Friday, December 29, 2006

Camus and Arbusto

Camus?

I have to say it again. I did not make this up.

It seems George Bush was reading The Stranger by Albert Camus (one sitting, I hear) and then had a conversation with his press secretary Tony Snow, late of Fox News, about the origins of existentialism. There are several main issues in existentialism, and one of them is the notion of the Absurd. Words fail me.

The so-called court appeal in Iraq upheld Saddam’s hanging, to be carried out within 30 days. Now in each case, a judge was replaced, one quit because of government interference and the second because the prosecutor didn’t like him, at least three of his attorneys were murdered, as well as several others, the procedural issues are overwhelming, but it was upheld? Not even our court would do that. Perhaps the only other one I can think of is, well, no, you try to think of one. I’m busy. They will probably execute him tomorrow.

Oh, he then wrote a note to supporters not to hate the occupiers. Right.

Gerald Ford died so they are going to shoot off a cannon, one shot/per hour, to remember him. I remember him sliding down an airplane stariway. Anyway, he will first have a funeral in southern California near the Mexican border, then flown to D.C. to the rotunda building for a three day lay and a funeral, then to the senate area for a funeral, then to Michigan for a funeral and, when they are good and sure he is actually dead, be buried there.

Here is something about the attacks on Carter. Of all people:

Click here to return to the browser-optimized

version of this page.

This article can be found on the web at

*http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/hedges*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Get Carter

by CHRIS HEDGES

[from the January 8, 2007 issue]

Jimmy Carter, by publishing his book /Palestine Peace Not Apartheid/,

walked straight into the buzz saw that is the Israel lobby. Among the

vitriolic attacks on the former President was the claim by Abraham

Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that Carter is

"outrageous" and "bigoted" and that his book raises "the old canard and

conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S.

government." Many Democratic Party leaders, anxious to keep the Israel

lobby's money and support, have hotfooted it out the door, with incoming

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing that Carter "does not speak for

the Democratic Party on Israel."

Carter's book exposes little about Israel. The enforced segregation,

abject humiliation and spiraling Israeli violence against Palestinians

have been detailed in the Israeli and European press and, with

remarkable consistency, by all the major human rights organizations. The

assault against Carter, rather, says more about the failings of the

American media--which have largely let Israel hawks heap calumny on

Carter's book. It exposes the indifference of the Bush Administration

and the Democratic leadership to the rule of law and basic human rights,

the timidity of our intellectual class and the moral bankruptcy of

institutions that claim to speak for American Jews and the Jewish state.

The bleakness of life for Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, is

a mystery only to us. In the current Israeli campaign in Gaza, now

sealed off from the outside world, almost 500 Palestinians, most

unarmed, have been killed. Sanctions, demanded by Israel and imposed by

the international community after the Hamas victory last January in what

were universally acknowledged to be free and fair elections, have led to

the collapse of civil society in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as

widespread malnutrition. And Palestinians in the West Bank are being

encased, in open violation of international law, in a series of podlike

militarized ghettos with Israel's massive $2 billion project to build a

"security barrier." This barrier will gobble up at least 10 percent of

the West Bank, including most of the precious aquifers and at least

40,000 acres of Palestinian farmland. The project is being financed in

large part through $9 billion in American loan guarantees, although when

Congress approved the legislation in April 2003, Israel was told that

the loans could be used "only to support activities in the geographic

areas which were subject to the administration of the Government of

Israel prior to June 5, 1967."

But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown

humanitarian crisis. "Gaza is in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy

wrote recently in the Israeli paper /Ha'aretz/. "The Israel Defense

Forces have been rampaging through Gaza--there's no other word to

describe it--killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling,

indiscriminately.... How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical

talk about 'the end of the occupation' and 'partitioning the land' now

appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before....

This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."

And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions

carrying out gun battles in the streets, /Ha'aretz/ reporter Amira Hass

bitterly notes, "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are

killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the

extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million

human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"

In fact, if there is a failing in Carter's stance, it is that he is too

kind to the Israelis, bending over backward to assert that he is only

writing about the occupied territories. Israel itself, he says, is a

democracy. This would come as a surprise to the 1.3 million Israeli

Arabs who live as second-class citizens in the Jewish state. The poverty

rate among Israeli Arabs is more than twice that of the Jewish

population. Those Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the

West Bank are not permitted to get Israeli residency for their spouses.

And Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the military or the country's

intelligence services and thus lack the important personal connections

and job networks available to veterans, are systematically shut out of

good jobs. Any Jew, who may speak no Hebrew or ever been to Israel, can

step off a plane and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian

living abroad whose family's roots in Palestine may go back generations

is denied citizenship.

