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Noam Chomsky with a poser, "What Is The Common Good?"
Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."
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Follow @Uncle_Ernie The President's Analyst's Nightmare For Real! It was only a matter of time before Big Brother brought in their partners-in-crime i.e., Big Telecom to take over their search for the "terrorists" to whom your grandmother is talking. By Ernest Stewart "I know. Bedouins hate the phone company. Matter of fact, I've never been in a country where everybody didn't hate the phone company." ~~~ V.I. Kydor Kropotkin ~ The President's Analyst "When Dow Chemical and Monsanto first brought out GE crops, they assured us their new, expensive seeds would clean up our environment and reduce pesticide use. That didn't happen. Today, weeds are resistant to Roundup; and many farmers are using older, more deadly pesticides to kill them. 2,4-D corn and soybeans just keep us on the same old pesticide treadmill; it's a terrible idea." ~~~ Iowa corn and soybean farmer George Naylor Classic plastic eyeball, he's your special friend He sees you every night Well, he calls himself Big Brother But you know, it's no game You're never out of his sight! 1984 ~~~ Spirit "Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others." ~~~ Brian Tracy In case you missed it... The National Security Agency is exploring how it could relinquish control of the massive database of domestic phone logs that has been the focus of an intense national debate, according to current and former officials briefed on the discussions.NSA head Keith (I'm a liar) Alexander said, "NSA itself has seriously considered moving to a model in which the data are held by the private sector. No one else wanted it - especially not the phone companies, who've described it as a 'bit of a hot potato.'" Of course, I'd trust Keith to tell the truth about as far as I could comfortably spit out a very large sewer rat (which isn't very far at all!); and I have no doubts that the rat would taste far better than Keith's word. If we had a Republic instead of a Corpo-rat dictatorship, Keith would've been off to a super-max to spend the rest of his worthless life, instead of the high life at taxpayer expense. Ergo, I have no doubt that the Telecoms will soon be recording your every move and keystroke, and then listening in just like they used to do. Which begs the question -- with over 1.5 million square feet of space in their new Utah Data Center, why do they need to send any of the info they're collecting out where it can be easily sold to other corpo-rats to use at their leisure? Unless, of course, that was their plan to begin with? In Other News In case you missed it, those brilliant know-it-alls over at the USDA have decided to pave the way for the commercial use of genetically-engineered crops dubbed "Agent Orange" corn and soybeans. Don't you just love that special "Agent Orange sauce?" Apparently, the USDA feels not enough of us are dying from GMO poisons, and have set about to rectify that by opening up our diet to some real killers. In its "Draft Environmental Impact Statement" (EIS) released last Friday, the agency said it's "preferred" option for Dow AgroSciences' "Enlist" corn and soybean, genetically engineered (GE) to be resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D, is to deregulate them. You may recall, we sent millions of tons of Agent Orange to wipe out the jungle in Vietnam, along with most American soldiers exposed to it, which is the least we could've done; unfortunately, we also wiped out the environment to the point where it still hasn't recovered in forty year's time. Oh, and did I mention it causes major birth defects to children whose parents were treated with these poisons? Now, the USDA has decided to take the money and allow our future generations to pay the price for Dow Chemical's profit margin. Specifically its 2,4-D, the third-most widely used herbicide in the U.S., made by Dow Chemical -- and a component of Agent Orange. The herbicide has been linked to Parkinson's disease, birth defects, reproductive problems, and endocrine disruption. "'Agent Orange crops' are designed to survive a chemical assault with 2,4-D. They will increase the use of toxic pesticides in industrial agriculture while providing absolutely no benefit to consumers," said Center for Food Safety executive director Andrew Kimbrell. If you thought "Roundup" brand corn is bad, and it is, this is even worse. Not only will the food poison you; but the USDA -- who's supposed to be looking out for us -- has been reduced to a rubber stamp, allowing whatever poisons the 1% want to use on us -- thus making a bigger profit at our demise. And Finally To prove that not all Federal judges are criminal, there's the case of U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. His ruling last month was the first major legal defeat for the NSA and Barry spy programs since Edward Snowden made the scene and began shedding light on once-secret corners of the agency's expansive surveillance and data collection programs. Judge Leon called the program "almost-Orwellian technology" and challenged its constitutionality. He continued... "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast."We knew Barry wasn't going to let that stand; so off he went to the court of U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, who concluded the program was a necessary extension of steps taken after the 9/11. You'll recall that William was a pick of Slick Willie Clinton, who stocked the courts with 1% lackeys; and here is a result. Paulie said... "This blunt tool only works because it collects everything. The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented." Judge Pauley's act of treason stood head and shoulders above the rest last week, so he wins this week's Vidkun Quisling Award. Keepin' On It's one of those cases of mixed emotions. You know, kind of like watching your Mother-in-law drive your new Beemer off a cliff. We're still doing our thing, thanks to Dennis from Calgary, a newbie to the magazine who sent in a nice check to keep us going. Thanks, Dennis! Trouble is, we're still $200 short of paying off last year's bills; so I had to give them pretty much all of this month's social security check -- something I swore to never do again. So, we're still here -- for at least another 6 months -- before any new bills come due. Last week was supposed to be our last edition; but last week, I was trying my best just to survive a combination of the flu & COPD; and somehow I managed to get over it! Not as easy as you might think, combined with having to take the dog for his walk three times a day into those record-low temps we've had for the last couple weeks. When it's -15 below zero without the gale force winds, dropping it to around -45 below, it's cold and amazing to me that I could do it! Therefore, any help you could send us to keep us fighting the powers that be would be greatly appreciated. Please send us what-ever-you-can as often as you can; and we'll keep fighting the good fight for you and yours! *****  11-27-1945 ~ 12-31-2014 Thanks for the film!  03-30-1943 ~ 01-02-2014 Thanks for the music!  01-19-1939 ~ 01-03-2014 Thanks for the music!  12-18-1922 ~ 01-06-2014 Thanks for the film! ***** We get by with a little help from our friends! So please help us if you can...? Donations ***** So how do you like Bush Lite so far? And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it? Until the next time, Peace! (c) 2014 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for the last 12 years managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. Visit the Magazine's page on Facebook and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter. |
 What Is The Common Good? By Noam Chomsky This article is adapted from a Dewey Lecture by Noam Chomsky at Columbia University in New York on Dec. 6, 2013. Humans are social beings, and the kind of creature that a person becomes depends crucially on the social, cultural and institutional circumstances of his life. We are therefore led to inquire into the social arrangements that are conducive to people's rights and welfare, and to fulfilling their just aspirations - in brief, the common good. For perspective I'd like to invoke what seem to me virtual truisms. They relate to an interesting category of ethical principles: those that are not only universal, in that they are virtually always professed, but also doubly universal, in that at the same time they are almost universally rejected in practice. These range from very general principles, such as the truism that we should apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others (if not harsher ones), to more specific doctrines, such as a dedication to promoting democracy and human rights, which is proclaimed almost universally, even by the worst monsters - though the actual record is grim, across the spectrum. A good place to start is with John Stuart Mill's classic "On Liberty." Its epigraph formulates "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges: the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." The words are quoted from Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of classical liberalism. It follows that institutions that constrain such development are illegitimate, unless they can somehow justify themselves. Concern for the common good should impel us to find ways to cultivate human development in its richest diversity. Adam Smith, another Enlightenment thinker with similar views, felt that it shouldn't be too difficult to institute humane policies. In his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" he observed that "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it." Smith acknowledges the power of what he calls the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people." But the more benign "original passions of human nature" might compensate for that pathology. Classical liberalism shipwrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but its humanistic commitments and aspirations didn't die. Rudolf Rocker, a 20th-century anarchist thinker and activist, reiterated similar ideas. Rocker described what he calls "a definite trend in the historic development of mankind" that strives for "the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life." Rocker was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in anarcho-syndicalism - in European terms, a variety of "libertarian socialism." This brand of socialism, he held, doesn't depict "a fixed, self-enclosed social system" with a definite answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of human life, but rather a