I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble…”

Cindy Sheehan | “Good Riddance Attention Whore” •
Cindy Sheehan | Letter to Democratic Congress •

Sheehan Quits as Face of US Anti-War Fight
By Dan Glaister
The Guardian UK | Dateline: Tuesday 29 May 2007

Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq three years ago, said yesterday she was stepping down from her role as the figurehead of the US campaign against the war.

“This is my resignation letter as the ‘face’ of the American anti-war movement,” she wrote in a sometimes bitter diary entry on the website Daily Kos. “I am going to take whatever I have left, and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children, and try to regain some of what I have lost.”

Ms Sheehan, 49, rose to prominence when she voiced her discontent with President George Bush’s policies when he met her and other grieving members of military families.

Announcing her decision on Memorial Day, the anniversary on which the US remembers its war dead, she said that her announcement had been prompted by the recent hostility she had faced from Democrats.

“I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican party,” she wrote. “However, when I started to hold the Democratic party to the same standards that I held the Republican party, support for my cause started to erode, and the ‘left’ started labelling me with the same slurs that the right used.”

On Saturday, in an open letter to Democratic members of Congress, she announced that she was leaving the party because she felt its leaders had failed to change the country’s course in Iraq.

She said that the most devastating conclusion she had reached after three years of protest, which included a trip to Cuba and the setting up of a protest camp outside Mr Bush’s Texas ranch, was that her son had died for nothing.

“I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful,” she wrote. “Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months.”

“Good Riddance Attention Whore”
By Cindy Sheehan
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Dateline in our fraternal site truthout: Tuesday 29 May 2007

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day morning. These are not spur-of-the-moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be [put aside] when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.

It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too … which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or any more people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America … you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

*******************************
Letter to Democratic Congress
By Cindy Sheehan
Tuesday 29 May 2007

May 26, 2007
Dublin, Ireland

Dear Democratic Congress,

Hello, my name is Cindy Sheehan and my son Casey Sheehan was killed on April 04, 2004 in Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq. He was killed when the Republicans still were in control of Congress. Naively, I set off on my tireless campaign calling on Congress to rescind George’s authority to wage his war of terror while asking him “for what noble cause” did Casey and thousands of other have to die. Now, with Democrats in control of Congress, I have lost my optimistic naiveté and have become cynically pessimistic as I see you all caving into, as one Daily Kos poster called: “Mr. 28%”

There is absolutely no sane or defensible reason for you to hand Bloody King George more money to condemn more of our brave, tired, and damaged soldiers and the people of Iraq to more death and carnage. You think giving him more money is politically expedient, but it is a moral abomination and every second the occupation of Iraq endures, you all have more blood on your hands.

Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, said after George signed the new weak as a newborn baby funding authorization bill: “Now, I think the president’s policy will begin to unravel.” Begin to unravel? How many more of our children will have to be killed and how much more of Iraq will have to be demolished before you all think enough unraveling has occurred? How many more crimes will BushCo be allowed to commit while their poll numbers are crumbling before you all gain the political “courage” to hold them accountable? If Iraq hasn’t unraveled in Ms. Pelosi’s mind, what will it take? With almost 700,000 Iraqis dead and four million refugees (which the US refuses to admit) how could it get worse? Well, it is getting worse and it can get much worse thanks to your complicity.

Being cynically pessimistic, it seems to me that this new vote to extend the war until the end of September, (and let’s face it, on October 1st, you will give him more money after some more theatrics, which you think are fooling the anti-war faction of your party) will feed right into the presidential primary season and you believe that if you just hang on until then, the Democrats will be able to re-take the White House. Didn’t you see how “well” that worked for John Kerry in 2004 when he played the politics of careful fence-sitting and pandering? The American electorate are getting disgusted with weaklings who blow where the wind takes them while frittering away our precious lifeblood and borrowing money from our new owners, the Chinese.

I knew having a Democratic Congress would make no difference in grassroots action. That’s why we went to DC when you all were sworn in to tell you that we wanted the troops back from Iraq and BushCo held accountable while you pushed for ethics reform which is quite a hoot … don’t’ you think? We all know that it is affordable for you all to play this game of political mayhem because you have no children in harm’s way…let me tell you what it is like:

You watch your reluctant soldier march off to a war that neither you nor he agrees with. Once your soldier leaves the country all you can do is worry. You lie awake at night staring at the moon wondering if today will be the day that you get that dreaded knock on your door. You can’t concentrate, you can’t eat, and your entire life becomes consumed with apprehension while you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Then, when your worst fears are realized, you begin a life of constant pain, regret, and longing. Everyday is hard, but then you come up on “special” days … like upcoming Memorial Day. Memorial Day holds double pain for me because, not only are we supposed to honor our fallen troops, but Casey was born on Memorial Day in 1979. It used to be a day of celebration for us and now it is a day of despair. Our needlessly killed soldiers of this war and the past conflict in Vietnam have all left an unnecessary trail of sorrow and deep holes of absence that will never be filled.

So, Democratic Congress, with the current daily death toll of 3.72 troops per day, you have condemned 473 more to these early graves. 473 more lives wasted for your political greed: Thousands of broken hearts because of your cowardice and avarice. How can you even go to sleep at night or look at yourselves in a mirror? How do you put behind you the screaming mothers on both sides of the conflict? How does the agony you have created escape you? It will never escape me … I can’t run far enough or hide well enough to get away from it.

By the end of September, we will be about 80 troops short of another bloody milestone: 4000, and MoveOn.org will hold nationwide candlelight vigils and you all will be busy passing legislation that will snuff the lights out of thousands more human beings.

Congratulations Congress, you have bought yourself a few more months of an illegal and immoral bloodbath. And you know you mean to continue it indefinitely so “other presidents” can solve the horrid problem BushCo forced our world into.

It used to be George Bush’s war. You could have ended it honorably. Now it is yours and you all will descend into calumnious history with BushCo.

The Camp Casey Peace Institute is calling all citizens who are as disgusted as we are with you all to join us in Philadelphia on July 4th to try and figure a way out of this “two” party system that is bought and paid for by the war machine which has a stranglehold on every aspect of our lives. As for myself, I am leaving the Democratic Party. You have completely failed those who put you in power to change the direction our country is heading. We did not elect you to help sink our ship of state but to guide it to safe harbor.

