Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The Decline and Fall of the U.S., or the "Year in Rebuke"


The "Year in Rebuke" is a nice title that was used by Harry Sheerer on his Le Show recently.  Le Show is based in New Orleans and you can download his podcasts for free at Shoutcast or Itunes.  It's a pretty good show.

I often hear from people wondering what will happen when Chomsky passes away (not that he ever will).  Well, here is someone who pretty much summarizes the state of the United States and whose knowledge is almost overwhelming.  Since he is extremely accurate and factual, he is not that well-know in the mass media, but he has won several awards:

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Allan Nairn: As U.S. Loses Its Global Economic Edge, Its "One Clear Comparative Advantage is in Killing, and It’s Using It"

    * "Obama Has Kept the Machine Set on Kill"–Journalist and Activist Allan Nairn Reviews Obama’s First Year in Office

Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: As 2010 draws to a close, what is the role of the United States in the world today? From the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the cuts in social programs here at home, where is the emerging hope for change around the world?

Today we spend the hour with award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. In 1991, we were both covering Indonesia and occupied East Timor and witnessed and survived the Santa Cruz massacre, in which Indonesian soldiers killed more than 270 Timorese. We survived the massacre, but the soldiers fractured Allan’s skull.

Over the past three decades, he has exposed how the U.S. government has backed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in Haiti. He also uncovered U.S. support for the Indonesian military’s assassinations and torture of civilians. Among other awards, he’s won the Alfred I. duPont Award and the Robert F. Kennedy International Prize for International Reporting, the George Polk Award for his exposé of Pentagon and CIA funding of paramilitary death squads in Haiti, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting. He’s just back from China and in the region of Asia over the last year. He’s joining us in our studio today for the hour.

Allan, welcome to Democracy Now!

ALLAN NAIRN: Thanks. Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a tall order to talk about the role of the United States in the world today, but why don’t we start right there?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, now, as the U.S. is losing its edge economically, it has one clear comparative advantage. And that’s in killing. And it’s using it. Obama has increased the attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan. Brookings Institution last year estimated that for every one militant, as they put it, killed in Pakistan, the U.S. drones kill 10 civilians. And they said that was OK; they defended the U.S. policy. General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, also the National Security Agency, also former director of National Intelligence, said that our default position is to kill our adversaries, referring to the use of the drones. Harold Koh, who’s the legal adviser for the Justice Department, earlier this year at a State Department briefing on the results of the review conference on the International Criminal Court, described the international legal environment that the U.S. had helped shape. And he said this: "No U.S. national can be prosecuted for aggression. We ensure total protection to our American forces and other nationals going forward." So, in that situation, the U.S. defines who the adversaries is. The default U.S. position is to kill the adversary. When you kill the adversary, you kill 10 civilians. What are the survivors, the loved ones of those civilians, supposed to do, when the international legal system is rigged so that there is no peaceful redress, so they have no place to go? It’s unjustified. It’s terrorism by the U.S. law’s own definition.

But it’s also ominous for Americans, especially ominous in a historical moment where the U.S. is losing its edge. Right now it still has the massive military advantage, but how long is that going to last? Other countries have more people to field as troops. Other countries can manufacture weapons more cheaply. The U.S. still has the edge in military technology, but in today’s information age, that can’t last very long. So, if the appeal to decency can’t wake up Americans and make them say stop, maybe the appeal to self-interest and fear can do it.

Imagine a moment not too far in the future—some of the technical magazines just started writing about this—where foreign countries would have the capacity to put drones in the skies over New York, over San Diego, over Alabama, over Chicago. How would Americans feel about that, when the discretion on whether to push the button on the missile and launch it at anyone—at anyone in the U.S.—a member of Congress, a member of the President’s staff, a GI, someone walking down the street—when that discretion lies with someone in some foreign capital, some commander? And imagine how Americans would feel if those overseas controllers of the drones flying in the skies over the U.S. decided to apply American standards; if they decided to apply the Brookings standard that says, OK, if we target one American military planner and we kill 10 civilians, that’s OK; if they decide to apply General Hayden’s standard that, well, it’s our default position to kill these adversaries; and if they decide to apply the U.S. State Department standard, which says no matter what we do, we can’t be prosecuted. That’s the situation that the U.S. is setting up. And it’s going to be increasingly dangerous for Americans as time goes by.

AMY GOODMAN: The international soldier death toll in Afghanistan is, well, I think, as of this broadcast, around 709. Almost 500 of those are U.S. soldiers. It’s the deadliest year in what? We’re coming—we’re in the 10th year, the longest war the U.S. has been involved in, ongoing work, in the history of this country. What about Afghanistan, what you feel needs to be done?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s interesting that you mention the killings of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. To me, one of the most interesting points that’s made in the documents released by WikiLeaks came out in some of the earlier releases, particularly the Iraq war logs. If you read those, you see that when the U.S. military is reporting on U.S. killings of civilians in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they almost always say, "Well, we did it to protect our forces. Some of our soldiers came under fire. We responded. And we wiped out the house." In some cases, they end up wiping out the whole village compound. "And that’s why those civilians were killed." Or, "There was fire from the ground. Our men were in the air in a helicopter. We returned fire. It turned out that it was a wedding party on the ground, and they were shooting their guns in celebration. But we did it with the intent of protecting our forces."

And there’s a certain logic to that. If you’re a soldier and you’re in combat, naturally you want to protect yourself and protect your friends, and you will do everything possible to do that, including killing someone who you think, who you speculate, might be firing at you or might potentially fire at you. So that inevitably sets up a situation where when you send troops into a country in a hostile situation, when you invade a country, that means—really it means, in a practical sense—that in order to protect your troops, you have to kill civilians, you have to kill them in large numbers. And that’s what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan. That’s what it did in Iraq. And that’s what it’s setting up to do in a series of other places. It’s an inevitable result of the initial act, of the initial act of invasion, and, in legal terms, what is often the initial act of aggression.

AMY GOODMAN: In Pakistan, you were talking about the drones, and we just read this headline about U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan killing at least 33 people over the last two days. On Tuesday, drones struck a pair of sites in North Waziristan, killing 15 people. Separate attack Monday, 18. U.S. has carried out more than 116 drone attacks this year, more than double the amount from last year. I think the figure of some poll taken in Pakistan, about 59 percent of the people of Pakistan feel the United States is the enemy, yet the United States is pouring billions of dollars to shore up the government of Pakistan.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. That poll would actually suggest that maybe the U.S. image is improving a little, because there have been some other polls where it’s like 70 and 80 percent of Pakistanis saw the U.S. as the main enemy.

What the U.S. is doing with the Pakistan military is remarkable, especially when you compare it with the Iran nuclear situation. The U.S. is saying that, well, maybe we’ll have to invade Iran, or maybe we’ll have to let Israel invade Iran, because Iran is developing nuclear weapons and Iran is a hostile Islamist regime. Well, the U.S. also says, as documented further in the WikiLeaks releases, but it’s said this publicly, that the Taliban in Afghanistan and also the—what are called the Taliban and their allies of Pakistan are backed by the Pakistani military, are backed by the ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence. That is the same Pakistani military that controls the nuclear weapons that Pakistan already has. That is the same Pakistani military that is receiving billions upon billions of dollars in U.S. aid. Yet the U.S. is not saying, "Oh, we have to cut off that Pakistani military. We have to invade Pakistan, because they’re backing the Taliban."