trend in human development that strives to attain Enlightenment ideals. So understood, anarchism is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936; reaches further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the American rust belt, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain; and encompasses the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives. This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself. If these structures can't meet that challenge, they should be dismantled - and, anarchists believe, "refashioned from below," as commentator Nathan Schneider observes. In part this sounds like truism: Why should anyone defend illegitimate structures and institutions? But truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And I think they provide useful stepping stones to finding the common good. For Rocker, "the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement." It should be noted that the American brand of libertarianism differs sharply from the libertarian tradition, accepting and indeed advocating the subordination of working people to the masters of the economy, and the subjection of everyone to the restrictive discipline and destructive features of markets. Anarchism is, famously, opposed to the state, while advocating "planned administration of things in the interest of the community," in Rocker's words; and beyond that, wide-ranging federations of self-governing communities and workplaces. Today, anarchists dedicated to these goals often support state power to protect people, society and the earth itself from the ravages of concentrated private capital. That's no contradiction. People live and suffer and endure in the existing society. Available means should be used to safeguard and benefit them, even if a long-term goal is to construct preferable alternatives. In the Brazilian rural workers movement, they speak of "widening the floors of the cage" - the cage of existing coercive institutions that can be widened by popular struggle - as has happened effectively over many years. We can extend the image to think of the cage of state institutions as a protection from the savage beasts roaming outside: the predatory, state-supported capitalist institutions dedicated in principle to private gain, power and domination, with community and people's interest at most a footnote, revered in rhetoric but dismissed in practice as a matter of principle and even law. Much of the most respected work in academic political science compares public attitudes and government policy. In "Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America," the Princeton scholar Martin Gilens reveals that the majority of the U.S. population is effectively disenfranchised. About 70 percent of the population, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale, has no influence on policy, Gilens concludes. Moving up the scale, influence slowly increases. At the very top are those who pretty much determine policy, by means that aren't obscure. The resulting system is not democracy but plutocracy. Or perhaps, a little more kindly, it's what legal scholar Conor Gearty calls "neo-democracy," a partner to neoliberalism - a system in which liberty is enjoyed by the few, and security in its fullest sense is available only to the elite, but within a system of more general formal rights. In contrast, as Rocker writes, a truly democratic system would achieve the character of "an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community." No one took the American philosopher John Dewey to be an anarchist. But consider his ideas. He recognized that "Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country," even if democratic forms remain. Until those institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain "the shadow cast on society by big business," much as is seen today. These ideas lead very naturally to a vision of society based on workers' control of productive institutions, as envisioned by 19th century thinkers, notably Karl Marx but also - less familiar - John Stuart Mill. Mill wrote, "The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected to predominate, is, the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers electable and removable by themselves." The Founding Fathers of the United States were well aware of the hazards of democracy. In the Constitutional Convention debates, the main framer, James Madison, warned of these hazards. Naturally taking England as his model, Madison observed that "In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," undermining the right to property. The basic problem that Madison foresaw in "framing a system which we wish to last for ages" was to ensure that the actual rulers will be the wealthy minority so as "to secure the rights of property agst. the danger from an equality & universality of suffrage, vesting compleat power over property in hands without a share in it." Scholarship generally agrees with the Brown University scholar Gordon S. Wood's assessment that "The Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period." Long before Madison, Artistotle, in his "Politics," recognized the same problem with democracy. Reviewing a variety of political systems, Aristotle concluded that this system was the best - or perhaps the least bad - form of government. But he recognized a flaw: The great mass of the poor could use their voting power to take the property of the rich, which would be unfair. Madison and Aristotle arrived at opposite solutions: Aristotle advised reducing inequality, by what we would regard as welfare state measures. Madison felt that the answer was to reduce democracy. In his last years, Thomas Jefferson, the man who drafted the United States' Declaration of Independence, captured the essential nature of the conflict, which has far from ended. Jefferson had serious concerns about the quality and fate of the democratic experiment. He distinguished between "aristocrats and democrats." The aristocrats are "those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes." The democrats, in contrast, "identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interest." Today the successors to Jefferson's "aristocrats" might argue about who should play the guiding role: technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, or bankers and corporate executives. It is this political guardianship that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry, as Dewey put it, "from a feudalistic to a democratic social order" based on workers' control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others.
Like Karl Marx's Old Mole - "our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, then suddenly to emerge" - the libertarian tradition is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to peek through, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, seeking to bring about what seems to me to be a reasonable approximation to the common good.
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 Neutral - In Whose Favor? By Uri Avnery A FORMER Israeli army Chief of Staff, a man of limited intelligence, was told that a certain individual was an atheist. "Yes," he asked, "but a Jewish atheist or a Christian atheist?" Lenin, in his Swiss exile, once inquired about the party affiliation of a newly elected member of the Duma. "Oh, he is just a fool!" his assistant asserted. Lenin answered impatiently: "A fool in favor of whom?" I am tempted to pose a similar question about people touted to be neutral in our conflict: "Neutral in favor of whom?" THE QUESTION came to my mind when I saw an Israeli documentary about the US intermediaries who have tried over the last 40 years or so to broker peace between the Palestinians and us. For some reason, most of them were Jews. I am sure that all of them were loyal American citizens, who would have been sincerely offended by any suggestion that they served a foreign country, such as Israel. They honestly felt themselves to be neutral in our conflict. But were they neutral? Are they? Can they be? My answer is: No, they couldn't. Not because they were dishonest. Not because they consciously served one side. Certainly not. Perish the thought! But for a much deeper reason. They were brought up on the narrative of one side. From childhood on, they have internalized the history and the terminology of one side (ours). They couldn't even imagine that the other side has a different narrative, with a different terminology. This does not prevent them from being neutral. Neutral for one side. By the way, in this respect there is no great difference between American Jews and other Americans. They have generally been brought up on the same history and ideology, based on the Hebrew Bible. LET US take the latest example. John Kerry is carrying with him a draft plan for the solution of the conflict. It was prepared meticulously by a staff of experts. And what a staff! One hundred and sixty dedicated individuals! I won't ask how many of them are fellow Jews. The very question smacks of anti-Semitism. Jewish Americans are like any other Americans. Loyal to their country. Neutral in our conflict. Neutral for whom? Well, let's look at the plan. Among many other provisions, it foresees the stationing of Israeli troops in the Palestinian Jordan valley. A temporary measure. Only for ten years. After that, Israel will decide whether its security needs have been met. If the answer is negative, the troops will remain for as long as necessary - by Israeli judgment. For neutral Americans, this sounds quite reasonable. There will be a free and sovereign Palestinian state. The Jordan valley will be part of this state. If the Palestinians achieve their long-longed-for independence, why should they care about such a bagatelle? If they are not considering military action against Israel, why would they mind? Logical if you are an Israeli. Or an American. Not if you are a Palestinian. Because for a Palestinian, the Jordan valley constitutes 20% of their putative state, which altogether consists of 22% of the territory they consider their historical homeland. And because they believe, based on experience, that there is very little chance that Israelis will ever willingly withdraw from a piece of land if they can help it. And because the continued military control of the valley would allow the Israelis to cut the State of Palestine off from any contact with the Arab world, indeed from the world at large. And, well, there is such a thing as national pride and sovereignty. Imagine Mexican - or even Canadian - troops stationed on 20% of the territory of the USA. Or French troops in control of 20% of Germany. Or Russian troops in 20% of Poland. Or Serbian troops in