Obama’s Role in the Militarization of Mexico

An interview with Laura Carlsen…

“Militarization is not the way to deal with Mexico’s political crisis.” Laura Carlsen

Mike Whitney— Will you explain what Plan Mexico is and how it relates to the North American Free Trade Agreement? (NAFTA)

Laura Carlsen: Plan Mexico, also called the Merida Initiative, is a three-year regional security cooperation plan devised by the former Bush administration and presented in October of 2007. The plan grew out of the extension of NAFTA into security areas, known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Originally Plan Mexico was to be announced in the context of the SPP trinational summit but was delayed. It is presented as a petition of the Mexican president Felipe Calderon for US help in the war on drugs but in reality it was designed in Washington as a way to “push out the borders” of the US security perimeter, that is, that Mexico would take on US security priorities including policing its southern border and allowing US companies and agents into Mexico’s intelligence and security operations.

Plan Mexico proposed $1.4 billion in mostly foreign military financing. It is referred to as a “Counternarcotics, Counterterrorism and Border Security” proposal.

MW—Shortly after he was elected president, Felipe Calderon began using the military in the so-called War on Drugs. Since then, there has been a steady rise in troop deployments and an escalation in the violence. What is the Washington’s role in this ongoing counterinsurgency operation?

Laura Carlsen: The Obama administration has supported the plan and even requested, and received from Congress, additional funds beyond what the Bush administration requested. In the three years since Calderon launched the war on drugs in Mexico with the support of the US government drug related violence has shot up to over 15,000 executions and formal reports of violations of human rights have increased sixfold. More than 45,000 solders have been deployed in streets and communities throughout Mexico. Washington recognizes serious problems with the drug war model and yet continues to claim, absurdly, that the rise in violence in Mexico is a good sign–it means that the cartels are feeling the heat, the argument runs. the plan itself does not contain any real benchmarks of what citizens should expect as signs of progress so it can continue to be funded despite its failure.

The State Department was required to submit a human rights report to release 15% of some portions of the appropriations and finally did so last summer. But the report stated that even given a lack of progress in human rights (including reported use of torture with impunity, lack of civilian justice for military forces, killings of civilians and corruption) the mere fact of reporting constituted compliance and released the funds.

So far the effort is not described as a counterinsurgency effort, because Mexico does not have a formal widespread insurgency movement. However, the targeting of grassroots opposition leaders in recent years has raised fears that dissidents are and will be a target of the increasingly militarized society.

MW— In your article you say that the Merida Initiative is the direct outgrowth of the national security framework imposed on bilateral relations. Does that mean that the Bush Administration was using the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism to conceal its real political goals? If so, what are those goals?

Laura Carlsen: The Bush administration used the counterterrorism paradigm to extend US presence in strategic areas. In Mexico, the idea was to open up lucrative defense and intelligence contracts while aiding the rightwing government, which still faced serious questions of legitimacy due to unresolved accusations of fraud in the 2006 elections.

MW—Are there US intelligence agents, special forces or mercenaries conducting counterinsurgency operations in Mexico? Is Mexico required to allow the US military to operate in Mexico due to security and/or trade agreements?

Laura Carlsen: Mexico does not allow US soldiers on its territory. However there is a growing presence of DEA and other types of US agents in the country, as well as a private security companies. We do not have a good system for tracking the presence and activities of the private firms contracted for security and training purposes. This is a major problem.

MW—What effect has militarization had on political expression? How has it affected grass roots organizations, unions, and indigenous groups? Has there been an uptick in military-related violence, such as rape, beatings, torture and homicide?

Laura Carlsen: There has been an increase in human rights violations by the armed forces. In some regions, dissident leaders have been targeted by the military. Women, indigenous people, migrants, dissidents and youth are particularly vulnerable.

Note: “The militarization of Mexico has led to a steep increase in homicides related to the drug war. It has led to rape and abuse of women by soldiers in communities throughout the country. Human rights complaints against the armed forces have increased six-fold…. The Mexican Armed Forces are not subject to civilian justice systems, but to their own military tribunals. These very rarely terminate in convictions.” “The Perils of Plan Mexico“, Laura Carlsen, counterpunch.

MW—More than 50 Mexican human rights organizations have petitioned Congress to withdraw support for the Merida Initiative. Their letter reads:

“We respectfully request that the U.S. Congress and Department of State, in both the Merida Initiative as in other programs to support public security in Mexico, does not allocate funds or direct programs to the armed forces …

We urge the United States to consider ways to support a holistic response to security problems; based on tackling the root causes of violence and ensuring the full respect of human rights; not on the logic of combat.”

Have you seen any improvement or shift in policy since Barack Obama was elected?

Laura Carlsen: No. The administration has given its full support to the failed drug war. however, there are signs of drug policy reform in domestic policy that could eventually affect the way foreign counternarcotics efforts are viewed. The rhetoric of “ci-responsibility” is really nothing new and the efforts at reducing gunrunning and demand have not been followed up by new policies. the approach continues to be primarily military and violent, with no money whatsoever included in the Merida initiative for heath aspects such as addiction treatment or prevention.

Bio—Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City, holds a B.A. in Social Thought and Institutions from Stanford University and a Masters degree in Latin American Studies, also from Stanford. In 1986 she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study the impact of the Mexican economic crisis on women and has lived in Mexico City since then. She has published numerous articles and chapters on social, economic and political aspects of Mexico and recently co-edited Confronting Globalization: Economic integration and popular resistance in Mexico, and co-authored El Café en Mexico, centroamerica y el caribe: Una salida sustentable a la crisis. Prior to joining the Americas Policy Program, where her most recent analysis can be found at www.americaspolicy.org, Carlsen was a correspondent for Latin Trade magazine, editor of Business Mexico, freelance writer and researcher. The Americas Policy Program is a program of the Center for International Policy in Washington DC, at www.ciponline.org.

Yeswecanistan

All the crying from the left about how Obama “the peace candidate” has now become “a war president” … Whatever are they talking about? Here’s what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don’t do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama’s foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: “Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.” This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

But the shortcomings of Barack Obama and the naiveté of his fans is not the important issue. The important issue is the continuation and escalation of the American war in Afghanistan, based on the myth that the individuals we label “Taliban” are indistinguishable from those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, whom we usually label “al Qaeda”. “I am convinced,” the president said in his speech at the United States Military Academy (West Point) on December 1, “that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

Obama used one form or another of the word “extremist” eleven times in his half-hour talk. Young, impressionable minds must be carefully taught; a future generation of military leaders who will command America’s never-ending wars must have no doubts that the bad guys are “extremists”, that “extremists” are by definition bad guys, that “extremists” are beyond the pale and do not act from human, rational motivation like we do, that we — quintessential non-extremists, peace-loving moderates — are the good guys, forced into one war after another against our will. Sending robotic death machines flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan to drop powerful bombs on the top of wedding parties, funerals, and homes is of course not extremist behavior for human beings.

And the bad guys attacked the US “from here”, Afghanistan. That’s why the United States is “there”, Afghanistan. But in fact the 9-11 attack was planned in Germany, Spain and the United States as much as in Afghanistan. It could have been planned in a single small room in Panama City, Taiwan, or Bucharest. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? And the attack was carried out entirely in the United States. But Barack Obama has to maintain the fiction that Afghanistan was, and is, vital and indispensable to any attack on the United States, past or future. That gives him the right to occupy the country and kill the citizens as he sees fit. Robert Baer, former CIA officer with long involvement in that part of the world has noted: “The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. They simply want us gone because we’re foreigners, and they’re rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters.” ¹

The pretenses extend further. US leaders have fed the public a certain image of the insurgents (all labeled together under the name “Taliban”) and of the conflict to cover the true imperialistic motivation behind the war. The predominant image at the headlines/TV news level and beyond is that of the Taliban as an implacable and monolithic “enemy” which must be militarily defeated at all costs for America’s security, with a negotiated settlement or compromise not being an option. However, consider the following which have been reported at various times during the past two years about the actual behavior of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban, which can raise questions about Obama’s latest escalation: ²

The US military in Afghanistan has long been considering paying Taliban fighters who renounce violence against the government in Kabul, as the United States has done with Iraqi insurgents.

President Obama has floated the idea of negotiating with moderate elements of the Taliban. ³

US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, said last month that the United States would support any role Saudi Arabia chose to pursue in trying to engage Taliban officials. ⁴

Canadian troops are reaching out to the Taliban in various ways.

A top European Union official and a United Nations staff member were ordered by the Kabul government to leave the country after allegations that they had met Taliban insurgents without the administration’s knowledge. And two senior diplomats for the United Nations were expelled from the country, accused by the Afghan government of unauthorized dealings with insurgents. However, the Afghanistan government itself has had a series of secret talks with “moderate Taliban” since 2003 and President Hamid Karzai has called for peace talks with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar.

Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the United Nations have become increasingly open about their contacts with the Taliban leadership and other insurgent groups.

Gestures of openness are common practice among some of Washington’s allies in Afghanistan, notably the Dutch, who make negotiating with the Taliban an explicit part of their military policy.

The German government is officially against negotiations, but some members of the governing coalition have suggested Berlin host talks with the Taliban.

MI-6, Britain’s external security service, has held secret talks with the Taliban up to half a dozen times. At the local level, the British cut a deal, appointing a former Taliban leader as a district chief in Helmand province in exchange for security guarantees.

Senior British officers involved with the Afghan mission have confirmed that direct contact with the Taliban has led to insurgents changing sides as well as rivals in the Taliban movement providing intelligence which has led to leaders being killed or captured.

British authorities hold that there are distinct differences between different “tiers” of the Taliban and that it is essential to try to separate the doctrinaire extremists from others who are fighting for money or because they resent the presence of foreign forces in their country.

British contacts with the Taliban have occurred despite British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly ruling out such talks; on one occasion he told the House of Commons: “We will not enter into any negotiations with these people.”

For months there have been repeated reports of “good Taliban” forces being airlifted by Western helicopters from one part of Afghanistan to another to protect them from Afghan or Pakistani military forces. At an October 11 news conference in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai himself claimed that “some unidentified helicopters dropped armed men in the northern provinces at night.” ⁵

On November 2, IslamOnline.net (Qatar) reported: “The emboldened Taliban movement in Afghanistan turned down an American offer of power-sharing in exchange for accepting the presence of foreign troops, Afghan government sources confirmed. ‘US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast … America wants eight army and air force bases in different parts of Afghanistan in order to tackle the possible regrouping of [the] Al-Qaeda network,’ a senior Afghan Foreign Ministry official told IslamOnline.net.” ⁶

There has been no confirmation of this from American officials, but the New York Times on October 28 listed six provinces that were being considered to receive priority protection from the US military, five which are amongst the eight mentioned in the IslamOnline report as being planned for US military bases, although no mention is made in the Times of the above-mentioned offer. The next day, Asia Times reported: “The United States has withdrawn its troops from its four key bases in Nuristan [or Nooristan], on the border with Pakistan, leaving the northeastern province as a safe haven for the Taliban-led insurgency to orchestrate its regional battles.” Nuristan, where earlier in the month eight US soldiers were killed and three Apache helicopters hit by hostile fire, is one of the six provinces offered to the Taliban as reported in the IslamOnline.net story.

