Would the world be better off without religion? That was the topic of a recent debate in the NYU Intelligence Squared series. One of the audience questions concerned the enormous wealth hoarded by churches, which Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza defended as follows:

I think in the case of the Vatican, the wealth of the Vatican is in priceless treasures, tapestries, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, art. Now, let’s remember… it was popes, the Medici popes and so on, who commissioned those paintings. If it wasn’t for Catholicism, we wouldn’t have the Sistine Chapel.

This was the only line of the night that got boos from the audience. It’s easy to see why, since D’Souza was clearly trying hard to overlook the obvious reply: The reason it was the church that commissioned those artworks, and not some other buyer, is because the church had all the money! The great composers, painters and sculptors of the Renaissance worked for whomever could afford to pay them, which is why they often ended up working for the church even when they were notorious freethinkers, as in the case of Giuseppe Verdi. If it wasn’t for Catholicism, we might not have the Sistine Chapel, but it’s a near-certainty that we’d have different artworks, equally majestic and famous, by the same artists. As Richard Dawkins has suggested, wouldn’t you love to hear Beethoven’s “Evolution Symphony”?

I bring this up because, thanks to the Occupy protests, inequality has come to dominate the American political conversation. Poverty and inequality are at their highest levels since the Great Depression, and there’s a growing clamor to raise taxes on the wealthy to provide more opportunity for the rest of us. I think this is an excellent idea, and I’d like to suggest that beside Wall Street bankers and stock traders, there’s another group of the mega-wealthy that’s often overlooked.

Why don’t we consider taxing the churches?

Not all churches or all ministers are rich, but some of them are very rich indeed. And that’s no surprise, because society subsidizes them through a constellation of generous tax breaks that aren’t available to any other institution, even non-profits. For example, religious organizations can opt out of Social Security and Medicare withholding. Religious employers are exempt from unemployment taxes, and in some states, from sales tax. Religious ministers — and no other profession; the law specifies that only “ministers of the gospel” are eligible for this benefit — can receive part of their salary as a “housing allowance” on which they pay no taxes. (Compounding the absurdity, they can then turn around and double-dip, deducting their mortgage interest from their taxes, even when their mortgage is being paid with tax-free money in the first place.) And, of course, churches are exempt from property tax and from federal income tax.

We’re all paying for the special privileges afforded to religion. Your taxes and mine have to be higher to make up the revenue shortfall that the government isn’t taking in because these huge, wealthy churches don’t pay their own way. By some estimates, the property tax exemption alone removes $100 billion in property from U.S. tax rolls. (And it’s not just the big churches where that exemption bites: According to authors like Sikivu Hutchinson, the proliferation of small storefront churches is a major contributor to poverty and societal dysfunction in poor communities, since these churches remove valuable commercial property from the tax base and ensure that local governments remain cash-strapped and unable to provide basic services.) Just about the only restriction that churches have to abide by in return is that they can’t endorse political candidates — and even this trivial, easily evaded prohibition is routinely and flagrantly violated by the religious right.

Combined with a near-total lack of government scrutiny, the privileges granted to religion have enabled megachurch ministers to live fantastically luxurious lifestyles. An investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley in 2009 gave a rare public glimpse of how powerful preachers spend the cash they rake in from their flocks: jewelry, luxury clothing, cosmetic surgery, offshore bank accounts, multimillion-dollar lakefront mansions, a fleet of private jets, flights to Hawaii and Fiji, and most famously in the case of Joyce Meyer, a $23,000 marble-topped commode. Meyer’s ministry alone is estimated to have an annual take of around $124 million.

Most of these Elmer Gantry-types preach a theology called the “prosperity gospel.” The basic idea of this is that God wants to shower you with riches, but only if you first “plant a seed of faith” by giving your church as much money as you possibly can, trusting that God will repay you tenfold. (The typical ask is for 10 percent of your annual income — gross, not net; people who tithe based on their net income hate the baby Jesus.) Naturally, this idea has made some churches very, very rich, while making a large number of poor, desperate people even poorer.

One might think this scam would only work for so long before people start to realize that giving all their money away isn’t making them rich. But the pastors who preach it have a very convenient and clever rationalization: when supernatural wealth fails to materialize, they tell their followers that it must be their own fault, that they’re harboring some secret sin that’s preventing God from fulfilling his promises.

But beyond the prosperity gospel, we’re now witnessing a new and even more brazen idea spreading among the American religious right: that the poor should accept their lot without complaint, and that calling for a stronger social safety net or advocating higher taxes on the rich is committing the sin of envy. For example, here’s Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who’s found a profitable after-prison career as a born-again right-wing pundit, denouncing the poor for wanting a better life for themselves:

Despite this, many people insist on soaking the well-off because… what they want is to see their better-off neighbors knocked down a peg. That’s how envy works.

Thomas Aquinas defined envy as “sorrow for another’s good.” It is the opposite of pity. And it is one of the defining sins of our times.

(I would guess that by Colson’s standard, some of the authors of the Bible would also be committing the sin of envy with their denunciations of the rich.)

The right-wing Family Research Council has also joined in, calling for its followers to pray that God stifles the Occupy Wall Street protests; its president, Tony Perkins, has said that Jesus “endorses the principles of business and the free market”. And then there’s this billboard, which asserts that protesters’ demands for health insurance and higher corporate tax rates violate the biblical commandment against coveting. I would’ve thought this was a bizarre joke if not for the fact that so many powerful right-wing Christians are openly saying the same thing.

On its surface, Christianity seems like the least likely religion for this theology of the rich and powerful to take root. The Bible, after all, denounces wealth and praises poverty in no uncertain terms. In fact, Jesus unequivocally commands that Christians should sell all their possessions, give the money to the poor, and live as wandering mendicant evangelists. The famous analogy about a camel going through the eye of a needle was a parable intended to forcefully make the point that it’s almost impossible for a rich person to get into Heaven — and by the Bible’s standard, millions of modern Christians are very rich indeed:

Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

…Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

–Matthew 19:16-24

In another verse, Jesus tells his followers not to save money or store up possessions, but to travel constantly with no thought for the future, having faith that God will somehow feed and clothe them each day:

“And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?

And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind… But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

–Luke 12:22-31

The Bible goes so far as to say that the first community of Christians weren’t just socialists, but communists:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”

–Acts 2:44-45

By some accounts, this verse is what inspired Karl Marx’s dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Irony of ironies: Communism was espoused in the pages of the Bible!

Of course, these commands are nearly impossible to follow, and that’s precisely the point. In the beginning, Christianity was a small, radical sect whose followers expected the world to end within their own lifetimes. It’s no wonder that they saw no use for earthly possessions. But when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire and began to convert the powerful and the comfortable, this would no longer do. No large, organized religion could possibly thrive on precepts like this, and so they were left by the wayside in the pursuit of worldly riches and imperial grandeur.

This pattern happens over and over: Even when it begins among the poor and disenfranchised, religion almost always ends up being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful and used as a convenient excuse to justify inequality. Nothing is more effective at persuading the poor not to rebel or protest than the belief that, if they stay quiet and compliant, they’ll be rewarded after death. As the columnist Ed Weathers wrote, “If you would have your slaves remain docile, teach them hymns.” And this idea isn’t just prominent in Christianity — we also see it in other religions, like Hinduism, which teaches that people’s social caste is the deserved result of the karma they accumulated in past lives. Obey the rich people in this life, and maybe you’ll be reborn as one of them next time!

The repeated exploitation of religion throughout history to further beat down the downtrodden isn’t just a coincidence. Any belief system which teaches people to fix their gazes on another life can by its nature be leveraged to excuse poverty, oppression, and injustice in this one. When we see wealthy preachers joining hands with wealthy bankers to urge the masses to stop protesting and quietly accept their lot, it shouldn’t be surprising — it’s a reminder of the natural order of things. Both groups are privileged elites whose highest concern, with a few rare and honorable exceptions, is hanging on to that privilege.

There’s a lesson here for the 99 percent of us: If we seek social justice, the only way we’ll ever truly attain it is to overthrow every ideology that promises pie in the sky by and by. As long as our effort is focused, even partially, on another world, it will always be divided and therefore less effective than it could be. (It’s not for nothing that John Lennon put “Imagine no religion” together with “No need for greed or hunger.”) We’ll have real equality and real opportunity when we learn to set aside fantasies of another existence and turn our attention fully to this life and the things of this world, which are the only real or important things.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

Ben Wizner, the litigation director for the ACLU’s national security project, cheerfully admits that its April 2011 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 23 of the very same US State Department diplomatic cables we all read this time last year, when WikiLeaks released them to five newspapers including the Guardian, was “cheeky” – a way to foreground the “absurdity of the US secrecy regime”.

And so it has. Nearly eight months after the original FOIA request, the State Department has finally released … 11 cables. Federal censors have helpfully redacted them, making it easy to see, by a simple act of comparison (which the ACLU performs for us, here), precisely which sections the State Department wants hidden. Missing are a dirty dozen cables the government refused to release – despite those cables having already been leaked, published and analysed in virtually every major national and international media venue – again, because they were classified as secret or deemed to contain sensitive information.

Administration officials unleashed plenty of hyperbole and hysteria when the cables were first published. But it turned out that none of the information in them actually endangered American citizens, allies or informants. They did, however, prove embarrassing for the US and many foreign leaders. Because it turned out that claims about national security were often an excuse to prevent us from seeing our government engaged in unethical, unconstitutional and, sometimes, illegal practices. These ran the gamut from extraordinary renditions, detentions and torture to shaking down other governments in an attempt to influence their political processes and tamper with their criminal justice systems.

We learned that the same Obama administration that had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the Bush torture regime at home had also tried to put its thumbs on the scales of justice in Spain – aggressively attempting to prevent a counter-terrorism judge from trying the senior legal minds of the Bush administration for their part in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

We learned about the US attempt to scuttle the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, the greengrocer mistaken for a senior al-Qaida official. He was kidnapped, tortured, drugged, beaten and thrown into Afghanistan’s CIA-run Salt Pit prison, until – oops – they realised they had the wrong guy and dumped him in the Albanian outback. In public, Munich prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA operatives involved in his abduction and torture, and Angela Merkel’s office called for an investigation. In private, the German justice ministry and foreign ministry both made it clear to the US that they were not interested in pursuing the case, emboldening the US to refuse to arrest or hand over the agents.

If the first part of the ACLU’s agenda in asking for the 23 already-leaked cables is to highlight what it calls a “penchant for excessive secrecy in defiance of all reason”, the second is to spotlight the way in which the Bush and Obama administrations abuse the state secrets privilege to keep illegal programs from being judicially reviewed.

When the ACLU challenged the CIA on behalf of el-Masri in 2005, a judge dismissed the case. The US government did not deny that he was wrongfully kidnapped. Instead, it successfully argued that his case be dismissed because litigation of his claims would expose state secrets and jeopardise American security. This despite the fact that, as el-Masri pointed out, “President Bush has told the world about the CIA’s detention program, and even though my allegations have been corroborated by eyewitnesses and other evidence.”

First the Bush administration and then the Obama administration successfully evoked the state secrets privilege to prevent the ACLU from filing a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc, the folks who helped the CIA fly extraordinary rendition victims to secret sites where they were detained, tortured and interrogated. Again, the government claimed that further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public. And again, it appears to have won.

In the hall of mirrors that the US security regime has become, information that is not officially acknowledged cannot be used to hold government officials responsible in the courts. And an administration that can evade charges of misconduct, including torture, by hiding behind state secrets claims, even when all the details are publicly known, becomes the guardian of its own liability. That’s bad news.

Transparency and accountability are the oxygen of democracy. But don’t hold your breath waiting for this administration to respond to requests for either one.

Nancy Goldstein’s work has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, NPR, Politico, Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Washington Post, where she was an Editor’s Pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

17 December, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Sorman, Libya: It was a warm early Monday morning along the Libyan coast on June 20, 2011.

At approximately 0200 GMT the next day in NATO Headquarters in Brussels and 30 minutes later in its media center in Naples, staffers finished tabulating NATO’s 92nd day of aerial attacks on Libya and began to post the data on its website (www.nato.int).

Twenty four hours earlier an Atlantic Alliance command unit, located approximately 30 miles off the Libyan coast, in a direct line with Malta, and NATO’s targeting unit had signed off on 49 bombing missions for June 20th, the last day of spring and the last day of NATO’s original UN bombing mandate.

The authority for NATO’s bombing, which far exceeded earlier estimates ,killing or wounding of between 90,000-120,000 Libyans and foreigners, and the displacement of more than two million Libyans and foreign workers was claimed from the hastily adopted UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and UNSCR 1973. UN resolutions 1970 & 1973 gave NATO UN Chapter 7 authority to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, initially for 90 days which ironically ended the day before its bombing at Sorman.

The two UN Security Council Resolutions were insisted upon by their main sponsors, France, the UK, Italy and the US who claimed that ”a limited no-fly zone would protect Libya’s civilian population from the wrath of the government of Libya’s leader, Muammar Kaddafi.” NATO requested and was granted two additional 90 days extensions to continue its Libyan mission which gave its air force until the end of 2011 to continue Operation Unified Protector.

It was early Monday morning, June 20, 2011.

Sorman Libya. A quiet and peaceful Libyan town, Sorman is located 45 miles west of Tripoli, near the Mediterranean coast, in the Zawiya District of the Tripolitania region in northwestern Libya. Many of the town’s children grew up exploring the 3rd Century truly magnificent Roman Ruins at nearby Sabratha. Some archaeologists consider Sabratha, located almost in direct line with Rome across the Mediterranean, and built on a high cliff above the sea, as the most complete extant Roman architecture with only a small part of this large Roman city having been excavated. This observer has visited Sabratha a few times since the mid-1980’s and each visit presents more awe. Families from Sorman and nearby villages regularly visit and picnic there.

In the early hours of June 20, 2011 it was dark in Sorman except for some muted half-moon light. A few dim street lights and some partially illumined homes provided some light as residents began to rise and prepare for the Al Fajr (“Dawn”) prayers.

At the homestead of Khaled K. El-Hamedi, the 37 year old President of the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief (IOPCR), one of Libya’s most active social service organizations everyone was asleep following a rambunctious birthday party for his three year old son. The Hamedi family members included Khaled’s three year old son Khweldi, five year old daughter Khaleda, his beautiful pregnant wife Safa, his aunt Najia, and his six year old niece Salam, among others.

At NATO’s Control and Command Center, the 49 bombing missions planned for early morning of June 20, included a target at Sorman, which would push the number of NATO reconnaissance sorties over Libya to 11,930. This number would become 26,500 by midnight on October 31, when NATO would end its air campaign. The days bombing sorties would also bring the tally of rocket and bombing targets to 4,521. This figure would increase to more than 11,781 by late fall, when NATO was instructed to end OUP (Operation Unified Protector).

NATO’s prepares to bomb Dorman’s “command and control center”

Before the bombs were fired at Khaled K. al-Hamedi compound, NATO staff conducted a six step process the first of which was surveillance using the MQ-9 Reaper UAV, which sometimes is also used to fire missiles. Also above Sorman was the Predator drone with full-motion video. During June 19 and the early hours of June 20, the drones locked on the Hamedi homestead target and relayed updated information to NATO’s command center.

The Hamedi home was not what NATO labels a “time-critical target” so there was plenty of time for its staff to transmit information about the site from unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to intelligence analysts. Almost certainly, according to a source at Jane’s Weekly, NATO UAV’s watched the Hamedi compound over a period of days and presumably observed part of the birthday party being held for three old Huweldi, the day before the order to bomb was issued.

NATO Rules of Engagement for Operation United Protector, constitute a set of classified documents which present specific and detailed instructions about what is a legitimate target and who can approve the target, whether pre-planned or “on the fly” when a pilot happens upon a target of opportunity.

