Read the entire list at the Workers Action website. The title of the article is Ten Lessons for Today’s Unions from Labor’s Militant History.

For more on Iris Dement, visit her website.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that there is a theme running through all of these events. I found an article on Michael Hudson’s website that ties many phenomena together, in a readable manner. The article is long and there is a discussion of economics, but it is still readable for the economically challenged, which includes most of us. The explanation for why Obama is spineless is in this article, as is the explanation for the gutting of Social Security and Medicare.

I’m posting a few snippets from the article to lure you to the website to read the entire essay:

“The Obama administration raised the financial sector’s bailout to $13 trillion. This has vastly increased the government debt. And now, Mr. Obama wants to bring it back down by cutting back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social spending – to transfer wealth and income to the top of the economic pyramid. At the start of his administration he appointed a Deficit Reduction Commission led by advocates of cutting back Social Security and Medicare: Republican Senator Alan Simpson (McCain’s economic advisor!) and Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, representing the right-wing Democratic Leadership Committee cite above. The aim of this commission was to give Mr. Obama an “experts’ report” supporting the diametric opposite of the liberal constituency that voted for him.”

“Ms. Bair said that that when she opposed giveaways to banks, Obama’s officials would say that there would be a meltdown if they didn’t save Citibank, AIG and other financial institutions that had acted recklessly. She pointed out that the FDIC had successfully wound down Washington Mutual and other insolvent institutions. This was the FDIC’s business, after all. Even Citibank had enough assets to cover insured depositors. The problem was its gambles on derivatives and junk mortgages. The government could have taken it over and made normal insured depositors whole. But there weren’t enough assets in Citibank and AIG to pay the gamblers and the big players. She complained that in every case she was told the big gambling institutions – basically, the nation’s wealthiest one percent – couldn’t lose a penny.”

I hope these teasers intrigue you enough to go to Michael Hudson’s website and read this essay.

This article is further evidence of what I like to call the tyranny of television. Have you done any research on-line about Jerry Mander yet?

And yes, I am a contrarian!

An excerpt from the article:

“The American media deploys a deep and varied arsenal of rhetorical devices in order to marginalise opinions, people and organisations as “outside the mainstream” and therefore not worth listening to. For the most part the people and groups being declaimed belong to the political Left. To take one example, the Green Party – well-organised in all 50 states – is never quoted in newspapers or invited to send a representative to television programmes that purport to present “both sides” of a political issue. (In the United States, “both sides” means the back-and-forth between centre-right Democrats and rightist Republicans).”

Killing Osama, Resolving Nothing

By DAVID SWANSON

The plane I was on landed in Washington, D.C., Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we’ve previously supported has been an ongoing disaster.

Our killing of Saddam Hussein has been followed by years of war and hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths. Our attempts to kill Muammar Gadaffi have killed his children and grandchildren and will end no war if they eventually succeed. Our attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, including wars justified by that mission, have involved nearly a decade of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan and the rest of the ongoing global “generational” war that is consuming our nation.

The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over for trial both before and after September 11, 2001. Instead our government opted for years of bloody warfare. And in the end, it was police action (investigation, a raid, and a summary execution) and not the warfare, that reportedly tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan. After capturing him, our government’s representatives did not hold him for trial. They killed him and carried away his dead body.

Killing will lead only to more killing. There will be no review of bin Laden’s alleged crimes, as a trial would have provided. There will be no review of earlier U.S. support for bin Laden. There will be no review of U.S. failures to prevent the September 11th attacks. Instead, there will be bitterness, hatred, and more violence, with the message being communicated to all sides that might makes right and murder is the way in which someone is, in President Obama’s words, brought to justice.

Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death. But I’m not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow. Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try.

Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.

Ending the wars was our moral duty last week exactly as this week. But if the symbolism to be found in the removal of a key propaganda piece can be combined with the recent overwhelming U.S. support for ending the wars, to actually end the wars, then I’ll be ready — with clean hands and with no nasty gleam of revenge in my eye — to pop open the champagne.

But let’s return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a U.S. airline pilot. The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.

Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways? As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?

Not while we’re dancing in the street to celebrate death.

Imagine the propaganda that the U.S. media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy. That is the propaganda we’ve just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr. When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the blind people think that they still see. The world looks to them like a Hollywood adventure movie. In those stories, killing somone generally causes a happy ending. That misconception is responsible for piles and piles of corpses to which more will now be added.

David Swanson is a writer in Charlottesville, Va.

As Joe says, “Truth is a hard road to travel.” I certainly haven’t found many companions.

Understanding America’s Class System

Honk if you love caviar

By Joe Bageant

How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters — huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.

Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington’s political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.

Moneywise, Washington’s political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite’s behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation’s most privileged and ambitious young moths.

They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires — probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi’s net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.

Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class’s social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.

Screw the proles, just count the money

This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can’t see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.

On the other hand, you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect — or not to expect. The track record of the political class is an open book. As the layer of millionaires buffering the elites who pay for their campaigns, they’ve done their jobs. They approved the Bush administration’s massive tax cut for the rich. They dropped the per-child tax credit for families with incomes less than $20,000. They “reformed” prescription drugs right out of Medicare. They reformed health care into hundreds of billions of increased profits for the insurance industry.

However, the American political class’ finest moment came in September 2008 when the financial greed machinery of American investment houses went tits up. The Republican and Democratic parties, major corporations, and manufacturers of US opinion came together in one of the greater bipartisan efforts in modern US history. There was nothing to do, they all agreed, but buy up $700 billion in “toxic asset” investments. “Otherwise,” they prophesied, the world would end. Meaning that the ongoing national Ponzi scheme they have always sold to the American people as the US economy, would finally crash.

And in case there were any skeptics out there among the unwashed, the public was reminded just how much they stood to lose — which was everything. Deep in the boiler room, the Goldman Sachs black bag crew had wired up the “economy” with enough explosive “financial instruments” to take out every working mook’s home, or retirement savings, which the medical industry was already sucking up at an alarming rate. Something had to be done before the health care industry got it all, and repo the family ride.

Yessiree, it was gonna be a “systemic collapse,” by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this “rescue” was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike — a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?

In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said “Bullshit,” by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?

Then, in midstream, the political and economic owning classes switched horses, after realizing there was more gravy for the kingpins in buying up banks and big industries. It was unconstitutional, but what the hell, that’s what Supreme Courts are for. The proles mumbled and peered into their TV sets for explanations that never came.

Of course, partisan opposition being what it is these days — a blood-soaked ditch of snarling hyenas — Obama’s election meant the GOP needed to denounce the new Democratic president for display purposes. Or at least shit in the Oval Office, and then blame him. So most Republicans holding office in 2008 were forced to argue publicly against “troubled asset relief,” “stimulus packages,” and the huge bailouts. Besides, somebody had to unfurl the motley banner of a “self balancing free market,” at least widely enough for the GOP to hide behind in the back room where the real deals are always cut. The place where the weapons companies propose systems, using congressional representatives and generals as sales reps. Where it is understood that, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out near the end of his life, when it was safe to tell the truth, “stockholders are just appendages, someone to hold the bag for the corporations, and stocks are just gambling chips for hedge funds and Wall Street,” and for the suckers who think they can actually outwit High Frequency Trading — a.k.a. High Speed Fraud. (Thanks to reader Brent B. for sending me that one).

Ah, but I have digressed. What else is new? The main thing is that the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years. Public burnings in the national town square of media always draw a crowd.

Bwaaaaaa! Obama won’t let us play

Fortunately, for both parties, there is no such thing as an American political memory. That Lindsay Lohan dated fellow rehab client, snowboarder Riley Giles, yes, that can be remembered. That the Republicans signed off on similar, if smaller giveaways under Pappy Bush and Clinton — well, that may as well be ancient Egyptian history. So is the fact that the both parties forced banks to make high rate home loans to people who did not qualify, because the inflated home values during the expanding bubble would make billions for big investors who knew when to get out. Should they stay too long at the fair and go bust, they would set up the howl of “too big to fail.” The administration, which has no more a clue as to what makes the economy tick, would then rush them pallets of money. That’s what a banker calls a win-win situation: when the banker holds both ends of a winning deal.

Meanwhile, elite Republicans still needed a beef with the new black guy on the block who had just kicked their ass and was still very popular at the time. The best they could come up with on the bailouts was that they had been allowed too little input. “Obama won’t let us play with him. Bwaaaaaa!” A smokescreen of course, since he was doing exactly what they would have done, handing Republican bankers every bit of money the people had and a helluva lot they didn’t have, but could make payments on for the next, oh, 100 years or until the final miserable, smoking collapse, whichever comes first.

In the end though, nobody in Washington disputed the ruling class’s right to dictate policy. After all, the political class agreed with the ruling class’s major premise: The public does not know shit, never has, never will. Also that it is best not to get the public too riled up, not because the public has any power (power is money in America and the elites have it all now), but because elected officials would have to answer brainless questions from people such as Tea Partiers. Or Ron Paul cultists. Gawd!

Howard, won’t you please come home

America has always had a ruling class, and it has always bullshitted the world that it doesn’t. But at least the ruling class of the past was interesting and varied, because diverse sorts of Americans were getting rich.