The part about al-Qaeda is ambiguous and questionable, not only because the term has long been loosely used as a catch-all for any group or individual in opposition to US foreign policy in this part of the world, but also because the president’s own national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, stated in early October: “I don’t foresee the return of the Taliban. Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling. The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” ⁷

Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.” ⁸

From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.

How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007. ⁹

Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?

So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.

Although the “surge” failed as policy, it succeeded as propaganda.

They don’t always use the word “surge”, but that’s what they mean. Our admirable leaders and our mainstream media that love to interview them would like us to believe that escalation of the war in Afghanistan is in effect a “surge”, like the one in Iraq which, they believe, has proven so successful. But the reality of the surge in Iraq was nothing like its promotional campaign. To the extent that there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq (now down to a level that virtually any other society in the world would find horrible and intolerable, including Iraqi society before the US invasion and occupation), we must keep in mind the following summary of how and why it “succeeded”:

• Thanks to America’s lovely little war, there are many millions Iraqis either dead, wounded, crippled, homebound or otherwise physically limited, internally displaced, in foreign exile, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. Many others have been so traumatized that they are concerned simply for their own survival. Thus, a huge number of potential victims and killers has been markedly reduced.
• Extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place: Sunnis and Shiites are now living much more than before in their own special enclaves, with entire neighborhoods surrounded by high concrete walls and strict security checkpoints; violence of the sectarian type has accordingly gone down.
• In the face of numerous “improvised explosive devices” on the roads, US soldiers venture out a lot less, so the violence against them has been sharply down. It should be kept in mind that insurgent attacks on American forces following the invasion of 2003 is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.
• For a long period, the US military was paying insurgents (or “former insurgents”) to not attack occupation forces.
• The powerful Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire for his militia, including attacks against US troops, that was in effect for an extended period; this was totally unconnected to the surge.

We should never forget that Iraqi society has been destroyed. The people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their health care, their legal system, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their security, their friends, their families, their past, their present, their future, their lives. But they do have their surge.

The War against Everything and Everyone, Endlessly

Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 and wounded some 30 at Fort Hood, Texas in November reportedly regards the US War on Terror as a war aimed at Muslims. He told colleagues that “the US was battling not against security threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Islam itself.” ¹⁰ Hasan had long been in close contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al Qaeda sympathizer now living in Yemen, who also called the US War on Terror a “war against Muslims”. Many, probably most, Muslims all over the world hold a similar view about American foreign policy.

I believe they’re mistaken. For many years, going back to at least the Korean war, it’s been fairly common for accusations to be made by activists opposed to US policies, in the United States and abroad, as well as by Muslims, that the United States chooses as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that in 1999 one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns ever — 78 days in a row — was carried out against the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. Indeed, we were told that the bombing was to rescue the people of Kosovo, who are largely Muslim. Earlier, the United States had come to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia in their struggle against the Serbs. The United States is in fact an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become an American bombing target appear to be: (a) It poses a sufficient obstacle — real, imagined, or, as with Serbia, ideological — to the desires of the empire; (b) It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.

Notes

1. Video on Information Clearinghouse ^↩
2. For the news items which follow if not otherwise sourced, see:
   • The Independent (London), December 14, 2007
   • Daily Telegraph (UK) December 26, 2007
   • The Globe and Mail (Toronto) May 1, 2008
   • BBC News, October 28, 2009 ^↩
3. New York Times, March 11, 2009 ^↩
4. Kuwait News Agency, November 24, 2009 ^↩
5. Pakistan Observer (Islamabad daily), October 19, 2009; The Jamestown Foundation (conservative Washington, DC think tank), “Karzai claims mystery helicopters ferrying Taliban to north Afghanistan”, November 6, 2009; Institute for War and Peace Reporting (London), “Helicopter rumour refuses to die”, October 26, 2009 ^↩
6. IslamOnline, “US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases“, November 2, 2009^↩
7. Washington Times, October 5, 2009, from a CNN interview ^↩
8. Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2009 ^↩
9. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007. ^↩
10. Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2009 ^↩

Dr King Spanks Obama: Part 4

Some months ago, at the 23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Celebration in San Francisco, attendees were asked to answer the question, “What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?” [1] This article series is an effort to provide Dr. King an opportunity to answer that question for himself from the pages of a book he wrote in 1967 entitled: “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”. But more than a mere contrast between two persons, this article series seeks to compare recent American history with contemporary struggles, and to explore visions of a more desirable future. This is the spirit of Dr. King’s book title and of Obama’s campaign slogan, “Change We Can Believe In”. At this point, we’ve reached chapter 5 of Dr. King’s book, which advances the following centerpiece of his philosophy:

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income… This proposal is not a “civil rights” program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 [2]

Now termed the “Basic Income Guarantee” (BIG), this measure doesn’t receive quite the discussion or popular acclaim that it did 40-years ago. But it has been advanced by a historic list of prominent supporters, including Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and more recently, Richard C. Cook. [3] This essay will argue that higher levels of economic democracy are a prerequisite, not a byproduct, of such a measure. Meanwhile, with a vast body of contemporary support, Barack Obama has recently advanced a similar proposal:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14-percent — 14-percent of its gross national product — on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim’s talking about when he says ‘everybody in, nobody out’, a single-payer health care plan, universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately, because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.” — Barack Obama, 2003 [4]

At first glance, Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might seem to be on the same page, or at least somewhere in the same ballpark. But now that Democrats have finally taken back the White House and Congress, Rob Kall asks an essential question: “Who would have thought that Obama’s health care plan would enrich big Pharma and raise profits for health insurers while raising taxes on small businesses and threatening to jail people who were uninsured?” [5] As Progressives Democrats of America complain, “the one option that would produce enough savings to include every single American, contain rising costs, and ensure no one ever faces a medical bankruptcy again was never seriously considered despite the fact that 86 members of Congress have co-sponsored HR 676, The Medicare for All Act. Congress has failed to debate the one option that nearly 60% of doctors and nurses support, most Americans want, along with a growing number of unions, cities and towns” — single payer health care. [6]

In my home state of Washington, the Spokesman Review reports: “The 1 in 5 adults lacking insurance stand to sink the financial stability of the state’s health care providers… Many health care providers have softened the losses by charging more for those with insurance… We’re reaching a point where we can’t sustain this system”. [7] Even from a strictly “free market” perspective, this continuing trend is a market failure [8] that the Obama administration now seeks to mandate for every US citizen instead of a more sustainable single payer system that was originally proposed. According to Stephen Lendman: “If Obamacare is enacted, it will cost more, deliver less, leave millions uninsured, millions more underinsured and leave a broken system in place. It will enrich the insurance, drug and large hospital chain cartels at the expense of universal coverage. It will solidify a class-based system delivering the best care money can buy. Others will get sub-standard treatment, and for millions none at all.” [9] Kate Randall adds, “Obama’s health care counterrevolution is of a piece with his entire domestic agenda. It parallels the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, the imposition of mass layoffs and wage and benefits cuts in the auto industry, and a stepped-up attack on public education and on teachers.” [10]

Nonetheless, public support for Barack Obama and his alleged “centrist” approach appears to remain fairly high, as for some reason he was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Nobel committee, Obama has created “a new climate in international politics.” But Paul Craig Roberts remands:”Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably. No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s ‘war on terror’. Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples. The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made ‘War is Peace’ the reality.” [11] So the Nobel committee has essentially discredited themselves and the Peace Prize itself by awarding it to a warmonger like Barack Obama. This should raise serious questions about how they were coerced into doing so, and by whom.

When Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he responded, “I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize. After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” [12]

Meanwhile, the violence driven by American imperialism continues to spread throughout the world while most black Americans are still chained to the “lowest rung of the economic ladder” as Dr. King lamented more than 40-years ago. While they are joined by a growing population of whites, Hispanics and other races, it is significant to note that an inordinate proportion of African Americans still find themselves living in poverty. In fact, Professor David Harvey suggests the recent mortgage foreclosure crisis is largely a racial phenomenon, “a financial Katrina”, with its devastation focused mainly in the inner-city of places like Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore where the concentration of ethnic minorities is typically highest. [13] [14] The Chicago Tribune reports that “deep recession is hitting African-Americans more severely than the overall population”. As the nation’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate nudged toward 10 percent, the African-American jobless rate was 15.5 percent with Illinois blacks at 18.6 percent in the third quarter, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.

The Tribune goes on to say: “The United States historically has seen higher unemployment rates for minorities, but the gap has widened in this recession, in part because of job losses in the manufacturing and auto sectors. And the jobless growth, coupled with the predatory lending that flourished in segregated neighborhoods during the real estate boom, have led to dramatic spikes in mortgage foreclosures, sending home values into a downward spiral. The bottom line: A silent depression for African-Americans”. [15] According to Larry Pinkney, “the underbelly of this nation is the black underclass. Instead of becoming smaller and moving out of poverty and disenfranchisement, the black underclass has grown much, much larger and become even more impoverished and disenfranchised”.

In chapter 5 of his book, Dr. King implores the American black population to educate themselves and to become more actively involved in politics. [2] While some have successfully heeded this call to action, Pinkney further observes, “The relatively small black elite has shamelessly, in complicity with the elite of its white counterpart, helped spawn an insidious new form of racism and economic apartheid. Moreover, members of the black underclass are themselves chastised and blamed by this insidious black elite and intelligentsia for being the economic and social victims of a callous, avaricious, capitalist system which now finds itself in deep trouble nationally and globally”. [16]

But is it any surprise that a black rise to power under capitalism would be proportionately similar to a white rise to power under the same system? Is it any surprise that the interests of “black power” would closely match and collaborate with the interests of “white power”? Under capitalism, is it any surprise that the interests of power are directly opposed to the interests of the remaining population regardless of skin color? Is it any surprise that a black President would advance an agenda very similar to most of his lily white predecessors?

