Blogogram

The Key to Sussex?

2011-09-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

Two royals seeing eye to eye

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Shortly after news of Pataudi's death, a friend of mine sent me the following one-line email:

Who was the other cricketer with one eye?........Ranjitsinhji.

Pataudi

I thought this didn't make any sense. I had read somewhere long ago how Ranji's cousin Duleepsinhji, on first going to England, was told by some doctor that he had a problem with his eyesight. His house master dismissed any such notion saying that no relative of Ranji could possibly have anything wrong with his eyes. Besides, I reasoned, it's one of those things you expect would be common knowledge if true.

Ranjit Singh

Then it occurred to me my friend might be joking. He was talking, no doubt, about Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who did indeed have only one eye! One of the Yehudi-Menuhin-is-a-violinist. Mahatma-Gandhi-is-a...non-violinist variety, it seemed.

After dashing off a clever note to my friend saying I wasn't aware that Maharaja Ranjit Singh played cricket, something impelled me to read up on Ranji just to be sure. On Wikipedia at first glance, there was lots about his time in England, his cricket of course, and his disputes over the title to his principality of Nawanagar. There was no prominent mention of any business of making do with one eye, etc.

As I read through the Wikipedia page, though, I found the following passage deep in its bowels:

Ranji

"When the First World War began in August 1914, Ranjitsinhji declared that the resources of his state were available to Britain, including a house that he owned at Staines which was converted into a hospital. In November 1914, he left to serve at the Western Front, leaving Berthon as administrator.[note 9][209] Ranjitsinhji was made an honorary major in the British Army, but as any serving Indian princes were not allowed near the fighting by the British because of the risk involved, he did not see active service. Ranjitsinhji went to France but the cold weather badly affected his health and he returned to England several times.[210] On 31 August 1915, he took part in a grouse shooting party on the Yorkshire Moors near Langdale End. While on foot, he was accidentally shot in the right eye by another member of the party. After travelling to Leeds via the railway at Scarborough, a specialist removed the badly damaged eye on 2 August."

Don't ask me how an eye damaged on 31 August needed removing on 2 August. I'm merely quoting Wikipedia verbatim.

This was long after his prime cricketing years. He had played his last test match in 1908, and seems to have last played serious county cricket in 1912. He played for Sussex, even captaining it briefly (as did Pataudi).

For all that it is my friend who will have the last laugh. Wikipedia again:

"Ranjitsinhji's last first-class cricket came in 1920; having lost an eye in a hunting accident, he played only three matches and found he could not focus on the ball properly. Possibly prompted by embarrassment at his performance, he later claimed his sole motivation for returning was to write a book about batting with one eye; such a book was never published.[166]"

Was there any famous cricketer (other than Pataudi) from India who played with a visual handicap? Well, you can bet your right eye on it.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the USA. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com.

Who controls your food supply?

2011-09-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Food Bandits

"The number of hungry people has soared to nearly 1 billion, despite strong global harvests...Just four companies control at least three-quarters of international grain trade; and in the United States, by 2000, just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years."

Read full article...

Nation Magazine's upcoming Oct 3 issue carries an anchor piece by Francis Lappe Moore (author of Diet for a Small Planet), along with replies by well-known experts on the topic of food security: Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan.

That this is a vital issue of both individual liberty and national sovereignty is without question. That it is discussed so little is a reflection on our myopia.

Raj Patel in his piece Why hunger is still with us says,

"[W]e’re growing more crops than ever before not for direct human consumption, or even animal feed, but as biofuels, to keep cars on the road. Already, more than a tenth of the world’s total coarse grain output is used for fuel, and the OECD predicts that within a decade a third of all sugar cane grown on earth will be used not for sweetening but for combustion."

Eric Schlosser places the problem in larger context,

"The corporate monopolies and monopsonies, the contempt for labor unions, the capture of federal agencies, the corruption of elected officials, the lies routinely told to consumers, the disregard for the environment and for public health—none of these things are unique to the food industry. You will find them in the oil, chemical, media and financial industries, among many others. They have become commonplace in the US economy. They are signs of a much larger problem, of a society where a handful of corporations choose the lawmakers, dictate the laws, control production and distribution, widen the gulf between rich and poor."

And increasingly, one might add, none of these things are unique to the United States either. As Vandana Shiva says of the situation in India,

"But the biggest threat we face is the control of seed and food moving out of the hands of farmers and communities and into a few corporate hands. Monopoly control of cottonseed and the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton has already given rise to an epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India. A quarter-million farmers have taken their lives because of debt induced by the high costs of nonrenewable seed, which spins billions of dollars of royalty for firms like Monsanto."

Far more significant than who wins in 2012, don't you think?

From Market Snodsbury to Madison Square Garden?

2008-04-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

Jeeves takes ~~Charge~~ Revenge

(with apologies to PG Wodehouse)

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The usual Jeeves story is as follows: Bertie gets in hot water, goes bleating to Jeeves, who brings to bear his infinite sagacity to rescue his master. While doing so, he also extracts a victory of sorts -- making Bertie give up something -- now a jacket, now a tie, another time his moustache! The story ends with a restored Bertie Wooster calling for a restorative brandy and soda, only to find the effects already at his elbow. Jeeves is perfect.

Unsuitable romantic dalliances are one thing, calling for no more than minor strictures as above, but a permanent change in the status-quo is a different matter altogether. In such instances, Jeeves can be ruthless, as when Wooster contemplates having his sister and her three daughters move in with him ("it will be nice to hear the pitter-patter of little feet about the place, Jeeves", or words to that effect). Jeeves realizes that immediate and salutary measures are called for. In an unforgettable episode (the only one written in Jeeves' hand rather than Wooster's), he puts Bertie before an audience of schoolgirls, from which Wooster emerges a chastened man, cured of his illusions about how charming the young ladies are.

Something similar occurred last month, when Sen. Bertie Wooster (D-IL) was asked about a ripe idea (assumed, naturally, to have emanated from Jeeves). Instead of paying tribute to the great man ("from the collar upward, he stands alone" would have been mot juste), he instead chose to take the tack of I was reluctantly compelled to hand the misguided blighter the mitten...

Addressing the girls school in Philadelphia shortly thereafter, he sought to exercise the full force of his own personality, freely throwing all and sundry under the bus as he did so -- from public figures to private individuals -- most notably his own grandmother -- no wonder he was described later by Jeeves as merely doing what politicians do. But in his defense, we must add that here Bertie was only following the ancient Wodehousian dictum, drilled into every Drones Club alum: stick to stout denial.

Jeeves, meanwhile, bided his time, making no comment. As the expression goes, he watched Bertie's future progress with considerable interest, shaking his head many times over the next few weeks, with an avuncular sadness, as he watched the young master's discomfiture -- whether it was letting his hair down in San Francisco CA, bowling in Altoona, PA, or blowing it in the debate a couple of days before the big primary. A lesser gentleman's gentleman would have said that nature had scored the equalizer, and proceeded to tear out those eleven pages from the book at the Junior Ganymede.

But as Bertie Wooster has said often, Jeeves stands alone (in this instance quite literally, and that was one huge grievance right there).

He waited his moment, and when he was ready, he burst forth...as Gussie Fink Nottle.

Now there are two unforgettable speeches in the Wodehouse canon. One, mentioned above, is Bertie Wooster addressing the Girls' School. The second is Gussie Fink Nottle's speech to the Market Snodsbury Grammar School. Fink Nottle, the shy and reclusive friend of Wooster's (and student of newts -- your joke here) is fully drunk (Wooster and Jeeves, unbeknownst to each other, have both spiked his drink, with the common objective of getting him over his fear of audiences) as he plows ahead with his speech, inebriation having vanquished inhibition:

[A snippet of Bertie Wooster's description of the speech]

"G. G. Simmons was an unpleasant perky-looking stripling, mostly front teeth and spectacles... Gussie, I was sorry to see, didn't like him. 'So you've won the Scripture-knowledge prize, have you?'

'Sir, yes, sir.'

'Yes,' said Gussie, 'you look just the sort of little tick who would. And yet,' he said, pausing and eyeing the child keenly, 'how are we to know that this has all been open and above board? Let me test you, G. G. Simmons. Who was What's-His-Name - the chap who begat Thingummy? Can you answer me that, Simmons?'

'Sir, no, sir.'

Gussie turned to the bearded bloke. 'Fishy,' he said. 'Very fishy. This boy appears to be totally lacking in Scripture knowledge.'"

[Bertie leaves around this point, embarrassed as Gussie spots him and discloses to the audience that Bertie Wooster, the pessimist, had said that if he spoke, his pants would split in the back. Later on, Jeeves fills him in...]

"...he proceeded to deliver a violent verbal attack upon the young gentleman, asserting that it was impossible for him to have won the Scripture-knowledge prize without systematic cheating on an impressive scale. He went so far as to suggest that Master Simmons was well known to the police.

'Golly, Jeeves!'

Yes, sir. The words did create a considerable sensation. The reaction of those present to this accusation I should describe as mixed. The young students appeared pleased and applauded vigorously, but Master Simmons's mother rose from her seat and addressed Mr Fink-Nottle in terms of strong protest.

'Did Gussie seem taken aback? Did he recede from his position?'

No, sir. He said he could see it all now; and hinted at a guilty liaison between Master Simmons's mother and the head master, accusing the latter of having cooked the marks, as his expression was, in order to gain favour with the former.

'You don't mean that?'

Yes, sir.

'Egad, Jeeves! And then -'

They sang the national anthem, sir."

Jeeves, in Gussie Fink Nottle's costume (Fink Nottle once was arrested dressed as Mephistopheles) is now embarked upon a veritable spree of Market Snodsburys, giving the original a run for its money. Starting with the NAACP convention, where he showed off his mimicry, sang, danced and conducted a mock orchestra, he went on to a packed house at the National Press Club in Washington DC.

As the show hits the road, Bertie squirms, helpless. But as he has himself often noted, pity the poor fish that would match its wits against Jeeves.

Copyright (c) Niranjan Ramakrishnan, 2008.

The 29 Who Stood Up

2008-02-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

Here are the 29 Senators who voted against the FISA Extension Bill (which would grant retroactive both to the administration and the phone companies who spied on the American people, without a warrant, breaking the law as it existed at the time). Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were both absent for the vote.

Akaka (D-HI)
Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Cardin (D-MD)
Dodd (D-CT)
Dorgan (D-ND)

Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Harkin (D-IA)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)

Menendez (D-NJ)
Murray (D-WA)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Wyden (D-OR)

Neoliberal and Neoconservative

2007-09-02T00:35:00.000-07:00

In an article published in Commondreams, George Monbiot writes about the rise and meaning of neoliberalism. While the term is is heard frequently, few people know what it means. According to Monbiot, it means the maximum freedom to corporations, and the withdrawal of the state from everything except defense of private property and the nation's perimeter.

If that is neoliberalism, what is neoconservatism? One may suppose it is the similar, defiant, twist of an old label to a new and opposite one, rather like Leon Trotsky being an adopted name, that of Trotsky's (whose real name was Lev Bronstein, I think) jailer.

Neoconservatism is the revision of all things conservative, the active intervention of the state to promote a political agenda. From muscular use to suborning of the state is usually an inevitable journey, and its tale in 21st century America is captured by two fine articles, also in Commondreams; one by Ted Rall, the cartoonist, "We are all Gonzaleses now", and the other by Paul Campos (Gonzales & Son: The Legacy of An Honest Day’s Work).

The Immigration Bill

2007-05-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

A bill several hundred pages long, full of fine print, crafted in secret and sprung upon a Senate with little time to reflect, must necessarily be viewed with suspicion. Especially when the provisions talk about increasing the nation's legal population, at one swoop, by some 4% (12 million/300 million). A country which has a serious debate over whether breaking and entering into the country is really such a serious issue, and carries on with platitudes such as:

This is inevitable,
We cannot really do anything about it
Immigration is a net plus
We are a nation of immigrants
etc.

is making a virtue of out of lassitude and lack of will. Two articles, one by George Will in the Washington Post, and the other by Ann Coulter in Human Events, both bring this idiocy sharply to light. George Will writes:

Some Democrats argue that liberalism's teetering achievement, the welfare state, requires liberal immigration policies. The argument is: Today there are only 3.3 workers for every retiree. In January, the first of 77 million baby boomers begin to retire. By the time they have retired, in 2030, there will be 2.2 workers for every retiree -- but only if the workforce is replenished by 900,000 immigrants a year.
On Monday, however, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation stunned some senators who heard his argument that continuing, under family-based immigration, to import a low-skilled population will cost the welfare state far more than the immigrants' contributions to the economy and government. He argued that low-skilled immigrants are costly to the welfare state at every point in their life cycle and are very costly when elderly. Just the 9 million to 10 million adults already here illegally will, if given amnesty, cost an average of $300,000 -- cumulatively, more than $2.5 trillion-- in various entitlements (Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, housing, etc.) over 30 years.

As to those who argue that finding the illegal immigrants is impossible, Ann Coulter writes in Importing a Slave Class:

If it's "impossible" to deport illegal aliens, how did we come to have so much specific information about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won't. Someone must have talked to them to gather all this information. Let's find that guy -- he must know where they are!

How do we even know there are 12 million of them? Why not 3 million, or 40 million? Maybe we should put the guy who counted them in charge of deporting them.

She also makes a telling rejoinder to the argument that "We can't deport them all":

The jejune fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens -- and fast!

I'm astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100%.

We can't catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can't do that. We can't even catch all murderers. What we need is "comprehensive murder reform." It's not "amnesty" -- we'll ask them to pay a small fine.

Finally, why this hurry? Why does this have to be done this week (or the next). First, establish the principle that breaking into the country does not pay. On this basis, other things can be discussed. Debates that are rushed through with a view to 'getting it behind us' usually have a way of returning and biting us in the behind. Witness the Democratic Senate's stupidity in the Iraq War debate of 2002.

See also: Immigration Bill's Point System.

Frank Rich: Iraq, the Larger Sin

2007-04-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

April 22, 2007

President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he’ll take six weeks to show his face — and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

But he couldn’t inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the “surge” was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg’s. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.

At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer’s metastasis — the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

Mr. Gonzales’s politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration’s legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America’s image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn’t end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales’s reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.

Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik’s longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president’s spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had “no reason to believe” that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.

Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan’s spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed — by Mr. Gonzales — and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to “questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption,” not to mention a “friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime.” Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.

Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it’s as a paradigm of the Bush White House’s waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties in the former police chief’s New York résumé, there still would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any administration job.

The year before Mr. Kerik’s nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police — and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad’s markets.

Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White House’s priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik’s P.R. usefulness as a symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).

Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz’s scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in 2003.

No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.

You don’t have to be a cynic to ask if the White House’s practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion.

Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.

Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It’s no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.

Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war’s endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it’s clear that he’s the one with reason to be afraid.

You Said It!

2007-04-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times

Imus in the Hornet's Nest

April 11, 2007, 5:42 pm
Dick Cavett

Don Imus must feel as if he has been run over by a cement truck, which then reversed and backed over him.

It’s probably true that the women on the Rutgers basketball team are not Imus fans and, as he says, they probably didn’t know who he is. It would be interesting to know exactly how the ladies got the bad news. Did someone say, for example, “A broadcaster announced on the air that you have undesirable ethnic hairdos and that you are prostitutes”?

Imus claims he doesn’t know how this happened and brought the ceiling down on him. As one who has had many opportunities to misspeak and to offend — and has taken them — I know how he feels. Much of the show’s appeal has to do with the entertaining danger in watching Imus and his colleagues dance on “the line” and sometimes on either side of it. This time he stepped off the starboard side onto a hornets’ nest, to mix metaphors.

Is there not a sort of a conundrum in everyone’s agreeing that the words are horrible, and not fit to be broadcast or heard — and then hearing them re-aired every 20 minutes on most TV channels? Not even euphemizing the H-word. Some of the seeming astonishment expressed about how well-spoken, attractive, articulate and self-possessed the basketball players are — all true — at times bordered a bit uncomfortably on Obama’s being called (surprisingly?) “articulate” and “clean.”

Would a white team be surprisingly articulate?

I don’t know all the questions to be asked about this. Some of them would be: Who said the words? What was the context? How damaging were the words meant to be, and how damaging were they in fact? What is known of the speaker? Is he a racist? Does he discriminate against black people? Has he ever done anything good for them?

It has reminded me of a hilarious old black comic I saw once at the Apollo Theater — the best house for comedy. In style, he affected lack of education and worked in dialect. “White folks sometimes seem amazed to see us folks can stand up on our hind legs.” (Audience giggles.) “And SPEAK.” (Big laugh.) “Sometimes I think they gonna offer me a dog biscuit.” (Pandemonium.)

At such times as this, the camera-shy reverend Al Sharpton can be counted on to pop up, this time in Draconian mode. He wants Imus out, gone, the show canceled and Imus dead, professionally at least.

Hold on a minute, Your Amplitude.

Millions like this show. All kinds of people, from college professors to firemen to actors, writers and — I’m told even G.I.’s in beds who have survived both Iraq and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Nobody in his right mind defends what Imus said. Certainly not Imus. For decades, he has been an equal-opportunity offender. For many the combination of this style plus his contrasting high-quality guest list add up to the program’s quirky appeal. But it was inevitable that one day, as just happened, a land mine was stepped on by the risk-taking host. It shouldn’t be confused with Hiroshima.

Imus retooled his show and himself from an earlier persona, making it a program that welcomes a who’s who of guests. This very upgrading makes the blunder stand out in starker contrast than it would if his show were solely goofball, escapist entertainment.

I’ve noticed over the years that the hate-mail, get-’em-off-the-air crowd always tries to constitute itself as a pressure group that will “write to all your sponsors.” They want to not just get you off the air but — to savor the full enjoyment — bring you to your knees financially. In rare cases where they have succeeded, the health of their target has been destroyed. This is what that old bag Lillian Hellmann did to Mary McCarthy.

But Imus, I’m sure, has a shekel or two stashed away in case he were bounced or just decided to chuck it. He is a reader and would not be at a loss to fill his new free hours.

What is Donald Imus really like? I appear on his show sometimes, but I don’t pretend to know what all is concealed by the mask he works behind as an entertainer. He appears to be white, gentile and a family man. He’s a skilled conversationalist, an experienced broadcaster, a wry humorist and, lest we forget, an authentic philanthropist.

In addition, he belongs to a few minorities himself. He is a blonde, a genuine cowboy, a recognized bugler and one of three people in the media who pronounces both C’s in arctic.

The final irony of all this is that when the suffering is past, good is likely to come of it. But if you change, Donald, don’t throw away all of the old Imus. We don’t want you to come back as Pat Boone.

The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV

2007-04-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

40 years ago today, Martin Luther King gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York. By a coincidence, it was exactly one year before he was to die. Read the full text. King quotes James Russell Lowell's lines, "Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide, In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;", no less true today than it was 40 years ago.

An article marking Dr. King's death anniversary today, and why his activities from 1965-1968 are so little publicized, first drew my attention to this speech, which is surely one of his most memorable, and least known. The article, by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, is entitled: "The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV".

Movement by Micrometers

2007-02-17T22:40:00.000-08:00

Mr. Jefferson’s Inheritors

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

"I belong to no organized party", Will Rogers once boasted famously, "I am a Democrat". Today, he would be dumbstruck by the conformity that has overtaken his party.

It is hard to imagine a time which cried out more for a vigorous opposition. Yet, when it was needed most, the Democratic Party failed to provide any check on a government run amok.

President Bush spoke last week, assuring his listeners that with 20,000 additional troops, he could hold off the Middle East from exploding. Simultaneously, he was also telling them there were no guarantees, that this was a last attempt before calling it a day in Iraq. Having destroyed a noncombatant nation and triggered the deaths of thousands (30,000 by his own admission, 655,000, according to Lancet), here he was, telling us how he proposed to save Iraq and the rest of the world. "Sau choohe kha ke billi Haj pe chali", as the saying goes (not to put too fine a point on it).

To be fair, Mr. Bush has been no less assiduous in devastating his own country. Today it was reported that the CIA and the Pentagon were accessing people's bank records without any official warrant. Earlier this month, it was discovered Bush had ordered postal mail to be intercepted and read without a warrant. Habeas Corpus is no longer guaranteed in the United States, phone conversations may be listened to, email monitored, library and book purchases tracked, all without any court order. Mr. Bush has been deciding which laws he will or will not choose to obey, using an artifice called a 'signing statement'. This is what the birthplace of modern democracy, the home of 'government of laws, not men', has become in our day.

At a more prosaic level, if the war has reduced Iraq’s infrastructure to rubble, America’s own can hardly be called shipshape. The tab for the war is already $350 billion, money which, experts have calculated, would’ve provided for hundreds of schools, built scores of hospitals, put thousands through college, or even paid for the inspection of all cargo coming into the United States, a oft-voiced concern. The budget surplus has been turned to a record deficit.

"Where were you when Kennedy died?", the question goes. So might the Democrats be asked, "Where were you when a boy president, taking power in a doubtful election, careened through and broke every norm in your own country and across the world?

"Missing in Action" (MIA) is mot juste. Who can forget that it was a Democratic-controlled Senate which gave President Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq!

It was October 2002, a month before the midterm election. Heedless of warnings from the likes of Sen. Robert Byrd, a majority of Democratic senators pushed for the war resolution, fearful of being labeled "soft on terror" by Bush and his twin Svengalis, Cheney and Rove. But this Faustian deal availed them nothing; the election took away the very majority they had compromised so much to retain.

By 2004, it was clear that the whole WMD thing was a crock. Yet, not one prominent Democrat receded from his or her vote. John Kerry even kept saying that, knowing what he knew now, he would still have voted for the war resolution. Neither Kerry, nor Hillary Clinton, nor any other big-name Democrat, deigned to visit Cindy Sheehan at Camp Casey outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where she was on a Gandhian satyagraha to seek an answer from President Bush to a simple question: for what noble cause did her son die fighting in Iraq?

Bush would not even meet with her. Neither, to its everlasting shame, would the Democratic leadership.

In the end, the Democratic Party never took a bold stand on the two issues of our time, the Iraq War, and the shredding of the American Constitution.

By 2006, the country had itself moved far ahead of the Democrats. Bush’s dropping poll numbers lent them enough calcium to start speaking out on Iraq, though careful seldom to raise the issue of the Original Sin, content merely to critique Bush’s 'conduct' of the war.

Nevertheless, so reviled had Bush’s Republican Party become, all across the nation, in states red and blue, that the elections gave the Democrats a nice majority in the House, and unexpected control of the Senate.

Early indications are that caution is still their watchword, not impeachment. They will criticize the ‘surge’ but not say a word about the 'occupation'.

Still, there is euphoria. Because, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you have to go to bat with the opposition you have, not the one you might wish you had.

If in these testing hours the Democrats were craven, the Republicans were in enthusiastic lock-step with the administration's lawlessness. Together, they call to mind these lines from a famous novel, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness[…], and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Tom and Daisy? Surely Fitzgerald meant George and Hillary...?

Torture by Worms

2007-02-17T22:35:00.000-08:00

February 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

JIMMA, Ethiopia

Presidents are supposed to be strong, and on his latest visit to Africa Jimmy Carter proved himself strong enough to weep.

The first stop of Mr. Carter’s four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

“She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet,” Mr. Carter added. “And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously.”

“Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain” because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. “I cried, along with the children.”

