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July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
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July
25, 2002
On Paul Krugman's Howl,
and Other Populist Proposals
The
media may be focusing on murder while plummeting stock prices
are ruining savings, but the blindness behind populism's rejection
of broad progressive reform is seconded only by the inevitability
of war.
by Norman Madarasz
So now our globalizing, populist counterparts
claim, like good Marxists, that capitalist is used to crises,
which it always overcomes. Or, better yet, that capitalism is
crisis. Shareholder capitalism-- the postmodern economic fantasy--
is meeting its moment of relativism.
As Alexander Cockburn wrote in CounterPunch (July 19, 2002):
"Makes your blood boil, doesn't it?" By which he was
referring not to the brutal murder of five-year-old Samantha
Runnion, whose picture of innocence captivated viewers of the
CNN.com webpage throughout last week while the DJIA/S&P500/TSX
bubble burst. Although the vapors released by the blow were
already creeping up the dark alley in which CNN's boss of bosses
would soon be resigning and, finally, admitting to being under
SEC investigation, her picture would not budge. By now it has
become obvious that the sweetly locked child was kidnapped and
murdered not once, but twice: once by her sick henchman, then
by CNN and corporate media at large. America's window on the
world has its camera fixed in Warholian immobility, sentenced
to filming life on Sordid Street, North America, while politics
is sequestered from the people.
In the brewing stew of resentment against
the sharp-eyed business slicks who ripped off its old-age pension,
it isn't just the wasted life of a child that's being fed to
the North American middle class. Executive decisions in the
corporate-owned media are effective without always being explicit.
Yet it is crystal clear that Samantha Runnion's picture was
cynically meant to distract and compel mounting outrage into
some other site, just any other one, than the president's dumb
comment on the market now being good value, or the v.-p.'s arrogant
self-righteous refusal to reveal his role as a prime profiteer
of the gigantic defense budget. Beyond possible future indictment,
what is also being played out in media pages is a populist cum
patriotist take-over bid on reformist and progressive policies.
For the first time since the late sixties, reform is seriously
gripping the public mind, and populist leaders will have nothing
of it.
MILITARISM
IN THE NEWS
Throughout the nineties, the redundant
liberal press moved fearfully away from politics and issues
of reform. It draped the conservative restructuring of the government's
social obligations as progress, indeed as revolution. Their
man stood in the 0-office, but nothing really changed from 1600
Pennsylvania Ave. to the Mall when it came to installing changes
and living by the golden rules of abusive power. Whenever the
water started scalding, Bill Clinton, like George Bush Sr.,
Ronald Reagan and every other American president down perhaps
to James Madison, with the possible exception of FDR, took control
of the corrupt circumstance by betraying the revolutionary principles
on which the American republic was built. They each turned to
cynical populism to assure the honorable legacy of their name,
and prosperity of those who brought them to power.
And what is that populist pill prescribed
to quell political heat? War. And there's so sound resonating
in the closed quarters of Washington these days more than the
war huddle, which is only a euphemism for the need to divert
the prospect of further House inquiries into that "corporate
stuff".
There's no better way of ensuring the
required diversion than by sputtering news brief after news
brief on war preparations-- here and abroad. My generation came
to political consciousness during the early years of Reaganism.
We were primed on war: the threat from the USSR, primarily,
but much more closely-- absurdity of absurdities-- from Nicaragua.
The war message was constant. Years later,
should I have really been surprised by my gesture in 1983 while
preparing my banner for a demonstration on disarmament to have
symbolically stuck a cruise missile into Reagan and Andropov's
groin? What I was dreaming of was a world rid of militarism
and the military murder of civilians. Yet Freud had always been
a poor remedy for insufficient economic analyses. Spruced by
the hyper-martial media ecology, the line between the dream
of peace and the desire for war thins into a fine thread.
Two war fronts are hastily being prepared.
