Tag: Bush

Capitulations

August 8, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

With the recent capitulation in the face of small government, “free-market” ideologues, Obama continues in the grand tradition of corporate spokesliars like Ronald Reagan, who use popularly endearing personalities as cover for regressive transferals of wealth.

Nothing encapsulates the subservience of these U.S. Presidents to their corporate financiers like the moment, captured in a brilliant segment of M. Moore’s Capitalism, in which then-chairman of Merrill Lynch literally whispers directives into Reagan’s ear.

Reagan went on to preside over the “wholesale dismantling of our industrial infrastructure” for the “sake of short term profits.”

Reagan began with the evisceration of the labor unions, infamously firing every member of the air traffic controllers union after they had been on strike for two days. Moore identifies this moment as “The Day the Middle Class Died“.

But he lays ultimate responsibility for the calamity not on Reagan or his puppet-masters — they were just looking after their own interests after all  — but on the lack of solidarity among the other labor unions who refused to fight:

The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that’s just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers — they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.

Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America.

And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything — and they did.

(At MotherJones, btw, Kevin Drum looks at the numbers over the past decades to show why unions matter, not only for unionized employees but for non-unionized workers as well. The punchline: Sociological studies show that in the absence of strong labor unions, income inequality grows and the political clout of the middle class shrinks.)

Popular capitulation in the face of this rightward shift took a brief respite as a result of the outrageous excesses of the most recent Bush presidency — millions took to the streets in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, for example. And while Democratic Party leaders, fearful of not “supporting the troops”, colluded with the Bush regime at every dark step, there was at least the pretense that they stood in opposition to aggressive war, secret prisons, government surveillance and the like.  And when Bush tried to gut new deal social programs by privatizing them, the Unions, as weak as they had become relative to the decades preceding Reagan, blocked his plans.

“But since 2008 a Democratic president has neutralized all these constituencies,” laments A. Cockburn at Counterpunch.

Indeed, those to the left of pro-war free-market ideologues who run this country have no appetite for taking the current imperial spokesmodel to task. Why? Because he is “the first black president”, or because “he is doing the best he can”, or because they fear who might succeed him if he is defeated in the next election.

This reflexive support for Obama leads Cockburn to the ironic conclusion that “the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent”:

McCain! But, you wail, he would have plunged America into new wars, kept Guantanamo open, launched an onslaught on entitlements, surrendered to Wall Street and the banks…

McCain would have tried all these things, but maybe he would have quailed amid a storm of public protest.

The lesson, I think, is that what is essential is a principled, rather than partisan, opposition to Imperial theft and violence.  And this means an opposition that remains alive even when the office of the President is filled by a person whose surface qualities — their party affiliation, their skin tone, their oratory skill — one finds appealing.

Ultimately it is this popular capitulation of principle that allows officeholders to betray their constituencies. If they can take your vote for granted, there is no need to be concerned about your interests.

More Black Sites, More Drones

July 25, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

As the the U.S. Congress and President negotiate about whether to pay its bills and which social programs to cut, funding for secret prisons and killer robots continue unabated.

Jeremy Scahill recently broke a story about a CIA secret prison in Mogadishu, where “terror suspects” are rendered for extra-legal storage and interrogation.

As usual following such stories exposing imperial wrongdoing, “news” media sycophants are then deployed to spin the facts by uncritically quoting anonymous government officials.

This Mogadishu CIA black site prison is just part of the larger story of the “Global War On Terror”, began by Bush 43 and continued by Obama, albeit without reference to Bush’s absurd title.

Sauron’s gaze now turns to the not-so-green pastures of Yemen and Somalia, sending forth riderless fell-beasts to spy on and kill those within proximity of those suspected of standing against the Imperial Will:

The Obama administration has escalated the existing drone program and begun a new CIA drone campaign in Yemen (one that just killed numerous people over the weekend); it also, contrary to public denials, provided the arms to Saudi Arabia to attack a rebel group in Northern Yemen.  Yemen is also the justification for Obama’s attempt to institutionalize a due-process-free assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens.  The administration just commenced a separate drone campaign in Somalia.

Presumably, these not-so-new targets of U.S. beneficence will suffer the same drone inflicted civilian slaughterings that regularly transpire (despite denials by government spokesliars) in the other terror war fronts.

Enough about Assange: What WikiLeaks has Revealed

December 29, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

By focusing on the personalities or philosophy behind Wikileaks, in addition to the Imperial and Corporate reactions to its successes thus far, it is easy to lose focus on the actual substance of the leaks themselves. So here is an incomplete list of significant revelations emerging from Wikileaks in 2010, summarized from a list of headlines compiled by G. Greewald:

UPDATE: Here is another round-up of what Wikileaks revelations, compiled by CBS news.