You had Texas wildcatters in the “oil bidness.” You had Southern cotton and tobacco aristocrats guzzling bourbon, fondling their stock portfolios and their black maids. You had industrialists and California and Florida real estate hotwires, Boston Brahmins and New York financiers. There was the bootlegging inside stock trader Joseph P. Kennedy, not to mention Prescott Bush moving financial assets around for the Nazis during WW II. They were products of varied educations, or in some cases, no education. They came from many regions, back when America still had distinct cultural regions, before it was completely homogenized and stratified for maximum capitalist efficiency.

Whatever they may have been, they were seldom dull. I would love to have known Howard Hughes, a man who could direct a film, and build the largest aircraft ever built, the 200-ton, all-wood Spruce Goose, not to mention the busty Jane Russell’s underwire bra. Stop and consider Bill Gates and the other colorless puds of today. Almost makes you miss the robber barons.

Think Tony Hayward gives a shit?

You hear it all the time these days: The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 45% of the rest of Americans combined.

I have seldom met an American who thought this is a good thing, and seldom met one who understood how the ruling class got so rich. Simply put, it was through constant cultivation of bigger and more labyrinthine government, creating legal and technical complexities to sluice money nationally and globally in their direction, and to cover their asses in the process. The results are such things as 3,000 page health care bills (defining which corporate elites get which parts of the cake), or the 2,000-page NAFTA and its 9,000 tariff product codes.

Once the public was buried in such a maelstrom of legal paperwork, computer transactions, modeling, etc., it was easy to argue that the world had become so complex that the skills and brains to operate it were extremely rare and those who had them were fucking geniuses. These are people who dwell in such airy realms that we should pay them vast amounts of money and never question their decisions. That’s how we got such oblivious duds as Timothy Geithner (who never held a nongovernment related job in his life) running the Treasury, and tens of thousands of the Empire’s pud whackers, ranging from petty legal commissars, on up to the Alan Greenspans of this world — a bumbling arrogant old fart who never had a clue but understood the rules: look enigmatic and blow whichever administration is in power.

In fact, capitalist natural selection for mediocrity is how British Petroleum got Tony Hayward, who was unfortunate enough to be tossed out of the boat onto the media beaches of public awareness in his briefs. If ever there was a specimen of the slimy corporate salamander, we saw it in sniveling nakedness right there. Reportedly, the salamander will receive $18 million, plus annual pension payments totaling $1 million per year, the possible forfeiture of which makes good news copy to cover BP’s ongoing negligence, theft and intimidation. So the public howls and throws eggs at the straw man, who has been making $1.6 million a year and is now sitting on his yacht “trying to get his life back.” Does anybody really believe Tony Hayward gives a shit? Oh, there may be some news of BP’s demise, its “absorption” by another corporation or something similar to Enron, sold off piecemeal to other massive corporations at a bargain prices, while everyone was watching the saga of the mediocre white collar criminal, Ken Lay. You’d think we’d learn. Corporations do not go away; they just morph along, sucking up generation after generation’s money.

The rabble at the gates

You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds. They must look pious and sound right while lying through their teeth and picking our pockets. In other words, they have an astute grasp of American politics and business — which are the same thing, of course.

Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation’s saviors — morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.

So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.

Immediately they conclude that it is the American people’s fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard. (I’ve been plenty guilty of this myself over the years, and am now a recovering American liberal, well on my way not to conservatism, but toward a strumpetocracy, government by strumpets. It’s a real word, Google it.) Not that the progressive flag was actually flying; American liberals threw down their standard 40 years ago in the rush for comfortable technical, teaching and administrative jobs in government, universities and non-profits. “Ah yes,” they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!” liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.

Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama’s characterization of American heartlanders “clinging to God and guns.” Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, “what everybody knows is true.” Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class. Hard to believe their predecessors were the point men and women for the Scopes trial, the eight-hour day, unions, anti-McCarthyism, Cesar Chavez, Negro civil rights.

Big dogs eat first

The ruling elite stays in power through the patronage both parties offer their supporters. They hang onto or follow their party’s leaders much the same as remoras cling to big sharks, and pilot fish accompany sharks, happy to get the leftovers. Both parties provide their activists and followers with livelihoods, through programs or legislation that just happen to make the rich richer.

One good example is the psychologists, doctors and social workers who initiate the process of getting half the country on anti-depressants or mood stabilizers, a term that should scare the hell out of anyone who grasps the concept of the corporate state. They get their jobs through government funding, or research that defines behaviors as illnesses requiring powerful psychoactive drugs.

One new favorite is ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, in which children act like — surprise, surprise — the young assholes that children can sometimes be. Teenage rebellion becomes a psychological disorder. Diagnostic manual symptoms include “often argues with adults,” an unheard of behavior of teenagers calling for antipsychotics such as Risperidone. Side effects of Risperidone include a mild speed like buzz, a super erection lasting hours, lactation and suicidal tendencies. Phew!

