It’s not “because of 9/11″ or to “stop terrorism,” as President Obama now says. The war is neither just nor legal: the real reason for it seems to be the long-standing U.S. policy of control over the largest oil-producing region of the world. And not because we need the oil ourselves; the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home. Most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa. But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the European Union and East Asia (China and Japan). That has been American policy for a long time. The National Security Advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977-81), Zbigniew Brzezinski (he was also a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign), observed that control of Mideast energy provides the US with “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia, an idea of American government planners that goes back to the end of World War II, in 1945.

The war in Afghanistan, to which President Obama sent 30,000 additional US troops just before accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got exactly ninety-two words in his more than hour-long State of the Union Address last month. Last year he called Afghanistan “the central front of the War on Terrorism.” This year it is revealed that he is conducting a secret war in neighboring Pakistan, a much bigger and more modern country, with two-thirds of the population of the United States and a numerically bigger army – but potentially a more dangerous road-block to American control of the entire Mideast. The vast region from Palestine to Pakistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa – what the US military calls “Central Command” – contains much of the world’s oil and gas resources. Over 60 years ago, the State Department described the oil reserves of the region as “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” The same factors enter into the conflicts over pipelines from Central Asia: US planners want to ensure that they go to the West, not the East, and that the pipelines should follow a complicated path to avoid Russia and Iran, so as to ensure US control.

President Obama sharply escalated President Bush’s war in Afghanistan, even though Western-run polls show that about 75 percent of Afghans are in favor of negotiations among Afghans – including both the US puppet government and the Taliban, whom the US calls terrorists (or, as Secretary of State Clinton said recently, “Really bad guys”). There are now more than 110,000 troops under U.S. command in Afghanistan, including more than 34,000 European troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer informed a NATO meeting that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally have to protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system. So the strongest armies in the world are “fighting terrorism” by killing people in villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan requires a regional solution instead, in which the neighboring countries – Iran, India, Russia, China – work out a settlement and Afghans work something out among themselves. There is a significant peace movement in Afghanistan. Afghans themselves should make the decision about when and how the US and NATO – who have no right to be there – should leave.

Meanwhile the US military continues to occupy Iraq, where the US has just announced that it will double the size of its embassy – already by far the largest in the world. Iraq has the second largest known reserves of oil in the world (after Saudi Arabia). The US is also killing people in Yemen and Somalia. A look at the map will show why. These countries are on the approaches to the Middle East. The US insists on controlling by various means the entire region within a 1500-mile radius of the Persian Gulf. “Terrorists,” according to the US government, are those who oppose the US occupation.

Israel, America’s stationary aircraft-carrier in the Mideast, sent US-supplied aircraft to attack the Palestinians in Gaza, the world’s largest prison-camp, in December of 2008. They killed more than thirteen hundred people. Since then Israel has continued to blockade Gaza. AWARE Films will host a presentation by scholar-activist Robert Naiman at 2pm Sunday 14 February at the Champaign Public Library. Naiman will discuss the Gaza Freedom March and his December 2009 trip to the Middle East. Naiman coordinates Just Foreign Policy and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. The talk is free and open to all. Join us for refreshments and after-talk discussion. For information call 352-2803.

Although known world-wide as “Bush’s poodle,” former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has had to testify before a commission investigating US-UK plotting to invade Iraq, while demonstrators chanted, “Liar! Murder!” Nothing similar has happened in the US to those who planned the illegal war or instituted the US torture of prisoners that accompanied it. And the Obama administration – which has not brought the torture regime to an end – continues to defend Bush administration criminals. This week the Obama administration cleared lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee of professional misconduct for crafting memos that justified water-boarding and other forms of torture. Protest John Yoo, War Criminal on Monday 8 February at 11am in Chicago in front of the Union League Club 65 W. Jackson Blvd., between Dearborn & Clark .

For a discussion of why the US government wages war and misrepresents its reasons for it, see the informative book A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, and the new graphic novel A People’s History of American Empire, by historian Howard Zinn, who died last week at the age of 87.

THE WAR WILL CONTINUE until more Americans speak up loudly and reject it. A majority of Americans do reject it, but for the moment that is not enough for our government. If you are appalled that the U.S. is conducting an unjustified war in the Middle East – and misrepresenting the reason for it – call your Congressional representatives. Congressman Tim Johnson, Senator Roland Burris, and Senator Dick Durbin can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Tell them that the U.S. has no business killing people in the Middle East for resisting our invasion and occupation. (Your protest makes a difference: Congressman Johnson, who voted for the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, now says that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote for any more funding for war in the Middle East.)

Resistance in the military is growing. This week the US military decided to transfer to Iraq the court martial of Iraq war veteran Spc. Marc Hall – for writing a song. Hall has been jailed at Fort Stewart, Georgia, since December 11 because he wrote a song called “Stop Loss” about the practice of involuntarily extending military members’ contracts. You can support him by calling Ft. Stewart Public Affairs Chief, Kevin Larson at 912-435-9879. Tell him that (1) you are opposed to holding Specialist Marc Hall’s court martial in Iraq and (2) all charges against him should be dropped. If you are a veteran, mention that during your call.

You can also join a local peace group that is working to end the war in Afghanistan. In Champaign-Urbana, one local peace group is AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort , members and friends of which produced this leaflet for the 6 February 2010 “Main Event” – our monthly peace demonstration in downtown Champaign, at the corner of Main and Neil Streets. We meet every Sunday 5-6:30pm in the Wahlfeldt Room in the basement of the old post office in Urbana. Visitors and new members are welcome.

AWARE is also happy to provide speakers and/or discussion leaders on the Mideast war and related issues. Write . AWARE is composed of people opposed to the war, but it is not affiliated with any other group or political party.

AWARE presents AWARE on the Air each Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, cable channel 6. Each week we bring you comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government’s betrayal of our democratic principles.

END THE U. S. WAR AGAINST THE MIDDLE EAST
BRING ALL UNITED STATES TROOPS HOME
STOP PAYING FOR WAR FROM PALESTINE TO PAKISTAN

In the presidential elections of 1952, 1968, and 2000, Republican candidates did well by running against the wars being conducted or recently concluded by incumbent Democratic administrations. Eisenhower’s “I will go to Korea,” Nixon’s “secret plan to end the Vietnam war,” and Bush’s opposition to “nation building” (referring to the Clinton-Gore war in the Balkans) all garnered them votes. It’s possible that a more honest debate on the Long War in the Mideast (it’s not about stopping terrorism) may occur because the Republican wing of our one-party government (it’s one business party) may see it as in its short term interest in 2012.

Of course there have been for some time principled opponents of the Mideast war among Republicans, notably the paleoconservatives around the journals “American Conservative,” “Chronicles,” and the website Antiwar.com. See Bill Kauffman’s excellent book “Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism” (2008). And add now the Ron Paulists – their critique of the war is as clear and cogent as Dennis Kucinich’s and has a larger following – and even a not insubstantial group among the Tea-partiers.

The Democrats’ sell-out on the war has been clear since the Kerry campaign – and their betrayal once they got control of the Congress. Obama sold himself to our rulers with the promise that he could bring the dissidents – primarily the anti-war movement – back in, and he largely succeeded. (The segments of “The Audacity of Hope” on the Vietnam war makes particularly instructive reading on this point.)

An effective anti-war movement in the coming year(s) will have to be marshaled against the Democrats’ policies, and of course against the principal commitments of the Republican party as well. But in the short term we might find some Republicans who claim to be fellow-travelers on the road to a principled peace. We shouldn’t immediately try to kick them to the curb, if only because they’ll provide us with opportunities to talk to more people.

But there is a danger: “a striking division between elite ideas and broad public opinion…” Obama is supposed to have taken care of that, as he advertised he would in the Audacity of Hope. But there are problems — shown by the fact that in both foreign and domestic policy the ideas of the US public — however inchoate — are substantially and increasingly to the left of either party. And it’s the job of those parties to constrain and contain those ideas.