The Sorman attack on the Hamedi home was planned as part of what NATO calls its “Joint Air Tasking Cycle (JATC). A target development team put the Hamedi home on the June 20th daily list of targets. The team used a report from NATO intelligence analysts who determined that retired officer Khaled al Huweldi, Hamedi, one of the original members of the Gadhafi led 1969 coup against King Idris in 1969, and a former member of the Al Fatah Revolution’s Revolutionary Command Council was living on the property. His assassination had been ordered by NATO because they hoped to weaken the regime in some way even though the senior Hamedi was retired and had no decision making role in Libya.

On June 19, the day before the bombing attack on the Hamedi family at Sorman, NATO was obliged by its own regulations and by the international law of armed conflict to conduct a “potential for collateral damage review” of this mission.

There is no evidence that this was ever done.

A requested US Congressional NATO Liaison Office review of the Sorman bombing, initially requested from Libya on August 2, was completed in early September 2011 and found no documentary evidence or other indication that Bouchard or anyone in NATO’s Target Selection Unit, evaluated, discussed, or even considered the subject of potential civilian casualties at the Hamedi home in Sorman.

Following Bouchard’s green light to bomb the Hamedi home, the coordinates were fixed at 32°45′24″N 12°34′18″E . Specific aim points on the Hamedi property were chosen and eight bombs and missiles were readied and attached to the strike aircraft.

At Sorman, NATO used a variety of bombs and missiles including the “bunker busting” BLU-109 (Bomb Live Unit) which is designed to penetrate 18 feet of concrete. NATO also used the American MK series of 500 lb, (MK 81) 1000 lb, (MK-82) and the 2000 lb (MK-84) that Israel used so widely during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The MK series and the BLU-109 are reportedly being stockpiled in Israel in preparation for both countries anticipated next war in this region.

Following the infernal at Sorman, NATO denied responsibility but the next day NATO admitted carrying out an air strike somewhere in Sorman but denied that there were civilian deaths even as its drones filmed the scene close up. NATO’s media office in Naples issued a statement claiming “A precision air strike was launched against a high-level command and control node in the Sorman area without collateral damage.” NATO spokespersons also told Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that “the facility was a legitimate military target and that all necessary precautions were taken before conducting the strike which minimized any potential risk of causing unnecessary casualties”.

The official NATO record of its bombing of Libya for June 20, 2011 reads as follows and remains unchanged:

“Allied Joint Force Command NAPLES, SHAPE, NATO HQ.

Over the past 24 hours, NATO has conducted the following activities associated with Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR:

Air Operations Sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 149

Strike sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 52

Key Hits

20 JUNE: In the vicinity of Tripoli: 1 Command & Control Node, 8 Surface-To-Air Missile Launchers, 1 Surface-To-Air Missile Transport Vehicle. In the vicinity of Misratah: 3 Truck-Mounted Guns, 2 Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns, 1 Tank. In the vicinity of Tarhunah: 1 Military Equipment Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Al-Khums: 1 Military Vehicle Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Zintan: 1 Rocket Launcher.”

Oddly, NATO records for June 20th as well as subsequent reports of bombing attacks listed for June 20th and June 21st in its daily logs have never included the bombing attack on Sorman or the attack on the Al-Hamedi residence which indisputably killed 15 civilians.

Just before the bombs hit, eye witnesses, reported seeing red specks in the sky and then flashes of intense light, immediately followed by thunderous ear splitting blasts as eight American bombs and rockets pulverized their neighbors homestead.

In an instant Khaled El-Hamedi’s family was dead. The children were crushed, blown apart or shredded into pieces, along with friends and extended family members who had slept overnight.

Khaled was working late, attending meetings with displaced Libyans driven from their homes and urgently in need of IOPCR help. As he returned home, Khaled saw from his car window the sky light up and heard exploding bombs. He was frozen in horror as entered his property and observed rescue workers frantically digging and futilely trying to move the thick concrete slabs of his home hoping against hope that they would miraculously find survivors.

Libyan government spokesman Mousa Ibrahim announced the death of 15 people, including three children, were killed at Sorman. He slammed the NATO bombing as a “cowardly terrorist act which cannot be justified.” Investigators, who visited Sabratha hospital 10 kilometers from Sorman, saw nine bodies, including three young children. They also saw body parts including a child’s head.

For those who visited the Al-Hamidi family compound back in June following the NATO bombings, as this observer did less than a week after the crime as part of an international delegation, the scene was one of total devastation.

Collapsed and blown apart concrete and tiled homes, small body parts, and bits of family belongings and memorabilia, trees, some blown over, others bending and nearly denuded of their foliage, dead, terrified and dying petting zoo animals, including exotic birds, Ostrich, Deer, small animals and large moose killed or left near death and most in a blind stupor staring blankly from what remained of their shelters while dying of wounds and from trauma.

Outside one of the bombed houses I noticed crushed cartons of spaghetti pasta and cans of tomato sauce, stockpiled for distribution to the needy as part of the work of IOPCR during the summer and in preparation for the coming Holy month of Ramadan observances which included doing and performing charitable works and individual humanitarian acts.

Under growing pressure from the international community including NATO member states, NATO HQ claimed equipment malfunction, missed target, poor intelligence and pilot errors. Finally US Defense secretaries Gates and his replacement, Leon Panetta admitted that NATO lacked effective intelligence on the ground to identify military targets with certainty. Former Defense Secretary Gates, in criticizing NATO’s operation in Libya implied that NATO used a bomb first ask questions later paradigm in Libya. And this appears to have been the case. These excuses in no way absolve NATO and its 28 NATO member states of responsibility.

Canadian Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard insists to this day that only Libya’s military was targeted: “This important strike will greatly degrade Gadhafi regime forces’ ability to carry on their barbaric assault against the Libyan people,” he told the media from his office in Brussels. The civilian deaths at Sorman came just hours after NATO acknowledged that one of its missiles had gone astray early on Sunday, hitting a residential neighborhood of Tripoli.

At the request of Khaled al-Hamedi, himself being sought by Libya’s new government, and aware that I was going to return to Sorman, I felt honored as I made my way to his loved ones gravesites on the family homestead where he and I first met, in order to deliver a message from him to his loved ones.

Picking my way through debris in the dark, under the cold and suspicious eyes of a couple of local militiamen, I stood at the same spot, where on June 27th his family’s freshly dug graves bore witness to what Khaled was describing to our shocked delegation concerning the details of the horror and hellfire that NATO unleashed upon his family.

Back in June I had moved to the rear of our group as Khaled spoke to us about the loss of his babies, his beauties and his precious pregnant wife. I was embarrassed because for some reason, uncontrollable tears would not stop streaming down my face and, despite averting my eyes, I saw that Khaled noticed. I was touched when this young man, to whom I was a total stranger, came to me and put his arm around my shoulder in comfort. Clearly he understood that each of us can feel the pain of others, even of strangers, as well as connect them with our own losses of loved ones in life.

Later, as I learned more about Khaled’s family and saw their most expressive and revealing photos, I came to believe that with respect to the wanton criminal aggression that caused thousands of needless deaths of innocents over the period of nearly nine months against this simple, gentle society, that Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi, and the others slaughtered at Sorman, are forever iconic representatives of all the innocent civilians who were slaughtered in Libya since March 2011.

During my recent visit to Sorman, I stood at the same location as last June. I surveyed the area and then approached the graves of Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi. In the cold darkness, and the piles of rubble still in place,it was eerie

I knelt close, felt a strange source of warmth and looked over my shoulder.

I whispered in the silent night that I had a message from your loving Husband, Father, Uncle and Nephew that he asked me to deliver to you.

I read to them the message entrusted to me. And I left a copy in Arabic, pinned to a bouquet of flowers:

The message read:

“Please say a very big hello to them and tell them I am coming.

Please tell them “I won’t leave you alone

And I miss each of you so very much.”

And please write them each a note.

Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi.

Franklin, Tell them, “You are my life.

You are my love.

I miss you very, very much.

Life without you is so painful, so hard and completely empty.

I won’t stay and live away from you. I promise.

I’ll return and be close to you. Baba will be back.

I love you.

As I made my way back to the main road in search of a taxi, a militiaman stopped me and interrogated me about why I was there, confiscated my camera and ordered me to leave the area at once.

I paused for a moment and looked back toward what had been a loving family home, a petting zoo and bird sanctuary that had delighted the children in this neighborhood.

A little boy and girl, perhaps siblings, maybe six or seven years old, approached me with their Ethiopian nanny and asked: “Wien, (where is) Khaleda? Wien Khweldi? metta yargeoun ila Al Bayt (when will they come home?)

“When will they come home?”

Unable to speak, I kissed and patted their sweet heads and continued on my way.

Khaled K. Al-Hamedi is strong, deeply religious, and fatalistic. He has pledged to family and friends around the world that he will continue his work with the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief in spite of the life shattering loss of his loved ones.

An honorable family, a peaceful and welcoming town, a devastated country, and a shocked and angry international community demand justice from those who sent ‘Unified Protector’ and NATO’s no-fly zone to destroy Libya in order to “protect the civilian population.”

Franklin Lamb is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

This article was reposted from CounterCurrents.org.

by: Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch [3] | News Analysis

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury would have recognized Morris Davis’s problem.

Here’s the First Amendment, in full [4]: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself [5] from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on. In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Now, it also seems to be chipping away at the most basic American right of all, the right of free speech, starting with that of its own employees. As is often said, the easiest book to stop is the one that is never written; the easiest voice to staunch is the one that is never raised.

It’s true that, over the years, government in its many forms has tried to claim that you lose your free speech rights when you, for example, work for a public school [6], or join the military [7]. In dealing with school administrators who sought to silence a teacher for complaining publicly that not enough money was being spent on academics versus athletics, or generals who wanted to stop enlisted men and women from blogging, the courts have found that any loss of rights must be limited and specific. As Jim Webb wrote [8] when still Secretary of the Navy, “A citizen does not give up his First Amendment right to free speech when he puts on a military uniform, with small exceptions.”

Free speech is considered so basic that the courts have been wary of imposing any limits at all. The famous warning [9] by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes about not falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater shows just how extreme a situation must be for the Supreme Court to limit speech. As Holmes put it in his definition: “The question in every case is whether the words used… are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” That’s a high bar indeed.

The Government v. Morris Davis

Does a newspaper article from November 2009, a few hundred well-reasoned words that appeared [10] in the conservative Wall Street Journal, concluding with these mild sentences, meet Justice Holmes’s high mark?

“Double standards don’t play well in Peoria. They won’t play well in Peshawar or Palembang either. We need to work to change the negative perceptions that exist about Guantanamo and our commitment to the law. Formally establishing a legal double standard will only reinforce them.”

Morris Davis got fired from his research job at the Library of Congress for writing that article and a similar letter to the editor [11] of the Washington Post. (The irony of being fired for exercising free speech while employed at Thomas Jefferson’s library evidently escaped his bosses.) With the help of the ACLU, Davis demanded his job back. On January 8, 2010, the ACLU filed [12] a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on his behalf. In March 2011 a federal court ruled [13] that the suit could go forward.

The case is being heard this month [14]. Someday, it will likely define the free speech rights of federal employees and so determine the quality of people who will make up our government. We citizens vote for the big names, but it’s the millions of lower-ranked, unelected federal employees who decide by their actions how the laws are carried out (or ignored) and the Constitution upheld (or disregarded).

Morris Davis is not some dour civil servant. Prior to joining the Library of Congress, he spent more than 25 years as an Air Force colonel. He was, in fact, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo and showed enormous courage in October 2007 when he resigned [15] from that position and left the Air Force. Davis had stated he would not use evidence obtained through torture back in 2005. When a torture advocate was named his boss in 2007, Davis quit rather than face the inevitable order to reverse his position.

In December 2008, Davis went to work as a researcher at the Library of Congress in the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division.  None of his work was related to Guantanamo. He was not a spokesperson for, or a public face of, the library. He was respected at work. Even the people who fired him do not contest that he did his “day job” as a researcher well.

On November 12, 2009, the day after his op-ed and letter appeared, Davis was told by his boss [16] that the pieces had caused the library concern over his “poor judgment and suitability to serve… not consistent with ‘acceptable service’” — as the letter of admonishment he received put the matter.  It referred only to his op-ed and Washington Post letter, and said nothing about his work performance as a researcher. One week later, Davis was fired.

But Shouldn’t He Have Known Better Than to Write Something Political?

The courts have consistently supported the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to use extreme and hateful words, of the burners of books, and of those who desecrate the American flag. All of that is considered “protected speech.” A commitment to real free speech means accepting the toughest cases, the most offensive things people can conceive of, as the price of a free society.

The Library of Congress does not restrict its employees from writing or speaking, so Davis broke no rules. Nor, theoretically at least, do other government agencies like the CIA and the State Department restrict employees from writing or speaking, even on matters of official concern, although they do demand prior review [17] for such things as the possible misuse of classified material.

Clearly, such agency review processes have sometimes been used as a de facto method of prior restraint.  The CIA, for example, has been accused of using indefinite security reviews to effectively prevent a book from being published. The Department of Defense has also wielded exaggerated claims [18] of classified material to block books.

Since at least 1968, there has, however, been no broad prohibition against government employees writing about political matters or matters of public concern.  In 1968, the Supreme Court decided a seminal public employee First Amendment case, Pickering v. Board of Education [19].  It ruled that school officials had violated the First Amendment rights of teacher Marvin Pickering when they fired him for writing a letter to his local paper criticizing the allocation of money between academics and athletics.

A Thought Crime

Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote that Wall Street Journal op-ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen, never mentioning his (unrelated) federal job. The government just did not like what he wrote.  Perhaps his bosses were embarrassed by his words, or felt offended by them. Certainly, in the present atmosphere in Washington, they felt they had an open path to stopping their own employee from saying what he did, or at least for punishing him for doing so.

It’s not, of course, that federal employees don’t write and speak publicly. As long as they don’t step on toes, they do, in startling numbers, on matters of official concern, on hobbies, on subjects of all sorts, through what must be an untold number of blogs, Facebook pages, Tweets, op-eds, and letters to the editor. The government picked Davis out for selective, vindictive prosecution.

More significantly, Davis was fired prospectively — not for poor attendance, or too much time idling at the water cooler, but because his boss believed Davis’s writing showed that the quality of his judgment might make him an unsuitable employee at some future moment. The simple act of speaking out on a subject at odds with an official government position was the real grounds for his firing. That, and that alone, was enough for termination.

As any devoted fan of George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, or Philip K. Dick would know, Davis committed a thought crime.

As some readers may also know, I evidently did the same thing. Because of my book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [20], about my experiences as a State Department official in Iraq, and the articles, op-eds, and blog posts [21] I have written, I first had my security clearance suspended [22] by the Department of State and then was suspended [23] from my job there. That job had nothing to do with Iraq or any of the subjects I have written about. My performance reviews were good, and no one at State criticized me for my day-job work. Because we have been working under different human resources systems, Davis, as a civil servant on new-hire probation, could be fired directly. As a tenured Foreign Service Officer, I can’t, and so State has placed me on indefinite administrative leave status; that is, I’m without a job, pending action to terminate me formally through a more laborious process.

However, in removing me from my position, the document the State Department delivered to me darkly echoed what Davis’ boss at the Library of Congress said to him:

“The manner in which you have expressed yourself in some of your published material is inconsistent with the standards of behavior expected of the Foreign Service.  Some of your actions also raise questions about your overall judgment. Both good judgment and the ability to represent the Foreign Service in a way that will make the Foreign Service attractive to candidates are key requirements.”

There follows a pattern of punishing federal employees for speaking out or whistle-blowing: look at Davis, or me, or Franz Gayl [24], or Thomas Drake [25]. In this way, a precedent is being set for an even deeper cloud of secrecy to surround the workings of government. From Washington, in other words, no news, other than good or officially approved news, is to emerge.

The government’s statements at Davis’s trial, now underway in Washington D.C., do indeed indicate that he was fired for the act of speaking out itself, as much as the content of what he said. The Justice Department lawyer representing the government said [26] that Davis’s writings cast doubt on his discretion, judgment and ability to serve as a high-level official. (She also added that Davis’s language in the op-ed was “intemperate.” One judge on the three-member bench seemed to support the point, saying, “It’s one thing to speak at a law school or association, but it’s quite a different thing to be in The Washington Post.” The case will likely end up at the Supreme Court.

