legalienate

So What's New?

2009-12-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

So What’s New?

We begin 2010 with a national debt of over twelve trillion dollars and rising. That’s roughly 40 thousand dollars per taxpayer. Should we continue paying for the phony war on terror which started in Afghanistan, moved to Iraq, returned to Afghanistan, is spreading to Pakistan and has lasted longer than World War Two? Or should we put an end to the terror war on tax payers in the USA? Guess which costs us more : our military budget to murder thousands of innocent people and maintain puppet regimes in foreign countries, or our national budget to help citizens find jobs, housing, health care and education? Political lies and moronic bigotry can make it seem that immigrants, the poor and hypochondriacs are sinking us into deeper debt, but morons can also show that the moon is made of green cheese, flying saucers regularly visit earth and the Democratic and Republican parties truly represent the interests of all americans. Yeah, right.

It’s time we face the reality of a crumbling empire that still seems to provide freedom and opportunity, but only for a shrinking minority. And the burden of supporting that minority falls on a majority which picks up the deadly tab in a world growing more politically treacherous, economically desperate and ecologically dangerous. Each day we expect change to result from rhetorical reform offered by the ruling minority’s hired help makes it more difficult to create the radical transformation we must bring about to help save our nation and our world .

Anyone who still thinks the new model hybrid presidential brand represents a difference in anything more than style suffers from wishful thinking disorder. Some are finally shaking the cobwebs out of their heads and organizing to force him to do what they voted for, rather than expect him to voluntarily disobey his financial and political owners. He did not miraculously come to us from the heavens but was selected, shaped and packaged to be sold as an all new product at a time when the system could no longer continue under the old brand name. But his job description is the same as the previous national CEO : represent corporate capital, Wall street and Israel first, and the rest of us, if at all, second .

Those still in denial need to face the global death, destruction and debt that have not only continued but are getting worse under this new regime. What our consciousness controllers tell us are great speeches are merely rhetorical stunts to dull our senses to the substantial continuity with the last regime’s most murderous policies. Denial is difficult to shake given our near total control by corporate media in its job as stenographer for power and mass sleeping pill for its subjects . But there are more alternative outlets for news , analysis and political organizing than ever before that need to be used and strengthened and they are not only on the internet.

Countless small struggling print journals - like The Coastal Post and The Independent Monitor - need the support of citizens interested in change for the better in the lives of previously silenced and manipulated minorities. But whatever the ethnic, religious or other special identity observed, we need to ultimately become the great majority who face lethal problems that need common solutions. The increased warfare in the middle east, rhetorical and military hostilities in latin america and general disrespect by the developed world leaders for the rest of humanity are a call for supporters of real peace and social justice to confront the root causes of war and ecological destruction before it is too late.

Long before he took office this president made it clear that he would protect corporate capital’s global domination and maintain its major branch office in Israel. His induced perception as unique - being only half white instead of all white - played a major role in making him seem truly different. But people with sincere hopes and ideals have had them crushed so often in the past that this latest farce will hopefully be the last lesson needed. No matter what rhetorical pomp and political circumstance are offered , no matter what ethnicity, race , sex or sexuality is claimed by the candidate, financial backing and ownership are far more important. The party of individual wealth , corporate capital and Israel remains in charge, with only minor cosmetic and stylistic adjustments that make no difference at all to foreigners being threatened, embargoed or invaded, or americans left homeless, jobless , uneducated, in debt and denied health care .

Anti-social techniques of mind management remain persuasive among a public trained to worship individual responsibility and show near contempt for governmental action in the name of all the people. This will continue as long as we accept our dysfunctional union as something called a democracy and ourselves as subdivisions of humanity . Global society’s class divisions become obvious when we see which countries invade and which are invaded. And where the consumption frenzy leads directly to the increased debt of the middle class and further suffering of the poor. But whether they are colonized natives, oppressed peasants or exploited workers, the previously submissive are demanding change in their status by organizing as one people with common interests.

When lacking clean water, sickened by chemical foods and polluted air or suffering drought, warfare or hurricanes , it is humanity which is in torment, not simply nationalities. 2010 will hopefully bring us closer to acting as a people with common racial origins , universal bonds and a desperate need to create social solutions to problems that will get worse the longer we allow them to be trivialized as combat between mythological good and evil, simple individual concerns or special identity group dilemmas. All of us or none of us? Indeed. Happy New Year? Make it so.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net

News from " The Garlic"

2009-12-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

President Announces Invasion After Peace Speech

After giving one of his weekly stirring speeches on peace which bring tears to the eyes of admirers, detractors and those suffering Mental Antagonism Disorder(MAD) the president called for a massive military attack on the third world nation Oblivia.

“The Oblivians who are rising up to demand that the west repay them for past plundering of their people and other resources fail to understand the nature of Western domination. We are higher orders of humans, regardless of race, creed or mental status, while they represent a deadly threat to the well being of all Americans whose pets desperately need the animal foods our nation relies on and which come from the remains of Oblivia’s livestock and children. Especially during this cherished holiday season, we must do the smart thing and kill for peace.”

Many of the assembled press joined in tearful appreciation of the president’s rhetorical ability to cloud minds and morals with his soaring rhetoric. Spin doctors, political analysts, congress and day care workers united in support for this smart new war to save humanity from a stupid old culture.

Oblivians Delighted At Invasion By Multicultural Forces

The newly invaded people of Oblivia have expressed grateful satisfaction at being devastated by an attacking army of diverse persons. “My home was bombed by afro-asian-american bisexual jews and my daughter was raped by a latino-arab-american lesbian” said a smiling, if distraught, native of the third world nation which provides dog and cat food to the developed world. “Of course I am sad to lose my home and my family, but at least I can grieve knowing that they were murdered by a truly integrated, socially diverse force of invaders and killers. In a strange and confusing way, I am almost happy that I have suffered for the good of affirmative action in the developed world. Thank you so much for the drug injection you gave me before conducting this interview. Why is my skin making faces at me?”

Tiger Woods named Stud of the Millennium

After the entire female population of Concord, New Hampshire revealed that they had slept with Tiger Woods, raising the alleged total of woman he has had to upwards of fifty seven thousand, PlayWithYourSelf magazine nominated him for Stud Of the Millennium, with aging publisher Hugh Betcha offering Woods accommodation at the world famous PlayWithYourSelf mansion, constructed in the shape of male genitalia.

Woods would not answer calls from the press but his publicist said that while he appreciates all the tasteful attention given his alleged sexual escapades in a nation which sees 100 people killed on its highways every day , he would soon leave organized major sports and enter miniature golf competition out of respect for all the envious white men , angry black women and other unfortunate citizens living lives of such incredible emptiness that only sordid gossip about celebrities could hold their attention.

Attack on Department of Clichés Headquarters

A bloody attack on Cliché Central was claimed by the Clarity in Speech Liberation Front. Three media workers were shot dead while saying that a decade long study had proved that the envelope was being pushed towards transparency by sources which could not be revealed at the present time. A message released to major media and minor online gossip sites said:

“We will not tolerate any further evasions of language, distortions of speech or refusals to call a spade a spade for political reason. Death to the speakers of obfuscatory cliché ridden, uh, inarticulate empty repetitious talk that goes on and on, with interruptions of inarticulateness that, um, like, you know, mess up our minds and like, make it very difficult to , um, get a point across, which has been a problem for the one one hundredth of a decade during which this comment has been in the process of, um, getting across or trying to, like, make clear.”

The group was thought to be affiliated with the international terrorist communist islamic rosicrucian illuminati front and, um, was seen as the biggest threat to peace since the attacks of, uh, 911.

Obamanation Called Abomination by U.N. General Assembly

After the United Nations In-Security Council supported a U.S. - Israel resolution censuring Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and the Little sisters of the Poor as supporters of International terrorism, child molesting and puppy dog and kitty cat beating, the General Assembly voted unanimously to move U.N. headquarters far from the abomination of the Obamanation. The new headquarters will be in a place more representative of the hopes and sentiments of the global majority: a cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Leading Banks To Pay TARP With CARP Funds

Major financial institutions which borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars of public money from the TARP fund (troubled asset relief program) have promised to pay their debts early, using money from the CARP fund ( criminal asset relief program). The president, congress and federal reserve thanked them for their early payment and agreed to loan them several trillion more dollars if CARP isn't enough to assure them another record profit making year.

Speaking for the average American taxpayers, former homeowners and unemployed workers, a minority of congress renounced their citizenship and escaped to the West Bank and Gaza, where they hoped to find higher morality if not peace or justice.

Hate Crimes Definition Expanded:
Six billion more Covered

Under pressure from groups which felt they were left out, hate crimes will be considered in cases of discrimination judged to be based on taunting or harassing because of height, weight, region of birth, membership in Crips, Bloods, Elks or Masons, style of dress, being clean shaved or bearded , being overweight, underweight, weightless, unstylish and unfashionable in attire or treated as stupid by people who think they are smart.

Liberal groups threatened to sue conservatives for Hate Crimes under the new definition because conservatives call them wimpy but Conservatives had already filed suit because liberals call them rednecks. That case may reach the Supreme Court after it is featured on the Daily Show, The Onion and the new online sensation from Legalienate, The Garlic. All these groups have been accused of hate crimes in the past or will be in the future, along with countless millions of individuals who will finally have the opportunity to get even with society for making them, uh, members of, uh, groups which are really, like, hated.

Stay Tuned

Morales Accuses The U.S. of Terrorism - Rejects Hillary Clinton's Warnings

2009-12-13T17:30:00.000-08:00

December 12, 2009

La Paz

Bolivian President Evo Morales rejected Saturday the declarations of U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who said that relations between Bolivia and Iran "weren't a good idea" and could have consequences.

Exporting terrorism

In a press conference in the central region of Cochabamba Morales referred to Clinton's declarations on Friday about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's November visit to Bolivia and Venezuela. "If people want to flirt with Iran, they should look at what consequences there could be for them. And we hope that they will think twice about it," warned the Secretary of State.

"They say that Iran exports terrorism. Do you know who really exports terrorism? It's those people who send troops from their countries to other countries, those who install military bases in other countries. They are the ones who plan and carry out terrorism. It's the government of the United States that plans and carries out terrorism," declared Morales.

"In solidarity Cuba sends 'troops' abroad, they're doctors who save lives. Do you suppose the (U.S.) soldiers are going to save lives? The armed soldiers are going to take lives, like in Afghanistan, like in Iraq, like with the U.S. military bases in South America," explained Morales upon rejecting "emphatically those words coming from the United States."

Bolivia is better off

He added that Bolivia is a "proud and sovereign" country that "doesn't accept warnings or threats, they are pointless and we categorically reject them because the United States has no moral standing, since they are the ones who export terrorism."

The indigenous leader likewise maintained that "without imperialism and without capitalism Bolivia is better off," and that since in his country economic sovereignty is respected, things have improved.

Vice-Chancellor Hugo Fernandez rejected Friday what he characterized as interference on the part of the United States, and said that in the negotiations to improve relations between Bolivia and that country they are working "precisely on the point of non-interference in internal matters, that has to remain very clear."

In 2008, Morales expelled the U.S. Ambassador Phillip Goldberg for suspicion of conspiring with the opposition, and later suspended operations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which he accused of espionage, and at the beginning of 2009 he ordered the expulsion of another diplomat.

Tense relations

In response, Washington also ordered the expulsion of the Bolivian ambassador.

However, both countries are seeking to normalize their relations and the Bolivian Chancellor David Choquehuanca announced the arrival of a Mission from Washington for a third round of negotiations, without specifying the date of the meeting.

Bolivia and Iran established diplomatic relations at the end of 2007, but they still haven't exchanged ambassadors, among other reasons because the Senate, dominated by the opposition, didn't ratify the agreements between the two countries.

Source: "Evo acusó a EU de terrorismo," Univision en línea, 12 de diciembre de 2009

Nobel, No Brains, Obama's Surrealist "Peace" Speech

2009-12-12T23:39:00.000-08:00

"Never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor."

------------Gore Vidal

Now Barack Obama has added his name to the list of previous American Nobel peace prize winners: Henry Kissinger, the Butcher of Indochina whose bombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions; Woodrow Wilson, the Apostle of Self-Determination who invaded Panama, Haiti, Mexico (twice), the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, the USSR (twice), and restored segregation to Washington D.C.; Teddy Roosevelt, who exulted in the slaughter of war and saw the elimination of indigenous peoples as the righteous fulfillment of “Manifest Destiny”; President McKinley’s War Secretary Elihu Root, who directed the U.S. slaughter in the Philippines starting in 1898, dismissing Filipino independence hero Emilio Aguinaldo as a “Chinese half-breed” and Filipinos in general as "children" who were “but little advanced from pure savagery"; and Dr. King, who surely must have wondered what he had ever done to deserve such degrading company.

More suitable for a Ripley's believe it or not collection than a peace address, Obama's acceptance speech is the familiar attempt to construct a self-serving mythology that deflects all blame from the U.S. onto its official enemies. For example:

"America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, restrict the most dangerous weapons."

As noted before on this blog, Washington unveiled the Marshall Plan to avert economic, social and political chaos, prevent the collapse of U.S. exports, achieve "multilateralism," and dissipate the growing strength of indigenous communist parties (i.e., not Moscow-directed) in post-war Europe. In the absence of massive U.S. aid, American strategic planners feared, war-ravaged Europe might forsake capitalism for experiments with socialist enterprise and government controls, which could have jeopardized "free enterprise" even in the United States. There was major elite concern over the "dollar gap," which prevented Europe from being a market for U.S. manufactured goods, threatening to produce a glut of unbought merchandise that could plunge the U.S. economy into economic chaos. Europe was thus subordinated to a considerable degree to the designs of U.S. corporations, with a corresponding narrowing of the European political spectrum. A prime element of the plan called for the exclusion of "Communists" from power, a broadly defined Satan class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements. Secretary of State George Marshall, after whom the Marshall Plan is named, made it clear that U.S. aid was contingent on not voting what Washington considered political undesirables into power.

The United Nations began by discarding the guarantees of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. It accepted coolie labor and cheap raw materials as the basis of the world economy. It redefined colonies as "dependent territories" and placed them under Great Power trusteeship until they demonstrated they were sufficiently deferential. It denied representation to blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, Guamanians, and Alaskans. India's delegation was completely British. The USSR flatly refused to participate in the "parliament of democracy" sham.

Attending the opening session as a spokesman for the N.A.A.C.P., W. E. B. DuBois protested the continued abuse of 750 million oppressed people around the world, complaining that there was no provision “even to consider the aggression of a nation against its own colonial peoples,” which meant that in the U.N.'s ostensible planetary democracy “at least one-fourth of the inhabitants of the world have no part in it, no democratic rights.”

Meanwhile, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov declared it essential that “dependent countries are enabled as soon as possible to take the path of national independence,” and Washington announced it would neither propose nor support a declaration of universal human rights. When Latin American delegations resisted the continuation of Great Power rule, a U.S. delegate urged Nelson Rockefeller, Assistant Secretary of State For Latin American Affairs, to give them a spanking: “Your goddamn peanut nations aren’t voting right. Go line them up.”

Three years later (1948), Washington opposed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' call for economic security to be a basic entitlement, dismissing the proposal as socialist heresy. Any notion of a right to subsistence was anathema to the U.S. State Department, which successfully lobbied to have economic, social, and cultural rights split off from civil and political rights, thus creating a divided U.N. covenant. Believing that a right to eat was an intolerable limitation on "free enterprise," Washington never ratified the Covenant calling for guaranteed economic security, and relegated it to inferior status ever after.

On the U.S. commitment to preventing genocide, Washington has never owned up to its genocidal or quasi-genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples, let alone atoned for it. There is a U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington dedicated to Jewish suffering in WWII, but not one commemorating the wiping out of indigenous nations here in the U.S.

In 1998, Amnesty International offered this rather unflattering portrait of the U.S.'s record vis-a-vis preventing genocide:

"The first U.N. Human Rights treaty ratified by the U.S.A. was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It ratified the Convention in 1988, 40 years after signing it and after 97 other states had already ratified it. The U.S.A. took 28 years to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, after 133 other states had already ratified it. At least 71 other states ratified the Convention against Torture before the U.S.A. It was only in 1992, after 109 other states, that the U.S.A. ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 26 years after its adoption by the UN General Assembly. The ICCPR is one of two principal treaties protecting human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The other - the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - has still not been ratified by the U.S.A."

On war and weapons, Washington is far and away the world leader in producing armaments and war, is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, and refuses to renounce a first-strike nuclear policy. It maintains thousands of U.S. military bases around the world while allowing no country to have a base in U.S. territory. Its Latin American officers graduating from Fort Benning Georgia have tortured and murdered all over Latin America for decades.

"Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting. It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War . . . a just peace includes not only civil and political rights - it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want."

But the United States opposed (and still opposes) the likely large world majority favoring economic security as a human right!

Furthermore, economic security and economic opportunity are not the same thing. No one works harder than workers eager to prevent their families from starving. If there were economic security this kind of desperate earnestness would disappear, and with it a good deal of productivity and profit. On the other hand, for the owners of the system, the security of being "too big to fail" encourages the runaway speculation that has crashed the system into disaster on a regular basis. The only way to prevent the kind of economic pain the world is currently experiencing (for the umpteenth time) is to place worker security and well-being above the profit motive. But that means an entirely different kind of economy and a fight to the finish with the private owners of the present economy. It is difficult to believe Obama is calling for that.

Freedom from want? Obama has gone along with shoveling trillions of dollars of public money to the swindlers who almost destroyed the world economy, and may yet do so. He has done little or nothing for the millions who have lost homes, jobs, pension funds, and hope for the future. Having run up an astronomical budget deficit to provide "economic security" for those designated "too big to fail," he now speaks of cutting the deficit rather than directing government spending to meeting the needs of Wall Street's long-suffering victims. He cannot have it both ways. Either there is economic opportunity for all, which means that corporations, no matter how large, must be allowed to fail just like smaller businesses when their performance merits that, or there is economic security for all, which means government spending must be directed toward meeting the needs of the American people, not subsidizing Wall Street firms, which are not supposed to need such help in a "free enterprise" economy where all are said to rise or fall in accordance with their merits.

"For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

Evil exists in "the world," but not in U.S. leaders and institutions. How can that be? It is self-serving to assume, as Obama does, that the U.S. is free of evil, while its official enemies are defined by it. Nowhere does he concede that "rogue states" have legitimate grievances that must be addressed, or that the U.S.A is guilty of evil acts that must be atoned for. Only others are wicked; the U.S. makes mistakes, but is incapable of evil. This is an attitude more characteristic of a juvenile delinquent than a great diplomat.

The false dichotomy of pacifism vs. force is equally self-serving. The alternative Obama overlooks - real diplomacy, real problem-solving, an end to demonization in favor of cooperative engagement around issues that threaten human extinction - is ruled out in advance.

Hitler's armies might never have done any damage if not for the huge surge in U.S. investment in Germany that occurred between 1929 and 1940 - the years the Nazis rose to awesome power. It seems likely that a non-violent movement of U.S. investors might very well have insured that Hitler never achieved the heights of power that allowed him to do so much damage. In short, "stopping" Hitler by force is far less impressive when seen from the perspective of having helped him for a decade prior to the U.S. entering the European war. Furthermore, the U.S. put fascists back in power repeatedly in the wake of its victories in WWII, so the presumed U.S. commitment to "stopping" fascism is dubious at best.

Ditto for getting Al Qaeda to "lay down its arms" - or shall we say box cutters. Here Obama seems to forget that Al Qaeda is "armed" primarily by a desire for revenge against U.S. crimes in the Muslim world, especially Palestine. Osama bin Laden, or whoever speaks using that name, has made it very clear that what the U.S. has primarily to do in order to achieve peace with "Al Qaeda" is end its support for a Jewish apartheid state on Palestinian land. Israel is far and away the leading grievance in the Arab world and it is understandable why it would be. But Obama doesn't get it, cannot get it. He's committed to Jewish supremacy, not peace.

Yes, force is sometimes necessary. Force was necessary to expel the U.S. from Nicaragua in the 1930s, from Cuba in the 1950s, and from Vietnam in the 1970s. But Obama is oblivious to the need for force to be applied against the United States. He can only think of the United States as a victim of unjust force, never the perpetrator. His ideological blindness is total on this score.

"The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense."

The great majority of the world in fact did not support the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001, with international public opinion strongly favoring diplomatic and judicial measures over military action. An international Gallup poll in late September 2001 asked, "Once the identity of the terrorists is known, should the American government launch a military attack on the country or countries where the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to extradite the terrorists to stand trial?" Among Europeans support for the application of U.S. force ranged from 8% in Greece to 29% in France. In Latin America, support went from 2% in Mexico to 11% in Colombia and Venezuela. Panama was an exception, with public support for the military option favored by 16%. Even in Israel, a majority opposed responding with force. Meanwhile, Taliban overtures to extradite Bin Laden were rejected by Washington, which also refused to provide evidence for its accusations.

