‘50s, when the goddamn Un-American Committee came to town.  I basically told them to kiss my ass.  I never would have dreamed Detroit’s Black leaders would let these Republican “Emergency Mother Fuckers” (EMF’s) come back into Detroit and take it over like this!

When I told those motherfucking HUAC rednecks how to pronounce the word “negro,” and made them apologize to me for their disrespect, I was coming out of the industrial unions in the depression.  The CIO was the first important interracial organization that fucked up white power.  Those motherfuckers never forgave us for that.  Detroit was the birthplace of the UAW/CIO and the first motherfucking major US city governed by its African American majority.

Sure I made some mistakes.  How the fuck could I have known workers’ wages would stop rising – permanently – just when I won the mayor’s office?  I wasn’t fucking Jimmy Boggs!  If I’d known what these motherfucking corporations were gonna do to my People – even to the White workers – you bet your ass that as Mayor I wouldn’t have been so quick to kiss up to ‘em!  Anyway, without struggle there’s no progress, and you don’t struggle fucking perfectly; you fight and learn from your motherfucking mistakes and fight again until you can’t fight the sons of bitches any more.  That’s my education.  Aloha, Motherfuckers!

CHORUS: “We are the 99%!”

GRACE LEE BOGGS:  I may be 96 years old now, but at least I’m the first character here who’s actually still alive!  It’s an incredible, hopeful, terrible time to be alive in Detroit, now that we’ve been brought so far down there’s no choice except to begin to do things differently, to make a different way to live.  Detroit has taught me many things.  Our time is like thousands of years ago, in the transition from hunter-gatherer society to what would become known as “civilization.”

Now is the time to grow our souls, as an essential part of making the next American revolution.  We no longer have the luxury of petitioning government to reform politics and make things better for us.  We have to do things for ourselves.  Create re-imagined spaces and institutions, where healthy relationships with other People, with nature, and with our selves can be rebuilt – transformational organizing revitalizing and creating “beloved communities.”

Education – real, interactive, relevant, place-based and transformative learning – is a huge part of the broad renewal of our selves and our world.   We have to probe deeply beyond familiar concepts like “racism” and “jobs,” to understand the link between our country’s passion for economic growth and slavery.  We talk about enslaving people as if it were only a matter of racism.  It was not just racism.  In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, this country’s rapid economic growth depended on having many more people doing the work.  That’s why we enslaved Blacks.  And it depended on getting more land.  That’s why we exterminated so many Native Americans.  That fundamental contradiction – of dehumanizing ourselves while degrading others, for the sake of rapid economic growth – was built into the founding of this country.

Confronting issues like that means confronting organized power, as well as the false myths many People live by.  But the ruling powers of our nation and our world are themselves powerless to deal with our real problems: our youth without hope of a decent future; our planet’s ecological crisis; our unsustainable, unjust, unequal economic system.  The rulers are powerless, because they don’t believe another world is possible.  Our power comes from the belief that another world is possible, and the determination to get together and create it!

CHORUS: “This is what democracy looks like!”

KARL MARX:  I’m glad sister Grace mentioned confronting the system of organized power, because we often forget that our real issues and problems are not about one person or another, about Obama or Bush or Bing or Snyder or any individual or group of People.  The problem is not People’s behavior or attitudes (although Mitt Romney’s bullying behavior as a teenager should perhaps be considered an exception).  It’s the system that causes People to behave and believe in violent, unjust, dominating and prejudiced ways.  Making another world is about conflicts between classes, not individuals.

In Capital, Volume 3, I wrote that “The realm of freedom can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind force of Nature, and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature.”  Such rational collective action of “the 99%,” based on ecological health instead of financial or industrial greed, is still ultimately the only answer for places like Detroit, which is the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the rest of the world.

Groucho Marx (no relation) defined “Politics” as “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”  How did he know about Obama, Snyder and Bing and their silly, selfish systems of “There is no alternative”?  When you are threatened with despotic rule by “Emergency Managers,” perhaps the infamous idea, “You have nothing to lose but your chains” takes on a more concrete reality!

CHORUS: “Solidarity Beats Austerity!”

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.:  Every January 15 we are reminded that in 1963 I had a “dream” about racial equality and desegregation.  How many remember that by the time I was killed in 1968, I focused on the “triple evils” of materialism, militarism and racism?  That I had publicly opposed the imperial US war in Southeast Asia, not because it was too expensive, strategically misguided or lost, but because it was fundamentally wrong and immoral?  That I called for “a radical revolution of values” from a “thing-oriented” to a “person-oriented” society?

My evolutionary journey from the dream to radical revolution seems to have begun in a Birmingham, Alabama jail, where I wrote about my People “smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.”  Will the “restructuring” of Detroit change, or even acknowledge or address this unjust inequality that so obscenely persists for most of the 80%-plus African-American population of this city fifty years later?  What about the silenced Latino and profiled Arab populations?  Are they merely seeking “restructured” cages?  Or will this century finally see the Promised Land of air, land, water, food, shelter, education and justice for all?

What I wrote in the Birmingham jail applies today to Governor Snyder, State Treasurer Dillon and their bland platitudes: “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the White Citizens Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,’ who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…”  Michigan EMFs – “Emergency Manager Fascists” (after all, I was a man of the cloth) – seem to be confused about which century they are living in.

When I scribbled those words on scraps of paper that were smuggled out of the jail by my attorney (who thought at the time I might be losing my grip on sanity, by the way), African Americans had already been waiting over 300 years for their basic human rights.  It’s now 50 years later, and the white power structure of Michigan is systematically expanding various forms of “emergency” rule over most People of Color in the state!  Rebellion and civil disobedience are the only honorable and intelligent options they leave us!

CHORUS: “We Want the World and We Want it Now!”

MALCOLM X:[v] What I said in life applies very well to Detroit today: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing.”  To read the papers or watch their corporate-bastard cousins on TV news, you’d think the only thing Detroiters want is to be like Black suburbanites, and the reason they can’t achieve that exalted status is because they’re completely incompetent fools.

I lived a life of controversy and reinvention, and was assassinated by my former allies, after I broke free from their dogma and tried to follow my own path.  Today I’m remembered as the most articulate spokesman for a new way to think and talk about race in America.  The same controversy and conflicts that shaped my life and my death continue to dominate race relations in the Detroit region, between the overwhelmingly Black city, the white-dominated suburbs and state, and the Latino, Native American, Arab and Asian minorities caught in the middle.

What Detroiters need, and what their state overseers refuse to tolerate, is Detroiters’ self-determination; the fundamental human rights of all Peoples to decide for ourselves the best political and social arrangements for our communities.  Without it, talk of “freedom” is a lie!

This isn’t rocket science.  Governor Snyder and his latter-day white supremacist buddies “get it.”  They demonstrate their lack of trustworthiness because they refuse to accept People outside their circle as true equity partners.  Fittingly, Detroit was where I articulated the difference between the “house Negro” and the “field Negro” in my “Message to the Grassroots” speech at King Solomon Church in 1963.  Old habits apparently die hard!      

CHORUS: “Black Power!”

TONI MORRISON:  As a worker known for specializing in both language and ghost stories (and the second character here who’s still actually living!), let me offer a few thoughts about the language of the Governor, and the wealthy and powerful animal spirits he represents.

As I said when I accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, I reject language of money that drinks blood.[vi]  What do I mean by that?  Here’s an example: “The Program Management Director acting in the place and stead of the Mayor and the City Council with respect to a Reform Initiative in the event that the Financial Advisory Board finds a Reform Default of this Agreement.”  That just makes me want to reach for a silver crucifix to ram thru some vampire’s heart!

If what they really mean is, “When corporate capital says ‘jump!’ You say ‘How high?’,” then (with due respect to the vernacular, as Soulman Young would’ve put it:) just fucking say that!  Drop the dead, unyielding language that’s content to admire its own paralysis. Statist language, censored and censoring, ruthless in its policing duties, with no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance, is a lie, and an evil lie that’s calculated to enable oppression, dispossession, injustice and racist domination of weakened human beings.

Detroit’s People get no benefits from this misprision of language.  The official language of the state’s “Agreements” is smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege; it’s a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability and harmony among the public.  They speak the malign language of law-without-ethics only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.  Their obscene, misused and distorted language falls on utterly deaf ears!

In place of “restructuring” let’s have liberation.  Economic fairness in place of “fiscal stability.”  Not fraudulently coerced “consent.” Rather freely embraced desire for justice, passion for truth and beauty, wisdom and integrity.  “Emergency managers” (which would better be called “dictators”) have drunk enough of the People’s blood!  Cut them off!

CHORUS: “Don’t be afraid![vii]”

ARUNDHATI ROY: I too am still alive, and very happy to see ghost stories spreading beyond India in our interconnected world.  The whole world is spinning out of control around a concept of “value” created by capitalism.  A thing is valuable only if the far-seeing, self-possessed and energetic representatives of “the 1%” – the rich, the capitalists, the leading men and some women of Governor Snyder and Mayor Bing’s “business community” – can find ways to use it to get more wealth and power for themselves.

This is a totally crazy way to “value” ourselves and our world.  That seems to occur to us intermittently, but it is the normal way things work, so we submit to it.  The fact that it’s getting out of control is the good news!

As cunning, brilliant, wise, far-seeing and energetic as the representatives of the business community like Governor Snyder often are, in spite of their vast, historically demonstrated capacities to innovate, adapt, ally and do business with fascists, socialists, despots, military dictators and freakish scumbags of every description, even with “Emergency managers,” they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact.  Capitalism is destroying the planet.

The current crisis of capitalism, democracy and the living Earth is making a very few very, very rich, while spreading socioeconomic and personal disaster throughout “the 99%” everywhere.  If not for these predatory “externalities” of capitalist dealings, the specter of Detroit’s “restructuring agreement” might be funny; like I described India’s relations with global capital: “an unequal partnership in which [Detroit] is being held in a bear hug and waltzed around the floor by a partner who will incinerate her the moment she refuses to dance.”

CHORUS: “No Incineration! No Dancing Bears!”

RAYCHEL GAFFORD:  I’m alive too.  [PROUDLY!]  I led the walkout of hundreds of students from Detroit’s Western International High School on April 25, 2012, and we started the Southwest Detroit Freedom School in Clark Park across the street.  Our voices are the most important of all!