Free Speech is for Iranians, not Government Employees

If Morris Davis loses his case, then a federal employee’s judgment and suitability may be termed insufficient for employment if he or she writes publicly in a way that offends or embarrasses the government. In other words, the very definition of good judgment, when it comes to freedom of speech, will then rest with the individual employer — that is, the U.S. government.

Simply put, even if you as a federal employee follow your agency’s rules on publication, you can still be fired for what you write if your bosses don’t like it. If your speech offends them, then that’s bad judgment on your part and the First Amendment goes down the drain. Free speech is increasingly coming at a price in Washington: for federal employees, conscience could cost them their jobs.

In this sense, Morris Davis represents a chilling precedent. He raised his voice. If we’re not careful, the next Morris Davis may not. Federal employees are, at best, a skittish bunch, not known for their innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. Actions like those in the Davis case will only further deter any thoughts of speaking out, and will likely deter some good people from seeking federal employment.

More broadly, the Davis case threatens to give the government free rein in selecting speech by its employees it does not like and punishing it. It’s okay to blog about your fascination with knitting or to support official positions. If you happen to be Iranian or Chinese or Syrian, and not terribly fond of your government, and express yourself on the subject, the U.S. government will support your right to do it 110% of the way. However, as a federal employee, blog about your negative opinions on U.S. policies and you’ve got a problem. In fact, we have a problem as a country if freedom of speech only holds as long as it does not offend the U.S. government.

Morris Davis’s problem is neither unique nor isolated.  Clothilde Le Coz, Washington director of Reporters without Borders [27], told me earlier this month, “Secrecy is taking over from free speech in the United States. While we naively thought the Obama administration would be more transparent than the previous one, it is actually the first to sue five people for being sources and speaking publicly.”  Scary, especially since this is no longer an issue of one rogue administration.

Government is different than private business. If you don’t like McDonald’s because of its policies, go to Burger King, or a soup kitchen, or eat at home. You don’t get the choice of federal governments, and so the critical need for its employees to be able to speak informs the republic. We are the only ones who can tell you what is happening inside your government. It really is that important. Ask Morris Davis.

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well [21]. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People [20] (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), has recently been published. To read about the grilling he’s gotten from the State Department for his truth-telling, click here [28].

[Note on further readings: You can check out the ACLU’s full-filing text on behalf of Davis by clicking here [29].]

[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, the Department of Defense, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, or authorized this post.]

Reposted from Truth-out.

Perhaps there were truly free markets before the industrial revolution, where townspeople and farmers gathered in a square to exchange livestock, produce and handmade tools. In our modern world, such a market does not exist. Governments set up the rules of the game, and those rules have an enormous impact on our economic outcomes.

In 2007, the year of the crash, the top 1 percent of American households took in almost two-and-a-half times the share of our nation’s pre-tax income that they had grabbed in the 40 years folliwing World War Two. This was no accident – the rules of the market underwent profound changes that led to the upward redistribution of trillions in income over the past 30 years. The rules are set by Congress – under a mountain of lobbying dollars – but they are adjudicated by the courts.

The Supreme Court, with a right-wing majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, has become a body that leans too far toward the “1 percent” to be considered a neutral arbiter. So whether they know all the ins and outs of the court’s profound rightward shift or not, those protesting across the country as part of the Occupy movement are motivated by its corruption as well.

While conservatives constantly rail against judges “legislating from the bench,” it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That’s what a 2005 study by Yale University legal scholar Paul Gewirtz and Chad Golder found. According to the scholars, those justices most frequently labeled “conservative” were among the most likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress, while those most frequently labeled “liberal” were the least likely to do so.

A 2007 study by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein looked at the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies, and found a similar trend. The Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices were again the most likely to engage in this form of “activism,” while the “liberal” justices were most likely to exercise judicial restraint.

The most notorious case of activism by the Roberts court was its ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which overturned key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, rules that kept corporations — and their lobbyists and front groups (as well as labor unions) — from spending unlimited amounts of cash on campaign advertising within 60 days of a general election for federal office (or 30 days before a primary).

At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

To arrive at their ruling, the court’s conservative majority stretched the Orwellian legal concept known as “corporate personhood” to the limit, and gave faceless multinationals expansive rights to influence our elections under the auspices of the First Amendment.

“They wanted to hear the possibility that that’s the way the constitution would read to them,” said Grayson. “So they picked an issue out of the air that nobody had conceived of [as a First Amendment case] because 100 years of settled law meant that corporations cannot buy elections in America, and they not only allowed corporations to buy those elections, but they made it a constitutional right.”

Early on, the plaintiffs themselves had decided not to base their case on the First Amendment. It was the conservative justices themselves who ordered the case re-argued fully a month after a ruling had been expected, asking the lawyers to present the free speech argument they’d earlier abandoned.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens noted that it was a highly unusual move, and that the court had further ruled on a Constitutional issue that it didn’t need to consider in order to decide the case before it — the diametric opposite of the principle of “judicial restraint.” He charged that the conservative majority had “changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

That’s nothing new. The Citizens United decision simply advanced a bizarre legal doctrine, developed during the last 150 years, that effectively codifies the power of corporate interests.

Corporate personhood’s origin in English law was reasonable enough; it was only by considering companies “persons” that they could be taken to court and sued. You can’t sue an inanimate object.

During the 19th century, however, the robber barons, aided by a few corrupt jurists deep in their pockets, took the concept to a whole new level in the United States. According to legal textbooks, the idea that corporations enjoy the same constitutional rights as you or I was codified in the 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. But historian Thom Hartmann dug into the original case documents and found that this crucially important legal doctrine actually originated with what may be the most significant act of corruption in history.

It occurred during a seemingly routine tax case: Santa Clara sued the Southern Pacific Railroad to pay property taxes on the land it held in the county, and the railroad claimed that because states had different rates, allowing them to tax its holdings would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th  Amendment. The railroads had made the claim in previous cases, but the courts had never bought the argument.

In a 2005 interview, Hartmann described his surprise when he went to a Vermont courthouse to read an original copy of the verdict and found that the judges had made no mention of corporate personhood. “In fact,” he told the interviewer, “the decision says, at its end, that because they could find a California state law that covered the case ‘it is not necessary to consider any other questions’ such as the constitutionality of the railroad’s claim to personhood.”

Hartmann then explained how it was that corporations actually became “people”:

In the headnote to the case—a commentary written by the clerk, which is not legally binding, it’s just a commentary to help out law students and whatnot, summarizing the case—the Court’s clerk wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The discovery “that we’d been operating for over 100 years on an incorrect headnote” led Hartmann to look into the past of the clerk who’d written it, J. C. Bancroft Davis. He discovered that Davis had been a corrupt official who had himself previously served as the president of a railroad. Digging deeper, Hartmann then discovered that Davis had been working “in collusion with another corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field.” The railroad companies, according to Hartmann, had promised Field that they’d sponsor his run for the White House if he assisted them in their effort to gain constitutional rights.

Hartmann noted that even after the ruling, the idea of corporate personhood remained relatively obscure until corporate lawyers dusted off the doctrine during the Reagan era and used it to help reshape the U.S. political economy.

Nike asserted before the Supreme Court . . . as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination—the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War—and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.

Such is the power of a corrupt judiciary.

Returning to the present, while Citizens United is arguably the Roberts court’s most widely criticized ruling, it was not the only time the majority has bent over backward to protect the interests of corporate America and the 1 percent. Legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick, writing on Slate, condemned the court’s “systematic dismantling of existing legal protections for women, workers, the environment, minorities and the disenfranchised.” Those who care about spiraling inequality, she wrote, “need look no further than last term at the high court to see what happens when—just for instance—one’s right to sue AT&T, one’s ability to being a class action against Wal-Mart, and one’s ability to hold an investment management fund responsible for its lies, are all eroded by a sweep of the court’s pen.”

The takeaway is that those camping out in town squares across the country must direct their energy not only at Wall Street, but also at its enablers, in Congress, and ultimately, at the high court.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Reposted from AlterNet.

“How could this happen in America?”

“Is this still my country?”

In the past few days, those and similarly poignant Twitter posts have appealed to fundamental American values in objecting to the notorious U.C. Davis event, where police pepper-sprayed seated protesters, and to cities generally cracking down on the Occupy movement. The crackdowns have brought a military level of combativeness to what many Americans — even those not in sympathy with the protesters — would normally see as a police, not a military matter.

Police, not military. The distinction may seem academic, even absurd, when police are bringing rifles, helmets, armor, and helicopters to evict unarmed protesters. But it’s an old and critical distinction in American law and ideology and in republican thought as a whole. The 17th-century English liberty writers, on whose ideas much of America’s founding ethos was based, believed that turning the armed might of the state, (necessary in waging war against foreign enemies), to domestic policing of local communities tends to concentrate power in top-down executive action and vitiate treasured things like judiciary process, individual liberty, representative government, and free speech.

Constabulary and judiciary matters, high Whigs came to think, should never be handled by what they condemned as “standing armies.” It’s true, on the other hand, that keeping public order, not just aiding in prosecutions, is a duty of local police. When concerted crowd violence occurs against people and property, policing may be expected to be pretty violent too, and distinctions between combat and policing sometimes naturally blur.

But where protest is peaceful — maybe loud, maybe deliberately annoying, combative in its rhetoric, even possibly illegal, yet not actually violent or dangerous — treating it the way a state normally treats an outside military threat will give many Americans, across a broad political spectrum, a gut problem.

We’ve seen military hardware and tactics used in the Occupy crackdowns. We’ve seen them in post-9/11 federal funding in the states and municipalities for homeland security. We’ve seen them in the aptly named “war on drugs.” And anyone who has watched shows like “Cops” has seen — and may by now take for granted — techniques and technologies of military-style police raids on homes, raids that in more upscale neighborhoods might amount to nothing more than knocking on a door and serving a warrant. A Twitter post from Joy Reid, of the blog the Reid Report, put it this way last week: “Disconnect: liberals see a suddenly ‘militarized,’ possibly federalized police force. Black people see ‘the usual.’”

The police behavior at U.C. Davis — manifestly not “rogue-cop,” a trained, planned exercise — reveals the cool military thinking behind the operation. Pepper-spraying looked surgical, preemptive, even robotic. The strategic directive must have been to conserve police effort and maintain police maneuverability at virtually any cost. Such efficiencies and capabilities would be important in a riot; they’re not important when hoping to evict unarmed, seated protesters. It’s not as if officers have been resorting to battle gear under otherwise unmanageable pressure or initiating violence only as a last resort. They’ve been arriving in battle gear. They’ve been construing noncompliance as potential attack. They’ve moved preemptively to disable attack where none existed, not just trying to evict but seemingly hoping to inspire fear, to punish and defeat.

The mood these operations convey is that failure to achieve police objectives must result in something awful for the body politic. In reality, leaving citizens sitting around a park or campus a few more days, even possibly illegally, might be frustrating for police and others; it’s hardly the end of the world. Sometimes taking a few deep breaths is the only thing to do. But military training, tactics, and weaponry seem to inspire the idea in civic strategists that failure to achieve an objective is tantamount to fatal defeat by a hostile enemy. Intolerable. Not an option.

That mentality tends to place American governments at enmity with their dissident citizens — and vice versa. The fact that much militarizing of police, over the past twenty years, has federal sources raises endlessly complicated questions that reflect strangely on the histories of American federalism and government suppression. A horrific theme of the Civil Rights Movement was police violence, and many Americans have branded on their brains the watercannons, clubs, dogs, fists, and boots used against nonviolent protesters in the 1950s; police involved were generally state and local. Then in 1957 federal troops — the 101st Airborne Paratroopers — entered Little Rock, Arkansas, with fixed bayonets, to enforce federal law by ensuring the entry of African American students to state school there; states-rights advocates talked about federal overreaching and police state, the end of liberty. Then again, in the 1960s and ’70s the federal government, via its law-enforcement arm the FBI, carried out a covert war — involving assassination, it’s fairly uncontroversial to say — on the militant activist group the Black Panthers, who it’s fairly uncontroversial to say were not always peaceful protesters.

Responding now to police efforts against demonstrators, liberals and leftists have begun raising anew the issue of inappropriate police militarization and violence. Yet it’s the libertarian right that has done much of the reporting and research on the issue in recent decades (Democracy Now! is among left-liberal institutions that have also covered the issue for many years). The current state of heightened awareness means there’s a possibly interesting opportunity for people of varying backgrounds and politics to begin a new conversation. That conversation would involve some very strange bedfellows — and might spark new enmities. The Salon columnist Joan Walsh’s suggestion last weekend on Twitter that if police violence has federal sources, then President Obama bears some responsibility set off a torrent of invective violent even by Twitter standards.

James Madison may offer some long-range perspective. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, arguing for forming a nation instead of retaining the confederation of states, he said that force applied to citizens collectively rather than individually ceases to be law enforcement and becomes war; groups so treated will seize the opportunity to dissolve all compacts by which they might otherwise have been bound. Madison’s argued against militarism in favor not of anarchy but of a higher kind of law and order.

And in 1794, Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, advising President Washington (to no avail) to eschew military adventure against the so-called Whiskey Rebels, and to use prosecutions instead, argued passionately that the real strength of government always lies not in coercion but in the affection of the people. Randolph was facing an actual insurrection, with threat of secession, not a peaceful protest; there were federal crimes involved. Still he advised against a military operation. The loathing of military suppression as a substitute for due process of law, going back to our first administration, runs deep in the American psyche.

But it’s worth remembering that equally strong feelings have always run the other way. Long before events known as the Whiskey Rebellion had risen to any kind of crisis, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury, was urging Washington to bring military force against citizens somewhere in the country; otherwise, Hamilton believed, authority would always be in question. When Washington did so, he ignored habeas corpus and nearly every individual right set out in the new Bill of Rights, federalizing militias to bring overwhelming force to shock and awe innocent citizens of an entire region of the country. In his book Crisis and Command, John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” has defended the George W. Bush administration’s tactics in dealing with suspected terrorists by citing precedent — not wrongly — in Washington’s behavior in the 1790s.

“Is this still my country?” That’s been a question from day one, asked by Americans of widely diverging views in response to government crackdowns on protest. Objecting to military violence against protesting citizens may be inherently American. The urge to crack down can look inherently American too.

William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories ‘Declaration’ and ‘The Whiskey Rebellion’ and a collection of essays, ‘Inventing American History.’

Reposted from AlterNet.

15 July, 2011
Post Carbon Institute

World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in ‘clean-coal’ technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination.

There are two reasons to believe that coal prices are likely to soar in the years ahead.

First, a spate of recent studies [1–5] suggests that available, useful coal may be less abundant than has been assumed — indeed that the peak of world coal production may be only years away. One pessimistic study [1] published in 2010 concluded that global energy derived from coal could peak as early as 2011.

Second, global demand is growing rapidly, largely driven by China. Demand rose modestly in the 1990s (0.45% per year), but since 2000 it has been surging at 3.8% per year. China is both the world’s biggest producer of coal (40% of global production) and its biggest consumer. Its influence on future coal prices should not be underestimated.

Economic shocks from rising coal prices will be felt by every sector of society. Better data on global coal supplies is long overdue and energy policies that assume a bottomless coal pit need rethinking urgently.

Forecasting future supplies of coal is a murky business, largely because of the unreliability of national estimates. China claims that it has enough coal to fuel its growing economy at current rates. According to data collected in the 2000–10 national resource survey by the China’s Ministry of Land and Resources, the country’s proven reserves of coal total 187 billion tonnes, the second-largest reserves after the United States. For China, that is about 62 years’ worth of coal — at 2009 rates of consumption (roughly 3 billion tonnes a year). This simple ‘lifetime’ calculation is popular with industry and politicians but it can generate a false sense of security over the actual state of reserves.

