While U.S. leaders claim that the American military fights for American freedoms, Army Colonel Denise Lind, the judge in this case, nevertheless, allows military prosecutors to litigate secretly from public view. This is not surprising especially since U.S. citizens do not own and operate their own government like citizens do in real democracies.
Judge Lind would normally be a public servant in any free country instead she functions as a tooth in the big bad gears of the military-industrial machinery. The prosecution’s documents and other evidence filed in the case are not open to public view. Judge Lind also keeps her trial orders “top secret.” Somehow Judge Lind operates by an alternative set of laws since she obviously marches to the tune of her dictating chain of command. (1) She operates in a class-based judicial system and Bradley Manning lives in the lower class. So, Judge Lind follows procedures accordingly. She follows the rules of the powerful, not the rule of laws. She is a spoke in the powerful wheels of the big green machine that rolls over the First Amendment right of public access to criminal proceedings which applies both to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions and to courts-martials. (2)
On April 25, 2012, Judge Lind denied the defense motion to dismiss all 22 charges during a pretrial hearing in Bradley Manning's court martial. Defense Attorney Coombs, whose fees are paid by supporters, argued that the prosecution failed to follow discovery procedures for evidence. The Army still sniffs through the thousands of so-called “top secret” documents for a proof that Manning ‘willfully intended’ that the leaks damaged U.S. interests. (3) Judge Lind has scheduled the trial from September to October this year, allotting the Army time to sift out a reason to throw away the key to Manning’s cell.
Private First Class Bradley Manning, 24, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, was arrested at a U.S. base in Iraq on charges of leaking classified material to Wikileaks, a whistleblower website.(4) Manning sits in a cell since May 2010 without a trial. To date that’s more than 700 days, including fourteen months of mind-bending solitary confinement from May 2010 until July 2011. That was solitary confinement with suicide prevention, meaning mostly without his clothes, making for a humiliating torture in the same ilk as at Guantanamo. According to most treatises—Geneva Convention, the UN, etc.—this is torture, war crimes, and grounds to throw out the case.
After protests from constitutional law groups, the Army moved Manning to a medium-security prison, allowing interaction with other “detainees,” a term the government uses these days for people held indefinitely for “suspicions”—a perversion of fundamental American rights reflected in the totalitarian Patriot Act and the fascist NDAA of which the Taliban would be proud. (5) Several powerful people, including Pres. Obama, have already condemned Manning publicly. This is a grounds for dismissal.(6)
The Army got around to arraigning Manning in February 2012 with the most serious charges: communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, and aiding the enemy, a capital offense. Military Prosecutors argue that the leaks helped al Qaeda. (7) So far the prosecutors say that they would not seek the death penalty.
Judge Lind knows how to play the political games. Like many others, she crawled her way up the military ladder to make colonel, inching her way now toward more power. She must have become one tough cookie, pursuing a career in an organization founded on testosterone-ladled machismo. As an organization, the military is paradoxically the farthest thing from any whiff of democracy with its dictatorial and draconian chain of command that demands soldiers get the dirty work done—and even while it claims to protect American freedoms. And while many soldiers, like Manning, (8) increasingly see the U.S. invasions of the Middle East as a perversion of truth and of American values by dint of its secrecy, its use of torture, its murder of thousands of civilians of all ages.
The U.S. military along with its justice seems to enjoy taking exceptions to the law when it needs its top security in the politically darkened court room as well as out on battle fields made soggy by the blood for oil exchange.
Some of the documents that Manning allegedly leaked include videos of Apache helicopters pilots killing unarmed Iraqis and Reuter journalists as if they were mere targets in a video game. (9) The secrecy of information in Manning’s case and about everything else in these endless wars delivers an indictment against the U.S. systems of justice and governance by its massive volumes of secrets.
It was secrecy that enabled powerful people to demand that the U.S. military bomb more than 2 million Vietnamese and Cambodians, mostly rice farmers. Even big fancy U.S. aircrafts that drop bombs from the sky can also commit terrorist actions. We cannot forget the Bay of Tonkin incident, a false-flag justification to initiate war in Vietnam. Likewise, the invasion of Iraq was planned in 1998, four years before 9/11, as part of the NPAC. (10)
It just so happened that the 9/11/2001 disaster created the much needed false-flag justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure the oil reserves—even though applying the same money and effort to develop a clean energy industry would be a much more beneficial solution, not to mention moral. At the detriment of the world, the powerful people who own the status-quo oil industry have vested interests in acquiring and selling more oil even if it means killing for it.
Retaliation plays a part into this farcical prosecution of Manning because the classified documents, whoever leaked them, reveal the incompetence and bad faith of many powerful people as was the case in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. (11) And since Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak, the military now stamps even its toilet paper as “top secret” to the point that the American public doesn’t have the slightest clue about its country’s history or what they pay in lives and taxes for wars.
The U.S. military has drifted away from its moorings to any accountability and far from the civilian world. (12) “A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, statecraft cannot function if it is shrouded in secrecy.” (13) Perhaps the only way to regain a glimmer of democracy is to require a general election for all U.S. invasions, especially since the U.S. “elite” are totally incapable of foreign policy or domestic policy as well considering the financial terrorism on Wall Street.
With so much use of dark secrecy and manipulation of the laws and the media, powerful people crush the checks and balances like ugly road kill. Without proper oversight, regulations and investigations, America has become an empire in which we live not by rules of law, but by rules of powerful people.
In Glenn Greenwald’s recent book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, we find case after case revealing how powerful people apply the justice system differently for two social classes, the regular citizen, like Bradley Manning, and the powerful people, like G.W. Bush—the latter blatantly broke the law by colluding with telecommunication corporations to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens’ emails and telephones in 2005—a serious crime—without the slightest legal action: (14) “…the problem extends well beyond such inequalities. The issue isn’t just that those with political influence and financial power have some advantages in our judicial system. It is much worse than that. Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever.” (15)
The case of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame resembles the mirror inverse of Manning’s case in several ways. (16) G. W. Bush and his cabinet had contracted Wilson, Plame’s husband, to investigate the Nigerian government as a seller of (yellow cake) plutonium for Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD developments. When Wilson reported the truth that no such link between Niger and Iraq existed, the Bush cabinet retaliated by leaking Plame’s cover as a secret CIA agent specialized in WMDs.
Plame and Wilson called for an investigation, claiming that this leak put Plame and her informants and colleagues in a perilous situation. The Bush cabinet played a frat-boy prank on the judicial investigation by using Scotter Libby—a longtime member in the neocon fraternity house (PNAC)—as the patsy.
Libby was convicted on a handful of felonies. But good’ol frat-boy G.W. Bush commuted Libby’s felonies after only a few weeks in a high-class jail. “This rare triumph for equality before the law could not have happened but for an improbable set of circumstances. First, Libby had made the mistake of crossing the CIA, which loathes any outing of covert agents. Because it was the CIA that had asked the Department of Justice to investigate the leak, the request had to be taken seriously….These circumstances combined to produce the rarest of all Washington events: the prosecution of a truly powerful individual for serious crimes committed while in office.” (17)
Our so-called leaders still attempt to justify aggressive invasions and occupations in unrelated Iraq and Afghanistan as if the 9/11/2001 disaster called for colonizing and controlling the oil regions. We remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers were born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and that none of them had anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan.
Powerful people in the U.S. used 9/11 to hijack the American people’s imaginations and fears into frivolous war and succeeded in doing this by using a “false flag” like the Bay of Tonkin incident in Vietnam. “Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on willful distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions.” (18) The powerful people in the U.S. carry out state terrorism. "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad." (19)
The more the U.S. military invades foreign countries, the more the invaded and occupied foreigners—the Taliban or Khmer Rouge, ragheads, gooks or whatever—will fight to defend their country. The more powerful people can make a farce of American justice, the more the regular Americans become as oppressed as Bradley Manning and the unarmed Iraqis shot down by those Apache helicopters pilots. (20) Bradley Manning is a national hero for shining a little light on an America groping in the dark without a moral compass.
Sources:
1) The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, Or Books, 2012, Kindle page (location) 54.
2) Secrecy in the trial: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hafetz/bradley-manning-trial_b_1450955.html
3) Defense motion denied: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/25/bradley-manning-defence-motion-denied
4) http://wikileaks.org/
5) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): it strips away many of the most basic civil rights in American law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012
6) Officials publicly condemn Manning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0
7) Judge refuses to dismiss: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/6811592/Judge-refuses-to-dismiss-soldiers-WikiLeaks-case
8) The Passion of Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, Or Books, 2012, Kindle page (location) 494.
9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
10) PNAC: Project for the New American Century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
11) Pentagon Papers, by Daniel Ellsberg, Penguin (Non-Classics), Sept. 2003. And a recent documentary on this story: The Most Dangerous Man in America: http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Dangerous-Man-America/dp/B00329PYGQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335641885&sr=8-1
12) Drift, by Rachel Maddow, 275 pp., Crown Publishers, NY, New York. And a New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/books/review/drift-by-rachel-maddow.html
13) The Passion of Bradley Manning, Ibid, Kindle page (location 62-63).
14) With Liberty and Justice for Some, by Glenn Greenwald, Metropolitan Books; Oct. 2011; Kindle page (location) 30
15) Ibid.; Kindle page (location) 25.
16) Joe Wilson & Valerie Plame vs Dick (Chickenhawk) Cheney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqGoaORCuLM See also the movie Fair Game.
17) With Liberty and Justice for Some; Ibid.: Kindle page (location) 516-518.
18) The Passion of Bradley Manning, Ibid. Kindle page (location) 52. See also the documentary on secrecy: WikiRebels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9xrO2Ch4Co
19) Letters and Other Writings of James Madison; J.B. Lippincott & Co.; 1865; Vol. II, p. 141. Available on Amazon.com
20) With Liberty and Justice for Some: Kindle page (location) 63-66. “Alexander Hamilton did not often see eye to eye with Paine, but on this he heartily agreed. “The instruments by which [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE,” he wrote in 1794. “If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!” Like Paine and Hamilton, Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put the rule of law at the top of his list of core principles for a free and legitimate government: “The very definition of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.’…Good government is an empire of laws.”
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Drones Enable Corporate Power
Several articles have recently appeared in the news about the legality of using drones to assassinate U.S. citizens and foreigners. The article by Jean MacKinzie at the Global Post (1) recently considered the question, “Are our drone attacks legal?” The article provides insight into the legal justifications or lack thereof. However, as attorneys go, they look mostly at the laws on the books or the precedence or juris prudence. This view certainly has its limits.
The military does not need new laws to allow the assassination of people by drones or by any other clever means. As many times in recent events, the Patriot Act allows the U.S. to capture and/or kill anyone considered a terrorist and without a fair trial, due process of the law, or even solid evidence.