In chapter 2 entitled, “Black Power”, Dr. King argues, “The problem of transforming the ghetto is, therefore a problem of power — a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.” With this, Dr. King obviously understands that opposing interests are involved. But until this antagonism is dissolved, any personal transition from one pole to the other merely erases one’s sympathetic relationship with the opposing pole. There is no incentive for any President of the United States to “transform the ghetto”, as his position of power is contingent upon the powerlessness of others. So the goal of “equality”, which Dr. King so fervently pursued, is not for any individual or group to rise to power over others, but to dismiss the existing power structure as much as possible in all human activity in order to maximize democracy and to minimize opposing interests. “Are we seeking power for power’s sake? Or are we seeking to make the world and our nation better places to live? If we seek the latter, violence can never provide the answer. The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” In chapter 2, Dr. King goes on to say:

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice… There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in white. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.” [17]

Many argue that one year is not nearly long enough for any President to effect “change” in these regards. And granted, President Obama probably didn’t intend “Change We Can Believe In” to suggest he could solve all the world’s problems overnight. But it does seem entirely reasonable for us to expect him to at least initiate a “change” of direction in the most damaging trends. Instead, Barack Obama continues to deliberately fortify those trends in the same direction they have been headed for the past 40-years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by his own government. [18] “For the first time in humanity, over 1 billion people are chronically hungry”, says a United Nations World Food Programme online video. The US Department of Agriculture reports recently that in 2008, one in six US households were “food insecure”, the highest number since the figures were first gathered in 1995. [19] Once again, these aren’t static snapshots, they are dynamic and growing economic trends.

How is it that citizens of the wealthiest nation in human history increasingly find themselves living in tents and under bridges and without adequate nourishment? At the same time, how is it that 75-percent of all American youth aged 17-24 are too fat and stupid to pass a military entrance exam? [20] [21] Is all this due to irresponsibility amongst the lower classes, or is it because of upper class greed? The best answer is probably that our class-based socioeconomic system is inherently is designed to channel economic wealth and political power away from producers and into the hands of non-producers. Whether we are aware of the fact or not, each of us consent to this antagonistic relationship and actively contribute to its predominance through daily participation.

One argument against this conclusion is that increasing numbers of workers, involuntarily displaced by technological advancement and other economic developments, qualify as “non-producers” who have no share in the wealth and power generated by production. But the result of their displacement is increased competition for jobs at the individual level, which tends to drive aggregate wages down. So the active role of rising unemployment and a growing “underclass” is to reduce and discipline the remaining workforce, to increase its productive output and to drive wages down, thereby delivering more wealth and power into the hands of a shrinking upper class. While some analysts might refer to this as “economic efficiency”, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presents another view:

“Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will… We have come to the point where we must make the non-producer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution… The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other… The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” [2]

While Dr. King’s vision is both admirable and perhaps attainable, he also anticipates “fierce opposition”. Moreover, he seems to realize his suggested measures are impossible without “deep structural change” implemented through “some form of constructive coercive power”. [22] For example, in chapter 5 of his book, King states: “It was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the 98 percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer.” [2]

It might be surmised from this that Dr. King merely advocates consumer activism whereby people “vote with their dollars.” But consumers can’t vote with dollars they don’t possess. Moreover, unemployment and poverty are structural features of the predominant economic system, not a mistake or an aberration that can be corrected through some kind of reform. So effective withdrawal of mass consent for the existing wage-based system involves more than a mere “boycott” or failure to participate. Structural transformation of the decision-making process involves the construction of an entirely new socioeconomic system where human beings are no longer enslaved by either masters or wages. Further study indicates that Dr. King not only understood the severe limitations of his prior campaigns but that he also had much higher goals in mind:

“We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although our actions were bold and crowned successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience… The future of the deep structural changes we seek will not be found in the decaying political machines. It lies in new alliances of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, labor, liberals, certain church and middle-class elements.” [2]

Here, Dr. King describes what David Harvey has more recently termed The Right To The City: “The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” [23]

Both Dr. King and Professor Harvey go on to suggest that transforming our social relations to effect deep structural change involves far more than mere labor movements or consumer uprisings or civil rights activism or ecological arguments or mournful cries from the unemployed, homeless and starving. Instead, a unified cooperative alliance amongst all these common interests is essential to effect the needed transition from capitalism toward a more equitable and sustainable socioeconomic system. David Harvey insists that democratic control of productive surplus is imperative, and Dr. King is very explicit in defining his view of cooperative alliance:

“A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.” [2]

So a truly cooperative “alliance” involves a set of “common interests” with no “basic conflict”. There is nothing complicated about this, as most human interests are generally held in common and are best managed democratically. The most obvious exceptions are any sort of personal drive for financial independence or political power, derived through private accumulation and exclusive individual control of capital surplus. These pursuits tend to promote hostile relations with others and establish opposing sets of interests. Everyone wants control of capital surplus — and everyone should have it — democratically. For the very essence of capital is social improvement, and there is no justification for that power to be concentrated in the hands of an exclusively entitled minority. Economic democracy and political service are collaborative, not individual, pursuits, and the wreckage of our dying system is potentially fuel for more universal and sustainable levels of human cooperation. Unemployed capital and unemployed labor living side-by-side is always an opportunity to transform the system. So there is no reason Dr. King’s dream of racial equality through the abolition of poverty can’t materialize. But there is also no reason to expect such blessings to be delivered from the President of the United States or his floundering Congress. As Dr. King further suggests:

“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program; what is material is the presence of an ability to make things happen. The powerful never lose opportunities — they remain available to them. The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity — it is always arriving at a later time. The deeper truth is that the call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naiveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs. The first course is grounded in mature realism; the other is childish fantasy.” [2]

The abolition of poverty will begin here and now — in the United States of America — with a deliberate and aggressive expansion of the cooperative business sector supported by a network of publicly owned banks. [24] For higher levels of economic democracy are a prerequisite, not a byproduct, of programs like Basic Income Guarantee and Single Payer Health Care. To demand progressive programs from a conservative government is “the height of naiveté”. To expect a conservative government to magically become progressive with the election of a black man to the Presidency is “childish fantasy”. The challenge and the responsibility for the pursuit of progressive measures belongs to individuals and firms at the community level who already understand the root of the problem and the potential solutions. Lots of people simply “don’t get it”, and that’s okay. The responsibility of those who do understand is not to persuade or convince those who stubbornly object, but to transform social relations at the community level by providing a superior living example of economic democracy [25] to others who are more receptive.

Michael Moore recently distributed a list of “15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now” in these regards. [26] But as stated above, the most urgent measures on that list involve democratizing the workplace and capital investment: 1) Fire your boss and reorganize the workplace cooperatively. 2) Close your bank account and deposit your money in a credit union or some other form of publicly owned bank. That is, any kind of system that does not feed back into the currently predominant debt-based monetary system. The combination of both measures is a large-scale dismissal of the current socioeconomic system. Instead of money being loaned into circulation at interest from a fractional reserve and exclusively controlled by a handful of private bankers, cooperative firms will pool some portion of their productive surplus into an investment fund which is democratically ploughed back into the economy in the form of grants, specifically for the purpose of expanding the cooperative business sector.

Thus, money is earned, not loaned, into circulation, and economic growth for the sake of political power is no longer an imperative. The newborn economy will deliberately operate parallel to — and in direct competition with — the existing system, and it will steadily grow from within it. The main criteria for success is a transfer of popular consent from the old system to the new. So transition will most likely be slow and painful, and the new system must constantly innovate to develop and maintain competitive advantage without compromising the basic principles of the democratic local cooperative. Laws and customs will eventually change. But until they do, the challenging cooperative economy must be led voluntarily by a growing body of individuals and organizations who already understand the urgent need for deep systemic transformation. Without this fundamental understanding in mind, any movement against capitalism will certainly fail.

In summary, British philosopher James Allen (1864 – 1912) wrote a short volume called “As A Man Thinketh” during the turbulent Industrial Revolution of late nineteenth-century England. In that small book he presents the following overview of human cooperation: “It has been usual for men to think and to say, ‘Many men are slaves because one is an oppressor; let us hate the oppressor.’ Now, however, there is among an increasing few a tendency to reverse this judgment to say, ‘One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves.’ The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance, and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves. A perfect Knowledge perceives the action of law in the weakness of the oppressed and the misapplied power of the oppressor; a perfect Love, seeing the suffering which both states entail, condemns neither, a perfect Compassion embraces both oppressor and oppressed.” [27]

Notes:

[1] Staff. (February 02, 2009). “What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?”. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/news/article/what_would_dr_king_want_to_say_to_barack_obama/

[2] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 5. ISBN 0807005711

[3] Wikipedia. (11-23-2009). “Economic democracy: National dividend”. Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy#National_dividend

[4] Obama, Barack. (2003). “Obama on single payer health insurance”, speech to the AFL-CIO. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE

[5] Kall, Rob. (11-10-2009). “Top-down blowback; The GOP Discovers that the Grassroots Bites Back”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Top-down-blowback-The-GOP-by-Rob-Kall-091110-686.html

[6] Progressive Democrats of America. (07-23-2009). “The Mad as Hell Doctors Road Tour”. PDA Web site. http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/alliances/2009-07-23-09-33-18-alliances.php

[7] Stucke, John. (11-20-2009). “Ranks of uninsured swell in state”. Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/nov/20/ranks-of-uninsured-swell-in-state/

[8] Kendall, David. (09-03-2009). “Health Care and the Free Market”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Health-Care-and-the-Free-M-by-David-Kendall-090830-360.html

[9] Lendman, Stephen. (11-18-2009). “Universal Single Payer Health Care Coverage: An Economic Stimulus Plan”. Countercurrents. http://www.countercurrents.org/lendman181109.htm

[10] Randall, Kate. (07-28-2009). “Obama’s health care counterrevolution”. World Socialist Web Site http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j28.shtml

[11] Roberts, Paul Craig. (10-10-2009). “Warmonger Wins Peace Prize “. Countercurrents. http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts101009.htm

[12] King, Dr. Martin Luther. (12-10-1964). “Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech”. Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-acceptance.html

[13] Harvey, David. (11-21-2009). “Race and the Mortgage Crisis”. WordPress. http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/race-and-the-mortgage-crisis/

[14] Harvey, David. (10-29-2008). “A Financial Katrina – Remarks on the Crisis”. City University of New York Graduate Center: Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. http://davidharvey.org/2008/12/a-financial-katrina-remarks-on-the-crisis/

[15] Bergen, Kathy. (11-06-2009). “African-Americans hit inordinately hard by recession”. Chicago Tribune. Chicago, IL. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-black-jobs-nov06,0,2759566.story

[16] Pinkney, Larry. (11-05-2009). “And What of the Black Underclass?”. The Black Commentator. http://www.blackcommentator.com/349/349_kir_black_underclass_printer_friendly.html

[17] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 2. ISBN 0807005711

[18] Douglass, James W. (March 15. 2000). “The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict”. Christian Century. http://www.precaution.org/lib/09/prn_king_assassination_another_verdict.000315.htm

[19] Goodman, Amy. (11-19-2009). “Hungering for a True Thanksgiving”. Information Clearinghouse. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24016.htm

[20] Wallace, William S. (06-01-2009). “Most young people don’t meet standards for military service”. Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008/jun/01/most-young-people-dont-meet-standards-for/?print-friendly

[21] Davenport, Christian, and Emma Brown. (11-06-2009). “Most young unfit for military”. Washington Post-ABC News poll reported in the Spokesman Review. Spokane, WA. pg 1. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/nov/06/most-young-unfit-for-military/

[22] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?”. New York, NY: Beacon Press. Excerpts from chapter 4. ISBN 0807005711

[23] Harvey, David. (2008). “The Right To The City”. Text: http://davidharvey.org/media/righttothecity.pdf. Video Lecture: http://www.a0n.com/medellin/righttothecity.htm

[24] Dorrien, Gary. (05-15-2009). “A Case For Economic Democracy”. OpEd News. http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=A-Case-for-Economic-Democr-by-Gary-Dorrien-090513-750.html

[25] Wikipedia. (11-23-2009). “Economic democracy”. Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy

[26] Moore, Michael. (10-22-2009). “Michael Moore’s Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now. MichaelMoore.com. http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-letter/michael-moores-action-plan-15-things-every-american-can-do-right-now

[27] Allen, James. (B 1864 – D 1912) (published 1992). “As A Man Thinketh”. Barnes & Noble. pg 37

The U.S. Creeps Closer to a Police State

When word first arrived that the G-20 would be meeting in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, activists began organizing protest demonstrations. Events like this are what freedom of speech is made for. What better occasion to protest than a meeting of the world’s 20 top leaders — most of them deservedly hated — where they will be imposing policy on billions of people worldwide?