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

As president, Mr. Carter put the issue of human rights squarely on the national agenda. Now Mr. Carter argues — and he’s dead right — that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political and civil rights, and that we also need to fight for the human right of children to live healthy lives.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

“I’m determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world,” Mr. Carter said as he walked in blue jeans through a couple of villages in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia, the third country of his African tour.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Carter ended up “adopting” diseases like Guinea worm disease, river blindness, elephantiasis, trachoma and schistosomiasis that afflict the world’s most voiceless people. These are horrific diseases that cause unimaginable suffering, yet they rarely get attention, treatment or research funding because their victims are impoverished and invisible.

When Mr. Carter met with Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan’s president, President Zia had never heard of Guinea worm and didn’t know it existed in Pakistan. Nor did his health minister. But after Mr. Carter put the issue on the agenda, Pakistan worked energetically with the Carter Center to eliminate the parasite in that country.

The villages here in Ethiopia that Mr. Carter visited cradle a fast-moving creek, making a lovely image of thatch huts and bubbling water. But the creek is home to the black flies whose bites spread the parasite that causes river blindness, leading to unbearable itching and often eventually to blindness.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine the suffering of people with river blindness,” Mr. Carter said as he traipsed through the village beside his wife, Rosalynn.

Already, Mr. Carter’s campaign is making huge progress against the disease.

Kemeru Befita, a woman washing her clothes in the creek near Mr. Carter, told me that two of her children had caught river blindness in the last couple of months. After a visit to the witch doctor didn’t help, she took them to a clinic where — thanks to Mr. Carter’s program — they received medicine that killed the baby worms. They are two of the nearly 10 million people to whom the Carter Center gave medication last year alone, who won’t go blind.

At the end of the day, this one-term president who left office a pariah in his own party will transform the lives of more people in more places over a longer period of time than any other recent president. And I hope that he can also transform our conception of human rights, so that we show an interest not only in the human rights of people suffering from the oppression of dictators, but also from the even more brutal tyranny of blindness, malaria and worms.

Molly Ivins Dies

2007-02-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

With wit, conscience and courage, Molly Ivins exposed the sham of the Bush administration before and after its scourge began. She died of cancer on Jan 31. I once heard her speak, on television, at a meeting to protest the Patriot Act and the assault on civil liberties post 9-11. She was full of Texas adages, making everyone laugh as only she could, even as she told the cold truth. If we had a few more journalists like her, Iraq would never have been launched.

Here are a few tributes to her. But first, here's her final column, still fighting, as she knew she was at the end of her life. She was 62.

Enough is Enough (Jan 26, 2007)

I remember Molly (John Nichols' Tribute in The Nation)

New York Times Tribute

Gandhi Photographs, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech

2007-01-31T08:39:00.000-08:00

On Gandhi's death anniversary, Slate has published a set of pictures taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer. (Thanks, Anand, for the link).

By chance, I read Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech of 1978 yesterday. It could have been given by Gandhi, reading out from "Hind Swaraj". Or Lohia from "Marx, Gandhi and Socialism". As he left Russia, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out a single message to the Russian people, "Live not by Lies". He tries, in this speech, to say the same thing to America. The warning, given 29 years ago, acquires an air of clairvoyance today.

Here's the address in full:

A World Split Apart
Speech by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 1978.

am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things that were rejected and appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I said . . .

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to its religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.

The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too. and this can hardly suit anyone.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)

The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution.

If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.

Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency — all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man — the master of the world — does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)

The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word "press" to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it?

Here again, the overriding concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb.

Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed everyday, confusing readers, and then left hanging?

The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan "Everyone is entitled to know everything." (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)

Hastiness and superficiality — these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons — maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world . The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a survey, in particular to look into the impact of these characteristics on important aspects of a nation’s life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities, and art.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich’s book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the U.S.

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.

Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.

The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.

A Deadly December

2007-01-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

Two Satraps and an Emperor

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Three famous people died in December 2006. Everyone knows what 'Emperor' means. But what is a "Satrap"?

The word, which is usually said to be of Latin and Greek origin, actually turns out to be from Sanskrit, via Old Persian. The root is "Kshethra Paavana", which means "region protector", which is to say, a vassal who oversees a province or area on behalf of an emperor. Ancient empires used satraps to manage far-flung possessions, a tried and tested technique based on an established spoils system. The satrap, or local lord, exercised wide powers over his subjects, unhindered by the Empire in whose name he ruled, so long as he proclaimed fealty to the Emperor, and, of course, forked over a suitable portion of the revenues from his region.

It is, come to think of it, one of the oldest recorded applications of outsourcing. The Greek and Roman empires used it, as evidenced by the word itself. Empires in India did the same: the great Emperor Ashoka (circa 300 BC) was known to have a great many satraps, as did the Mughals (1526-1707).

So has the practice continued, right down to our times, although the nature and form of the spoils system have evolved. During the Cold War, the West and the Communist bloc's each had their own set of satraps, turning the world into a checkerboard of allegiances.

When Alexander the Great invaded the Punjab, he faced a local king, Porus, who fought with great valor before being defeated. When Porus was brought before Alexander in chains,the story goes, Alexander mocked him, asking, "How would you like to be treated?" Porus is said to have replied, "Like a king treats a king!" Alexander was so impressed by his bearing and dignity, it is reported, not to mention his bravery, that he gave Porus his kingdom back, and made him a satrap. I've always wondered how a spirited soul like Porus could come to an accommodation that would leave him a vassal. But then, the swallowing of one's pride at the right time is evidently a time-honored skill essential to both business and statecraft. How many times have we not seen proud CEOs of an acquired company mutating into meek heads of departments in the new dispensation; all it took was a few million dollars!

Things might go the other way too. Sometimes, a satrap would get too big for his boots, and develop notions of independence or delusions of grandeur. At other times, satraps would attempt a well judged leap into the arms of another empire, in search of a better deal. The task of an empire, then, became the decapitation of that satrap and installation of a new one. Since this was a lengthy and costly proposition, wise emperors would make sure the vassals were kept in fair humor.

The age of Revolutions changed this some. Woodrow Wilson's encouragement of nationality changed it even more. Whereas "Civis Romanus Sum" was once a proud cry, no local ruler could retain/bolster the self-respect of his people any longer by open fealty to an outside empire. Subtler ways were needed. Nothing was more vexatious than democracy, where, by definition, there could be multiple opinions, even on which Empire to align with. Far easier to foster a dictatorship as with the old satrapy, where keeping the local ruler in power was all it took to retain allegiance. As a corollary, the more emasculated the people, the less effort required to maintaining the satrapy.

History will note that two former satraps of America, in two different hemispheres, died at the end of 2006. Both ran regimes that, everyone agrees, perpetrated untold numbers of crimes -- murders and disappearances, torture and rape.

One was sought by half-a-dozen countries for many years, yet escaped prosecution for "crimes against humanity", partially with the help of United States. He died of natural causes, before he could be tried, having used every artifice to avoid the certain prospect of the noose.

The other, was hunted down and captured by the United States, and kept in its custody for three years. He was tried, after a fashion, in circumstances that would hardly be called dispassionate by any Western standard. A sentence of death handed down, for "crimes against humanity". Following an appeals process that was over almost before it started, he was executed by hanging. Saddam Hussein mounted the gallows saying that he was not afraid, for this was the path he had chosen.

Fazed less and less by irony with each passing day, America lionized Pinochet, upon his death, as a visionary responsible for Chile's resurgence. In Saddam Hussein's case, it welcomed his execution as a vindication of the judicial process. All this while simultaneously heaping praise upon a recently departed President Ford, for pardoning President Nixon in advance, thereby sparing the nation the agony of... the selfsame judicial process!

It is testament to our public diplomacy that women in India, among other parts of the world, have vowed to name their newborn sons "Saddam".

Perhaps it is written that he who rises by a hanging (chad) will fall by a hanging (sad).

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Santa Claus is Chinese

2006-12-19T15:04:00.000-08:00

Why China is Rising and the US is Declining

by Lester R. Brown

I know Santa Claus is Chinese because each Christmas morning after all the gifts are unwrapped and things settle down I systematically go through the presents to see where they are made. The results are almost always the same: roughly 70 percent are from China. After some research, it seems that my one-family survey is representative of the country as a whole.

Let’s start with toys. Some 80 percent of the toys sold in the United States—from Barbie dolls to video games—are made in China. Talking toys that speak English learned the language from Chinese workers. Electronic goods—from Apple’s iPod to Microsoft’s Xbox—are made in China. Clothing—from the latest cashmere sweaters to gym suits—is also likely to have a “Made in China” label.

The Christmas tree itself may come from China. While real Christmas trees are grown in every state in the United States and are marketed locally, many families now gather around artificial Christmas trees. Eight out of every 10 artificial Christmas trees sold in the United States are made in China. Last year Americans spent over $130 million on plastic Christmas trees from China.

This year Americans will spend over $1 billion on Christmas ornaments from China. And in perhaps the greatest irony of all, even nativity scenes are made in China. Last year Americans spent more than $39 million buying nativity scenes shipped in from the East. China’s success in attracting foreign investment capital and mobilizing this huge workforce has made it the workshop of the world.

That the U.S. Christmas is made in China is a metaphor for a far deeper set of economic issues affecting the United States. Today Christmas is celebrated in both the United States and China—but for different reasons and with far different economic consequences. For the Chinese, the manufacturing bonanza means record profits, rising incomes, and, in a society where people save some 40 percent of their income, a sharp jump in savings. In the United States, Christmas shopping expenditures, headed for another record high this year, contribute to rising credit card debt and a soaring trade deficit.

Underneath the American Christmas spirit and good cheer is a debt-laden society that appears to have lost its way, marred in the quicksand of consumerism. As a society, we seem to have forgotten how to save so we can invest in a better future. Instead of leaving our children a promising economic future, we are bequeathing them the largest debt burden of any generation in history.

At the personal level, credit card debt just keeps climbing, and at the government level, we have the largest deficit in history. At the international level, we have a trade deficit that moves to a new high month after month.

It’s not the fact that our Christmas is made in China, but rather the mindset that has led to it that is most disturbing. We want to consume no matter what. We want to spend now and let our children pay. It is this same mindset that introduces tax cuts while waging a costly war. Economic sacrifice is no longer part of our vocabulary. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt banned the sale of private cars in order to mobilize the manufacturing capacity and engineering skills of the U.S. automobile industry to build tanks and planes. In contrast, after 9/11, President Bush urged us to go shopping.

In the United States we are so intent on consuming that personal savings have virtually disappeared. We have an average of five credit cards for every man, woman, and child. Of the 145 million cardholders, only 55 million clear their accounts each month. The other 90 million cannot seem to catch up and are paying steep interest rates on their remaining balance. Millions of people are so deeply in debt that they may remain indebted for life.

The official national debt, the product of years of fiscal deficits, now totals $8.5 trillion—some $64,000 per taxpayer. (See data at www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update62_data.htm.) By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, this figure is projected to reach a staggering $9.4 trillion. We are digging a fiscal black hole and sinking deeper and deeper into it.

Each month the Treasury covers the fiscal deficit by auctioning off securities. The two leading international buyers of U.S. Treasury securities are Japan and China. In this role, China is now also becoming our banker. This developing country, where income levels are one sixth those of the United States, is financing the excesses of an affluent industrial society. What’s wrong with this picture?

In times past, when our fiscal deficits were covered largely by U.S. lenders, interest payments on the debt were reinvested in the United States. Now they are flowing abroad to Japan, China, and other foreign holders of U.S. debt.

While the U.S. fiscal deficit, driven partly by the war in Iraq, soars to stratospheric levels, the country is facing an unprecedented fiscal challenge as the baby boomer generation retires, pushing up the costs of social security, Medicaid, and Medicare. This, combined with the growing interest payments on our debt to China and other countries, will put a nearly impossible tax burden on the next generation—something for which they may never forgive us.

The U.S. trade deficit is growing by leaps and bounds, nearly doubling from $452 billion in 2000 to an estimated $850 billion in 2006. Rising oil imports and the trade deficit with China account for over half of it.

National policy failures such as not adequately supporting the use of renewable energy technologies have contributed to the growing U.S. trade deficit. For example, the United States should be a leading manufacturer and exporter of solar cells and wind turbines, but it has fallen behind both Europe and Japan. The solar cell, invented at Bell Labs in 1954, is an American technology. But the U.S. effort to develop solar energy was so weak and sporadic that both Germany and Japan forged ahead and developed robust solar cell manufacturing and export industries.

The situation is similar with wind. Although the modern wind industry was born in California at the beginning of the 1980s, the U.S. failure to sustain support for wind resource development allowed European countries to largely take over this industry.

Even though rising oil imports are widening our trade deficit, we consume oil with abandon, weakening the economy and undermining our political independence.

We have lost influence in world financial markets simply because of our mounting debt, much of it held by other countries. If China’s leaders ever become convinced that the dollar is headed continuously downward and they decide to dump their dollar holdings, the dollar could collapse.

Beholden to other countries for oil and to finance our debt, the United States is fast losing its leadership role in the world. The question we are facing is not simply whether our Christmas is made in China, but more fundamentally whether we can restore the discipline and values that made us a great nation—a nation the world admired, respected, and emulated. This is not something that Santa Claus can deliver, not even a Chinese Santa Claus. This is something only we can do.

Georgie, There's a Crowd Downstairs

2006-12-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

Where's the Accountability for the Dead and Wounded?

By SEAN PENN

Sean Penn received the 2006 Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award from the Creative Coalition on December 18, 2006, in New York City, where he delivered the following speech.

The Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award. For the purposes of tonight and my own personal enjoyment, I'm going to yield to the notion that I deserve this.

And in the spirit of that, tell you that I am very honored to receive it. And for this I thank the Creative Coalition and my friend Charlie Rose. It does seem appropriate to take this opportunity to exercise the right that honors us all--freedom of speech.

Note for later:

The original title for the Louis XVI comedy called "Start The Revolution Without Me" was one of my favorites. That original title was "Louis, There's a Crowd Downstairs." But I'll come back to that...

Words may be our most civil weapons of change, when they connect to actions of sacrifice, or good will, but they have no grace or power without bold clarity. So, if you'll bear with me, borrowing a line from Bob Dylan, "Let us not talk falsely now--the hour is getting late."

Global warming

Massive pollution

Non-stop U.S. war in Iraq

Attacks on civil liberties under the banner of war on terror

Military spending

You and I, U.S. taxpayers, spend 1 1/2 billion dollars on an Iraq-war-'focused' military everyday, while social needs cry out.

Health care

Education

Public transit

Environmental protections

Affordable housing

Job training

Public investment

And, levy building.

We depend largely for information on these issues from media industries, driven by the bottom line to such an extent that the public interest becomes uninteresting.

And should we speak truth, we stand against government efforts to intimidate or legislate in the service of censorship. Whether under the guise of a Patriot Act or any other benevolent-sounding rationale for the age-old game of shutting down dissent by discouraging independent thinking and preventing progressive social change.

The most effective forms of de facto censorship are pre-emptive. Systemically, we are encouraged to keep our heads down, out of the line of fire--to avoid the danger, god forbid, that someone in the White House, on Capitol Hill, or a media blow-hard might take a shot at us.

But, as a practical matter, most of the limits on creative expression and other forms of free speech come from self-censorship, where the mechanism of corporate clout offers carrots and brandishes sticks. We avoid a conflict before the conflict materializes. We reach for the carrots and stay out of range of sticks.

Decades ago, Fred Friendly called it a "positive veto"--corporations putting big money behind shows that they want to establish and perpetuate. Whether in journalism or drama, creative efforts that don't gain a financial "positive veto" are dismissible, then dismissed. We may not call that "censorship." But whatever we call it, the effects of a "positive veto" system are severe. They impose practical limits on efforts to bring the most important realities to public attention sooner rather than later...

We're beginning to see more revealing images of this war. But it's later now, isn't it? What we have to pay attention to are the results of these "practical limits." One, is that wars become much easier to launch than to halt.

I've got a feeling about how we can begin to change this process and I want to pass it by you. Children grow up in our country -- many by the way, under conditions of extreme poverty -- and are told from a very early age "You will be accountable!" "With freedom, comes responsibility!" And so the lecture goes...Democratic and Republican alike. Lie-cheat-steal, and there will be consequences! Theft will be punished. Actions that cause the deaths of others will be severely punished. The message, from leaders in Washington, news media, mom, dad, and church is clear. Criminals MUST be held accountable.

Now, there's been a lot of talk lately on Capitol Hill about how impeachment should be "off the table." We're told that it's time to look ahead--not back...

Can you imagine how far that argument would go for the defense at an arraignment on charges of grand larceny, or large-scale distribution of methamphetamines? How about the arranging of a contract killing on a pregnant mother? "Indictment should be off the table." Or "Let's look forward, not backward." Or "We can't afford another failed defendant."

Our country has a legal system, not of men and women, but of laws. Why then are we so willing to put inconvenient provisions of the U.S. constitution and federal law "off the table?" Our greatest concern right now should be what to put ON the table. Unless we're going to have one set of laws for the powerful and another set for those who can't afford fancy lawyers, then truth matters to everyone. And accountability is a matter of human and legal principle. If we're going to continue wagging our fingers at the disadvantaged transgressors, then I suggest we be consistent. If truth and accountability can be stretched into sham concepts, we may as well open the gates of all our jails and prisons, where, by the way, there are more people behind bars than any other country in the world. One in every 32 American adults is behind bars, on probation, or on parole as we stand here tonight.

Which is to say that, globally, the United States is number one at demanding accountability and backing up that demand with imprisonment. But, when it comes to our president, vice president, secretary of state, former secretary of defense...this insistence on accountability vanishes. All of a sudden, what's past is prologue. And we're just "forward-looking." But some people can't just look forward. Men and women stationed in Iraq at this moment, under orders of a Commander-in-Chief so sufficiently practiced in the art of deception, that he got vast numbers of American journalists and the most esteemed media outlets of this country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and PBS to eagerly serve his agenda-building for war. And the process also induced vast numbers of artists and performers (probably even some in this room tonight) to keep quiet and facilitate the push for an invasion in Iraq.

I'm sure many people who I met in Baghdad, both in my trips prior to and during the occupation, now similarly cannot just look forward. With lives so entirely shattered by a violence of occupation--an ongoing U.S. war effort and the civil war that it has catalyzed. All on the back of a crumbled infrastructure, following eleven years of devastating U.N. sanctions.

And, where is the accountability on behalf of the American dead and wounded, their families, their friends, and the people of the United States who have seen their country become a world pariah. These events have been enabled by people named Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice, as they continue to perpetuate a massive fraud on American democracy and decency.

On January 11, 2003, I made an appearance on Larry King's show following my first trip to Iraq. I suggested that every American mother and father sit down with a scrap of paper and pencil and scribble the following words: Dear Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so -- We regret to inform you that your son or daughter so-and-so, was killed in action in Iraq. I then asked that those mothers and fathers complete that letter in whatever way might comfort them should they receive it. When one considers what a bewildered continuation of those words a parent might attempt to write today, it seems inconceivable that this country could've ever bought into this war. Who were those mothers and fathers believing in?! We know it's not the administration alone, but a culture at large, cloaking itself in self-righteousness, religion, and adolescent hero-dreaming machismo. Would they have believed Rush Limbaugh if they'd known he was high as a kite on OxyContin? Would they have believed the factually impaired Bill O'Reilly if they knew he was massaging his rectum with a loofah while telephonically harassing a staffer? Hannity, had they known he was simply a whore to the cause of his pimps--Murdoch and Ailes? Or the little bow-tie putz, if they knew all he was seeking was a good laugh from Jon Stewart? Maybe our countrymen and women were listening to Ted Haggert while he was whiffing meth and boning a muscle-headed gigolo? Or Mark Foley seeking junior weenis? Joe Lieberman, sitting Shiva? And Toby Keith, singing about how big his boots are?

"Oh, there goes Sean...he had to go and name-call. They say he can't help himself." Or, did I name-call? Maybe I just quickly summed up 7 or 8 little truths. Oh, no, you're right--I name-called. I said, "putz". I take it back. Or, do I? Did I say "whore?" Pimp? These are questions. But, the real and great questions of conscience and accountability would not loom so ominously -- unanswered or evaded at such tremendous cost -- without our day-to-day failure to insist on genuine accountability. Of course we'd prefer some easy ways to get there. But no easy ways exist. Not a new Congress. Not Barack Obama. And, not John McCain. His courage in North Vietnamese prison makes him a heroic man. His voting record in Congress makes him a damaging public servant. We have gotta stand the fuck up and show the world how powerful are the people in a democracy. That's how we regain our position of example, rather than pariah, to the world at large. And that is how we can begin to put up our chins and allow pride and unification to raise our own quality of life and security.

They tell us we lost 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Is that enough? We're about to match it. We're within weeks, if not less, of killing 3,000 Americans in Iraq. I ask Speaker Pelosi, can we put impeachment on the table then? Without former FEMA chief Mike Brown being held accountable, post Katrina (scapegoat though he may have been) we'd have had the same chaos and neglect when Rita hit Houston. Think about it. And, the same people who trumpet deterrence as a justification for punishment when we speak of "crime and punishment," will boast their positive thinking when dismissing the deterrent qualities of an impeachment proceeding.

What is impeachment? It's not a Democratic versus Republican event. Not if used responsibly. If the House of Representatives votes to impeach this president, is he thrown out of office? No, he is not thrown out of office. That is not what impeachment is. Impeachment is the opportunity to proceed with accountability and give our elected senators, democratic and republican, the power to pursue a thorough investigation. The power to put the truth on the table. Mothers and fathers are losing their kids to horrifying deaths in this war every single day. Horrible deaths. Horrible maimings. Were crimes committed in enlisting the support of our country in this decision to go to war? For the moment we're living the most spineless of scenarios; where the hawks abused impeachment eight years ago, now, the rest of us politely refuse to use it today. Let's give the whistle-blowers cover, let's get the subpoenas out there, and then, one by one, put this administration under oath. And then, if the crimes of "Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" are proven, do as Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution provides, and remove "the President, Vice President and...civil officers of the United States" from office. If the Justice Department then sees fit to bunk them up with Jeff Skilling, so be it.

So...look, if we attempt to impeach for lying about a blowjob, yet accept these almost certain abuses without challenge, we become a cum-stain on the flag we wave. You know, I was listening to Frank Rich this morning, speaking on a book tour. He said he thought impeachment proceedings would amount to a "decadent" sidetrack, while our soldiers were still being killed. I admire Frank Rich. And of course he would be right if impeachment is all we do. But we're Americans. We can do two things at the same time. Yes, let's move forward and swiftly get out of this war in Iraq AND impeach these bastards.

Christopher Reeve promised to get out of that chair. Well, I don't know about you, but it feels like he's up now and I wouldn't be standing here if it weren't on his shoulders. Let it be for something.

Georgie, there's a crowd downstairs.

Thank you and good night.

Name, Interrupted

2006-10-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

Vote for James H. 'Jim'

Funny Business

by Niranj...

My son is taking a class on 'Elements of Comedy' at his school this quarter. Hearing him talk of distinctions between 'ridiculous' and 'ludicrous', 'preposterous' and 'absurd', all of which we had in our ignorance hitherto classed as 'funny', our household has lately been awakened to a heightened appreciation of why, specifically, we have been laughing at various things all these years. A Moliere within a Moliere, as it were. Now that would be an irony, I should think. Or is it a case of circular logic? I give up. His headache, not mine.

But can any number of comedy studies classes prepare one for something like this?