Roll up the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and bury them in the dust on a dark shelf. These “patriot” laws greatly expand the powers of the president, the military and law enforcement with the ability to assassinate or detain anyone considered associated with terrorism. The laws make it convenient for “authorities” to identify just about anyone as a terrorist by relatively vague criteria and, without due process or evidence, to kill people from a remote control, virtual reality video gaming seat.
This includes the several recent cases in which the FBI coaches and coaxes vulnerable individuals. “Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack…only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.” (2)
These dark and dubious FBI sting operations (3) are now being used to trump up justifications to impose sanctions against Iran. For various political reasons, President Obama has jumped on this bandwagon with such casus belli—justifications for aggression. The use of trumped up justifications for U.S. sanctions and military invasions has become a cookie cutter process for presidents throughout American history. (4)
Laws are overwhelmingly made to protect those in power—call it "national interests." Money provides power and power protects those with the money.
U.S. government policies are overwhelmingly skewed to protect the investors and owners of wealth, especially for those dealing in fossil fuels which provide unprecedented returns on investments and even more so as the crude reserves diminish and the profits increase.
Unfortunately, fossil fuel is flagrantly obsolete simply because it causes endless wars for the resources and it destroys the environment on which life depends. Climate change and oil spills cause ecological catastrophes, which in the long, and also in the short run, have begun to destroy the planet. The only way to avoid these lethal and toxic events is to develop alternative technology.
Alas, the country's power elite avoids rapid changes in energy technology because the investments to develop new energy sources, renewable and clean, might require a short-term reduction on their returns on investments. This is a simple rule of capitalism, especially in the "free" and unregulated capitalism in the United States.
If the United States were to develop alternative, renewable, clean energy sources on a massive scale—wind, hydrogen, solar, etc.—and be the first and most advanced in this technology, the investors would gain a huge and global competitive advantage. But this change in technology requires short-term reductions in returns on investments before the profits increase.
While spending trillions of dollars in futile, endless wars in order to control access to fossil fuels, our elected officials ignore the opportunity to invest public resources to develop the renewable energy sources and so too, create more good jobs.
Instead of a national and rational energy policy, our elected officials, motivated by Big Money corporations, cater to the ruling class, which wants to use any type of military actions, drones or otherwise, to defend their access to the highly profitable fossil fuels.
Faceless corporations are ready to stop anyone who stands in their way to harvest the profits from the crude and this applies to any other industry such as healthcare or finance. The owners of wealth—the 1 percenters—are reluctant to reinvest into new energy sources. It's a lot easier to maintain the current and highly lucrative status quo, even when that means the ruling class needs to kill anyone standing in the way of their profits.
The financially powerful ruling class—however irrational their policies—writes the laws that enable the owners of wealth to carry on with their business and maintain their short-term and enormous profits. Or they simply ignore laws such as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. Their irrational and greedy operations reveal just how short-sighted unregulated, unguided capitalism is. Big Money corporations like Koch and Exxon serve as just one of many examples how the U.S. system favors the rule of powerful men rather than the rule of rational laws that benefit the greatest good of the entire country. Koch and Exxon write state legislation repealing climate change laws.
The purpose of government—at least in a democracy—is to allow rational use of resources for the greatest good of the nation.
Since the Big Oil barons want to control their grip on petroleum no matter where it’s found, the U.S. government's policy, by default, is to support their wishes, despite any democratic process. The simple and obvious truth is that the U.S. government offers the country’s people no rational energy policy for the greatest good of the country. On the contrary, the U.S. elected officials take their commands from the large and financially powerful corporations which, in turn, compensate the elected officials by large campaign contributions.
Since the death of FDR and the New Deal, U.S. elected officials—Democrats and Republicans—have turned their functions away from democracy.(5) The United States has become an inverted totalitarianism—a corporate ruled state—as the government provides services first and foremost to the wants and needs of the 1 percenters, the owners and investors of corporations.(6)
Since the U.S. elected officials—congressmen, senators, president—cater to the wants of the members of their own ruling class instead of the general population, and since the elected officials command the U.S. military, then also the public’s military provides killing services—security or defense—first and foremost for the benefits of the 1 percenters. This New World Order in the United States now resembles a totalitarianism like that of the old Soviet Union, even though it’s called by euphemistic names like “free market.” There’s nothing free about it, especially as the middle class pays the brunt of the taxes to finance these oil-motivated military escapades into endless wars.
As it stands then, any American who joins the military thinking patriotically and heroically that he or she is “serving the country" is gravely—no pun intended—mistaken. You join up with the military, you provide protection for large corporations, most of which are not even American (CACI, Halliburton, KBR to which Cheney gave no-bid contracts in Iraq, and this list of war profiteers is long). (7)
To break this down into pragmatic and simple terms, the military, with all its clever toys, like the drones, only serves the interests of the few, extremely wealthy…the 1 percenters. The military, following commands from the ruling class, which includes the elected officials, enables these patricians to pursue their search for greater profits today in the Middle East and tomorrow elsewhere. The Big Oil lords do so with government subsidies and special tax breaks on top of all other services.
The rest of us plebs—the 99 percenters—have all learned to avert our eyes and thoughts about this simple truth. Our democracy is no longer in the hands of the voting citizens. Us 99 cent-ers are mere subjects obeying the demands of corporate fiefdoms.
So, no matter how you parse the legal arguments about drones or other clever killing tools, the answer to such debates carries a foregone conclusion.
The Big Oil lords, the wealthy barons of Wall Street—the ruling corporate class—this small group of elites makes the rules by simple force of financial power. They determine the laws and often act regardless of the laws.
The unjustified, preemptive invasion of Iraq serves as one blatant example of disregard for the laws. And there are many more such examples from Cheney’s war crimes regarding torture to Rumsfeld’s blind military and nation building blunders.
Likewise, the Supreme Court also demonstrates how the highest ranks of the justice system adjudicates not in the interests of the greatest benefits of the citizenry but rather in favor of the interests of their own ruling class by allowing corporations all rights as individual citizens. Big Money corporations are seldom American and most often global and without any national loyalty.
With the 2010 judgment on Citizens United v FEC, we find again how the “authorities” in America give corporations the right to spend unlimited funds to influence elections despite the wishes of 85% of the citizens. (8) The Supreme Court justices give corporations all the rights of individual citizens, such as free speech, even through they are hardly "American citizens," as they are almost all global and mostly based in tax-evading islands, and they are never prosecuted as individuals when they break the laws.
None of these military policies or the energy policies—not to mention the "too big to fail" policies on Wall Street—serve for the greatest good of the nation but rather for the interests of those who possess the billions and millions of financial force. Elected officials—both Democrat and Republican—serve the barons of industry more so now than ever before and to hell with anyone who stands in their way.
Drones are effective tools as they ultimately enable the tycoons in their pursuit of greater profits.
The well-heeled attorneys can debate all they want about the legalities of drones or Patriot Acts or torture or preemptive invasions based on lies or massive fraud in the banking or in the healthcare industries. Our current perversions of the system of justice and of politics, is determined not by rational laws but by powerful barons of industry.
Bigger forces trump the laws.
Sources:
(1) MacKinzie, Jean. Are our drone attacks legal?, Global Post, Oct. 11, 2011, http://news.salon.com/2011/10/11/are_our_drone_attacks_legal/?source=newsletter
(2) Greenwald, Glenn. The FBI again Thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon blog, Sept. 29, 2011, http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
(3)Porter, Gareth. Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting, Real News Network, Oct. 15, 2011. Take a look at this recent report on the Real News Network:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7452
And here is an article explaining how President Obama is running with this dubious FBI sting operation: Feller, Ben. “Obama says Iran must be held accountable for plot,” Associated Press. Oct. 13, 2011.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_AMBASSADOR_PLOT?SITE=AP&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
(4) See my article posted of various blogs: “Church of Later Day Neocons.”
“This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican military, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tonkin incident helped justify the Vietnam War.”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Church-of-Later-Day-Neocon-by-Mark-Biskeborn-080725-949.html
(5) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Before the war, during the first two terms of FDR’s presidency (1933-41), a substantial attempt was made to establish a liberal version of social democracy. Looking back upon that experience, one has difficulty recognizing an America in which, unapologetically, public debate and discussion centered on matters such as planning; focusing resources on the poor and unemployed; bringing radical changes agriculture by limiting production; regulating business and banking practices while not fearing to castigate the rich and powerful; raising the standard of living of whole regions of the country; introducing public works projects that created employment for millions and left valuable public improvements (libraries, schools, conservation practices, subsidies to the arts); and promoting all manner of participatory schemes for including the citizenry in economic decision-making process.”
(6) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation. …that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.”
(7) See the short lists on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering
(8) See the video that explains this: http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/
The military does not need new laws to allow the assassination of people by drones or by any other clever means. As many times in recent events, the Patriot Act allows the U.S. to capture and/or kill anyone considered a terrorist and without a fair trial, due process of the law, or even solid evidence.
Roll up the Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta and bury them in the dust on a dark shelf. These “patriot” laws greatly expand the powers of the president, the military and law enforcement with the ability to assassinate or detain anyone considered associated with terrorism. The laws make it convenient for “authorities” to identify just about anyone as a terrorist by relatively vague criteria and, without due process or evidence, to kill people from a remote control, virtual reality video gaming seat.
This includes the several recent cases in which the FBI coaches and coaxes vulnerable individuals. “Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack…only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.” (2)
These dark and dubious FBI sting operations (3) are now being used to trump up justifications to impose sanctions against Iran. For various political reasons, President Obama has jumped on this bandwagon with such casus belli—justifications for aggression. The use of trumped up justifications for U.S. sanctions and military invasions has become a cookie cutter process for presidents throughout American history. (4)
Laws are overwhelmingly made to protect those in power—call it "national interests." Money provides power and power protects those with the money.
U.S. government policies are overwhelmingly skewed to protect the investors and owners of wealth, especially for those dealing in fossil fuels which provide unprecedented returns on investments and even more so as the crude reserves diminish and the profits increase.
Unfortunately, fossil fuel is flagrantly obsolete simply because it causes endless wars for the resources and it destroys the environment on which life depends. Climate change and oil spills cause ecological catastrophes, which in the long, and also in the short run, have begun to destroy the planet. The only way to avoid these lethal and toxic events is to develop alternative technology.
Alas, the country's power elite avoids rapid changes in energy technology because the investments to develop new energy sources, renewable and clean, might require a short-term reduction on their returns on investments. This is a simple rule of capitalism, especially in the "free" and unregulated capitalism in the United States.
If the United States were to develop alternative, renewable, clean energy sources on a massive scale—wind, hydrogen, solar, etc.—and be the first and most advanced in this technology, the investors would gain a huge and global competitive advantage. But this change in technology requires short-term reductions in returns on investments before the profits increase.
While spending trillions of dollars in futile, endless wars in order to control access to fossil fuels, our elected officials ignore the opportunity to invest public resources to develop the renewable energy sources and so too, create more good jobs.
