Tomgram: Glenn Greenwald, How the Rich Subverted the Legal System
By Glenn Greenwald
Posted on October 25, 2011, Printed on October 25, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175458/
What if, last Friday, President Obama had stepped to the podium at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and begun his remarks this way: “Good afternoon, everybody. As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end -- for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world. After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011. Today, I’m here to tell you that I’m breaking that pledge. It will not happen. Instead, I’m leaving 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in that country indefinitely.”
Of course, the president made no such claim (nor, if things had turned out differently in Iraq, would he have done so). Nonetheless, according to news reports, such an outcome -- thousands of American troops in Iraq, possibly for years -- was the administration’s first choice, while military commanders were evidently eager to leave tens of thousands of troops behind. It was the outcome that Washington had been negotiating for and lobbying Iraqi politicians about all year. Because the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to give U.S. troops legal immunity, full withdrawal (with the possibility of reinsertion later) became the administration's default position, and President Obama was left to take unreserved credit for fulfilling an election campaign pledge to bring all U.S. troops home by the end of 2011, the outcome he hadn’t wanted. (“Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year...”) Keep this in mind as well: given the State Department’s militarization there -- it plans to run a mercenary “army” of perhaps 5,000 hired guns from its monster Baghdad embassy in 2012 -- and a recent, little-noted statement by Iraqi cleric and American opponent Muqtada al-Sadr, the American war will not necessarily end next year either.
Mainstream papers reported all this, including the preferred plans for staying in Iraq, even while hailing the president’s decision to leave and keep his pledge, with no hint of the striking hypocrisy involved. (The New York Times front-page headline read: “Last U.S. Soldiers to Exit From Iraq in 2011, Obama Says, Fulfilling Vow to End Eight-Year War -- Dispute With Baghdad Is Cited.”) Whether anyone outside the mainstream media is impressed with this sort of presidential maneuver anymore is an open question. Certainly, Glenn Greenwald wasn’t and that shouldn't surprise anyone. With his scathingly on-target regular columns at Salon.com, it would be no exaggeration to say that Greenwald has had a hand in making many of us immune to American political and financial hypocrisy of every sort.
Now, he’s written a new book, just out today, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, that -- again, who could be surprised? -- is surely the book for the Occupy Wall Street moment in this country. Riveting to read, it’s a must for understanding how immunity and impunity became, economically and legally, a way of life for the Washington and Wall Street elite. Tom
Immunity and Impunity in Elite America
How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land
By Glenn Greenwald
As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.
Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades. As journalist Tim Noah described the process:
“During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth -- the ‘seven fat years’ and the ‘long boom.’ Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20%. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.”
The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1% of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.
In addition, substantial wealth inequality is so embedded in American political culture that, standing alone, it would not be sufficient to trigger citizen rage of the type we are finally witnessing. The American Founders were clear that they viewed inequality in wealth, power, and prestige as not merely inevitable, but desirable and, for some, even divinely ordained. Jefferson praised “the natural aristocracy” as “the most precious gift of nature” for the “government of society.” John Adams concurred: “It already appears, that there must be in every society of men superiors and inferiors, because God has laid in the… course of nature the foundation of the distinction.”
Not only have the overwhelming majority of Americans long acquiesced to vast income and wealth disparities, but some of those most oppressed by these outcomes have cheered it loudly. Americans have been inculcated not only to accept, but to revere those who are the greatest beneficiaries of this inequality.
In the 1980s, this paradox -- whereby even those most trampled upon come to cheer those responsible for their state -- became more firmly entrenched. That’s because it found a folksy, friendly face, Ronald Reagan, adept at feeding the populace a slew of Orwellian clichés that induced them to defend the interests of the wealthiest. “A rising tide,” as President Reagan put it, “lifts all boats.” The sum of his wisdom being: it is in your interest when the rich get richer.
Implicit in this framework was the claim that inequality was justified and legitimate. The core propagandistic premise was that the rich were rich because they deserved to be. They innovated in industry, invented technologies, discovered cures, created jobs, took risks, and boldly found ways to improve our lives. In other words, they deserved to be enriched. Indeed, it was in our common interest to allow them to fly as high as possible because that would increase their motivation to produce more, bestowing on us ever greater life-improving gifts.
We should not, so the thinking went, begrudge the multimillionaire living behind his 15-foot walls for his success; we should admire him. Corporate bosses deserved not our resentment but our gratitude. It was in our own interest not to demand more in taxes from the wealthiest but less, as their enhanced wealth -- their pocket change -- would trickle down in various ways to all of us.
This is the mentality that enabled massive growth in income and wealth inequality over the past several decades without much at all in the way of citizen protest. And yet something has indeed changed. It’s not that Americans suddenly woke up one day and decided that substantial income and wealth inequality are themselves unfair or intolerable. What changed was the perception of how that wealth was gotten and so of the ensuing inequality as legitimate.
Many Americans who once accepted or even cheered such inequality now see the gains of the richest as ill-gotten, as undeserved, as cheating. Most of all, the legal system that once served as the legitimizing anchor for outcome inequality, the rule of law -- that most basic of American ideals, that a common set of rules are equally applied to all -- has now become irrevocably corrupted and is seen as such.
While the Founders accepted outcome inequality, they emphasized -- over and over -- that its legitimacy hinged on subjecting everyone to the law’s mandates on an equal basis. Jefferson wrote that the essence of America would be that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.” Benjamin Franklin warned that creating a privileged legal class would produce “total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections” between rulers and those they ruled. Tom Paine repeatedly railed against “counterfeit nobles,” those whose superior status was grounded not in merit but in unearned legal privilege.
After all, one of their principal grievances against the British King was his power to exempt his cronies from legal obligations. Almost every Founder repeatedly warned that a failure to apply the law equally to the politically powerful and the rich would ensure a warped and unjust society. In many ways, that was their definition of tyranny.
Americans understand this implicitly. If you watch a competition among sprinters, you can accept that whoever crosses the finish line first is the superior runner. But only if all the competitors are bound by the same rules: everyone begins at the same starting line, is penalized for invading the lane of another runner, is barred from making physical contact or using performance-enhancing substances, and so on.
If some of the runners start ahead of others and have relationships with the judges that enable them to receive dispensation for violating the rules as they wish, then viewers understand that the outcome can no longer be considered legitimate. Once the process is seen as not only unfair but utterly corrupted, once it’s obvious that a common set of rules no longer binds all the competitors, the winner will be resented, not heralded.
That catches the mood of America in 2011. It may not explain the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it helps explain why it has spread like wildfire and why so many Americans seem instantly to accept and support it. As was not true in recent decades, the American relationship with wealth inequality is in a state of rapid transformation.
It is now clearly understood that, rather than apply the law equally to all, Wall Street tycoons have engaged in egregious criminality -- acts which destroyed the economic security of millions of people around the world -- without experiencing the slightest legal repercussions. Giant financial institutions were caught red-handed engaging in massive, systematic fraud to foreclose on people’s homes and the reaction of the political class, led by the Obama administration, was to shield them from meaningful consequences. Rather than submit on an equal basis to the rules, through an oligarchical, democracy-subverting control of the political process, they now control the process of writing those rules and how they are applied.
Today, it is glaringly obvious to a wide range of Americans that the wealth of the top 1% is the byproduct not of risk-taking entrepreneurship, but of corrupted control of our legal and political systems. Thanks to this control, they can write laws that have no purpose than to abolish the few limits that still constrain them, as happened during the Wall Street deregulation orgy of the 1990s. They can retroactively immunize themselves for crimes they deliberately committed for profit, as happened when the 2008 Congress shielded the nation’s telecom giants for their role in Bush’s domestic warrantless eavesdropping program.
It is equally obvious that they are using that power not to lift the boats of ordinary Americans but to sink them. In short, Americans are now well aware of what the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, blurted out in 2009 about the body in which he serves: the banks “frankly own the place.”
If you were to assess the state of the union in 2011, you might sum it up this way: rather than being subjected to the rule of law, the nation’s most powerful oligarchs control the law and are so exempt from it; and increasing numbers of Americans understand that and are outraged. At exactly the same time that the nation’s elites enjoy legal immunity even for egregious crimes, ordinary Americans are being subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest penal states, under which they are unable to secure competent legal counsel and are harshly punished with lengthy prison terms for even trivial infractions.
In lieu of the rule of law -- the equal application of rules to everyone -- what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.
The tide that was supposed to lift all ships has, in fact, left startling numbers of Americans underwater. In the process, we lost any sense that a common set of rules applies to everyone, and so there is no longer a legitimizing anchor for the vast income and wealth inequalities that plague the nation.
That is what has changed, and a growing recognition of what it means is fueling rising citizen anger and protest. The inequality under which so many suffer is not only vast, but illegitimate, rooted as it is in lawlessness and corruption. Obscuring that fact has long been the linchpin for inducing Americans to accept vast and growing inequalities. That fact is now too glaring to obscure any longer.
Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator and a current contributing writer at Salon.com. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses. His just-released book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (Metropolitan Books), is a scathing indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
Copyright 2011 Glenn Greenwald
October 24, 2011
9
Hero , Mad Dog, Or Something In-Between?
Muammar Gaddafi: In Memoriam
by FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN
Was he a “mad dog” as Ronald Reagan dubbed him, or “the King of Kings” as some leaders of African nations crowned him, or “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” as he named himself in 1972? Whichever title describes him best, the fact is he was different things to different people, and the murkiness surrounding his character and contributions to Libya or lack thereof remain murky in these days following his assassination. That too , remains murky: did a young Libyan “rebel” shoot him, or was he killed by a Nato airstrike?
“Facts” around the achievements of his socialist policies remain similarly debatable, though reports of the Human Development Index as recently as 2009 gave Libya the highest ranking of all African countries, with a GDP that was fourth highest in the continent. Citizens had access to free health care and education and indeed, from having only one-fifth of its citizens able to read and write before he took power in 1969, at the time of his death, Gaddafi’s policies could boast an 83% literacy rate. His government also handed out 50,000$ to every couple on their marriage to help them secure a home, and bank loans accumulated no interest.
