"Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution." That's the title of a booklet Cindy Sheehan is selling online. I know we have CNBC to set us straight on such things, but I thought I'd check out Cindy's take. Her full-length books have been terrific, and I've published 1,631 shorter articles by or about her, because Cindy is not just a grieving mother. She's a grieving mother who feels betrayed, is mad as hell, is uncorrupted by money, power, or party, would rather die than censor her statements, and gets straight to the heart of a question faster than anyone else I know.
Medea Benjamin recently wrote that Congress needs to see the people's rage. A Congress member could get a fine understanding of the rage sweeping this nation by reading a few pages of Cindy Sheehan. Cindy advocates nonviolent and thoughtful solutions, but her writing is almost pure rage and fury the like of which hell hath not.
"We in the US of A," Sheehan writes, "have less than 5 percent of the world's population, yet we wastefully consume from 25-40 percent of the world's resources, but we don't have to apologize for being gluttonous pigs who murder innocent people for these resources."
"Both political parties of the Robber Class," Sheehan argues, "like to say that we have to fund the wars to 'Support the Troops,' and a very tragic amount of people in the Robbed Classes buy into that nonsensical rhetoric and even the so-called Peace Movement allows itself to be co-opted by 'Supporting the troops, but not the war.' The false urban myth of the hippie girl spitting on returning soldiers from Vietnam and calling them 'baby killers' was designed by the Robber Class so we would never question the war crimes committed by our troops which is unfortunately inherent to war and unavoidable during times of war."
As you may have gathered, Cindy divides us into the Robbed and the Robbers, with most of us on the Robbed side. The Robbed are essentially the working class, people who have to struggle for healthcare and higher education.
"Well, never fear!" writes Sheehan. "Obama has a plan! If 'you are willing to volunteer in your neighborhood or give back to your community or serve your country, we will make sure that you can afford a higher education.' When he said this, most of the bots in the Congress jumped up in unison and cheered. My first thought was, 'you dirty mother-effers!' Am I against service? No, my entire life is for service. … none of the children of the members of Congress, or their partners in crime on Wall Street or in the defense [sic] industries have to do 'service' to get a college education. … Does a child of the Robber Class have to go into 4 to 8 years of indentured servitude [in the military] to get buck teeth straightened or rotten teeth pulled?"
These are the 10 myths Cindy explains: Myth One: America: Greatest Nation in the Universe! Myth Two: Elections Matter Myth Three: There's a huge Difference Between Dems and Repubs Myth Four: It is Noble to Die in Robber Class Wars Myth Five: The Central Banking System is good for the Robbed Class Myth Six: It's a Privilege to pay Income Taxes to the Robber Class Myth Seven: Housing, Health Care and Education are Privileges, too Myth Eight: America has a Free Press Myth Nine: The Environment, Who Needs it? Myth Ten: 19 Muslims with box cutters were responsible for 9/11
I actually think elections matter, although not remotely as much as a lot of people think. And I think Cindy kind of cops out by discouraging people from voting and encouraging them, and never coming to a real decision one way or the other. I don't think ranked voting or the Fairness Doctrine, two reforms Cindy proposes, will solve much. But I think an honest examination, like the one in Cindy's booklet, of what can be repaired and what should be started from scratch will help solve quite a lot.
Author's Bio: David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a convenor of the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and chair of the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and Justice.
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama’s rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft-proven ability of Afghan “militants” to drive out foreign invaders — from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians — he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.”
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops — not to mention 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese — dead in Vietnam.
John Kennedy became President the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
But he was certainly old enough to absorb the fecklessness and brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And his instincts at that time were good enough to see through the Bush administration’s duplicity.
And, with him now in the White House, surely some of his advisers would be able to brief him on both Vietnam and Iraq, and prevent him from making similar mistakes — this time in Afghanistan. Or so I thought.
Deflecting an off-the-topic question at his March 24 press conference, Obama said, “I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy. … Right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is, are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe?”
Okay, it is understandable that President Obama has been totally absorbed with the financial crisis. But surely, unlike predecessors supposedly unable to do two things at the same time, our resourceful new President certainly could find enough time to solicit advice from a wide circle, get a better grip on the huge stakes in Afghanistan, and arrive at sensible decisions. Or so I thought.
Getting Railroaded?
It proved to be a bit awkward Friday morning waiting for the President to appear…. a half-hour late for his own presentation. Was he for some reason reluctant?
Perhaps he had a sense of being railroaded by his advisers. Perhaps he paused on learning that just a few hours earlier a soldier of the Afghan army shot dead two U.S. troops and wounded a third before killing himself, and that Taliban fighters had stormed an Afghan police post and killed 10 police earlier that morning.
Should he weave that somehow into his speech?
Or maybe it was learning of the Taliban ambush of a police convoy which wounded seven other policemen; or the suicide bomber in the Afghan border area of Pakistan who demolished a mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers, killing some 50 and injuring scores more, according to preliminary reports.
Or, more simply, perhaps Obama’s instincts told him he was about to do something he will regret. Maybe that’s why he was embarrassingly late in coming to the podium.
One look at the national security advisers arrayed behind the President was enough to see wooden-headedness.
In her classic book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset: “Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs … acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”
Tuchman pointed to 16th Century Philip II of Spain as a kind of Nobel laureate of wooden-headedness. Comparisons can be invidious, but the thing about Philip was that he drained state revenues by failed adventures overseas, leading to Spain’s decline.
It is wooden-headedness, in my view, that permeates the “comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” that the President announced on Friday. Author Tuchman points succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
“Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it. … Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,’ an academic disguise for ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.’”
It seems only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman’s daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against “cognitive dissonance.”
A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, "The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
In any case, Obama explained his decision on more robust military intervention in Afghanistan as a result of a “careful policy review” by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghani and Pakistani governments, NATO allies, and international organizations.