Some Voting Machines Chop Off Candidates' Names
Computer Glitch Affects Voters in 3 Jurisdictions; Error Cannot Be Fixed by Nov. 7

By Leef Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; B04

U.S. Senate candidate James Webb's last name has been cut off on part of the electronic ballot used by voters in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville because of a computer glitch that also affects other candidates with long names, city officials said yesterday.
<stuff omitted...>
Thus, Democratic candidate Webb will appear with his first name and nickname only -- or "James H. 'Jim' " -- on summary pages in Alexandria, Falls Church and Charlottesville...

There, but for the grace of God... was my first thought as I read the report. If the machine deemed "James H. 'Jim' Webb" too long, I could only thank my luck that I had firmly turned down all requests to run for the Senate from Virginia this year.

I scanned the Post quickly to see if a similar fate had attended George Allen, Webb's incumbent opponent in the race. A quick tally revealed that George Allen had more letters in his name than James Webb -- and even more, if you added recently-acquired middle names like 'Macaca' and 'Stock Option'.

Actually, Allen did pretty well in what might be termed Great Ballot Massacre of 2006. The report goes on to say George Allen is one of the few whose names appear in full, although his party affiliation has been cut off. Fortune finally appears to be shining on Allen. What a godsend, in a time when according to every poll, the presence of the letter 'R' after the candidate's name is tantamount to electoral cyanide!

Diebold has really outdone itself this time, I said to myself as I read the story. Except the company in charge of messing up elections in Virginia is, it turns out, not Diebold but another called Hart InterCivic, whose name appears in full in the WP report. Was it Tolstoy who wrote that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? One type of mess in Florida, another in Ohio, yet another in Virginia... Who says originality is dead in America?

Hart InterCivic and Virginia's Secretary of Elections were both assuring the public, (per the Post report on Page B4) in rather chirpy terms, that Hart InterCivic intends to install the newer system version before the next election in 2007.

In an brilliant article (The Evening of Empire) in Counterpunch recently, the analyst Werther set out a grim view of our situation, drawing parallels between the mendacity, authoritarianism and unrelieved bungling that will forever mark America in the Bush years, with identical trends which characterized the last years of the Roman Empire.

Ah, but was Rome ever this funny?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

A Rome Reprise

2006-10-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

From Counterpunch:

October 23, 2006

Hubris, Bravado and Hypocrisy

The Evening of Empire

By WERTHER

When the admirable Tiberius upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves."

-- Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Amid the onrush of Caligulan sex scandals, suspension of the Constitution, depressing bulletins from the Babylonian front, and all manner of bogus "events," a recent news item has passed with remarkably little public stir, despite being featured above the fold on the front page of The Washington Post, a bulletin board as eagerly read by the capital city's strivers as Pravda in its day by the fellow-traveler, or Osservatore Romano by the untramontanist Catholic.

The article [1] informs us that the President has signed off on a "National Space Policy." The cornerstone of this new policy is the administration's intention to "oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interest."

The document adds elsewhere that the new policy must "enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interest there." Note the unctuous use of the modifier "our"--as if the interests of parasitic contractors, government placemen, and neoconservative scribblers constituted the res publica.

If the English language means anything, the plain intent of the policy is to assert that the United States (or rather its governing clique) can do anything it likes, and treaties be damned, including the Outer Space Treaty currently in force. This conclusion would be consistent with the administration's treatment of other judicial impedimenta, such as the Geneva Convention or the late Constitution. Similar to the Senate's craven grant of plenary power to the Roman Emperor, a supine legislative branch has encouraged the administration to believe its own whim is law--to make war, to torture, to "unsign" treaties.

Yet the Post journalist, in the idiot-savant manner made famous by Bob Woodward, stenographically quotes a "senior government official who was not authorized to speak on the record" as saying "This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period."

Ah, just as the Military Commissions Act was not about torture! How like the administration to assign one of its "senior" functionaries to pretend to speak without authorization in order to add verisimilitude to an assertion that it plainly wanted to disseminate--an assertion at odds with the plain text of its policy. And the Post's reporter fell for it like a yokel at the Barnum circus. Thus the rest of the article becomes a fraudulent "debate" between the administration's allegations and those of its critics; thereby lending weight to the presumption that there are legitimately "two sides" to any issue involving the administration.

While the Establishment press (other than the Post) gave little attention to the space policy story, the blogosphere (to the extent it paid any attention) behaved in a predictable fashion: the usual hand-wringing about the militarization of space, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, and forecasts of dark tidings generally. There is some truth to these assertions, but they are subsidiary to a more significant point.

The space policy document is not so much a blueprint as a symptom. But of what?--of fiendish Machiavells, plotting to storm the very heavens? Perhaps that is the intent of these laptop Flash Gordons, but between the desire and the fulfillment falls the shadow: the shadow of utter incompetence.

What is to be said about an administration which dreams of policing outer space, when for three and a half years its legions have been stalemated in their occupation of a broken-down country with a pre-war GDP less than that of Fairfax County, Virginia? The Iraq war has been such a riot of fecklessness as to take one's breath away.

One is hard put to find a more badly fought war in our history. The United States, remember, entered the war with its defense expenditure already nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Vastly increasing the regular military budget since then, as well as piling on the $100+ billion annually for Iraq supplemental spending that "doesn't count" against fictitious Congressional spending limits, has not improved matters.

Since the imperial court, and particularly its War Minister, Donald Rumsfeld, is so fond of World War II analogies, perhaps it is fitting to point out that the tone for the Iraq debacle was set by the establishment in the spring of 2003 of the Coalition Provisional Authority, a repository of more political hacks, shrieking poseurs, and ideological zealots than at any time since Hitler and Goering "cut up the giant cake" of the Ukraine by offering it to the administration of Nazi Party lay-abouts known derisively as "golden pheasants."

The soldiers are now paying the price. Scanning the casualty lists, one is struck by the number of enlisted reservists over the age of 50. In a past war such hexagenarians would, for example, be cannon fodder for the Volkssturm's last-ditch defense of Berlin. One also hears of a veteran of one Iraq deployment, who had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and placed on suicide watch, being ordered back to Iraq. [2]

If this is an imperial army, it smacks of late imperial Rome, plugging the gaps in its vast, ramshackle conquests with too few troops to stem the barbarian hordes. As if on queue, the Post's op-ed page saw fit to air a solution to the troop dilemma on the day after its space policy story: neocon fanatic Max Boot and Establishment weathervane Michael O'Hanlon teamed up to advocate recruiting foreigners (including undocumented aliens) into the military as a step to citizenship. [3] Shades of the Germanic volunteers in the Legions of Rome!

It is sufficiently ironic that a coterie which dreams of Zeus-like control of the heavens comes a cropper in a minor imperial project on terra firma. But what are we to say about the pretensions of a class that asserts such omnipotence, when the very borders of the country in whose name it rules are as permeable as cheese cloth?

One almost feels sympathy for the dilemma of our rulers. The mob that helped put this clique on the imperial throne is demanding that this southern invasion across the imperial limes be halted forthwith. And the proles know whereof they speak: their living standards are at risk, and while they can be mollified with television entertainment and sports spectacles, they, like the mob at the Circus Maximus, can be fickle in its loyalty to the imperial purple.

At the same time, the money barons who sustain the emperor and his retinue profit handsomely from the chaos on America's southern border. The hordes who swarm across it work the latifundia of the great, E Coli-ridden corporate farms, pluck the chickens, and construct the houses of the luxuriating class. If one were a betting man one would lay odds the money barons will win and the borders will remain porous, the nascent totalitarianism of Homeland Security and the fury of the mob notwithstanding.

If the geographic situation of the United States, in the sense of the contrast between its far-flung (if futile) imperial ventures and its utter breakdown as a sovereign nation-state, is reminiscent of late Rome, then the economic basis of the empire completes the picture. The United States is no longer a producer, it is a ravenous consumer, now with an annual trade deficit of three-quarters of a trillion dollars (an unimaginable figure even ten years ago).

China, the favorite nation-state "national security threat" of the imperial gang, is a prime beneficiary of our governing class's addiction to arbitraging labor. A war with China, while not an impossibility, is far-fetched. War would instantly empty the shelves of Wal-Mart; where would the people who earn Wal-Mart wages shop, other than Wal-Mart? One could foresee serious social instability (read: riots) as a result. Even if our rulers were competent enough to construct a space denial program to discomfit the Chinese, they could finance it only if the Chinese Central Bank remained strangely passive, and did not dump U.S. Treasury bills.

Thus it was with Rome:

"Rome lived on its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo." [4]

Seen in the historical perspective of an Edward Gibbon or a Winwood Reade, the Bush administration's National Space Policy bears out neither the vain hopes of its authors nor the nagging fears of its critics. Rather, it is a gesture of bravado characteristic of empires in the evening of their existence. Logic might suggest that such empires would hive to the status quo, and avoid adventures that could drain their power. Logic, however, can be deceiving.

Just as the Emperor Valens embarked on a disastrous campaign against the Goths in 376, the Austro-Hungarian Empire rolled the dice in 1914, and the British embarked on the feckless Suez campaign of 1956 (significantly, when their finances were in terrible shape), so the American Empire doubles its bets at the casino of history. It would vault the firmament to bring its purported enemies to heel, when the very basis of its power is ebbing away.

It is the expression of late imperial hubris, not just of a mad emperor, but of a whole governing system.

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] "Bush Sets Defense as Space Priority," The Washington Post, 18 October 2006, p.A1.

[2] "Troops With Stress Disorders Fit For Duty?" CBS News, 19 October 2006

[3] "A Military Path to Citizenship," The Washington Post, 19 October 2006, p. A29

[4] The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (1871)

Pat Tillman's brother Writes...

2006-10-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

After Pat’s Birthday
by Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin was discharged in 2005.

Copyright 2006 TruthDig.

Toadies and Timid Men

2006-10-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

October 3, 2006

From Counterpunch

How Empires Die

By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN

"When Government undertakes a repressive policy, the innocent are not safe. Men like me would not be considered innocent. The innocent then is he who forswears politics, who takes no part in the public movements of the times, who retires into his house, mumbles his prayers, pays his taxes, and salaams all the government officials all round. The man who interferes in politics, the man who goes about collecting money for any public purpose, the man who addresses a public meeting, then becomes a suspect. I am always on the borderland and I, therefore, for personal reasons, if for nothing else, undertake to say that the possession, in the hands of the Executive, of powers of this drastic nature will not hurt only the wicked. It will hurt the good as well as the bad, and there will be such a lowering of public spirit, there will be such a lowering of the political tone in the country, that all your talk of responsible government will be mere mockery ...

"Much better that a few rascals should walk abroad than that the honest man should be obliged for fear of the law of the land to remain shut up in his house, to refrain from the activities which it is in his nature to indulge in, to abstain from all political and public work merely because there is a dreadful law in the land."

--Rt. Hon. Srinivasa Sastri, speaking in the Imperial Legislative Council, at the introduction of the Rowlatt Bill, Feb 7, 1919

It was bad enough, when the bill doing away with habeas corpus and adherence to the Geneva Conventions was being discussed this week, that its supporters actually said that only those who had done wrong need worry. It is further testament to our standard of political discourse that the rebuttal was often equally pathetic -- we can't trust this president to exercise good judgement! Few statesman in today's debate can capture the issue as succinctly as did Rt. Hon. Sastri nearly a century ago.

All of this is moot, in another sense. This is just one more slide, albeit a huge one, in a long list of slippages our people and politicians have allowed over the last decade, always with the exhortation to 'put it behind us'.

We set out to make Iraq in America's image. We have succeeded splendidly in achieving a certain mutual resemblance. Today there is no difference between disappearing in Iraq and disappearing in America. In one place you might be held incognito by a militia, in the other by the government. Until yesterday, the difference was that in America, the governent was obliged to produce you before a magistrate, to let you have a lawyer, to allow your family to know.

The mobs in the middle east may raise a million cries of, "Death to America", but it is George W. Bush and his pocket Congress that are carrying out their wishes.

'Na Vakeel, Na Daleel, Na Appeal', was the slogan raised by Indians against the imposition of the Rowlatt Act in 1919. Translation "No lawyer, No Trial, No Appeal".

"The Rowlatt Act was passed in 1919, indefinitely extending wartime "emergency meaures" in order to control public unrest and root out conspiracy. This act effectively authorised the government to imprison without trial, any person suspected of terrorism living in the Raj." (From Wikipedia)

There was anger in India -- and shock. Whatever one's dislike of British rule, it had the perceived merit of standing fast by notions such as open trials, prisoner's rights, appeals, due process, impressive in a country which had mainly known princely whim for justice in earlier times. The Rowlatt Act tore the veil of moral superiority from the public face of British rule.

Indian opposition to the Act, voiced by many well-meaning and eloquent legislators such as Sastri, was ignored. Public outrage was widespread, but unfocused. Gandhi was then a relatively fresh face in India, having returned from South Africa less than four years before. His exploits in South Africa and more recently in Bihar had won him fair renown, but he was by no means yet pre-eminent.

Though on unfamilar political terrain and younger than many other leaders in a country where age equated to deference, Gandhi had two attributes that set him apart from most other leaders --daring and faith. Only he could have had the nerve to call for a general strike throughout India, as he did. Only he could have grasped that a draconian law was an insult to the country, and that to not counter it in the fullest measure was to betray an article of faith. He was in Madras, at the home of his host Rajagopalachari (later to be the first Indian Governor General), when, as he writes in his autobiography, "The idea came last night in a dream that we should call upon the country to observe a general hartal (strike)". On April 6, without any formal organization, in an era without phones, photocopiers, or computers, word spread, and the entire country came to a standstill!

If Gandhi found a law permitting detention without trail by a foreign government abhorrent enough to launch a nationwide general strike, what is America doing when similar laws are being passed by its own government?

Answer: Not even a filibuster. Are there political leaders holding town hall meetings (electronic and otherwise) telling the people what this draconian legislation means? They are far too busy trying to dodge the accusation of being 'soft on terror'. As in 2002, this will not save them. Tony Snow warned today that their statements of doubt during the debate can and will be used against them in the campaign (proof that Miranda at least still lives, after a fashion). They are, in Sastri's words, "Toadies, Timid Men".

Following the hartal, in Punjab (where the Lt. Governor would shortly impose indignities such as a crawling lane where Indians could not walk, but only crawl), people assembled in a park in Amritsar on Baisakhi Day (the Punjabi New Year) on April 13, 1919, to protest the arrest of two activists. Known to history as Jallianwalla Bagh, the garden was enclosed all around by a wall. Gen. Reginald Dyer, head of the army in Punjab, said he wanted to provide Indians a "moral lesson", and had his troops fire into the enclosed space, resulting in the death of 379 people (by official count).

The rest (no pun intended) is history. After the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh, the English lost any moral hold they had over the minds of Indians. The Great Hartal also signified the beginning of the Gandhi Era. Within thirty years, the Empire was finished. As a booklet on Jallianwalla Bagh says, "If at Plassey the foundations of the British Empire were laid, at Amritsar they were broken".

In our times, having already disdained the law and being caught out by the Supreme Court, our Emperors are trying to rewrite the statute retroactively, assisted by a conscience-free Congress. That a reportedly sick man hiding in a cave in Waziristan has brought about the abolition of habeas corpus in America is the clearest verdict on who is winning the War on Terror.

In India, in 1976, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi passed a similar law, abolishing habeas corpus and setting herself unpunishable for any crimes committed before or during her office (it was repealed, lock stock and barrel, when a new government came to power). But before she could do so, the entire opposition had been arrested, the press had censorship clamped on it, and the jails filled with a hundred thousand dissenters picked up in midnight sweeps. India's parliament does not have a filibuster. The Democrats and Republicans who sold the country down the river have no similar defense, other than to say it has become a habit.

Where is the Martin Luther King today to call for civil disobedience? Where are the crowds outside the White House and Congress? The fight is no longer against the Bush administration or its minions in the other estates. Their Empire is headed for the abyss. The question, is, will it take the Republic along?

Gandhi wrote in his Satyagraha in South Africa (whose 100th Anniverary fell on 9-11-2006!), that people came to him saying, "We are ready to follow you to the gallows". He replied, "Jail is enough for me." If the Republic is to be saved, those who love it must ask themselves what they are ready to give up in return. As for the rest, Samuel Adams (yes, the beer guy) had this answer:

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, " go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Pirates of the Mediterranean

2006-10-04T22:03:00.000-07:00

(from the NY Times, Sep 30, 2006)

By ROBERT HARRIS

The New York Times

Kintbury, England

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”

The Emperor has No Clothes

2006-09-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Those living in glass houses, etc. is well known. Yet, the hubris of the Bush administration is such that they actually tried to blame 9-11 on the Clinton Administration. As is well known, Clinton finally hit back (too little, too late, and too much in self-defense after being quiet and cozying up to the Bushies all these years as the country was going to hell) but nonetheless...

A mini- Ed Murrow for our times. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC broke the silence finally, in the mainstream media, and made this brilliant peroration. View it here.

300 Billion and Counting

2006-09-26T11:02:00.001-07:00

Torturing the Obvious
Why this too shall pass

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

According to the New York Times, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from April 2006 concludes the Iraq War has actually increased Islamic radicalism.

You don't say! Americans are shocked, shocked that our bombing, devastating and occupying a country that did us no harm would inflame its inhabitants and swell the ranks of those arrayed against America.

"Common Sense", wrote Einstein, "is prejudice acquired before the age of 18". In science, the obvious is often contrary to the truth, which is why scientists are sticklers for 'proof'. As Isaac Asimov said, anyone could 'see' that the sun revolved around the earth. Mistrusting the obvious is thus the first attribute of a scientist.

In human affairs, on the other hand, the obvious may be the most important thing. Not for nothing does the Declaration of Independence say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident". If instead, Thomas Jefferson were to have set out to prove why Life, Liberty and Happiness are essential commodities for human existence, the English might still be here. As it is, the document calls out to us across the centuries. The great leaps in politics are made by appeals to the heart, not the head.

The great truths (eternal verities, my dad called them) have no proof, nor are they pious. They are merely based on emprical, societal, experience. In the old saying "Honesty is the best Policy", the use of the word, "Policy" is worth noting. It appeals not to ideology or ethics, but to simple everyday practicality. It says that any temporary gains of dishonesty are bound to evaporate over the long run.

Devotion to such obvious truths was America's salvation. Its common sense was a uniter. It was obvious that rules were to be obeyed, that the law was majestic. Even more, it was obvious that the law acquired teeth not by adding provisions, but by first enforcing the few that existed. Scrapping or changing laws was difficult by design, but the laws on the books were respected. Even the 'American Street' seemed to have a working understanding of the Constitution and ordinary people were aware of things like the first or fourth amendments, no mean achievement for a large society.

What is one to say when, in a few short decades, the same people whose native pragmatism and instinctive linkage of societal and personal self-interest made their country unique, suddenly seem to have reached a stage where the obvious requires a dissertation? We have arrived in a milieu where coffee shops need to put up signs warning patrons that spilling hot coffee on your crotch can be painful.

How do we suddenly find ourslves here? Not so suddenly, in fact, for the signs have been there all along. As Michael Neumann wrote, the onset of Dementia Americana has its origins all the way back in the election of Ronald Reagan. Whether or not Neumann is correct, take a look at the list below; blunders that would have been immediately obvious to a previous generation, but which barely trouble the current one:

The proposition that budget deficits and lowered taxes would together usher in the millenium, an obvious crock, gives the Gipper a 49 state reelection win,
The notion that shutting down American factories and getting things manufactured abroad, touted and accepted as the way to enduring prosperity,
NAFTA, whose obvious consequence was described best by Ross Perot's "Giant Sucking Sound" (a prediction realized in greater measure than even Perot might have imagined)
The Environment, an American ideal dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, steadily under attack begining with James Watt, with state after state voting for the notion that land conservation was inimical to individual prosperity,
The obvious advantage of having a common language for the country, undermined by a tawdry appeal to multiculturalism and multilingualism (signs in every language, so long as we can sell in one of 'em!),
The country actually entertains a serious debate on whether illegal immigration is wrong,
President ignores warnings of 'bin Laden determined to strike inside the US', vacations, reads My Pet Goat, and refuses to order an inquiry into 9-11 until over a year later, when forced,
Responding to 15 hijackers coming from a country which financed madraasas and recognized Osama's hosts, by going to war against a country which had no connection to 9-11,
Responding to the attack by training our guns on the American Constitution, a la the Patriot Act, illegal wiretapping, detentions without trial...,
Reelecting a President who had not only flubbed 9-11, but was so obviously clueless three years later that he had to declare in the first presidential debate, "Of course I know Osama Bin Laden Attacked Us. I know that!".

Comedy happens when the fool pays inordinate attention to some trifling problem while disaster looms in the background, unnoticed by him but obvious to the audience. Tragedy too. While America gets riled up over gay rights (for or against) and engrossed in who won Survivor last night, state and country totter under a quarter century of determined movement (see James Kurth's excellent essay, The Rich Got Richer) toward a split society.

Now, three hundred billion dollars (and countless dead and maimed) have bought, we are told, the spread of Islamic radicalism.

The obvious solution? Go after those who leaked the story, of course. And thank God for that brand new torture agreement. Now at least the President is bound (unless he decides otherwise) to permit the Times and the leakers to see the evidence.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Three 9-11's

2006-09-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

P. Sainath writes of three 9-11's. This appeared in the Hindu on 9-11-2006.

Three 9/11s choose your own

P. Sainath

There were three 9/11s in history. The New York one of 2001. The neo-liberal one of Chile 1973, and the non-violent one of 1906 Gandhiji's satyagraha in South Africa. The authors of all three tried to change the world. Two brought bloodshed, destruction, misery, and chaos. But the Mahatma's WMD Weapon of Mass Disobedience helped change the world for the better.

FIVE YEARS on, the world is a more dangerous place than it was prior to September 11, 2001. Acts of terror, real and presumed, cause panic each month across the globe. Hundreds of people have been killed in terror attacks in many countries. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Both nations have been ravaged and devastated. Millions of lives have been disrupted forever. Lebanon lies shattered. And more and more flashpoints even nuclear ones emerge. In a divided planet, there is one zone of agreement: the worst is yet to come.

The appalling crime committed in New York on 9/11 when close to 3,000 people were murdered in the WTC bombing is still fresh in memory. One claim of the time was that it had "changed the world forever." Did it? And in what ways? The West's search for security against a global threat continues. It was there in the 1960s too, when the satirical song writer Tom Lehrer sang an ode to it in his "MLF Lullaby." The `multilateral force' set up to `deter' the Russian threat was its subject. "MLF, will scare Brezhnev," crooned Lehrer, "I hope he is half as scared as I."

Changing the world in terms of `exporting democracy' has come a cropper. The bloodied streets of Iraq show us just how insane that notion was and is. As for Afghanistan, it gets more bizarre each month. Take the recent claim by British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells. "Across the country progress is being made. Afghanistan had economic growth of 14% last year." Well, in 2003, the same country had the fastest rate of growth in the world 21 per cent. More than half of that coming, as the United Nations noted, from opium. In any case, Afghanistan's figures improve if you just stop the bombing for a few hours. It's not hard when your base is zero. Or worse.

Both the crazies who brought down the WTC and those later responding to them, stay firmly convinced they are changing the world. The world itself remains somewhat stubbornly resistant to these notions. In every society, the Muslim-non-Muslin divide has deepened as neighbour suspects and lives in fear of neighbour. The war on terror translates too, into a war of suspicions and nerves. Meanwhile the basic pretexts for the assault on Iraq have collapsed. A U.S. Senate panel finds that Saddam had no link with Al-Qaeda whatsoever. And the weapons of mass destruction story has ceased to be even a joke.

