Well, we could have returned to the Clinton era tax rates and solved the problem. Didn't see all the rich folks emigrate in 1993, did we? Or we could never have had the Bush cuts in the first place when the budget was still in surplus 11 years ago. Forgotten that?
But then, you simply will never accept that the vast and grotesque explosion of wealth among the top 1% during recent years was itself artificial and economically distorting, and by the way completely failed to prevent the 2008 crash and might even have helped cause it. The rich still have that Bush blood money.
Whereas when the rich robbed the country dry in the 1920s and ran it into a crash, they ended up having to pay it back with a raise in the top rate to 63% and then to 91%, all while America was borrowing its way into its era of greatest prosperity. So what if it was World War II that caused it? That war was used to improve wages, especially for minorities, to create the GI Bill which unleashed vast productive talents unseen in the laissez-faire era, and rebuild Europe and create the vast post-war prosperity that allowed America to pay off much of the debt (The GOP backed the 91% tax rate and we ran budget surpluses for over a decade). All while private ownership of gold was illegal! And the rich ended up BETTER off than before the Depression, they just weren't so far ahead of the rest of us that they could buy our politicians and media to tell us any lies they pleased. Like the lie that redistribution never worked.
Now if you're going to say that's all a lie, then there's no point in continuing this. If you're going to act pragmatic and say, "well, the rich couldn't emigrate to flee high taxes in 1945 but they can now," what does that tell us about their loyalty to the republic that they robbed blind such that they should control most of what we read and hear?
The purpose of the Right-wing movement in our lifetime can be stated simply: to destroy the belief of the American people that they can organize politically for secular improvement.
All their bogeymen, the ACLU, ACORN, labor unions, women's rights' groups, even the New Deal version of the Democratic Party, were created on the idea that citizens own public resources and can direct them to make material and social improvements for those who needed them most.
All the factions of the Right believe, conversely, that the monstrous society that ran into the ditch in 1929 needed no reform, merely the blood sacrifice of starving millions to balance markets. The Christian Right wants no earthly improvement by secular means; they want the poor to run to them and bribe God with sacrifices and punishments. The corporate and libertarian Right want no alternative to more greed and more consumption. If we just go back to the past things will automagically get better and better.
This movement has been awfully successful in the last 40 years, hasn't it? You point out that most of us support modern ideas like progressive taxation, but when we are bullied by faith-drunken patriots who accuse us of oppressing them by using their taxes to end polio or feed schoolchildren, we get confused and shaken and slink away ashamed, worse off than before. We're being trained to be medieval peasants, a class that all groups on the Right consider an improvement on uppity ghetto trash. Peasants don't organize for reform, they follow witchhunters and lynch mobs and inform on their neighbors' sins to the local priests.
That's why Moslems are poor and lazy, right? Because they haven't gutted their own religious faith (as Martin Luther did to satisfy his German merchant-class sponsors) to sanctify greed and economic growth over all else.
That's the Protestant work ethic, always looking for another angle to get ahead until it degenerates from a "work" ethic to a speculation and bailout ethic, while never changing in its characterization of other races and religions as lazy and shiftless who thus deserve to be conquered, cheated, reformed, structurally adjusted, and privatized to their detriment.
Well, Grumpy Old Man, if you think capitalist America is surrounded by an evil, atheist dark-skinned world of Communists who envy it and threaten its destruction, aided by 14th Amendment black and Latino citizens, consider how much worse shape capitalism would be in worldwide if American forces weren't stationed in 130 countries propping up regimes against their own dissenters.
Or, conversely, all of the above is wrong and for the last 30 years the corporations have intentionally been cutting our pay, shipping our jobs overseas, and handing us rifles to point at the rest of the world to enforce the global sweatshop that Marx once predicted would occur.
Without the giant banks and military-industrial complex corporations and the exploitation of foreign labor and savings, what would American capitalism really look like now?
There's a reason why no country in the world now operates according to libertarian principles - 1929.
Because it's different when a "patriot" is persecuted. That's just proof that the enemy is all around us, using rights that only real Americans should be allowed to have. One does not even have to explain to the followers what the solution is...
Because they keep believing that if they turn the clock far enough back, Paradise will erupt.
Why? Because they're sure there's too much equality in the world now, whereas in the past their kind had a monopoly on power therefore it must have been great. The Confederacy for the states' righters, the Gilded Age for the libertarians, the Pax Britannica for the neocons, and the Old Testament for the Christian theocrats. Note that all of these point to the 19th century, even the religious example since many Protestants of that time tried to push Old Testament principles.
But the idyllic America they worship never existed. So they keep pushing further back into the past, into ever more primitive, barbaric times. Now they are to the right of the Founding Fathers, so the Pilgrims and Medieval feudalism are the next goalposts.
Why isn't Joe McCarthy being mentioned more in discussion of this campaign of intimidation?
1. The mainstream media loves to talk about McCarthy in the context that he was defeated - the system worked, the corporate media eventually did the right thing. But if it all happens a second time...
2. The Right is taking public positions unimaginable even under Bush. Governors talking nullification and secession, attacks on the 14th Amendment, claims that Hitler was a "liberal". So clearly Tailgunner Joe is on the agenda for political rehabilitation. Get set to have Fox relentlessly hammer us on how he was a hero who caused no harm.
3. The way is being prepared for a new MacCarthy - one not tainted by having been elected to office, since we know democracy is tainted by all those un-Americans voting. No, the new MacCarthy must be a corporate employee... uh, "entrepreneur". That makes the libertarians and militias very happy. Whether it's Beck or someone even worse being groomed and fine-tuned to succeed him hardly matters.
So the Palestinians and Israelis are morally equal in wanting each other to go away. But the Palestinians were there for centuries, and had their land seized in a pre-meditated scheme. If I steal your car, you want me to go away and I want you to go away, but in the eyes of the law I am the criminal.
You just think the Palestinians won't suffer as much if they are the ones to slink away and die in the alley as the Israelis because they're less human than Israelis and they're naturally suited for poverty and degradation. Isn't that always the underlying assumption when white and brown people fight each other for the same survival resources? I despise most of all the sort of caucasian bourgeoise eunuchs who kill with legalisms and propaganda so they can claim to have no blood on their hands - maybe I respect the Arabs more for being honest about how far they'll go to get their homes back while Israelis bask in their beach resorts and expect their airstrikes and drones to commit genocide for them.
Are you still living under the illusion that Israel's rulers do not have as their ultimate goal the disappearance of the Palestinian people? They say what they must when the world's cameras are turned on. But the logic of their "military" strategy is to make life unbearable for the Palestinians so that they no longer hang around and press their claims for stolen property - because the claim is factually true. Hamas did not steal Judea from the Hebrews, Rome did. But the Israeli state of today is the continuation of the Zionist organizations who Jabotinsky called upon years ago to do unto the Arabs what America had done unto the Indians. We didn't annihilate the Indians because our population growth eliminated them as a political threat, but Arabs, alas, breed too quickly to be swept under the rug.
I don't see why it is so shocking to point out the obvious, given that we Americans have done the same and many of our European ancestors have done the same. We grab land and then pass laws to prevent others from grabbing it from us.
For the Right, hating on the Libyan rebels is easy, even though they risk everything against a man that the Right wanted dead when Ronald Reagan told them to want him dead. It's part of the Israeli-backed narrative that Arabs are a race of mad dogs and must not be allowed to have democracy because, well, they will vote their consciences and that's bad for Israel.
For the Left, it's more of a cold contempt for the rebels, and it rarely seems based on any sympathy for Gaddafi as a Marxist. It's more as if the Libyans ruined everything by shooting back, and then inviting in our Empire to bail them out.
But there are arguments to be made that the Libyan rebels represent a much more radical change than the Egyptians and Tunisians have been able to wrest from their still-intact Establishment. As long as those countries avoided all-out rebellion, their ruling structures and class system survived. In Libya, the structure is now deeply damaged, the Army divided and now largely ruined, the central bureaucracy replaced by bands of mutinous soldiers and angry civilians struggling to learn how to govern themselves. Anyone far enough to the Left to know about the Zapatistas and the anti-neoliberal rebellions of South America knows that the greatest challenge is getting people engaged in organizing solutions to their own problems. It's an exciting, high-risk, high-reward time.
The problem is, that's up to the rebels. There was no rebel coalition to forestall occupation in Iraq, and we screwed over the rebel coalition that we'd help conquer Afghanistan. But they have to win on the ground.
Ironically, their very lack of unity is proof that they're not a US-manufactured fraud; and the US's lack of a coherent strategy is proof that this wasn't an imperial project of long duration but an improvisation out of panic over the consequences of Gadaffi's victory. But all of that wears down on the odds of a quick peace.
Actually, certain powerful Americans knew a great deal about the Iraqi opposition, because they had manufactured it from exiles and intended to install it in power. Dick Cheney and the AEI and others were running that operation throughout the '90s. We underestimated the power of the actual opposition to both Saddam Hussein and our occupation from the Shi'a, and from Sunni tribes in Anbar.
Everything that happened in Libya was far too fast for the US, which likes to obsess about an enemy for a decade or two before actually doing anything. The neocons have been touting Iranian exiles lately, not Libyans. It looks like Kosovo again, where we got caught flat-footed and looked embarassingly impotent in the face of an ongoing atrocity, so we made up a solution.
But Sudan did get strongarmed by the international community into in effect allowing itself to be partitioned. Since it has a right-wing Islamist regime, I haven't heard any leftists complain about this.
The problem is, what would pacifists have had America do once Gadaffi finished off the rebels? They surely would not have supported going back to business as usual with him, right? And we all know how lousy economic embargoes have been. So we would have had to cut off all oil exports, and all food imports, and all contractors needed to repair the country. The price of oil would have gone way up, hurting people all over the world. Gadaffi would have held on to power long enough for many to starve.
I'm not saying this to condemn pacifists, but to point out the lack of useful options in the international system as it now exists. The human-rights movement is the reason why we now embargo rulers who commit mass murder, but that movement has not given us a humanitarian way to rescue the victimized populations, leaving them in a hellish limbo. We keep saying that we won't get involved the next time, but then the news video comes in of the refugee trails and the starving children, like in Kosovo, and the first-world public freaks out and demands that something, anything, be done to make the bad images go away, and the leaders comply with counterproductive or inept interventions.
But of course said publics do not want to pick a fight with Saudi Arabia and end up standing in unemployment lines during another depression, any more than they wanted to attack the USSR over Hungary or attack China during the Cultural Revolution and risk nuclear war. So our leaders are safe. That's how it is and I have not heard any useful alternatives to these arrangements from any part of the political spectrum.
The problem is that we would still have to embargo Gaddafi's half of Libya, and the price of oil would thus still go through the roof causing global suffering (remember what happened when it hit $140?). Meanwhile people would starve in that part of the country, while the rebels' single most useful service to humanity, the continuation and extention of the Arab revolution, would grind to a halt.
On the other hand, now that the rebels are not being exterminated, they have the breathing space to prove they actually stand for something worth our intervention. Unfortunately, the track record on past regimes created by no-fly zones is mixed. However, the physical isolation of those regimes from the First World and the obscurity of their politics let them get away with very low standards of conduct. The very conditions that made the Libyan war so visible, so rapid and so accessible to Western intervention must now be employed to hold the revolutionary regime to a standard of conduct so high that it is undoubtedly an integral part of the democratic wave in North Africa. In fact, they have a chance to go considerably further than Egypt in that the Army will be shattered and the rebels and mutineers will not accept merely an amended constitution.
It will be worth if the rebels rebound quickly and get the fuel and vehicles necessary to roll back down the coast and besiege Tripoli. At that point the West will be helpless to dictate a replacement government, while the besieged dictators of several other protest-riven countries will feel the tide rolling against them.
But we're betting the whole region on the courage of a few thousand rebels who may already be dead because they were the ones willing to expose themselves. Bush invaded Iraq precisely because he assumed those sorts were already killed in the rebellion that his father refused to support in '91, and thus they would not interfere with Cheney's plans for occupation. Call it the Warsaw '44 strategy. The legitimacy of this whole operation is in the hands of the Libyan activists on the ground. If their leaders hunker down in their bomb shelters and demand ever more US intervention, the world will believe that the quid pro quo is that they are getting it by selling off their country to US Big Oil.