‘Proven recoverable reserves’ are estimates of the national coal resources that geologists believe are technically and economically feasible to mine. New mining technology and higher coal prices could, in principle, increase the size of those reserves. But the overwhelming global trend, as revealed by national coal surveys over the past few decades, is for the size of countries’ estimated reserves to shrink as geologists uncover restrictions — such as location, depth, seam thickness and quality — on the coal that can be practically extracted.

For example, both German and South African reserves have fallen by more than one-third between 2003 and 2008. The first British coal survey, in the nineteenth century, suggested that the nation had enough coal to last 900 years. The current reserves lifetime is only 12 years [6], and the British coal industry is a tiny fraction of its former size. Similarly, the first official US coal survey, in the early twentieth century, suggested that the country had enough coal for 5,000 years. That estimate shrank to about 400 years in 1974 and stands at 240 years today. There are exceptions to this trend: estimates of reserves in Indonesia and India have grown. However, in aggregate, estimates of global coal reserves have dropped at a faster rate in recent years than can be accounted for by mining alone.

[Insert Photo here]

OPTIMISTIC FORECASTS

China’s reserves were last surveyed in the early 2000s, and the US reserves in the 1970s. China does not possess, as the United States does, vast deposits of surface-minable coal. More than 90% of China’s coal comes from underground mines that can be as much as 1,000 metres deep, presenting increasing engineering challenges. We strongly suspect that the current reserves figures are too optimistic. The coal is certainly there, but — like the majority of coal elsewhere in the world — most of it is probably destined to stay put. One way to estimate future production is to look at past production trends. This method was pioneered by geophysicist King Hubbert, who used 1950s data from the US oil industry to predict that US oil production would peak in the early 1970s. It did. Hubbert production profiles plotted over time assume the shape of a distorted bell curve, with a short peak and gradual decline (see graphic). Applying Hubbert analysis to coal, Chinese academics Tao and Li [7] forecast in 2007 that China’s production will peak and begin to decline long before the simple 62-years estimate, perhaps as early as 2025. During and after the period when production peaks, resource quality will dwindle and mining costs will rise, pushing up coal prices, as is already beginning to happen with Asia-Pacific coal.

Tao and Li used the Chinese government’s latest official reserves figure of 187 billion tonnes to arrive at their peaking date between 2025 and 2032. Other forecasts are more pessimistic. A 2007 forecast3 by the Energy Watch Group, based in Berlin, used a reserves figure of 114.5 billion tonnes (reported by China to World Energy Council in 1992) to forecast a peak of production in 2015, with a rapid production decline commencing in 2020. Analogous concerns raised in 1998 about the end of cheap oil [8] proved prescient. The price of oil has grown substantially since then, as have the costs of finding and extracting new supplies. The current price of more than US$80 per barrel is about three times higher than the upper range in official forecasts for 2010 that were being issued in the late 1990s [9]. New technologies have made marginal oil reserves accessible, but deepwater drilling and oil-sands production entail high costs and risks.

Similarly, new technology — underground coal gasification — may eventually make marginal coal reserves accessible, but it will take time and substantial investment to commercialize on a large scale. Meanwhile, the world’s highest-quality and most-accessible coal reserves are disappearing as demand for the fuel grows.

[Insert photo here]

Coal consumption is accelerating fast, notably in China (see graphic). This renders meaningless reserves-lifetime figures calculated on the basis of flat demand. A 2009 report from China’s Energy Research Institute forecast that coal demand would rise by 700 million to 1 billion tonnes by 2020, reducing the reserves lifetime to about 33 years. If coal demand grows in step with projected Chinese economic growth, the reserves lifetime would drop to just 19 years [10].

COAL RELIANT

China has few options for reducing its reliance on coal. It uses coal in many more industries than the United States, where coal mostly fuels power generation. About half of China’s coal provides 80% of the country’s electricity supply; another 16% supplies the coke for its iron and steel industry, the largest in the world. Hundreds of millions of people in northern China consume another 6% for their winter heat supply. The remaining 28% is primarily used in industries such as cement, non-ferrous metals, and chemicals. Although China is rapidly expanding its supply of natural gas, to replace just the coal used for heating would double its total gas consumption.

Urbanization is also driving demand for coal. Less than half of China’s population now lives in cities (compared with 80% for the United States and the European Union). To improve living conditions and opportunities for its citizens, the government wants the urban population to grow by 350 million people over the next 15 years, all of whom will require infrastructure such as housing, energy, transport, water supply and waste treatment. This will necessitate a steady supply of building materials such as cement, steel, aluminium and copper, all of which depend on coal for their production. Over the next decade, economic growth and urbanization are expected to use at the very least 700 million tonnes of coal — assuming that aggressive energy-efficiency and alternative-energy targets are also met [7].

Can China go elsewhere for its coal? The United States has the world’s biggest reported reserves, but almost all its current production — 1 billion tonnes — is used domestically. The biggest exporters of coal, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa, have much smaller reserves and production rates — some 250 million to 400 million tonnes a year. In 2008 the entire seaborne trade in steam coal (mainly used by power plants) amounted to about 630 million tonnes. Although this could grow (Australia, Russia and Indonesia are expanding capacity), growth will be limited, and prices pushed up, by the need to construct mines, railways and ports.

Russia has large but mostly undeveloped coal resources in Siberia. They are not located near demand centres, and rail transport of coal is expensive (which is why the largest exporters are coastal and trade is waterborne). Nevertheless, Russia could export Siberian coal to China more easily than to Europe, especially if China helped to build the railways.

China alone could absorb all current Asia-Pacific exports with just three years of import growth at current rates. Because other countries in the region also depend on coal imports, China clearly cannot take all, but competition for imports drives up prices. And then there’s India, where imports are expected to nearly double to 100 million tonnes by 2012. India is one of the few countries to revise its reserves estimates upwards in recent years, but its higher-quality reserves are limited and it is importing increasing quantities.

The inevitable result of soaring demand and dwindling supply will be rising coal prices globally, even in nations that are currently self-sufficient in the resource.

The poor quality of coal data globally means that uncertainty clouds every forecast. Even in the technologically advanced United States — the ‘Saudi Arabia of coal’ — most experts rely on decades-old coal surveys. These are commonly interpreted as indicating that the nation has a coal supply with a 250-year lifetime. This figure is not reliable enough for strategic energy planning.

In terms of energy output, US coal production peaked in the late 1990s (volume continued to increase, but the coal was of lower energy content). In 1995 the US Geological Survey (USGS) promised a new national coal survey, but it has not been seen as a high priority by that organization or by Congress. The most recent surveys [11],[12] of two key mining regions show rapid depletion of high quality reserves. There is still an enormous amount of US coal, but whether future energy production can be increased is doubtful, even taking into account new mining areas in Montana, Alaska and the Illinois basin.

LIMIT CONSUMPTION

At the very least, the USGS should urgently complete a new national coal survey. And it is essential for the security of energy supplies globally that Chinese domestic coal production and the timing of its likely decline is better understood.

We believe that it is unlikely that world energy supplies can continue to meet projected demand beyond 2020. Therefore, new limits on energy consumption will be essential in all sectors of society — including agriculture, transportation and manufacturing — and will be imposed by energy prices and shortages if they are not achieved through planning and policy.

Supply limits also have implications for the development of clean-coal technology. Also known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), clean coal is one proposal for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions while growing energy supplies. Because maintaining economic growth while cutting coal out of the energy equation globally will be difficult, and because nearly everyone assumes that coal will remain cheap far into the foreseeable future, the idea is to keep the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal from going into the atmosphere.

There are two hitches: the difficulty of scaling up such an enterprise, and its effect on electricity prices. As many analysts have noted, the scale and cost of clean-coal infrastructure will be vast [13]. Energy analysts agree that this will boost the price of electricity, but the scheme could work if coal prices remain low. If they don’t, building new coal plants — conventional or clean — makes little economic sense, except to replace ageing inefficient infrastructure.

Nations should immediately begin to plan for higher fossil-fuel prices and to make maximum possible investments in energy efficiency and renewable-energy infrastructure. Even then the world will have to accept a slowdown in economic growth.

Richard Heinberg and David Fridley are at the Post-Carbon Institute in Santa Rosa, California 95404, USA. \

Heinberg is the author of nine books, including Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis, The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and the soon-to-be-released The End of Growth. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most effective communicators of the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels.

David Fridley: Since 1995, David Fridley has been a staff scientist at the Energy Analysis Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He is also deputy group leader of Lawrence Berkeley’s China Energy Group, which collaborates with China on end-user energy efficiency, government energy management programs, and energy policy research. Mr. Fridley has nearly 30 years of experience working and living in China in the energy sector, and is a fluent Mandarin speaker. He spent 12 years working in the petroleum industry both as a consultant on downstream oil markets in the Asia-Pacific region and as business development manager for Caltex China. He has written and spoken extensively on the energy and ecological limits of biofuels.

This article was Originally published November 18, 2010 in Nature Vol 468. Republished with permission.

1. Patzek, T. W. & Croft, G. D. Energy 35, 3109–3122(2010).

2. Mohr, S. H. & Evans, G. M. Fuel 88, 2059–2067(2009).

3. Zittel, W. & Schindler, J. Energy Watch Group, Paper No. 1/07 (2007); available at http://go.nature.com/jngfsa

4. Rutledge, D. Hubbert’s Peak, The Coal Question, and Climate Change (2007): available at http://rutledge.caltech.edu

5. Höök, M., Zittel, W., Schindler, J. & Aleklett, K. Fuel 89, 3546–3558 (2010).

6. 2010 Survey of Energy Resources (World Energy Council, 2010); available at http://go.nature.com/hde5r7

7. Tao, Z. & Li, M. Energy Pol. 35, 3145–3154 (2007).

8. Campbell, C. J. & Laherrère, J. H. The End of Cheap Oil. Sci. Am. (March 1998).

9. Energy Information Administration. Annual Energy Outlook 1998 (DOE/EIA, 1997).

10. 2050 China Energy and CO2 Emissions Report (in Chinese) Science Press, 2009).

11. Luppens, J. A. et al. Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming. Open-File Report 2008-1202 (USGS, 2008).

12. Coal Reserves of the Matewan Quadrangle, Kentucky — A Coal Recoverability Study. US Bureau of Mines Circular 9355 (USGS, 2003).

13. Strategic Analysis of the Global Status of Carbon Capture and Storage. (Global CCS institute, 2009).

15 July, 2011
Al Jazeera

In Ecuador, protesting for the rights of the Earth and trying to preserve natural resources may make you a “terrorist”.

If you thought there was anything romantic about environmental activism or indigenous rights, think twice. Socialist ideas about nature – such as keeping water a public good – can get you facing charges of sabotage by a leftist government. In the land of the Incas, if you protect the pachamama ["Mother World"], you might just be a “terrorist”.

It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.

In Ecuador, “terrorists” are indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the Andean highlands fighting to preserve access to water in their communities. Old penal codes written in times of dictatorship are being revived by leftist presidents to repress indigenous activists. As “terrorists”, they are labelled as enemies of the state, and arrested – by the very president that claimed leftist credentials and staged his inauguration in overtly ethnic style.

When the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala gathered delegations from the entire hemisphere in Ecuador last month, the focus was on the criminalisation of environmental protest.

Abya Yala, which means “continent of life” in the language of the Panamanian Kuna peoples, refers to the Americas. The summit has consolidated ethnic organising capacity across borders since it first organised in 1990, maintaining a diversity of indigenous voices from Canada and the US all the way to Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile.

This fifth meeting was symbolically held in Cuenca, where the last Inca died of smallpox – brought from Europe – years before the Spaniards themselves made it to the Andes. This year’s topic was water – yakumama in Quechua, and the earth – pachamama, echoing the growing environmental pressures on rural communities.

But the week’s true highlight was the establishment of an independent, transnational Ethics Tribunal.

Modelled on a “truth commission”, the Ethics Tribunal was designed as a public court to bring visibility to injustices and foster government accountability towards international human and indigenous rights. It was specifically established to address cases of criminalisation of indigenous protest for environmental justice.

On June 22, a four-judge tribunal heard multiple expert reports – as well as 17 personal testimonies – taking more than four hours on the issue.

According to Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, there are currently 189 cases of people accused of sabotage and terrorism by the Ecuadorian government, for protesting the privatisation of natural resources. The situation is so critical that Amnesty International issued a statement denouncing it as an attempt to silence opposition to government policies.

Cases vary in context, but not in substance. In Cochapata, community members were condemned to eight years in jail on charges of terrorism for opposing mining – the government has so far ignored the amnesty granted by the constitutional assembly. A radio station in the Amazon province of Morona Santiago, Radio Canela, was shut down in April for fueling opposition.

Silencing the opposition

The most prominent cases relate to the accusation and illegal arrest of some of the most visible indigenous leaders in Ecuador – Pepe Acacho, Marlon Santi, Delfin Tenesaca and Marco Guatemal. The four heads of national indigenous organisations were accused of sabotage for participating in marches against laws to privatise water during a 2010 summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in the indigenous town of Otavalo, where leftist presidents discussed continental multiculturalism without inviting indigenous organisations.

All cases reveal a state-led effort to silence indigenous protest to protect access to clean water.

Using so-called “anti-terror” laws to silence indigenous struggles over natural resources is not a new strategy. Chile, for instance, has extensively used anti-terror laws created under the Pinochet regime to criminalise Mapuche protests over lumber. Canada has also responded to opposition against resource extraction on native land in Ontario by incarcerating the protesters.

What is news is that a leftist president – who has repeatedly fallen back on ethno-politics to increase his legitimacy – is using forms of martial law inherited from past military regimes to destroy indigenous calls for environmental justice.

The irony is that President Correa, a political ally of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez against North American hegemony, maintains a strong discourse of environmental justice for the Global South. Not only has his administration pioneered international norms by granting new rights to nature in the 2008 Constitution, but it strongly supported the World’s People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Bolivia in 2010.

Yet President Correa started using laws codified in the 1920s and 1970s, including the Doctrine of National Security designed by the military dictatorship, to persecute indigenous opposition. He created a state of emergency, calling upon the armed forces to intervene when internal security might be threatened, and he has already shown a willingness to use them.

Proposed legislation to increase jail time for stopping traffic is a direct attempt to disrupt traditional forms of indigenous protest, which often rely on marches and road-blocks.

Correa’s government, which was elected under a mantle of social justice, has also silenced his opposition through legal and military violence and manipulating judicial mechanisms to repress dissidents. The most recent referendum expanded the executive grasp on the judicial apparatus, making it even more dangerous to oppose his neoliberal stance on natural resources.

Ecuador’s indigenous movement, often described as the strongest in Latin America, has been strongly targeted as the main opposition to Correa’s neoliberal agenda with regards to water.

Last year’s proposed Water and Mining Laws to further privatise access to water and expand mining concessions was stopped only by indigenous mobilisation. Extractive policies are at a peak, with close to two thousand mining concessions, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

Despite Correa’s best efforts to silence indigenous claims, one cannot but recall Bolivia’s water wars a decade ago. Multinational participation in the privatisation of water led to widespread street protests, and the more the government repressed protest the more tensions escalated until Cochabamba exploded in conflict.

Indigenous peoples have been struggling for survival on their lands for centuries – they are not about to let water go. Instead, the confrontation seems to be worsening.

As things intensify, the indigenous peoples of Ecuador will continue to take their protest to the streets. They will also focus on organising international pressure on their government. The Ethics Tribunal will not run out of work anytime soon.

Manuela Picq has just completed her time as a visiting professor and research fellow at Amherst College. She is returning to the Amazon this autumn to continue her research on indigenous peoples’ rights.

23 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org

US air and ground operations strategically target civilians, Pentagon (and NATO) denials notwithstanding. They lie despite clear evidence refuting them. Their latest crime claimed 19 Libyans, all civilians, including women and eight children, apologies not forthcoming and deceitful when they do.

NATO (code for the Pentagon) duplicitously called it a “precision strike on a legitimate military target – a command-and-control node which was directly involved in coordinating systematic attacks on the Libyan people.”