Neo-Liberal 9/11

September 11, 1973. Then it was the export not of democracy but of terror. This was the day the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was brought down. By the Chilean armed forces led by General Augusto Pinochet. And fully supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Allende was pushing measures that favoured his nation's poor. But even the most modest re-distribution of wealth was intolerable to the Chilean elite. As also to the U.S. corporations controlling so much of the economy.

"Make the economy scream," President Nixon ordered CIA boss Richard Helms in 1970. His order was duly carried out. A vast array of overt and covert actions were launched to wreck that nation's economy. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves," declared Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The 9/11 of 1973 saw what analyst and author William I. Robinson called "the bloodiest coup in Latin American history." Over 3,000 people were murdered after the armed forces bombed and stormed the Presidential Palace. Allende himself went down in the battle. Estimates of people killed in the years that followed range from 3,000 to 20,000. Well over 100,000 people were arrested in the first three years. Many simply "disappeared." The film Missing starring Jack Lemon was inspired by this period.

Chile's National Stadium was used as a concentration camp. Thousands suffered gruesome tortures. And many of them were slaughtered. Among those tortured and put to death here was the legendary Victor Jara, one of Latin America's greatest musicians.

Chile's 9/11 also marked the start of the imposition by force of a neo-liberal economic model on an unwilling nation. U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" ran riot in Chile. While the putschists raped, tortured and murdered pregnant mothers and children, neo-liberal policies had the same impact on the economy of the poor.

Some 25 years later, the U.S. and the Britain were still holding Gen. Pinochet's hand. The leader of Chile's bloody putsch was arrested in London while there on a visit. This followed an Interpol Red Notice. A warrant had been issued against him in Spain for crimes his junta had committed against Spanish citizens in Chile during his 17-year dictatorship. But his old friends in the West did not desert him. (The same powers are driving trials of war criminals in Iraq and elsewhere.) Pinochet is back in Chile facing murder charges there too.

Latin America, though, is seeing a wave of anti-neo-liberal globalism protests. And a trashing of pro-U.S. regimes. Whether in Venezuela or Ecuador or Bolivia. Last year, tiny Uruguay became the first nation in the world to ban water privatisation. Others too, are reclaiming their natural resources from foreign corporations. The world is changing, but not in the way the authors of 9/11, 1973, hoped for. Moral authority in Latin America belongs to a Castro or a Chavez. No pro-U.S. leader comes anywhere close.

Non-violent 9/11

The first of the 9/11s did help change the world. That was the day Gandhiji's Satyagraha in South Africa first began September 11, 1906. Today is the 100th anniversary of that launch of his non-violent resistance movement. Gandhiji was quite clear it was a war he was fighting against racism and colonial oppression in South Africa. A war he saw as touching anti-colonial sentiment in India as well. A war he felt he had a strategy for. "Only the general who conducts a campaign can know the objective of each particular move," he later wrote. "And as this was the first attempt to apply the principle of satyagraha to politics on a large scale, it is necessary any day that the public should have an idea of its development."

For decades, the weapon of mass disobedience he had developed rattled the British in India. Gandhiji always referred to 9/11, 1906, as the day it all began. "The term satyagraha was invented and employed in connection therewith," he wrote. And listed the times where he used it again in India. It was to be used yet again in South Africa much later. It was also used by Martin Luther King in the civil rights struggle in the United States.

On that day in Johannesburg, the Indians Gandhiji spoke to were more than a little mystified by his notion that the might of the Empire could be engaged differently. It's a debate that lasts to this day. With no easy answers. Gandhiji himself acknowledged there were no "miraculous qualities as such in satyagraha..." And that a movement which lost sight of the truth would find the technique of little use.

Yet, the struggle put the South African government in the dock. It saw the repeal or suspension of some of the more obnoxious laws the Indians there were opposed to. Very importantly, it brought about a vital measure of Hindu-Muslim unity amongst Indians in South Africa for the first time. New factors were to make things a whole lot worse later. But at the time, it set off a process that caught on in many other parts of the British Empire. Not the least within India, led by Gandhiji himself.

The British had to contend with the rising of millions of ordinary people. His weapon and its allied tools helped forge great changes in Indian history. But this General was not for war. "War with all its glorification of brute force is essentially degrading," he wrote. "It demoralises those trained for it. It brutalises men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality."

That was in an era when another global figure, then bigger than Gandhiji, had declared "War is the most natural, the most commonplace thing... War is life. ... all struggle is war." Hitler too, changed the world.

Three 9/11s. One that helped change the world for the better. Two that had much in common. The bloody slaughter of innocents, the brutalisation of millions. And the imposition of regimes hated and despised. Juntas with no legitimacy at all. Think of a Pinochet now hiding behind pleas of age, ill-health, and senility to escape justice Think of an Iraqi regime whose leaders almost no one can name. Or of a Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan whose writ barely runs across the presidential palace in Kabul. Who has to at all times be protected from his own people by American soldiers. Think also of a Henry Kissinger who has curbed his travel in recent years for fear of facing war crimes charges in more than one country in Europe. Think, too, of an old man who warned: "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind."

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Krauthammer on the Pope's Remarks

2006-09-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

Tolerance: A Two-Way Street

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, September 22, 2006; Page A17

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It's hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today's Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to "hunt down" the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children's hospital.

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it" is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

The fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood. The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident) with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and civil war.

Christianity more than matched that lurid history with the Crusades, an ecumenical blood bath that began with the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of preseason warm-up to the featured massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure.

And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism?

However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout "God is great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.

Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion to Islam. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act -- rather than the charge -- of forced conversion?

Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik 'Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews "apes and pigs"? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that "someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one-third of a trinity. . . . Don't you hate the faith of such a polytheist?"

Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Ali Gum'a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against "the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers . . . who prepare [Passover] matzos from human blood"?

The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council in Iraq declares that it "will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the 'jizya' [head] tax; then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword." This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.

As I said. No sense of irony.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Five Years after 9-11

2006-09-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

What Happened?

When Anecdote Beat Principle

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

What's become of 'merica

Soothly, Who can say?

Bush and Cheney only grin

In a nasty way.

Justices are reticent

Senators are mute

But the belts of all their friends

Simply bulge with Loot.

--with apologies to Rudyard Kipling

However compelling the immediate drama, history's milestones are laid out in retrospective, not as things unfold. They are at best convenient markers for processes which are more significant by far. If events are the hares of history, flashy and flamboyant, processes are its tortoises, obstinate, relentless -- and conclusive.

We live in the Age of the Picture, where almost everything has to be made for TV, where reality itself is not exempt from adaptation. Because events lend themselves to graphic portrayal so much better than processes, which are tedious, it is natural, given our predeliction, that our dominant means of understanding be shaped around events. More people get their grasp of the world from watching 20 minutes of the evening news, than by reading the newspaper. This enforces its own reality.

Chances are that this glacial truth will determine our destiny more than 9-11 or the Iraq war. If the Battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton, the twin towers clattered to the ground with the sound of phony debates in a hundred 'episodes' of Meet the Press, Larry King Live or Face the Nation, playing in the background on our TV sets. You cannot spend fifty years replacing the paradigm of reading and discussing issues with a culture of entertainement and sound-bite politicking (while your government is playing with fire all across the globe) without reaching a point where so much failure on so many fronts becomes possible.

Alexander Cockburn in his latest piece has loosed some withering scattershot in the direction of all those conspiracy buffs who claim that there is more to 9-11 than meets the eye. Don't these nuts know that even the best planned operations can go wrong, he asks. One is tempted to echo the Reverend Al Shapton, "I hope Bush is lying. The alternative is too scary to contemplate". If the notion of hundreds of people having to be involved in a conspiracy is troublesome, how about a conspiracy of millions? The cloak and dagger stealth of 9-11 is nothing as compared to the open machinations which brought forth the Iraq War, launching it with a huge majority of public support. That was a conspiracy of 290 million people, secure in the knowledge that the bombs would be falling elsewhere, even if a goodly number of them couldn't find Iraq on a map. Agatha Christie, in her bestselling Murder on the Orient Express, was far more modest.

And with public support for the war now headed south, is it fair to ask why such a huge majority has cratered? The 'principles' that launched the war have not changed. Please don't say it is because no WMD's were found. That was settled long ago, and well before the 2004 elections, when we elected the same gang which carried out all this, our eyes wide open. The cause of the current angst and unease is that things have not gone swimmingly. What if they had? I'm reminded of something I read in the wake of 9-11. When some middle eastern spokesman went on television and expounded at great length how 9-11 was immoral because Islam condemns violence, a writer asked, "and what if Islam did not condemn violence, would that make killing all these people right?". The sad irony is that the politics and the population of a country founded on principles are both bereft of any allusion to same when considering their affairs. The implications of this truth underly all our follies -- and our fates.

As the brilliant Joe Bageant wrote in Counterpunch recently (I paraphrase), we are now so far along a haze induced by our decades-long sniffings of consumerism that even the capacity to grasp and discuss matters of principle has deserted us. All we can do is talk personalities, and whom we can 'trust' (the fellow who at least seems to believe the lies he tells). With apologies to Kipling again,

And that was like arranging chairs

Upon a sinking boat,

Though he that told the better lie

Might get the larger vote.

Even when discussing 9-11, isn't it astounding that not single politician has asked, five years on, why so many checks and balances failed that day and after? All we can think of is how Giuliani did this or that while Bush did not. What happens when personalities trump principles? The quick answer, 9-11 -- and its aftermath.

For a quarter century at least we have steeped ourselves in what Mahatma Gandhi termed a deadly social sin, Politics without Principle. I don't even mean this in the conventional sense, a la Tom Delay's gerrymandering or the Abramoff junkets. I mean the pursuit of politics without articulation of principle.

A whole generation has thus been raised in a political atmosphere that brooks no politics! A respectable philosophy has taken hold that everything will be resolved by the market, and politics is despicable. The myopic view that all politics is local, attributed to Tip O'Neill, obscures the fact that without grasp of principles, it is impossible for anyone to transcend boundaries. Having imbibed this lesson too well, all that the local politician does upon ascending to higher realms is to apply the same understanding to his new environs, that is to say, up-shifting from petty theft to grand larceny. This is a bigger tragedy than mere corruption. It is impossible to have a national conversation when the population has lost the ability to discuss principles. It is the same mindset which leads serious politicians to argue that trade is a substitute for politics.

Is there a principle involved in 9-11? Is there a principle which says that when a huge failure like 9-11 happens, someone should be held responsible? Is there a principle that when one accepts responsibility, it means paying a political price (a resignation, a demotion). Is there a principle that no matter what, freedoms are sacrosanct? Are not politics arguments over principle? Isn't this the sort of discussion that should dominate the political debate, and animate the presidential race? When was the last time you recall a Democratic candidate raise an issue of principle? Even in the last general election, which ought to have been ideal for a discussion of principles, Kerry, for all his wealth and education, turned out a true man of the masses , a politician who could not argue principle. He sought to run an entire race without asking if it was right to invade Iraq.

Without principle, the national debate reduces to little more than a series of sitcom episodes. For showcasing his welfare reform package, one president would make some lady in the audience stand up during the state of the union, relaying her vignette. To show that Katrina victims are being helped, another president has some individual appear in a press conference with him, telling his story. This is the level of politics in America, bereft of principle, replete with anecdotes. News coverage is the same way. If there is at all a principle somewhere in all this, it has been that the market will take care of everything, including politics. And in a perverse sense, it is.

It is why our leaders (why blame Bush alone, any Democract could have given voice to these) call for shopping and traveling as a way to combat Al Qaeda, instead of asking the nation to sacrifice, share in the challenge of protecting and preserving the nation. As with the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog in the night, what was not done after 9-11 is as significant as 9-11 itself. There has been no effort to rein in energy consumption, no call to sacrifice. There has been no action on border or port security worth the name. We are morphing into a third world kleptocracy where the leader thinks all is well so long as his family, tribe or unit is profiting from his reign. There is no challenge in principle, from the political class, to the notion of spying on citizens or detention without trial. The author of the magic bullet theory, Arlen Specter (there's one more anecdote!), now wants to turn the law retroactively so that Bush will be exonerated for his warrantless wiretapping.

The entire text of the Federalist Papers is about principles. The entire political debate on TV is anecdotal. For the political process and for the country, from 'anecdotage' to dotage is a but a short step.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@#yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Thoughts in the Traffic Jam

2006-09-10T07:52:00.002-07:00

Joe Bageant is one of America's best essayists. Read his latest.

Inside the Iron Theater

By JOE BAGEANT

Nobody talks about it out loud, but a few million Americans are seriously doubting their sanity these days. Or having their sanity doubted. Or both. They seldom speak their minds because what is going on in there is a vision of society that conjures grave doubt, if not outright horror. It is the kind of stuff that will get your ass kicked off the island in a heartbeat. Nobody wants to hear it.

Yesterday I was gridlocked with my wife in traffic near the new mall, surrounded by cars full of monsters. Every redneck face and bloated or coifed middle class head in every vehicle was a grotesque, awful thing. In them you could see the meanest kind of white man ignorance, or smug middle class obliviousness, the kind that could care less if all the babies in Iraq were fried on spits in the Green Zone of Baghdad, so long as their nails get done on Saturdays. (Ah, you’ve seen the monsters too, haven’t you!) There was that fleshy, overweight killer ugliness America seems to produce these day, the faces of a happy motoring people whose armies hold the world at gunpoint so they can stuff down pizza and check out this town’s newest mall. Underneath the ugliness, there's a festering mean streak caused by frustration of knowing deep-down that government and commerce are corrupt -- everybody knows this, but tolerates it for fear of losing their bling. The choice was ever thus (DeToqueville noted its beginnings) but now has become a waking nightmare. One that brings up rage for some if us, rage that, if expressed in the wrong places and too often will get me thrown into the psyche ward if I tarry too much longer here in the land of the free.

“Lookie there,” I told my wife, who was driving, “A fucking car wash right over the spot where Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s mother was born! I remember when it was in a cornfield. And all these zombies who don’t give a crap about the bloody sand and sweatshops they create, just so they can buy a cheap skirt and drive cars worth 10 years of wages in most of the world through a goddamned car wash! If every American died tomorrow, it is unarguable that the planet would be way more sustainable for not having to feed their greed!” On the inside I was bawling and screaming at the same time. I go off on on these tirades increasingly these days. It is not good.

I could see by my wife’s face she was wondering if “getting Joe some help” was in order. Oh yes, getting some help---which in America means calling the authorities, in this case the psychiatric medical ones. Advanced technology and the skills of the medical cadre of the super-state offer its citizens wondrous ways to reach out to those in need of help. But it always comes down to prescribing drugs or possibly of even being locked up “for your own good,” until your ideations are more “normal.”

And so it is that many of us keep the rage inside as best we can, unwilling to destroy a job, or a marriage. And there are many of us, judging from the emails I receive (see www.joebageant.com), men and women alike, mostly over 40 with lots at stake, who fear being judged unstable by the well intentioned folks around us who never in their wildest thoughts would consider themselves good Germans. At any rate, who wants to be seen as unbalanced at the very moment in our lives when we unexpectedly find ourselves seeing Americans and America as they really are (and may have always been) for the first time. Not that it required insight. The sheer scale and pervasiveness of our national condition, plus decades of exposure, made it so damned obvious we could no longer escape it.

Regardless, inside me it gives rise to an alter ego I call THE SCREAMING MAN, who luckily for me, only screams inside my head. I’ve come to learn lately that plenty of other Americans have their own SCREAMING MAN and even see the same monsters I see in the traffic. (A big thank you to the L.A. Times reporter who was the first to tell me he saw the same creatures). The thought that so much of my readership is comprised of such folks is worrisome at times.

Once the monsters in the traffic reveal themselves, life can never be the same. We are left to go about doing all the ordinary things we always did, but with the building inexpressible moral outrage, living out our lives as rote actors in a theater of iron. Inside the iron theatre---a place surrounded by high walls of normalcy, where to discover a window to the outside is considered madness---the majority have apparently learned their scripts too well. So we are left in sitting in traffic jams to fester on our evil situation.

The great evils both past and present---the American genocide against the red Indian, My Lai and the uncounted others like it, Chairman Mao’s purges, the Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians, the Muslim slaughter in Darfur, Bosnia, and most notably the Holocaust---were not carried out by sociopaths, but by ordinary people who believed in their states their leaders and their gods. The machinist who made instruments for Nazi Germany felt no guilt. Nor does the anonymous mailroom employee in the Department of Homeland Security. I make a living editing military history magazines, thereby providing “pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder,” as Marguerite Yourcenar put it. And right next door to my workplace Pakistani and Croatian programmers design death dealing aircraft circuitry for Curtis Wright, yet inside our florescent lit, air conditioned reality, there is not an ounce of guilt, much less a sense of accountability. Our work feels unquestionably ordinary, just as does the work of the traffic monsters, most of who work in Washington DC or the beltway around it.

(Vertigo, a taste of vomit in the throat, then…)
SCREAMING MAN HERE! AND I SAY FRY ALL THE PORK-FACED PUD-PUMPERS WITHIN A HUNDRED MILE RADIUS OF DC! BULLDOZE THEIR WINE-SOAKED CONDOS. RAZE THE BELTWAY AND SOW IT WITH DEPLETED URANIUM! WE NEED A REAL KILLER ON THE JOB. WHERE THE HELL IS THAT MURDERING GODDAM NAZI JEW SHARON WHEN YOU NEED HIM? GET ME MOKTADA AL-SADR ON THE PHONE!

Sheesh!

Oprah, LSD and the Lycra Micro Jukebox

How did we become so numb to the greatest moral issues of our time? Our time? Probably in human history, considering the irrevocable destruction of our ecosystem. Especially considering that 40 years ago they seemed to dominate the national arena…The Vietnam War, civil rights… A hell of a lot of wrong choices built the 200-year long road to where we now find ourselves, and I must admit that my generation did its share of the paving, laying down much of the roadbed during the Sixties. Despite much talk since then about the Sixties fight for moral justice, talk still easily launched by the pop of a chardonnay cork or the appearance of The Grateful Dead at the local arena, nearly to a man or woman, my generation, regardless of affluence, has traded principles for simple materialism. Assuming of course, they had any identifiable principles, which most didn’t.

Perhaps it was only part of this country’s ongoing struggle to accept successive waves of immigration, but the Sixties saw a push toward openness toward diverse viewpoints and values. There has always been great pressure on our social and public institutions to be capable of accepting the diversity thronging at its doors, a pressure yielded to only when it looks like things are about to blow sky high: “OK niggers, you can ride in the front of the bus. Pssst! Jeeter, get out the fire hoses and turn the dogs loose.” No institution is more pressed than the educational system. “Aw now the Mexicans want bilingual education!”, which has been handed the responsibility of building character by parents, and charged by the state with creating obedient, functional citizens who can multiply at least to the sixth power, are willing to file income tax forms, and at least pretend they don’t smoke pot. We are talking bare minimum standards here, although lately the multiplication standard has been dropped in favor of a willingness to be subjected to surveillance and mass body cavity searches at football games. In a nation where real education remains under suspicion by both the devoutly religious right, and the all-but-antireligious left, it was natural that school administrators and 10 million or so state teachers college graduates---themselves products of the mediocrity characterizing our common denominator approach to democracy and education---would arrive the “morality-is-all-a-matter of opinion” solution. It was the only way out. And, besides, from their standpoint, it looked true.

(Hissss…crackle…can this truly be a signal through my fillings?)

AW, SHUT THE FUCK UP BAGEANT! NO MORAL ISSUE EVER GOT "EXPLORED" IN THIS COUNTRY. NEVER! THEY JUST GET EXPRESSED IN LOATHESOME SHORTHAND AT DISGUSTING LENGTH BETWEEN G.O.P. CRETINS WHO, IN THEIR HALF-WITTED SELF-DELUSIONS BELIEVE THAT RONALD REAGAN SHOOK HIS FIST AT THE BERLIN WALL AND ENDED THE COLD WAR…AND FAGGOT DEMOCRATS, A MISERABLE LOT NOW FORCED TO PRETEND THEIR VOTES WILL EVER GOING TO BE COUNTED AGAIN!

Godammit, I was trying to establish rational discourse here. Now where was I? Oh yes. The erosion of moral principles…

So we now we find principles treated as mere opinion by most young people and their parents, call it diversity tolerance overshoot, and any answers posed to the great questions of our age neatly written off. Global warming? Just some scientists’ opinion. The unjustness of our wars? More opinion. Inequity in society? In whose opinion? Wastefulness of our lifestyle? A matter of opinion.

Over the course of two generations of this, a predictable thing happened. Because the first generation avoided the questions, the second one never learned that they could be asked. The atmosphere could not be riper for pure triumphant consumer capitalism and its inherent militarism (Somebody has to clear the way for Wal-Mart democracy.) If there are no overarching public moral or intellectual questions, then the only remaining questions are material ones: Which is best? The iPod or the RCA Lycra Micro Jukebox? Headphones, cell phones and polyphonic ringtones, everyone is plugged into the white noise of pure commerce. It’s the new “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I liked then old version better. Used appropriately, LSD posed the great questions. And sometimes highlighted a few answers, too.

But it doesn’t take a psychedelic experience to pursue the kind of truth inherent to fleshly human existence, the kind that seeks justice from within our bones. In fact, it takes effort to avoid it. I’ve never seen a culture or human being that did not have an inherent sense of justice, an innate desire for balance. Most consider this to be the spiritual side of man, if they consider it at all. Most do not. A huge portion of the world is commodity addicted, while another portion is simply looking for a warm dry spot in which to shit or lay down and die. There is not much room for contemplation of the finer points of existence in either instance. Whatever the case, the American lack of even minimal spiritual observance inducted us into the Empire’s cast of featureless players inside the iron theater. Nobody needs answers to meaningful questions that are never asked, or dare not be asked.

Some days however, change does seem to be afoot, as it certainly must be, given that change is the world’s only constant. A majority of Americas now disapprove of the war in Iraq. Just three years ago when I started writing from this town’s taverns and churches, working people therein absolutely loved George Bush. Now they have returned to their normal state of political apathy, seldom speaking of Bush, but with one difference---they no longer approve of his war, and express disapproval generally in the form of grumbling. They grumble because television has given them permission to do so, through its constant touting of polling results expressing “dissatisfaction” with the war. Being “dissatisfied” with something, a war in this case, is more in accordance with their programming as consumers, not citizens. They will never get permission to be really pissed off, much less pissed off enough to burn anything down.
Television polls never specifically count the outraged and the heartbroken, thus reducing our deepest emotions, once more, to mere opinion in another opinion poll. Outrage is impermissible, except for the pretend outrage of Crossfire, etc, which has entertainment value, thus profitability. Which is why the majority of Americans know little about Cindy Sheehan. Sorry to say that here in lefty blogdom, but it’s true. Cindy Sheehan has never been on Oprah.
When and if Sheehan ever is on Oprah, we will know we have won regarding the war in Iraq. We will have won if your standard for victory is acknowledgment by the high priestess of emotional vapidity and Barnes and Noble sales, talked to by a woman who uses her child rape as a credential. In her particular celebrity delusion, she considers herself the emotional caretaker of the nation, the Martha Stewart of the soul. Lusting for proximity of your cause to celebrity may be a gratifying short term antidote, but lusting for universal justice is the ultimate cure.