Kosovo? Impossible, you say. So why do American experts take it for granted that Palestinians are different? That they wouldn't mind? Because they have a certain conception of Israelis and Palestinians. THE SAME lack of understanding of the other side is, of course, prevalent in the relations between the two sides themselves. On the last day of anno 2013, Israel had to release 26 Palestinian prisoners, who had been held since before the 1993 Oslo Accord. This was part of the preliminary agreement achieved by John Kerry for starting the current negotiations. Every time this happens, there is an outcry in Israel and rejoicing in Palestine. Nothing exemplifies the mental gap between the two peoples more clearly than these contrasting reactions. For Israelis, these prisoners are vile murderers, despicable terrorists with "blood on their hands". For Palestinians, they are national heroes, soldiers of the sacred Palestinian cause, who have sacrificed more than 20 years of their young lives for the freedom of their people. For days, all Israeli networks have reported several times a day on demonstrations of bereaved Israeli mothers, clutching in their hands large photos of their sons and daughters, crying out in anguish against the release of their murderers. And immediately after, scenes in Ramallah and Nablus of the mothers of the prisoners, clutching the portraits of their loved ones, dancing and singing in anticipation of their arrival. Many Israelis were cringing at this sight. But the editors and anchormen would be astonished if they were told that they were inciting the people against the prisoner release, and - indirectly - against the peace negotiations. Why? How? Just honest reporting! This revulsion at the other side's rejoicing seems to be an ancient reaction. The Bible tells us that after King Saul was killed in the war against the Philistines, King David lamented: "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon (both Philistine towns) ; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph." (II Samuel. 1:20) Binyamin Netanyahu went further. He made a speech denouncing the Palestinian leadership. How could they organize these demonstrations of joy? What does that say about the sincerity of Mahmoud Abbas? How could they rejoice at the sight of these abominable murderers, who had slaughtered innocent Jews? Doesn't this prove that they are not serious about seeking peace, that they are all unreformed terrorists at heart, out for Jewish blood? So we cannot give up any security measures for a long, long time. The prisoners themselves, when interviewed by Israeli TV immediately after their release, argued in excellent Hebrew (learned in prison) that the main thing was to achieve peace. When asked, one of them said: "Is there a single Israeli, from Netanyahu down, who hasn't killed Arabs?" THIS GAP of perceptions is, to my mind, the largest obstacle to peace. This week Netanyahu gave us another beautiful example. He spoke about the continued incitement against Israel in Palestinian schoolbooks. This item of right-wing Israeli propaganda pops up every time the other tired arguments are let out to grass. How can there be peace, Netanyahu exclaimed, if Palestinian children learn in their classes that Haifa and Nazareth are part of Palestine? This means that they are educated to destroy Israel! This is so impertinent, that one can only gasp. I don't think that there exists a single Hebrew schoolbook that does not mention the fact that Jericho and Hebron are part of Eretz Israel. To change this one would have to abolish the Bible. Haifa and Hebron, Jericho and Nazareth are all part of the same country, called Palestine in Arabic and Eretz Israel in Hebrew. They are all deeply rooted in the consciousness of both peoples. A compromise between them does not mean that they give up their historical memories, but that they agree to partition the country into two political entities. Netanyahu and his ilk cannot imagine this, and therefore they are unable to make peace. On the Palestinian side there are certainly many people who also find this impossible, or too painful. I wonder if Irish schoolbooks have obliterated 400 years of English domination or abomination. I doubt it. I also wonder how English schoolbooks treat this chapter of their history. In any case, if an independent (neutral?) commission of experts were to examine all the schoolbooks in Israel and Palestine, they would find very little difference between them. Of Israel's four main school systems (national, national-religious, western-orthodox and eastern-orthodox), at least the three religious ones are so nationalist-racist that a Palestinian competitor would be hard-pressed to trump them. None of them says anything about the existence of a Palestinian people, not to mention any rights on the country they may possess. God forbid (literally)! TO BE more than a mere fragile armistice, peace needs reconciliation. See: Mandela. Reconciliation is impossible if either side is totally oblivious to the narrative of the other, their history, beliefs, perceptions, myths. John Kerry does not need 160 or 1600 experts, neutral or otherwise. He needs one good psychologist. Or maybe two. One can easily understand the feelings of a mother whose son was killed by a Palestinian militant. If one tries, one can also understand the feelings of a mother whose son was ordered by his leaders to attack Israelis and who returns from prison after 30 years.
Only if the American intermediaries, neutral or otherwise, understand both can they contribute to furthering peace.
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 Obama, The Great Dis-Equalizer By Glen Ford President Obama, the Grand Facilitator of the greatest consolidation of financial wealth in human history, began his sixth year in office declaring that income inequality is "the defining challenge of our time." The Grand Bargainer who saved George Bush's bank bailout and presided over the (ongoing) infusion of tens of trillions of dollars into Wall Street accounts, and who bragged less than two years ago that, "Since I've been president, federal spending has actually risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years," now calls for government action to reverse the momentum of his own policies. The Great Pretender, who in 2008 called for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, and then did absolutely nothing to effectuate it when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, now proposes to raise the bar to $10 an hour in order to embarrass Republicans in an election year. The Daring Debt Buster who, on his own initiative, has frozen federal workers' wages since 2010, and worked hand in glove with Republicans to gut social programs in the name of fiscal restraint, laments "growing inequality and lack of upward mobility" among the masses. The chief executive who lifted not a finger to pass "card check," the Employee Free Choice Act of 2009, that might have given organized labor a fighting chance to survive, now pretends to be a born again champion of collective bargaining and yearns for the days when "you knew that a blue-collar job would let you buy a home, and a car, maybe a vacation once in a while, health care, a reliable pension." Meanwhile, Obama's Justice Department sided with the Republican-appointed Emergency Financial Manager of Detroit, who was seeking to impose bankruptcy on the mostly Black city and raid retiree's pensions - revealing the administration's true colors. The nation's First Black President admits that "African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of opportunity - higher unemployment, higher poverty rates," and claims he'll push for "targeted initiatives" to combat this "legacy of discrimination" (although all the proposed targeting is in the form of tax incentives for business). Yet, nearly five years ago, in a press conference marking his first hundred days in office, Obama categorically rejected targeted aid for Black communities, thus ensuring that the cascading effects of the Great Meltdown would plunge African Americans deeper into the abyss. Obama said: "So my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that it will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.By 2009, according to economist Pamela Brown, white household wealth was 19 times that of Black households, "and is probably even greater now" - compared to a ratio of 12 to 1 in 1984 and down to 7 to 1 in 1995. The collapse of Black economic fortunes has been catastrophic, yet Obama offers only tax cuts for corporations, streamlined business regulations, undoing of sequestration, more rhetoric about ending off-shoring of jobs, and stronger application of antidiscrimination laws. The president wants us to forget that he was the one who proposed sequestration in the first place, in an effort to force a Grand Bargain with Republicans; that his economic advisors are secretly meeting with hundreds of corporate lobbyists to shape a jobs-destroying Trans Pacific Partnership that is "like NAFTA on steroids," and then fast-track it through Congress; and that Obama has nominated two Republican prospective judges from Georgia to federal courts, one of whom fought to keep the Confederate banner in the state flag, while the other was the lead lawyer in defense of Georgia's Voter ID law. The Obama administration has many priorities, but nondiscrimination is not one of them. Whatever Obama means when he says "targeted assistance," it seldom translates as actual money for non-corporate persons. Back in April of 2012, his administration was cited for failing to spend almost all of $7.6 billion that Congress set aside to help communities and homeowners hardest hit by the housing crisis - a cohort that is disproportionately Black and brown. Obama's Treasury Department offered no explanation other than they had not put together a proper spending plan. However, it is obvious that Obama's people wanted to avoid doing anything that might interfere with the banks' foreclosure processes, so as not to disturb Wall Street's manifold schemes to further rig the market. The growing crisis of income and wealth inequality is a result of the internal logic of capitalism under the hegemony of Wall Street. Obama's fix for the vast social carnage the banksters leave in their wake, is to forge a State that is even more dutiful in propping up "the markets" and stripping down the public sector. There is no room in that presidential mission for even modest amelioration of the public's pain. The president's rhetoric is nothing more than noise, totally disconnected from actual policy. The Lords of Capital - for whom Obama is a servant - have nothing to offer but more austerity and war.