His regime also became known for supporting “terrorism” around the globe (particularly against Israel), and though Libyans were arrested and indicted for the Lockerbie bombing, it has still not been proved that Libya under orders from Gaddafi had anything to do with it, nor why if so.
Meanwhile, his relationships with women—particularly his female bodyguards also known as “amazons” including his Ukrainian nurses—certainly seemed bizarre to say the least, though one of his nurses upon learning of his death claimed she was very saddened by it and by the fact that none of the elite female unit who surrounded him was by his side at the end. The woman, Oksana Balinskaya, also went on to say she and her other colleagues had a “good life” in Libya and that she would like to go back to the country to live once the dust settles. She did not condemn Gaddafi, but said he had been a good boss who paid them well , and that her life in Libya was much better than anything she could look forward to in her native Ukraine. Yet we are told that Gaddafi was a tyrant, who lived a life of immense luxury while his citizens suffered from economic deprivation and political repression , and that Libyans are now “free” and rejoicing after his ignominious end.
So what do all these conflicting accounts add up to? What is the truth? Third world anti-imperialist hero and women’s libber, or rabidly repressive tyrant with a rapacious lust for women?
All I can say is, from my personal viewpoint as the young and idealistic 14 year-old Pakistani girl I was when the dashing Col. Muammar Gaddafi arrived for the 2nd meeting of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) in Lahore, Pakistan, in the spring of 1974 when a whole generation was as green as the grass of Lahore’s numerous parks, the man represented hope for the third world against the imperial West –and what a package that hope came in! He looked good, tall and handsome in his military uniform ( even though we knew better than to trust dictators in the guise of soldiers but we were girls of a certain age after all, and prone to romantic swoons at the figure a young man in uniform cut in front of our dazed eyes!)–and he sounded even better—that potent mix of revolutionary zeal combining the best of Islamic ideals of economic and social justice with the even headier language and concepts of western socialism. We all believed he meant what he said—we so wanted our leaders to stand up against the tyranny of a capitalist world order that was clearly dividing our world into one of haves and another of have-nots. And despite his descent into megalomania and crazy behavior, I ‘d still like to believe he retained some vestiges of that early promise. Yes, he died in a manner unbefitting a hero….but then, he had ceased being that to many in his country. But to others, both within Libya and elsewhere, he encapsulated the image of the resistance fighter, lobbing ill-advised and even insane comments and braggadocio at his militarily superior enemies, someone who some of the time at least, spoke truth to power. And perhaps for that, he paid the price.
FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN is a Professor and University Distinguished Scholar in the Department of English and Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair State University NJ. She is author, most recently, of the controversial memoir, Lahore With Love: Growing up with Girlfriends Pakistani Style (Syracuse University Press 2010; InsanityInk Publications 2011. She can be reached a:khanf@mail.montclair.edu
October 24, 2011
1
by ELIZABETH HELPERN
New York City.
Last Saturday I found myself sitting cross-legged in the middle of Times Square singing peace songs and wondering to what exactly I was committing. Arrest? Pepper spray? Beating? About half an hour earlier I had arrived at what was being called the Occupy Party, meant to imply the fun kind not the political kind. And fun it was, music, costumed stilt walkers, families, tourists. Then, for what reason I still do not understand, the NYPD swarmed in on horses and in riot gear with trucks of metal barricades and began penning people in, block by block.
I think the police action took many by surprise because the day before Occupy Wall Street had celebrated a huge victory when Brookfield Inc., owner of Zuccotti Park, and city officials called off the forced evacuation of the park. The Times Square crowd, now pushed into close quarters by the police barriers, reacted with chants of “this is a peaceful protest” and, as the intimidation increased, “the whole world is watching”.
And so there I sat, not sure how far I was willing to go as a passive resister, but unable to move because I would not be bullied into surrendering my right to peaceful assembly in my own city. I hoped my husband, at his 25th high school reunion that night, would not have to come bail me out. More than that I hoped getting arrested on a Saturday didn’t mean jail until Monday. Fortunately, a legal observer (a volunteer attorney with Occupy Wall Street) spoke with police then relayed the request for us to head out peacefully, which many of us did. Some stayed and about 40 were arrested. Many moved on to Washington Square Park. I went home, admittedly relieved.
It was a huge day for Occupy protesters in Times Square and around the world, and these big days buoy the movement. They make us feel like we are really doing something. They are filmed, photographed and written about on and in every media outlet. But they can’t all be big days. The real game is sustain and maintain. The daily work. It can be boring. Cleaning, preparing food, meetings, meetings, and meetings. You can see it reflected as journalists and bloggers struggle to find new angles on the story.
They often revert to the favorite topic, the constant drumbeat in the background, and not the one downtown residents have been complaining about for a month. The demand for demands. This is just a distraction. It is not for OWS to come up with the solutions. We don’t all agree on solutions and that is fine.
I believe, perhaps foolishly, that some things can still be accomplished through our existing political system, so I continue to work within that framework as well as OWS. The two are not mutually exclusive. I recently volunteered on the campaign of a candidate running for Civil Court Judge. Today I will be volunteering at a political table at Zuccotti Park. There we have petitions against hydrofracking and expiration of the New York State Millionaires Tax. We have voter registration forms. I choose to work in this way, but I will sit in protest in the middle of Times Square if I have to.
I don’t expect or need others to bend to my point of view or to work in the same way I do. It’s not a choice between individualism and socialism. Work on your own and with the collective. Sustain and maintain. Just show up, and remember, every day is not a headline.
Photos by Hillary Atiyeh.
October 24, 2011
20
Worshipping the State
What the Establishment Isn’t Telling You About Libya
by ANTHONY DiMAGGIO
Washington is erupting in euphoria and self-congratulation over Muammar Gaddafi’s death. That celebration was predictably followed by further adulation in our sycophantic press system, which never saw a foreign intervention it didn’t like. The usual propaganda about the United States’ vital role in ending world tyranny and promoting freedom and democracy is repeated ad nauseam, to the delight of the political and economic class.
First came the announcement of President Obama, reported in Reuters, which hailed Gaddafi’s death “as a warning to authoritarian leaders across the Middle East that iron-fisted rule ‘inevitably comes to an end,’ and as vindication for his [Obama’s] cautious strategy toward Libya.”
Editorial celebrations in the elite press quickly followed. Highlighting past charges of terrorism against Gaddafi, the New York Times concluded that the U.S. and its allies “can feel relief and satisfaction in the supporting role they played in ending his horror. Now they have to help and goad Libyans into building a stable and peaceful democracy.” Furthering this paternalistic perspective were the editors of the Washington Post, who thanked Obama for having “rightly” focused on the problem of tracking down loose weapons stockpiles remaining after the fall of Gaddafi’s regime. The Post encouraged Obama to take further actions, as “Libya’s stabilization under a democratic government could help tip the broader wave of change in the Arab Middle East toward those favoring freedom.” Finally, the Los Angeles Times’ editors reminded the Obama administration of the need to “play a constructive role” in post-Gaddafi Libya: “The rebels could not have succeeded without months of relentless NATO airstrikes…[but] a longer term challenge is to establish a democratic and pluralistic society. President Obama said Libya faced a long and winding road to democracy. The United States and its allies can shorten that road by lending expertise to the designers of a new Libyan democracy.”
Buried within the LA Times editorial was the admission that a “deeper U.S. military involvement in Libya” (during the Civil War period earlier this year) seemed beyond the reach of the Obama administration “because no one seemed able to explain why that country was more appropriate for intervention than many other nations ruled by autocrats.” This question is exactly what critical observers should be asking themselves when they hear self-adulating politicians celebrating U.S. “selflessness” and “altruism.”
The blatant hypocrisy of “democratic intervention” in Libya, coupled with U.S. support for brutal dictatorships throughout the rest of the world, is generally not considered a legitimate issue of discussion in U.S. political culture. If this elementary point was discussed, pundits would immediately be forced to acknowledge the United States’ longstanding support for the repressive Saudi regime, which continues to escalate its human rights atrocities.
Consider, for example, the 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Saudi Arabia. HRW condemns Saudi Arabia for pursuing merely “symbolic” reforms in terms of improving “the visibility of women” and establishing basic protections for freedom of expression. The 2011 report highlights a pattern of Saudi abuses that can be described as nothing short of barbaric and medieval. Torture is routinely used to extract “confessions,” while authorities systematically refuse to inform criminal suspects of the charges leveled against them. It is common practice in Saudi Arabia to arrest citizens for criticizing prominent Sunni clerics, while women are treated as legal minors under the guardian system, which refuses to allow them basic rights taken for granted in Western countries. Immigrant workers, who make up half of the country’s work force, are regularly repressed. HRW describes their plight as akin to “slavery-like conditions” – seen most clearly in the “withholding [of] wages” and the “forcing [of many] migrants to work against their will.” Unpaid workers who go on strike to protest their repressive work conditions are summarily deported without hearing or trial. If these transgressions were not enough, the country is a world leader in beheadings, executing nearly 60 people in the first 10 months of 2011 alone, for a variety of unforgivable “offenses” such as being a homosexual, among other transgressions.
The hypocrisy of U.S. policy is quietly acknowledged in reporting from time to time in the mass media. The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported in March 0f 2011 that the U.S. had shifted to promoting “regime alteration” with regard to U.S. autocratic allies in the Middle East, while simultaneously promoting total regime change in the case of Libya and Gaddafi. As the WSJ reported, “the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers” in terms of promoting reform. “The approach has emerged amid furious lobbying of the [Obama] administration by Arab governments, who were alarmed that President Obama had abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and worried that, if the U.S. did the same to the beleaguered king of Bahrain, a chain of revolts could sweep them from power, too, and further upend the region’s stability.”