We do not condone our government’s violent meddling in sovereign countries and we condemn the continued murderous occupation of Iraq.

We gave you a chance, you betrayed us.

Sincerely,
Cindy Sheehan
Founder and President of
Gold Star Families for Peace.

Founder and Director of The Camp Casey Peace Institute

Eternally grieving mother of Casey Sheehan

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Except for endorsing the views and information contained herein, Cyrano’s Journal Online has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is CJO endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

President Chavez at podium, during Bolivarian rally.

ANNALS OF SCUMBAG PRESS

It’s obvious that the American media are, once again, doing their dirty imperial job and working hard to assassinate the character of a non-capitalist leader and his revolution so as to facilitate the entry of assassins or the US military. A viler form of prostitution is hard to find, but that’s standard operating procedure for much of US journalism.

PLEASE SEE ALSO COMPANION ARTICLE: LESSONS IN CURTAILING MEDIA FREEDOM
Media Advisory by FAIR | Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org
See also VENEZUELA’S RCTV: Sine Die and Good Riddance at Thomas Paine’s Corner https://bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=53

Dateline: 5/25/07

The story is framed in U.S. news media as a simple matter of censorship: Prominent Venezuelan TV station RCTV is being silenced by the authoritarian government of President Hugo Chávez, who is punishing the station for its political criticism of his government.

According to CNN reporter T.J. Holmes (5/21/07), the issues are easy to understand: RCTV “is going to be shut down, is going to get off the air, because of President Hugo Chávez, not a big fan of it.” Dubbing RCTV “a voice of free speech,” Holmes explained, “Chavez, in a move that’s angered a lot of free-speech groups, is refusing now to renew the license of this television station that has been critical of his government.”

Though straighter, a news story by the Associated Press (5/20/07) still maintained the theme that the license denial was based simply on political differences, with reporter Elizabeth Munoz describing RCTV as “a network that has been critical of Chávez.”

In a May 14 column, Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl called the action an attempt to silence opponents and more “proof” that Chávez is a “dictator.” Wrote Diehl, “Chávez has made clear that his problem with [RCTV owner Marcel] Granier and RCTV is political.”

In keeping with the media script that has bad guy Chávez brutishly silencing good guys in the democratic opposition, all these articles skimmed lightly over RCTV’s history, the Venezuelan government’s explanation for the license denial and the process that led to it.

RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez’s democratically elected government. During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks. “I must thank Venevisión and RCTV,” one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film documents the networks’ participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup—hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

On April 11, 2002, the day of the coup, when military and civilian opposition leaders held press conferences calling for Chávez’s ouster, RCTV hosted top coup plotter Carlos Ortega, who rallied demonstrators to the march on the presidential palace. On the same day, after the anti-democratic overthrow appeared to have succeeded, another coup leader, Vice-Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez, told a Venevisión reporter (4/11/02): “We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you.”

That commercial TV outlets including RCTV participated in the coup is not at question; even mainstream outlets have acknowledged as much. As reporter Juan Forero, Jackson Diehl’s colleague at the Washington Post, explained (1/18/07), “RCTV, like three other major private television stations, encouraged the protests,” resulting in the coup, “and, once Chávez was ousted, cheered his removal.” The conservative British newspaper the Financial Times reported (5/21/07), “[Venezuelan] officials argue with some justification that RCTV actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Mr. Chávez.”

As FAIR’s magazine Extra! argued last November, “Were a similar event to happen in the U.S., and TV journalists and executives were caught conspiring with coup plotters, it’s doubtful they would stay out of jail, let alone be allowed to continue to run television stations, as they have in Venezuela.”

When Chávez returned to power the commercial stations refused to cover the news, airing instead entertainment programs—in RCTV’s case, the American film Pretty Woman. By refusing to cover such a newsworthy story, the stations abandoned the public interest and violated the public trust that is seen in Venezuela (and in the U.S.) as a requirement for operating on the public airwaves. Regarding RCTV’s refusal to cover the return of Chavez to power, Columbia University professor and former NPR editor John Dinges told Marketplace (5/8/07):

What RCTV did simply can’t be justified under any stretch of journalistic principles…. When a television channel simply fails to report, simply goes off the air during a period of national crisis, not because they’re forced to, but simply because they don’t agree with what’s happening, you’ve lost your ability to defend what you do on journalistic principles.

The Venezuelan government is basing its denial of license on RCTV’s involvement in the 2002 coup, not on the station’s criticisms of or political opposition to the government. Many American pundits and some human rights spokespersons have confused the issue by claiming the action is based merely on political differences, failing to note that Venezuela’s media, including its commercial broadcasters, are still among the most vigorously dissident on the planet.

When Patrick McElwee of the U.S.-based group Just Foreign Policy interviewed representatives of Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists—all groups that have condemned Venezuela’s action in denying RCTV’s license renewal—he found that none of the spokespersons thought broadcasters were automatically entitled to license renewals, though none of them thought RCTV’s actions in support of the coup should have resulted in the station having its license renewal denied. This led McElwee to wonder, based on the rights groups’ arguments, “Could it be that governments like Venezuela have the theoretical right to not to renew a broadcast license, but that no responsible government would ever do it?”

McElwee acknowledged the critics’ point that some form of due process should have been involved in the decisions, but explained that laws preexisting Chávez’s presidency placed licensing decision with the executive branch, with no real provisions for a hearings process: “Unfortunately, this is what the law, first enacted in 1987, long before Chávez entered the political scene, allows. It charges the executive branch with decisions about license renewal, but does not seem to require any administrative hearing. The law should be changed, but at the current moment when broadcast licenses are up for renewal, it is the prevailing law and thus lays out the framework in which decisions are made.”

Government actions weighing on journalism and broadcast licensing deserve strong scrutiny. However, on the central question of whether a government is bound to renew the license of a broadcaster when that broadcaster had been involved in a coup against the democratically elected government, the answer should be clear, as McElwee concludes:

The RCTV case is not about censorship of political opinion. It is about the government, through a flawed process, declining to renew a broadcast license to a company that would not get a license in other democracies, including the United States. In fact, it is frankly amazing that this company has been allowed to broadcast for 5 years after the coup, and that the Chávez government waited until its license expired to end its use of the public airwaves.

BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

While the object of fascism is always the same, to disarm, intimidate, repress, and roll back the sectors of society pushing for further equality and democratization, thereby making possible a higher degree of exploitation, its various manifestations take up the coloring dictated by specific cultures and epochs. That’s why military fascism in Chile is different than Argentina’s, or Spain’s, and why German fascism was far more brutal and systematic than the Italian variety. When and if it comes, American fascism will have its own defining characteristics, most likely a presidential façade.

When the news filtered out in 2003 about the creation by the Pentagon of a formal, overt, disinformation agency to “influence US public opinion,” many political activists who track the system’s shenanigans reacted with a big collective yawn. Media watchers have long known about the CIA’s pervasive infiltration of mainstream journalism, with hundreds if not thousands of well-camouflaged “assets” around the world, and the de facto nullification of the injunction against conducting propaganda in the US.

This nefarious program, now at least half a century old, and whose actual dimensions we can only guess at, has included the sponsoring of journalists, authors, publishing imprints, newspapers, radio and tv stations, and many other tricks, all amounting to immense power to inject a false consciousness spin on contemporary realities. What’s more, this doesn’t include the huge pile of falsifications pouring from legions of non-CIA-connected journalists and commentators, operating under their own pro-capitalist or reactionary biases, nor the adulterated output from those already working under clear corporate fiats, as in the case of Rupert Murdoch’s media, by far the word’s pre-eminent avatar of Orwellian communications.

Against this backdrop, the announcement that the US public was to be subject to open propaganda by one of the government’s most powerful agencies was not alarming because it indicated a drastic departure from a wonderful information regime in which all voices were heard, and truth reigned supreme, the ghosts of Cronkite and Murrow rattling in the backgroundfor we never did have such a system, but, because in its own sinister way it marked a subtle shift in the way the plutocratic elites choose to mask or reveal their manipulation of the state apparatus for their own ends.

So the interesting question that comes up is this: Why do the “mind managers” feel they should now drop some of the pretense? The simplest assumption might apply: because they may feel the need to tighten further the linkages between “official truth” and the mass communications apparatus (while accustoming the public to such questionable fusion…and remember that the right never has enough), and besides they may feel the time is right. While the Iraq War debacle has contributed mightily to unravelling the credibility of this regime, the “globalization elites” fronted by Bush at the moment feel protected from retaliation by a quasi-impregnable wall of national paranoia and jingoism of their own creation, an obscurantist climate designed to harden the ignorance and provincialism with which far too many Americans perceive the world and their own interests.

But if the world’s elites (led by the American plutocratic establishment) are readying themselves for battle with the masses, what makes them think the battle is imminent or inevitable? After all, class war—one-sided, self-conscious class war— as we see in the US goes on all the time, so what makes this juncture more perilous?

Stoking up fear, an exercise in upper-class self-preservation

The midwife for all this, of course, is the much accursed Bin Laden and his gang of misguided reactionary fanatics, whose very existence is a direct corollary of American foreign policy, but if Bin Laden hadn’t obliged by stepping up to the plate, he would have been created. He’s simply too useful to the governing elites. In this context, what is even more troublesome is that, should the American public start to put aside the 9/11 memories, and therefore its effects, refocusing on their real problems such as increasing unemployment, inadequate health access, and the innumerable bizarre social and economic priorities implemented by the elites, they might be subjected to a new round of jingoist fever, again, thanks to the same cast of perps, and with further distractions and dislocations from such pressing issues. The advantages to the plutocracy of a Bin Laden specter roaming the world, of another Reichstag fire writ large, are so attractive that the chance of his re-entry into the American scene, with perfectly woeful consequences for the remainder of American democracy, are almost guaranteed. It is that sinister eventuality we must constantly watch out for and work to prevent.

I have often rebuked my fellow sufferers on the US left for crying wolf too soon and calling anything even slightly authoritarian “fascism,” but moves like these fall squarely out of the textbook of creeping fascism. Bertram Gross, not to mention Gramsci, or R. Palme Dutt (the British Marxist who wrote that classic, FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION) spelled it out eloquently. Their diagnosis was that fascism, as known in Europe, would be an unlikely occurrence in America. The American brand of fascism, they concurred, would be one with a strong, self-righteous presidential mask, behind which the ruling orders, in pursuit of a fierce global class agenda, would implement policies designed to eviscerate democracy in its totality while keeping the appearance of sweet democracy in place.

I have long argued that, since the beginning of “government by professional manipulation” in America (which reached what we might call “self-conscious maturity” under Ronald Reagan), that the country has been ruled and continues to be ruled by a plutocratic oligarchy smugly dressed in the garments of democracy. The problem for the ruling orders is not new: Alexander Hamilton was already aware, along with many of the Founders, that a real, popular democracy would represent a huge class menace to dominant privileges. That people, once awakened to their true interests would simply vote their exploiters, or “betters,” out of power–at least for a while. The bicameral system was set up (in the age of puny, local media) as one way to stem or derail this ominous tide. (In France, the revolutionaries installed a unicameral system, which is intrinsically more democratic.)

At the moment 9/11 took place, the world’s ruling plutocracies (among which I now must include China’s authoritarian capitalists, and Russia’s state capitalist Mafias) were already facing an intractable problem: a hugely unstable system of massive natural and human exploitation, with a rapidly mounting tide of completely intractable social and political problems.

Under the conditions of modern industrialism, world production can easily outstrip world consumption due to the tremendous productivity of new technologies. All capital machines, such as conveyors, presses, welders and related equipment used in a car assembly, for example, are designed and sold to replace human labor with machine labor
This phenomeon is certainly not restricted to manufacturing, where of course it is more visible; the service sector, banking, for example, has also seen its human ranks thinned considerably thanks to the introduction of sophisticated automation routines in many of its front— and back-end tasks. And in management journals there’s been talk for decades of the “totally automated auto plant,” the “totally automated bank,” and many other visions, all spelling out the end of mass human employment in production.

The apparently inexorable trend, therefore, is for industry to require fewer and fewer workers—in all sectors—to turn out ever larger outputs…so what does this actually mean for us? Under conditions of authentic democracy and egalitarianism, this should mean humanity’s gradual liberation from toil, as, ideally fewer and fewer hours of labor would have to be surrendered to produce a very high standard of living.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Why? because social property, read capital to produce everything–land, machines, etc.—is owned by a tiny minority and it is precisely this tiny minority that also appropriates the lion’s share of society’s production, translated, of course, into money, which is nothing but a certificate of entitlement to this enormous mountain of goods and services…a “claim” redeemable anywhere such certificates are accepted. (By law the legal tender, or currency, must be accepted everywhere in the nation.)