When we've had no-fly zones before they defined distinct ethnic enclaves. But fighting may be continuing all across Libya. Is it logical to try to suppress Gaddafi's entire air force instead of a more focused effort to rescue the people of Benghazi? If such suppression is carried out, will the fighting in Misrata be affected? Will foreign air forces fire on the strung-out tank columns that are Gaddafi's only means of enforcing control of his country?
By the way, last night CCTV's English-language news service claimed that the Egyptian Army is now sending arms to the rebels. While Gaddafi seems to be using equipment little different than when he got beat by Chad (!), America has poured billions of dollars' worth of toys into Egypt's army. A few of those toys, thrown against Gaddafi's elite units, 500 miles from their bases and straining on their supply lines, could have a dramatic effect.
The one thing I haven't heard anyone mention is giving the critical weapons to the rebels - such as TOWs and Stingers - that would allow them to conquer the country by themselves. Is there any evidence that this will be the approach, or is the West going in to impose a government it is comfortable with?
As for the idea that the rebels are frauds who were working for the West all along, shame on you. They took a huge chance, and the unreliability of the US as an ally is legendary. The problem is whether they will be screwed over like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was after 2001 so that an actual US client can be proclaimed leader.
I think that what happened here was the US's belated realization that if Gaddafi survived he'd have to be embargoed anyway for his actions, which would take 2 million barrels a day off the oil market. Politicians are far more afraid of that right now than Islam or Arabs or terrorism.
"Usurping"? Turkey's discredited elites, overthrown in 2000, were moving down the same neoliberal, US-stooge direction as all the European countries that have had economic meltdowns in recent years, the ones that Rumsfeld famously called "The New Europe", plus Blair's UK.
Why then does Turkey alone prosper with a populist government that - thanks to harsh criticism by its citizens - finally stood up to the US?
Maybe the people of a country work harder and behave more responsibly when they actually believe their opinions matter, not just the oligarchy of their local branch of Wall Street. Latin America is in a period of relative good health, a decade after its neoliberal Uncle Tom elites began to be driven from power.
These days nearly all the successful countries are ones that don't obey America.
It could be advantageous for Egypt to send in its Army.
1. it could rally the Egyptian people to accept the not-quite-democratic regime that the Army is installing at home to protect its large economic interests
2. it could signal the revival of Egypt as the leading power of the Arab world
3. a client state in all or part of Libya could serve as Egypt's own private Saudi Arabia, providing it with oil and cash to keep everybody happy
Now I'm sure there are many impediments to this, and I'm really sure that Israel has told Washington what it thinks about a stronger Egypt, so that might be as far as it gets.
We have to consider that the reason we're having this debate is that we are no longer competent to balance the complex tradeoffs of all our crappy energy alternatives, but no one has the guts to admit whom he'd sacrifice to get his way. If we were the country we were in 1942, we could build solar furnaces across enough of the Southwest (with its innate heat-storage capability) to at least preserve civilization. But now all we care about is convenience and comfort; the lack of baseload from solar means we might require energy rationing. So we whine and special interests run scare ads and nothing gets done. The same scenario applies to ALL the alternatives: wind, nuclear, coal-bed methane, five-mile deep offshore oil. We are ALL responsible for whomever will get hurt by whatever alternative we choose, so we lie and claim no one will be hurt and that "no one" freaks out and blocks our solution.
In grad school we learned a term for this disease of middle-aged democracies: pluralist stagnation. Unfortunately, there's a quack surgeon for this disease, carrying a scalpel called fascism.
Actually, since Gaddafi said that he wouldn't do business with anyone who attacked him, that would logically cause him to swing his portion of the oil over to Russian and Chinese companies, which does us no good. If we had simply backed the rebels in the first place, we could have bagged the whole country since the rebels would have been open to signing new contracts. Now we're stuck with another Saddam Hussein post-1991 situation; we have to embargo his oil because of his abuses, but that causes prices to go sky-high, which is poison for any politician in an elected government.
But you see, the media coverage was bad because yet again the nuclear authorities kept changing their story and slowly admitting hour after terrifying hour that things were worse. Just like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear industries act the same all over the world. Why is that?
So while I support the idea of new reactor designs, this behavior by the very industry and regulators who are supposed to operate those designs makes me just want to walk away from the whole thing and drown it in concrete. Imagine how much worse it is for low-information voters who can't be bothered to learn how anything in modern society works.
So you won't get the money for new reactor types, because it all sounds like the same old story.
Independence movements have a right to violence, otherwise we wouldn't be here. There isn't some court that determines which movements are legitimate enough to have the same right to kill as a sovereign state.
However, violence is a strategy, and it carries costs and benefits that the leaders of movements must evaluate. What worked in Egypt did not work in Libya, so revolution became necessary. Moslems and Arabs have to evaluate those tradeoffs the same as Irishmen and colonial Americans had to. If you try to overthrow the government, it will fight back, and you may be the bad guy and it the good guy.
But just this one paragraph is already too morally complicated for most Americans, so let's just say that King's racism is that he believes colonial domination is only wrong when whites do it to other whites, while like a lot of Americans he implicitly believes that non-whites are "uplifted" by Anglo-Franco-American occupation. So how dare Germany do to Europe what Europeans did to Africa and Asia? How dare the Vietnamese refuse to live under French rule? How dare non-whites in America (and Israel) threaten to give birth to enough voters to seize democratic control in the future?
I agree with Roland. It's a violation of international law to unilaterally install a no-fly zone, but we damn well can recognize the rickety coalition in Bengazi as a "government" and loan it all the Stingers and TOWs it needs to win and stabilize oil prices. We also have a perfect right to offer any Libyan pilot who defects $1,000,000 for his MIG. And if a few of our ECW planes fly over Tripoli with their gear on full-blast and fry some communications centers, we can always say it was an accident.
As for the fashionable cynicism that this is all a plot to "control" Egypt, I think we all can see that the problem in North Africa is that everyone is pretty much on his own. The Egyptians don't give a damn about Libya, so a US military base there will not give us control over the Suez Canal. In fact, in 1956 we had a major military base in Libya, but it didn't give us any control over Britain and France trying to conquer the canal; we forced them to withdraw by threatening to cut off their Marshall Plan money.
Yes, but the message we will hear in America is "drill, baby, drill". We are addicts, and we will not let go of the idea that there's still one big strike to be had in US-controlled North America or its offshore waters that will replace Saudi Arabia but the Commies in Washington are blocking it.
I don't know what data it would take to disprove that kind of thinking that wouldn't lead us to go berzerk and start torching our cities.
It sounds as though a much more thorough revolution is occurring in Libya than in Egypt, in that the Egyptian Army owns much of the country's manufacturing and acted to protect the status quo of cash flowing to generals, while in Libya the fracturing of society and the army has allowed new political-economic structures to begin to form - and they're in the half of the country with the oil. In the short run, that means the rebel army units may not be capable of offensive action to finish the war, but it also means that those units are acting with the people to govern. Where are the generals?
Evidence is that some of our generals are welcoming in Christian extremism and extremists as a way to make sure that if things fall apart, our military might will fall the Right way. Check out Mikey Weinstein's Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which keeps track of this strange conspiracy: http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/
Various generals like the infamous Boykin have indicated that the forces will take action against a president who is too socialistic, a la Francisco Franco. Given that our military is now only 1/3 of 1% of our population, and that a lot of Blacks seem to have left in disgust with Bush's war, it would not be hard for undereducated, unemployable young fanatics from the heartland to fill up its ranks in preparation for the Boykins to make their move.
The thing about Weinstein's revelations about the Air Force Academy that scared me most is that while I grew up in a USAF family, I've come to see that the leaders of USAF have the most contempt for civilian life of all the services, because the butchery of civilians is the core of Douhet's religion of strategic bombing adopted by all the major air forces. So long before I heard of MRFF I suspected that if there was a civil conflict in our country, the Air Force would be the only service willing to slaughter civilian protestors in "enemy" towns like New York and San Francisco.
What is added to the debate is the revelation that countries that dominate other countries or even the world are much more likely to do these nasty things more often in more places. Singh3 is pointing the finger to power, which corrupted the British while they had it, and has corrupted us now that we have it.
I have to admit, I don't want the neocons to get even a single victory in the Arab world, and in their eyes Gaddafi was an enemy. The question which it is still too soon to ask is: who will get the oil wealth when Gaddafi capitulates? If a new regime keeps the oil fields and diverts their revenue to a new agenda of social democracy, great. If the German proposal to build solar thermal farms across North Africa and send electricity to Europe by underground cable is carried out, fantastic.
But these days every treasure in the world ends up being contested by only two great powers: American seduction and Chinese bribes.
Gaddafi has become more cooperative with Western capitalists since 9/11. Given the US's disaster in Iraq and its bungling loss of Central Asia's energy potential to China, we've also become willing to let bygones be bygones. So, the US is keeping its hands off until whoever really runs the capitalist world figures out a scheme to trick Libya into handing over its oil fields.
Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", and you will know why America really invaded, and why that guaranteed that Iraq would be horribly governed.
And America had no intentions of allowing elections under occupation. It was the growing uprising in spring 2004, only a year after the invasion, that forced it to give in to Ayatollah Sistani's demand for elections. We tried to appoint a US puppet prime minister, which would have created an "Iraqi" government that could do what the Occupation was prohibited to do under international law: sign over the oil fields. No dice with Sistani.
There was not a single tragedy in Iraq that was not forseeable, which means the blood of everyone who died from the sanctions and invasion, many more than died at Saddam Hussein's hands, is on our hands. As a wise American judge said at Nuremburg, the planning of a war of aggression is the supreme war crime, for it contains within it the seeds of all the others.
Well, we might be about to find out in Madison, Wisconsin, where the far-right governor attempted a legislative ambush to destroy the state's public service employee unions on the pretext of closing a budget gap caused by his own tax cuts, and instead caused 30,000 protestors to appear. But now the Tea Party is holding a counter-demonstration to attack the evil Communist public school teachers and janitors. Will they ride camels?
You've hit on the key point ignored by all media; Egypt's "private" economy was owned by Mubarak and the generals. It was explained by a CIA analyst that almost all manufacturing in Egypt is done by firms which include military ownership; whether they are sole owners or bought in as partners I don't know. Obviously the Army acted in this crisis so as to protect its financial stake. A bloodbath would have been bad for sales, so the Army tried to stall on committing to any real change without actually wiping out the demonstrators.
But what does it mean when an economy is owned by the Army instead of the civilian government? If the latter is overthrown, then obviously what it owns is either the property of the new civil regime or it is seized directly by groups of revolutionaries. Army ownership means very little may change.
What is striking is that it seemed okay with the champions of free enterprise that the Army owned the economy. Meaning the US government, the US corporations, the GOP in particular, the neocons and the Likud in Israel. Now that things have gone bad I guess some of these groups will be quick to blame Egypt's failures on "socialism", but when have they ever minded massive transfers of wealth to a handful of old conservative men? Without looking at distribution of wealth, terms like socialism and capitalism tell you little about what's really going on. There were many Latin American countries where wealthy oligarchs owned the Army and ruled through terror, but it all passed the libertarian stench test, especially in Milton Friedman's sacred Chile. As long as wealth owns government and not the other way around, then it's freedom!
Why does it matter? Pakistan's industries are heavily owned by men who happen to be retired generals. And perhaps, just perhaps, the American hypocrisy on this issue is a sign that our Far Right's solution to its visceral hatred of the very capitalist elites in New York that it benefits by voting for total deregulation and tax cuts is to champion a more Christian and patriotic replacement class. Yes, General Motors, General Electric, General Everything owned by Generals. Or ex-generals, as long as they spout the right brand of fascism.
We're already paying the price for our cynical imperialism; $700,000,000,000 a year for the war budget, with troops in 130 countries. Every country we move into then requires that we move into another country to protect the first. The time comes when you cannot afford to even defend your principles on your own soil.