Iraq, of course; or Iran, perhaps, if we are to judge by Sunday's
Bay of Tonkinesque maneuver against fishing boats in its territorial
waters. And the Bush administration WILL wage war. As another
18 companies and/or banks are under investigation by the SEC,
and stocks keep revealing their virtual and empty shells, it'll
take a little catharsis to cool the people down. Bush and the
War Party, i.e. the 'hawks', will attack unilaterally, which
means of course with Israel's assistance, with or without Turkey's
aid (whose current political instability should not deter their
all-powerful military from making airbases available to the
US Air Force).
In fact, it is only a matter of time
before the bombs start falling on Baghdad, as it is also only
a matter of weeks before Bush and the House Republicans begin
a downward spiral toward the fall elections. What with the Democrats
most likely taking over the House later this year, litigation
against the Executive branch of government may actually pick
up steam-- especially if it becomes a democrat's campaign promise.
It has long been clear that under the
impulsion of the Hawks, who have determined American foreign
policy since last fall's attacks, Bush's only way out will be
through war. "Al-Qods al-Arabi", the pan-Arabic newspaper
published in London, reports on a meeting held on July 9 between
twenty leading Iraqi dissidents in exile organized by the American
Secretary of State in view of ousting the existing regime. They
claim that the attack will take place no later than this fall,
even though the Americans have not managed to rally all major
Iraqi democratic forces. As the stakes behind Bush's honor gain
center stage, the times will truly become dangerous ones, for
there is much foreign doubt as to the American Armed Forces'
capacity to conquer Iraq.
The other war front is home security.
On Sunday July 22, on "Meet the Press" Tom Ridge cranked
up fears even further with the hypnotically repeated claim that
al-Quaeda is planning a nuclear attack on U.S. soil. No details
of dirty bombs on Chicago thugs: just a nuclear attack. From
Latin America, citizens look on scandalized at the way the
Administration is waging this war on the Home Front. Awareness
has grown that America is not exempt from the political repression
it has sponsored elsewhere. For as the N.Y. Times reported on
Saturday July 20, in an update on measures taken in Washington
to pass reform on accounting practices, the financial crimes
<S.W.A.T>. task force meant to clean up corporate malfeasance
is really nothing more than a pilot project for a bad rerun
in a perpetual return that the president might already be living
out again through the bottle. As Frank Rich reported, "it
exists mainly on paper, as a cutely named entity with no real
assets. It calls for no new employees or funds and won't even
gain new F.B.I. agents to replace those whom the bureau reassigned
from white-collar crime to counterterrorism after Sept. 11."
There is nothing being done to soothe
the markets, while the administration plans to deploy the army
to assist in policing. As far as the president seems to be concerned
about the markets, he could care less. To the president's credit,
nor does the Senate seem interested in any accounting reforms
other than a smoke screen sure to be rejected by the lower house.
Furthermore, Warren E. Buffet reports that clans of CEOs, reduced
to a few bad apples on the TV screen, continue to funnel shareholders'
money to lobby the House against accounting reforms making options
a company expense.
There have been no major white-collar
crime cases in the U.S.-- or in Canada, its northern copy in
this matter-- over the past fifteen years that has succeeded
in throwing a single corporate crook in jail: let alone forcing
him to dump his shell-company tax haven accounts into the pension
funds from which he stole. And the financial press keeps defending
allegedly corrupt executives through the worse moments, asking,
as did Matthew Ingham from The Globe and Mail: what will it
solve if CEO's are sent to jail?
POPULIST PROPOSALS
ARE ONLY
A SMOKE SCREEN TO DEEP REFORM
Two wars, then, on two opposite fronts
make it much safer for the North American middle class to choose
populist diffusion over progressive reform. Populism loves the
scapegoat. Reveling on blood, it is ready to hit hard against
the unlucky bastards (Arthur Andersen?) who have confirmed the
laws of human nature.
Allow me to point out that the progressive
community, from a constructively critical point of view, has
always known there is no such thing as human nature. Greed is
a matter of circumstance and of condition. Populist choosing
is a function of force and, much more efficiently, government
propaganda (or information, since in North America propaganda
is only what the other side does). Then there is progressive
thought's recently renewed discovery. Human nature is something
whose construction is best hid by cushy humanities grants awarded
with the disclaimer: all theory must recall the hand that feeds.