The majority of protesters consisted of labor and community groups; they encountered an army of police…literally. The New York Times paints an intimidating picture:

“…the police were out in force, patrolling on bicycles, foot and horseback, by river and by air … protesters trying to march toward the convention center…encountered roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police fired a sound cannon (a new weapon) that emitted shrill beeps … then threw tear gas canisters that released clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light.” Rubber bullets were used in a separate incident.

And:

“Riot fences lined the sidewalks. Police helicopters, gunboats and Humvees darted to and fro. City officials announced they had up to 1,000 jail cells ready after county officials freed up additional space last week by releasing 300 people who had been arrested on minor probation violations.” (September 25, 2009).

What threat required such a military-like response? None was given. The New York Times article and many like it imply that the mere existence of marching protesters warrants a colossal reaction. Of course the presence of “anarchists” is used to further scare readers into accepting such foolishness, as if this breed of protester is especially lethal (the vast majority of anarchists are like all protesters — they do not attack the police or anybody else, though some protesters respond aggressively when being confronted with the above mentioned police weapons).

The G-20 police presence is not a terrible surprise to anyone who has attended a legitimate, community-organized protest over the years. Non-provoked usage of brutal weaponry is becoming commonplace; the police-enforced use of “free speech zones” at protests — small areas surrounded by fences in some cases — is nothing new.

But the staggering police presence at the G-20 confirms that the stakes have been raised. Two turning points that deserve special attention — since the mainstream media continues to ignore them — are last years Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In both cases incredible abuses of police powers were witnessed, with the Republican Convention (RNC) showcasing the most extreme cases of state repression.

At the RNC the unlawful tactic of mass arrests were used when, in separate incidents, a public park and bridge were surrounded by police, trapping everyone in the dragnet. The documentary, Terrorizing Dissent, has excellent footage of both episodes (www.terrorizingdissent.org). Police brutality was also a regular occurrence at the RNC — including much unnecessary usage of pepper spray and tasers — while occurring alongside an even more troubling episode.

The group now referred to as the RNC 8 consists of eight community organizers potentially facing years in jail for helping organize protests at the RNC. The original charge was the Orwellian Conspiracy to Riot in the second degree in Furtherance of Terrorism (other terrorism-related charges were later added). These terrorism charges were the first ever usage of the Patriot Act toward political activists. And although the terrorism provisions of the charges have since been dropped, due to public pressure, the attempt to equate terrorism with activism has incredible, non-accidental implications for the future.

When the Patriot Act was first enacted, there was no shortage of writers and activists warning about the potential of misuse. These predictions have been fully confirmed. Both the Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act have created what many believe to be the framework for a full-fledged police state, with the initial flurry of abuses creating a series of dangerous precedents.

One famous precedent is the so-called Telecom scandal, where tele-communication corporations colluded with the Bush-controlled National Security Agency to illegally spy on an unknown number of innocent people. No one has gone to jail for this. Indeed, as a Senator, Obama was one of many Democrats who supported Bush’s telecom immunity bill, which excuses those who broke the law while creating new powers to make spying on Americans legal.

Equally outrageous is the Military Commissions Act, created under Bush to destroy a fundamental democratic right: habeas corpus, or due process. This right says that the government cannot jail a person unless there is proof of crimes committed, while also giving that person a chance to challenge these charges in a legal court with a jury.

Bush created a separate category of person called an “enemy combatant,” which he claimed was too dangerous to be treated constitutionally. An “enemy combatant” can be tried in a military court with secret or no evidence; or they can be jailed forever without even the symbolic military trial. Of course, it is only a hop and a skip away for political activists charged with terrorist crimes to be considered “enemy combatants” or “domestic terrorists.”

Obama continues to uphold Bush’s destruction of due process. Obama has said publicly that many so-called enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay will be held “indefinitely” without being tried for their alleged crimes. Supposedly, they are “the worst of the worst.” If this is true then evidence should be produced to prove it, since anyone can accuse anybody of the most heinous crimes. Without evidence, however, such accusations correctly fall on deaf ears. But no more. Now, accusations of “terrorist activities” warrant life sentences. No crime need be committed, only a vague intention — even if such intentions were formed by the suggestions of an FBI informant and are impossible to implement. The media blares these absurd “terrorist plots” as facts, and the rationale behind the destruction of civil liberties is re-enforced.

It must not be forgotten that many of the “crimes” Guantanamo Bay inmates are being accused of are merely acts of resistance to the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, something they have every right to do.

The grossly illegal Guantanamo Bay is not being closed down like Obama promised, but moved. The equally illegal Bagram air base in Afghanistan is getting an upgrade, this according to the Independent:

“The air base is about to undergo a $60 [million] (£42m) expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.” (February 22, 2009).

Not only will Bagram continue to be an institution of terror, but also some analysts estimate that there remain 18,000 people held worldwide in foreign U.S. facilities — so-called black sites — with no legal rights. The absence of even Red Cross observation at these prisons insures that “harsh interrogations” (torture) will remain a regular habit.

The above abuses of the Patriot Act have trickled down from high-profile terrorism cases (some who have made confessions under torture), to regular usage against alleged gang members, drug dealers and immigrants.

For example, one section of the Patriot Act gives police the power to search people’s home secretly without notifying the homeowner — called “sneak and peeks,” a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. The logic again was that “special powers” were needed to track down “terrorists.” The Huffington Post reported, “Only three of the 763 “sneak-and-peek” requests in fiscal year 2008 involved terrorism cases… Sixty-five percent were drug cases.” (September 23, 2009).

The illegal entry and searching of immigrant’s homes — or anyone suspected of being an immigrant — is widely known by the Latino community and continues to include the terror-inducing tactics of pre-dawn raids with guns drawn.

Once anti-constitutional behavior is applied to alleged terrorists, and extended to immigrants and people suspected of being gang members or drug dealers, such police behavior becomes normalized, and can then be easily expanded to all people accused of being “criminals.” Police are widely known to consider political activists, protesters, and striking workers as criminal types, beliefs encouraged by the mainstream media.

Which brings us to why? Why does the destruction of democratic rights that accelerated under Bush continue with Obama? With every political “why” question one must first answer: who benefits?

In this case the benefiting parties are the giant corporations that dominate politics in the U.S. The people steering these companies had good foresight: they saw that the global capitalist economy necessitated a race to the bottom for workers’ living standards. As U.S. corporations faced stiffer competition abroad for international markets, wages and benefits for U.S. workers would have to shrink, especially when U.S. corporations were investing heavily in emerging economies — China, India, etc., — for their slave wages.

U.S. corporate executives also understood that China became a police state out of necessity, so that its dollar-a-day workers could be brought into line (U.S. corporate investment rose sharply after the Tiananmen Square massacre). The trend of U.S. workers’ wages leads logically to similar conclusions.

The creation of NAFTA to extend the dominance of U.S. corporations to Mexico and Canada would also have predictably negative effects on workers’ living standards. Now, with two unpopular wars taking place and a third on the way (Pakistan) to further extend the profit margins of U.S. corporations, a breaking point is nearing.

Public money is being used to bail out banks and wage foreign wars while the recession continues to destroy jobs and drive down wages. This unpopular policy is viewed as a necessity for U.S. corporations, and Obama has no intention of reversing course. The police-state foundation created by Bush and continued under Obama is a stern warning to the U.S. working class to accept our fate or face dire consequences. It is already a fact that many people are too afraid of police repression to attend a protest, just as some workers are too afraid to be on a picket line during a strike.

Ultimately, a real democracy cannot function where there exists tremendous inequalities in wealth, where large sections of the population are in poverty. This is why democracies are not viable in poor countries: the super-rich use their power over the state — including dictatorships and mass repression — to crush social movements that challenge the status quo, as we are witnessing today in Honduras. The same dynamic is being created in the United States, where the vast majority of people are clamoring for real change, while those in the two-party system are using all means available to keep their rotten system in place.

America Sees Red

There is a Jewish tale, in which a man is promised that he will be granted any wish he chooses, so long as his neighbour will get twice as much. After some thought he states his wish: please put me out one of my eyes! This is a very American attitude. An American refuses to get free medical care, if the condition is that others will get it, too. This we learned from the rallies against Obama’s health reform. The slogans and ideas of the demonstrators were just too weird!

A little girl asks how she will pay the bill for the reformed health services. This little girl — or rather, her parents – did not go out and ask how she was going to pay off the bills for the Iraqi and Afghani wars, how she was going to pay for the US involvement in Palestine, how she would repay the trillions given away to the bankers. Up until now, Big Government was good. It provided billions for AIG – ok. Billions for a new fighter jets – great. Billions to Blackwater to kill more Afghanis and Pakistanis – fine. Billions to Israel – perfect. But funding for health? What a communist notion!

The US health insurance problem is something we foreigners can’t understand. All of us, whether in England or Russia or Israel or France, have a national health service; we regret only that it is not as good as it used to be. But how can normal people prefer turning their health into a commodity and making it dependent on their bank accounts? This strange attitude is rooted in America’s older ills.

The US is an experimental ‘project’ – to see what would happen when a rather empty space is colonized by people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and affiliations, all moved by the desire to get rich and knowing no moral inhibitions but the Smith and Wesson. At first, they destroy the natives and the neighbours, afterwards they turn to cannibalism. If the Americans do not eat each other, it is only because they have found somebody else to eat together.

America was informed by love of profit and by hatred of communism. Her anticommunism is visceral, brutal, basic, inherent. The United States was created as the supreme sheriff, as the bastion of staunch individualism, of ‘homo homini lupus est’, of rejection of the notions of solidarity and mutual help. This was the plan of project designers.