If the world didn't support the U.S. attack at the beginning, what are the chances that it supports it eight years later?

Interview with Gullible Skeptic Editor Michael Schlermer - “Official Holocaust history is objective, scientific, and infallible.”

2009-12-07T22:11:00.000-08:00

Legalienate: What is a skeptic?

Schlermer: A skeptic is a person who looks for the logic, reason, and evidence for a claim.

Legalienate: This makes you, in general, quite distrustful of conspiracy theories, no?

Schlermer: Absolutely. The more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Legalienate: So how do you respond to the claim of A. S. Marques posted on your website, to wit: “So how about the great ‘Holocaust’ conspiracy? . . . You know, the vast German plan to secretly exterminate an entire race in the hope future historians would be at a loss to determine what had happened to it, allegedly resulting in 6 million murdered Jews, with no procedural plan, no written orders at any level, no assigned method of mass murder or bureaucratic control, leaving it to the imagination of a whole bunch of telepathic improvisers who came up with mass execution by such methods as steam, electrocution, non-toxic Diesel exhaust and Zyklon B pesticide. And, of course, not leaving the slightest vestige of such a carnage accessible to forensic examination in any of its precisely located alleged sites.”

Schlermer: I’m a believer.

Legalienate: Really? So much for skepticism, right? Well, let’s take this one step at a time. Just how do we know that homicidal gas chambers existed in WWII?

Schlermer: From the death camp remains for one thing.

Legalienate: You mean things like a small unsealed room with an unlocked door that opens outwards and has a window in it and is called a “gas chamber” by those with a huge vested interest in demonizing everything German?

Schlermer: Well, not only that. We also have eyewitness testimony that swears people were gassed in such places. This corroborates the physical evidence.

Legalienate: I see.

Schlermer: We also have tons of documents from the Nazi archives.

Legalienate: But none of them mention homicidal gas chambers.

Schlermer: They do indirectly. Experts have determined that when the Nazis spoke of eliminating the Jewish problem they actually meant physical extermination in gas chambers. I’m talking about very rational, scientific researchers who wear white coats.

Legalienate: Impressive. Is there any other evidence?

Schlermer: Yes. There are speeches by Hitler and other Nazi officials venting their hatred for Jews and their desire to rid Germany of their presence.

Legalienate: Do they mention homicidal gas chambers?

Schlermer: No. But we have photographs, too.

Legalienate: Of mass gassing chambers?

Schlermer: No. Distant shots of the outside of buildings said to contain mass gassing chambers.

Legalienate: What about the eyewitness testimony?

Schlermer: Very credible.

Legalienate: Like claims that 800 people were packed into a space the size of a file cabinet?

Schlermer: Every bit of evidence doesn’t have to be right for the general conclusion to be sound.

Legalienate: Like 42,000 gassings a day at a single camp?

Schlermer: Ballpark figures aren’t necessarily dishonest . . . .

Legalienate: Like the floor of the mass gassing chambers opening up and depositing the corpses in a “subterranean chamber” that is nowhere to be found in the concentration camp where this event allegedly happened?

Schlermer: Look, anecdotal samples can’t disprove a general proposition . . .

Legalienate: So could you give us the systematic evidence for mass gassing chambers?

Schlermer: With pleasure. Hitler hated Jews and gave anti-Semitic speeches. Nazi documents allude to permanently solving the Jewish “problem” in Europe. There are Zyklon B pesticide traces in former German concentration camps. Eyewitnesses swear mass gassings occurred in these camps. There are also photographs of burning bodies from the camps. And we have architectural blueprints for cremation ovens, as well as gas chambers, which Holocaust deniers say are merely fumigation chambers. There are photographs of the outside of buildings in former concentration camps showing prisoners lined up as though waiting to be gassed. All this evidence converges on the conclusion that the gas chambers existed and were used for mass murder.

Legalienate: Converges?

Schlermer: It all points to the conclusion that they must have existed.

Legalienate: Must have existed? I thought we were proving what did exist.

Schlermer: We are. The evidence says they must have existed, therefore they did.

Legalienate: Is that really the same thing?

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: I see. A customer on Amazon who reviewed your book “Denying History,” says this: “I learned this concept (convergence) under a different name in religion class. It was called ‘leap of faith.’”

Schlermer: But the Holocaust is science. Official Holocaust history is objective, scientific, and infallible.

Legalienate: I see. Isn't it interesting that whenever someone wants to use false or unrelated evidence to support a favored conclusion he talks about how it “converges” on that conclusion? Theology professor David Ray Griffin used that method to “prove” that the twin towers in New York were brought down by pre-planted exposives.

Schlermer: That’s not really fair . . . I oppose Griffin . . .

Legalienate: But not his method. Now how do the existence of cremation ovens carry implications of murder? Aren't dead bodies cremated in every country?

Schlermer: Of course.

Legalienate: So can I ask why cremation ovens are always mentioned in the same breath as gas chambers, as though cremating corpses were the same as murdering people?

Schlermer: You certainly may.

Legalienate: That’s all you have to say?

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: You accept that Zyklon B gas was used to fumigate the camps?

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: So there were fumigation chambers and mass gassing chambers?

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: How come there are no physical remains of the enormous gas chambers that supposedly executed 2000 Jews at a time?

Schlermer: The Nazis destroyed them.

Legalienate: Why were no photographs of the homicidal gas chambers taken by Nazi guards? After all, there are many photographs of American lynch mobs proudly smiling after their grisly deeds were done, why no celebratory Nazi pictures of the gas chambers?

Schlermer: Because the Nazis wanted to keep the final solution secret.

Legalienate: So how come there are roughly a million survivors churning out endless Holocaust testimonials? If they were really determined to maintain secrecy, shouldn’t the Nazis have shot them all, so they couldn’t tell their story to the world?

Schlermer: No conspiracy is perfect . . .

Legalienate: I should say not . . . . Now on the objectivity issue, isn’t it self-serving of you to claim that your side in the debate is the product of scientific historiography, while that of your opponents is the fruit of prejudice?

Schlermer: No. Deniers only seek to confirm their biases. They doggedly look for evidence to substantiate their preconceived views. The mark of intellectual honesty is the willingness to subject one’s favored hypothesis to vigorous attack.

Legalienate: So why won’t Holocaust true-believers debate their opponents?

Schlermer: They don’t want to legitimize them.

Legalienate: But if their opponents’ arguments are hopelessly flawed, wouldn’t demonstrating this in front of a mass audience lead to their delegitimization?

Schlermer: One would hope so. But people tend to believe a lot of weird things, no matter how much they are reasoned with.

Legalienate: Indeed. . . . Like Jewish bodies were converted to soap by the Nazis?

Schlermer: Yes, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the story is wrong.

Legalienate: And Jewish skulls were converted to shrunken heads?

Schlermer: Some of the particulars may be wrong, but . . .

Legalienate: And Jewish skin was made into lampshades?

Schlermer: Look, I’ve already pointed out that a general proposition can’t be invalidated by anecdotal evidence.

Legalienate: What’s the general proposition here, that Holocaust historians are brain-damaged?

Schlermer: Not exactly, but . . . .

Legalienate: Now, as for dealing with Deniers, you say that censorship is no way to handle them.

Schlermer: Right. I’m a firm believer in free speech.

Legalienate: How do you react to the beatings, torchings, bombings, book shreddings, heresy trials, blasphemy laws, and jailings inflicted on Holocaust deniers?

Schlermer: They’ve invited this, so there’s really nothing to be done.

Legalienate: In other words, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to your death your right to be given summary justice by a howling mob.”

Schlermer: Well put.

Legalienate: Thank you. You say Holocaust Deniers are “ideological.”

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: Their fondness for fascism leads them to minimize or deny crimes of the Nazi state?

Schlermer: Exactly.

Legalienate: And how about the other side? Doesn’t the Holocaust Industry’s incestuous relationship with the state of Israel predispose it to distortions and fabrications that favor the interests of that state?

Schlermer: Not that I’ve noticed.

Legalienate: I see. Why are political affiliations relevant to the Holocaust debate in the first place? You go to considerable lengths to point out the “right wing” associations of Holocaust Deniers.

Schlermer: Because they establish that Deniers have an ideological axe to grind, which interferes with their ability to objectively assess history.

Legalienate: I see. And the political affiliations of the Holocaust Industry don’t have a prejudicial effect?

Schlermer: Not all historians who accept the Holocaust are part of the “Holocaust Industry.”

Legalienate: They are if they intend to continue publishing.

Schlermer: In truth, there is no “Holocaust industry,” just honest researchers seeking truth against a rising tide of obtuse Deniers motivated by racism.

Legalienate: I see. Your co-author Alex Grobman is a founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual. That doesn’t interfere with his objectivity?

Schlermer: Not in the least.

Legalienate: O.K. let’s continue. You say that the moral superiority of the Allies in WWII is demonstrated by the fact that the killing stopped the moment the Allies won.

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: But the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki while the Japanese were trying to surrender. The Purple code had been broken and Washington knew they were petitioning the Soviets for surrender. After the war, the U.S. War Department announced that there was no military necessity to the atomic bombings.

Schlermer: But all that occurred on the road to victory . . .

Legalienate: So a lost war is the only crime . . . .

Schlermer: No. The Axis powers would have gone on killing had they won.

Legalienate: How do you know that?

Schlermer: It was part of their ideology. Aryan supremacy. They were committed to killing off their racial inferiors.

Legalienate: Like Teddy Roosevelt and Manifest Destiny?

Schlermer: Look. I’m talking about the racism in WWII.

Legalienate: Right. So let me read you a quote about how bad it got: “We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying in a hole with the dead, and . . . boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”

Schlermer: That’s exactly the ideology of hatred I’m talking about. It needed to be defeated militarily.

Legalienate: But it wasn’t. That’s a quote from war correspondent Edgar L. Jones, describing the U.S. war in the Pacific.

Schlermer: Well, in that case it was an unfortunate excess caused by the stress of battle.

Legalienate: You say that the Axis “killed for geography, for political control, for economic power, for racial purification, and for pleasure.”

Schlermer: Yes.

Legalienate: The United States doesn’t do such things.

Schlermer: Of course not.

Legalienate: Did the indigenous nations of North America voluntarily disband to make way for the United States?

Schlermer: No, but . . .

Legalienate: Weren’t they physically eliminated through genocide, or something very much like it?

Schlermer: Maybe, but there was no poison gas involved . . .

Legalienate: Didn’t the United States launch war with Mexico in 1846 in order to take California?

Schlermer: Possibly, but . . .

Legalienate: Isn‘t that killing “for geography?”

Schlermer: Perhaps, but . . .

Legalienate: When Thomas Jefferson shared his aspirations for founding a country “without blot or mixture” and urged that the Indians be "exterminated" or driven “with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains,” was he not endorsing killing for racial purification?

Schlermer: Look, we were talking about Europe . . .

Legalienate: When U.S. troops exulted in their “turkey shoot” in the Gulf War in 1991, were they not “killing for pleasure?”

Schlermer: We are not Nazis!

Legalienate: In 1898, when the U.S. began slaughtering a couple of hundred thousand Filipinos to gain a “gateway to the Orient,” were they not killing “for economic power?”

Schlermer: I really don’t know . . . .

Legalienate: By establishing slavery did the U.S. not kill “for political control” of people they reduced to chattel? And who is in political control in the dozens of countries where Washington maintains military bases to this day? Aren’t the deaths of dissidents that occur in those countries in large part Washington’s responsibility? Isn’t that, too, “killing for political control?” How many of those countries are permitted to have military bases inside the United States?

Schlermer: We are a democracy, we stand for human rights . . . .

Legalienate: Thank you for your time.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad Seal Cooperation With Anti-Washington Accords and Speeches

2009-11-26T00:38:00.000-08:00

Caracas November 25

The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, consolidated today in Caracas a relationship that the host leader characterized as "exemplary," with new accords and speeches in defense of their cooperation and against the United States.

In a signing ceremony on cooperation projects in Miraflores Palace, both heads of state agreed that "accusations of violence" against them are a "joke," before stating that their collaboration is for the purpose of "building life," and denouncing Washington's responsibility for conflicts and crisis situations in the world.

"In truth it seems a joke that they accuse us of violence," declared Chavez, echoing words pronounced shortly before by his Iranian colleague.

Both responded to the State Department spokesperson, Ian Kelly, who said that he hoped that Caracas would emphasize to Ahmadinejad "the concerns that the international community have about his nuclear program, his alleged support for terrorism, and the status of Iranian human rights."

The Iranian president said that the real worries are about "nuclear and chemical arsenals" and repeated "threats of military invasion," in reference to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chavez, for his part, emphasized that if Washington wants to be consistent it should extradite the "father of terrorists of this continent," Luis Posada Carriles.

"We remind the Nobel peace prize winner (Barack Obama) that he has there (in the U.S.) the terrorist that ordered the bomb that killed 73 passengers be placed aboard the Cuban airliner, a man that also tortured and killed when he was in Venezuela," said Chavez with respect to Carriles.

During the more than three hours that the ceremony lasted both presidents repeatedly denounced those who "attack" them, in clear allusion to the United States, which they referred to as the "yankee empire," and they stated that the collaboration of their countries is in "service to the people."

The "arrogant ones" initiated "their propaganda against Venezuela and Iran, but the whole world is seeing that the objective (of the cooperation) is the welfare of the peoples," declared Ahmadinejad, who cited (as evidence) construction projects for houses, refineries, and hospitals, as well as research studies.

In the ceremony at Miraflores, which concluded at around 10:00 p.m. local time, both leaders presided over the signing of twelve agreements in the areas of energy, transportation, and housing, among others, after holding a meeting behind closed doors for more than three hours.

Chavez indicated that 129 agreements of bilateral cooperation already exist and that another 68 have been considered in recent weeks.

The Venezuelan president stated that the inspection of those agreements has been very satisfactory and that those programs aimed at "consolidating" the "political, cultural, scientific, and economic independence" of the two countries are "showing results."

During the ceremony, the presidents followed live broadcasts in order to witness the handing over of homes constructed with Iranian cooperation, and the inauguration of the headquarters of a bilateral fund in Caracas aimed at financing the joint projects.

It is anticipated that the fund will have a billion dollars in capital before the end of 2010, supported in equal parts by both countries.

Ahmadinejad, who arrived Tuesday night to Venezuela, showed up for his appointment with Chavez in the presidential palace at around 3:15 p.m. local time, on this his fourth visit to Caracas since he came to power in 2005.

The Venezuelan leader gave him a warm welcome, calling him not only "brother," but also "gladiator of anti-imperialist struggles," in the reception ceremony on the steps of the presidential palace.

"The homeland of (Simon) Bolivar welcomes you and your wife," declared Chavez, who expressed his satisfaction with the present South American tour of the Iranian leader, which has taken him to Brazil and Bolivia as well.

The Venezuelan leader, whose country has not maintained relations with Israel since this past January, denounced that country as the "assassination arm of the empire" upon referring to it.

Chavez reiterated his criticisms of his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, for having stated that he and Ahmadinejad "will soon disappear," saying he took it as a "threat" and would act "accordingly."

The visit of the Iranian president, who is expected to leave Caracas this evening, has provoked various protest actions in Venezuela, where groups of students and political opponents have expressed their rejection of the presence of the Iranian leader, whom they accuse of being a "dictator" and of discriminating against women.

Source: "Chavez y Ahmadinejad sellan cooperación con acuerdos y discursos contra EEUU" Univision en línea, 25 de noviembre de 2009 (Translation by Michael K. Smith)

Interview with Deborah Lipstatic - "Holocaust Denial is Pervasive, Growing, and Doomed"

2009-11-22T22:04:00.001-08:00

November 22, 2009

by Michael K. Smith

New York City -- Speaking from the Bellevue psychiatric ward where she is undergoing evaluation for advanced schizophrenia, Holocaust Confirmer Deborah Lipstatic today declared, "The situation is critical and victory is at hand" in the war on Holocaust heresy.

Lipstatic, Professor of Victimology at Coca Cola University in Atlanta, insisted that Holocaust denial is not a legitimate field of study and entirely worthless intellectually, which, she said, explains why she devotes herself night and day to refuting its claims.

This year marks nine years since historian David Irving lost his libel suit against Lipstatic, who chronicled her battle against him in her book, “Money Can't Buy Love But It Can Buy The Courts - How I Single-Handedly Defeated David Irving With Swarms of Lawyers and Researchers and an Avalanche of Holocaust Industry Cash" (Orthodox Books, 2000).

Legalienate's editors were generously granted a lengthy interview with her on the recently proclaimed Holocaust Obsession Day, which lasts for 24 weeks instead of what Lipstatic called the "stingy" 24 hours of the standard day. Speaking from the isolated back ward where she currently resides, she explained how to make failure look like victory, why freedom requires adherence to a single view, and how Holocaust denial plays a crucial role in forging Jewish identity, especially among Gentiles.

LEGALIENATE: Nine years later, how would you characterize the Irving trial?

LIPSTATIC: It was a resounding victory for the world inside my head. I went head-to-head with the world's leading Holocaust denier and I single-handedly won a judgment stating that historical facts are not to be determined by the courts.

LEGALIENATE: But wasn't that obvious from the beginning?

LIPSTATIC: Not to me it wasn't.

LEGALIENATE: Have you solved the problem of Holocaust denial?

LIPSTATIC: Of course not. But we did provide precise explanations proving that what Deniers say are complete deviations from what we say. We didn't prove what happened, and nobody else better either, but we proved that what they say happened could not possibly have happened if what we say happened, happened. And to quote George Bush the Elder, "what we say, goes."

LEGALIENATE: I see. How do you advise people to deal with Holocaust deniers?

LIPSTATIC: The first way is to see if the facts prove the case: If they say “At this meeting Hitler said X, Y and Z," you can go and check if they changed the date. If they say Hitler said X, Y and Z on a Wednesday, but it was actually a Tuesday, you can be sure you are dealing with lying scum and dismiss their argument.

The second way is deductive reasoning or logic. Deniers will say that the very fact that there are so many survivors proves that the Holocaust couldn't have been as ruthlessly efficient as we say it was, because if the Germans were all-powerful and utterly determined to kill every last Jew, how did more than a million Jews survive?" You counter that by saying that there were a lot of miraculous escapes, because the Jews were plucky and determined and learned to jump off the transport trucks just in the nick of time.

LEGALIENATE: Why weren't they gunned down?

LIPSTATIC: They ran between the bullets.

LEGALIENATE: Oh.

LIPSTATIC: The third way of refuting Deniers is by citing the facts: If they say, “How do we know there were gas chambers?” you can say, “Let me show you the German plans for gas chambers.” But if they say, "Where is the forensic proof of the gas chambers themselves?" you can reply, "Let me show you Israel's plans to have people like you extradited and put on trial for Holocaust denial." That clinches the argument.

LEGALIENATE: Why don't you debate deniers?

LIPSTATIC: It's like trying to convince a member of the flat earth society that the earth is round. There's no point.

LEGALIENATE: But you can show a flat earther a picture of the round earth. Do you have a picture of a mass gassing chamber?

LIPSTATIC: No, but it wouldn't matter if we did. Deniers are irrational. They think absence of evidence is evidence of absence of evidence. They're completely irrational.

LEGALIENATE: How are they successful then?

LIPSTATIC: The usual way. They confuse people with convoluted explanations that lead nowhere. Remember, Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is hatred of Israel, and hatred of Israel is anti-Jewish prejudice, and anti-Jewish prejudice is congenital in Gentiles, so it's impossible to eliminate, but we must try to do the impossible because it's ennobling and we owe it to the victims of the Holocaust.

LEGALIENATE: I see. You're sure there's no point in debating your opponents?

LIPSTATIC: If you try to argue with a person who is committed to a completely illogical premise, then you're lost to begin with -- you're already sucked into their world of fantasy.

LEGALIENATE: So, it's like imaginary numbers in mathematics. They don't really exist, can't exist. After all, what's the square root of a negative number?

LIPSTATIC: Exactly.

LEGALIENATE: So math teachers who force kids to study that stuff are nutcases who can't face reality. The kids have ample reason to turn them in.

LIPSTATIC: Right. They're defaming the rational numbers. Have them call the Simon Wiesenthal Center. They have a program to extradite them to Israel to stand trial for numerical anti-Semitism.

LEGALIENATE: How has Holocaust denial changed since your trial and book?

LIPSTATIC: Well, recently we've seen the emergence of both "hard core" and “soft-core” denial. Hard-core denial is saying, "I need forensic evidence of mass gassing chambers before I can believe in them." That's hard core because once you get on the slippery slope of requiring material evidence for your beliefs it becomes addictive and you stop believing just for belief's sake, or because there are Holocaust specials pouring out of the TV twenty-four hours a day, and you start thinking, "Why should I believe in something that no one can show me the material basis of?" The next thing you know you don't believe in UFOs or penis-enlargement, and the entire basis of civilized order collapses.

