So now here we are after years of oppression, invasion, and wholesale slaughter of a nation of people - who have been put in a terrible position by the "powers that be." After the wholesale rape of the country, and now the continued occupation, they want to remove the entire future of Iraq to coddle their overfed crooked corporate children - the oil companies.  After all, they have the "approval" of their puppet government that invites them to do so.

This situation is nothing new, it comes about because of not only the crimes I mentioned above, but because the entire global economic system and mode of commerce and trade are corrupt.  With a dominant few holding the technologies and materials necessary to make Iraqi oil a productive and profitable enterprise. Allowed to strangle building resources, the movement of both materials and product, and the closure of markets to whom they wish to rule by both occupational presence and tyrannical proxies.  So, if you are thinking that it is a set of circumstances out of the control of the hands of humanity that has befallen the Iraqis, and it "has" to be this way - YOU WOULD BE WRONG! This is because this entire global system, which is not wrong because it is merely "global,"  but because it posits the wealth of the many in the hands of the few (which is not true globalism), has caused this collapse that you see today. This is why it is time for a new global vision, where all of humanity may grow, thrive, prosper and not a few corrupt individuals from a few dominant countries that "rule" the world.

SHALL i NAME THAT SYSTEM AND ITS FEW BLOODY ADHERENTS?

"Furious protests threaten to undermine the Iraqi government's controversial plan to give international oil companies a stake in its giant oilfields in a desperate effort to raise declining oil production and revenues.

In less than two weeks, on 29 and 30 June, the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussain Shahristani, will award service contracts to the world's largest oil companies to develop six of Iraq's largest oil-producing fields over 20 to 25 years.

Senior figures within the Iraqi oil industry have denounced the deal. Fayad al-Nema, the director of the South Oil Company, which comes under the Oil Ministry and produces most of Iraq's crude, said on the weekend: "The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years. They squander Iraq's revenues." Mr Nema is reported to have since been fired because of his opposition to the contracts, which he says is shared by many other officials in Iraq's state-owned oil industry. 

The government maintains that it is not compromising the ownership of Iraq's oil reserves – the third largest in the world at 115 billion barrels – on which the country is wholly dependent to fund its recovery from 30 years of war, sanctions and occupation.

But the fall in the oil price over the past year has left the government facing a financial crisis; 80 per cent of its revenues go to pay for salaries, food rations and recurrent costs. Little is left for reconstruction and the government is finding it hard to pay even for much-needed items such as an electrical plant from GE and Siemens.

The development of Iraq's oil reserves is of great importance to the world's energy supply in the 21st century. They may be even larger than Saudi Arabia's, as there was little exploration while Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein. International oil companies are desperate to get their foot in the door.

"Everyone wants to be in Iraq," says Ruba Husari, an expert on Iraqi oil. "Together with Iran, this is the only oil province in the world that has great potential. It is a great opportunity for oil companies because nobody knows the size of Iraq's reserves. Iraq itself needs to know what is under its soil."

But Iraqis are wary of the involvement of foreign oil companies in raising production in super giant fields like Kirkuk and Bai Hassan in the north and Rumaila, Zubair and West Qurna in the south. They suspect the 2003 US invasion was ultimately aimed at securing Western control of their oil wealth. The nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry by Saddam Hussein in 1972 remains popular and the rebellion against the service contracts has been gathering pace all this week.

Parliament is demanding that bidding be delayed. MPs summoned Mr Shahristani, a nuclear scientist imprisoned and tortured under Saddam Hussein, to answer questions about the service contracts and the fall in Iraq's oil production and exports. Jabir Khalifa Kabir, the secretary of parliament's oil and gas committee, says the contracts will "chain the government with complex contractual terms" and will abort South Oil Company's own plans to raise production. The government says the bidding must go ahead.

The contracts are not particularly favourable to the international oil companies. They are rather the outcome of the companies' extreme eagerness to get into Iraq and the government's attempt to obtain expertise and investment without ceding control. The companies will be paid a fee linked to first restoring and then increasing oil output. They will, however, have greater control when there is a second round of bidding for oilfields which have been discovered but not yet developed. Separate again is the question of exploration for as yet undiscovered oil reserves.

Critics of the deal in parliament say that Iraq has already invested $8bn (£4.9bn) in developing its super giant fields. But Mr Shahristani needs $50bn over the next five or six years to raise current production levels from 2.5 million barrels a day of crude and knows the money and expertise can only come from outside Iraq.