When we not only walked out of school, but started our own Freedom School, Detroit’s school/jail administrators talked about us as if we were merely “truant,” as if what we did was somehow wrong, by some warped version of social values.  They prohibited us from holding our freedom school sessions too close to the school building, as if such a foolish restriction would stop us!  How can one who’s unable to admit a distinction between conscientious civil disobedience and anti-social misconduct be entrusted with responsibilities for education?

More questions: What are we supposed to look for in terms of an “education” in this community, in this time, under these circumstances?  What kinds of values create a system that closes dozens of school every year and leaves young people with no vision or hope for a decent future?  By what authority do selfish and greedy political climbers claim moral and intellectual high ground from which to lecture us?

Some answers:  We will learn what we need to know thru our actions, our self-determined confrontations with the actual conditions of crisis in our communities, our creativity and spiritual quests, and our respect for those who demonstrate that they deserve our respect!

The authority we recognize will come from service to others; from honesty; from solidarity with those we love and trust because they love and trust us.

Our values are clearly stated in our Freedom School, in our demands to the school system, and in the tradition of collective, transformational action that we proudly inherit.

CHORUS: “WE DEMAND RESPECT!!!![viii]”

“Challenging Reality Itself” is the Only Alternative

“They’re selling postcards of the hanging/They’re painting the passports brown…” – Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”

Those particular lyrics – the first two lines of a mind-blowing and unique rock song – didn’t really hit me for many years.  The universally compelling themes they evoke with such astonishing brevity: coercive laws of competition in commerce (“selling”); terrifying images of mob violence consequences for victims of the dominant reality (“postcards of the hanging”); an imaginative life of consciousness, art and the mind (“painting”); distorted beyond recognition in a funhouse mirror version of reality hurtling toward fascism (“brown passports”).

Until living thru the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist crimes against humanity, the visionary depth and wealth in just the first two lines of Dylan’s great song ( a composition that had already turned my brain inside-out once when I was a teenager), never occurred to me.  Now I see the terrifying prejudice, fear and hatred of the mob, combining in real time with the State’s violent, indifferent opportunism, to destroy lives, freedoms and justice.  Robotic drone massacres at the push of a button, based on a single all-powerful leader’s merest whims, and my People shrug as if it were just another titillating mock-story about celebrities’ sexual misconduct measured by hypocritical, self-righteous personal moralism.  History happened, and continues.  In blood tones.

“Desolation Row” is sort of an heir to Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording “Strange Fruit” – perhaps the most important single recording of the 20^th century, taking inspiration from horrors of lynching victims under Jim Crow terrorism. (“They’re selling postcards of the hanging…”)  Both are melodic and poetic vocal performances that challenged not only brutality but reality itself.  I am struck again and again by the immense power of music, and all art, to change and reframe daily life.  What can the rest of us take and use from such geniuses’ creative confrontations with the oppressive realities of our common world?

Imagine the great Lady Day, a woman raised in poverty and taken into whorehouses, become an African-American musical genius, in the bloody fascist heart of the 20^th century, confronting a microphone and the deadly evil of Jim Crow with heart-stopping lyrics as well as unsurpassed vocal artistry, transforming the legacies of folk and jazz music with a single soul-shattering performance:

Blood on the leaf and blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter fruit!

What a strange, terrible and wondrous thing.  What an awful price she paid.  Consider the unbreakable cultural chains that connect such courage, suffering and brilliance to the magic of Motown and the Afro-centric cultural consciousness of Detroit.  The political indecency of the likes of Rick Snyder and Andy Dillon the “turnaround expert,” presuming to talk down to People who learned in the school of hard knocks what life is really about.  “Restructuring,” indeed!

In the words of the great, martyred Native American leader Crazy Horse, we live in the shadow of the real world.  Stepping out of that shadow – into a history of our own making, by any means necessary, creating whatever meaning we can wrest away from the flimflam turnaround men – would be a fine way to take personal responsibility for this reality.

The world corporate capital constructed and maintains for us – the world of “There is no alternative” and “Fiscal Stability” – is not the real world.  The real world is a place where we are taken seriously as People and as agents of our own reality, our own history and our own future.

Freedom is impossible for those who can’t even conceive of inhabiting this real world.  Freedom means actively and energetically challenging claims to “reality” itself, the technological, corporatist reality of the “too big to fail,” the “homeland” and the “war on” drugs, terror and us.  It means reshaping not only our conceptual categories, but our political economy along more democratic, equitable and egalitarian lines, derived from the ancient beneficial human institution of the commons.

That’s what “restructuring” Detroit will require.   I wonder every day, all day long, if in Detroit today we have it in us to reject the hypocrisies and exploitation of Snyderism, and embrace real alternatives?

The Commons

Approaching the end of this long ghost story, it’s clear to me that part of our answer, if we have one, must be rediscovering the ancient institution of the commons, and putting it in place of the depraved, soulless market- and corporate-based socioeconomic principles and institutions to which there is supposedly “no alternative.”

The world of the 21^st century is not that of the so-called enlightenment in the 18^th, the early industrial revolution of the 19^th, or the fascist, genocidal horrors of the 20th centuries.  Our world has been reduced in size by modernity, and expanded in scope.  We see the things we need to live – not only food, shelter and other material things, but also education, health and just coexistence with our natural environment and other species.  They’re right there in the shadows, behind the misleading symbols and caricatures of reality on glowing screens everywhere.

We need – and can transform! – an economic system based on equitable sharing of all these things, in place of the spiritual wasteland of high-tech industry governed by capital.  Toni Morrison’s “Beloved Jazz Paradise” made flesh – and water and soil and spirit.

As Arundhati Roy recently put it: we “live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden [Indian] farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.”  This is our global reality.  It’s time we start challenging it, and keep doing so, until all that’s left of our common wealth, our rights and values and our world of humanity and nature are restored to us.  Or die trying and haunt the EMFS forever.

”Any idiot can face a crisis — it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” – Anton Chekhov

“Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this Earth.” – Thomas Carlyle, “The French Revolution”

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…” – “Me and Bobby McGee”

Mothers’ Day May 13, 2012

A scheduled vote this coming Thursday in the House Agriculture Committee should reassure Wall Street that nothing has changed.

The vote in question will be on H.R. 1838, the “Swaps Bailout Prevention Act” as  exclusively reported here back in February.  The bill nullifies one of the few positive contributions of the Dodd Frank reform act, the so-called Lincoln Rule banning any federally insured institution, such as JPMorgan, from trading derivatives, thereby forcing them to set up separately funded subsidiaries for such trading.  H.R. 1838 now enjoys bi-partisan support, has already been endorsed by the Financial Services Committee (agriculture has historic jurisdiction regarding derivatives) and will quite likely proceed on its merry way toward full enactment.

This melancholy development should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the progress of financial reform in recent years.  The last time naked credit default swaps (naked meaning they are traded as speculative bets rather than hedges) got in the headlines was the fall of 2008, when, via the massive exposure of AIG  to these same instruments, the global financial system trembled on the brink.  Fingers were being pointed at the CDS (Credit Default Swap) market as the detonator of the disaster. There were authoritative calls for tough regulation, re-enactment of Glass-Steagall and other worthy endeavors.

Major players on Wall Street were swift to take action.  Led by Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, nine leading financial institutions set up the CDS Dealers Consortium and hired the master derivatives lobbyist Ed Rosen, of Cleary, Gottlieb, to keep things in order.  Rosen crafted a memo suggesting that the market remain under the benign supervision of the Federal Reserve (which at that point was underwriting the banks to the tune of $7 trillion and more.)  Meanwhile Timothy Geithner at Treasury was working on his master plan for policing the CDS market.  Eventually, in May, 2009, Geithner unveiled his proposal, identical in all essential respects to Rosen’s memo.

A lot of money has flowed under the bridge and into legislators’pockets since then.   The Dodd Frank financial reform legislation finally hit Obama’s desk, laced with loopholes and riddled with exceptions.  The President is currently touting “financial reform” as one of his achievements.  Chronicles of the crash meanwhile have touted Dimon’s statesmanlike role in keeping his bank out of the knacker’s yard while other totemic institutions crumbled around him.  Dimon indeed has had the gall to claim that he had simply taken bailout money to encourage the others, telling shareholders in March 2010 that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve (only) to help motivate others to use the system,” without mentioning that at their peak, when the TAF program had been going a year, his Fed loans amounted to $48 billion, twice the bank’s own cash reserves.

Even when the bank’s secret Fed assistance came to light, the tide of flattery flowed on.  Ever predictable, PBS Frontline recently devoted most of an hour to lionizing JPMorgan for having invented naked CDS  but being prudent enough not to misuse them.  Now comes the fiasco of the bank’s $2 billion (make that $4 billion, at least) loss on a hugely stupid bet dutifully reported in the media as a “hedge.”

The Dodd Frank act has not yet come into effect, thanks to energetic work by Mr. Rosen and his fellow lobbyists.  As Professor Michael Greenberger, who as a regulator in 1998 watched the Clinton Administration clear away derivatives regulation at Wall Street’s behest, tells me, “If Dodd-Frank had been in effect, (JPMorgan’s) trades would almost certainly have been required to be cleared and transparently executed. So they would have been priced by objective clearing operations on at least a weekly basis for purposes of collecting margin against the losing nature of the trades. As the trades lost value, margin would have been called for on a regular and systematic basis. (The losses would never have reached $ 2B without much earlier and corresponding regular calls for margin.) The losing nature of the trades would have been transparent to market observers and regulators for quite some time and the losses would not have piled up opaquely. It is almost certain that, at the very least, the Fed (not wanting to exacerbate its reputation for throwing taxpayer money at TBTF problems), would have backed JPM off these trades long ago.

So it’s pleasant to reflect that if Dimon had kept Rosen etc chained up and his checkbook closed, he might not be experiencing the current unpleasantness.  Forced to give up a sunny weekend to field toadying questions from the likes of NBC’s David Gregory, Dimon must have uttered a nostalgic sigh for those innocent, simple days when it all began.

Back in 1986, Dimon was the bright young  protégé of “Sandy” Weill, when he was forced out of American Express in a coup de requin.  Master and servant made their way to Baltimore, Maryland, where Weill acquired a storefront moneylending firm called Commercial Credit.  Potted media biographies flung together since the news of JP Morgan’s massive gambling losses broke  last week put a decorous sheen on this phase of Dimon’s career.  ABC News for example described the Baltimore company as “a sleepy finance firm that catered to middle-class clients.” Weill’s former assistant, Alison Falls, got it right at the time.  “Hey guys,” she is said to have remarked “this is the loansharking business.”