Of course, propaganda terms like “stability” are regularly employed in the mass media whenever U.S.-friendly dictators are threatened, whereas “stability” is quickly replaced with words like “democracy” and “liberation” whenever enemies of the state are under assault. Such deception, however, is very much necessary for U.S. officials seeking to obscure ongoing U.S. support for repression and deterrence of democratic rights. The case of Bahrain is instructive, as Saudi Arabia was provided with carte blanche support from the U.S. to escalate its massive human rights violations via attacks on Bahraini Shiite protestors. Working closely with Bahrain’s Sunni government, the Saudi-Bahraini repression involved an official ban on the political opposition party, systematic detainment, beatings, and rape of female minors (and others), censorship of the country’s main opposition paper, and even the prosecution of dozens of the country’s top medical professionals, who were charged with the “crime” of providing medical treatment to protesters who were injured by Saudi government forces. Such disgusting behavior is seen as absolutely vital by the U.S., since Bahrain is of vital strategic importance. The country hosts the U.S. Fifth fleet and is geographically situated next to majority Shiite areas in Saudi Arabia, which hold the lion’s share of Saudi oil. If these areas were to fall under independent (non-U.S.) Shiite control, it would pose a major threat to American dominance of the region’s oil reserves. An independent Shiite government in Saudi Arabia would likely move toward strengthening relations with Shiite majority countries such as Iran and Iraq, which are both independent of U.S. control. This nightmare scenario would be (and is) vehemently opposed by the U.S.
Savage repression by U.S. allies is conveniently ignored in editorial narratives that suggest the U.S. is involved in the Middle East simply to promote liberty and democracy. The long U.S. history of acknowledging neocolonial policy concerns is also completely ignored. Journalists benefitted from an extensive policy planning record to draw from, if they had decided to discuss U.S. imperial interests in Libya. Policy motivations – simply put – have long been driven by concern with dominating Middle Eastern oil supplies by force, and with support for repressive, U.S.-friendly regimes in geographic areas (such as North Africa) that are tangential to the Middle East.
With regard to oil concerns, President George H. W. Bush articulated U.S. policy toward the Middle East, explaining in National Security Directive 26 that: “Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to United States national security. The United States remains committed to its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate through the use of military force, against the Soviet Union or any other force with interests inimical to our own.”
The Carter administration – the most “idealist” of the post-World War II presidencies in terms of its rhetoric – openly acknowledged in National Security Directive (NSD) 63 (and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the need to ensure “the availability of oil [from the Middle East] at reasonable prices.” Carter’s administration announced that any “attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force.” This policy of targeting unfriendly governments that reside in regions tangential to the Middle East was further reinforced in other official policy documents. In discussing U.S. policy, the Reagan administration explained in NSD 27 the need “to ensure the U.S. access to foreign energy and mineral forces” as a key aspect of “national security” priorities. Reagan described in NSD 57 that areas tangential to the Middle East, such as north-east Africa remain “important because of its strategic position with respect to the Persian Gulf.” Carter established a similar concern in NSD 63, discussing U.S. interest in dominating Middle Eastern oil as also extending to the “horn of Africa.”
With specific regard to Libya, policy planners envisioned sanctions against Libya within a grander policy agenda. The Reagan administration instated sanctions against Libyan oil in the name of promoting U.S. “national security.” This designation of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi as official enemy of state was largely due to his participation in the non-aligned movement, in addition to his ties to the Soviet Union. In NSD 32, the Reagan administration announced that it would spare no effort in opposing “inefficient economies” – or those challenging U.S. military and capitalist dominance – which were seen as “create[ing] opportunities for Soviet expansion in many parts of the developing world.” Libya was considered to be one such “inefficient” economy.
Of course, Libya’s recent political circumstances saw much destabilization, as related to its civil war. Such instability within “enemy” countries is historically portrayed by U.S. presidents as justification for U.S. intervention. The Reagan administration, for example, spoke of “unstable governments” and “weak political institutions” within geographic areas of strategic importance as posing “threats to U.S. national security,” while the Nixon administration’s planning documents similarly warned of the importance of “maintaining stability” in repressive allied countries (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran) in the name of promoting U.S. geopolitical interests in the Middle East.
Destabilization of Libya posed major risks – direct and indirect – to U.S. regional dominance. As already mentioned, Libya resides at the periphery of a Middle Eastern region that contains the vast majority of the world’s oil resources. More directly, Libya itself holds as much as two percent of world oil reserves; rebellion in Libya threatened to upset the flow of this resource, with up to a million barrels of oil removed from global markets, and with investors increasingly nervous that rebellion could spread to other nearby oil producers such as Algeria. Although Libya produces two percent of all world oil, and exports little of that to the U.S., its oil is of a high quality – which magnifies its importance in the world market. Furthermore, disruptions even in countries with relatively smaller reserves threaten the allied European oil market (countries like Italy and Spain are heavily reliant on Libyan oil). This reliance explains to a large extent strong European and NATO interest in intervening in the Libyan conflict. Historically, the U.S. has retained major interest in disruptions in European economic markets, worrying that such instability might spill over into the increasingly volatile American economy.
None of the above points are addressed in any serious or consistent way in the U.S. media and in political circles. Sadly, the propaganda discussion that passes for “dialogue” on Libya extends little beyond open sycophantic worship of the Obama administration’s “visionary” and “cautious” approach to dealing with the Libya conflict. At most, Republicans criticized Obama for failing to secure Republican support for intervention. However, we shouldn’t let this perverted discussion obscure our understanding of what was really at stake in this conflict. U.S. interests in Libya are no different, strategically speaking, than those throughout the Middle East. The same contempt for democracy drives U.S. foreign policy, regardless of location.
Anthony DiMaggio is the author of numerous books, The Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011 from Monthly Review Press, and other works such as Crashing the Tea Party (2011); When Media Goes to War (2010); and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He has taught American politics and International Relations in Political Science at a number of colleges and universities, and can be reached at: adimag2@uic.edu
October 24, 2011
12
Who Will Have the Last Laugh?
Killing Gaddafi
by DEEPAK TRIPATHI
Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. This verse from the Bible speaks aloud of the manner of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, as well as his brutal killing. It is also a lesson for those who fought Gaddafi. The end of him has left a disturbing trail of savagery, from which the victors have not emerged unscathed. Where Western governments have been complicit and the mainstream media sadly restrained and unchallenging, NGOs have strained their conscience and luck to speak out about reprisals by both sides.
Gaddafi is the second Arab ruler to meet his end as a result of Western intervention in this, so far brief, new century. Unlike Iraq, the Western powers are not in Libya as occupiers in a formal sense. That there are no “boots on the ground” is President Barack Obama’s escape route. However, we know all too well that air power, especially drones, has changed the nature of warfare, making it possible to control territory from the sky. Boots not being there on the ground is irrelevant. Like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in October 2001, the Western powers have National Transitional Council fighters on the ground in Libya. In 1979, they had Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the consequences are all clear before us.
The United States, Britain and France, flying NATO’s flag, embarked on a “humanitarian” bombing mission. Their remit, under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, was to protect civilians in Benghazi, initially by enforcing a no-fly zone. How different does that mission look eight months later? Only a few days ago, the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, visiting Libya, had said, “We hope he [Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon.” How many times have we heard the foreign minister of one country proclaiming that the leader of another be eliminated?
It was an act of incitement by an external power to anti-Gaddafi fighters to hunt him down. It was against United States law which prohibits state-sponsored assassinations, under a 1976 order signed by President Gerald Ford. That order reads: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Further, it was against the Security Council’s authorization for the Libyan mission.
Hillary Clinton’s statement constitutes grounds for her, and possibly President Obama’s, impeachment. But that will not happen under this Congress over a foreign war. Nonetheless, the assassination has ominous implications for the future. As Obama’s reelection in November 2012 approaches, the appetite for war in Washington could turn out to be another blunder with a high price tag. Already, the International Crisis Group, a respected NGO, has warned of repercussions for Africa and of militant Islam.
Writing in the Guardian, the editor of London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Abdel Bari Atwan, said, “Pictures of his final struggle will bolster those who remain Gaddafi loyalists––and make no mistake, there are many who will lament his demise, either out of self-interest or tribal loyalty.”
What happened in the final moments of Gaddafi is worth examining. At the end of the battle for Sirte, NATO planes located a convoy of vehicles in which he was traveling. They bombed the vehicles, killing a large number of people. Gaddafi survived, but his brutal end was near. It is highly likely that NATO informed anti-Gaddafi fighters about his location. Images of his final moments leave no doubt that the 69-year-old former dictator was tortured by a frenzied mob before he died.
Among the crowds on Libya’s streets these days are heavily armed teenagers willing to fight and kill. As the National Transitional Council celebrates “Liberation Day” today, what kind of Libya is in prospect must be a question that haunts not only that country, but the entire region. Meanwhile, the race for lucrative contracts for British companies there has begun. As Gaddafi’s body lay in a meat store at Misrata, in London Defense Secretary Philip Hammond told British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head there to secure business.
Within minutes of the announcement of Gaddafi’s death, leaders in London, Paris and Washington were hailing the event. Outside his official residence in Downing Street, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that he was proud of Britain’s role in Libya, and that “we should all remember Gaddafi’s victims.” Surely we should all remember those, too, who were rendered by the West to the Gaddafi regime to be tortured as part of the “war on terror.” Cameron made no mention of them. President Sarkozy of France called Gaddafi’s death a “major step forward.” Employing his usual rhetoric, President Obama proclaimed that “the dark shadow of tyranny has been lifted.”
According to CBS News, Hillary Clinton shared a laugh on learning about Gaddafi’s death. Her comment, “We came, we saw, he died.” Who will have the last laugh is by no means certain.
Deepak Tripathi is the author of Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books, Incorporated, Washington, D.C., 2011) and Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (also Potomac, 2010). His works can be found at:http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at: dandatripathi@gmail.com.