False! It targeted Gaddafi ally Khweildy al-Hamidy’s private estate, murdering civilians inside beneath the rubble, government spokesman Moussa ibrahim saying:

“This is very twisted logic. So you kill children. You kill mothers. You kill fathers, aunts and uncles, and then you try to explain it by twisted political military logic.”

Since NATO terror bombings began March 19, an average of nearly nine daily civilian deaths followed, besides unknown hundreds killed by rebel cutthroats in their controlled areas, murdering any suspected pro-Gaddafi supporters – what Western media reports and governments won’t explain.

Numerous reports confirm it, including TeleSUR on June 3 saying:

“British activists have verified the consequences of NATO attacks against civilians in Libya. A spokesman for British Civilians for Peace (BCP)” there with French, German, Italian and regional activists confirmed noncombatant deaths. They also “found no evidence of the Libyan army shelling civilians,” but observed NATO terror bombing atrocities firsthand.

BCP spokesman Dale Roberts said in two Libyan visits:

“I have seen and witnessed the effects of bombing on civilians. This has included schools, hospitals, infrastructure and civilian areas,” unrelated to military sites.

Roberts added that UK and Western media suppress truths because:

“European public opinion is against a war that was not debated in Parliament, even in my country, Great Britain,” adding:

“One of the main reasons why” UN Resolution 1973 passed was because “Libya was being blamed and made responsible for attacks on unarmed civilians. They are false. We visited the areas in Tripoli (the UN Resolution) cited….and it is clear that these areas were not attacked.”

Like all US-led wars, lies facilitate terror bombing Libya. They include baseless allegations, claiming despots massacre civilians or threaten neighboring states with WMDs to stoke fear and enlist popular support.

In his book “War is a Lie,” David Swanson explains “common themes in the war lying business, lies that keep coming back like zombies that just won’t die.” And no matter how often they’re later exposed, they’re used again effectively because major media managed news repeat them, knowing they’re spurious but do it anyway complicit with state crimes.

Except in self-defense, wars aren’t ever justified, legitimate or legal, especially America’s, the only global superpower facing no external threats, so manufactured ones assure more conflict for imperial expansion and unchallenged dominance, no matter the body count to achieve it.

As a result, the same pattern repeats, segueing from one aggression to another or multiple ones simultaneously, illegally, and disastrously, heading America for tyranny, ruin, and eventual bankruptcy. Morally it’s had that status for generations, notably since WW II.

“In a world with so many uncertainties and unpredictable actors,” says Immanuel Wallerstein, “the most dangerous ‘loose gun’ is….the United States.”

For example, so-called Pentagon “Kill Teams” murder with impunity. Some collect body parts as souvenirs or trophies the way US military personnel did in WW II, mutilating dead Japanese, as well as later in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, exhibiting depravity inculcated in young recruits during training.

US death squads have also been used in US wars since WW II. During the Korean War, tens of thousands were murdered, and in Vietnam, Counterspy magazine called Operation Phoenix “the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the Nazi death camps,” perhaps exceeded post-9/11 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and numerous proxy wars, taking a horrendous human toll from combat operations alone.

Moreover, since WW II, US terror bombings killed millions of noncombatants to cow enemies into submission, what’s now commonplace in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, as well as earlier in Iraq and could be resumed if ordered.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim once said, “The immorality of war depends entirely on the leaders who willed it.” In America, of course, it’s top administration and Pentagon officials. In his opening Nuremberg address, Justice Robert Jackson denounced the:

“men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberative and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.”

He called them “men of station and rank (who don’t) soil (their) hands with blood,” but use “lesser folk” to do it, committing crimes of war and against humanity to enhance their status and privilege.

As a result, in Iraq and Afghanistan, US forces still order troops to kill every military-aged man on sight. Moreover, during training, enemies are dehumanized to make it easy, programming recruits to feel guiltless about horrific crimes.

Yet international and US laws are clear and unequivocal, including US Army Field Manual (FM) 27-10 standards that incorporate Nuremberg Principles, Judgment and the Charter and The Law of Land Warfare (1956):

– FM’s paragraph 498 states that any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished;

– paragraph 499 defines a war crime;

– paragraph 500 refers to a conspiracy, attempts to commit it and complicity with respect to international crimes;

– paragraph 509 denies the defense of superior orders in the commission of a crime; and

– paragraph 510 denies the defense of an “act of state” to absolve them.

Two points are key:

– these provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel, including top commanders, the Secretary of Defense, his subordinates, and the President and Vice President of the United States; and

– under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause (Article VI, paragraph 2), all international laws and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land.”

Nonetheless, US forces commit regular atrocities, in Afghanistan for nearly a decade, Pentagon commanders dismissively saying operations will continue to achieve goals that include killing civilians, no matter how many alienated Afghans become willing Taliban recruits against a hated occupier.

Why not when terror bombings kill entire families, including young children. When thuggish troops conduct middle-of-the-night home intrusions, intimidating, arresting, and at times killing gratuitously. When remote control droning kills like sport. When people are homeless, hungry, unemployed and deprived because America came, occupied and doesn’t give a damn about human need.

After terrorizing Iraqis, in June 2009, Stanley McChrystal took charge of US/NATO Afghanistan forces to do it there. Earlier, he headed the Pentagon’s infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), de facto death squad operations to kill with impunity.

After his sacking a year later, David Petraeus (CIA director designate) doubled NATO air strikes and increased Special Forces terror raids to inflict more death and destruction against people who won’t stop resisting until America’s occupation ends.

Of course, mostly civilians suffer, what major media reports won’t explain, regurgitating Pentagon lies about successful militant strikes, suppressing truths to let imperial wars rage, bogusly called liberating ones.

In fact, when Washington wants war, nothing deters officials from waging it or several simultaneously, inventing reasons to justify what only naive masses and co-conspirators believe.

So when Obama says “we” have moral authority to liberate Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Libyans or other nations he attacks, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter once reflected in January 2000 on then lawless 1999 Serbia/Kosovo operations, saying:

“When they said ‘(w)e had to do something,’ I said: Who is this ‘we’ exactly that you’re talking about?….Under what heading do ‘we’ act, under what law? And also, the notion that this ‘we’ has the right to act,’ I said, presupposes a moral authority of which this ‘we’ possesses not a jot! It doesn’t exist!”

In fact, it’s as immoral, unethical and illegal as for serial killers, motivated by whatever drives them, including a passion for violence, real or delusional rewards.

When they’re nations, not sociopaths, Orwellian doublespeak disguises real motives deceptively. For example, Obama calls Libyan attacks a “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” not war, no matter how much death and destruction is inflicted.

So claiming constitutional Article 2, Section 2 authority as armed forces commander in chief, in fact, violates Article 51 of the UN Charter, prohibiting attacks against other nations except in self-defense, and only until the Security Council acts.

Moreover, the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8 is violated, granting Congress sole power to declare war, never the executive unilaterally, for any reason or with doublespeak mumbo jumbo disguising it.

War is war. It’s also hell on the receiving end, harmful to combatants, and detrimental domestically when popular needs go unmet.

As chief executive, Obama is responsible for mass murder and destruction. If rule of law standards mattered, he’d be impeached, convicted and jailed for high crimes – in fact, the supreme international one against peace and others related to it.

Instead, he’ll finish his current term, likely be reelected, and leave office rewarded with multi-million dollar book deals and six-figure lecture offers to extol a record demanding condemnation in a court of law, holding him fully accountable for high crimes, demanding harsh punishment. In fact, only victims face that fate.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

29 May, 2011
The Archdruid Report

ABSTRACT: Despite four decades of detailed warnings, industrial civilization has failed to turn aside from self-destructive policies of exponential growth and dependence on nonrenewable resources. At this point, stark limits of time and resources as well as a failure of political will make attempts to prevent the fall of industrial society an exercise in futility. Individuals, small groups, and communities can still prepare for the approaching crises by mastering low-tech survival skills now to lay foundations for a sustainable society in the future.

I. The Closed Window of Opportunity

In 1972, the Club of Rome’s path-breaking study The Limits to Growth(1) sent shockwaves around the world. At a time when politicians and pundits across the political spectrum argued that infinite economic growth was not only possible but desirable, The Limits to Growth showed that infinite growth on a finite planet was a recipe for disaster. They predicted that depletion of vital resources and increasing impacts from pollution would break the back of the global economy, leading to industrial collapse and massive die-off in the first half of the twenty-first century. Further studies(2) over the next few decades confirmed and expanded the warning, while economists and energy scientists showed that a sustainable steady-state economy was in reach if the process started at once.(3)

After half-hearted efforts sparked by the oil shortages of the 1970s, the industrial nations returned to business as usual. Alternative energy sources and proposals for a transition to sustainability withered on the vine. Meanwhile global population, rates of energy use, and pollution soared while resources dwindled. In 1992, twenty years after the original Club of Rome study, the same team ran their computer models again with newer and more complete data.(4) What they found confirmed the worst fears of ecologists and resource economists: the industrial world was in overshoot.

Among ecologists, “overshoot” describes a situation where a population of living things has outgrown its environment and is damaging the resource base that supports it.(5) As a population in overshoot expands further and increases its demands on its resource base, the resource base shrinks, cutting into its ability to support the population. Sooner or later rising demand collides with declining resources. The inevitable result is die-off.

The Club of Rome team twisted their computer models nearly to the breaking point to find a plan of action that would avert catastrophe if it was adopted immediately. The resulting plan was politically impossible – it would have required the citizens of the United States to accept Third World living standards – and it never reached the stage of public discussion. Even such feeble measures as the Kyoto greenhouse gas accords failed to win global support, and the dubious Republican “victory” in the 2000 presidential election made any attempt to face the looming future a dead issue until 2005 at the very earliest.

The implications of this delay have rarely been understood or accepted, even by those aware of the approaching crisis. Environmental activists still present schemes for making the transition to a steady state economy as though the industrial world had time to implement them. Yet in 1992, the “Limits to Growth” team warned that if the industrialized world did not launch a massive program to achieve sustainability within a few years, the chance to prevent industrial collapse and dieoff would have been missed.(6) Twelve years have passed since that final warning, and once again nothing has been done.

The hard reality of our situation is that the window of opportunity for a controlled transition to sustainability is past. Depletion of global oil reserves (the so-called “Peak Oil” problem) and global warming are only two aspects of a sprawling crisis that already affects every corner of the globe. The limits to growth are no longer a problem for the future. We are facing them now.

II. The Future Mirrored in the Past

The original “Limits to Growth” study provides a model for our future that bears careful study. Its most crucial and least appreciated prediction is that industrial collapse is an extended process, not an overnight catastrophe of the sort beloved by Hollywood scriptwriters. In simple terms, industrial society has to supply soaring needs from a shrinking resource base. As population rises, more people have to be fed, clothed, and housed; as production increases, more factories and infrastructure have to be built, maintained, and replaced; as the global environment suffers, droughts, crop failures, emerging infectious diseases, and rising sea levels all have economic impacts to be countered.

All these require ever-increasing resource use, but as resources are depleted, the cost of finding and extracting them becomes another burden on the economy. Worse, geological and/or environmental factors set inescapable upper limits on many resources. There is only so much oil in the ground, for example, and the faster you pump, the sooner you run dry. Forced to produce goods and services for immediate needs, forced to maintain and replace factories and infrastructure, to deal with impacts from environmental degradation, and subsidize a dwindling resource base all at once, industrial society is caught in a trap it can’t escape. It can’t do all of these things at once, and yet it can’t stop doing any of them without going under.

The result is a rolling collapse extended over decades. As the economy falters, the shrinking pie of industrial production has to be cut into ever narrower wedges, divided between keeping the work force fed, clothed, and housed; maintaining and replacing economic capital and infrastructure; dealing with the immediate economic impact of environmental degradation; and struggling to keep oil and other resources flowing. Any shortfall in any of these imposes bottlenecks on the whole economy and makes the pie shrink further. Industrial production slumps and the core systems of the industrial economy start coming unglued: energy distribution networks fail, financial systems disintegrate, transport falters, national governments come apart. Finally population dieoff begins as the wrecked industrial system no longer produces enough to meet even the most basic human needs. The process ends with impoverished survivors a century from now scratching out a meager living amid the crumbling ruins of a once-great civilization.

This scenario makes a shocking contrast to the cozy fantasies of perpetual progress most people cherish. Those who study history, on the other hand, will find it much more familiar. The same process has happened dozens of times before, and our present predicament can best be understood by paying attention to the past.

The most crucial of these lessons is that all civilizations fall. As Joseph Tainter points out in his essential book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” this is one of the most predictable things about them.(7) Our civilization is larger and better equipped with gadgets, but it still faces the same fate as Nineveh and Tyre. Like the inhabitants of Rome at the beginning of the fifth century, or the people of the Mayan city of Tikal at the dawn of the tenth, we happen to be living in the early stages of this terrible but natural process. The crisis we face is no supernatural event, nor an instant catastrophe of the Hollywood sort. As the saying has it, it’s not the end of the world – just the end of one more human civilization that failed to notice environmental limits, and crashed as a result.

Another crucial lesson is that the common notion of holing up in a cabin in the hills with stockpiled food and enough firearms to outfit a Panzer division is a Hollywood fantasy, not a realistic response. It takes time for a civilization to come apart, and the process is like rolling down a slope, not like falling off a cliff. We face a future of shortages, economic crises, disintegrating infrastructure, and collapsing public health, stretched out over a period of decades. A few years of stored food and an assortment of high-tech paramilitary gear are hopelessly inadequate preparations in the face of this reality.

Stockpiles of precious metals, another common hedge against collapse, are even more useless. All the gold in the world means nothing unless people value it enough to trade scarce resources for it, and if they value it that much in the postindustrial future, your chances of surviving long enough to enjoy it are not good. Archeologists in Britain every few years turn up hoards of gold and silver hidden away by wealthy Romans as the empire fell around them. The fact that the hoards are undisturbed suggests that their owners did not survive long enough to enjoy them.

A useful way to think of the approaching crisis is to imagine that someday soon you will be put on a boat, taken to some primitive corner of the world far from industrial society, and left there for the rest of your life. You can take anything you want with you, but the place you are going is inhabited, and if your only value consists of the things you have stockpiled, plenty of people will be interested in removing you and enjoying your stockpile themselves. In the postindustrial dark age, where all of us who survive the next decade or so will be spending the rest of our lives, the same rules apply.

III. The Problem with Progress

Many people come out of school thinking of civilization as some vague assemblage of art, literature, buildings, and government. At its core, though, a civilization is a system for producing and distributing goods and services. Roman civilization included not only temples and emperors but also grain markets, aqueducts, roads, and soldiers. When Rome fell, the population crash that followed was not caused by a shortage of temples. It happened because grain no longer reached the markets, goods no longer traveled over the roads, and legionaries no longer kept barbarians on the other side of the frontier.

The present situation is even more extreme. Most people in the developed world have never had to feed, clothe, house, or protect themselves with their own hands, and have only the vaguest notions about how to do so. They rely for every necessity of life on the industrial economy. Even the most basic requirements of life are tied to the industrial system; how many people nowadays can light a fire without matches or a butane lighter from some distant factory? The skills necessary to get by in a non-industrial society, skills that were still common knowledge a century ago, have been all but lost throughout the developed world.

This disastrous situation results from the modern obsession with progress. When a new technology is introduced, the older technology it replaces ends up in the trash heap. Since new technologies almost always demand more resources, use more energy, and include more complexity than their older equivalents, each step on the path of progress has made people more dependent on the industrial system and more vulnerable to its collapse. Compare a slide rule with a pocket calculator. People in the resource-poor world of the future will have a much easier time fabricating slide rules than pocket calculators. Unfortunately only a few retirees today still know how to use slide rules, and books on how to make and use them have long since been purged from library shelves. Even basic math skills are being lost as schoolchildren punch buttons instead of learning multiplication tables. Will our descendants have to rediscover mathematics all over again, reinventing addition by experimenting with pebbles in the dust? The possibility can’t be completely dismissed.

For “slide rules” and “calculators” in the example just given, insert almost any piece of older technology and its more recent replacement. As we’ve climbed the ladder of progress, we’ve kicked each rung to pieces as we reached the next. Now we’ve run out of rungs, and the one holding us up is cracking beneath our weight. If it gives way, there’s nothing to break our fall this side of the ground.