As outlined in an excellent takedown by Michael Hudson in Southern Exposure in 2003, the firm specialized in preying on poor people, especially African Americans such as Johnny Slaughter, from Noxubee County, Mississippi, who not only was charged 40.92 percent on his loan in the mid -1990s but was also sold disability insurance even though he already had a disabling spinal injury.  A neighbor, Mattie Henley, was charged 44.14 percent.

Following on this ingenious and immensely profitable business model, it took the pair only a few sleazy insurance company acquisitions and the enthusiastic endorsement of Wall Street and the media, not to mention the Clinton Administration, to the creation of Citibank (Dimon and Weill parted company in 1999), the glories of subprime, and our current utterly disastrous situation.

ANDREW COCKBURN is the co-producer of the feature documentary on the financial catastrophe American Casino He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press, now also available in Kindle edition. He can be reached at amcockburn@gmail.com

These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US.  Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US?

Some Facts About Drone Assassinations 

The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.   But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or the identities of most of those killed.

In Pakistan alone, the New America Foundation reports US forces have launched 297 drone strikes killing at least 1800 people, three to four hundred of whom were not even combatants.   Other investigative journalists report four to eight hundred civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Very few of these drone strikes kill high level leaders of terror groups.  A recent article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS estimated “only one out of every seven drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader.  The majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low level fighters, together with a small number of civilians.”

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in November 2011 revealed that most of the time the US did not even know the identities of the people being killed by drones in Pakistan.  The WSJ reported there are two types of drone strikes.  Personality strikes target known terrorist leaders.  Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants but are people whose identities are not known.  Most of the drone strikes are signature strikes.

In Yemen, there have been at least 34 drone assassination attacks so far in 2012 alone, according to the London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.  Using
drones against people in Yemen, who are thought to be militants but whose names are not even known, was authorized by the Obama administration in April 2012, according to the Washington Post.   Somalia has been the site of ten drone attacks with a growing number in recent months.

Civilian deaths in drone strikes are regularly reported but more chilling is the practice of firing a second set of drone strikes at the scene once people have come to find out what happened or to give aid.  Glen Greenwald of Salon, a leading critic of the increasing use of drones, recently pointed out that drones routinely kill civilians who are in the vicinity of people thought to be “militants” and are thus “incidental” killings.  But also the US also frequently fires drones again at people who show up at the scene of an attack, thus deliberately targeting rescuers and mourners.

Here are five reasons why these drone assassinations are illegal.

One.  Assassination by the US government has been illegal since 1976 

Drone killings are acts of premeditated murder.  Premeditated murder is a crime in all fifty states and under federal criminal law.  These murders are also the textbook definition of assassination, which is murder by sudden or secret attack for political reasons.

In 1976 U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, Section 5(g), which states “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” President Reagan followed up to make the ban clearer in Executive Order 12333. Section 2.11 of that Order states “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Section 2.12 further says “Indirect participation.  No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”  This ban on assassination still stands.

The reason for the ban on assassinations was that the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate national leaders opposed by the US. Among others, US forces sought to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

Two.  United Nations report directly questions the legality of US drone killings

The UN directly questioned the legality of US drone killings in a May 2010 report by NYU law professor Philip Alston.  Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said drone killings may be lawful in the context of authorized armed conflict (eg Afghanistan where the US sought and received international approval to invade and wage war on another country).  However, the use of drones “far from the battle zone” is highly questionable legally.  “Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.” Can drone killings be justified as anticipatory self-defense?  “Applying such a scenario to targeted killings threatens to eviscerate the human rights law prohibition against arbitrary deprivation of life.” Likewise, countries which engage in such killings must provide transparency and accountability, which no country has done.  “The refusal by States who conduct targeted killings to provide transparency about their policies violates the international law framework that limits the unlawful use of lethal force against individuals.”

Three.  International law experts condemn US drone killings 

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international affairs and politics at Princeton University thinks the widespread killing of civilians in drone strikes may well constitute war crimes.  “There are two fundamental concerns. One is embarking on this sort of automated warfare in ways that further dehumanize the process of armed conflict in ways that I think have disturbing implications for the future,” Falk said. “Related to that are the concerns I’ve had recently with my preoccupation with the occupation of Gaza of a one-sided warfare where the high-tech side decides how to inflict pain and suffering on the other side that is, essentially, helpless.”

Human rights groups in Pakistan challenge the legality of US drone strikes there and assert that Pakistan can prosecute military and civilians involved for murder.

While stopping short of direct condemnation, international law expert Notre Dame Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell seriously questions the legality of drone attacks in Pakistan.  In powerful testimony before Congress and in an article in America magazine she points out that under the charter of the United Nations, international law authorizes nations to kill people in other countries only in self-defense to an armed attack, if authorized by the UN, or is assisting another country in their lawful use of force.  Outside of war, she writes, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.  Because the US is not at war with Pakistan, using the justification of war to authorize the killings is “to violate fundamental human rights principles.”

Four.  Military law of war does not authorize widespread drone killing of civilians  

According to the current US Military Law of War Deskbook, the law of war allows killing only when consistent with four key principles: military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity.   These principles preclude both direct targeting of civilians and medical personnel but also set out how much “incidental” loss of civilian life is allowed.  Some argue precision-guided weapons like drones can be used only when there is no probable cause of civilian deaths.  But the US military disputes that burden and instead directs “all practicable precautions” be taken to weigh the anticipated loss of civilian life against the advantages expected to be gained by the strike.

Even using the more lenient standard, there is little legal justification of deliberately allowing the killing of civilians who are “incidental” to the killings of people whose identities are unknown.

Five.  Retired high-ranking military and CIA veterans challenge the legality and efficacy of drone killings 

Retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright squarely denies the legality of drone warfare, telling Democracy Now:  “These drones, you might as well just call them assassination machines.  That is what these drones are used for: targeted assassination, extrajudicial ultimate death for people who have not been convicted of anything.”

Drone strikes are also counterproductive.  Robert Grenier, recently retired Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, wrote, “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in the future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”

Recent polls of the Pakistan people show high levels of anger in Pakistan at US military attacks there.  This anger in turn leads to high support for suicide attacks against US military targets.

US Defense of Drone Assassinations 

US officials claim these drone killings are not assassinations because the US has the legal right to kill anyone considered a terrorist, anywhere, if they can argue it is in self-defense.  Attorney General Holder and White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan recently defended the legality of drone strikes and argued they are not assassinations because the killings are in response to the 9/11 attacks and are carried out in self-defense even when not in Afghanistan or Iraq.  This argument is based on the highly criticized claim of anticipatory self-defense which justifies killings in a global war on terror when traditional self-defense would clearly not.  The government refuses to provide copies of the legal opinions relied upon by the government.

Growing Resistance to Drone Assassinations 

In signs of hope, people in the US are resisting the increasing use of drones.

CODEPINK, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the London-based human rights group Reprieve co-sponsored an International Drone Summit in Washington DC to challenge drone assassinations.   Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill noted that Congress only managed to scrape up six votes to oppose the assassination of US citizens abroad.  “What is happening to this country? We have become a nation of assassins.   We have become a nation that is somehow silent in the face of the idea that assassination should be one of the centerpieces of US policy.”

The American Society of International Law issued a report “Targeting Operations with Drone Technology: Humanitarian Law Implications” in March 2011.   Concerned that drones may be the future of warfare, scholars examined three questions in the US use of drone technology: the scope of armed conflict (what is the battlefield upon which deadly force of drone killing is authorized); who may be targeted; and the legal implications of who conducts the targeting (since it is often not military but clandestine CIA agents who decide who dies).   Concluding that the US may soon find itself “on the other end of the drone” as this technology expands, they criticize official US silence on these key legal questions.

Others are taking direct action.  Select examples include: fourteen people arrested in April 2009 outside Creech Air Force base in Nevada in connection with a protest against drones by the Nevada Desert Experience; in January 2010 people protested drones outside the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia; in April 2011, thirty-seven were arrested at Hancock Air Force base in upstate New York as part of a four hundred person protest against the use of drones;  in October 2011, as part of the International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space there were protests outside of Raytheon Missile Systems plant in Tucson;  in April 2012, twenty-eight people were pre-emptively arrested on their way to protest drones at Hancock Air Force Base.

There is a brilliant new book, DRONE WARFARE authored by global activist Medea Benjamin which documents the nuts and bolts of the drone industry and the money involved in their production and operation.  She collects many global media reports of innocent civilian deaths, investigations into these deaths, and gives voice to international opposition groups like her own CODEPINK, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters International, Human Rights Watch, the Catholic Worker movement, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and others working against the drones.

As National Public Radio and The New Republic jointly editorialized, there is good reason to doubt the veracity of US claims that drone killings are even effective.  Drone use has escalated and expanded the US global war on terror and thus should be subject to higher levels of scrutiny than it is now.  As the use of drones escalates so too does the risk of killing innocents which produces “legitimate anti-American anger that terrorist recruiters can exploit….Such a steady escalation of the drone war, and the inevitable increase in civilian casualties that will accompany it, could easily tip the delicate balance that assures we kill more terrorists than we produce.”

There is incredible danger in allowing US military and civilians to murder people anywhere in the world with no public or Congressional or judicial oversight.  This authorizes the President and the executive branch, according to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, to be prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.

The use of drones to assassinate people violates US and international law in multiple ways.  US military and civilian employees, who plan, target and execute people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are violating the law and, ultimately, risk prosecution.  As the technology for drone attacks spreads, protests by the US that drone attacks by others are illegal will sound quite hollow.  Continuation of flagrantly illegal drone attacks by the US also risks justifying the exact same actions, taken by others, against us.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights.  A version of this article with full sources is available. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com

The HRW report begins with some fairly plain sentences, “International humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, requires that all attacks be directed at military targets. Civilians are immune from deliberate attack. While not all civilian casualties indicate a violation of the laws of war, attacks cannot be indiscriminate or cause disproportionate civilian loss.” The pointed statement is the second one, namely that “civilians are immune from deliberate attack.” Absent an investigation of NATO’s own materials, it would be impossible to prove that these attacks were deliberate. NATO claims, as we shall see, that it is not capable of killing civilians deliberately. If there were civilian casualties, NATO contends, these are either by “weapons system failure” or by the accidents of war. No deliberate intent can be proven, so no blame lies with NATO.

