Archive for June, 2007
June 14th, 2007
By Phil Rockstroh
Recent news reports have revealed that the Bush Administration has bestowed upon itself the right to grant itself absolute power if “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions” might come to pass. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html
Actually, the hypothetical catastrophes stated above sound very much like the veritable calamities inflicted upon the nation by the Bush presidency itself. Worse, at present, many of our Democratic representatives are showing their outrage regarding the disastrous policies of the administration — by agitating to bomb Iran.
Regarding such circumstances, Eric Fromme warned, “the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it.” Ergo, we witness these collective pathologies play out in the perpetual aggression of American foreign policy, the exploitation inherent in our corporate workplaces, marketplaces, and healthcare practices and the exponentially expanding destruction of the environment.
How, then, can we begin to alter these seemingly ineluctable circumstances?
First off, don’t give the elites credit for being more intelligent than they are. Ruthlessness, striving and cunning should not be mistaken for intelligence. The only real accomplishment of the present day ruling class has been to transform their self-justifying lies into a form of performance art.
In reality, they have left private institutions bloated and public ones bankrupt. And left us, as a people, directionless and bereft of hope.
But that is not the totality of the situation: We must muse upon our own complicity in creating this cultural catastrophe. We’ve all been employed as landscapers on this blood-sodden deathscape.
At present, in our alienation and attendant passivity, our plight is analogous to that of so-called “crib babies,” those socially and emotionally arrested, orphaned children who were left to languish in indifferent institutions. Culturally, we seem devoid of the ability to respond to each other, to create a just society — or even envisage one.
Such is the extent of our alienation and it is reflected in the media clowns and confidence artists who comprise our (misnomer alert) leadership. We can produce slick, television-friendly self-promoters — i.e. Thompson and Obama — but we can’t rebuilt New Orleans or devise an exit strategy from Iraq.
Creating mass media is not tantamount to creating society. When we live in an era wherein image trumps reality, it follows that an infantilized populace will be transfixed by the shiny objects of media culture — that the tiny dramas of shallow celebrities will work like crib mobiles to distract us from the deep anguish of being a species standing before the crumbling edifice of paradigm collapse.
If media culture seems so unreal, it is because it is a reflection of our chronic alienation — our systemic disengagement from communal involvement; so profound is our alienation — not only from our environment — but also from our inner lives that we pose a danger to ourselves and others — which is, of course, the clinical criteria describing those unfortunate souls whose sanity has deteriorated to the point in which they require institutionalization.
Conversely, a populace being in possession of an inner life would prove a dangerous development to the one percent who hold ninety percent of the nation’s wealth — those who prosper from our alienation and its attendant apathy. It is a given these corrupt elitists will try to maintain our estrangement from our inner realities — because if we were to be roused to awareness insurrection would result.
Being internally colonized by consumerism, we have lost the ability to imagine meaningful change, because our inner lives are no longer our own. Benumbed by our complicity in corporate blanding, by means of ceaseless branding, our inner beings, rather than resembling a teeming, vital polis of meaningful engagement, now seem closer in resemblance to the cold florescent light-flooded shelves of off-the-interstate convenience stores. Impulse and shallow need — in other words — utter desperation — has usurped the deepening eros of communal engagement.
Hence, the thronging avenues of imagination, personal and collective, have been replaced by a soul-numbing proliferation of Starbucks and Banana Republic outlets that serve palliative remedies masking the pain of our powerlessness to alter the tragic trajectory of the times. All transpiring as the sky burns and Arctic glaciers melt into rising seas — and we’re driven to distract ourselves from descending dread by means of another latte buzz, shopping excursion, the unreality of Reality TV, and the pathetic pandering of a political class of shallow hacks who are themselves powerless before their Thanatotic addiction to power.
Such are the colic nightmares of us cultural crib babies. What comes of this degree of alienation? Violence (from shooting sprees to perpetual war). Addiction (from mindless consumerism to prisons overcrowded with drug users). Magical thinking (from neo-con fantasies of global dominance to Christian End Time hallucinations). Paranoia (The abiding delusion that little brown people cross our borders in order to take our jobs, force us to speak their language, and blow up our malls … after, of course, they’ve swept the floors and scrubbed the toilets). Depression (from wide-spread use of anti-depressants to the massive demoralization that reveals itself in pandemic levels of social apathy).
What if the media were to begin to chronicle this collective nervous breakdown? What if we became unable to avert our gaze from the tragedies of our time? What if we were induced to not only stare into the abyss — but were grabbed by the lapels by it?
Then, I suspect, our apathy would grow unpalatable. We’d choke on our fetid self-justifications; swallowing our rationalizations would prove about as appetizing as eating a foot-long hotdog inside a slaughterhouse.
At some point, try driving out into the American countryside (as I’ve spent the last six months doing). See for yourself the drought-desiccated Everglades and Okefanokee swamps ablaze, where clouds of smoke are enswathing the states of the Deep South like a death shroud. Walk through the splintered, toxic rubble of New Orleans. Although do not go to gawk, but to grieve — and rage –and then meditate on how we came, as a people, to abandon an entire American city. Then continue, as I did, down Interstate 10, onward through the concrete-encased, “heat dome” of the stripmall archipelago that is Houston; its ugly, ad hoc architecture glazed in the Greenhouse Gas-trapped infernos known as weather in Sun Belt cities. Then proceed out into the West Texas prairielands and approach the areas where enormous, industrial livestock holding pens and slaughterhouses are located. Places, where exploded-from-high-speed-impact carcasses of swarms of black flies stipple your windshield, where the reek of death cannot be masked, even if you possess a car-deodorizer the size of Arkansas.
In these places, you’ll find the reek of empire; as well as, the reason the people of the world have turned their faces away from us in revulsion. This stench permeates the air of our nation and clings to the fabric of our lives. Moreover, although George Bush is a veritable idiot savant in the art of creating the stench of death, our Little Prince of Putrefaction is not taking the reek back to Texas with him when we’re finally rid of him. No, it is our own essence now. Iconography-wise: Let’s lose the imagery of noble and lofty bald eagles: rotting road kill should be proclaimed our national animal.
Yes, we’re powerless before the enormity of the age — but we cross the line into complicity when we’re oblivious to our own individual stake in it. At this point, we can no longer afford the luxury of retreating to our comfort zones. Tears must scald our eyes; horrific visions should haunt our nights. The hour has come when we must wrestle with the demon of our own indifference who gains his sustenance and strength from the bribes, large and small, we accept from this death-sustained system.
Worse yet, our pathologies are embodied in our infant/tyrant leadership who throw global-wide tantrums of mass destruction because as a people we have forgotten how to give ourselves over to the eros of engaging the world by social and political involvement.
How do we begin to restore ourselves and reclaim our nation? — First, by remembering we’re alive — and that life is finite. The awareness of the urgency of the situation at hand will quicken one’s pulse and the demon will lessen its grip as one’s blood rises in mortification and outrage.
How will we know we are turning the tide? — When our listless sleepwalking gives way to participation mystique — to vivid, waking dreams of living flesh.