The inevitable upshot of such grotesque disequilibrium is overconsumption on one side and underconsumption on the other.
In other words, as long as the social relations that bind society to this unfair “contract” remain in place so will this untenable equation, since, if technology is constantly eliminating human labor, and therefore paychecks, who is going to have the necessary income to go back to the market and buy back that ever expanding pile of production?

So, the simple, biggest reason for the problem of faltering demand, recession, or even depression on a world scale, is severe income and wealth inequality, which becomes ever more acute as the system—unchecked by progressive forces such as labor and other pro-democracy groups—follows through with its inherently myopic dynamic of heaping ever larger accumulations of wealth onto the hands of a privileged few while slowly and inexorably immiserating the majority. Such conditions must eventually lead to a major, structural crisis, and they do. History is replete with such examples. But since the system can choose any solution to the crisis, except the obvious—social justice—as the latter goes against its central, non-negotiable dynamic, this is then the anteroom to fascism.

FINANCIAL FRAGILITY ON THE INCREASE

The US today shows alarming inequality. This is evident to all of us who can look at the situation fairly and impartially. We now have hundreds of billionaires, and a similarly growing mass of millionaires. Meanwhile, the income and wealth gap is not big, it’s obscene. The legendary American middle class, the envy of the world, the staple of television sitcoms of the 1950s, not to mention the working classes, have lost a substantive share of national income over the last 35 years and the financial stress observed in this sector is evident in most national indicators.

Consider: There were 1,661,996 bankruptcies filed in Fiscal Year 2003, up 7.4 percent from the 1,547,669 filings in Fiscal Year 2002. This is the highest-ever total of filings for any reporting period. Since 1994, when filings totaled 837,797, bankruptcies in federal courts have increased 98 percent.

The financial profile of the typical American family reflects this troubling reality. As reported by the Washington Post in March of 2006,

[The typical family] has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it to the bank. The breadwinners make more than $43,000 a year but can’t manage to pay off a $2,200 credit card balance.

That is the portrait of the median American household as painted by the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Such findings might represent a rude awakening to those still starry-eyed about the vaunted “new affluence” everyone was until recently talking about.

But how does capital deal with this problem? In the way you have seen all over the place: cutting back on wages and benefits, laying off workers, or simply moving to a remote location where labor can be paid a pittance and where neither humans nor animals nor nature do or will enjoy any protection. (The output is then cheerfully sent back to the more affluent—but shrinking— developed world, where extravagant profits are made, except that here, too, the crunch is inevitable because average income, in real terms, is dropping relative to production.)

In the more developed world, especially Europe, where citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of politics, and larger self-defense organizations than in the USA, governments have been obliged to apply some bigger band-aids to the crisis—read a measure of tangible social welfare. But the issue remains: the social vessel is listing badly, making water from many holes and infinite patches and now requires a serious overhaul, if not rebuilding altogether.

An outside observer, say an interplanetary traveller who never set foot in America, might deem such conditions deranged. And why not? Is it sane to live under a system whose ruling elites openly decry a rise in employment and living standard for the masses? And, conversely, isn’t it bizarre that, on Wall Street, supposedly the barometer of society’s economic health, when multinationals lay off workers by the tens of thousands, or shut down facilities, or abandon communities for an overseas location in pursuit of bigger profits for the few, the stocks go up amid wild celebration, and the executives in charge get fat bonuses and other rewards?

In a sane, truly democratic, not to say moral, society such behavior would be hidden from view, like the plotting of common criminals. But in this society, long inured to the reigning disease, Wall Street reactions are not hidden from view at all, they’re bragged about, as they remain safe behind an elaborate national brainwash that teaches Americans to accept such conditions with the tolerance we assign to the whims of nature.

The crisis of overproduction represented by humanity’s new technological capabilities is here to stay and can only be resolved by a far, far more equitable distribution of the product of human labor, on a world scale. This means serious, dramatic revisions of the current social contract—”the terms of agreement”—between two utterly conflicting social interests. Or the abandonment of such an injurious contract entirely.

I hate to quote one of the bogeymen of the American psyche, Karl Marx’s longtime collaborator and friend, Engels, but he put it admirably in 1886:

[If] there are three countries (say, England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the world market, there is no chance
but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required.

That was written in the 19th century. Multiply that by a thousand to begin to approach the contours of the current crisis.

DARKER BEFORE DAWN—IS IT TRUE?

The sense of despair that many activists feel these days, battered on all sides by this truly monstrous regime–monstrous in its immorality, cynicism, hypocrisy, self-righteousness and sheer evil–and its all-enveloping prostituted cheer-leading media, is shared amply in this quarter. In a sense, and without going too far afield, the present situation is the inevitable outcome of several realities which have defined this sick society for quite some time:

(1) The absence of a workers’ party, and by that I mean nothing so “alien” to the American mind as a bolshevist vanguardist party, but simply the absence of a real movement and party expressing and articulating the needs and visions of the average person, whose needs are clearly anchored in a “working class reality.”

Parties in a class-divided society, which the US surely is (business propaganda aside), are supposed to represent the interests of the various classes constituting the social pyramid. But since both Democrats and Republicans stand first and foremost for “free enterprise,” i.e., the polite coinage for the national and international bourgeoisie, what we have here is a single party cynically masquerading as two. I’m sure this is scarcely a revelation to most moderately sophisticated American audiences. (The obvious question then is, why is such a fraudulent state of affairs tolerated?)

(2) The successful enthronement in the American mind of liberals as real leftists.

Ferociously centrist, some might call them “extremists of the center,” liberals, frequently the embodiment of the petit bourgeois element in a nation, have never been and never will be real leftists because their entire class orientation and economic interests, which, as is true for all classes, largely determine their mindset, is anchored in the upper, propertied sector, which they tend to ape. This limits their vision and political actions. They are for endless tinkering within the system, while never daring to go beyond its egregiously restrictive limits. Their systemic solutions are therefore stillborn, quilts of pitiful patches with the problem itself often dictating remedial policy. (Witness, for example, Hillary Clinton’s health plan reform initiative, whereby no Naderites, or the Harvard Independent Health Reform Study Group, or similar authentic healthcare system critics were invited to the discussions, but the AMA, the Hospital chains, and Big Pharma’s lobbyists were. When was the last time that the disease set out to stamp itself out?)