So, the solution for Iran possibly getting a nuclear weapon is to invade Iran. The solution for Pakistan actually having a nuclear weapon and actually backing the Taliban is to give more money to Pakistan. There’s no underlying logic to it, except the logic of sustaining war, of sustaining conflict, of sustaining tension, of having an ongoing drama that provides the top politicians, like Obama, like Bush before him, a chance to prove their toughness, a chance to boost their popularity, and which sustains the vast military complex that chews up so much of the U.S. economy. Once you get beyond that, you can’t come up with a coherent explanation as to why the U.S. should be doing that.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think the U.S. should do right now with Afghanistan?

ALLAN NAIRN: Get out.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

ALLAN NAIRN: Pull the troops out. The only legitimate role would be if you could find a way—and it’s not easy now in a state, in a place that is so devastated and corrupted—if you could find a way to pump in money that would serve as a kind of reparation for the damage that the U.S. has done to Afghanistan and maybe have that money go to rebuild houses and feed hungry people. That would be a justified U.S. role. But the military, the intelligence people, just get them out. They are only making matters worse. They are only making matters worse for the civilian population of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they’re also only making matters worse for Americans, who worry about being bombed when they’re on an airplane, who worry about car bombs in Times Square. Anyone who seriously looks at this sees, and often says and often writes, that this creates more animosity, more people who want to attack the U.S. So get out, and you save more lives on the ground there, and you also diminish the danger to Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn. His articles appear online at allannairn.com. That’s A-L-L-A-N-N-A-I-R-N dot com. We’ll continue with him after break. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up 2010, we’re spending the hour in a wide-ranging discussion with Allan Nairn—he has just returned from China, he was in Asia for the last year—to get an outside perspective of what’s happening in this country, how people in the other parts of the world see the United States and also what’s happening here at home. Allan Nairn is an award-winning investigative journalist and activist.

Allan, you mentioned the issue of reparations. Expand on that.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, this came to mind with what happened earlier this year in Haiti, with the earthquake, now the cholera. Haiti, just a few miles from Miami, is in so many ways a devastated place. You know, when Haitians and some well-meaning foreigners who try to help in Haiti look around and try to help, try to rebuild from the earthquake, try to stop the spread of the diarrhea that’s killing thousands, it’s not always clear what they can do. Some steps are evident, but the damage to Haiti has been so massive—the hillsides stripped of trees, the entire national housing stock in such a weak state that it could be knocked down by the shaking of an earthquake that would not do the same damage in another country—they’re starting at a tremendous disadvantage.

Yet Haiti, if you look historically, is one of the great nations of world history. They were a pioneer of democracy. The Haitian slave rebellion that led to the founding of the nation led to the establishment of one of the first republics in the world, a republic that the U.S. Founding Fathers immediately said had to be destroyed because of the destructive example it would set, because of the threat that it might give the slaves in the American South an idea and they might try to rebel and establish—turn America into a republic, a real republic, in which slaves could also have citizenship rights, as opposed to the fake republic which prevailed in the U.S. at that time. Haiti was also the source of great riches, gold in the mountains, riches that were taken by France and used to gild the palaces of Paris and Versailles. And the place was looted, the place was sacked, by France, the U.S., by other foreign interests. And now it’s at one of the lowest economic levels of any place in the world.

And if you look at Haiti, if you look at Afghanistan and other of the world’s poorest places, part of the solution is obviously letting people alone politically and militarily so they can pursue their own solution. You know, China is now being heralded as an example of economic progress. Well, China was an imperial system. They were colonized. And they went through, really, what was in effect a series of revolutions, a series of political revolutions, before they were able to reach the point that they could achieve this rapid economic progress. Can you imagine the United States letting Haiti go through an actual revolution, a social revolution that would change the basic terms of who owns the land, of who owns the property, of who has power? The U.S. won’t even let Haiti have a fair election. When Aristide, the reformist priest, got elected as president, the military ousted him in a coup, and the U.S. came in and backed death squads to institutionalize that. When Aristide later got elected as president, the U.S. kidnapped him and ran him out of the country. So the U.S. won’t even let Haiti have an election, let alone a revolution. But if you look at—so that would be one element, allowing real political freedom, so the Haitians could choose a way out.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "allowing"?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, allowing, not—if the Haitians decide to try to redistribute land, or as—the very modest steps that Aristide tried to take when he was first president, he doubled the minimum wage. He tried to institute a basic Social Security system. This was enough for the U.S. to say, well, a military coup is a better solution. So, stepping back and letting them do what they need to do politically.

But beyond that, the practical solution, and the only reasonable one, would be some kind of massive reparation, some kind of giving back of the modern equivalent of all that gold that was stolen and all the other wealth that was taken out of Haiti over the years.

Now, the immediate response to that, when you say reparations, is people say, "Oh, that’s not reasonable. That’s not fair, because that was done by ancestors. That was done by people in the past. I didn’t—I’m not guilty of robbing Haiti. Why should I pay?" OK, that’s a reasonable argument. But if you want to cancel the old guilt, because you didn’t do it, you didn’t do the crime, you didn’t do the theft, that would also mean that you should also cancel the old inheritance that came down to you from those same ancestors. So, alright, so you don’t have to pay reparations, but that would also mean you have to surrender your unearned inheritance. And if you look realistically at the world, most of what people have comes from what they inherit, not from what they earn themselves.

Take this country. You grow up in the suburbs. You grow up in, you know, a nice neighborhood of New York City. You have good food. You have clean water. You won’t be sickened by your own excrement. You live in a building that’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The roads outside are solid and safe. You can go to school for free. You have all these things and more. And you have all this before you have lifted a finger in labor, in work, in earning, in initiative, in free enterprise. You have all this while you’re just a kid sitting there watching cartoons on television. So, obviously, you have a vast inheritance, some of it from your own family, but most of it from the society as a whole, from the rich society.

You know, in this country and in a lot of the rich world, when we talk about issues of equality, there’s always a standard debate goes on, a very sterile debate, between equality of opportunity and equality of result. The right says, "Oh, we can only have—we shouldn’t have equality of result: everybody ends up at the same place. We should only have equality of opportunity: people start from the same place, and then you have a fair race." I tell you, the poor of the world would be thrilled to settle for just equality of opportunity. Forget equality of result. If you really had a regime of equality of opportunity, that would mean all children start from the same place. They all start with nutritious food, with clean water, with free schooling, with a safe home, etc., and then, let the chips fall where they may, run the race. But that is so far from what we have now in the world. It’s obvious. It’s obvious to everyone. In order to achieve that equality of opportunity and in order to be evenhanded in applying the principle of what to do about the theft and the inheritance accumulated by our forefathers, you would need massive reparations, a massive flow of money from the rich world to places like Haiti, to places like Afghanistan. And that’s just through applying consensus principles that everyone accepts.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to award-winning journalist Allan Nairn. Allan, talk about AFRICOM.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, AFRICOM is the Africa military command that was started by Bush, Jr., and has continued and expanded under Obama. And it’s a remarkable thing. It gets very little publicity, especially in the U.S. But what it does is it sends into the hungriest parts of the world, the countries of—in particular, the countries of north and northeastern Africa, it sends in U.S. Green Berets, drones, CIA operatives. They militarize these societies. They are there ostensibly to fight what they refer to as Islamist terrorism. And so, in these societies where people are stunted from hunger, where it’s a day-to-day struggle for food among vast percentages of the populations, the U.S. is sending in bullets and increasing tensions.