In desperation, we can contend that that “broad public opinion” is benighted and reactionary and therefore condemnable as “neo-isolationism” (“They’re tea-partiers!”), as the article does:

a return to the inwardness [sic] of the post-World War I years, when the
country refused to join the League of Nations. Even as intellectuals call for
cosmopolitanism, more and more Americans are declaring themselves
anti-outsourcing, anti-foreign-products, anti-immigration,
anti-international-law — and pro-protectionism.

We can’t have that, but what can’t be done, within the limits of allowable debate, is to examine the nature and sources of US policy (e.g. the word “oil” does not appear) — or its real effects.

To do so would be to see that in the US a rapacious moneyed elite — whose interests not only differ from but contradict those of the majority at home and abroad — maintain their power by misleading the domestic population (“manufacture of consent”), whom they exploit as they exploit the rest of the world, in conflict and cooperation with other similar elites. USG insistence on control of the Mideast, and its willingness to commit murder and cause havoc there, are part of that conflict — with incalculable results.

Today more than 130 people are killed and more than 500 wounded in attacks in US-occupied Baghdad. In the streets of US-occupied Kabul, Obama is burnt in effigy while crowds chant “Death to America!” Meanwhile, the US dismisses an international report on Israeli crimes in the occupied territories. Thus the terrorism that is the US excuse for invasion and occupation in the Middle East
is maintained.

From May ‘68: “le vote ne change rien; la lutte continue.”

The basis of a democratic state is liberty;
which, according to the common opinion of men,
can only be enjoyed in such a state; this they
affirm to be the great end of every democracy.

–Aristotle, POLITICS 1317a40f.

[1] HOW DID LIBERTY GET INTO THE RICH MEN’S CONSTITUTION?

We’ve heard the words so often that we don’t seem to need to think too much
about what they mean: our government exists to “establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defense, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”
(Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, 1787).

We don’t notice for example, that that’s not just a list but a progression: if
we establish a just society, we “insure … tranquility” (peacefulness) inside
the country (domestically), so that we can then defend ourselves in common
against those outside; and peace inside and outside a just society can allow us
to work to make everyone better off — to “promote [that is] the general
welfare” — with the goal of securing what makes for liberty and what liberty
brings us — “the blessings of liberty” — for us and our families.

We might be surprised that liberty comes at the end of the progression, not at
the beginning, where we might expect it. But the framers of the Constitution
thought of the blessings of liberty as an achievement, not a given, for all that
we had a right to them. They were men of the Enlightenment, the great movement
of liberatory thought of the 18th century, which drew on the intellectual riches
of the past — ancient, medieval and modern: the Hebrew Bible, the New
Testament, the wisdom of Greece and Rome, and the thinkers of the thousand years
that followed.

But they were hardly dealing in the abstract. The people who wrote the 1787
Constitution, now in force in the United States, were well-to-do men dealing
with a practical challenge. A Massachusetts farmer named Daniel Shays, a
veteran of the Revolutionary War, had turned up at a county court house a year
before to object to a rich man’s foreclosure on Shays’ farm. And Shays brought
some friends who were in the same predicament. And they brought their guns.

Shays knew how to use his. He had fought in the battles of Bunker Hill,
Ticonderoga, Saratoga and Stony Point. At the end of the war, he was awarded a
ceremonial sword by the Marquis de Lafayette, for distinguished service.

When he and his friends arrived art he court, the Massachusetts authorities
called out a private militia, and when the militia arrived, many joined Shays.
Those who had wealth and power in the newly independent united states –
governed then by the Articles of Confederation — concluded that they needed a
stronger government to defend their property.

The result was the secret and technically treasonous assembly in Philadelphia in
the hot summer of 1787 (the members of which had sworn allegiance to the
Articles of Confederation and were licensed only to amend them).

Our best source for the deliberations over the Constitution (and its principal
author), James Madison, notes in his diary that the primary purpose of the new
government was “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” –
i.e., to protect the rich against Daniel Shays and his friends.

Madison and his colleagues may have been self-interested but they were not
stupid. Unlike many modern intellectuals, they had not cast aside the
accumulated wisdom of the human race, but had respect for it and tried to apply
it to their own circumstances. The government that they designed was based on
the principles of the Enlightenment and two thousand years of thought about the
best state of a commonwealth.

We today — most of us — have learned not to despise people on the basis of
their race, religion, gender, or place of national origin, but we still seem to
be willing to condescend to those who have the unfortunate characteristic of
being dead. We discount what they thought and said as if they were children,
not as adult as we are. I think that leads us to miss a lot, at the very least.
The framers, as men of the Enlightenment, were not that way.

In reaction against the despotic state structures of Renaissance Europe, the
Enlightenment “asserts [liberty] as its major idea — an opposition to all but
the most restricted and minimal forms of state intervention in personal and
social life. This conclusion is quite familiar, however the reasoning that leads
to it is less familiar and, I think, a good deal more important than the
conclusion itself.

“One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in
Wilhelm Von Humboldt’s ‘Limits of State Action’, written in 1792 … In his view
the state tends to ‘make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends,
overlooking his individual purposes.’ And, since humans are in their essence
free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a
profoundly anti-human institution. That is, its actions, its existence, are
ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human potential
in its richest diversity — hence incompatible with what Humboldt [and many
others] saw as the true end of man. (And for the record I think that this is an
accurate description.)

“…For Humboldt [and the Enlightenment in general] humanity’s central attribute
is its freedom. ‘To enquire and to create, these are the centers around which
all human pursuits more or less directly revolve.’ But he goes on to say that
‘all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the inner life of the
soul and can never be produced by external and artificial contrivances. The
cultivation of the understanding, as of any man’s other faculties, is generally
achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or his own methods of using the
discoveries of others’…

“He says, ‘Man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he
does; and the laborer who tends the garden is perhaps in a truer sense its
owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits.’

“And since truly human action is that which flows from inner impulse, ‘it seems
as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men
who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius
and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their
character, and exult and refine their pleasures; and so humanity would be
ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often
go to degrade it’…

“‘Freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the
pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in
producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free
choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into
his very being, but remains alien to his true nature. He does not perform it
with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.’

“‘And if someone acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or
instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies
and power,’ he says, ‘we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.’

“For Humboldt then, man is born to enquire and create, and when a man or a child
chooses to enquire or create out of its own free choice, then he becomes, in his
own terms, ‘an artist rather than a tool of production or a well-trained
parrot.’ This is the essence of [the Enlightenment] concept of human nature.”

[2] IF THE CONSTITUTION IS ABOUT LIBERTY, WHY DO WE HAVE SO LITTLE OF IT?

To come to the present — Where, in our experience, is that concept most often
violated? I suggest our liberty is lost most notably in our work life, at our
jobs. Our work is in the first place what we freely create with the talents of
our head and hands. In this sense people want to work — indeed it is work
like that that distinguishes us from other animals, with whom what appears as
work is instinct. For us it is a matter of liberty.

In the modern world however we have to give over control of what makes us human,
our work, to someone else’s control. I can have a job — I can be employed — if
and only if it makes some rich person richer than it makes me. And in that job
I have little if any democratic control.

“[In] the modern era, economic, political and ideological systems have
increasingly been taken over by vast institutions of private tyranny that are
about as close to the totalitarian ideal as any that humans have so far
constructed. ‘Within the corporation,’ political economist Robert Brady wrote
half a century ago, ‘all policies emanate from the control above. In the
[conjunction] of this power to determine policy with the execution thereof, all
authority necessarily proceeds from the top to the bottom and all responsibility
from the bottom to the top. This is, of course, the inverse of “democratic”
control; it follows the structural conditions of dictatorial power.’”

This situation runs directly counter to the ideas that animated the framers.
Another Enlightenment thinker, Simon Linguet, wrote twenty years before the
Constitution,

“It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm
laborers to till the soil, whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to
construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to
those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying
them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in
order to get from him permission to enrich him… What effective gain has the
suppression of slavery brought to them? … He is free, you say. Ah, that is his
misfortune. These men, it is said, have no master. They have one, and the most
terrible, the most imperious of masters: that is, need. It is this that that
reduces them to the most cruel dependence.”