The Israel lobby in the United States does not serve Israel or the

Jewish community--it serves the interests of the Israeli extreme right

wing. Most Israelis have come to understand that peace will be possible

only when their country complies with international law and permits

Palestinians to build a viable and sustainable state based on the 1967

borders, including, in some configuration, East Jerusalem.

This stark demarcation between Israeli pragmatists and the extreme right

wing was apparent when I was in the Middle East for the /New York Times/

during Yitzhak Rabin's 1992 campaign for prime minister. The majority of

American Jewish organizations and neoconservative intellectuals made no

pretense of neutrality. They had morphed into extensions of the

right-wing Likud Party. These American groups, to Rabin's dismay, had

gone on to build, with Likud, an alliance with right-wing Christian

groups filled with real anti-Semites whose cultural and historical

ignorance of the Middle East was breathtaking. This collection of

messianic Jews and Christians, leavened with rabid American

imperialists, believed they had been handed a divine or moral mandate to

rule the Middle East, whether the Arabs liked it or not.

When Rabin, who had come to despise what the occupation was doing to the

citizenry of his own country, was sworn in as prime minister, the

leaders of these American Jewish organizations, along with their

buffoonish supporters on the Christian right, were conspicuous by their

absence. On one of Rabin's first visits to Washington after he assumed

office, according to one of his aides, he was informed that a group of

American Jewish leaders were available to meet him. The surly old

general, whose gravelly cigarette voice seemed to rise up from below his

feet, curtly refused. He told his entourage he did not have time to

waste on "scumbags."

Friday, December 22, 2006

Before Christmas

THE ABSURD TIMES

This week made little sense to me. About midweek, I noticed a headline from AP titled something like “Bush Warns of Danger in Iraq,” or something like that. Naturally, I did not pursue the matter as life is weird enough as it is. Isn’t that what 85% of the entire world was warning him about 4 years ago? I don’t get it.

He also announced, as a part of responding to the wishes of about 80 to 90% of U.S. citizens that we get out of Iraq, that he will increase the size of our occupation by about 30,000 troops. After all, democracy is too important to be left to the people, any people. (See the remarks of Noam Chomsky, below, courtesy of Democracy Now.)

Donald Trump retiared the beautiful, blond, bulimic, buxom, well-defined, girl kissing, cocaine snorting, bimbo from Kentucky as Miss USA. She stated, “I want to be the best Miss USA ever!” Apparently Donald got my message. Well, not really, the announcement came after much, er, um, well, he changed his mind and that’s that.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff said they didn’t want the extra troops. For one thing, they don’t have any tanks left to spare. They are also short of other things (I can imagine!) and are sending a bill to congress. Bush used to say that he gave the Generals everything they wanted, but said nothing about giving them things they don’t want. Finally, this statement from the military, including Abizad, is unprecedented. Fox news types always wondered why the generals would first retire and then criticize. Well, now they don’t retire. This is the best of all possible worlds, then, what with Miss USA still in power.

Dr. Rice mentioned Iran, saying “with chapter 7, they will find out what company they are in.” I have no idea, but I have heard that the U.S. is sending ships of all sorts to the straits of hormuz, and the reasoning is that it is a way to attack Iran. I have no idea. I don’t WANT any ideas. I’m tired of fascism and imperialism.

Below is a transcript from Democracy Now what explains some of this. I first encountered Noam Chomsky as a Doctoral Student studying Linguistics and had no idea about his political writings. It was clear from his writing that he was a genius, the Einstein of modern linguistics, but I had issues with him. One problem was that he was talking about a revolutionary approach to the subject, one which pretty much kicked the rug out from under Behavioralism as a science, but he was presenting it with all the same tired formats or traditional grammarians. The other issue that made me wary was his positing language as a clear distinction in an evolutionary sense between man and the rest of the animals. This last was something I realized that I had to deal with. It was simply my own experience that such a distinction is usually used to justify cruelty to animals and was thus not a scientific approach.

So I attacked on the basis on the mode of presentation only to be informed that he had already changed that and only used it because it was language familiar to those he assumed would be interested – linguists. So, he was right.

Anyhow, here is his transcript:

**********************************************************************************************

From Bolivia to Baghdad: Noam Chomsky on Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1433244

World-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky spoke this weekend at an event titled, “What’s Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation.” Chomsky spoke about the Iraq Study Group report, recent elections in Latin America, the current situation with Iran and much more. [includes rush transcript]

World-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky spoke this weekend at an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. The event titled, “What’s Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation” was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston. Chomsky, who is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, returned from Latin America in October. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist, governments to power that are challenging U.S foreign policy. Chomsky also spoke about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America.

In this excerpt, he begins by analyzing the recently released Iraq Study Group report that was chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker.

Chomsky begins by talking about the recent South America Summit meeting, held earlier this month in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

* Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology speaking last weekend at an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we bring you world-renowned scholar and linguist Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in an event sponsored by Massachusetts Global Action. The speech was called “What’s Next? Creating Another World in a Time of War, Empire and Devastation.” It was held at the Emmanuel Church in Boston.