How will we know if we’re losing? — Simple: We will remain as we are, at present: bloodless, wane spirits imprisoned within our own clammy skin.
This is the archetypal criteria at the root of the mythic imagery of raising the dead: The simple realization that one is alive within life; that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization has ended; and that one’s individual dreams and longings — and even one’s flesh — are not exclusively our own, but are part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet.
Accordingly, there is neither an omnipresent, ever-watchful Sky Daddy divinity above nor a Risen Son savior proffering redemption, yet there is engagement (action and inspiration) within the vastness of the world — a redemption borne of risk that serves to re-animate a necrotic heart. In short, we so love the world we give ourselves to it.
To do so, it is imperative we begin unshackling ourselves from the noxious orthodoxies of church, state, political party, and corporation, as well as from our own narcissistic strivings within those hierarchies of vampires and wean ourselves from the petty perks we garner from group approval and institutional bribes.
Accordingly, the first step is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to reveal it in all its shabby-ass human glory — even if the implications of doing so are ugly — even if to do so will be to risk scorn in one’s personal life and reversals in one’s professional standing.
Years ago, I heard the tale of a fellow, a struggling artist, who had bought an old, dilapidated house. Upon moving in, he discovered the place was infested with cockroaches. Worse, the house sat close to railroad tracks and when trains trundled by, shaking the house, its floors, walls, and ceilings literally seethed with agitated cockroaches.
Since no amount of bug spray could lessen the massive infestation, the artist began zapping the bugs with glow-in-the-dark spray paint. Later, when friends dropped by in the evening and a train rumbled down the adjacent tracks, he would switch off the lights and all present were dazzled by the moving, organic mobile of scuttling, multi-colored lights he created.
At present, this is where we find ourselves as a people: powerless before the ugliness of the age. Therefore, we have little choice other than to light the ugliness up and turn the objects of our revulsion (personal and collective) into something resembling the truth of art.
What will we gain?
Only this: the enduring beauty of ugly truth — one of the few balms available within the agonies of a dark and ugly age.
June 14th, 2007
By: Joel S. Hirschhorn author of Delusional Democracy and Friends of the Article V Convention
The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll results vividly show a population incredibly dissatisfied with their nation’s political system. In other countries in other times such a depressing level of confidence in government would send a signal to those running the government that a major upheaval is imminent. But not here in the USA. Why?
First, here are the highlights of the poll that surveyed 1,008 adults from June 8-11, with a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
A whopping 68 percent think the country is on the wrong track. Just 19 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction - the lowest number on that question in nearly 15 years. And most of those with the positive view are probably in the Upper Class.
Bush’s approval rating is at just 29 percent, his lowest mark ever in the survey. Only 62 percent of Republicans approve, versus 32 percent who disapprove. Take Republicans out of the picture and a fifth or less of Americans have a positive view of Bush.
Even worse, only 23 percent approve of the job that Congress is doing. So much for that wonderful new Democratic control of Congress. Bipartisan incompetence is alive and well.
On the economic front, nearly twice as many people think the U.S. is more hurt than helped by the global economy (48 to 25 percent). Globalization does not spread wealth; it channels it to the wealthy, making billionaires out of millionaires.
I have long asserted that Americans live in a delusional democracy with delusional prosperity and these and loads of other data support this view. There is a super wealthy and politically powerful Upper Class that is literally raping the nation. Meanwhile, the huge Lower Class continues to lose economic ground while their elected representatives sell them out to benefit the Upper Class. Yet no rational person thinks that a large fraction of the population is ready to rise up in revolt against the evil status quo political-economic system that so clearly is not serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Why not?
For a nation that was built on a revolt against oppressive governance by the British, something has been lost from our political DNA. We apparently no longer have the gene for political rebellion. It has been bred out of most of us. And those of us that urge a Second American Revolution are seen as fringe, nutty subversives.
Part of the genius of our contemporary ruling class elites is that they have engineering a state of political and economic oppression that paradoxically is still embraced by the Lower Class. The rational way to understand this is that ordinary, oppressed Americans are in a deep psychological state of self-delusion. Despite all the empirical, objective evidence of a failed government, they fail to see rebellion opportunities. Many still believe they live in the world’s best democracy. But across all elections considerably less than half the citizens even bother to vote anymore. Yet, as the new NBC/Journal poll results show, people are cognitively aware of just how awful the political-economic system is. Yet they are not feeling enough pain to seriously consider rebellion. And it is visceral pain that must drive people to the daring act of rebellion.
Why is there insufficient pain for revolution? This is a deadly serious issue. What is historically unique about America is that even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are distracted by affordable materialism, entertainment, sports, gambling, and myriad other aspects of our frivolous, self-absorbed culture. Even failed school and health care systems do not drive people, paying enormous sums to fill up their SUVs, to rebellion. So, Americans are aware of their oppression, but the power elites have successfully drugged them with a plethora of pleasure-producing distractions sufficient to keep them under control. We are free to bitch, but too weak to revolt. The Internet has provided a release valve for some pent up anger and frustration. But it too has mostly become another source of distraction, rather than an effective tool for rebellion.
Though these new poll statistics make news, those in control of the political-economic system are not afraid that the population is on the verge of retaking their constitutionally guaranteed sovereign power and take back their nation. Thousands of people like me keep writing books and articles and creating protest groups and events. Those in power just find new, ingenious ways to keep the population distracted - if not through pleasure, then certainly through fear of terrorism. Growing economic insecurity also contributes to self-paralysis, as do never-ending political lies.
What a system.
Even as the population has growing awareness of the dire condition of their nation, the move by the politically powerful on the right and left continues to seek a new immigration law that will solidify the selling out of America. Business interests want more of those fleeing Mexico and other nations to keep wages low. Instead of Mexicans rising up in rebellion against their oppressive government and economic system they escape to the USA. But Americans have no such viable escape solution. Though global warming will certainly make Canada increasingly attractive.
So what do Americans have - other than a terribly bleak future? Where is hope in our dismal world?
In a bizarre twist of history that further illustrates just how impotent Americans have become, virtually all citizens are either unaware of or unreceptive to the ultimate escape route that the Framers of our Constitution gave us. They anticipated that Americans could become quite dissatisfied with the federal government. They feared that the political system could become incredibly corrupted by moneyed interests. They were right.
So here we sit over 200 years after our nation was created unwilling to use what is explicitly given to us in Article V of the Constitution - the option to have a convention outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court to make proposals for constitutional amendments. Do we really believe in the rule of law? If so, then we should understand that the supreme law of the land - what is in our Constitution - is the ultimate way to obtain the deep political and government reforms to restore true democracy and economic fairness to our society.
Make no mistake: an Article V convention has been stubbornly opposed by virtually all groups with political and economic power. This is most evidenced by the blatant refusal of Congress to obey the Constitution and give us an Article V convention, even though the single explicit requirement for a convention has been met. This fact alone should tell rational people that they are being screwed and oppressed. The rule of law is trumped by the rule of delusion. Our lawmakers are lawbreakers.