I guess they're still better than the Indonesian Army, which parlayed its self-appointed role of deliverer of Indonesia's liberation into three horrible genocides. I'm beginning to think of all the unpunished criminal institutions out there, the Indonesian Army got away with the most.
I hate to say it, but this may actually be a good thing. Fewer Americans watching is fewer Americans being whipped up into an Arab-bashing frenzy and calling their Congressmen to support the Empire.
A new survey also says 70% of Americans don't want us to get involved in this crisis, which probably consists of factions who just hate the 3rd world and don't want to do their duty as citizens to stay informed of our global entanglements, and wiser heads who realize that we will just screw everything up.
It looks like the new guy in Jordan is just an old conservative, replacing yet another failed whiz-kid neoliberal. Don't know anything about Jordan's people (as opposed to its imposed ruling dynasty) so I can't say if merely backing off of Shock Doctrine capitalism will cause tempers to cool down.
Actually, Luk, most educated Americans support the empire and want to make it "nicer" partly out of fear that the subjugated peoples will rise up against it. The educated Americans you have been reading are not typical of the greedy, shortsighted, ignorant bourgeoisie. We invade a country, and most Americans hold their breath for a few weeks hoping that we've "gotten away" with it. Then they relax and go back to buying stuff. That's very telling.
If you study the evolution of the international law of military occupation, which Juan often discusses, after WW2 the US pushed to strengthen prohibitions against profiting from conquest, and if anything made American corporate penetration of Occupied Japan less than it had been during the 1920s. That was a sort of golden moment of enlightened self-interest, where FDR recognized that the power of empire could turn any country into the next Reich and that no country could ever be put in the position where conquest was more profitable than trade. Those are principles against unregulated self-interest, based on common sense. It's all been downhill ever since.
At this very moment millions of Americans are supporting new bills in states like Arizona to strip citizenship from US-born children of illegal - and possibly legal - aliens.
Why?
Because they're overwhelmingly likely to use their votes for the Democratic Party, and there won't be enough white Republicans to offset them in the future. If they split their votes 50-50, you'd never have heard of the idea.
So there's what we mean by Arab democracy - only Arabs who act white deserve a voice in government.
You can call Hizbollah hypocritical, but at least it has the guts to stand up to Israel, without which there will never be any means to attain justice for any Arab. Perhaps Mr. Anzalone thinks that Abbas kissing Israeli butt will be the model for the capitalist nirvana that our invasion of Iraq failed to procure.
Problem is, what if the end game of our owners is to create a neo-feudalist society in which the masses are allowed market freedom, meaning the right to watch gay porn or listen to rap music in our homes, but all political expression is rigidly ruled by a volunteer militia of theocratic rednecks, a sort of Invisible Empire like the KKK or the Mississippi Citizens' Council? This network would recruit from the same discarded economic classes in the Red States that the Army, police and prison guards draw from, and in fact would include many of them off-duty, as they would inevitably have far-right prejudices. They would get paid two or three times as much as their neighbors in these armed enforcement jobs, and come to be a new elite in the boondocks, while commuting to the evil cities to keep them under occupation. Public dissenters, radical professors, and union organizers will have accidents.
No one believes this possible because they take the Tea Partiers' libertarianism at face value, but let's recall that the KKK was enforcing the Confederate agenda of states' rights, unlimited private property rights, and the "natural" destitution of the poor and minorities.
Besides, most Americans have already been indoctrinated to believe the outside world is evil, communistic and plotting to steal America's rightful prosperity and supremacy. So they won't even expose themselves to enemy propaganda by listening to foreign stations.
So much for libertarian claims that capitalists would never sacrifice profits in order to indoctrinate the public to favor tax cuts, war, racism and other inegalitarian institutions.
While we're at it, how can you prove that Jared Lee Loughner was any less a political actor than James Earl Ray? I mean, basically we all assume because Ray was a Southern white guy that he had a political grudge against MLK, but his behavior of stalking his future victim and collecting news clippings about him make him look just as much an obsessed nut as a man provoked by extremist segregation rhetoric. You can be both violently crazy and political - we've seen entire nations be both.
The genius of the Israel lobby is that it found a way to become a stakeholder in both our parties at the same time; by relying on the unthinking support of the liberal Jewish base in the Democratic Party, while turning Israel into a warmongering right-wing theocracy that fired up our own Christian Right with a "feasible" model for America's future that it used to take over the GOP. Lieberman the stealth reactionary was one of the coordinators, calibrating how far he could drag his co-religionists with him into bed with a GOP they despised.
Actually, Zeke, most of us talk sports. It's the only thing that it's safe for white strangers and black strangers to talk about in an elevator, or red-staters and blue-staters to talk about at an IHOP.
A sports league is a safe, artificial world of corporate countries who have regularly scheduled wars in which no one gets killed, and of course the desire to win is so great that fans tolerate black guys getting paid millions when they despise kids no different than those athletes in the streets. Revenue is socialistically split between the owners and a player draft makes sure no team goes out of business (or moves to China), but the American fantasy of capitalism is maintained by the competition on the field itself.
Now consider that one of the worst crises ever faced by the Byzantine Empire was a civil war that broke out between two athletic associations, the Blues and the Greens, which sponsored various sports teams in Constantinople. Bread and circuses - the proles had no vote, so they turned rabid enthusiasm on their sports instead until the Blues and Greens became entangled with the empire's political factionalism and accusations of favoritism. Massive rioting and burning ensued.
To me the fact of their ignorance is less frightening than the idea that they think they aren't ignorant. What the heck proof can they even offer an interviewer of their knowledge of the outside world?
Maybe they think that their immediate comfort is literally the only thing that matters, that any consideration of the country's future, the environment, wage trends, imperial decline or anything else would lead them to the discovery that they will have to make some kind of sacrifice. Just as they feel they already get guilt-tripped into a sacrifice whenever environmentalists or foreign aid activists or climate scientists bring home the bad news.
So why did people ever commit to sacrifice for a better future or better world? Have our capitalist masters engineered the opposite of the Revolution of Rising Expectations that we used to hear about? Is this a Reaction of Falling Expectations, where we feel we will be suckers if we vote for long-term solutions instead of short-term war, that we're Alice running the Red Queen's race as fast as we can just to avoid losing economic ground and we can't afford to stop to help our comrades fallen along the way?
It does not seem our behavior can change except by a catastrophe that brings everything to a stop.
Americans have to know what side to cheer for before they can let themselves be entertained. Once the establishment media tells them who in Tunisia will best serve American greed, it will all go down familiar paths.
The 1979 situation may represent the difference between people in Arab states simply wanting revolution per se, versus wanting the formulations of Khomeini.
But then no revolution has only one stage. Iran originally fell to a coalition movement that included seculars and leftists, just as many other revolutions included bourgeoise elements that returned to their businesses while their Marxist compatriots gathered all power. So what might have been admired about Iran could have been very short-lived.
I don't think the Tea Party sees itself as a forward-looking group at all. The very name indicates they want to turn the legal clock back to the founding of the Republic - far-right writers in whose footsteps the teabaggers slog clearly and repeatedly deride democracy and hint at taking the right to vote away from everyone who didn't have it in 1789. Why else repeal the 14th Amendment?
They're nostalgic reactionaries, and we've had nostalgic reactionary movements of a failing middle class in Europe during the Depression while America mostly chose to move forward. If these guys in Tunisia are like that, it won't be hard to tell.
But shouldn't the shootings by friends and family be of the most concern, since they are carried out with weapons bought based on the NRA dogma that the country is infested with dangerous un-white Others who think of nothing but criminal acts around the clock? This dogma is meant to divide the country into a law-abiding (read white and submissive minority) half that buys guns and respects capitalism and is meant to be represented by the 2nd Amendment, and a violent untermenschen who breed like rats and threaten to thus steal democracy just like they stole their guns. Yet what the stats tell us is that we have met the enemy; he is us, our entitled, aggressive, take-what-we-want selves in the form of our neighbors, spouses and disgruntled employees. We are in an undeclared war with ourselves.
So you see no connection at all between the eliminationist, exceptionalist rhetoric of the Tea Party and the criminal traditions of America that you claim to oppose?
Because America could start much worse wars than the recent ones and it has a movement that believes the entire world outside of America is evil.
They are saying that when an American patriot calls for violence, it has a divine moral sanction, so it cannot lead to evil. Whereas when a leftist calls for violence, anyone who influenced him is evil, anyone who supports him is evil, and he is responsible for anything bad that might be tied to him.
Which in simplest terms, reduces to "the ends justify the means". America is God's instrument on Earth, so its patriots' ends are divine and if their means of calling for war and execution or imprisonment of their enemies causes them to win elections, then any other bad things that result (like someone actually carrying out the requested act instead of remembering to vote for a Tea Partier or send money to Palin) are irrelevant.
But if anyone else does it, vice versa. There can be no fair contest or objective rules against God.
Question is, how many of us have been brainwashed into believing that "patriots" are incapable of evil? That no matter what horrible things they do, they must always mean well, because they are more authentic Americans than the rest of us.
Also, Juan, note that Britain used to be a lot more like America. In the 19th century London was a violent hellhole and gentlemen who could afford them carried guns. Perhaps mass production threatened to make guns too available to the poor and that's what scared the elites into gun control, but conversely the threat of violent revolution from the left and right, and the world wars (which became civil wars in some countries), taught Europeans the hard way about the need to combine social justice with a prudent attitude about lethal force. The result is that handguns are restricted, but hunting rifles are available, and in Switzerland, etc, well-regulated military rifles are distributed, because none of those are expected to be used against one's fellow citizens. That would be madness.
None of this happened in immature America.
I'd hate to think of the size of the catastrophe it will take to teach Americans that if they are buying guns primarily expecting to use them on their fellow countrymen, their entire society is badly in need of reform.
The question is, why does a society in crisis choose to embrace fascism rather than social democracy? Why 1933 Germany instead of 1933 America?
Certainly the social mythology about "natural" inequality - of races, nations, and classes - plays a big role in this crossroads. Germany were led to believe that their economic problems were due to too much equality, meaning of "good" Germans versus "inferior" Germans under democracy. Americans had been fed a torrent of ideology for years before the '29 crash justifying vast and growing inequality of all types on the hypothesis that it would produce prosperity for all, which obviously was discredited.
Why didn't Germans come to the same conclusion about who their enemy was as Americans, and why can't Americans now see what their forefathers saw?
Well, the war against the Native Americans solved the problem of putting white people in ownership of the land now called the United States. And that's America's origin myth. Complete with private citizen-settlers provoking the other side with their private weapons and trusting the US government to do its duty to defend them against the retaliation. Guess we know what's coming when the Right begins its final campaign to "restore" America.
And to add to that, all this occurred after a generation of rampant European imperialism on three continents - creating militarized populations ready to turn their jealousies on each other in 1914. The failure of that war in turn created the seedbed of fascism, essentially on the grounds that all the past killing and conquest and racism had not gone far enough.
And why had so many European rulers and elites promoted imperialism and violent nationalism? To steer the voters away from Socialism.
So then when any single Democrat out of a hundred million says anything provocative, that's morally equivalent to GOP leading presidential contender Palin doing it, or acknowledged GOP leader Rush Limbaugh or Tea Party hero Glenn Beck doing it?
Where were you during the Bush years when one major right-wing radio host after another called for opponents of the war to be killed or imprisoned? How did you feel about that?
How about any number of lesser right-wing superstars calling Islam a "religion of evil", or calling for America to conquer the Islamic world? Or calling FDR a Communist or Lincoln a tyrant(as Ron Paul did)?
America was a racist corporate whorehouse until FDR and the New Deal. Its greatness lasted from his inauguration until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Most of the current level of American hourly wages is due to growth in that period; they have fallen since. Most of our national debt was created by the arms buildup Reagan began and which never ended. Most of our private debt was created by the Reagan ideology that greed is next to Godliness, three giant financial bubbles that collapsed because Democrats were too intimidated by free-market ideology to defend the regulations imposed after the '29 crash.