But even assuming getting within four feet of Oprah Winfrey constitutes victory, we will have won far too late for the already dead on both sides. Vietnam proved that the Empire’s wars are easier to stop than the overall trajectory of national hubris and folly. Winning is stopping wars before they start, or creating a society wherein war is the last resort, not a casual preemptive option. As for the growing rejection of the war, copping to the obvious in the face of defeat, then claiming moral high ground after we have scorched it and everyone on it, well, that’s no victory at all.

Which leaves me here to fester on celebrity and moral victory under the looming possibility of forced medication by the state. Hmmmm….

Where the hell are you Aldous Huxley?

So are they gonna medicate me and you or what? Surely I must have some time left before that happens. And if they don’t, then I’ll have to do it myself anyway. You cannot win in the Iron Theater. What its producers and directors want to happen is destined to happen. They are always in control. And when it comes to control, you can’t beat the good ole US pharmaceutical industry, which has clearly met the challenge of adult rage and despair, and is now doping down the kids before they even hit puberty. Over the past six years mental health drugs prescribed to children have jumped 550%.

Recently the NFC (New Freedom Commission on Mental Health) recommended the mandatory mental health screening for 100% of America’s school children and drug treatment for all children “judged to in need of drugs.” Hell, every kid in the whole damned country needs drugs, if only to face their future in the global gulag being constructed for them.

Godammit, Huxley, you saw it coming, didn’t you? But I don’t think it will be nearly as much fun as your grim vision. You held out the possibility of science perfecting bread and circuses—Soma. Now THAT was an idea, bud! Three brands of pharmacological reality: Technicolor Soma a pleasant hallucinogen; Soma medium, a Valium-like tranquilizer; and El Crusho black gold, the heavy sleeping pill. And for the rugged freedom loving individualist, you offered those tropical islands offshore. There was really nothing coercive about it all. If the corpocracy had listened to you Hux, about how to do oppression the right way, I’d be curled up in the lap of Halliburton right now, gurgling happily. I have nothing against state-controlled euphoria if they don’t skimp on the euphies. By the way Hux, can I do the Technicolor on the Island? Or will I be kicked off that one too?

Anyway, we seem to be truly dicked now. Man the machine making monkey is so proud of the machines he has created he now pushes toward the machining of human nature itself. Why not? It was always so damned unpredictable. So yes, by dammit, let’s do’er! Let the scientific and economic machinery we have created remake us in its own likeness. Let there be technology without wisdom and efficiency without human benefit. Let there be one blissful nation of highly medicated sleepwalkers in a scientific hell that, if you get doped up enough, feels like paradise.

A visitation from Diogenes and Stonewall Jackson

So what about that rage, huh? My own personal experiences tell me that, being part of human nature, it’s also unpredictable stuff. Tonight I went to a dinner party given by a freedom-hearted couple, the female half of which is probably the most intellectually courageous woman in town. I can’t know that with certainty because even the most liberal people in this Southern burgh would never dare to invite me to dinner. Word has gotten around.

Two hours into the dinner party, I did a bad thing. I called a nice-enough but gutless, apolitical guest, “one more ignorant motherfucking American wanting respect for his self-imposed blindness,” adding that “Everything is not just an opinion, you know.” My good wife stood horrified. (Yes, there was alcohol involved.) Now, I know I am not the judge of that man’s days, and that he has the right to his opinion or non-opinion. But some days I cannot find even the dinner party pretense of respect for American denial, and this was one of those days.

By way of rationalization, I tell myself that if Diogenes of Sinope could live under a tub and take shots at the entire Greek world, then I am entitled to a snootful and an occasional outburst, despite the disparity between my talents and the long dead old Greek’s. It’s either that, or the deer rifle and water tower solution. Or the cheap online polemics you are now suffering. All of which is more bullshit, but it is the best I can do at the moment to rationalize bad behavior.

It is 11 pm, after the dinner party, and I sit in this muggy summer darkness on a bench in front of the Stonewall Jackson Headquarters Museum, located right behind my house.

Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse and sucked on lemons while he calmly managed the slaughter of thousands. I should probably take up lemons instead of gin. But at least I am guilty of mere stupidity, not slaughter. Tomorrow I will repent. Maybe. Depends upon whether anyone with legal authority finally decides I need help. Meanwhile, any kind of resistance, even the stupidest sort waged against fools, gives relief on a hot night inside the iron theater.

This anger will all come out in the morning as prose. Most likely, bad prose. (It did and you are reading it now.) But at least it will be out. Hell, there is only the world at stake.

*For Al Aronowitz, “The Blacklisted Journalist,” (1928-2005). A friend and mentor in art.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, from Random House Crown about working class America, scheduled for spring 2007 release. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found at: http://www.joebageant.com. Feel free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com. Copyright © 2006 by Joe Bageant.

Jews in Hezbollah

2006-08-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

Got your attention, didn't I. No, I don't know if there are any reports of Jews fighting for Hezbollah. But this was an equally silly or man-bites-dog piece of news I ran across, of a Hindu commander of a Kashmiri Islamic militant outfit, the Hizb Mujahideen. Read the article here.

The New Emergency by Patrick J. Buchanan

2006-08-21T19:22:00.000-07:00

Patrick J. Buchanan has written an important new book (State of Emergency). I haven't read it yet, but saw a brief set of highlights from it on the web, reproduced later. The book deals with the unfettered illegal and legal immigration fast turning America into a third world country, a theme Buchanan has stressed repeatedly over the years. The immigration debates and rallies of this year make this book timely, though it may be too late as a wake up call.

This from the Drudge Report:

**Exclusive**

“As Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away, from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.”

So begins a new work of warning from Pat Buchanan.

And this time Buchanan goes all the way.

STATE OF EMERGENCY: THIRD WORLD INVASION AND CONQUEST OF AMERICA streets this week and is designed to jolt readers with stats/analysis of illegal immigration gone dangerously wild.

Buchanan warns: “The children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West."

One in every twelve people breaking into America has a criminal record.

By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics concentrated in the U.S. Southwest.

Between 10 and 20 percent of all Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbean people have already moved to the United States.

Every month, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends more illegal aliens breaking into our country, 150,000, than the number of troops we have in Iraq.

[The book was ranked #571 on AMAZON's sales chart Sunday evening.]

Buchanan slams the president: “Concerned about his legacy, George W. Bush may yet live to see his name entered into the history of his country as the president who lost the American Southwest that James K. Polk won for the United States."

In EMERGENCY, Pat Buchanan charges the Mexican regime with an Aztlan Plot, a conscious campaign to use America as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed, both to relieve social pressure and effect a cultural re-annexation of the American Southwest. La Reconquista, the reconquest of the lands lost by Mexico in the Mexican-American War, Buchanan charges, is underway.

The Republican Party, a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is in the grip of a cult called “Economism.” It is all about money now. The GOP worships at the “Church of GDP”

• Both parties are paralyzed by guilt over American past racial sins.

• Powerful Mexican and U.S. elites seek to erase America’s borders and merge the United States and Mexico into a “North American Union.”

In his controversial final chapter, “Last Chance,” Buchanan lays out a national plan to deal with the State of Emergency, before it makes an end of America:

• An Eisenhower-type deportation program, beginning with all illegal aliens convicted of felonies and every gang member not a U.S. citizen.

• A ten-year moratorium on all legal immigration, at the level JFK favored in 1958 -- 150,000 to 250,000 a year.

• A $10-billion, 2000-mile double-line security fence between the United States and Mexico, built with no apologies to Mexico City.

Developing...

Tony Blankley, Buchanan's fellow member of the McLaughlin Group, has this to say in his review of the book:

Most people will be familiar with Mr. Buchanan's view on immigration. But even those who have read his earlier books and read his columns, as I have, will not be prepared for the remorseless presentation of unimpeachable facts with which he makes his convincing case for the reality of his book's subtitle: "the third world invasion and conquest of America." Here he deepens his case against illegal immigration (and his case for a moratorium on even legal immigration) with statistic after statistic concerning, among many topics, the shockingly disproportionate degree of disease and crime that illegal Mexican and other immigrants are transmitting into the country.

For example, in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide, which total 1,200-1,500, are for illegal aliens. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California now has almost 40,000 cases of tuberculosis (a disease only recently thought to be virtually extinct in America). He presents compelling evidence that the "Reconquista" of southwestern United States is not merely the silly conceit of a few extremists, but is widely desired by Mexicans (he cites a 2002 Zogby poll showing that by 58 percent to 28 percent, Mexicans believe the American Southwest belongs to Mexico).

New to me was his citation to the fact that all 47 Mexican consulates in the United States are mandated to provide textbooks to U.S. schools with significant Hispanic populations, which textbooks teach history from the point of view of General Santa Ana -- in which America stole the Southwest. The Los Angeles consulate, alone, has distributed 100,000 such textbooks just this year to the L.A. Unified School District.

This weekend, I turned on the PBS TV channel and discovered a Sesame Street program in Spanish. Since when did the regular PBS channel become bi-lingual? The notice from the utility company comes in seven or eight languages. High up in the Lick Observatory in San Jose this summer, I saw signs in English, Spanish-- and Vietnamese (I think). The recent response to a wholly unjustified destruction of Lebanon's civil life, strong armed by an Israeli lobby, and the equally intense lobbying by Indian groups to twist (wholly willing, for a price, one should add) congressional opinion on the nuclear agreement, are evidences of where immigrant loyalties are influencing important policy decisions.

Notwithstanding his unforgivable support to Bush in the 2004 election, despite all his opposition to Bush on the Iraq War, Buchanan has been been astute in his diagnosis of many of the major trends of our times. He is right on immigration, he is right on foreign wars, he is right on outsourcing, he is right on globalization, he is right in his opposition to US foreign policy being made an adjunct of Israel's. That's a lot of rights. A big picture guy who can also quote minute details to bolster his points, Patrick J. Buchanan is worth listening to.

The Politics of Terror - Cui Bono?

2006-08-18T14:11:00.000-07:00

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from the terror of terror?

A few months back, Werther wrote a brilliant piece in Counterpunch, called "A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask". Now, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC has a remarkable presentation of the close proximity of terror warnings of the past four years to politically inconvenient times for the Bush administration. This is an incredibly painstaking work of journalism. See for yourself: Nexus of Terror and Politics. A must watch. Olbermann presents facts without making allegations. Far more powerful that way.

John Kerry was Right?

2006-08-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Here's an astonishing article by George Will, who was an ardent supporter of George W. Bush, and (I think) was a supporter of the Iraq War.

Yes, that George Will.

The Triumph of Unrealism

By George F. Will

Tuesday, August 15, 2006; Page A13

Five weeks have passed since the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers provoked Israel to launch its most unsatisfactory military operation in 58 years. What problem has been solved, or even ameliorated?

Hezbollah, often using World War II-vintage rockets, has demonstrated the inadequacy of Israel's policy of unilateral disengagement -- from Lebanon, Gaza, much of the West Bank -- behind a fence. Hezbollah has willingly suffered (temporary) military diminution in exchange for enormous political enlargement. Hitherto Hezbollah in Lebanon was a "state within a state." Henceforth, the Lebanese state may be an appendage of Hezbollah, as the collapsing Palestinian Authority is an appendage of the terrorist organization Hamas. Hezbollah is an army that, having frustrated the regional superpower, suddenly embodies, as no Arab state ever has, Arab valor vindicated in combat with Israel.

Only twice in the United Nations' six decades has it authorized the use of substantial force -- in 1950 regarding Korea and in 1990 regarding Kuwait. It still has not authorized force in Lebanon. What is being called a "cease-fire" resolution calls for Israel to stop all "offensive" operations. Israel, however, reasonably says that its entire effort is defensive. The resolution calls for Hezbollah to stop "all attacks." The United Nations, however, has twice resolved that Hezbollah should be disarmed, yet has not willed the means to that end. Regarding force now, the U.N. merely "expresses its intention to consider in a later resolution further enhancements" of the U.N. force that for 28 years has been loitering without serious intent in south Lebanon.

The "new Middle East," the "birth pangs" of which we supposedly are witnessing, reflects the region's oldest tradition, the tribalism that preceded nations. The faux and disintegrating nation of Iraq, from which the middle class, the hope of stability, is fleeing, has experienced in these five weeks many more violent deaths than have occurred in Lebanon and Israel. U.S. Gen. George Casey says 60 percent of Iraqis recently killed are victims of Shiite death squads. Some are associated with the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, which resembles a terrorist organization.

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates' debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a "senior administration official," insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

"The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It's like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn't work."

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike "the law enforcement approach," does "work."

The official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy -- and domestic politics -- unrealism.

Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

georgewill@washpost.com

A Connecticut Donkey...

2006-08-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

A Connecticut Donkey in King George's Court

(with apologies to Mark Twain)

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The first three letters just happen to be,

L-I-E., L-I-E.

(with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, The Sound of Music)

But what's in a name? It is the actions that count. And here, perhaps the biggest greatest contribution to legitimizing the actions of the Bush administration has come from what can be euphamistically called, an 'enabling' legislator.

I first noticed the strange behavior of Joseph I. Lieberman shortly after the 2000 election. Those were difficult days (you have to remember, we had higher standards then). It was bad enough that Gore and Lieberman went quietly into the night after so blatant a travesty as the Rehnquist court judgement. While Gore may not have had Obrador's gumption, it was clear that he was at least capable of inner outrage.

Lieberman, on the other hand, clearly appeared relieved that he could now go back to full-time faux bipartisanship. Instead of being a stringent opposition politician watching every false move of the ruling party, he was happy to promote a phony 'let us all get along'. Such an attitude, always dubious in an opposition, turned disastrous for the country when a criminal and inept administration was at the helm.

The stentorious statesman who pilloried Ralph Nader in 2000 for bolting the party and standing as an independent, announced during the primary campaign he would consider precisely such a move himself. He kept this pledge, announcing after his loss last evening, using a concession speech to Lamont into a launching pad for his campaign as independent, although he kept saying that he would be a Democrat. How? By opposing the Democratic nominee? While Lamont in his victory speech praised Lieberman, the Senator spewed bile on the upstart who had beaten him. Talk of the politics of division!

But doublespeak comes naturally to this self-professed moralist. Michael Kinsley wrote long ago that when he was hosting his TV show, the two politicians who were always available to appear, day or night, weekday or weekend, were Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, the very same enablers who gave so many of Bush's egregious initiatives the stamp of moral authenticity, or at least, temporary cover. I cannot erase from my memory how assiduously Lieberman helped McCain pilot the Iraq War resolution through the Senate, and how Lieberman went after Howard Dean when Dean said Saddam Hussain's capture had not made America any safer (see Duryodhana Dies). No wonder the Bush administration made full use of Lieberman's crucial votes, portraying him as a reasonable and bipartisan politician who cared for the country in this time of war. Rather ironic, coming from a crew that itself didn't care about the country, and saw the war only as an opportunity to curtail rights and help its friends.

Bill Clinton, knowing Lieberman's intentions, still came out to campaign for him. How glorious that it helped not at all, exploding the myth that people will be fooled into excusing enablers, and their enablers. So did Chris Dodd and Barbara Boxer, both of whom had voted against the war. The Senate protects its own.

A week before the primary, facing a 13 point gap in the polls, the man of principle attempted to shed his record with a vigor that surprised even his admirers, all the while claiming to stand firm on principle. "I not only respect your right to disagree or question the president or anyone else -- including me -- I value your right to disagree".

How magnanimous! One wishes Lieberman had valued as much his right to disagree with Bush. We are not talking about any old administration here, but the most brazen and incompetent one in memory. But Lieberman had no problem voting with the Bush team for Gonzales, Rice, CAFTA, the Patriot Act, Roberts, Alito, on the recent resolution (the original and the watered down versions) on withdrawing troops...

Lamont may have any number of flaws, but his courage in taking on this so-called icon of the Democratic party (a true representative for a party under whose Senate leadership the war resolution was passed), challenged him on the War and laid him low, assures him a place in the history of our times.

Congrats and thanks, Ned Lamont, for your wake up call to the Democratic Party, and for causing more sleepless nights for all those other minor and major Liebermans among the political elite.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

The Fig Leaf(let) of Warning

2006-08-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

Looking for the Bright Side

By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN

Banta Singh has been hit by a car, and his colleague Santa Singh is visiting him in the hospital. Seeing Banta swathed in bandages, Santa racks his brain for something cheerful to say.

Finally, he observes, "Ohe Banta, look at it this way, at least it is only your left hand that's broken, not the right."

Banta Singh brightens up immediately. "Aha! At last, a person who appreciates my presence of mind! You know, actually it was my right hand that was under the car at first. I thought to myself how terrible that would be, so I quickly withdrew my right hand, and put in my left instead!"

--From my late friend, philosopher, and guide, D. Subbarao.

If Banta Singh's logic appeals to you, then you should have no difficulty applauding the wisdom of the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman.

Speaking of the deaths of ordinary men, women and children in Qana and other places in Lebanon, Mr. Gillerman told the Security Council that Israel regretted every casualty, and was indeed so concerned to avoid them that each time, before bombing, it dropped leaflets beseeching people to leave the area. His nodders, assistant nodders, and sundry yes-men on the US side, including John Bolton, Condoleezza Rice, Tony Snow, Hillary Clinton and why, even Bill Maher, have been echoing Mr. Gillerman's words in their own remarks.

The Israeli statements exceed even the old Billy Bunter double-defense, "I never touched that cake. Besides, it tasted terrible". First they said they were ultra-careful to hit the correct building. Then they said they were sure Hezbollah was holed up near, if not inside the building itself. Then they said they had used precision missiles. Then they said they were sorry, but this was war, and errors do happen. This is why they dropped leaflets in the first place.

Once you have given a warning, you are absolved. What next, complaints that Israel only dropped printed leaflets, of omitting to put up warnings on the web and send out an email message to everyone in Lebanon? (A Jewish state sending out spam?). Some people are never satisfied.

By this fresh piece of Israeli-American logic, however, Hitler's atrocities are mitigated, if not absolved, because he had given umpteen warnings to the Jews, all the way from Mein Kampf on, of their impending fate if he came to power. If people didn't believe him, stuck around and suffered the consequences, it was because they did not follow their many smart cohorts who left Germany when they were warned. Hezbollah and Hamas, too, are similarly exculpated, because they have never left any Israeli in doubt of their intentions towards Israel. As is Osama bin Laden because, long before Khobar Towers, Cole and 9-11, he repeatedly warned American to leave the Muslim lands.

Welcome to the 21st century version of "Let them eat Cake".

Going along with this argument for a moment, assume that I, as a resident of Lebanon at whose feet a floating Israeli leaflet has just landed, decide that prudence is in order, and taking the warning seriously, depart town with my family. I return two days later to find my roof lying on my living room floor, my town devastated, my water and power supply busted. One million Lebanese are, like imaginary me, estimated to be refugees within their own country, having left their residences in heed of Israeli warnings or fear of being buried alive by a bomb. Surely they are beside themselves in gratitude for Israel's pre-bomb warning leaflets.

The natural tendency of the human mind is to equate the protagonists in a fight. In the subconscious of world opinion, then, the Hezbollah is acquiring coequal status with Israel. Current reality too has added to the perception. Once upon a time, Israel finished off three whole countries and doubled the territory under its control, all in less time than God took to create the universe. Today it cannot advance more than two miles along a narrow front, against an entity that is not even a regular army (maybe for that very reason).

By its tactics, which have killed ten times the number of people as has Hezbollah, Israel has also obliterated any distinction between itself and its enemy which, as it says, does not care about the human toll. Along with its leaflets, myths of Israeli military invincibility and moral superiority too have dropped out of the sky, making their way to the ground where Hezbollah stands.

The Banta Singh analogy does not end with Israel, however. Those who rejoice in the damage to Israeli myths should be equally mindful of falling victim to the mystique of Hezbollah. The tragedy remains that it has taken a religious and sectarian militia to accomplish what broad-based nationalist and secular movements could not. To take heart in Israel's discomfiture, ignoring this reality, is to emulate Banta Singh's smug satisfaction in salvaging the right hand by sacrificing the left. No pun intended.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

Campaigns in the new Century

2006-08-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

Michael Neumann is an extraordinarily original and perceptive thinker. His article, How Time Flies, is among the most insightful writings on the Iraq and Afghan wars, though it analyzes the actual fighting almost not at all. Here, once again, is a piece by him in yesterday's online edition of Counterpunch examining the nature of communication and organization in the era of emails.

Like other writings by Neumann, it does not seek to provide an answer, but leads one to a better starting point for thinking about the problem.

August 1, 2006

War in the Blathersphere

What is to be Said?

By MICHAEL NEUMANN

Every day the emails swarm, like earnest flies around some goo on the sidewalk. You get more of them when there is more human misery, more filth or gore. They are useless in various ways. Sometimes they moralize about the obvious. Often they tell you what you already know. They at once proclaim that the press does not report the story, and get the story from the press. Many emailers both get their items from, say, The Guardian, and pretend that The Guardian doesn't exist, or that you don't read it. But if you get these sorts of emails, you do read it. If you don't read it, you don't get these sorts of emails.

Even then, you may well learn what the emailers insist, ad nauseam, you will never learn. "Watch as Palestinians struggle without basic necessities", says CNN.

Sometimes the emails do contain information you can't get elsewhere, but don't want from anywhere. You receive them because you have been identified, correctly, as someone concerned about the horrors unfolding in some particular part of the world. If the idea is to arouse further concern, one wonders why: your greater concern probably won't mean that you help the sufferers, or even that you try to help them. Most likely you will simply send more emails, which is why the concerned types often get the same story from four or five sources.

Sometimes the emails call for 'action'. Petitions are signed. There are 'boycotts', which really are a sort of *in*action: for a while, a few concerned boycotters half-heartedly try to do the work of billions. Here, in full, is what one very decent person sent out a few months ago: "To express solidarity with the Palestinian people and their democratically elected government, all citizens of the world should join in a global non-violent boycott of US and European products until the governments of these countries change all such policies which condone, help and support the occupation of the Palestinian people and their effective genocide by the Israeli Apartheid regime." If there were enough people to mount these boycotts, the problems they address would not exist in the first place. But boycott efforts do bear fruit in the form of many more emails, for and against the boycott.

The emails (and I've sent them myself) are symptomatic of a big, bad, debilitating problem. They exhibit profound faith in a doctrine contradicted by all recent history. Apparently, most kind-hearted people with keyboards feel that humanity, or the people, or the nation, or some skillful vanguard, is driven by a powerful conscience which, once aroused, will like a lion descend on injustice and rip it to shreds. How quickly this is to happen isn't clear, but the emailers at once proclaim the dire urgency of 'the situation' and signal that really, there is no urgency at all. We know and they know and the whole world knows that outraged consciences are not going to change anything much anytime soon. People are dying right now, we are told - yet not one person on the planet can expect these messages to drive back the killers or suppress the terrible ambitions of their handlers. If the emails produce any effect, it will be far, far down the road, when today's urgency has become last year's memory.

Some emailers simply pretend otherwise. For others, the answer is: "one has to do something." No one doesn't, when this is all one does. For yet others, their messages are simply a bearing of witness to evil, which essentially means watching people suffer and die. Why this should be some moral obligation or personal accomplishment is a mystery.

If these emails are action, what we need is better talk. It is emphatically not time to organize - organize whom? how many? with what money? to what end? to do what? have a march? How exactly will 'organizing' stop the next army crashing through the next far-off slum, much less the armies already on the move? No one can really believe that because marches and lugubrious meetings have failed in the past, they will succeed in the future. Indeed the very same critics who insist on the impotence of individuals in the face of a thoroughly debased electoral process, the emasculation of the trade unions and the repression of genuine dissent - these same critics act as if none of this made any difference, and we could, politically, do pretty much as we'd like.