Come learn more about the effort to get an Article V convention at www.foavc.org and become a member. Do not keep witnessing the unraveling of American society, voting for lesser evil candidates, and believing the propaganda that putting different Democrats or Republicans in office will actually improve things for most of us. Choose peaceful rebellion by using what our Constitution gives us. Fight self-delusion.
June 11th, 2007
By Rowan Wolf
While I doubt that the United States was ever quite the “Light on the Hill” as romanticized, we did once stand for some things that were worth being proud of. There were times when - even in war - we held ourselves to an ethical standard that was respected. During World War II, German soldiers had no fear of surrendering to U.S. troops, because they knew they would be well treated. How did the U.S. turn into some version of Mordor with the “light” now the “eye of Sauron?”
image found at http://vwt.d2g.com:8081/15-Mordor.jpg
Who would have thought that the United States would stoops so low that an ally - Italy - would
try 26 Americans for kidnap and torture? Italy is trying 26 people from the CIA, and six Italians for the kidnapping of Abu Omar - a Muslim cleric from Italy. The U.S. will not turn over the Americans to Italian authorities, so they are being tried in absentia. The trial is focused on the Bush’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dick Marty’s report for the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights - Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report - has been released (6/07/07). The 72 page report pulls no punches on the United States rendition program, nor on the CIA’s international prison system. It starts bluntly enough:
“1. What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges leveled against them and without any judicial oversight - denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.
2. Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where
they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”
(essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however
unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought. After the suffering they went through, they were released without a word of apology or any compensation - with one remarkable exception owing to the ethical and responsible approach of the Canadian authorities - and also have to put up with the opprobrium of doubts surrounding their innocence and, right here in Europe, racist harassment fuelled by certain media outlets. These are the terrible consequences of what in some quarters is called the “war on terror.”"
Welcome to the neoconservatives’s America. Where once we stood for freedom and justice, we now stand for preemptive war, torture, and ghost prisoners. The new United States requires a debate on the Senate floor over whether to reinstate Habeas Corpus - the right upon which all other Constitutional rights rest. Of course, one has to wonder about allowing it to be removed to start with.
While Guantanamo has raised outrage with the holding of people indefinitely, “military tribunals,” secret evidence, and the full intention to imprison people potentially for life, at least some pressure can be brought to bear. But when you have secret prisons with people kidnapped, and disappeared … what have we allowed ourselves to become?
It seems the United States has become a rogue state. It was not enough to be an empire - it had to be an evil empire. Of course that evil is not just directed outward. Our own Constitution has been ripped to shreds while the remnants of infrastructure have either been hollowed out, or converted to corporate hand maidens. Meanwhile, the seeds of the next imperial surge are being laid - the placement of political hacks across the civil service and even in the Department of Justice. Hacks whose only qualification is a sworn allegiance to Bush and the neoconservative cause.
The Bush cabal, and the elite they represent, know that they are likely to lose the White House in 2008. In fact, they probably hope to head for the shadows while the fallout of the nuking of democracy and the economy falls on the heads of the Democrats. Then, they will swoop back in with players already in place for the ongoing stripping of whatever bones of the U.S. remain.
The question remains whether the people of the United States have the will to really become the Light on the Hill, or if they are willing to accept living and dying for Mordor.
Articles of Interest
First CIA rendition trial opens
CIA jails in Europe ‘confirmed’
The war on terror: Inside the dark world of rendition
Report Gives Details on CIA Prisons
June 8th, 2007
By Rowan Wolf
Iraq is teetering on the edge, but this one is not into civil war. Iraq could find itself at war with Turkey. It is stunning to imagine that a nation in name only; with (reportedly) fewer than 10,000 soldiers “combat capable;” living under a foreign occupation and an increasingly bloody struggle for power; could find itself having to defend its “sovereignty” against Turkey.
The issue is the increasingly open conflict between Iraqi Kurds and Turkey. Turkey has a long history of conflict with the Kurds, and has been adamant about not allowing a Kurdish state on their border… and that Kurdish state has been a threat since the U.S. made an alliance with the Kurds prior to invasion and overthrow of Hussain.
Things have been getting increasingly hot on the Iraq-Turkey border. Tensions marked by threats and cross border raids, and recent shelling by Turkey (which are largely being officially denied). However, there is no denying the increasing tension, and Kurdish refusal of Turkey’s demands to stop the PKK - a labeled terrorist organization - from its alleged attacks inside Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has stated that he would not stand in the way of a military request to attack across the border:
“Today a foreign news agency announced that Turkey was involved in an over-the-border operation. Later, these reports were denied. What is it that is desired with these sorts of reports? If actions based in northern Iraq and aimed at our country don’t make us uncomfortable, who will they make uncomfortable? There is no argument between our administration and the military’s General Staff on this front. If there are to be over-the-border operation steps taken, we will first enter into talks with our security forces, and then it will be carried to the Parliament. If a request comes from the armed forces, we will not stand in front of them. What the time comes, we will do what is needed.”
As I noted in my May 5, 2007 article Of Surges and Purges, open conflict - even war - between the Kurds and Turkey would place the United States in a very bad position. Two allies of the US essentially at war with each other, with the United States essentially pledged to protect Iraq, could result in the U.S. at war with Turkey.
While the sore point with Turkey are with the Kurds, the Kurds are in Iraq and part of the Iraqi government. An attack on the Kurds by another nation is an attack on Iraq. It seems unlikely (and perhaps in the long term unwise) to act as if such conflict is “regional” rather than national.
Utilizing a convoluted and callous logic, open conflict between Iraq and Turkey could serve multiple purposes. For Turkey, which is facing a political crisis in a power match between secular and religious tug of war for political power, a “war” might serve as a unifying action. Ironically, the same might be true with Iraq. While, the Kurds have been separate for some time from the rest of Iraq, they are part of Iraq. An invasion of northern Iraq could be a rallying and unifying point for Iraqis. It might also be a blessing to the U.S. occupation as Turkey could be labeled as the “invader” rather than U.S. forces. Of course, that might damage any alliance between the U.S. and Turkey.
Despite the fact of a long U.S. - Iraqi Kurd alliance, the U.S. has historically been willing to look the other way regarding attacks from Turkey. Under the long sanctions that were placed on Iraq, the United States implemented the northern “No-fly zone.”* While the Northern No-Fly Zone protected the Kurdish area from Hussain, those protections were periodically withdrawn so the Turkish Air Force could make bombing runs into northern Iraq.**
The fact that Turkey has been accepted to candidacy to membership in the European Union may prove a double-edged sword. Would the EU feel somewhat bound to back Turkey in such a conflict, or would it distance itself? There has already been some distancing of the EU from Turkey because of the political turmoil in Turkey.
Given that part of the EU has supported the U.S. invasion and occupation (most strongly Britain and Poland) would Turkish military action against Iraq pose a further challenge to a sometimes contentious European Union?
Certainly, the ongoing conflict between the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey is yet one more instability in a region that is becoming increasingly unstable. It is not a desirable development to have that expand into “formal” military action. Such conflict, even at its present level, is thorn in the foot of stability in Iraq.
* Contrary to rhetoric, the no-fly zones did not have UN approval, and were not part of UN sanctions.