Unaccountable Rice: More of Obama’s “Looking Forward” and Stewart’s Sycophancy

October 19, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In 2003, acting as W. Bush’s “National Security Advisor”, Condoleeza Rice was one of the most vocal and mendacious fear mongers pushing for the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq:

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon…. we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Around the same time, Rice also chaired the White House meetings in which “combined interrogation techniques”, i.e. torture, were approved:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

Thus did Rice help to unleash a shameful decade of war and torture. At least  a hundred thousand people, perhaps as many as a million and a half, died as a result of the war that she enabled, not to mention the untold numbers of wounded and displaced; Torture is now as American as apple pie, to the enduring shame of us all.

But that doesn’t stop President “Look Forward, Not Backward” from inviting the war criminal to advise him.

And it doesn’t stop corporate shill and professional “moderate” sycophant John Stewart from playing patty-cake with her on the Daily Show, helping the should-be-disgraced Rice reinvent herself and promote her new autobiography.

See also here.

7th Anniversary of a Supreme International Crime

March 25, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

The current Iraq War, which has now dragged on into its 7th year, was justified by the U.S. government and mainstream news media on the basis of a series of demonstrable lies either made up or extracted by torture from people accused of terrorism by the Bush Administration.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands (perhaps a million) of people have been killed in the course of what the International Tribunal at Nuremberg would have considered “the supreme international crime“.

The 7th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion was commemorated this Saturday by modest popular protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington D.C.  I attended and documented the Los Angeles event in the following video:

The L.A. march was organized by the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition and was led by disabled Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic (author of “Born on the 4th of July“), who was accompanied by a color guard of terror war veterans carrying the flags of war profiteering corporations.

And here is a nice essay on the anniversary by Andy Worthington.

Fallujah Birth Defects

March 16, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_Fallujah_Defect

Images of Zahra Muhammad, Inas Hamed, and Miriam Yasir.

The ancient city of Fallujah has suffered much since U.S. forces invaded and occupied it in 2003.

In April of that year locals gathered in front of a school to protest the lingering occupation, whereupon the U.S. forces opened fire on the crowd, killing 17 and wounding 70. Two days later, U.S. forces opened fire on another crowd that had gathered to protest the first massacre, and killed two more.

An insurgency against the occupation emerged in Fallujah, for some reason, and in April 2004 the insurgents ambushed a convoy of Blackwater mercenaries. The mercenaries were killed and their burned bodies were dragged through the streets and hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates.

The Empire’s responded with a series of exponentially brutal reconquistas called Viligant Resolve and Phantom fury, in which the U.S. deployed snipers and white phosphorus on the people of Fallujah – a war crime within a war crime within a war crime.

Now, 6 years later, women are being warned by local officials not to reproduce because of the sharp rise in birth defects, possibly – just possibly – the result of toxic weapons used by the invading forces.

The Guardian has video here, and a piece about the difficulty of precisely determining the causes of the birth defects here. The BBC covers the story here.

“Personhood” and the 14th Amendment

March 4, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Welcome to the relaunch of The World’s Got Problems. We have been dark for a few weeks but of course the darkness of the world’s problems continues unabated.  So in this inaugural post of the relaunch, I will take a step back and look at certain recent developments as they relate to what I find to be an underlying problem – the dominant political culture’s selective and variable application of the 14th Amendment and the concept of “personhood”.
WGP_Person_2

Three Fifths of a Person

The United States, at its best, is a political order based on Enlightenment principles of human rights and liberty. But compromises were made at the very beginning, most notoriously by writing slavery into the Constitution. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 a distinction is made between “free Persons” and “other Persons”:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The “other persons” were of course the population of black slaves, not so distant ancestors of the current President’s wife and children, who counted as 3/5ths of a “free Person” for the sake of determining appropriate levels of taxation and representation in the House.

After the Civil War, this “3/5th Compromise” was rendered moot by the 13th Amendment’s abolition of chattel slavery, while the 14th Amendment superseded Acricle 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution and guaranteed “due process” and “equal protection” to every “person”.

Corporate Personhood

What is good enough for a freed slave is good enough for a corporation, apparently – within only a couple of decades, “equal protection” began to be applied to non-human “legal persons”.  In 1886, before hearing arguments for Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted from the bench:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment…applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Although this “obiter dictum” was not officially part of the Court’s decision, court reporter (and former railway president) Bancroft Davis included it in his summary – and it has served as faux precedent ever since.  From Mother Jones:

After Santa Clara, federal judges began granting more and more rights to nonliving “persons.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania Coal Co. was entitled to “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment because a state law, designed to keep houses from collapsing as mining companies tunneled under them, limited how much coal it could extract. In 1967 and 1978, businesses prevailed in Supreme Court cases citing the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment as protection against fire and workplace safety inspections.