Lenin asked, and answered, the question of what is to be done. Today the question is adolescent and the answers are lame. "We must build a movement" now belongs to the same category as "we must make the revolution" or "we must radicalize the underclass" or "make love not war". Leftists need to take their own pessimism about American politics seriously. If anything is ever to be done, some illusions need to go.
First among them is the supposed power of goodness. Many morally good movements have indeed succeeded. The usual suspects are the struggles of black Americans (Martin Luther King or Malcom X, take your pick), feminism, trade unions, the anti-apartheid movements and, implausibly, Gandhi's pacifist yet blood-soaked liberation of India. Others might add the Cuban, Algerian, Chinese, or Russian revolutions, and the Vietnamese expulsion of their enemies. But none of these movements succeeded *because* they were morally good. The bulk of those who fought these fights - as opposed to the well-wishers on the sidelines - were acting out of self-interest. The rank and file often fought for themselves or their families. The political types fought for some group to which they belonged, and with which they identified. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcom X had fine words but little else for the Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh had fine words and little else for American or South African blacks. No one expected, or should have expected, otherwise.

Today, these heroes might have sent some emails, and those emails might have been appreciated. People like getting messages of support. Maybe these messages even help a little - but not much. Usually a movement succeeds because it has enlisted huge numbers of self-interested followers, usually against a numerically inferior opposition. Departures from this pattern say nothing for the power of The Good. The Vietnamese had important Soviet support; this had to little to do with love of justice and much to do with countering American ambitions. The civil rights movement had the armed backing of the US federal government, and the anti-apartheid movement had (much-exaggerated) international backing. In both cases morality was not the driver of this support; it was rather a recognition that, without racial equality, there would be an ongoing bloodbath that would serve no one's political or economic interests. In both cases, many local whites eventually came to the same conclusion.

A look at some of the world's more conspicuous failures provides a better gauge of the power of moral concern. One sometimes hears that the world just didn't care about the pogroms against Jews in Russia and the Ukraine, the Armenian massacres, the horrors of Biafra, Ethiopia, Rwanda. This is nonsense: there was a huge outpouring of concern about these events, as there was about many forms of poverty and exploitation the world over, as there was when America was poised to attack Iraq. Lack of power, not lack of concern, was the problem. Then, of course, there are the painful failures we live with this very day, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Congo. We give our emails and articles and speeches no credit for any improvement in these areas, because there is none. Hand-wringing is not new; that's why we ought to know it doesn't work.

This is no somber reflection on 'human nature'. Concern is not enough, that's all, and for three reasons.

First, we take sides. Once you are for the USA, you will not be overwhelmed by concern for dead Afghan kiddies. People don't actually proclaim the one-sidedness of their compassion, but why should they need to? Isn't it an obvious fact of life? If there are people who cried as many tears for both wounded Vietnamese and wounded American GIs, for both innocent Jews and innocent Germans, for both Palestinian and Israeli children, there are very few, and fewer still whose tears helped any substantial proportion of these victims.

Second, our concern, however admirable, is almost never sufficiently focused. There are so many things to be concerned about. One person is particularly touched the condition of the Palestinians, another by cancerous children, another by famine in the Sudan, another by sweatshops, another by animal extinctions, another by landmines, another by the destruction of native cultures, another by sweatshops. Often the same person flits from one concern to another.

Third, and decisively, We lack any real power to change what we are concerned about. Our votes count for nothing; nonviolent protest is ignored; violent protest, these days, is inconceivable. This could all change, but not soon. For now, many people - and who can prove them wrong? - judge there is nothing they can do about the world's ills, and look to their own business.
These are the reasons not to preach. Now it would be silly to argue against concern for others, or to claim that moral argument has absolutely no place in politics. Sometimes it is useful for deflating propaganda. Often it is useful for creating propaganda, once a cause has powerful support. But it almost never creates such support, and the left has gone astray by inflating its very modest political importance.
It is time we stop bringing one another news and views we've already heard, time we stopped wallowing in others' crimes, time we stopped invoking wimpy principles of law and morals as if these invocations really mattered, time we stopped crying on one another's soggy shoulders. Preaching does spawn longer and more varied email lists, but it is time we realized that this electronic chatter will never help the people we claim to want to help. It is not, for example, that no one will care about the plight of the Palestinians. On the contrary, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have cared, do and will care, very much. But that's just why we should realize that mere caring, and the actions it produced, are resoundingly ineffectual. The Palestinians are worse off than ever, and Israel couldn't care less about our caring.

The short of it is that you cannot build an effective movement on altruism, which means that, for many of the causes that most concern us, you cannot build an effective movement at all. There is an alternative, unromantic and unsatisfying, but much more promising, and therefore morally obligatory. It is to appeal to the interests of those with power. Depending on your point of view, this could mean the rich and corporate, or the mainstream majority, or either, or both.

These appeals need to be practical. Sermonizing results at best in empty gestures. Nor is it any good basing such appeals on what some pet theory proclaims as the deeper interests of humanity. If people were responsive to leftists revealing deeper, unrecognized human interests, the world's problems would have been solved a long time ago. Instead, effective appeals address the ignoble, short-term, possibly 'unreal' interests of those with power. These interests are mainly to have wealth and/or a good job, security and the comforts of life - yes, that includes gas for SUVs.

If effective appeals deviated from leftist orthodoxy, that would hardly speak against them. But they don't. Appealing to unsavory groups or interests doesn't endorse those interests or say anything about the legitimacy of policies or power structures. It is no renunciation of the desire to change those structures, even by the most radical means.
It is simply recognition of contemporary political realities. If that isn't impeccably orthodox, so much the worse for orthodoxy.

For anyone who actually gives a damn whether people starve or are beaten or burned to death, the whiny moralizing of the left is no longer a mere annoyance. It is also immoral. Lacking any remotely reasonable prospect of success, it is an exercise in self-gratification. The forms of this gratification may vary: for some it is simply a relief from great distress about the ways of the world, an outlet for painful frustration. For others it is an exercise in snobbery. For others it is a trip to fantasyland, glowing with visions of revolutionary triumph. Whatever its form, leftist moralizing places the moralizer's own satisfaction over the needs of those in desperate straits. That's not good; it's selfish. It is unpleasant to admit powerlessness and to act within the political framework of an abhorrent system. But it's the only game in town.
To pretend otherwise is hypocrisy - not the worst sin, perhaps, but one the left most loves to condemn. It is to act as if one really cares about others while pursuing a strategy that clearly will help only oneself.

The irony of it all is that it is only once leftists give up on their obsession with concern that they can make progress on those same concerns, on what induced them to become leftists in the first place.
The ignorance and stupidity of America's leaders and their supporters present great opportunities. Many think American policies, though they do run counter to the interests of 'ordinary Americans', serve the interests of big business, or the ruling class. This is false. Most American foreign policies run counter to the interest of big business as well.

Big business, on the whole, has no interest in supporting Israel, or invading Iraq, or confronting Iran, or tying aid to 'abstinence' birth control.* Major oil companies, who value stability, have no interest in risky, expensive, outrage-provoking schemes to siphon off oil from Central Asia. Even in Venezuela or Bolivia, American businessmen don't think lame coup attempts are an intelligent response to oil nationalizations. No corporate type wants high-ranking dweebs admonishing Russia or China about human rights, or provoking these nations with attempts to encircle them. All of these policies, because of the chaos and hostility they create, are worse for America's security, its energy supplies. and therefore its economy. American foreign policy is, often as not, an appeal to special voting blocks like anti-Castro Cubans or born-again Christians, not the implementation of corporate agendas.

The idiocies of US policy are an opportunity, not for effective action, but for its prerequisite, effective talk. In half the world, the US undercuts its security and economic prospects by supporting Israel, thereby alienating oil producers and key allies. Iran was once in the US camp; support for Israel is part of the reason it is now on the other side. In the first Gulf War, most of the world, including Syria, sided with the US and even fought alongside it. Now only a coalition of poodles skitters at America's heels. In Turkey, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in every country important to US objectives, anti-American sentiment explodes; this endangers America's grip on its energy suppliers. On the other side of the ocean, America's boycott of Cuba has done much to alienate first Venezuela, then Bolivia; Brazil and Mexico may not be far behind. This policy benefits no one and pleases only bitter first-generation Cuban refugees in Florida.

None of this does middle America or the big corporations any good. It's not hard to promote change on the only viable basis for promoting it, the self-interest of those who can make the changes. But most leftists, instead of addressing the obvious needs of virtually all Americans, apparently think they can infect a whole population with passionate altruism and high ideals. People are going hungry! Children are dying! International law is defied! There are violations of the Geneva Convention! Democracy is not being spread! Corporations are profitable! US policymakers are hypocrites!

When unions organize, when Toyota wants to sell a car, they don't say: "this will be great for someone else." Until the left stops thinking that's a smart way to sell change, the question of what is to be done can't even arise. Civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement, feminism, environmentalism - the only progressive postwar movements that can claim some success - were successful precisely because they got past leftist idealism and made powerful appeals to the interests of those involved.(**)

Real compassion requires placing results over political puritanism. No one heeds connoisseurs of purity and agony. Nobody is interested in what we do or don't 'support' - the emptiest term in the whole vapid lexicon of leftism. You can 'support' violent revolution all you like, just as you can 'support' socialism in the United States or fair wages around the world or a secular state in Israel/Palestine. "Supporting' these things - or even more comically, 'demanding' them - has absolutely no tendency to bring them within a parsec of reality. At such a distance from high ideals, it is idle to fuss about whether they've been abandoned. Again, and until then: we are powerless. This could change dramatically tomorrow, but there is no sign of it changing, and if the signs come they will overshadow our 'radicalism' completely.
For now, we are - to harp on it - powerless. It is only by accepting this that we can set about persuading those who do have power to do less harm. If we succeed, and our chances are good, the American left will have more power than it has had for many years.

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(*) Inevitably Halliburton will come to mind. Halliburton, despite years of government patronage, hasn't made it to the top 100 of the Fortune 500. Its 2005 revenues are a bit over 20 billion and its 'profit' is a loss of 979 million; it lost similar amounts in the previous three years. Exxon Mobil had revenues of $270 billion and profits of $25 billion. ChevronTexaco had revenues of almost 148 billion and profits of over 13 billion. ConocoPhillips had revenues of over 121 billion and profits of 8 billion. None of these truly big companies made anything noticeable out of Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Israel.

(**) Even churchmen are often less other-wordly than lefists in recognizing the importance of appeals to self-interest. The leader of Greece's Orthodox church, condemning Israel's attack on Lebanon, provides an example:

"[Israel is] sacrificing innocent civilians by the hundreds, and creating refugees by the thousands," he added, telling the Israeli authorities, "Do not provoke our consciences. Do not feed the world condemnation against you. It is not in your interest...Fear God's wrath."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741764.html

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those of his university. His book What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been republished by Broadview Press. He contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. His latest book is The Case Against Israel. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.

Fidel Castro on September 11

2006-08-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

Prophetic? You be the judge. Pay attention to the words in italics.

[Speech in Havana, September 22, 2001]

Fellow countrymen:

No one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins, the economic and political factors that brought it to live and those responsible for it.

The unanimous irritation caused by the human and psychological damage brought on the American people by the unexpected and shocking death of thousands of innocent people whose images have shaken the world is perfectly understandable. But who have profited? The extreme right, the most backward and right-wing forces, those in favor of crushing the growing world rebellion and sweeping away everything progressive that is still left on the planet. It was an enormous error, a huge injustice and a great crime whoever they are who organized or are responsible for such action.

However, the tragedy should not be used to recklessly start a war that could actually unleash an endless carnage of innocent people and all of this on behalf of justice and under the peculiar and bizarre name of Infinite Justice.

In the last few days we have seen the hasty establishment of the basis, the concept, the true purposes, the spirit and the conditions for such a war. No one would be able to affirm that it was not something thought out well in advance, something that was just waiting for its chance to materialize. Those who after the so-called end of the cold war continued a military build-up and the development of the most sophisticated means to kill and exterminate human beings were aware that the large military investments would give them the privilege to impose an absolute and complete dominance over the other peoples of the world. The ideologists of the imperialist system knew very well what they were doing and why they were doing it.

After the shock and sincere sorrow felt by every people on Earth for the atrocious and insane terrorist attack that targeted the American people, the most extremist ideologists and the most belligerent hawks, already set in privileged power positions, have taken command of the most powerful country in the world whose military and technological capabilities would seem infinite. Actually, its capacity to destroy and kill is enormous while its inclination towards equanimity, serenity, thoughtfulness and restrain is minimal.

The combination of elements --including complicity and the common enjoyment of privileges-- the prevailing opportunism, confusion and panic make it almost impossible to avoid a bloody and unpredictable outcome.

The first victims of whatever military actions are undertaken will be the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world with their unbelievable economic and social problems, their unpayable debts and the ruinous prices of their basic commodities; their growing natural and ecological catastrophes, their hunger and misery, the massive undernourishment of their children, teenagers and adults; their terrible AIDS epidemic, their malaria, their tuberculosis and their infectious diseases that threaten whole nations with extermination.

The grave economic world crisis was already a real and irrefutable fact affecting absolutely every one of the big economic power centers. Such crisis will inevitably grow deeper under the new circumstances and when it becomes unbearable for the overwhelming majority of the peoples, it will bring chaos, rebellion and the impossibility to govern.

But the price will also be unpayable for the rich countries. For years to come it would be impossible to speak strong enough about the environment and the ecology, or about ideas and research done and tested, or about projects for the protection of Nature because that space and possibility would be taken by military actions, war and crimes as infinite as Infinite Justice, that is, the name given to the war operation to be unleashed.

Can there be any hope left after having listened, hardly 36 hours ago, to the speech made the President before the U.S. Congress?

I will avoid the use of adjectives, qualifiers or offensive words towards the author of that speech. They would be absolutely unnecessary and untimely when the tensions and seriousness of the moment advise thoughtfulness and equanimity. I will limit myself to underline some short phrases that say it all:

We will use every necessary weapon of war.

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.

Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

I’ve called the armed forces to alert and there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act and you will make us proud.

This is the worlds fight, this is civilizations fight.

I ask for your patience [...] in what will be a long struggle.

The great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depend on us.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. [...] And we know that God is not neutral.

I ask our fellow countrymen to meditate deeply and calmly on the ideas contained in several of the above-mentioned phrases:

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

No nation of the world has been left out of the dilemma, not even the big and powerful states; none has escaped the threat of war or attacks.

We will use any weapon.

No procedure has been excluded, regardless of its ethics, or any threat whatever fatal, either nuclear, chemical, biological or any other.

It will not be short combat but a lengthy war, lasting many years, unparalleled in history.

It is the worlds fight; it is civilization's fight.

The achievements of our times and the hope of every time, now depend on us.

Finally, an unheard of confession in a political speech on the eve of a war, and no less than in times of apocalyptic risks: The course of this conflict is not known; yet its outcome is certain. And we know that God is not neutral.

This is an amazing assertion. When I think about the real or imagined parties involved in that bizarre holy war that is about to begin, I find it difficult to make a distinction about where fanaticism is stronger.

On Thursday, before the United States Congress, the idea was designed of a world military dictatorship under the exclusive rule of force, irrespective of any international laws or institutions. The United Nations Organization, simply ignored in the present crisis, would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever. There would be only one boss, only one judge, and only one law.

We have all been ordered to ally either with the United States government or with terrorism.

Cuba, the country that has suffered the most and the longest from terrorist actions, the one whose people are not afraid of anything because there is no threat or power in the world that can intimidate it, with a high morale Cuba claims that it is opposed to terrorism and opposed to war. Although the possibilities are now remote, Cuba reaffirms the need to avert a war of unpredictable consequences whose very authors have admitted not to have the least idea of how the events will unfold. Likewise, Cuba reiterates its willingness to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism.

An objective and calm friend should advise the United States government against throwing the young American soldiers into an uncertain war in remote, isolated and inaccessible places, like a fight against ghosts, not knowing where they are or even if they exist or not, or whether the people they kill are or not responsible for the death of their innocent fellow countrymen killed in the United States.

Cuba will never declare itself an enemy of the American people that is today subjected to an unprecedented campaign to sow hatred and a vengeful spirit, so much so that even the music that sings to peace has been banned. On the contrary, Cuba will make that music its own, and even our children will sing their songs to peace while the announced bloody war lasts.

Whatever happens, the territory of Cuba will never be used for terrorist actions against the American people and we will do everything within our reach to prevent such actions against that people. Today we are expressing our solidarity while urging to peace and calmness. One day they will admit we were right.

Our independence, our principles and our social achievements we will defend with honor to the last drop of blood, if we are attacked!

It will not be easy to fabricate pretexts to do it. They are already talking about a war using all the necessary weapons but it will be good recalling that not even that would be a new experience. Almost four decades ago, hundreds of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons were aimed at Cuba and nobody remembers anyone of our countrymen sleepless over that.

We are the same sons and daughters of that heroic people, with a patriotic and revolutionary conscience that is higher than ever. It is time for serenity and courage.

The world will grow aware of this and will raise its voice in the face of the terrible threatening drama that it is about to suffer.

As for Cubans, this is the right time to proclaim more proud and resolute than ever:

Socialism or death!
Homeland or death!
We will overcome!

The Moral Culpability for Qana

2006-08-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

by Patrick Buchanan
(Reprinted from www.antiwar.com).

"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27.

"Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.

The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.

Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.

"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.

Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas, and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.

But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."

Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."

"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.

Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war – on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks, and buses were all hit with air strikes.

Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon – i.e., the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing, and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.

If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.

Thousands of Lebanese civilians are injured. Perhaps 800,000 are homeless.

Yet, whatever one thinks of the morality of what Israel is doing, the stupidity is paralyzing. Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had – when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah, and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah – Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah.

And how does one defend the behavior of the United States?

When Gillerman was exulting in the disproportionality of Israel's attack on Lebanon, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling smugly beside him. When the UN Security Council tabled a resolution condemning Hezbollah's igniting of the war and Katyusha attacks, but also the excesses of Israel's reprisals, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton vetoed it. When a few congressmen sought to moderate a pro-Israeli resolution by adding words urging "all sides to protect innocent life and infrastructure," GOP leader John Boehner ordered the words taken down.

Why? Because, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, had prepared the resolution and wanted it passed the way they wrote it. Our Knesset complied. It sailed through the House 410-8.

For two weeks, Bush seemed unable to find a word of criticism for what our friends in Israel were doing to our friends in Lebanon. He publicly sent more bombs to Israel. He and Condi emphasized that America did not want a cease-fire – yet.

And because America provides Israel with the bombs it uses on Lebanon, and we refused to restrain the Israelis, and we opposed every effort for a cease-fire before Sunday, America shares full moral and political responsibility for the massacre at Qana.

Rubbing our noses in our own cravenness, "Bibi" Netanyahu took time out, a week ago, from his daily appearances on American television, denouncing terrorism, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the terror attack on the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin's Irgun, an attack that killed 92 people, among them British nurses.

This was not a terrorist act, Bibi explained, because Irgun telephoned a 15-minute warning to the hotel before the bombs went off. Right. And those children in that basement in Qana should not have ignored the Israeli leaflets warning them to clear out of southern Lebanon.

Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.

When people care about elections

2006-07-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

Unlike Gore, who gave in timidly, and Kerry, who did not even entertain the idea of a fight following the Ohio fraud, here's what happens when a candidate stands up. The scene (picture from the New York Times) is a rally addressed by Lopez Obrador, the candidate who says he was cheated f victory by election fraud.

What if Gore and Kerry had been more like Obrador? This is the title of an article some weeks back by Terry Curtis Fox. A great piece which makes the point that leaders are supposed to lead. Leaders of the people are supposed to lead people, not talk at them from behind a phalanx of focus group runners, ad mavens and pollsters. Fox makes the point that, even if Gore's public rallies, protests, boycotts, etc. had failed and Bush ended up becoming president anyhow, it would have chastened the administration. As it was, the meek concession spurred them to on to greater levels of brazenness.

An old article by Niranjan Ramakrishnan, "The Silence of the Lambs", written shortly after the 2000 elections, makes the same point. Democracy flourishes when people demonstrate that they have a stake.

NYT Endorses Lieberman's Opponent in CT Primary

2006-07-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

Editorial

A Senate Race in Connecticut

Published: July 30, 2006

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

•

But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.

As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”

That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.

Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.

At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.

•

On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel

2006-07-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

From counterpunch.com, July 21, 2006.

The Power of Arrogance

2006-07-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

The Power of Arrogance

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Despite all the cries of outrage and shock over what is happening in the Middle East, is there really any difference between the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon? A parody of the Cartesian mindset of recent vintage is in play once more -- I can get away with it, therefore I do.

The United States destroyed huge parts of Afghanistan after 9-11. Thousands were rendered homeless, large numbers were killed and maimed. In the end, Bin Laden, the purported quarry, was never found.

Then came Iraq, where there was not even the fig leaf of hot pursuit. A warmed over dish of fear, concocted from the embers of 9-11, old UN resolutions (proving in the process that some UN resolutions are more important than others), fake intelligence reports and journalistic fabrications, was enough to get a nod from a craven and petrified Congress. Thousands perished as a result. And along with the usual toll of infrastructure, a deliberate American negligence caused priceless museum artifacts belonging to all mankind to be lost forever.

The engagements in Afghanistan or Iraq are far from over. Already, here comes the third volume in the series: Lebanon. Watch out, JK Rowling.

Hezbollah is holed up in Southern Lebanon, lobbing missiles on Israeli border towns. Hezbollah guerrillas have kidnapped Israeli soldiers. The stated objective is to remove the threat of missiles and recover the captives. Fair enough. But why bomb Beirut, 100 miles to the north, and Tripoli, another hundred miles farther? Why destroy dozens of bridges, airports and seaports, oil depots and power plants? Why punish the people of all Lebanon? Because the terrorists are hiding everywhere, comes the answer. The United States is on record supporting this logic. Quite naturally, too, for it applies an identical reasoning to justify its own actions.

If this rationale is accepted, an impartial observer might wonder, could one justify the bombing of the World Trade Center? Did not the CIA have offices in one of the collapsed buildings, and was it not well known that the CIA had orchestrated coups, assassinations, riots, military takeovers, etc. in several parts of the world? If the Israelis could bomb Lebanese army bases without any provocation from the Lebanese army, and the US could defend such an act, on what basis could they oppose someone crashing a plane into the Pentagon, undoubtedly a military target?

Something to think about, perhaps, but even such introspection is persona non grata in our times. We like to keep it simple: I can get away with it, therefore I do. The same powers that chided Russia for its actions in Chechnya, and bombed Serbia into submission for its moves against Kosovar drug runners, today make the all-purpose claim that "Israel has a right to defend itself", ranking right up there on the inanity scale with such gems as, "We are a nation of immigrants". Of course every country has a right to defend itself. But by bombing power plants and bridges all across a non-combatant state? By demolishing residences and roads? All for the actions of one group? Israel, of all countries, should know that that mass punishment of populations is a war crime.

Both Democratic and Republican worthies dutifully thronged the microphones this weekend, many to aver that bombing civilian targets is justified; for the terrorists are holed up among civilians. An even more amusing (if sad) variant of their plaint was "But Hezbollah does it". Is the standard for a modern, democratic, state the same as it is for terrorists and warlords? But who would ask that question? They never raised it when Bush rammed through the Patriot Act, not when it became known that their government was spying on its citizens and prying into their financial transactions, not when Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo surfaced. Why should they raise it now?