Ethiopia is a good example. Ethiopia is famous as a place with recurring hunger problems. And the U.S. has seized upon it as its key military platform in the region, kind of like the role that Colombia plays for the U.S. in South America. The U.S. backed Ethiopia in an invasion of Somalia. The U.S. is sending covert operatives in constantly, and this in the midst of the worst kind of deprivation. And no one talks about it here. Yet, it’s criminal.

AMY GOODMAN: When President Bush wanted to establish AFRICOM in Africa, he couldn’t get an African country to agree to be its base, so he had to turn to Europe.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, for good reason. But if you look at how things are changing in the world today, the U.S. militarily is in some senses in retreat, and that’s a very good thing. It’s what allowed South America to experiment with democracy in recent years. You have the rise of populist movements in places like Venezuela and Ecuador that would have been impossible in an earlier era, when the U.S. was ready to pounce on any stirring of dissent in Latin America. The U.S. created death squads throughout Central America and also South America in the 1960s and '70s, starting under Democratic administrations, Kennedy and Johnson. But today, in the recent period, U.S. attention has been diverted elsewhere, and it's allowed politics to—some free choice, some free elections, to develop. And it’s a very good thing.

Now there’s a possibility that the U.S. may be forced into a retreat in Asia as the power of China grows. Now, China is a dictatorship. They apply repression on their borders. They back a murderous regime in Burma. They repress the people of Tibet. But they are not anywhere near as aggressive as the U.S. in defining their area of operations as the entire globe and sending in military and intelligence forces into every country on earth. And so, in the face of the rise of China’s power, if the U.S. starts to retreat from Asia, it could provide some tactical possibilities for popular movements. They could start to play one off against the other.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have the United States, a first-rate military power, and yet its economy is seriously slipping. What does that mean—first-rate military power, second-rate economy?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it means that, in a certain sense, killing and the use of force abroad becomes even more important for the U.S. than it was before. But even that, even that edge, I think, is—may not last for too long. You know, after Reagan invaded Grenada, he said, "Now the U.S. is standing tall. Now we can be proud." After the U.S. invaded Iraq, Wesley Clark, General Wesley Clark, who became—later became a leading politician in the Democratic Party, said, "This shows that we cannot be challenged. No one can dare to defy us."

Well, Reagan turned out to be right, because after Grenada, the U.S. launched a series of attacks on soft targets, places that couldn’t really defend themselves, like Panama, Nicaragua, many other places. But Clark turned out to be wrong, because the U.S. was essentially defeated in Iraq, essentially rebuffed. What initially looked like a victory turned into a disaster for U.S. power. And now, it’s not the case that the U.S. can just drop a hint to a given country and they have to fear that the U.S. parachuters will be dropping the next day. And that is something that opens up possibilities for the world. It’s something that we have to take advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: The tax compromise, the bill that was passed, $800—more than $800 billion, who it helped? It extends the Bush-era tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, reduces the estate tax, in return for a 13-month extension for jobless benefits, a handful of tax credits for low- and moderate-income Americans, at least a quarter of the tax savings going to the wealthiest one percent of the population. The only group that will see taxes increase are the nation’s lowest-paid workers. Talk about who benefits in this country and the trend that’s going on in this country.

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, there’s this remarkable trend now, this mania for what they call "austerity" among the—almost the entire U.S. intelligentsia, everyone saying, "Oh, we have to cut the deficit. We have to cut back."

AMY GOODMAN: The most hit word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is the word "austerity" in 2010.

ALLAN NAIRN: And the meaning of austerity, or the usual understanding of that word, is cutting back on luxuries. And that’s a good thing. That would be a good thing if the U.S. were to cut back on luxuries. Well, you can’t cut back on luxuries unless you have luxuries. And the people who really have luxuries are the U.S. rich. But those who push austerity are not talking about cutting back on luxuries for the rich; they’re talking about cutting back on necessities for working people and the poor. So, at a time when the U.S. Department of Agriculture is documenting increasing numbers of American families that report experiencing some days of hunger in their household, at a time when U.S. schools are turning out fewer students who are good at reading and math and logical thinking as compared to—especially as compared to students from other countries, at this precise time, what does the entire U.S. intelligentsia say with one word? Cut Social Security. Cut unemployment insurance. Cut food stamps. Cut the public schools. Cut the opportunity to get higher education. As opposed to saying—real austerity—cut the luxuries of the rich. In a way, it’s a little puzzling, in a way, because the overall economic effect of it is to cut at a time when you should be expanding. In the midst of a recession, conventional capitalist economic theory says, you have to stimulate, you have to expand. Instead, they’re talking about going in exactly the opposite direction.

In a way—I mean, this is just kind of speculation, but there may be some connection to the military troubles the U.S. is having, because, you know, in American politics, and among American intellectuals who deal with politics, you always have to prove you’re a tough guy. You always have to prove you’re willing to be harsh, you’re willing to make the tough choices. And for most of recent history, that’s been proven by backing various wars and invasions and support for repressive regimes overseas. You know, you would prove you were tough-minded by backing that. Now, after what happened to the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan with their military failures, it’s a little embarrassing to go down that route to prove your toughness. So today, to prove you’re tough, you talk about, "Oh, we have to make painful choices on entitlements. We have to make painful choices on Social Security and Medicare." They don’t mean painful for the people who have the money; they mean painful for the people who don’t.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. We spend more than six times as much as the country with the next-highest budget, which is China.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah, but that will be—that’s a very interesting state of affairs, because it’ll be hard for the U.S. to sustain that. OK, they spend the money on weaponry, but where are they going to make those weapons? Because the entire movement of U.S. corporations in recent years has been to shift their industrial production of everything overseas, in search of the cheapest, most repressed, most terrorized labor they can find. And military equipment is an industrial good like any other. And before long, it’s going to become increasingly more and more uneconomical for the U.S. to try to make that military equipment domestically, and it’s going to be harder to control that technology.

You know, but that also—that economic shift has some good implications. You know, it’s especially striking when you’ve been overseas for a while and you come back to the U.S. You see that there is—especially among the U.S. upper middle class, there’s this whole lifestyle, this whole green cyber lifestyle where everybody’s got their iPad and their iPod and, you know, their i-this and their i-that. But if you look at what is behind that, you know, the coltan, the minerals that are used to make the components for that, that’s mined in the Congo, where the workers are virtual slaves. The manufacturing of those electronic gadgets is no longer done in the U.S.; it’s done in places like China—the iPhone made in Shanghai, for example. So, what lies behind that is fun for the upper middle class, who are playing with the gadgets; unemployment for the U.S. workers, who don’t make them anymore; virtual slavery for the Congolese workers who are extracting the minerals under the lash.