“And if there is something degrading to human nature in the idea of bondage, as
every spokesman for the Enlightenment would insist, then it would follow that a
new emancipation must be awaited, what [another Enlightenment figure] referred
to as the ‘third and last emancipatory phase of history’ — the first having
made serfs out of slaves, the second wage-earners out of serfs, and the third
which will bring the commercial, industrial, and financial institutions under
democratic control.”

Von Humboldt, in 1792, sums up his Enlightenment vision as follows: he says “the
whole tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be
reduced to this: that while they would break all fetters in human society, they
would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is
no more able to develop than the one who is fettered.”

“And he in fact looks forwards to a community of free association, without
coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free people
can create, inquire, and achieve the highest development of their powers.” That
was the idea of liberty behind the 1787 Constitution.

[3] CUI BONO?

It is an essential vision; it is the vision that underlies our American
institutions — and where there is no vision the people perish. But how today
do we realize that vision of the blessings of liberty, given the social and
political morass into which we have sunk at the end of the first decade of 21st
century?

Well, some of our rulers seem to be finding a way to secure the blessings of
liberty for themselves and their posterity. A year ago this week the USG began
an unprecedented bailout of the some of the richest people in the country and
the institutions that had made them so rich, the banking institutions of the
country. And the size of the bailout was unprecedented. Billions of dollars
that shored up institutions with no semblance of democratic control, billions of
dollars that found their way into the pockets of the richest people in the
country and made them impossibly richer.

“The bailout of the banks was an exercise in corruption and favoritism. The
Obama administration’s deals with the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and
hospitals look the same.”

[4] A FIVE-POINT BOFROU

How about, instead, A BAILOUT FOR THE REST OF US — and particularly one that
restores our liberty?

As it happens, I have one here — and it consists of five points, like the
preamble to the Constitution.

It recognizes that the blessings of liberty are of two kinds, of the mind and
the body. They cannot be separated any more that body and soul can be separated
here below. The blessings that make for liberty free the body, the blessings
that come from liberty free the mind and soul.

{POINT ONE} is justice, specifically tax justice, justice regarding income. The Internal Revenue Code is said to be more than twice as long as the KJV of the Bible, and it is principal instrument for the vast concentration of wealth in very few hands that’s occurred in the last few years. (The Code, not the Bible.) So what do we do? “Get rid of the infamous thing,” as Voltaire said, during the Enlightenment. (He was in fact talking about something else.)

Abolish the internal revenue code and establish a low, flat tax on all income.
In order to begin to redress the extreme imbalance in wealth in this country, we
should perhaps abolish all income taxes. If you tax something, you usually get
less of it (that at least is the theory behind raising the taxes on cigarette
smoking, and it seems to work]. But against the idea of abolition is the sense
that in a democracy of one person one vote, we should all contribute at least a
little to the functioning of that government. So a low, flat tax — and no
Internal Revenue Code.

But we shouldn’t stop there. During the administration of President Richard
Nixon, almost 40 years ago, a bill that would have established a negative income
tax almost made it through Congress. Such a proposal joined to a low flat tax
could provide an income at the level of a living wage for all Americans. The
plan was set out in detail by the late economist Milton Friedman in 1962 in his
book “Capitalism and Freedom.”

“With an NIT, the need for minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and even social
security would be eliminated — along with the vast and expensive bureaucracies
that administer them. The NIT would be in effect a guaranteed annual income
(GAI) at the level of a living wage.

Perhaps even more importantly, some degree of liberty would be restored to our
work. The need to take any job that’s offered in order to eat regularly and
feed one’s family would no longer exist. On the other side, the disappearance
of the minimum wage would restore employment to being a capitalist act between
consenting adults. Take the job at the wage offered if you want to — but you
don’t have to.

Our gimcrack system of minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, and social security
doesn’t even work. Today a family of four living on minimum wage cannot afford
the average two-bedroom apartment in any community in the United States.

And this aspect of the BOFROU would do far more to end the recession than the
Bailout of the Bankers. All admit that consumer spending is the crucial support
for the real economy. At the dawn of the automobile industry, Henry Ford paid
high wages so that his workers could afford the cars that they were building.
Now we can’t even employ 10% — some say 20% — of those who want to work.

A populace with a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage would
have to spend it, providing the demand immediately that the administration’s
stimulus program is supposed to provide a good way down the road.

But, I hear you cry, this would be expensive! How would we pay for it? It’s
interesting that that question wasn’t asked a year ago when vast sums were
required to bail out the banks. Nor was it heard during the last administration
or this one when billions of dollars were said to be needed to kill people in
the Middle East.

But we’ll do better, and answer the question with

{POINT TWO}: tax wealth (as opposed to income). Tax something and you get less
of it, as we said, and we don’t want less wealth but rather less difference in
wealth. Although real wages in this country haven’t risen in more than a
generation, the rich have gotten richer at a rapidly increasing rate while
almost all of us have at best stayed level. The concentration of wealth has
grown enormously. There has been a vast redistribution of wealth upwards, into
the top 1% of the population. We want to reverse that.

Income disparities don’t capture the real nature of economic inequality in
America, because the rich don’t take their money in income but, say, capital
gains. The distribution of wealth is much more unequal than the distribution of
income. The bottom 60% of households possess only 4% of the nation’s wealth.
The top 20% has 50% of the income but 85% of the wealth.

Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of families. The
wealthiest 1 percent of families owns more than a third of the nation’s net
worth, the top 10% of families owns over 70%, and the bottom 40% of the
population owns far less than 1%.

A steeply graduated tax on wealth would exempt 95% of all Americans. Only the
top 1% would pay noticeable amounts — and toward the top of that 1%, they
should be quite noticeable.

It should be clear here that we are talking about liberty, not envy — about
bodily freedom, not about the equalization of wealth. “I cannot see the
slightest objection to other people being richer than I am; I have no urge to be
as rich as everybody else, and no Christian (and indeed no grown up person)
could possibly devote his life to trying to be as rich or richer than others.”

But there’s another source of money to pay for the GAI at the level of a living
wage that will restore consumer demand. That leads us to

{POINT THREE} Bring the troops home and stop paying vast amounts for imperial
wars. Bring the troops home, not just from the Middle East, where the
administration is killing people to secure control over world oil supplies and
is lying about what it doing; it’s not stopping terrorism but creating it.
Bring the troops home also from the more than 700 (sic!) military bases that he
US has around the world.

The US spends more on the military each year than the entire rest of the world.
A generation ago, we were told that would stop after the fall of Communism.
The peace divided could be returned to the people. It didn’t happen.

That military and those bases are supposed to be defending us against terrorism,
but the dirty little secret — in fact it’s a filthy big secret — is that the
US needs the threat of terrorism to justify its military incursion into the
Middle East.

And terrorism is a real threat, as a result of the US invasion and occupation of
foreign lands, notably the Middle East. And why? If the primary product of
Iraq were asparagus, do you think that we would have half the American army there?

If the USG really wanted to defend us against terrorism, it would do things it
has avoided doing, like securing our ports. (I have a friend who says it would
be easy to get a nuclear bomb into NY harbor: “Just wrap it in a bale of
marijuana,” he says.)

Of course, it’s no joking matter. The prospects are serious indeed, but instead
of dealing with them, our government says it’s stopping terrorism by killing
people in Pakistani villages with drone rockets.

And there is one more great cost of our government’s military adventurism,
discussed in one of the best political books I’ve read recently, Bill Kauffman’s
“Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and
Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.” In it Kauffman makes the point that the
victims of American militarism include notably the men and women in the US
military and their families.

{POINT FOUR} We can also afford to provide healthcare, and without the
administration’s “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act,” as
it has rightly been called.

Much ridicule has been heaped upon the charge that the administration’s Rube
Goldberg plan would mandate end of life decision, the dreaded “death panels.”

But “Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right
to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those
gasping in the thin air of senility? [I take his matter rather personally.]
There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly
expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century
to sterilize “imbeciles.” [A distant cousin of mine was a major figure in that
campaign.] Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women
in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets
or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.