** This information from a personal military source who was part of that operation.
June 6th, 2007
By Joel Hirschhorn
There are numerous reasons to admire you, as I have for many years. Clearly you are running for president as a Republican, rather than a third party candidate, for the purpose of getting richly deserved media and public attention not available to those outside the two-party duopoly. In last night’s debate among Republican presidential candidates you proudly described yourself as a “champion of the Constitution.” However, you are missing a major opportunity to demonstrate your courage and allegiance to our constitutional republic.
You have acknowledged the appropriateness of amending the Constitution. In fact, you introduced legislation for an amendment that would stop giving automatic citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents. You said: “Our founders knew that unforeseen problems with our system of government would arise, and that’s precisely why they gave us a method for amending the Constitution. It’s time to rethink birthright citizenship by amending the 14th amendment.”
Personally, I endorse this particular amendment. More important, however, I am disappointed that you have never latched on to the long history of Congress’ failure to honor and obey the part of Article V of the Constitution that gives Americans the right to a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution - an alternative to Congress proposing amendments. Interestingly, the particular amendment that you favor will probably never emerge from Congress, but might have a better chance through an Article V convention.
Why have you failed to acknowledge that Congress has ignored over 500 applications from state legislatures from all 50 states for an Article V convention? As a champion of the Constitution, surely you know that the one and only requirement explicitly stated in Article V is that two-thirds of state legislatures ask for one. And surely you know that Congress has never passed any law that expands or modifies this single explicit constitutional requirement. So, I ask you Congressman Paul: Why have you remained silent on the Article V issue?
If you do not believe that Congress should honor Article V’s provision for a convention, why not say so publicly? If you believe that it should never be used, then why not call for an amendment to delete it from our Constitution?
Please Congressman Paul, as a champion of the Constitution, do not behave like other members of Congress and silently veto a crucial part of the Constitution that the Framers wisely gave us. They anticipated that eventually Americans could lose confidence in the federal government. You clearly have earned the respect and support of millions of Americans because you object to so many policies and actions of the federal government. Thus, you, more than virtually any other member of Congress, should appreciate the wisdom of the Framers in giving us the Article V convention option.
I beg you to speak up and demonstrate just how much of a champion of the Constitution you really are by bringing national attention to the Article V convention issue and supporting its use. As a founder of Friends of the Article V Convention I invite you to play a leading role in giving the United States of America its first Article V convention.
[The author had the pleasure of a private meeting with Congressman Paul about a year ago to discuss his book Delusional Democracy - Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government: www.delusionaldemocracy.com. He serves as National Press Secretary of Friends of the Article V Convention: www.foavc.org.]
June 6th, 2007
By Anwaar Hussain of TruthSpring
The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
President Bush is in Europe flaunting, in a hard sell pitch, his brand of democracy to the world at large and to Russia in particular. He is known to have said: “We believe that the voice of the people ought to be determining policy, because we believe in democracy.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is as fallacious a statement as any that the President of United States has been giving since he took over the reins of his great country. Fallacious too because the American President is selling a product that America does not have.
Granted that we in the Muslim countries have not much idea of the fruits of democracy, having been perpetually ruled by kings, despots, generals, tyrants, autocrats and dictators of all hues. Granted too the fact that no democracy is perfect and at any given time it is either getting better or getting worse, yet the President’s statement is a wholly fallacious one. Fallacious because despite calling itself ‘the champion of democracy’, internally, the U.S. has hardly ever had a direct democracy where American people determine American policy, the true essence of democracy, and externally, it has a long and sordid record of closely coddling mambas like Pol Pots, Marcoses and Zias of the yore. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because corporate corruption of American politicians and government has shredded to bits whatever semblance of democracy America was left with. Fallacious too because instead of having democracy in the decision making institutions of America it is rather the fine art of corporate corruption that now stands democratized and institutionalized with all now having a chance at equal opportunity corruption. All it takes is money. Corporate corruption in America is now at a stage where it has become a bipartisan, open, and legal practice with Americans finally coming to accept it as a status quo, an integral part of a dollar-driven, cheating culture. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because it is now plain for all to see that misrepresentative government and corporatism has oppressed American citizenry to the extent that their democracy has become nothing more than a corporate theocracy, a fascist feudal state in which “the serfs” serve the corporate state as voiceless workers, voracious consumers, submissive citizens and pliant subjects. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because the immoral alliance that he and his predecessors have been having with dictators the world over runs exactly counter to the false pledges of democracy to their subjects. Fallacious too because those who cosset ruling tyrants cannot advocate for themselves the exclusive privilege of bringing democracy to the oppressed. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because despite the fact that for all his internal and foreign misadventures, from social issues to Iraq war, the support of American masses having decidedly moved from a trusting to a distrusting majority, he presses on stubbornly. Fallacious because while clinging doggedly to his disastrous policies, he is known to have called himself ‘the decider’ on more than one occasion. Fallacious too because despite the aforementioned fact, there is not one single institution in that ‘mother of all democracies’ that can help loosen the death like grip of the yellow fangs of his administration from the jugular of its unfortunate victims. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because contrary to its democratic plumage, his own party’s strategy is now out in the open. And that is a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. Fallacious too because the severely mauled, but still breathing, democratic opposition has so far miserably failed to nip in the bud this wicked vision of a one-party global empire. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because he has had real laws passed at home that have torn bomb-size holes in the Bill of Rights, set into motion an actual shift of American judiciary toward the radical right and has so fused his government with corporations, the military, portions of the media and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus that now it scares the living daylights out of common Americans. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because the world can see his quisling lackeys overseeing his experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq about to roll in dust and his ally in Pakistan looking with stunning disbelief at the shifting sands of national opinion beneath his feet. Fallacious too because had his vision of democracy bore even a scrap of resemblance to the original idea, his friends in these countries would have been elevated to prophet hood by the innocent masses of these countries. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because we the world can see that for us at least, American democracy has boiled down to nothing more than that of a lynch mob who vote on the fate of their victims even as the rope is being readied to carry out the inevitable verdict. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because American democracy is not only not a democracy; it is in fact the exact opposite…a ‘minocracy’. He is trying to sell to the world a system in which if only 60% of the people bother to cast their vote, in a majority system with two parties, 31% of the electorate can impose its will on the remaining 69%; and with three parties competing, 21% of the people could rule a country through an appointed elite. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
The President’s statement is fallacious because American democracy has actually translated itself into vesting the incredible amount of the power of the President of United States into a mediocrity like the incumbent President with disastrous results for America and the world at large. Fallacious because mediocrity has now become the rule and unlimited irresponsibility one of the privileges associated with his kind of totalitarian democracy. Fallacious too because with the justification of a popular mandate, a third-rate politician has been given the licence to squander resources and bringing chaos into the world without the fear of being held accountable for it. The American President is selling a product that America does not have.
Some democracy, America.
Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain
June 6th, 2007
By Rowan Wolf
Hold onto your hats folks. Gas prices could skyrocket shortly due to cyclone Gonu which is hitting Oman and heading into Gulf of Oman. This could have a significant effect on oil fields, production facilities and shipping. There is an extensive discussion at the Oil Drum at this link and the most recent thread at this link. I will try to summarize the high points.