The government in Baghdad may be near broke but Iraqis ask whose fault that is. The Oil Ministry, like much of the government, is dysfunctional when it comes to carrying out long-term projects. Mr Shahristani is blamed for poor management skills, though he eloquently defends himself by saying that when he took over the ministry in 2006, he had to cope with attacks by guerrillas who once were blowing up a pipeline every day.

This explains Mr Shahristani's problems in northern Iraq, where the Sunni Arab insurgency of 2003-08 was strong, but not in the far south, where the Shia community is dominant and there was no uprising.

Jabbar al-Luaibi, the former head of the South Oil Company, who battled to maintain oil production in these years, gave a devastating interview detailing the failings of the Oil Ministry to provide the most basic equipment needed to monitor the oil reservoirs.

"It's like driving your car without any indicators on the dashboard," he said, adding that if mismanagement continued in the same way as in the past "who knows, we might have to start importing crude oil".

The Iraqi government made two other mistakes for which it is now paying. It optimistically believed the price of oil would stay high at $140 a barrel. Instead of investing extra revenues by paying for outside expertise and equipment to raise production in the oilfields, it spent the money on raising the pay of government employees and increasing their number.

This increased Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's popularity in the provincial elections in January but left the government short of cash when oil prices collapsed. Prices have risen since then, but not nearly enough to solve the government's problems.

In June 2008 the Iraqi oil industry seemed poised to receive foreign help by signing two-year technical support contracts with oil companies. Control would have remained with Iraq. However, at the last minute, the contracts were cancelled despite being supported by Mr Shahristani and the council of ministers. The reason why this happened explains much about why the state machine is unable to carry out long-term policies. Jobs are allocated to members of political parties regardless of their experience or abilities. After 2003 the Oil Ministry had been the fief of the Fadhila, a Shia Islamic party strong in Basra, and, though it left the government, it never wholly accepted Mr Shahristani as minister.

Showing a certain cheek, Fadhila members – having sabotaged the plan to acquire foreign expertise when money was available to buy it last year – now criticise the government for being forced to accept worse terms because it cannot invest itself.

Many Iraqis will be angered to see their historic oilfields being partially run by foreign companies. But the government believes it has no choice."

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

(thanks Datta, I fogot to mention this originally)

ADMINISTRATIONS CHANGE BUT THE MEGALOMANIACS REMAIN THE SAME

DEADLY RHYTHM

DANCING ON THE BACKS OF THE BRUISED

IS THERE A LEARNING CURVE?

FOLLOW UP ARTICLE

(thanks again Datta)

WHERE HAS YOUR MONEY GONE? IN THE POCKETS OF A FEW

By Chris Hedges

"Did they play Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world's largest ghetto?

What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture—yes, we still torture—only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?

We may thrill to Obama's rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration. The wars of occupation go on or have been expanded. Israel continues to flout international law, gobbling up more Palestinian land and carrying out egregious war crimes in Gaza. Calcified, repressive regimes in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are feted in Washington as allies.

The speech at Cairo University, which usually has trucks filled with riot police outside the university gates and a heavy security presence on campus to control the student body, is an example of the facade. Student political groups, as everyone who joined in the standing ovation for the president knew, are prohibited. Faculty deans are chosen by the administration, rather than elected by professors, "as a way to combat Islamist influence on campus," according to the U.S. State Department's latest human rights report. And, as The Washington Post pointed out,  students who use the Internet "as an outlet for their political or social views are on notice: One Cairo University student blogger was jailed for two months last summer for 'public agitation,' and another was kicked out of university housing for criticizing the government."

The expanding imperial projects and tightening screws of repression lurch forward under Obama. We are not trying to end terror or promote democracy. We are ensuring that our corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive we become. This is the game playing out in the Muslim world.

The Bush White House openly tortured. The Obama White House tortures and pretends not to. Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month's issue of Harper's magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation and force-feeding, continues to be used to break detainees. The president has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept. And the Obama administration has sought to obscure the fate and condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment. It has sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees."

Muslim rage is stoked because we station tens of thousands of American troops on Muslim soil, occupy two Muslim nations, make possible the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, support repressive Arab regimes and torture thousands of Muslims in offshore penal colonies where prisoners are stripped of their rights. We now have 22 times as many military personnel in the Muslim world as were deployed during the crusades in the 12th century. The rage comes because we have constructed massive military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and established basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The rage comes because we have expanded our military empire into neighboring Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It comes because we station troops and special forces in Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And this vast network of bases and military outposts looks suspiciously permanent.