Corporate lawyers have also taken a shine to the First Amendment. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed with corporations claiming that the state could not limit their political spending in an antitax campaign. Almost two decades later, a federal appellate court struck down a Vermont law requiring that milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be so labeled. Dairy producers had a First Amendment right “not to speak,” the court said. In California, Nike invoked the First Amendment to fight a lawsuit arguing that the company’s public relations materials misrepresented sweatshop labor conditions.

Most recently, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has relied on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to fight Maryland’s Wal-Mart law, designed to force the company to expand its spending on employee health care. The retail group has also sued Suffolk County, New York, which last fall passed a similar ordinance aimed at nonunionized supermarkets.

Which brings us to last month when the Supreme Court reasserted the application of legal “personhood” to corporations in their ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which overturns previous campaign finance law and grants corporations (and unions) the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence federal elections.

For Chris Hedges, this marks the final nail in the coffin of democracy. We are now living in a state of “Inverted Totalitarianism“. You can find some some more analysis at the SCOTUSblog. (BTW, the “corporation” icon in the image above is taken from the excellent documentary, The Corporation.)

“Detainees” are not persons.

But while the Supreme Court assumes that corporations are included withing the set of “persons”, actual human beings are still being excluded from the category.

The Obama Administration, for example, decided last month to follow the Bush policy of imprisoning detainees without charges, denying them what the 14th Amendment guarantees to all “persons” – not just citizens.  Glenn Greenwald has analysis of this decision here, where he criticizes the hypocrisy of democratic leaders and liberal pundits who were opposed to these measures under Bush – but defend them now that their guy is in charge. Also, he points out the sad irony of the timing of this decision:

“…today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year — an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo — indefinite detention with no charges — will continue indefinitely.”

Keep in mind that these “detainees” are merely terrorism suspects – but many have endured torture and years of imprisonment.  Although torture and imprisonment without trial are clearly unconstitutional, those “people” who ordered and legally justified torture brag about their accomplishments, teach at universities and work on their books – without any fear of reprisal.

The US versus THEM mentality that rose from the ashes of 9-11 is still operational under Obama, though it has become more insidious because it appears in intelligent, bipartisan blackface – and therefore now a largely unquestioned feature of “liberal” as well as “conservative” world-views.

Also, it is the perfect mirror of Al-Qaeda’s theological justification for slaughter of civilians – an “American Takfiris”

Homosexuals are people – more or less, sooner or later.

After the 14th Amendment was adopted, there was a wave of marriages between former slaves. But many southern states maintained miscegenation laws which prohibited marriages between the races. It wasn’t until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these laws were declared unconstitutional – again by appealing to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  According to that decision, marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man”.

And yet gay people continue to be denied this right to in all but five of the United States, and the Federal Government does not recognize gay marriage due to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by President Clinton.

The two lawyers on the opposite sides of Bush v. Gore are teaming up to challenge California’s Proposition 8 in Federal Court. You can listen to these strange bedfellows argue the case for marriage equality in an interview with Bill Moyers here. (Moyers, always the seeker of truth, plays devils advocate.)

Also, Gay people still can’t serve openly in the military, also a lingering Clinton policy.  Things look like they are turning around here, however, now that the top defense officials are seeking the end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

INCOHERENT BULLSHIT

December 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

WGP_NobelWhile Nobel Peace prize recipients of the past have used their acceptance speeches to decry war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama attempted to justify it.

The speech has been praised for its “complexity” and for its “confronting the paradoxes” of a pro-war peace prize speech, but there are seven elements of the speech I found to be incoherent, self-contradictory, simple minded, hypocritical or plain dishonest.

1. WAR IS PEACE

The fundamental incoherence is the root claim that “instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” This is false. While it may be true that instruments of war have a role in ACHIEVING peace – by replacing an oppressive order with a more just one, for example – it only does this through a SUSPENSION of peace. That is the force of the activist chant, “No Justice, No Peace!”

An exception can be made, perhaps, in the case of the Cold War. One could argue, for example, that atomic weapons “preserved” the peace through the threat of mutually assured destruction. But Cold War peace was war for the “Third World”, and the arms race has left us with a military-industrial-congressional complex that dictates a hawkish foreign policy which includes the bombing of villagers with remote control robots.

2. NON-VIOLENCE IS NAIVE; NON-VIOLENCE IS NOT NAIVE

But regardless of the efficacy of instruments of war in “preserving” the peace, it should be noted that its potential to achieve peace can also be doubted, as it clearly was by both halves of Obama’s guiding binary “North Star” – Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In a blatant self-contradiction, Obama says that “there is nothing weak – nothing passive – nothing naive – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King” but that at the same time he “cannot be guided by their examples alone” because he “must face the world as it is”.