Instead of a national and rational energy policy, our elected officials, motivated by Big Money corporations, cater to the ruling class, which wants to use any type of military actions, drones or otherwise, to defend their access to the highly profitable fossil fuels.
Faceless corporations are ready to stop anyone who stands in their way to harvest the profits from the crude and this applies to any other industry such as healthcare or finance. The owners of wealth—the 1 percenters—are reluctant to reinvest into new energy sources. It's a lot easier to maintain the current and highly lucrative status quo, even when that means the ruling class needs to kill anyone standing in the way of their profits.
The financially powerful ruling class—however irrational their policies—writes the laws that enable the owners of wealth to carry on with their business and maintain their short-term and enormous profits. Or they simply ignore laws such as the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. Their irrational and greedy operations reveal just how short-sighted unregulated, unguided capitalism is. Big Money corporations like Koch and Exxon serve as just one of many examples how the U.S. system favors the rule of powerful men rather than the rule of rational laws that benefit the greatest good of the entire country. Koch and Exxon write state legislation repealing climate change laws.
The purpose of government—at least in a democracy—is to allow rational use of resources for the greatest good of the nation.
Since the Big Oil barons want to control their grip on petroleum no matter where it’s found, the U.S. government's policy, by default, is to support their wishes, despite any democratic process. The simple and obvious truth is that the U.S. government offers the country’s people no rational energy policy for the greatest good of the country. On the contrary, the U.S. elected officials take their commands from the large and financially powerful corporations which, in turn, compensate the elected officials by large campaign contributions.
Since the death of FDR and the New Deal, U.S. elected officials—Democrats and Republicans—have turned their functions away from democracy.(5) The United States has become an inverted totalitarianism—a corporate ruled state—as the government provides services first and foremost to the wants and needs of the 1 percenters, the owners and investors of corporations.(6)
Since the U.S. elected officials—congressmen, senators, president—cater to the wants of the members of their own ruling class instead of the general population, and since the elected officials command the U.S. military, then also the public’s military provides killing services—security or defense—first and foremost for the benefits of the 1 percenters. This New World Order in the United States now resembles a totalitarianism like that of the old Soviet Union, even though it’s called by euphemistic names like “free market.” There’s nothing free about it, especially as the middle class pays the brunt of the taxes to finance these oil-motivated military escapades into endless wars.
As it stands then, any American who joins the military thinking patriotically and heroically that he or she is “serving the country" is gravely—no pun intended—mistaken. You join up with the military, you provide protection for large corporations, most of which are not even American (CACI, Halliburton, KBR to which Cheney gave no-bid contracts in Iraq, and this list of war profiteers is long). (7)
To break this down into pragmatic and simple terms, the military, with all its clever toys, like the drones, only serves the interests of the few, extremely wealthy…the 1 percenters. The military, following commands from the ruling class, which includes the elected officials, enables these patricians to pursue their search for greater profits today in the Middle East and tomorrow elsewhere. The Big Oil lords do so with government subsidies and special tax breaks on top of all other services.
The rest of us plebs—the 99 percenters—have all learned to avert our eyes and thoughts about this simple truth. Our democracy is no longer in the hands of the voting citizens. Us 99 cent-ers are mere subjects obeying the demands of corporate fiefdoms.
So, no matter how you parse the legal arguments about drones or other clever killing tools, the answer to such debates carries a foregone conclusion.
The Big Oil lords, the wealthy barons of Wall Street—the ruling corporate class—this small group of elites makes the rules by simple force of financial power. They determine the laws and often act regardless of the laws.
The unjustified, preemptive invasion of Iraq serves as one blatant example of disregard for the laws. And there are many more such examples from Cheney’s war crimes regarding torture to Rumsfeld’s blind military and nation building blunders.
Likewise, the Supreme Court also demonstrates how the highest ranks of the justice system adjudicates not in the interests of the greatest benefits of the citizenry but rather in favor of the interests of their own ruling class by allowing corporations all rights as individual citizens. Big Money corporations are seldom American and most often global and without any national loyalty.
With the 2010 judgment on Citizens United v FEC, we find again how the “authorities” in America give corporations the right to spend unlimited funds to influence elections despite the wishes of 85% of the citizens. (8) The Supreme Court justices give corporations all the rights of individual citizens, such as free speech, even through they are hardly "American citizens," as they are almost all global and mostly based in tax-evading islands, and they are never prosecuted as individuals when they break the laws.
None of these military policies or the energy policies—not to mention the "too big to fail" policies on Wall Street—serve for the greatest good of the nation but rather for the interests of those who possess the billions and millions of financial force. Elected officials—both Democrat and Republican—serve the barons of industry more so now than ever before and to hell with anyone who stands in their way.
Drones are effective tools as they ultimately enable the tycoons in their pursuit of greater profits.
The well-heeled attorneys can debate all they want about the legalities of drones or Patriot Acts or torture or preemptive invasions based on lies or massive fraud in the banking or in the healthcare industries. Our current perversions of the system of justice and of politics, is determined not by rational laws but by powerful barons of industry.
Bigger forces trump the laws.
Sources:
(1) MacKinzie, Jean. Are our drone attacks legal?, Global Post, Oct. 11, 2011, http://news.salon.com/2011/10/11/are_our_drone_attacks_legal/?source=newsletter
(2) Greenwald, Glenn. The FBI again Thwarts its own Terror plot, Salon blog, Sept. 29, 2011, http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
(3)Porter, Gareth. Alleged Iranian Assassination Plot Appears an FBI Sting, Real News Network, Oct. 15, 2011. Take a look at this recent report on the Real News Network:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7452
And here is an article explaining how President Obama is running with this dubious FBI sting operation: Feller, Ben. “Obama says Iran must be held accountable for plot,” Associated Press. Oct. 13, 2011.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_AMBASSADOR_PLOT?SITE=AP&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
(4) See my article posted of various blogs: “Church of Later Day Neocons.”
“This is how the American industrial military complex works. It’s become a cookie cutter process for presidents since the Mexican American War when the Thornton Skirmish arose between the U.S. and Mexican military, handing President Polk a justification of war against Mexico in 1846. The sinking of the USS Maine gave Teddy Roosevelt a trumped up reason for the Spanish American War just as the Tonkin incident helped justify the Vietnam War.”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Church-of-Later-Day-Neocon-by-Mark-Biskeborn-080725-949.html
(5) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Before the war, during the first two terms of FDR’s presidency (1933-41), a substantial attempt was made to establish a liberal version of social democracy. Looking back upon that experience, one has difficulty recognizing an America in which, unapologetically, public debate and discussion centered on matters such as planning; focusing resources on the poor and unemployed; bringing radical changes agriculture by limiting production; regulating business and banking practices while not fearing to castigate the rich and powerful; raising the standard of living of whole regions of the country; introducing public works projects that created employment for millions and left valuable public improvements (libraries, schools, conservation practices, subsidies to the arts); and promoting all manner of participatory schemes for including the citizenry in economic decision-making process.”
(6) Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press, Feb. 2010.
“Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation. …that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.”
(7) See the short lists on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering
(8) See the video that explains this: http://storyofstuff.org/citizensunited/
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Corporations in the U.S. and in Mexico an Inverted Totalitarianism: Devour, Prey, Seduce
They are mammoth carnivores, dark power brokers, and, as proven time and again, without tough governing, they devour the earth, seduce public officials, and prey on human greed. They can hold everyone in their crushing jaws, smash innovation in one sweep of their tails, and pack off entire nations back in time some 66 million years as hostage for the release of Tyrannosaurus Rex herds, reaping chaos.
Corporations are beneficial forms of business. They provide almost equal investment opportunities for everyone—although without equal decision information—and they sometimes even create "economies of scale" by delivering useful products most efficiently at low, competitive prices. By leveraging capital, they are able to build products otherwise unimaginable, like Adobe software, Boeing aircraft, Apple Computers, and then others like BP, Goldman Sachs investments, AIG insurance, Merrill Lynch investments, or Enron energy.
They are giant businesses. Without regulatory limits, they wield monstrous power. In the U.S., as in Mexico and in other countries, they have become stronger than the government; their money can overrule environmental laws, influence and even control our public officials and judiciary. They prey on our most treasured democratic institutions and values. The patrician owners, leaders of corporations, have their own self-interests and agendas, and they rarely set a priority to improve the greater good of society.
On the other hand, government's job is to balance the competitive markets so that they comply with the needs of society in general such as clean environment, health, or whatever the majority of citizens set as social goals. Today this balancing is not working. And it's a problem we need to fix in our current system of government.
The stewards of industry always spread a certain ideology to protect their interests. Consider the privately owned Koch Industries, valued in the billions, the Koch brothers own patented processes, mostly by inheritance, to convert oil into gasoline; you can guess why they lobby against any awareness of global warming. (1)
The captains of industry believe in magic. They have become the tribal high priests of our culture, while our enfeebled democracy fails to set boundaries and rules to develop our society in general. One of the most glaring ideas that corporate elitists hold close to their hearts is that a "free market"—one that is uninhibited by government policy—always corrects itself to the most efficient conditions. This notion about a "free market" arose from something Adam Smith said way back in the 18th century in terms of "the invisible hand" that guides markets to correct themselves as they satisfy the needs of individuals.
Meanwhile, the neoliberal corporatists ignore that they are neither concerned nor equipped to solve larger economic and social problems. The more contemporary, post-WWII economists, like John M. Keynes, emphasized that government must play a crucial role in markets in order to point industries toward the optimal levels of wealth, the greatest good of society, and away from abuses of power. American has miserably butchered its social development, while nurturing rampant consumerism for individuals and predatory corporatism. Right-wing activists, like the middle-class Tea Baggers, are woefully misguided and unwittingly only abusing themselves.
Corporate managers are generally not wise, altruistic saints looking for the best possible benefits for society at large. No. Their job is to keep their firms competitive and increase profits and stock values by any means. Today, one of the popular methods includes "investing" obscene sums of money in lobbying to slacken labor laws, taxes, and the bridles of government regulations. And as individuals, corporate managers do not possess the will or the power to make rational decisions for an entire society's best interests. They work for their own self-interests to own more preferred shares and to promote their careers, salaries, and bonuses. As they sip martinis at their exclusive country clubs, they joke about the stupidity of middle-class Tea Baggers.
Today's military and economic crises reflect many others in U.S. history. In the 1920s bankers and investors raised speculation into a feeding frenzy of greed leading to a Wall Street bubble, burst, and Great Depression in the 1930s. Likewise, the delusional bubble years of Reagan/Bush led to the same false gods of free-wheeling corporations taking power over the balancing controls of government oversight.