They must be disempowered, root and branch, and society "reformed" in their absence.
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 The CIA, Amazon, Bezos And The Washington Post An Exchange with Executive Editor Martin Baron By Norman Solomon To: Martin Baron, Executive Editor, and Kevin Merida, Managing Editor, The Washington Post Dear Mr. Baron and Mr. Merida: On behalf of more than 25,000 signers of a petition to The Washington Post, I'm writing this letter to request a brief meeting to present the petition at a time that would be convenient for you on Jan. 14 or 15. Here is the text of the petition, launched by RootsAction.org: "A basic principle of journalism is to acknowledge when the owner of a media outlet has a major financial relationship with the subject of coverage. We strongly urge the Washington Post to be fully candid with its readers about the fact that the newspaper's new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. The Washington Post's coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon -- and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA." The petition includes cogent comments by many of the people who signed it. I hope that you can set aside perhaps 10 minutes on Jan. 14 or 15 for the purpose of receiving the petition and hearing a summary of its signers' concerns. For confirmation of an appointment, I can be reached on my cell phone... Thank you. Sincerely,
Norman Solomon [January 2, 2014] ******************** Dear Mr. Solomon: Thank you for your note. I was able to read the petition on the RootsAction.org site and to see the list of those who signed it. I certainly would be happy to review any additional information you might send. The Post has among the strictest ethics policies in the field of journalism, and we vigorously enforce it. We have routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage. We reported on Amazon's pursuit of CIA contracts in our coverage of plans by Jeff Bezos to purchase The Washington Post. We also have been very aggressive in our coverage of the intelligence community, including the CIA, NSA, and other agencies, as you should know. The Post was at the leading edge of disclosures about the NSA in 2013. Most recently, it reported on the CIA's hidden involvement in Colombia's fight against FARC rebels, including a fatal missile attack across the border in Ecuador. You can be sure neither the NSA nor the CIA has been pleased with publication of their secrets. Neither Amazon nor Jeff Bezos was involved, nor ever will be involved, in our coverage of the intelligence community. The petition's request for disclosure of Amazon's CIA contract in every story we write about the CIA is well outside the norm of conflict-of-interest disclosures at media companies. The Post is a personal investment by Jeff Bezos, whose stake in Amazon is large but well less than a majority. The CIA's multi-year contract with Amazon is a small fraction of company revenues that have been estimated at roughly $75 billion in 2013. Amazon maintains no corporate connection to The Post. Even so, we have been careful to disclose Jeff Bezos' connection to The Post and Amazon when directly relevant to our coverage, and we will continue to do so. For example, such disclosures would be called for in coverage circumstances such as the following: CIA contracting practices, the CIA's use of cloud services, big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon's pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general. We take ethics very seriously here at The Post. One of our policies is that we seek comment from the subjects of our stories prior to publishing them and that we make a genuine effort to hear and absorb their point of view. By contrast, I am unaware of any effort to hear us out prior to the launch of this petition drive. A personal meeting now does not seem necessary or useful. I hope this note explains our perspective. And again, if you wish to send additional information that you feel might be helpful to us, we will review it closely. Sincerely,
Martin Baron [January 2, 2014] ******************** Dear Mr. Baron: Thank you for your letter. Whatever the Post's guidelines and record on ethical standards, few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA. Updating of the standards is now appropriate. You write that The Washington Post has "routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage." But the RootsAction.org petition is urging the Post to provide readers of its CIA coverage with full disclosure that would adequately address -- and meaningfully inform readers about -- relevant circumstances of the current ownership. Those circumstances are not adequately met by a narrow definition of "corporate conflicts." A reality is that the Post is now solely owned by someone who is by far the largest stakeholder in a world-spanning corporate giant that has close business ties -- and is seeking more extensive deals than its current $600 million contract -- with the CIA, an agency which the newspaper reports on regularly. The petition requests that The Washington Post adopt a full disclosure policy that is commensurate with this situation. The gist of the request is recognition that, as the saying goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant for any potential conflict of interest. When you write that the Post has a policy of routinely disclosing corporate conflicts when "directly relevant to our coverage," a key question comes to the fore: What is "directly relevant"? Given that few agencies are more secretive than the CIA -- and even the most enterprising reporters are challenged to pry loose even a small fraction of its secrets -- how do we know which CIA stories are "directly relevant" to the fact that Amazon is providing cloud computing services to the CIA? Amazon's contract with the CIA is based on an assessment that Amazon Web Services can provide the agency with digital-data computing security that is second to none. We can assume that a vast amount of information about CIA activities is to be safeguarded by Amazon. With what assurance can we say which stories on CIA activities are not "directly relevant" to Jeff Bezos's dual role as sole owner of the Post and largest stakeholder in Amazon? We actually don't know what sort of data is involved in what your letter calls "the CIA's use of cloud services." The disclosure/non-disclosure policy that you've outlined seems to presume that, for instance, there would be no direct relevance of the cloud services contract to coverage of such matters as CIA involvement in rendition of prisoners to regimes for torture; or in targeting for drone strikes; or in data aggregation for counterinsurgency. Are you assuming that the Post's coverage of such topics is not "directly relevant" to the Bezos/Amazon ties with the CIA and therefore should not include disclosure of the financial ties that bind the Post's owner to the CIA? Readers of a Post story on the CIA -- whether about drones or a still-secret torture report, to name just two topics -- should be informed of the Post/Bezos/Amazon/CIA financial ties. In the absence of such in-story disclosure, there is every reason to believe that many readers will be unaware that the Post's owner is someone with a major financial stake in an Amazon-CIA deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If Amazon's $600 million multiyear cloud contract with the CIA is a small fraction of the company's revenue, there is clear intent for it to grow larger. And $600 million is, by itself, hardly insignificant; let's remember that Mr. Bezos bought the Post for less than half that amount. "We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA," a statement from Amazon said two months ago. In public statements, Mr. Bezos and Amazon have made clear that they view this as a growing part of Amazon's business: a feather in the corporate cap of the company in its drive to increase market share of such business operations. This is intended as a major and expansive income source for Amazon and for its CEO, Mr. Bezos, whose personal wealth of $25 billion is a consequence of Amazon's financial gains. Why not provide a sentence in the Post's substantive coverage of CIA activities, to the effect that "The Post's owner Jeff Bezos is the largest stakeholder in Amazon, which has a $600 million contract with the CIA"? By declining to provide such disclosure, the Post is failing the transparency test when coverage of the CIA falls outside of the circumscribed areas where your letter says Post policy now provides for disclosure ("CIA contracting practices, the CIA's use of cloud services, big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon's pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general"). Such concerns are among the reasons why tens of thousands of people, including many Post readers, have signed the petition to The Washington Post that I will be delivering on January 15. While it's unfortunate that you don't want to have a meeting for a few minutes on that day, I hope that you will mull over the concerns that are propelling this petition forward. Sincerely,
Norman Solomon [January 4, 2014] ******************** Dear Mr. Solomon: Thank you for expanding upon your views. Just to reiterate, The Post has among the strictest ethics policies in the field of journalism. Those policies are sufficiently expansive, comprehensive, and current to take into account The Post's acquisition by Jeff Bezos. The policies are strictly enforced. However, as I explained in detail in my previous note, your proposal is far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations. Meantime, as plain evidence of our independence, we will continue our aggressive coverage of the intelligence community, including the CIA. I hope you've noticed it. The CIA has, and it's not happy. Sincerely,
Martin Baron
[January 4, 2014]
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But Bastrop is not a 6-year-old boy, and an MRAP is not a toy. Bastrop is a Texas county of some 75,000 people, and MRAP stands for "Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected." It's a heavily-armored military vehicle - one of several versions of war tanks that have become the hot, must-have playthings of police departments all across the country.