The Muslim world fears, correctly, that we intend to dominate Middle East oil supplies and any Caspian Sea oil infrastructure. And it is interested not in our protestations of good will but in the elemental right of justice and freedom from foreign occupation. We would react, should the situation be reversed, no differently.

The brutal reality of expanding foreign occupation and harsher and harsher forms of control are the tinder of Islamic fundamentalism, insurgences and terrorism. We can blame the violence on a clash of civilizations. We can naively tell ourselves we are envied for our freedoms. We can point to the Koran. But these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.

Obama, whose embrace of American imperialism is as naive and destructive as that of George W. Bush, is the newest brand used to peddle the poison of permanent war. We may not see it. But those who bury the dead do."

(Thanks Datta)

TRUTHDIG ORIGINAL ARTICLE

PEACE BE UPON BARACK

THE TWO FACES OF OBAMA

YOU DON'T FLY TO THE POWER, YOU FIGHT THE POWER

DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT?

I'D RATHER DIE

THIN LINE

SHALL WE CONTINUE?

WITH ATTITUDE

WHAT HAS CONTINUED WITHOUT A PAUSE

(thanks DJ)

" target="_self">*

BEYOND THE SOARING RHETORIC OF OBAMA'S CAIRO SPEECH: A TOXIC INNOCENCE AT HOME - PHIL ROCKSTROH - THOMAS PAINE'S CORNER
(thanks Datta)

"JERUSALEM–The Israeli government has repeatedly announced plans to forge ahead with plans to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank in direct opposition to President Barack Obama's demand for an absolute settlement freeze. On May 27, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leveled strong criticism at Israeli policy, telling reporters that President Barack Obama "wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions." Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev responded by declaring that "normal life" in the settlements would continue, using a phrase that is code for continued construction.

With neither side exhibiting willingness to back down, the stage is set for a contentious clash between Israel and the U.S. over settlement policy. At the center of the maelstrom is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the hawkish Likud Party, who has highlighted his unique understanding of the United States – he is Yale educated and speaks flawless English.  Supporters of the settlement movement are an integral part of his governing coalition. How Netanyahu navigates between his far-right constituency and increasingly insistent demands from Obama will not only determine the fate of his government, but also the fate of Israel's "special relationship" with Washington.

Bibi the Nazi bullshit artist

A gathering of the settlement movement's leading figures in Jerusalem on May 22, documented in this exclusive Mondoweiss report, revealed the unprecedented influence of the settlers on Israeli policy. The event, a ceremony for the presentation of the Moskowitz Foundation Prize for Zionism, was organized and bankrolled by one of Netanyahu's closest confidants and backers, the American casino tycoon Irving Moskowitz. For over a decade, Moskowitz has funneled millions in profits from his California-based Hawaiian Gardens casino, where he has been sued for exploiting undocumented workers, into settlement construction projects in the West Bank, including Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. He has also funded several neoconservative think tanks including a research center named after Netanyahu's brother, Yonatan, who was killed while leading the Entebbe rescue raid in 1976. Moskowitz and Netanyahu have remained close since he established the center.

In 1996, Moskowitz convinced Netanyahu, in his first round as prime minister, to open a tunnel adjacent to the Temple Mount, a controversial act that led to several days of rioting and 70 deaths. Four years later, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the tunnel set off the so-called Al-Aqsa uprising, the opening salvo of the Second Intifada. Now, Moskowitz's imprint on the West Bank's landscape is most clearly reflected in the expansion of the settlement called Kiryat Arba, a hotbed of Orthodox Jewish radicalism located high above the occupied city of Hebron.

Irving Moskowitz, casinos for illegal settlements

Kiryat Arba founder Noam Arnon is the recipient of the 2009 Moskowitz Prize, an honor that included $50,000 in cash. After receiving his prize before a cheering crowd of two thousand settlers, Arnon complained to me, "We think that somehow the Arabs have taken over the international media and the international mood, and they convinced the world to believe that there is a Palestinian people and these people deserve to have a Palestinian state — which is totally untrue."

Moshe Aumann, Nobel Prize for theft theory

Despite the fanaticism of Arnon and his followers, who routinely rampage through Hebron, vandalizing Palestinian homes and attacking local residents (often under the watch of the Israeli army), they are not isolated as a rogue element in Netanyahu's political world. Indeed, several of notables stood on stage to present Arnon with his prize. They included Professor Moshe Aumann, who won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on understanding conflict through game theory, and Uzi Landau, the Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure. (Landau's party, Yisrael Beiteynu, has introduced bills that would compel Arab citizens of Israel to take loyalty oaths and which would criminalize open discussion of what the Palestinians call "Nakbah," or "catastrophe" of Israel's founding). Also in attendance was Benny Begin, a leading Likud member of Knesset and the son of the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister.