Once the problem is put in these terms, the core strategy of response is obvious. If industrial civilization faces inevitable collapse, the crucial step that must be taken now is the rediscovery and deployment of non-industrial means of survival. A few critical skills have already been preserved or rediscovered and passed on in this way; consider the case of the organic agriculture movement, which has evolved efficient, sustainable methods of growing food without petrochemicals using human muscle as the only energy source, producing yields exceeding those of modern industrial farming. Using such methods, a spare but nutritionally complete diet for one person for one year can be raised on less than 1000 square feet of soil.(8) Unfortunately only a small minority of farmers and a somewhat larger fraction of home gardeners practice these essential skills.

The same is true of many other non-industrial skills. One expert estimated recently that fewer than 500 people in North America can reliably start a fire with a hand drill, the simplest and most readily available of “primitive” fire-starting methods.(9) Black powder flintlocks, the only firearms that will still work when the high-tech ammunition runs out and today’s assault rifles become tomorrow’s awkwardly shaped clubs, are the province of a small network of hobbyists and historical reenactment fans. If these and other effective technologies are to be passed on to the future, this has to change.

IV. Building the Future from the Grassroots Up

Most proposals for dealing with the approaching crisis of industrial civilization take a top-down approach, offering grandiose plans for huge programs to retool the entire industrial world at once. As shown above, it is too late for that approach, even if the political will to accomplish it existed — which it clearly does not. But an alternative grassroots approach remains possible.

What would a grassroots approach to the coming crisis look like? It would begin with individuals learning the skills needed to build a sustainable society within the shell of the collapsing industrial system. These people would revive the basic skills of postindustrial survival, learning how to light a fire, grow a garden, treat an illness, and fight off an assault without any help from the industrial system, using simple hand tools and the capacities of their own bodies and minds. These skills would be practiced and mastered, not merely learned intellectually, so they could be used and taught to others at a moment’s notice.

Each person would then learn some specialized non-industrial skill. The list of potential skills is limited only by the needs, wants, and resources of the postindustrial world. Blacksmiths and beer makers, herbalists and horse breeders, weavers and woodworkers, all fill critical economic niches once the factories shut down forever. Those who have learned such skills and can meet people’s needs will survive and prosper even in difficult times, for unlike stockpiles, which benefit only the people who have them, skills benefit everyone. History shows that even in the most lawless and brutal societies — the pirate havens of the seventeenth-century Caribbean are a classic example – people with necessary skills such as physicians, navigators, and shipwrights were protected from violence because it was in everyone’s best interests to keep them unharmed.

What gives this strategy power is that it can be done by one person acting alone and still have a positive impact. Anyone who learns the basic skills of postindustrial survival and some useful craft can survive, teach others to survive, and pass on crucial legacies to the future. As more people start learning and practicing the skills of a postindustrial economy, though, potentials expand swiftly. Once there are enough blacksmiths to keep the future supplied with iron tools, one or more of them can learn gunsmithing and prepare to arm a future community with Kentucky long rifles or the like. Once enough people know how to grow grain, brewing beer becomes a logical next step.

Many people assume that the collapse of industrial society would be followed by a reversion to the Stone Age, if not to a Mad Max fantasy of roaming raiders who somehow manage to keep eating food and firing bullets long after farms and factories are gone. It’s clear that whatever the future holds, it holds many fewer people than today’s world, and the road there won’t be easy or pleasant. Still, plenty of societies in the past achieved a high level of civilization without the benefit of industrial technology. Widespread literacy, democratic government, and a decent standard of living can be achieved without factories and fossil fuels — witness the American Republic two hundred years ago. If people prepare now, there’s no reason why the technology and lifestyles of 1800 should be out of reach for our grandchildren, and good reason to hope for a less catastrophic passage through the crises of the near future to the new dawn beyond.

NOTES

1. Meadows, D. H. et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe, 1972).

2. See especially Catton, W. R., Overshoot (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), and Gever, J. et al., Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1986).

3. See, for example, Daly, H., Toward a Steady State Economy (San Francisco: William Freeman, 1973), and Lovins, A., Soft Energy Paths (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977).

4. Meadows, D. L. et al., Beyond the Limits (Post Hills, VT: Chelsea Green,
1992).

5. The concept of overshoot is explored in detail in Catton, op. cit.

6. Meadows, D. L. et al., op. cit.

7. Tainter, J., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

8. See Duhon, D., One Circle (Willits, CA: Ecology Action, 1985), and Freeman, J. A., Survival Gardening (Rock Hill, SC: John’s Press, 1983).

9. Baugh, D., “The miracle of fire by friction,” in Wescott, D., ed., Primitive Technology (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs-Smith, 1999), pp. 32-33.

John Michael Greer is the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, and the forthcoming The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara

25 April, 2011
TomDispatch.com

An Empire of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs begins to totter

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.

Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.

Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer — and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer — is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Why, half a century later, would Washington betray its stated democratic principles by backing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against millions of demonstrators and then, when he faltered, use its leverage to replace him, at least initially with his intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a man best known for running Cairo’s torture chambers (and lending them out to Washington)? The answer again: because both were reliable subordinates who had long served Washington’s interests well in this key Arab state.

Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power. Of course, all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control — and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and set their own agendas was also the moment when it became clear that imperial collapse was in the cards.

If the “velvet revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 tolled the death knell for the Soviet empire, then the “jasmine revolutions” now spreading across the Middle East may well mark the beginning of the end for American global power.

Putting the Military in Charge

To understand the importance of local elites, look back to the Cold War’s early days when a desperate White House was searching for something, anything that could halt the seemingly unstoppable spread of what Washington saw as anti-American and pro-communist sentiment. In December 1954, the National Security Council (NSC) met in the White House to stake out a strategy that could tame the powerful nationalist forces of change then sweeping the globe.

Across Asia and Africa, a half-dozen European empires that had guaranteed global order for more than a century were giving way to 100 new nations, many — as Washington saw it — susceptible to “communist subversion.” In Latin America, there were stirrings of leftist opposition to the region’s growing urban poverty and rural landlessness.

After a review of the “threats” facing the U.S. in Latin America, influential Treasury Secretary George Humphrey informed his NSC colleagues that they should “stop talking so much about democracy” and instead “support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American.” At that moment with a flash of strategic insight, Dwight Eisenhower interrupted to observe that Humphrey was, in effect, saying, “They’re OK if they’re our s.o.b.’s.”

It was a moment to remember, for the President of the United States had just articulated with crystalline clarity the system of global dominion that Washington would implement for the next 50 years — setting aside democratic principles for a tough realpolitik policy of backing any reliable leader willing to support the U.S., thereby building a worldwide network of national (and often nationalist) leaders who would, in a pinch, put Washington’s needs above local ones.

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would favor military autocrats in Latin America, aristocrats across the Middle East, and a mixture of democrats and dictators in Asia. In 1958, military coups in Thailand and Iraq suddenly put the spotlight on Third World militaries as forces to be reckoned with. It was then that the Eisenhower administration decided to bring foreign military leaders to the U.S. for further “training” to facilitate “the ‘management’ of the forces of change released by the development” of these emerging nations. Henceforth, Washington would pour military aid into the cultivation of the armed forces of allies and potential allies worldwide, while “training missions” would be used to create crucial ties between the U.S. military and the officer corps in country after country — or where subordinate elites did not seem subordinate enough, help identify alternative leaders.

When civilian presidents proved insubordinate, the Central Intelligence Agency went to work, promoting coups that would install reliable military successors –replacing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who tried to nationalize his country’s oil, with General Fazlollah Zahedi (and then the young Shah) in 1953; President Sukarno with General Suharto in Indonesia during the next decade; and of course President Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, to name just three such moments.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Washington’s trust in the militaries of its client states would only grow. The U.S. was, for example, lavishing $1.3 billion in aid on Egypt’s military annually, but investing only $250 million a year in the country’s economic development. As a result, when demonstrations rocked the regime in Cairo last January, as the New York Times reported, “a 30-year investment paid off as American generals… and intelligence officers quietly called… friends they had trained with,” successfully urging the army’s support for a “peaceful transition” to, yes indeed, military rule.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Washington has, since the 1950s, followed the British imperial preference for Arab aristocrats by cultivating allies that included a shah (Iran), sultans (Abu Dhabi, Oman), emirs (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai), and kings (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco). Across this vast, volatile region from Morocco to Iran, Washington courted these royalist regimes with military alliances, U.S. weapons systems, CIA support for local security, a safe American haven for their capital, and special favors for their elites, including access to educational institutions in the U.S. or Department of Defense overseas schools for their children.

In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summed up this record thusly: “For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy… in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

How It Used to Work

America is by no means the first hegemon to build its global power on the gossamer threads of personal ties to local leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain may have ruled the waves (as America would later rule the skies), but when it came to the ground, like empires past it needed local allies who could serve as intermediaries in controlling complex, volatile societies. Otherwise, how in 1900 could a small island nation of just 40 million with an army of only 99,000 men rule a global empire of some 400 million, nearly a quarter of all humanity?

From 1850 to 1950, Britain controlled its formal colonies through an extraordinary array of local allies — from Fiji island chiefs and Malay sultans to Indian maharajas and African emirs. Simultaneously, through subordinate elites Britain reigned over an even larger “informal empire” that encompassed emperors (from Beijing to Istanbul), kings (from Bangkok to Cairo), and presidents (from Buenos Aires to Caracas). At its peak in 1880, Britain’s informal empire in Latin America, the Middle East, and China was larger, in population, than its formal colonial holdings in India and Africa. Its entire global empire, encompassing nearly half of humanity, rested on these slender ties of cooperation to loyal local elites.

Following four centuries of relentless imperial expansion, however, Europe’s five major overseas empires were suddenly erased from the globe in a quarter-century of decolonization. Between 1947 and 1974, the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese empires faded fast from Asia and Africa, giving way to a hundred new nations, more than half of today’s sovereign states. In searching for an explanation for this sudden, sweeping change, most scholars agree with British imperial historian Ronald Robinson who famously argued that “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators,” their power began to fade.

During the Cold War that coincided with this era of rapid decolonization, the world’s two superpowers turned to the same methods regularly using their espionage agencies to manipulate the leaders of newly independent states. The Soviet Union’s KGB and its surrogates like the Stasi in East Germany and the Securitate in Romania enforced political conformity among the 14 Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe and challenged the U.S. for loyal allies across the Third World. Simultaneously, the CIA monitored the loyalties of presidents, autocrats, and dictators on four continents, employing coups, bribery, and covert penetration to control and, when necessary, remove nettlesome leaders.

In an era of nationalist feeling, however, the loyalty of local elites proved a complex matter indeed. Many of them were driven by conflicting loyalties and often deep feelings of nationalism, which meant that they had to be monitored closely. So critical were these subordinate elites, and so troublesome were their insubordinate iterations, that the CIA repeatedly launched risky covert operations to bring them to heel, sparking some of the great crises of the Cold War.

Given the rise of its system of global control in a post-World War II age of independence, Washington had little choice but to work not simply with surrogates or puppets, but with allies who — admittedly from weaker positions — still sought to maximize what they saw as their nations’ interests (as well as their own). Even at the height of American global power in the 1950s, when its dominance was relatively unquestioned, Washington was forced into hard bargaining with the likes of the Philippines’ Raymond Magsaysay, South Korean autocrat Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.

In South Korea during the 1960s, for instance, General Park Chung Hee, then president, bartered troop deployments to Vietnam for billions of U.S. development dollars, which helped spark the country’s economic “miracle.” In the process, Washington paid up, but got what it most wanted: 50,000 of those tough Korean troops as guns-for-hire helpers in its unpopular war in Vietnam.

Post-Cold War World

After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, ending the Cold War, Moscow quickly lost its satellite states from Estonia to Azerbaijan, as once-loyal Soviet surrogates were ousted or leapt off the sinking ship of empire. For Washington, the “victor” and soon to be the “sole superpower” on planet Earth, the same process would begin to happen, but at a far slower pace.

Over the next two decades, globalization fostered a multipolar system of rising powers in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Ankara, and Brasilia, even as a denationalized system of corporate power reduced the dependency of developing economies on any single state, however imperial. With its capacity for controlling elites receding, Washington has faced ideological competition from Islamic fundamentalism, European regulatory regimes, Chinese state capitalism, and a rising tide of economic nationalism in Latin America.

As U.S. power and influence declined, Washington’s attempts to control its subordinate elites began to fail, often spectacularly — including its efforts to topple bête noire Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a badly bungled 2002 coup, to detach ally Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia from Russia’s orbit in 2008, and to oust nemesis Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian elections. Where a CIA coup or covert cash once sufficed to defeat an antagonist, the Bush administration needed a massive invasion to topple just one troublesome dictator, Saddam Hussein. Even then, it found its plans for subsequent regime change in Syria and Iran blocked when these states instead aided a devastating insurgency against U.S. forces inside Iraq.

Similarly, despite the infusions of billions of dollars in foreign aid, Washington has found it nearly impossible to control the Afghan president it installed in power, Hamid Karzai, who memorably summed up his fractious relationship with Washington to American envoys this way: “If you’re looking for a stooge and calling a stooge a partner, no. If you’re looking for a partner, yes.”

Then, late in 2010, WikiLeaks began distributing those thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that offer uncensored insights into Washington’s weakening control over the system of surrogate power that it had built up for 50 years. In reading these documents, Israeli journalist Aluf Benn of Haaretz could see “the fall of the American empire, the decline of a superpower that ruled the world by the dint of its military and economic supremacy.” No longer, he added, are “American ambassadors… received in world capitals as ‘high commissioners’… [instead they are] tired bureaucrats [who] spend their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points, never reminding them who is the superpower and who the client state.”

Indeed, what the WikiLeaks documents show is a State Department struggling to manage an unruly global system of increasingly insubordinate elites by any means possible — via intrigue to collect needed information and intelligence, friendly acts meant to coax compliance, threats to coerce cooperation, and billions of dollars in misspent aid to court influence. In early 2009, for instance, the State Department instructed its embassies worldwide to play imperial police by collecting comprehensive data on local leaders, including “email addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans.” Showing its need, like some colonial governor, for incriminating information on the locals, the State Department also pressed its Bahrain embassy for sordid details, damaging in an Islamic society, about the kingdom’s crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”

With the hauteur of latter-day imperial envoys, U.S. diplomats seemed to empower themselves for dominance by dismissing “the Turks neo-Ottoman posturing around the Middle East and Balkans,” or by knowing the weaknesses of their subordinate elites, notably Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s “voluptuous blonde” nurse, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s morbid fear of military coups, or Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud’s $52 million in stolen funds.

As its influence declines, however, Washington is finding many of its chosen local allies either increasingly insubordinate or irrelevant, particularly in the strategic Middle East. In mid-2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia reported that “President Ben Ali… and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people,” relying “on the police for control,” while “corruption in the inner circle is growing” and “the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.” Even so, the U.S. envoy could only recommend that Washington “dial back the public criticism” and instead rely only on “frequent high-level private candor” — a policy that failed to produce any reforms before demonstrations toppled the regime just 18 months later.

Similarly, in late 2008 the American Embassy in Cairo feared that “Egyptian democracy and human rights efforts… are being suffocated.” However, as the embassy admitted, “we would not like to contemplate complications for U.S. regional interests should the U.S.-Egyptian bond be seriously weakened.” When Mubarak visited Washington a few months later, the Embassy urged the White House “to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership.” And so in June 2009, just 18 months before the Egyptian president’s downfall, President Obama hailed this useful dictator as “a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good in the region.”

As the crisis in Cairo’s Tahrir Square unfolded, respected opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei complained bitterly that Washington was pushing “the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.” After 40 years of U.S. dominion, the Middle East was, he said, “a collection of failed states that add nothing to humanity or science” because “people were taught not to think or to act, and were consistently given an inferior education.”