What Human Rights Watch found is consistent with other reports, notably a January 2012 report by independent Arab human rights groups, Amnesty International, the
Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, and most importantly the Commission of Inquiry appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council (March 2, 2012). All find evidence of civilian casualties, with a whiff of war crimes at the margins of these reports. They are too careful to make any rash claims, but it is hard to ignore that this is the implication.

NATO has refused to cooperate with any of these inquiries. To the UN, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that “NATO incidents,” as he called them, are not crimes; “We would accordingly request,” he concluded in his letter from February 15, 2012, “that, in the event that the commission elects to include a discussion of NATO actions in Libya, its report clearly state that NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya.” When HRW approached NATO for its cooperation, NATO replied on March 1, the day before the UN report was released. NATO pointed out that it had already helped the UN Commission, and so HRW could simply see that report. Richard Froh, Deputy Secretary General of Operations for NATO, wrote to HRW, “We encourage you to consider these comments [in the UN report] when drafting your own report.” But NATO did not cooperate with the UN’s commission. It was a brush off.

NATO has said that it has conducted its own internal review. It has not made this review public. When the UN Commission and HRW asked NATO for specific details and not just its boilerplate target selection criteria, NATO has not done so. NATO has not sent its investigators to the ground for its internal lesson learned report. The entire exercise seems like a whitewash.

When asked if it will do a more through investigation, NATO claims that it has no mandate to do so. If the Libyan government asks for such an assessment, NATO claims, it would “cooperate fully.” The Libyan government has set up an inter-ministerial task force to investigate civilian deaths. Nothing has come of this task force, and as my sources in Tripoli tell me, it is likely that its members have neither met nor been briefed as to their terms of reference. Given the turmoil in Tripoli, as I show in my Libyan Diary in the current subscriber-only edition of Counterpunch newsletter, it is understandable that this task force has done little. When rebels storm the prime minister’s office as they did on May 7, it is unlikely that a forensic analysis of civilian deaths is on the forefront of the minds of this beleaguered government.

Human Rights Watch concludes of this official Libyan government task force, “Given that NATO played a critical role in the defeat of the Gaddafi government, however, the task force is likely to avoid serious criticism of NATO’s air campaign.” David Mepham, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, suggested, “NATO’s claim that it cannot investigate civilian casualties because it has no mandate to be in Libya is feeble and disingenuous. If Human Rights Watch can visit each of the sites – to inspect weapons debris, interview witnesses and examine medical records and deaths certificates, alongside reviewing satellite imagery and photographic evidence – NATO should certainly ask the Libyans for access to the sites to do the same. It has not done so.” And it seems unwilling to do so.

Human Rights Watch asks that NATO pay compensation to the families who have lost loved ones. That is certainly a just call. But it is insufficient. NATO acts with impunity, promoting the preposterous notion that it is not in its DNA to conduct atrocities. Such pretense is dangerous. It gives the armies of the West license to act as do the helicopter pilots who killed twelve civilians (including Reuters correspondents Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen) in Baghdad on July 12, 2007, or troopers from 2010 who posed for their “atrocity photos” in Afghanistan. Drones and night-raids, depleted uranium bunker buster bombs and water boarding: these are pendants of brutality. There is no limit to them if one assumes that one is not capable of being barbaric. Absent a proper investigation of NATO’s war making this kind of warfare will be considered to be acceptable.

The scandal here is that NATO, a military alliance, refuses any civilian oversight of its actions. It operated under a UN mandate (Security Council Resolution 1973) and yet refuses to allow a UN evaluation of its actions. NATO, in other words, operates as a rogue military entity, outside the bounds of the censures and sanctions of democratic society. It is precisely because NATO refuses an evaluation that the UN Security Council will not allow another NATO-like military intervention. The new HRW report reinforces what was raised in the UN report from March. It simply underlines the necessity of a formal and independent evaluation of NATO’s actions in Libya.

Vijay Prashad’s new book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , is published by AK Press. He will be one of the keynote speakers at the NATO Counter-Summit in Chicago on May 18-19.

With nuclear energy rapidly losing favor around the globe, the industry’s boosters have taken to blaming countries that have rejected it for worsening climate change. Top of the target list? Germany, which has vowed to generate 80-100% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2050; and Japan, which chose this month not to restart the last of its 54 nuclear reactors.

The accusation that these countries are worsening climate change is pretty rich coming from US commentators.  By any measure – whether calculating total CO₂ emissions or per capita – the US is one of the worst offenders on the planet. Among major nations, the US trails only Australia (almost exclusively reliant on coal) in emissions per capita at 17.7 tonnes per year (based on US Energy Information Administration 2009 data). Japan and Germany rank 37^th and 38^th respectively. China recently overtook the US in both total CO₂ and total greenhouse gas emissions. But the US remains in commanding second place, responsible for 17.8% of the world’s total CO₂  emissions and 15.7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

By contrast, Japan’s 2009 CO₂ emissions stood at 3.6% of the world’s total. Germany’s were at 2.5%.  While a greenhouse gas emissions increase is bad news for the planet no matter where it occurs, the US should put its own carbon emissions house in order before criticizing others. Even if both Japan and Germany’s emissions were to rise significantly, they will continue to trail the US by a large margin.

With the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster prompting an overwhelming public rejection of continued reliance on nuclear power in Japan, the country is scrambling to institute a rapid renewable energy program while relying in the near-term on energy efficiency, and especially on conservation. Inevitably, with few home-grown energy resources in operation, Japan will also import fossil fuels. Critics decry this as leading to an inevitable increase in CO₂ emissions. This may well turn out to be the case for a time. But nuclear energy is the cause of this, not the solution.

Japan, like the US, France and others, had the choice not to put all its eggs in the atomic basket when it made nuclear energy a national strategic priority in the early 1970s. But, in choosing to rely so profoundly on the most dangerous method ever invented to boil water, Japan left itself nowhere to go when the inevitable happened – an industry-ending deadly disaster that made nuclear energy publicly unacceptable. Consequently, it is Japan’s historic reliance on nuclear energy which will now cause it, at least temporarily, to increase its greenhouse gas emissions. Had it turned to renewables earlier and integrated them sooner, this would not be the case. Instead, before Fukushima, Japan was on the path to increasing nuclear energy’s 30% share of electricity production to 50% by 2030.

The motivation for Japan’s nuclear choice, despite having foresworn nuclear weapons, was likely rooted in military, rather than civilian energy priorities.  The US arrived at a similar crossroads in 1952 when President Truman’s blue ribbon commission on energy – dubbed the Paley Commission after its chairman – concluded that nuclear power could deliver only a modest fraction of American energy requirements at best. Instead, the commission strongly recommended “aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy – an effort in which the United States could make an immense contribution to the welfare of the world.” It predicted that such a commitment could heat 13 million homes and offices by 1975.

Instead, incoming President Eisenhower took a different path, likely prompted by Cold War politics and the so-called “prestige” of the atom.  His program, “Atoms for Peace,” killed the chances of US worldwide pre-eminence in renewable energy development and instead condemned the country to reliance on the three big polluters – coal, oil and nuclear – the predicament in which we find ourselves today. Again, our fatal contribution to the current climate crisis was made worse by the early decision to favor nuclear energy over renewables.

The criticisms of Germany are highly misplaced since they ignore several key facts: The European Union has imposed a carbon emissions cap which means that Germany is legally bound not to exceed this and therefore cannot increase its carbon emissions; Germany’s  plan to reach 100% renewable energy by 2050 means it is winding down  – not expanding – use of all fossil and fissile fueled electricity generators between now and then; and, even though Germany will still bring on new coal plants in the next decade, these are replacing older, far more CO₂ intensive coal plants, thereby still not increasing German emissions.

In reality, Germany continues to reduce its carbon emissions – by 2.1% last year with eight reactors shut down – while solar power output increased by 60 percent in 2011.

In conclusion, it is not the relinquishing of nuclear power that is worsening climate change. It is having focused so predominantly on that energy source in the first place – one that is unsustainable, non-renewable and, when it goes drastically wrong, demonstrably counter-productive from all perspectives including environmentally, morally, financially and technologically.

Finally, as a popular billboard now making the rounds of Facebook, states: “When there’s a huge solar energy spill, it’s just called a ‘nice day.’”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a founder of Beyond Nuclear and its international specialist. For more, see www.beyondnuclear.org. 

The reasons are easy enough to explain.  Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner.  He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him — so goes American political thinking — candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks.  Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.

Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing is more.  More ships for the Navy.  More planes for the Air Force.  More troops in general — perhaps 100,000 more.  And much more spending on national defense.

Clearly, come November, whoever wins or loses, the national security state will be the true victor in the presidential sweepstakes.

Of course, the election cycle alone is hardly responsible for our national love of weaponry and war.  Even in today’s straitened fiscal climate, with all the talk of government austerity, Congress feels obliged to trump an already generous president by adding yet more money for military appropriations.  Ever since the attacks of 9/11, surging defense budgets, forever war, and fear-mongering have become omnipresent features of our national landscape, together with pro-military celebrations that elevate our warriors and warfighters to hero status.  In fact, the uneasier Americans grow when it comes to the economy and signs of national decline, the more breathlessly we praise our military and its image of overwhelming power.  Neither Obama nor Romney show any sign of challenging this celebratory global “lock and load” mentality.

To explain why, one must consider not only the pro-military positions of each candidate, but their vulnerabilities — real or perceived — on military issues.  Mitt Romney is the easier to handicap.  As a Mormon missionary in France and later as the beneficiary of a high draft lottery number, Romney avoided military service during the Vietnam War.  Perhaps because he lacks military experience, he has already gone on record (during the Republican presidential debates) as deferring to military commanders on decisions such as whether we should bomb Iran.  A President Romney, it seems, would be more implementer-in-chief than civilian commander-in-chief.

Romney’s métier at Bain Capital was competence in the limited sense of buying low and selling high, along with a certain calculated ruthlessness in dividing companies and discarding people to manufacture profit.  These skills, such as they are, earn him little respect in military circles.  Compare him to Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt, both take-charge leaders with solid military credentials.  Rather than a Trumanesque “the buck stops here,” Romney is more about “make a buck here.”  Rather than Teddy Roosevelt’s bloodied but unbowed “man in the arena,” Romney is more bloodless equity capitalist circling high above the fray in a fancy suit.