LEGALIENATE: I'm convinced. And soft-core denial?

LIPSTATIC: Soft-core is more subtle. It's “Why do we have to hear so much about the Holocaust?” Or "Haven't the Jews done anything other than be exterminated in Nazi gas chambers?" The person who makes this kind of remark is gullible, not hateful, so they're worth talking to. Just tell them, "You have to hear constantly about the Holocaust because it's the only historical event that ever had any real importance." But if they don't buy that, brand them an anti-Semite and hound them mercilessly. It's for their own good.

LEGALIENATE: How do you respond to those who compare Nazi treatment of the Jews to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians?

LIPSTATIC: You have to zero in on what genocide is -- you can say, "A genocide is something done to the Jews, never by them, or a lesser genocide done to lesser people, but which is endorsed by Jewish groups to help take heat off of Israel. Like Darfur." The point is that only Jewish suffering counts. Gentiles are thick, so you can't make this point too often.

LEGALIENATE: Is Holocaust denial on the rise?

LIPSTATIC: Definitely. Holocaust denial is pervasive, growing, and doomed. It is incredibly serious that it is taking over, but at the same time utterly trivial and quite meaningless. We must ignore it and crush it - right away.

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker), both from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com

More Bulletins from Konsciousness Kontrol

2009-10-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

Green Peace Has Corporate Rival

Green Pus, a new advocacy group formed by international capital, lauds garbage and waste as profit makers that can be recycled into more garbage and waste which will create jobs to produce, distribute, sell and then collect, recycle and reproduce more garbage and waste.

A spokesman for the group said “ Garbage and waste are the backbone of our economy . Foolish “green peacers” try to protect the earth not realizing it is the exploitation and destruction of earth that brings great prosperity to humanity.”

Green Pus has adopted as its logo a photo of third world children picking through enormous piles of foul rubbish seeking food, clothing and shelter for their families, with the caption:

Without garbage these poor children would never survive!

Environmental Movement Takes Strong Antiwar Stand

A new coalition urges ecological sensibility in all future wars. It will not support any military actions unless they are performed against bio-invadable nations.

“We must only attack bio-invadable countries in future or the environmental damage done by wars will endanger all of us, even those far away from the actual killing and maiming. And our attacking forces must be diverse and multi-lingual, in keeping with a changing environmental movement that is diverse and multi lingual”

Bio-invadable nations are those far enough away that the attacking nations don’t have to worry about the pollution, toxic chemicals, maimed victims and other ecological dangers of wars affecting them.

The group was immediately nominated for a Nobel Peace prize.

Pubic - Not Public! - Option

America’s new Private Health Insurers Assurance of Control program will cover the cost of pre-surgical shaving of tax paying citizens’ genital areas with a special subsidy collected from illegal immigrants. A spokesperson for the Speaker of the House said “congress and the president regret the mistaken notion of a public option, unthinkable in our free market economy in which there is no such thing as a free lunch, a free health exam, or for that matter, when you come to think of it, an actual free market.”

Israel Justifies Killing Children In Gaza

Jewish state claims they would likely have become terrorists when they grew up and the IDF was thus protecting the nation from a future holocaust.

“These kids were certain to grow up wanting to murder innocent Jews, since they were Palestinians and we know how horribly they have treated the Jewish people, worse even than the nazis who only tried to exterminate Jews but never threatened them with mass drowning by driving them into the sea.”

The Democratic Congress and President Obama supported Israel’s action as understandable and necessary defense and the president said “I stand with Israel 100%, always have and always will, even if they might have to kill my daughters if they find out my daughters might someday become terrorists who might develop nuclear weapons and might use them to kill innocent Israeli children and might create a second holocaust.”

Congress passed a supporting resolution calling for aborting all Palestinian babies as potential future terrorists. The vote was unanimous. “We stand with Israel 100%, always have and always will “ said a spokesperson for the republican minority.

Citizen Activist Group Charged With Hate Crimes

By accusing politicians of performing as "lap dogs for corporate wealth" and calling them "sexual perverts for snuggling at the crotch of capital "and "foot fetishists for licking the boots of power", the citizen action group SCORN has been accused of hate crimes by congress, the president, major media, and organized religion.

A spokesperson for the established values coalition said “Our great nation was not built on straight talk, honesty, or calling a spade a spade. In fact, cancel that last metaphor or I could face trial, too. This kind of hate language could lead to acts of terrorism, critical thinking and other horrors too evil to even mention. They must be tried in a court of constitutional law that forbids such genocidal language. Such perversion of free speech must be dealt with by rational and serious people.”

Unlimited Violence Games Deemed Suitable For TV

The television success of kick, punch and spit-on boxing has led to the creation of even more vicious sports and the FCC has decided that the new Unlimited Violence games will be allowed on pay television. These games will introduce American audiences to live, competitive throat slashing, eye gouging and disemboweling of opponents, but also terror bombing of their families and ethnic cleansing of their neighborhoods.

“American viewers have grown tired of simply watching one man beat another senseless and they need to see actual murders and if possible, group annihilations. This is far more realistic and entertaining than kick, punch and spit on boxing and sponsors are lining up to buy time on these telecasts which will surely attract new millions to pay tv, especially if their credit cards haven't yet been canceled. “

Future plans are to include a division for battling women which would include competition involving homicidal makeup smearing, violent bitching about stupid men and tearing off wigs without without first removing hair clips. There had been a suggestion about dog and cat fighting, but producers thought viewers would find such cruelty to animals completely unacceptable.

Don’t Ask : Just Kill ?

2009-10-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

As the economic assault on middle class America continues one government institution profits from this condition. Our division into identity groups has long been supported by corporate capital to strengthen the myths of equality and meritocracy, and to keep us competitively consuming without questioning the system of consumptive competition. But one public entity has been the greatest beneficiary of affirmative action programs .

Working class minorities and women have found the U.S. armed forces the most accessible entry point in attaining jobs and an education . The present situation and the all volunteer armed forces has meant a recruiting bonanza as people with other economic doors slammed in their faces gravitate to the military. Unfortunately this puts them on the front lines of supposed defense of a nation which has not been threatened by outside force for nearly two hundred years, since the War of 1812.

We presently spend more than 600 billion dollars a year on the military, conduct offensive wars in two nations and maintain more than 700 bases in foreign countries. Our military is a global police force for an empire which costs us trillions of dollars , thousands of lives and creates more enemies for America. Defense?

This is just one major contradiction in policies that ostensibly benefit groups suffering as outsiders by making some of their members alleged insiders. But their minority success is purchased by a majority which is failing. While some women and minorities rise in status, unemployment and debt are sinking much larger groups of citizens, obviously including minorities and women. No matter how we are ethnically , racially or sexually categorized, most of us are of an economic class kept divided by designations which become almost religious in that faithful beliefs in our differences have almost as much to do with them as material evidence for their existence.

We certainly have a murderous history of racist oppression of Africans in the worst possible attack on human rights, then continued with a warped institutional base which reduced others to sub-citizen status. But while many of us still suffer severe disadvantage , rewarding only some , and then in a contradictory fashion, is hardly the way to bring the whole society into a balance of equality and justice. As long as our economics totally negate any possibility of real equality but only a facade perpetuated by the minority of wealth with the most power, we cannot achieve a just society but one with justice for some only at the expense of everyone else .

Science clearly finds that we are one race with geographic differences in how we look but none in how we are biologically composed. Cultural differences are learned behaviors that have absolutely nothing to do with skin tone, sex, religious or ideological belief. We need a serious discussion of this to identify the enormous problems we face as a class in this political economy. Unfortunately, ruling divisions that treat us as individuals except when confined to subjugated identity groups, but collectively regard us as a massive consumer mob have so far prevented that discussion.

Among those reduced to being social outcasts, homosexuals have fought to be openly and honestly themselves and not live in shadows. Forcing people to lie about who they are is anti-human and the move towards openness is a positive step for all society. But finding this freedom in the military is a perverse blessing. That a community based on what was once called “the love that dare not speak its name” would derive liberation from being allowed to openly perform as warriors is a social pathology. Whether the president was sincere or not, his plea for equal rights by ending the policy of homosexuals remaining secretive in the service or losing their jobs is twisted political logic . And foolishness about macho warriors is more outdated than bigoted discrimination against gays and lesbians. Any child can sit at a console and push buttons that send weapons to blow up humans thousands of miles away. The Hollywood idea of war is a product of affluent image creators who wouldn't know physical combat from physical labor. But these myths must be confronted and not perpetuated by groups among us led to believe they are somehow liberated by participation in the most wretched and immoral social operation we can imagine.

Gays are not unique in being manipulated into thinking they can achieve equality only by uncritically accepting all established institutions as long as they can participate in them. These are the outcomes of every effort to advance specific groups only by advantaging select members of the group, which in our economy always means at the expense of others. But to consider it progress to be an open, honest participant in the actions of mass murder and cleansed by the diabolically deceitful name of defense is a moral tragedy .

As is too often the case, such alleged equalities are negative rather than affirmative. Being “allowed” to participate in the market place in the same destructive economy previously dominated by others, or to act as grasping, selfish and egocentric as the profiteering minority that still rules the economy, can only be seen as affirmative by a confused population. The majority of us who support continued destruction of the social and natural environment by our forced divisions into competing cross purposes need to learn that we are a common race and class, with common interests in our survival. Those will not be satisfied if we are reduced to acting as singularly identified groups , members of a ruled class endangering our future by not acting together in the present. None of us, gay, straight or neuter, should buy into this military lie, nor the crippled system it supports.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be
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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in print in the Coastal Post and The Independent Monitor and online at the blogspot: Legalienate

Dogma, Double Standards, and Doubt - The Bradley Smith Heresy and Beyond

2009-10-19T13:54:00.001-07:00

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

-----James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

In his autobiography "Break His Bones" Bradley Smith gives us a lively and infuriating review of the Holocaust dogma that has crippled intellectual freedom in the U.S.. It should be required reading for every course with an Elie Wiesel book on the class reading list. While sympathetic to Jewish suffering, it dispassionately analyzes the fantastical claims made by Holocaust eyewitnesses, including mass gassing chambers, lampshades made of human skin, soap made from Jewish cadavers, and towering geysers spurting human blood for months on end in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe. Maintaining a steady, ironic tone throughout, the author details the intellectual cowardice of college professors, the craven submissiveness of the corporate media, and the fanatical zeal of Holocaustomaniacs.

This remarkable achievement has not come without a price. Holocaust Industry fanatics routinely slander Smith, disrupt his speaking engagements, prevent circulation of his work, keep him on the brink of financial ruin, and threaten to kill him, his wife, and his children. Nevertheless, Smith persists in pointing out the wild implausibilities in the conventional Holocaust narrative, as he has for three decades, and calls for an open debate on the topic on U.S. college campuses. Though no such debate has yet taken place, his tireless efforts to give sanity a chance have left the Holocaust Industry looking increasingly ridiculous.

At the root of this mother-of-all-industries is a Judeo-centric self-obsession that simply will not face reality - or let anyone else do so either. James Baldwin explained the problem well in his famous letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Noting that the illusion of black inferiority had long served as the anchor of white identity, Baldwin told his nephew that white people couldn't help but feel alarm in the face of a black freedom movement that attacked their very sense of reality. "Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame," wrote Uncle James. "You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature." And violations of nature cannot be assimilated. "The black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar," he observed, "and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations."

Among Jews, orthodox belief in the Holocaust has functioned as an immovable pillar, so that any skepticism about mass gassing chambers threatens to bring the Temple of Eternal Victimhood crashing down upon their heads. Having long built Jewish identity around a narrative of 2000+ years of unmerited suffering culminating in "extermination" in Nazi gas chambers, organized Jewry cannot easily accept that key aspects of the story may be as much legend as factual description, as much myth as reality. Confronted by Smith's skepticism, they do not debate what they consider to be his intellectual errors, but rather, smear him as Nazi-sympathizing scum.

Though it is often claimed that "tons" of captured German documents prove beyond doubt that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews in gas chambers, in fact documents are scarce, and their interpretation is very much disputed. As a result, the Holocaust narrative has become almost solely dependent on the testimony of martyrs. But eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially from those who were held in conditions ripe for the flourishing of collective hysteria. "History is filled with stories of masses of people claiming to be eyewitnesses to everything from sexual union with the Devil to abductions by moon men in flying saucers," Smith observes. How "anti-Semitic" of him to notice.

The situation being what it is, Smith gets no support among U.S. college professors, who meekly submit to Holocaust Industry tyranny, even as they piously declare their (imaginary) belief in free speech. While they may be in favor of free speech in the abstract, as soon as they encounter the slightest doubt about homicidal gas chambers they are reduced to Holocaust Industry sound bites that divert attention from the disputed facts to the alleged sinister motives of those who seek to have them investigated.

Like Holocaust Industry lobbyists, the professors insist there can be no "other side" to the gas chamber story, because Holocaust revisionists are hateful people with an "agenda," and so cannot arrive at the truth the way the dispassionate professors allegedly do. This is the educational equivalent of Israel's claim that it can find no partner for peace, only terrorist maniacs intent on continuing Nazism by other means. If Bradley Smith doesn't realize by now that Jewish apartheid is inherently noble because mass gassing chambers are inherently credible - and vice versa - so much the worse for him. Such is the level of intellectual sophistication at U.S. colleges, now charging tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of becoming associated with them.

Given the ban on open Holocaust debate, "Break His Bones" might just as well have been titled, "Free Speech: An Autopsy." "Every institution of higher learning cooperates in the suppression of revisionist scholarship," Smith notes. "No book or periodical distributor will handle revisionist publications" and "no philanthropic organization will contribute funds to revisionist research." For Smith, this is a "spiritual" issue, not a political one, since you either want free speech "for others as well as for yourself or you don't really want it." Minds that have mastered Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche find these words impenetrable.

Here is the dismal sequence of speech suppression at U.S. universities. After Smith places an ad calling for free discussion of the Holocaust, agents of the Holocaust Industry express indignation that heretical ideas are being given a public platform. Devoid of shame, they contact the president of the university in question, "suggesting" that debating a Holocaust revisionist legitimates racism and must not be tolerated. Then they launch vicious attacks on the heretic, claiming he is lying and implying that he is a genocidal murderer at heart. They accuse the editors and advertising departments of the offending paper with having all of the worst qualities of the revisionist himself. Next, they smear all revisionists as peddlers of hatred and denounce as anti-Semitic the campus organizations that extend them invitations. This performance produces the intended effect: cowed professors and administrators maintain a disgraceful silence and campus libraries and bookstores refuse to shelve revisionist works.

Nor is this all. Thanks to Hillel rabbis, Smith reports, today's American university students are spied on with a thoroughness that puts U.S. intelligence agencies to shame. "Rabbis who work to destroy those who argue for open debate on the Holocaust stories represent a New Inquisition," and are converting the Holocaust into "a quasi-religious cult, complete with an immense crank literature of infallible texts, crazy miracles, saintly eye-witness tales of miraculous escapes from nazi devils," the entire fantastical tale protected against scrutiny "by taboos and media witch trials." Anyone who doubts receives the prescribed rabbinical punishment - "public disgrace and financial ruin."

Thirty years of such organized hysteria have conditioned Smith to expect anything but a debate on the points of contention that separate revisionists from proponents of the orthodox version of the Holocaust. His opponents never disappoint him. When he asks for substantiation of the mass gassing thesis he is asked, "Why do you defend Nazis? How can you justify Hitler? Why does it matter to you how the Jews were murdered?" When he points out the ludicrous nature of the claims that are taken seriously about homicidal gas chambers, he is told not to focus on them: "It's not the gas chambers that are important. What's important is the fact that the Jews were murdered. There are so many more important issues." When he persists in focusing on facts, he is psychoanalyzed: "What are your motives? Your real motives?" When he stands up for intellectual freedom, it is contemptuously dismissed: "Free speech? Don't try to put us on about free speech. What did the Jews ever do to you?" Discussion, debate, intellectual exchange, all are completely irrelevant: "We don't care about your fantasy about how there are no proofs that the gas chambers existed. We're past that. We know they existed. We want to know why you do it. Why the gas chambers? Why the Holocaust? Why the Jews?"

Charges of anti-Semitism are particularly easy to refute in Smith's case. He concedes that the German National Socialist state singled out Jews for special and cruel treatment, that they were stripped of their rights, forcibly relocated to ghettos, conscripted for labor, dispossessed of their property, and deported from the countries of their birth. He acknowledges that large numbers of them perished in awful conditions presided over by the Nazis. "In short," he says, "Jewish culture in Eastern Europe was destroyed during the Hitlerian regime." Such are the thoughts of what the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith calls one of the most dangerously racist men in America.

One weakness of Smith's work is its "spiritual" orientation and the uncritical anti-Communist bias that accompanies it. Smith judges historical events to be the product of "hate" projected onto human institutions, not to a clash of interests objectively in conflict. "Those who hate or believe they do," he writes, are in a struggle with their inner lives, as we all are. Projecting the struggle out into institutions and political movements is what leads to the violence, not the feelings themselves." This stance encourages Smith to gloss over important distinctions and give too much importance to his personal dislikes, which have no bearing on historical events.

For example, responding to the horrendous 911 attacks on the U.S., Smith issues a blanket condemnation against widely disparate political figures for engaging in "violence":

"With respect to killing the innocent for the acts of those who rule them, the Islamist radicals did nothing unusual. They represent an old established human tradition. They want to right what, from their point of view, are the injustices being carried out against 'their' people. That's what they all say. Hitler said it. Stalin said it. Pol Pot and Idi Amin said it. Even Che Guevarra (sic) and the pipsqueak Fidel Castro said it. They all were willing to intentionally kill the innocent for what they convinced themselves was a 'higher good.' The people who did the World Trade Centers were unique only in that they represented no nation state, but an NGO, a non-governmental organization."

What is interesting about this commentary is that it omits mention of Palestinian violence. Smith cannot be unaware of the long train of kidnappings, shootings, bombings, hijackings, and general war carried out by the PLO and Hamas. But unlike in the case of Marxist inspired movements, he omits mention of it. Why? Because, as Smith repeatedly points out, Israel is to blame for establishing an apartheid state on Palestinian land and brutally expelling as many of the indigenous inhabitants as possible, actions that make such a "terrorist" response, if not inevitable, certainly highly predictable. In other words, he puts the blame where it belongs - on the actions of the oppressor, not on the desperate measures of the oppressed to fight back. This is as it should be, and Smith should do the same vis-a-vis other oppressed groups, whether they be Nicaraguan, Cuban, Chinese, Russian, Korean, or Vietnamese.

After all, none of the figures Smith indicts above would likely accept that their policy was to "intentionally kill the innocent," and therefore it is up to each and every one of us to rationally evaluate what they actually did, rather than dismiss them as heartless mass murderers on ideological grounds. Smith prefers to ignore the distinction between oppressor and oppressed and issue a blanket indictment against both groups for engaging in "violence." But this sheds no light on history, which, after all, is a secular process, nor does it address the issue of what oppressed majorities should do to escape the brutal conditions institutionalized violence imposes on them. For such people, the issue is not hatred, but desperation. Smith nowhere addresses their plight.

For Smith, "the initiation of violence is the overriding issue." The problem with this orientation is that it overlooks the fact that violence is seamlessly integrated into all the dominant institutions of capitalist society, making it quite impossible to determine the "initiation" of violence. Under capitalism it is permissible to exclude millions of people from access to clean water, adequate food, medical care, and other basic necessities, resulting in countless unnecessary deaths. Capitalist propagandists insist this is not violence, but that a social movement dedicated to changing these priorities by displacing capitalist elites by force is violence. This is a starkly ideological definition that Smith does not bother to inspect. In fact, he uncritically supports it.

Furthermore, Smith, like Holocaust revisionists in general, is far too credulous in believing fantastical claims about socialist or Communist atrocities, whether real or imagined. Consider this episode Smith relates from the 1980s: "In Mother Jones there's a photograph of a Nicaraguan girl with the stump of one leg wrapped in bandages. Some progressive-forces group is using the photo as anti-Contra propaganda. The one-legged girl is laughing and the propagandists are asking for money. These are the same folks who did not take photographs of the one-legged girls manufactured by the Sandinistas when the Sandinistas were guerrillas . . . .their own politics are more important to them than the one-legged girls."

Here Smith uncritically equates the Contras and the Sandinistas as "guerrillas" dedicated to "manufacturing" mutilated children in the pursuit of political goals. But is this true? The Contras, composed overwhelmingly of ex-Somoza National Guardsmen famous for torture, rape, and murder, were an imperial mercenary army, never a guerrilla force, and they had no indigenous support inside Nicaragua. Their leaders were wealthy Somocistas who were given $84,000 tax-free every year by Washington to deliberately target civilians for torture and murder. There was no comparable Sandinista loyalty and policy, before or after the revolution. In fact, during the guerrilla phase the Sandinistas won the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the population by "violent" actions against high value political enemies, not against civilians in general. (After the revolution they abolished the death penalty rather than execute the men who would later form the Contras.) So if the Sandinistas were "manufacturing" one-legged girls, how does one account for their overwhelming popularity at the time among the Nicaraguan people? In fact, Smith's claim is simply untrue.