(3) The rise and (momentary) triumph of corporate propaganda

The system requires the illusion of options, the illusion of some sort of political balance. And as democracy, against great odds, instinctively struggles to survive and deepen its roots, corporate power, especially through its media and political assets, works tireslessly to confuse and derail the effort. Thus the propaganda apparatus necessitated to negate obvious realities, to inject and maintain a pre-emptive consumerist consciousness among the masses, and to sow escapist notions as a complementary venting valve for gathering tensions, is an enormous and sophisticated machine, precisely what we witness today in modern America. In fact, the rise of such a disinformation machine, a marketing conduit for ideological and economic wares, was foreseen more than 80 years ago, as the growth of corporate propaganda was anticipated to match, blow by blow, the extension of democracy.

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that only liberals are heard in this country as “legitimate critics” when it comes to shaping national debates. Reflecting the so-called two-party system, which provides us with a rump political spectrum, the media, too, take care not to admit people to the left of what is regarded as “mainstream opinion” or what some quaintly define as the “loyal opposition” (loyal to what? to whom? That’s never spelled out with any precision).

True radicals (those that go to the root of a problem) are ruled out as “extreme” from the start. (When the national debate commission not only prevents Ralph Nader from attending the debates, but threatens to throw him in jail for exercising his right to do so, we know we are living in a country where the word democracy is something of a joke.)

In this regard, for those who will surely protest with alacrity that America is still the land of the free, I will say only this: The freedom guarantees of any bourgeois democracy can only be tested when that society’s power-holders feel they are under attack.True chalenges—by international standards have never been seen in the US, but the record so far is not pretty, and I refer you here to any number of episodes and incidents in American history showing that the American upper class is extremely manipulative and paranoid in the defense of its privileges. The trip wire is indeed very close to the ground in this nation.

But, folks, who needs widespread repression when the masses can be so successfully controlled by a pervasive 24/7 brainwash? Why show the jackboot and the truncheon, when we can launch massive invasions with relative impunity, under transparently hypocritical motives, and appear every day on the boob-tube with the photo-op of the day, claiming to be the last defenders of human sanity and decency on earth? Why indeed use the mailed fist and give away the system’s true fascistic nature when ubiquitous sound-bites and torrents of idiocy on the tube will suffice? I repeat: The true test of whether this or any nation is a reliably “free” and authentic democracy can only be approached with the rise of a mass movement seriously bent on replacing the current rotting structures with something deserving of the word “representative democracy.”

My money is that long before the emergence of such a welcome phenomenon you will see the system’s crises depositing us at the doorstep of operational fascism, albeit of the American sort, “friendly fascism.”

THE PREFIGUREMENT OF FASCISM, AMERICAN STYLE

Coups and military takeovers may happen in the middle of the night, but fascism (especially the strain incubated behind a presidential façade) arrives on the scene with plenty of advance notice. Its ready-made arsenal of anti-democratic weapons gives it away: increasing thuggery, judicial intimidation, widespread lies at all levels of governance, cultivation of public paranoias, political persecutions, dismantlement of constitutional rights in exchange for “security,” and, when all this fails, widespread repression using the immense reservoir of technical and military assets the system has amassed, from military repression to “retail suppression,” using covert assets, or even “indirect assets,” that is, killing dissidents and making it seem a common crime. (The latter is an old and characteristically sordid tactic used throughout the Third World.)

One may be justified to wonder if, against this backdrop, a populace so effectively depoliticized, and so exasperatingly naive about the true material mainsprings of American policy—abroad and at home—can ever manage to stand up to claim its rightful position as the genuine sovereign and fount for US policies on this endangered planet? How will this gross democratic imposture be retired in the face of the most successful and sophisticated plutocratic propaganda system ever devised?

That is the central question facing all dedicated activists in America and around the world. For America’s ever deepening immersion in fascistoid waters is the cross that the world continues to bear in this age of wholesale reaction sponsored by the “Free World colossus.” And the longer we take in finding genuine solutions to this crisis, the harder it will be to implement them. We have only this rapidly eroding chance to win the battle of communications, and win it we must.

—Patrice Greanville

RELATED PIECE: Naomi Wolf—FASCIST AMERICA IN 10 EASY STEPS

—FINIS—

BY DANNY SCHECHTER

[D]espite the many scholars who have validated it, even with some nitpicks, their “model” is ignored in most journalism schools and newsrooms because its real focus is on the powers behind the media…

Twenty years ago, a professor of finance at the Wharton School in Philadelphia and a far better known professor of linguistics at MIT set out to come with a way to explain how our media really works. Rather than offer a case study of coverage of one issue, or an analysis of this or that flaw or media “mistake,” they set out to try to make sense of the way the media functions as a “system” what rules govern the behavior of media institutions in reporting on crisis abroad. They didn’t call it a theory because they believed they were not being speculative but factual.

They came up with what they called a “model,” not of journalism, but of propaganda.

The ambitious book, since revised, explained their “Propaganda Model.” It’s called, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. It became a best seller among a public angry with the news we are getting and popular with media students worldwide who saw that there was now a systematic way to analyze media performance in a structural way. It’s still in print and still provoking controversy.

The author’s names are Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky, both considered intellectual heroes and heavyweights among generations of rebels and critics worldwide.

At the same time, despite the many scholars who have validated it, even with some nitpicks, their “model” is ignored in most journalism schools and newsrooms because its real focus is on the powers behind the media and how they shape it to serve their own interest.

Many of the mainstream journalists who even know about it dismiss it as a “conspiracy theory,” even though Chomsky is a well-known critic of conspiracy theorizing. (This is like that old joke in which someone says they are an “anti-communist” only to be told, “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.”)

This past week, I spoke at a conference in Canada, not the US of course, where its impact is widely appreciated, still debated and updated. Still, there was only one mainstream corporate journalist there, Antonia Zerbisias, the always insightful media columnist of the Toronto Star who explained the “model’s focus on the “filters” that much news has to pass through.

“Stripped down for purposes of, as Chomsky would say, typical media “concision,” they are: ownership interests, advertiser concerns, the nature of journalists’ sources, flak (or negative feedback) and ideology.”