Consider as well Romney’s five telegenic sons.  It’s hard to square Mitt’s professions of love for our military with his sons’ lack of interest in military service.  Indeed, when asked about their lack of enthusiasm for joining the armed forces during the surge in Iraq in 2007, Mitt off-handedly replied that his sons were already performing an invaluable national service by helping him get elected.

An old American upper class sense of noblesse oblige, of sons of privilege like George H.W. Bush or John F. Kennedy volunteering for national service in wartime, has been dead for decades in our otherwise military-happy country.  When it comes to sending American sons (and increasingly daughters) into harm’s way, for President Romney it’ll be another case of chickenhawk guts and working-class blood.

For election 2012, however, the main point is that the Romney family’s collective lack of service makes him vulnerable on national defense, a weakness that has already led Mitt and his campaign to overcompensate with ever more pro-military policy pronouncements supplemented with the usual bellicose rhetoric of all Republicans (Ron Paul excepted).  As a result, President-elect Romney will ultimately find himself confined, cowed, and controlled by the national security complex — and he’ll have only himself (and Barack Obama) to blame.

Obama, by way of contrast, has already shown a passion for military force that in saner times would make him invulnerable to charges of being “weak” on defense.  Fond of dressing up in military flight jackets and praising the troops to the rafters, Obama has substance to go with his style.  He’s made some tough calls like sending SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden; using NATO airpower to take down Qaddafi in Libya; expanding special opsand drone warfare in Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, including the assassination of U.S. citizens without judicial process.  America’s Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2009 has become a devotee of special forces, kill teams, andhigh-tech drones that challenge the very reality of national sovereignty.  Surely such a man can’t be accused of being weak on defense.

The political reality, of course, is different.  Despite his record, the Republican Party is forever at pains to portray Obama as suspect (that middle name Hussein!), divided in his loyalties (that Kenyan connection!), and not slavish enough in his devotion to “underdog” Israel.  (Could he be a crypto-Muslim?)

The president and his campaign staff are no fools.  Since any sign of “weakness” vis-à-vis Iran and similar enemies du jour or any expression of less than boundless admiration for our military will be exploited ruthlessly by Romney et al., Obama will continue to tack rightwards on military issues and national defense.  As a result, once elected he, too, will be a prisoner of the Complex.  In this process, the only surefire winner and all-time champ: once again, the national security state.

So what can we expect on the campaign trail this summer and fall?  Certainly not prospective civilian commanders-in-chief confident in the vitally important role of restraining or even reversing the worst excesses of an imperial state.  Rather, we’ll witness two men vying to be cheerleader-in-chief for continued U.S. imperial dominance achieved at nearly any price.

Election 2012 will be all about preserving the imperial status quo, only more so.  Come January 2013, regardless of which man takes the oath of office, we’ll remain a country with a manic enthusiasm for the military.  Rather than a president who urges us to abhor endless war, we’ll be led by a man intent on keeping us oblivious to the way we’re squandering our nation’s future in fruitless conflicts that ultimately compromise our core constitutional principles.

For all the suspense the media will gin up in the coming months, the ballots are already in and the real winner of election 2012 will be the national security state.  Unless you’re a denizen of that special interest state, we know the loser, too. It’s you.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF).  He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The keffiyeh, called a ‘poshu’ or a ‘pushi’ scarf in Turkish is also common among Palestinians and the Kurds in the South of Turkey.  It’s a useful garment.  It keeps your neck warm in the winter and protects your head from rain and hot sunshine.  It’s not such a common sight in cosmopolitan Istanbul however, and unfortunately for Cihan Kırmızıgül, just at that moment police in the area were on the lookout for anybody wearing one.  Unbeknownst to Cihan, shortly before he joined the bus queue there had been an attack on an empty supermarket in the district by a group of about 50 people who threw Molotov cocktails at the building before fleeing the scene.  The assailants were suspected members of the outlawed PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and all had been wearing keffiyehs.

Simply for sporting the same item of clothing (and also being Kurdish) Cihan was arrested on the suspicion that “he might have been part of the incident” and charged with being a ‘terrorist’. Whilst being held in prison custody a series of 8 court hearings began.

In the second hearing a ‘secret witness’ stated that he had seen Kırmızıgül throwing a Molotov cocktail. Later on, the secret witness changed his statement and said, “Kırmızıgül was not at the scene of the incident, I have never seen him before”.  However, the court decided to keep Kırmızıgül in detention.

In the text of a petition calling for Cihan’s release fellow Galatasaray students wrote: “Kırmızıgül’s continued arrest has turned into a hefty and unjust punishment because law requires “presumption of innocence” until convincing and lawful evidence is presented in court concerning his alleged crime.”

Finally, on the 23rd March 2012, after 25 months detention in prison, where he lost weight and was subjected to physical and psychological violence, and not allowed to continue his studies or take exams, Cihan was finally released pending trial of his case. However, after less than 2 months out of captivity, at the court hearing on May 11th he was found guilty of “committing a crime on behalf of an organization without being a member of that organization”, “throwing Molotov cocktails”, and “damaging property”.  He was sentenced to 11 years 3 months of imprisonment in total.  The judge decreed that “The piece of cloth called “pushi” (keffiyeh) was strong criminal evidence.”

Suat Eren, Kırmızıgül’s attorney said after the trial: “There are hundreds of files like Cihan’s. For that reason, I believe Cihan’s case must be supported by the public, as such attacks continue unabated against defenseless people by relying on the powers of the state. I define this as terror. This constitutes attacking a defenseless person. People are not taken into custody at a moment’s notice, or live in fear of their houses being raided in a state of law. ”

A spokesperson from Amnesty International said: “Anti- Terror Laws have to be changed and comply with the international standards.  It’s very important to implement fair trial standards at all prosecutions in Turkey.  We are very concerned as Cihan is back to prison and the hearing is based on the conflicting testimony of witnesses and the keffiyeh (Puşi) he was wearing.”

The case has come under widespread criticism, with protest demonstrations by supporters and sympathisers, and teaching staff from Galatasaray University wearing badges featuring the slogan “Don’t touch my student!”  Famous Turkish singer Aysegul Erce has written and performed a song about the case,  dedicated to Cihan Kırmızıgül – “For Justice.  For Freedom..”  Exactly.

Michael Dickinson lives in Istanbul.  He can be contacted via his website – http://yabanji.tripod.com/

Amano indicated in an interview with The Daily Beast Friday that he intends to hold up an agreement on Iranian cooperation in responding to allegations of military involvement in its nuclear programme until the IAEA is allowed to visit to Parchin.

Amano told journalist Michael Adler the “standoff” over access to Parchin “has become like a symbol” and vowed to “pursue this objective until there’s a concrete result”.

Adler cited an “informed source” as saying that the IAEA rejects any linkage between a visit to Parchin and the rest of the plan for cooperation being negotiated, and insists that a visit to Parchin must come first before any agreement.

But the actual draft negotiating text of the agreement on “Clarification of Unresolved Issues” with Iran’s proposed changes from the original IAEA proposal, which has been posted on the website of the Washington, D.C.-based Arms Control Association, shows that the major conflict over their cooperation is whether the process has a definite endpoint, not access to Parchin.

Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, has said that Iran is willing to grant access to Parchin but only under an agreed plan for Iranian cooperation with the IAEA.

Amano and Western officials have justified the insistence on immediate access to the Parchin site to investigate an alleged explosive containment vessel for testing related to a nuclear weapon by suggesting that satellite photographs show Iran may be trying to “clean up” the site.

Amano hinted at that accusation in the interview with Adler without making it explicitly. “We have information and there are some moves – there’s something moving out there,” he said. “Going there soon is better.”

But it is well known that no amount of washing would eliminate traces of radioactivity, which would be easily detected by any IAEA inspection.

On Mar. 8, in response to a presentation by Soltanieh to the IAEA Board of Governors detailing the negotiations, Amano confirmed, in effect, that agency was insisting on being able to extend the process by coming up with more questions, regardless of Iran’s responses to the IAEA’s questions on the agreed list of topics. He complained that Iran had sought to force the agency to “present a definitive list of questions” and to deny the agency “the right to revisit issues….”

Amano’s demands for immediate access to Parchin and for a process without any clear endpoint appear to be aimed at allowing the United States and its allies to continue accusing Iran of refusing cooperation with the IAEA during negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group scheduled to resume in Baghdad May 23.

Amano was elected to replace the more independent Mohamed ElBaradei in 2009 with U.S. assistance and pledged to align the agency with U.S. policy on Iran as well as other issues, as revealed by a WikiLeaks cables dated July and October 2009.

The draft text as of Feb. 21 shows Iran seeking a final resolution of the issues within a matter of weeks but the IAEA insisting on an open-ended process with no promise of such an early resolution.

The unfinished negotiating draft explains why Iran is holding on to Parchin access as a bargaining chip to get an agreement which will give Iran some tangible political benefit in return for information responding to a series of IAEA allegations.

The still unfinished draft represents the original draft from the IAEA, as modified by Iran during the last round of talks, according to Soltanieh in an interview with IPS on Mar. 15.

The negotiating draft shows that Iran and the IAEA had proposed and Iran agreed that the very first issues on which Iran would respond were “Parchin” and the “foreign expert”. Those were references to the allegation published in the November 2011 IAEA report of a bomb test chamber there, as well as the allegation that a Ukrainian scientist had assisted in the building of the chamber.

A second topic included “detonator development”, “high explosive initiation” and “hydrodynamic experiments”. All three of those subtopics have been discussed as connected to the alleged test chamber at Parchin, and the draft shows that Iran proposed all five subtopics be considered together as a single topic with Parchin.

The issue of whether or not the plan would provide for a clear-cut closure if Iran provided satisfactory answers comes up repeatedly in the draft. In the third paragraph, the IAEA draft refers to “a number of actions that are to be undertaken before the June 2012 meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, if possible”.

But the draft appears to anticipate a process without any specific terminal point. “Follow up actions that are required of Iran,” it says, “to facilitate the Agency’s conclusions regarding the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme will be identified as this process continues.”

The draft text shows that Iran amended that paragraph so that the process would be completed by the June 2012 IAEA board meeting. The entire sentence providing for identification of further actions required of Iran during the process is struck out in the text.

Iran agrees in the draft agreement to “facilitate a conclusive technical assessment of all issues of concern to the Agency.” But Iran inserted the sentence, “There exist no issues other than those reflected in the said annex.”