Uzi Landau, Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure (that is, Palestinian Destruction)

After the ceremony, Landau mingled easily with settlement leaders, who beseeched him for support. Though Landau's bodyguard attempted to prevent journalists from approaching him, my journalistic colleague  Jesse Rosenfeld managed to ask him about Obama's call for freeze on settlement construction. Visibly irritated by the mention of Obama's demand, Landau issued an unequivocal statement. "Those who say, or are trying to suggest that Arabs can build anywhere and everywhere, and Jews can't –it's something that should be totally rejected.""

Uh-oh, lets not forget baby Benny Begin (Likudnic), chip off the old block

MAX BLUMENTHAL ORIGINAL ARTICLE AND VIDEO

VINTAGE MAX - RAPTURE READY!

MORE MAX - BOMB A GHETTO, RAISE A CHEER

ISRAELI SETTLER SPORT, BEATING ELDERLY PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

ISRAELI SOLDIERS PROTECTING SETTLERS AS THEY ATTACK PALESTINIANS

PALESTINE, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN - WHAT DO THEY ALL HAVE IN COMMON?

BOYCOTT, SANCTION, DIVEST

WHO PROFITS?

"ISRAEL IS DEEPLY SADDENED..." YEAH RIGHT

MAX - HOW I GOT GASSED IN THE WEST BANK - ISRAELIS SHOOTING CHILDREN WITH LIVE BULLETS

ANOTHER DAMNING VIDEO BY MAX (BELOW), THE CONTRAST IS STAGGERING

"The events of the past few days have demonstrated the naked class interests behind the Obama administration's "restructuring" of the auto industry and its plan to throw General Motors into bankruptcy.

On Thursday a group of major bondholders, including some of the largest financial institutions in America, agreed to a Treasury Department's offer to accept a stake of up to 25 percent in GM once the automaker emerges from bankruptcy.

The deal with key bondholders—along with drastic wage and benefit concessions being imposed on GM workers—is part of the administration's plan for the "orderly" bankruptcy of the century-old industrial icon, which includes plans to eliminate a third of its remaining workers and factories, along with hundreds of dealerships.

The bondholders hold about 20 percent of GM's $27 billion in unsecured debt. Given the near collapse of the company, however, their debt cannot fetch more than a few pennies on the dollar in the open market. Nevertheless, they have demanded concession after concession from the US Treasury Department and a massive, publicly financed payoff. Earlier this week, they rejected the administration's offer of a 10 percent share, knowing full well their action would drive the company into bankruptcy and possible liquidation.

The bondholders are made up of several hedge funds and large investment firms specializing in the "distressed debt market," including Fidelity Investments, Research & Management, Loomis, Sayles, the Pacific Investment Management Company and Franklin Resources Inc. According to New York Times business columnist Andrew Sorkin, "G.M. bonds have been changing hands rapidly, suggesting that some hedge funds have been plowing into them, gambling that these investments soon will be worth even more."

In a statement to investors, the financial institutions said the "revised offer" was the "best alternative for bondholders," and added that US Treasury plans to give additional funds to GM, "vastly improving the balance sheet of the company and substantially increasing its equity value." 

Several bondholders are holding out for an even better deal from the bankruptcy judge, while still others reportedly stand to make a profit from the collapse of the company because their investments are protected by credit default swaps with Wall Street insurers.

From the beginning, the Obama administration's intervention in the auto crisis has amounted to another plundering of public assets and assault on the working class. In a watershed event, it is carrying out the quasi-nationalization of the auto industry—taking control of 72.5 percent of GM—in order to protect the interests, not of the workers or society at large, but of the most powerful sections of the financial elite at the expense of the working class.

The achievements won by auto workers over decades of struggle—living wages, medical care, retirement benefits, college education for their children—have long been seen by America's financial elite as an obstacle to its profits. The Obama administration is seeking to use its assault on auto workers to set the stage for a sweeping attack on the jobs and living standards of every section of the working class and thereby organize a "recovery" of the US economy based on austerity and poverty for working people and vastly increased profits for the wealthy.