In a talk to a conference plenary, Zerbisias smiled before pronouncing that the model is “true.” There it is– a media veteran said it!

True-but not necessarily up to date in this new ever changing media era of diverse technologies, major outlets losing audience and credibility, increasing top-down control by conglomerized monopolies, vast information available on the internet, increasing media production by citizens and media makers, and growing disenchantment with a media that does more selling than telling.

Of course, media outlets have an ideological orientation that usually conforms with the interests of their governments. Journalists who challenge it are often marginalized, ignored or fired. I have documented that in my books and film WMD about the deplorable media coverage of the Iraq war. I am not the only one to argue that there was complicity and collaboration between a servile press corps and the Bush Administration that we both cheerleading for war.

There are two other aspects to this that needs to be examined including top-down coercion as when politically motivated moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi or Conrad Black buy a media outlet and discharge journalists with whom they disagree.

There has just been a worrisome recent development at the one media outlet in the world known for its independence, AlJazeera where a new board has been named with a gutsy independent journalist replaced as managing director by a former Ambassador to Washington. You just know what that will result in–Foxeera, was the formulation coined by one reader.

In some countries, media dissenters are jailed or even killed. That’s why it was suggested at the conference that the title Manufacturing Consent today should be modified for “Manufacturing Compliance.” Increasingly governments don’t care what people think at all– or if they consent-just that they go along with the program by hook, crook or club. Most prefer that we don’t vote at all. That’s why elections are treated as sports events. The non-voters increasingly outnumber whose who cast ballots.

Even more distressing is the trend towards the depoliticalization of politics through the merger of showbiz and newsbiz to assure that much of the media agenda is noisy and negative, stripped of all meaning: superficial, often celebrity-dominated with little in-depth explanatory or investigative journalism. They would rather market American Idol as the American Ideology. To them, the only “hegemony” in Canada is its beer and hockey.

The people who run our media are, after all, in the end, promoting a culture of consumption, not of engaged citizenship. They want eyeballs for advertisers, not activists to promote change. The sound-bytes presented as substance are there for entertainment, not illumination. It’s heat, not light, all the way.

So truth be told, the real propaganda in an era where with more pundits than journalists, is less real coverage. It is pervasive and invisible at the same time–omission more than commission. They want to dumb us down, not smarten us up. They foster passivity, skepticism and resignation. Forget beliefs of any kind–just buy, buy, buy. Why even use deception when distraction works just as well?

Yes, the lack of coverage of East Timor that Noam Chomsky railed against was atrocious, as is today’s war coverage. but so is the absence of reporting on the devolution of democracy and much of the suffering in our own country.

Perhaps the more appropriate title in what Detroit calls a “new model year,” is “Manufacturing Indifference.”

News Dissector Danny Schechter is “blogger-in-chief” of Mediachannel.org. His new film is IN DEBT WE TRUST (indebtwetrust.com). Comments to

Of American Exceptionalism, Apple Pie, and Moral Rot

BY JASON MILLER| Dateline: 5/13/07

Biography of Kathleen Parker excerpted from The Washington Post Writers Group page:

Now one of America’s most popular opinion columnists, appearing in more than 350 newspapers, Parker is at home both inside and outside the Washington Beltway. But she came to column-writing the old-fashioned way, working her way up journalism’s ladder from smaller papers to larger ones. “I never set out to become a commentator – and do continue to resist the label ‘pundit’ – but I found that keeping my opinion out of my writing was impossible,” says Parker. “One can only stand watching from the sidelines for so long without finally having to say, ‘Um, excuse me, but you people are nuts.’”

Despite myriad signs of the waning power and impending collapse of the abomination known as the American Empire or Pax Americana, there are those among us who insist on perpetuating history’s greatest and deadliest charade. While our nation inflicts tremendous misery and suffering upon the Earth and its sentient inhabitants, our opulent class and their sycophantic apologists dress the United States in a cloak of moral rectitude so pious that one who sees the truth finds it difficult to refrain from vomiting. History will afford us generous praise for our military prowess, economic might, but most of all, for our capacity to project a false image, both to ourselves and others.

Greedy, hubristic, gluttonous, bellicose, and reactionary almost beyond belief, those who wield the bulk of wealth and power in the United States maintain a phenomenal illusion of America’s decency. Hollow pillars of noble ideals merely serve as storage silos for the manure the cynical de facto aristocracy perpetually feeds the masses to ensure that there are enough true believers to man the bulwarks of a system riddled with contradictions and corruption.
Machiavellian moneyed elites infest and dominate nearly every node of power in our maleficent socioeconomic and political infrastructure, including Wall Street, the Pentagon, Congress, the White House, and the Fourth Estate. America’s persistent efforts to dominate the rest of the world serve their interests while significantly diminishing the quality of life for the rest of us. Spending close to a trillion dollars a year on “defense” and committing war crimes with the casual ease of a man brushing his teeth enrich the military industrial complex, financially starve initiatives that would benefit humanity, and fuel a vicious cycle US military aggression, hatred, blowback, and US retaliation.

While the crony capitalist criminals have a multitude of means at their disposal with which to beguile the masses into complicity in their egregious crimes against humanity, their principal weapon is their army of propagandists. Possessing “all-American” looks, exhibiting unwavering patriotism, and fulfilling her self-designated role as spokesperson for “sane adults,” Kathleen Parker is one of the establishment’s chief proponents in the corporate media. As such, she provides relentless cover for a class of criminals who put Al Capone and his associates to shame.

Consider a dissection of some of her work as it appeared on Jewish World Review.com:

In her 4/11/07, “Don Imus’s Via Dolorosa”, Ms. Parker opined:

“What Imus said was not hateful, but it was thoughtlessly unkind to young women who are not, in fact, ‘hos’…. Black hip-hop artists have been denigrating the women of their families and neighborhoods for years with terminology that reduces all women to receptacles for men’s pleasure.”

As she often does, Kathleen slyly buttresses the white patriarchal power structure which continues to dominate the United States, despite having suffered some significant erosion. Note how she assures us that Imus’s remark was not “hateful” and quickly identifies hip hop artists as the true villains.

While misogynistic song lyrics are morally repugnant, they do not alleviate Imus of culpability for his remark. When a dominant media figure, who happens to be a white male in a society which is only several generations removed from chattel slavery and Jim Crow, calls gifted black female athletes and scholars “hos” from a platform which enables him to reach an audience of millions, it is time for him to go.