Human nature being what it is, this satanic plan was partly upset by the inherent goodness of men and women. There are many wonderful Americans, rebels against crass materialism and unbridled greed, but they are isolated in their milieu; the best American characters are living and fighting alone. Such is Thoreau in his Walden. Such is Ishmael aboard the Pequod. Such is the Old Man at the Sea. Solidarity – togetherness – is conspicuous by its absence from American literature.

Every European state, from England to Russia, has its National Health, for every nation considers self a living body, and every member of the nation is as valued as a body part. All these nations are or were Christian and solidarist. Their citizens were embraced by one church. The US is different because of the anti-solidarist and anti-Christian spirit of her founders. Her Manifest Destiny did not connect to the faith. The US founders openly denied she was a Christian nation when concluding the Tripoli treaty, and their denial was sincere, because solidarity is a basic tenet of the Christian faith.

Every part of American society – Left, Right, churches, parties – are touched by this lack of compassion magnified by envy. The US Right is obsessed with anticommunism. This goes without saying for the imperialist Right of Ronald Reagan and George Bushes Junior and Senior. What is upsetting is that even the traditional anti-imperialist, nationalist American Right (the “paleocons”) are equally anti-communist and anti-Christian. I, for one, hoped they would understand their mistakes of yesteryear and become allies of other anti-imperialist forces including China, Russia and Iran. Alas, while they do not like neocons, and this is all to the good, they are no better themselves: Instead of fighting Arabs, they would rather kill Russians.

In a recent essay, Patrick Buchanan glorifies Adolf Hitler’s Germany and vilifies Communist Russia. He is sorry that the US allied with the Russians against the Germans, and not vice versa. Though Russia is no longer Communist, he would like to fight it anyway.

Mind you, I do not need smelling salts every time Hitler’s name is mentioned. I do not think everyone has to hate Hitler. I am at peace with people who admire Hitler for sentimental reasons: they like his solidarism, or German greatness or his vegetarianism, or his treatment of banks and bankers or unification of German lands. But there is a red line: people who admire Hitler because he attacked Russia and/or massacred civilians are my enemies too. In the battle of Stalingrad, I know which side I am on. And Buchanan is on the other side.

Similar anti-communist and anti-Russian notes prevail in other far-right white-nationalist writings. Be on the look out for the telling word “hordes”. For neocons, there are Muslim hordes, for the white-nationalists, these are Russian hordes, as in Patrick Buchanan: “By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin”. He forgot to explain that this happened because the people of these great capitals had decided to try their luck in Moscow under Hitler’s banners, and it may well happen again if this lesson is forgotten.

Our erstwhile friend Tom Sunic came from his search for a New Right to the Old Hitlerism: “The last shot in the European capital of Berlin was fired by a drunken Soviet soldier, killing the young French Waffen SS volunteer.” Well, God bless the Soviet soldier, drunken or sober, for his steady mark, and to hell with the SS-man, young or middle-aged, especially if he volunteered to do that butcher job.

Buchanan writes of “the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin”. Hatred of Stalin, the man who stopped Hitler, created modern Russia and resurrected the Russian Church after the Trotskyite excesses, is the common ground of these anticommunists. If they care at all about the Russian people as they pretend they do, they can ask them and find out that despite decades of anticommunist propaganda, Stalin is much loved by Russians. In the huge recent poll run by the Russian TV, Stalin was chosen ‘the most important personality in the whole history of Russia’ next to St Alexander Nevsky. The Russians remember that Stalin became the leader of an illiterate country devastated by civil war – a country of no industry, of dying agriculture, of no money and of plenty of debts, surrounded by enemies. He created industry, built housing and roads, created full free health care and comprehensive free education for all; he made Russia the best educated country in the world.

Unprejudiced Americans may find Stalin’s simple attitude to life and business rather to their liking. He’d have solved the current financial crisis by dispatching the bankers to chop wood somewhere deep in Oregon and by canceling all debts. The automobile plants of Detroit would be saved. When Stalin discovered a Zionist Lobby in his country, he smashed it on the spot instead of surrendering to them, while ordinary Jews who were loyal to Russia retained their positions. That is why his name is besmirched by anticommunists.

This is neither the time nor the place to deal with impossible exaggerations of alleged Soviet crimes. It is enough to state that they are fantastic. Nobody, even Stalin, could have killed one hundred million people out of one hundred sixty million, won a war and yet found himself with two hundred fifty million at the end of it.

This sick hatred of communism pours out of a column by another anti-imperialist right-winger, Chuck Baldwin. This “alternative candidate” fumed against the Chinese national flag, which is red, being hoisted at the White House’s South Lawn for an anniversary of the Chinese national holiday. He speaks of “the extreme offensiveness of flying the Communist Chinese flag”. This is “unbelievable, unreal, horrific, obscene, even traitorous… for the communist leaders of Mao’s China are the Butchers of Beijing, and this proves … the communist leanings of President Barack Obama”.

Further, Baldwin spreads the heart-rending story of the Chinese people’s suffering under the cruel leadership of Mao. If Communist leadership is so bad, how come the US is indebted to China to the tune of a few trillions? Before Mao, China was an impoverished semi-colony of the West, ‘the Chinese and dogs were not allowed’ into some parts of Shanghai, famines were annual, and Anglo-American navies studiously supplied the people with opium when they weren’t busy burning Beijing Palace. Now, after so many years of Communist tyranny, the Chinese are a shining example for the rest of the world.

In any case, flying the Chinese national flag at such events is not a proclamation of Communism as state doctrine, it is just a normal sign of courtesy. Likewise, flying the Israeli flag over the same lawn was not considered by the sane as a sign of submission to the Elders of Zion, nor flying the British flag as cancellation of Declaration of Independence. It is pity that the Obama administration allegedly got cold feet and decided to cancel the event. This suppleness of Obama’s back is not a good sign, as we have already learned in the Middle East.

The US Left is afraid of communism as well. In many, many articles and responses to the anti-Obama rallies, left-wing authors invariably stress the racism of the demonstrators. William Rivers Pitt called the “white, middle-aged, overweight, pissed-off right-wingers… a Klan rally minus the bedsheets and torches.” Susie Day pretends that the rallies were formed by those whites upset by Obama’s mouthing off to a white cop.

I am not a great believer in racism. Reputation of this sin is largely overblown, to the best of my knowledge. The Russians, who are supposed to be racists, loved Stalin, a Georgian. The French and the Germans, presumably also racist, had a Jewish prime minister and a foreign minister respectively in the last century. The Americans had no problem electing the black Obama. So much for racism. The American leftists who explain everything by racism are barking up the wrong tree, and they know it – but they dare not speak about the real problems.

This sick fear of human solidarity is American society’s knee-jerk reaction. It was activated by the Lobby in order to undermine President Obama. Because he spoke against Israeli expansion, because he mentioned Palestinian rights and sorrows, they fight against him on every possible occasion – even on the issue of national health. If Obama would just do everything they want in the Middle East, his domestic initiatives would pass as easily as a steamer through the Golden Gate.

Obama is attacked at every step. Look at the Middle East: Israel wants to bomb Iran. The President refused Netanyahu’s pleas to attack Tehran, but the Lobby doesn’t take no for an answer. In the Voice of the Lobby, a.k.a. The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens impossibly claims: Obama Is Pushing Israel Toward War. How? Obama’s refusal to attack Iran is “pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran”. The Voice of the Lobby does not hide the fact that such a strike could well usher in a “price of oil at $300 a barrel, a Middle East war, and American servicemen caught in between.” For a normal reader, the conclusion is clear: that’s why Obama forbade the Israelis to attack Iran. But the Lobby’s sophist offers another solution: let Obama’s America attack Iran instead of Israel. Obama’s refusal to interfere with Iran is presented as “Obama’s pushing Israel toward war”. Begorrah!

While the enemy is active, no friends are forthcoming to help the embattled American President. Many of us received and forwarded an email claiming that Obama supported the coup d’etat in Honduras. But much less attention was paid when Obama actually cut off US aid to Honduras in response to the coup.

Sensing this loneliness of the President, Netanyahu ridicules his mild and limited demands. There is no other word for Israel’s response – that they will freeze some settlements’ construction work for a few months. Such a response is only marginally better than “shove it”. This was followed by an announcement that some five hundred new Jewish homes will be built in the teeth of Obama’s demand. Obama does not dare to push intransigent Israel any more, for Congress and the Senate are in the Jewish pocket, and these powerful Jews prefer Zionism to Communism.

What a pity! Once upon a time, the Jews were all for Communism and none for Zionism, and the human lot markedly improved. In a remarkable article, Winston Churchill wrote in 1920s: the Jews are choosing between Communism and Zionism, let us direct them towards Zionism so they will isolate themselves and stop bothering us. His plan was realised: Jews were seduced by the Zionist idea, parted with communism and became its enemies. The result was quite sad: the positive contribution of Israeli Jews to mankind’s welfare is next to zero, unless you count the development of new torture and surveillance techniques. Jews elsewhere waste their abilities and time on the same rotten Zionist project, instead of helping their fellow countrymen to improve their lives. Winston Churchill lit a candle, and its light attracts the butterflies who die in its flames. The daring report of Judge Richard Goldstone is a first harbinger of a weather change: despite his pro-Israel sympathies he condemned the recent Zionist atrocities in Gaza.

Now it is time for Obama to move forward fearlessly. He should listen to his fellow- Americans. If they are so upset and worried by immigration, stop immigration completely. Send away illegal aliens, or legalise those who have lived long enough in America. Show people that you care about them.

Proceed with the health care. This field is ripe for revolution. Only in a time of crisis can a great leader enact radical reforms:

• Borrow the script from Illich’s Medical Nemesis, and minimise the cost of medical care. Do it the Cuban way.
• Treat health care like fire brigades – human bodies are no less important than buildings. Nobody is amazed that the fire brigades are not private. Turn health care into a public service, and make all doctors public employees.
• Ban private medical care.
• Provide medical help for everyone, at the state’s expense.
• Stop expensive life-saving, life-supporting devices. No transplantations, no complicated infertility treatments, no reproductive technology, no heart-and-brain operations, no abortions.
• Cut down research. Let incurable diseases remain incurable.
• Allow people to get born and to die; this is normal, as opposed to this morbid fear of death.
• While he’s at it, nationalise pharmaceutical companies. Let them sell medicine to the national health service at the cost of production.

Thus the national health system will become good, simple, comprehensive and inexpensive. Communism? Yes! Good for you? Yes, unless you are a wealthy gynecologist. And Comrade Stalin would approve of it! J

The Revolution Was Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
Because the revolution will not be televised. …

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
The revolution will not be right back after a message
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ‘60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution.[1]

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

The Gardner Went Blind

Weeds Took Over The Garden…

“Rescue me and deliver me out of the hand of aliens whose mouths speak deceit and whose right hand is the hand of falsehood.” Psalm 144:11

Warning: This article contains language that may cause strong reactions!