The filthy character of this entire process is underscored by the role of Steven Rattner, the head of Obama's auto task force, who profited from his investments in Chrysler and GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors. Rattner, a private equity manager whose net worth is estimated to be at least $608 million, held a million dollars in shares of Cerberus Capital Management, which bought Chrysler and GMAC, according to a federal financial disclosure. The Treasury Department claims Rattner has sold any investments that represented a "conflict of interest."

Steven Rattner (above), building 15 mil home in Martha's Vineyard

As head of the task force, Rattner—who owns a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, an airplane and a horse farm—has demanded auto workers accept a massive and permanent reduction in their living standards, including, for example, the immediate elimination of dental and optical care for hundreds of thousands of retired workers and their dependents.

The ruthlessness with which the Wall Street investors defend their interests stands in stark contrast to the manner in which the United Auto Workers has willingly accepted the destruction of GM workers' jobs, living standards and working conditions.

"Faced with this dire situation and realizing failure to meet the government requirements would surely mean the end of General Motors, your bargainers painstakingly put together modifications to the collective bargaining agreement to satisfy the Treasury Auto Task Force," the UAW declared in a summary of its concessions contract. It continued, "We realize the proposed viability plan requires painful, unprecedented sacrifices from UAW members."

The agreement sanctions the destruction of 23,000 of the remaining 62,000 UAW jobs, along with concessions on wages, bonuses, break time, holidays, work rules and retiree medical benefits. These will save the company $1.5 billion and bring labor costs on a par with or below those of nonunion workers at US plants operated by Toyota and other international companies.

Auto workers "get-the-finger"

While the bondholders fight tooth and nail for their interests, the UAW gives away the achievements won by workers through generations of bitter struggle and sacrifice. To understand why this is the case requires more than pointing to the congenital spinelessness and corruption of the UAW officialdom.

Over the last several decades, the UAW apparatus has developed material interests separate from and directly antithetical to those of the workers it claims to represent. The income and assets of the army of functionaries has increased—now totaling $1.2 billion—even as the membership has fallen by two-thirds. In the restructuring of the auto industry the UAW is functioning as an auxiliary of the Wall Street financial institutions and a labor police force to impose the most ruthless conditions of exploitation on its dues-paying "members."

In return, the Obama administration has handed the UAW billions in GM shares, giving the organization up to a 20 percent ownership stake in GM, along with a seat on the corporate board of directors. From this position, the UAW will have a direct financial stake in the further slashing of labor costs in order to boost the value of their shareholdings.

As the UAW contract summary stated, "With a greatly improved balance sheet, as well as with the significant restructuring of business operations, there is a realistic prospect that the stock in the new company will represent significant value in the future."

The starting point of any serious struggle by auto workers is the recognition that the UAW is not a "union" in any meaningful sense of the word, but a corporatist syndicate, which represents social interests that are deeply hostile to those of the workers. The working class not only owes no allegiance to this organization, it has to throw it out of the factories and build new organizations of struggle, based on its own class interests.

The revival of the powerful traditions of class struggle, with which auto workers are historically identified, requires a new political perspective, based on the international unity of the working class, a political break with the Democrats and capitalist politics as a whole and the fight for the socialist reorganization of economic life."

ORIGINAL ARTICLE WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

BECOME ONE

HISTORIC WALK OF THE ATTEMPT TO DESTROY LABOR UNION - IT HAS GROWN TODAY

DECADES INTO SMOKE

DROWNING

IN DEBT AND POWERLESS

THE SUCKER REFRAIN

SOLIDARITY

EDUCATED AND ENSLAVED

HAVE YOU MADE IT YET?

FIGHT FOR SOMETHING BETTER

FORM NEW COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATIONS

(THANKS DATTA)

How likely is that to happen? Even at a moment when the financial crisis is bleeding dry a vast swath of the world's people, when collective anxiety shakes every age, religious, and racial group, and when, as always, the deprivations and burdens are falling most heavily on ordinary working people, the prognosis is uncertain. If he were alive today, Marx would not look to pinpoint exactly when or how the current crisis would end. Rather, he would perhaps note that such crises are part and parcel of capitalism's continued dynamic existence. Reformist politicians who think they can do away with the inherent class inequalities and recurrent crises of capitalist society are the real romantics of our day, themselves clinging to a naive utopian vision of what the world might be. If the current crisis has demonstrated one thing, it is that Marx was the greater realist."