Chomsky is a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently returned from Latin America. He talked about the recent elections in the region, which have brought leftist governments to power that are challenging US foreign policy. Chomsky also talked about Iraq and Iran in the context of Latin America.

In this excerpt, he begins by analyzing the recently released Iraq Study Group report that was chaired by the former Secretary of State James Baker.

NOAM CHOMSKY: There are efforts to try to extricate the US from the US power—doesn’t matter much to the people, but US power—from the catastrophes it’s created for itself. The most recent such effort, right on the front pages now—so I’ll keep to that one—is the Baker-Hamilton report, the Iraq Study Group report, which has some interesting features. Very interesting.

For example, one of its—it doesn’t have much in the way of proposals—but the thinking is interesting. So here’s one paragraph, refers to recent polls in Iraq. The US government and polling agencies here take regular polls in Iraq. They care a lot about Iraqi opinion. And this points out that recent polling indicates that 79% of Iraqis have a mostly negative view of the influence that the United States has in their country, and 61% of Iraqis—includes Kurds—approve of attacks on US-led forces. Well, that’s clearly a problem. And we have to deal with that problem by changing tactics, so they’ll understand that we really love them and we’re trying to help them and they’ll stop thinking they ought to attack us and hating us, and so on. OK, that was the proposal.

There’s something missing. The same polls that they cited have some other information, for example, that two-thirds of the people of Baghdad want US troops out immediately, and about over three-quarters of the whole population, including Kurds, again, wants a firm timetable for withdrawal within a year or less. Well, that isn’t mentioned, because in our mission to bring democracy to the world, we don’t care about the opinions of people. They’re kind of irrelevant, so that isn’t mentioned. And, of course, there’s no timetable for withdrawal. That’s one of the options they rejected.

Also interesting is that the American people are treated the same way. A majority of people here are in favor of a firm timetable for withdrawal. But that’s irrelevant, too. In fact, back as far as April 2003, considerable majority of people here in the United States were in favor of keeping US troops there only if they were under UN supervision. The UN ought to take responsibility for security, for economic development, reconstruction, for democratic development, and so on. But that opinion was, of course, totally ignored and, to my knowledge, not even reported.

Now, that continues, if that attitude continues, the next big problem, next to Iraq, is Iran. And the Baker-Hamilton Commission, as you know, gave a recommendation about that. It said the US must somehow engage Iran, but they said that that’s going to be problematic given the state of US-Iranian relationships. Well, the US population has an opinion about that, too. 75% of the population here, including a majority of Republicans, think that the United States ought to keep to diplomatic peaceful measures in engagement with Iran, which they approve of, and not use military threats—exact opposite of the policy.

The same attitudes are true of the people of the region. They don’t like Iran, and they don’t certainly [inaudible] nuclear-armed Iran, but a majority of the population of the regional states favors a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military intervention, just as people here do. Well, that’s kind of irrelevant, so that’s also not mentioned in the report.

A third interesting fact about the report is that it says the United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East—of course, taken for granted they must achieve those goals. It doesn’t mean the people of the United States, it means the government and their constituency. The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. And then goes on to say that the US must encourage discussions and so on, but restricting and allowing Palestinians to participate, but only those who accept Israel’s right to exist. OK, those are the only Palestinians who can participate. What about Israelis who accept Palestine’s right to exist? Well, no point in mentioning them, because there probably aren’t any.

And, in fact, there shouldn’t be any. No state has a right to exist. It’s obvious. In fact, the whole concept, right to exist, as far as I’m aware—somebody should—it’s a good research project for someone—to my knowledge, that concept was created in the 1970s when the Arab States and the PLO accepted, formally accepted—PLO tacitly, the Arab States formally, the major ones—formally accepted Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognized borders, borrowing the wording of the major UN resolution, UN 242. So it became necessary to raise the barrier to prevent negotiations diplomacy and to allow expansion instead.

And here comes right to exist, which, of course, nobody is going to accept. It means accepting not only the fact of the expulsion of Palestinians, but also its legitimacy. No state in the world is ever going to accept that, any more than Mexico accepts the—it recognizes the United States, but it does not recognize the legitimacy of the US conquest of half of Mexico—outlandish.

But even if we reduce it from the crazy notion of right to exist to just recognizing Palestine, how many—who—recognizing Israel, suppose we limit Palestinians to those who recognize Israel, which Israelis recognize Palestine? Does the United States recognize Palestine? I mean, I won’t run through the history here, but for 30 years, the US and Israel have, with rare exceptions, been unilaterally preventing the establishment of a broad international consensus on a two-state settlement. I mean, they’re willing now, in the last couple of years, only the last couple of years, to accept a very truncated Palestine that’s dismembered, surrounded—no chance of viable existence. Maybe they’ll recognize that. A couple of Bantustans, but not any viable state.