Gonu has hit Oman and is heading on into the Gulf. The reports range from this being the most powerful storm to hit Oman in 60 years, to reports that no cyclone has ever entered the Gulf of Oman. Storm surges of 10-15 feet are expected to hit the coast of Iran. This will definitely impact shipping in the region - even oil shipping.
According to Oil Drum, Oman produces 774,000 bbl/day, and their operations could be impacted for 30 days or more. Combined with other likely impacts in the Gulf of Oman, there could be a drastic reduction in oil movement out of the region.
The image below - Courtesy of Wired News, looks at reasonably current gas prices around the world.
By Rowan Wolf
You can visit the Hurricane tracking center to see the updated path and impact of Gonu. It is about 3/4 down the page. and then look at the USGS Interactive Map of Geology, Oil and Gas Fields of the Geological Provinces of the Arabian Peninsula.
Given that the world is running on less than a 2% margin of supply and demand on oil, even an insignificant disruption could hit hard. If the Oil Drum estimates of at least a 30 day disruption in Oman happen, then threats of $4 a gallon gasoline prices in the US this summer could easily increase by 15-20%. That would put us closer to $5 a gallon than four.
Thanks to the folks at The Oil Drum for the extensive information.
June 4th, 2007
By Jason Miller
Jonah Goldberg is the living, breathing embodiment of virtually all that is pernicious in the malignant socioeconomic and political structures collectively known as the American Empire. Yet tragically, this scheming sycophant to the cynical, privileged criminals of the US plutocracy reaches countless millions through myriad corporate media conduits as he weaves his sophistic arguments supporting nearly every morally repulsive aspect of United States foreign policy.
Rising to his position amongst the US mainstream punditry elite through vigorous and shameless self-promotion based on his mother’s involvement in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, young Jonah quickly learned our culture’s ferocious appetite for the sordid, the lurid, and all that validates our collective pathological narcissism euphemistically called the American Dream. To this day, he skillfully crafts malevolent agitprop to convince and reassure us here in the United States that it is our unconditional right to murder, exploit, invade, and oppress as we preserve and advance the “American Way.”
To get a sense of the extent of his reach and his penchant for promoting himself, take a gander at the bio sketch he penned for himself. (This appears at National Review Online):
“Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online for which he writes his thrice-weekly column “The Goldberg File” and a contributing editor to National Review. Goldberg also writes a nationally syndicated column distributed by Tribune Media Services, which appears often such newspapers as the Kansas City Star, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Times, the Orlando Sentinel, San Francisco Chronicle, the Manchester Union Leader, and others. He also writes a regular media criticism column for The American Enterprise magazine. Mr. Goldberg was a contributing editor and columnist for the now-defunct Brill’s Content.
Mr. Goldberg is also a CNN contributor and regular panelist on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. He is an occasional guest-host on Crossfire and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs.
Since Mr. Goldberg became editor of National Review Online, it rapidly become one of the dominant players in web journalism, earning high praise from The Columbia Journalism Review, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. The New York Press concluded that National Review Online is “by far the best political online operation going today.”
Jonah Goldberg is a former television producer who has credits in a wide range of productions. He was the senior producer of Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, the award-winning public-affairs program and he has written and produced two PBS documentaries. Prior to his work in television Mr. Goldberg was a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. An award-winning journalist, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Worth, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, The Weekly Standard, the New York Post, Reason, The Women’s Quarterly, The New Criterion, Food and Wine, The Street.com, and Slate.”
It is a tragic indictment of our so-called “Fourth Estate” that an enabler of egregious war crimes enjoys such a massive megaphone through which to shout his virulent lies.
Consider this assessment of Goldberg by Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, a preeminent expert on the Middle East:
“Extremist rightwing hawks like Jonah Goldberg used their privileged position as pundits to terrify the US public that Iraq was a threat to the US. He repeatedly said in the buildup to the war that Iraq was a menace to the US, and he repeatedly brought up North Korea’s nuclear weapons as a reason for a preemptive attack on Iraq.
Iraq never has had nuclear weapons. Iraq never has been as close as two decades from having nuclear weapons. Iraq dismantled all vestiges of its rudimentary and exploratory nuclear weapons research in 1991. Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 1992, 1993 and all the way until 2002, when Jonah Goldberg assured us Americans that we absolutely had to invade Iraq to stop it from imminently becoming a nuclear power just like North Korea….
Jonah Goldberg is a fearmonger, a warmonger, and a demagogue. And besides, he was just plain wrong about one of the more important foreign policy issues to face the United States in the past half-century. It is shameful that he dares show his face in public, much less continuing to pontificate about his profound knowledge of just what Iraq is like and what needs to be done about Iraq and the significance of events in Iraq.”(1)
*Now that we have some background on Jonah, let’s subject some of his writings to critical scrutiny:
On 12/15/06, Goldberg opined in “Iraq Needs a Pinochet”:
“I think all intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro…
Now consider Chile. Gen. Pinochet seized a country coming apart at the seams. He too clamped down on civil liberties and the press. He too dispatched souls. Chile’s official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87 percent of them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country.
But on the plus side, Pinochet’s abuses helped create a civil society. Once the initial bloodshed subsided, Chile was no prison. Pinochet built up democratic institutions and infrastructure. And by implementing free-market reforms, he lifted the Chilean people out of poverty. In 1988, he held a referendum and stepped down when the people voted him out. Yes, he feathered his nest from the treasury and took measures to protect himself from his enemies. His list of sins — both venal and moral — is long. But today Chile is a thriving, healthy democracy. Its economy is the envy of Latin America, and its literacy and infant mortality rates are impressive.”
Here Mr. Goldberg crests the summit of the Everest of American hubris. Pinochet was the United States’ instrument to advance the “noble” agenda of free market ideology. Under the guidance of Henry Kissinger (an unindicted war criminal), the CIA and ITT (a major US corporation with significant business interests in Chile) carefully orchestrated the coup (including the assasination of the popularly elected leftist, Salvador Allende) which brought Augusto Pinochet to power.
Interesting that Jonah boasts that Pinochet “built up democratic institutions” when Augusto himself once quipped, “Democracy is the breeding ground of communism.”
Since communism is anathema to Goldberg and his ilk, Jonah would need to exhaust himself with mental gymnastics to overcome the gross inconsistency between Pinochet’s alleged accomplishments on behalf of democracy and Augusto’s belief that democracy bred communism.
Even if our master prevaricator managed to overcome such a hurdle, how could he hope to resolve the glaring contradictions created by attributing the proliferation of “democracy” to an autocrat installed by the CIA through assassinating a leader elected by the people of a sovereign nation?
To justify and rationalize the perpetual imperialism necessary to satisfy capitalism’s insatiable demand for new markets, cheaper labor, and inexpensive raw materials, the United States needs adept professional liars like Jonah. His apologia for Pinochet, a tyrant who had been charged with over 300 crimes (including egregious human rights abuses and massive embezzlement) before he died in 2006, demonstrates Goldberg’s unswerving allegiance to the cause of the moneyed elite.