But on the Chinese end of things and in other comparable economies, it’s a slightly different and more interesting story, in one sense. There’s tremendous exploitation of these Chinese workers. After they shifted away from communism in the strict economic sense and made the capitalist opening, labor rights declined in China. This is according to a study by a corporate-sponsored think tank there. Even under the strict communist dictatorship of Mao, workers in China had more rights than they did in the initial years of the capitalist opening that began with Deng. But now, that picture is starting to change. There are labor shortages in China. There have been a series of actions by workers. They’re not allowed to organize unions, but there have been, in effect, wildcat strikes, riots, workers so driven to despair that they commit suicide—this, in particular, at Foxconn, one of the companies that makes components for the iPhone—all sorts of turmoil around Chinese labor. And in response, the government has had to make big concessions to them. They got severance pay. The migrant workers who come in from the countryside are now allowed certain rights in the city that they didn’t have about the schooling of their children, about social welfare. Without yet having legal unions, they are starting to make progress, and they’re generating upward pressure on wages.

Now, that is profound, because China is such a large and growing production—percentage of world production, that upward pressure on wages out of China is going to ripple everywhere. It’s going to ripple all the way to Indonesia, all the way to Haiti, and all the way to the U.S. This started about two-and-a-half years ago. And even though U.S. labor has been all but crushed politically—and that’s what’s making these attacks on Social Security and the schools and Medicare possible, because labor isn’t—American labor isn’t there to defend them anymore. The middle class that labor helped create is badly weakened. Even though that’s the current situation, there’s kind of a reinforcement coming, and that is upward pressure on wages by the new activity of workers in the very politically repressed China. And this inevitably will be spreading to other places. So it’s actually a very hopeful development to look out for and to look—that people can be looking to take advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about WikiLeaks, the largest release of secret documents in the history of this country. We’re speaking with award-winning journalist, activist, Allan Nairn. He lives overseas, has just come back for a week to this country, returning to Asia in just a few days. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. We’ll be back with Allan in a minute.

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Friday, December 24, 2010

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

We have just learned about the nefarious war on Christmas through sources famuiliar with F*X News:

Democrats held Republicans hostage for a lame duck session of congress.

At least 8 NBA Games are being played on Christmas!!

The Dallas Cowboys are playing a Football Game on Christmas!

We are certain that the National Hockey League will have a game or two scheduled.

Is nothing sacred?

I understand that police and firemen will be on duty Christmas!

Even F*X News will telecast on Christmas.

We. however, will fight this trend of activity and attempt to spend the entire day on the couch or in bed.

Also, we encourage you to teach your kids, when they sit on Santa's lap, to grab his junk!

Help preserve the Christmas spirit!  Grab a Republican's junk!

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Wikileaks Task Force -- WTF???!!!! Christmas Edition

WIKILEAKS TASK FORCE

Special Christmas Edition



Illustration: I found this on the web.  Will be glad to delete or give credit to anyone who claims to have created it.


The CIA has given us all a wonderful Christmas Present to celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus.  (Well, it's as good a reason as any you've heard so far, no?)  They had set up a special task force dedicated to finding out WTF is going on with all the Wikileaks stuff.

Now this is serious business.  Back in the 70s, Nixon had an enemies list and many people were very pissed off to have been left off of it.  Art Buchwald, in particular, kept protesting that he hated Nixon more than other people who got on the list.  Why the poor guy was almost ashamed to show his face in public.  William Kunstler made it, however.  So did anyone with the name of "Kennedy."

We found out that some really serious stuff was going on about genetically modified food, mostly sold by Monsanto.  Don't mess with Monsanto.  Well, France did.  We hired a guy to show that such food was safe and he found out that, not only was the particular genetic splicing dangerous and unhealthful, but that ALL genetic splicing could lead to a plethora of unintended consequences, all bad, such as stimulating recessive traits. 

People have heard that the FBI is up to its old tricks.  Below is a discussion of how that is happening.

I have a few questions and I'd really like some information on this.  Which of our lackeys is more likely to shackle up Assange and ship him over here to be "interrogated"?  England or Sweden?  I've heard arguments both ways.

Well, it's the time of the year for love and friendship, peace on earth, so shut up or you will be visited during the night and carted off to jail!

********

The FBI’s probe into antiwar activists is growing. In September, FBI agents raided the homes and offices of activists in Chicago and Minneapolis. Subpoenas that were withdrawn have been reactivated, and a new subpoena was served to a Palestinian solidarity activist in Chicago. We speak with two of the people targeted and two former FBI agents. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Maureen Clare Murphy, Chicago journalist and Palestinian solidarity activist.
Tracy Molm, Minneapolis-based peace activist. FBI agents raided her home and seized belongings in September. Prosecutors have now reactivated her subpoena.
Coleen Rowley, former FBI special agent and whistleblower.
Mike German, National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He was an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from 1988 to 2004.