When lies are accepted as fact and national policies aligned with falsehood; when tragic homicidal events are planned as instruments of enslavement and attributed to phantom enemies; when morality is debauched and conflicting cultures thrown together like pit bulls in a dog-fighting ring and heat is turned up under this mixture, a massive explosion seems imminent. Close by shadowy oligarchs wait, impatient to enslave the world.

In the United States the Twenty First Century has brought a pandemic increase in real and potential control over citizens and ominous prospects for the future.

A new lawless brutality has marked the post 9/11 era: the War in Iraq, torture, frivolous imprisonments, murders, propaganda, and tyrannical laws seemed to come about with ever increasing intensity. Division creates weakness and weakness allows outside control. The moneymasters understand and exploit existing antagonisms to their advantage. Neo-Israel has created over 60 years of constant conflict. The United States is being prepared for a similar fate as immigrants from many different cultures have created a potential militant antagonism.

James Petras, a retired university professor, has written an explosive article entitled “The Destruction of a Civilization” revealing the atrocities being inflicted on Iraq during the U.S. occupation. Petras documents the tremendous influence of American Zionist Jews on our Middle Eastern policies and the Stalin-like elimination of dissidents by pitting Shite gunman against Iraqi Christians and other social leaders. The ancient Iraqi Christian population, was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, and bishops slain or driven into exile; intellectuals, academics and scientists were assassinated or forced to leave the county. “The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role in the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident.”

Petras maintains that1.3 million Iraqi civilians have been eliminated by “Death squads” and through the encouragement of tribal, religious, and ethnic rivalries. This includes the physical elimination of “academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists”. Also destroyed were cultural entities like “libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals”.

According to professor Petras, Iraq’s dissidents have been murdered, its foundational institutions destroyed and its culture decimated. The nation has been gutted and is now completely dependent on Western institutions.

Read the entire Petras article here.

Most Americans have accepted bombing civilians as a legitimate form of warfare but few are aware that the hate propaganda emanating from our government translates into atrocious behavior in our soldiers. During World War II Japanese atrocities were loudly publicized but nothing was written about American infractions. It was never acknowledged that U. S. troops were capable of the horrors Laurence Vance lists in a rambling essay entitled “Rethinking the Good War” — “things like the harvesting of gold teeth from dead and not-so-dead Japanese soldiers, boiling the flesh off enemy skulls to make ornaments for military vehicles or to send home as souvenirs, urinating in the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers, carving enemy bones into letter openers, mutilating corpses, attacking and sinking hospital ships, shooting sailors who abandoned ship, shooting pilots who bailed out, killing wounded enemy soldiers on the battlefield, torturing and executing enemy prisoners, massacring unarmed Japanese soldiers who just surrendered, kicking in the teeth of prisoners before or after their execution, and the collecting of Japanese ears “

As Vance points out atrocities were committed by both sides but most Americans have nurtured the thought that the current enemy is the sole source of atrocities. Now it is us, we are the ones who endorse torture and the murder of dissidents. We are the overgrown bully on the block. It is our armies that invade and occupy nations that have done us no harm. Armed with the conclusions of the Project for the New American Century, we have become an incarnation of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao seeking to control the world by armed force. Isn’t it time that information began to sink into the American psyche?

Good soldiers learn to hate the image of the enemy that government propaganda has constructed in their minds. Hate is the foundation on which wars are built.

United States burgeons with professing Christians. Most of them along with their leaders supported President George W. Bush and his invasion of Iraq. They consider themselves patriotic; they support our troops and the imperial intentions of our government. Robert Gipson in an internet response states the problem well, “You’re correct that most ‘mericans don’t care about killing innocent civilians in other countries–en masse. Americans today are a generation of zombies programmatically desensitized to ultraviolence, and adroitly manipulated by government ops like 9/11. And that’s where I differ with you. Our rabidly homicidal ‘leaders’ are not at all concerned with saving ‘merican lives. They’re interested solely in killing more efficiently. They gleefully send thousands of ‘merican troops to die fighting ‘enemies’ that our leaders themselves carefully create and continuously (covertly) arm, like the Taliban. As I write this, they’re deliberately pushing Russia on all sides, trying hard to provoke the nuclear exchange our ‘leaders’ want–which will kill tens of millions of ‘mericans”.

I am constantly bombarded with email messages enjoining me to support and pray for our troops who are fighting for our freedom. Nothing could be farther from the truth! Since President Bush began the second invasion of Iraq in 2003 a myriad of tyrannical laws have been written and enacted. These laws will eventually bring Martial Law and the excuse for our imprisonment will be some form of danger (real or imagined). Our troops are not fighting for our freedom; they are fighting for our captivity!

The Bible does not support imperialism, neither at the national level nor at the individual level. Nowhere are we directed to pray for troops that are engaged in killing innocent civilians at a rate of 10 or more to 1 (ten civilians killed for every soldier) in a nation that never threatened us or meant us harm. Such actions are a travesty and Christians who support them are guilty of the egregious sin that is slowly bringing United States under tyranny. We need to recall all of our soldiers from the Middle East and from over a 100 other nations where they have been stationed since World War II.

Are American Christians and their leaders blind, deaf, and dumb? Why is our industry being moved to Asia? Why has our standard of living been in decline for the past several decades? Who promotes the homosexual abomination and why? Why are our roads full of chuckholes and our hospitals going broke when illegal immigrants get free medical care and billions of dollars are being wasted by illegal wars on foreign shores? Why do East Indians own all of our motels and why are the merchants we buy from becoming so large that they no longer need to talk with us instead referring our inquiries to foreigners whose language we cannot understand? Why is our government giving trillions of dollars to bankers who refuse to be accountable? Does any Christian leader understand that chaos, cognitive dissonance, disagreement, immorality, war, poverty, and pestilence are the tools of revolution and revolution provides the foundation for despots?

One who supports his country in sinful endeavors that bring the wrath of Almighty God down on the entire population does not understand the meaning of love. War is a tool used to bring additional power to government and to the cabal that controls it. Support for this evil manipulation is a hate that plunges the supporter into the domain of the Devil.

God’s people should have been earnestly engaged in defeating national imperialism from the very beginning. Church leaders are vested with responsibility to understand what is going on, comprehend its malignant nature and confront it forcefully from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday. The church is God’s spokesman in His creation. R. J. Rushdoony writes, “If the church is faltering or straying, the preaching is clearly at fault. True preaching cannot leave men unconcerned: it will either arouse them to repentance and to godly action, or it will arouse them to ungodly hostility as they see themselves in the light of God’s Word.”

The Bible does not mince words. Speaking of profligate messengers Isaiah 56 reads “His watchmen are blind they are all without knowledge; they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark…The shepherds also have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, each to his own gain, one and all.”

I have frequently written that if a Christian is not experiencing hostility he is not properly expressing the Gospel. Dr. Rushdoony confirms that observation. Our problem seems to be that preachers either fail to discern the reality that surrounds them or are afraid to confront it lest they be mocked. The result is a boring frivolity that is either replaced by useless humanistic emotionalism or a dry rendition of scripture – it is irrelevant and churches are dying because of it. No, our pulpits are not blasphemous they are not preaching lies but the truncated truth they are preaching is useless because it fails to address the salient issues of our day.

How far must we fall before our preachers realize their duty is not to build churches but to support the dominion of God? How long must we endure the pious, holier than thou game that displaces the two edged sword of truth that should be coming from our pulpits? Will we fall into Martial Law and be governed by foreigners, half breeds, homosexuals, women, Pharisaical Jews and parsimonious charlatans – all servants of a conspiratorial cabal? Will that be our fate? It appears it will.

The Return of the Body Snatchers

In the Turkish blockbuster action movie Valley of the Wolves, an American Jewish doctor in Abu Ghraib prison gently removes a kidney out of a live and suffering Arab prisoner and places it into a special vessel with the label “To Tel Aviv”, thus reinforcing the Israeli-American bond of eternal friendship. Real life imitates cinema, as we learn from the dreadful story of Palestinian youths being hunted for their inner organs by that most moral army in the world, Israel’s, as published by a leading Swedish newspaper [read its English translation below]

Donald Boström, a Swedish photographer who worked in the West Bank in 1992, was tipped off by UN officials to follow the bloody trail of Israeli soldiers who had kidnapped young Palestinians and returned their dead bodies five days later “with a slit from the abdomen up to the chin.” The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons were used as involuntary organ donors; they disappeared for a number of days only to be returned in the dark of night, dead and autopsied. Why did they keep their bodies for five days before letting us bury them? What happened to their bodies in the meantime? Why are they performing autopsies, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why were their bodies returned at night time? Why was this done with a military escort? Why was the area closed off during the funeral? Why was the power supply interrupted?”

These questions continued to haunt Boström. He took gruesome pictures of the returned bodies. Like Vanunu, he smuggled his films abroad. When back in Sweden, he offered the story to Dagens Nyheter, a liberal newspaper which, incidentally, is owned by the Jewish Bonnier family. DN refused to publish it. The story was laid to rest until now, when the Social Democrat newspaper Aftonbladet decided to let it run.

In Israel, the reaction was hysterical. The country is in danger of busting its guts in rage. Huge pressure has been exerted upon Swedish authorities to condemn the newspaper, to punish the offending author and to beg forgiveness. The Swedish Ambassador in Tel Aviv, a member of the rich and influential Jewish family Bonnier who incidentally own the majority of Swedish newspapers, TV networks and cinemas, expressed her ‘shock and disapproval’ on a website. Her speedy acceptance of the Tel Aviv diktat misfired. The Swedish government disavowed her interference with the freedom of Swedish press; the editors of Aftonbladet insisted on their right to say what they find fit and called for an international inquiry.

Carl Bildt, the Swedish Foreign Minister, was discomfited by Israel’s intention to cancel his scheduled visit and had already written in a blog that “such articles can cause anti-Semitism, and instigation is against the Swedish law”. However, he did not cry uncle in the way Netanyahu and Lieberman had demanded, while indomitable Aftonbladet Culture Editor Åsa Linderborg, the true hero of the drama, had sent two of her correspondents to the area of crime. They confirmed Boströms findings. Unprepared for such steadfastness, the rage and hysterics in Tel Aviv rather subsided, facing united front of Swedish public opinion.

It is easier to express ‘outrage about the old canard’ than to answer the questions posed by Bostrom. The facts are disturbing, and the accusations are not new. There were too many reports of such goings on, beside the cases mentioned by the Aftonbladet. Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and Hashem Mahmid accused the Abu Kabir institute of forensic medicine of expropriating the inner parts of Palestinian corpses. They said that Palestinian doctors have complained about receiving the bodies of their dead emptied of their innards. Israeli newspapers reported that in 2007 three Palestinian teenagers were killed near Khan Younes in Gaza Strip and their bodies were returned to their parents all cut and brutalised six days later. Israel often does not even return the dead bodies of Palestinians to their families but has them buried in a secret cemetery. This causes even more suspicions.