Kathleen’s piece diverts our attention from another important issue. Why did his corporate chieftains fire Imus? Were they acting on the “moral duty” with which Ms. Parker professes to be so enamored? No. Imus got the axe because major advertising sponsors did not want to risk losing customers and withdrew their monetary support of Imus’s show.

Which leads to another significant point. Parker’s revulsion with hip-hop lyrics which denigrate women is fully justified. Yet she fails to acknowledge the fact that the bourgeoisie masters of the recording universe could end such abject immorality tomorrow if they wished. But even hip-hop with degrading lyrics sells. And profits rule, don’t they Kathleen? Did you forget to whom you sold your soul?

Writing in “The Mother of All Blunders” on 4/6/07, Parker gave us this gem:

“On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust-denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.”

This presents an excellent example of the rabid belligerence and paranoia our corporate-controlled media works so hard to engender in the hoi polloi. While his government certainly has exhibited a tendency towards internal repression, to whom is Ahmadinejad a danger outside of Iraq? To the world’s lone superpower, which is equipped with the most lethal killing machine in the history of humanity? To Israel, a nation with a potent military, a nuclear arsenal and the unconditional support of the US? Whom has Iran invaded lately? What is it that Ahmadinejad has lied about? Is Holocaust denial now a violation of international law? What of the world’s denial of the genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians?

Thankfully, in March of this year, Ms. Parker was there to remind us of “America’s Clear and Present Danger”:

“Simply put, the present danger is a worldwide threat from radical Islamist terrorism that has a strong state sponsorship component, an overt and covert military component, and an ‘insidious peaceful component’ that is now present in the United States.
That is to say, peacefully and without much notice, Islamists are trying to use our laws of tolerance against us to carve out exceptions for themselves. The radical Islamist faction that has infiltrated and intimidated Europe has found a home in our polite denial.”

To justify its outrageous military spending and perpetual wars, the United States needs enemies. When the Soviet Union disbanded and the US became the world’s only hegemon, policy makers needed a replacement for Communism to justify their “Realpolitik” interventions around the globe. Capitalism’s imperative is to expand or die.

How convenient for them that the “Islamofascists” have emerged. Former US allies like Saddam Hussein, CIA-trained guerilla fighters in Afghanistan, and millions of justifiably enraged victims of direct or indirect US oppression represent the ideal foe. Violently resistant to our exploitation, numbering over a billion, nearly ubiquitous, often dark-skinned (meaning they are easily dehumanized by our exquisite propagandists like Ms. Parker), and (by virtue of geographic good fortune) in possession of much of “our oil,” Islamic people are readily portrayed to US Americans as “a worldwide threat” which has now reached our shores as an ‘insidious peaceful component.’

If so many of our fellow citizens were not so easily persuaded to believe Kathleen’s absurd perversion of reality, it would be comical. We are the threat. Islamic violence is a reaction to years of invasion, genocide, theft of resources, toppling of governments, support of despots, and destruction of infrastructure. Imagine what we would do if we were in their place. But then again, empathizing with the “other” is akin to providing comfort to the enemy, isn’t it, Ms. Parker?

Musing about the state-sponsored murder of Saddam with “We Are All Executioners Now,” in January of this year Ms. Parker penned:

“Where we’ve seen it before was in the horror movies Islamist terrorists staged when they butchered hostages such as Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, knowing that the world would watch.
The differences are obvious, of course. Berg and Pearl were innocents, and Saddam was a lawless monster indicted, tried and convicted under a civilized code of jurisprudence. If anyone deserved ultimate justice for crimes against humanity, Saddam did. In death, he joins that foul fraternity of other torturers and murderers for whom death was tardy.”

Again Kathleen presents us with an emotionally charged intellectual hand-job intended to create sympathy for “our people”, demonize the “other”, and legitimize the United States’ utter disregard for the law, let alone justice.

While the gruesome deaths of Berg and Pearl were tragic, where is her concern for the millions upon millions of victims of our imperial wars and occupations since the end of World War II?

Kathleen also conveniently “memory-holed” the fact that the ‘lawless monster,’ Saddam, was our ally when he was at war with Iran during the Reagan era.

Amnesty International characterized Hussein’s trial and conviction as ‘deeply flawed and unfair,’ despite Parker’s assurance that it was conducted ‘under a civilized code of jurisprudence.’

And if ‘in death’ Saddam joined ‘that foul fraternity of other torturers and murderers for whom death was tardy,’ when do we schedule the executions of Kissinger, Bush 41 and Bush 43, Clinton, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a host of other US leaders? Their crimes are as well-documented as Saddam’s and are of equal or greater magnitude.
Shortly after Hugo Chavez spoke at the UN in September of 2006, Parker fired off, “The Axis of Oil and Nuts”:

“Chavez would be a hoot if he weren’t so dangerous. As the leader of America’s fourth-largest foreign oil supplier, he has undeserved power, both in the world and over the U.S. When he’s feeling grumpy, he threatens to cut us off. Wouldn’t we love not to have to entertain his mood shifts?”

Ms. Parker has a knack for defying reason while appearing to inundate us with irrefutable folksy wisdom. Admittedly, Chavez is over the top with his rhetoric and tends to make a caricature of himself. However, as with Ahmadinejad, to whom is Chavez a danger? Venezuela has not initiated a war or invasion under his leadership. There is no documented evidence that Chavez has killed (or ordered the killing) of a soul.

Chavez’s power to damage the US economically is far more limited than Kathleen implies. Venezuela accounts for about 15% of US oil imports. While it would certainly render a blow to the United States if Chavez stopped selling us his petroleum, we would manage.
In reality, the danger that Chavez poses is to US hegemony. As a shameless apologist for the US ruling elite, Ms. Parker is duty-bound to attack leaders like Chavez, who assert what “undeserved power” they have to protect their nation’s sovereignty and to challenge US global dominance.

Displaying rare form in April of 2006, Kathleen scribbled, “The Christianists are Coming, the Christianists are Coming”:
“For those who do not spend their days pulling imaginary bugs out of their eye sockets, ‘Christianist’ is a relatively new term that roughly refers to a virulent strain of right-wing political Christianity that, supposedly, parallels Islamist lunacy.