Clearly, Israel's actions were not spur-of-the-moment, far from it. Several commentators have said the Israelis had planned for precisely such an opportunity for years. That's merely a tactical element. As a strategic backdrop, it was America that provided the enabling logic with its two singular examples of attacking non-combatant countries with not a whimper from the world. Lebanon's prime minister this week called Israel a major perpetrator of terror, saying Israel had set his country decades back in time.

Now another country has employed the same logic to justify the same tactic. More world silence. Wasn't the UN created for just such occasions? Deconstructionists may ponder the significance of the term "United Nations" sounding so much like "Eunuch Nations". It is further a hallmark of our times that the worst presidency of US history coincides with the tenure of the most spineless UN Secretary General in the organization's life. That line about the age bringing forth the man takes on a whole new meaning.

Much has been made of how the Israeli public is solidly behind Ehud Olmert. It might help to recall how solid American public support once was for going into Iraq, and how high Bush's approval was as he first bombed Afghanistan. It was said of the intrepid scooter wallah of New Delhi that if the front wheel could make it, he would proceed boldly into the narrow lane, forgetting the rest of the vehicle was wider. That's public opinion in a nutshell.

If the US has demonstrated anything during the past three years, it is that today, after spending a half-trillion dollars (eleven million dollars an hour, to quote Rep. John Murtha), it is unable to prevail in a contest with a ragtag band of insurgents with no overt support from any major power (unlike its opponents in the Vietnam or Korean wars, who were backed by China and the USSR). An honest reflection might have led to a sober view of the current crisis. Instead, Bush is busy rattling his sabers against Syria and Iran, trying to widen the conflict. Rather than calling for an immediate cease fire (a reasonable step even while condemning Hezbollah), he has justified the destruction of Lebanon, a friendly country whose government was installed at his own behest.

It is tempting to hang the well-worn phrase, "The Arrogance of Power" on Israel's attitude and on America's. But realistically, it is rather more a case of the Power of Arrogance. Consider this spectacle: The biggest debtor in the world tacitly encourages the destruction of an entire nation, by another nation whose defense budget is largely underwritten by itself. Guess who is going to pay for the reconstruction aid to Lebanon that must inevitably ensue? The American Taxpayer, it would seem, is the world's perennial dupe. In an article (How Time Flies), Michael Neumann captured this paradox well, "America's weakness is not a problem; the problem is that it acts as if it were strong..." Arrogance has the power to sideline reality and embark on ever more ambitious projects. Let's not forget the words of a White House official quoted in Ron Susskind's book, boasting that the White House created its own reality.

The consequence of silent acquiescence in aggression three times in five years will take the whole world, not just Lebanon, back into the dark ages. The clearest lesson of all this is that the collective deterrent of world opinion exists no longer. A very real proliferation has resulted -- that of the idea that powerful nations can attack others without fear of consequence -- unless...

Welcome to the New (clear) World Order.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living in the USA. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com.

Joe Bageant

2006-07-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

Thank Heaven for 7-Eleven

Democracy rots from the inside out as a nation of telemarketers and war criminals parties on amid the stench.

A spring Sunday morning and I am at the politically incorrect 7-Eleven buying my cholesterol loaded half-and-half for my peasant slave labor grown coffee. In the parking lot, car speakers blare out Bob Marley from a grungy 1987 Olds Cutlass (the last year GM made 'em), while the owner, a Haitian guy, sits on the curb eating his Smokey Big Bite hot dog, sunshine pouring over the whole world sweet as that quart of chocolate milk he is going to wash it all down with. Bob Marley is singing "One Love" and that Smokey smells so damned good I order one for myself and settle in next to that Haitian dude. And I think, "Is this a great fucking country or what? Yessiree, the world's best hope."

And it is. Or was. Or something. Ask any poor suffering bastard in the garbage dumps of Mumbai or Caracas to name the best place in the world to live and most will answer "The United States." Maybe it's for all the wrong reasons. And surely the image is driven by the global hype and bullshit of an America that cannot get over itself -- cannot pause from its huckstering long enough to see that the America of both John Wayne and FDR quit circling the drain thirty years ago. It has since been pulled asunder by spectacular greed and the learned helplessness of the consumer state. And denial. The kind that allows us to sanctify the young men starring in that horrific snuff flick over in Iraq as "heroes." But we were talking about the third world weren't we? Where if you are eating spoiled cat meat and getting raped nightly in a Bangkok slum, things like a Cutlass gunboat with busted springs and a Smokey Big Bite on a Sunday morning look good. Damned good. There is not much that cannot be explained by population geography and proximity to basic goods and services. This is not wasted upon the predatory few among us concerned with capturing, holding and blackmailing others for access to them under our free market system. It's a brutal process, one we can only coexist with through ironclad denial. Did free people make your clothes? Mine neither.

My Dutch friend Bram is mystified at our denial, which he says "is spooky." "How can anyone sustain such a thing?" Well, it's easy when you are born numb. Most of us born under American extremist capitalism are inured to its sheer brutality. To Americans, it's just the way things are. The world is a tough place. We agree that god has blessed us; we deserve what we have and let it go at that. Citizens born under the Third Reich felt the same way about their consensual reality. Not many of us can grasp the national hubris involved, thanks to the heady patrio-religious mythology of American exceptionalism in which we were spawned and educated in preparation for adulthood as citizens of the consumer state. Collectively, we feel exempt from human folly because our particular god, the Christian God, the Jewish God, The Mormon God, the Seventh Day Adventist God, Muslim God or whatever one's cult deems divine, has chosen us. Whatever we think we are as liberals, your nation and mine, the government we are responsible for has always acted on these beliefs, destroying whole nations, peoples and the planet under that exceptionalist banner. At some point, liberals and neocons and the apolitical alike, are going to have to own all of America's history, not just the parts we prefer. For instance, it was FDR who packed off all those decent Japanese families off to internment camps. Abraham Lincoln loved his nigger jokes. Bram remains mystified.

Mercifully enough, the same predatory American capitalism that generates so much of the world's misery renders its own citizens irrelevant save for their purchasing power, to the entire process and therefore guiltless -- in their own minds at least -- of the empire's crimes. Such is the unburdened material happiness granted us. It is not hard for Americans to conclude that we are outside of, and therefore irrelevant to global events or changes. We are waaaaay over here on this vast continent with only a media generated holograph to tell us who we are as a people and as individuals. And it tells us we foremost are citizens of a state which suffers no diversion from profitability. The vast majority of Americans don't even know there is a global reality, except in the sense that the price of gasoline is affected by some swarthy peoples living in a sandy place full of terrorists somewhere else on the globe. We know the price of gas and we know what we are going to rent at the video store on Friday. We know what we will eat at the restaurant on Saturday and when the game is televised on Sunday. Personally, I also know that four blocks from where I sit writing this an old man named Virgil pulled one of his own teeth last week because he cannot afford a dentist. Rather than kick out a little dough Virgil's way, I poured a shot of Woodford Reserve and was grateful I have dental insurance. Being "grateful for what we have" is the time honored American mantra used to mask denial.

Thus we express gratitude for what the corpocracy bestows us, convinced that we are flourishing in those big box store isles of Kansas or in the soft leather booths of the martini bar off Central Park, depending upon one's class. It only took a couple of generations to accept and then enjoy the reduced humanity but increased flood of material stuff as a bona fide life experience. Beat off to internet porn and NFL football while the wife sleeps alone. The state generated hologram IS reality. Reality IS the image, not the flesh. It's true of all of us. I have done it and still do it. I know. And you more than likely do too. Let's not kid ourselves here.

Even as the empire is coming down around us all very few can possibly believe it. Why should they? Nothing seems to have changed their particular religious or political camps. Literate and thoughtful liberals can still watch Brit coms and send their kids to Shakespeare camp. Less than literate Fox Network watching worker bee Republicans can still sup on the easy piety of cross and flag…ogle Anne Coulter's boney ass. And Joe Six-pack still scratches his belly in irrelevance as the elites of two political priesthoods struggle, one to get their mitts deeper into the national treasury, the other to convince us that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden actually have blood in their veins. The next elections, both parties tell us, will determine the fate of our nation. Really? Regardless of who wins, Joe Six-pack will lose. Virgil will lose. The rest of us will continue being carried along by the media hologram of political lies and profitable illusions that hold it all together. Today I read a news story about how the massacre of Iraqi families in Hidatha "traumatized" our heroes. What do you call a republic that dishes up such shit up to its citizens? What do you call the citizens who mindlessly swallow it? What do you call people who do not march in the streets and start fires in protest of a horrific regime that guts small democracies, slaughters whole families and villages abroad and rigs the ballot boxes at home? What do you call such deniers of the obvious? Of course we can safely call the latter modern Democrats, but that is another story.

In any case, most liberals/leftists/progressives, or whatever the hell one calls such an ineffectual bunch of twits, refuse to even consider open resistance. They exist in the same prison of learned helplessness and planet devouring gluttony as conservatives, but with New Age or pseudo-leftist wallpaper. I have an awful suspicion they will never be brave again in their lives, assuming they ever were.

There seems to be no warning people of the lie they have swallowed, the black thing they have eaten and which now devours them from within. The "American lifestyle," the "good life," was such a comfortable lie to swallow. And because the material world trumps the mind and therefore trumps less quantifiable stuff such as freedom and insight quite easily, the black thing is now chewing at the Constitution which, being essentially a property document, was never all that strong to begin with. But it's all we have. As resident bully of human consciousness, the reptilian brain so easily slashes and chaws through the limbic one, announcing the supremacy of the fist and the gullet over the higher self. "I can eat these tortilla chips (or perhaps nine dollar a pound organically pastured chicken breast, or whatever it is that socially responsible rich people eat) and watch plasma TV right now. But I would have to go to the library to get On Walden Pond, which I never heard of anyway. Take to the streets? What for? "Pass me the salsa, honey." I do this myself almost nightly. There may be no saving me or the world, or mankind in the world from itself. Realization will come the hard way, which is how humanity learns. Too late and at a terrible cost.

Meanwhile, we remain obedient, not disturbing of our comfort, save maybe once a year for a rote "demonstration" downtown for or against something or other, the school bond or the war in Iraq, during which we are flushed with joy at the site of so many of our own kind, but having demonstrated only that such displays are just that -- displays. Toothless displays in a predatory system that respects only the fang and the claw. The newspapers print a photo next day, we dispute their estimated number of demonstrators, and then we settle back into obedience.

Americans have always been an obedient people, proud to be answerable and obedient to the nation's law and god, with one reinforcing the other somehow in the national mind. Obedient people do not look up from their assigned cubicles; do not ask if their work is meaningful or contributory to mankind. Never question the way things are. Not in church, nor in daily life. And if the air reeks of a republic rotting from the inside out, you just hold your nose.

Consequently, we are we forced to acknowledge the fiction of self governance, though voting power never gets in the way of elite agendas such as tax breaks and war profits (though it may slow them down at times, giving the illusion of voting power to a nation with no memory whatsoever.) The pretense reaches its most absurd levels during national elections, where self-governance is put to the test. For instance, no matter who won in the 2004 presidential elections, this country would still have been lead by a member of the Skull and Bones Society. What are the odds of that happening? In a nation of 295 million people our choice came down to two members of one of the most exclusive and secretive clubs on the planet. Do you really believe in coincidences like that? I don't. Nobody does. But we pretend to because the truth is just too awful for anyone with more than an inch of forehead to contemplate.

Yet, unimaginable as it may seem, there are even worse things afoot to contemplate. Forces such as the emerging Christian militia, the Joshua generation, a runaway military establishment, to name a few, working fanatically to make our obedience ever more lethal. Yesterday I saw a photo of 25,000 young fundamentalist Americans marching in Philadelphia and San Francisco in support of a theocratic state. I can honestly say I was completely unnerved by it. Those little electrical nerve waves went through my entire body, the kind that happen when you see a car wreck take place. I live around fundamentalist Christians, my whole family is fundamentalist Christian and I know what they are capable of and indeed are planning to do given the chance. They are being led by the same types who formed the old white militia movements in the Seventies and Eighties before Timothy McVeigh rendered their public position untenable. I couldn't shut up about it and friends. But even the most "informed" ones looked at me like I was crazy, or at the very least, weirdly obsessive. These are not stupid people. They are simply Americans. And because we are friends, we moved on to another topic. This is the sort of strange national disconnect that has so many folks like myself silently screaming inside our heads.

And that is when we must do something something to stop the screaming, something utterly mundane and completely oblivious to break free of the hysterical grimness of it all. Like sit in the sun with a Smokey Big Bite and let Bob Marley "Stir it Up" right there in the parking lot. Grin along with some Haitian dude and watch a white trash mama in ridiculously tight shorts step around you, inches from your face on that curb by the 7-Eleven door, an ankle tattooed, cheap perfumed angel of god sent to remind us that, "Politics ain't everything Buster, and the world ain't all bad. Not by a long shot! Now finish that chowing down dog, get off your ass and go do the right thing."

Yo mama!

Whither Zarqawi?

2006-06-23T11:49:00.001-07:00

Or was it "Wither, Zarqawi. Silently."?

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

This is how the Washington post reported it:
In the hours leading up to the attack, "we had absolutely no doubts whatsoever that Zarqawi was in the house," (Maj. Gen.) Caldwell said, adding that the tips leading to the safe house had come from within Zarqawi's network. "It was 100 percent confirmation. We knew exactly who was there, we knew it was Zarqawi, and that was the deliberate target that we went to get."

And the New York Times:

Several weeks ago, someone inside the Zarqawi network turned the military's attention to the spiritual adviser, identified as Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, said Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the senior military spokesman in Iraq... last night was the first time that we have had definitive, unquestionable information" where Mr. Zarqawi was, the general said. "Therefore, the decision was made to strike."

Unasked and unanswered, as usual, is the key question: If an alleged lynch pin of Al Qaeda such as Zarqawi was in your net, what would you, an administration with a professed one-point agenda of fighting terrorism, do? Ensure his death? Or try your best to reel him in alive? Dropping two five hundred pound bombs on his abode practically guarantees the former, although Zarqawi, like Rasputin, seems to have survived even such a drastic effort, succumbing to his wounds subsequently. Would you not think it was worth almost any price to keep such a high-value target alive, so that he could talk?

Despite the 1000 pounds of ordnance expended on Zarqawi's villa, a great deal of information was yet recovered: a "treasure trove", to quote US officials. This was followed, they added, by dozens of other raids on other suspected Al Qaeda locations all across Iraq, leading also to a number of arrests and other veins of intelligence. But why could all this not have been done after securing the mother lode, the reputed center of the web of terrorism in all of Iraq, Zarqawi himself?

This question does not even appear to have been raised with any seriousness.

Zarqawi was an American original, so to speak. No one had heard of him prior to Colin Powell's awarding him top terrorist status during his United Nations presentation (sic) en route the quick march to the Iraq War. Whether this was just one more embellishment in Powell's wholesale foray into fiction that morning is more than academic. The fact that the Bush administration chose to assassinate him rather than capture and bring him to trial, only serves to increase curiosity about American connections with Zarqawi, adding to the pile of questions assembled by Congressman John Conyers and others to see whether there is a fit case for impeachment. Several writers have pointed out that if Zarqawi was in Iraq prior to 9-11 (thereby establishing an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, as per the Bush administration's argument), he was in the Kurdish territories, whose government was favorable to the US and outside of Saddam Hussein's control. He became a monstrous feature of Iraq proper only following the Occupation.

What does this policy of "Dead-or-Alive-but-preferably-Dead" vis-a-vis Zarqawi say about the lagging pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, a 6-foot-4-inch figure who has managed to remain incognito now for close on five years?

Shouldn't every White House correspondent be seeking an answer to this question of why dead rather than alive? And while we're at it, should not senators and representatives raise this too, at every conceivable forum?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan lives on the West Coast. he can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

A Fein Idea

2006-05-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Say we've Had it. Ha! Send them Du Jail!

Two things are infinite -- the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. --Albert Einstein

Time moves at a less frenetic pace on C-SPAN than elsewhere on television. Yesterday they were showing four law professors appearing before the House Judiciary Committee testifying about the FBI raid on Capitol Hill. Bruce Fein, Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan was, as usual, brilliant. Putting his finger on a central weakness of our style of discourse, cause of many a derailed public discussion after 9-11, he pointed out the perils of forgetting the essential in pursuit of the incidental. Fein emphasized that the principle was key. If you let a (bad) principle stand and challenge only the incident, it is like ignoring a loaded weapon which can be brought out and used later.

Fein was talking about the principle of separation of powers, admonishing the committee to be firm in addressing the violation of this 'principle', instead of getting caught up in whether, in this instance, Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA) hid money in his refrigerator, etc.

His advice is more widely applicable. A few months ago, I had pointed out in an article, "Gonzales Channels Mark Twain how, in answer to a question by Chuck Schumer whether the Executive had the authority to tap the phones of its political opponents, Alberto Gonzales gave this answer, "We're not going to do that". Schumer and the other members simply moved on, apparently satisfied. Gonzales did not reject such a course on principle, only on the specifics as they existed at that point.

Everyone is now talking about Haditha. It is the Abu Ghraib of 2006. We've progressed from reports of systematic torture to stories of systematic murder. A perennial stock-in-trade here is 'innocent civilians' (see also Civilians and Combatants), which leads one to ask, if these were innocent civilians, what crime did the other 100000 Iraqis, who have been killed, maimed and displaced by Bush and Blair's war, commit? Or the half-million children estimated to have died during the sanctions preceding the invasion?

Here too Fein's point is valid: if we were not in Iraq, there would be no Hadithas and no Abu Ghraibs. It is the principle of the thing. In all the millions of words expended on Iraq War by Senators and Congressmen, commentators and journalists, a basic question seldom finds a place: How was it correct to invade a country that had not attacked us? If only we had persisted with this simple point of principle...It never featured in the Senate or any other debate.

Similar is the answer to charges of warrantless wiretapping: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. That this does not trouble most Senators is bad enough; that this point is actually advanced by some of them is astonishing. It is unnecessary to stress that if this is acceptable, so is the prospect of the local cops breaking into your home or car and searching it. Once you give up the principle of due process the road downhill beckons.

The administration is not averse to principle when convenient, pointing to Saddam Hussein's trial as upholding the principle of "no one is above the Law". Saddam Hussein and his colleagues are being prosecuted for deaths of people in Dujail. No one alleges that Saddam Hussein personally executed anyone. One more principle is then invoked, executive accountability. If these principles are applicable and celebrated by America and Britain, when will Bush and Blair be put in the dock for Haditha?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com/.

Bush and Blair despondent

2006-05-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

In their press conference yesterday, Bush and Blair are reported to have been less gung-ho than previously. I was reminded of the old Irish joke: An Englishman laughs at a joke three times -- first when he hears it, second when it is explained to him, and finally, when he understands it. Yesterday, they seemed to have got it. Not all of it, and neither is it a joke. But their own defeat and three years of waste are finally sinking in. I don't think they still are able to see the tragedy of thousands of people dead, lives broken, families ruined, children maimed, soldiers warped, all the things that war brings. WW1 and WW2 and Vietnam should have provided ample understanding of that. Paul Krugman has written an op-ed in the NYT about Gore's new film, and the loss of not having a thinking person as president at this crucial time. That's ok for Bush. But Blair is a thinking person? What explains his enthusiasm for the Iraq project? Tariq Ali said in an interview about a year ago on NPR that it was his evangelistic predeliction. Blair is a staunch evangelical.

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The Democrats and the flight from 9-11

2006-05-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Making Hay(den) While They Shun Signs

by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Bertie Wooster: Were you frightfully bright as a kid, Jeeves?

Jeeves: My mother thought me intelligent, sir.

Bertie Wooster: You can't go by that. My mother thought me intelligent!
(from a PG Wodehouse novel, a rough recollection)

If I am one of the 200 million whose phone records have been tracked by the government, General Michael Hayden has probably heard of me, but I am unable to say I reciprocated his interest. He only came up on my radar screen when he made his strident and unapologetic defense a few months ago of the warrant less phone tapping program.

It says something about a country when a president at 34% approval can nominate a confessed lawbreaker to one of the most powerful offices in the nation. (Hayden's assertions that he didn't think he broke the law is rather like Wooster's mom marveling at her child's intellect). It says even more when he encounters anything other than scornful indignation at his hearings. That he should be acclaimed and endorsed by the Senate panel speaks volumes about the Senate's own self-confidence. There was a time when Congress would bristle at the merest presumption upon its powers of oversight. Now it overlooks the most brazen usurpation's with a practiced acquiescence honed by five years of cowering.

The law be damned, the hell with freedoms, what we we need is "competence" in this age of terrorism, you say. And this is the standard Bush argument too, for anything and everything after 9-11.

So let's talk competence. Didn't Gen. Hayden lead the NSA before and during 9-11? How could anyone who held a high position in national security on that day be even considered for further office? Richard Reeves wrote that if 9-11 had happened in Japan, there would be no one left in the government to turn off the lights.

Let us accept that shame is not in our DNA. Corporate executives layoff poeple, export jobs, make losses, all while raising their own salaries and pensions. A leader who presided over two national disasters continues along as if he has invented sunlight. A Congress which signed on to starting an uprovoked war cannot bring itself to do anything to end the catastrophe it has wrought. We are all-forgiving. We are, after all, a compassionate people.

Democrats, particularly, pride themselves as the keepers of compassion. Nowhere is their claim more evident than with their deference to people like Hayden, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, all of whom were in charge when the greatest disaster in American history (per the administration's repeated assertion) struck. Perhaps a need to demonstrate bipartisanship might explain their reticence to seek prosecution of these officials for incompetence and criminal negligence. But why lionize them, vote to keep them in their posts, give them promotions, or participate in ceremonies to pin medals of honor on them?

Julius Caesar spoke of the brave dying but once and the cowardly dying repeatedly. One always assumed suicide was a one time affair, but the Democrats have long exploded that canard, elevating suicide to an art form. They refused to raise 9-11 as a Republican failure in 2002, and lost. Kerry refused to touch the issue in 2004, and lost. The Democrats still run from it in 2006...

What credibility can they have on national security when they bolster the same individuals and teams that were in charge on 9-11? And with what voice could they challenge the administration's precept and practice of obedience to the law being optional, a mere courtesy, dependent entirely upon the pleasure of the executive, when they praise and vote for those who take pride in such an attitude?

As a purely political act, every opposition normally attempts to distinguish itself in the public mind by positioning itself against the ruling party. Even an opposition without principle would instinctively seek to challenge any senior appointee, just to increase the administration's discomfiture. That's politics. In this case, a proven incompetent and confessed lawbreaker should have received no votes, from either party. That's principle. In fact, principle should dictate that everything that Bush does should be opposed, with assent being the rare exception. A look at the polls would suggest that's the conclusion the country has reached.

When the Democrats voted 4-3 in favor of such a nominee, it shows not just their complete bankruptcy of both political instinct and moral principle. Even more, it shows that they are ignoring the signs from their own constituents, who are way ahead in their unbelief in the very bona fides of this administration.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.

The Miasma of Progress

2006-05-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

What Exactly is "Development"?

By P. SAINATH

India's development debate has actually regressed this past decade. For one thing, a single, homogenised view of development is being shoved down from above. Whether it works or does not work is not the issue. Any departure from it is heresy. If you oppose the draining of people's water by Coca Cola and the poisoning of their wells, that's anti-development.