Big Pharma makes billions more in the name of alleviating the people’s suffering. Obviously many millions are indeed suffering, but if that is the case, then American society is suffering. Never will it be asked publicly just what psychic anguish our society is suffering from. Because the answer is capitalist industrial commodity disease, and the psychic pathology of Americaness. That would mean consulting Mr. Marx, who predicted much of it, or Arthur Barsky, who brought the definition up to date.

For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which is one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government.

In the process, the already rich get richer and the rest of the middle class commissariat becomes more dependent upon the rich. As conservative editor and writer Angelo M. Codevilla, pointed out in a July 2010 article: “By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty.” A third is more than enough to tip the scales at their will.

Keep ‘em dazzled with foot work

Meanwhile, there are the rest of us. That great throng of squawking, family loving folks, professionals and peasants alike, libertarians, patriots, people who worship god and those who loathe religion — people who still believe that hard work is the road to success despite the evidence, people who know differently because they sell used cars or work for the US Post Office — citizens who rightfully suspect that government taxes merely feed the beast, or who believe, again rightly, that no politician truly represents their interests, and that the government is now in the business of social engineering for economic purposes. Fundamentalist Christians, gays, small businessmen, Hispanic Americans, organic farmers, pro-lifers and abortion supporters, union workers in the North and Southern anti-unionists, school teachers and stump preachers — we all feel threatened by our government.

At the same time, in order to keep revolution at bay, and the military in cannon fodder and defense industry in contracts, we have been heavily indoctrinated to believe America leads the world in all things, and that the rest of mankind lives less prosperous, less free lives, coveting our “lifestyle.” In short, they are lesser people.

Still though, we have in common that none of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep ‘em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of “fast changing world events,” or a banking collapse no one could have predicted — things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do — become a uniformly pliant mass.

Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country’s economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class. Look at the sorry assed “Tea Party Revolution,” which will have to be allied with the GOP (which its backstage leadership has been anyway) in 2012 if it wants to be even a small factor. Media noise about the Tea Party doth not a revolution make, and it certainly does not overthrow the ruling class, who do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.

And besides, the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority, not to mention the machinery of both parties to grant itself more authority.

In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don’t take such risks. That’s not gutlessness. It’s common sense.

Therefore, you are left with a rigged game called legislative action. This is an invisible power process, masked by another process called public relations strategy, which feeds it into yet another process called media, that makes “news decisions,” as to what you need to hear or see. And there’s plenty you don’t need to hear. For instance, NPR, the New York Times and thousands of other outlets refuse to use the word torture to describe waterboarding, preferring instead “aggressive interrogation methods,” unencumbered interrogation, free interrogation, or similar euphemisms. NPR’s justification for sugarcoating US torture is, “”the word torture is loaded with political and social implications.”

Ya think?

Truth is a hard road to travel

After decades of hyper-militant consumerism and its attending alienation, and a national consciousness spun from pure capitalist bullshit and mirrors, it is testimony to the American people that they can still see to piss straight, much less recognize any sort of truth whatsoever. Yet, a portion of Americans are beginning to grasp the truth about what has happened to their country — that it has been bought and paid for by an elite class in a nation that is supposed to be classless. They are beginning to realize that, when it comes to actually governing our country, we are powerless as individuals — even members of the political class — and serve the overall will of its true owners. It’s been that way so long we’ve become conditioned to accept it as a natural state, something we cannot change, and do not even know how to question, because, like the atmosphere, it’s just there.

The higher truth is something we recognize when we encounter it. We may not have the right words, or all the facts, but we can feel it in our bones. Intuition is the first glimmer in the distance. It goes unsaid that we always have the choice of not looking in truth’s direction, or not looking for it at all. Seldom is it a pleasant sight, which is the chief sign that it is truth. Even the best of it arrives to the sound of ominous bells.

I think about that young reader, Brent B., who takes time to email me now and then. Today he wrote, summarizing the only thing of which I am certain:

It’s a hard thing to know the truth in this world, it’s like something inside of you dies, but sometimes you still have to know it.

I have known of the Transition Town movement for well over two years now and I’m also familiar with what the people in the Peak Oil movement have to say. However, I haven’t had the courage to really study and think about the implications of the facts presented by either movement. Until now. I am tired and beyond weary of the bickering and finger-pointing that has taken place in this country for the last four or five years. I voted for change in 2006, 2008, and 2010 and have gotten none. It is time to start making changes at a personal level and to ignore the mindless chattering that takes place on a daily basis in this country. I won’t be posting much in the future, because I don’t have much to say about the insanity that is unfolding all around us. The only thing that I will say at this time is that the insanity is directly related to everything that Richard Heinberg has to say in this video. We “baby boomers” have lived through the best times in history and the future is not going to be nearly as bright. It is time to get to work and to start making the changes in our lives so that our great-grandchildren will have a planet to live on.