Absent a global war capable of simply sweeping away an empire, the decline of a great power is often a fitful, painful, drawn-out affair. In addition to the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down to something not so far short of defeat, the nation’s capital is now writhing in fiscal crisis, the coin of the realm is losing its creditworthiness, and longtime allies are forging economic and even military ties to rival China. To all of this, we must now add the possible loss of loyal surrogates across the Middle East.

For more than 50 years, Washington has been served well by a system of global power based on subordinate elites. That system once facilitated the extension of American influence worldwide with a surprising efficiency and (relatively speaking) an economy of force. Now, however, those loyal allies increasingly look like an empire of failed or insubordinate states. Make no mistake: the degradation of, or ending of, half a century of such ties is likely to leave Washington on the rocks.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the award-winning book, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. He has also convened the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, and the findings from their latest conference, at Barcelona last June, will appear next year as Endless Empires: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which McCoy discusses why Washington is likely to cling disastrously to empire in the midst of decline, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Brett Reilly is a graduate student in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

The following is an excerpt from The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet, edited by Emily Hunter (Conari Press, 2011).

Eco-Terrorism 101

If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it. —Billy Bragg

It started with a knock on the door. Someone had pounded three times. I turned the knob without looking through the peephole. It must be the landlord, I thought. He had gotten into the habit of arriving unannounced with prospective tenants to show our apartment, one of the freshly renovated studios in a 70-something-year-old building in Chicago. Before I had opened the door, though, I knew it was not Steve the Landlord. Our dogs were barking. Wildly. The dogs, Mindy and Peter, were snarling, and they never snarled, they never growled. I opened the door anyway.

The guys behind it—gruff-looking early-30s guys with manicured goatees, navy suits, ties with outdated geometric patterns, scuffed black shoes, broad shoulders, hardjaw lines, wholesome haircuts, and eyes looking for fights—were just naturally FBI agents. I didn’t even need to see the badges.

I just said I was in a hurry, that I had to get ready for work, and then I started to close the door. The good cop—well, I will call him the good cop, only because he looked less eager to kick my ass—put his left palm on the gray steel door, firmly enough to put pressure but not firmly enough to make any noise. I could either come downstairs, he said, or they could make a visit to my place of work, the Chicago Tribune.

Dogs barked. Panic. I was not afraid of them, but I was afraid of a spectacle in the newsroom. I relented and then closed the door to get ready.

“What’s going on?” my girlfriend, Kamber, asked from the futon, half asleep.

“It’s the FBI,” I said matter-of-factly, as if it had been Steve the Landlord.

A few minutes later, we crammed into the freight elevator, good cop, bad cop, and me. The elevator ground to a halt, the latticework steel door creaked open, and we walked through the dark hallway to the alley. It was a gloriously sunny Chicago summer day, but the sunlight could not overcome the condominium towers of steel and glass, could not swim through the cracks in the walls, and so I stepped into an alley shrouded in gray.

In college, I had learned about government operations like the counter intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the FBI’s history of harassing and intimidating political activists. False names, phone taps, bugs, and infiltration were used in attempts to disrupt groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. I had learned from books, professors, and Law & Order episodes that if approached by the FBI, for any reason, you should never talk. Nothing good can come of it.

Both good cop and bad cop had heard that line before. The shorter, “nicer” cop started talking anyway.

“Look, we just want to talk to you,” he said. “We want you to help us out. We can make all this go away.”

—————

Working long hours on the metro desk at the Chicago Tribune, covering shooting after shooting, murder after murder, had turned me into the type of reporter I never wanted to become. I felt detached, apathetic, and cynical. Just before the visit from the FBI, I wrote in my journal, “I’m tired of writing meaningless stories, I’m tired of going to sleep at night feeling like I left the world the same way I saw it in the morning.”

After only a few months at the Tribune, I had already built a spectacular wall of emotional detachment. It felt as if it were made of broken bottles and concrete chunks, sharp and gray. I thought I would never survive this beat, unless i found some way to keep a toehold on my humanity. So I decided to go leafleting.

When I worked at the Texas Observer, I wrote a story about an animal rights activist who was prohibited from protesting fur stores as a condition of her sentence for nonviolent civil disobedience. In my research of other draconian legal attacks on activists, I also learned about Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, an international campaign that had formed for the sole purpose of closing the notorious animal-testing lab Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Five undercover investigations had exposed animal welfare violations in the lab. I remember sitting in the Texas observer office, downloading a clip of undercover video filmed inside of Huntingdon. It showed animal experimenters with beagle puppies. The puppies’ veins were too small, and one of the experimenters could not insert a needle. He grew frustrated. He shook the dog and then suddenly punched the puppy in the face, hard enough to knock a grown man down. I will never forget that dog’s punctuating wails.

When if decided I wanted to do something positive to balance out the futility I felt at the Tribune, I decided to leaflet about Huntingdon. one month prior to FBI agents knocking on my door, Kamber and I met six local activists at the a-zone (or autonomous zone) in Chicago, which was part independent bookstore and part rabblerouser gathering place. it offered titles on topics including the Zapatistas, herbal medicine, and bicycle repair, and it smelled like punk rock.

From there, we caravaned to a suburb north of Chicago and the home of a corporate executive with Marsh, Inc., an insurance company for Huntingdon. Once out of the van, I hung leaflets on front doors, urging their Marsh neighbor to cease doing business with Huntingdon Life Sciences. The fliers made no suggestions of violence or property destruction, they made no threats. Instead, they spelled out what went on in the lab, how Marsh is connected, and why readers should ask their neighbor to use his power wisely.

After about twenty minutes of leafleting, police arrived. They radioed back and forth with their headquarters, trying to decide what to do. Then they handcuffed us.

——————

After the FBI agents followed me out of the apartment building and into the alley, bad cop started needling. He asked if I knew the type of people involved in the campaign to close Huntingdon. He said they were “extremists.”

“I can tell you’re a good guy,” he said. “You have a lot going for you.” he said he could tell by the way I dressed, where I lived. “You don’t want this to mess up your life, kid. We need your help.”

He told me I could help them by providing more information about the other defendants and other animal rights groups. I had two days to decide. He gave me a scrap of paper with his phone number, written on it underneath his name, Chris.

“If we don’t hear from you by the first trial date,” he said, “I’ll put you on the domestic terrorist list.”

Wait, what? I felt as if I was staring blankly ahead, but my eyes must have shown fear.

“Now I have your attention, huh?” he said.

Put me on a terrorist list for leafleting?

“Look,” Chris said, “after 9/11, we have a lot more authority now to get things done and get down to business. We can make your life very difficult for you. You work at a newspaper? I can make it so you never work at a newspaper again.”

I replied that people who write letters, who leaflet, are not the same people who break the law. As I walked away, I crumpled his phone number and tossed it in a nearby dumpster, and just before I left the shadows and could reach the sunlight, Chris said, “have a good day at work at the metro desk.

Say hello to your editor, Susan Keaton. And tell Kamber we’ll come see her later.”

I wish I could say the visit did not affect me. But the history nerd in me could not help but think about all the times when the government had targeted political activists. I could not help but think about the deportation of Emma Goldman and the relentless spying and harassment of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I thought of the White Rose, a group of students my age who covertly printed and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and, when caught, when interrogated and tortured, refused to show fear. They were beheaded. I had always hoped, as we all do after reading stories like this, that if I were ever put in a similar position, I would not flinch.

But I was afraid. Even though I never considered, even for a moment, becoming an informant, I could not stop thinking about how I was on a domestic terrorist list. I was convinced my journalism career was over. Even worse, I was convinced these FBI agents would somehow pass the word to my parents, who would be so disappointed in me, and to my little sister, who would stop looking up to me. These thoughts burrowed somewhere deep behind my eyes and, no matter how irrational they sound, I began to see them as truth.

I did not know it then, but this experience would mark the beginning of both a personal and political journey. After the initial fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out why I would be targeted as a terrorist for nothing more than leafleting. The focus of my life would shift to investigating how animal rights and environmental activists had become, according to the FBI, the “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

——————–

In hindsight the path from that FBI visit to my current life seems completely straight and natural. In reality, I spent years straddling fences, cautiously poised between “unbiased” reporting and advocacy journalism, between my career and the passions I have labeled side projects.

I made some small efforts to climb down. I left an “unbiased” newspaper job covering politics in Washington, DC, to use my writing for very biased purposes at the American Civil Liberties union, ghostwriting op-eds and speeches on the Patriot Act and government surveillance. At night, I continued researching and writing about activists being labeled terrorists. Through my work at the ACLU, and my freelance reporting, the true scope of the attacks on political activists came into focus.

The environmental movement, like all social movements, has a wide range of elements. There are people who leaflet and write letters. And there are underground groups like the Earth Liberation Front, which have vandalized SUVs, burned ski resorts, and destroyed genetically engineered crops. Even at their most extreme, none of these tactics have injured a single human being. Not one.

Meanwhile, the department of homeland Security does not list right wing terrorists on a list of national security threats, and the FBI omits right wing attacks in its annual terrorism reports. Those groups have been responsible for the Oklahoma city bombing, the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, violence against doctors, and admittedly creating weapons of mass destruction.

Through my reporting, I learned that environmental and animal rights activists are being labeled terrorists not because of violence, but because of their beliefs. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have waged a coordinated campaign to push their political agenda.

They have sent out press releases accusing mainstream organizations like the Sierra club, PETA, and Greenpeace of supporting “eco-terrorism.” the children’s movie Hoot has been dubbed “soft-core eco-terrorism for kids.” American Idol star Carrie Underwood was smeared as supporting terrorists when she encouraged her fans to support the Humane Society.

Examples like this would be funny if they had not worked their way into the top levels of government. In 2006, politicians proposed “eco-terrorism” legislation similar to bills that had been introduced at the state level for years. Because of my reporting, colleagues at the ACLU recommended that I testify at a hearing by the house Judiciary committee. Leading democrats on that committee agreed. Suddenly, the fears that I thought I had overcome began to crawl back into my head.

If I challenged this legislation, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, would I be smeared as an “animal rights terrorist”? Would FBI agents fulfill their promises from years ago and tell members of congress that I am on a domestic terrorist list? Would the representative from Wisconsin turn to me and ask, “Mr. Potter, are you now, or have you ever been, a vegetarian?”

The historian Howard Zinn always advised his students, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” the committee staff explicitly told me that democratic leadership supported this bill; I was to speak about my reporting but not challenge the legislation. Meanwhile, corporations and industry groups wanted nothing more than for their bill to proceed unchallenged. The train was moving, I thought, whether anyone liked it or not.

I decided I would not be a token gesture of dissent in their spectacle of democracy. Rather than propose modest tweaks to the bill, I testified that lawmakers must reject it in its entirety. I said that scarce terrorism resources should not be exploited to protect corporate interests. In my testimony, I compared the “eco-terrorist” legislation and scare mongering to one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, the communist witch hunts of the Red Scare.

As I awaited questions from members of congress and braced myself for the reaction from the democrats who invited me, I looked down at my notes and at my hands. It struck me that they were perfectly still. It was an empowering feeling, to have my words and my actions completely in line with my beliefs. Never in my life had I felt so calm.

Immediately after the hearing, I began calling activist groups and urged them to notify their members about the legislation. I began to write regularly for a Web site I created, GreenIsTheNewRed.com. And I began speaking at law schools, conferences, churches, potlucks, punk rock shows—anywhere I could to raise awareness about the law and help stop it.

Months later, the law was rushed through the House of Representatives with only six members of congress in the room. Most lawmakers were breaking ground for a new memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. when legislation was being passed that labeled King’s tactics—including nonviolent civil disobedience—as terrorism.

It was a major defeat, and for the corporations who supported the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, it was only the beginning. Since then, similar legislation has been introduced in many other states.

In Utah, a lawmaker said legislation is needed to target people like Tim Dechristopher, the University of Utah student who disrupted an oil and gas auction by bidding on parcels of land. In Tennessee, Rep. Frank Niceley argued before the general assembly for eco-terrorism legislation, saying, “Eco-terrorists are left-wing eco-greenies. It’s a different type of terrorism. They don’t have Osama Bin Laden leadin’ them.”

So how have these “eco-terrorism” laws been used? In California, four activists were arrested under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act for protesting animal experimentation outside of the experimenter’s home. Their indictment lists that they chanted, protested, made fliers, and wrote slogans on the ground in children’s sidewalk chalk. As I write this, they are awaiting trial.

For those who have been convicted as “terrorists,” the label follows them from the courtroom into prison. for example, Daniel McGowan was arrested in 2005 for his role in two arsons by the Earth Liberation Front. He targeted genetic engineering and a timber company that logged old-growth forests. In a court hearing, the lead prosecutor called the Earth Liberation Front a terrorist organization and compared the property destruction of McGowan and his codefendants to the violence of the Ku Klux Klan.

McGowan pleaded guilty to his charges and was sentenced to prison as a terrorist. He is now incarcerated in a secretive prison facility on U.S. soil, called a communications management unit (CMU). He was transferred there without notice and without opportunity for appeal.

The CMUs radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that rival, or exceed, the most restrictive facilities in the country, including the Supermax ADX-Florence. Inmates and guards at the CMUs call them “Little Guantanamo.” they have also been described as prisons for “second-tier” terrorists.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, these inmates “do not rise to the same degree of potential risk to national security” as other terrorism inmates. Most prisoners are Muslim, and the secretive prisons have also housed Andrew Stepanian, an animal rights activist convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” charges.

Through interviews with attorneys, family members, and a current prisoner, it is clear that these units have been created not for violent and dangerous “terrorists,” but for political cases the government would like to keep secret.

——————-

My experiences with the FBI pales in comparison to what many activists have endured, both during this “Green Scare” and in other eras of government repression. I have not been threatened with prison time, terrorism enhancement penalties, or anything like that. However, my experience has prompted the stark realization that the overly broad use of the word terrorism affects many more people than those who set foot in a courtroom.

Few activists will be visited by the FBI, even fewer will be arrested. The real purpose of all this—the FBI visits, the public relations campaigns, the legislation—is to instill fear and make everyday people afraid of speaking up for their beliefs. The scare-mongering has had what attorneys call a chilling effect: it has made everyday people feel as if they must choose between their activism and being labeled a terrorist, and that is not a choice anyone should have to make.

It can be unsettling and frightening to learn how far the government has gone to attack political activists, and sometimes I wonder if spreading this information simply makes more people afraid. But time and again, in dozens of venues, from the New York City Bar Association to anarchist bookstores, I have seen an incredible thing happen when people learn about these issues and then turn to their neighbors. Their conversations are never about how they are afraid; they are about how they are angry and want to take action.

The best way to handle the fear these scare tactics create, I learned, is to confront it head on. “Never turn your back on fear,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote. “It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.”

——————–

The leafleting case in Chicago was eventually dismissed, and we decided to move back to Texas. Kamber and I packed our few belongings and prepared for the journey home. I dreaded moving day. Not because of any attachment to the city, but because I did not want to walk downstairs, through the marble lobby with its Corinthian columns and Victorian couches, and enter Steve the Landlord’s office to turn in our keys. He knew, I thought. He must.

The building was old, but secure. The FBI agents did not kick down any doors when they visited our apartment. They flashed badges and were escorted inside. They probably told Steve that Kamber and I were suspected terrorists, and that this was a national security matter that needed urgent attention. Perhaps they showed him my photo, film noir style. Would he even buzz me into his office? I wondered. Would he ask me to slide the keys under the door, to keep me at a safe distance? Would he refuse to return my security deposit, because there was a “no terrorist” clause in the fine print of the lease?

I opened his door and walked up to his desk as he spoke with a couple of prospective tenants. I tried to silently slip the keys across the desk, but they jangled like jailer’s keys, and the sound of metal on wood echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. I turned, exhaled, and walked away. He called after me when I was almost to the doorway. Here it comes, I thought. Steve the Landlord is going to say how disappointed he is in both of us. How he is going to take custody of the dogs because they should not live with such terrorist scum.

“Hey, will,” he said. I turned to face him. “Give ’em hell.”