THE ARTICLE - THOROUGHLY MODERN MARX - FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE

THE SOCIALIST REGISTER

BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE UP AGAINST AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE

SOUND THE ALARM AND COME TOGETHER

BECOME ONE



NOW COMES THE BAD PART

Palast on Stevie "The Rat" Rattner.

"While Stevie the Rat sold his interest in the Dog from Hell when he became Car Czar, he never relinquished his post at the shop of vultures called Quadrangle Hedge Fund. Rattner's personal net worth stands at roughly half a billion dollars. This is Obama's working class hero.

If you ran a business and played fast and loose with your workers' funds, you could land in prison. Stevie the Rat's plan is nothing less than Grand Theft Auto Pension.

It doesn't make it any less of a crime if the President drives the getaway car."

I SMELL A RAT
(Thanks Datta)

"So what's wrong with seizing workers' pension fund money in a bankruptcy? The answer, Mr. Obama, Mr. Law Professor, is that it's illegal."

The Torture Memos

These were the most significant revelations, barely reported.

While such testimony about the viciousness and deceit of the administration should indeed be shocking, the surprise at the general picture revealed is nonetheless surprising. A narrow reason is that even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- incidentally, a place that Washington is using in violation of a treaty that was forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons are alleged, but they are hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for secret prisons and rendition, and were fulfilled.

A broader reason is that torture has been routine practice from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and then beyond, as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new Republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Furthermore, torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened US history, much as in the case of other great powers. Accordingly, it is surprising to see the reactions even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: for example, that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for" (Paul Krugman). To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of history.

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task is Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study written in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the US has a "transcendent purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a scrupulous scholar, he recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with the "transcendent purpose" of America.

We should not, however, be misled by that discrepancy, Morgenthau advises: in his words, we should not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it." What actually happened is merely the "abuse of reality." To confound abuse of reality with reality is akin to "the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds." An apt comparison. 

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a book by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the US is "just one great, but imperfect, country among others." Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but regards it as fundamentally mistaken. The reason is Hodgson's failure to understand that "America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward." The American idea is revealed by America's birth as a "city on a hill," an "inspirational notion" that resides "deep in the American psyche"; and by "the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's error is that he is keeping to "the distortions of the American idea in recent decades," the "abuse of reality" in recent years.

Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" of America from its earliest days.

The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation "ordained by God." One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony established its Great Seal. It depicts an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On it are the words "Come over and help us." The British colonists were thus benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is a graphic representation of "the idea of America," from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim il-Sung-style worship of the savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill" while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, leaving a hideous legacy. 

This early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention," to use the currently fashionable phrase, turned out to be very much like its successors, facts that were not obscure to the agents. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru." Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty ... among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement." The merciless and perfidious cruelty continued until "the West was won." Instead of God's judgment, the heinous sins bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American "idea."2

There was, to be sure, a more convenient and conventional version, expressed for example by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who mused that "the wisdom of Providence" caused the natives to disappear like "the withered leaves of autumn" even though the colonists had "constantly respected" them.3

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed individualism and enterprise. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The outcome was hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequaled by any people in the 19th century," and urged that it is "not to be curbed now," as the Cubans too are pleading with us to come over and help them.4 Their plea was answered. The US sent troops, thereby preventing Cuba's liberation from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony, as it remained until 1959.

The "American idea" is illustrated further by the remarkable campaign, initiated virtually at once, to restore Cuba to its proper place: economic warfare with the clearly articulated aim of punishing the population so that they would overthrow the disobedient government; invasion; the dedication of the Kennedy brothers to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba (the phrase of historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, who took the task as one of his highest priorities); and other crimes continuing to the present, in defiance of virtually unanimous world opinion.

There are to be sure critics, who hold that our efforts to bring democracy to Cuba have failed, so we should turn to other ways to "come over and help them." How do these critics know that the goal was to bring democracy? There is evidence: so our leaders proclaim. There is also counter-evidence: the declassified internal record, but that can be dismissed as just "the abuse of history."

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898. But that is to succumb to what historian of imperialism Bernard Porter calls "the salt water fallacy," the idea that conquest only becomes imperialism when it crosses salt water. Thus if the Mississippi had resembled the Irish Sea, Western expansion would have been imperialism. From Washington to Lodge, those engaged in the enterprise had a clearer grasp.