And if things are as you say, sir, then why have the capitalist class gained such unprecedented and undemocratic wealth and power over America in the last 30 years? Isn't the Left the enemy of wealth and the Right its friend?
Glaspie's infamous conversation with Saddam reminds me of what happened in 1949, when Dean Acheson announced that the "US Defense Perimeter" included Japan, but not Korea. The next summer North Korea invaded South Korea. So why didn't Truman have to bear the full consequences of that blunder? Because he simply, suddenly acted as though South Korea HAD always been part of this elastic defense perimeter and sent in troops, which would have made it unpatriotic for anyone to ask too many questions.
The real problem is, America can try to impose rational restraints on its own actions, but as soon as it sees some unpleasant consequence from this, the ignorant and paranoid public freaks out and demands action regardless of the cost. So no one can ever really be sure where our government stands on anything until it happens.
No, Israel is preparing US congressmen to protect Israel from the consequences of causing massive civilian casualties. That means there's a pretty good chance they're going to try it, like the last stupid invasion of Lebanon, which was clearly planned before two kidnapped GIs provided casus belli, or the storming of the Turkish aid ship. Or like America's invasion of Iraq. Casus belli is not what it used to be here in the world of rich white people with killer robots.
The thing that struck me from frontline reports of the most recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon was the lousy performance of the Israeli ground forces. But it fits on a trend line of declining performance, and that in turn fits an increasingly insular, fat, bourgeoise society that lives off of arms exports and real estate rackets. Therefore I can't imagine what their commanders could have done to improve matters beyond more rigorous training.
That leaves the air war. And that is very telling. This is nothing more than a society that bombs Arabs as a ritual of tribal supremacy, as proof that they "deserve" whatever they can seize. Every few years they will harvest another crop of dead Arabs on the unsaid yet sacred goal of breaking the Arab will, of getting Arabs to admit that they are a conquered race who must pay tribute to a superior civilization. They figure the Arabs who still have the manhood to fight back will expose themselves, and be quickly killed off, leaving an ever more compliant and weak gene pool.
But this stuff doesn't work anymore. It used to be that the rich and the conqueror out-reproduced their victims. But now it is the other way around, and the more wretched you are, the more future soldiers you have.
Thanks to Wikileaks for leaving us no place to hide when we lie to protect Israel's next war of social engineering. And thanks, Juan, for translating it into the original German.
Yusuf, I think you have a point, but you may be missing a greater evil: the story says that Moslem parents are buying trees because their kids don't want to be left out. Where did the kids hear of Christmas from? Corporate advertising, US media full of corporate-driven gift-giving, etc. The real religion of America is no longer Christianity, and its owners transformed Christmas into capitalism's high holy day long ago. Consider that the only reason Americans believe that Santa wears a red suit is that Coca-Cola incessantly put out Christmas ads throughout the 20th Century depicting him dressed in Coca-Cola red.
I don't have a problem with King supporting the IRA, which simply was fighting an alien conquerer race like the Palestinians have. I have a big problem with his certitude that white people have the right to resist conquest, and brown people have no right at all.
Try making him explain the difference between British colonization and Israeli colonization until his head explodes.
Hatred is self-interest in search of a justification.
The illness, I think, is in what we choose to believe is in our self-interest. Once we've made the fateful decision that it's worth starving all the blacks to get a tax cut, or it's worth bombing all the Arabs to get cheap oil, it is supremely easy for us to come up with the most ridiculous moral justifications to do what we want. But our calculations of the secret benefits of our actions are complete nonsense, because we always act as though our murderous actions will have no consequence.
Which is odd, because if we were going to murder our spouses for the insurance money, the very first thing we would think of is how difficult it would be to avoid the consequences. Perhaps the act of wrapping such crimes in the cloak of patriotism or religion then blinds us to the need to subtract the cost of consequences from our greedy calculations. After all, once we commit ourselves to telling such lies, we tend to want to believe them, and if we're really benefitting God and Country, surely they will mystically empower us to get away with it.
Which is no crazier than believing that you can take out a home equity loan and buy a $60,000 truck because the value of your house will always rise. An awful lot of us fell for that one.
I've never understood the context of right-wing homophobia except as part of a larger obsession with population growth as a form of military power.
To illustrate this, consider three areas where early Christians disagreed with each other, but the rising Catholic hierarchy later imposed doctrine:
1. suicide
2. abortion
3. homosexuality
I can't get into it here, but these ideas, like the role of women in the church, were openly in play for the first century or two A.D. In every case, the hierarchy chose the path that would ensure the growth of its army of followers over both rival Christian groups and the pagan establishment it sought to overthrow. No suicide, no abortion, and only heterosexual sex meant plenty of babies and no one trying to defect to Heaven ahead of schedule.
It is not surprising that both Hitler and Stalin handed out medals to women who had lots of babies. Or that Romania was obsessed with baby-making. Or that there's a Christian extremist scheme called the "Quiverful" movement that pressures women fundamentalists into having more babies, ostensibly to overcome the Moslem hordes who are always depicted as multiplying like rats. Sarah Palin appears to be an actual adherent of this doctrine.
Amazing - the Quiverfuls have openly reduced a baby to an arrow, a weapon to be expended in war. A woman's womb is nothing but a barracks for future soldiers. This makes homosexuals a sort of pre-deserter, depriving America of the future legions it needs to "win" World War III, to say nothing of the patriarchal discipline those legions would require to wage such a suicidal struggle.
I haven't seen the report, but I would argue that if the conspiracy was organized for specifically religious reasons, then it would be fair to call it a conspiracy from that religion. So abortion clinic bombers pretty much automatically are Christian terrorists; it's only a matter of proving whether they are Catholic or Protestant conspiracies. Not all neoconservatives are Jews, and neocon schemes to strengthen Israel have nothing to do with the well-being of Jews worldwide, so I would call that a Zionist conspiracy, not a Jewish conspiracy. Obviously I don't think the Federal Reserve or organ harvesting have a specifically Jewish purpose.
But what is the corporatist end-game in estranging Americans further and further from the view of reality of the rest of the human race, on global warming, on the right to health care, on imperialism and American exceptionalism?
It seems that America gets a veto on the entire rest of the world. So if you can corrupt the American political process, you can in effect have your way with the entire planet. If Reagan cut taxes on corporations, then every country had to cut taxes on corporations. If America said that Iraq was a threat, everyone had to accept that it was not in fact waging an illegal war of aggression. The entire global capitalist class protects and eulogizes America to push ultra-capitalist policies on all governments regardless of the resulting destruction and chaos.
But what happens the day when America is proven wrong and everyone who isn't American understands that?
I think it will be like this: one day, when the ecological disasters become too big to deny, our owners will go on TV and tell Americans, "Yes, we lied about everything. But now the blood is on your hands too, and the world will demand reparations. So you have no choice but to obey us to the bitter end or lose the material goods that are all you value."
Question is, are the younger Israelis turning into Middle Easterners - or are they turning into fat, ignorant, bigoted, violent, gun-toting, greedy, McMansion-building, imperialist redneck Americans? Them and us, together holding the world at gunpoint just another day longer...
You're right - ultimately it will be our creditors who will decide the disposition of our empire. I can't figure out who Beijing will side with. Their obsession with supporting political stasis in the 3rd World would point to them backing Israel - so might the similarity of their colonization of Tibet and Sinkiang at the expense of their natives to the Zionist project. However, China wants the good will of the world to continue to expand its corporate empire at the expense of America's corporate empire, and less and less of the world backs Israel every day.
The answer to Louie's question is that people at this site would rather believe that our murderous bias against the basic right of the Palestinians to their own homes and farms is caused by the influence of a foreign lobby exploiting our guilt over the Holocaust, instead of the much more sickening possibility that we just choose the Whiter, more Yankee-like side in every conflict out of sheer bigotry.
Or, they give religion an accurate name: reactionary self-justification. Which is why I gave up not only on Baptism but on Baptism's racist, greedy, war-loving God. I don't know where Hitchens got his beliefs, but once I began to doubt the fascistic absolutism that such a religion requires, I had no place to go but all the way to the other side to call it out as an evil.
"Men are selfish, greedy, insensitive and bigoted by nature."
And thus by nature they create biased belief systems to ennoble these behaviors. No one can be trusted. Even worse, when exceptional individuals like the Buddha or Jesus come along and try to reverse these evil belief systems, their prescriptions are quickly overcome by the hypocrisy of their followers. The more beautiful the vision of harmony and justice, the more brutal the betrayal, which is why Christ's followers have enslaved several continents and annihilated hundreds of native cultures.
Well, so much for any illusions among libertarians here that Alan Keyes = Ron Paul. Not that Keyes has ever or will ever gain traction among the base - ultimately, there is literally no black man in existence that they will ever trust as their tribal war chief. They do not worship war for the glory of America, but for a subset of America, and at the expense of all the other subsets.
So we're better off in a country where we violate the rights of SOME people because they fall outside the characteristics of the ruling elite and thus could include a percentage that has a grudge against that elite?
How would this debate be playing out if it were the aftermath of another white right-wing terrorist atttack? I can't imagine we will profile-search people who look like Timothy McVeigh in this country. Leaving the subtle suggestion that those are the Real Americans and that when they commit violence against the government, like Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment" measures, they are defending the true nation against the usurping servant races.
But then Tea Partiers would argue that fascism is statism, and that the poor misunderstood capitalists would not collaborate with fascism if the government had not been allowed to grow so powerful that it became necessary for their business interests to manipulate it. Because why should profit not be above the law, when all good Americans know that the law was created to protect "life, liberty and property" - not "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
As long as we start with the premise that property is prior to government, then it is impossible to construct any society that regards humans as equal citizens regardless of their wealth. Therefore fascism simply is one of many tools available for the rich to reach their desired end state - permanent enshrinement of their naturally-growing monopoly on all forms of power. Was, say, the feudal ruling class of medieval Europe private, government, or military in nature? Our far right would jump up and down and say those alien noblemen were "big government", but they in fact were fatcats who used their obligation to provide horses and arms to the common defense to obtain the reward of a monopoly on civil office. Halliburton and the mercenary corporations are working on their own road to that same end. If Hitler's party/militia was viewed as a private venture, then certainly his goal was feudalism.
Torture was as American as apple pie long before our time. That's why there were things like the Miranda rule. Torture was a routine practice for American cops in the past - but we ignore that sorry history now because, well, so many of the supposed threats they were fighting turned out either to be phantoms, or were assimilated into normal American politics by progressive victories.
But aren't we always told that America was "better" in the past?
I think the Tea Party thinks it is a mass movement. Any of their leaders - except the now-ignored Ron Paul - come out against military tribunals?
The plan is to build worship for the parallel system of military courts as being superior to the corrupted secular humanist civil courts, so that when they get the White House back, they can use it to eliminate the enemies that they really care about: you and me.
I think that the whining you describe is especially acute in those post-colonial states that aren't real nations to begin with. Pakistan is literally an abbreviation for its four regions, P, A, K and I (Indus = Sindh). Which I'm sure only works in English. It's as if British bureaucrats just dumped this zone on the appropriate colonial Army and said, "It's yours."
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Well, we could have returned to the Clinton era tax rates and solved the problem. Didn't see all the rich folks emigrate in 1993, did we? Or we could never have had the Bush cuts in the first place when the budget was still in surplus 11 years ago. Forgotten that?
But then, you simply will never accept that the vast and grotesque explosion of wealth among the top 1% during recent years was itself artificial and economically distorting, and by the way completely failed to prevent the 2008 crash and might even have helped cause it. The rich still have that Bush blood money.
Whereas when the rich robbed the country dry in the 1920s and ran it into a crash, they ended up having to pay it back with a raise in the top rate to 63% and then to 91%, all while America was borrowing its way into its era of greatest prosperity. So what if it was World War II that caused it? That war was used to improve wages, especially for minorities, to create the GI Bill which unleashed vast productive talents unseen in the laissez-faire era, and rebuild Europe and create the vast post-war prosperity that allowed America to pay off much of the debt (The GOP backed the 91% tax rate and we ran budget surpluses for over a decade). All while private ownership of gold was illegal! And the rich ended up BETTER off than before the Depression, they just weren't so far ahead of the rest of us that they could buy our politicians and media to tell us any lies they pleased. Like the lie that redistribution never worked.