No Estimate? No Problem
Know why he did not mention a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the likely effects of this slow surge in troops and trainers? Because there is none.
Guess why. The reason is the same one accounting for the lack of a completed NIE before the “surge” in troop strength in Iraq in early 2007.
Apparently, Obama’s advisers did not wish to take the risk that honest analysts — ones who had been around a while, and maybe even knew something of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan — might also be immune to “cognitive dissonance,” and ask hard questions regarding the basis of the new strategy.
Indeed, they might reach the same judgment they did in the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism. The authors of that estimate had few cognitive problems and simply declared their judgment that invasions and occupations (in 2006 the target then was Iraq) do not make us safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
The prevailing attitude this time fits the modus operandi of Gen. David Petraeus, who late last year took the lead by default with the following approach: We know best, and can run our own policy review, thank you very much.
Which he did, without requesting the formal NIE that typically precedes and informs key policy decisions. It is highly regrettable that President Obama was deprived of the chance to benefit from a formal estimate. Recent NIEs have been relatively bereft of wooden-headedess. Obama might have made a more sensible decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
As one might imagine, NIEs can, and should, play a key role in such circumstances, with a premium on objectivity and courage in speaking truth to power. That is precisely why Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair appointed Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, the body that prepares NIEs — and why the Likud Lobby got him ousted.
Estimates on Vietnam
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war.
Sensitive ones bore this unclassified title: “Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam.”
Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed were: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand?
Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being “good team players.” But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that.
Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were often pooh-poohed as negativism. Policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account, and often didn’t.
The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best estimate as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.
So, hats off, I suppose, to you, Gen. Petraeus and those who helped you elbow the substantive intelligence analysts off to the sidelines.
What might intelligence analysts have said on the key point of training the Afghan army and police? We will never know, but it is a safe bet those analysts who know something about Afghanistan (or about Vietnam) would roll their eyes and wish Petraeus luck.
As for Iraq, what remains to be seen is against whom the various sectarian factions target their weapons and put their training into practice.
The Training Mirage
In his Afghanistan policy speech on Friday, Obama mentioned training 11 times. To those of us with some gray in our hair, this was all too reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric at the start of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
In February 1964, with John Kennedy dead and President Lyndon Johnson improvising on Vietnam, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara prepared a major policy speech on defense, leaving out Vietnam, and sent it to the President to review. The Johnson tapes show the President finding fault:
LBJ: “I wonder if you shouldn’t find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.”
McN: “The problem is what to say about it.”
LBJ: “I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. … Our purpose is to train the [South Vietnamese] people, and our training’s going good.”
But our training was not going good then. And specialists who know Afghanistan, its various tribes and demographics tell me that training is not likely to go good there either. Ditto for training in Pakistan.
Obama’s alliterative rhetoric aside, it is going to be no easier to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with more combat forces and training than it was to defeat the Viet Cong with these same tools in Vietnam.
Obama seemed to be protesting a bit too much: “Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course.” No sir.
There will be “metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable!” Yes, sir!
And he will enlist wide international support from countries like Russia, India and China that, according to President Obama, “should have a stake in the security of the region.” Right.
“The road ahead will be long,” said Obama in conclusion. He has that right. The strategy adopted virtually guarantees that.
That is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, late last year when Gates, protesting the widespread pessimism on Afghanistan, started talking up the prospect of a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style “surge” of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. “The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’” McKiernan stated, adding that what is required is a “sustained commitment” that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
McKiernan has that right. But his boss Mr. Gates did not seem to get it.
Bob Gates at the Gate
Late last year, as he maneuvered to stay on as Defense Secretary in the new administration, Gates hotly disputed the notion that things were getting out of control in Afghanistan.
The argument that Gates used to support his professed optimism, however, made us veteran intelligence officers gag — at least those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
“The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces,” Gates explained.
Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. (Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which “insurgents” attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as “contact.”)
Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost.
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
I don't fault the senior military. Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, “a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones standing in back of Obama on Friday have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT’S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect.
Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan — probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
Sound Military Advice
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero Gen. Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after World War II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama’s fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young President in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined."
When JFK's top military advisers, critical of the President’s reluctance to go against that advice, virtually called him a traitor — for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example — Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in — despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy.
Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the President."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation that President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young President so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country.
Kennedy resisted the kind of pressures to which President Obama has now succumbed. (There are even some, like Jim Douglass in his book "JFK and the Unspeakable," who conclude that this is what got President Kennedy killed.)
Mr. Obama, you need to find some advisers who are not still wet behind the ears and who are not brown noses — preferably some who have lived Vietnam and Iraq and have an established record of responsible, fact-based analysis.
You would also do well to read Douglass's book, and to page through the "Pentagon Papers," instead of trying to emulate the Lincoln portrayed in Team of Rivals.
I, too, am a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but Daniel Ellsberg is an author far more relevant and nourishing for this point in time. Read his Secrets, and recognize the signs of the times.
There is still time to put the brakes on this disastrous policy. One key lesson of Vietnam is that an army trained and supplied by foreign occupiers can almost always be readily outmatched and out-waited in a guerrilla war, no matter how many billions of dollars are pumped in.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the only non-American military historian on the U.S. Army’s list of required reading for officers, has accused former President George W. Bush of “launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them.”
Please do not feel you have to compete with your predecessor for such laurels.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Chomsky: Plan is recycled Bush/Paulson. We need nationalization and steps towards democratization.
Posted March 30, 2009 - Real News
Part 2
Transcript
NOTE: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS UNEDITED. CHANGES MAY ENSUE. THE REAL NEWS NETWORK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR MISTAKES FOUND HEREIN.
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. We're in Cambridge at MIT with Professor Noam Chomsky, who I think needs no introduction. Thanks for joining us.
CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you.
JAY: So a few days ago, the Obama administration and Geithner, they announced their plan for the banks. What do you make of it?