“’The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our society is a classic
example of ‘mission creep,’ In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would
be a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion
began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected
geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort Down’s babies
than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been widely put into
action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and
abortion as our central tools.

“So if we have mission creep in the opening round, what’s to persuade people
that there won’t be mission creep at the other — and the kindly official
discussing living wills won’t tiptoe out of the ward and tell the hospital that
the old fellow he’s just conferred with is ripe to meet his maker?”

Instead, we already have a system, established more than 40 years ago, that
provides for medical care — if you’re old enough: in principle, you go to the
doctor or hospital of your choice, and the government pays the bill. But
Medicare is available only to those over 65. We solve the healthcare crisis by
making it available to all. But the administration is in fact instead proposing
to invade that system to pay for its plan, which has been rightly called “an
absolute gift to the [insurance] industry.”

{POINT FIVE} Liberty must be physical as well as mental. The CEO of the
yuppie grocery Whole Foods, Inc., writes in the WSJ that there is no “intrinsic
right to health care, food or shelter … This “right” has never existed in
America.” Americans in his view have only the right to starve, or die of
exposure, unless they rent themselves to people like him. But that is hardly
the blessings of liberty that the government is established to secure.

But humankind “must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before
it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.” Two years after the
writing of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The earth belongs to the
living,” and he meant specifically the things needed for human flourishing.

The blessings of liberty come in two sorts; (1) the things that give us liberty,
the free use of our bodies, and (2) the things that liberty gives us, the free
use of our minds. And these things belong to us not as handouts form a Lady
Bountiful government, but as rights that it is the responsibility of government
to secure.

If we do not attend to both, we are in the situation described in the second
chapter of the Letter of James in the New Testament:

“If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not
enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, ‘I wish you well; keep
yourself warm and eat plenty,’ without giving them these bare necessities of
life, then what good is that?”

***

IN SUMMARY, THEN, if we think of ways of pursuing the goals for government set
out 222 years ago, we find some suggestions for a bailout for the rest of us:

[1] ESTABLISH JUSTICE by a tax system — flat and negative — that would
produce a guaranteed annual income at the level of a living wage;

[2] INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, disturbed since Daniel Shays’ time by the
conflict of rich and poor, by taxing vast wealth directly (and undue
financialization via a Tobin tax, etc.);

[3] PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE by bringing the troops home and actually
defending against terrorism, rather than using it as an excuse for the invasion
and occupation of foreign countries;

[4] PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE by providing healthcare via Medicare for all,
and education for interest, not for employment; and

[5] SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY — the
blessings that make for liberty, those of the body, and the blessings that flow
from liberty, those of the mind — to promote the situation of the person who is
living without hindrance the life that is becoming to a human being, the
“satisfactory” life — which means literally the life that is “sufficiently
made” — and, for that, liberty is essential, as we’ve known at least since the
Enlightenment.

###

First, it’s been represented as a victory for the party of Angela Merkel (who’ll continue as chancellor), the CDU/CSU (roughly equivalent to the Republicans here).

In fact the CDU/CSU vote percentage remained about same at 37% as in the election four years ago — but far fewer Germans voted this time, 71% of those eligible, compared with 78% in 2005. (That’s of course still much greater than the US total.) If you look far enough, you can find that the AP admits that “[Merkel's] party suffered its second-worst showing since World War II.”

The reason that the CDU looked good is that the SPD (roughly equivalent to the Democrats) collapsed, from 36% to only 23%, their worst percentage since 1953. Maybe voters have gotten tired of people who call themselves socialists and aren’t.

That allows the CDU/CSU to form a government with the Free Democrats (a “liberal” party in the European sense, roughly equivalent to Libertarians — the word isn’t used in that sense in Europe), who raised their total from 10% to 15%, after dramatically announcing their opposition to German participation in the Afghan war (cf. the Ron Paul “revolution”).

The other beneficiaries of the SPD collapse were the left parties, Die Linke — from 9% to 12% — and the Greens (not very left) — from 8% to 11%. Naturally, the NYT reported the election as a defeat for “the left” — meaning the not-at-all left SPD — while not noticing that real gains came on the real left.

And on at least one important issue, the “left/right paradigm” isn’t very helpful. While the two major parties support the war in Afghanistan (just as in the US), the Libertarian/FDP oppose it, as do Die Linke and (some of) the Greens.

“All in all, however, the two big parties which have headed every German government since the second world war are now down to less than 57% of the vote [from over 70% only four years ago]. All the minor parties polled strongly and increased their shares. For the first time in modern Germany, all the parties in the new Bundestag have polled more than 10% but less than 40%” [Guardian/UK].

UPDATE. The NYT grudgingly admitted what had happened in an editorial on Tuesday (in the third graf):

Both parties lost ground on Sunday, the Christian Democrats slightly, the Social Democrats precipitously. Both registered their lowest percentages since the 1940s. The big gainers were the new Left Party, the Green Party and the pro-business Free Democrats.

But then it quickly pointed out what the real problem is:

German troops are more needed than ever in Afghanistan. Berlin should resist political pressures to pull them out.

What are the (only) alternatives? McChrystal or Biden. God help us. McChrystal — tens of thousands more US troops; Biden — air war against our real enemy in the region, Pakistan.

On the way, Rich makes the liberal’s favorite move about Vietnam. He contends, quite ahistorically, that it was Johnson who “Americanized” that war, and Kennedy was conflicted and innocent. That’s hogwash, as anyone who wants to look at the historical record will conclude. The invasion of South Vietnam occurred in 1962, while Kennedy was alive. (The war was always against the people of South Vietnam, who didn’t have the good grace to accept the government that we’d picked out for them.)

The point of the piece is to delegitimize the only non-criminal path for the US, the withdrawal of its troops (and mercenaries, corporations, etc.) from the region.

“Invading armies have no rights, only responsibilities. Among them are the responsibility to pay reparations for their crimes, and to hold the guilty accountable. A crucial responsibility is to pay careful attention to the will of the victims. The decision to withdraw does not lie in the hands of the invaders. That should be elementary.” [Noam Chomsky]

That’s from Yves Engler, “The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy” (Fernwood Books Ltd., Halifax).

Still, there’s something to be said for a country that was the real land of freedom for slaves in the 19th century and refuge for war resisters in the 20th (and in the 18th).

In 2004 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a television series to determine who is considered to be the greatest Canadian of all time. (The project was inspired by the BBC series Great Britons.) It included a series of documentaries, with 10 Canadian celebrities acting as advocates and presenting their cases for The Greatest Canadian.

The winner by vote was not a military leader or PM, but the man responsible for bringing Canada universal healthcare (i.e., the equivalent of Medicare for all, not Obamacare), Tommy Douglas. (A Scottish-born Baptist minister, Douglas was Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, and as such head of the first socialist government in North America; from 1961 to 1971, he was the leader of the social democratic New Democratic Party.)

That’s unimaginable in the thoroughly propagandized US. –CGE

It was a 19th-century gibe that “newspapers are half advertisements — and the rest lies between them.”

But the lies can be subtle — and usually lie (sorry) in the unstated assumptions (unstated, they’re harder to refute). But occasionally they break cover.

Take this morning’s Afghanistan article on the front page of the NYT, the country’s agenda-setting paper (and its agenda is put in place by its executive editor Bill Keller, a right-wing Democrat). It was written by long-time foreign and military reporter, Thom Shanker.

Half-way thru, we find the following, a complete paragraph:

The military’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan
is focused on protecting the population and
preventing the Taliban from destabilizing the country.

The Obama administration’s transparently false propaganda assertion is presented as simple fact. If it weren’t about killing people, the only reasonable response would be disbelieving laughter. But instead members of the political class in the US take that as one of their assumptions in the coming “debate about Afghanistan.”

I’m sure I could find in this same newspaper 45 years ago (the Kennedy-Johnson administration) — I’m sure I read it there then — the equivalent assertion:

The military’s counterinsurgency effort in South Vietnam
is focused on protecting the population and
preventing the Viet Cong from destabilizing the country.