Are the good people of Bastrop facing some imminent terrorist threat that warrants military equipment? No, it's a very pleasant, laid-back place. And while the county is named for a 19th century land developer from the Netherlands who was wanted for embezzlement in his home country, the relatively few crimes in Bastrop today don't rise above the level of routine police work.
Even the Sheriff's department, which is the proud owner of the MRAP, says it doesn't have a particular use for the war machine, but "It's here if we need it." Well, yeah... but that same feeble rational would apply if the county decided to get an atom bomb - you just never know when a big mushroom cloud might come in handy! The Pentagon, which gave the MRAP to Bastrop, and our sprawling Department of Homeland Security, are haphazardly spreading war equipment, war techniques, and a war mentality to what are supposed to be our communities' peacekeepers and crime solvers.
Having the technology and mind-set for military actions, local authorities will find excuses to substitute them for honest police work, turning common citizens into suspects and enemies. As a spokesman for the Bastrop sheriff's department said of the MRAP, "With today's society... there's no way the thing won't be used." How comforting is that?
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1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.
2. A poll of people in 65 countries, including the United States, finds that the United States is
overwhelmingly considered the greatest threat to peace in the world. The
consensus would have been even stronger had the United States itself not
been polled, because the 5 percent of humanity living here is largely
convinced that the other 95% of humanity -- that group with experience
being threatened or attacked by the United States -- is wrong. After all,
our government in the U.S. tells us it's "in favor" of peace. Even when it
bombs cities, it does it for peace. It's hard for people under the bombs to
see that. We in the U.S. have a better perspective.
3. Polls in the United States through the 2003-2011 war on Iraq found that
a majority in the U.S. believed Iraqis were better off as the result of a
war that severely damaged -- even "destroyed" -- Iraq[1]. A majority of
Iraqis, in contrast, believed they were worse off.[2] A majority in the
United States believed Iraqis were grateful.[3] This is a disagreement over
facts, not ideology. But people often choose which facts to become aware of
or to accept. Tenacious believers in tales of Iraqi "weapons of mass
destruction" tended to believe more, not less, firmly when shown the facts.
The facts about Iraq are not pleasant, but
they are important. To believe that the people who live where your nation's
government has waged a war are better off for it, despite those people's
contention that they are worse off, suggests an extreme sort of arrogance
-- and a misplaced arrogance because you've just proven that a few slick
politicians can make you believe up is down.
4. According to U.S.ians the greatest threat to peace on earth is a nation
that hasn't threatened any other, and hasn't attacked any other in
centuries, a nation that suffered horrible chemical weapons attacks and
refused to use chemical weapons in response, a nation that has refused to
develop nuclear weapons but been falsely accused of doing so by the U.S.
government for decades. That's right: a bit of laughably bad propaganda,
regurgitated in variations for 30 years, and the smart critical thinkers of
the Land of the Free declare a nation with a military budget below 1% of
their own -- Iran -- the Greatest Threat to Peace.[4] Edward Bernays is
cackling wickedly in his grave.
5. Because no cartoon character has ever been named after Edward Bernays,
nobody's ever heard of him.
6. In poll after poll after poll, 75% to 85% in the United States say their
system of government is broken. Yet, what remains the top piece of advice
to agitators for change? That's right: "Work within the system." And what
remains the fallback ultimate reliable justification for launching or
escalating or continuing a war: That's right: "We need to bring our system
of government to others."
7. When U.S. military spending begins to inch below $1 trillion a year,
military-friendly journalists
declarethe
weapons lobby dead. When it begins to inch back slightly above $1
trillion a year, slightly less military-friendly journalists
declare the
weapons profiteers alive but struggling. In both scenarios the level
of
spending remains roughly $1 trillion and the difference between the high
end and the low end, while greater than most other public programs will
ever see, is less than the Pentagon "misplaces" in an average 12-month
period.
8. On Tuesdays, President Barack Obama goes through a
list of men, women, and children, picks which ones to have murdered, and has
them murdered. Knowing this would conflict with hating exclusively a
particular sub-group of our public sociopaths, so most people simply choose
not to know it.
9. If Iraq had really had those weapons, and if Syria had demonstrably
really killed a small number of its victims with the wrong type of weapons,
and if Iran were really building nuclear weapons, . . . then launching wars
on those countries would still be illegal, immoral, and disastrous. We all
have opinions about the question the warmakers want asked, but not about
the insanity that lies behind the question.
10. People have been dying since before recorded history, and yet only
those who pretend to believe nobody dies can be considered serious, honest,
upstanding folk. That there's another longer life helps us not worry so
much about getting screwed during this one. Perhaps it also helps us in
allowing our "representatives" to routinely end the lives of so many
foreign, and thus ignorant, people.
Footnotes:
1. The last such poll may have been Gallup in August 2010. |
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Writers of science-fiction and esoteric matters like to talk about parallel universes and envision how life forms can magically move from the present universe to another, somewhat like our own but different, by simply getting into a machine and pushing a button.
I have been guilty of suggesting that aliens freely visit our world by shifting from their universe to ours in those strange UFOs and then going back again. After our misadventures with space exploration, it seemed a more plausible explanation for alien visitation than believing another race of beings could, or would travel light miles from other galaxies or constellations to visit Earth.
Within the last 20 years physicists and mathematicians have developed a string theory that makes the concept of parallel universes more plausible. Plausible, at least mathematically. From a reality standpoint, the probability of our ever finding a way to easily travel from one universe to its twin appears to be out of our grasp.
The string theory suggests that, at its core, the universe we live in is composed of subatomic strings within a closed loop, or circle. According to the theory, everything in the universe can be explained in terms of these microscopic strings, or loops. To get a grasp on this, think of the tiny atom with protons and electrons in motion around neutrons, much as planets spin around our sun and millions of solar systems spinning around in a constellation and each constellation spinning about within a galaxy, and so on.
It all seems to work in remarkable order, and yet when the mathematicians and physicists start working out all of the complex equations, based upon the string theory, they come up with a remarkable number of possibilities for parallel universes, all similar but all uniquely different from our own.
One article by Margaret Wertheim quotes physicist Joseph Polchinski as estimating as many as 10 to the power of 60 solutions to these equations. That would count out to a million billion billion billion billion billion billion possible universes. I think there would be a lot of zeros in a figure like that.
Wertheim quotes Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde who she says has developed a theory of "eternal inflation." He suggests that there exists an "infinite bubbling sea of universes, each as real and concrete as our own.
"In Linde's theory, each universe is a unique bubble of space and time equipped with its own laws of physics and its own cosmic history. These other universes may differ wildly from our own, possessing different kinds of matter, different kinds of forces, even different numbers of dimensions," she wrote.