October 24, 2011
27
The One Per Cent’s New/Old Solution to Economic Crisis
Destroying Estonia
by JEFFREY SOMMERS and MARKKU SIPPOLA
The elite financial press continues to promote their Baltic austerity model. Last month in CounterPunch, Michael Hudson and I showed how Anders Aslund, from the bank-funded Petersen Institute, kicked the snowball down the hill to roll and grow regarding the latest incarnation of the Baltic Tiger myth. Soon, Robert Samuelson and The Washington Post followed Andersen’s lead by peddling poor Latvia as their poster child for austerity’s “triumph.’ Now that Latvia’s “achievements” have been debunked, they have moved on to promote Estonia. This was most recently been done by The Wall Street Journal, where they have rhapsodized over plucky Estonia’s economic brawn, while comments on their blog sites toss “take that, Paul Krugman!” swipes at Keynesians.
Many economists and financial press writers mimic children on amusement park rides. They think their austerity policies are “steering” their vehicle rather than being guided by underlying structural forces. This is only half true in the case of Estonia. I was a featured speaker for a debate with an Eesti Pank (Estonia’s Central Bank) member in debate this past June for a recorded event at Tallinn Technology University. Neoliberals attending gushed like pre-teens at a Justin Bieber concert exalting “how did you do it?” The Bank official refreshingly responded with Baltic modesty, “we were born lucky.” What did he mean? This certainly was not the answer economists wanted! The Bank official cited Estonia’s geography as their fortuitous comparative advantage.
In short, the Estonian “model,” essentially, is to have its capitol, Tallinn, connected to Helsinki by almost 40 ferries a day and be only 18 minutes by helicopter for executives traveling between them. In fact, locals have come to reference Tallinn and Helsinki as simply, “Talsinki.” Thus, for this tiny country of 1.6 million people whose population would only rank as a mid-size metropolitan area in the US, its chief advantage has been to be plugged into one of the world’s most successful social democracies. Finnish and Swedish companies seeking labor on the cheap can simply hop and skip over to Tallinn. Is it because Estonians are more productive that they go there? No. Then why? Lower labor costs, of course. Indeed, Estonians cleverly entice Scandinavian businessmen to come and escape “socialism.” It’s kind of like the excitement of leaving the reliable wife behind for a new tryst. This sometimes has its downsides. Estonians are not always known for their speed. Try calling SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) customer service and you can see this on display as an Estonian call center rep will bureaucratically take you on a tortoise-speed “run” through their system–that said, however, done with the greatest professionalism. If it’s professionalism or high-quality design you want, you can find both in Estonia, but don’t expect speed.
What is the reality of Estonia’s economic model? One, it has US GINI coefficient levels. If you like massive inequality, then you found the right place with Estonia and the Baltics generally. Secondly, they have effervescing unemployment and social pathologies only somewhat mitigated by Estonian labor (and business) exiting to and from the neighboring labor and business markets of Finland.
Indeed, the so-called Estonian “success” has delivered purchasing power rates only a third below Greece’s, even though Estonia sits next to, and is really integrated into, one of the world’s richest purchasing power countries. Linguistically, Estonian and Finnish are mutually understandable. This make for easy penetration of each other’s business and labor markets. Data released by Statistics Estonia on 2009 reveal huge poverty for a European Union country. About 16 per cent of the Estonian population or about 211,000 people lived in relative poverty in 2009. The situation has not got any better in the two subsequent years – and the austerity measures are not likely to make things better. About the only thing good that can be said, is that Estonia’s model has worked better than Latvia, where their austerity and flat taxes have produced an exit of Biblical proportions that threatens to destroy that country.
Paradoxically – but perhaps not surprisingly – Estonia, is the country least resorting to the internal devaluation policy of the Baltics (judged a posteriori). Yet, it is outperforming the other Baltic countries in recovering from the crisis. By this logic, then, if anything, it should be argued that the weaker one implements austerity and internal devaluation the better an economy performs! True, the point of departure has been different in Estonia than in Latvia and Lithuania: Estonia was the economically best off of the Baltics before the crisis. It did not need to rescue failed banks–as Estonia’s financial institutions are all foreign-owned, and thus they have no domestic banks to bailout.
The downside of near total foreign ownership, however, is they have to make all their debt-service payments to foreign nationals in a kind of new debt serfdom reflective of the days of Swedish, German, and Russian feudalism in Estonia, as Michael Hudson has noted.
How much has neighboring social democratic Finland helped Estonians in coping with their problems? The Finns offer lots of short-term jobs in construction, services and other industries. Elaborating further, it is estimated that since the new millennium between 92,000 to 133,000 Estonians worked abroad. This corresponds to 14-19 per cent of the total workforce. Indeed, almost, 3 per cent of the Estonian workforce went to work abroad in 2009 alone. This means that a considerable proportion of the workers have opted for a temporary job abroad – in most cases Finland. There is a clear upward trend with regard to the intentions to emigrate.
In 2006, 26 per cent of working-age Estonians considered emigration, whereas in 2010, no less than 38 per cent contemplated it. But, have migration intentions changed from short-term to longer-term? No less than 13 per cent of the potential emigrants have expressed their desire to leave Estonia permanently. The youngest cohort (the 15-24 years old) in a study by Brit Veidemann showed the most enthusiasm about leaving. One need not elaborate on what this means for a nation already in demographic collapse. It is to be noted that this cohort was least interested in this option in 2006, before austerity was introduced. Yet, a survey conducted in 2009 among Estonian emigrants evidenced that while a quarter of the respondents wanted to return to Estonia, 45 per cent of them intended to stay in the countries to which they escaped.
There is a good deal of grousing on internet chat forums about rotten work conditions and miserly salaries in Estonia. This argument is supported by a survey conducted among Estonians in 2010 concluding that 40 per cent of working-age people were afraid of dismissals, and 49 per cent of them were dissatisfied with promotion and developmental prospects in their work.
In sum, we strongly encourage The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other outlets to stop promoting Estonia and Latvia’s austerity policies as solutions to economic crisis in the US or other European nations. Doing so only reveals why protests have emerged in over 80 countries and in nearly 2000 cities over the increasing dysfunctionality of neoliberal economic policy. To take liberty with Tacitus, “they keep making crises and call it prosperity,” Wall Street and their ideologists are massively out of touch with reality. Their tragic-comedy can no longer be sustained.
It is disingenuous at worst and lazy at best to advocate the United States follow the model of these tiny Baltic states each with less than 2 million people. Do we really want to create even more poverty and unemployment? Where would the 50 million Americans under a Baltic scale austerity regime escape to? Canada? Mexico? The Virgin Islands? Baltic workers have been pushed to flee in massive numbers. We need to get real and recognize both the outright failures of the Baltic austerity solution and the highly specialized environments that their circumscribed successes have produced. Suggesting they are replicable in the US or larger European nations is the height of irresponsibility.
Jeffrey Sommers is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Visiting Faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He can be reached at: Jeffrey.sommers@fulbrightmail.org
Markku Sippola is postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. He has studied labour market regimes, industrial relations and Nordic firms’ investment strategies in Russia and CEE countries. He can be reached at: markku.sippola@uef.fi
October 24, 2011
10
US Troops to Uganda
Another Immoral Adventure
by NICHOLAS KRAMER
“I have authorized a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces… On October 12, the initial team of U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment deployed to Uganda. During the next month, additional forces will deploy… These forces will act as advisors to partner forces that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the LRA [Lord's Resistance Army]… Subject to the approval of each respective host nation, elements of these U.S. forces will deploy into Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” So stated Barack Obama, the elected representative of the American people and the leader of our empire, in a short note to the leaders of the US congress. Thus began yet another immoral military adventure into foreign lands at a time when America itself is crumbling to such an extent that its own citizens have (finally) begun long-term occupations of its cities and towns.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Lord’s Resistance Army is a brutal scourge on the African people. Its members have indeed “murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women, and children in central Africa” as Obama has stated. For example, according to Human Rights Watch, over the course of just four days in 2009, the LRA viciously killed at least 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others (likely for use as child soldiers, sex slaves, and other horrible purposes). Most of those killed (including a three year-old girl and a 72-year old man) were first tied up, then hacked or beaten to death with machetes, axes, or clubs. We should all hope for the end of this organization, and on an individual level do whatever we can to speed its demise.
As an individual, I could choose to travel to central Africa to volunteer as a human shield, standing between the LRA and its victims. Or, as a less extreme option, I could donate my time and/or money to a non-governmental organization that is working to end the violence in the region through capacity-building and demobilization of child soldiers. I could engage in any number of actions as an individual that would be both moral and beneficial to the people of Uganda and other affected countries.
If only we could trust governments to make good and moral decisions that would always reflect what we would do as individuals. Unfortunately for us all, the US government is not known for this, especially when it comes to propping up authoritarian regimes, arming dictators with weapons to use against their own people, and training military-types to more effectively and efficiently torture and otherwise “control” human beings. See, for example, US military “aid” to Afghanistan, Bahrain, Colombia, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Lebanon, Oman, Turkey, and the West Bank/Gaza, all of whom received more than $100 million each just between 2002 and 2004 and tend to be regularly cited by even the US State department for things such as ethnic/minority oppression, oppression of women, threats to civil liberties, child exploitation, religious persecution, and judicial/prison abuses.
The simple truth is that throughout history, violence perpetrated by governments (often against their own people) tends to far outstrip violence perpetrated by non-state actors, including terrorist organizations, rebel groups, and individual criminals. This is not because governments are any less moral than violent non-state actors, but rather because governments have more resources at their disposal with which to wreak their terror.
In his statement celebrating the enactment of the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, Barack Obama commended the government of Uganda “for its efforts to stabilize the northern part of the country” against the LRA and noted that we “have supported regional governments as they worked to provide for their people’s security.” The people of Uganda might wonder exactly when it is that their government is providing for their “security”: is it when Ugandan women are gang raped by members of the military and/or police? Or perhaps it is when state security forces mutilate the genitals of Ugandan men through kicking, beating with sticks, puncturing with hypodermic needles, and tying the penis with wire or weights. These are just a few examples of the “efforts” of the Ugandan government in what Human Rights Watch describes as a “state-sanctioned campaign of political suppression” which includes “illegal and arbitrary detention and unlawful killing/extrajudicial executions, and using torture to force victims to confess to links to the government’s past political opponents or current rebel groups” in its 2004 report State of Pain: Torture in Uganda.