Reagan's empty speeches about "no government is best government" are still praised as great oratory by the wealthy, who benefit from it. The empty discourse continues even after all the hypermedia has crashed down around the ankles of the middle-class workers, who now pay for the excesses of the wealthy and their sycophant policy makers. America's history of bubble-and-bust business cycles allows no one to plead ignorance. No one can act surprised, least of all the well-heeled financial wizards responsible for the premeditated busts for profits.
American politics repeatedly shows the world that brain-dead incompetence is tolerated, the more its consequences are colossal and costly to working-class families.
The dazzling myth in today's America is that the U.S. government is empowered to direct the economy for the benefit of all people since the government is--theoretically--for and by the people.
FDR's New Deal supported this conviction and "a wide range of regulatory agencies were created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively." (3)
Since the 1950s, the U.S. government has become weaker than corporate power. Its democratic processes no longer serve the interests of its citizens. During the 80s, Reaganomics (a.k.a. neoliberal economic policy) weakened and dismantled most of FDR's New Deal, "socialist" policies, which resulted in less equality. From the time of Reaganomics to the present, government policies distributed 200 times more wealth to the top 1 percent of the population, back to the robber barons—a return to the Gilded Age—while the middle class' income barely increased, if at all.(4)
During the 90s, Clinton continued this neoliberal trend. While looking to gain support from the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs, he hired Robert Rubin for help, which resulted in Rubinomics—the overturn of the regulatory Glass Steagall Act, thus enabling free-wheeling banking to run off the tracks by 2008. Banks like Goldman Sachs only used this major catastrophe first to fleece the middle class and then to take its tax-paid bail-out as the spoils of a corporate coup d'état.
Recent crises show us how both Republicans and Democrats sing the same hymns in order to garner financial and political support from corporate lords. Does America now have a single party like, say, China or Cuba? If not, at least the differences are now little more than staged soap-opera dramas to maintain the American myth that voters have a choice—one between the neoliberal or the neoliberal policies—and that America is still a functional democracy, home of the free and the brave.
The U.S. government is weak. It cannot control its own military-industrial complex, which has grown its own power base by lobbying, despite what citizens might vote to stop the endless wars and colonial occupations, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Andrew Bracevich points out in his book, Washington Rules, the American empire has become an unbearable burden, almost impossible to shake off our shoulders.
Business leaders almost all sing from the same hymn book of fixed-ideas. Since before the Gilded Age, they have always used their power to lobby against government regulations, except for the few who dare heresy, only to risk their careers. "But Shiller's views conflicted with conventional thinking in a more profound way."(8)
The "smart" economists sing in harmony in order to keep their cushy jobs, they advocate economic policies beneficial for corporate agendas. No. This is not a conspiracy, it's just business as we know it in America.
The ideology has become a religion in America. Many public officials, economists, and industrialists have joined "the Family"—an elitist social prayer group—which cleverly brought God into their ruthless business ideology, where any means justifies their profits. In their world of elitist religion, the idea of the "invisible hand" is not government intervention, but it is God's providence, God's invisible hand guiding His chosen leaders, and to hell with Christ's middle-class morality; theirs is a new world order of "Christ plus nothing." For them, Christ is a God-chosen leader just as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Hitler.
The wheels have fallen off American democracy. The vast majority of corporations, like religions, are not organized in any profit-sharing, democratic process. Quite the contrary, corporations "manage personnel" much more strictly than churches "shepherd their flock," and neither organization asks their participants to vote on issues.
Does the Catholic Church ask its members to vote on abortion, gay marriage or preemptive war? Pat Robertson asks his congregates for donations, but does he ask his congregation permission to buy a personal jet? Does the CEO of XE ask his employees what mercenary contracts to take on? And yet these are the primary types of organizations to which a large number of Americans voluntarily, and perhaps unwittingly, adhere as if they prefer living as automatons with prescribed moral and behavioral codes that provide simply a veneer of ethical professionalism. Middle-class working families seldom find the time to consider how our democracy hobbles along while industrialists devour any economic equality. Castaneda describes how inequity cripples democracy in Mexico. It directly applies to the U.S.:
Corporate advertising creates a society with freedom to consume. Many business theorists, like the blundering and famous Milton Friedman, found this "free market" ideology to be highly appealing material for bestselling books. Friedman promoted the fetish of a market enabling consumers a "freedom of choice." This became especially attractive for most captains of industry looking to increase profits by any means, advertising and popularizing unbridled commerce.
At the same time, despite or because of this ideology of "consumer freedom," an eerie conformity—Babbittry—in how people think develops as we Americans behave as consumers more in line with marketing research rather than as citizens with individual critical thinking. Consumerism destroys communities where each individual competes to outdo the other. The alienation leaves people lonely and craving for some source of fulfillment. Drugs, alcohol, shopping or religion become the options in a mass market without any other culture than to work and to consume.
This surreal society, made up of androids, driven by purchase power, reveals itself now more than ever as some corporations in many industries crash after devouring their own food chain.
Many of the Wall Street bankers are terrorists. Al Qaeda's financial investors made millions by "going short" on stock purchases in U.S. airlines before 9/11, because they knew that, after the attack, the value of the shares would plummet. Following the example of the Islamic terrorists, our own investment bankers "went short," investing in the failure of the very same bad mortgage and credit card loans they sold to working families. Many Goldman Sachs employees probably attend mass or synagogue at least once a week, people drinking from our mainstream founts of moral courage and spiritual strength. Nevertheless, they contrive clever methods to fleece the consumers of America's spectacular, neon-lit disposable society—the middle-class workers jostling to buy stuff, living for celebrity bling, driving guzzling SUVs manufactured by an industrial dinosaur.
The American aristocracy sets the rules, not the democratic system. A cabal of elitist economic advisors, like Rubin mentioned above, usually set policies of immense public consequences and more often than not, we--the general citizenry are hardly given a voice in the decision process or, if we do as in the 2008 elections for Obama, our voices were ignored as the campaign promises slipped on the occupation of Afghanistan or the futile 2009 surge in Iraq, and on the promise to raise the minimum wage, or on the mediocre healthcare reform, or the closure of Guantanamo.
In the recent financial catastrophe on Wall Street, policy makers made status quo assumptions, a blind faith in their ideology, and yet, despite their colossal blunders, they still remain in public office with their erroneous policies about free markets, torture, preemptive invasions, endless war, and wire tapping.
Money trumps reality. Policy makers, like the ones named above, work in government or in think tanks or universities, which are often heavily influenced by the corporations that sponsor their jobs and research. This corporate influence has increased over the decades as corporations pay tax deductible "donations" to organizations and thus find a strong voice in how research findings are presented or not. Consider U.C. Berkeley's findings on how "new microbes" are eating up the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico and then look at BP's $500 million donations to the same research center. Consider the millions of dollars BP spent on lobbying to both Republicans and to Democrats, and then consider how the White House now fails to pressure BP to pay a high premium for the damages. Consider also how the Supreme Court recently overturned Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, enabling corporations unlimited and direct campaigning for political candidates.
In his book, Democracy Incorporated, Wolin describes how these important institutions from think tanks, universities, and news media as well as the government were taken over or suppressed, and brought into a central control to create a total center of power, a totalitarian state, like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia, which monopolized the power in order to restructure society.
Wolin considers how a new form of totalitarianism can arise in a superpower, which loses its sense of limits and morphs into an empire out of touch with reality. It's a country where civil rights, due-process of law, and habeas corpus are revoked and imprisonment and torture are sanctioned. It's a place where a vice president can publically boast of supporting this torture and "new world order." Government intelligence agencies produce fictional reports, as happened in W's administration, in order to please the president, who, in turn, pleases corporations, like Big Oil, by attempting to occupy the world's second largest oil reserve. In order to obtain more financial sponsorship, politicians, news media, universities, and think tanks provide corporations with the news and information they want the public to hear.
Take the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was signed by George Bush, Sr. in 1992 and put into effect in 1994 by Bill Clinton, making it a bipartisan agreement. It encapsulates many of the false assumptions that the prominent, and, unfortunately, influential policy makers of the last fifty years—from Volker to Greenspan and on to Bernanke—have blindly advocated while advising stately politicians.
Policy makers created NAFTA based on erroneous ideology. The "free trade" part of NAFTA reflects the old hymn that free markets do godly miracles when left to their own entrepreneurial devices. Years later, Canada might boast as a winner relatively speaking, if there was one. Although U.S. businesses justified the agreement as a means to become more competitive by reducing labor costs, even though America lost millions of middle-class jobs, devalued wages, and increased inequality. Meanwhile, other industrialized countries like Japan keep their own citizens employed by innovating and by responding to market demands, instead of the short-term profits gained momentarily by short-term labor cuts for which American management is infamous. Consider the innovative electric car, the Nissan Leaf, compared to the now extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex, GM's Hummer.
Mexico lost the most from NAFTA. Mexico's American-trained economists expected that the agreement would boost manufacturing and economic growth by setting up the maquiladoras. Many peasants moved from their farms to the U.S. factories in border towns and worked with hardly any labor laws to protect their interests only to see that the U.S. firms decided to outsource their work to countries where wages were even lower at the time in India and China. Consequently, many Mexican peasants lost their jobs and they could not return to their peasant farmlands because the U.S. farms began exporting to Mexico large quantities of agricultural products at even lower, subsidized prices.
Castenada describes the affects of NAFTA and how Mexico already resembles an "inverted totalitarian" state:
NAFTA motivates peasants to cross the border. The next job opportunity for most any blue collar Mexican worker is to cross the border for jobs paying less than minimum wage or to stay in Mexico to take a job in the only rising industry—the drug cartels that manufacture and traffic illegal drugs. The drug cartels operate much like any large corporation, except that their products are illegal, which attracts entrepreneurs only slightly more ruthless than the leaders at such businesses as XE, Halliburton, BP, or Goldman Sachs.
From Castenada's description, in Mexico, there are few regulations for the large corporations. It is a dream paradise model for many of the American neoliberal elitists. If they visited Mexico they would find that the government even provides guarantees for many monopolies such as Carlos Slim, who became one of the richest men in the world by acquiring almost all—94 percent—of the telephone companies in Mexico. With proper "arrangements" made with the public officials, many billionaire monopolists thrive in Mexican industries. One company owns 70 percent of the tortillas/cornmeal market, another controls Telmex telecommunications, there is the now state-owned Pemex oil, and only two corporations hold 80 percent of all pharmaceuticals, and on and on. Better yet, for the wealthy, even religion holds a monopoly by the Catholic Church keeps the Great Unwashed gullible and submissive to the providence of God's will. Those in power stay in power and garner larger and larger pieces of the pie.