(For a review of MLK’s reasons for opposing imperial wars, see our first post here.)

3. EVIL IS BAD, mmm’KAY?

And how is the world, really, in Obama’s view? It is the world of Christian mythology, where “evil” exists, evolutionary sciences are ignored, and “man” must struggle with the legacy of Original Sin.

“War, in some form or another, appeared with the first man,” Obama asserts.

Who is he talking about? Adam? Cain? Or are we supposed to think of the opening scene of Kubrick’s 2001?

4. “JUST WAR” SHOULD BE GOVERNED MULTILATERALLY; THE EMPEROR’S UNILATERAL ACTIONS ARE JUST

In any case, for Obama the inevitability of war means that one must strive not to end war, but to make it more just. And this is where another incoherence of the speech emerges. First, Obama touts the role of U.S. in creating the U.N., which he commends as a mechanism “to govern the waging of war.” Then he laments that “this old architecture [i.e., the U.N.] is buckling under the weight of new threats” (never mind that the greatest threat to the U.N. in the past decade has been U.S. refusal to be limited by multilateralism and international law). Then he proceeds to re-assert the Bush doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war: “I – like any other head of state – reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation” against “threats to the American people.”

So, “just war” requires multilateral governance but it is the Emperor’s right to act unilaterally in “defense” of his nation against “terrorists”.

(For a comparison between Obama and FDR on unilateralism, see here. For an academic philosopher’s perspective on how Obama’s war fails all six criteria for a “just war”, see here.)

5. THE UNITED STATES HAS MADE THE WORLD SECURE, EXCEPT FOR A FEW MISTAKES

Here Obama’s geo-political unilateralism merges with his mythology of “good” versus “evil” to produce a thorough U.S. Exceptionalism:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Therefore, according to Obama, each of the following either “underwrote” global security or was merely a “mistake”: the overthrow of democracy in Iran (’53), the Vietnam War (’60-’75), the bombings of Cambodia (’69-’75) and Laos (71-’73), C.I.A support of violent right wing movements in Greece (’47-’49), Guatemala (’54 and ’66), Indonesia (’65), Dominican Republic (’65-66), Chile (’73), Angola (’76 -’92), and Nicaragua (81-90), etc. – not to mention the invasion of Iraq or the torture and rendition programs.

According to Obama, the U.S. has done these things “not because we seek to impose our will” but because of “enlightened self-interest,” and he believes that “the United States must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war.”

6. ALL WHO BREAK INTERNATIONAL LAW MUST BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, EXCEPT FOR U.S. OFFICIALS WHO HAVE BROKEN THE LAW IN THE PAST

Obama’s incapacity for self-reflection (or, less generously, his mendacity) is boundless when it comes to the question of accountability. At every turn, OBAMA’S “Justice” Department has blocked accountability for his predecessor’s torturers and war-starters, but with a straight face he asserts that “those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable” and that “those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted.”

7. WE ALL SHARE A COMMON HUMANITY, EXCEPT FOR AL-QAEDA

Even Obama’s Exceptionalism unravels into incoherence, however. “As the world grows smaller,” Obama muses, ” you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we all basically want the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.” On the other hand, “negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

According to Obama, we all have a “spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.” All of us, that is, except for the “vicious adversary that abides by no rules.”

UNANIMITY

December 10, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, Barbara Lee received death threats and charges of treason for being the only person in Congress to refuse to grant, as she put it, “a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events – anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit.”

“In granting these overly broad powers,” she continued, “the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.”

The exercise of those broad powers have indeed ended many innocent lives and are still quite operational – the current President appealed to them when he announced his latest plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan:

“Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaeda and those who harbored them – an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.”

Lee was that lone voice in opposition to the blank check for Bush and his successors, and is still in office and sticking to her (opposition to) guns – she opposed Obama’s first Afghanistan troop “surge” and is now opposing this latest one as well – even going so far as to sponsor a bill to cut off funding for the war.

Congratulations, Rep. Barbara Lee, TWGP’s Undersung HeroTM of the month!

CONTINUITIES 5

November 23, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

The World’s Got Problems has been careful to document the many ways in which the Obama administration has maintained continuity with its disgraced predecessor.

This continuity continues as Obama:

Much more here, but regarding that last point, the latest episode of Bill Moyer’s show presents audio recordings of telephone conversations between President Johnson and his advisors on whether to escalate the war in Vietnam in the months before the ’64 elections. Actually listen to LBJ struggle with the options, and reluctantly make the tragic choice to bomb and invade.

Update 09/28/09: Obama chooses not join more than 150 countries in signing a land mine ban.  Throw that on the pile too.