The details of violence and torture are difficult to even read, but it is important to understand exactly what sort of activities our government is supporting in our names. Put yourself, for instance, in Derrick’s shoes – his story was also recounted in the Human Rights Watch report mentioned above. One day in Uganda, Derrick was riding in a bus which was hijacked by five or six armed members of the Ugandan military in civilian clothes. The men pulled two passengers from the bus, executed them, and then asked Derrick if he knew them. When he denied it, they started beating him, shoved a gun into his mouth, then dragged him to the headquarters of the Ugandan military intelligence organization. He was there beaten with an electrical wire and a hammer, cut deeply with a knife across his back, stabbed in his testicles with needles, and finally shocked and burned with electricity before he lost consciousness. He woke up under the steps of a nearby building; his captors apparently had no more use for him.
Now put yourself more realistically in the shoes of his torturers and their employer, the Ugandan government, which Barack Obama commends. Make no mistake: it is they who we support with our “aid” – not Derrick, and certainly not the people of Uganda. Ending the threat to Ugandan civilians posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army is a noble goal (for who and under what authority are separate questions). But at what moral cost do American military personnel “advise” the Ugandan military? When we support brutal governments in foreign countries – be it through aid, training, or troops on the ground – there are real and lasting consequences for the people who live there. There are many reasons to oppose the US incursion into Uganda (the risk of blowback, the chance of escalation, the furtherance of the imperial presidency, the financial cost, the practical fact that we can’t intervene everywhere, and so on), but the most important argument is moral.
In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He was not seeking merely to criticize, but rather to acknowledge the moral hypocrisy of his calls for non-violence in the civil rights movement while implicitly supporting the violent actions of his own government. “For the sake of those boys,” he continued, “for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” For the sake of us all, we cannot be silent now. It is fundamentally immoral to arm, train, or otherwise “advise” any government that engages in torture and/or other forms of repression, no matter who our common enemy may be. As the still-reigning greatest purveyor of violence worldwide, the single most important action the United States government could take against the horrors of the world would be to stop contributing to them. Please join me in demanding an immediate end to US military operations in and aid to the Ugandan government.
Nicholas Kramer is a former associate investigator for an oversight & investigations (O&I) committee in the United States Senate. He no longer lives or works in Washington, D.C. He may be reached through his website at TakingResponsibilityForEmpire.com.
October 24, 2011
56
Reckless Endangerment
Totally Corrupt America
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of the through-going financial fraud that gave us the financial crisis. Taibbi shows that the US “superpower” can match any third world backwater in the magnitude of greed and fraud that is endemic in business and government. Taibbi’s Griftopia was published last year. This year Henry Holt publishers have provided us with Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment.
Morgenson and Rosner tell the story again, but with less drama and provocation. Possibly, it might be more acceptable to those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong.
I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches. To the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless fraud that the US financial sector and its regulators now epitomize.
The financial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw in Alan Greenspan’s theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was made to hold him accountable. It was the intentional result of people motivated by short-term profits who wanted to get theirs and get out.
As Reckless Endangerment shows, fraud characterized every stage of the process from the fraudulent borrower incomes and credit scores that mortgage issuers gave to unqualified buyers, through the securitization of the mortgages and their triple-A investment grade ratings by the rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s especially, but also Moody’s and Fitch) to the investment banks that sold what the banks knew was junk to investors around the world as investment grade securities. Indeed, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously betting against the mortgage derivatives that it was selling to clients.
Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which once considered it a matter of honor to represent the interests of customers, took advantage of the trust that had been built up in the past to commit fraud against customers in order to advance the banks’ short-term profits and the out-sized multi-million dollar managerial bonuses that these fraudulent profits produced.
Morgenson and Rosner provide a number of unique accounts of how those benefitting from fraud were able to defeat laws that were passed that would have held them to account. For example, the state of Georgia passed perfect legislation that held predatory lending to account. William J. Brennan Jr. and Georgia Governor Roy E. Barnes got the Georgia Fair Lending Act through the state legislature. It was a model for other states. As the federal regulators had thrown in the towel, the state laws would have prevent the worst part of the financial crisis, it not prevented the crisis altogether.
The Georgia law only lasted a few months, because the rating agencies saw that their enormous profits from issuing fraudulent investment grade ratings were threatened by the law. The corrupt rating agencies mischaracterized the consumer protection act as a jihad by regulators. Standard & Poor’s declared that it would no longer allow Georgia mortgages to be placed in mortgage securities that it rated.
In other words, Georgia mortgages could no longer be securitized. This announcement banned Georgia mortgage lenders from securitization. Thus, the law was overturned, and fraud ran wild.
These kind of mafia strong-armed tactics in order to protect at all costs the short-term mega-bonuses that drove the totally fraudulent system have never been held accountable or punished. Totally innocent people are held indefinitely and tortured by the US government for no other reason than to convince the gullible public that they are endangered by terrorists, but those who wiped out the home ownership and retirement pensions of millions of Americans now hold high and honorable positions on corporate boards and US regulatory agencies.
Federal regulatory agencies totally failed. Brooksley Born tried to use her statutory authority to regulate over-the-counter derivatives, but she was blocked by the Federal Reserve chairman, the US Treasure secretary, and the SEC chairman and forced to resign. As University of Chicago Nobel economist George Stigler predicted, regulatory agencies are captured by those who are intended to be regulated. This was the case.
Regulators turned a blind eye to obvious criminal fraud, and were rewarded with lucrative positions in the financial community. The same for the US senators and representatives who repealed Glass-Steagal and other financial regulations.
For example, former US senator Phil Gramm who spearheaded the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, the repeal of which set up the financial crisis, was rewarded by being made vice chairman of the mega-bank UBS, a Swiss global financial services company.
What Taibbi, Morgenson and Rosner make clear is that while monster criminals continue to collect their multi-million dollar annual incomes, depressed single mothers, deserted by the men who fathered their child, are sent to prison for having small quantities of illegal drugs to boost their depressed spirits, and their children are put out to adoption.
This is “justice” in America where there is “freedom and democracy.”
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
October 24, 2011
17
Repression into Barbarism
The War on Terror in Australia
by JEFF SPARROW
Footage from the recent police raid on the Occupy Melbourne camp in the city square has been circulating globally: ugly Youtube clips of protesters dragged by the hair, cracked over the head, menaced by dogs and so on.
Why did the conservative lord mayor, Robert Doyle, send in his constabulary to disperse a relatively small and entirely peaceful assembly that could quite easily have been accommodated for the foreseeable future?
In an article for the tabloid Herald Sun, the mayor explained his reasoning.
‘The protest,’ he said, ‘[had] been infiltrated by professionals: what were those knives, hammers, bottles, bricks and fuel for?’
Some took that as merely a clueless affirmation of Doyle’s position on the Occupy percentage scale: he was so thoroughly part of the one percent that he didn’t recognize the implements normal people use when camping.
But there’s a considerably more sinister explanation.
‘Peaceful? Hardly,’ Doyle continued. ‘And how do these protesters explain the knives, hammers, bricks, bottles and flammable liquids that we found in their illegal tent city? What were they for?’
By labelling demonstrators as ‘professionals’, by trumpeting the fearsome arsenal his men had uncovered, Doyle was deliberately invoking the specter of terrorism.
In Australia, the War on Terror has, for the most part, taken place exclusively on our television screens, with the official apologists for Iraq and Afghanistan stressing the necessity for fighting ‘Over There’ precisely so we don’t have to war ‘Over Here’.
But these events provide an illustration of how such conflicts inevitably seep home.
Before 2001, Australian authorities gave a certain institutional recognition of the legitimacy of protest. By rallying regularly, and in large numbers, the social movements of the 1970s established the street march as an accepted facet of the political process. For a while, there was even a tacit agreement (albeit regularly breached) about keeping police off campuses. If the students were marching, well, that was their right, with the universities accepted a degree of disruption in the name of a vibrant political culture.
Those days are well and truly over. The post-9/11 security laws give authorities tremendous powers to use against protesters: during the APEC meetings of 2007, for instance, the NSW government partitioned Sydney into zones and then released a list of people who weren’t permitted into certain areas on the basis not of anything they’d done but on the grounds of what they might do.
In Melbourne, the conservative Liberal Party and the equally conservative Labor Party have been engaged in a law and order bidding, the results of which have manifested in the government’s new ‘public order response team’: essentially, a dedicated anti-protest squad. Even before the assault upon the camp, the policing of Occupy Melbourne was more like the deployment for an international incident (horses, dogs, motorcycles, vans, etc) than a response to a protest of a few hundred people.
Since George Bush explained that you were either with him or with the terrorists, the line between dissent and criminality has been deliberately blurred. We’ve also seen a normalization – indeed, almost a cathectization — of extreme violence.
Occupy Melbourne’s attempts to regroup coincided with local newspapers showcasing images of Muammar Gaddafi’s battered corpse, lovingly reproduced in sufficiently high-resolution so that the bullet wounds to his head could be admired. Once – and not so very long ago either – it was taken for granted that even the vilest criminal deserved due process, that torture and summary executions were barbarous, and that only sociopaths gloated over the bodies of their enemies.
But that’s all so yesterday. These days, footage of a man being kicked and stabbed and dragged off to be shot embarrasses nobody. On the contrary, it’s almost universally accepted as an appropriate backdrop for world leaders to prate about freedom and democracy and humanitarianism.
In that context, it’s no wonder that Doyle feels that Victoria Police did, as he puts it, a ‘magnificent job’. If the protesters were terrorists – ‘professionals’, no less – well, we all know what that follows.
Indeed, the deployment of state violence against anti-corporate protesters provides a happy point of concurrence for neo-conservatives and neo-liberals.