Meanwhile taxes on these monopolies and oligarchies are extremely low compared to income taxes on the dwindling middle class. Almost half the population—more than 102 million—lives in poverty. The rich continue to gain more wealth while the peasants sink deeper into poverty. (16)
NAFTA did serve at least one benefit for Mexico. With the free trade, it is easier to export drugs into the U.S., making it the most lucrative industry, second only to the rapidly depleting oil business. As the drug business increases in value, the Mexican government takes greater pieces of the profits in the form of bribes or "la plaza," in which the drug lords pay government officials not to intervene in the commerce, while legitimate corporations pay a tribute—called lobbyist contributions in the U.S.—to gain favors.
The drug industry overwhelms the Mexican government. Once the drug industry rose into the billions of dollars, the government became weaker, less able to control its own army because the drug lords now earn more money, and able to bribe public officials and law enforcement at all levels, they conduct their business as a true "free market," one without any civil authority, much less regulations, and the competition between the cartels rages to all-out civil war, where drug dealers use all types of violence imaginable--kidnapping, rape, murder, torture, beheadings—to gain market share over the competitors. Since January, 2007, 29,000 people have been killed in drug-related activity. (17) The growing drug violence boosts the U.S. weapons industry, which conducts business without much oversight.
When a country is unable to protect its own citizens' interests, it is a failed state. The Mexican government is too weak to corral the violence and lobbyist money—bribes—to influence public officials, and unable to protect the regular citizens; it is a failed state. Now officials in the Mexican army partner with certain cartels in order to obtain a substantial part of the profits. For the time being, the Mexican army provides favors for the Sinaloa cartel and against the Juarez cartel.
Like all countries, Mexico's history is unique. If it ever had a functional democracy, it was only during brief and unusual moments. Since it transitioned from a monarchy to a pseudo-democracy, it has always been an "inverted totalitarian state," where the elite reign over the lower classes, and where the public officials serve their fellow elites, the barons of industry. If the U.S. continues on its current trend toward a system in which the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of corporations instead of the citizens, we, too, will reap all the benefits of pseudo-democracy as in Mexico, where lobbyist money speaks louder than votes.
Mexico operates with a truly free market. The government hardly intervenes except to help well-paying organizations. Its religious culture keeps the lower classes submissive and more interested in the next life than this one here and now. It's an ideal business environment for the American neoliberal elitists.
(1) Mayer, Jane, "Covert Operations," The New Yorker, August 30, 2010
(2) Wolin, Sheldon, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton University Press, 2010, Kindle edition. Preface.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010 and at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
(5) Taibbi, Matt, "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone Magazine, Dec. 10, 2009.
(6) Reich, Robert, Supercaptialism, New York: Vintage, 2008, page 5.
(7) Bracevich, Andrew, Washington Rules,
(8) Smith, Ives, Econned, New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 2010, pg. 19.
(9) Sharlet, Jeff, The Family, New York: Harper Perennial, 2008, pg. 100.
(10)Castaneda, JorgeG.The Mexican Shock, New York: The New Press, 1995, pg. 34.
(11) Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, New York, W.W. Norton Co., 2010, pg. 197.
(12) Smith, Econned, Ibid., pg. 43.
(13) Hedges, Chris, Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction, Truthdig (blog), January 25, 2010.
(14) Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, Kindle edition.
(15) Castaneda, The Mexican Shock, Ibid., pg. 80.
(16) Llana, Sara, "Calderon's Challenge: Confronting Monopolies," Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23, 2007
(17) "Mexico under Siege," Los Angeles Times online
Corporations are beneficial forms of business. They provide almost equal investment opportunities for everyone—although without equal decision information—and they sometimes even create "economies of scale" by delivering useful products most efficiently at low, competitive prices. By leveraging capital, they are able to build products otherwise unimaginable, like Adobe software, Boeing aircraft, Apple Computers, and then others like BP, Goldman Sachs investments, AIG insurance, Merrill Lynch investments, or Enron energy.
They are giant businesses. Without regulatory limits, they wield monstrous power. In the U.S., as in Mexico and in other countries, they have become stronger than the government; their money can overrule environmental laws, influence and even control our public officials and judiciary. They prey on our most treasured democratic institutions and values. The patrician owners, leaders of corporations, have their own self-interests and agendas, and they rarely set a priority to improve the greater good of society.
On the other hand, government's job is to balance the competitive markets so that they comply with the needs of society in general such as clean environment, health, or whatever the majority of citizens set as social goals. Today this balancing is not working. And it's a problem we need to fix in our current system of government.
The stewards of industry always spread a certain ideology to protect their interests. Consider the privately owned Koch Industries, valued in the billions, the Koch brothers own patented processes, mostly by inheritance, to convert oil into gasoline; you can guess why they lobby against any awareness of global warming. (1)
The captains of industry believe in magic. They have become the tribal high priests of our culture, while our enfeebled democracy fails to set boundaries and rules to develop our society in general. One of the most glaring ideas that corporate elitists hold close to their hearts is that a "free market"—one that is uninhibited by government policy—always corrects itself to the most efficient conditions. This notion about a "free market" arose from something Adam Smith said way back in the 18th century in terms of "the invisible hand" that guides markets to correct themselves as they satisfy the needs of individuals.
Meanwhile, the neoliberal corporatists ignore that they are neither concerned nor equipped to solve larger economic and social problems. The more contemporary, post-WWII economists, like John M. Keynes, emphasized that government must play a crucial role in markets in order to point industries toward the optimal levels of wealth, the greatest good of society, and away from abuses of power. American has miserably butchered its social development, while nurturing rampant consumerism for individuals and predatory corporatism. Right-wing activists, like the middle-class Tea Baggers, are woefully misguided and unwittingly only abusing themselves.
Corporate managers are generally not wise, altruistic saints looking for the best possible benefits for society at large. No. Their job is to keep their firms competitive and increase profits and stock values by any means. Today, one of the popular methods includes "investing" obscene sums of money in lobbying to slacken labor laws, taxes, and the bridles of government regulations. And as individuals, corporate managers do not possess the will or the power to make rational decisions for an entire society's best interests. They work for their own self-interests to own more preferred shares and to promote their careers, salaries, and bonuses. As they sip martinis at their exclusive country clubs, they joke about the stupidity of middle-class Tea Baggers.
Today's military and economic crises reflect many others in U.S. history. In the 1920s bankers and investors raised speculation into a feeding frenzy of greed leading to a Wall Street bubble, burst, and Great Depression in the 1930s. Likewise, the delusional bubble years of Reagan/Bush led to the same false gods of free-wheeling corporations taking power over the balancing controls of government oversight.
Reagan's empty speeches about "no government is best government" are still praised as great oratory by the wealthy, who benefit from it. The empty discourse continues even after all the hypermedia has crashed down around the ankles of the middle-class workers, who now pay for the excesses of the wealthy and their sycophant policy makers. America's history of bubble-and-bust business cycles allows no one to plead ignorance. No one can act surprised, least of all the well-heeled financial wizards responsible for the premeditated busts for profits.
American politics repeatedly shows the world that brain-dead incompetence is tolerated, the more its consequences are colossal and costly to working-class families.
The dazzling myth in today's America is that the U.S. government is empowered to direct the economy for the benefit of all people since the government is--theoretically--for and by the people.
"They argued perhaps naively, that in a democracy, the people were sovereign and government was, by definition on their side. The sovereign people were entitled to use governmental power and resources to redress the inequalities created by the economy of capitalism." (2)
FDR's New Deal supported this conviction and "a wide range of regulatory agencies were created, the Social Security program and a minimum wage law were established, unions were legitimated along with the rights to bargain collectively." (3)
Since the 1950s, the U.S. government has become weaker than corporate power. Its democratic processes no longer serve the interests of its citizens. During the 80s, Reaganomics (a.k.a. neoliberal economic policy) weakened and dismantled most of FDR's New Deal, "socialist" policies, which resulted in less equality. From the time of Reaganomics to the present, government policies distributed 200 times more wealth to the top 1 percent of the population, back to the robber barons—a return to the Gilded Age—while the middle class' income barely increased, if at all.(4)
During the 90s, Clinton continued this neoliberal trend. While looking to gain support from the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs, he hired Robert Rubin for help, which resulted in Rubinomics—the overturn of the regulatory Glass Steagall Act, thus enabling free-wheeling banking to run off the tracks by 2008. Banks like Goldman Sachs only used this major catastrophe first to fleece the middle class and then to take its tax-paid bail-out as the spoils of a corporate coup d'état.
"Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having f**ked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running GoldmanSachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way." (5)
Recent crises show us how both Republicans and Democrats sing the same hymns in order to garner financial and political support from corporate lords. Does America now have a single party like, say, China or Cuba? If not, at least the differences are now little more than staged soap-opera dramas to maintain the American myth that voters have a choice—one between the neoliberal or the neoliberal policies—and that America is still a functional democracy, home of the free and the brave.
"Why has capitalism become so triumphant and democracy so enfeebled? Are the two trends connected? What, if anything, can be done to strengthen democracy?" (6)
The U.S. government is weak. It cannot control its own military-industrial complex, which has grown its own power base by lobbying, despite what citizens might vote to stop the endless wars and colonial occupations, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Andrew Bracevich points out in his book, Washington Rules, the American empire has become an unbearable burden, almost impossible to shake off our shoulders.
"The global military presence is ostensibly essential to the defense of American freedom even in places where the actual threat to American freedom is oblique or imaginary. Americans take all this for granted and so are blind to its significance. Like corruption or hypocrisy, this national security consensus has long since become part of the wallpaper of national life, attracting attention only when some especially maladroit escapade comes to light. So, too, with the Washington rules: It's only when something especially egregious occurs—most commonly a botched war—that members of the public take notice, and even then only briefly."(7)
Business leaders almost all sing from the same hymn book of fixed-ideas. Since before the Gilded Age, they have always used their power to lobby against government regulations, except for the few who dare heresy, only to risk their careers. "But Shiller's views conflicted with conventional thinking in a more profound way."(8)
The "smart" economists sing in harmony in order to keep their cushy jobs, they advocate economic policies beneficial for corporate agendas. No. This is not a conspiracy, it's just business as we know it in America.
The ideology has become a religion in America. Many public officials, economists, and industrialists have joined "the Family"—an elitist social prayer group—which cleverly brought God into their ruthless business ideology, where any means justifies their profits. In their world of elitist religion, the idea of the "invisible hand" is not government intervention, but it is God's providence, God's invisible hand guiding His chosen leaders, and to hell with Christ's middle-class morality; theirs is a new world order of "Christ plus nothing." For them, Christ is a God-chosen leader just as Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Hitler.
"James A. Farrell or Henry Ford, commanding Pinkertons and the police; in Seattle, it was Dave Beck, Teamster, who owned the law, "Beck was living evidence that God's invisible hand blessed the ruthless as much as or more than those whom he considered the deserving." (9)
The wheels have fallen off American democracy. The vast majority of corporations, like religions, are not organized in any profit-sharing, democratic process. Quite the contrary, corporations "manage personnel" much more strictly than churches "shepherd their flock," and neither organization asks their participants to vote on issues.