Now if you're going to say that's all a lie, then there's no point in continuing this. If you're going to act pragmatic and say, "well, the rich couldn't emigrate to flee high taxes in 1945 but they can now," what does that tell us about their loyalty to the republic that they robbed blind such that they should control most of what we read and hear?
The purpose of the Right-wing movement in our lifetime can be stated simply: to destroy the belief of the American people that they can organize politically for secular improvement.
All their bogeymen, the ACLU, ACORN, labor unions, women's rights' groups, even the New Deal version of the Democratic Party, were created on the idea that citizens own public resources and can direct them to make material and social improvements for those who needed them most.
All the factions of the Right believe, conversely, that the monstrous society that ran into the ditch in 1929 needed no reform, merely the blood sacrifice of starving millions to balance markets. The Christian Right wants no earthly improvement by secular means; they want the poor to run to them and bribe God with sacrifices and punishments. The corporate and libertarian Right want no alternative to more greed and more consumption. If we just go back to the past things will automagically get better and better.
This movement has been awfully successful in the last 40 years, hasn't it? You point out that most of us support modern ideas like progressive taxation, but when we are bullied by faith-drunken patriots who accuse us of oppressing them by using their taxes to end polio or feed schoolchildren, we get confused and shaken and slink away ashamed, worse off than before. We're being trained to be medieval peasants, a class that all groups on the Right consider an improvement on uppity ghetto trash. Peasants don't organize for reform, they follow witchhunters and lynch mobs and inform on their neighbors' sins to the local priests.
That's why Moslems are poor and lazy, right? Because they haven't gutted their own religious faith (as Martin Luther did to satisfy his German merchant-class sponsors) to sanctify greed and economic growth over all else.
That's the Protestant work ethic, always looking for another angle to get ahead until it degenerates from a "work" ethic to a speculation and bailout ethic, while never changing in its characterization of other races and religions as lazy and shiftless who thus deserve to be conquered, cheated, reformed, structurally adjusted, and privatized to their detriment.
Well, Grumpy Old Man, if you think capitalist America is surrounded by an evil, atheist dark-skinned world of Communists who envy it and threaten its destruction, aided by 14th Amendment black and Latino citizens, consider how much worse shape capitalism would be in worldwide if American forces weren't stationed in 130 countries propping up regimes against their own dissenters.
Or, conversely, all of the above is wrong and for the last 30 years the corporations have intentionally been cutting our pay, shipping our jobs overseas, and handing us rifles to point at the rest of the world to enforce the global sweatshop that Marx once predicted would occur.
Without the giant banks and military-industrial complex corporations and the exploitation of foreign labor and savings, what would American capitalism really look like now?
There's a reason why no country in the world now operates according to libertarian principles - 1929.
Because it's different when a "patriot" is persecuted. That's just proof that the enemy is all around us, using rights that only real Americans should be allowed to have. One does not even have to explain to the followers what the solution is...
Because they keep believing that if they turn the clock far enough back, Paradise will erupt.
Why? Because they're sure there's too much equality in the world now, whereas in the past their kind had a monopoly on power therefore it must have been great. The Confederacy for the states' righters, the Gilded Age for the libertarians, the Pax Britannica for the neocons, and the Old Testament for the Christian theocrats. Note that all of these point to the 19th century, even the religious example since many Protestants of that time tried to push Old Testament principles.
But the idyllic America they worship never existed. So they keep pushing further back into the past, into ever more primitive, barbaric times. Now they are to the right of the Founding Fathers, so the Pilgrims and Medieval feudalism are the next goalposts.
Why isn't Joe McCarthy being mentioned more in discussion of this campaign of intimidation?
1. The mainstream media loves to talk about McCarthy in the context that he was defeated - the system worked, the corporate media eventually did the right thing. But if it all happens a second time...
2. The Right is taking public positions unimaginable even under Bush. Governors talking nullification and secession, attacks on the 14th Amendment, claims that Hitler was a "liberal". So clearly Tailgunner Joe is on the agenda for political rehabilitation. Get set to have Fox relentlessly hammer us on how he was a hero who caused no harm.
3. The way is being prepared for a new MacCarthy - one not tainted by having been elected to office, since we know democracy is tainted by all those un-Americans voting. No, the new MacCarthy must be a corporate employee... uh, "entrepreneur". That makes the libertarians and militias very happy. Whether it's Beck or someone even worse being groomed and fine-tuned to succeed him hardly matters.
So the Palestinians and Israelis are morally equal in wanting each other to go away. But the Palestinians were there for centuries, and had their land seized in a pre-meditated scheme. If I steal your car, you want me to go away and I want you to go away, but in the eyes of the law I am the criminal.
You just think the Palestinians won't suffer as much if they are the ones to slink away and die in the alley as the Israelis because they're less human than Israelis and they're naturally suited for poverty and degradation. Isn't that always the underlying assumption when white and brown people fight each other for the same survival resources? I despise most of all the sort of caucasian bourgeoise eunuchs who kill with legalisms and propaganda so they can claim to have no blood on their hands - maybe I respect the Arabs more for being honest about how far they'll go to get their homes back while Israelis bask in their beach resorts and expect their airstrikes and drones to commit genocide for them.
Are you still living under the illusion that Israel's rulers do not have as their ultimate goal the disappearance of the Palestinian people? They say what they must when the world's cameras are turned on. But the logic of their "military" strategy is to make life unbearable for the Palestinians so that they no longer hang around and press their claims for stolen property - because the claim is factually true. Hamas did not steal Judea from the Hebrews, Rome did. But the Israeli state of today is the continuation of the Zionist organizations who Jabotinsky called upon years ago to do unto the Arabs what America had done unto the Indians. We didn't annihilate the Indians because our population growth eliminated them as a political threat, but Arabs, alas, breed too quickly to be swept under the rug.
I don't see why it is so shocking to point out the obvious, given that we Americans have done the same and many of our European ancestors have done the same. We grab land and then pass laws to prevent others from grabbing it from us.
For the Right, hating on the Libyan rebels is easy, even though they risk everything against a man that the Right wanted dead when Ronald Reagan told them to want him dead. It's part of the Israeli-backed narrative that Arabs are a race of mad dogs and must not be allowed to have democracy because, well, they will vote their consciences and that's bad for Israel.
For the Left, it's more of a cold contempt for the rebels, and it rarely seems based on any sympathy for Gaddafi as a Marxist. It's more as if the Libyans ruined everything by shooting back, and then inviting in our Empire to bail them out.
But there are arguments to be made that the Libyan rebels represent a much more radical change than the Egyptians and Tunisians have been able to wrest from their still-intact Establishment. As long as those countries avoided all-out rebellion, their ruling structures and class system survived. In Libya, the structure is now deeply damaged, the Army divided and now largely ruined, the central bureaucracy replaced by bands of mutinous soldiers and angry civilians struggling to learn how to govern themselves. Anyone far enough to the Left to know about the Zapatistas and the anti-neoliberal rebellions of South America knows that the greatest challenge is getting people engaged in organizing solutions to their own problems. It's an exciting, high-risk, high-reward time.
The problem is, that's up to the rebels. There was no rebel coalition to forestall occupation in Iraq, and we screwed over the rebel coalition that we'd help conquer Afghanistan. But they have to win on the ground.
Ironically, their very lack of unity is proof that they're not a US-manufactured fraud; and the US's lack of a coherent strategy is proof that this wasn't an imperial project of long duration but an improvisation out of panic over the consequences of Gadaffi's victory. But all of that wears down on the odds of a quick peace.
It was effectively over when Gadaffi's tanks surrounded Benghazi, before we intervened.
Actually, certain powerful Americans knew a great deal about the Iraqi opposition, because they had manufactured it from exiles and intended to install it in power. Dick Cheney and the AEI and others were running that operation throughout the '90s. We underestimated the power of the actual opposition to both Saddam Hussein and our occupation from the Shi'a, and from Sunni tribes in Anbar.
Everything that happened in Libya was far too fast for the US, which likes to obsess about an enemy for a decade or two before actually doing anything. The neocons have been touting Iranian exiles lately, not Libyans. It looks like Kosovo again, where we got caught flat-footed and looked embarassingly impotent in the face of an ongoing atrocity, so we made up a solution.
But Sudan did get strongarmed by the international community into in effect allowing itself to be partitioned. Since it has a right-wing Islamist regime, I haven't heard any leftists complain about this.
The problem is, what would pacifists have had America do once Gadaffi finished off the rebels? They surely would not have supported going back to business as usual with him, right? And we all know how lousy economic embargoes have been. So we would have had to cut off all oil exports, and all food imports, and all contractors needed to repair the country. The price of oil would have gone way up, hurting people all over the world. Gadaffi would have held on to power long enough for many to starve.
I'm not saying this to condemn pacifists, but to point out the lack of useful options in the international system as it now exists. The human-rights movement is the reason why we now embargo rulers who commit mass murder, but that movement has not given us a humanitarian way to rescue the victimized populations, leaving them in a hellish limbo. We keep saying that we won't get involved the next time, but then the news video comes in of the refugee trails and the starving children, like in Kosovo, and the first-world public freaks out and demands that something, anything, be done to make the bad images go away, and the leaders comply with counterproductive or inept interventions.
But of course said publics do not want to pick a fight with Saudi Arabia and end up standing in unemployment lines during another depression, any more than they wanted to attack the USSR over Hungary or attack China during the Cultural Revolution and risk nuclear war. So our leaders are safe. That's how it is and I have not heard any useful alternatives to these arrangements from any part of the political spectrum.
I think arming the rebels from frozen accounts is an excellent idea.
The problem is that we would still have to embargo Gaddafi's half of Libya, and the price of oil would thus still go through the roof causing global suffering (remember what happened when it hit $140?). Meanwhile people would starve in that part of the country, while the rebels' single most useful service to humanity, the continuation and extention of the Arab revolution, would grind to a halt.
On the other hand, now that the rebels are not being exterminated, they have the breathing space to prove they actually stand for something worth our intervention. Unfortunately, the track record on past regimes created by no-fly zones is mixed. However, the physical isolation of those regimes from the First World and the obscurity of their politics let them get away with very low standards of conduct. The very conditions that made the Libyan war so visible, so rapid and so accessible to Western intervention must now be employed to hold the revolutionary regime to a standard of conduct so high that it is undoubtedly an integral part of the democratic wave in North Africa. In fact, they have a chance to go considerably further than Egypt in that the Army will be shattered and the rebels and mutineers will not accept merely an amended constitution.
It will be worth if the rebels rebound quickly and get the fuel and vehicles necessary to roll back down the coast and besiege Tripoli. At that point the West will be helpless to dictate a replacement government, while the besieged dictators of several other protest-riven countries will feel the tide rolling against them.
But we're betting the whole region on the courage of a few thousand rebels who may already be dead because they were the ones willing to expose themselves. Bush invaded Iraq precisely because he assumed those sorts were already killed in the rebellion that his father refused to support in '91, and thus they would not interfere with Cheney's plans for occupation. Call it the Warsaw '44 strategy. The legitimacy of this whole operation is in the hands of the Libyan activists on the ground. If their leaders hunker down in their bomb shelters and demand ever more US intervention, the world will believe that the quid pro quo is that they are getting it by selling off their country to US Big Oil.
When we've had no-fly zones before they defined distinct ethnic enclaves. But fighting may be continuing all across Libya. Is it logical to try to suppress Gaddafi's entire air force instead of a more focused effort to rescue the people of Benghazi? If such suppression is carried out, will the fighting in Misrata be affected? Will foreign air forces fire on the strung-out tank columns that are Gaddafi's only means of enforcing control of his country?
By the way, last night CCTV's English-language news service claimed that the Egyptian Army is now sending arms to the rebels. While Gaddafi seems to be using equipment little different than when he got beat by Chad (!), America has poured billions of dollars' worth of toys into Egypt's army. A few of those toys, thrown against Gaddafi's elite units, 500 miles from their bases and straining on their supply lines, could have a dramatic effect.