AMY GOODMAN: We are watching and listening to Noam Chomsky, giving an address last week in Boston. When we come back, we’ll turn to the segment of his speech where he talks about Latin America, from which he just returned. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to Noam Chomsky, who spoke a few days ago in Boston.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I’ll start with last weekend. Important city in South America, Cochabamba, with quite a history. There was a meeting last weekend in Cochabamba in Bolivia of all the South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn’t read that wire service report, I’ll read you a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.

In last Saturday, the South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of all the nations, and there was the two-day summit of what’s called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders—reading just now—agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the—I’m reading from the AP report—the result left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient—normal stance. They went on. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

There is one—has been one point of hostility in South America. That’s Peru, Venezuela. But it points out that Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that was the only real conflict in South America. So that seems to have been smoothed over.

The new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.

Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia’s rich gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa, the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela, as I’m sure you know, is the only—it which points out—is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even incomparable to Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s very important in the general global context. I’ll return to a couple of words about that.

There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.

This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there has been real moves towards integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. I mean, there have been—I’m sure you know—attempts at independence, but they’ve been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support, because there was very little regional cooperation, so you can pick them off one by one.

That’s what happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil, the first of which happened right after the assassination was already planned. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them, but only one finally ended up with reaching Central America, with Reagan’s terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America, similar things happening in the Caribbean. But that was sort of a one-by-one operation of destroying one country after another. And it had the expected domino effect. It’s the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests, which were horrendous. It’s only beginning to be understood how horrendous they were.

But integration does lay the basis for potential independence, and that’s of extreme significance. The colonial history—Spain, Europe, the United States—not only divided countries from one another, but it also left a sharp internal division within the countries, every one, between a very wealthy small elite and a huge mass of impoverished people. The correlation to race is fairly close. Typically, the rich elite was white, European, westernized; and the poor mass of the population was indigenous, Indian, black, intermingled, and so on. It’s a fairly close correlation, and it continues right ‘til the present.

The white, mostly white, elites were not—who ran the countries—were not integrated with—had very few interrelations with the other countries of the region. They were Western-oriented. You can see that in all sorts of ways. That’s where the capital was exported. That’s where the second homes were, where the children went to the universities, where their cultural connections were, and so on. And they had very little responsibility in their own societies. So there’s very sharp division.

They were also very support—you can see it, for example, in imports. Imports are mostly luxury goods, overwhelmingly. Development, such as it was, was mostly foreign. It was much more open, Latin America, much more open to foreign investment than, say, East Asia. It’s part of the reason for their different paths of development in the past—radically different paths of development in the last couple of decades.

And, of course, the elite elements were very strongly sympathetic to the neoliberal programs of the last 25 years, which enriched them—destroyed the countries, but enriched them. Latin America, more than any region in the world, outside of southern Africa, adhered rigorously to the so-called Washington Consensus, what’s called outside the United States the neoliberal programs of roughly the past 25, 30 years. And everywhere where they were rigorously applied, they led to disaster. There’s scarcely an exception. Very striking correlation. Sharp reduction in rates of growth, other macroeconomic indices, all the social effects that go along with that.

Actually, the comparison to East Asia is very striking. Latin America is a much—potentially much richer area. I mean, a century ago, it was taken for granted that Brazil would be what was called the “Colossus of the South,” comparable to the Colossus of the North. Haiti, now one of the poorest countries in the world, was the richest colony in the world, a source of much of France’s wealth, now devastated, first by France, then by the United States. And Venezuela—enormous wealth—was taken over by the United States around 1920, right at the beginning of the oil age, had been a British dependency, but Woodrow Wilson kicked the British out, recognizing that control of oil was going to be important, and supported a vicious dictator. And then, more or less, it goes on until the present. So the resources and the potential were always there. Very rich.

In contrast, East Asia had almost no resources, but they followed a different developmental path. In Latin America, imports were luxury goods for the rich. In East Asia, it’s capital goods for development. They had state-coordinated development programs. They disregarded the Washington Consensus almost totally. Capital controls, controls on export of capital, harsh punishments for it, pretty egalitarian societies, a lot of—authoritarian, sometimes, pretty harsh—but educational programs, health programs, and so on. In fact, they followed pretty much the developmental paths of the currently wealthy countries, which are radically different from the rules that are being imposed on the South.

And that goes way back in history. You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India. Life expectancy in Japan was greater than in Europe. Europe was kind of like a barbarian outpost, but it had advantages, mainly in savagery, conquered the world, imposed something like the neoliberal rules on the conquered regions, and itself, very high protectionism, a lot of state intervention and so on. So Europe developed.