The Iranian insistence on a commitment that the agency would not introduce additional issues parallels Iran’s approach to a similar agreement with the IAEA in August 2007. That agreement was aimed at clearing up a six issues on which the IAEA had expressed suspicions that Iran had secretly done work on a nuclear weapon.

In that case, the IAEA agreed that there would be no further issues introduced. But new issues were subsequently raised by the agency.

A crucial element of the plan presented by the IAEA is a provision under which the Agency “may adjust the order in which issues and topics are discussed, and return to those that have been discussed earlier, given that the issues and topics are interrelated.” In other words, there would be no promise of closure on an issue, regardless of what information Iran provides on the topic or topics.

The IAEA draft envisions a process that would begin with an Iranian “initial declaration”, after which the IAEA would “provide…initial questions and a detailed explain of its concerns” with regard to each successive topic and “where appropriate, documents related to the Agency’s concerns”.

But the draft shows an Iranian strikethrough on the word “initial”, rejecting the IAEA’s right to come up with more questions even after the initial questions were answered.

Iran and the IAEA had conflicting approaches to how the process would work. The IAEA draft provided that, after Iran had responded to questions and requests, and the IAEA had analysed the responses, “the Agency will discuss with Iran any further actions to be taken.”

In another demand for flexibility to continue the inquiry on a particular topic regardless of whether Iran had answered all questions initially posed by the agency, the IAEA draft provides that the agency “may adjust the order in which issues and topics are discussed and return to those that have been discussed earlier, given that issues and topics are interrelated.”

Iran deleted the language allowing the return to issues that had been discussed earlier.

The Iranian proposals for change indicate Tehran believes that the IAEA draft is intended to keep Iran under suspicion for an indefinite period as part of a larger negotiating strategy by the United States and its allies in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran.

GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006. 

What does the news say?

“MONTERREY, Mexico (AP).- Forty-nine decapitated and mutilated corpses were found abandoned in a pool of blood in a highway connecting the Mexican metropolis of Monterrey to the US border in what seems to be the latest in an escalation war between drug cartels.

“The corpses of 43 men and 6 women were found at about 4 a.m. Sunday in the town of San Juan on a non-toll highway that leads to the border city of Reynosa. A white stone arch welcoming visitors was spray-painted with black letters: “100% Zeta.”

“At a news conference in Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene stated that along with the decomposing bodies, a ‘narcomanta’ had been found at the scene, in which authorship is attributed to the group “Los Zetas.”

“The victims could have been killed as long as two days ago, so authorities believe they were not murdered on the spot.  ‘Identifying them will be a difficult task because all of them were beheaded and hacked off their hands and feet’, the official said.

“The state Attorney-General, Adrián de la Garza, said that no reports of local missing people had been received in recent days, so the victims could be persons from other Mexican states or even US-bound Central American immigrants.”

“Mexican drug cartels have been waging and ever bloodier war seeking to take control over trafficking routes as well as the local drugs market and extortion, whose victims include US-bound immigrants.”

“So far in May, 18 bodies were found in a tourist area near Guadalajara; 23 people were found decapitated or hung from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, where violence among cartels has escalated. This year alone, cadavers have been found in the states of Veracruz, Guerrero, Morelos, Jalisco, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León.

“He stated that there were no clues indicating that the new wave of violence is linked to the presidential elections to take place this July.  ‘It has the dynamic of a war between cartels’, he said.”

For its part, the Internet portal ‘BBC World’ reported as follows:

“The scene of decapitated and mutilated bodies in Nuevo León, where 49 bodies were dumped on the road this Sunday, shocked many for the extreme barbarity displayed by the killers. Even in Mexico, where after five years of intense war among drug cartels it seemed like they had seen it all.”

Not a few countries of Our America have been affected by these problems.

In our homeland, the problems described here do not exist: would this be the reason why the empire is trying to make it surrender by starvation and hostility?

Half a century has not been enough, and I very much doubt that the empire can wait for another half a century before it sinks deep in its own mire, sooner than later.

Fidel Castro’s column appears weekly in CounterPunch.

•   The lesser of two evils occasionally does something right, which, in fact, is what defines his lesserdom.

•  Just because the person you voted for won the White House doesn’t mean you can’t keep pressing your causes, a point ignored by most liberals during the Obama and Clinton years, thus aiding these administrations’ drift to the right on issues such as social welfare, war and civil liberties.

Rather than being treated as a unique event, the gay marriage advance could better be used as a model for liberal and progressive behavior in the coming months. Obama has no programs of his own other than to win reelection, which is one of the reasons he is not doing better against Romney in the polls. It would be a favor to shove him towards policies which he presently rejects out of cowardice or indifference, by demonstrating their power, popularity and potential.

The possibilities are numerous. There is majority support for a large range of policies that Obama is terrified of touching, many of which he hasn’t even started “evolving” on.

But the ones that could make the biggest difference in the least amount of time would be those dealing with the economic crisis. For example, Obama could:

·  Finally come up with a meaningful program to help troubled homeowners, such as a reverse mortgage system under which the government bought back over time a portion of troubled mortgages or simply bought a share of the equity in financially endangered homes at current values. Remember: we are in a recession or depression and the
values of homes dramatically reflect it. Thus chances are good that a government program of this sort could actually make money in ten or twenty years.

·   Put a limit on credit card interest rates based on the single digit levels of the 1980s. There is no justification for the current credit card usury.

But the one that could be a real swinger in this election would be a program that blends America’s sense of patriotism with its need for public works and economic stimulation.

Right now, the employment situation of veterans is appalling. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports:

“The unemployment rate for veterans who served on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces at any time since September 2001 — a group referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans — was 12.1 percent in 2011. The jobless rate for all veterans was 8.3 percent. . . Young male veterans (those ages 18 to 24) who served during Gulf War era II had an unemployment rate of 29.1 percent in 2011, higher than that of young male nonveterans (17.6 percent).”

And what are we doing for these vets? Hardly anything. Compare that with what we did for veterans after World War II, programs which also helped the whole country make the transition to a peacetime econmy – including major aid for home loans and education. The present veterans’ policy is pathetic, almost – one might say out on the stump – verging on the anti-patriotic.

What if we had, instead, a Veterans Works Project, a program in which money now being used futilely in Afghanistan is put to work on domestic public works projects staffed primarily by veterans?

Suddenly the political game changes. Instead of Obama defending socialism, as the Republicans would have use believe, the policy becomes a patriotic cause.

And the interesting thing is that Obama could get support from, of all places, the defense industry. The end of war means less defense contracts. What if many of these contracts were shifted to domestic public works programs?

As a final touch, once the program got going, Americorps – which currently has 85,000 volunteers a year – could be expanded to include veterans on a part or full  salary basis.

Our post WWII efforts were not the only time that economics has been blended with patriotism. Eisenhower boosted the massive interstate highway program in the 1950s on the grounds that it was necessary for national defence. If America were ever invaded, we needed good roads to get the Army where it needed to be.  He had come by the idea originally as a participant in a transcontinental motor convoy staged by the Army in 1919 to point out the need for better highways.

Thus,  a  Veterans Works Project would have at least three good precedents.

And while we’re talking about precedents, let us not forget the works programs of the New Deal which make current stimulus efforts look absurdly puny.  As Wikipedia recounts

“The Works Progress Administration  employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 miles of highways and roads.”

And the patriotic angle was not ignored, as the Art Story notes:

“Several U.S. politicians had originally envisioned a fusing of art and patriotic American values. This inspired President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to begin the Works Progress Administration in the spring of 1935, and its subprogram, the Federal Art Project, several months later. The FAP was designed to both supplement artists’ incomes and, more importantly, fund patriotic art projects in an effort to rally dispirited American citizens.”  

It is essential for progressives and liberals to rediscover their former role as leaders in economic decency and equity. And helping veterans would be is not only a necessity in its own right – it would be a politically smart way to start a much broader economic revival. After all, it’s worked before and it could work again.

Sam Smith edits the Progressive Review. He is the author of The Great American Repair Manual.

Like many new and rapidly growing parties, the Pirate Party has only a partially formed agenda and undoubtedly means many different things to different supporters. However a general theme is clearly a support for freedom of the Internet. This means a rebellion against governmental efforts to track users and to limit the flow of material over the web.

Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party’s demons is copyright protection, and rightly so. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic of the late Middle Ages that has no place in the digital era. It is debatable whether such government-granted monopolies were ever the best way to finance the production of creative and artistic work, but now that the Internet will allow this material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

As every graduate of an introductory economics class knows, the market works best when items sell at their marginal cost. That means we maximize efficiency when recorded music, movies, video games and software are available to users at zero cost. The fees that the government allows copyright holders to impose create economic distortions in the same way that tariffs on imported cars or clothes lead to economic distortions.

The major difference is that the distortions from copyright protection are much larger. While tariffs on cars or clothes would rarely exceed 20-30 percent, the additional cost imposed by copyright protection is the price of the product. Movies that would be free in a world without copyright protection can cost $20-$30. The same is true of video games, and the price of copyrighted software can run into the thousands of dollars.

In total, hundreds of billions of dollars a year flow from the rest of us to those with government-granted copyright monopolies, like Disney, Time-Warner, and Microsoft. This government-directed flow of money dwarfs the size of the items that gets Washington politicians hot, like the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy.

Of course we need to pay creative workers, but we should find more efficient mechanisms, where a higher percentage of the cost borne by the public ends up in the workers’ pockets. Some alternatives already exist. There is much creative work in the United States and around the world that is supported directly by governments or private non-profits. For this work, writers, musicians, and other creative workers are paid for their work at the time they do it. There is no need for copyright protection.

However, we would clearly need much more funding if the flow of money from copyright protection were to be lost. One possibility is an artistic freedom voucher. This is a refundable tax credit of around $100 that each person could use to support the creative worker(s) of their choice. It would be similar to the charitable tax deduction, except it would be a credit. The condition of getting the money is that a worker would not be allowed to get copyright protection for a period of time (e.g. five years).

A program like this should generate a vast amount of material that would be freely available to the whole world. The powers of the government would no longer be used to bottle up the Internet, and we would see the end of legislative disasters, like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which sought to make everyone into a copyright cop.

We would also need new mechanisms to support the development of software. Here also there is a vast amount of software developed each year that does not depend on copyright protection. Much of it is custom software for specific companies. Other software is explicitly developed to be freely available to the public.