CHOMSKY: Well, there are several plans, actually. One is capitalization. The other, the more recent one, is picking up the toxic assets with a private-public coalition. And that sent the stock market zooming right away. And you can see why: it's extremely good for bankers and investors. It means that an investor can, if they want, purchase these valueless assets. And if they happen to go up, well, it makes money; if they go down, the government insures it. So there might be a slight loss, but there could be a big gain. And that's—one financial manager put it in The Financial Times this morning, "It's a win-win situation."
JAY: A win-win situation if you're the investor.
CHOMSKY: If you're the investor, yeah.
JAY: If you're the investor.
CHOMSKY: For the public it's a lose-lose situation. But they're simply recycling, pretty much, the Bush-Paulson measures and changing them a little, but essentially the same idea: keep the institutional structure the same, try to kind of pass things up, bribe the banks and investors to help out, but avoid the measures that might get to the heart of the problem—however, at the cost, if you consider it a cost, of changing the institutional structure.
JAY: What's the plan you would support?
CHOMSKY: Well, I mean, say, for example, take the bonuses, the AIG bonuses that are, you know, causing such anger, rightfully. Dean Baker pointed out that there's an easy way to deal with it. Since the government pretty much owns AIG anyway (it just doesn't use its power to make decisions), split off the section of AIG—the financial investment section—that caused all the problems, split it off, and let it go bankrupt. And then the executives can seek to get their bonuses from a bankrupt firm if they like. So that would pretty much take care of the bankruptcy problem, and the government would still maintain its large-scale effective control, if it wants to exert it, of what's viable in AIG. And with the banks, the big banks, like Bank of America, one of the big problems is nobody knows what's going on inside. You know, there are very opaque devices and manipulations which technically the government—. They're not going to tell you themselves. You know, why should they? It's not their business. In fact, when Associated Press sent journalists to interview bank managers and investment-firm managers and ask them what they've done with the TARP [Troubled Assets Relief Program] money, they just laughed. They said, "It's none of your business. We're private enterprises. Your task, the public, is to fund us, but not to know what we're doing." But the government could find out—namely, essentially, take over the banks.
JAY: Is all of this sort of machinations of policy because they want to avoid nationalization?
CHOMSKY: You don't have to use the word "nationalization" if it bothers people, but some form of, you know, receivership which would at least allow independent investigators, government investigators, to get into the books, find out what they're doing, who owes what to whom, which is the basis for any form of modification. I mean, it could go on to something much beyond, but it's not contemplated. It's not a law of nature that corporations have to be dedicated solely to profit for their shareholders. It's not even legislation. It's mostly court decisions and management rules and so on. And it's perfectly conceivable for corporations, if they exist, to be responsible to stakeholders, to the community, to the workforce.
JAY: Well, especially when it's all public money at this point that's running the system.
CHOMSKY: Look, fact of the matter is it's almost always public money. So take, say, the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. How did he become the richest man in the world? Well, a lot of it was public money. In fact, places like where we're sitting right now,—
JAY: MIT.
CHOMSKY: —that's where computers were developed, the Internet was developed, fancy software was developed, either here or in similar places, and almost entirely on public funding. And then, of course, I mean, the way the system works, fundamentally—it's kind of an overstatement, but fundamentally, is that the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and the profit is privatized.
JAY: Which is what we're seeing now with the whole [inaudible] bailout.
CHOMSKY: Well, there's a lot of talk about it now because it's the financial institutions and it's very visible, but this happens all the time. I mean, as I say, computers and the Internet, the basis for the IT revolution in the late '90s.
JAY: So when you say "challenging the institutional structure," what would you like to see happen?
CHOMSKY: For a start, corporations, banks, and so on should be, I think, responsible to stakeholders. That's not a huge change. In fact, it's even been brought to the courts. It was an important case, highly relevant now. About 30 years ago, when the major steel companies wanted to destroy the Youngstown steel plants—major part of the steel industry, you know, the core of the community had been built up around it, and so on—and they wanted to move it or get rid of it. And the workers and the community wanted to keep it and felt they could run it privately. And in fact they brought a case up through the courts, arguing that the management rules ought to be changed so that stakeholders, rather than just shareholders, would have control over the corporation. Well, it lost in the courts, naturally, but it's a perfectly feasible idea. It could be a way to keep communities alive and the industry here.
JAY: So if you're looking at the financial system now and you take this principle, the representing the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders, what would that look like in terms of policy?
CHOMSKY: First of all, to begin with, it would mean that the government would not just bail out the banks, pour capital into them, but would exercise control. And control begins with inspection. So we find out what they're doing. And then you keep the viable parts. And if they're viable, they might just vote it into public control. I mean, the government could probably have, you know, bought AIG or Citigroup for far less than what they're paying them now. I mean, in a democratic society, the government would meet the public, and then there should be direct public engagement in what these institutions ought to do and how they ought to distribute their money, what the terms ought to be, and so on. I mean, they could be democratically run by the workforce, by the community.
JAY: But doesn't it—whether you use the word or not, requires a kind of nationalization. I mean, does the bank then become a publicly owned institution?
CHOMSKY: They become publicly owned institutions which serve the public and where decisions are made by the public. That's a long way off. You have to approach that in steps. When you think of nationalization, you know, the doctrinal system, with historical reasons, associates nationalization with, you know, some Big Brother taking it over, and the public follows orders. But that's not necessarily the way it's done. There are many nationalized institutions that are run quite efficiently. In fact, take, say, Chile, which is supposed to be the poster child for, you know, Thatcherite/Reaganite free-market economics. A large part of the economy's based on a nationalized, very efficient copper producer, Codelco, which was nationalized by Allende, but was so effective that during the Pinochet years it was never dismantled. Actually, it's being sort of chipped away at now, but it still provides the—I think it's still the biggest copper producer in the world, provides most of the government income. And elsewhere too there are highly successful nationalized firms. But nationalization is only one step towards democratization. The question is who manages them, who makes the decisions, who controls them. Now, in the case of nationalized institutions, it's still top-down, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, again, it's not a law of nature that institutions can't be democratically run.