Does the Catholic Church ask its members to vote on abortion, gay marriage or preemptive war? Pat Robertson asks his congregates for donations, but does he ask his congregation permission to buy a personal jet? Does the CEO of XE ask his employees what mercenary contracts to take on? And yet these are the primary types of organizations to which a large number of Americans voluntarily, and perhaps unwittingly, adhere as if they prefer living as automatons with prescribed moral and behavioral codes that provide simply a veneer of ethical professionalism. Middle-class working families seldom find the time to consider how our democracy hobbles along while industrialists devour any economic equality. Castaneda describes how inequity cripples democracy in Mexico. It directly applies to the U.S.:
"Economic mistakes, political abuses, and the dramatic increase of inequality in what was already one of the world's most unjust societies might not have been entirely avoided through democratic rule and authentic accountability, but they were absolutely inevitable in the absence of representative democracy." (10)
Corporate advertising creates a society with freedom to consume. Many business theorists, like the blundering and famous Milton Friedman, found this "free market" ideology to be highly appealing material for bestselling books. Friedman promoted the fetish of a market enabling consumers a "freedom of choice." This became especially attractive for most captains of industry looking to increase profits by any means, advertising and popularizing unbridled commerce.
At the same time, despite or because of this ideology of "consumer freedom," an eerie conformity—Babbittry—in how people think develops as we Americans behave as consumers more in line with marketing research rather than as citizens with individual critical thinking. Consumerism destroys communities where each individual competes to outdo the other. The alienation leaves people lonely and craving for some source of fulfillment. Drugs, alcohol, shopping or religion become the options in a mass market without any other culture than to work and to consume.
This surreal society, made up of androids, driven by purchase power, reveals itself now more than ever as some corporations in many industries crash after devouring their own food chain.
Many of the Wall Street bankers are terrorists. Al Qaeda's financial investors made millions by "going short" on stock purchases in U.S. airlines before 9/11, because they knew that, after the attack, the value of the shares would plummet. Following the example of the Islamic terrorists, our own investment bankers "went short," investing in the failure of the very same bad mortgage and credit card loans they sold to working families. Many Goldman Sachs employees probably attend mass or synagogue at least once a week, people drinking from our mainstream founts of moral courage and spiritual strength. Nevertheless, they contrive clever methods to fleece the consumers of America's spectacular, neon-lit disposable society—the middle-class workers jostling to buy stuff, living for celebrity bling, driving guzzling SUVs manufactured by an industrial dinosaur.
"The upper classes in this country raped this country. You f**ked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said "This is wrong'." (11)
The American aristocracy sets the rules, not the democratic system. A cabal of elitist economic advisors, like Rubin mentioned above, usually set policies of immense public consequences and more often than not, we--the general citizenry are hardly given a voice in the decision process or, if we do as in the 2008 elections for Obama, our voices were ignored as the campaign promises slipped on the occupation of Afghanistan or the futile 2009 surge in Iraq, and on the promise to raise the minimum wage, or on the mediocre healthcare reform, or the closure of Guantanamo.
In the recent financial catastrophe on Wall Street, policy makers made status quo assumptions, a blind faith in their ideology, and yet, despite their colossal blunders, they still remain in public office with their erroneous policies about free markets, torture, preemptive invasions, endless war, and wire tapping.
"Indeed, major actors such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner [Robin's pals] still are in leadership positions, with their past conduct receiving remarkably little criticism despite their having helped design the policies that precipitated the meltdown." (12)
Money trumps reality. Policy makers, like the ones named above, work in government or in think tanks or universities, which are often heavily influenced by the corporations that sponsor their jobs and research. This corporate influence has increased over the decades as corporations pay tax deductible "donations" to organizations and thus find a strong voice in how research findings are presented or not. Consider U.C. Berkeley's findings on how "new microbes" are eating up the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico and then look at BP's $500 million donations to the same research center. Consider the millions of dollars BP spent on lobbying to both Republicans and to Democrats, and then consider how the White House now fails to pressure BP to pay a high premium for the damages. Consider also how the Supreme Court recently overturned Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, enabling corporations unlimited and direct campaigning for political candidates.
"Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury." (13)
In his book, Democracy Incorporated, Wolin describes how these important institutions from think tanks, universities, and news media as well as the government were taken over or suppressed, and brought into a central control to create a total center of power, a totalitarian state, like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Stalinist Russia, which monopolized the power in order to restructure society.
Wolin considers how a new form of totalitarianism can arise in a superpower, which loses its sense of limits and morphs into an empire out of touch with reality. It's a country where civil rights, due-process of law, and habeas corpus are revoked and imprisonment and torture are sanctioned. It's a place where a vice president can publically boast of supporting this torture and "new world order." Government intelligence agencies produce fictional reports, as happened in W's administration, in order to please the president, who, in turn, pleases corporations, like Big Oil, by attempting to occupy the world's second largest oil reserve. In order to obtain more financial sponsorship, politicians, news media, universities, and think tanks provide corporations with the news and information they want the public to hear.
"Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private' governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power." (14)
Take the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA was signed by George Bush, Sr. in 1992 and put into effect in 1994 by Bill Clinton, making it a bipartisan agreement. It encapsulates many of the false assumptions that the prominent, and, unfortunately, influential policy makers of the last fifty years—from Volker to Greenspan and on to Bernanke—have blindly advocated while advising stately politicians.
Policy makers created NAFTA based on erroneous ideology. The "free trade" part of NAFTA reflects the old hymn that free markets do godly miracles when left to their own entrepreneurial devices. Years later, Canada might boast as a winner relatively speaking, if there was one. Although U.S. businesses justified the agreement as a means to become more competitive by reducing labor costs, even though America lost millions of middle-class jobs, devalued wages, and increased inequality. Meanwhile, other industrialized countries like Japan keep their own citizens employed by innovating and by responding to market demands, instead of the short-term profits gained momentarily by short-term labor cuts for which American management is infamous. Consider the innovative electric car, the Nissan Leaf, compared to the now extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex, GM's Hummer.
Mexico lost the most from NAFTA. Mexico's American-trained economists expected that the agreement would boost manufacturing and economic growth by setting up the maquiladoras. Many peasants moved from their farms to the U.S. factories in border towns and worked with hardly any labor laws to protect their interests only to see that the U.S. firms decided to outsource their work to countries where wages were even lower at the time in India and China. Consequently, many Mexican peasants lost their jobs and they could not return to their peasant farmlands because the U.S. farms began exporting to Mexico large quantities of agricultural products at even lower, subsidized prices.
Castenada describes the affects of NAFTA and how Mexico already resembles an "inverted totalitarian" state:
"And this would happen, they warned, not in a nation magically propelled toward the First World by irresponsible headlines or high-level trade agreements, but in a country as firmly anchored as ever in the Third World, a country consisting of several segregated nations, plagued by injustice and inequality, authoritarianism and corruption, poverty and marginalization. The Chiapas uprising became a symbol of that crisis—which was not, however, confined to Chiapas." (15)
NAFTA motivates peasants to cross the border. The next job opportunity for most any blue collar Mexican worker is to cross the border for jobs paying less than minimum wage or to stay in Mexico to take a job in the only rising industry—the drug cartels that manufacture and traffic illegal drugs. The drug cartels operate much like any large corporation, except that their products are illegal, which attracts entrepreneurs only slightly more ruthless than the leaders at such businesses as XE, Halliburton, BP, or Goldman Sachs.
From Castenada's description, in Mexico, there are few regulations for the large corporations. It is a dream paradise model for many of the American neoliberal elitists. If they visited Mexico they would find that the government even provides guarantees for many monopolies such as Carlos Slim, who became one of the richest men in the world by acquiring almost all—94 percent—of the telephone companies in Mexico. With proper "arrangements" made with the public officials, many billionaire monopolists thrive in Mexican industries. One company owns 70 percent of the tortillas/cornmeal market, another controls Telmex telecommunications, there is the now state-owned Pemex oil, and only two corporations hold 80 percent of all pharmaceuticals, and on and on. Better yet, for the wealthy, even religion holds a monopoly by the Catholic Church keeps the Great Unwashed gullible and submissive to the providence of God's will. Those in power stay in power and garner larger and larger pieces of the pie.
Meanwhile taxes on these monopolies and oligarchies are extremely low compared to income taxes on the dwindling middle class. Almost half the population—more than 102 million—lives in poverty. The rich continue to gain more wealth while the peasants sink deeper into poverty. (16)
NAFTA did serve at least one benefit for Mexico. With the free trade, it is easier to export drugs into the U.S., making it the most lucrative industry, second only to the rapidly depleting oil business. As the drug business increases in value, the Mexican government takes greater pieces of the profits in the form of bribes or "la plaza," in which the drug lords pay government officials not to intervene in the commerce, while legitimate corporations pay a tribute—called lobbyist contributions in the U.S.—to gain favors.
The drug industry overwhelms the Mexican government. Once the drug industry rose into the billions of dollars, the government became weaker, less able to control its own army because the drug lords now earn more money, and able to bribe public officials and law enforcement at all levels, they conduct their business as a true "free market," one without any civil authority, much less regulations, and the competition between the cartels rages to all-out civil war, where drug dealers use all types of violence imaginable--kidnapping, rape, murder, torture, beheadings—to gain market share over the competitors. Since January, 2007, 29,000 people have been killed in drug-related activity. (17) The growing drug violence boosts the U.S. weapons industry, which conducts business without much oversight.
When a country is unable to protect its own citizens' interests, it is a failed state. The Mexican government is too weak to corral the violence and lobbyist money—bribes—to influence public officials, and unable to protect the regular citizens; it is a failed state. Now officials in the Mexican army partner with certain cartels in order to obtain a substantial part of the profits. For the time being, the Mexican army provides favors for the Sinaloa cartel and against the Juarez cartel.
Like all countries, Mexico's history is unique. If it ever had a functional democracy, it was only during brief and unusual moments. Since it transitioned from a monarchy to a pseudo-democracy, it has always been an "inverted totalitarian state," where the elite reign over the lower classes, and where the public officials serve their fellow elites, the barons of industry. If the U.S. continues on its current trend toward a system in which the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of corporations instead of the citizens, we, too, will reap all the benefits of pseudo-democracy as in Mexico, where lobbyist money speaks louder than votes.
Mexico operates with a truly free market. The government hardly intervenes except to help well-paying organizations. Its religious culture keeps the lower classes submissive and more interested in the next life than this one here and now. It's an ideal business environment for the American neoliberal elitists.
(1) Mayer, Jane, "Covert Operations," The New Yorker, August 30, 2010
(2) Wolin, Sheldon, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton University Press, 2010, Kindle edition. Preface.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Wilkinson, Richard and Pickett, Kate, The Spirit Level, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010 and at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
(5) Taibbi, Matt, "Obama's Big Sellout," Rolling Stone Magazine, Dec. 10, 2009.