Rush Transcript

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JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to the latest developments in the FBI’s widening targeting of antiwar and Palestinian solidarity activists. In late September, FBI agents raided the homes of activists in Minneapolis and Chicago. They seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury were served on 13 people but later withdrawn when the activists asserted their right to remain silent.
But earlier this month, subpoenas were reissued against three of those targeted in the raids. And just this week, a new subpoena was delivered to a Chicago-based activist and journalist involved in Palestinian solidarity work—at least the 23rd person subpoenaed since September.
AMY GOODMAN: All those subpoenaed have been involved with antiwar activism that’s critical of U.S. foreign policy. Details on the grand jury case remain scarce, but the subpoenas cited federal law prohibiting, quote, "providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations." In June, the Supreme Court rejected a free speech challenge to the material support law from humanitarian aid groups that said some of its provisions put them at risk of being prosecuted for talking to terrorist groups about nonviolent activities.
Maureen Clare Murphy is the Chicago journalist and Palestinian solidarity activist who was issued a subpoena this week. Maureen is also an editor at the website Electronic Intifada, though the site is not being targeted in the FBI probe. In a statement, the Electronic Intifada said, quote, "Although The Electronic Intifada itself has not been a target of any of the subpoenas, we consider the grand jury investigation and all of the subpoenas to be part of a broad attack on the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements and a threat to all of our rights."
We’re also joined from Minneapolis by Tracy Molm. Her home was among those raided by FBI agents in September. Some of her belongings were seized. She’s one of three activists whose subpoenas were reactivated earlier this month.
And we’ll be speaking with two former FBI agents. Joining us from Washington, D.C., Mike German, National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism from 1988 to 2004. And on the line from Iowa City, Coleen Rowley. She worked as an FBI special agent for almost 24 years. In 2002, she was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year after she blew the whistle on pre-9/11 intelligence failures.
Let’s go first, though, to Chicago, to Maureen Clare Murphy, who has just been issued this subpoena. Maureen, tell us what you know and what happened. How were you issued the subpoena?
MAUREEN CLARE MURPHY: So, I was in my home office on Tuesday morning when I got the knock on the door that more than 20 activists around the country have now gotten from the FBI. And so, they rang my buzzer, and when I answered, they identified themselves as the FBI, and they asked me if I would come and speak with them. And when I declined, they said they had a subpoena for me to appear before a grand jury here in Chicago on January 25th.
AMY GOODMAN: And what else does the subpoena say?
MAUREEN CLARE MURPHY: And as you mentioned, my subpoena is—I’m one of 23 who have now been subpoenaed, and the FBI also served subpoenas to three other activists in Chicago on Tuesday throughout the city.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And did they attempt to seize any of your possessions or records or computers?
MAUREEN CLARE MURPHY: No, they did not come into my home. And none of the activists who had been subpoenaed since the September 24th raids, as far as I know, have had their property seized or their houses raided. So, you know, I don’t think that they really need to come into my home and find out what I do, because I’ve always been working within the mass movement, you know, calling for the U.S. government to end U.S. aid to Israel.
And, you know, it’s kind of ironic that we are being subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, when oftentimes we’re protesting outside of federal buildings, and we’re calling on our legislators and we’re being very vocal and public in our calls for a more just U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. So, I don’t think the government needs to subpoena us to find out what we believe in and what we do. And so, that’s why we think this is really about intimidating our movement and trying to silence our movement, because, you know, they know what we do, and we know what we do is just and peaceful. And what it’s really about is basically trying to silence our very strong and successful movement.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to turn right now to go back to two activists who we spoke to earlier this year. And as we cover this widening net that is ensnaring a number of people, we wanted to remind you of who these people are. Their homes were raided. They told their stories on Democracy Now! We spoke to Joe Iosbaker in Chicago and Jess Sundin in Minneapolis.
JESS SUNDIN: Friday morning, I awoke to a bang at the door, and by the time I was downstairs, there were six or seven federal agents already in my home, where my partner and my six-year-old daughter had already been awake. We were given the search warrant, and they went through the entire house. They spent probably about four hours going through all of our personal belongings, every book, paper, our clothes, and filled several boxes and crates with our computers, our phones, my passport. And when they were done, as I said, they had many crates full of my personal belongings, with which they left my house.
JOE IOSBAKER: It was a nationally coordinated assault on all of these homes. Seven a.m., the pound on the door. I was getting ready for work, came down the stairs, and there were, I think, in the area of 10 agents, you know, of the—they identified themselves as FBI, showed me the search warrant. And I turned to my wife and said, "Stephanie, it’s the Thought Police."
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Joe Iosbaker and Jess Sundin, who—Jess in Minneapolis. Like them, Tracy Molm’s home was raided by FBI agents in September, some of her belongings seized, one of three activists whose subpoenas now have been reactivated. Tell us what has happened now, Tracy.
TRACY MOLM: Right now, our individual lawyers are being called into meetings with the District Attorney, Fox, in Chicago. They’re essentially trying to scare us into talking, to naming names and giving them a case against the movement and against the people that we have worked with historically to fight for justice for the people of Palestine and the people of Colombia.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’re also joined on the phone by Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent who was named by Time Magazine Woman of the Year for her exposure of the problems in intelligence by the FBI pre-9/11. Your reaction to these raids, especially since they all seem to be focused around people who are involved in Palestinian solidarity work and there’s certainly no indication that there’s any terrorist threat to the United States here from the Palestinian movement?
COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, you know, after 9/11, we almost—there was a green light put on, and there was a very big blurring between protest, civil disobedience and terrorism. And you saw this in many ways. The door was open to basically targeting, without any level of factual justification, advocacy groups. And again, this began pretty quickly after 9/11.
It’s gotten to the point now, nine years later—and I wanted to mention the Washington Post is doing a pretty good job of exposing this, this top-secret America, this monitoring. Their most recent article in the Washington Post says there’s a hundred—the FBI has 164,000 suspicious activity reports. Again, these are things that just have no level of factual justification, that people call in, and the FBI is now keeping records on people. So, I think that, you know, this case will just be the start of targeting various groups like this.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of an interview we did recently when Bruce Nestor came into town, the former head of the National Lawyers Guild in Minneapolis. He’s representing those who have been summoned before the grand jury. Bruce Nestor talked about potential consequences the activists face for defying subpoenas.
BRUCE NESTOR: Three people are now being—looking at reappearing in front of the grand jury and likely being forced with the choice between talking about who they meet with, what the political beliefs of their friends and allies are, or perhaps risking contempt and sitting in jail for 18 months. These are people who are deeply rooted in the progressive community in Chicago and Minneapolis. These are grandmothers, they’re mothers, they’re union activists. They were some of the organizers of the largest antiwar march at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
And so—and they’re being prosecuted under this material support for terrorism law, a law that was really enhanced under the PATRIOT Act and that allows, in the government’s own words, for people to be prosecuted for their speech if they coordinate it with a designated foreign terrorist organization. What you run the risk of there is that even if you state your own independent views about U.S. foreign policy, but those views somehow reflect a group that the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization, you can be accused of coordinating your views and face, if not prosecution, at least investigation, search warrants, being summoned to a grand jury to talk about who your political allies and who your political friends are.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Bruce Nestor, who’s representing some of those being subpoenaed, former head of the Naitonal Lawyers Guild in the Twin Cities. Mike German is joining us from Washington, D.C., National Security Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He was an FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism for many years. Mike, talk about your assessment of this widening dragnet and its consequences.