Then there is Lee Smolin, a specialist in quantum gravity at Perimer Institute in Canada, who suggests that baby universes constantly "bud" from older universes from the heart of black holes.
Of course there is the belief among the occultists that each human, possessing a piece of the soul or God within them, generates his or her own universe from mere existence and thought. We all live in our own unique universe that overlaps and interacts with the universes of the people we come in contact with each day. These people also believe that we have the mental ability to shape and change our universes as we choose.
I enjoy carrying this concept one step farther. That is to say that each time we make a choice in life, we are, in effect, splitting our universe into two parts. In one universe we take the left road and in the other universe we turn right. We consciously follow the choice that we make and continue on that path. But in the new universe, there is a clone of us following the other path and living out its consequences.
With somewhere between six and seven billion people on this planet, all actively generating multiple new universes every day, it is conceivable that Polchinski's impossible number of parallel universes, calculated from the string theory way of looking at things, might be quite right.
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House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-California, has made no secret of his desire to diminish and dismantle the United States Postal Service.
Issa has for some time now peddled plans to end Saturday deliveries by the USPS-which continues to perform with more agility than private firms, as holiday delivery patterns illustrated-in ways that are all but certain to make the postal service vulnerable to privatization.
Issa has a right to his opinion.
But the cynical determination with which he is now advancing it is jarring.
Issa has proposed legislation to address one of the many flaws in the budget agreement that was cobbled together in December by House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and Senate Budget Committee chair Patty Murray, D-Washington: a cut to military retirement benefits to veterans under the age of 62.
Eliminating the benefit cut is a good idea, as it is part of an austerity agreement that seeks to balance budgets by placing more of the burden on government workers and military personnel-rather than multimillionaires like Issa.
But Issa is not proposing to offset the restoration of benefits by taxing the wealthy or closing loopholes.
Rather, he wants to do so by ending Saturday mail delivery.
Ending mail delivery on the weekend would dramatically undermine the ability of the postal service to meet the demands of modern shipping and communications. The likely result would be a rapid shift of traffic to private firms, which contribute heavily to politicians but which do not provide the universal, low-cost service that is the hallmark of the postal service.
And it has the potential to do something else: harm the employment prospects of veterans.
The USPS has historically been one of the nation's largest employers of veterans-second only to the US Department of Defense, according to USPS figures. Roughly 120,000 postal service employees-more than 20 percent of the total workforce-have records of service in the military. Roughly a third of those employees are rated as 30 percent or more disabled, a reflection of the fact that the postal service goes out of its way to provide an array of employment services and options for veterans.
Cuts to the postal service threaten an institution that provides jobs to veterans and that-thanks to its own practices and strong commitments from postal unions-respects them once they are in those jobs.
Instead of embracing Issa's latest and most cynical assault on a necessary service, Congress should do right by veterans. It can move to strengthen the USPS, along lines proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Congressmen Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon, and Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin. And it can address the benefits issue by enacting the Military Retirement Restoration Act, which has been introduced by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire.
Shaheen's legislation would repeal the provision in the budget agreement that cuts benefits for military retirees, including disabled veterans who are eligible for retirement benefits. It would offset the estimated $6 billion cost of doing so by ending the abuse of so-called "tax havens" by US-controlled corporations that incorporate offshore and claim "foreign" status in order to avoid paying taxes in the United States.
As US Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat who is a key co-sponsor of the legislation, notes, this provision is identical to Section 103 of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act and is expected to raise over $6.6 billion over ten years.
"This is a common sense measure built on the idea that everyone needs to pay their fair share," explains Baldwin. "By closing this one corporate tax loophole, we can ensure our military veterans receive the benefits they've earned and deserve."
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 The Last Gasp Of American Democracy By Chris Hedges This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state's wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us-one of the final ones, I suspect-is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives. The public debates about the government's measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises-and one will arise-that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive. The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security. I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi-the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the "shield and sword" of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation. "We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security." The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population-one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America's black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection. The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," is not, in the end, to discover crimes, "but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population." And because Americans' emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough "evidence" to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state. The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d'etat, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency's spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations-a form of legalized bribery-are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying-under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation-as the people's right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods-MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News-while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, in his essential book "Democracy Incorporated," calls our system of corporate governance "inverted totalitarianism," which represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry." It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of democracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security. Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state's ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting "democracy" in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror.
The Romanian poet Paul Celan captured the slow ingestion of an ideological poison-in his case fascism-in his poem "Death Fugue": |
 Four Points About The 1971 FBI Break-In By Glenn Greenwald The New York Times this morning has an extraordinary 13-minute video from a team of reporters including the independent journalist Jonathan Franklin, and an accompanying article by Mark Mazzetti, about the heroic anti-war activists who broke into an FBI field office in 1971 and took all of the documents they could get their hands on, and then sent those documents to newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post. Some of those documents exposed J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program, aimed at quashing internal political dissent through surveillance, infiltration and other tactics. Those revelations ultimately led to the creation of the Church Committee in the mid-1970s and various reforms. The background on the Church Committee's COINTELPRO findings and the "burglary" operation which exposed it is here. With the statute of limitations elapsed on their "crimes", ones the FBI could never solve, the courageous perpetrators have now unveiled themselves. The NYT story is based on a new book by Post reporter Betsy Medsger and the forthcoming documentary 1971 (of which my journalistic partner, Laura Poitras, is an Exective Producer). There are four crucial points to note: (1) Just as is true of Daniel Ellsberg today, these activists will be widely hailed as heroic, noble, courageous, etc. That's because it's incredibly easy to praise people who challenge governments of the distant past, and much harder to do so for those who challenge those who wield actual power today. As you watch the video, just imagine what today's American commentariat, media class, and establishment figures from both parties would be saying in denouncing these activists. They stole government documents that didn't belong to them! They endangered national security! They did not take just a few documents but everything en masse that they could get their hands on. Former FBI and CIA chief William Webster is shown in the film conceding that the documents they revealed led to important debates, but nonetheless condemning them on the grounds that they used the "wrong methods" - criminal methods! - to expose these bad acts, insisting that they should have gone through unspecified Proper Channels. That all sounds quite familiar, does it not? Many of the journalists and pundits who today will praise these activists would have undoubtedly been leading the orgy of condemnations against them back then based on the same things they say today. (2) The crux of COINTELPRO - targeting citizens for their disfavored political views and trying to turn them into criminals through infiltration, entrapment and the like - is alive and well today in the United States. Those tactics are no longer called COINTELPRO; they are called "anticipatory prosecutions" and FBI entrapment. The targets are usually American Muslims but also a wide range of political activists. See here for how vibrant these COINTELPRO-like tactics remain today. (3) The activists sent the FBI's documents they took to various newspapers. While the Post published articles based on them (after lengthy internal debates about whether they should), the other papers, as Trevor Timm documents, "were not nearly as admirable." In particular: According to Medsger's book, even though the New York Times eventually published a story based on the documents, a reporter of theirs apparently handed the documents back to the FBI to help with their investigation. And the Los Angeles Times, never published any story and may have also handed the documents back to the FBI.Moreover, the U.S. Government exhibited zero interest in investigating and prosecuting the lawbreakers inside the FBI. Instead, they became obsessed only with punishing those who exposed the high-level wrongdoing. This, too, obviously should sound very familiar.
(4) The parallels with the 1971 whistleblowers and those of today, including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, are obvious. One of the 1971 activists makes the point expressly, saying "I definitely see parallels between Snowden's case and our case" and pronouncing Snowden's disclosure of NSA documents to be "a good thing." Another of the activists, John Raines, makes the parallel even clearer:
"It became pretty obvious to us", he said, "that if we don't do it, nobody will." Note, too, that these activists didn't turn themselves in and plead to be put in prison by the U.S. Government for decades, but instead purposely did everything possible to avoid arrest. Only the most irrational among us would claim that doing this somehow diluted their bravery or status as noble whistleblowers.