It was of course a lie both times. And both times it wasn’t even presented as controversial. –CGE

===

PS–There’s actually some news in this article, or may be. It comes in the penultimate paragraph (where any information of importance is usually found in a NYT article), viz.

“Mr. Obama said Monday that the public should ‘not expect a sudden announcement of some huge change in strategy,’ and he pledged that the issue was ‘going to be amply debated, not just in Congress, but across the country before we make any further decisions.’”

We can conclude from this that the administration and its friends in the media are moving heaven and earth to see that there will be as little debate as possible on war in Afghanistan “not just in Congress, but across the country.” The healthcare “debate” and the town meeting demonstrators have been a godsend to the administration for that purpose.

But there may be something to Obama’s denial of “a sudden announcement of some huge change in strategy.” He may be saying in his covert way that the administration has already determined, in Grant’s words, “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer” — and that means many more troops.

===

PPS–In the final paragraph, a Pentagon spokesman casually refutes the distinction between “combat troops” and “trainers,” on which Obama based his claim that he wasn’t lying when he said he’d bring the troops home from Iraq. (“I meant *combat* troops”…)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/asia/16mullen.html

###

I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day American politician:

Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have been done as the British empire did — buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans? And the hatred lingered for 100 years. Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. (Ron Paul)

Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho’ he may have become so). His position before secession was that the federal government did not possess the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already existed; he supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.

In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley),

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

And what was “saving the Union” about? All would admit today that the effect of Lincoln’s policy was to establish a much more powerful central government in the United States. (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about a verb: “the United States is” vs. “the United States are.”) But the cause of the war was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor differently — by slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came into conflict after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that followed it.

Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect of competing against a forced-labor system. But favoring free soil did not mean agitating to free the black man. The majority of Western farmers were not abolitionists … Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace. That goal, and the attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party. (W. A. Williams)

The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily abolitionist and only adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi empire farmed with wage-labor, not slave-labor. (Hence the central Republican party plank was “no extension of slavery.”)

Options other than war were available to Lincoln, and he was aware of them. Advice came from the most distinguished American military figure of the day, Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). He served on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history and may have been the ablest American commander of his time; he devised the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the Confederacy.

In a letter addressed to Governor Seward (leading Republican and Lincoln’s Secretary of State) — and obviously meant for Lincoln’s eyes — on the day preceding Lincoln’s inauguration (March 3, 1861), Scott suggested that the president had four possible courses of action:

[1] adopt the Crittenden Compromise (which restored the Missouri Compromise line: slavery would be prohibited north of the 36° 30′ parallel and guaranteed south of it);
[2] collect duties outside the ports of seceding States or blockade them;
[3] conquer those States at the end of a long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; or,
[4] say to the seceded States, “Wayward sisters, depart in peace!”

Scott clearly preferred the fourth. In retrospect, it probably would have been best. (Scott was retired from the service Nov. 1, 1861, and was succeeded by General George McClellan.)

I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would have opposed the war in 1860 — but obviously not because s/he would have supported slavery. When Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), he gave as his principal reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle between capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern workers “were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

One of the few recent scholarly studies not to observe the Lincoln cult is William Marley’s Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006). From a review:

Focusing on the North’s road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham Lincoln made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in addressing the Union’s breakup … Marvel describes the president’s course of action as ‘destructive and unimaginative.’ The confrontation at Fort Sumter ended any chance of avoiding conflict, he writes … Lincoln’s early and comprehensive infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous precedents for future autocratic executives.

Illustrating the important principle that the poets often get there first, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: A Novel (1984) made a similar argument a generation ago. But the theme was absent from this week’s celebrations.

–CGE

I do think however that Shlaim gets one point wrong, a point that has some significance for understanding the factions in the US government. Writing about the national unity government formed in the spring of 2007 by Hamas and Fatah (after Hamas had won a democratic election in 2006) “that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel” — Shlaim says

Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives [sic] participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

But David Rose’s article (“The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008) describes how

the White House [sic] tried to organize the armed overthrow of the Hamas-led government after Hamas swept Palestinian elections [in  2006] … the administration boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose.

The point is that this plot was carried out not by neocons but by the “realists” in the administration — and the neocons were outraged, because the plot involved arming the Fatah faction, while the neocons insisted that all Palestinians of whatever faction should simply be suppressed.  Their detestation of the realists’ policy led two leading neocons, David Wurmser and John Bolton, to become the primary sources for Rose’s expose — revealing how marginalized the neocons had become in Bush’s second administration. (Wurmser resigned as Cheney’s Mideast adviser in July 2007.)

The point is important because the same people who were running US Mideast policy in 2007-08 will be running it in 2009-10 — and not just SecDef Gates. The “loss” of Gaza to Hamas was not due to the neocons but to the realists of the “permanent government.”  –CGE

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

However much that may be a guide for oneself, Christians at least (and Eliot thought of himself as one) are cautioned against judging the motives of others. We’re reduced to trying to descry the good action and leaving alone the heart’s reasons that the reason does not know (in others at least).

But there can be as we might say operational differences in opposing the war (a) because it’s wrong, or (b) because it’s done wrong.

They’re obvious as soon as an appropriate remedy is proposed: the alternative is (a) stop doing it, or (b) do it better.

It may be that this distinction — indeed antithesis — has been exploited to neutralize the anti-war movement in the five years since the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history. In any case, that movement does seem to have been successfully neutralized, and it wasn’t an accident.

I’m frightened, for example, by the disappearance of the word “co-option.” A coinage of the 1960s (the word meant something else before that), the word in the midst of the Vietnam war came to mean to absorb a political group or idea into a larger (and probably inimical) one. Here are some examples from the OED:

1969 Atlantic Monthly: “A Republican Party based in the ‘heartland’ (Midwest), West, and South can and should co-opt the Wallace vote.”
1970 New Yorker: “All too often, mere approval of their social and political concern has, in the jargon, co-opted their causes and deadened them.”
1982 N.Y. Times: “The argument has been, co-opt the left before it’s too late.”

That seems to me to be what has happened to the contemporary anti-war movement — and we’ve even lost the language to describe what has happened.

Of course that’s not an accident. The forces of ideological control in this society are vigorous and powerful. They were profoundly frightened by “the sixties,” and they fought back with a generation-long campaign. The general term for the counter-attack, from Thatcher and Reagan to Clinton and Blair, was neoliberalism, but not just as an economic doctrine. Bush and Obama are both heirs of it.

As far as the anti-war movement is concerned, the principal agent of co-option in the US has been the Democratic party, culminating in the recent electoral campaign. Given control of Congress to end the war in 2006, the Democrats instead ended the sentiment that had given them control by adopting it in word and undermining it in deed.

No one understood that task better than BHO (which is why he was the nominee). Here’s what he wrote in The Audacity of Hope about the Vietnam war:

The disastrous consequences of that conflict — for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought — have been amply documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government [SIC: NOT MILLIONS OF ASIANS] — and between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into the living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know what they were doing — and didn’t always tell the truth [NOTE THE NATURE OF THE OBJECTION TO THE WAR]. Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader aims of American foreign policy [CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT?!]. In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the ‘military industrial complex,’ and international institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism and imperialism [NOTE: 'THEIR' VIEW, NOT BHO'S]. Those on the right responded in kind [SIC], laying responsibility for the loss of Vietnam ['LOSS'?] but also for the decline America’s standing in the world squarely on the ‘blame America first’ crowd — the protestors, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League intellectuals and liberal media.

That seems to me a pretty good summary of opposition to the US war in SE Asia “not because it’s wrong but because it’s not done right.” And there’s no break in BHO’s opinion when it’s extended to the war in SW Asia. The passage is from a book published just two years ago. And the anti-war movement disappeared into his campaign. –CGE

New programs will be posted inshallah in the new year.

But wealth owned by corporations should be assigned to individuals (principally shareholders) for accounting purposes and then taxed. (We do that now informally — that’s why we say Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are rich.)

Wealth should be taxed in a way that reverses the accelerating trend to inequality (and plans for that exist). Under the pressure of neoliberalism, those European countries that had (small) wealth taxes have removed them (except France and Switzerland).