MIKE GERMAN: Well, I think part of the problem is sort of the scope of this investigation and the aggressive tactics that are being used, when there isn’t any public evidence to suggest these people pose a threat. In fact, the FBI spokesman said immediately after the raids that there wasn’t a threat to the community. So, it sort of leads to a question of why there is this nationwide, you know, early morning raids, as if these are Mafia groups, when, you know, it’s clear from the materials that are being seized, the materials that are being requested in the search warrant returns that are public, that a lot of this is associational information that’s being requested—address books, computer records, literature and advocacy materials, First Amendment sort of materials.
So, this creates a huge chill beyond these activists or their associates to the entire advocacy community, where, you know, again, these people, as already stated, have longstanding advocacy histories, you know, are organizers, know a lot of people in the community. So it creates a chill throughout, and it damages our democracy, because people start to be afraid of participating in the political process. And that really is a huge problem beyond the scope of just the individuals involved in this case. And, you know, the fact that the FBI is doing this and using terms like "terrorism" to describe these individuals creates a huge chilling effect that we really have to be concerned about.
AMY GOODMAN: Mike, I wanted to ask you—I don’t know if it’s exactly related, but new details on how the United States has assembled a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. Another Washington Post exposé on this, the FBI operating a massive database known as Guardian with the names and personal information of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents who have never committed a crime but were reported to have acted suspiciously by a local police officer or a fellow citizen, the database containing over 160,000 suspicious activity files. Despite the sweeping size of the database, the Washington Post reports, the FBI says it’s resulted in only five arrests and no convictions. In addition, the Post reveals the FBI is storing 96 million fingerprints in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
And the Post also reports that local law enforcement agencies have begun using surveillance equipment designed for war zones. In Memphis, Tennessee, some police patrol cars now contain military-grade infrared cameras that can snap digital images of one license plate after another, while analyzing each almost instantly.
Mike German, you have worked in counterterrorism for years, before being at the ACLU, from 1988 to 2004. What’s going on here? What are the dangers with this?
MIKE GERMAN: Well, you know, you might remember a program called Total Information Awareness that was started right after 9/11, and the idea was, if we can just grab all the available data that’s out there, somehow we’ll be able to manage it in a way that we’ll know everything that’s happening. And while Congress killed that specific program, that idea never disappeared.
And the FBI appears to be at the center of one of these expansive collection programs called eGuardian, is the new one. Guardian is one that’s been around for a while. But now there’s a new one, eGuardian, that’s part of a nationwide suspicious activity reporting program that encourages state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the general public, to report behaviors that they describe as inherently suspicious, and these include things like taking notes or drawing diagrams, taking measurements, taking photographs or video. So, of course, these are benign activities that have no inherent suspicion regarding them, so what we’re concerned with is what people will really be reporting is people that, because of their own personal bias, are already suspicious of. You know, it won’t be everybody who’s taking notes; it’s only going to be that person who wears religious garb that they are, you know, religiously biased against or, you know, a person of a specific race or nationality. So, what this allows, this sort of reduction in standards allows the collection of material against people who are not even suspected of being involved in wrongdoing. And that is really an open door to abuse.
And we have Freedom of Information Act requests outstanding for the eGuardian program. We’re interested in a lot of different new FBI programs. There’s a Domain Management program, which purports to allow the FBI to collect racial and ethnic demographic information and map our communities across the nation by race and ethnicity. So, again, this suspicion-less collection information is a huge and growing problem, and all of this data just is being warehoused, literally—I mean, that’s what they call it, the Investigative Data Warehouse—for any kind of abuse that might occur later. And, of course, you know, the ACLU has already documented these types of spying operations being directed against political advocacy in 33 states across the nation. In fact, when the latest Washington Post report came out, one of the intelligence collection operations it focused on was the Tennessee fusion centers. And one of our legal fellows became interested upon reading the article and went to the website, and sure enough, one of the suspicious activities reported on the website was an ACLU advocacy effort regarding the celebration of religious activities in public schools. So, clearly, they’re collecting information about political advocacy, and this is part of the larger problem across the country.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Mike, I’d like to ask you—this is not the first time in U.S. history that we’ve had these problems. I think back—you mentioned Total Information Awareness. But going back even further, several decades ago, the Church Commission uncovered all kinds of spying by the U.S. government on legal dissident groups in the United States. And, of course, back in the 1920s during the Palmer Raids, there was all kinds of government attempts to round up people who were involved in what is normally legal, but opposition, politics of one kind or another. How come there is so little outcry in the general population of these enormous attempts by the government to take away civil liberties and to spy on the citizens?
MIKE GERMAN: You know, you’re exactly right. There is, you know, a long history of abuse of secret domestic intelligence powers. And that’s why after the Church Committee uncovered those abuses in the 1970s, there were guidelines put in place, the Attorney General Guidelines, that required a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing before the FBI could start aggressive investigations. And those were the standards that I operated on, doing domestic terrorism investigations. And I found they were very helpful, that what it did is it helped me focus on people who were actually doing bad things, rather than people who were saying things that I didn’t like or didn’t agree with, and that that helped me use my resources in an efficient way to target the people who were doing bad things. And unfortunately, after 9/11, those standards have been diluted significantly to where now the FBI literally requires no factual predicate to start an investigation.
And as far as the public outrage, a huge part of the problem is, again, these activities are taking place in secret. So it’s hard to know how they’re impacting any particular group or individual. And that’s why we set up a website, the Spy Files website, aclu.org/spyfiles, where we’re collecting a lot of this material. And, you know, it’s not just the FBI that’s spying now; it’s Department of Homeland Security, it’s the Department of Defense, it’s state and local law enforcement agencies that are involved in these activities. So, you know, this Washington Post story, I think, will be a big help to let people know that, you know, your innocence doesn’t protect you anymore, that they can literally start collecting information on anyone.
And, you know, we had a recent case in Maryland where the Maryland state police were spying on political activists. And one of the activists said something very interesting to me. She said, you know, "I was a Vietnam War protester. So when I became a war protester again with the recent conflicts, I kind of assumed that the government would be spying on me. But when I finally got those records back, what scared me more than anything was that much of the information was wrong. They had me at demonstrations I wasn’t at. They had me associated with groups I wasn’t associated with. And that scared me more, because now my doing everything right and not being involved in violence wasn’t going to protect me from their errors, and I could be associated with things that I wasn’t actually doing." And that’s really a big part of the problem.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 30 seconds, but I wanted to go back to Coleen Rowley, another former FBI agent, on a related issue, and it’s WikiLeaks. You have signed on, along with a number of other people, like Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of the Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Dan Ellsberg and British intelligence employee Katharine Gun, to a letter that says WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America who thrive on secrecy are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. As we wrap up this discussion, let’s end up on WikiLeaks, Coleen.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, I think there’s a big tie-in between transparency and knowing what your government is doing and what we just heard Mike German mention, which is these infiltrations without factual justification of advocacy groups. The Minneapolis case seems to have stemmed a lot from the lead up to the Republican National Convention and the protests, where they simply targeted protesters. And I think that if we had more transparency and we had ways of people telling the truth about what’s going on, we would not actually see the—I’m very afraid we’re doomed to repeat that terrible history of the COINTELPRO era and the House Un-American Activities.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there. Coleen Rowley and Mike German, both former FBI agents. Coleen Rowley, a whistleblower named Time Person of the Year in 2002, Mike German, now with the ACLU, thanks so much for being with us.