After the success of humanitarian intervention in Cuba in 1898, the next step in the mission assigned by Providence was to confer "the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples" of the Philippines (in the words of the platform of Lodge's Republican party) -- at least those who survived the murderous onslaught and the large-scale torture and other atrocities that accompanied it. These fortunate souls were left to the mercies of the US-established Philippine constabulary within a newly devised model of colonial domination, relying on security forces trained and equipped for sophisticated modes of surveillance, intimidation, and violence.5 Similar models were adopted in many other areas where the US imposed brutal National Guards and other client forces, with consequences that should be well-known.

In the past sixty years, victims worldwide have also endured the CIA's "torture paradigm," developed at a cost reaching $1 billion annually, according to historian Alfred McCoy, who shows that the methods surfaced with little change in Abu Ghraib. There is no hyperbole when Jennifer Harbury entitles her penetrating study of the U.S. torture record Truth, Torture, and the American Way. It is highly misleading, to say the least, when investigators of the Bush gang's descent into the sewer lament that "in waging the war against terrorism, America had lost its way."6

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld et al. did introduce important innovations. Ordinarily, torture is farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their government-established torture chambers. Alain Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out that "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so." Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, "the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed." Obama's ban "doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of 'armed conflict,' which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict ... his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."7

Sometimes engagement in torture is more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter years. Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, and this is commonly improved by murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists, and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.8

These studies precede the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear. And the tendencies continue to the present.

Small wonder that the President advises us to look forward, not backward -- a convenient doctrine for those who hold the clubs. Those who are beaten by them tend to see the world differently, much to our annoyance. 

In March, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama's Department of Justice "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama's campaign promises and earlier stands.10

The case of Rasul v Rumsfeld appears to be following a similar trajectory. The plaintiffs charged that Rumsfeld and other high officials were responsible for their torture in Guantanamo, where they were sent after they were captured by Uzbeki warlord Rashid Dostum. Dostum is a notorious thug who was then a leader of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan faction supported by Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian states, joined by the US as it attacked Afghanistan in October 2001. Dostum then turned him over to US custody, allegedly for bounty money. The plaintiffs claimed that they had traveled to Afghanistan to offer humanitarian relief. The Bush administration sought to have the case dismissed. Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief supporting the Bush position that government officials are not liable for torture and other violations of due process in this case, because the Courts had not yet clearly established the rights that prisoners enjoy.11

It is also reported that Obama intends to revive military commissions, one of the more severe violations of the rule of law during the Bush years. There is a reason. "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies."12 A serious flaw in the criminal justice system, it appears.

There is much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information -- the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986 after shooting down his plane delivering aid to Reagan's contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Rather, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny and poor country under terrorist attack by the global superpower. And Nicaragua should certainly have done the same if they had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then Ambassador in Honduras, later appointed counterterrorism Czar, without eliciting a murmur. Cuba should have done the same if they had been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what victims should have done to Kissinger, Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda far in the distance, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bombs." 

Such considerations, which abound, never seem to arise in public discussion. Accordingly, we know at once how to evaluate the pleas about valuable information.

There is, to be sure, a response: our terrorism, even if surely terrorism, is benign, deriving as it does from the city on the hill. Perhaps the most eloquent exposition of this thesis was presented by New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, a respected spokesman of "the left." America's Watch (Human Rights Watch) had protested State Department confirmation of official orders to Washington's terrorist forces to attack "soft targets" -- undefended civilian targets -- and to avoid the Nicaraguan army, as they could do thanks to CIA control of Nicaraguan airspace and the sophisticated communications systems provided to the contras. In response, Kinsley explained that US terrorist attacks on civilian targets are justified if they satisfy pragmatic criteria: a "sensible policy [should] meet the test of cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end"13 -- "democracy" as US elites determine. His thoughts elicited no comment, to my knowledge, apparently deemed acceptable. It would seem to follow, then, that US leaders and their agents are not culpable for conducting such sensible policies in good faith, even if their judgment might sometimes be flawed.

Perhaps culpability would be greater, by prevailing moral standards, if it were discovered that Bush administration torture cost American lives. That is, in fact, the conclusion drawn by US Major Matthew Alexander [pseudonym], one of the most seasoned interrogators in Iraq, who elicited "the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq," correspondent Patrick Cockburn reports. Alexander expresses only contempt for the harsh interrogation methods: "The use of torture by the US," he believes, not only elicits no useful information but "has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11." From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reason.14 

There is also mounting evidence that Cheney-Rumsfeld torture created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantanamo on the charge of "engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance." He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russian invasion. After four years of brutal treatment in Guantanamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq, and in March 2008 drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and 13 soldiers -- "the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee," the Washington Post reports, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment, his Washington lawyer concludes.15

All much as a reasonable person would expect.