The United States, as a typical case, had the highest tariffs in the world, most protectionist country in the world during the period of its great development. In fact, as late as 1950, when the United States literally had half the world’s wealth, its tariffs were higher than the Latin American countries today, which are being ordered to reduce them.

Massive state intervention in the economy. Economists don’t talk about it much, but the current economy in the United States relies very heavily on the state sector. That’s where you get your computers and the internet and your airplane traffic and transit of goods, container ships and so on, almost entirely comes out of the state sector, including pharmaceuticals, management techniques, and so on. I won’t go on into that, but it’s a strong correlation right through history. Those are the methods of development.

The neoliberal methods created a third world, and in the past 30 years, they have led to disasters in Latin America and southern Africa, the places that most rigorously adhered to them. But whereas there was growth and development in East Asia, which disregarded them, following the rules, following pretty much the model of the currently rich countries.

Well, there’s a chance that that will begin to change. There are finally efforts inside South America—unfortunately not in Central America, which has just been pretty much devastated by the terror of the last—of the ‘80s particularly. But in South America, from Venezuela to Argentina, it’s, I think, the most exciting place in the world. There’s reactions to this. After 500 years, there’s a beginning of efforts to overcome these overwhelming problems. The integration that’s taking place, that I just read about, is one example.

There’s efforts of the Indian population. The indigenous population is, for the first time in hundreds of years, taking a—really beginning in some of the countries, take a very active role in their own affairs. In Bolivia, they succeeded in taking over the country, controlling their resources. Bolivia—and it’s also leading to significant democratization, real democracy, in which the population participates. So it takes a Bolivia—it’s the poorest country in the hemisphere in South America—Haiti is poorer—it had a real democratic election last year, of a kind that you can’t imagine in the United States, or in Europe, for that matter. There was mass popular participation, and people knew what the issues were. The issues were crystal clear and very important. And people didn’t just participate on election day. These are the things they had been struggling about for years. Actually, Cochabamba is a symbol of it. I’ll come back to that. So, clear issues, popular participation, ongoing efforts, elected someone from their own ranks. I won’t bother to compare it to the United States. You can work it out for yourselves, but that’s a real democratic election of the kind we can’t imagine.

In fact, in our elections, the issues are unknown. There’s careful efforts to make sure that the issues are unknown to the public, for good reasons. There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy. So you have to keep away from issues and concentrate on imagery and delusions and so on. The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television. You don’t expect to get information from a television ad. You don’t expect to get information about a candidate from debates, advertisements and the other paraphernalia that goes along with what are called elections here.

There’s a lot of fuss on the left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn’t count the votes right, and so on. That’s all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don’t take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term “election.” And so, it doesn’t matter all that much, if there was some tampering. I suspect that’s why the population doesn’t get much exercised over it. The concern over stolen elections and vote tampering, and so on, is mostly an elite affair. Most of the country didn’t seem to care very much. “OK, so the election was stolen.” I mean, if you’re flipping a coin to select a king or something, it doesn’t matter much if the coin is biased. That seems to be the way most people feel about it. And there’s some justification.

In fact, the attitude of the public here towards the political system is very dramatic. I mean, about a third of the population in the United States, according to recent polls, believes that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11. But they don’t think it’s a problem, like they don’t think that’s anything to worry about it. Yeah, of course, they’re all crooks and gangsters and murderers, tell us something new, you know. It doesn’t have much to do with us. That’s a shocking commentary on the state of American democracy.

There’s a lot of talk here about, you know, we have a divided country. We have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back together. Red and blue, and so on. That’s pretty marginal. It is a divided country. It’s divided between public opinion and public policy. A very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll continue with Professor Noam Chomsky’s address after break.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to the address of Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking last Thursday in Boston.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Just to give one last illustration, I was driving home from work the other day and torturing myself by listening to NPR, and—I have kind of a masochistic streak I can’t get over. Actually, some day I’m going to sue them. Sometime—once they got me so angry that I started speeding. I lost control of what I was doing, and I was stopped by a cop, and I was going like 60 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone. Maybe a basis for a civil suit, if there are any lawyers around here. But they had a section on Barack Obama, the great new hope. And it was very exuberant: what a fantastic personality he is and a great candidate, thousands of people coming out. And it went on for about 15 minutes of excited rhetoric. There’s only one thing missing. They didn’t say a word about what his policies were on anything. It’s kind of not—doesn’t matter, you know. He’s a unifier. He looks at you when he talks to you. He’s a really decent guy. Great background. OK, that’s an election.

Bolivia was radically different, and that’s a very striking different. Well, there is—one of the things that’s happened in Latin America in the past several decades is there has been a wave of authentic democratization. Despite US efforts to impede it, it’s taken place. However, an unfortunate side effect of it is that as the wave of democratization increased, while support for democracy remained strong in Latin America, support for the elected governments has been declining, steadily declining.