Turn off your televisions, people, and get to work. And watch this video – it is a very reasoned and thoughtful presentation of the quandry that we find ourselves in, as a species. Richard Heinberg is no Chicken Little – his presentation is very straight forward and logically presented. It is unsettling and provokes the intense desire to deny everything that he says. But denial will get us nowhere. Get to work. The video is almost 26 minutes long, so make some time to watch it and think about it.

It wouldn’t hurt to go to the Rethink Afghanistan site and check it out, would it? They are asking for stories by their readers telling how their communities could use the money being wasted. As they say on their website, “What would you want to fix if we could spend those funds here at home, instead of wasting them on a war that’s not making us safer?”

Check it out.

Savvy to a Fault: Coming to Terms With Imperial Power

by Chris Floyd

December 3, 2009

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it”. — Henry David Thoreau

To me, this quote from Thoreau expresses the only rational, moral and humane stance that a citizen can take toward the vast and brutal machinery of the American imperial state in our time. The crimes of this state are monstrous, and mounting. But what is worse is that these crimes are not aberrations; they are the very essence of the system — they are its goal, its product, its lifeblood.

And what is this crimeful essence? Matt Taibbi described it well in a recent article:

“Our Western society quite openly embraces war as a means of solving problems, and for quite some time now has fashioned its entire social and economic structure around the preparation for war.”

I believe this is an indisputable fact. Decades of historical evidence give it proof. The last three decades especially have seen the relentless acceleration of this systemic evolution. The quality of life for ordinary Americans, those outside the golden circle of the elite and their retainers, has decayed immeasurably – and measurably. Stagnant wages. Degraded infrastructure. A poisoned food chain. Whole communities — with all their social, political, cultural and family networks — gutted by the heedless flight of capital to cheap labor (and slave labor) markets abroad, and by the dissolution of an embodied economic life into the shadow-play of high finance, the ghostly manipulation of numbers that produces nothing of value except gargantuan profits for a very few. A bonfire of public amenities, making daily life harder, harsher, constricted, diminished. Ever-growing social and economic disparity, shrinking the circle of opportunity. Two million citizens behind bars, in prisons overflowing with non-violent drug cases – nightmarish institutions given over to gangs, neglect, punitive regimens and private profit.

Yet this long, grinding process of diminishment and degradation has been accompanied by a never-ending expansion of the war machine into a dominant position over almost every aspect of American life. Not even the ending of the Cold War slowed this excrescence; defense budgets grew, new enemies were found, there were new missions, new commands, new wars. The ruling elite of American society were – and are – obviously willing to let the welfare, prosperity, opportunities and liberties of the common people sink deeper and deeper into the mire, in order to finance a system structured around war, with all the attendant corruption, brutalization and accrual of authoritarian power that war brings.

This is the system we have. It’s right out in the open. There is a deep-rooted expectation – and not, alas, just among the elite — that the world should jump to America’s tune, by force if necessary. And when, for whatever reason, some part of the world does not jump – or bump and grind – to the Potomac beat, then it becomes a “problem” that must be “solved,” by one means or another, with, of course, “all options on the table,” all the time. And whether these “problems” are approached with blunt, bullying talk or a degree of cajolery and pious rhetoric, the chosen stance is always backed up with the ever-present threat of military action, up to and including the last of those “options” that always decorate the table: utter annihilation.

This is not even questioned, must less debated or challenged. America’s right to intervene in the affairs other nations by violent force (along with a constant series of illegal covert activities) – and to impose an empire of military plantations across the length and breadth of the entire planet – is the basic assumption, the underlying principle, the fervently held faith shared by both national parties, and the entire elite Establishment. And if you want to have the necessary instruments to maintain such a state of hegemony, then you must indeed structure your society and economy around war.

Many nations – all vanished now – have done this. The Roman Empire was one. Nazi Germany was another. At great cost to the economic, social and political life of ordinary Germans, Adolf Hitler geared the state to produce the war machine necessary to assert the dominance in world affairs which he felt was Germany’s natural right. One of his chief aims was to procure enough “living space” and natural resources in Eastern Europe to compete with America’s growing economic might. The Holocaust of European Jews was, for all its horror, just a preliminary to the greater “ethnic cleansing” to come. As historian Adam Tooze reminds us in The Wages of Destruction, the Nazis had drawn up detailed plans for the extermination – by active mass murder and deliberate starvation – of up to 40 million East Europeans.

Today, we all recognize the inhuman madness behind this hegemonic ambition. We shake our heads and say, “Whatever evils we may be accused of, we have never and would never do such a thing.” Perhaps. But leaving aside for a moment the millions – millions – of African slaves and Native Americans who died in order to procure the living space and natural resources of North and South America for European peoples, it is clear that most Americans – the elite above all – can easily countenance the deaths of, say, more than one million innocent Iraqis, or upwards of three million Southeast Asians, without any disturbance in their sense of national righteousness, their bedrock belief that the United States has the natural right, even the duty, to assert its hegemony over world affairs.