By the way, "you" in my comment refers to one of the posters further upstream, not Mark Delmege.
The one thing I haven't heard anyone mention is giving the critical weapons to the rebels - such as TOWs and Stingers - that would allow them to conquer the country by themselves. Is there any evidence that this will be the approach, or is the West going in to impose a government it is comfortable with?
As for the idea that the rebels are frauds who were working for the West all along, shame on you. They took a huge chance, and the unreliability of the US as an ally is legendary. The problem is whether they will be screwed over like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was after 2001 so that an actual US client can be proclaimed leader.
I think that what happened here was the US's belated realization that if Gaddafi survived he'd have to be embargoed anyway for his actions, which would take 2 million barrels a day off the oil market. Politicians are far more afraid of that right now than Islam or Arabs or terrorism.
And blowing up your own cities with foreign mercenaries is stabilizing?
"Usurping"? Turkey's discredited elites, overthrown in 2000, were moving down the same neoliberal, US-stooge direction as all the European countries that have had economic meltdowns in recent years, the ones that Rumsfeld famously called "The New Europe", plus Blair's UK.
Why then does Turkey alone prosper with a populist government that - thanks to harsh criticism by its citizens - finally stood up to the US?
Maybe the people of a country work harder and behave more responsibly when they actually believe their opinions matter, not just the oligarchy of their local branch of Wall Street. Latin America is in a period of relative good health, a decade after its neoliberal Uncle Tom elites began to be driven from power.
These days nearly all the successful countries are ones that don't obey America.
It could be advantageous for Egypt to send in its Army.
1. it could rally the Egyptian people to accept the not-quite-democratic regime that the Army is installing at home to protect its large economic interests
2. it could signal the revival of Egypt as the leading power of the Arab world
3. a client state in all or part of Libya could serve as Egypt's own private Saudi Arabia, providing it with oil and cash to keep everybody happy
Now I'm sure there are many impediments to this, and I'm really sure that Israel has told Washington what it thinks about a stronger Egypt, so that might be as far as it gets.
We have to consider that the reason we're having this debate is that we are no longer competent to balance the complex tradeoffs of all our crappy energy alternatives, but no one has the guts to admit whom he'd sacrifice to get his way. If we were the country we were in 1942, we could build solar furnaces across enough of the Southwest (with its innate heat-storage capability) to at least preserve civilization. But now all we care about is convenience and comfort; the lack of baseload from solar means we might require energy rationing. So we whine and special interests run scare ads and nothing gets done. The same scenario applies to ALL the alternatives: wind, nuclear, coal-bed methane, five-mile deep offshore oil. We are ALL responsible for whomever will get hurt by whatever alternative we choose, so we lie and claim no one will be hurt and that "no one" freaks out and blocks our solution.
In grad school we learned a term for this disease of middle-aged democracies: pluralist stagnation. Unfortunately, there's a quack surgeon for this disease, carrying a scalpel called fascism.
Actually, since Gaddafi said that he wouldn't do business with anyone who attacked him, that would logically cause him to swing his portion of the oil over to Russian and Chinese companies, which does us no good. If we had simply backed the rebels in the first place, we could have bagged the whole country since the rebels would have been open to signing new contracts. Now we're stuck with another Saddam Hussein post-1991 situation; we have to embargo his oil because of his abuses, but that causes prices to go sky-high, which is poison for any politician in an elected government.
But you see, the media coverage was bad because yet again the nuclear authorities kept changing their story and slowly admitting hour after terrifying hour that things were worse. Just like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Nuclear industries act the same all over the world. Why is that?
So while I support the idea of new reactor designs, this behavior by the very industry and regulators who are supposed to operate those designs makes me just want to walk away from the whole thing and drown it in concrete. Imagine how much worse it is for low-information voters who can't be bothered to learn how anything in modern society works.
So you won't get the money for new reactor types, because it all sounds like the same old story.
Independence movements have a right to violence, otherwise we wouldn't be here. There isn't some court that determines which movements are legitimate enough to have the same right to kill as a sovereign state.
However, violence is a strategy, and it carries costs and benefits that the leaders of movements must evaluate. What worked in Egypt did not work in Libya, so revolution became necessary. Moslems and Arabs have to evaluate those tradeoffs the same as Irishmen and colonial Americans had to. If you try to overthrow the government, it will fight back, and you may be the bad guy and it the good guy.
But just this one paragraph is already too morally complicated for most Americans, so let's just say that King's racism is that he believes colonial domination is only wrong when whites do it to other whites, while like a lot of Americans he implicitly believes that non-whites are "uplifted" by Anglo-Franco-American occupation. So how dare Germany do to Europe what Europeans did to Africa and Asia? How dare the Vietnamese refuse to live under French rule? How dare non-whites in America (and Israel) threaten to give birth to enough voters to seize democratic control in the future?
I agree with Roland. It's a violation of international law to unilaterally install a no-fly zone, but we damn well can recognize the rickety coalition in Bengazi as a "government" and loan it all the Stingers and TOWs it needs to win and stabilize oil prices. We also have a perfect right to offer any Libyan pilot who defects $1,000,000 for his MIG. And if a few of our ECW planes fly over Tripoli with their gear on full-blast and fry some communications centers, we can always say it was an accident.
As for the fashionable cynicism that this is all a plot to "control" Egypt, I think we all can see that the problem in North Africa is that everyone is pretty much on his own. The Egyptians don't give a damn about Libya, so a US military base there will not give us control over the Suez Canal. In fact, in 1956 we had a major military base in Libya, but it didn't give us any control over Britain and France trying to conquer the canal; we forced them to withdraw by threatening to cut off their Marshall Plan money.
Yes, but the message we will hear in America is "drill, baby, drill". We are addicts, and we will not let go of the idea that there's still one big strike to be had in US-controlled North America or its offshore waters that will replace Saudi Arabia but the Commies in Washington are blocking it.
I don't know what data it would take to disprove that kind of thinking that wouldn't lead us to go berzerk and start torching our cities.
It sounds as though a much more thorough revolution is occurring in Libya than in Egypt, in that the Egyptian Army owns much of the country's manufacturing and acted to protect the status quo of cash flowing to generals, while in Libya the fracturing of society and the army has allowed new political-economic structures to begin to form - and they're in the half of the country with the oil. In the short run, that means the rebel army units may not be capable of offensive action to finish the war, but it also means that those units are acting with the people to govern. Where are the generals?
The Anglo-Saxon world has forgotten that poor people have issues.
Evidence is that some of our generals are welcoming in Christian extremism and extremists as a way to make sure that if things fall apart, our military might will fall the Right way. Check out Mikey Weinstein's Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which keeps track of this strange conspiracy: http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/
Various generals like the infamous Boykin have indicated that the forces will take action against a president who is too socialistic, a la Francisco Franco. Given that our military is now only 1/3 of 1% of our population, and that a lot of Blacks seem to have left in disgust with Bush's war, it would not be hard for undereducated, unemployable young fanatics from the heartland to fill up its ranks in preparation for the Boykins to make their move.
The thing about Weinstein's revelations about the Air Force Academy that scared me most is that while I grew up in a USAF family, I've come to see that the leaders of USAF have the most contempt for civilian life of all the services, because the butchery of civilians is the core of Douhet's religion of strategic bombing adopted by all the major air forces. So long before I heard of MRFF I suspected that if there was a civil conflict in our country, the Air Force would be the only service willing to slaughter civilian protestors in "enemy" towns like New York and San Francisco.
What is added to the debate is the revelation that countries that dominate other countries or even the world are much more likely to do these nasty things more often in more places. Singh3 is pointing the finger to power, which corrupted the British while they had it, and has corrupted us now that we have it.
Kind of makes you wonder where Madeline "400,000 Dead are Worth It" Albright is right now.
I have to admit, I don't want the neocons to get even a single victory in the Arab world, and in their eyes Gaddafi was an enemy. The question which it is still too soon to ask is: who will get the oil wealth when Gaddafi capitulates? If a new regime keeps the oil fields and diverts their revenue to a new agenda of social democracy, great. If the German proposal to build solar thermal farms across North Africa and send electricity to Europe by underground cable is carried out, fantastic.
But these days every treasure in the world ends up being contested by only two great powers: American seduction and Chinese bribes.
Gaddafi has become more cooperative with Western capitalists since 9/11. Given the US's disaster in Iraq and its bungling loss of Central Asia's energy potential to China, we've also become willing to let bygones be bygones. So, the US is keeping its hands off until whoever really runs the capitalist world figures out a scheme to trick Libya into handing over its oil fields.
Read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", and you will know why America really invaded, and why that guaranteed that Iraq would be horribly governed.
And America had no intentions of allowing elections under occupation. It was the growing uprising in spring 2004, only a year after the invasion, that forced it to give in to Ayatollah Sistani's demand for elections. We tried to appoint a US puppet prime minister, which would have created an "Iraqi" government that could do what the Occupation was prohibited to do under international law: sign over the oil fields. No dice with Sistani.
There was not a single tragedy in Iraq that was not forseeable, which means the blood of everyone who died from the sanctions and invasion, many more than died at Saddam Hussein's hands, is on our hands. As a wise American judge said at Nuremburg, the planning of a war of aggression is the supreme war crime, for it contains within it the seeds of all the others.
Well, we might be about to find out in Madison, Wisconsin, where the far-right governor attempted a legislative ambush to destroy the state's public service employee unions on the pretext of closing a budget gap caused by his own tax cuts, and instead caused 30,000 protestors to appear. But now the Tea Party is holding a counter-demonstration to attack the evil Communist public school teachers and janitors. Will they ride camels?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/18/946859/-Wisconsin-update:-Assembly-rescinds-vote-to-move-to-final-passage,-bill-now-amendable-again
You've hit on the key point ignored by all media; Egypt's "private" economy was owned by Mubarak and the generals. It was explained by a CIA analyst that almost all manufacturing in Egypt is done by firms which include military ownership; whether they are sole owners or bought in as partners I don't know. Obviously the Army acted in this crisis so as to protect its financial stake. A bloodbath would have been bad for sales, so the Army tried to stall on committing to any real change without actually wiping out the demonstrators.
But what does it mean when an economy is owned by the Army instead of the civilian government? If the latter is overthrown, then obviously what it owns is either the property of the new civil regime or it is seized directly by groups of revolutionaries. Army ownership means very little may change.
What is striking is that it seemed okay with the champions of free enterprise that the Army owned the economy. Meaning the US government, the US corporations, the GOP in particular, the neocons and the Likud in Israel. Now that things have gone bad I guess some of these groups will be quick to blame Egypt's failures on "socialism", but when have they ever minded massive transfers of wealth to a handful of old conservative men? Without looking at distribution of wealth, terms like socialism and capitalism tell you little about what's really going on. There were many Latin American countries where wealthy oligarchs owned the Army and ruled through terror, but it all passed the libertarian stench test, especially in Milton Friedman's sacred Chile. As long as wealth owns government and not the other way around, then it's freedom!
Why does it matter? Pakistan's industries are heavily owned by men who happen to be retired generals. And perhaps, just perhaps, the American hypocrisy on this issue is a sign that our Far Right's solution to its visceral hatred of the very capitalist elites in New York that it benefits by voting for total deregulation and tax cuts is to champion a more Christian and patriotic replacement class. Yes, General Motors, General Electric, General Everything owned by Generals. Or ex-generals, as long as they spout the right brand of fascism.
We're already paying the price for our cynical imperialism; $700,000,000,000 a year for the war budget, with troops in 130 countries. Every country we move into then requires that we move into another country to protect the first. The time comes when you cannot afford to even defend your principles on your own soil.
I guess they're still better than the Indonesian Army, which parlayed its self-appointed role of deliverer of Indonesia's liberation into three horrible genocides. I'm beginning to think of all the unpunished criminal institutions out there, the Indonesian Army got away with the most.