JAY: What would it look like?
CHOMSKY: What would they look like?
JAY: Mm.
CHOMSKY: The participation by workers councils, by community organizations at meetings, discussions in which policies are made—that's how democracy's supposed to work. I mean, we're very far from that, I mean, even in the political system. Just take, say, primaries. Okay, the way our system works, candidates running for office, his campaign managers go to some town in New Hampshire and they set up a meeting, and the candidate comes in and says, "Here's what a nice guy I am. Vote for me." You know. And people either believe him or not and go home. Suppose we had a democratic system that worked the other way around. The people in the town of New Hampshire would get together at conferences, meetings, public organizations, and so on, and they would work out the policies that they would like to see. And then, if somebody's running for office, he can come; if they want, they could invite him, and he would listen to them. They would say, look, here's the policies we want you to implement; if you can do this, we'll allow you to represent us, but we'll recall you if you're not doing it.
JAY: Well, as you say, this is far off in terms of today's politics.
CHOMSKY: It's not that far off. It happens.
JAY: But at the national level, it's—.
CHOMSKY: At the national level it's far off. But let's take what's probably the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere, although people don't like to think of it that way, Bolivia. It's the poorest country in the hemisphere. It's the poorest in South America. It's had elections in the last couple of years in which the large majority of the population, who happen to be the most repressed people in the hemisphere, the indigenous population, have for the first time in 500 years entered the political arena, determined the policies they want, and elected a leader from their own ranks, a poor peasant. And the issues are very serious—their control over resources, economic justice, cultural rights, the complexities of a very diverse multi-ethnic society. The policies are pretty much coming out of the public themselves, and the president is supposed to implement them. Now, you know, nothing works that perfectly, all sorts of problems, but that's kind of the basic theme. Okay. That's functioning democracy. It's almost the opposite of the way our system works.
JAY: Well, in the next segment of our interview, let's talk about the future of democracy, or what we might call it, in the United States. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Professor Noam Chomsky.
Part 2
PAUL JAY: Welcome back to The Real News Network. We're at Cambridge at MIT with Professor Noam Chomsky. Thanks for joining us again. So, in the first segment of our interview, we talked about what a Chomsky-supported economic plan might look like, which has to do with considering the public stakeholders, I guess, and not just consumers, and what that might mean in terms of banking and democracy. And as we get into the issue of democracy, what do you think in fact is going to happen here? By that I mean the current plans for the financial sector, the auto sector, the general stimulus plan. One, do you think they're going to work? And if they're not going to work, what are we heading into in terms of the intensity of the crisis? And what does that mean in terms of American democracy?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I don't think anybody knows whether they're going to work. It's kind of shots in the dark. The general—and I don't have any particular insight—my guess is that it's not going to be the Great Depression, but that there may be some difficult years ahead and a lot of patchwork if the current policies are pursued. Now, the crucial core of current policies is keep the institutional structure stable: same structure to authority; domination, decision-making from the top. You know, public has a role. You know, it can be consumers. You can rent yourself to it—it's called getting a job.
JAY: And putting up the money to bail out.
CHOMSKY: And you can put up the money to bail it out, but you're not part of the decision-making apparatus. There's almost certainly—in fact, it's certain there will be some form of regulation. I mean, the deregulation mania of the past 30 years, based on really fundamentalist religious concepts about efficient markets, I mean, that's pretty much gone, and that went very fast. So take, say, Lawrence Summers, who's now the chief—practically the chief economic advisor, has got to rebuild the regulation system of the kind he destroyed a few years ago. He was in the lead in blocking Congress from regulating derivatives and other exotic instruments, under the influence of these pretty much smashed ideas about efficient markets and rational choice and so on. Alright, that much is really shattered, and there will be a reconstruction of some regulatory apparatus. But the history of this is pretty clear and understandable: regulatory systems tend to be taken over by the industries that they're regulating. That's the way it worked with the railroads and so on. And it's natural. You know, they have power, concentrated power, concentrated capital, enormous political influence—they pretty much run the government. So it ends up with them taking over control of the regulatory apparatus in their own interest. And it may work. You know. So, for example, during [what] many economists call the golden age of modern state capitalism, roughly 1950 to the mid-'70s, you know, there were no huge crises. There was a regulatory system, there was regulation of capital flows, exchange rates, and so on, and it led to the greatest peacetime growth in history. It changed in the mid-'70s when the economy moved towards deregulation and financialization, huge-amount increase in flows of speculative financial capital, mythologies about efficient markets. And there was growth, of course, but it was highly concentrated in a few pockets, and we've been through 30 years of relative stagnation in real wages for the majority of the population.
JAY: And how does any of that change? The stimulus [inaudible] stimulus plan [inaudible]
CHOMSKY: No. In fact, it's not—well, you know, it's interesting. There's a slight redistributive aspect in tax policy, very slight. I mean, it's called, you know, socialism, communism, and so on, but it barely gets back to where it was a few years ago. On the other hand, the best way to lead to a more egalitarian system would be, simply, permit unionization. Unions traditionally have not only improved the lives and benefits and, you know, working conditions and wages of workers, but they have also helped democratize society. They are one of the few means in which, you know, ordinary people can get together and make plans and influence public choices and so on. Now, that's not being pursued. In fact, it's kind of interesting: it's almost been driven out of our minds. There was a dramatic example of that a couple of weeks ago. President Obama wanted to show his solidarity with working people, so he went to Illinois and talked at an industrial plant. The choice was striking: he chose Caterpillar. Now, he had to do that over the objections of church and human rights groups because of the devastating effect that Caterpillar machines are having in the Israeli-occupied territories, where they're wiping out agricultural land and destroying all of the roads and villages and so on. But nobody, as far as I can see, noticed something even more dramatic. I mean, Caterpillar has a role in US labor history. Caterpillar was the first plant in generations to bring in scabs to destroy a strike. Now, that was, I think, 1988, sort of part of the Reagan attack on labor, but this was the first industrial installation to do it. Now, that's a huge, important fact. At that point, the United States was alone, along with South Africa, in permitting anything like this. And that essentially destroys the right of association for working people.