Removing taxes from productive investment (but not speculation — the Tobin tax) would presumably create jobs, as would the removal of income taxes (a much larger stimulus than is being contemplated). But the existence of jobs shouldn’t depend on whether they enrich corporations. People have a right to exercise their talents of head and hands in a useful way, and government must organize and apply that work. Everyone has a right to a job and a livable income.

I defended these proposals — which are hardly original — when I ran for Congress in Illinois’ 15th Congressional district in 2002. –CGE

La Repubblica published his impatient answer to the question of what today’s
left should do:

It’s a waste of time and sense to try to define a leftist identity. You have to do what’s right and necessary for the country. It’s up to posterity to decide whether it came from the right or the left.

Amen. Requiescat in pace. La lotta continua.

Senator Barack Obama said Wednesday he would order a surge of U.S. troops – perhaps 15,000 or more – to Afghanistan as soon as he reached the White House [Globe & Mail 20081022].

Obama’s position has been clear for some time. But it’s been expressed in such a way that he and the Democrats have been able to eviscerate the anti-war movement, owing to the false notion that he was an anti-war candidate.

Remember that the largest anti-war demonstrations in human history occurred before the Bush administration’s descent upon Iraq, with more than a million dead? Where did that sentiment go? In fact, it never went away — three-quarters of he American populace still disapprove of the war. But the American parody of democracy has made that fact irrelevant.

It testifies to a form of control — of media, of propaganda, of politics, and of what is generally thought — that any 20th-century totalitarianism would envy, that the Democrats and Obama have been so successful in co-opting and neutralizing the anti-war movement.

The only answer we have is to begin to build a serious movement in opposition to the Obama administration and its war policy, in the first place by exposing its lies — such as his lie that we are deterring terrorists by killing children in AfPak.

The presidential election campaign was primarily a distraction.  There were serious issues presumably at stake, notably the war and the economy, and the campaign not only ignored them but purposely obscured them.

The reason’s not far to seek.  As the late Australian social scientist Alex Carey wrote, “The 20th century was characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”  A trillion dollars spent every year on marketing in the US — where political candidates are sold like cars or coffee — has some effect.

The issues were important, and for that very reason could not be submitted to the voters for their consideration.  The dirtiest secret of American politics — or at least the most important one — may not be the government’s torture policy, filthy as that is, but rather the contradiction between the interests of the tiny elite of possessors (perhaps less than 1% of the US population) and those of the large majority of the population.  But of course it’s not *very* secret: as Noam Chomsky points out,

This is a business-run society: you market commodities, you market candidates. The public are the victims and they know it, and that’s why 80% think, more or less accurately, that the country is run by a few big interests looking after themselves. So people are not deluded, they just don’t really see any choices…

–and, as a result, many ignore the distraction thrown up for them by the advertising/propaganda industry, the “campaign” (particularly protracted in a year when the two major parties are noticeably promoting unpopular policies on the war and the economy: there’s a lot of distraction to be done).  About half of the electorate doesn’t vote, in part because they think not unreasonably that the outcome of the election will make little difference to them and polices won’t change much.  Even in the most recent presidential election “landslides” — 1972 and 1984 — three out of four of the eligible voters did *not* vote for the winning candidate (Nixon and Reagan, respectively).

Most of the media propaganda that passes for politics in the US is directed to what Gore Vidal calls the “chattering classes” — about a quarter of the total US population who make up what some have called the “tertiary bourgeoisie,” i.e., most of those with a traditional college (third level) education.  Given that the actual ruling class — the owners — is probably less than one percent of the US population (approximately a million people), that leaves three-quarters of the US population generally ignored in the “manufacture of consent” — and they return the favor, as they are meant to.

It has not escaped the attention of our rulers in general that people who work long hours and are anxious about their circumstances can spend less time finding out how those circumstances are determined, talking to other people about it, and doing something about it — i.e., practicing democracy.  The US anti-war movement of the 1960s arose in part from the greater prosperity and relative economic equality of that decade in comparison with this one. Americans had the leisure to do politics, as the Trilateral Commission described in dismay in “The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies” (1976). The crisis was that there was too much democracy: that had to be stopped, by the counter-policies of neoliberalism. American politics in the last thirty years shows that it was.

Of course that 25% of the population who are the especial concern of the propaganda system show the effects as well.  It is a surprising fact that, throughout the Vietnam War, support for the US government’s position was directly (not inversely) proportional to years of formal education; that is, in spite of the myth that the anti-war movement of those days was confined to the colleges, in fact the  college-educated were more likely to support administration policy than those without a bachelor’s degree.  The ideological institutions — the universities and the media — were doing their job, even though by the end of the 1960s, 70% of Americans came to say that the Vietnam War was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” according to longitudinal studies by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations.

It is quite remarkable that, prescinding from the enthusiasms of the moment (Obama v. McCain et al.), polls show that Americans hold political opinions of a general social-democratic/New Deal sort — opinions, it need hardly be said, that they do not hear in the media or from Obama, McCain et al.  The result is that the two business parties, for all their struggle at product-differentiation, like Coke and Pepsi, support largely similar policies that are generally to the Right of those favored by a majority of the population.  Medical care is just the most obvious example, and is has been for decades.

In an important article (“If Obama Loses,” August 18, 2008), Paul Street writes about “Thomas Frank’s widely mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so many white working class Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of following their supposed natural ‘pocketbook’ interests by backing Democrats. Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank’s ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America’ (New York: 2004) has generally been taken to have argued that the GOP distracts stupid ‘heartland’ (white working-class) voters away from their real economic interests with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay rights.  Insofar as Democrats bear responsibility for the loss of their former working class constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this was due to their excessive liberalism on these and other ‘cultural issues’.

“But Frank’s argument was more complex or perhaps more simple. At the end of his book, in a passage that very few leading commentators seem to have read (a shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), Frank clearly and (in my opinion) correctly blamed the long corporatist shift of the Democratic Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of — and opposition to — economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the GOP achieved in winning over working-class whites.”

Street quotes Larry M. Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton: “Frank exaggerated white working-class voters’ susceptibility to cultural diversion: ‘In recent presidential elections,’ [Bartels] notes, ‘affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns.’ In other words, working class white voters don’t especially privilege ‘cultural issues’ (God, guns, gays, gender, and abortion) over pocketbook concerns and actually do that less than wealthier voters.”

Bartels summarizes an effect of the propaganda system. “Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.”  It’s the tertiary bourgeoisie who are (taught to be) distracted by these issues.

Like the presidential election in which they figure, these issues are meant to be a distraction — and they are safe issues from our rulers’ point of view, because decisions on them do not much affect central governmental responsibilities like war and the economy. In our America, policy is well-insulated from politics: we have at best a simulacrum of democracy.  Passionately preferring a candidate who’s within the allowable limits of debate is a recipe for irrelevance, as it’s meant to be.  The show must go on; ignore the little man (many men, actually) behind the curtain.

THE WAR WAS NOT A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ISSUE

With two-thirds of Americans saying since the beginning of the campaign that the war in Iraq was a mistake, one might ask why it was removed as an issue.  Why didn’t one candidate put himself in opposition to the war and promise a real withdrawal from Iraq (which Obama didn’t promise)?  That one could even have been McCain, once Obama’s scenery-chewing over Afghanistan and Pakistan (“AfPak,” in DC-speak) made it clear to all (except those liberals who assumed that he would change in office) that he was not an anti-war candidate.  McCain could have protected himself from the charge of flip-flopping by off-loading the responsibility to the “commanders on the ground’ (as they both did anyway) and claim that conditions had changed (either for the better or the worse — it wouldn’t matter).

The answer reveals the nature of the presidential candidacy.  Far from being driven by the polls, presidential candidates are auditioning for a role essentially in the gift of the elite. (The media, owned almost entirely by the largest corporations — there are brave exceptions like *CommonSense* — are the necessary enforcers.) When the contrast between the views of the elite and those of the majority becomes clear, the candidates know to take up those of the elite.  (In 1992 Clinton was barely elected with a vague promise of providing health care as all other industrialized states do.  But when it became clear that Americans favored that plan — “single-payer health care” — when it was explained to them — the Clinton administration replied that it “was not politically possible”: i.e., the elite did not support it.)