The mass murder in Iraq, the horrible slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia, the direct involvement in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, Latin America, and the Iran-Iraq War – to name just a few such operations carried out within the last generation – are regarded as actions which, however “mistaken” some might feel them to have been, were undertaken in good faith, to “preserve our way of life” from this or that imminent, overwhelming threat to our very national existence. [Which was, of course, the same reasoning Hitler used to justify his militarism: the urgent need to protect the German people from maniacal, irrational, bloodsworn enemies bent on their total destruction.]

And let us not forget that American war planners also drew up detailed plans involving the extermination of tens of millions of East Europeans in “first strike” nuclear attacks – plans which they often urged national leaders to put into practice. And even today, the constantly asserted vow to keep the nuclear option “on the table” at all times means that every single action or policy toward a “problem” nation carries with it the explicit threat to kill millions of people – to outdo the Holocaust in a matter of minutes.

Can one really look at such plans and attitudes, and at the towering, Everest-like mountain of corpses produced by American polices – just in the last generation – and say that there is not also a form of inhuman madness behind this hegemonic ambition as well? Is this really a system that one can be associated with honorably in any way? What should we think about a person who wants to lead such a system, who wants to take hold of the driving wheel of the war machine, to use it, to expand it, to accept all of its premises, to keep all of its horrific “options” forever on the table, to feed it and gorge it and coddle it and appease it at every turn, while millions of their own people sink further into degradation and diminishment?

Shouldn’t someone who knowingly, willingly, eagerly bent all of their energies toward taking power in such a system instantly and irretrievably forfeit our regard and support? Should we really give such a “leader” the benefit of the doubt, cut him some slack, be ready to praise him when he or his government momentarily behaves in a normal, rational or legal manner? Should we grimly insist that he is the only choice we have, that his heart is probably in the right place, and that all we can do is try and cajole him into being “better”?

II.

In the light of these considerations, it is astonishing to see what has been the main reaction of many leading progressive writers to Barack Obama’s murderous escalation of the imperial war in Afghanistan and the dirty war in Pakistan. While voicing their “disappointment” with the decision, they have reserved most of their scorn not for the man who has ordered this new tranche of mass death and inhuman suffering, but for those who have accused Obama of “betrayal.”

No, that’s not a joke. The new progressive line on the escalation seems to be this: “We knew all along he was going to do it, so what’s the big deal?”

That has been the chief response from such high-profile progressives as Digby and Joan Walsh. They seem far more worked up about the fact that some people (such as Tom Hayden, Gary Wills, and others) are accusing Obama of “betrayal” than they are about the thousands of innocent people who will die from Obama’s decision, and the long-reverberating evil, at home and abroad, this escalation will engender.

Both Digby and Walsh are at great pains to establish how savvy they have been about Obama from the very beginning. For example, Digby writes: “I never had any illusions about where he and most of the other Democrats were headed with the “Good War” narrative. It always ends up the same way.” She ridicules Hayden for declaring, during the campaign, that “all American progressives should unite for Barack Obama,” and for now being disappointed that the president is not “the second coming of Ghandi, Houdini and Jesus Christ,” as Digby scornfully describes Hayden’s earlier belief.

Fair enough. It’s true that Obama made no secret of his intent to escalate the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and anyone who didn’t expect him to do so was being wilfully blind, or naive. On the other hand, what these savvy commentators fail to note is that Obama has already escalated the Af-Pak war, earlier in his term — an escalation as large as Bush’s “surge” in Iraq. And obviously, this effort didn’t work; hence the latest “strategic review” that led to Obama’s fateful West Point speech. So although Obama did promise to escalate the Af-Pak conflict during the campaign, he did not promise to keep doing it, over and over, even in the face of obvious failure. Thus it is not inherently “silly” or irrational for an Obama supporter like Hayden or Wills to feel betrayed by this second escalation, and by the transparently specious rationales that Obama offered for it.

But let’s leave that aside. For the main issue regarding the escalation is not whether Tom Hayden is silly or if he was too gushing or naive in his earlier support of Obama; the main issue is the actual reality of this murderous course. And here, we come to the matter of the progressives’ self-proclaimed savviness.

Digby and Walsh and other savvy progressives say they knew all along that Obama was going to embark on a horrific policy which would inevitably result in the needless death of innocent people, the further war-profiteering corruption of our own political system, and the exacerbation of extremism, hatred, strife and destabilization around the world. Yet they still stretched every nerve and sinew exhorting people to vote for him in the presidential election. Indeed, the entire campaign thrust of these savvy, realistic, pragmatic progressives could be summed up in one oddly familiar line: “All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama.”