JAY: The Employee Free Choice Act, which is supposed to be something that's going to facilitate unionization, we haven't heard much about it since the election.
JAY: Didn't hear much about it. We didn't hear anything when Obama went to the plant, which is the symbol of destruction of labor by unfair practices, because this has been driven out of people's minds. The Employee Free Choice Act is always misrepresented. It's described as an effort to avoid secret elections. It's not that. It's an effort to allow workers to decide whether there should be secret elections, instead of leaving decisions entirely in the hands of employers, who can use card check if they want [inaudible] they can choose, you know, a secret election, but workers can too. That's what the act would now—. On the campaign trail, Obama talked about it, but it steadily receded into the background. And a much bigger step towards, you know, overcoming the radical redistribution to the top that took place in the last 30 years would simply be to ease the efforts at unionization. Now, you know, every recent president since Reagan has attacked this. I mean, Reagan straight out told employers, "We're not going to apply the law." So firing of workers—legal firing—for organizing I think tripled, according to Business Week, during the Reagan years. When Clinton came along it was basically a different device—it's called NAFTA. NAFTA provided employers with a wonderful means to prevent organizing: just put up a big sign saying "Mexico transfer operation." It's illegal, but if the government's an outlaw government, you can get away with it. And the Bush years we don't have to talk about. But you could reverse this, and that would be a significant step towards not only slightly reversing the enormous redistribution of income to the top, but also democratizing the society by providing mechanisms by which people can act politically in their own interest. But, you know, that's so far at the margins it's barely being discussed. And things like, say, stakeholder control of institutions, workers in the community, it's not much below the surface in people's minds. It is being pushed aside. Now, if you look back to the 1930s, when maybe the closest—it's not the same, but rather similar issues were arising, what really struck fear into the hearts of the business world were the sit-down strikes. That's when business started talking about the hazard facing industrialists and the rising political power of the masses and so on. Now, what's so threatening about a sit-down strike? Well, you know, a sit-down strike is just five seconds before the idea emerges, "Why should we sit here? Why not run the factory? We can do it, arguably better than the managers can, 'cause we know how it works." Now, that's frightening. And it's beginning to happen. Just a month ago there was a sit-down strike in a Chicago plant, Republic Windows and Floors, I think it was called. You know, the multinational that owned it wanted to close it down or move it somewhere or something. And the workers, they demonstrated it and protested, you know, and so on, but finally there was a sit-down strike. Well, they sort of half-won; they didn't completely win. A lot of them kept their jobs. A different company bought it. But it didn't move on to the next step. The next step is, "Well, why shouldn't we run the plant, along with the community, which cares about it, and maybe a broader community, which also cares, in the general public?" Well, you know, those are issues that really ought to be discussed.
JAY: In the next segment of our interview, let's take this conversation of what American democracy might look like in the next few years, especially if this economic crisis continues to unravel. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Noam Chomsky.
Will we learn in time, with the production of each new bomb, biological weapon, or cancerous chemical by the right wing U.S. Empire made up of Republicans and Democrats, as well as, Protestants, Catholics, Christian/Judaeo and duplicitous others -- "That our only legitimate hope of survival is to prize what remains of the Earth and foster its dependent renewal"?
Misinformed in our right to know, many of us think we inherit the land from our fathers when actually we only borrow it from our children; where what will they do when the last tree is cut and the clean air, pure water and land is all poisoned?
Most of us are unaware even our religiosity is made relative, in that Emperor Constantine the Great outlawed books such as those of Greece that advanced the mind of man. He commissioned a single Eusebius, to edit the original religious books to those that enhanced Constantine's aim to take over both church and state.
In so doing Eusebius, united paganism into Christianity almost overnight by removing at least 33 percent of the First Church's vast works and keeping those with the pagan motifs, symbols and rituals, which they had been familiar for over 300 years. The 81 books Eusebius left remaining, which later came to be known as the original King James Version of the Bible, were hand-picked by him and adopted by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. And likewise with the Protestant Reformation, the “‘Authorized’ King James Version” of 1611 was selected from Eusebius's prior compilation.
Then in 1885 the Archbishop of Canterbury removed 15 other books (the apocrypha) leaving most Protestant bibles with 66 books. And so with the masses of both Catholic and Protestant from Constantine's arrangement it worked, even unto this day. But a few others have sought the wisdom of I Thessalonians 5:21 where it says, "Prove all things; hold fast, that which is good." And it was Edmond Burke who said “All that is necessary for evil to advance is for good men to do nothing.”
Subsequently had these acumen been acted upon it would have redefined our understanding and changed the destiny of Bush's Reaganomics (Capitalism's trickle down effect) and aggressive preemptive strikes actuating further that evil desire to take over and enslave the world, not unlike Constantine's takeover of Rome and more.
Inasmuch the richest 400 people's income in the U.S. wouldn't have increased to an average of $250 million a year while millions (the least of them) are thirsty, cold, hungry, sick, can't find a job and dying. Whereto in his eight years just as Reagan doubled the national debt, Bush increased it to $10 trillion-plus, deceptively benefiting a wealthy few, it would not have happened for we would have known better.
Too, instead of the U.S. Empire bombing and slaughtering millions of innocent people in at least 60 falsely presented interventions of war since World War II (too lengthy to name) we would have been leading the way for humanity, in a positive sense, to work together for the well being of each other. Instead the right wing war profiteers kept most Americans thinking it was the right thing to do, when in actuality only an elite few had a clue.
But greed is an immoral and shortsighted conception without any practical reason -- save evil itself, as shown by the insistent Empire ravishing the universe's indefensible, which is neither compatible with Christianity, Democracy nor a living ecosystem.