(6) Reich, Robert, Supercaptialism, New York: Vintage, 2008, page 5.
(7) Bracevich, Andrew, Washington Rules,
(8) Smith, Ives, Econned, New York: PalgraveMcMillan, 2010, pg. 19.
(9) Sharlet, Jeff, The Family, New York: Harper Perennial, 2008, pg. 100.
(10)Castaneda, JorgeG.The Mexican Shock, New York: The New Press, 1995, pg. 34.
(11) Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, New York, W.W. Norton Co., 2010, pg. 197.
(12) Smith, Econned, Ibid., pg. 43.
(13) Hedges, Chris, Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction, Truthdig (blog), January 25, 2010.
(14) Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, Kindle edition.
(15) Castaneda, The Mexican Shock, Ibid., pg. 80.
(16) Llana, Sara, "Calderon's Challenge: Confronting Monopolies," Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23, 2007
(17) "Mexico under Siege," Los Angeles Times online
Friday, September 24, 2010
Rapture of Charlatans
The overwhelming readership of the Left Behind series of novels by Lahaye and Jenkins reveals to what extent our “exceptional” American culture cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. A huge swath of the American public has gone out and bought these and other similar escapist novels by the millions. Many Americans seek to escape reality by drugs or by religious fantasies or both.
It may well be a sign that many of us have died morally, spiritually, and intellectually. No other culture of industrialized countries is so hoodwinked by the vagaries of born-again evangelical cults.
Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility. Delusional interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which John wrote as an allegory of his spite for the Imperial Romans, who imprisoned him, has turned into public policy about the most crucial areas of civilization’s survival on earth: nuclear arms and global warming.
We Americans love to avoid the real issues and, instead, focus on sensational gossip about celebrity stories, which pass for news and information. Today’s middle-class Tea Party members participate in mass delusions as they support the despotic right-wing agenda, in the hope that, yes, they too can become multi-millionaires simply by sounding like the wealthy corporatists who, in turn, deteriorate the middle class’s own standard of living. In reality, the original Bostonian Tea Party members of 1773 committed acts of terrorism against the British imperial despotism—taxation without representation.
As the corporatist, neoliberal, economic policies have undermined American ideals and institutions, our government has weakened to the point of losing its ability to bridle the corporations that impoverish our economy and destroy our environment. Many Americans prefer to cling to fantasies that God will snatch us up from this harsh reality and take us to a Disney World in the sky.
In times of despair and turmoil, many Americans have turned to demagogues, like G.W. Bush, who gave lip service to shallow notions of Christian faith, and charlatans like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, or Joel Osteen who entertain us with reassuring wet-dreams of Christ coming down to enable us with wealth and prosperity or to swoop up only those among us who care less about our community and our own political interests so long as we get right with God.
These demagogues—like W —an American president who took a nation to war on the pretext that “God told me what to do”—they have led the gullible middle-class crowds throughout American history to destroy the very American ideals that enable us to become educated, wise, critically astute, and free citizens of a functional democracy, and not enslaved in the stupor of delusions and religious superstitions.
The word “rapture” appears only once in the Book of Revelation, yet, in America, it has taken on a life of its own, far from the actual text written by John. Without critical thinking, without a culture of literate, thinking people, we are doomed to enslave ourselves to the fear stirred up by charlatans, who sell us one version or another of one “sacred text” or another and keep us locked up in the shackles of fear that we might be left behind unless we conform to some televangelist conniver.
Now at the end of the war in Iraq, we have to dig our way out of the hole in which the evangelical, born-again Christians and neoconservatives buried us all. In wagging the preemptive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the policies that W’s administration established only undermined America’s Constitution and its values, from the justice system to national defense.
The neoconservative, born-again Christians take liberties to invent a reality when it is needed to carry out Armageddon type actions, but creating a reality in order to justify the death of thousands of people and wasting trillions of dollars is nothing less than lying. Lying on a national scale like this equates to criminal fraud and deception.
How did W succeed in misleading the American people only to establish radical, extremist policies that bankrolled our economy and destroyed thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives? W explained why he pursued the policies of radical extremists, “There is a higher father that I appeal to.”
During W’s presidency, the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians teamed up to manipulate the wishful thinking of an America that no longer knows the difference between TV drama and reality. There are two worlds in America, the fantasy view of right-wing religious fundamentalists who spin their own reality and act on it without considering the consequences even when engaging in war, and the pragmatic, humanists who work from rational sets of known facts as a basis for public policy that serves the greatest good of all citizens, including the poor and the middle class, not just the wealthy.
In the hindsight of the W administration, the most dangerous threat from extreme fundamentalists arises not from the Islamists, but the neoconservative, fundamentalist Christians. W’s administration has proven this.
(1) Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) pg. 14.
(2) Jeff Sharlet, The Family, (Harper Perennial, 2008) pg. 3.
It may well be a sign that many of us have died morally, spiritually, and intellectually. No other culture of industrialized countries is so hoodwinked by the vagaries of born-again evangelical cults.
Eventually, we Americans will have to wake from our state of self-indulged juvenility. Delusional interpretations of the Book of Revelation, which John wrote as an allegory of his spite for the Imperial Romans, who imprisoned him, has turned into public policy about the most crucial areas of civilization’s survival on earth: nuclear arms and global warming.
We Americans love to avoid the real issues and, instead, focus on sensational gossip about celebrity stories, which pass for news and information. Today’s middle-class Tea Party members participate in mass delusions as they support the despotic right-wing agenda, in the hope that, yes, they too can become multi-millionaires simply by sounding like the wealthy corporatists who, in turn, deteriorate the middle class’s own standard of living. In reality, the original Bostonian Tea Party members of 1773 committed acts of terrorism against the British imperial despotism—taxation without representation.
As the corporatist, neoliberal, economic policies have undermined American ideals and institutions, our government has weakened to the point of losing its ability to bridle the corporations that impoverish our economy and destroy our environment. Many Americans prefer to cling to fantasies that God will snatch us up from this harsh reality and take us to a Disney World in the sky.
In times of despair and turmoil, many Americans have turned to demagogues, like G.W. Bush, who gave lip service to shallow notions of Christian faith, and charlatans like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, or Joel Osteen who entertain us with reassuring wet-dreams of Christ coming down to enable us with wealth and prosperity or to swoop up only those among us who care less about our community and our own political interests so long as we get right with God.
These demagogues—like W —an American president who took a nation to war on the pretext that “God told me what to do”—they have led the gullible middle-class crowds throughout American history to destroy the very American ideals that enable us to become educated, wise, critically astute, and free citizens of a functional democracy, and not enslaved in the stupor of delusions and religious superstitions.
The word “rapture” appears only once in the Book of Revelation, yet, in America, it has taken on a life of its own, far from the actual text written by John. Without critical thinking, without a culture of literate, thinking people, we are doomed to enslave ourselves to the fear stirred up by charlatans, who sell us one version or another of one “sacred text” or another and keep us locked up in the shackles of fear that we might be left behind unless we conform to some televangelist conniver.
Now at the end of the war in Iraq, we have to dig our way out of the hole in which the evangelical, born-again Christians and neoconservatives buried us all. In wagging the preemptive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the policies that W’s administration established only undermined America’s Constitution and its values, from the justice system to national defense.
“When it came to constitutional checks and balances, to the powers of the executive branch, lines had been crossed, fundamental principles violated, putting at risk precisely what made America so special. Dick Cheney had led Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons in creating a separate, shadow national security apparatus to create a disinformation pipeline putting forth its own wished-for reality as a mechanism to start the war.” (1)
The neoconservative, born-again Christians take liberties to invent a reality when it is needed to carry out Armageddon type actions, but creating a reality in order to justify the death of thousands of people and wasting trillions of dollars is nothing less than lying. Lying on a national scale like this equates to criminal fraud and deception.
How did W succeed in misleading the American people only to establish radical, extremist policies that bankrolled our economy and destroyed thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives? W explained why he pursued the policies of radical extremists, “There is a higher father that I appeal to.”
During W’s presidency, the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians teamed up to manipulate the wishful thinking of an America that no longer knows the difference between TV drama and reality. There are two worlds in America, the fantasy view of right-wing religious fundamentalists who spin their own reality and act on it without considering the consequences even when engaging in war, and the pragmatic, humanists who work from rational sets of known facts as a basis for public policy that serves the greatest good of all citizens, including the poor and the middle class, not just the wealthy.
“Hitler, to the Family [a secretive fundamentalist Christian organization in which many right-wing power brokers participate], is no more real than Attila the Hun as drafted by business gurus who promise unstoppable “leadership” techniques drawn from history’s killers;” (2)
In the hindsight of the W administration, the most dangerous threat from extreme fundamentalists arises not from the Islamists, but the neoconservative, fundamentalist Christians. W’s administration has proven this.
(1) Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush, (Simon & Schuster, 2007) pg. 14.
(2) Jeff Sharlet, The Family, (Harper Perennial, 2008) pg. 3.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Mexico: God Is Murdered Somewhere between the Chihuahua Desert and El Paso
A drug lord tied him to the back bumper of his old Ford pickup and dragged him across the rugged desert terrain until nothing remained of his carcass.
After struggling for generations to improve their lot, many Mexicanos have stopped praying. Instead, they are selling drugs to the wealthy gringos in el norte. Meanwhile the Mexican government keeps a choke hold on the middle class in order to enrich the ruling class and use a clever public relations machine to conceal their mafia-type operations from the rest of the world.
Operating from Ojinaga, a remote desert pueblo, Pablo Acosta developed the first multimillion-dollar exporting business from the harshest desert in Mexico. As a teenager in 1958, Pablo Acosta saw his father gunned down in the street in a small Texas town for no particular reason. Pablo learned early about toughness. Although his father was illiterate, he taught Pablo about business, how higher business risks often yielded higher profit margins. After his father’s abrupt death, caused by a bullet between his eyes, Pablo began to apply his business savvy to a fledgling drug business during the 1960s.
Like the violent fights against a tyrannical regime, smuggling also represents one of the links between the popular Villa-Zapata Revolution (1910) and the growing drug industry that first began by selling cactus moonshine, sotol and mescal to Americans during Prohibition in the U.S. The drug business picked up in the 1960s.
That never happened. The status quo, elite class picked apart the revolution and then reinforced its authoritarian regime once again and to this day. In place of the failed revolution, peasants, like Pablo Acosta, found a new marketplace, where they have a chance at a middle-class, if not higher, standard of living—despite the risks.
For peasants, ambitious to improve their situation, drug trafficking has become the surest work that pays the mortgage, nice cars, and education for their many children. It’s the Mexican dream. Running drugs north is the ticket to success and, if a guy plays his cards right, he can move up in the organization. It’s the fast track, like earning an MBA or a JD in the U.S., more risky but more lucrative.