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Monday, December 20, 2010

Death of Liberalism: Obama as a Sell-Out

 
 
 




Illustration: from www.whatnowtoons.com

The illustration pretty well shows reality.  The problem is that the
corporate media has pretty much got them thinking that tax-cuts
for the rich will feed their families.



This is a very important interview that pretty much sums up what is happening in our country and the people who call themselves "Liberal".  The very idea of a right-wing press complaining about the "liberal media" is a complete absurdity and there are very few exceptions.

He does not say it directly, but we are really in a condition of Neo-Fascism.  (See a definition of "fascism at the bottom of this blog.) 

Norman Mailer complained a couple decades ago about "nascent Fascism," and he was right, only now it is reborn, a veritable Renaissance of fascism mixed with mass stupidity. 

Fascism, after all, is a ruling system wherein the governmental, military, and corporate forces are merged so closely that it is difficult to tell where one leaves of and the other begins.  How can we expect, for example, the media, owned by the corporate powers, to criticize the government, owned by the corporate powers?  Or how expect the government to regulate the use of public airwaves for the "good of the people" when the government is owned by the same people who own the broadcast stations? 

Now, why is there then so much criticism of Obama when corporate Amerika has benefited so much from him?  Well, he has served his purpose and is being encouraged to be even more servile. 

For example, are we really expected to believe that 95% of voters are in favor of massive tax cuts for people who make, individually, over a quarter of a million dollars?  Well, the answer is "Yes, you bloody well believe it or 'steps will be taken'".  After all, whose side do you think the major media is on?