Whereas Iraq alone is now suffering more than a million deaths, and there continues to be no job shortage on the need for gravediggers either here at home or abroad. While would we seek to sustain Earth's existence it could be more positive for our grandchildren's grandchildren.
They are using fear/mafia type tactics to shut us up and discourage any and all reporters and peoples from speaking out or acquiring proof of what they dishonestly do.
They are attempting to bully truthseekers , any non government sanctioned reporter and peaceful protesters into silence.
This did not work in the 60's and it will not work now.
A rose is a rose is a rose. But a conservative is a libertarian is a liberal. When labels confuse rather than clarify, they should be dropped.
RESOLVED: That we use political labels as little as possible when describing people's ideologies. When somebody asks me, "Are you a liberal? Conservative? Libertarian? I answer, "What's the issue?" Categorizing someone's ideas as either "liberal" or "conservative" is often used to avoid real thinking about actual issues.
I refrain from referring to political positions as either "left" and "right" in my writing. I generally use the word "liberal" to describe a person's spending habits, as in the case of a "liberal" spender--one who is generous or possibly overly lavish. I also occasionally refer to a person who is open-minded and tolerant of other people's views as being "liberal" minded. "Conservative" on the other hand, seems best used in the context of investing--I call a person who is prudent and moderate in his choice of investments a "conservative investor" (as opposed to "speculative")--though it also seems reasonable to describe one who wants to conserve time-honored values as a "conservative." Not surprisingly, I like to be called "liberal" or "conservative" depending on the issue, the action or the mind-set. I dislike being called either if it is a method for throwing me into a convenient ideological box.
The three main reasons why labels are best avoided in political discussions are: (1) Labels are often an inaccurate description of a person's or group's views. (2) Labels often become pejorative terms used in character assassination (3) Labels put people into political boxes and keep them there, preventing individuals from objectively considering alternative opinions and changing their minds.
Obsolescence, Left and Right
The terms "left" and "right" came into use after the French revolution. In the French National Assembly, the "liberals" sat to the left of the president's chair, the "moderates" in the center, and the "conservatives" to the right. Those on the left were designated "liberals" and "radicals" because they wanted to make major reforms in politics and the economy. Their opponents on the right became "conservatives" and "reactionaries" because they were aristocratic nationalists who wanted to return to the status quo of the ancien regime. Those in the center were the "moderates" who were looking for a compromise. This political spectrum has often been used in describing the signers of our Declaration of Independence. Still, though Thomas Jefferson has often been called a classical liberal, calling him a left-winger seems out of place.
This dichotomy may have made sense during the American and the French revolutions. But once the principles of freedom and constitutional law were established (in America, at least), the "liberals" gradually became "conservatives" by defending the new status quo of liberty and limited government. Turnabout being fair play, in the 20th century the collectivists who pushed to eliminate economic freedom and expand the role of the state became the "liberals" or "progressives." Having adopted the favorable titles of "progressive," "modern" and "advanced," they scorned the opposition as "right-wing" and "reactionary." Thus, in the twisted world of political labeling; what the 19th century liberals supported -- free enterprise capitalism and laissez faire government -- the 20th-century liberals opposed by pushing for big government and interventionism in the marketplace.
Label confusion has reigned ever since, and the political spectrum has become a rhetorical version of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine. The 19th century liberal ideals became the policies of some (but by no means all) 20th century conservatives.
Marxists, Communists and other international collectivists became the "radical left," while the Fascists of the 1930s in Italy and Nazi Germany were designated "right wingers" simply because they opposed the "Reds." But the only difference in their politics was nationalism vs. internationalism. The fascists were every bit as collectivist as Stalin.
Believers in economic and political liberty had a hard time dealing with label stereotypes in the 1950s. They opposed the New Deal and wanted a return to laissez faire, so they were dubbed "reactionary conservatives." Because they were ardent "anti-Communists," they were linked closely with the Fascists and Nazi-era "rightists." Many conservatives responded by saying they were "old fashioned liberals," but this didn't mean anything to anyone in the torrent of nebulous labels.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I resented these and other pejorative labels. It was nearly impossible to convince anyone of the virtues of free enterprise capitalism, laissez faire government, and opposition to communism if my views were always called "reactionary," "old fashioned' and "Neanderthal." The conservatives responded in kind by calling the New Deal liberals "radicals," "pseudo progressives' and "communist sympathizers." Only the "moderates" sounded "responsible," and depending on their position on an issue, they usually got hit by traffic going both ways. There was a lot of bad blood, and very little sharing of ideas. Conservatives refused to read John Kenneth Galbraith and The Washington Post, and liberals eschewed Milton Friedman and National Review.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the labels became more complex and less enlightening as the political stereotypes began to crack. We now witness dictatorships of the left and the right, market economies of the left and right, revolutions of the left and right, and totalitarianisms of the left and right. We have socialist left-wing parties privatizing public services, and conservative rightwing governments imposing tariffs and higher taxes. We have extreme liberal Democrats supporting deregulation of the airlines and decontrol of natural gas. We have the nation's most liberal newspaper, The New York Times, coming out against the minimum wage. We have a right-wing anarchocapitalist endorsing radical left-wing land reform in Latin America and legalization of drugs in the United States.
In the Middle East we have right-wing Christians killing left-wing terrorists. Soviet opponents of perestroika and glasnost are called "conservatives" by the American press, as are South African racists. Political analysts are having a devil of a time labeling an old "liberal" publication, The New Republic, because its views are no longer predictable. Politicians are now starting to run as individuals and not as members of a political party. And what's this about conservative lobbyists joining hands with liberal lobbyists to fight IMF funding? None of this makes sense if we insist on dividing the world into the standard left-right divisions.