That hand says, there IS such a thing as human nature, and it
IS greedy. What's more, there's not a damned thing in hell any
one can do to change it.
Anyone who has bothered opening a book
of philosophy knows that's a lie. Progressives and some liberals
fought in the nineties to keep the population alert at the fiction
of deregulating the economy and downsizing government. In early
twenty-first century English North America, one does not have
to strive for socialism in the hopes of building a more equitable
society: being a principled capitalist today is as radical a
proposal to take as being communist was in the past. That's
because there is little if any thing capitalist about the way
both the Democrats and Republics have turned the economy to
their limited self-interest.
While humming the mantra of small government,
the House and Executive have shifted public funds to the contracts
pressed upon them by big business lobby groups (i.e. scarcely
camouflaged former House Representatives and Senators). High
paid think tanks have been handsomely financed to tailor the
transactions to a capitalist cut. Strip away social plans,
but just don't say it's the lower and middle classes who can't
make up for lost services. Deregulate industry, but just don't
say that it's workers who are forbidden to organize for their
rights, in terms of salary, job security and safety as their
executive managers pocket the exponential growth on options
now known throughout the American establishment as the option
to sell your life away. Especially, as all think tankers are
such pious members of various churches, renew the line that
kept Christendom going for two millennia: strive for the best
and most honest life, and the free market will redeem you --
when you're dead!
With every extinct social, artistic and
health measure or program, what many progressives failed to
see was what unsavory institutions were also listed under the
social program heading. Police, or at least policing, is part
of the crew, as is especially police trained to fight and indict
white-collar crime. Canada started to face that realization
a half decade ago as a string of corporate-related crimes emerged,
involving members of the federal cabinet and high-profile lobby
groups (basically staffed with former cabinet members) in illegal
commissions for astonishingly large state contracts in the transport
industry, which in Canada also designates the military. As
those under investigation caught sight of the legal agitation
through their counterparts' leaks, the sums for which they threatened
to sue the government prevented most police work from continuing,
and most white-collar policing jobs from existing. With a police
department already under-budgeted, is it really any wonder why
a commissioner decides to turn his bright minds to busting massage
parlor hookers and cottage country pot smokers, instead of
checked-collared corporate criminals? Liberals didn't seem to
pay much heed to matters as complexly twisted as those. It was
far easier flinging missiles at Milosevich.
What else can one answer to Mr. Andrew
Grove, Chairman of Intel, who lamented in an op-ed piece published
by the Washington Post of the generalized damning of CEOs and
CFOS as he glorifies the America that gave him the chance his
native Communist Hungary had only stifled? My own parents fled
from political repression in Communist Hungary, though they
quickly noticed that the changing of the guard in 1989 made
a lot of people rich only at the expense of an increasingly
impoverished middle class. By a fine brush stroke in the art
of business ethics, Mr. Grove merely seems to be protecting
his own reputation, for what he says of the corporate classes
is so contemptuously dismissive as to be quite untrue: "Other
honest, hard-working and capable business leaders feel similarly
demoralized by a political climate that has declared open season
on corporate executives and has let the faults, however egregious,
of a few taint the public perception of all." Who is chasing
after scape goats here, the public or corporate executives
themselves?
There is systemic corruption in American
finance and business. The public is only now discovering how
long this system has been in place. Notwithstanding Grove's
brilliance, men of his ilk must be damning the university classes
they never took on Hegel, Nietszche and historical returns.
Because Soviet-styled state socialist practices are being revealed
as having co-opted American big business' competitive principles,
at least since the late seventies. Yet hasn't the honest CEO
and CFO all along been arguing that there IS a free market,
that there's NO favoritism, that mergers do NOT spell monopolies.
After so much lecturing, Mr. Grove would do well to encourage
"systemic solutions" from workers, instead from the
very managers who have led the system astray, educated as they
were in leading business schools to do so as creative improvs
and interpretations.