Smith is similarly dismissive of FMLN "violence" during the war in El Salvador from 1979 to 1994, when a U.S. sponsored death squad government (Salvadorean death squads were created by the C.I.A. during the Kennedy Administration) killed roughly 70,000 people, often after hideous torture, the vast majority of them civilians. Nonetheless, after reading a newspaper article about a priest in El Salvador who had joined the guerrillas, Smith characterized the situation as follows: "So the priest is going to bless the people who are killing the people for the good of the people. The usual." He neglects to point out that the people were the ones who took up arms to protect themselves against death squads created by Smith's government in Washington, and that the priest was therefore blessing these efforts at self-defense, not exercises in wanton killing, as Smith would have us believe.

"I ought never to initiate force against another person to get something I want," writes Smith in his book, "The Man Who Saw His Own Liver." He seems not to realize that this precept has no application in the lives of the hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of people who do not have the luxury of wondering what a "want" is, so preoccupied are they with securing that which they desperately need to keep death at bay for themselves and their children. (Recall that psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of human motivation deals with needs, not wants.) If they pick up a gun to protect themselves against the imperial armies and C.I.A. goon squads sent to repress and kill them, in Smith's eyes they are just as guilty of "violence" as their enemies in Washington. But this is like saying that the surgeon who cuts you open to remove a diseased organ is no better than the gangbanger who knifes you in order to steal your wallet. In fact, given the vastly greater killing carried out by imperial armies as compared to guerrilla forces, it's a lot worse than saying this.

Smith states that "the Holocaust story increasingly reads like the greatest, most successful PR campaign of the 20th century." If this is true, and it is not difficult to credit, then belief in Communism as a satanic and even more murderous force than Nazism has to be a close second. After all, from the moment of its triumph the Bolshevik revolution was hysterically smeared, accused by the capitalist press of engineering deliberate starvation, massacre, sexual communism, and hideous refinement of unspeakable torture. Bolshevik leaders were denounced as assassins and lunatics, human scum, criminals by nature, and beasts. The fledgling Soviet Union was depicted as a land of raving maniacs forcing hapless peasants to fight over carrion with dogs.

Testifying before the Congressional Overman Committee in 1919 U.S. Ambassador to Moscow David Francis claimed the Bolsheviks were killing everyone “who wears a white collar or who is educated and who is not a Bolshevik.” Madame Katherine Breshkovskaya, a famous anti-Bolshevik militant, testified that in one year of Bolshevik rule twice as many Russian men, women, and children had been killed than Russian soldiers were lost at the front during all of World War I. Other witnesses swore the revolutionary army was made up of criminals and Jews transplanted from New York’s Lower East Side. Still others insisted promiscuity was running amok, with women nationalized and roped into "free love" bureaus. The bed-hopping Bolsheviks were also alleged to be roasting their political enemies in furnaces, scalding them with steam, dismembering them on racks and hacking them to pieces with axes. Sound familiar?

The following year (1920) Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann published their study of New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution, characterizing it as “nothing short of a disaster.” Far from basing its views on fact, the Newspaper of Record had shamelessly promoted stories “dominated by the hopes of the men who composed the news organization.” Accordingly, the Bolsheviks schizophrenically appeared in the Times' coverage as both “cadaver and world-wide menace,” depending on the imperialist needs of the moment.

“The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see," observed Merz and Lippmann. “The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.” Fabrication was routine: The Times cited fictional atrocities, repeatedly claimed the Bolshevik government was at the point of collapse, and spread panic about an imaginary threat of armed revolution inside the United States.

The Times’ newsmen were guilty of a “boundless credulity, an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions a downright lack of common sense.” Their contributions to public understanding at a time of world crisis have been “about as useful as that of an astrologer or an alchemist.”

“For subjective reasons,” Lippman and Merz went on, the staff “accepted and believed most of what they were told” by the U.S. government and “the agents and adherents of the old regime.” With the U.S.S.R. reduced to starvation and ruin they mocked Soviet leaders’ peace offers as Bolshevik subterfuge designed to “concentrate their energies for a renewed drive toward world-wide revolution,” starting with a “Red invasion of Europe” that somehow never materialized.

At the same time, in the eagerness to equate Marxism with Satanism Communist social gains have been routinely screened out of capitalist news coverage. The dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights that characterized the Stalin period are very rarely mentioned when the USSR is being discussed. It is considered axiomatic that "socialism doesn't work," so the idea that revolutionary communism actually created a better life for for the mass of people (in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba) than the miserable existence that preceded it under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists, simply cannot be entertained no matter what the facts are.

In China, where the 1949 revolution unified the country and ultimately ended mass starvation, the social gains of the Communist period were quite marked. According to work published by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen (and his associate Jean Dreze) in 1989, "Chinese efforts have been quite spectacular," but dramatic gains in raising life expectancy and quality of life levels came abruptly to an end in 1979 when market-based reforms were implemented and "the downward trend in mortality [in China was] at least halted, and possibly reversed." The results were "particularly severe" for women and female children. After 1979, there was "a steady decline in the female-male ratio in the population" and a two year decline in female life expectancy, after a period of steady growth in the pro-reform period.

Meanwhile, in neighboring capitalist India, Sen and Dreze reported, Indian death rates were even higher than in China during the famine attending the Great Leap Forward, an event that resulted in somewhere between 16.5 million and 29.5 million people starving to death, the authors conclude. Nevertheless, "as far as morbidity, mortality, and longevity is concerned, China has a decisive lead over India." Between 1949 (the year of the revolution) and 1979 "China . . . achieved a remarkable transition in health and nutrition," while "no comparable transformation has occurred in India." Therefore, as of 1979, "the life of the average Chinese has tended to be much more secure than that of the average Indian." If India had adopted China's social programs, "there would have been about 3.8 million fewer deaths a year around the middle of the 1980s." The authors do not shy away from the obvious conclusion: "That indicates that every eight years or so more people in addition die in India - in comparison with Chinese mortality rates - than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine." In short, India in its experiment with democratic capitalism starting in 1947 caused more deaths than all those attributed to Communist states in the whole world after 1917 - over 100 million by 1949 - and tens of millions more in the last three decades.

How often does this conclusion reach a mass audience in the United States? Has it ever reached Bradley Smith? And where are the New York Times headlines screaming of a capitalist murder machine running amok?

The point is that claims about tens of millions of people being deliberately murdered are very often ideological exercises designed to demonize or otherwise discredit selected enemies of capitalist empire. Therefore, stories of Communist "gulags" and deliberate Marxist mass murder campaigns should be taken with a very large grain of salt. They are all too similar to stories of soap made from Jewish cadavers and lampshades made of human skin.

Sources:

Bradley R. Smith, "Break His Bones - The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist," (Bradley R. Smith, 2002)

Bradley R. Smith, "The Man Who Saw His Own Liver," (Nine-Banded Books, 2008)

Michael Parenti, "Blackshirts & Reds - Rational Fascism & The Overthrow of Communism," (City Lights, 1997)

Noam Chomsky, "Rogue States - The Rule of Force in World Affairs," (South End, 2000)

Robert K. Murray, "Red Scare - A Study in National Hysteria, 1917-1920," (University of Minnesota, 1955)

Murray B. Levin, "Political Hysteria in America - The Democratic Capacity For Repression," (Basic Books, 1971)

Robert Justin Goldstein, "Political Repression in Modern America," (Schenkman, 1978)

Peter G. Filene, ed. "American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917-1965," (Dorsey Press, 1968)

Interview with Allan Nairn, "Democracy Now," June 8, 2004

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker), from Common Courage Press
Posted by Michael Smith at 11:00 PM

Weapons of Mass Distraction: Again!

2009-10-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Seven million jobs vanish from the economy in two years, most never to return without a multi trillion dollar public works program. American leadership stresses market profiteering as a solution to climate change , while more scientists see that as the source of a problem so critical it needs immediate action . The slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan has lasted longer than the 20th century world wars and now spreads to Pakistan , destroying more lives and draining more trillions from a nearly bankrupt USA . Tensions grow among stressed out citizens , including some of what passes for their political leadership . So what should most concern us?

IRAN?

We are continuously warned of the ominous threat represented by this nation said to be secretly preparing to annihilate all life on earth, or at least its most perennially menaced tribe . Ahmadinejad is supposedly out to exterminate Jews with nuclear weapons that do not exist. They certainly exist in Israel but are never mentioned in our “don't ask don’t tell” policy towards the Jewish apartheid state. With 70 million people, Iran spends some $7 billion annually on its military. Israel spends double that amount, with one tenth that population . The United States spends $600 billion , or 85 times more than Iran . Obviously, Israel and the USA are pacifist nations while Iran is a military monster. Also, atheists wrote the bible and pimps believe in free love.

Given the hysterical ravings of corporate puppets posing as our government and then repeated by their media stenographers , we can be forgiven for consuming intellectual garbage and believing it is informational health food.

America’s Israeli lobby has been hysterically demonizing Ahmadinejad and Iran for years now. Most recently , after thousands of AIPAC minions lobbied for it, congress - America’s not Israel’s - approved action authorizing government divestiture from companies invested in Iran’s petroleum and gas sectors. Then the Secretary of State - America’s not Israel’s - argued for a “diplomatic” approach so “we gain credibility and influence ...to make a sanctions regime as tight and crippling as we would want it to be.” Why should we “cripple” Iran, which has done nothing to us while suffering American meddling in its political process for generations? It dates back to the assumption of power by the Islamic revolution which overthrew an American created despot . But it became worse when Ahmadinejad hosted an international conference on the holocaust with some participants who would be imprisoned in their own nations for merely suggesting a critical view of an historic event. Since then the hatred for him, the distortions of his public comments and the charge he was embarked upon the annihilation of the Jewish people has become a dementia with the potential of plunging the entire world into unimaginable horror . This terrible threat needs to be dealt with by rational leadership, if any still exists. There is reason for doubt.

The president who supposedly represents change speaks out of both sides of his mouth, making occasional statements of reason to attempt balance with the usually irrational , but the possibility of lunatic action by other leaders still looms . Most of the world can see through the blatant lies and hysterical suppositions of those who claim imminent extermination if Iran is not destroyed, but it is more difficult to overcome consciousness control exercised here by the lobby and its employees in U.S. government and media. While some confused and disoriented Americans are screaming over alleged socialist policies taking their hard earned money, a minority ruled government is moving toward stealing far more than some angry family's christmas club fund.

As more of our people suffer joblessness, unpayable debt, unaffordable health care and sink into poverty , our heads are filled with gibberish about a threat from nonexistent Iranian weapons . We should remember the charges lodged against Iraq by the same political forces that are trying to get us into another murderous fiasco. They clamor for more blood to avoid what they devoutly believe is an eternal assault on Jews which seems to date back to a time even before there were Jews. Some compare the situation to Viet Nam in that we get more deeply into an un-winnable war, as though its immorality doesn't matter and only victory assumes importance. But even without moral consideration - essential in our immoral system - the wastefully brutal madness of conducting war while our nation suffers crippling social problems shows deteriorating ability of leaders to understand material reality. It calls for a genuine democratic intervention, something that presently seems beyond American capacity .

What is to be done when a war making president receives a peace prize, and this after condemning a report which called Israel's atrocity in Gaza exactly what it was? When media outlets purvey such disinformation that much of the public is reduced to believing socialists rule the USA ? An individual in our condition would be sedated and put in a padded cell but our problem is social. Despite our cultural shaping as isolated individuals, we need to create democratic social action to reverse the process by which we live, but will not be able to survive if it continues .

A spineless president who bends to minority power is a problem but could become a solution if democracy brings real majority control . Obama will follow orders coming from power, which is why he obeys the war making class. If there is to be peace and a better world, real democracy needs a wake up call among the people. An aroused public needs to provide a choice that reflects majority values and interests or minorities will not only continue ruling Obama, but make things much worse than they are now . Is that possible? Don’t ask, just make it impossible.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net

Cloning of Holocaust Martyrs Seen As Only Way to Preserve Extermination Legend - Mass Production of Elie Wiesels to Start This Week

2009-09-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith

Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island

With the WWII generation rapidly passing into history, custodians of the official Holocaust narrative have concluded that the only way to preserve the extermination legend is to clone the remaining Holocaust martyrs while time still permits.

Proponents of the extermination thesis have long worried that the death of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust will cast undue attention on the lack of forensic evidence for mega-gas-chambers, calling into question how an assembly line of extermination could have existed without leaving behind material and documentary evidence. The temporary solution of intimidating the public with an avalanche of tear-jerking stories has the defect of depending on mortal eyewitnesses whose testimony necessarily loses dramatic impact upon their deaths. The "final solution" was hit upon last year by Dr. Avigdor Leibowitz at a conference of Cloners For Social Responsibility, where he proposed to "keep guilt alive" by mass producing key eyewitnesses in perpetuity, thus immortalizing exterminationist gas chambers and Holocaust martyrdom. The ambitious project is slated to kick off in just a few days with the cloning of Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, who has called the effort to extend his melancholic existence unto eternity, "the thrill of my life."

Authorization for the first run of Wiesels has been issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, which, citing the Endangered Species Act, says 500 Wiesels are needed immediately to preserve a gas chamber legend facing extinction at the hands of an unprecedented upsurge in rational skepticism throughout the world. The situation is now widely seen to be critical, with the board of directors of the Jewish Institute of Holocaust Addicted Dogmatists (JIHAD) determining that cloned Wiesels and Holocaust museums must become as common as ATM machines, in order to hold off the rising tide of "hate speech" viciously asking for Holocaust martyrs to substantiate their factual claims.

The Wiesel clones are scheduled for international speaking tours for the next fifty years, with the revenue generated by their speeches earmarked for settlement expansion in Israel. Related plans to clone Ariel Sharon to solve the Palestinian problem are still in the planning stages, but non-partisan AIPAC lobbyists insist these efforts will soon usher in permanent Middle East peace.

In a telephone interview with Legalienate's editors yesterday, Dr. Leibowitz indicated that the cell to be used as the donor for the cloning of Wiesel will be taken from his larynx. The original plan to extract a donor cell from his brain was abandoned upon discovery that Wiesel's brain is largely disengaged when he speaks of the Holocaust, so that the actual source of his martyr testimony originates in random fluctuations of the larynx.

Due to Wiesel's advanced age, there is some concern as to whether his clones will be able to reproduce themselves, or even whether they should. After all, the real concern is not the children, but the parents, whose immortality must be preserved for the good of humanity. Clone families will thus have a different psychology from ordinary families, where the children are the vehicle for expressing the immortality of the parents. In clone families, on the other hand, children will likely be seen as detracting from parental efforts to immortalize the Holocaust. Child abuse could result if these children develop interests other than the Holocaust, although this threat is believed to be minimal since clones and their offspring will be required by law to live in Holocaust museums, where exposure to other themes will be exceedingly unlikely.

One technical issue that caused initial consternation is that cloning cannot re-create what comes from the environment, which means that memories of actual Holocaust survivors will have to be downloaded into the brains of the cloned martyrs after birth. Though this is not difficult technically, psychologists have expressed concern that downloading delusional beliefs could have unpleasant developmental consequences. Mathematicians, for example, worry that those who accept that one can reduce the estimated number of deaths at Auschwitz from four million to one million without affecting the overall death toll of six million, may prove incapable of even simple math. Thus Wiesel clones could be at a severe disadvantage in making change, balancing their checkbooks, and cutting proportional slices of birthday cake.

Similarly, those who accept at face value Wiesel's writing that geysers of blood spurted from the ground for months on end in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Europe, may face insurmountable challenges in judging liquid volume, confusing a leaky faucet with a Biblical flood, trying to fill swimming pools with an eyedropper, and installing lighthouses in the bathtub so their children don't get "lost at sea."

Some have argued for editing out such troublesome beliefs before downloading them into the clones, but others point out that it is no simple matter to separate the factual from the fantastical. For example, Wiesel simultaneously claims that his Nazi captors were the most viciously cruel monsters in all of history and that he voluntarily abandoned Auschwitz with them, avoiding liberation by the Soviet Army. This belief would seem to be a prime candidate for editing out, as its starkly contradictory nature could produce a cerebral hemorrhage in an unwitting clone recipient, but many orthodox Holocaust proponents argue that the Wiesel brain is akin to the King James Bible, i.e., that it is the literal word of God and must not be altered even slightly.

------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker) from Common Courage Press.

America's Minority Threat

2009-09-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

American minorities have long been defined as racial, ethnic or religious groups by comparison to white Anglo Saxon protestants , the nation’s founding colonist majority. The population has changed radically since our origins and those suffering discrimination have seen that minority definition outlive its usefulness. Groups demanding equality have led to conflicting policies that set a highly visible majority against itself , while a barely visible minority is hardly noticed. That most dangerous minority maintains power with the help of divisive social programs that keep Americans battling over small portions of the society’s massive wealth, while it luxuriates in the nation’s riches.

Old world social divisions were supposedly erased as we advanced to become a middle class nation of affluent equality . But our working class is artificially reduced to competing factions set against one another by a new world ruling power . Middle class unity only exists in unconscious crowds at the commodity consumption mall. When it comes to alleged democracy, citizens are categorized into isolated groups kept apart by those who profit from socializing individual identities. We need to oppose all forms of discrimination, but while most receive at least some attention those of class and wealth receive hardly any at all.

Our dominating minority holds power by cooperating with its members while it forces the majority into competitive war, whether in local markets or on foreign battlefields . It sustains power in a degeneration of democracy that enables it to purchase politicians and send the bill to that majority who pay and suffer for its political perversion. Present social stress can be blamed on a president who looks black but is half white, and the hateful reaction to him by a minority which looks white and is all racist , but its roots are even deeper. Racism is as great a national problem as it was before Obama was born, but the minority group that selected him to be elected by its subjects is the real issue. It is not a race, but an economic class which rules America. That class has long adjusted to the changing face of the nation and through affirmative action seen to it that so-called minorities and women - really the majority - occupy major positions in all corporate institutions , both private and public .

When groups that suffered discrimination see one of their own raised to power status there should be celebration, but with the understanding that only those individual members profit, while most of the group remain at a loss . This social pleasure at individual achievement is programmed into the consciousness of the culture and it helps the controlling minority to maintain its power. The group having one of its members join the upper class strengthens the fable of meritocracy that says anyone can achieve wealth and power in America, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority never do any such thing.

America’s majority tax payers of all races, creeds and faiths have been made to bail out America’s minority tax collectors of banking and finance , and this unnatural fact of the political economy needs to be confronted before it creates further poverty and suffering for the entire population.

When the nation expends hundreds of billions of dollars to fight wars that benefit a munitions industry and a foreign policy owned and run by minorities, it should not glorify one of its fragmented groups being awarded a senate seat or a court appointment. When that nation spends trillions of dollars to bail out minority finance capital it should not glorify one of its splinter groups winning a business contract or cabinet position. Those individuals who meet physical or cultural descriptions common to a narrowly identified group will be acting for the ruling monetary power and against the interest of their disassembled majority. And that majority will continue being distracted by individual success while it pays for wars, economic chaos , ecological destruction and ultimate social failure .

These divisions manipulate us to replace an old president waging supposedly stupid wars with a new president waging supposedly smart wars , without noticing that they are the same wars. Whichever private servant of capital occupies the publicly subsidized housing in Washington, he or she, of whatever imposed identity group label, will continue to slaughter foreigners and squander our wealth on degradation abroad that brings more poverty at home. The only minority that profits from these destructive policies is not the easily noticed scapegoat group at the bottom of the economic pyramid , but the least noticed at the top. That group is really only 1% of the population or less, and though it is mostly white it is integrated enough in its servant class so that the crumbs dropped from its table are falsely seen a full meal by those socialized to accept malnutrition as a healthy diet because the waiter or waitress is “one of us”.

If we are to achieve a truly democratic society our minority consciousness must change to one in which we become united members of a majority. That majority will not tolerate paying off minority investors by laying off majority workers , nor will it allow bankers in debt to be bailed out of their loans while workers in debt are being thrown out of their homes. Anti democratic power must be taken from our most dangerous minority , and democratic control assumed by the real majority. If we go on battling among ourselves over which minority is the chosen one , we will continue paying the deadly price of subsidizing the destruction of everyone’s social, political and natural environment. Only a minority can be ignorant enough to sustain its demise , but only a majority can be smart enough to change its future.

Holocaust Museum Near Hiroshima Sparks Controversy

2009-09-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith

A "Holocaust Education Center" near Hiroshima has sparked public controversy about the meaning of Jewish suffering in Japan.