It’s worth recalling that the Melbourne City Square only ever become a public space because the Builders Laborers Federation won a campaign to prevent the council demolishing historic buildings in the area and selling the space to developers.
Because of that victory, the square served, for many years, as a focal point for public assemblies of all kind – until, that is, the early nineties when a right-wing premier sold most of it in one of the privatization sprees that were all the rage back then.
That, then, was the other the justification for the assault on Occupy Melbourne. The camp was, supposedly, interfering with the local businesses — and in today’s world the rights of free enterprise always trump those of free assembly.
Neoliberals might not fetishize violence in the same creepy fashion as their neoconservative brethren but it’s central to their creed that no-one interfere with the sacred workings of the invisible hand. Hence the hostility of a surprising number of establishment ‘progressives’ to the ‘Occupy’ idea: there’s a liberal technocratic mindset for which anti-market protests simply do not compute.
What will happen now?
Organizationally, Doyle’s brutality seems to have given the campaign a shot in the arm, with numbers nearly doubled in the rally the next day. Politically, the Occupy movement in Australia now grapples with all kinds of question about the nature of the state and society.
Whether the camp will be re-established remains to be seen. But the implications of the last week will reverberate on the Australian Left for a long time to come.
Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of Killing: Misadventures in Violence.
October 24, 2011
29
Destroying the Livelihoods of Thirteen Million People
The Myth of Greek Profligacy
by MARSHALL AUERBACK
Historically, Greeks are very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so much. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Germans pick up the tab. This is nonsensical propaganda, designing to justify the continued collective execution being inflicted on Athens for the sins of its fathers and grandfathers. As if Greece is the only country ever to cook its books in the European Union! The heart of the problem is in the antiquated revenue system that supports that state, which results in a budget shortfall consistently about 10 per cent of GDP. The top 20 per cent of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis.
So it’s not a problem of Greek profligates, or an overly generous welfare state, both of which suggest that the standard IMF style remedies being proposed here are bound to fail, as they are doing right now. In fact, given the non-stop austerity being imposed on Athens (which simply has the effect of deflating the economy further and thereby exacerbating the very problem the Greeks are trying to eliminate), the Greeks really are getting close to the point where they should just default and shift the problem back to those imposing the austerity. It can’t be worse than the slow execution they are facing today.
In reality, the Greeks have one of the lowest per capita incomes in Europe (€21,100), much lower than the Eurozone 12 (€27,600) or the German level (€29,400). Further, the Greek social safety nets might seem very generous by US standards but are truly modest compared to the rest of the Europe. On average, for 1998-2007 Greece spent only €3530.47 per capita on social protection benefits–slightly less than Spain’s spending and about €700 more than Portugal’s, which has one of the lowest levels in all of the Eurozone. By contrast, Germany and France spent more than double the Greek level, while the original Eurozone 12 level averaged €6251.78. Even Ireland, which has one of the most neoliberal economies in the euro area, spent more on social protection than the supposedly profligate Greeks.
One would think that if the Greek welfare system was as generous and inefficient as it is usually described, then administrative costs would be higher than that of more disciplined governments such as the German and French. But this is obviously not the case, according to Eurostat. Even spending on pensions, which is the main target of the neoliberals, is lower than in other European countries.
Furthermore, if one looks at total social spending of select Eurozone countries as a per cent of GDP through 2005 (based on OECD statistics), Greece’s spending lagged behind that of all euro countries except for Ireland, and was below the OECD average. Note also that in spite of all the commentary on early retirement in Greece, its spending on old age programs was in line with the spending in Germany and France.
In fact, Greece has one of the most unequal distributions of income in Europe, and a very high level of poverty, as the following table shows. Again, the evidence is not consistent with the picture presented in the media of an overly generous welfare state—unless the comparison is made against the situation in the US.
Of course, these facts don’t matter. The prevailing myth is that Greece is in the words of the FT’s John Authers, “a country that was truly profligate”, with little in the way of data to support that assertion. The country, however, is truly stuck: they can’t devalue, they can’t pay their way, at current prices, and nobody will voluntarily finance them. So they must exit and devalue or drop their domestic prices. The massive default, though inevitable, is just a step along the way.
To make the problem worse, export earnings also seem to face their own structural cap that is consistently exceeded by import spending, which means that the debt that finances the government shortfall is increasingly held abroad. The debt is issued under Greek law, but now it is payable in Euros which Greece is powerless to print. In this sense, ironically, the fiscal crisis is a consequence of Greece’s success, after a long preparation, in joining the European Union, and hence giving up its own currency.
The point is that, if this analysis of the source of the problem is correct, then standard IMF austerity policy is unlikely to do much to help. If the problem is not the level of wages, or the size of the welfare state, then pushing wages down and shrinking the welfare state is not going to do much. Greece, after all, is still a democracy and if one is to judge from the intensifying riots in the country, it is far from clear whether Greece (or any other euro zone member for that matter) is really willing to cut spending and raise taxes rates enough to make a difference. This much is implicitly being conceded by the “Troika” – European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB), which was submitted to the EU Summit yesterday, and will no doubt be a part of the deliberations in the Greek debt restructuring proposals to be hammered out by Oct. 26th.
On the first page of the document is not only a pretty open and blatant admission that expansionary fiscal consolidation (EFC) has proven to be a contradiction in terms, at least in Greece, but there is also a serious policy incompatibility problem, at least over the intermediate term horizon, with efforts at internal devaluation (ID) – that is, attempting nominal domestic private income deflation in order to improve trade prospects when one has a fixed exchange rate constraint.
While they stop short of recognizing that their demands and the actions they have imposed on Greek policymakers are setting off a debt deflation implosion of the Greek economy (never mind rupturing any semblance of a social contract, and ripping the social fabric to shreds as well – this is, after all, the jackboot version of neoliberal “reform” designed to stamp out any last vestige of social democracy and organized labor in the eurozone) this is a very large concession for the Troika to have taken.
To admit that EFC is not working, and that pursuing ID will aggravate matters further, including the ability of Greece to hit fiscal targets, is a fairly large step in the recognition of the reality of the situation. This is not something the faith based neoliberal economists in the Troika organizations are often prone to do. It is not what their incentive structures, formal and informal, tend to encourage them to do.
So why pursue it? Well, let’s face it: this has far less at this stage to do with Greece (even as the prevailing mainstream myth continues to perpetuate the picture of a lazy, unproductive country full of profligates and scroungers), than punishing other potential fiscal recalcitrants. They are scapegoating the Greeks – in order to make sure that should Greece take the rumored “hair cut” on its debt and restructure, the other peripheral countries – especially Italy – won’t get any ideas and be tempted down the same path. This is the strategy to prevent what is euphemistically called the “contagion impact”. In reality, it is also called the principle of collective guilt, destroying the livelihoods of thirteen million people for political reasons. Given their own history, the Germans above all other nations, should understand this phenomenon.
If the prevailing mix of fiscal austerity policies continue, there will be spill-over effects to nations that export to Greece. To be sure, Greece is a tiny market in Euroland, but its fiscal problems are by no means unique. As the bigger economies like Spain and Italy also adopt austerity measures, the entire continent can find government revenue collapsing – even Germany, where economic deceleration has become markedly more noticeable in the past few months. Worse, exports to neighbors will be hurt by reduction of demand. Finally, if austerity succeeds in lowering wages and prices in one nation it can lead to competitive deflation, only compounding the problem as each country tries to gain advantage in order to promote growth through exports. What is most remarkable to us is that the largest net exporter, Germany, does not appear to recognize that its insistence on fiscal austerity for all of its neighbors will cook its own golden egg-laying goose.
Angela Merkel likes to say that no real economic union is possible if one party to the union (Greece) works shorter hours and takes longer holidays than another (Germany). What she should say is that no real economic union is possible if the governing plutocrats of ALL nations (not just the billionaire Greek shipowners who probably have already moved their money offshore, but also wealthy bankers who have suffered no consequence of their own fraudulent and willfully destructive lending practices) consistently evade their fair share of the cost of that party’s own state expenditure, expecting the union either to pay the bill itself, or to force the bottom 80 per cent to pay it.
Greece is not a special case, but rather a case in point of what happens when you impose fiscal consolidation on countries with high private debt to GDP ratios, high desired private net saving rates, and large, stubborn current account deficits. What is needed is a way to redistribute demand toward the trade deficit nations—for example, by having the trade surplus nations spending euros on direct investment in the trade deficit nations. Germany did this with East Germany. Such a mechanism could be set up under the aegis of the European Investment Bank very quickly. Effective incentives to “recycle” current account surpluses in this manner via foreign direct investment, equity flows, foreign aid, or purchases of imports could be easily crafted. If it could be accomplished, it will be a way Greece and the others could become competitive enough to secure their future through higher exports.
Failure to embrace this kind of growth option will ultimately give the Greeks little alternative but to default, leaving the euro zone’s policy makers with an even bigger and costlier mess on their hands. Admittedly, this will not fully solve Greece’s problems as they would like have to leave the euro zone as well and reintroduce the drachma. This would entail capital controls, which will cause people to head for the exits (this is, after all, a country with lots of boats). If they default, it would be more akin to a “Samson moment” for the entire euro zone. Like Samson in his last days, blinded and beaten by the Philistines, Greece is weakened, blind and bound. Default would represent one last defiant burst of strength with which it “pulls down the temple” (in this case the euro zone) via default and takes down everybody. Myth-making at the expense of the Greeks does not serve anybody’s interests, as there will be a cascade of defaults everywhere, and a Soviet style collapse in incomes, hardly an enticing prospect for the global economy. Not an attractive ending, but this is the kind of outcome which the troika’s self-surviving, immoral and cruel policies could lead to. The Greeks, and the vast majority of Europe’s citizens, deserve better.
MARSHALL AUERBACK is a market analyst and commentator. He is a brainstruster for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Intitute. He can be reached at MAuer1959@aol.com
October 24, 2011
11
"Do you think we are the parasites of Europe?"