And even as she denigrates Tom Hayden – who at least put his actual body and liberty on the line to oppose an unjust war in Vietnam, taking to the streets in direct action against the state, which then put him on trial as part of the “Chicago Seven” – Digby herself wrings her hands and says we all had no choice but to vote for Obama. There was only him and Hillary, then only him and McCain; what else could we do? Even if we knew – as Digby and Walsh say they knew – that Obama was going to murder people, destabilize the world and continue the Empire’s monstrous Terror War, we had no other choice but to vote for him.

No other choice. What else could we do? Aside from the third parties offering alternatives to what Digby calls “a moderate [Democrat] and a doddering right wing fool with his ignoramus running mate,” one wonders if our progressives have ever heard of Thoreau — who, like Hayden, put his actual body and liberty on the line to disassociate himself from a system he regarded as deeply immoral?

In any case, according to our progressives, not only was there no choice but voting for Obama, there is no justification now for criticizing him for doing what we savvy people knew he was going to do. Anyone who, like Hayden and Wills, is now breaking ranks with Obama over Afghanistan is just “having a fit,” and being “silly” and “puerile.”

No, it seems that the only thing that responsible, savvy progressives can do now is keep faith with the president – keep up our contacts with the Administration, keep our feet “inside the tent,” keep our savvy listservs going — and “push [Obama] to better solutions,” as Walsh tells us.

I find all of this remarkable. Again, it’s not that Digby, Walsh and others are uncritical of Obama’s decision. Walsh declares herself “deeply disappointed, saddened even” by the escalation, and Digby thunders, or rather, sighs, that she wishes “Obama had changed his mind on Afghanistan, and argued for him to do it.” She will even “continue to do so” – that is, argue for Obama to change his imperial mind. To argue, appeal, petition, and encourage the leader to better solutions. But obviously there will be none of that civil disobedience stuff that silly-billy Tom Hayden and his ilk pulled in their time.

In fact, Digby seems to slam Hayden directly for the “silliness” of his “behavior” in “his heyday” – that is, when he was taking direct action to try to stop an immoral war. She says of his denunciation of Obama’s betrayal: “It’s this kind of behavior that has given liberals a bad name since Hayden was in his heyday.”

Well, we all need to mind our behavior, of course, just as our parents sternly admonished us. So by all means, let us not be indecorous in our opposition to murder and corruption. Let us not be intemperate in our resistance to evil. And for god’s sake, let us not be silly or “have fits” in our dissent against atrocity, deceit and destruction.

I hold no special brief for Tom Hayden, who over the years turned into a standard hack politician, nor do I endorse every point of his new dissent. But if he is using what is left of his notoriety to speak out against this monstrous war and its escalation – for whatever reason, even a baseless sense of “betrayal” – then I say more power to him. What on God’s green earth does it matter if someone says they feel “betrayed” by Obama’s decision or not? In the light of the death and destruction to come, how could that possibly be important? And how could defending Obama against this charge of betrayal be such a major concern – for people who say they oppose the decision and decry its consequences?

But this is the kind of schizophrenic reaction — “the president is a murderer/we must vote for the president” — that is bred by the acceptance of an inhuman system. Thus we see these strange diversions among our leading dissidents (“Silly old Hayden!”), these partisan splittings of infinitesimal hairs (“our guy is 2% less evil than their guy, so we have no choice but to vote for him”).

We also see the strange phenomenon, among almost all leading progressives, of leavening criticism of the system with praise for any “constructive” actions or decisions its leaders might produce. For example, Glenn Greenwald recently set out some recommendations on how rational citizens can avoid “the behaviors that turned the Right into a dissent-stifling cult of personality erected around George W. Bush.”

Greenwald noted several ways in which right-wing activists muted any ideological or philosophical objections they might have had to a specific Bush policy – his vast expansion of the federal government, for example, which should have been anathema to movement conservatives – and instead rallied blindly around the Leader, no matter what. He then detailed – and rightly condemned – some of the many, many instances when progressive activists have done the same with Obama, and makes the unassailable argument that the justice of a particular cause (public health care, gay rights, torture, civil liberties, etc.) should far outweigh any partisan worries about Obama’s political standing.

Most of his recommendations were common sense; their general thrust is somewhat along the lines of an approach examined here on the day after the 2008 election: “WIBDI (What If Bush Did It?): A Prism for the New Paradigm.” Or you can even boil it down further, as Bob Dylan did more than 40 years ago in a single memorable phrase: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.”

But at the head of these suggestions, Greenwald puts this:

If Obama takes action or makes a decision that you think is good and constructive, say so and give him credit.

One looks at this and thinks: Why? Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to make a special effort to commend the leaders of the kind of system described above, one which has “fashioned its entire social and economic structure around the preparation for [and ceaseless practice of] war”?