Speaking to an overflow audience at the annual Japanese Holocaust Survivor Conference in Tokyo, Abraham Foxman, National Director of of the Anti-Defamation League, articulated a viewpoint that enjoys increasing prominence in Japan of late: "Japanese banks, some of the largest in the world, are as free of Jews as Hitler would have wanted. It's disgraceful."

Heads nodded and eyes welled up with tears as Foxman went on to observe that, "The prejudice and hatred against Japanese Jews is one of the great untold stories of human history." To objective observers only one explanation for this silence stands out. "That Japanese public life can remain nearly 'Jew free' in the 21st century is chilling testimony to the genocidal impulse that has been allowed to triumph here," explained Foxman. Asked what it all means, he said, "Never again will Japanese Jews be meekly led to the slaughterhouse."

Calling for a worldwide sushi boycott until every sushi shop in Japan has a Holocaust memorial detailing the monstrous 2000-year history of Japanese anti-Semitism culminating in complete Jewish exclusion from Japanese life, Foxman urged Japanese Holocaust Survivors to spearhead a movement dedicated to overcoming the country's hateful past. Roaring applause greeted his call for, "One, two, a thousand Elie Wiesels."

Taking the opposite view is the increasingly embattled "Japanese Association For the Advancement of Japanese People," a racist organization dedicated to the idea that logic deserves a role in historical debate, an extremist notion finding little support among mainstream historians. The group's president, Yasuo Murayama, claims that charges of Japanese anti-Semitism are senseless, because Japan shut itself off from the world for more than two centuries to prevent Christian "contamination" of the country, a militant policy that included the 1638 Shimabara Rebellion in which tens of thousands of Christians were slaughtered to keep Japan free of Christian proselytizing. For this reason the country is almost completely free of anti-Semitism. Foxman disagrees, insisting that although all Christians are racists, anti-Semitism does not derive from Christianity at all, and actually pre-dates the Big Bang. He claims that Jew hatred has spread to the far reaches of the universe billions of galaxies away, including Japan, although an overwhelming Japanese majority denies that Japan is part of the universe.

Among the displays at Hiroshima's Holocaust Education Center are a pictorial representation of Jewish influence on the evolution of Kabuki and Noh, featuring the Japanese penchant for beauty in miniature, and items left from a Tokyo Bar Mitzvah that the Simon Wiesenthal Center claims was raided by the Gestapo in August 1943. According to the organization's super-sophisticated intelligence operatives, all of the Bar Mitvah participants were shipped to Auschwitz on ocean-going rail cars, never to be heard from again.

A Japanese teenager who recently became the 6 millionth visitor of the Holocaust Education Center received a free copy of the best-selling "Diary of a Young Geisha," which tells the tragic story of a young Japanese girl who adopts the identity of a geisha in order to hide from the Gestapo, only to discover that the Nazis are thousands of miles away in Europe, leaving her to a life of mindless banter and playing the shamisen. She commits suicide.

The more cynical minded visitors to the Holocaust Education Center have alleged that the location of the museum just forty-five minutes from where the atomic bomb was dropped represents a Zionist ploy to elbow out atomic bomb survivors for entitlement to the world's most prestigious victim monopoly. As is well known, competitive victimhood is a fiercely contested sport around the world, and, to quote the legendary major league baseball manager Leo Durocher, "nice guys finish last."

Source:

"Teen Becomes 100,000th Visitor at Holocaust Center in Japan,"Japan Today, August 30, 2009

-------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire," and "The Madness of King George," with Common Courage Press

When Working Class Heroes Were Something To Be: Celebrating the IWW on Labor Day

2009-09-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

By Michael K. Smith

One hundred and four years ago Big Bill Haywood lumbered onto the platform at Brand’s Hall in Chicago, gaveled the podium with a piece of loose board, and called the assembly to order. Flanked by Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, and Lucy Parsons, he announced the birth of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union of native-born radicals whose capacity for militant solidarity was and remains unmatched in U.S. history.

Haywood told the two hundred plus delegates crammed into the hot, overcrowded hall that they were “the Continental Congress of the working class,” adding that, “The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.” This ambition was to be fulfilled, not by violent seizure of state power, but by paralyzing big business with a series of general strikes, culminating in direct workers’ control of all industries.

After trekking to the graves of the 1886 Haymarket martyrs buried in Waldheim Cemetery, the I.W.W. delegates passed a resolution endorsing the Russian revolution then in progress. The preamble of their constitution announced a complete divorce from those who rented their labor: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few who make up the capitalist class have all the good things in life.” Therefore, conflict “must go on until all the toilers come together ... and take and hold that which they produce by their labor.”

Revolutionary in spirit, the “Wobblies” plunged directly into danger, demanding their due without haggling or hassle. They saw the profit system as one giant leach on the back of the working class, and insisted that compromise between owners and workers made no more sense than between a fungus and blighted potato. Determined to gain control of production, not negotiate the terms of subservience, they disdained gradualism as procrastination and disliked contracts for surrendering the right to strike at any time. They had even less regard for elections, agreeing with the socialist priest Father Hagerty that, “Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box never did achieve emancipation.”

Furthermore, where other unions shunned the lowly in preference for the “skilled,” the I.W.W. welcomed all races, privileged no one, included housework as a category of labor, and organized chambermaids and prostitutes. The answer to the owners’ One Big Trust, they declared, was One Big Union, which, they believed, was the prelude to a society where all would take their share of production and receive the necessities of life without resort to money.

Outdoor workers addicted to jokes and wild stories, the Wobblies thrived on disaster—and had to—as they were constantly attacked by police, shot by militia, beaten by scabs and vigilantes, and bitterly denounced as “the scum of the earth” by a business press dedicated to egging the bullies on. For Wobblies to speak their minds was itself a crime, and they were regularly dragged off soapboxes for reading seditious material—like the U.S. Constitution. Characterized by soaring idealism and police brutality, these “free speech fights,” as they came to be known, featured Wobblies dropping their tools for hundreds of miles around and walking or riding the rails to besiege the conflict zone. There they sang, shouted, lectured, and put on skits until the jails were swamped, a city’s treasury was drained, and the First Amendment was recognized. The San Diego Tribune supplied a standard press reaction in 1912: “Hanging is none too good for them and they would be much better dead; for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are waste material of creation and should be drained off in the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.”

The most famous—and infamous—of Wobblies was the nationally renowned “Big Bill” Haywood. A child of the West, he was recognized on the streets of New York the way a star athlete might be today. Adored by women and instinctively obeyed by men, he was the most popular unionist in the country. Possessed of the manners of a gentleman, he packed a revolver, cried like a baby when reciting poetry, and delivered thunderous orations that ignited crowds of workers like a wick in a powder keg.

The brutality of wage work taught Haywood of injustice early and converted him to socialism. His first boss whipped him when he was only twelve, and the same year he witnessed a black man surrendered to the tender mercies of a lynch mob. Three years later he was a Nevada miner doing a “man’s work for a boy’s pay,” breaking the loneliness of Eagle Canyon reading Darwin, Marx, Burns, Voltaire, Byron, and Shakespeare. An older miner’s explanation of the class struggle capped his education, though the lesson didn’t sink in until the Haymarket anarchists were hung two years later.

In subsequent years Haywood saw scores of men poisoned at Utah’s Brooklyn lead mine, watched a friend’s head crushed against an air drill by a slab of falling rock, and had his own right hand smashed between a descending car and the side of the shaft at Iowa’s Silver City mine. “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital,” he liked to say, “but I have the marks of capital all over me.” Of the class subordination that made such disfigurement routine, he said this: “[The] barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.”

After Haywood in the annals of great I.W.W. leaders came Vincent Saint John. Son of a pony express rider, he was also a delivery boy, a farm hand, a tinner, a printer, an upholsterer, a prospecter, a miner, and a militant unionist. In the 1890s he had ruined his lungs rescuing dozens of men from a smoke-filled mine in Telluride. In 1901, his men rewarded him with the presidency of the Telluride miners’ union at the tender age of 25. St. John promptly armed them with 250 rifles and 50,000 rounds of ammunition, which they used to ambush scabs from behind boulders and trees and shoot their way into possession of the mines.

His men nicknamed him “the Saint” to honor his incorruptibility, with one of them remembering later that “the air smelled clean in his presence.” On the other hand, the mine owners considered him a dynamiter, a gunman, and a dangerous agitator—and always kept a price on his head. With a graduate degree from the school of hard knocks St. John’s only creed was action.

In 1906, he found himself at the center of a brutal labor struggle in Goldfield, Nevada, the biggest, busiest, richest gold camp in the world. Crowded with dance halls, saloons, and gambling houses, it was a boom town swarming with claim jumpers, fortune hunters, and gamblers, all drawn to the gold like children to candy from every district in the West. St. John recruited 20,000 local workers for the I.W.W., including miners, dishwashers, engineers, stenographers, teamsters, clerks, newsboys, croupiers, maids, and prostitutes. He established the eight-hour day, guaranteed a minimum daily wage of $4.50 for all, and abolished begging for jobs. Any employer wishing to hire workers had to come and negotiate with the union committees. A company detective explained to the Rocky Mountain News that the I.W.W. leader posed an intolerable threat to civilized society wherever he went: “St. John has given the mine owners of Colorado more trouble in the past years than twenty other men up there. If left undisturbed, he would have the entire district organized in another year.”

But the Wobblies were really about the rank-and-file. Striking dramatically in the East for the first time, the I.W.W. led one of its most memorable strikes in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912, where 20,000 textile workers without a dime to their names walked off the job in mid-winter to protest a cut in their already desperately low pay. Accusing their employers of wrecking families, they charged them with having “taken away our wives from the homes, our children ... from the playground, stolen out of schools and driven into the mills, where they were strapped to the machines, not only to force the fathers to compete, but that their young lives may be coined into dollars for a parasite class, that their very nerves, their laughter and joy denied, may be woven into cloth ... .” Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, a stockholder in the American Woolen Company, responded for the employers, explaining with admirable directness that, “Any man who pays more for labor than the lowest sum he can get men for is robbing his stockholders.”

The employers held all the cards, but the I.W.W.’s direct action proved to be trump. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Joan of Arc of Labor,” mesmerized the workers with her poignant explanations of class warfare. “Would you like to have nice clothes?” she rhetorically asked throngs of immigrant women. “Oh, yes!” they shouted in unison. “Well, you can’t have them,” she responded. “Your bosses’ daughters have those things!” Flynn then proceeded to ask the women why they had abandoned their native villages, their aged parents, and their children to come to an alien land, knowing full well they had come for a better life in the New World, free from tyranny and oppression, from landlords and military conscription, a life of work, savings, education for their children, and a chance to send for others.

“What freedom?” Flynn shouted, blasting their hopes with a harsh dose of class reality. She asked if they were free when they were herded into fortress-like New England mills, or when they were branded as inferiors and intruders, or when they were disdained as “Greenhorns” and “Hunkies.” She asked if they were free as wage slaves, hired and fired at the whim of a soulless company, paid unlivable wages for grueling hours tending a whizzing machine. She asked if they were free when they were clubbed, jailed, and shot down in the street, or when politicians ignored their suffering because they couldn’t vote.

Urging the women to neutralize the police and militia by putting down their tools, folding their arms, and bringing machinery, production, and profits to a halt, she poignantly inquired: “Can they weave cloth with soldiers’ bayonets or policemen’s clubs?” “Did they dig coal with bayonets in the miners’ strikes or make steel or run trains with bayonets?” Heads nodded and eyes welled up with tears as Flynn explained a magical new English word: “Solidarity.”

Labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, a friend of Flynn’s, never forgot what she witnessed: “She stirred them, lifted them up in her appeal for solidarity ... It was as though a spurt of flame had gone through the audience ... . Something beautiful and strong had swept through the people and welded them together, singing.”

For once, the mill owners’ bag of repressive tricks failed them. They banned fixed picket lines by local ordinance, but the strikers responded with a roving human chain that circulated the mills 24 hours a day, while supporting crowds surged through town singing labor songs and occupying department stores. They imported scabs, but the strikers denied them sleep, serenading them with mocking choirs that recorded their names and sent them back to their native lands to disgrace their families. Police, clerics, mill management, and city officials tried to proceed with business as usual, but found themselves loudly jeered at wherever they went. Soldiers discovered the backs of their uniforms being suddenly shredded by anonymous scissors emerging from beneath long cloaks. Female gangs stripped the proud forces of order bare, forcing them to flee in humiliation while the women hooted and pointed at their nakedness.

National publicity of a tactical blunder proved decisive. Besieged by police, militia, and cavalry, the workers arranged for host families in neighboring towns to temporarily care for their children. Margaret Sanger helped escort a flock of “pale, emaciated, dejected children” to the train station, all of them lacking even “a stitch of wool on their bodies.” Troopers surrounded the station and the police attacked, clubbing the children and tearing them away from their parents. Dozens of frantic women and kids were beaten, arrested, and thrown kicking and screaming into patrol wagons. Hauled away to jail, the parents were charged with “neglect” and improper guardianship, while their children were shipped off to the Lawrence Poor Farm. Livid strikers besieged the police station as shock reverberated throughout the country at the cowardly attack on children. The U.S. Bureau of Labor ordered an investigation and the House Committee on Rules opened hearings on the strike and the textile industry. Governor Foss of Massachusetts suddenly informed the mill owners that the state troopers had to be withdrawn.

The mill agents’ smug confidence that workers divided into countless different crafts and nationalities couldn’t possibly pull off a strike proved to be unfounded. With public support cratering and the loss of their tariff on imported woolens increasingly likely, the companies gave in, granting the strikers a raise, reduced hours, overtime pay, and a promise not to retaliate for the strike.

Crowds of exuberant workers celebrated their stunning victory, joyously singing the Internationale in two dozen languages.

Sources:

Bird, Stewart with Dan Georgakas and Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever - An Oral History of the I.W.W. (Lake View Press, 1985)

Camp, Helen C., Iron In Her Soul - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left, (Washington State University Press, 1995)

Dubofsky, Melvyn, ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, (Manchester University Press, 1987)

-----We Shall Be All - A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (University of Illinois, 1988)

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, The Rebel Girl, (International Publishers, 1955)

Foner, Philip S., ed., History of the Labor Movement in The United States, Volume 4, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917, (International Publishers, 1965)

Garrison, Dee, Mary Heaton Vorse - The Life of an American Insurgent, (Temple University, 1989)

Lens, Sidney, The Labor Wars - From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns, (Anchor, 1973)

Milkman, Ruth, ed., Women, Work & Protest - A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1985)

Renshaw, Patrick, The Wobblies - The Story of the I.W.W. and Syndicalism in the United States, (Ivan R. Dee, 1999)

Zinn, Howard, The Zinn Reader, (Seven Stories, 1997)

Michael K. Smith is the author of “Portraits of Empire,” “The Madness of King George (with Matt Wuerker), and “Rise To Empire” (forthcoming), all from Common Courage Press.

Health Care: A Commodity, or a Right?

2009-08-24T22:36:00.000-07:00

The hysteria of the capitalist class is one of the best entertainment options available in these waning days of American empire. Consider the League of American Voters' warnings about "Obamacare," which includes a TV ad crafted by Dick Morris. You remember Dick Morris. He's the former Jesse Helms adviser that won Bill Clinton's heart and operated as the presidential pimp. The horny duo spent many pleasant days indulging their lust at public expense while the Clinton administration "deregulated" the economy, so the financial sector could do what it does best: bankrupt the country.

Although he may have given up prostitutes, Morris is still screwing the country. A sample of the claims made by the League of American Voters appears below in quotes.

"So, without your consent, you very easily could lose your insurer and your doctor."

Lots of people are losing their insurers and their doctors right now. That's because private HMOs reserve the right to dismiss costly customers when their medical needs cut into the bottom line. They prefer healthy profits and sick people, not the other way around.

"Great doctors probably will not want to get the very low rates the government will pay private doctors who are part of the new government system."

Why should a public option require that doctors be paid "very low rates?" The only reason the government will likely pay low rates is because private corporations insist on that. They don't want the competition from a high-quality public option, and insist that it be worse than the worst of the HMOs, so they won't be driven out of business. But they deserve to be driven out of business. Health care isn't a commodity, it's a right.

"The truth is that Obamacare would (assign?) almost 50 million new patients to government care."

Tens of millions of patients currently have NO health care under the privatized system. Obama's plan could make things worse, or better, but aiming to insure the uninsured is not in itself evidence of a step backwards. Every other industrial country except the U.S. has a national insurance program that makes health care a right, not a commodity. Incidentally, U.S. soldiers receive government medical care. Is that a liberal plot to force feed them communism? Obviously not. If government care is good enough for the military it's good enough for everyone.

"This means that faceless bureaucrats will decide the type and quality of your care."

Bureaucrats have faces. It's really hard to get any kind of job if you don't have a face, even in the government sector.

Having said that, however, it should be pointed out that HMOs are loaded with bureaucrats, that's why administrative costs are much higher under them than under Medicare.

"It is a very dangerous thing to give your life and well-being over to government bureaucrats!"

It's hard to quarrel with this. National security bureaucrats are killing thousands with endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia etc. Why allow them to ration wars according to spurious notions of public need? Make them turn a profit or get out of business!

"Imagine if you or a loved one is older than 80 years and critically needs heart surgery. Instead of getting the heart procedure, you or that loved one could be informed that you are simply too old. "

People are often too old to stand a reasonable chance of being able to endure heavy anaesthesia, and surgery is often ruled out for that reason. Does that mean your doctor or insurance company is trying to kill you? Of course not. In any case, whether one is under private HMOs or government care, such decisions have to be made. There is nothing to be gained by getting hysterical about it, and there is no reason to suppose that the quality of decision making has to be lower under a government plan than under a private sector plan. The one thing we do know is that under the private sector, profit, not health, is the superordinate goal. If it is profitable to an HMO to keep grandma alive, they'll be interested in doing that. If not, her life may depend on the conscience of an insurance agent, who is paid not to have a conscience.

[Postscript: Ezekiel Emmanuel, the brother of White House chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, has written that older Americans should be a lower priority for health care spending. (See "Obama's Mistakes In Health Care Reform" published by Counterpunch, September 7, 2009) Objections to this kind of remark are understandable. To the extent that government-sponsored health care pits one sector of the population against others, it is not universal care, and should be opposed. However, a misguided government health care plan hardly proves that government sponsored health care is unworkable per se.]

"These committee members will set guidelines with which faceless bureaucrats will make decisions about you and your healthcare."

Is that worse than having faceless private insurance agents make decisions about you and your healthcare, guided only by what is profitable for them and their companies? That's the situation presently. If you have a car crash and are lingering near death someone has to decide if it is financially worthwhile to save your life. If you are uninsured, you stand a much better than average chance of being declared unfit to live. If everyone were insured under a single payer plan, which unfortunately Obama doesn't favor, letting someone die for financial reasons would be much less likely.

"The Obama plan will cost more than $1 trillion in new federal outlays, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office."

If true, that's a good reason to support a single-payer plan, which would not require new outlays, and would actually save money.

False Savior: Bill Clinton

2009-08-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

We can't say we weren't warned. Summarizing his pre-White House political career the Arkansas Democrat Gazette highlighted his gas bag tendencies and demonstrated eagerness to suck up to power: "A purely rhetorical approach to issues that may please all, coupled with a tendency to side with those interests powerful enough to do him some political good . . . his tax policy in Arkansas has been to hand out exemptions to large corporations and soak the middle class."

Like other leaders of his party, Governor Clinton had no problem with Washington's terrorist war against Nicaragua, so long as Democrats were kept properly informed. During his years in the statehouse he never found reason to intervene in the Reagan Administration's cocaine trafficking and Contra supply efforts at the West Arkansas Mena air base, all part of an imperial war that killed thousands of civilians. Though he never tired of talking about his own efforts to rise from humble beginnings, the struggles of the Nicaraguan people to secure their most basic human rights never attracted his slightest attention.

Ordinary Americans proved equally unworthy of his concern. Declining to push for a civil rights law, Clinton achieved the dubious honor of helping make Arkansas one of only two states in the nation without one. Unfortunately, his indifference to injustice wasn't just confined to race. With Arkansas ranking near the bottom of the country in workplace conditions, health and safety standards, regulation enforcement, and per capita income, he did little to reverse the steady decline of American labor, though he did find time to award $100 million in tax breaks to corporations. Bill Becker, head of the AFL-CIO, complained that Clinton's tendency with labor leaders was to "pat you on the back and piss down your leg." Thus, after enjoying 16 years of union support, Clinton announced that he had "serious reservations" about an AFL-CIO petition for a ballot initiative allowing union shop workplaces, even though both workers and management agreed. He also awarded Morrilton Plastics a $300,000 loan guarantee to help them build up excess inventory in preparation for a strike. Clinton still praises himself for "saving" 410 jobs with this move, but John R. Brummett, editor of the Arkansas Times said with greater realism at the time that, "When it comes to business vs. labor, you won't get a much clearer case than Morrilton to show you he's pro-business."