Penned in October of 2001, Mr. Goldberg’s “Time to Return to Colonialism?” offers a particularly revealing look at the nature of his character and his agenda:
“SUDDENLY, serious people are rethinking an old idea that’s time has come again: colonialism.
For years, colonialism has been discredited. It was considered racist on the left to point out that many people lived better and more productive lives under, say, British rule than they have without it (Belgian rule is another story)….
…. But Americans may be willing to listen to a serious argument for American Empire. And now we have it. Max Boot, the features editor of The Wall Street Journal, has written a cogent and measured essay in the Oct. 15 issue of The Weekly Standard explaining that our problems abroad don’t stem from too much American “imperialism,” but too little.
Boot runs through the litany of American foreign policy failures in the last decade and, uniformly, he finds our mistakes stemmed not from an arrogance of power, but from a reluctance to use it.”
Who are these “serious people” who are “rethinking an old idea that’s time has come again?” They are obviously seriously deranged reactionaries if they truly desire a return to colonialism. Jonah’s attempt to repackage and revitalize Kipling’s “White Man’s burden” is the height of arrogance and reeks of racism and totalitarianism.
Sorry Jonah, but the incredibly sorry state of affairs in much of post-colonial Africa, the murder of 600,000 Filipinos, the slaughter of 3 million Vietnamese, and the annihilation of 600,000 plus Iraqis are but a handful of many poignant examples which demonstrate the abject immorality of colonialism and reveal the fact that ultimately, human beings are willing to kill and die before sacrificing their sovereignty to a brutal oppressor.
Jonah, most of us are now living in the Twenty First Century. Join us.
Goldberg delivered a gem in December of 2006 when he sang the praises of a malefactor of monumental proportions in “Jerry Ford’s Magic”:
“And now we have dear, sweet Jerry Ford. Everybody, it seems, loves Ford. Ted Kennedy even gave him a Profile in Courage Award a few years ago. But there’s an interesting difference. Ford was Tito Puente-ized early. His decision to pardon Richard Nixon — the courageous act for which he later got his Profile award — elicited enormous criticism and, some argue, cost him the election in 1976. But he quickly rebounded and was never hated the way Reagan, Goldwater or Nixon were…
….But Ford’s legacy is more important than the maneuvering of ideological partisans. Politics is about moments. The American people in 1974 yearned for a respite from the ideological clamor of the previous decade. Ford, by the sheer force of his own character, turned the Oval Office into the calm eye of a storm the American people had grown all too weary of.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan said Ford was the most decent man in politics he’d ever met. Ford’s ‘luminous affability,’ in the words of the National Review, ‘enabled him to unite the country instantly, magically, in a way that would have been impossible for the (men) who had been lining up for the job. … This accidental President was exactly — for the moment — the right man.’
Considering the ideological clamor of the current moment, it’s tempting to ask who the right man, or woman, today might be.”
“Dear, sweet Jerry Ford” pardoned a man who ordered secret, illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia that liquidated 600,000 human beings. How about we give him a posthumous “Profile in Cowardly Participation in Mass Murder Award”?
Let’s not forget that Ford and Kissinger also green-lighted and supported Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, which resulted in the slaughter of 200,000 innocent people.
Jonah reveals his true agenda behind his sickening hosannas for Ford, an abject war criminal, when he asserts that “it’s tempting to ask who the right man, or woman might be” to give us a “respite” from the “ideological clamor of the current moment.” Who indeed, Mr. Goldberg, will rise up to provide cover for the current crop of malefactors in DC and prevent a mass revolt against your precious establishment, which has been rotten to its very core for years?
Jonah scribbled, “What Protestors Don’t Get: Globalization=More Democracy,” in February, 2002:
“For example, if multinational corporations threaten democracy, how come the number of democracies grew simultaneously with the rise of the multinational corporation? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date for when the “multinational corporation” or “globalization” began, but over the last 30 years we’ve been told that democracy is increasingly threatened by these diabolical forces. The funny thing is, the number of democracies has been rising, with occasional fluctuations, pretty much nonstop.”
Obviously Mr. Goldberg has a unique vision of what democracy entails. Where are these democracies about which he raves? Would Chile under the Pinochet regime have qualified as one? We don’t even have a democracy in the United States. In fact, there is very little left of the constitutional republic which existed before the evisceration of our Constitution.
Corporations, spawned by a rapacious economic system driven by selfishness and greed, are structured as tyrannies. Given the fact that oligarchic corporations wield such immense power in the United States, and throughout the world, it is lunacy to assert that “the number of democracies has been rising” in conjunction with the proliferation of corporate influence. Unfortunately for Jonah, a whole comprised of totalitarian parts cannot be a democracy. Unless of course one subscribes to Goldberg’s nonsense and defines a plutocratic imperial power and its neo-colonies as democracies.
In August of 2001, Jonah graced us with “Americans Wouldn’t Tolerate Terrorism at Home”:
“In fact, it’s worse than that because Israel never intends to kill innocents. When terrorists kill Israeli civilians, Israelis attack terrorist strongholds, military targets and bomb-making infrastructures.
Sometimes, they’ve even used rubber bullets. But even when the “payback” is unambiguously severe, it is always delivered to grown-up, declared combatants. Hence, when Palestinian innocents die it is virtually always an unfortunate byproduct of Israeli action. When Palestinians kill, innocents are the target.”
The more one reads his work, the more apparent it becomes that Goldberg’s objective is to vindicate as many ruthless oppressors as his seemingly infinite capacity to lie will allow.
According to information updated on May 31, 2007 at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/, since September of 2000 Israel has killed 934 Palestinian children while Palestinians have killed 118 Israeli children. A total of 4,098 Palestinians and 1,021 Israelis have died in the conflict over the last seven years. Over 31,000 Palestinians have suffered injuries; only 7,600 Israelis have been wounded. The United States subsidizes Israel to the tune of over $7 million per day while giving the Palestinians nothing. Israel has been targeted by 65 UN resolutions (each of which, being the rogue state that it is, it has ignored). The Palestinians have not been censured by the UN once. Israel is holding over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners and the Palestinians hold one Israeli captive. While Israel has demolished over 4,000 Palestinian homes, the Palestinians have razed zero Israeli houses.
“…Israel never intends to kill innocents.” Do you think the family members of those innocents that Israel has killed at a 4:1 ratio give a dam about the intent of the IDF, Jonah?
Israelis pack a wallop with those “rubber bullets,” don’t they, Mr. Goldberg?
What Goldberg fails to reveal in his commentary is that the “Israeli action” which causes innocent Palestinians to die as an “unfortunate byproduct” represents the implementation of the ultimate Zionist objective, which is to eradicate Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank through oppression, economic strangulation, and, when they can get away with it, direct military action.
As for the wounded and dead Israeli civilians, they are the tragic victims of retail terror carried out in response to the wholesale terror waged by their government and that of the United States.
“Wanted: An Iranian Saddam” from January of 2006 offers quite an impressive display of mental contortions and truth distortions, even for one as ethically limber as Jonah Goldberg:
“Conventional wisdom holds that there are really only two options for dealing with Iran: military strikes (by us or Israel) or the usual bundle of conferences, ineffective sanctions and windy UN speeches that lead to nothing….