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

Chris Hedges: Obama is a "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"

Hedges
The compromise tax-cut deal that President Obama signed into law on Friday has angered many of his supporters. In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges argues that the failure of President Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In the book, Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt. [includes rush transcript]
Filed under Author Interviews
Guest:
Chris Hedges, fellow at the Nation Institute. He is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of a number of books; his latest is called Death of the Liberal Class.

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.
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AMY GOODMAN: President Obama signed the controversial $858 billion tax-cut legislation into law Friday. At least a quarter of the tax savings under the deal will go to the wealthiest one percent of the population. The only group that will see its taxes increase are the nation’s lowest-paid workers.
In the wake of the tax deal, the Washington Post reports the White House is, quote, "moving quickly to mend its strained relationship with the Democratic base, reassuring liberal groups, black leaders and labor union officials who opposed the tax compromise that Obama has not abandoned them." The Post goes on to say, quote, "Liberal groups were part of [the] broad coalition that helped elect Obama in 2008, and activists had high hopes [that] he would govern as a left-of-center president. But tensions with the White House increased as many liberals complained Obama took a more centrist view on issues," unquote.
Well, my next guest argues the failure of Obama to represent the interests of his supporters is just another example of a quickly dying liberal class. In his new book, journalist and author Chris Hedges explains how the five pillars of the liberal class—the press, universities, unions, liberal churches and the Democratic Party—have become corrupt.
Chris Hedges is a fellow at the Nation Institute, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 as part of a team covering the issue of global terror. He’s author of a number of books; his latest, Death of the Liberal Class. On Thursday, Chris Hedges was one of the more than 130 people, mainly war veterans, arrested outside the White House in an antiwar protest led by the group Veterans for Peace.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened? It hardly got any coverage in the corporate media.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, well, that’s not much of a surprise, at this point. I think we’ve seen a kind of a withering of corporate media, including my own paper, the New York Times. As advertising rates decline and as circulation drops, they become even more craven in their service of the power elite and reportage that in no way offends the structures of power. So, you know, events like that one are nonentities for mainstream news organizations.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by the "death of the liberal class"?
CHRIS HEDGES: The collapse of the pillar, the primary pillars of the liberal establishment, those liberal institutions—the press, labor, public education and, in particular universities, culture, liberal religious institutions and the Democratic Party—that have been under assault.
And I speak a lot about World War I and the rise of the Committee for Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was the first system of modern mass propaganda, very closely studied by the Nazis, used to sell an unpopular war to an American public, but also used to crush populist, radical, progressive anarchist, Socialist, Communist movements that had frightened the power elite on the eve of World War I. And they employed for the first time the techniques of mass crowd psychology studied by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud. They understood that people were moved or manipulated not by fact or reason, but by what Walter Lippmann calls the "manufacturing of consent" in his 1922 book Public Opinion. And we’ve never recovered ever since.
So the assault and destruction of these populist or radical movements, which kept liberal institutions honest, and then the purges within liberal institutions, especially the anti-Communist purges of the 1950s. And many people who were expelled from these institutions were no way Communist, figures like I.F. Stone, arguably our greatest journalist of the 20th century, couldn’t even get a job at The Nation magazine and ends up a pariah. He’s not alone—thousands and thousands of people. So that with the rise of neoliberalism and the corporate state under Clinton, these—we lost the radical movements, and we lost the liberal institutions that normally make possible incremental or piecemeal reform within the formal mechanisms of power.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened within the universities.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, there was—of course, one of the most egregious examples occurred here in New York City when Rockefeller went after City University. What they did is they destroyed the capacity for people outside the power elite to get great education. City University at one time was one of the great universities in the country and educated, you know, a huge swath of mostly first-generation immigrants. The corporatization of universities is far advanced now. You have a withering of the humanities, destruction of philosophy departments. Departments must raise not only their own research and grant money, but often their own salaries. Well, you know, who’s going to pay for that?
And so, what we’ve turned our universities into are essentially vocational schools. If you go to a school like Princeton, then you will become a systems manager and go to Goldman Sachs. If you go to an inner-city dysfunctional public school in a place like Camden, you are trained vocationally to stock shelves in Walmart. It’s a kind of solidification of a very pernicious class system, and one that doesn’t train students anymore to think but to fill slots.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, you were a longtime correspondent for the New York Times. For two decades you worked there. You were one of the premier war correspondents. You wrote the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. You won the Pulitzer Prize about eight years ago. You talk in Death of the Liberal Class about your experience at the Times. Why don’t you go through it for us in detail and what you think it indicates?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about those figures, like Sydney Schanberg and others, who were expelled from these liberal institutions—Richard Goldstone, who wrote the Goldstone Report on the 22-day Israeli assault on Gaza, would be another example—because there are clear parameters within these institutions that you don’t cross. The perfect example would be the buildup to the Iraq war. Here, the liberal, so-called self-identified liberal class—figures like David Remnick at The New Yorker; Bill Keller, who was a columnist at the New York Times, now the executive editor; George Packer; on and on, even people like Frank Rich, people forget—all backed the war. And they did it as sort of reluctant hawks. Probably the poster child for this was Michael Ignatieff of the Carr Center, at Harvard, for Human Rights, who’s now the head of the Liberal Party in Canada.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, that reluctance makes them the most convincing.
CHRIS HEDGES: And it—yeah, of course it does, because it gives a kind of moral veneer to a crime. It’s heartfelt. "We don’t like war. We all opposed the Vietnam War." This is almost verbatim Ignatieff’s argument. And "But it’s something that has to be done. We have to face the hard, bitter truth of world politics and recognize that we are a force for good." Samantha Power does this, in essence, in her book on genocide. It’s the idea that the empire is sort of used to—it can abrogate for itself the right to use force to impose virtues. It’s an utter tautology and absurdity to those of us who have been at war. But it works. And the function of the liberal class and why it is traditionally tolerated by the power elite is because it disarms movements that should have stood up on the eve of the Iraq war and fought back.
And, of course, my own clash with the New York Times occurred over the war after I gave a commencement address, which you played on Democracy Now!, at Rockford College, my first and last invitation to give a commencement address. And if I had gotten up and said, "America is a great democracy that goes abroad to liberate and provide freedom and impose—or, you know, give its sort of virtues of Western civilization to the lesser people of the Middle East," well, nobody would have said anything. Indeed, John Burns was quite public in his support for the war. But to challenge the intentions and the virtues of the power elite, that’s the line that the liberal class—if you cross that line, which, of course, Goldstone did in his report—Schanberg did it when he started writing about real estate developers who were driving out low-income and medium-income New Yorkers from Manhattan and the homeless on the streets—then you’re out. Then you are pushed out of the institution.
So, oftentimes there are good people within these institutions, but if they hold fast to these moral imperatives, inevitably they are shunted aside. And the problem is, with the rise of the corporate state and power systems, especially financial systems, that by any definition or any criteria are criminal, you have liberal institutions like the New York Times paying deference to these institutions, when in fact they should be challenging them.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, if you had given a speech for the war at Rockford College, you hardly would have been reprimanded. But just for a moment, let’s go back in time. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org, this amazing moment, the speech that you gave, that you did not actually think was going to be that controversial.
CHRIS HEDGES: No.
AMY GOODMAN: After all, Rockford College was Jane Addams’ college.
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s all I knew about it. I thought they were just pacifist Socialists.
AMY GOODMAN: When the police were escorting you out, why don’t you just quickly explain what happened, and then what the Times did about this?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it was—I had my mike cut. And you can watch it on YouTube or on—link it to democracynow.org. And I was booed, and people stood up and started singing "God Bless America" and jeering and—
AMY GOODMAN: And you were saying?
CHRIS HEDGES: I was talking about the consequences of the war. I spent seven years in the Middle East, months of my life in Iraq. I speak Arabic. This wasn’t an opinion. This was based on a tremendous amount of time and energy in an area of the world I knew very well. And then I was finally escorted—they closed all the roads out of the campus, and the security escorted me out before the awarding of diplomas, because they didn’t want the students to come in close proximity. I had two young men try and climb up on the stage at the end and push me off the podium. And what happened was the trash talk. Fox and all these people got a hold of the home videos and ran it in these sort of endless loops. So I was lynched in the same way they lynched, you know, figures like my friend Jeremiah Wright. And—
AMY GOODMAN: You almost were a minister.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, I almost was. I finished but wasn’t ordained. And the Times had to respond. So they responded by giving me a formal written reprimand, and were Guild—they were Guild, which means that the next time I spoke out against the war, the next time I violated that warning, I would be fired. And that’s when I left the paper.
AMY GOODMAN: You were actually quite muted in criticism of the government when you were at the New York Times and you were being interviewed, like by us.
CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah. The Times wouldn’t consider it muted. Maybe for Democracy Now! listeners, it was muted. But yeah, the stance was—and I knew what I was doing. I had been there 15 years. It was a kind of career suicide. But I felt so strongly that this was a mistake, and there were so few of us that had that kind of experience, in particular, in the Arab world, that I had a kind of duty to speak out.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Chris Hedges. His new book is called Death of the Liberal Class. The incoming head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, New York Congressmember Peter King, says he’s going to hold hearings on what he calls the radicalization of American Muslims. What is your response to this?
CHRIS HEDGES: It’s racist. It’s racist garbage. And I speak to Muslim groups all over the country, and they’re terrified. And it’s—in the stories that I hear anecdotally of every time they fly, constant intrusions by state security into matters of privacy, when these people have done nothing wrong. They are being demonized, especially by the right wing, for the failings of the—as the state continues to unravel and collapse, they are being picked out as scapegoats. And should we suffer another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, I’m very, very frightened for what’s going to happen to American Muslims, who are hardly radical. Every time I go to these groups, they fall all—the most radical person in the room is myself, or they fall all over themselves to talk about American democracy and how great it is and how they are so proud to be citizens. It’s heartbreaking to watch.
I mean, I spoke at the Jerusalem Fund, and in the middle of the talk—you know, I can get away with it, because I’m not Muslim. The director got up and said, "You know, this is his own opinion. We totally disassociate. We have nothing to do with his stance." The fear—and legitimate fear—that has been driven by Neanderthals like this guy and others by demonizing American Muslims is really deeply frightening.
AMY GOODMAN: You were being arrested on Thursday in the snow in Washington, D.C. with over 130 others. Among them, who? Dan Ellsberg—
CHRIS HEDGES: Right.
AMY GOODMAN:—Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Ray McGovern, who was the briefer for George H.W. Bush for years, worked at the Central Intelligence Agency; many veterans. We played some clips last week, at the same time that this tax bill was passed, which will increase taxes on the working poor and decrease, of course, at the highest level, the wealthiest Americans. Link the war with—spending on the war with what we’re spending on people at home and dealing with poverty here.
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, this was—became a very prominent theme that Martin Luther King beat home, especially in the last years of his life during the Vietnam War, that—especially because we’re going into debt. I mean, we’re building a kind of debt peonage system, which is used then as an excuse to go after wage earners, to go after systems like Social Security. I mean, one of the most pernicious things that Obama did in this tax bill was reduce contributions to Social Security, because of course that’s next on the target, as well as raise the deficit by $900—$700 and $900 billion.
And what’s terrifying about movements like the Tea Party is that they provide a kind of emotional consistency. And, of course, that undercurrent of racism towards undocumented workers, towards Muslims, is very much a part of the language of that pernicious right wing. But it embraces all things military, as if somehow the military is not part of government. It’s an irrational political policy. You know, nobody—they want to get government off their backs, but nobody—everybody wants to extend unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and of course not touch the big—you know, the force that is draining the—hollowing the country out from the inside, which is the military-industrial complex—50 percent of all discretionary spending. And so, as these deficits—we’ve now racked up the largest deficits in human history, and as these deficits are ratcheted upwards, and there is an inability to question the self-destructive quality of the armament industry, then it’s taken out on the backs of the working class—and our working class is already in tremendous financial straits—and in the middle class.
AMY GOODMAN: The incoming House Banking Committee chair, Spencer Bachus, said, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, that’s pretty much been the policy since Bill Clinton.
AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama?
CHRIS HEDGES: A disaster. A poster child for the bankruptcy of the liberal class. Somebody who, like Clinton, is a self-identified liberal, who speaks in the traditional language of liberalism but has made war against the core values of liberalism, which is a concern for those people outside the narrow power elite. And the tragedy, if tragedy is the right word, is that Obama, who made this Faustian bargain with corporate interests in order to gain power, has now been crumpled up and thrown away by these interests. They don’t need him anymore. He functioned as a brand after the disastrous eight years of George Bush.
And what we are watching is an even more craven attempt on the part of the White House to cater to the forces that are literally destroying the United States, have reconfigured, are reconfiguring this country into a form of neofeudalism. And all of the traditional—the pillars of the liberal establishment, that once provided some kind of protection and, more importantly, a kind of safety valve, a mechanism by which legitimate grievances and injustices in this country could be addressed, have shut tight. They no longer work. And so, we are getting these terrifying, proto-fascist movements that are leaping up around the fringes of American society and have as their anger not only a rage against government, but a rage against liberals, as well. And I would say that rage is not misplaced.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chris Hedges, you began your speech outside in the snow, outside the gates of the White House, by saying, "Hope, from now on, will look like this."
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s right. All we have left are acts of physical resistance. Of course, I’m deeply nonviolent. And if we don’t get out, then we’re finished. To trust in the normal mechanisms of power and those normal liberal institutions that once—and Democracy Now!, of course, is an exception to this—but, you know, once gave voice and a place to working men in this country is to be very naïve and essentially acquiesce to our own bondage.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, worked for the New York Times for more than two decades. His latest book is Death of the Liberal Class.

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Fascism (pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology.[1][2][3][4] Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy.[5][6] Fascism was originally founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined extreme Sorelian syndicalist political views along with nationalism.[7][8][9] Though normally described as being on the far right, there is a scholarly consensus that fascism was influenced by both the left and the right.[10][11][12][7][13]
Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.[14] They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism.[14] Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.[15][16]
They advocate the creation of a single-party state.[17] Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.[18] They identify violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.[19]