Worse, it fits into a larger pattern.

All over the world, Israel and Israelis are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern form of cannibalism. Beside the case of the New Jersey ring mentioned in the Boström’s article, there are plenty others.

• Turkey: An Israeli professor Zaki Shapira was arrested in Turkey for allegedly cutting into live Turks for spare parts, reported the notoriously anti-Semitic paper Jerusalem Post.
• South Africa: Another anti-Semitic paper, the New York Times, reported on an Israeli trafficking ring active from South Africa to Brazil.
• Brazil: An Israeli officer, Gedalya Tauber, was arrested in Brazil for inducing the poor to part with their body parts. He spilled the beans about activity of his fellow countrymen.
• The Ukraine: The Jerusalem Post reported the arrest of “an Israeli illegal organ-smuggling ring” that flew their donors and recipients to the Ukraine.

In many cases, Israelis were the doctors, traffickers, smugglers and recipients of the body parts, as the Jewish state is the only country in the world where the state pays for, and best doctors are legally engaged in, the transplanting of illegally obtained organs, reported Ha’aretz. The next step was the evolution of international networks for this sort of traffic. Jews are well positioned to get involved in this sordid business: there are many Jewish doctors, there are many ties between Jewish communities in different countries, and there are few moral inhibitions.

This lack of moral inhibitions allowed a leading Chabad rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzburgh, to give his religious permission to a Jew to take a liver from a goy even without his consent. He said that “a Jew is entitled to extract the liver from a goy if he needs it, for the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a goy, likewise the life of a goy is more valuable than the life of an animal.”

Modern Israelis have forgotten their faith, but have retained this lack of inhibition. An Israeli business newspaper, The Marker, has published an opinion piece by an Israeli lawyer justifying the trade in body organs, for “organs are just commodity, and so they can be bought and sold like any commodity in an open market”.

The distance between kidneys bought and snatched is not that big: if organs are “just a commodity”, surely it is permissible to take them from Palestinians, just as it is ‘permitted’ to take from Palestinians centuries-old olive trees while building the Wall.

Indignation is easy, but it is not so easy to prove that the Israelis, who do not hesitate to break arms and legs and pour napalm on schoolchildren, do draw a line about getting some profit from Palestinian innards. Aftonbladet’s demand for an international enquiry is reasonable: if the Israelis have done nothing wrong (beyond murdering hundreds of young men), they have nothing to fear from an international investigation. Yet Israel refused UN enquiry commissions permission to visit Jenin after the 2002 massacre and Gaza after the 2009 massacre.

For Israel, the most upsetting part of this affair was the breach made in the wall. I do not mean the monstrous Sharon’s Wall protecting the biggest Jewish ghetto in the Middle East, but the wall of media control which protects it overseas. Jews buy media all over the world not for fun, and not for profit, but for the influence it has over minds. This is the case in Sweden, where members of its tiny Jewish community own newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and even Swedish Hollywood – Svensk Filmindustri AB. This media actively promotes the neo-liberal policies of privatisation, commodification, immigrant influx, dismantling the welfare state – in short, policies that are good for wealthy Jews.

Israeli representatives work hard to keep reporting from the Middle East under their control. A few years ago, the leading radical left magazine Ordfront published a thoughtful piece Israeli Regime Directs Swedish Media by Johannes Wahlström, telling of Israeli meddling with the Swedish press, of Israeli officials going to newspaper editors and to correspondents. In that article Donald Boström tells of the dreadful story he wanted to tell, but he couldn’t get through the wall of pro-Israeli censorship in the Swedish media.

Israel is not the only country suspected of such nefarious activities. Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for Balkan crimes, wrote in her 2008 book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals that under the aegis of the Kosovo Liberation Army, this ally of NATO and the US, hundreds of young Serb prisoners were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. Carla del Ponte had seen the house where such surgeries were done and had met with the people involved, one of whom “personally made an organ delivery” to an Albanian airport for transport abroad.

However, Carla del Ponte’s accusation against Albanians did not cause such a stir, and nobody condemned her as “anti-Albanian”, nor would she care if somebody had, for it is perfectly all right to be anti-anybody as long as not anti-Jewish. The Jews have a potent weapon in their “anti-Semitism” label. Or do they?

Could it be that the useful-for-Israel fear of anti-Semitism does not work like a charm anymore? This is possible. The Cairo speech of Obama apparently has had no direct consequences; Obama tried to apply pressure to Israel in order to freeze the settlements, but in vain. Did he fail? It is too early to judge, as Zhou Enlai was wont to say. Such changes rarely occur by the wave of a magic wand … they take time. Recent publications on the Jewish criminal gang in New Jersey, attacks on Goldman Sachs, medals for Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, an award to Felicia Langer, the collapse of the pro-Jewish socialist party and the appearance of an anti-zionist party in France, the Boström article in Aftonbladet – all are small and separate incidents, but together they imply that the change is coming. Swedes, French, Germans and even New Jerseyans are no longer afraid of Washington coming at them like sixteen tons in defence of Zionists, as would have been the case in the days of George W. Bush. Obama even refused to appoint a new anti-anti-semitic commissar.

This thought frightens the Tel Aviv government more than anything. If today they let the Swedes get away with it, tomorrow there will be somebody else, and then the fear of the Jews will be assigned to the category of unmanly unrealistic fears, like fear of mice.

Second Ending

More importantly, Israeli outrage is a proof that – despite approval for it by radical Cabbalists and neoliberals – transplantation of human organs is an immoral dreadful thing, too close to cannibalism, and we all know that. Yes, it is awful if Israeli soldiers tear kidneys out of Palestinians and kill them afterwards. But it is equally awful, if a kind doctor removes a kidney out of a Detroit mechanic whose house was repossessed by a gentle banker, or out of a Ukrainian worker who was sacked by a polite oligarch, or out of an Indian farmer who has to pay his debt to Monsanto. Every poor man on the planet is a Palestinian – though the means of his dispossession may vary. This kind of thing should be stopped. The human body is sacred. These operations are too expensive and can’t be justified. Mankind should overcome its fear of death. We live and we die. There is no reason to waste thousands of dollars prolonging a life by expensive operations if this money can be used for feeding the starving. More about this later…

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An English translation of the famous article in a leading Swedish paper.

Our sons plundered for their organs

By Donald Boström

You could call me a “matchmaker,” said Levy Yitzhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for 10,000 dollars, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for 160,000 dollars. The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: “Quite a lot. And I have never failed,” he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5-6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent of the world’s kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country’s organ reserve – a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that “the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France’s example shortly.”

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn’t condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business – on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel’s big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in line for a kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Ahmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone – not even a cat could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don’t remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village’s carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action was Bilal Ahmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught meant torture and death for these boys – they had to stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. “Captain Yahya is the worst of them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Mahmud and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

- Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted? Nafes’s uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Ahmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home et cetera. The 133 people killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians – of which the army spokesperson was talking – has no bearing on the reality in the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.

Donald Boström

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

Anti-Empire Report

“And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man’s arse.” Montaigne

If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was “highly objectionable”. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were “outrageous and disgusting”. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “angry and repulsed”, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images “deeply upsetting.” Miliband warned: “How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.” ¹

Ah yes, “the civilized community of nations”, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward. ² No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an “accident”. Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today’s oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi’s innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he’s innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi’s trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case. ³ The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [Air Malta to Frankfurt] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.” ⁴

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout’s honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite. ⁵

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. “If he goes back to Libya,” Swire says, “it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. … I’ve lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive.” ⁶

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: “American intelligence documents [of 1989, from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)] blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.” Added the Times: “The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was ‘no current credible intelligence’ implicating her.” ⁷

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it’s highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya’s guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take “responsibility” for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

Humankind shall never fly

All those angry people. Yelling at the president and members of Congress about how the proposed government health plan, and Obama himself, are “socialist”. (See the poster of Obama as the Joker character from Batman with “Socialism” in large letters, as the only word.⁸) These good folks wanna get their health care through good ol’ capitalism; better no health care at all than godless-atheist commie health care; better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government. But these screaming, heckling Americans — like most of their countrymen — might be rather surprised to discover that they don’t really believe what they think they believe. I wrote an essay several years ago, which is still perfectly applicable today, entitled “The United States invades, bombs, and kills for it, but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?”

A common refrain, explicit or implicit, amongst the recent health-care hecklers is that the government can’t do anything better or cheaper than private corporations. Studies, however, have clearly indicated otherwise. In 2003, US federal agencies examined 17,595 federal jobs and found civil servants to be superior to contractors 89 percent of the time. The following year, a study to determine whether 12,573 federal jobs could be done more efficiently by private contractors found in-house workers winning 91 percent of the time, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. And in 2005, a study of tens of thousands of government positions concluded that federal workers had won the job competitions more than 80 percent of the time. All these studies, it should be kept in mind, took place under the administration of George W. Bush, who, upon taking office in 2001, declared it his top management priority that federal workers should compete with contractors for as many as 850,000 government jobs. ⁹ Thus, any pressure to influence the outcome of these studies would have been in the opposite direction — putting the outside contractors in the best light.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Boys of Capital have been chortling in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.

The continual selling of the Afghanistan war

“But we must never forget,” said President Obama recently, “this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” ¹⁰

Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the ultra-nationalist group whose members would not question such sentiments. Neither would most Americans, including many of those who express opposition to the war when polled. It’s simple — We’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. We’re fighting the same people who attacked New York and Washington. Never mind that out of the tens of thousands the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001. Never mind that the “plot to kill Americans” in 2001 was hatched in Germany and the United States at least as much as in Afghanistan. What is needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

As to “plotting to do so again” … there’s no reason to assume that the United States has any concrete information of this, anymore than did Bush or Cheney who tried to scare us in the same way for more than seven years to enable them to carry out their agenda.

There are many people in Afghanistan who deeply resent the US presence there and the drones that fly overhead and drop bombs on houses, wedding parties, and funerals. One doesn’t have to be a member of al Qaeda to feel this way. There doesn’t even have to be such a thing as a “member of al Qaeda”. It tells us nothing that some of them can be called “al Qaeda”. Almost every individual or group in that part of the world not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wishes to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American aggression while being a member of al Qaeda and people retaliating against American aggression while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit in your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

In any event, as in Iraq, the American “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists. This is scarcely in dispute even at the Pentagon.

The only “necessity” that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, the establishment of military bases in this country that is surrounded by the oil-rich Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf regions, and making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran. What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire?

But the war against the Taliban can’t be won. Except by killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States should negotiate the pipelines with the Taliban, as the Clinton administration unsuccessfully tried to do, and then get out.