I hate to say it, but this may actually be a good thing. Fewer Americans watching is fewer Americans being whipped up into an Arab-bashing frenzy and calling their Congressmen to support the Empire.
A new survey also says 70% of Americans don't want us to get involved in this crisis, which probably consists of factions who just hate the 3rd world and don't want to do their duty as citizens to stay informed of our global entanglements, and wiser heads who realize that we will just screw everything up.
It looks like the new guy in Jordan is just an old conservative, replacing yet another failed whiz-kid neoliberal. Don't know anything about Jordan's people (as opposed to its imposed ruling dynasty) so I can't say if merely backing off of Shock Doctrine capitalism will cause tempers to cool down.
Actually, Luk, most educated Americans support the empire and want to make it "nicer" partly out of fear that the subjugated peoples will rise up against it. The educated Americans you have been reading are not typical of the greedy, shortsighted, ignorant bourgeoisie. We invade a country, and most Americans hold their breath for a few weeks hoping that we've "gotten away" with it. Then they relax and go back to buying stuff. That's very telling.
If you study the evolution of the international law of military occupation, which Juan often discusses, after WW2 the US pushed to strengthen prohibitions against profiting from conquest, and if anything made American corporate penetration of Occupied Japan less than it had been during the 1920s. That was a sort of golden moment of enlightened self-interest, where FDR recognized that the power of empire could turn any country into the next Reich and that no country could ever be put in the position where conquest was more profitable than trade. Those are principles against unregulated self-interest, based on common sense. It's all been downhill ever since.
I assume, then, that you reject categorically and in its entirety every word of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine."
As went US-controlled Latin America, so goes the US-controlled Middle East.
The question for Egypt is the same as for every country struggling for survival in the world today.
What can you do for China?
At this very moment millions of Americans are supporting new bills in states like Arizona to strip citizenship from US-born children of illegal - and possibly legal - aliens.
Why?
Because they're overwhelmingly likely to use their votes for the Democratic Party, and there won't be enough white Republicans to offset them in the future. If they split their votes 50-50, you'd never have heard of the idea.
So there's what we mean by Arab democracy - only Arabs who act white deserve a voice in government.
You can call Hizbollah hypocritical, but at least it has the guts to stand up to Israel, without which there will never be any means to attain justice for any Arab. Perhaps Mr. Anzalone thinks that Abbas kissing Israeli butt will be the model for the capitalist nirvana that our invasion of Iraq failed to procure.
Well, we used to have progressives of unlimited intellect like Martin Luther King but the Right murdered enough of them to quiet things down.
See "Beyond Vietnam, A Time to Break Silence".
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
Problem is, what if the end game of our owners is to create a neo-feudalist society in which the masses are allowed market freedom, meaning the right to watch gay porn or listen to rap music in our homes, but all political expression is rigidly ruled by a volunteer militia of theocratic rednecks, a sort of Invisible Empire like the KKK or the Mississippi Citizens' Council? This network would recruit from the same discarded economic classes in the Red States that the Army, police and prison guards draw from, and in fact would include many of them off-duty, as they would inevitably have far-right prejudices. They would get paid two or three times as much as their neighbors in these armed enforcement jobs, and come to be a new elite in the boondocks, while commuting to the evil cities to keep them under occupation. Public dissenters, radical professors, and union organizers will have accidents.
No one believes this possible because they take the Tea Partiers' libertarianism at face value, but let's recall that the KKK was enforcing the Confederate agenda of states' rights, unlimited private property rights, and the "natural" destitution of the poor and minorities.
Besides, most Americans have already been indoctrinated to believe the outside world is evil, communistic and plotting to steal America's rightful prosperity and supremacy. So they won't even expose themselves to enemy propaganda by listening to foreign stations.
So much for libertarian claims that capitalists would never sacrifice profits in order to indoctrinate the public to favor tax cuts, war, racism and other inegalitarian institutions.
While we're at it, how can you prove that Jared Lee Loughner was any less a political actor than James Earl Ray? I mean, basically we all assume because Ray was a Southern white guy that he had a political grudge against MLK, but his behavior of stalking his future victim and collecting news clippings about him make him look just as much an obsessed nut as a man provoked by extremist segregation rhetoric. You can be both violently crazy and political - we've seen entire nations be both.
The genius of the Israel lobby is that it found a way to become a stakeholder in both our parties at the same time; by relying on the unthinking support of the liberal Jewish base in the Democratic Party, while turning Israel into a warmongering right-wing theocracy that fired up our own Christian Right with a "feasible" model for America's future that it used to take over the GOP. Lieberman the stealth reactionary was one of the coordinators, calibrating how far he could drag his co-religionists with him into bed with a GOP they despised.
The Tunisian Army doesn't have nukes.
This story would also be covered differently if Tunisia had any oil.
Actually, Zeke, most of us talk sports. It's the only thing that it's safe for white strangers and black strangers to talk about in an elevator, or red-staters and blue-staters to talk about at an IHOP.
A sports league is a safe, artificial world of corporate countries who have regularly scheduled wars in which no one gets killed, and of course the desire to win is so great that fans tolerate black guys getting paid millions when they despise kids no different than those athletes in the streets. Revenue is socialistically split between the owners and a player draft makes sure no team goes out of business (or moves to China), but the American fantasy of capitalism is maintained by the competition on the field itself.
Now consider that one of the worst crises ever faced by the Byzantine Empire was a civil war that broke out between two athletic associations, the Blues and the Greens, which sponsored various sports teams in Constantinople. Bread and circuses - the proles had no vote, so they turned rabid enthusiasm on their sports instead until the Blues and Greens became entangled with the empire's political factionalism and accusations of favoritism. Massive rioting and burning ensued.
Or to use a fictional example:
Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan!
To me the fact of their ignorance is less frightening than the idea that they think they aren't ignorant. What the heck proof can they even offer an interviewer of their knowledge of the outside world?
Maybe they think that their immediate comfort is literally the only thing that matters, that any consideration of the country's future, the environment, wage trends, imperial decline or anything else would lead them to the discovery that they will have to make some kind of sacrifice. Just as they feel they already get guilt-tripped into a sacrifice whenever environmentalists or foreign aid activists or climate scientists bring home the bad news.
So why did people ever commit to sacrifice for a better future or better world? Have our capitalist masters engineered the opposite of the Revolution of Rising Expectations that we used to hear about? Is this a Reaction of Falling Expectations, where we feel we will be suckers if we vote for long-term solutions instead of short-term war, that we're Alice running the Red Queen's race as fast as we can just to avoid losing economic ground and we can't afford to stop to help our comrades fallen along the way?
It does not seem our behavior can change except by a catastrophe that brings everything to a stop.
Americans have to know what side to cheer for before they can let themselves be entertained. Once the establishment media tells them who in Tunisia will best serve American greed, it will all go down familiar paths.
Narrative Accomplished!
The 1979 situation may represent the difference between people in Arab states simply wanting revolution per se, versus wanting the formulations of Khomeini.
But then no revolution has only one stage. Iran originally fell to a coalition movement that included seculars and leftists, just as many other revolutions included bourgeoise elements that returned to their businesses while their Marxist compatriots gathered all power. So what might have been admired about Iran could have been very short-lived.
I don't think the Tea Party sees itself as a forward-looking group at all. The very name indicates they want to turn the legal clock back to the founding of the Republic - far-right writers in whose footsteps the teabaggers slog clearly and repeatedly deride democracy and hint at taking the right to vote away from everyone who didn't have it in 1789. Why else repeal the 14th Amendment?
They're nostalgic reactionaries, and we've had nostalgic reactionary movements of a failing middle class in Europe during the Depression while America mostly chose to move forward. If these guys in Tunisia are like that, it won't be hard to tell.
But if it is cultural, then the mostly right-wing gun lobby is faced with two horrible explanations:
1. America as a whole has an inferior, defective culture that has no business dominating the world
2. America has a particular minority group that is inferior and defective that's to blame for all our troubles
Oh, the troubles that either line of argument will lead to.
But shouldn't the shootings by friends and family be of the most concern, since they are carried out with weapons bought based on the NRA dogma that the country is infested with dangerous un-white Others who think of nothing but criminal acts around the clock? This dogma is meant to divide the country into a law-abiding (read white and submissive minority) half that buys guns and respects capitalism and is meant to be represented by the 2nd Amendment, and a violent untermenschen who breed like rats and threaten to thus steal democracy just like they stole their guns. Yet what the stats tell us is that we have met the enemy; he is us, our entitled, aggressive, take-what-we-want selves in the form of our neighbors, spouses and disgruntled employees. We are in an undeclared war with ourselves.
Sort of a "peculiar institution", would you say?
So you see no connection at all between the eliminationist, exceptionalist rhetoric of the Tea Party and the criminal traditions of America that you claim to oppose?
Because America could start much worse wars than the recent ones and it has a movement that believes the entire world outside of America is evil.
They are saying that when an American patriot calls for violence, it has a divine moral sanction, so it cannot lead to evil. Whereas when a leftist calls for violence, anyone who influenced him is evil, anyone who supports him is evil, and he is responsible for anything bad that might be tied to him.
Which in simplest terms, reduces to "the ends justify the means". America is God's instrument on Earth, so its patriots' ends are divine and if their means of calling for war and execution or imprisonment of their enemies causes them to win elections, then any other bad things that result (like someone actually carrying out the requested act instead of remembering to vote for a Tea Partier or send money to Palin) are irrelevant.
But if anyone else does it, vice versa. There can be no fair contest or objective rules against God.
Question is, how many of us have been brainwashed into believing that "patriots" are incapable of evil? That no matter what horrible things they do, they must always mean well, because they are more authentic Americans than the rest of us.
Also, Juan, note that Britain used to be a lot more like America. In the 19th century London was a violent hellhole and gentlemen who could afford them carried guns. Perhaps mass production threatened to make guns too available to the poor and that's what scared the elites into gun control, but conversely the threat of violent revolution from the left and right, and the world wars (which became civil wars in some countries), taught Europeans the hard way about the need to combine social justice with a prudent attitude about lethal force. The result is that handguns are restricted, but hunting rifles are available, and in Switzerland, etc, well-regulated military rifles are distributed, because none of those are expected to be used against one's fellow citizens. That would be madness.
None of this happened in immature America.
I'd hate to think of the size of the catastrophe it will take to teach Americans that if they are buying guns primarily expecting to use them on their fellow countrymen, their entire society is badly in need of reform.
The question is, why does a society in crisis choose to embrace fascism rather than social democracy? Why 1933 Germany instead of 1933 America?
Certainly the social mythology about "natural" inequality - of races, nations, and classes - plays a big role in this crossroads. Germany were led to believe that their economic problems were due to too much equality, meaning of "good" Germans versus "inferior" Germans under democracy. Americans had been fed a torrent of ideology for years before the '29 crash justifying vast and growing inequality of all types on the hypothesis that it would produce prosperity for all, which obviously was discredited.
Why didn't Germans come to the same conclusion about who their enemy was as Americans, and why can't Americans now see what their forefathers saw?
Well, the war against the Native Americans solved the problem of putting white people in ownership of the land now called the United States. And that's America's origin myth. Complete with private citizen-settlers provoking the other side with their private weapons and trusting the US government to do its duty to defend them against the retaliation. Guess we know what's coming when the Right begins its final campaign to "restore" America.
And to add to that, all this occurred after a generation of rampant European imperialism on three continents - creating militarized populations ready to turn their jealousies on each other in 1914. The failure of that war in turn created the seedbed of fascism, essentially on the grounds that all the past killing and conquest and racism had not gone far enough.
And why had so many European rulers and elites promoted imperialism and violent nationalism? To steer the voters away from Socialism.
So then when any single Democrat out of a hundred million says anything provocative, that's morally equivalent to GOP leading presidential contender Palin doing it, or acknowledged GOP leader Rush Limbaugh or Tea Party hero Glenn Beck doing it?
Where were you during the Bush years when one major right-wing radio host after another called for opponents of the war to be killed or imprisoned? How did you feel about that?
How about any number of lesser right-wing superstars calling Islam a "religion of evil", or calling for America to conquer the Islamic world? Or calling FDR a Communist or Lincoln a tyrant(as Ron Paul did)?