Indeed. And destroying unions is what the business class is all about. As far as this goes, Clinton characterizes himself as an "Eisenhower Republican," and it was Eisenhower who overthrew Guatemalan democracy on behalf of United Fruit in 1954, after which Guatemalans, especially union leaders, were subjected to decades of torture and terror, a policy that eventually reached genocidal proportions in the 1980s. But maybe it saved a few jobs - like for undertakers.

Clinton's environmental policies were no bargain either. As governor he argued for voluntary compliance with environmental standards and stacked his pollution control board with representatives of major polluters. He turned the White River into a cesspool of poultry and cattle industry waste and approved more than $400 million in state tax breaks for International Paper and three other paper mills, letting the former company cut trees in the habitat of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker and annually vent nearly two million tons of chemicals into the air and water from its Pine Bluff plant. A grateful International Paper pumped money into Clinton campaign coffers as regularly as it did garbage into the environment.

Clinton's gift for gab and slickly two-faced demeanor soon propelled him into national politics. Running for president, he condemned his Republican opponents as captives of corporate lobbyists, though he himself was a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Bankers Association, the Tobacco Institute, Merrill Lynch, Coca Cola, and Occidental Petroleum. While promising federal jobs, urban aid, and a campaign to Rebuild America and "put people first," he parroted the corporate line that the groups that would benefit from such a program were unworthy "special interests." Afflicted with the moral blindness that capitalism requires in its leaders, Clinton couldn't see that the system can't "put people first," because it puts profits first.

Clinton lectured voters that they needed to have the "courage to change," but he showed no interest in changing Washington's longstanding contempt for international law, which denied desperately needed progressive change throughout the world. He applauded President George Bush Senior's intervention in Somalia, vowed to "drop a hammer" on Cuba once elected, and endlessly reiterated his desire that the United States "be leading the Desert Storms in the 21st century." On the domestic front, he called for "good jobs at good wages," but ignored the hordes of unorganized checkout clerks at Wal Marts in Arkansas, who were getting steadily poisoned by the state ranked 48th in environmental practice by the Institute For Southern Studies.

Clinton quickly demolished hopes for a liberal administration. In his first 100 days he sent fleeing Haitian refugees back to their killers in Port Au Prince. He turned Africa policy over to a Bush appointee, encouraging Jonas Savimbi to go on the rampage in Angola. He put the Zionist lobby in charge of Middle East policy. He called for Pentagon spending above the post-1950 Cold War average. He increased secret intelligence spending and maintained full funding for the Drug Enforcement Agency. He capitulated on grazing and mineral rights on public lands and delivered economic policy to Wall Street. He promoted NAFTA while gutting the side agreements protecting workers and the environment that he had promised to enforce. He rejected the single-payer health insurance long favored by other industrial countries, pushing instead for a system of "managed care" that would increase profits for the private insurance companies that donated $850,000 to getting him elected.

While rhetorically criticizing the so-called excesses of the Reagan years, Clinton in practice extended the Reagan "revolution" beyond the bounds that Reagan himself had contemplated. He shrank the federal government relative to the private economy, especially social welfare budgets. He increased the suffering of the poor. He dismantled the post-WWII capital-labor accord and made the control of business costs trounce unemployment as a policy concern. He strove to make taxes go increasingly towards police, prisons, and war, while restricting the social safety net to the elderly. In short, he advanced Republican orthodoxy across the board, embracing a war on drugs, limitless "free trade," balanced budgets, a crippling of civil liberties, the death penalty, Star Wars, and runaway prison construction.

On no major issue was he even slightly progressive. Much praised for holding an allegedly constructive attitude on race (novelist Toni Morrison praised him as the nation's "first black president"), Clinton in fact deliberately insulted blacks from the beginning. When the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots demonstrated for the umpteenth time that U.S. cities were hellholes of racial and class oppression, he mouthed ignorant platitudes about the "culture of poverty," blaming the victims for their plight. In the subsequent Sister Souljah fiasco, Clinton appeared before Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition to denounce Souljah for having stated that black gang members involved in incessant warfare against each other instead consider "hav[ing] a week and kill white people." Clinton distorted this into an advocacy of racial murder, which it was not. Souljah's comments were predicated on one being a black gang member in a racist society, intricately connected to vast social violence obviously not susceptible to quick solution. In that circumstance, Souljah suggested, why not kill white people rather than blacks, since white deaths garner broad social concern in a way that black deaths do not. It was not advocacy of racial murder, but a rhetorical attempt to awaken blacks to the fact that a racist society was encouraging them to kill only themselves. Clinton wrenched Souljah's comments out of context to let minorities know that slick white professionals were still in control of the Democratic Party, so blacks had better tone down their grievances and stay at the back of the campaign bus.

As president, Clinton added injury to insult, carrying out a devastating war on the poor and people of color, while preaching chastity to young blacks and continuing to develop a well-deserved reputation as a compulsory philanderer himself. In 1993, with crime rates not rising, and with nonviolent offenses and minor parole violations accounting for the vast majority of the jailed, Clinton called for 100,000 new cops on the beat, boot camps for juveniles, expanded prison construction, an extension of the death penalty to dozens of new offenses, and the criminalization of gang membership. At the time a typical inmate in a U.S. jail was a nonwhite male who had become involved in petty crime because no avenues to a legal life of conventional satisfactions existed. He had usually not finished high school, had no job skills, had never enjoyed steady employment, and was not working at the time of his arrest. The top five predictors of his crime referred to economic conditions: business failure rate, number of unemployment claims, number of workers on strike, number of personal bankruptcies, and incidence of mortgage foreclosure. Clinton addressed none of this, seizing on the opportunity to kick a helpless constituency in the face while basking in the applause of clueless pundits.

It is difficult to exaggerate the viciousness of Clinton's war on the poor. In 1996, bursting with homilies about moral discipline, thrift, and "family values," Clinton revoked federal income support for the poor ("welfare reform"), a policy no Republican president had ever dared to implement. The move to end welfare "as we know it," plunged a million more American children into poverty (the U.S. already had the highest child poverty rate in the world among industrial nations) and deprived poor families of $28 billion in food assistance. A provision in the bill mandated that welfare mothers divulge the name of their children's father or be stricken from the rolls. The original plan of moving people "from welfare to work" had called for softening the transition with guaranteed health care, child care, job training, and a living wage. None of that made the final bill.

"Your president is a real asshole," commented Labor Secretary Robert Reich's wife to her husband as he returned home after the nasty deed was done.

On foreign policy Clinton was even more disastrous. Just as Jimmy Carter had, Clinton falsely announced he had achieved lasting peace in the Middle East. He neglected to mention that his Oslo Accords called for the incorporation of Palestinian lands in a permanent colonial structure administered by Israel, which was not peace but a solidification of the racist status quo. Israel remained in control of everything that counted: East Jerusalem, the constantly expanding settlements, the economy, the land, the water, sovereignty, and "security." The final settlement was to be based on U.N. Resolution 242, which recognized only the rights of existing states, defining the Palestinians as mere stateless refugees, not a nationality dispossessed of its rightful territory. Jerusalem was to be Israel's eternal and undivided capital, while the Palestinian National Authority was slated to control less than 3% of the West Bank. In the "autonomy" region, Palestinians were to govern 30% of the territory under the overall "security control" of the Israeli military. The remaining two-thirds of the West Bank was to be reserved for Israeli settlements. The Israeli Military Administration retained an exclusive right to legislate, judge, and execute policy, while Diasporan Palestinians had no "right of return" to the land of their birth, as called for by unanimous U.N. decision in 1948. The Palestinians were granted merely "limited autonomy" in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, which, as Palestinian scholar Edward Said noted, meant that the PLO had converted itself from a liberation movement into a "small-town government."

Meanwhile, Jewish settlement construction in the occupied territories accelerated dramatically in the Clinton years, a policy that served as backdrop for Ariel Sharon's touching off of the new intifada with an invasion of the Al Aqsa mosque site in Arab Jerusalem in September 2000. The next day Prime Minister Ehud Barak ordered riot police to storm the compound where 20,000 Palestinians were praying. Rocks were thrown and the police opened fire, killing seven and wounding 220. President Clinton showed his approval by speedily delivering to Israel the largest shipment of attack helicopters in a decade.

In spite of much nonsense written about the allegedly extraordinarly generous Clinton-Barak plan at Camp David in 2000, the Clinton Administration continued to back Israel's rejectionism to the hilt. Barak conceded nothing, not a return to the 1967 borders, not a right of return for Palestinian exiles, not Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem. He refused to dismantle Jewish settlements and called for terminating Palestinian electricity, telecommunications, and water. And when the Palestinians resisted, he saw to it that the nearly defenseless civilian population was pounded by helicopter gunships, F-16s, tanks, missiles, and machine guns.

Clinton also backed Colombia's death squad government to the hilt, as it converted much of the national territory to a corpse strewn wasteland. Thousands of people were tortured and murdered, hundreds of thousands made refugees, giving Colombia honors as the country with the largest displaced population in the world. The security forces responsible for the devastation were closely linked to the narcotraffickers Washington allegedly was intervening in Colombia to fight against. When Clinton took office, U.S. aid to Colombia amounted to about half the total for the Americas. Clinton increased it.

At a ceremony for Colombia's new ambassador to the U.S. in 1993, Clinton praised the gangster state as a "valued trading partner" and "one of our strongest allies . . . . in the effort to . . . .see democracy flourish and the rule of law prevail." He saluted "the policeman on the street and the soldier in the field," for their valiant help in such a noble effort. The day after his speech a group of soldiers in the field killed three peasants and dumped their bodies in front of the Catholic bishop's residence in Tibu, a typically grisly display of propaganda by the deed. These were just the latest victims of Washington-backed death squads that had claimed twenty thousand lives in the previous seven years. The targets were those whose existence interfered with elite efforts to maintain a national disparity that awarded 3% of the population 70% of the land: community leaders, human rights and health workers, union activists, students, religious workers, vagrants, the unemployed, street children, prostitutes and homosexuals. Many of the "undesirables" were killed for the cash their body parts yielded on the black market.

A similar campaign of mass destruction was carried out in Turkey. While Washington rewarded its client state with billions of dollars in jet planes, tanks, and other weapons, Ankara went on the rampage in the southeast, where major U.S. airbases were located, razing Kurdish villages to the ground and forcibly evacuating refugees. Tens of thousands were killed and millions left homeless, an atrocity dwarfing much more highlighted events occurring in the former Yugoslavia, but no accusations of resurgent Hitlerism were heard in the U.S. media as they were in relation to Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs.

In Somalia Clinton continued the "humanitarian" mission of George Bush Senior, with U.S. troops waging gun battles in the streets of Mogadishu with teenage gangsters, killing thousands in the righteous effort to conquer an evil "warlord." Assaulting hospitals, bombarding political meetings, shooting into protesting crowds, and bulldozing homes to make free fire zones, they encountered only curiously ungrateful Somalis, who raised their shoes over head in a ritual gesture of contempt, showing their invaders a forest of heels. According to the C.I.A. the Somali intervention - Operation Restore Hope - killed between 7000 and 10,000 Somalis.

In Iraq, Clinton continuously bombed the country to preserve "no fly" zones having absolutely no legality, while maintaining harsh economic sanctions that killed staggering numbers of Iraqi civilians. By 1996, six hundred thousand children had died from malnutrition and disease as a result of the sanctions. A U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report stated that Iraqi children under five were plagued by "wasting" - severe hunger, visible in the ribs and limbs. "Iraq," the report said, "is increasingly becoming like a concentration camp." The continued silence of the international community, it warned, "results in genocide." On 60 Minutes Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright firmly justified the policy that Leslie Stahl reminded her had killed "more children than died in Hiroshima." "This is a very hard choice," Albright said, "but the price, we think the price is worth it."

Clinton declined to withdraw support from client Indonesia when it unleashed another huge slaughter on the island of East Timor. In the six months preceding a 1998 popular referendum on independence for the island, Indonesian forces armed and trained by Washington carried out a campaign of terror and intimidation that killed thousands, according to Church officials and other credible observers. While most of the population was driven from its homes and the country was destroyed, Clinton did nothing to reign in the killers. Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger explained that a U.S. attempt to stop the slaughter would be analogous to his cleaning up his daughter's dirty room at college, a trifling errand beneath the dignity of a superpower.

Incredibly, 80% of East Timorese went ahead and voted for independence from their murderers, which prompted the Indonesian military to exact revenge by torching Dili, sacking and burning churches, killing priests, nuns, and pro-independence leaders, leaving behind a charred landscape of pillaged remains. Just five days before the referendum the Pentagon had announced that "A U.S.-Indonesian training exercise focused on humanitarian and disaster relief activities concluded August 25." By the end of 1999 Amnesty International reported that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were trapped in "makeshift camps" in Indonesian West Timor as "virtual prisoners," frequently "intimidated, harassed, extorted and in some cases sexually assaulted and killed."

An Australian academic specialist commented that exact figures on Timorese deaths were unknown because (1) bodies were still being discovered (2)"as many as 80,000" people were still unaccounted for, and (3) many others were thought to have been "dumped in the shark-infested ocean." What was known was that the sick, the elderly, and children, lacking clean water, cooking fuel, and modern sanitation and shelter, were dying in large numbers from gastroenteritis. The retreating Indonesian army polluted wells with corpses and chemicals, and destroyed the water supply and phone systems. The Clinton Administration, who welcomed General Suharto to Washington in 1995 as "our kind of guy," let the Indonesian generals go about their business unimpeded.

An equal opportunity destroyer, Clinton also bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan in August, 1998, destroying half the medicine supply in that poor African country, along with the facilities for replenishing them. Washington blocked a UN inquiry into the justification for this bombing, which the Clinton administration said was because it produced EMPTA, a building block in the manufacture of VX nerve gas, and because it was financed by Osama bin Laden. These claims evaporated almost overnight, while the death toll from the strike - in a country with endemic malaria, tuberculosis and other fatal diseases - was estimated by the Boston Globe's Jonathan Belke to be in the "tens of thousands" just in the year following the bombing, with the ultimate toll unknowable but beyond even that grim estimate. Werner Daum, Germany's ambassador to Sudan, wrote in the Harvard International Review that, "It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess." Human Rights Watch reported that as a consequence of Clinton's bombing UN and other relief agencies indefinitely postponed their relief efforts in Sudan, a disruption of assistance that likely produced many other preventable deaths, given that in the south of the country alone the U.N. estimated there were 2.4 million refugees at risk of starvation.

In 1999, Clinton launched his most-publicized intervention, a "humanitarian" war against Serbia that had no legal sanction from the U.N. Security Council. Yugoslavia was subjected to round-the-clock air attacks for 11 weeks, which dropped twenty thousand tons of bombs and spewed hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into water, air, and soil, poisoning fields and streams, exposing millions of people to the radiation from depleted uranium, and wiping out the productive capital of the entire country. There is no doubt about where responsibility for these crimes lies. Captain Martin de la Hoz, who participated in bombing missions flying an F-18, confirms that, "All the missions that we flew, all and each one, were planned by U.S. high military authorities."

Neither is there any doubt about who caused the war. In pre-war negotiations at Rambouillet, Clinton and Co. demanded that NATO receive "free and unrestricted passage" throughout Yugoslavia, immunity for crimes, and full use of the electromagnetic spectrum, along with all airports, roads, rails, and ports. When the Serbian Parliament objected to being treated as a conquered nation, as any self-respecting government would, the U.S. moved to "save lives" by bombing Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians, Hungarians, and Romanis, burying them in blood-spattered rubble.

The Clinton/NATO aggression killed almost three thousand people. Initially the war was cast as an effort to maintain NATO's "credibility," but the campaign was quickly repackaged as an effort to stop genocide by yet "another Hitler," overlooking the fact that the truly massive violence occurred as a consequence of the NATO bombings.

Slobodan Milosevic's (the latest Hitler) democratic opposition was silenced, the flight of Kosovar refugees expanded to a flood, the U.N. was kicked to the sidelines, and a resurgent Luftwaffe goose-stepped through the Balkans under the high-minded guidance of Clinton internationalists. The demolition of Yugoslavia completed, NATO Commander Wesley Clark indicated that the official pretext for the aggression was merely a cover story, stating that the NATO operation "was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing . . . . There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea." In fact, Clark bragged that the goal of the war was to "demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure" of Yugoslavia. Such is the fate of countries that wish to retain public sector services and social programs in a capitalist world order.

Clinton lied about nearly everything to do with Yugoslavia. He said he acted to fulfill "the demands of an outraged and united international community." But the 154-member UN was deliberately bypassed, and not even the Security Council endorsed the war. Clinton claimed that he conducted the war "to enable the Kosovar people, the victims of some of the most vicious atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, to return to their homes with safety and self-government." In fact, a large majority of Albanian Kosovars were forced to leave their homes not by Milosevic, but by the NATO bombings. Clinton claimed that the NATO triumph ushered in new hope that victims of ethnic or religious oppression could permanently count on support from the U.S. and the world. In fact, the U.S. was and is far and away the world leader in fomenting and capitalizing on all kinds of oppression to maintain a secure global system of profit extraction. Clinton applauded U.S. pilots for allegedly "risking their lives to attack their targets" while avoiding civilian casualties, even though they allegedly were "fired upon from populated areas." In fact, U.S. combat deaths were zero, and American pilots faced little or no danger as they dropped thousands of tons of bombs on nearly helpless civilian populations. Clinton insisted that "when our diplomatic efforts to avert this horror were rebuffed, and the violence mounted, we and our allies chose to act." In fact, there was no diplomacy at Rambouillet, just the usual ultimatum to submit to U.S. demands or endure unprovoked attack. Clinton bragged that 19 democracies had joined forces to defend against "the stiffest military challenge in NATO's 50-year history." In fact, Yugoslavia posed no serious military challenge to NATO, which represented countries whose collective GDP was about 50% of the world's GDP and whose collective military spending was more than half the world's. The war could in no realistic way be construed as self-defense. On the contrary. It was a sadistic smashing of a defenseless nation by the most powerful rogue forces in the world.

Perhaps Clinton's proudest achievement is his economic record. It is true that, thanks to social security surpluses, he did record three consecutive years of fiscal surplus between 1998 and 2000, leading to suggestions that he - and even more, Alan Greenspan - was the Financial Messiah. Greenspan was applauded for having tamed inflation, kept unemployment low, and presided over the greatest stock market boom in history.

Inflation did decline, but this was mostly because workers were unable to secure wage increases commensurate with productivity increases even at low unemployment rates. Greenspan conceded as much when he praised the economy's performance in 1997 as "extraordinary" and "exceptional," while adding that a major factor accounting for this was "a heightened sense of job insecurity and, as a consequence, subdued wages." And because household incomes and even corporate profits were unable to keep pace with the soaring market, the 1990s spending spree could only be financed by unprecedented borrowing. (Household debt mushroomed under Clinton, reaching 97.4 percent of disposable income.) But the debt-financed boom began falling apart even before Clinton left office.

We should also keep in mind that under Clinton the distribution of wealth in the U.S. became more skewed than at any time in the previous 40 years. The ratio of average CEO pay to the average worker's wages rose from 113 to 1 in 1991 to 449 to 1 when Clinton left office in 2001. Why does this matter? Because extremely lopsided wealth distribution always leads to economic collapse when the rich can no longer productively spend or invest their fortunes and opt instead for speculative schemes that siphon wealth rather than create it. At that point aggregate purchasing power begins to collapse because the plundered middle class has too little money with which to sustain broad consumer demand. Recession or depression is the depressingly familiar result.

Clinton actually invited the current recession/depression by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which had been passed in the wake of the Depression to keep commercial banking separate from investment banking, in order to prevent speculators from collapsing the market as they had in the 1929 crash. In fact, in the name of market efficiency and modernization Clinton advanced financial deregulation across the board, opening the way for the fraudsters to plunder the nation's assets and leave the public holding the bag - of toxic assets.

It is true that Clinton increased the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15, but this did not reverse the steady decline in purchasing power of even that higher minimum. When Clinton left office in January 2001, the $5.15 minimum was 35 percent below the minimum wage's peak real value in 1968, even though the economy had become 81 percent more productive since then. Furthermore, average real wages were lower under Clinton than they had been under Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr.

The official poverty rate declined from 15.1 percent to 11.3 percent in 2000, which means that the prevalence of poverty was the same as it had been in 1974. But per capita GDP in 2000 was 70 percent higher than it had been in 1974, productivity was 61 percent higher, and the stock market was up 603 percent. Given these figures, anything short of the outright elimination of poverty represented overwhelming failure to promote the general welfare, as called for in the U.S. Constitution. In any case, child care costs rose steeply for a large percentage of poor households after Clinton cut federal welfare support for single mothers. If this single factor were accounted for, the slight decline in the official poverty rate in the Clinton years as compared with the Reagan-Bush years would most likely vanish.