Of course, there is an immediate logic to it. You would do it to establish your credibility, your objectivity, to say, “I’m neither a reflexive Obama-basher nor a swooning cheerleader; I call them as I see them.” This in turn would lend more weight to your criticisms of the Administration; when you “hold Obama’s feet to the fire” or “push him to better solutions” on this or that issue, your principled dissent can’t be dismissed out of hand by the leadership as mere partisan opposition.

And if we were dealing with a different political reality – on a smaller, more human scale, say, with a more equitable distribution of power in society, and a vastly reduced scope (and appetite) for violence, corruption and domination on the part of an unassailable, lawless elite – then perhaps such an approach might do well. But that, alas, is not our reality. We wrestle with a militarized regime whose powers are, as I said in an earlier piece on Thoreau, “so much greater, far more pervasive, more invasive and much more implacable, more inhuman” than the fledgling state our Walden forbear confronted all those years ago. We are dealing with a government that is committing, at every moment – with every breath we take – horrendous crimes against life and liberty, with its murderous wars of aggression and domination, and its ever-spreading authoritarian encroachments.

Again, should we give credit to such a regime, single it out for praise, whenever it happens to behave in a rational manner on one issue or another? After all, functioning governments of every kind do a multitude of worthy things for their people every day. They build roads, lay electric lines and sewer pipes, maintain the food supply, sponsor medical research, facilitate technological developments, adjudicate civil disputes, provide disaster relief, maintain parks and recreation areas, etc., etc. – the list is virtually endless. And this was equally true of, say, Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, and other regimes imbued with a crimeful essence. Would you have told a dissident opposing the depredations of Hitler or Stalin or Franco or Tojo or the apartheid regime in South Africa that he or she must always be sure to point out any constructive thing these governments do, and give them credit for it?

This is not a call to ignore reality. The constructive things that governments do are part of their record. But it’s important to note two points here. First, we’re not talking about making a casual observation when you glance at the paper – “Glad they’re not going to prosecute Grandma for that medical marijuana now” – and factoring that into your general knowledge base. Instead, we’re talking about the specific context of Greenwald’s recommendations, which deal with those who are trying to make active political and moral judgments about government policy, with the ultimate aim of bringing about a reality that is more just, more humane.

Second, and more importantly, we must emphasize again that we are not dealing with an ordinary situation here, with a system whose good and bad elements are roughly equal (or confined to the historical past), allowing one to sit down and weigh this policy against that one, and, then, upon careful reflection, coming to some judicious assessment. No; we are now – and have been for decades – dealing with a situation of the most frantic and dire moral urgency, the “all-day permanent red” of a system whose purpose, structure, meaning and method have become war, with all the hatred, corruption, degeneration and devolution that war brings.

In such an extreme system, all balance is gone; a constructive act here or there cannot offset those mountains of corpses. And its seems a terrible waste of time and energy to divert one’s attention from these horrors – and the urgent need to stop them – just to give a few props for a stray good deed or reasonable move here or there.

The latter approach also involves, consciously or unconsciously, to one degree or another, an association with it, in Thoreau’s sense. You have, in effect, accepted power on its own terms. You engage deeply with the system in order to “hold Obama’s feet to the fire” (while being careful to acknowledge his “constructive” measures) because you believe this will make the system better. But if the system itself is structured to produce the boundless evils of war and domination and injustice, you cannot make it better. You can only, at the very most, mitigate a few of its pernicious effects, for a time, and only at the margins.

This is by no means an unworthy goal; extreme systems force that kind of triage upon us. Raoul Wallenberg could not end the Holocaust; he could only save what was in relative terms a very small number of people at the margins. But who would deny his heroism, and wish that he had not sought such small but deeply meaningful mitigations? Conversely, who among us would have suggested that Wallenberg, in the dire moral urgency of his mission, take time out to give credit to the Nazis for, say, their “Strength Through Joy” recreational programs for ordinary workers, or their remarkable highway system? Or in our time, do we require Shirin Ebadi to praise the Tehran regime for its social housing programs, or Aung San Suu Kyi to give credit to the Burmese generals for building roads or installing storm drains?

Everyone has to make their own accommodations with reality, of course. And to quote the old song-and-dance man once again: “Life is sad, life is a bust;/All you can do is do what you must.” I’m not laying down commandments or prescriptions for anybody. But I will say that Thoreau’s stance seems more and more to be the only honorable course for an American to take, in whatever way and to whatever degree he or she finds possible.

And I will also say that those who profess their adherence to “progressive” values such as peace, justice, liberty, equality and truth would serve their cause better by focusing on the essential nature of a system that eviscerates those values, and on the actual operations of power, the crimes and atrocities being committed by the actual wielders and servants of power, instead of mocking people for “throwing fits” and being “puerile” when they denounce the system’s leaders for leading the nation deeper and deeper into evil.