There’s a reasonable explanation for that that was given by an Argentine political scientist, Atilio Boron. He pointed out that the wave of democratization correlated with the neoliberal programs, which are designed to undermine democracy. I don’t have time to talk about it, but every element of them is specifically designed to undermine democracy, to restrict the public arena and participation and so on. So he concludes—I think plausibly—that it’s not surprising that while a desire to have democracies remains very high, support for the elected government declines, insofar as they follow the programs that are undermining democracy.

Now, there are a few exceptions. The leading exception—again, Latin American opinion is also pretty carefully polled and studied, so we know a lot about it—the leading exception is Venezuela. From 1998 to the present, support for the elected government has increased sharply, in pretty dramatic contrast to almost all of Latin America. There are some increases elsewhere. And, in fact, Venezuela leads the continent in support for the elected government. That’s probably why it’s called anti-democratic and authoritarian and, you know, dictator, and so on and so forth.

The rhetoric here is kind of interesting. There are authoritarian tendencies, undoubtedly, but depicture of Chavez as a tin-pot dictator—has destroyed freedom of press and so on—that’s the standard line also in the rightwing press in South America, and believed, in fact, completely inconsistent with the facts.

I mean, take, say, freedom of the press. As you know, there was a coup in Venezuela in the year 2002, supported by the United States. The government was overthrown. It was taken over by Pedro Carmona, a rich businessman, who immediately dissolved parliament, destroyed the supreme court, got rid of the attorney general’s office, the public defender. Every vestige of democracy was instantly demolished.

US strongly supported it. The Venezuelan private press, the press, strongly supported it. One of the people who supported the coup was the opposition candidate in the last election. Just another—other supporters of the coup were a group called Sumate, the group that the US provides aid to for what’s called “democracy building.” So the coup was supported by a substantial part of the elite in the society that was backed by the United States, destroyed the democratic system.

It was quickly overthrown by a popular uprising. US had to back off. But what’s striking is that the newspapers continue to publish, still continue to attack the government. Rosales, who supported the coup, ran in the election. Sumate, which supported the coup, is functioning, the main recipient of US democracy promotion funds.

Just imagine that that had happened in the United States. Suppose there was a coup that overthrew the government, supported by the leading press, you know, by political figures and so on. Would the press continue to function? I mean, would the supporter of the coup be the opposition candidate in the next election. I mean, it’s unimaginable. They’d all be lined up in front of firing squads. But this is the tin-pot dictator who’s destroying freedom of press, not the first time. But these are quite important developments.

And what they illustrate is a decline in the—first of all, a move towards integration, independence and authentic democracy with mass popular movements and participation and so on, all extremely important, but also along with it goes a decline in the methods of domination and control. I mean, the US has dominated the region for a long time with two major methods: one of them, violence, and the other, economic strangulation, economic controls. And both of those methods are declining in efficacy.

2002 was the last effort of the United States to overthrow a government. In earlier years, it was routine. And in fact, the governments that the US is now supporting—say, Lula—probably would have been overthrown 40 years ago. There’s not that much difference between Lula and Goulart, the Brazilian president who was overthrown by the Kennedy-instigated coup. There is a notable decline in the efficacy of violence for control.

And the same is true of economic controls. ve si decline. The main economic controls in recent years have been the IMF, which is virtually a branch of the US Treasury Department. But the countries are freeing themselves of its controls. Argentina basically told the—Argentina was the poster boy of the IMF. It was a great success story, except that it led to a total complete crash, a terrible crash. Argentina did recover, but by violating IMF rules, refusing to pay its debts, buying up what remained of the debt and “ridding ourselves of the IMF,” as the president put it. They were able to do that, partly with the help of Venezuela, which bought up about a third of the debt, another form of cooperation. Brazil, in its own way, moved in the same direction, freeing itself from the IMF.

Bolivia is now doing it. Bolivia had been, again, a rigorous obedient student of the IMF for about 25 years. It ended up with per capita income lower than when it started. Well, now they’re getting rid of the IMF, too, again with Venezuelan support. And as this proceeds through the—in fact, the IMF itself is in serious trouble. If you look at the business pages, you’ll notice that its viability is in question, because it’s not getting the kinds of funds it used to get from the role it played in what one—the US executive director of the IMF once called it the credit community’s enforcer. It’s like the Mafia. They’re the goons who were sent in to get the payments, the default, and so on. But they’re not getting it anymore, and their own funds are running low. They may not survive.

Well, all of this is just one aspect of the weakening of the economic controls, alongside the weakening of the controls of violence, and that’s going hand-in-hand with the steps towards integration and independence.