But, alas, instead of scrapping the entire phony nomenclature, everyone seems to be making up more labels. There's the New Right and the Old Right, the Southern Conservative Democrats and the Northern Liberal Democrats, the Neo-Conservatives and the Paleo-Libertarians, the Post-Keynesians, the Neo-Marxists, and the Neo-Liberals. The list goes on and on, growing like topsy and confusing everyone except the most stalwart who spend all day reading everything from every point on the political compass.
Fortunately, some editors and publishers have recently recognized the misleading and counterproductive nature of labeling and have largely discarded it. Reason magazine is one example. Eschewing ad hominem political tags, Reason analyzes issues on their own merits, not based on who espouses them. For the Scrap-Heap of History
It's time to make a change in our political lexicon. The national press and the political analysts need to stop using the outdated and misleading leftwing liberal/right-wing conservative dichotomy. When someone's philosophy is labeled and compartmentalized, thinking stops and name-calling begins. Once an economist is labeled a Marxist, only the Marxists listen. When a political analyst writes a column called "On the Right," no one except the "right-wing" faithful reads it. Dividing ideology into camps on two sides of the political spectrum tends to elevate both sides to an equal status, as if both policies hold equal sway and are equally justifiable. Then the moderates whisper, "Perhaps we should compromise!" We are left with the erroneous impression that "the extreme left is just as bad as the extreme right." Categorizing philosophies leads toward political nihilism and away from the desire to find the truth.
In short, it is high time that political pundits and the national media put away their cold-war mentality and endorse a new standard where each person stands on individual merit and not in some political box. Left and right, liberal and conservative, radical and reactionary--all are words of the past that divide people. I say scrap them. When adjectives are absolutely necessary, let's at least try to be more specific. Use adjectives and nouns that are meaningful, accurate and unbiased. If we don't, the war of political ideas will be decided on the basis of an axiom of my colleague, Larry Abraham: "Those who control the adjectives win."
Let's begin by considering Context One: Human Nature in more depth. Entire libraries have been written on the subject of human nature, but for our practical purposes those which probe humanity's "default settings" such as Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis are the most useful.
Although we can slice and dice complex human responses in hundreds of ways (for instance, Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities ), for the purposes of a stripped-down practical analysis we can group our "default responses" into four basic categories: inertia, fear/panic, casting our lot with a "Big Man"/leader or fatalism/giving up.
Since we cannot sustain the emotionally charged state of fear/panic ("fight or flight") for long, decisions made in this instinctive mode tend to be rash, hasty, impulsive and poorly planned. Thus the key is to recognize this mode and consciously avoid making decisions with long-term consequences while in the grip of this "instant response" survival-mode.
Humans, like our relatives the chimpanzees, are social animals. Like chimps, we are "wired" to form groups and select/follow leaders who reach their high status by offering something back to the community: protection, "potlatch" type sharing of wealth, etc. We will examine this political/social response to crisis in a later section.
But humans also have the capacity to be alone, like our other primate relatives the orangutans. Thus withdrawing from the community has deep roots in human nature and history.
Being creatures of habit—and habits are a survival mechanism, for why change anything when "everything's working"?-- humans prefer the status quo until crisis forces us to change. The underlying state in this inertia/attachment to the status quo is complacency, which acts as a cognitive and emotional "attractor" or trap, as does fatalism/withdrawal.
Complacency and Fatalism
Complacency and fatalism are both seductive "cognitive traps" and emotional "attractors" which we have to avoid if we are to think clearly. Each is an "attractor" because each is highly appealing for several fundamental reasons.
1. Human nature veers between these basic social/anti-social emotions: complacency/status quo (inertia) and fatalism/resignation (withdrawal).
2. History reveals these attractors (complacency and fatalism) were active in previous great declines/collapses, such as the Roman Empire circa 400-576 C.E. (see below)
3. Humans prefer simplistic "answers" to challenges/problems, and a blind faith in the status quo or resignation both fit the bill.
Complacency is best understood as what's expressed in the phrase, "Don't worry, it will sort itself out on its own." In stable "normal" times, this complacency is usually rewarded; various corrective feedback loops within complex systems kick in and problems are met with countermeasures that act to restabilize the system.
But in very dynamic eras, destabilizing factors overwhelm the usual corrective feedback mechanisms, and things do not sort themselves out. Dramatic, even radical action must be taken. In these times, complacency is not a practical or helpful strategy: it is a soothing but dangerous cognitive trap which guarantees the believer will be unprepared for the challenges just ahead.
In the cognitive trap of fatalism, we recognize the risks/dangers of the situation but feel helpless to correct or solve the problems. In this trap, we remove ourselves from action and give up, dooming ourselves to being swept up by whatever passing winds arise.
The goal here is to avoid these traps, analyze the challenges we face clearly, and then plan out a simple but interconnected three-part strategy for not just survival but prosperity and security.
Complacency can take many forms. For instance, a person who has prepared themselves for a doomsday collapse of civilization, i.e. "The end of the world as we know it" (TEOTWAWKI) may well find themselves ill-prepared for an equally probable slow decline in social cohesion and living standards. That is, living conditions in highly developed nations may descend not to a Collapse of Civilization into Chaos but to a Third World level of stable impoverishment.
This highlights the need to ground our analyses and expectations in history—not because it repeats, but because it rhymes. No one can know the future, so we must be cautious about putting all our eggs in one basket/scenario. Prudence suggests always maintaining a skeptical point of view: what if we're wrong? What's our Plan B/alternative strategy?
Fatalism is similarly devious. People who withdraw from society are certainly taking action, but they have surrendered the opportunity to influence the outcome positively: that is fatalism of the first order.
If you're reading this, then you have already advanced beyond the naïve complacency of "don't worry, everything will work itself out" which is mesmerizing large segments of our citizenry. You may well be a member of The Remnant—more on that later.
In the video below "Troy From West Virginia" saw it fit to make a phone call to 9/11 Family Member Bob McIlvaine and repeatedly call him a piece of trash because he has a different opinion on the subject. He even had the nerve to say that he was faking his tears over his dead son.