Support AlterNet by purchasing your copy of The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet through our partner, Powell’s, an independent bookstore.

Will Potter is an award-winning independent journalist based in Washington, DC. He has just released his first book, Green Is The New Red, from City Lights Books.

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have as much loot, stock and property as the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

Watch Video: Michael Moore Speaks in Wisconsin

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep you head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn’t have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn’t be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That’s how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he’s stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn’t have to sleep in his car between shifts at O’Hare airport. That’s how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn’t be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he’s just another slob.

And that, my friends, is Corporate America’s fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don’t understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. “Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

“There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you …?”

America ain’t broke! The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it’s one person, one vote, and it’s the thing the rich hate most about America — because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/michael-moore-america-is-not-broke68265

March 2, 2011

By Tom Engelhardt

This is a global moment unlike any in memory, perhaps in history.

Yes, comparisons can be made to the wave of people power that swept Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91.  For those with longer memories, perhaps 1968 might come to mind, that abortive moment when, in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe, masses of people mysteriously inspired by each other took to the streets of global cities to proclaim that change was on the way.

For those searching the history books, perhaps you’ve focused on the year 1848 when, in a time that also mixed economic gloom with novel means of disseminating the news, the winds of freedom seemed briefly to sweep across Europe.  And, of course, if enough regimes fall and the turmoil goes deep enough, there’s always 1776, the American Revolution, or 1789, the French one, to consider.  Both shook up the world for decades after.

But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit this Middle Eastern moment into any previous paradigm, even as — from Wisconsin to China — it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet.  Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous — or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth) — in the presence of unarmed humanity.  And there has to be joy and hope in that alone.Even now, without understanding what it is we face, watching staggering numbers of people, many young and dissatisfied, take to the streets in Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti, Oman, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Libya, not to mention Bahrain, Tunisia, and Egypt, would be inspirational.  Watching them face security forces using batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and in all too many cases, real bullets (in Libya, even helicopters and planes) and somehow grow stronger is little short of unbelievable.  Seeing Arabs demanding something we were convinced was the birthright and property of the West, of the United States in particular, has to send a shiver down anyone’s spine.

The nature of this potentially world-shaking phenomenon remains unknown and probably, at this point, unknowable.  Are freedom and democracy about to break out all over?  And if so, what will that turn out to mean?  If not, what exactly are we seeing?  What light bulb was it that so unexpectedly turned on in millions of Twittered and Facebooked brains — and why now?  I doubt those who are protesting, and in some cases dying, know themselves.  And that’s good news.  That the future remains — always — the land of the unknown should offer us hope, not least because that’s the bane of ruling elites who want to, but never can, take possession of it.

Nonetheless, you would expect that a ruling elite, observing such earth-shaking developments, might rethink its situation, as should the rest of us.  After all, if humanity can suddenly rouse itself this way in the face of the armed power of state after state, then what’s really possible on this planet of ours?

Seeing such scenes repeatedly, who wouldn’t rethink the basics?  Who wouldn’t feel the urge to reimagine our world?

Let me offer as my nominee of choice not various desperate or dying Middle Eastern regimes, but Washington.

Life in the Echo Chamber

So much of what Washington did imagine in these last years proved laughable, even before this moment swept it away.  Just take any old phrase from the Bush years.  How about “You’re either with us or against us”?  What’s striking is how little it means today.  Looking back on Washington’s desperately mistaken assumptions about how our globe works, this might seem like the perfect moment to show some humility in the face of what nobody could have predicted.

It would seem like a good moment for Washington — which, since September 12, 2001, has been remarkably clueless about real developments on this planet and repeatedly miscalculated the nature of global power — to step back and recalibrate.

As it happens, there’s no evidence it’s doing so.  In fact, that may be beyond Washington’s present capabilities, no matter how many billions of dollars it pours into “intelligence.”  And by “Washington,” I mean not just the Obama administration, or the Pentagon, or our military commanders, or the vast intelligence bureaucracy, but all those pundits and think-tankers who swarm the capital, and the media that reports on them all.  It’s as if the cast of characters that makes up “Washington” now lives in some kind of echo chamber in which it can only hear itself talking.

As a result, Washington still seems remarkably determined to play out the string on an era that is all too swiftly passing into the history books.  While many have noticed the Obama administration’s hapless struggle to catch up to events in the Middle East, even as it clings to a familiar coterie of grim autocrats and oil sheiks, let me illustrate this point in another area entirely — the largely forgotten war in Afghanistan.  After all, hardly noticed, buried beneath 24/7 news from Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, that war continues on its destructive, costly course with nary a blink.

Five Ways to Be Tone Deaf in Washington

You might think that, as vast swathes of the Greater Middle East are set ablaze, someone in Washington would take a new look at our Af/Pak War and wonder whether it isn’t simply beside the point.  No such luck, as the following five tiny but telling examples that caught my attention indicate.  Consider them proof of the well-being of the American echo chamber and evidence of the way Washington is proving incapable of rethinking its longest, most futile, and most bizarre war.

1. Let’s start with a recent New York Times op-ed, “The ‘Long War’ May Be Getting Shorter.” Published last Tuesday as Libya was passing through “the gates of hell,” it was an upbeat account of Afghan War commander General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency operations in southern Afghanistan.  Its authors, Nathaniel Fick and John Nagl, members of an increasingly militarized Washington intelligentsia, jointly head the Center for a New American Security in Washington.  Nagl was part of the team that wrote the 2006 revised Army counterinsurgency manual for which Petraeus is given credit and was an advisor to the general in Iraq.  Fick, a former Marine officer who led troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and then was a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul, recently paid a first-hand visit to the country (under whose auspices we do not know).

The two of them are typical of many of Washington’s war experts who tend to develop incestuous relationships with the military, moonlighting as enablers or cheerleaders for our war commanders, and still remain go-to sources for the media.

In another society, their op-ed would simply have been considered propaganda.  Here’s its money paragraph:

“It is hard to tell when momentum shifts in a counterinsurgency campaign, but there is increasing evidence that Afghanistan is moving in a more positive direction than many analysts think. It now seems more likely than not that the country can achieve the modest level of stability and self-reliance necessary to allow the United States to responsibly draw down its forces from 100,000 to 25,000 troops over the next four years.”

This is a classic Washington example of moving the goalposts.  What our two experts are really announcing is that, even if all goes well in our Afghan War, 2014 will not be its end date.  Not by a long shot.

Of course, this is a position that Petraeus has supported.  Four years from now our “withdrawal” plans, according to Nagl and Fick, will leave 25,000 troops in place.  If truth-telling or accuracy were the point of their exercise, their piece would have been titled, “The ‘Long War’ Grows Longer.”

Even as the Middle East explodes and the U.S. plunges into a budget “debate” significantly powered by our stunningly expensive wars that won’t end, these two experts implicitly propose that General Petraeus and his successors fight on in Afghanistan at more than $100 billion a year into the distant reaches of time, as if nothing in the world were changing.  This already seems like the definition of obliviousness and one day will undoubtedly look delusional, but it’s the business-as-usual mentality with which Washington faces a new world.

2.  Or consider two striking comments General Petraeus himself made that bracket our new historical moment.  At a morning briefing on January 19th, according to New York Times reporter Rod Nordland, the general was in an exultant, even triumphalist, mood about his war.  It was just days before the first Egyptian demonstrators would take to the streets, and only days after Tunisian autocrat Zine Ben Ali had met the massed power of nonviolent demonstrators and fled his country.  And here’s what Petraeus so exuberantly told his staff: “We’ve got our teeth in the enemy’s jugular now, and we’re not going to let go.”

It’s true that the general had, for months, not only been sending new American troops south, but ratcheting up the use of air power, increasing Special Operations night raids, and generally intensifying the war in the Taliban’s home territory.  Still, under the best of circumstances, his was an exultantly odd image.  It obviously called up the idea of a predator sinking its teeth into the throat of its prey, but surely somewhere in the military unconscious lurked a more classic American pop-cultural image — the werewolf or vampire.  Evidently, the general’s idea of an American future involves an extended blood feast in the Afghan version of Transylvania, for like Nagl and Fick he clearly plans to have those teeth in that jugular for a long, long time to come.

A month later, on February 19th, just as all hell was breaking loose in Bahrain and Libya, the general visited the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul and, in dismissing Afghan claims that recent American air raids in the country’s northeast had killed scores of civilians, including children, he made a comment that shocked President Hamid Karzai’s aides.  We don’t have it verbatim, but the Washington Post reports that, according to “participants,” Petraeus suggested “Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties.”

One Afghan at the meeting responded: “I was dizzy. My head was spinning. This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd.”

In the American echo-chamber, the general’s comments may sound, if not reasonable, then understandably exuberant and emphatic: We’ve got the enemy by the throat!  We didn’t create Afghan casualties; they did it to themselves!  Elsewhere, they surely sound obtusely tone deaf or simply vampiric, evidence that those inside the echo chamber have no sense of how they look in a shape-shifting world.

3.  Now, let’s step across an ill-defined Afghan-Pakistan border into another world of American obtuseness.  On February 15th, only four days after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president of Egypt, Barack Obama decided to address a growing problem in Pakistan.  Raymond Davis, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier armed with a Glock semi-automatic pistol and alone in a vehicle cruising a poor neighborhood of Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore, shot and killed two Pakistanis he claimed had menaced him at gunpoint.  (One was evidently shot in the back.)

Davis reportedly got out of the vehicle firing his pistol, then photographed the dead bodies and called for backup.  The responding vehicle, racing to the scene the wrong way in traffic, ran over a motorcyclist, killing him before fleeing.  (Subsequently, the wife of one of the Pakistanis Davis killed committed suicide by ingesting rat poison.)

The Pakistani police took Davis into custody with a carful of strange equipment.  No one should be surprised that this was not a set of circumstances likely to endear an already alienated population to its supposed American allies. In fact, it created a popular furor as Pakistanis reacted to what seemed like the definition of imperial impunity, especially when the U.S. government, claiming Davis was an “administrative and technical official” attached to its Lahore consulate, demanded his release on grounds of diplomatic immunity and promptly began pressuring an already weak, unpopular government with loss of aid and support.

Senator John Kerry paid a hasty visit, calls were made, and threats to cut off U.S. funds were raised in the halls of Congress.  Despite what was happening elsewhere and in tumultuous Pakistan, American officials found it hard to imagine that beholden Pakistanis wouldn’t buckle.

On February 15th, with the Middle East in flames, President Obama weighed in, undoubtedly making matters worse: “With respect to Mr. Davis, our diplomat in Pakistan,” he said, “we’ve got a very simple principle here that every country in the world that is party to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations has upheld in the past and should uphold in the future, and that is if our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.”

The Pakistanis refused to give way to that “very simple principle” and not long after, “our diplomat in Pakistan” was identified by the British Guardian as a former Blackwater employee and present employee of the CIA.  He was, the publication reported, involved in the Agency’s secret war in Pakistan.  That war, especially much-ballyhooed and expensive “covert” drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands whose returns have been overhyped in Washington, continues to generate blowback in ways that Americans prefer not to grasp.

Of course, the president knew that Davis was a CIA agent, even when he called him “our diplomat.”  As it turned out, so did the New York Times and other U.S. publications, which refrained from writing about his real position at the request of the Obama administration, even as they continued to report (evasively, if not simply untruthfully) on the case.

Given what’s happening in the region, this represents neither reasonable policy-making nor reasonable journalism.  If the late Chalmers Johnson, who made the word “blowback” part of our everyday language, happens to be looking down on American policy from some niche in heaven, he must be grimly amused by the brain-dead way our top officials blithely continue to try to bulldoze the Pakistanis.

4.  Meanwhile, on February 18th back in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on one of that country’s “largest money exchange houses,” charging “that it used billions of dollars transferred in and out of the country to help hide proceeds from illegal drug sales.”

Here’s how Ginger Thompson and Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times contextualized that act: “The move is part of a delicate balancing act by the Obama administration, which aims to crack down on the corruption that reaches the highest levels of the Afghan government without derailing the counterinsurgency efforts that are dependent on Mr. Karzai’s cooperation.”

In a world in which Washington’s word seems to travel ever less far with ever less authority, the response to this echo-chamber-style description, and especially its central image — “a delicate balancing act” — would be: no, not by a long shot.

In relation to a country that’s the prime narco-state on the planet, what could really be “delicate”?  If you wanted to describe the Obama administration’s bizarre, pretzled relationship with President Karzai and his people, words like “contorted,” “confused,” and “hypocritical” would have to be trotted out.  If realism prevailed, the phrase “indelicate imbalance” might be a more appropriate one to use.

5.  Finally, journalist Dexter Filkins recently wrote a striking piece, “The Afghan Bank Heist,” in the New Yorker magazine on the shenanigans that brought Kabul Bank, one of Afghanistan’s top financial institutions, to the edge of collapse. While bankrolling Hamid Karzai and his cronies by slipping them staggering sums of cash, the bank’s officials essentially ran off with the deposits of its customers.  (Think of Kabul Bank as the institutional Bernie Madoff of Afghanistan.)  In his piece, Filkins quotes an anonymous American official this way on the crooked goings-on he observed: “If this were America, fifty people would have been arrested by now.”

Consider that line the echo-chamber version of stand-up comedy as well as a reminder that only mad dogs and Americans stay out in the Afghan sun.  Like a lot of Americans now in Afghanistan, that poor diplomat needs to be brought home — and soon. He’s lost touch with the changing nature of his own country.  While we claim it as our duty to bring “nation-building” and “good governance” to the benighted Afghans, at home the U.S. is being unbuilt, democracy is essentially gone with the wind, the oligarchs are having a field day, the Supreme Court has insured that massive influxes of money will rule any future elections, and the biggest crooks of all get to play their get-out-of-jail-free cards whenever they want.  In fact, the Kabul Bank racket — a big deal in an utterly impoverished society — is a minor sideshow compared to what American banks, brokerages, mortgage and insurance companies, and other financial institutions did via their “ponzi schemes of securitization” when, in 2008, they drove the U.S. and global economies into meltdown mode.

And none of the individuals responsible went to prison, just old-fashioned Ponzi schemers like Madoff.  Not one of them was even put on trial.

Just the other day, federal prosecutors dropped one of the last possible cases from the 2008 meltdown.  Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., once the nation’s top mortgage company, did have to settle a civil suit focused on his “ill-gotten gains” in the subprime mortgage debacle for $67.5 million, but as with his peers, no criminal charges will be filed.

We’re Not the Good Guys

Imagine this: for the first time in history, a movement of Arabs is inspiring Americans in Wisconsin and possibly elsewhere.  Right now, in other words, there is something new under the sun and we didn’t invent it.  It’s not ours. We’re not — catch your breath here — even the good guys.   They were the ones calling for freedom and democracy in the streets of Middle Eastern cities, while the U.S. performed another of those indelicate imbalances in favor of the thugs we’ve long supported in the Middle East.

History is now being reshaped in such a way that the previously major events of the latter years of the foreshortened American century — the Vietnam War, the end of the Cold War, even 9/11 — may all be dwarfed by this new moment.  And yet, inside the Washington echo chamber, new thoughts about such developments dawn slowly.  Meanwhile, our beleaguered, confused, disturbed country, with its aging, disintegrating infrastructure, is ever less the model for anyone anywhere (though again you wouldn’t know that here).

Oblivious to events, Washington clearly intends to fight its perpetual wars and garrison its perpetual bases, creating yet more blowback and destabilizing yet more places, until it eats itself alive.  This is the definition of all-American decline in an unexpectedly new world.  Yes, teeth may be in jugulars, but whose teeth in whose jugulars remains open to speculation, whatever General Petraeus thinks.

As the sun peeks over the horizon of the Arab world, dusk is descending on America.  In the penumbra, Washington plays out the cards it once dealt itself, some from the bottom of the deck, even as other players are leaving the table.  Meanwhile, somewhere out there in the land, you can just hear the faint howls.  It’s feeding time and the scent of blood is in the air.  Beware!

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s.
Sign up to receive the latest updates fromTomDispatch.com here.

Reposted from AlterNet