The US has had to have a policy change. There’s still a distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys happen to be governments the US probably would have overthrown 40 years ago, like Lula’s Brazil That’s one of the good guys. Morales and Chavez, they’re the bad guys. Well, that’s the party line. You’ve read it over and over.

In order to maintain it, it’s necessary to finesse some of the facts, like, for example, the fact that when Lula was re-elected in October—the good guy—his first act was to fly to Caracas to support Chavez’s electoral campaign—that’s the bad guy. Now, that wasn’t reported in the United States, too remote from the party line. Also, Lula dedicated a Brazilian project in Venezuela, a bridge over the Orinoco River, new development projects, and so on. That’s all the wrong story.

And as I mentioned, as the AP reported, Venezuela has been in the lead of trying to move towards regional integration. That’s what Chavez’s [Bolivarian] Alternatives for the America is all about—is supposed to be about, that involves efforts to develop institutions for an integrated South America. Petroamerica is kind of an integrated plan for an integrated energy system of the kind that China is trying to initiate in Asia, also very worrisome to the United States. Telesur is an effort to break through the closely guarded Western media monopoly. It’s a big story in itself. The University of the South, if it takes off, would be an academic center for the Americas, and so on.

Well, the US is kind of losing control. It’s not that US policy is changing. The policy has to be adjusted. The US has not given up on means of violence and economic control, but they’re taking new forms. So the training of Latin American officers has, by the US, has gone way up, very sharply in the last few years. And they’re being trained differently. The training is being shifted. It’s being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon. That’s of some significance. When training of Latin American officers is under State Department controls, there’s at least theoretically congressional supervision of human rights violations and so on. Not very many teeth in it, but at least it’s sort of there.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT linguist and political analyst, Noam Chomsky, speaking in Boston several days ago.

www.democracynow.org

Saturday, December 16, 2006

The Absurd Times

Link is now http://AbsurdTimes.blogspot.com

THE ABSURD TIMES

(The Absurd Times)

No, we are not under new management, just on our third title or address. We started with ContemporaryAwareness and gave up on that because it had too many letters to type in. Aware21 followed, but the focus had shifted. The articles on Cognitive Therapy are still in the archives (Mainly July and August, 2006), but then attention was on the election and the need to restore some semblance of a balance of power in government.

The original idea was to comment on the irrational situation in life and how cognitive science could enable people to live with it. However, simply mentioning these events and laughing at them is the only sage guide to survival in increasingly absurd times.

The name suggested itself to me while a talking conservative head on HARDBALL had published something in the NEW YORK TIMES and said that he first looked for a publication called the Ironic Times. Well, he had used the word correctly, he thought, because he was one of those who think of the New York Times as a leftist newspaper when it is really corporate owned and fairly right-wing. Whenever one of its reporters gets caught lying and being too fascist and exposed as such, they merely say “oops” and fire the reporter. The last incident had to do with a female reporter/supporter of the war in Iraq.

What really goes on today, however, is incredibly absurd. I have a few modest examples:

The Baker Hamilton Report, or Iraq study group report, bipartisan, made some suggestions to extricate us from the mess in Iraq. Bush, Rice, et al., jumped all over the suggestion that Iran, as well as other border and area countries, be involved, saying that Iran had to do such and such before they would talk to them.

The President of Iran was asked for his reaction, which was, essentially, “Why should we help George Bush? He started the mess and it’s his problem.” Everyone assumed that Iran was simply dying to get to talk to us.

Miss USA, a pretty blonde from Kentucky, is being de-Tiaraed. Seems she was drinking, doing coke, and kissing Miss Teenage America. Isn’t Miss USA supposed to represent the media’s version of what is ideal in the USA? Oh yes, guess who owns the pageant? Donald Trump!

Mrs. Bush said Condy Rice will never be President because she is single. I don’t need a reason. The main question is why Laura Bush ever made such a comment? Could it be because Rice made it to Provost while Laura stayed a librarian?

Updates will still take place weekly.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Election Aftermath

Hello, again!

I have below another article on Iraq.

I had slowed down on my postings mainly because the election was over and the electorate resoundingly voted against the war in Iraq. Since then, there have been many developments.

The most curious to me was how our administration eliminated hunger in our country – that’s right, eliminated. From now on, people who do not have any food or enough food to eat, suffer from “long-term food insecurity.” So, no more hunger.

The latest polls I see show support for the war at about 20%, meaning four out of five Americans are fed up with it. If we allow for those neandrathals who want to make it bigger, sending more troops, it is more like 3 out of four. $70,000,000,000 has been appropriated recently, so that should be plenty to get us out of there if we start now. There will be no need, then, for the $100,000,000,000 requested of the incoming congress. All that money could be spent here. Maybe even do something about New Orleans.

A big decision has been made on a pandemic, however. It is estimated that in case of a bird flu pandemic, 47 states would run out of hospital beds in five days. The action taken was to make the head of DHHS in charge of that, rather than homeland security which is too busy arresting meatpackers to be overtaxed with something like an epidemic.