Developing the best mechanisms for supporting creative work will take much thought and debate. But it is long past time that this process got started and that we move beyond a hopelessly antiquated copyright system.

The Pirate Party has made an enormously important contribution to this process. While it is unlikely that it will ever become a dominant party in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, it may help to reshape the political agenda in the same way that the German Green Party did more than three decades ago.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

This article originally appeared on Al Jazeera.

Born in 1837, in Cork, Ireland, the teenage Mary Harris and her family emigrated first to Toronto, Canada, then to the U.S., with stops in Monroe, Michigan and Chicago, before settling in Memphis, Tennessee, where Mary met and married George E. Jones, an ironworker and organizer for the National Union of Iron Moulders.

Mary opened a dressmaking shop in Memphis, in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, fulfilling her dream of becoming a wife, mother and businesswoman.  Then tragedy struck.  Mary’s husband and four children (all of whom were under the age of five), died during a virulent yellow fever epidemic that swept through Memphis, leaving her a childless widow.

Following their deaths, and looking for a fresh start in a friendly environment, Mary returned to Chicago, where she set up another dressmaking business.  Then, incredibly, four years later, disaster struck again.  Mary’s dress shop, her home and her personal possessions were all lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

It was in the wake of these personal tragedies that Mary Harris Jones became heavily involved in the labor movement, initially as an organizer for the Knights of Labor, and then, with the Knights of Labor’s dissolution, as an organizer and spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers (UMW).  In truth, she was considerably more than a UMW organizer; she became the coal miners’ patron saint.

By all accounts Mary was a brilliant, charismatic speaker, and a fearless, dedicated champion of social justice.  The authorities (politicians, mine owners, business groups) were terrified of her.  In 1897, at the age of 60, she began using the name “Mother Jones,” and in 1902, a West Virginia District Attorney with the improbable name of Reese Blizzard, famously referred to her as “the most dangerous woman in America,” sealing her reputation.

One of Mary’s chief concerns was child welfare.  Not only was she an early and outspoken opponent of child labor, she took the maternal view that men’s wages should be generous enough to allow their wives to stay home and raise their children.  A brave and independent thinker—and unquestionably affected by the deaths of her four young ones—Mary shied away from many of the feminist issues of the day, including women’s suffrage, believing that a mother raising her children trumped everything else.

Although the word “iconic” tends to be overused these days, the term certainly applied to Mother Jones.  For roughly 60 years she was the working man’s spiritual leader and benefactor—part Madonna, part mediator, part rabble-rouser—a labor icon in every sense of the word.  This brief summary of her career doesn’t do her justice.  Suffice to say that in an era of colorful, larger-than-life male figures, Mother Jones more than held her own.  She died in 1930, at the age of ninety-three.

A couple of labor activists and historians, Steve Fesenmaier (in West Virginia) and Sanford Berman (in Minnesota), have spearheaded a drive to have Mother Jones honored by a commemorative stamp.  I’ve spoken with both men by telephone and was impressed not only with their staggering knowledge of labor history, but with their perseverance.  They’ve been committed to this project for seven years.

What does it take for the USPS (United States Postal Service) to put you on a commemorative stamp?  Several things, actually.  You don’t have to be an American, and you don’t have to be an intellectual or moralist (Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne and Elvis have been on stamps), but you do have to be dead for a minimum of five years (although exceptions can be made for ex-presidents).

Commemorative stamps have been around since 1893.  Interestingly, you can’t  get on a stamp if you’re a religious figure.  The USPS has a policy of not issuing stamps for people who were known primarily for their religious beliefs, which means Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are not eligible.

When atheists protested Mother Teresa getting her stamp, in 2010, the USPS was able to sidestep that potentially incendiary issue by claiming that the second-most famous Roman Catholic in the world (behind the Pope) was being honored for humanitarian rather than religious reasons.

The point that Messrs. Fesenmaier and Berman wish to emphasize is that the public can influence these selections.  There’s a group called the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee, composed of approximately 15 people, that makes recommendations to the USPS.  People can write to this committee and suggest candidates.  If Duke Wayne and Elvis can get stamps, why not labor’s legendary benefactor, Mother Jones?

The mailing address:

Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee:  Stamp Development

U.S. Postal Service

1735 North Lynn Street (Room 5013)

Arlington, VA 22209-6432

DAVID MACARAY, an LA playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy:  Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep.   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. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

The United States has been on the wrong track in terms of what it can attain. It still regards itself as having abilities which the events of the past century–wars, political crisis, and the like— have shown are beyond its or any country’s– power to control. America is having a very hard time being a “normal” nation that recognizes the limits and nature of its power.  It is spending immense sums of money to be able to attain goals beyond its capacity.  The German government under Angela Merkel is using pan-European methods to resurrect German power, but in ways that is developing important resistance.  In their own ways both the United States and most of Europe are at important turning points—and they will affect each other

Those who are critical of the existing world, whether the United States or elsewhere, have ample reason to be pessimistic:  rightist, chauvinist forces are becoming stronger both politically and ideologically in the U. S, the Netherlands, France.  At the same time, in France, Greece, Serbia, Italy, and elsewhere, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s draconian economic austerity program, for a balanced government budget and other conservative nostrums for Europe, has cost the centrist parties who support  her crucial votes in elections in France, Greece, and the United Kingdom’s local elections at the beginning of May.  Ms. Merkel’s austerity ideas, and the so-called technocrats in Italy and elsewhere who supported them, are now on the defensive.  Europe’s electorate is in the process of rejecting them and the European Union may collapse. If it does the American economy is especially going to be affected.

Ms. Merkel’s austerity program ignored its effects on the average citizen of Europe; it was hurting them (intentionally) often disastrously, in the form of unemployment, lower standards of living, longer hours and working years for those who still have jobs—and the first time they could vote they did so in a way that made the technocrats’ diktats irrelevant.  She was very likely to be rejected at the polls, and was!  But as of this time, events at the polls have not dented her ideas on how Europe’s economy should evolve.  She has remained consistent but she or the new French President, Francois Hollande, must bend, at least a bit, or else the euro zone will fall apart. Time will tell who flinches first, but neither might and then the future will be inevitable. Europe may be thrown into chaos; it may patch up its differences for a while, but sooner or later it is likely to fall apart economically.

The future of a common European economy is now more in doubt than ever.  The immediate outcome of the French, Greek, and other elections in early May was a fall in the value of the euro and a decline in the European stock markets.   Voters this past weekend in the most recent provincial elections in Northrhine-Westphalia, Germany most populous state, and earlier this month in Schleswig-Holstein, have overwhelmingly rejected Merkel’s party’s dominant position, putting her and her program’s future very much in limbo.   Support for Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union plummeted to about 26% from 35%, its worst showing yet in the state. Merkel’s policies are leading to political defeat for the conservative and technocratic forces in Germany and much of Europe.

Sarkozy, in any event, has been swept from power, as much or more for supporting Germany’s austerity ideas as any other factor. Germany’s hegemony over Europe’s economic future does not have backing in many nations that fought Germany twice, and the resurrection of German power is an integral aspect and goal of Merkel’s economic program. Those wars are still important: many people have long memories and suffered much during them. That he was a flashy playboy did Sarkozy no good but was not, in my opinion, decisive.  Those who supported Merkel’s ideas for wringing the average person’s economic well being to balance the budget have been rejected.   The Left has become stronger but so has the extreme-Right.

The notion of a European economic bloc, with a common economic program, is more and more politically difficult to sustain in the face of the varied political forces that oppose it. It is more likely than ever to collapse amidst social protests, rising unemployment and the negative social effects of the quant, old-fashioned conservative nostrums it proposes.

The Crisis in the American Military

Those in power have as much reason to be pessimistic, and many of them have been for a long time. The U.S.. fights wars–almost compulsively. Grandiose visions of American power in the world leads them to intervene in
places all over the globe, but so far it has lost many of its adventures, including full-scale wars, like Vietnam, and  has virtually bankrupted the United States in the process.  There is no correlation between expenditures, firepower or numerical superiority of manpower or materiel.  The result is that growing numbers in the Defense establishment are increasingly frustrated with a very expensive system that fails to deliver the results promised.

People on the Left are not the only ones who are disappointed or believe the future looks dismal. The system is not working as it’s supposed to.  It simply doesn’t function as those in power hoped it would, and they have infinitely more resources at their command than Leftists.  Their failure is more interesting; they have power but cannot attain their goals, and there are many reasons for it.  Moreover, they are increasingly acknowledging this. Most believers in the status quo are still blind to their failure, and I am discussing a small minority.  But there are many reasons the existing system is not attaining its goals, and they should be recognized even if this system is not likely to fall soon.

In 1992 Wolfowitz drafted a document that said the U. S. must be the world’s sole superpower and other nations must recognize their place in the world order.  It was extremely belligerent and ambitious, but his theories and his intelligence conflict with each other–which makes him embarrassingly inconsistent.  He may not have changed his mind but by 2002 he was adding crucial contingencies to his grandiose past ambitions that admitted the world scene was more complex than his earlier statements implied.  Most important, he admitted one could never tell what might happen next—the major challenges confronting the United States and the world were unpredictable.  “…I mean, we don’t have a war plan for the contingencies…we might face in 2010 or 2015. We’ve got to find some other ways of measuring the risk in that way….”

If you cannot predict how can you plan?  The answer is clear: you cannot; you proceed blindly. But if you spend money like the U. S. Defense establishment does, blindness about the nature of threats is a very grave situation in which to lose taxpayers’ money and run up national deficits, much less get into losing wars. The money, essentially, keeps arms makers in profit and creates jobs but has scant relationship to real military needs or future military crises.  The gross federal debt in fiscal year 2013 was $17.5 trillion.  There are other ways to calculate this but sooner or later these immense sums have to be confronted without creating an economic crisis, and that is extremely difficult.

No foreign invader has ever won a war in Afghanistan, and attaining military victories is not the same as winning wars.  A large majority of the American public is today—as opposed to when it started—against continuing the war against the Taliban, a conflict which has already gone on for over a decade and cost the U. S. almost 4,500 deaths.  The U.S. won many battles in Vietnam but it lost the war. Try though it might to win the Korean war, going to the Yalu in the hope of reuniting Korea, essentially it fought the Korean War to a stalemate that ended about on the 38th parallel–where it began–after which America’s military and political leaders said they would not fight another land war in Asia.  John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, implied they would use atomic weapons in the future.  But the U. S. subsequently fought another massive war in Vietnam with immense quantities of conventional firepower—a war they eventually lost militarily.  When they went into it they had no idea whatsoever in official Washington that they would lose so badly or that the war would last so long and cost so much.