Fury Mounts Among Greek People
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Athens
Greece last week was paralysed by a 48-hour general strike that began Wednesday and cast doubt on the unpopular government’s ability to implement reforms demanded by the European Union in return for further bailout money.
Black-masked youths hurled chunks of marble and petrol bombs at riot police in front of the parliament building in the centre of Athens. Police responded with stun grenades and tear gas as clashes spread to neighboring streets after mass rallies, where protesters demanded an end to tax rises and salary cuts that they say are reducing them to poverty. Acrid plumes of black smoke rose from blazing bins of uncollected rubbish and mixed with the white clouds of tear gas. Chunks of rock and broken glass littered the streets around the parliament.
“We are going back to the standard of living our grandfathers had,” Eliza Giannakaromi, who was marching with municipal employees, said. “It is happening at every level of society, so the Stelios Georgiou, a garbage collector who was holding a banner near by, said: “We want to kick out this government. I used to earn €1,200 (£1,050) a month and now I get €700. They should go after the tax evaders and not us.”
About 100,000 people marched in Athens. Some of the participants tried to force anybody wearing a hood to take it off, accusing those who refused of being anarchists or undercover police agents. By evening, the street battles had spread down Ermou, a popular shopping street.
But it is dubious if a deeply distrusted government can implement reforms that people see as being dictated by foreign governments and banks.
This loss of sovereignty is deeply felt. A pensioner, who gave his name as Nikos and was waving a large blue-and-white Greek flag, said: “My son goes into the army on Monday and I don’t know whether to be pleased or sad.”
The general strike and the parliamentary vote on reforms demanded by international creditors came before a European Union leaders’ summit, when Greece should receive €8bn – without it, the country will run out of money by November. In parliament the Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told MPs that Greece had no choice but to accept fresh hardships. “We have to explain to all these indignant people who see their lives changing that what the country is experiencing is not the worst stage of the crisis,” he said.
“It is an anguished and necessary effort to avoid the ultimate, deepest and harshest level of the crisis. The difference between a difficult situation and a catastrophe is immense.”
But for many Greeks, the catastrophe has already happened and protests increasingly involve the well-educated middle class. The strike yesterday involved air-traffic controllers, tax officials, pharmacists and doctors – as well as taxi drivers, dock workers and garbage collectors. Schools were closed and hospitals were only open for emergency cases. Every street in Athens has a heap of rotting rubbish on it despite a court order to the public service union to end its strike.
There are increasing doubts among small business people and professionals that severe austerity will achieve anything except push Greece further into a recession. There is also a deep distrust of the political class. Nicolas Kominis, a photographer, said he did not think the government had much choice but to agree to the demands of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
“The problem is that nobody trusts the government or the opposition because people blame them for starting the crisis in the first place,” he said.
The sense that those who caused the crisis are getting away with it is damaging the government. One banner carried at the march yesterday said: “When injustice prevails, then resistance is a duty.” Vasilis Zorbas, a doctor who is Mayor of the Agia Paraskevi district of Athens, said: “The Greeks are unhappy because of the impunity of those who made money at their expense.” He said he had two unemployed children, whose only option may be to emigrate.
A former minister from the ruling Pasok party, who requested anonymity, said: “It is this feeling of a lack of justice that is making people very angry. Everybody knows the names of ministers who helped themselves [to money] and took bribes but nobody touches them.” It is repeatedly alleged that ministers and MPs have not cut their own salaries significantly, though the system of bonuses and allowances is so complex that this is difficult to confirm.
Leaders of the march said that stereotype of Greece’s public sector as being bloated compared to the rest of the European Union is inaccurate. Balasopoulos Themis, the head of the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Employees of Local Government Organisations, said this is propaganda and the often-quoted figure of 768,000 public employees out of a workforce of four million includes the army, the police and even the clergy.
He said that overall the income of his union members has fallen by 40 per cent because of tax increases and salary cuts.
Real reform in Greece is unlikely to come from a government distrusted as self-serving and corrupt; the ex-minister said it did not have the political strength to impose change while facing powerful special interests.Up close, the most striking feature of the reforms being forced on Greece by its international creditors is their destructiveness and futility. The pay cuts, tax rises, cuts and job losses agreed to by parliament in Athens last week will serve only to send the economy into a steeper tailspin, even if it extracted a much-needed €8bn in bailout money from the EU leaders. “Nothing but a lost war could be worse than this situation,” one left-wing ex-minister tells me. “What is worse, no party or political group in Greece is offering real solutions to our crisis.”
On the right, there are similar lamentations. Asked if there is the possibility of a revolution in response to current disasters, Simos Kedikoglou, an MP from the opposition New Democracy party, says, “I wish there could be a revolution.” He argues that a revolution might at least have a sense of purpose and direction but “we are in a state of shock, and the danger, rather, is that we will have a social eruption, because people have lost hope”.
The mass rallies and 48-hour general strike that paralysed Greece last week were a sign of how far Greeks feel the reforms insisted upon by the Troika – the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission – are a recipe for a permanent collapse in living standards. The marches were bigger than before and socially more diverse. Smartly dressed women working for new technology companies and retired bank officials mixed uneasily with garbage and dock workers, but all had a similar complaint: their incomes are being cut past the point where they can make ends meet.
Greeks feel, probably rightly, that the extent of their calamity is not understood in the rest of Europe – or, if it is, is thought to be a richly deserved punishment for greed, laziness and corruption. “Do you think we are the parasites of Europe?” Sophia Giannaka, an MP from the ruling Pasok party asks me, the day after she reluctantly voted for the EU/IMF reforms. She says that Nicolas Sarkozy had told the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, that the Greeks “are the virus that is poisoning Europe”.
Greece is certainly damaged by a perception abroad that borrowed money and EU subsidies have financed a life of self-indulgence. Articles in foreign newspapers about the Greek crisis abound in phrases such as “eye-popping waste” and “bloated workforce”. Kedikoglou reckons that the number of employees dependent on the state is 1.2 million, which should be cut to 600,000, but he is clear that this cannot be done at once.
Down at the union headquarters of the municipal employees – one of the prime targets of the reforms – their combative leader, Themis Basalopoulos, denounces these figures for public service workers as grossly inflated and propagandist. As noted above, he says the number usually quoted, of 780,000 workers, “includes soldiers, policemen and even priests”. He adds that his members’ income is being cut by 40 per cent.
Basalopoulos leads the 22,000 garbage workers in the Athens region, whose strike has left every city street with heaps of rubbish. The government is trying to end the strike by court orders and use of private contractors, but, in a sign of the authorities’ increasing inability to get their way, neither has proved effective.
Below Basalopoulos’s office marchers from every district in Athens assemble behind their banners. Few are in their twenties and many are in their forties and fifties, reflecting that not many Greeks want to be manual workers. A strain on many parents’ incomes is the money spent on extra tuition for their children, to get them to university or to gain professional qualifications. But, as the economy implodes, it is these jobs that are disappearing. “The younger generation don’t have a future,” says Kedikoglou. “They don’t even have a present. Our best minds are going abroad. If I was 25 years old and studying abroad, I would never return to Greece.”
None of these deeply rooted economic and social problems is going to be solved by the Troika’s prescriptions. These may raise taxes and broaden the tax base but, in a deepening recession, the government’s receipts are less than expected. Greece should be trying to attract more tourists, but restaurants are becoming more expensive because of a steep increase in VAT.
There is a further reason why the EU-IMF imposed reforms – tax rises, public-service salary cuts, suspension of collective bargaining, 30,000 public service workers suspended and the tax base broadened – may not herald real change. They are being imposed by the very people whom most Greeks blame for misgoverning the country and benefiting from pervasive corruption. Nobody has been arrested. Ex-ministers live lavishly in Athens’ most luxurious properties. Everybody speaks furiously of the immunity of the political elite.
“A feeling of injustice hangs over Greece and angers Greeks even more than the austerity measures,” says Ms Giannaka. She is visibly uncomfortable with the failure of her own party to punish notorious wrongdoers. She admits that the party “has not been able to create a sense of justice”.
An obvious solution to the government’s lack of legitimacy would be a general election. The opposition complains that Papandreou played down the impending crisis in the last election, in 2009. Furthermore, he is dissolving the welfare state that Pasok itself largely created over the past 30 years. “They are killing their own child,” says Kedikoglou. Ms Giannaka admits, “The socialist dream of Greece in the 1990s has been totally destroyed.”
This leaves the ruling party without much identity and highly unpopular but, with 153 seats out of 300 in parliament, it has every reason to avoid an election.
For the present, the government feebly agrees to everything suggested by the Troika, but implementation is slow and episodic. The government’s own isolation grows and parliament itself was under siege for part of last week. Greeks are still going along with changes that reduce many to poverty in the hope of avoiding total ruin, but don’t see why they should pay up if personal disaster looks inevitable. Why, one politician asks, should “Greeks care if Greece goes bankrupt, if they are already bankrupt themselves?”
Patrick Cockburn is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
October 25, 2011
3
Worst Board Game Ever
Hillary and Qaddafi
by KATHLEEN PEINE
Another Halloween season is upon us, with the scary bloodless dead guy masks, the wild mobs clamoring for goodies, and well heck, that’s just Libya.
I have to say that I’m against the death penalty on principle except when I’m not, but I only consider a select few crimes worthy of that ultimate act. I’ve thought at length about capital worthy offenses….thing like those referencing the song Kumbaya to smear anyone who doesn’t want to chew on live babies, or people from urban areas who pepper their talk or writing with y’alls. One other fairly egregious offence that I hadn’t dreamt up but probably qualifies, would be having a crush on Condoleeza Rice. A rare affliction that I don’t imagine has tripped up too many men over the years.
But I don’t think Gaddafi was executed for a good reason like that.
I’m no expert, but I think being a nonprofit for the shakedown guys with the IMF/World Bank might be bad for longevity, maybe even worse than smoking (meth). I think trying to rally African countries away from debt based spiderwebs might also bring you closer to your waltz with eternity.