I shudder to think to think that Troy considers himself a patriot, good thing he isn't in a position of power, because a patriot should be aware that we have the right in this country to think whatever the hell we please, without the fear of persecution, and it's a right that real patriots died for. If he acts like this on a personal level, just think what BS actions he would take as a politician to silence the voices he doesn't like.
Despite who is right and who is wrong, the people on the side of this debate following closest to the brand of patriotism that the founders exhibited are the truth seekers...
On 9/11 the Bush administration declared a State of Emergency (SOE), which was formally proclaimed on September 14, 2001, and extended by Bush repeatedly thereafter, most recently on August 28, 2008.1 Under cover of this SOE, Bush secretly enacted many extreme measures, ranging from suspension of habeas corpus to preparations for martial law in America; all these were undertaken as part of secret so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) procedures associated with the SOE, and first instituted on 9/11.2and3
The National Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms so detested by Vice-President Cheney, requires specifically that
Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated. (50 U.S.C. 1622 (2002)4
Last fall one of us appealed on the Internet for the Democrats in Congress to take this statutorily required step, and also to learn what secret COG measures were being enacted under the SOE.5 There was no response.
In February 2009 we sent to officials in Washington the following appeal to consider terminating the State of Emergency. The appeal was sent to President Obama's staff in the White House, and to the staff of Nancy Pelosi, Peter DeFazio, and Dennis Kucinich in Congress. Almost two months have passed, and there has not yet been any response from the addressees.
We are now appealing to the readers of this post to contact their representatives in Congress, and demand that they consider the termination of the State of Emergency, as is required of them by law.
I used to rule the world Seas would rise when I gave the word Now in the morning I sleep alone Sweep the streets I used to own
I used to roll the dice Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes Listen as the crowd would sing "Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"
One minute I held the key Next the walls were closed on me And I discovered that my castles stand Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand
Coldplay – Viva La Vida
America has squandered the human sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears of two generations in less than seventy years. We have been an independent country for 226 years. From 1783 until 1946 was an unrelenting upward trajectory for the beacon of the free world. With the end of World War II, America was the last country standing. Germany and Japan were in shambles. Russia had lost millions of citizens, with Stalin about to murder millions more. Great Britain was a shell of its former self. The American Empire had been born. We were the manufacturer to the world. We rebuilt Europe and Japan. Our military was dominant. We made the best automobiles. We built 41,000 miles of national highway over two decades. In 1946, one in three U.S. workers was employed in the manufacturing industry. Today, less than one in ten workers makes something.
According to Stars and Stripes a human bio-weapon has been convicted of refusing to deploy to Iraq.
Although the article draws no such inferences, it appears obvious to me that since his severe back pain and active tuberculosis would have rendered him unable to perform other military functions, the officer was to be used as a human bio-weapon to spread TB among the Iraqi population.
Ever since infecting Native Americans with smallpox back in the pioneer days, the United States has maintained an interest in biological weapons, as witness the anthrax attacks which allegedly used weaponized anthrax from a government laboratory.
As with our use of depleted uranium weapons, the fact that our own troops were also likely to be exposed seems to have been of little or no consequence to our military.
In an unrelated story, the Miami Herald says that a Veterans Administration hospital in Florida may have exposed thousands of veterans to HIV and hepatitis.
Although biological warfare is not uncommon in military history, this may be the first time that a human bio-weapon has ever refused to deploy.
Dear (Sen. John F. Kerry, Chairman of Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee),
It is imperative that we hold oversight hearings on the Afghanistan conflict. Before committing more troops and taxpayer dollars to Afghanistan, we must first have a national conversation to address the many questions surrounding this war.
At a time when our country faces a credibility crisis around the world, record casualties in Afghanistan, and an economic meltdown at home, oversight hearings are needed now more than ever. The government must examine how foreign policy is being executed in Afghanistan, while helping to alleviate our financial strains.
We urge the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold oversight hearings in order to rethink our policy toward Afghanistan and uphold the nation's system of checks and balances.
This is an article that was sent to me in an e-mail from a friend who asked not to be named When I used it.
I believe this says it well and expresses my thoughts on the matter perfectly.
Dear friends,
I have followed the election of Obama on TV, and I see all the expectations and hopes of the people. Many of you have the same hopes. Of course I also have hopes. But not concerning Obama. I hope that people finally find out that it is better to have faith, especially in oneself. This is a time of 'do it yourself'. It is not a time to rely on some politicians with the hope that they will solve your problems. Do not forget that democracy in its origin means that the power is with the people and not with the rich or elected representants only. Do you have the impression that you have the power?
I have found that when debating people on the subject of government complicity in 9/11 they very often seem to be referring to one of the 48 myths about conspiracy theories discussed in your article, Debunking Myths on Conspiracy Theories, almost as if it was their playbook. This of course makes it a very good debating tool, as you can just say, well thanks for bringing up debunked myth #16 about conspiracy theories, next. An example of this can be found in the comments of a short post I put together for this blog in which I questioned whether Noam Chomsky had indeed dispelled 9/11 conspiracies with sheer logic. I would hazard a guess that type of result brings a smile to your writing team.
In 1899, one year after completing what many consider to be the first real Black Study, his magisterial sociological analysis, The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois addressed the American Academy in Philadelphia and proposed what might also be considered the first real Black Research Agenda.
To the white scholars gathered in Philadelphia, Du Bois proposed a path-breaking study of the Negro people:
The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of people ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation. If they miss this opportunity—if they do the work in a slipshod, unsystematic manner—if they dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day, they do far more than hurt the good name of the American people; they hurt the cause of scientific truth the world over. . .”
By David Swanson
and E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
are the most useful.
), for the purposes of a stripped-down practical analysis we can group our "default responses" into four basic categories: inertia, fear/panic, casting our lot with a "Big Man"/leader or fatalism/giving up.