Here again we find another example of that vital though oft-overlooked principle: often, those labelled "criminals" by an unjust society are in fact its most noble actors.
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 Happy New Year? By Paul Krugman There's an alarming amount of optimism out there about US economic prospects for 2014. Let me make the situation even more alarming by saying that I basically share that optimism. Why? Basically because of the Three Stooges effect: if you've been banging your head against a wall for no good reason, you'll feel a lot better when you stop. One way to look at the US economy in 2013 is that it was, in effect, trying to begin a strong recovery, but was held back by terrible federal fiscal policy. Housing was making a comeback, state and local austerity was, if not going into reverse, at least not getting more intense, household spending was starting to revive as debt levels came down. But the feds were raising the payroll tax, slashing spending via the sequester, and more. Incidentally, these other factors are why I don't take seriously the claims of market monetarists that the failure of growth to collapse in 2013 somehow showed that fiscal policy doesn't matter. US austerity, although a really bad thing, wasn't nearly as intense as what happened in southern Europe; it was small enough that it could be, and I'd argue was, more or less offset by other stuff over the course of a single year. The point, in any case, is that the head-banging is about to stop - not in the sense that we'll reverse our move in the wrong direction, but that we won't keep on moving in that direction. What a drag! But it's coming to an end. Meanwhile, housing is still moving forward, and other stuff is relatively favorable. None of this vindicates the multiple years of sluggish recovery that should have been vigorous. And let's be clear: this kind of forecast is much less secure than, say, my predictions that inflation and interest would stay low in a liquidity trap, which were grounded in model fundamentals.
Still, the new year starts with some good omens. Oh, and politics: between the non-disaster of Obamacare (which is producing epic levels of denial) and the prospect of a decent rate of economic growth, the midterm elections may not go the way many on the right currently expect.
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 The NSA Plays Mad King George In This Revolution By Robert Scheer It's the revolt of the geeks. Edward Snowden is John Peter Zenger digitized, a post-Internet free-press hero soaring above the security obsessions of the past decade to assert the inalienable requirements of individual sovereignty in a wired world. It was Zenger whose journalistic efforts to expose the wrongdoing of a colonial governor appointed by the crown landed him in jail facing the charge of "seditious libel," quite similar to that brought against Snowden for exposing the NSA's illegal spying. Their defense is the same: True patriotism demands a vigilant confrontation with government infamy. "I know not what reason is," Zenger published in his defense back in 1734, "if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason." After Zenger spent more than eight months in jail, a jury of his peers exonerated him and his cry for an unfettered free press came to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The patriotic ideology that drives Snowden is a throwback to that innate American sense of personal liberty in the face of government excess for which Zenger stood. In every interview Snowden has relied on the simple notion that informed the founders of our nation regarding the primacy of truth in public discourse. His commitment to that ideal cannot be comprehended by a mass media culture of careerism informed by public relations that trivializes all differences of truth and logic into incomprehensible mulch. His is instead the simple veracity of the once honored slogan that the truth shall set us free and that it is overwhelming government power that is most threatening to that freedom. What is at issue in the information Snowden's courageous actions have revealed is our government's denial of the core principles of the enlightenment: rule by, and of, an informed and thoughtful citizenry that has come to be smothered by the omnipresent corporatized national security state. He has translated those ideals from a technologically vastly more primitive time into a cry for freedom in the age of an Internet that contains both the seeds of human liberty in an increasingly informed and cosmopolitan public and its opposite, in the wired world's capacity to totally obliterate the right to personal privacy that is the essential oxygen of a free society. As power came to be ever more concentrated and its rewards more inequitably distributed, it was all rationalized as somehow harmonizing because of the onslaught of a neutral sounding technological revolution whose new billionaires seemed to profit not by exploitation but by enhancing the lives of the masses. Rather suddenly, as technological revolutions go, people ended up with a gadget in hand that informed them as to the best choices they might make, not merely in consumption of goods and services but in all matters including politics and education. So much so that school districts, Los Angeles being the latest, have equated the distribution of tablets with meaningful mass education. But few seemed to notice that the adjective "consumer" had come to be the essential modifier of "sovereignty," and that education and journalism were now synonymous with shopping. For most, this was an acceptable bargain, and they freely turn over not only the details of their physical location, expenditures, mail and reading habits, but also, and increasingly the most significant, biometric identifiers of self to any commercial agency eager to exploit their tastes. So far so good, until the government entered the game and in the aftermath of 9/11 came to overwhelm the prerogatives of the private sector. As long as it was only a matter of private corporations, even those as omnipresent as Google, doing the snooping, it fit the demands of freedom defined as consumer sovereignty in that one's freedom of market choices was infinitely refined, and when it was not, the service provider could be exchanged for another. Not so with the government, as its activities are revealed in the documents leaked by Snowden. Its snooping began in friendly alliance with the corporate giants that appeared in control of the Internet, but as they have since protested in the wake of the Snowden revelations, even mammoth multinational corporations like Google, Apple and AT&T are subject to the whims of government agencies, whose intrusive powers into the World Wide Web of communications shocked even the most knowledgeable of Internet engineers. We learned, again thanks to Snowden, that there are no rights of the individual that are any longer inviolate, and the very notion of the sovereignty of the individual, in his or her home or minds, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, is now a fiction.
Hence the revolt of the geeks, and Snowden soon will be recognized as one of many. These are folks of no clear party or cause other than the fear of unbridled government power. Like John Peter Zenger, they know, "every crime against the public is a great crime."