Not when George W. Bush claims God told him to attack Iraq, I guess.
Presumably someplace that doesn't have 4000 nuclear weapons with which to impose its madness on the rest of the world.
America was a racist corporate whorehouse until FDR and the New Deal. Its greatness lasted from his inauguration until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Most of the current level of American hourly wages is due to growth in that period; they have fallen since. Most of our national debt was created by the arms buildup Reagan began and which never ended. Most of our private debt was created by the Reagan ideology that greed is next to Godliness, three giant financial bubbles that collapsed because Democrats were too intimidated by free-market ideology to defend the regulations imposed after the '29 crash.
And if things are as you say, sir, then why have the capitalist class gained such unprecedented and undemocratic wealth and power over America in the last 30 years? Isn't the Left the enemy of wealth and the Right its friend?
Glaspie's infamous conversation with Saddam reminds me of what happened in 1949, when Dean Acheson announced that the "US Defense Perimeter" included Japan, but not Korea. The next summer North Korea invaded South Korea. So why didn't Truman have to bear the full consequences of that blunder? Because he simply, suddenly acted as though South Korea HAD always been part of this elastic defense perimeter and sent in troops, which would have made it unpatriotic for anyone to ask too many questions.
The real problem is, America can try to impose rational restraints on its own actions, but as soon as it sees some unpleasant consequence from this, the ignorant and paranoid public freaks out and demands action regardless of the cost. So no one can ever really be sure where our government stands on anything until it happens.
Crusaders = American presence. So thank you, Mr. Kristol, for proving that we Americans only have ourselves and our out-of-control ally to blame.
No, Israel is preparing US congressmen to protect Israel from the consequences of causing massive civilian casualties. That means there's a pretty good chance they're going to try it, like the last stupid invasion of Lebanon, which was clearly planned before two kidnapped GIs provided casus belli, or the storming of the Turkish aid ship. Or like America's invasion of Iraq. Casus belli is not what it used to be here in the world of rich white people with killer robots.
The thing that struck me from frontline reports of the most recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon was the lousy performance of the Israeli ground forces. But it fits on a trend line of declining performance, and that in turn fits an increasingly insular, fat, bourgeoise society that lives off of arms exports and real estate rackets. Therefore I can't imagine what their commanders could have done to improve matters beyond more rigorous training.
That leaves the air war. And that is very telling. This is nothing more than a society that bombs Arabs as a ritual of tribal supremacy, as proof that they "deserve" whatever they can seize. Every few years they will harvest another crop of dead Arabs on the unsaid yet sacred goal of breaking the Arab will, of getting Arabs to admit that they are a conquered race who must pay tribute to a superior civilization. They figure the Arabs who still have the manhood to fight back will expose themselves, and be quickly killed off, leaving an ever more compliant and weak gene pool.
But this stuff doesn't work anymore. It used to be that the rich and the conqueror out-reproduced their victims. But now it is the other way around, and the more wretched you are, the more future soldiers you have.
Thanks to Wikileaks for leaving us no place to hide when we lie to protect Israel's next war of social engineering. And thanks, Juan, for translating it into the original German.
Yusuf, I think you have a point, but you may be missing a greater evil: the story says that Moslem parents are buying trees because their kids don't want to be left out. Where did the kids hear of Christmas from? Corporate advertising, US media full of corporate-driven gift-giving, etc. The real religion of America is no longer Christianity, and its owners transformed Christmas into capitalism's high holy day long ago. Consider that the only reason Americans believe that Santa wears a red suit is that Coca-Cola incessantly put out Christmas ads throughout the 20th Century depicting him dressed in Coca-Cola red.
I don't have a problem with King supporting the IRA, which simply was fighting an alien conquerer race like the Palestinians have. I have a big problem with his certitude that white people have the right to resist conquest, and brown people have no right at all.
Try making him explain the difference between British colonization and Israeli colonization until his head explodes.
Hatred is not an illness.
Hatred is self-interest in search of a justification.
The illness, I think, is in what we choose to believe is in our self-interest. Once we've made the fateful decision that it's worth starving all the blacks to get a tax cut, or it's worth bombing all the Arabs to get cheap oil, it is supremely easy for us to come up with the most ridiculous moral justifications to do what we want. But our calculations of the secret benefits of our actions are complete nonsense, because we always act as though our murderous actions will have no consequence.
Which is odd, because if we were going to murder our spouses for the insurance money, the very first thing we would think of is how difficult it would be to avoid the consequences. Perhaps the act of wrapping such crimes in the cloak of patriotism or religion then blinds us to the need to subtract the cost of consequences from our greedy calculations. After all, once we commit ourselves to telling such lies, we tend to want to believe them, and if we're really benefitting God and Country, surely they will mystically empower us to get away with it.
Which is no crazier than believing that you can take out a home equity loan and buy a $60,000 truck because the value of your house will always rise. An awful lot of us fell for that one.
I've never understood the context of right-wing homophobia except as part of a larger obsession with population growth as a form of military power.
To illustrate this, consider three areas where early Christians disagreed with each other, but the rising Catholic hierarchy later imposed doctrine:
1. suicide
2. abortion
3. homosexuality
I can't get into it here, but these ideas, like the role of women in the church, were openly in play for the first century or two A.D. In every case, the hierarchy chose the path that would ensure the growth of its army of followers over both rival Christian groups and the pagan establishment it sought to overthrow. No suicide, no abortion, and only heterosexual sex meant plenty of babies and no one trying to defect to Heaven ahead of schedule.
It is not surprising that both Hitler and Stalin handed out medals to women who had lots of babies. Or that Romania was obsessed with baby-making. Or that there's a Christian extremist scheme called the "Quiverful" movement that pressures women fundamentalists into having more babies, ostensibly to overcome the Moslem hordes who are always depicted as multiplying like rats. Sarah Palin appears to be an actual adherent of this doctrine.
Amazing - the Quiverfuls have openly reduced a baby to an arrow, a weapon to be expended in war. A woman's womb is nothing but a barracks for future soldiers. This makes homosexuals a sort of pre-deserter, depriving America of the future legions it needs to "win" World War III, to say nothing of the patriarchal discipline those legions would require to wage such a suicidal struggle.
Okay, how about Pius XII = Nazi?
I haven't seen the report, but I would argue that if the conspiracy was organized for specifically religious reasons, then it would be fair to call it a conspiracy from that religion. So abortion clinic bombers pretty much automatically are Christian terrorists; it's only a matter of proving whether they are Catholic or Protestant conspiracies. Not all neoconservatives are Jews, and neocon schemes to strengthen Israel have nothing to do with the well-being of Jews worldwide, so I would call that a Zionist conspiracy, not a Jewish conspiracy. Obviously I don't think the Federal Reserve or organ harvesting have a specifically Jewish purpose.
But what is the corporatist end-game in estranging Americans further and further from the view of reality of the rest of the human race, on global warming, on the right to health care, on imperialism and American exceptionalism?
It seems that America gets a veto on the entire rest of the world. So if you can corrupt the American political process, you can in effect have your way with the entire planet. If Reagan cut taxes on corporations, then every country had to cut taxes on corporations. If America said that Iraq was a threat, everyone had to accept that it was not in fact waging an illegal war of aggression. The entire global capitalist class protects and eulogizes America to push ultra-capitalist policies on all governments regardless of the resulting destruction and chaos.
But what happens the day when America is proven wrong and everyone who isn't American understands that?
I think it will be like this: one day, when the ecological disasters become too big to deny, our owners will go on TV and tell Americans, "Yes, we lied about everything. But now the blood is on your hands too, and the world will demand reparations. So you have no choice but to obey us to the bitter end or lose the material goods that are all you value."
Question is, are the younger Israelis turning into Middle Easterners - or are they turning into fat, ignorant, bigoted, violent, gun-toting, greedy, McMansion-building, imperialist redneck Americans? Them and us, together holding the world at gunpoint just another day longer...
You're right - ultimately it will be our creditors who will decide the disposition of our empire. I can't figure out who Beijing will side with. Their obsession with supporting political stasis in the 3rd World would point to them backing Israel - so might the similarity of their colonization of Tibet and Sinkiang at the expense of their natives to the Zionist project. However, China wants the good will of the world to continue to expand its corporate empire at the expense of America's corporate empire, and less and less of the world backs Israel every day.
The answer to Louie's question is that people at this site would rather believe that our murderous bias against the basic right of the Palestinians to their own homes and farms is caused by the influence of a foreign lobby exploiting our guilt over the Holocaust, instead of the much more sickening possibility that we just choose the Whiter, more Yankee-like side in every conflict out of sheer bigotry.
I hope those people are right, too.
Or, they give religion an accurate name: reactionary self-justification. Which is why I gave up not only on Baptism but on Baptism's racist, greedy, war-loving God. I don't know where Hitchens got his beliefs, but once I began to doubt the fascistic absolutism that such a religion requires, I had no place to go but all the way to the other side to call it out as an evil.
"Men are selfish, greedy, insensitive and bigoted by nature."
And thus by nature they create biased belief systems to ennoble these behaviors. No one can be trusted. Even worse, when exceptional individuals like the Buddha or Jesus come along and try to reverse these evil belief systems, their prescriptions are quickly overcome by the hypocrisy of their followers. The more beautiful the vision of harmony and justice, the more brutal the betrayal, which is why Christ's followers have enslaved several continents and annihilated hundreds of native cultures.
Well, so much for any illusions among libertarians here that Alan Keyes = Ron Paul. Not that Keyes has ever or will ever gain traction among the base - ultimately, there is literally no black man in existence that they will ever trust as their tribal war chief. They do not worship war for the glory of America, but for a subset of America, and at the expense of all the other subsets.
So we're better off in a country where we violate the rights of SOME people because they fall outside the characteristics of the ruling elite and thus could include a percentage that has a grudge against that elite?
How would this debate be playing out if it were the aftermath of another white right-wing terrorist atttack? I can't imagine we will profile-search people who look like Timothy McVeigh in this country. Leaving the subtle suggestion that those are the Real Americans and that when they commit violence against the government, like Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment" measures, they are defending the true nation against the usurping servant races.
But then Tea Partiers would argue that fascism is statism, and that the poor misunderstood capitalists would not collaborate with fascism if the government had not been allowed to grow so powerful that it became necessary for their business interests to manipulate it. Because why should profit not be above the law, when all good Americans know that the law was created to protect "life, liberty and property" - not "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
As long as we start with the premise that property is prior to government, then it is impossible to construct any society that regards humans as equal citizens regardless of their wealth. Therefore fascism simply is one of many tools available for the rich to reach their desired end state - permanent enshrinement of their naturally-growing monopoly on all forms of power. Was, say, the feudal ruling class of medieval Europe private, government, or military in nature? Our far right would jump up and down and say those alien noblemen were "big government", but they in fact were fatcats who used their obligation to provide horses and arms to the common defense to obtain the reward of a monopoly on civil office. Halliburton and the mercenary corporations are working on their own road to that same end. If Hitler's party/militia was viewed as a private venture, then certainly his goal was feudalism.
Torture was as American as apple pie long before our time. That's why there were things like the Miranda rule. Torture was a routine practice for American cops in the past - but we ignore that sorry history now because, well, so many of the supposed threats they were fighting turned out either to be phantoms, or were assimilated into normal American politics by progressive victories.
But aren't we always told that America was "better" in the past?
I think the Tea Party thinks it is a mass movement. Any of their leaders - except the now-ignored Ron Paul - come out against military tribunals?
The plan is to build worship for the parallel system of military courts as being superior to the corrupted secular humanist civil courts, so that when they get the White House back, they can use it to eliminate the enemies that they really care about: you and me.
Who is going to judge God for the crimes committed in His name, then?
I think that the whining you describe is especially acute in those post-colonial states that aren't real nations to begin with. Pakistan is literally an abbreviation for its four regions, P, A, K and I (Indus = Sindh). Which I'm sure only works in English. It's as if British bureaucrats just dumped this zone on the appropriate colonial Army and said, "It's yours."