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the "war on terror" that Bush declared after 9/11, a "crime against humanity" carried out with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," as Robert Fisk reported. That crime rendered traditional international law "quaint" and "obsolete," Bush was advised by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, later appointed Attorney-General. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one or another form in commentary and analysis.

The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique, in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact that was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory since the British burned down Washington in 1814. Another unique feature is the scale of terror by a non-state actor. But horrifying as it was, it could have been worse. Suppose that the perpetrators had bombed the White House, killed the president and established a vicious military dictatorship that killed 50-100,000 people and tortured 700,000, set up a huge international terror center that carried out assassinations and helped impose comparable military dictatorships elsewhere, and implemented economic doctrines that destroyed the economy so radically that the state had to virtually take it over a few years later. That would have been a lot worse than 9/11 2001. And it happened, in what Latin Americans often call "the first 9/11," in 1973. The numbers have been changed to per capita equivalents, a realistic way of measuring crimes. Responsibility traces straight back to Washington. Accordingly, the -- quite appropriate -- analogy is out of consciousness, while the facts are consigned to the "abuse of reality" that the na•ve call history.

The reigning doctrine is sometimes called "American exceptionalism." It is nothing of the sort. It is probably close to universal among imperial powers. France was hailing its "civilizing mission" while the French Minister of War called for "exterminating the indigenous population" of Algeria. Britain's nobility was a "novelty in the world," John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India. This classic essay on humanitarian intervention was written shortly after the public revelation of Britain's horrifying atrocities in suppressing the 1857 Indian rebellion. The conquest of the rest of India was in large part an effort to gain a monopoly of opium for Britain's huge narcotrafficking enterprise, by far the largest in world history, designed primarily to compel China to accept Britain's manufactured goods.

Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists who were bringing an "earthly paradise" to China under benign Japanese tutelage, as they carried out the rape of Nanking. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.

As long as such "exceptionalist" theses remain firmly implanted, the occasional revelations of the "abuse of history" can backfire, serving to efface terrible crimes. The My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of the post-Tet pacification programs, ignored while indignation focused on this single crime. Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad -- the FBI-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression, or the bombing of Cambodia, to mention two egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq is a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

1 http://documents.nytimes.com/report-by-the-senate-armed-services-committee-on-detainee-treatment#p=72. Jonathan Landay, "Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link," McClatchy news, April 21. Gordon Trowbridge, "Levin: Iraq link goal of torture," Detroit News, April 22, 2009.

2 Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy (Michigan State, 1967); William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Kentucky, 1992).

3 On the record of Providentialist justifications for the most shocking crimes, and its more general role in forging "the American idea," see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (Cambridge 2007).

4 Cited by Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic (North Carolina, 2009).

5 Ibid. Alfred McCoy, Policing America's Empire (Wisconsin, 2009).

6 McCoy, A Question of Torture (Metropolitan, 2006). Also McCoy, "The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture," http://hnn.us/articles/32497.html. Harbury (Beacon, 2005). Jane Mayer, "The Battle for a Country's Soul," NY Review, Aug. 14, 2008. 7 News and Comment, Jan. 24, 2009, www.allannairn.com.

8 Schoultz, Comparative Politics, Jan. 1981. Herman, in Chomsky and Herman, Political Economy of Human Rights I, ch. 2.1.1 (South End, 1979); Herman, Real Terror Network, 1 (South End, 1982), 26ff.

9 McCoy, "US has a history." Levinson, "Torture in Iraq & the Rule of Law in America," Daedalus, Summer 2004.

10 Greenwald, "Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now," http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/11/bagram/index.html?source=newsletter.

11 Daphne Eviatar, "Obama Justice Department Urges Dismissal of Another Torture Case," Washington Independent, March 12, 2009, http://washingtonindependent.com/33679/obama-justice-department-urges-dismissal-of-another-torture-case.

12 William Glaberson, "U.S. May Revive Guantanamo Military Courts," NYT, May 1, 2009; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02gitmo.html?scp=1&sq=%22military%20commissions%22&st=cse.

13 Kinsley, Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1987.

14 Cockburn, "Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11," Independent, 6 April, 2009.

15 Anonymous (Rajiv Chandrasekaran), "From Captive to Suicide Bomber," WP, Feb. 22, 2009.

16 Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo (Routledge, 1996). Jesse Holland, AP, May 9, 2009. NYT.

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