But there is a third option that, alas, has become less and less likely in recent years: regime change from within. Pro-democracy — or at least anti-mullah — sentiment has been building in Iran for over a decade. In recent years there have been huge protests against the regime. Soccer stadiums full of Iranians have chanted “USA! USA!” In 2004, polls of various sorts indicated that anti-regime attitudes were held by up to nine out of 10 Iranians.
Iranians are a proud, nationalistic people and would probably rally around their government — or any government — were it threatened from without. That’s one reason Ahmadinejad has been rattling his sabers so much lately: It’s an attempt to bolster his unpopular regime.
A coup by sophisticated and serious members of the military would be great news. Even better would be a popular uprising. And best of all would be a combination of the two.
An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East. That would go a long way toward guaranteeing success in Iraq and would neutralize the threat of the Iran’s nuclear ambitions, even if they decided to pursue a bomb. After all, the argument about nuclear weapons is no different than the argument about guns. The threat is from the people who have them, not from the weapons themselves. Lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs.”
Writing from an ahistorical perspective so typical of the corporate media in the US, as Jonah laments that the “third option” of “regime change” is becoming “less likely,” he neglects to remind readers that the United States has been there and done that in Iran. In 1953 the CIA installed the Shah to replace Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. (Mossadegh, elected by the people to serve in parliament and by parliament to become prime minister, had exhibited the audacity to nationalize the oil industry to prevent US ally, Great Britain, from reaping nearly all the profits from Iran’s petroleum.)
By 1976, the Shah’s rule had evolved into such a brutal tyranny that Amnesty International declared that Iran had, “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”
It was the blatant US violation of Iranian sovereignty that catalyzed the 1979 revolution, hostage crisis, and subsequent formation of an Islamic government, a government which remains understandably hostile to Western intervention in its affairs. “Regime change” worked so well the first time. Why not try again, eh Jonah?
“An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East.” Wow! Jonah veered way outside the parameters of rational thought with that bizarre conclusion. “Old style military dictatorships” and “democratic institutions” are components of antithetical political structures. His column on Pinochet and this piece seem to indicate that Mr. Goldberg suffers from the delusion that the two can somehow coexist. Or perhaps he simply regards the intellect of his readers with such contempt that he thinks they will swallow his nonsense.
As for his assertion that, “lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs,” George Bush has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet at his disposal. If Jonah’s statement is true, we have tremendous cause for concern.
As nauseatingly opportunistic as his mother, Lucianne Goldberg, a woman who spied on George McGovern for Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign and advised Linda Tripp to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinsky, Jonah has few peers in the punditocracy who can match his mendaciousness or the degree to which he has prostituted himself.
May his readers, listeners and viewers recognize that he is nothing more than a shill for exploitative imperialists who impose their will on the world through acts of economic extortion and wholesale terror.
Further, let us hope that one day he reaps the bitter harvest of the noxious seeds he so eagerly sows.
Notes:
* As Jonah has so proudly informed us, his agitprop appears in numerous media outlets, but the source for each of the excerpts in this analysis was the online version of the Jewish World Review.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jonah_Goldberg
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (https://bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at https://bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at
June 3rd, 2007
By Rowan Wolf
Unless you have ardently avoided the news this weekend, you know that an alleged plot to blow up the jet fuel pipelines at JFK Airport was broken up this weekend. The story, and the likely scale of the threat, get more and more interesting.
The pundits seem to believe that the damage would likely have been limited. For example, the 40 mile stretch of the pipelines would likely not have blown up in the explosion. Certainly, a major explosion at JFK would be disastrous.
The plot was that - a plot. Though from the news reports one would have thought they were caught lighting the fuse. It remains to be seen whether this was any more serious than the plot by the guys from Florida.
The real surprise is that one of the “plotters” (Russell Defreitas, a US citizen and native of Guyana) purportedly worked for Evergreen Eagle - a cargo handling branch of Evergreen Aviation. Living in Oregon, this angle is being repeated on every local news report.
If Evergreen Aviation rings a bell, it is likely because it has long ties to the CIA. While some have reported that Evergreen is a front business for the CIA, one thing that is relatively solid is that the CIA has utilized Evergreen for covert operations.
The revelation that the investigation has uncovered that of one of the “plotters” was linked back to Evergreen raises a number of questions. So was Defreitas really a plotter, or was he an informant? Was there really a legitimate plot, or was this an effort to bring potential “plotters” out of the woodwork? Was the whole thing a whole cloth fabrication?
The odds are we won’t know for quite some time - if at all. Any of the above possibilities seem as likely as Defreitas somehow slipping under the radar of the CIA.
Other Front Company Information
Namebase Evergreen International Aviation
CIA Front Companies
totse.com CIA Front Companies
June 1st, 2007
By: Carolyn Baker of Speaking Truth to Power
…that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy. — “The Glass Menagerie”, by Tennessee Williams
William Faulkner famously stated that “good history is not was.” By this Faulkner meant that history is a tapestry of interconnected events whose meaning and significance cannot be appreciated unless past causes, present manifestation, and future consequences are assessed. Robert S. McElvaine, author of The Great Depression, America 1929-1941, provides us with the kind of tapestry to which Faulkner was alluding as McElvaine analyzes the first momentous collapse that the United States ever experienced.
I was recently gifted with this book by a friend who thought that as an historian, I would appreciate it and find it timely, and certainly I do, but due to current events and how rapidly they are unfolding, my comments about it here will not be from an academic perspective. I am much less interested in the quality of history in McElvaine’s book, although I find it first-rate, and more interested in the values the author is emphasizing and that the Great Depression manifested among the masses of American people. You might say that I have been touched by and wish to share the soul of this book, more than its intellect. For that reason, I choose to describe this article as a commentary rather than a review of the book.
One cannot thoroughly appreciate the catastrophic nature of the Great Depression without understanding what preceded it. The decade of the 1920s, not unlike the economic milieu of the 1980s and 90s, was a time of dizzying, unrestrained, and frantic consumption. It was the apotheosis of the “conspicuous consumption” about which Thorsten Veblen wrote in his turn-of-the-century classic The Theory Of The Leisure Class. Threading his tapestry forward, McElvaine writes that, “Put simply, most Americans late in the twentieth century have adopted the consumption ethic that was rising in the 1920s, but was temporarily reversed during the Great Depression.” (xviii) McElvaine, of course, wrote this book in the eighties, but certainly the consumption ethic has not abated but rather intensified since then.
Ironically, one factor that contributed to the onset of the Depression and that eventually pulled the nation out of it was consumption. Franklin Roosevelt’s stellar accomplishment in the engineering of New Deal policies was the emphasis on “purchasing power” for average Americans. McElvaine occasionally draws parallels throughout the book, and also in recent articles, between the twenties and the late-twentieth century, not only with regard to consumption but also to a stock market index that seemed during the 1920s to reach unprecedented heights. Clearly, the consumption on steroids that we have been witnessing the past sixty years in the United States is no longer capable of “curing” an economic depression, but it is certainly capable, along with mountainous debt, of contributing to the occurrence of a Second Great Depression.