Some of the leading Democrats have said that impeachment and cutting off funds for the war is “off the table.” Very well, would someone who knows where the table is put them back on?

Let’s hope this senator from South Dakota doesn’t die. I’d rather the opposition appoint the heads of committees, and Dick Cheney as the deciding vote in the senate is not a comfortable thought.

******************************************************************************************************

Znet | Iraq

*The Americans Don’t See How Unwelcome They Are, or That Iraq Is Now

beyond Repair

The main purpose of Bush invading Iraq was to retain power at home*

by Patrick Cockburn; Independent; December 11, 2006

During the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century, eunuchs at the court of the Chinese emperor had the problem of informing him of the repeated and humiliating defeat of his armies. They dealt with their delicate task by simply telling the emperor that his forces had already won or were about to win victories on all fronts.

For three and a half years White House officials have dealt with bad news from Iraq in similar fashion. Journalists were repeatedly accused by the US administration of not reporting political and military progress on the ground. Information about the failure of the US venture was ignored or suppressed.

Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, “a careful review of the reports ... brought to light 1,100 acts of violence”.

The 10-fold reduction in the number of acts of violence officially noted was achieved by not reporting the murder of an Iraqi, or roadside bomb, rocket or mortar attacks aimed at US troops that failed to inflict casualties. I remember visiting a unit of US combat engineers camped outside Fallujah in January 2004 who told me that they had stopped reporting insurgent attacks on themselves unless they suffered losses as commanders wanted to hear only that the number of attacks was going down. As I was drove away, a sergeant begged us not to attribute what he had said: “If you do I am in real trouble.”

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”

The query is perhaps key to Mr Bush’s priorities. The overriding political purpose of the US administration in invading Iraq was to retain power at home. It would do so by portraying Mr Bush as “the security president”, manipulating and exaggerating the terrorist threat at home and purporting to combat it abroad. It would win cheap military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would hold “khaki” elections in which Democrats could be portrayed as unpatriotic poltroons.

The strategy worked - until November’s mid-term elections. Mr Bush was victorious by presenting a false picture of Iraq. It is this that has been exposed as a fraud by the Iraq Study Group.

Long-maintained myths tumble. For instance, the standard stump speech by Mr Bush or Tony Blair since the start of the insurgency has been to emphasise the leading role of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and international terrorism. But the group’s report declares “al-Qa’ida is responsible for a small portion of violence”, adding that it is now largely Iraqi-run. Foreign fighters, their presence so often trumpeted by the White House and Downing Street, are estimated to number only 1,300 men in Iraq. As for building up the Iraqi army, the training of which is meant to be the centrepiece of US and British policy, the report says that half the 10 planned divisions are made up of soldiers who will serve only in areas dominated by their own community. And as for the army as a whole, it is uncertain “they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda”.

Given this realism it is sad that its authors, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, share one great misconception with Mr Bush and Mr Blair. This is about the acceptability of any foreign troops in Iraq. Supposedly US combat troops will be withdrawn and redeployed as a stiffening or reinforcement to Iraqi military units. They will form quick-reaction forces able to intervene in moments of crisis.

“This simply won’t work,” one former Iraqi Interior Ministry official told me. “Iraqis who work with Americans are regarded as tainted by their families. Often our soldiers have to deny their contact with Americans to their own wives. Sometimes they balance their American connections by making contact with the insurgents at the same time.”

Mr Bush and Mr Blair have always refused to take on board the simple unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis, though US and British military commanders have explained that it is the main fuel for the insurgency. The Baker-Hamilton report notes dryly that opinion polls show that 61 per cent of Iraqis favour armed attacks on US forces. Given the Kurds overwhelmingly support the US presence, this means three-quarters of all Arabs want military action against US soldiers.

The other great flaw in the report is to imply that Iraqis can be brought back together again. The reality is that the country has already broken apart. In Baghdad, Sunnis no longer dare to visit the main mortuary to look for murdered relatives because it is under Shia control and they might be killed themselves. The future of Iraq may well be a confederation rather than a federation, with Shia, Sunni and Kurd each enjoying autonomy close to independence.

There are certain points on which the White House and the authors of the report are dangerously at one. This is that the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki can be bullied into trying to crush the militias (this usually means just one anti-American militia, the Mehdi Army), or will bolt from the Shia alliance. In the eyes of many Iraqis this would simply confirm its status as a US pawn. As for talking with Iran and Syria or acting on the Israel-Palestinian crisis it is surely impossible for Mr Bush to retreat so openly from his policies of the past three years, however disastrous their outcome.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Monday, December 11, 2006

Starting Again

I'm back!

From now on, this blog will be a weekly.

Update coming soon.

Charles