Until ousted in the recent elections Kerala's Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy used to correctly assert that his State has very serious problems like joblessness. But then he suggested the United Democratic Front wants to make Kerala like Bangalore, [prime city of the neighboring state of Karnataka, endlessly feted by such touts of neoliberalism as Flat Earther, Thomas Friedman. Editors] That was his vision. That's development. Fact: there is no major indicator of human well being on which Kerala does not outrank Karnataka by miles. Life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality ratio, sex ratio or schooling. Or even nutrition, health, equity, and the ending of child labor. But Mr. Chandy's view revolved around express highways, flyovers, enclave smart cities, and the rest of it. Kerala has few of those.

Kerala has a good network of village roads, though. When you drive from Mysore to Wayanad and back, it's easy to tell when you've crossed the border. If the roads are awful, that's Karnataka. But good village roads are not a sign of development. Massive traffic jams are. Bangalore's techno triumphs are undermined by the chaos of its traffic, poor public transport, and gross private "cities" High tech cohabits with low efficiency in a deepening urban nightmare.

Kerala's people have had the best access to education and health. This is one State in the country that turns out more nurses than doctors. Kerala nurses are everywhere. Highly educated, efficient, and indispensable. The products of a once-fine schooling system. This might well break down as the poor lose access to such training. For some time, Kerala has mimicked Karnataka by trying to commercialize education. The case that Mr. Chandy makes was clear. Our students are going to Karnataka for such costly courses. Why should Kerala lose this money? Let's mop it up right here.

There are saner options. Expand and improve the public systems that made Kerala a success in the first place. But that would be anti-development. Meanwhile, the farm crisis has seen hundreds of suicides in Kerala. The children of these and other bankrupt households now find themselves forced out of Karnataka's educational sweatshops. They can no longer pay the fees and must leave, their deposits forfeit, studies unfinished. Many cannot even retrieve their school certificates. The colleges hold on to those to extort more money from already shattered families.

There's nowhere to go. They cannot afford the new private colleges at home either. The nation's finest pool of nursing graduates shrinks this way.

Bangalore, once the `Garden City,' `developed' rapidly. It drained many of its vital lakes and ponds to exploit the real estate beneath. And did that with breathtaking speed. Call it accelerated development. Now you have areas that suffer water shortages much of the year because you've drained the lakes. And flooding during the rains because you've built houses on those lakes. It is as simple as it is stupid. But we crave for more of the same development.

In the media, development is about engineering and technology. Not about improvement of the human condition. Nor about trying to be non-destructive. It is not important that the engineering and technology work. We don't even scrutinize that. But without them, it's not development. So if you have localized water systems that meet people's needs, that's not development. But if you plan to spend a quarter of your GDP on a brainless interlinking of rivers, that's development. Never mind that no one knows what its fallout will be.

The giant corporate hospitals are development. Networks of small dispensaries that are far more vital to public health are not. Why treat a scratch with a band-aid when you can do an organ transplant? We have the know-how, after all. We're at the point where medical tourism is going to earn someone a lot of money. And why fight malaria through preventive measures, good sanitation, better public health or anything as dumb as that? Better to distribute - as the touts advize - bed nets "impregnated with anti-mosquito repellent." That way, there's technology, contracts, and rewards for corporates, consultants, and corrupt bureaucrats.

Never mind that you will distribute millions of nets to people who have no beds. Nor does it matter that malaria parasites are remarkably uncooperative. They refuse to sign the roster when you're asleep and insist on being more active when you're not. That is, at dawn and dusk. When millions of people make their way to or from the fields in this country. Of course, you could make a bold new fashion statement by wearing your mosquito net to work, but it might cramp your style if you're a cane cutter.

Central to the regressive debate is the faith that there is only one way of doing anything. The big-budget, super-scaled, privatized way. Also, with major names. Dabhol in the Enron era was a fine example of this. So now we go back to it. Had Maharashtra spent a small amount each year strengthening its once profit-making State Electricity Board, we would not have such enormous sums of money. Losses that showed up in welfare budget cuts. But why be deterred by some of the highest power rates on the planet? Look Mama, we're world class.

The `debate' sparked off by the Narmada-linked fasts in Delhi took the same route. The dams are the only way. All that matters is we show some concern over `rehabilitation.' (Even if we do little about it in practice.) That this scheme will never work is irrelevant. People are incidental, the project is the thing. That even the pathetic share of water for Kutch and Saurashtra is being diverted to better-off destinations barely merits mention. That the power produced will be precious little - well, what does that have to do with development, anyway?

As for consent and humane conduct, how can these stand in the path of progress? The Orissa police shot dead 13 Adivasis in Kalinga Nagar. A crime dismissed with token tongue-clicking. A big daily put it simply in an editorial the next day. Let's face it. People will be displaced by projects. The question is how to re-settle them.

Yet, Orissa is a State where thousands of acres of land were taken by force from people for projects that never came up. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited is just one instance from the 1960s. Some of its giant units for which the land was then grabbed finally sprang up in Bangalore and elsewhere. But the surplus acres never went back to the shattered owners. This is also the State where the same village has been displaced three times for different projects. And where the dams of the 1960s still bear plaques boasting of how many villages they submerged. That, after all, proved how massive they were. Events of a kind that will never affect the rich residents of Malabar Hill in Mumbai. Though this city razed 84,000 homes of poor people in the same week the tsunami wiped out 30,300 in Nagapattinam. Mumbai, though, did it in the cause of development.

The regression shows in other ways, too. For instance, in the way some of the most vapid concepts are now romanced. It's at the point where malls are seen as the finest `public spaces.' An English daily ran a piece this week titled: "Hanging out at the friendly, neighborhood mall." Ultimately, says the piece, "a mall is seen as a place that is non-corrupt, safe and accessible. A public utility that functions and does not favour any class of user." What's more "all the amenities are free." No charge for the bathrooms, folks. Never mind the claim that shops, some of which sell exotic jewelled pens, do not `favor any class of user.' And never mind too, what the lesser shops and chains do to small retailers and the jobs of countless thousands. This notion of progress sits well with the one-way-only view of development.

Of course engineering and technology can play a vital role in development. They should. They must. The questions that have in every case to be answered are: For whose benefit? At whose cost? Do you do something because it is a good thing to do? Or simply because you can? Are there different ways of doing it? Which is the best of them? Do people have a right to say no even if they're poor? Have they a right to resist?

It's odd the more primitive debate on this now comes out of Kerala. Accept that framework, and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are way ahead of it. Countless big-budget `development' projects have been on forever. With little improvement in the living standards of the people in those States. Meanwhile, it might make sense to test one more indicator. Check how the bottom 30 per cent in each of our States is doing or has done over a period of time. It might give you a very different view of development.

P. Sainath is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu and the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. This piece initially ran in the Indian weekly Frontline. He can be reached at: psainath@vsnl.com.

From Counterpunch, May 20-21, 2006

What might have been

2006-05-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

From Republic to Imperium

2006-05-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

Three independent incidents:

USA Today revealed today that the NSA had been tracking the phone calls of millions of American customers of AT&T, Verizon and one other provider.
Several websites published the letter from President Ahmedinijad of Iran written to President George W. Bush of the US. Contrary to the dismissals, the letter, as Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com pointed out in his article, made several important points.
Featured on Tech Horizons, a public access channel from the George Mason University, was a review of Face Recognition techniques. Appearing as a panelist, a former general indicated without any disquiet that in the future, technology would ensure that all our movements anywhere would be tracked because we would be recognized.

Reading an article in the American Conservative by Michael Vlahos the same evening, I realized that he had brought these three, and so many other disjoint and disparate items of news and confusion together. His article, "The Weakness of Empire", identifies how 9-11 transformed America from a Republic to an Empire. He points a key fact that an empire consists of the people trading their voice for their putative security. He also points out that an empire needs constant military engagement. Hence, no talking to Iran. A vital article. A must read.

Illegal Immigration and the Commons

2006-04-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

The Eiffel Tower has been sold a couple of times. So too have Platform #1 of the Patna Railway Station, and the Taj Mahal. We are struck by the audacity of a seller parlaying a public landmark into a private transaction. We laugh at the suckers who were so gullible to buy them. As usual, we laugh loudest at those who resemble us most.

A couple of days ago, there appeared an article about the privatization of water in India. Privatization of the commons is always cause for alarm, because its social consequences are always disastrous. Some time ago, I wrote that the single major differentiator between the First and Third Worlds was the faith in the Commons. The First world had huge investments in the public sphere. No less a luminary than John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to Nehru, wrote in his memoirs how he would find himself chuckling at the Indian government's boasts of socialism, gently reminding them that there was much more social investment in America than they could ever imagine in India (I paraphrase).

What does this all mean in terms of consciousness? When I was growing up in India, a family celebrating a wedding would think nothing of erecting a wedding tent in the middle of a public street. Blocking a major road meant that you had real clout. A religious bhajan would be blared out on loudspeakers, with no concern for those in the neighborhood. Ditto for the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. People would complain when it was someone else doing it, but they would do the same in their turn. Now things have changed, as people are more conscious of the boundary between private and public.

Put differently, first world thinking means we do not presume upon public resources for private ends. When we begin to misuse public resources, the inevitable result is (a) greater layers of bureaucracy and (b) the deterioration all such public resources and (c) increased social tension and strife. Even the person who perpetrates this, if he continues to live in the same society, will eventually feel the ill-effects of this process.

One enduring contribution of the Reagan era has been the legitimization of the grab of the commons for private profit. Twenty five years after it commenced, we are still in Reagan's thrall, so much so that this mindset is no longer even questioned, although some stirrings may have commenced -- the latest evidence being a complaint by Field and Stream magazine that Bush and Cheney are terrible stewards of the wild.

Societies break down in strange ways when the commons is used for personal profit, or even perverse private fulfilment. Graffiti is shocking when it first appears on the stop sign near your home. A week later it shocks a lot less. A month later you're practically used to it. Respect for the law, too, is part of the commons. It works because everyone does it. Weird as it might seem, the simple expedient of standing in line is by no means universal. It is a tribute to American society that people do so. That so many people drive, and have a fair understanding of traffic rules, is nothing short of an American social engineering miracle.

What about illegal immigration? When I read impassioned speeches and writings about the rights of illegal immigrants, I wish I could ask these opponents of punishment for illegal immigration a simple question -- would you allow any illegal immigrant to stay in your home and support them 100%? Remember, 100% -- which means you have to pay for private schooling for their children, their health care, etc. -- forever (You cannot, after all, seek to benefit from a breaking of the law). I doubt there would be many takers. And this, it seems to me, is the basic infirmity of their position. They want to be charitable, and claim to be settling ancient scores, but all on the back of the Commons.

Call their attention to this, and there are angry responses about how America had done this or that atrocity, or how immigrants have built this country. That last is particularly unctious. Let us suppose I helped build a public park. Let us even ignore the fact that I was paid for it (as did any immigrant). Does that mean that I can, without permission, usurp it to throw a party? As with the Taj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower, I cannot dispose of something I do not own outright. If there are others involved, they must sign on too. In the case of the commons, those involved are the American people, most immediately those living along the Mexican border. Who has obtained their assent to allow foreigners to arbitrary cross into their towns, because some wise folk in Wall Street or Washington have concluded that immigration is a 'net plus'? And when their governments fail to protect them despite repeated pleas, why should anyone be surprised at the rise of bodies like the Minutemen?

One does not have to lose sight of America's numerous acts of omission and commission in and outside the USA. But that is no excuse for anyone to defend sneaking around the law, soaking up public resources in a manner never intended. After all, even if the official figures of 12 million illegal immigrants (which should, realistically, be revised upwards, being official statistics -- that's third world thinking) are true, that is a 4% population of illegal immigrants, encroaching upon the commons. A large figure in any circumstances, in an era when investment in the Commons is considered akin to heresy, it is a straw more than capable of felling the camel.

Niranjan Ramakrishnan can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com/.

The Approaching Water Crisis

2006-04-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

From Counterpunch (Apr 12, 2006)

Water as Commodity and Weapon

The Corporate Hijack of India's Water

By P. SAINATH

2001: The old man shuffled his feet, acutely embarrassed. No matter which part of India you're in, the first thing you do is offer your guests a glass of water. And this was one part of Nallamada in Andhra Pradesh blessed with that element. Things had changed, though. "Please don't drink it," he said, finally. "See how it is?" he asked, showing us a tumbler. Tiny blobs of thingummy floated atop a liquid more brown than transparent. But then he brightened up. "Will you have Coca-Cola instead? That, this village has." And so it did. As in the Aamir Khan ad. The smaller bottle for Rs. 5.

It's also there in countless other villages where a glass of clean water is now hard to find. And Coca Cola's impact on both drinking and irrigation water sparks revolts across the country. From Plachimada in Kerala to Kaladera in Rajasthan. From Gangaikondan in Tamil Nadu to Mehdiganj in Uttar Pradesh. From Thane in Maharashtra to Khammam in Andhra Pradesh.

2002: M.P. Veerendrakumar, chairman of the Mathrubhumi group of publications, is startled to discover that the Malapuzha river and dam in his native Kerala are "for lease or sale to private parties. "I did not know you could sell and buy dams and rivers." He learns this from a tender he sees in an American daily while on a trip overseas. "This had not appeared in any of our local newspapers."

It had already begun in Andhra Pradesh There, two years earlier, farmers chased away the World Bank's James Wolfensohn. He had come to unveil the confederation of "Water Users Associations" in the state. "Water Users." Oh, what a lovely word! It denotes that special group of folks who use water. The rest of us are non-users, a type of dryland bacteria.

But non-users, being a touchy, irritable lot, showed up in large numbers at the Koelsagar dam in Mahbubnagar. Pitched battles were fought and hundreds arrested. The government shifted the plaque of the dam to a safe haven miles away so the Bank Boss could cut his ribbon in peace.

2003: Private theme and water parks in and around Mumbai are found to be using 50 billion litres of water daily. This, while countless women in the slums and chawls of the city wait hours in queues for 20 litres. Meanwhile, anti-Coke battles are hotting up again. Kerala's pollution control board confirms the toxic nature of the sludge spewed out by Coke's plant in Plachimada. The panchayat revokes the plant's licence.

2004: The polls to parliament -- and in some states -- see the rout of the biggest 'water reformers.' Of course, there are many reasons for their defeat. But water is on that list. Sadly for the World Bank, its puff job is already done. So its report "India's Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future" appears as it is -- a year later. It sings the praises of Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh and N. Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra. And it claims they gained politically from the reforms. It says the water users associations were particularly good for Naidu. Because "farmers perceived this to be a reform which moved in the right direction." That is in 2005, a year after farmers in both states hand out some of the worst electoral defeats ever seen to the Bank's heroes.

2005: Bazargaon is a scarcity-hit Vidharbha village that has one sarkari well and gets tanker water once in ten days. It is also host to the giant 'Fun & Food Village.' An elite park which offers 18 kinds of water slides and uses millions of litres as a matter of course. All Bazargaon's water flows towards this 'village.' It's a story repeated in different ways in many places, across many states. Water as a commodity, flows from poor to rich areas.

In Yavatmal, a Maharashtra minister asks farmers at a meeting to "diversify into dairying." The crowd jeers. (Vidharbha has seen over 425 farm suicides in ten months.) The problems of water and irrigation loom large here. "You want us to take up milk production?" scoffs a farmer, rising to his feet. 'When you pay us a price of Rs. 6 for a litre of milk, but pay Rs. 12 for a litre of your bottled water?" The meeting ends early.

People pay more for water than corporates do. The bottled water brigade got treated and cleaned water in Hyderabad for 25 paise a litre for years. This goes into that bottle costing Rs. 12. In many parts of the country soft-drink giants get it almost free. Whole communities lose out as heavyweights like Coke step in. That company used 283 billion litres of water worldwide in 2004. Enough, points out the India Resource Centre, to "meet the drinking needs of the entire world's population for ten days." And the billions of litres it guzzles in India could meet the needs of whole districts. in Orissa or Rajasthan for a year.

Yet Coca Cola was the leading sponsor of the "World Water Forum" in Mexico this year. But Coke is not alone in the devastation it inflicts in India. Meet the Real Thing. Central and state governments in this country are privatising water. Coke is just one of the beneficiaries. Oddly, those selling out India's water almost never use the word 'privatisation.' They know how discredited that is. So the buzzword is 'efficiency.' Or 'public-private partnerships.' The real questions are never raised. Should anyone own water? How must it be shared? Who gets to decide? Is water a commodity to profiteer in or is it a human right? Is it more than a 'human' right? Countless other species also need it to survive.

The bazaar is large. And top water corporations figure in the Fortune 500 Global list. As Maude Barlow, one of the world's leading water activists, points out, the business "is already considered to be worth U.S. $400 billion annually". And there is lots more to be made. In her stunning book, Blue Gold, Barlow cites the Bank's own estimate of the market size. "In 1998, the World Bank predicted that the global trade in water would soon be a U.S. $800 billion industry, and by 2001, this projection had been jacked up to one trillion dollars." And these revenues are "based on the fact that only five per cent of the world's population are now receiving their water supply from corporations". So as the corporate grip on water tightens, "water could become a multi-trillion-dollar industry in the future. What if city after city privatises its water services?"

Now you know why our planners, Ministers and bureaucrats are eager to privatise. There's big bucks in it. Major `studies' and contracts are being awarded to private groups. As this deepens, people and governments will suffer huge losses. But government officials and private corporations will make giant gains.

The corporate hijack of water is on worldwide and one of the most important processes of our time. The World Bank and the IMF help ram it through. Water privatisation has often been shoved into their loan conditionalities in the past decade.

In few nations will the damage be as terrible and complex as in India. Here water use is already very unequal. Most irrigation and drinking water in India, for instance, has a clear caste geography. Even the layout of our villages reflects that. The dalit basti is always on the outskirts, where there is least access to water. Barring dalits from the main water sources of the village are not just about the 'social' horror of untouchability. It is also about curbing their access to this vital resource.

It is also closely tied to the framework of class. About 118 million households -- 62 per cent of the total -- do not have drinking water at home. As census household survey data analysed by Dr. S. L. Rao show, 300 million Indians draw water from community taps or handpumps. (Many World Bank and Asian Development Bank projects, by the way, will end up doing away with those community taps.)

About five million Indian families (roughly the population of Canada) still draw water from ponds, tanks, rivers and springs. This is a stratified society. The big dams that have displaced millions of Indians in the past decades have also narrowed control and access to water. Atop this structured inequity, we now install hyper-inequality.

A huge share of India's public health problems are linked to water-borne or water-related diseases. Diarrhoea alone claims lakhs of lives each year. Further reducing the access of poor people to clean water will sharply worsen matters. In State after State, the laws are being rewritten. A prelude to handing over control of both drinking and irrigation water to corporations. The Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Act simply prices farmers out of agriculture. If the rates implied in the act are actually imposed, irrigation costs could be in thousands of rupees per acre. It would in fact be more than what most farmers earn per acre.

At the same time as more and more fields run dry, golf courses dripping pesticides and guzzling over a million litres of water a day come up in regions of high stress. Even in Rajasthan. (In the Philippines, there have been shootouts between farmers affected by golf courses and the hired goons of the course owners.)

India is a nation of subsistence farmers. When you privatise the rivers and the streams, the canals and the dams, you privatise rainfall. And you ask for a social tsunami. This is also the swiftest route to corporatisation of agriculture. In that sector, we are already forcing out millions of small private owners called farmers. The task is to hand it all over to large corporations. This policy-engineered agrarian crisis wracking rural India is also about the greatest planned displacement ever in our history. Water will be a major weapon used against farmers in this process.

Noble terms serve to whitewash the theft of water from the poor. In Angul in Orissa, the World Bank sought to hand over water to the rich. And called the process 'pani panchayats.' There, the 'rotation' of canal water use saw to it that poor farmers could have a rabi crop only once in two years. With people rebelling, this 'model' collapsed. But not before causing much misery. In Andhra Pradesh, too, the Water Users Associations were mostly headed by the biggest landlords and contractors of the region.

Just think of the trouble we're begging for. Almost every giant political headache in this country is linked to water. The single most explosive issue in South India is the Cauvery waters dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Then there is the Almatti problem vexing Andhra Pradesh-Karnataka relations. There is the fight over the Kabini waters between Karnataka and Kerala. Even the 'Khalistan problem' had a distinct link to the struggle over the Ravi-Beas waters. Water conflicts in India also affect regions of the same state. The Krishna-Godavari water disputes drive conflict within Andhra Pradesh. The list is endless. Further, across the country, water conflicts of many kinds seep right down to intra-village battles and bloodshed .

Some of our worst troubles with neighbours have also been about water. The Kosi barrage with Nepal. The Farakka Barrage with Bangladesh. Indus waters with Pakistan. Over decades, we've made things a lot worse. The unregulated spread of borewells was an early form of privatisation. The richer you are, the more wells you can sink, the deeper you can go. It has proved quite disastrous. Many poorer farmers have seen their dug wells sucked dry as neighbours collar all the groundwater. In the end, it can destroy the entire village. Mushampally village in Nalgonda in AP has more borewells than human beings. The damage done to the aquifer has been terrible. Even the richest farmers also went bankrupt as water stress peaked.

In his bid to privatise water when chief minister, Chandrababu. Naidu wound up the irrigation development corporation of Andhra Pradesh. Which meant it was now each farm for itself. That led to lakhs of new borewells being sunk across the state. With disastrous results. Water shortages in many states have also led to the emergence of 'water lords' who make a fortune by selling the liquid. In Anantapur, some of these are former farmers who find this more lucrative than agriculture ever was.

In the cities, millions dwell in slums where they might pay the same rates others do for water. But they get far less and spend far more time in getting it. Against this deadly backdrop comes water privatisation. If even the upper middle classes of Delhi loathe it, imagine the plight of poor people in Chandrapur.

And get this. India could be the first nation in the world to nationalise its rivers and privatise their waters. That is if we go ahead with the great river interlining project. Nationalise? And privatise? The linking scheme would demand the former. The latter we are already deep into. Of course you can, like in Chhattisgarh, sell or lease the river itself`Sheonath's sorrow'.

Those bringing it to you include some of the top corporations in the world. Some of the companies now making a beeline for India have been turfed out of Latin America. Suez, one of the Big Three of water, told the Guardian that "it was almost impossible for it to work in Latin America or Africa. And so, instead, it would "be concentrating on China, India and Eastern Europe." The company did not mention that it had been tossed out of Grenoble in its native France as well. As Maude Barlow points out, that city also jailed its own mayor and a senior Suez executive for bribery.

As she also shows, it's not just any racket. It's scale is stunning. "Bottled water costs up to 10,000 times more than tap water in local communities. For the same price as one bottle, 1,000 gallons of water could be delivered to a person's home."

In Bolivia, when the MNC Bechtel took control of the water supply in the city of Cochabamba, it raised prices by 200 per cent. In cities in Peru, Chile and other nations too, water was priced out of the reach of the poor. All of them saw widespread unrest and political turmoil. Tiny Uruguay has set an example for the rest of the world. It amended its constitution in 2004 to bar private control of water and to declare water "a fundamental human right." This followed a referendum where close to two-thirds of the voters rejected privatisation.

The U.S. Ambassador calls for 'Public-private partnerships' (read privatisation) in India. Yet, as a report cited by Public Citizen points out: "About 85 per cent of all the water that comes out of a tap in the U.S. is delivered by a publicly owned and publicly operated system." That was and is the norm. Though the drive for profit will change things there, too.

Meanwhile, in India, the battles have begun. Protests across the country show that people will not take it lying down. Still, with so much money to be made, the privatisers will not just go away. The waters have just begun to get choppy. And we're in at the deep end.