Elevated levels of consumption are almost always attended by an increase in “individualism” and a decline in a sense of community. The Great Depression reversed this trend in America dramatically, and for me, that is perhaps the most riveting feature of McElvaine’s book as he writes, “…the most significant fact about the Depression era may well be that it was the only time in the twentieth century during which there was a major break in the modern trends towards social disintegration and egoism.” (xxiii)
From the perspective of today’s world, whenever I reflect on the 1930s, I never cease to be amazed at the spirit of cooperation that blossomed amid the hardship and impoverishment of the times. Of this McElvaine notes: “The economic collapse that started in 1929 obliged people who had begun to accept the new values of unlimited consumption and extreme individualism to take another look at these beliefs in comparison with the more traditional, community-oriented values that had existed in earlier times.” (xxiv) The author also notes that many men who had become unemployed and found themselves spending more time at home also found themselves in the position that women had traditionally experienced–that is, at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. Whereas in the Victorian era, the Horatio Alger-style, self-made man was championed, during the Depression the “self-made man became the self-destroyed man.” (xxiv) In other words, during the Depression, people began to recognize the value and necessity of interdependence which manifested in a preference not for the highly individualistic urban lifestyle, but for rural and small-town life.
I don’t wish to romanticize the Great Depression era as some golden age of cooperation and community, but I do believe there are applicable lessons to be learned from the way in which communities responded to the suffering of their time, particularly as we stand on the shifting sands of a cliff called “collapse.” As I have said many times, collapse is not an event but a process–a process which is not in the future but in which we are deeply engaged at this moment whether we recognize it or not. And imperfect as the spirit of interdependence may have been in the Depression era, it was, as McElvaine emphasizes, “…the time in which the values of compassion, sharing, and social justice became the most dominant that they have ever been in American history.” (7) Conversely, “…more and more people became dependent as the nation industrialized.” (7)
As the friend who gave me this book stated, “This book reveals very poignantly what has been lost in American culture.” He was referring above all to the issue of cooperative values, and values is something historians often avoid addressing in their frantic attempt to remain “objective.” Yet, as McElvaine notes, “Values are the critical base on which any society rests.” (196) Unfortunately, American capitalism itself is a poster-child for the schizophrenia between economics and ethics.
America in the 1920s was capitalism on steroids with the ruling elite gorging on corporate profits, most notably profits from the automobile and related industries. Three presidents in a row, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had agreed that “the business of America is business”. Yet when the house of cards collapsed in 1929, the working and middle classes, alongside intellectuals who had been criticizing capitalism for some time, awakened to the nightmare that the American dream had become. Not surprisingly, countless working and middle class individuals moved dramatically to the left politically, many embracing socialism and organizing and protesting for economic and social justice. Why else during the McCarthy era was the thirties referred to as the Red Decade? (203)
And of course, gangsters of the Depression era were portrayed in film as Robin Hood’s. The 1960s cinematic portrayal of support for and idealization of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows was not exaggerated. In my family I grew up on an often-told and re-told tale of my grandmother’s matter-of-fact statement that “if John Dillinger knocks on my door, I’ll give him a hot meal and a place to hide down in the cellar behind the furnace.” The Depression brought people–all kinds of people–together and kept them together.
One of the most powerful and moving pieces of cinema in the thirties was King Vidor’s “Our Daily Bread” in which a young unemployed husband and his wife (John and Mary) living in the city become desperate for income. John appeals to Mary’s rich uncle who gives them several acres of land which they are totally unskilled in farming. But along comes a farmer from a Midwestern state on his way to California with his family who joins them and begins teaching them how to farm. Soon the population of the farm grows and more and more unemployed, wandering individuals wind up on John and Mary’s land looking for not only a new start, but a sense of community with which to launch it. Together, the farm’s residents survive by hunting, growing their own food, and sharing skills. A series of challenges arises, but each time, the community moves through them–except for the most formidable of all, drought. However, near the farm is a reservoir, but the community has no way to access it. Therefore, they must construct a conduit from the reservoir to their crops–a gargantuan project that has them working day and night with picks and shovels routing the water to their land.
For me, the most powerful and moving scene in the film was the long brigade of men digging with their shovels and the coordinated thud of their picks into the earth, toiling around the clock, to bring water to their land. I’ll never forget the sound of those picks reverberating with sweat, determination, and above all, cooperation. They were successful, and their crops flourished, but only because they never gave up on creating a new life, and they never stopped working together to do so.
Today, no movement offers any viable alternatives for political, economic, social, or ecological justice. Few are even cognizant of the severity of the issues at hand, and most are woefully unprepared and uninformed. A frightening and naïve assumption prevails: that the U.S. government will “take care” of its citizens in the throes of natural disasters, pandemics, blackouts, or dirty bomb attacks. These realities could exacerbate one’s angst as one contemplates collapse, but in fact, they might instead motivate us to begin building the lifeboats we must have in order to navigate it. We will not be able to do this until we have experienced a profound transformation of our values–and our sense of community.
Historians generally agree that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesian economics rescued the nation from total catastrophe, but McElvaine points out that “…the changing mix of American values in the Depression–was of even more significance than was Roosevelt himself.”(324) Roosevelt’s agenda would have fallen on deaf and smug ears ten years earlier, and it could not have succeeded without a change in values in the American people that was able to resonate with the values of the New Deal. I hasten to add that I do not believe that it was the New Deal that ultimately pulled the nation out of the Depression, for as I make clear in my book U.S. History Uncensored, it was ultimately World War II and the launching of the military industrial complex that did so and has continued to “prevent” depressions and mask more protracted, less visible economic and social injustice.
“Perhaps the chief impact of the Great Depression,” says McElvaine, “was that it obliged the American people to face up to the necessity of cooperative action because it took away, at least temporarily, the easy assumptions of expansion and mobility that had decisively influenced so much of past American thinking.” (337) Expansion? Mobility? Do these sound like aspects of American life that could be severely curtailed by energy depletion, climate change, or an increasingly worthless U.S. dollar?
Mainstream economists have just begun to use the “R” word in relation to the economy, but anyone who has done even minimal research, with or without a degree in economics, understands that the United States, in fact many nations on earth, are moving rapidly toward a Second Great Depression. It is therefore imperative to understand the causes and effects of the First Great Depression, particularly its impact on the culture and the values of individuals in it.
The author goes on to point out the “feminization” of American society during the Great Depression, noting that “The self-centered, aggressive, competitive ‘male’ ethic of the 1920s was discredited. Men who lost their jobs became dependent in ways that women had been thought to be.” (340) Yet it was not only in loss of jobs that men became more “feminized.”
Whenever any individuals, male or female, join to create community in a spirit of cooperation, they are “feminizing”, for the feminine principle is above all, relational–a concept inherent in the traditions of many indigenous peoples. It is this kind of joining that characterized the Great Depression era and to which we must aspire as we build economic, emotional, and spiritual lifeboats for the daunting journey ahead.
There will be no New Deal, no FDR, no parental federal government to kiss everything and make it better. There will only be ourselves and the others with whom we choose to join and prepare.
Next Posts