Obama was never for the ending of the war and the withdrawal of the U.S. from Iraq.  He was never opposed to the war in principle, just tactically: it was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.  But “removing the troops now,” he said three years ago, “would result in a massive bloodbath for both countries,” and so couldn’t be done.  He criticized the hash the Bush administration had made of the war, and well-funded Democratic party front groups like MoveOn and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq [sic] worked to co-opt the antiwar movement for he Democratic party, but Obama could not adopt a principled opposition to the war.

The reason was that, for all the effort to use the war against the Republicans, the Democrats like the Republicans support the general US government policy of which the war in Iraq is a part.  With Israel as its “local cop on the beat,” as the Nixon administration put it, the US has conducted a generation-long war for the control of energy resources in a 1500-mile radius around the Persian Gulf — from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. That war will continue in the coming administration.  And not because the US is dependent on Middle East oil: less than 10% of the oil the US imports for domestic consumption comes for the Middle East.

Rather, the US goal in every administration for half a century has been to secure by means of the control of Middle East oil and gas what Obama foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski calls “indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region.” Those economies in Europe and northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are the real rivals to US economic hegemony, and the control of energy resources gives the US the whip-hand.  We will not give it up in the new administration, so the war was not an issue.

And it should by now be clear that, whether we call them al-Qaida, Taliban, insurgents, terrorists or militants, the people whom we’re trying to kill in the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their resources.  In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this cause, the Bush administration has repeatedly lied about the situation, from trumpeting the non-existent weapons of mass destruction to, apparently, forging incriminating letters.  But the new administration will continue with the biggest lie, that the US is fighting a “war on terror” — as they expand the war to Pakistan, which the Realists believe is the center of armed opposition to US control of he Middle East.

There are in fact presidential candidates who — unlike McCain and Obama — have serious things to say about the US government’s war policy.  The following is from a statement presented to the media on September 10 by Rep. Ron Paul, former Republican presidential candidate, joined by Cynthia McKinney, Green Party presidential candidate, Chuck Baldwin, Constitution Party presidential candidate, and Ralph Nader, independent presidential candidate; former Rep. Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, said he also agreed with the statement :

“The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with removal of all our soldiers from the region. We must initiate the return of our soldiers from around the world, including Korea, Japan, Europe and the entire Middle East. We must cease the war propaganda, threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on Iran, nor should we reignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be willing to talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to all who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear first strike against all nations.

“We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all persons under US jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation. We must reject the notion and practice of torture, eliminations of habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret prisons. We must deny immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people for the benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive orders.”

THE ECONOMY WAS NOT A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ISSUE

Similarly, the other great issue of the day, represented in the Wall Street bailout, saw no real difference between the candidates.  On the economy, as on the war, McCain could have employed a rhetorical flanking maneuver and taken the popular position in opposition to the bailout, along with the House Republicans, painting Obama as a tool of Wall Street (which he clearly was: the Obama campaign even received more contributions from Wall Street than McCain’s did).  It would however have taken more guts than McCain had to attack Obama on the bailout, as on the war.  More importantly, the elite position favored the bailout, despite the fact that constituents’ calls to congressional representatives were overwhelmingly in opposition.

The joint statement of the third-party candidates did however depart form elite demands on economic issues:

“We believe that there should be no increase in the national debt. The burden of debt placed on the next generation is unjust and already threatening our economy and the value of our dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along and not unfairly place this burden on a future generation.

“We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationships with the banking, corporate, and other financial institutions. The arbitrary power to create money and credit out of thin air behind closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be ended. There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and frauds.”

POLICY IS INSULATED FROM POLITICS

In the last days of the lesser Bush, it seems that US government policy is being made almost entirely within the executive branch, in the clash of two factions — the Neocons, who gained control after the 9/11/01 attacks and produced the invasion of Iraq, and the “Realists” (for lack of a better name), the foreign-policy establishment that continues as administrations come and go.  There’s no real opposition to the policies that issue from their rivalry.  Both the legislative and judicial branches are irrelevant. Congress has resigned to the administration its authority to make war, to make appropriations (in the bailout of Wall Street) — and even to make criminal law (in the PATRIOT Act, FISA, and MCA); the Supreme Court has made decisions on torture and false imprisonment, but ineffectually: the torture regime and the secret prisons still exist, and the courts have not released prisoners from Guantanamo, originally and openly designed designed to be outside the scope of the US courts.

Nothing characterizes the last year of the Bush administration more than the break with the Neocon dominance and the reassertion of control by the Realists.  The result of incapacity? (Was Bush in fact publicly drunk at the Olympics, as rumored on the net?)  Or pique? (The split between the White House and the Neocons in the office of the Vice-President may already be in place at the time of the Libby affair.)

In any case, Cheney’s easy use of Bush as an instrument (seen in the investigation the Washington Post had done but wouldn’t publish before the 2006 election) is no more. That means that the US government is largely back in the hands of a foreign policy establishment that brought us wars from Kennedy to Clinton.  And their drive for “full spectrum dominance” — hegemony, not survival — may finally make them more dangerous than the murderous Neocons. What some psychologists call splitting should be avoided (“Since the Neocons are bad, the foreign policy establishment must be good”) — noticeable as it may be in the presidential campaign…

There seems to have been a debate within the Bush administration on how best to construct the enemy that justifies the continuing US military presence in the Middle East: the Neocons wanted to make a bete noire out of a pacific and indeed helpful (to US regional interests) Iran, while the Realists wanted to do the same with terrorists in Pakistan — and they seem to have the upper hand in both the old and new administration.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was perhaps the senior member of the foreign policy establishment in the Bush administration, and it seemed clear that his people would have charge of the ongoing Middle East War, regardless of who the new president was.  Obama even suggested that he would like Gates to remain at the Pentagon (and Paulson at the Treasury).  In 2004, Gates co-chaired, along with Obama advisor Brzezinski, a Council on Foreign Relations task force report entitled, “Iran: Time for a New Approach,” the main point of which was to advocate a policy of “limited or selective engagement with the current Iranian government.”

Military action against Pakistan — which Obama called for more urgently than McCain — was already underway, and Obama’s intention was to improve upon the “baby steps” (as his adviser said) already taken by the Realists in the Bush administration in killing Pakistanis (many of them apparently Pushtun babies who would take no more steps).  But it was also clear that McCain in office would give way to the Realist consensus in the Pentagon and State Department. (Both McCain and Obama said that they will be guided by the “commanders on the ground”). The Neocons — holed up in the OVP and concentrating on avoiding prosecution (that’s what the Military Commissions Act was about) — have been largely brushed aside.

If one means the consideration of possible policy changes, the presidential election did not take place, and the new administration will present a strategic continuity with the old, both domestically and in the matter of killing foreigners.  God help us.

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Taxpayers receive preferred stock and collateral from a bank borrowing from the Taxpayers, both in the full amount of the loan sought by the bank.  In other words, stock plus collateral in double the amount of the loan. Taxpayers profit from a bailout before anyone else does.

Thanks to Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs for the heads-up by disclosing the terms of their deal, which should be the low water mark for any Taxpayer bailout.  A higher water mark would be the terms suggested above, which are not uncommon in private equity deals and chapter 11 bailouts.

Paulson’s plan calls for him to buy assets of an unknown but admittedly low value, at an inflated book value, for cash, from the member institutions of his own industry, with other folks’ money (ours).  He sees his industry and its member institutions as too important to fail.  With all due respect, Paulson cannot claim to be objective or disinterested.

Paulson’s plan pays in cash the price on the bank’s books for the subprime mortgage-based assets.  The book value is probably a high percentage of the total balances owed on the underlying mortgages.

Paulson’s price for the subprime mortgage-based assets is favorable to the banks. If Paulson’s price for the subprime mortgage-based assets was not favorable to the banks, the banks would not sell.