The revolution was televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag [heroin] and skip out for beer during commercials.
Because the revolution will not be televised. …

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock news
The revolution will not be right back after a message
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised

These are some of the lines of Gil Scott-Heron’s song that told people in the 1970s (which, I maintain, were just as ’60ish as the fabled 1960s) that a revolution was coming, that they would no longer be able to live their normal daily life, that they should no longer want to live their normal daily life, that they would have to learn to be more serious about this thing they were always prattling about, this thing they called “revolution”.

Fast Forward to 2009 … Gil Scott-Heron, now a ripe old 60, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post:

WP: In the early 1970s, you came out with “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the erosion of democracy in America. You all but predicted that there would be a revolution in which a brainwashed nation would come to its senses. What do you think now? Did we have a revolution?

GS-H: Yes, the election of President Obama was the revolution. ¹¹

Oh? So that’s it? That’s what we took clubs over our heads for? Tear gas, jail cells, and permanent police and FBI files? Published a million issues of the underground press? To get a president who doesn’t have a revolutionary bone in his body? Not a muscle or nerve or tissue or organ that seriously questions cherished establishment beliefs concerning terrorism, permanent war, Israel, torture, marijuana, health care, and the primacy of profit over the environment and all else? Karl Marx is surely turning over in his London grave. If the modern counter-revolutionary United States had existed at the time of the American revolution, it would have crushed that revolution. And a colonial (white) Barack Obama would have worked diligently to achieve some sort of bi-partisan compromise with the King of England, telling him we need to look forward, not backward.

Yugoslavia

During 1998-1999, the United States used the Kosovo conflict to reaffirm its hegemonic role in Europe. US officials deliberately undercut a potential diplomatic solution to the Kosovo war; instead of using diplomacy to resolve the conflict, the United States sought a military solution in which NATO power could once again be demonstrated. The resulting air war, in 1999, succeeded in fully establishing the continued relevance of NATO, thus affirming US hegemony in Europe and undercutting European proclivities for foreign policy independence.

– David Gibbs, “First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia“

There’s no issue of the recent past that has caused more friction internationally amongst those on the left than the question of what really took place in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Gibbs’ new book explores many of the myths surrounding this very complicated and controversial slice of history, particularly those dealing with the supposed humanitarian motivation behind the Western powers intervention and the many alleged Serbian atrocities.

Notes

1. Washington Post, August 22 and August 26, 2009 ^↩
2. Newsweek magazine, July 13, 1992 ^↩
3. Sunday Herald (Scotland), August 17, 2009 ^↩
4. “Opinion of the Court”, Par. 39, issued following the trial in the Hague in 2001 ^↩
5. Read many further details about the case at http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm ^↩
6. The Independent (London daily), April 26, 2009 ^↩
7. Sunday Times (London), August 16, 2009 ^↩
8. Washington Post, August 6, 2009, p.C2 ^↩
9. Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006 for this citation plus the three studies mentioned ^↩
10. Talk given at VFW convention in Phoenix, Arizona, August 17, 2009 ^↩
11. Washington Post, August 26, 2009 ^↩

Seizing Power and Property

Governments, local, county, state or federal, are artificial entities created by the people. Governments, collective organizations, were created to protect the life, liberty and property of each and every person.

Frederic Bastiat said: “If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.” [1]

Individuals cannot transfer rights or powers they do not inherently possess to an artificial government entity. One cannot bestow a right or privilege that one does not possess – those powers that each and every person possessed prior to the establishment of said government. Individuals may not legally plunder the property or resources of others, kill people, impose moral sanctions, or a plethora of other regulations, public and private extortions that governments regularly engage in.

Bastiat said: “Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?” [2]

The government, constitutionally, is limited only to those functions in which an individual citizen has a right to act. The government has derived its powers from the governed. People cannot delegate powers it does not possess to its creation. John Locke explained the concept: “For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life of property of another.” [3]

For instance, if Citizen A has a vehicle and Citizen B doesn’t, Citizen B cannot arbitrarily seize citizen A’s vehicle. That would be stealing! Citizen B, despite the fact that he may lust after Citizen A’s vehicle, cannot legally delegate a government entity to take Citizen A’s vehicle in his behalf. If the government usurps such authority, that would constitute public plundering – the road to tyranny. America is obviously well down that road, given the current pandemic public plundering sanctioned and facilitated by the government.

The vehicle analogy is also applicable to car dealerships, many of which are being illegally seized and transferred to other parties. The following letter appeared in a Florida newspaper in late May 2009: “My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business. We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part of their livelihood. We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community. We have strong local presence and stability. I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees. Sunshine Dodge is my life. On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory. Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank. HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN? THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY. This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong. This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy. This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families? This is a total economic disaster. HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

I am certain that George Joseph is just one of many dealers whose businesses have been seized by major car manufacturers, sanctioned by the bankers directing the current administration’s spoils system of rewarding campaign contributors, friends and corporate allies. This is a blatant Communistic redistribution of property. The Elite have no loyalties – other than to each other.

Unfortunately, government power was usurped long ago by the Elite, the majority of them lawyers, who impose laws favorable to themselves and their corporate cohorts but disastrous to the common citizen. To keep us fighting among ourselves, the Elite fashioned political parties. The sincere Republican and Democrat citizens are so preoccupied blaming the specific parties that they fail to recognize that the Elite within both parties utilize the spoils system – no matter which party is in power. Politicians are like professional wrestlers with orchestrated differences who choreograph their moves and celebrate after each match. Citizens naively believe the rhetoric because we hope things will improve while government Elites of both parties plunder our lives, liberties and pockets. We have all become enslaved and ransacked by a government that was “hired” to protect us from such egregious abuse.

In the 1700s the term “slave’ was applied to all indentured servants. Both black and white servants were granted their freedom as serving a specified length of time – typically seven years. Black and white slaves worked, lived, and played together, apparently indifferent to skin color differences. Racism was absent. That mutual acceptance was artificially altered when the minority colonial Elites, concerned about possible rebellion from the majority non-voting lower classes, took firm measures to divide poor whites and blacks “both socially and economically.” The bulk of society was composed of servants, landless tenants or small yeomen who owned inconsequential land that the Elite didn’t want. The Elite established a “divide and conquer” tactic that is still very much in place in most societies. [4]

Historian Edmund S. Morgan pointed out, “For those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class.” [5]

Edward Bernays, the grand master of propaganda stated: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.” [6]

The government and their compliant corporate press mold and manage our perceptions and prefer that we focus our anger and attention on numerous distractions – the illegal aliens, illusive terrorists, same-sex marriages, welfare recipients, North Korean testing, whether the CIA lied or was it Pelosi, Islamic fundamentalism, whether torture photos should be released or the current Supreme Court nominee, as if one court appointment can change the political landscape. The fact is that the government Elite set up this entire environment of contention to divert our attention from their treacherous unconstitutional, criminal activities – in both parties. This is all part of America’s drive into a One World Order, now hyper accelerated under the current administration.

You might ask – how did government Elites create the current environment. Decades ago the government abandoned the constitutional principles of non entanglement with foreign countries. Government officials are no longer public servants but private servants to deep-pocketed multinational corporations whose money keeps ego-driven politicians in power. Those same multinational corporations control the media flow of information in order to keep the people in an ignorant trance. Character-challenged politicians, mesmerized by power and money, cater to the insatiable greed of the privileged Elite under the pretext of spreading democracy, ousting cruel dictators, restricting the spread of Communism, Nazism, Fascism or terrorism.

The CIA created al Qaeda, the database and instigated Islamic fundamentalism by training 100,000 fundamentalist Muslim Mujahadeen. The CIA-friendly Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that, unbeknownst to the American public and Congress, that Trilateralist Jimmy Carter authorized $500 million on July 3, 1979 to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism throughout Central Asia in order to destabilize the Soviet Union, another made-in-America enemy that had served the purpose of its creation and now had to be dismantled. The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and functioned from 1979 to 1989 at a cost of $20-30 million per year beginning in 1980 which rose to $630 million per year in 1987. The U.S. poured another $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means student). Young zealots were recruited and sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al Qaeda were taught sabotage skills – terrorism. Young Afghans, Egyptian and Jordanian Arabs and some African American Muslims were instructed in the latest sabotage skills.Underground Dissident [7]

Taxpayer funds financed the I-hate-America textbooks for Muslim students. Prior to 1967, Islamic fundamentalism was a relatively small movement. In the early 1980’s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) gave a taxpayer funded grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and it’s Center for Afghanistan Studies to develop specialized textbooks. For more than twenty years the U.S. spent millions of dollars producing fanatical Islamic schoolbooks for distribution in Afghanistan, a country now known for its terrorist training camps. The schoolbooks, used throughout the 1990s for the country’s core curriculum, included illustrations of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines to indoctrinate young minds towards violent destruction. Who authorized this hateful instruction for young impressionable minds? [8]

For $190,000 a year, Donald Rumsfeld sat on the board and “attended nearly all of the board meetings” of the Swiss-based ABB Company between 1990 and February 2001. [9] In 2000 (based on a Clinton era contract) ABB sold $200 million worth of components to North Korea to allow construction of two nuclear reactors. Currently, there are concerns about their activities. In December 1983 and again in March 1984, Ronald Reagan sent his personal emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, a former Secretary of Defense, to meet with Saddam Hussein along with Reagan’s handwritten note. This first meeting, on December 20, 1983, was for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States, the first since the 1967 war. We formally restored diplomatic relations with Iraq in November 1984. Then, Rumsfeld and his corporate cronies secretly supplied Saddam’s military with the components to build chemical and biological weapons. Rumsfeld is just one example from dozens of Elites who repeatedly shift from boardroom to government office while stuffing their pockets from both positions.

David Rockefeller admitted in his relatively-recent book: “For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” [10] What further proof do we need of a pervasive conspiracy – just look at the mounting evidence and forget the mesmerizing, feel-good political jargon emanating from Washington.

Footnotes:

1, The Law, The Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, Foundation for Economic Research, New York, pp. 2-3
2, The Law, The Classic Blueprint for a Just Society by Frederic Bastiat, Foundation for Economic Research, New York, pp. 2-3
3, Locke, John, 1632-1704. Two Treatises of Government: of Civil Government Book II, p. 135
4, Divided, the South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams, The New Press, New York, 2008, p. 15
5, American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan, W.W. Norton & Co., 2003, pp. 269-270
6, Propaganda by Edward Bernays, Organizing Chaos, p. 37
7, How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahadeen: Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), January 15-21, 1998, p. 76; The CIA’s “Operation Cyclone” – Stirring the Hornet’s Nest of Islamic Unrest, October 27, 2002,
8, From U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad; Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts by Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, Washington Post, March 23, 2002
9, Rumsfeld was on ABB board during deal with North Korea
10, David Rockefeller: Memoirs by David Rockefeller, Random House, owned since 1998 by the large German private media corporation Bertelsmann, 2002, p. 405

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