It is generally thought that during the Clinton era fewer jobs were lost due to trade than under Reagan, but this is not true. Under Reagan and Bush Senior from 1980 to 1994 3.2 million jobs were lost in the U.S. because of free trade, that is, 228,571 jobs a year. Under Clinton, from 1994 to 2000, the beginning of NAFTA, another 3 million jobs were lost due to free trade, that is, 500,000 jobs a year. Furthermore, the new jobs Clinton boasted of creating were of lower quality in terms of pay, benefits, and security than those that had been shed.

Finally, a word on Clinton's disgraceful "personal" life. Bodyguards delivered women to Clinton, who, while auctioning off the Lincoln Bedroom as a six-figure overnight flophouse for fat cat donors, claimed the Oval Office as his "private" sanctuary. While speaking to teens of chastity and personal responsibility, he bullied his sexual conquests into silence, employing semi-official detectives to dig up blackmail data for use in extracting false testimony absolving him of responsibility for his predations. Kathleen Willey found her car tires punctured and a stranger inquiring after her children by name. "Don't you get the message?" the man asked.

Cabinet members and underlings were pressed into service to provide deniability and false alibis. Lawyers famous for devising loopholes for rich thugs made sure the swarm of abusive lies was all "legally accurate."

Eagerly slandering the women he targeted, Clinton dismissed Gennifer Flowers as a lying gold digger; insinuated that Paula Jones was a common slut who might secretly have enjoyed a sleazy encounter with him; discarded Kathleen Willey's accusation the basis that, "It's ludicrous to think I would come on to a small-breasted woman"; and portrayed Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker."

Can there be much doubt that he would have smeared Lewinsky far dirtier if she had not retained the presidential seal on her most famous dress?

Sources:

Christopher Hitchens, "No One Left To Lie To - The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton," (Verso, 1999)

Michael Parenti, "To Kill A Nation - The Attack On Yugoslavia,"(Verso, 2000)

Alexander Cockburn, "Washington Babylon," (Verso, 1996)

Alexander Cockburn, "The Golden Age Is In Us," (Verso, 1995)

Jim Hightower, "There's Nothing In The Middle Of The Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, (HarperCollins, 1997)

Norman Solomon, "False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era," (Common Courage, 1994)

Norman Solomon, "Through The Media Looking Glass," (Common Courage, 1995)

Javier Giraldo S.J., "Colombia - The Genocidal Democracy," (Common Courage, 1996)

John Irwin and James Austin, "It's About Time - America's Imprisonment Binge," (Wadsworth, 1994)

Robert Pollin, "Contours of Descent - U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity," (Verso, 2003)

Jack Rasmus, "The War at Home - The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan To George W. Bush," (Kyklos, 2006)

Edward W. Said, "The End of The Peace Process - Oslo and After," (Pantheon, 2000)

Noam Chomsky, "A New Generation Draws the Line - Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West," (Verso, 2000)

Noam Chomsky, "9-11," (Seven Stories, 2001)

Noam Chomsky, "Rogue States - The Rule of Force in World Affairs," (South End, 2000)

Noam Chomsky, "Keeping the Rabble in Line," (Common Courage, 1994)

Noam Chomsky, "World Orders Old and New,"(Columbia, 1994)

Noam Chomsky, "A Painful Peace," Z Magazine, January 1996

"A Democratic Triumph," the Progressive, September 1996

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Study Guide," the Progressive, November 1998

"Back to Baghdad," the Progressive, September 1996

"Iraq's Children," The Progressive, November 1997

Kevin Kelley, "The Myth of Humanitarian War," Utne Reader, January/February 2000

Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom, "The Kosovo/NATO Conflict," Z Magazine, May 1999

"A Superpower's Dilemma," Newsweek, September 20, 1999

"East Timor's Agony," the Nation, September 27, 1999

"Ambush in Mogadishu," Frontline, April 8, 1999
Posted by Michael Smith at 9:14 AM

Political and Economic Disabilities

2009-08-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

by Frank Scott

We’re told the recession is nearly over, again, but our system’s foundation reveals more weakness at each structural repair attempt by capital’s construction crew, also known as our government . This particular crisis will pass, but soon lead to others more serious until we make the economy work for the betterment of all, and not just benefit some at ever more deadly cost to everyone else .

Corporate America has increased profits by reducing its work force and their salaries, then forcing them to borrow money they should have been paid , and compounding the felony by collecting interest on that debt. The present recession is part of that attack on the working middle class , as millions bought homes at rates they could not afford. The hustlers who sold them mortgages based on invisible assets built a financial pyramid which only existed in their electronic religious temples . When material bills came due and capital had to produce substance for its own debts, what happened?

Corporate government rushed to the aid of corporate finance with trillions of taxpayer dollars, which could then be loaned back to taxpayers at even higher interest rates. As the system becomes more severely crippled , measures to save it become more blatantly outrageous, often bordering on madness. And reactions to this massive welfare program to save capitalism have produced outbursts of near lunacy.

For the first time in history America has a president who is only half white, causing mental agony for the still significant racist minority . Along with those who still believe Obama represents substantial change, they are near the breaking point. This despite the fact that Obama was selected by America’s rulers, to be elected by America’s ruled, to save private capital , and make that salvation seem a positive change for the public taxpayers . As if Obama’s sincere but often hallucinating supporters weren't bad enough, the situation has led the barely conscious opposition into a passionate crusade approaching mass hysteria. They charge Obama with being a socialist , or of having been born in another country. This reinforces the notion that America is the world’s leading producer of weapons, garbage and imbeciles, but severe mental stress doesn't lead to clear reasoning, and we are an extremely stressed population.

All of us are disoriented by the distortions and lies we get from our mind managers, and starry eyed believers who thought this hybrid speech maker was some agent of change in anything but rhetoric have little right to laugh at anyone else. We all need a wake up call.

The latest scheme to “change” our blood-for-profit health care system will do nothing more than provide public assurance for the continued domination of private insurance. The president disregards the majority's desire for a system like medicare to cover everyone, and obeys the dictates of insurers and pharmaceutical monopolies. The politically brain dead who call him a marxist should know that’s closer to the corporate socialism of Mussolini and Hitler, than the democratic theory of Marx. This health care hustle is another scheme to save the minority at the expense of the majority , accompanied by rhetoric from our designated reformer that says we’re getting “change we can believe in.” That's if we believe in the easter bunny and the tooth fairy .

Like everything else in the marketplace , political control is a purchased commodity, and organized corporate capital has far more buying power in the electoral mall than the disorganized public. That kind of power cannot be overcome by combining our dollars to compete with national lobbies , but only by combining our democratic actions to run the money changers out of the political temple. To affect real transformation we need to wrest control from interests so unprincipled they are selling humanity’s future in pursuit of their own private gain . And driving some of us crazy in the process.

Our heads are filled with stories of unjust treatment in Iran , while emptied of the daily atrocity that is Israel’s treatment of Gaza. We increase murder in Afghanistan as it continues in Iraq and spreads to Pakistan, and we’re told democracy is on the rise. We are warned about elected leaders in South America who oppose global capital, but we hear little about the elected leader in Honduras, exiled for the sin of disobeying his oligarchs on behalf of his people. Meanwhile, we have many here in a near psychotic state which has them rallying against an economy which does not exist but might work for their best interests if it did, or passionately supporting the economy which really does exist but works against all their individual and collective interests, because it does.

We need homeland security, but that has nothing to do with any outside threat . We have to control the political economic terrorists at home who are pushing us closer to disaster, while their media distracts with horror stories either far from our ability to affect, or directly attributable to our unconscious support for their continuation. We can neither remain enamored of a photogenic figure smoothly offering us loans with our own money in order to keep the banks in power, nor sink to the depths of hateful ignorance which finds us at each others throats because those throats are at our economic level or below , while our real enemies are so far above that economic level they can seem invisible.

Democracy is not simply attending a meeting , raising funds or voting in an election. It is the combined actions of citizens taking control of their destiny, by any means necessary , demanding, and getting, government answerable to them, and not entrenched wealth or foreign interests. The last election misled many to feel that democracy was finally achieved, but the present situation should make it clear that was not even remotely the case. We have a long way to go, and for our own good, we’d better get there soon.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that
the author is notified and no fee is charged for access.
Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on
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frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net

Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in the Coastal Post, The Independent Monitor and on his shared blog at:

http://legalienate.blogspot.com

Bulletins From Konsciousness Kontrol

2009-08-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

New Loan Promises To Save USA, Global Capital

The international banking firm of Soros, Tsuris and Soros has joined with Goldman, Ponzi and Sachs in announcing plans to finance a one hundred fifty trillion dollar( $150,000,000,000,000) loan to the USA, made possible through a complex arrangement involving OPEC, the Bulgarian Central Bank, Cosa Nostra , the Colombian Drug Cartel, Albania, the Vatican Zionist Minion , and the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The globally secured financial giant, long run by mathematical geniuses from the top secret HPOOIIOICNUTOH ( high priests of international investing of intriguing complexity not understandable to ordinary humans) expect to raise this historic amount via the sale of still to be created world government backed and guaranteed bonds, drawn on faith, hope and a complete and total lack of charity, in keeping with the constraints of harsh reality and profit seeking .

“Though there are neither bonds nor investors at the moment,” said firm spokesperson Bernardo Batista de Rothschild. “we know that the incredibly high interest rates we will offer - 30-35% - assure that very soon there will be many rushing to our doors, their brokers, our banks, their keyboards, or other text devices , with thumbs, checkbooks, credit cards, and promissory notes at the ready. ”

The American stock market rose to its highest level in two hundred years at this news, while unemployment dropped from its previous high of 44% to its lowest point in months; 39%.

“Things are finally looking up,” said president Palin, “and our long recession may finally be over. Again.”

New Court Assures Continuity with Old Court

The congress overwhelmingly approved the Supreme Court’s first autistic lesbian arab american atheist member, GloriaGus Fatima AntiCristo who will join recently appointed Chief Justice Glitzy Morales, the online gossip celebrity and nation’s first english speaking illegal immigrant on the court. “We are close to reaching the American dream on this court, with servants for minority capital coming from representatives of the great majority of our people, all divided into identity and ethnic groups but united in their dedication to maintain the system of identity and ethnic groups united in support of finance capital” said court spokesperson and former Mafia lawyer, Vito Nunzio Lieberman Chan, who spoke, as usual, through an interpreter.

New Coalition of Truthers, Birthers, Frothers and Mirthers

A new group uniting previously disparate forces promises to introduce a poli-psych-eco-giggle factor to american politics which has been sorely lacking since the Gerald Ford regime, previously honored as the most hysterical but harmless administration in U.S. history. The group, spanning a host of controversial issues, put out a press release on its forming. What follows are only some major points in a 2,457 page document.

Truthers:

New Expose Reveals Truth About 911: X-Files Group Suspected

Cigarette Man, other Mysterious White Guys and Area 51 captives implicated in intricate plot involving State Department, DMV, Starbucks , Brittany Spears, the Illuminati , and some jews...

Birthers:

Obama secretly born on Mars in test program to create universal slavery of poor white market investors,

He came here on space ship piloted by Fidel Castro as part of plot formed by interplanetary cabal to change earth-usa into slave colony for universe run by illegal mexican immigrant jews ...

Frothers:

Ex inmates of maximum security mental institutions secretly running United Nations, United States, United Air Lines and United Fruit, duping public, media, markets, private sector, athletes, tv stars and stamp collectors into believing there is a reality, advising one and all to watch channel zero when it is off the air to see the real state of the world.

Mirthers:

urge all to follow advice of Truthers, Birthers, Frothers, try not to think too much, and have a nice day

Iran! Global Menace! Still! Beware Iran! Hurry and Beware!

New Findings Indicate Iran Working on Secret Weapon powerful enough to destroy entire planet, especially Israel!

Researchers from Israel’s world famous think tank, Material Reality is an Oxymoron , announced results of their intensive two week study of Iran’s secret plans to exterminate all jews and possibly the rest of humanity, except for Mecca and a Starbucks in Tehran.

At a press conference which introduced the results of the incredibly efficient and widely supported U.S. financed study, an Israel spokesperson said:

“We firmly believe in the results of our painstaking study, so why shouldn't you?

Unless you’re an anti-Semite?

Are you?

ARE YOU?”

stay tuned...

The Death of Racism Has Been Greatly Exaggerated - Henry Louis Gates, Police Misconduct, and the "Culture of Poverty" Reflex

2009-07-26T01:47:00.000-07:00

by Michael K. Smith

"You cannot escape the pathology of a country in which you're born."
----- James Baldwin, 1970

"The American idea of progress is how fast I become white."
-----James Baldwin, 1979

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for "disorderly conduct" in his own home by a member of the Cambridge police department demonstrates that the United States has not relinquished its mission to be a "white" country.

Gates was returning from a three-week visit to China with his daughter when the unfortunate incident occurred. Arriving home, he discovered that his front door was jammed. He went around the house and entered by the kitchen door, then tried with the help of his chauffeur to unjam the front door. Meanwhile, a white neighbor witnessing two black men attempting to force the front door open phoned the police saying that an illegal break-in appeared to be in progress.

The responsibility for determining whether this was in fact the case fell to the Cambridge police. Officer James Crowley, who arrested Gates, does not claim to have been in doubt that Gates was the legal occupant of the house when he arrested him. He just didn't like the volley of fury Gates directed at him (Gates demanded his badge number so he could file a complaint), and his refusal to calm down when he discovered he was being suspected of criminal conduct. Crowley feels that his arrest of Gates was entirely appropriate (though the charge was quickly withdrawn) and that he has nothing to apologize for. Cambridge police commissioner Robert Haas says that Crowley is an exemplary officer and acted consistent with his law enforcement training. In fact, Crowley is so well regarded that he reportedly leads trainings of his fellow officers on the sensitive issue of racial profiling.

So when President Obama weighed in with the opinion that the Cambridge police department had "acted stupidly" in arresting a 58-year-old man with a cane in his own home, Crowley took it personally, criticizing Obama for intervening in a "local issue" and attributing the president's opinion to the fact that he was a personal friend of Gates. Policemen throughout the country reacted similarly and rallied to Crowley's side. David J. Holway, national president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers wrote Obama a letter demanding an apology, accusing the president of having exercised "poor judgment" and "indicted all members of the Cambridge police department and public safety officers across the country."

At the simplest level we can attribute the incident to a clash of deference expectations. Officer Crowley expected the deference that police feel they are entitled to for "putting their lives on the line" for the benefit of public order and safety, and was shocked at Gates's references to his "mama" and other vulgar expressions he found grossly unsuited to an elite college professor. Gates expected the deference owed to the rightful occupant of the home and was infuriated to discover he was suspected of being a criminal instead. Crowley had a gun, so force won out.

The extreme sensitivity displayed by the police is revealing. Cambridge police commissioner Robert Haas says his entire department was "deeply pained" at Obama's criticism, since Crowley had done nothing wrong, merely come upon "a crime in progress" and then had to work his way through it. But of course there was no crime in progress, which is precisely why Gates was angry, and why he had a right to be angry. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Crowley, Haas, or police in general understand this. And while the police may deny it, a white man in Gates's position would be far less likely to be a criminal suspect, though it is true that were he such a suspect he would also be far less likely to take it personally, as Gates did. But this is because white men are treated - not just by the police, but by everyone - as individuals, not as representatives of a race struggling to evolve from savagery to civilization. In other words, a white man could dismiss the incident as an amusing quirk of fate, because it would have no negative repercussions for whites in general, whereas no sane black person could possibly do this, because the racial stereotyping giving rise to it reinforces the perception of blacks as congenitally criminal.

In any event, one suspects that the Cambridge police are at least as pained that Gates was famous enough to make them look ridiculous as they are at Obama's opinion of their conduct. Had Gates been an ordinary black man, he would still be up on charges and the nation never would have heard of him. And this is far from a hypothetical point. Episodes like the Gates case happen all over the country on a regular basis, so officer Crowley is not correct when he characterizes the incident as a merely "local" issue. If racial stereotyping in Cambridge is similar to racial stereotyping around the country, as reason and history suggest it is, then we are dealing with a national, not a local, issue. How is it possible in 2009 that an exemplary officer in one of the most liberal areas in the country is unaware of this?

It is not difficult to surmise. The dominant culture in the U.S. teaches that racism is the product of hateful individuals whose evil motives are anachronistic in the wake of a civil rights movement, the emergence of a black middle class, and the election of a black president. This simplistic formula encourages a false belief that victory is at hand, when in fact extensive racial subordination continues to exist with no end in sight because the vast resources necessary to transform the most racially oppressed sectors of American society have never been allocated for that purpose, but are instead earmarked for the national security state. This reflects the priority of those who rule the country: war in defense of an international class structure that thrives on class and racial exploitation. Neither form of oppression is profoundly affected by the existence of a black U.S. president and neither will disappear anytime soon. And neither will ever disappear in the absence of a mass multicultural coalition of considerable political sophistication determined to dismantle the permanent war economy and establish a genuinely egalitarian society.

And like it or not, police will have to take part in such a movement, jettisoning the shield of professionalism that currently demands their illusory political neutrality. For the plain fact is that much of the danger that police confront on the job is due to highly combustible racial and class divisions that keep tens of millions of people perpetually on edge and ready to explode at the slightest official confirmation of their subordinate status. In other words, police have an obvious interest in reducing class and racial tensions in order to achieve better work conditions for themselves, with fewer ugly altercations, lower stress, and a reduction in police fatalities. Seen in this light, police should be among the most militant champions of sweeping racial change in all of the U.S.. The fact that they are not owes much to a deeply flawed perspective of reality.

For contrary to much self-congratulatory rhetoric that America has moved - or shortly will move - beyond racism, a fear of "niggers" persists throughout the country. Middle class families strenuously resist living in neighborhoods with more than token numbers of blacks and do everything to avoid sending their children to schools where large numbers of blacks attend. And even President Obama has not freed himself from using the vilest of racial stereotypes. Before winning the presidency he criticized young black men for "siring" children out of wedlock, a term derived from animal husbandry. Recall that Jesse Jackson was so frustrated with Obama speaking down to black people that he was heard to mutter that he'd "like to cut his (Obama's) nuts off."

Furthermore, in his campaign biography, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama criticizes not the exploitation that produces mass poverty, but the personal behaviors of the black poor. For example, he laments "too much television" on the part of black viewers, but says nothing of corporate monopoly of the public airwaves. He decries "too much consumption of poisons" by blacks (cigarettes and fast food), but fails to mention waste incinerators that spew their toxins in areas where disproportionate numbers of blacks live. He condemns "a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men," but praises Bill Clinton, whose sexual conduct insults Obama's ideals, and whose elimination of "welfare as we know it" plunged a million more American children into poverty in 1996, a disproportionate number of them black.

On the other hand, when the topic is black grievances, Obama can only weakly refer to the "bumps and bruises" and "petty slights" they must endure, not the widespread racism that brutally distorts their life chances while awarding a false sense of moral superiority to whites, who will shortly have to deal with the objections of billions of people of color around the world who see the fantasy of boundless white entitlement as akin to a death warrant for the human race.

Obama's stale admonition - discrimination shouldn't be an excuse for "failure" - can't begin to deal with the concerns of this world majority, however appealing it may be to guilty American liberals eager to pretend the ugly beast of racism has been vanquished. But until the president can shed their preoccupation with bootstrapism, stop itemizing allegedly aberrant black behaviors, and speak penetratingly about racist social policy, he shouldn't really be too surprised when black people continue to be treated with contempt.

Postscript: The facts are very much in dispute in this case. Professor Gates disputes officer Crowley's claim that he was verbally abusive. Lucia Whalen, the woman who called the police, did not identify Gates and his driver racially, and apparently did not even insist a crime was in progress. Officer Crowley wrote in his police report that she spoke to him when he arrived at the scene and identified Gates and his driver as "two black men with backpacks." Whalen says she saw suitcases, not backpacks, and only guessed that one of the two men at the house "might have been Hispanic." Moreover, she was not a neighbor, merely worked in the area (for the Harvard alumni magazine). The point remains, however, that officer Crowley should have vacated the scene as soon as he verified Gates was the legal occupant of the house.

Bulletin! Bulletin!

2009-07-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Peaceful rioters burn down Tehran, promise further Gandhian actions next week

MJ Shocker: King of Pop molested hundreds of children at his funeral; parents demand millions from estate, lawyers protest "serious undercounting" of child victims

Prestigious medical journal reveals depression caused by perception of reality: war, poverty, and ecocide thrive, sale of "happy pills" soars

Obama apologizes to white officer who arrested black professor for being uppity in his own home, agrees to take remedial course in word parsing from Bill Clinton

New business study proves driving while smoking, drinking, eating, texting, chatting on the phone, listening to music, putting on make-up, and looking at shopping catalogues, improves performance behind the wheel

Congress approves universal health care; all Americans born before World War I to receive unlimited free medical treatment starting in 2020. Obama hails new "humanitarian era"

Economists puzzled by low consumer confidence, urge tent city residents to go on shopping spree for good of America

Hillary Clinton urges ousted Honduran president to compromise with coup plotters, accept lifetime position as chief mango-washer in Nicaragua

Prime Minister Netanyahu assails "Spirit of Humanity" activists bringing supplies to Gazan children, decries role of "dual use" crayons in spreading "terrorist graffiti"

Rueful Osama bin Laden retires, declares Israel's pariah status and collapsing U.S. economy leave him "nothing to do."