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 Homegrown By William Rivers Pitt It was late September in 1993, and my friends and I were at a campground to enjoy a weekend away from the world. It was unusually cold as I shrugged my way out of the tent, and after answering an insistent call of nature just inside a line of trees to the east of our campsite, I set about the work of getting the fire going again. One by one, my friends emerged from their own tents in various stages of disrepair - the previous night had been a doozy, and more than a few of my crew looked and felt as if they had been devoured and shat out by wolves - to warm themselves by the flames. Once the coffee was going and the blood was flowing, a joint the size of New Jersey began making the rounds, as was tradition, a soothing balm for the tragically hung-over among us. After a fashion, I happened to notice a man two campsites over giving our little campfire circle a long, hard stare. One didn't have to be stoned to be paranoid about smoking marijuana twenty years ago, and my first thought was, "Cop." I quietly told my friends to cool it, cool it, something's off with that guy, and everyone immediately began doing the I-Ain't-Doing-Nothin' Shuffle. When the man started walking towards me, I began to do an inventory in my head of the cash I had on hand, the cash my friends had, in the event I wound up needing bail money. He presented himself before me, put out his hand, and introduced himself. I hope I'm not intruding, he said. Not at all, I told him with trepidation flying around my head like I was Tippi Hedren. I offered him some coffee while my friends milled around the campsite pretending they weren't baked and had important stuff to do, casting furtive glances my way as they waited for the hammer to fall. Listen, he said, I noticed you guys were smoking a joint. Uh-huh, I replied. I don't know anyone who smokes weed, he said. Uh-huh, I replied. My father has cancer, he said. It's bad. He can't eat because of his treatments, and that's as bad as the cancer. His doctor pulled me aside last week and mentioned marijuana as something that could help him. Uh-huh, I replied. You don't know me, he said, but I was wondering if you could give me some, so I can see if it helps him. I don't know anyone else I can ask. I was still. This is either a set-up, I thought, or this guy is for real. As a NORML supporter, I knew full well that what he was asking for could help his father, but the very last thing I needed was a drug arrest on my record. I took a moment with his eyes, and decided to make a leap of faith. I told him to wait there, went into a tent, dug our little green bag out of a backpack, and handed a portion of the contents to him. His face broke out in sunshine, and he shook my hand again. While in the tent, I had also grabbed a pen and an English Lit notebook that happened to be down in the pack. Here's my number, I said, scribbling. If that helps, call me, and I'll introduce you to some friends of mine. A few weeks later, he called me. I introduced. Months later, he called again to let me know his father had passed. Thank you, he said in a voice clotted with emotion. Thank you, thank you. It really helped him. Though the statute of limitations ran out long ago, the fact remains that by writing this, I have admitted to committing at least two crimes...which, twenty years later, is finally being exposed as nonsense. What began decades ago as a manifestation of institutional racism, combined with timber and petroleum interests looking to crowd hemp out of the pulp and fuel market, combined with "Law And Order" politicians riding the so-called "War On Drugs" into office, has metastasized into glaring legal paranoia that has consigned tens of thousands to prison and ruined millions of lives. I helped a sick man feel better, and enjoyed myself besides. For doing that, both I and the man I met at that campfire twenty years ago felt like furtive criminals as we sealed our pact to make his dying father feel good enough to eat something as the cancer chewed away at him. Twenty years later, I remember that exchange with the deepest fondness and pride. Unjust laws are not made to be followed, but are made to be defied and broken. Colorado and Washington State have already slapped aside the failed notions of Prohibition that have been dead for a century to fully legalize a substance so infinitely less lethal than tobacco and alcohol that it scarcely bears mention. Alaska, Oregon, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana and Nevada are soon to follow, and the push is on in Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maryland, Rhode Island and Vermont to follow suit. If successful, that represents nearly a third of the country, and one hell of a diverse cross-section, as well...and, if successful, the real work can begin: freeing those in prison convicted of crimes that are not crimes any more, and should never have been crimes to begin with. Since the Colorado law went into effect on New Year's Day, the nation has been afflicted with moralizing pabulum from the likes of David Brooks of the New York Times and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post. To wit: we smoked weed, but think of the children! I do. I think of the children who have grown up fatherless or motherless because a parent dared to ingest something that grows up out of the ground. I think of the generations of Black families fractured by the racist application of wrong-headed laws. I think of the children of sick people who have watched their loved ones waste away in starved, screaming agony from cancer or AIDS because they did not know any weed dealers, or were too frightened to try and find one, or were never told the stuff could actually help. What is more caustic to this society: marijuana (which is already everywhere anyway, and that is fact), or thousands upon thousands of people consigned to the tender mercies of the penal system? Marijuana, or thousands upon thousands of people suffering and dying in needless and entirely preventable pain? Res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers say. The thing speaks for itself.
Plant that bell and let it ring.
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Dear Bundesstaatlich Sachverstandige Pauley, Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts. Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your ruling saying the NSA can do whatever it wants, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Demoncratic whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account! Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2014. We salute you Herr Pauley, Sieg Heil!
Signed by, Heil Obama |
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One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a "redistributionist." Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America.
The stock market ended 2013 at an all-time high - giving stockholders their biggest annual gain in almost two decades. Most Americans didn't share in those gains, however, because most people haven't been able to save enough to invest in the stock market. More than two-thirds of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
Even if you include the value of IRA's, most shares of stock are owned by the very wealthy. The richest 1 percent of Americans owns 35 percent of the value of American-owned shares. The richest 10 percent owns over 80 percent. So in the bull market of 2013, America's rich hit the jackpot.
What does this have to do with redistribution? Some might argue the stock market is just a giant casino. Since it's owned mostly by the wealthy, a rise in stock prices simply reflects a transfer of wealth from some of the rich (who cashed in their shares too early) to others of the rich (who bought shares early enough and held on to them long enough to reap the big gains).
But this neglects the fact that stock prices track corporate profits. The relationship isn't exact, and price-earnings ratios move up and down in the short term. Yet over the slightly longer term, share prices do correlate with profits. And 2013 was a banner year for profits.
Where did those profits come from? Here's where redistribution comes in. American corporations didn't make most of their money from increased sales (although their foreign sales did increase). They made their big bucks mostly by reducing their costs - especially their biggest single cost: wages.
They push wages down because most workers no longer have any bargaining power when it comes to determining pay. The continuing high rate of unemployment - including a record number of long-term jobless, and a large number who have given up looking for work altogether - has allowed employers to set the terms.
For years, the bargaining power of American workers has also been eroding due to ever-more efficient means of outsourcing abroad, new computer software that can replace almost any routine job, and an ongoing shift of full-time to part-time and contract work. And unions have been decimated. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers were members of labor unions. Now, fewer than 7 percent are unionized.
All this helps explain why corporate profits have been increasing throughout this recovery (they grew over 18 percent in 2013 alone) while wages have been dropping. Corporate earnings now represent the largest share of the gross domestic product - and wages the smallest share of GDP - than at any time since records have been kept.
Hence, the Great Redistribution.
Some might say this doesn't really amount to a "redistribution" as we normally define that term, because government isn't redistributing anything. By this view, the declining wages, higher profits, and the surging bull market simply reflect the workings of the free market.
But this overlooks the fact that government sets the rules of the game. Federal and state budgets have been cut, for example - thereby reducing overall demand and keeping unemployment higher than otherwise. Congress has repeatedly rejected tax incentives designed to encourage more hiring. States have adopted "right-to-work" laws that undercut unions. And so on.
If all this weren't enough, the tax system is rigged in favor of the owners of wealth, and against people whose income comes from wages. Wealth is taxed at a lower rate than labor.
Capital gains, dividends, and debt all get favorable treatment in the tax code - which is why Mitt Romney, Warren Buffet, and other billionaires and multimillionaires continue to pay around 12 percent of their income in taxes each year, while most of the rest of us pay at least twice that rate.
Among the biggest winners are top executives and Wall Street traders whose year-end bonuses are tied to the stock market, and hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose special "carried interest" tax loophole allows their income to be treated as capital gains. The wild bull market of 2013 has given them all fabulous after-tax windfalls.
America has been redistributing upward for some time - after all, "trickle-down" economics turned out to be trickle up - but we outdid ourselves in 2013. At a time of record inequality and decreasing mobility, America conducted a Great Redistribution upward.
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On Tuesday, the Senate advanced legislation to extend long-term unemployment benefits, and all but six Republicans declined to vote for it. Instead of helping to restore this financial lifeline to out-of-work Americans, Conservative lawmakers say that they are launching their own plan to help the poor. Today, Senator Marco Rubio will deliver a speech marking the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, and he's expected to lay out the Republican plan to fight economic inequality.
Considering this is the same party that wants to slash food stamps, subject welfare recipients to drug tests, and kick people off unemployment assistance, it's hard to imagine how their ideas will include anything except for tax cuts for the rich. In a video message previewing today's speech, Senator Rubio asked, "After 50 years, isn't it time to declare big government's war on poverty a failure?" But, despite decades of Republicans trying to slash the social safety net, the war on poverty has actually been a success.
Just days ago, the New York Times released a report showing that the poverty rate would be twice as high without the government programs that the Right loves to hate. Republicans don't care about the war on poverty - they've been waging war on the poor for decades. If their tax cuts and austerity weren't so harmful to our nation, it would almost be laughable to hear conservatives talk about helping the poor. But the fact is - poverty isn't a joke.
~~~ Larry Wright ~~~  |
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Parting Shots...
Email:uncle-ernie@issuesandalibis.org
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