Our past is being rewritten. All the
honest CEO has to offer is a choice between a Stalinist or Orwellian
version.
CAPITALIST
PROGRESS AND EVOLUTION
Surely now, North American state capitalism
has benefited the population greatly. Yet as the rest of the
world has suffered increasingly, is globalization a lie then,
or a utopia? Wasn't the American population primed on the idea
that their work would help others live better, as figures kept
contradicting faith? Or was it simply that globalization was
a dead ringer since it also punished them as labor fled to countries
that were paying lower wages?
There are parameters by which to measure
affluence. In today's world they can no longer be limited by
national borders. Was it the case that the realists really new
from the start that only the richest countries would vanquish,
as the up-start Asian Tigers sat crossed legged with their jaws
clamped wondering where the riches had flown?
In this globalized world, in which the
U.S.A. had been the only economic and military superpower, never
has a generation of young people failed so badly to learn other
languages like 1990's "Hip-Hop Generation" and "Generation
X" did with triumphalist English. The largest class of
educated individuals in the world spat on language studies,
and consequently, on what their "partners" were saying
in their native French, Japanese and Spanish, the languages
of our closest allies after all, let alone in Russian and Arabic.
North-Americans read their management gurus and self-help pathos
as foreign executives desperately tried to catch up by hiring
language consultants to teach them everything from perfect American
English to Anglo-American pop culture, history and philosophy.
Which is why an economy skeptic like
Paul Krugman uttered a cry in May. Finalizing two highly visionary
and committed articles on the urgent need for accounting reform
in the unsolved wake of Enron, just as the whole "corporate
stuff" was about to implode the stock market, he ended
by lamenting with a gloomy, pathetic: "who will save America".
Krugman may have become internationally recognized as the Bush
Administration's staunchest critic. His violent partisan attacks,
however, are only the flipside of his faith in populism.
Krugman knows that the only reason the
American middle class rides in slick cars, drives on well-paved
roads, is surrounded and determined by high-technology, and
is able to work at full-employment levels despite, or in spite
of, its reduced purchasing power, is because other countries
and hedge funds invest massively in the American economy when
it has waxed stable. The North American economy, like most
others, relies on financing for its riches, not production.
That's fine as long as big money is being invested here. Apart
from its exponential trade deficit, the U.S.A. has largely gained
by selling its currency at astonishing exchange rates. This
is why it is foolish for Americans to equate the foreign (and
local) desire to invest locally as due either due to democracy,
which has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, or to American
military might. To be sure, both of these factors lend illusion
to the reality of economic stability. Which is why Krugman leapt
on a valuable economic history lesson when pointing out the
collapse of Suharto's Indonesia. Pauperized in a matter of weeks
following the economic collapse of the Asian tigers in the
fall of 1997, Indonesia was a miracle of pure finance, concentrated
in the dictator's clan.
Still, Krugman's last words on salvation
are a strong reminder of his politically self-interested pedigree.
The political language for that is populist damning of extra-parliamentary
reform. A post-modern Machiavellian, recall that Krugman also
denounced the anti-globalization movement as fanatics while
the Canadian State unleashed full repression in Quebec City
last year, as he also tainted the progressive intellectual French
group ATTAC as "extremists". At the World Social Forum
in Porto Alegre, Brazil, ATTAC proved that NGO's do succeed
in pressuring the repressive World system (basically the Bretton-Woods
institutions) to answer solid and rigorous criticism from skilled
professionals who have not sold their ideals to historical
fatalism. With Krugman's tough talk, it becomes possible to
"ignore the politics and look at the situation objectively",
as he coolly invited his readers on Tuesday morning. Unless,
of course, your only choice is the passion play between Democrats
and Republicans. Reducing that choice to the only game in town
is the populist's favorite backstroke.