BULLETIN...BULLETIN: Mocha Revolution & more

2009-07-23T13:21:00.000-07:00

Mocha Revolution in New York !

New York prep school students at the prestigious K. Wiford Ditzworthy Academy rose up in what they called a Mocha Revolution after a planned luncheon was canceled by a delivery service which decided they weren’t paying enough.

“Our workers are facing lay offs while these rich kids have caviar and crepes delivered to their schools, and they demand we lower our prices?”

But student leader W. Rutledge Goldworthy claimed that there was intense disrespect shown for the students by “these uneducated lower class workers who often make their deliveries without curtsying to our female classmates. We’re all feminists here and won't stand for our girls being dissed by these low lives, most of whom speak a foreign language which isn’t even french.”

At a hastily called press conference, a pretty student spokesperson said
“We’re not going to stand for this? We’re very serious?We won't tolerate disrespect from workers, teachers or our parents? No, we do not speak in declarative sentences? We are rich and you are all assholes? This press conference is over?”

A reporter for Woman’s Wear Weakly expressed shock at the student’s performance.
“Her Arpeggio Dilettante shoes were lovely, and the mink lined chador was a nice bow to the Iranian rebels, though the ear rings were a knock off and not really Gustave del Buttonna originals, but except for some seeming coffee stains on her sleeve, I saw no mocha at all... did you? This can't be a “mocha” revolution!”

When asked to clarify this serious political point, student W. Bennington Crassworthy said “We originally wanted to call it a Cappuccino revolution, but that really isn’t , like , a color, so we took Mocha, which is , like, one of our favorite drinks and really is a nice sort of, like, off shade of brown or tan which some of our fashion team really liked.”

School principal B. Geoffrey Twitworthy said that this could all be related to the recession stress, the closing of several high fashion boutiques in the area, and cutbacks on student trips to the Bahamas, Tibet and other exotic locales. But he added, “ we do expect an economic upsurge for neighborhood psychologists, at least, from the increase in family therapy visits this crisis is likely to create”

Still, after some parents have grounded their children , threatened to cut off allowances , close trust funds and imposed a curfew, the “Mocha” revolution ( U.S. Trademark, pat. pending) goes on, with defiant students taking to their roofs and penthouses chanting “money is great” and “death to the caterers” .

Single Payer Finally Wins!

After months of wrangling, wheeling, dealing and then some more wrangling , congress and the president have bowed to citizen demand and created a single payer health care system for the USA. Under the new system, every single person in the USA will pay for his or her health care, choosing between private, public, religious or secret insurance agencies which will guarantee that in return for premiums , monthly , weekly and deductible fees, all Americans will be able to buy health care. Every single one of them.

“We saw the pollssss that showed a great majority of our people wanted to be able to pay sssssingly, and we bowed to those demandssssss” sssaid the presssident.

Peace Rules! Nearly 2 Billion cut from military budget!

Peace movement, antiwar and other completely forgotten sources of criticism for previous administration’s were rejoicing over a cut in one Pentagon program which took nearly two billion dollars out of a more than 600 billion dollar military budget.
“We knew that if we persevered, by not making any public criticism, not organizing any demonstrations against war, and accepting the humanitarian notion that there are smart and winnable wars as opposed to stupid and loseable ones, we would get this administration to come around to our way of thinking and cut the military budget by almost .003%” said a spokesperson for the Weakness Over Unity coalition.

The group, elated over its great victory, has promised to confront global poverty next, vowing to create a free lunch kitchen for the starving and hungry billions who are being affected by the current global recession. At this rate of progress,the coaltion of groups declared that all wars and all poverty should be gone by, maybe the year 2525.

Stay Tuned!

Alternative News?

2009-07-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

Alternative News?

The performance of both corporate and independent media reporting the Iranian election should provoke apprehension among news consumers. When conservative Fox, liberal PBS, and radical Pacifica all refer to the Iranian president as “hard line”, and uncritically assume a stolen election , news is not being reported . A party line is being toed.

Whether owned by profits or non-profits , news media do not originate from pristine sources of truth and objectivity. And when they become a vast echo chamber in which allegedly competing voices all resonate with the same story, their lack of unbiased analysis promotes a dangerous intellectual paralysis.

What news media call objectivity is a point of view which they so label. Does it reflect prevailing wisdom? Or the idea that what prevails is wisdom? That’s called objectivity. But even that definition was degenerated with the Iran story, as most alternative viewpoints only differed in the picture’s details , without questioning the frame in which they were placed. Whatever their ownership, they bought fiction and sold it as fact .

Despite no evidence other than propagandists telling them it was so, minority voters in Iran believed that they were entitled to win an election. Here, bits of information were reported even when sources were unknown, and images open to interpretation were deemed incontestable reality. Throngs of demonstrators were labeled a revolutionary upheaval of society, rather than the passionate demand - however manipulated - for social reform which they were.

Polls had predicted Ahmadinejad would win decisively , and when he did it was reported as fraud. Then , all hell broke loose. At least among a roused population of Iranians, and a nation of misinformed Americans. Those led to believe they were entitled to victory demanded a recount. The results were supposedly reported too quickly, with no question raised as to Ahmadinejad's main opponent calling himself the victor just as quickly. And Iranians were only voting for one office, with four candidates. How long should it take to know the winner?

Within minutes of polls closing in America, media projections forecast victories in hundreds of races. Are these all examples of fraud ? A good case could be made that the Iranian vote was more democratic than ours, since Independent candidate Ralph Nader wasn’t allowed in the same room with ruling party members Obama and McCain, while Ahmadinejad debated all three opposition candidates on Iranian national TV.

None of those demonstrating in Iran, or twittering in America, were aware of any reality other than their respective sense that despite any evidence but their beliefs , a soundly defeated candidate had won the election. And this story was told in most of what passes for the alternative media , where with few exceptions, all spoke of the stolen election and the suppression of democracy in that fundamentalist citadel of oppression.

Most of all, the need to rid the world of “hard liner” Ahmadinejad was repeated with disrespectful reference to his supposed lack of intelligence, height, or proper western values . Why this bigoted , simple minded assault on an elected leader with vast support not only in Iran - where most people neither own computers nor speak english - but all over the world? Because alone among world leaders, he openly speaks against the injustice Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians, and questions the holocaust while pointing out that whatever the full story, it was a european crime ; why are Palestinians paying for it ? Most of the world finds that common sense , but in the west it’s grounds for excommunication from the church of capital, and dismissal from the human race.

Had John McCain’s voters repeatedly been told they were entitled to victory, and then that their votes were stolen by Obama, what might have happened in America? When multitudes of Americans demonstrated against war in Afghanistan and Iraq , what happened? The war continues, presently expanding to Pakistan. When students were murdered while protesting the Viet Nam war, what happened? It went on for five more years. It takes infantile arrogance to swallow a soap opera of online gossip posing as foreign politics , while our nation’s responsibility for murderous international chaos is apparent to the rest of the world but continues to evade most of us . Given our mass marketing of false consciousness, what can a public know or believe?

As new governments demand radical change, imperial power calls them tyrants and terrorists committed to destroying civilization . They strike fear in the hearts of profiteers by creating democracy from the bottom up, and redistributing wealth from the top down. Whether motivated by Socialism , Islam or Christianity, these movements for social justice are causing panic at the imperial center. But it is inexcusable for allegedly alternative media to blindly, and often willingly, follow the party line that portrays foreign leaders critical of the west as despots, and movements deriving power from real majorities as criminal for not serving their entitled minorities, which are socialized to be satisfied on demand without concern for any material reality but their own .

When such thought pollution flows though channels of information supposedly presenting critical points of view , only the internet offers any relief from total mind management . And it is threatened with corporate marketing control, as well as the old GIGO problem: garbage in garbage out. Viewpoints are not diverse simply for being expressed in familiar language or with acceptable accents. All who wish for a free flow of information and opinions as a means of achieving democracy need to not only support alternative sources, but see to it that they truly present viewpoints critical of the established order, and that they work to transform that order into one that serves the majority, rather than reinforces minority control. We saw an almost complete failure to do that among many of our supposed alternatives, and that must change if we are too have a future offering real hope for humanity .

Copyright (c) 2009 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

Robert McNamara

2009-07-08T01:03:00.000-07:00

He knew nothing about poverty or Asia or people or American politics, but he knew all there was to know about bureaucracy and production technology.

He was obsessed with numbers, calculation, and logic. Senator Barry Goldwater called him "an IBM machine with legs." Through the manipulation of statistics he sought not just a means of measuring reality but a way to conquer and subdue it. Using the same system of materialist accountancy with which he saved the Ford Motor Company, he rationalized the Pentagon bureaucracy and soon the U.S. military was producing corpses as efficiently as the auto giant turned out cars. What profit was to the bottom line, body count was to "progress" in Vietnam.

On grounds of cost-efficiency McNamara championed the electronic battlefield - "people sniffers," infrared sensors, cluster bombs, land mines packed with shrapnel, fragmentation bombs, all washed down with millions of gallons of chemical defoliants designed to peel back the protective Vietnamese jungle impeding Washington's onward march to imperial paradise. Much indebted to the liquid fire that boosted U.S. death counts, McNamara publicly applauded Dow Chemical Company's "service to the free world" in manufacturing napalm.

In 1962, with tens of thousands of Vietnamese dead due to U.S. bombing and defoliation, McNamara arrived in Vietnam impatient to discover what was holding up the victory train. Inspecting Operation Sunrise, a village repopulated after a forced relocation to an urban concentration camp, McNamara immersed himself in systems analysis and input-output ratios, pored over self-congratulatory Pentagon data, and breezily assured a prompt U.S. victory. Failing to even notice the seething villagers in his midst, he fired off a battery of technical questions to his underlings: How much of this? How much of that? Are you happy here?

With the corrupt and murderous Diem regime (South Vietnam) at the point of collapse, McNamara returned to Washington proclaiming that he had "seen nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future."

In 1963, McNamara declared that "we have turned the corner in Vietnam," one of many assurances he gave that U.S. victory was not only meaningful, but right around the corner. And as always, there were optimistic statistics to back him up, sometimes incredibly optimistic, such as a State Department report stating that the U.S. had inflicted 30,000 casualties on 15,000 Vietnamese guerrillas in 1962.

Also in 1963 McNamara announced that Latin American recipients of U.S. military assistance were changing their mission from "hemispheric defense" to "internal security," the green light for the region's security forces to make war on their own people in the name of anti-Communism. These forces studied the techniques of repression at the U.S. School of the Americas and a parade of coups and other bloody interventions followed in countries like Brazil, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama.

In 1964, with the C.I.A. conducting regular raids on Hanoi's coastal installations, McNamara accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of attacking what he presumed to be peaceful American destroyers, which happened to be spying in North Vietnamese territory. "While on routine patrol in international waters" the Secretary of Defense announced, "the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." President Johnson went on nationwide T.V. to condemn North Vietnam's "open aggression on the high seas." He called for broader authority to wage war against Vietnam while promising not to use it.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution swept through Congress, authorizing the President "to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace." In short, carte blanche to completely destroy Vietnam, which the U.S. subsequently did.

However, Washington could never achieve military victory. Unaccountably for John Kennedy's star Defense Secretary, the raggedly-dressed villagers of Vietnam refused to be reduced to statistical abstractions, confounding his prized system of "rational" predictions. McNamara was plunged into gloom and a profound sense of failure.

Years after he and the other members of John Kennedy's "Best and Brightest" administration had killed their millions in Indochina, McNamara was plagued by nightmares and found his eyes welling up with tears at the Vietnam Memorial. He unburdened his conscience in his memoirs, apologizing for having prolonged an unwinnable war.

McNamara's was a highly selective remorse. He was not sorry for napalmed babies, Agent Orange, and the countless My Lai-style massacres. He felt no guilt about two million dead civilians and soaring child cancer and birth defects in Vietnam. His only regret was that American soldiers had died with no chance of being victorious. He insisted his mistakes had been "not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities."

Chauffeured by limousine to book signings, he ignored the homeless Vietnam vets rotting on the streets of the nation they had served in battle. His book zoomed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Sources:

David Harris, Our War, (Random House, 1996)

Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, (Houghton-Mifflin, 1965)

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)

Howard Zinn, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, (Beacon, 1967)

David Halberstam, The Best and The Brightest, (Penguin, 1969)

Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)

William Blanchard, Aggression American Style, (Goodyear, 1978)

Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism,(South End, 1988)

Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent, (Common Courage, 1992)

Noam Chomsky, "Memories," Z Magazine, July/August 1995

Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions - The United States in Central America, (Norton, 1984)

Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, Wizards of Media Oz, (Common Courage, 1997)

False Saviors - Jimmy Carter

2009-07-03T18:18:00.001-07:00

A pious Sunday school teacher confessing to lust in his heart but swearing never to lie, he came to Washington to reestablish public faith in government just when popular disgust at monstrous U.S. crimes in Indochina had reached unprecedented heights. The big business agenda during his term in office (1977-1981) was to roll back the welfare state, break the power of unions, fan the flames of the Cold War to increase military spending, engineer tax breaks for wealthy corporate interests, and repeal government regulation of business. While portraying himself as a peanut-farming populist, Carter delivered the goods for Wall Street.

Having run as a Washington "outsider," he immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business relations between Japan and the United States.

His Secretary of State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon Johnson's Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request "inactive" status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews. Energy coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war. Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of Lockheed's supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the New Yorker that it was "egocentric" to worry that a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail "the end of the human race." (Since it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event, Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who would.)

In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (a study of the Federal Reserve Bank) called his most important appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's assistant for domestic affairs said that, "Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall Street." The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted the money supply and declared, "the standard of living of the average American has to decline."

Wealth was funneled upward and wages and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time ever American white collar families couldn't save money. With urban housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out, second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap. Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.

Carter's populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of dismal anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks and the poor, he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate profits and building up a huge military machine that drained away public wealth in defense of a far-flung network of repressive "friends" of American business.

The heaviest applause line in his Inaugural Address was his promise "to move this year a step towards our ultimate goal - the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth." But after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a program of building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had promised to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase it after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases in each of his last two years in office were identical to those first proposed by Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce foreign arms sales, he ended up raising them to new highs, and after speaking of helping the needy, he proposed cutbacks in summer youth jobs, child nutrition programs, and other popular projects serving important social needs. Similarly, though he had campaigned as a friend of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum wage and opposed most of organized labor's legislative agenda while handing out huge subsidies to big business. He made much ado about "human rights," but returned Haiti's fleeing boat people to the tender care of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission spoke of his "profoundest regrets" for the C.I.A.'s role in General Pinochet's bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him, insisting that the C.I.A.'s actions were "not illegal or improper."

Carter came to Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle East peace, including a solution to the Palestinian question "in all its aspects." Yet at Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the problem, let alone propose a mature way of dealing with it. He assumed that Palestinians were anonymous refugees whose nationalist aspirations could be safely ignored. He supposed a peace treaty could be signed in the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the Palestinians' "sole legitimate representative." He offered no apologies for negotiating an agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime Minister Menachem Begin's presentation of the Accords before the Israeli Knesset as a "deal," one much more favorable to Israel than to "the Arabs." He pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into Bantustans was not simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel's boasted final product of "peace"! Finally, his much praised Camp David accords were the death warrant for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern border secure with the removal of Egypt from the Arab military alliance, was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever change U.S. foreign policy.

Carter was effusive in his praise and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply unpopular in his country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White House the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a restless student generation had no prospects. The country's bloated bureaucracy was totally corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular support, the Shah's secret police threw tens of thousands of Iranians into jail, the economy gagged on billions of dollars of Western arms imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty International speculated that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record on the planet. Meanwhile, Carter declared that "human rights is the soul of our foreign policy," though he added the following day that he thought the Shah might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S. stood for human rights around the world.

After the Shah was overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of "the criminal Shah." (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for emergency medical treatment for cancer, thus precipitating the "hostage crisis.") To Carter, Americans were by definition innocent, outside history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances against the U.S. as ancient history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted mind, Iranians were terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a potentially terrorist nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S. hands. In short, without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy and crazed medievalists, what Washington today calls a "rogue state."

Having "lost" Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military outposts and electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet Union, the Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists, not making an issue of their having kidnapped the American ambassador in Kabul that year (1979), which resulted in his death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials condemned Islamic militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom fighters in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil incarnate. In a 1998 interview Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military assistance to the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before the U.S.S.R. invaded the country, even though he was convinced - as he told Carter - that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Among the consequences of that policy were a decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen torture that U.S. government officials called "indescribable horror," half the Afghan population either dead, crippled, or homeless, and the creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist warriors dedicated to unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries throughout the world.

The list of disastrous policies can go on. For example, Carter continued the Ford Administration's policy of backing Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, which killed tens of thousands of Timorese during Carter's years in office, and roughly a third of the Timorese population overall between 1975 and 1979. In 1977-1978 while Indonesia engaged in wholesale destruction in the form of massive bombardment, wiping out of villages and crops, and relocation of populations to concentration camps, the Carter Administration extended the military and diplomatic support necessary to make it all possible. In late 1977 Washington replenished Indonesia's depleted supplies with a sharp increase in the flow of military equipment (Jakarta used U.S.-supplied OV-10 Broncos, planes designed for counterinsurgency operations) encouraging the ferocious attacks that reduced East Timor to the level of Pol Pot's Cambodia. In a 1979 interview with the New York Times Father Leoneto Vieira do Rego, a Portuguese priest who spent three years in the mountains of East Timor between 1976 and 1979, said that "the genocide and starvation was the result of the full-scale incendiary bombing . . . I personally witnessed - while running to protected areas, going from tribe to tribe - the great massacre from bombardment and people dying from starvation." In May 1980 Brian Eads reported for the London Observer that "malnutrition and disease are still more widespread than in ravaged Cambodia." Relating the comments of an official recently back from a visit to Cambodia, Eads added that "by the criteria of distended bellies, intestinal disease and brachial parameter - the measurement of the upper arm - the East Timorese are in a worse state than the Khmers." Another stellar achievement of the "Human Rights" administration.

Furthermore, during Carter's brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb (which his administration praised for "only" destroying people while leaving property intact), endorsed "flexible response" and "limited" nuclear war, lobbied for the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a rapid deployment force for instant intervention anywhere, enacted selective service registration in peacetime, and advocated the construction of first-strike MX missiles for use in a nuclear shell game along an elaborate system of underground railroad tracks proposed for the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human rights, he escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South Korea, gave full support to Indonesia's near genocide in East Timor, and maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil's neo-Nazi Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero's desperate plea to cut off U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran junta, and Romero was promptly assassinated. Furthermore, he said nothing at all when the London Sunday Times revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated "all of Israel's security forces" and was so "systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders." And though he presented himself as sympathetic to those who had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay reconstruction aid on the grounds that during the devastating U.S. attack on the tiny country, "the destruction was mutual." (Try arguing that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn't a crime because "destruction was mutual.")

Carter turned domestic policy over to Wall Street, refusing to increase the minimum wage and telling his Cabinet that increasing social spending "is something we just can't do." According to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the Carter White House, he "did not see health care as every citizen's right," though every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne notes, "he never really accepted it." Instead, "he preferred to talk movingly of his deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack of health care, as though the depth of his compassion could be a substitute for a major new and expensive government solution for the problem." In point of fact, money can be saved under a government funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted on controlling business costs rather than providing universal coverage, neglecting to note that under Medicare - universal insurance for the elderly - administrative costs were a fraction of those charged under private HMOs.

Carter simply could not comprehend the vast unmet social needs that existed (and exist) in the United States. He thought there was a way to maintain a global military presence, balance the budget, and keep business costs low while adequately meeting social welfare needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without increased funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any reorganization than before, Carter erupted: "Are you telling me that there is no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it!" In response to a comment that his denial of federal funding for poor people's abortions was unfair, Carter summed up the political philosophy that rendered him hopelessly unprogressive: "Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot."

Like political candidates who do their bidding.

Sources:

Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)

Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)

Samuel Bowles et al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E. Sharpe, 1990)

Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter - A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, (Scribner, 1997)

Doug Dowd, Blues For America - A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)

William Blum, Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)

Edward W. Said, Covering Islam - How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (Vintage, 1997)

Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)

Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)

Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)

Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)

Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism - Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)

Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-82)

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols - Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin's 1994)

Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin's, 1995)

Walter LaFeber, The American Age - United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, (Norton, 1989)