Certainly being a colorful despot or a guy with sketchy fashion sense doesn’t preclude you from hugs and photo ops with the sane. Amazing that so many world leaders made it out alive from those handshakes and hugs with the clinically (diagnosed by the media) Batshit Disorder Guy. He’s been in and out of crazy for decades now. He’s fat/ he’s thin/ he’s fat/ he’s thin.
He’s Oprah.
It’s probably not that safe to have nationalized resources, either. I’m telling you, if we don’t sell that Grand Canyon to Megakoch this could happen to all of us.
But anyway, he’s so crazy, they tell us, he even had a wig! It’s not enough to kill you, parade your almost dead body around, and then parade your really dead body around. You need to add “and he was wearing a wig!” They just couldn’t afford him the dignity of being killed on youtube out of a drainage pipe-they had to add that. Next we will hear that he had porno photos of bin Laden in his possession and tattoos of Celine Dion on his ass.
Hillary: “In the library, with a candlestick, by Colonel Mustard…..no, no….wait…. in a drainage pipe, by a mouth foaming mob, in the desert.”
Since it’s all just a funny game, new edition Parker Brothers “Hubris”
I read that the crowd celebrated after his killing by beheading some camels. I didn’t just say that to be a jerk, you know…. the old stand-by insult for people in that region. Just name drop camel and feel superior. You know what I’m talking about. It’s not that. I guess they really did slaughter camels to celebrate. How silly of them to be such clichés.
I can see the history books of the future….the enlightened era of excellence was ushered in by the beheading of camels and the world was set right. Hillary smiled. Will the IMF guy that gets put in power have to pretend to enjoy camel slaughter to fit in like you have to ”just adore” golf when you get promoted over here? Because Hillary really does enjoy the camel slaughter, she wouldn’t have to fake it.
I remember many years ago when Hillary was the demon toast for many up and coming boomers. An older relative of mine even named his dog after her because she was, of course, a cloying beast who was going to give us all healthcare, and by doing so might decrease the pay of said relative. I think naming your dog after her was thought up in the Rush Rooms of the 90s (not to be confused with the Bath Houses of the 90s………well on that I’m not sure, only Dominican boys can be certain with Rush Limbaugh involved). But the bile for Hillary just seems to be gone- which is just nutty. Now is the time to name your dogs after her (but just bad ones). She turned into a true beast, or always was one, I don’t know. I’m just suggesting….if you have a bad dog to name.
Strange times, these– and make sure you enjoy that board game, Hillary. It’s great fun until you lose.
Kathleen Peine writes out of the Central Time Zone in America so please only email during those hours so as not to wake her. She can be reached at: kathypeine@gmail.com
October 25, 2011
29
Who Will Intervene Now?
Lynching Black Africans in Libya
by THOMAS C. MOUNTAIN
Black Libyans by the racist para-militaries who now rule Libya.
Bodies of black men hanging from highways. Bound and tortured bodies of Africans dumped along the roadsides. Am I talking about Libya or Louisiana?
And all under the approving eye of the first Black President of the USA.
The lynching of Africans in Libya has been so bad that African leaders across the continent have been forced to raise their voices in protest. When the President of Nigeria, the USA’s unofficial enforcer in West Africa leads an African wide outcry against the lynching of his citizens in Libya one would assume that it was heard in the Obama White House.
With the murder or expulsion of most of Libya’s African migrant population well on its way came the massacre and ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Black Libyans.
And all the while Barack Obama and his band of criminal cohorts in the western capitals and television news channels strung together words like “pro-democracy”, “freedom fighters” and “liberation” to describe the orgy of looting and lynching being carried out.
When Black Libyans took up arms to defend their families and homes from the Libyan lynch mobs they found themselves the beneficiaries of “pro-democracy” high explosives, delivered from on high by a freedom loving NATO air force.
Bombed from on high, lynched on the ground, the only choice is flee for your lives and that is what hundreds of thousands of Black Libyan have been forced to do.
And all under the approving eye of the first Black President in the White House.
Should we be surprised at such serpentine behavior by the first Black President? Isn’t this the guy who raised over $500 million to help him buy the White House, with $300 million of that from Wall Street?
Isn’t this the guy who surrounded himself before his election with the very worst criminals from the Clinton White house such as Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Gayle Smith and Eric Holder?
But isn’t Barack Obama supposed to know what it’s like to be a black man in America? Didn’t he used to attend a militant black church where the minister preached the Lord’s damnation upon the racist and genocidal rulers of the USA?
The brutal truth is that, like the shepherd’s dog taken as a pup from its mother to suckle at the tit of a sheep, Barack Hussein Obama spent those most critical teenage years being the only black kid in a school of thousands (Note; this writer attended the same school as Barack Obama, Punahou, some half a dozen years before him).
Punahou is one of the most elite schools in the USA, founded in Hawaii by Yankee missionaries who so famously brought the bible and took the Hawaiians land.
Today Punahou’s alumni include names that adorn the headquarters of multinational corporations like Dole Foods.
Barack Obama discovered what the white man wanted to hear from a black boy at an early age and apparently never forgot it.
From Punahou eventually to Harvard, Obama learned what the elite needed to hear if you wanted to get ahead even if it meant black is white, up is down and wrong is right.
So today we have the spectacle of a son of an African, the first Black President in the White house, broadcasting his approval for all the world to see that Libya or Louisiana, if lynching Africans is what it takes, God Bless the USA…and no where else.
Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be contacted at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.
October 25, 2011
1
Arrested at Vatican Square
Challenging the Old Boys Network in the Vatican
by BILL QUIGLEY
We never thought it would end up on a hard wooden bench inside a police station in Piazza Cavour. Maryknoll priest Fr. Roy Bourgeois, young Erin Saiz Hannah of Women’s Ordination Conference in the US and Miriam Duignan from Womenpriests.org from the UK were sitting there when my wife and I arrived. They were being detained by the Rome police.
It started when the Rome police spotted the three women in long white church liturgical garments robes, the man in a roman collar dressed all in black, and their supporters walking several blocks down the middle of Via della Conciliazione directly towards the Vatican, the headquarters of the institutional Roman Catholic Church and the Basilica of St. Peter.
The group sang Alleluias and carried a long purple banner Ordain Catholic Women, a big red and white banner proclaiming God is Calling Women To Be Priests” (in English and Italian), and a black and white Call to Action banner
The group wanted to deliver a petition, printed on pink paper, signed by more than 15,000 people who asked the Vatican not to expel Fr. Roy Bourgeois, 72, from the church for saying that women are called to be priests in the church. Fr. Roy faces expulsion from his Catholic community, Maryknoll, for refusing to recant his belief that women can and should be allowed to become priests. Bourgeois, a decorated Vietnam veteran, has been a faithful member of the Catholic missionary group, Maryknoll, for 44 years. For twenty years, he has worked with School of Americas Watch in the US, a group of thousands who challenge the role of the US military in training human rights abusers among Latin American militaries. Along with the petition was a list of hundreds of priests who asked that Fr. Roy not be expelled just for speaking out about a matter of conscience.
As the tour busses and other traffic veered around the marchers, pedestrians on the street cheered. The huge dome of St. Peter’s Basilica dominates the area which is thronged with pilgrims and tourists, and saturated with souvenir shops and vendors selling religious medals, holy cards, statues, refrigerator magnets, flags, and postcards.
The police presence quickly outnumbered the group and stopped them as they tried to enter Vatican Square.
Protests were not allowed in the Vatican said the police. But we are here to deliver a petition, the group responded. But you are carrying signs said the police. We can put the signs down responded the group. But the women are dressed like priests and that is a protest the police insisted. But we are legitimately ordained priests they told the authorities.
After much back and forth with Vatican authorities the police said Fr. Roy could go into Vatican Square because he was a real priest. When Fr. Roy insisted all the priests, men and women, should be allowed to enter, an undercover policeman violently grabbed the banners away from those peacefully holding them and the authorities arrested Fr. Roy, Erin Saiz Hannah who the police decided organized the event, and Miriam Duignan, who was acting as the translator.
Erin and Miriam were jammed into a police car and with lights flashing and sirens blasting were taken away. Fr. Roy was taken away in another police car.
After several hours’ detention inside the Rome police station, the three were released after they signed statements promising to return to Italy if the investigating magistrate decided to try them on the charges of protesting without a permit. The banners were seized as evidence and not returned.
As the three were released from police custody to cheers from the rest of the group gathered outside the police station, the group insisted the petitions must still be delivered. Ultimately they were delivered to high ranking church official who promised to consider them.
So, who were these people?
Three of women who marched alongside Fr. Roy in priestly garb are members of Roman Catholic Women Priests, an international group of more than a hundred ordained Catholic women priests, deacons and bishops from the US, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Latvia, Scotland, South Africa, and Switzerland. Priests Ree Hudson from St. Louis, and Janice Sevre Duszynska a priest and Deacon Donna Rougeux of Kentucky marched.
The organizers of the march were Women’s Ordination Conference, Call to Action and the international Womenpriests.org. Erin Saiz Hanna and Kate Conmy were there representing Women’s Ordination Conference, a group of thousands of Roman Catholics in the US who have been advocating for women priests since 1974. Nicole Sotelo and others from Call to Action, a 25,000 member organization of Catholic lay people, religious, clergy and bishops working for justice inside and outside the Catholic Church, were present. Therese Koturbash and Miriam Duignan from Canada and the UK represented Womenpriests.org a website in 26 languages with more than 1.5 million visitors annually. Dorothy Irvin, a world renowned biblical scholar, theologian and archeologist shared historical and archeological support for the presence of women priests in the early church. Others who needed to remain anonymous to retain their jobs joined is as well.
The group ended their Roman pilgrimage with a simple rooftop liturgy presided over by the women priests. Bread and wine were shared as people sang “Here I am, Lord.” In the background, the sun was setting both on the great dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and the men inside who think only they run the institutional church.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who also teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at quigley77@gmail.com