Meanwhile, even while fighting in Vietnam the American assumption, the basis on which they bought their equipment– was that they would fight principally in Europe against the USSR. They spent hundreds of billions of dollars on equipment designed explicitly for European conditions–for a nuclear war they never fought and could not fight, since it meant mutual destruction.

But even Wolfowitz was eventually aware of the problem: if you cannot predict you cannot plan, and that makes being a global superpower, which is extremely expensive, far more difficult.  The U.S. cannot spend without limit–that is impossible—and spending as much as required is the prerequisite, though scarcely sufficient, of being globally hegemonic.   His earlier theories have less of a sense of limits. In 1992 he thought the U.S. should and could exert its primacy everywhere, as if stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam–much less the futile adventures subsequently in Iraq and  Afghanistan– show that the United States does not have sufficient power to implement his grandiose notions based on theory at rather than reality.  He was still an ideologue of the Right but by 2002 he had at least some sense of limits.

Wolfowitz is an ideological, deductive theorist, who refuses to acknowledge the limits of America’s power.  But, as even he points out, America’s military leaders did not predict World War II  (at least some of the crucial details)–but also the collapse of the USSR in 1991, an alleged threat on which they spent countless billions preparing to fight a war with.  They failed to realize until the damage was done that they would not win the war against the Vietnamese Communists. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—and the war there  Wolfowitz claimed would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues—which turned out not to be true.  Iraq has been left in political shambles and corruption, and while some oil is being extracted, social and political conditions there prevent oil from being pumped to the extent it might.  The U.S. taxpayer paid for the cost of the  war there–about a trillion dollars, excluding indirect costs like veterans benefits.

New Priorities

Now U. S..’ priorities have moved, at least for now, back to the Pacific, which, of course, means China.  Before the Iraq War, the Bush Administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was eager to take on China. This is quixotic. China is far too powerful now to fight a war against; they are already far more powerful than Iran will ever be. The fact it is immense geographically is alone decisive; It also has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. A war with China would mean national suicide for the United States and it is highly unlikely to fight it, regardless who wants to fix their sights there.

That the Obama Administration is thinking of this is a reflection how it is still rooted in the Cold War mind-set.  The Pentagon is divided on priorities,  What they think important depends on the service, how they spend their budgets on weapons and what they think these weapons are best suited for.  Rivalry between the services remains a constant factor in assessing U. S. strategic options, and it has always existed since World War II. The only thing that the services have in common is the belief that the U.S. power should dominate the world. It is quixotic but it also typical of the U. S. military’s shared illusions.

For a half-century or more its budget and plans should have imposed priorities on its strategy, but its action and behavior have in fact been haphazardly guided by surprising events in much smaller, very poor nations, places—such as Korea and Vietnam, and then Iraq and Afghanistan—where in fact the rewards of success are relatively slight.  It has always believed that the control of Europe and the confrontation with the Soviets was decisive for world power–the root of all evil was allegedly in Moscow..  Essentially, it built arms oriented toward military success in Europe, with its cities and concentrated targets.  But instead it used the arms developed for European conditions in Third World nations.  It has been unable to correlate its actions with its resources and formal priorities, which have always been oriented to Europe.

There are many reasons for America’s loss of control over its priorities and its getting into quagmires such as Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  It aided iraq and Saddam Hussein, who subsequently became its enemy, against Iran,  and the anti-Soviet fighting forces (mainly Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban) in Afghanistan.  Irrational or not, the “credibility” of its power—its ability to win once it set out to do so—was a factor of great importance in the Vietnam War. It wanted to maintain the image of U.S. military power being invincible; it did not, and it came out looking pathetic. Partially linked to it was the American premise that it could succeed anywhere. In Latin America it certainly prevailed in some cases but nowhere did it try so hard or expend such firepower as it did in Vietnam or lose so much, both in prestige and money. Some American officers, a growing minority, became profoundly discontented with the military culture, realizing something was going wrong; this is especially true of those officers who had seen wars first-hand–unlike most neo-cons, who are mainly intellectuals aloof from reality. But the vast majority of officers remain oblivious to such critical thinking.

The problem is that no nation—the U. S. included– is able to rule the entire world, which is simply too big, and there are limits to any nation’s power. Poorer, underdeveloped countries, where militarily important resources are decentralized and where enemies take advantage of this fact, are very difficult to defeat.   Americas rulers, whether Republicans or Democrats, much less the Pentagon, simply refuse to acknowledge this fact.  Only unquestioning, gung-ho types are promoted in the American military leadership, and so they repeat past errors and ask no fundamental questions.

There are many other reasons for America’s failures besides the conformist nature of military leaders who maintain the same ambitions they did many generations ago, even though the distribution and nature of world power, both economically and militarily, has changed radically since 1945.  For one thing the U. S.. no longer has anything approaching a monopoly  on nuclear weapons, a fact that alone is decisive, because many nations have already built nuclear bombs and the technology for doing so  is much more accessible.  More and more states can build or simply buy nuclear weapons.

Crucial, too, is the fact that the U. S.’ local proxies, it allies in various Third World countries, are usually venal, alienating their local populations, wasting immense sums of American taxpayers’ money through thievery and corruption of various sorts.  Many in the military establishment have discussed how the failure of its dishonest local allies, or proxies, is an immense liability that frequently is a crucial cause of its military failures. It was surely crucial in Vietnam and is decisive in many other places as well.

Daniel Byman, in a monograph for the U.S. Army’s Strategic Warfare Institute. “Going to War With the Allies You Have,” discusses the problem of U.S. local allies who engage in “blatant and brutal oppression such as the killing of moderate political opponents and human rights organization and church officials.’’ making an outright victory in Latin America much more “unlikely.”  Its allies were inept, their soldiers “do not want to fight,” they have “bad leadership” whose main concern is staying in power and keeping the flow of riches into their personal coffers. That means watching their own security services, which have the power to overthrow them, and in some cases keeping the opposition, whether Communist or revolutionary of one sort or another,, sufficiently alive to have the Americans continue giving them aid—in a word, they often do not want to win lest they lose access to the American cornucopia.

Although it often believe they are acting to prevent the greater evil of Communism, the U.S. works with monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, that are characterized by  “corruption” and have poor intelligence and ineffective militaries.  Bauman’s monograph is simply a catalog of reasons for U. S. failures.  Its real significance is not that we don’t know these facts but that the U. S. Army sponsored a study of why it loses wars. Why the U.S. Army’s prestigious center studied this crucial problem, we cannot say for certain, but the SSI is the main place for the Army’s intellectuals and at least some Army officers are probably tired of pursuing a losing strategy again and again.

Lt. Col. Donald D. Davis, after going all over Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, concluded that Karzai’s government is not making progress. It is too corrupt and interested in perpetuating its own power. High Pentagon officials naturally deny these shortcomings but others—journalists especially–have already discussed the catalog of Karzai’s failures.  It is a very familiar account of America’s contradiction; it relies on proxies who are totally venal and unreliable to attain victory. But most ultimately fail.

A National Intelligence Estimate in December 2011—which mainly the CIA compiled– came essentially to the same conclusion as Davis. The Taliban will win by simply waiting out the Americans.

The Inevitability of Large American Military Expenditures 

The Pentagon’s vast spending on arms has proven insufficient to win military and political victories in innumerable nations where the U.S. has made the effort to prevail. But its vast budget at least creates many jobs and helps maintain the American economy.  The so-called defense industry has enormous influence in the House and Senate, which often forces the Defense Department to maintain their expenditures for weapons systems—including those that do not work—made in their districts and employing local labor—which then votes for the incumbents.

The Cold War was nominally over when the USSR collapsed in  the 1991, but the Cold War budget, ever-higher military spending,  has been institutionalized since 1950, and jobs in many areas of the U.S. depend on them. State-by-state breakdowns on defense industry employment are regularly issued: Kansas, Washington, and Texas lead the pack.  But even in 1950 the U. S., in the famous, now declassified National Security Council 68 paper, authored largely under Paul Nitze, explicitly adapted “military Keynesianism” as a way of creating  prosperity, allocating money for military expenses and running deficits that Congress would not legislate for peaceful purposes.  This  cynical process under President Harry Truman’s Democratic Administration was forced on the Congress because the Republicans under Senator Robert Taft of Ohio wanted to balance the budget but were also afraid to be accused of being called “soft on Communism” if they did not allocate the funds that Truman wanted for the Pentagon, Marshall Plan, and Truman Doctrine.  It worked, and the Democratic decision was monumental;  it caused military expenses to become integral to the American economy thereafter.  They became, from this time onwards, an institutionalized aspect of the entire American economy, and also the single most important factor creating the immense debt it has today of about $18 trillion.

The World is Changing

Both Europe and the United States are in crisis.  For the sake of space I do not focus so much on America’s economic problems, save that its vast military spending is the main cause of its colossal deficit. Sooner or later it must confront the fact that if it does not reduce this debt  it may wreck the international role of the US dollar.

The European crisis is both economic and political. And the Germans are trying to use their economic power to resurrect the traditional political power they had before Germany lost two European wars..  They will fail, probably, because the Merkel Government hurts not only Greeks, Spaniards, and other citizens of European nations but also Germans—who may vote against Merkel.

We are entering a turbulent period both in the U. S. and Europe!

GABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War? and The Age of War: the US Confronts the World and After Socialism. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is World in Crisis. 
 

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC).  In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.

Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.

Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of responses to its FOIA filing is one from the NOC Fusion Center Desk dated Nov. 5, 2011, which collects at the federal level and then distributes the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders.  Although none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information were widely disseminated by the DHS.

Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS, the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers around the US.

Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle — all the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police repression.

Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would “reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist. Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law enforcement, intelligence and military network.

On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston, Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal with Occupy movement actions.

Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence loop.”

Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists, it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy actions.

These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:

Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants — the Federal Protective Service (FPS) will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.

There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS “background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)

The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out lie:

DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments writ large.

Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.

The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.

The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the “We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in trying to crush the movement itself.

To see all the new FOIA documents, go to the PJIF website.

Dave Lindorff is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He lives in Philadelphia.