Neither Paulson nor the banks have presented any rationale, much less a convincing argument, for the proposition that the US is on the brink of financial chaos.  They have declared it to be so.  If you believe them, the banks are on the brink of failure without a bailout. If you believe them. One of the benefits of the better plan is to put that proposition to the test.  To accept the terms of the better plan, the banks will have to be on the brink of failure.  Otherwise they will not seek a loan, and a new equity participant, under the terms of the better plan that will enable them to survive.

Does the banks’ condition put the US on the brink?  What, because the banks won’t lend without a bailout?  I don’t believe so.  The banks remind me of the Sheriff in Blazing Saddles who takes himself hostage.  The banks commit suicide by not lending.  The banks won’t lend without a bailout? Fine. Don’t lend, banks. Don’t lend starting now.  You already have?  Huh.  Most banks in the DC area are advertising that they are not holding subprime mortgage-based assets and open for business to make loans.

If the banks won’t lend and there is money to be made lending, someone else will lend, like the banks that are advertising.  That’s the free market, and the creative destruction should start now. If things are so bad that banks won’t lend, the Taxpayers would be stupid to do so without the substantial potential for profit that the better plan provides.  Paulson’s plan provides only certainty, the certainty of losses.  Why would anyone buy high for the certainty of selling low?

Hidden in the courts is another problem.  The banks own securities. The value of the securities is based on subprime mortgages.  The banks do not hold the subprime mortgages, or the notes secured by the subprime mortgages; they hold securities.  A trustee for the issuer or the underwriter holds the notes and the equitable interest in the mortgages.  Independent trustees hold the legal interest in the mortgages and the power to foreclose. The mortgages for any particular issue of securities were assembled — without much forethought — from all over the country.  How many mortgages were bundled to offer one issue of the securities?  Lots.  Securitizing a whole bunch of mortgages at once reduced the relative amount of the soft costs necessary to pay the lawyers, underwriters, accountants and auditors necessary for the issue of the securities. There are many different issues of subprime mortgaged-based securities.

So for each issue of subprime mortgage-based securities, here’s the cast of characters and their problems:  the banks (from all over the country) holding a particular issue of securities, the issuer and the underwriter in say, NY, the issuer’s or underwriter’s trustee in say, DE, and the numerous trustees on the individual mortgages (from all around the country where the individual mortgaged properties are located) are difficult to assemble anywhere, and if assembled might fill the Yale Bowl, especially if the meeting is open to the homeowners.  Many of the trustees for the issuers and underwriters did not receive the original notes at closing, and many of the original notes can’t be found.  Banks have attempted to foreclose on the mortgages and sue homeowners for deficiencies after foreclosure, only to be turned away by the courts for lack of standing because they don’t hold the mortgages and cannot produce the original mortgage notes in court.  The trustees won’t act for lack of clear authority from anyone to tell them what to do.  Courts, banks, issuers, underwriters, holders, trustees, homeowner-mortgagors and mortgagees, oh my.

Paulson’s plan, with Taxpayers’ money, makes a fool’s bet, “Heads you win tales I lose,” with no upside for the foolish Taxpayers.  No one is guaranteeing that any recovery can be made on the subprime mortgage-based assets (in excess of the cost of collection), no one is guaranteeing that the banks will lend after a bailout, and nobody is even suggesting that this bailout, the one currently proposed, is the only one that will be necessary.  The precedent for others will be set by this one.  What about the securitized commercial mortgages of say, shopping centers in neighborhoods decimated by foreclosures?  What about the securitized asset-based lending of say, department stores’ inventories that can’t be sold because consumers are paying their variable rate mortgages instead of buying new washing machines?  What about the securitized credit cards that consumers are not paying to pay their mortgages instead, after maxing out their credit cards to pay the mortgage? Tune into call-in shows on radio or TV and hear the financial experts tell consumers to not pay credit cards and mortgages in order to feed their families.  I have.  The owners of securitized variable rate secured debt in any form (guess who?) are all out there, awaiting the denouement of the current drama and preparing their own play for the same treatment.  The banks will be back again for more bailouts after this one.  By definition, Paulson’s plan creates a moral hazard, and the speculative trading of the subprime mortgage-based assets and securitized variable rate secured debt has already begun.

The better plan calls for the Taxpayers to receive a first priority lien on fairly appraised collateral, along with an equity kicker.  After the Taxpayers receive the preferred stock interest valued at their investment, the subprime mortgage-based assets could be the collateral at their appraised value for the loan.   The value of the subprime mortgage-based assets as collateral is their appraised value, which may be ten or twenty times the total balances remaining on the underlying mortgages and is not likely to be the value of the assets carried on the bank’s books.   Understand that the loan and the investment are the same money in the better plan, and if the bank is able to repay the loan, the Taxpayers could double their money because they will still own the equity kicker. If the bank can’t repay the loan, Taxpayers recover on their collateral and share, as the most favored shareholder, in the liquidating dividend.  BTW, where are the government’s bank examiners requiring the write-down of the value of the banks’ books of the subprime mortgage-based assets? I think they work for Paulson.  Seriously, I do.

No more private profit at Taxpayers’ risk.  Under Paulson’s plan, we are about to nationalize the almost certain losses incurred in running the banks badly, and at the same time we leave the banks, without their losses, with more money, in the hands of the folks who ran them badly.  The only thing we have socialized in this country, after the bailout, will be the (mostly) unrecoverable losses of banks, acquired for cash at book value.  Somebody else already got the profit and the fees from making the subprime mortgage loans and from issuing the securities.  After the bailout, the banks will have shed their private losses, and received a premium of public cash for doing so. Private profit, public losses, all around.

A bank seeking the Taxpayers’ loan is not an admitting bankruptcy; the terms are merely a recognition of the risk in the loan that requires a private equity kicker to attract the lender (us).  Private equity is not bankruptcy.  The terms would be appropriate, for example, if I approached you to purchase an apartment building, me being broke.  You would put up the money for a first trust and a preferred ownership position for receipt of income, get paid in full first with interest, and end up with 50% of the apartment building and its appreciation, all your money paid back with interest, and half the income stream.  I would have 50% of the apartment building and its appreciation and share in the income stream once you are paid off in full with interest.  I have represented clients in similar leveraged deals where the financier (you, in my example) gets first payout on cash loaned (not contributed) and 50% of the equity in the deal.

For example, the financier in one deal (which involved a third party 80% first mortgage for the purchase of a real estate portfolio appraised at $70M) put up $14M, was paid back in full with interest in five (5) years, and retained a 50% interest in a real estate portfolio and its appreciation and income stream.  14M up, 14M with interest back plus 35M with appreciation and half the income stream off 70M.  At ten percent interest on the loan and a market appreciation of 1% on the portfolio, my client’s deal paid the financier, on a $14M loan (in simplistic terms), $1.4M per year in interest, $350K per year in appreciation, and $14M on the fifth anniversary, a total payout of $22,750,000 in five years, with an equity kicker of a $35M interest in a real estate portfolio, the income stream it creates and its appreciation.    The bank does not have to borrow from the Taxpayers if they don’t like our terms.

Buffett is not paying book value in cash for subprime mortgage-based assets, with no equity kicker or even a loan structure.  Buffett is buying into value.  Goldman Sachs has an international name with the best talent to run a highly leveraged portfolio and assets to match his buy-in twelve times over.  GS is poised to convert to a money center bank, among other options open to it, and would likely survive were there no bailout and no Buffett.  Buffett is not buying subprime mortgage-based assets, or even lending money. He is buying a preferred class of stock issued for him, which has first priority above all other owners.  In other words, Buffett is secured by all of GS assets, including the money he is paying in, if anything goes wrong, before any other owner gets paid.  If things go right, he receives a 10% annual dividend before anyone else on the equity side gets paid plus the value of his preferred stock. If the Taxpayers have a chance to take Buffett’s deal with Goldman Sachs they should take it.  Investing in Goldman Sachs preferred stock is not the same as investing in or lending to a bank with subprime mortgage based assets, much less buying the subprime mortgage-based assets at book value without an interest in the bank or a note from the bank to pay the money back.

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