What the current financial crisis may
end up provoking is the rising awareness among American consumers
that they are indeed part of a political collective. By politics,
I obviously don't mean the two-party trade-off the political
and corporate classes profess to be democracy. Politics really
means awareness of the class stakes being fought over through
the institution of representational bodies, and the attempts
made by the upper classes to flatten greater distribution of
services and wealth. As it does to establish the international
effects as analytic parameters for evaluation whether an economic
system is functioning as a productive, and not only a financial
system. So the U.S. hasn't done that bad for a state-capitalist
pseudo-democracy? With its GDP topping the international scale,
its relative purchasing power parity ranks low in comparison,
without even mentioning the worrisome projection of 4% for the
median Consumer Index, most often pointed to as the best predictive
measure for the economy.
All of this means that the distributed
wealth of American society is only a drop of what it could be
with true political leadership. Instead, North America has been
granted a stand in for the corporate take-over of civil society
and industry. Even as staunch a Republican ideologue as Kevin
Phillips argues angrily in Wealth and Democracy how both democracy
and the economy have been usurped by a small plutocracy of corporate
lords, i.e. an "overclass". Once the American consumer
witnesses his and her savings stolen by the very state they
had believed was enshrining them with individuality, even the
sacredness of American individualism can grow into a myth.
There has been no greater opportunity
since the late 1960s to think again what democracy means in
a country in which barely 50% vote, and of that 50% the proportion
is significantly higher in the upper classes than in the middle
and lower ones. This is not a question of politics only being
acted upon by the educated. It's a question of political control
being cast by those who hold the reigns of economic power, and
who, furthermore, will do everything in their power to hide
the process and mechanism behind the way control works. The
key to that has obviously been the corporate take over of the
media, opening the gates, in Phillips' words, to "the submergence
of politics in today's money culture." Did CEOs really
believe they would be kings for more than a day?
That's where populism comes in, and that's
what populism is meant to do at critical moments: distract and
focus on war. Yeah, we should have flattened 'Nam into a massive
parking lot, just like we've got to blow Iraq back into the
Middle Ages. Whether the USA could afford to continue depleting
its gold reserves in fighting the Vietnamese while the economies
of Germany and Japan were turning over yearly surpluses, remains
a point the hawks do not like to face.
As for Iraq, (or Iran), the irony is
of course that the "Middle Ages" for Europe was the
time during which Baghdad excelled as the center of the civilized
world. And it had been that center not for 100 years, but something
closer to 400 years until it was run over by Genghis Kahn's
nomadic war machine in the thirteenth century. Meanwhile back
in Western Europe, feudalism ruled with no signs of change,
devoid of science and press. Freedom of research and thought
was burnt at the stake by the brutal Inquisition waged upon
believers by its own Church. Faced with the populist cum patriotist
euphoria of war, September's attack on the gleaming twins and
twilit geometric marshal star should stand as reminders of the
enormous risks to which the American political and business
overclass is willing to put the American people when the primary
interest rate of their business ethics is to keep justice at
bay.
On Monday morning, North America woke
up to shareholder capitalism's fall. Not even a day had passed
after WorldCom filed for bankruptcy that the US Telecom Association
was already soliciting the FCC to allow it to pass the bankruptcy
cost down to the consumer. In the letter he sent to the FCC,
Michael Powell, president of the Association, claimed that it
was necessary to keep WorldCom's fall from destabilizing the
entire telecommunications industry. After executives stripped
the base upon which small investors' pension savings rested,
now the small consumer will have to pay for being so awfully
shortsighted.
Up-keeper, savior and bailiff of the
economy all at once, the consumer is especially its political
pawn. It's something like the get-rich principle from options
that executives have used to creating fake profits. Just that
for the small guy, the opposite rule applies: meet the get-poor
principle. It's what entire classes get when fighting conservatism
only by populism, which is no better than nothing. Until the
North-American middle and lower classes accept progressive challenges
waged on an international scale, we may as well just accept
the current scenario as simply another story among the tales
spun in the name of North-American shareholder capitalism. Critical
analyses of overclass dominance of the economy in the North
American context will not, however, be satisfied with cultural
fictions.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian philosopher, and political and economic analyst.
He writes from Rio de Janeiro, and welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
An Islam
Primer
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
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