Although both groups may be ‘true believers,’ those who try to connect the dots of Christian belief, specifically evangelical Christianity, to Islamism seem willing to overlook the fact that Islamists praise Allah and fly airplanes into buildings while Christianists praise Jesus and pass the mustard.”

Thank you, Kathleen, for again reminding those who pull “imaginary bugs out of their eye sockets” that you are their Virgil in this mad, Hellish world.

Ms. Parker commits several sins of omission in her sweeping portrayal of Western religious fanatics as innocuous picnickers relative to the “monsters” who have the audacity to worship Allah.
Aside from passing the mustard, “Christianists” provide undying political, social, financial, and moral support for the genocidal acts of both the US and Israeli governments in the Holy Land. They don’t need to commit acts of terrorism abroad; they have the US military, the CIA, the IDF, and Mossad to do that for them. Therefore, they can focus their efforts on domestic terrorism as they bomb abortion clinics, gay night clubs, and Olympic events.
In “Hezbollah’s Twilight Zone” (2/06), Ms. Parker wove a tale that would have left Rod Serling green with envy:

“Why some residents of Qana didn’t leave given fair warning is a point of speculation, but Hezbollah reportedly has blocked residents from evacuating other areas. Proportionality is a trickier question, but let’s be clear on the issue of moral equivalence. There is none. Hezbollah aims to kill civilians; Israel aims not to. But by firing rockets from civilian areas, Hezbollah forces Israel to return fire, thus inciting the condemnation of civilized nations and fueling the reliable outrage of the Arab street.

The fog of war may prevent absolute clarity, but this much seems certain: Those dead women and children are casualties of Hezbollah, not Israel. As in the case of Susan Smith, we mourn the deaths of the children, but have no sympathy for the responsible party.”

Let’s pause for a moment to applaud Kathleen for a nearly superhuman feat of mental gymnastics. If we are to accept her cleverly constructed argument, we must blame the defenders of the victims of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon while embracing the idiotic conclusion that Western shells, cluster bombs, and missiles are manufactured in such a way that they only kill the “bad guys”, and when civilians die, it is an aberration for which we are immediately forgiven.

Incidentally, Israel killed 1200 Lebanese civilians while Hezbollah claimed 43 Israeli civilian victims. If, as Ms. Parker claims, “Hezbollah aims to kill civilians; Israel aims not to,” both sides need to engage in some serious re-training of their forces.

Rewinding to 2004, let’s consider some of Kathleen’s “wisdom” from “You Say Fallujah, I Say Rambo!”:

“I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle….
…But so goes the unanimous vote around my household - and I’m betting millions of others - in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as ‘Fallujah.’
Wouldn’t it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them.
These are the times that try Americans’ souls….
…It is hard at such times to keep one’s head, to remain calm, to rise above the impulse to exact immediate revenge. Or to cut and run, as we did under similar circumstances in Somalia not so long ago. But keep our heads we must. Calmly we must transcend the primitive lust that compels ignorant others to mug idiotically for cameras.
Our revenge will be in facing down enemies who, though unworthy adversaries, impede the worthy goal of stabilizing a country whose future may predict our own….
….Americans have the appealing if self-defeating habit of projecting their values onto others who haven’t enjoyed centuries of self-enlightenment. But we learn and mean well.
What we know, and what we tell the rest of the world by our steadfastness, is that we will help even the unworthy; we will not back down from a just cause even when appalled and afraid; we mean what we say. “

What an artful display of war-pimping! In response to the death of four Blackwater mercenaries, at the hands of people whose nation WE invaded, she writes of nuking the Sunni Triangle and laments that “justice” against “zoo animals” is not so “available and so simple.”

Invoking the spirit of the American Revolution with her reference to Thomas Paine and the times trying our souls, she reminds us of our “moral superiority” and the need to “rise above the impulse to exact immediate revenge.” (Ultimately, we did indeed demonstrate our “civility and restraint” by allowing some time to pass before avenging the deaths of four guns-for-hire by leveling the city of Fallujah—we were so fortunate to have Kathleen as a moral compass).

Proudly waving the banner of American Exceptionalism, she reminds us that those attempting to end our occupation of their country are “unworthy”, yet tempered as we are by “centuries of self-enlightenment”, we will continue to “help” them.

Let’s hope that our “unworthy adversaries” who are maimed, dying, or who have lost family members realize that we US Americans “learn and mean well.”

Some place their faith in a deity, but as evidenced by Ms. Parker’s June 2006 column, “In Marines We Trust,” that trend may be changing:

“Not only do we not know what happened in Haditha, but we’ve failed to communicate effectively to the rest of the world what we do know: that our Marines always deserve the benefit of the doubt. And that if something did go terribly wrong in Haditha, it was a rare exception to the rule.

Instead of launching an aggressive PR campaign to debunk the growing impression that such incidents, if true, are par for American forces, we get a presumption of guilt and an ethics course to fix a problem that isn’t a problem. The failure to communicate responsibly and strategically in this case, coupled with the rush to judgment in the international court of public opinion, has hurt not only the Marines under investigation, but also all our military men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Here Ms. Parker implies that the vanguard forces of a morally reprehensible imperialistic superpower that slaughtered three million in Vietnam and has annihilated hundreds of thousands in Iraq since the Gulf War do their killing “innocently” and “ethically.” While there is certainly a distinction between individual soldiers killing unarmed civilians and a group of service personnel taking lives in the course of carrying out a military objective, one can also successfully argue that each death the US military causes in Iraq is a war crime because the United States launched a war of aggression, an offense for which several principals of the Third Reich were hanged. Besides, the evidence against the Marines in Haditha is quite damning and the Haditha’s and My Lai’s are not as isolated as the corporate media would have us believe.

Recruiting young people who are economically susceptible to their bribes and psychologically vulnerable to their brain-washing while mobilizing public support for unprovoked invasions and “interventions,” the tangled web of corporate entities, war profiteers, “elected officials”, plutocrats, upper echelon military careerists, and their handsomely rewarded propagandists, like Ms. Parker, ultimately bears the responsibility for a deepening sea of blood and a growing mound of dismembered corpses.

Kathleen Parker may project an “apple pie” image, but her ardent moral and intellectual defense of the wholesale liquidation of human beings, her dehumanization of Islamic people to fuel the fraudulent “War on Terror”, and her pathological nationalism reveal that she is morally rotten to the core.

Jason Miller is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at https://bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. He welcomes constructive correspondence at