Guys like Pablo Acosta hitched their wagons to this gravy train. The more cut-throat and aggressive drug runners learned to branch out, develop their own operations, and, most importantly, earn enough money to dominate la plaza, the marketplace.
¿Quién està manejando la plaza? Who is in charge of the marketplace? To Mexican drug traffickers, this expression takes on special meaning. Who pays the government authorities the license to operate, to kill competitors, and to control a territory?
The protection money goes up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each level up the chain of command until it reaches the highest levels, including the Mexican presidency, judiciary, police, and military.(3) The more a trafficker pays, the more he gains in territory and latitude to operate. A drug lord like Acosta, a Padrino or Godfather, can dominate an entire state like Chihuahua or Sinoloa, as reported by journalists, who risk their lives to reveal the dangerous secrets.
Contrary to reports in the mass media, the Mexican government has always been complicit in helping certain entrepreneurs to develop strongholds in their marketplaces. Even monopolies like Slim Helu’s telephone business is supported by a government guarantee, so long as the officials are handsomely bribed. Likewise, Mexican government officials all the way to the presidency receive bribes to protect certain entrepreneurs in the lucrative drug industry, as we see in daily news reports ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDVV1YxKuI ) exposing the government support for the powerful Sinoloa cartel.
An Evil Use of Branding and Marketing
The word “corruption” does not apply because the government operates by systematic self-enrichment of a dominating ruling class. “Corruption” implies some criminal exception to an otherwise principled government serving the interests of the general public. On the contrary, Mexico’s regime operates in secret from the general public and especially the United States. A clever use of branding, marketing, and public relations strategies, applied in Machiavellian tactics, enables the authorities to maintain a veneer of a disciplined and ethical system, while in reality the plutocracy, unaccountable to anyone, has always profited from operations like the harvesting of candelilla a century ago to supplying cocaine today. Drug trafficking operations in Mexico are now a billion-dollar business and offer so much profit that those in power cannot reject the drug trade as unethical or illegal. It is so attractive to everyone, it is unstoppable.
Today the government—the judicial system, the police, the military, and even the executive branch—participates in trafficking to further its ambition to garner wealth for the ruling class. Over centuries of rule, the Mexican government has developed a steadfast power arrangement in which a tiny group grabs the wealth at the cost of the rest of the population.
The Mexican government corrupts its own people by reaching down to the ambitious peasant classes and enabling and even sponsoring organized crime. Traffickers like Pablo Acosta or Amando Carrillo Fuentes, men from peasant backgrounds, did not buy and intimidate their way into power over la plaza. Rather, the government officials, from the local police all the way up to the president, allowed them to do what they do; they were encouraged, almost employed, to generate wealth for the men in positions of powerful authority, men who normally should protect and serve their country’s citizens. The Mexican government, under veils of secrecy and under-the-table deals, has refined its ability to tap into the ambitions and energies of individuals of lower classes and to channel them to increase the gains of their more educated and powerful masters in authority. When drug lords and others like them reach the end of their dangerous and glorious careers, the same system that sponsored them, now moves to kill them or jail them, and seize whatever wealth they may have accumulated.
Mexican officials and their civil servants fighting the war on drugs are part of a clever illusion, a public relations campaign. They call the media to witness and document how they ceremoniously burn marijuana stalks as a great stride in the battle against crime, but only after they have harvested the lucrative tips of the plants. When staging cocaine burnings, it is almost always corn starch, while the real coke is already sold to a favored cartel. They will seldom ever genuinely cooperate with U.S. drug enforcement officials beyond a mere charade of professionalism.
In one report to the next, from books like Drug Lord by Poppa (5) to Murder City by Bowden(6), Mexican officials vehemently deny any complaint or accusation of involvement. As proof of their commitment to fighting the war on drugs, they will pick out an ineffective drug runner to sacrifice in the name of the law and their own reputation. To hell with the drug-addicted victims in Mexico and much less in the U.S. Business continues, and it is good.
Like centuries before, today’s Mexico is a country of illusions, where public relations and marketed perceptions are tools in maintaining the status quo.
The GOP’s Use of Branding and Marketing
Just as Mexico’s ruling class covers its tracks through the drug industry by staging drug busts and jailing unreliable traffickers, so too, the ruling class in the U.S. creates the illusion that its political party, the GOP, advocates policies to improve the standard of living for the American middle class. The GOP greatly outperforms the Democratic Party by using consistent and harmonized talking points.
The GOP claims to stand for Christian beliefs and good, old-fashioned American traditions:
The GOP need look no further than south of the border to see their talking points in action. The Mexican ruling class has always maintained the policies that the GOP in the U.S. advocates. Both the right-wing in Mexico and in the U.S. seek to increase power for businesses and to weaken government, which only intensifies the distribution of wealth away from the middle class and into the hands of the wealthy. The policies have made Mexico third-world country it is today.
But this is changing. The standard of living for middle-class families has dropped drastically since the 1960s.
By eliminating the social infrastructure that a democratic government is designed to maintain for and by the general population, the right-wing in the U.S., particularly organizations like the Heritage Foundation, has carefully dismantled Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society. These initiatives, and others like them, were created to allow all American citizens access to opportunities to improve their living standard and to level economic barriers restricting access to education and healthcare.
Many of today’s right-wing organizations have their roots in the Christian Fellowship movement, also known as The Family, which took hold initially in the 1930s and grew in strength as it indoctrinated the wealthy as well as powerful politicians, including G. W. Bush.(9) The Family can trace its origins to even older American conservative organizations, including the KKK and Opus Dei, among others.(10) Like the twisted operations of the powerful mafia-style plutocracy that permeates the Mexican ruling class and government, a nefarious religious movement has now begun to seize control over the American government, including all its branches—the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—and even several state governments.
The Fellowship, like any church, interpretes the Bible and its prophets in ways suited for their own goals. The Family’s agenda focuses on gaining power by furthering the ambitions of many right-wing politicians. Since Jesus is an extremely popular, charismatic prophet, the Family uses Christ as a branding icon, a logo. It helps immensely in gaining votes. A large part of the American population follows most any agenda that includes an association with Jesus. The Family uses Jesus as a branding strategy just as McDonald’s uses the clown Ronald McDonald, although the Family’s political policies and agenda stray far from the ideals of love, peace, and equality that Jesus preached. The Family sees Jesus as a powerful, charismatic leader who captured a following of gullible masses just like other great men of history, including Genghis Khan and Mussolini.
(2)Id. at 222.
(3)Id. at 44.
(4)Id. at 336.
(5)Id.
(6)Murder City by Charles Bowden, 2010.
(7)Id at 204.
(8)The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009; Forward by R. B. Reich, at v.
(9) The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet (2009)
(10)The “Christian” Mafia by Wayne Madsen.
After struggling for generations to improve their lot, many Mexicanos have stopped praying. Instead, they are selling drugs to the wealthy gringos in el norte. Meanwhile the Mexican government keeps a choke hold on the middle class in order to enrich the ruling class and use a clever public relations machine to conceal their mafia-type operations from the rest of the world.
Operating from Ojinaga, a remote desert pueblo, Pablo Acosta developed the first multimillion-dollar exporting business from the harshest desert in Mexico. As a teenager in 1958, Pablo Acosta saw his father gunned down in the street in a small Texas town for no particular reason. Pablo learned early about toughness. Although his father was illiterate, he taught Pablo about business, how higher business risks often yielded higher profit margins. After his father’s abrupt death, caused by a bullet between his eyes, Pablo began to apply his business savvy to a fledgling drug business during the 1960s.
“Pablo Acosta would later tell how his father and Macario Vazques, the mostSmuggling has a long tradition in the Mexican border towns since before the Revolution of 1910, when guns were brought from the north to fight the authoritarian, almost fascist, government.
famous of candelilla [desert plants used to make wax] smugglers, once shot it
out with forestales [government forest rangers who often robbed peasants] in the
mountains above the river village of Santa Elena.”(1)
Like the violent fights against a tyrannical regime, smuggling also represents one of the links between the popular Villa-Zapata Revolution (1910) and the growing drug industry that first began by selling cactus moonshine, sotol and mescal to Americans during Prohibition in the U.S. The drug business picked up in the 1960s.
“For him [Regela, an FBI agent] the investigative experience became the thrill of traveling backwards in time. Smugglers wearing sombreros and crisscross bandoleers studded with high-caliber cartridges used tactics their forefathers had employed even long before the Mexican Revolution to evade detection.” (2)The revolution of 1910, like its predecessors, aimed at transforming Mexico’s charade of a democracy into a government for the people, where the regular Mexican citizen might have a chance on an equal economic playing field with the generations of landed Spanish aristocrats, and where peasants might obtain a small parcel of land to cultivate a viable living standard, almost like a middle class.
That never happened. The status quo, elite class picked apart the revolution and then reinforced its authoritarian regime once again and to this day. In place of the failed revolution, peasants, like Pablo Acosta, found a new marketplace, where they have a chance at a middle-class, if not higher, standard of living—despite the risks.
For peasants, ambitious to improve their situation, drug trafficking has become the surest work that pays the mortgage, nice cars, and education for their many children. It’s the Mexican dream. Running drugs north is the ticket to success and, if a guy plays his cards right, he can move up in the organization. It’s the fast track, like earning an MBA or a JD in the U.S., more risky but more lucrative.
Guys like Pablo Acosta hitched their wagons to this gravy train. The more cut-throat and aggressive drug runners learned to branch out, develop their own operations, and, most importantly, earn enough money to dominate la plaza, the marketplace.
¿Quién està manejando la plaza? Who is in charge of the marketplace? To Mexican drug traffickers, this expression takes on special meaning. Who pays the government authorities the license to operate, to kill competitors, and to control a territory?
The protection money goes up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each level up the chain of command until it reaches the highest levels, including the Mexican presidency, judiciary, police, and military.(3) The more a trafficker pays, the more he gains in territory and latitude to operate. A drug lord like Acosta, a Padrino or Godfather, can dominate an entire state like Chihuahua or Sinoloa, as reported by journalists, who risk their lives to reveal the dangerous secrets.
Contrary to reports in the mass media, the Mexican government has always been complicit in helping certain entrepreneurs to develop strongholds in their marketplaces. Even monopolies like Slim Helu’s telephone business is supported by a government guarantee, so long as the officials are handsomely bribed. Likewise, Mexican government officials all the way to the presidency receive bribes to protect certain entrepreneurs in the lucrative drug industry, as we see in daily news reports ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDVV1YxKuI ) exposing the government support for the powerful Sinoloa cartel.
“The story of Mexico is a predictable story of absolute power corroding absolutely. It is the story of awesome accumulations of wealth by a miniscule fraction of Mexican society derived through the advantages of power, through the systematic plundering of the wealth of its own people and through the exploitation of weaknesses in the United States. It is the story of a deliberate orchestrating of drug trafficking to flood those neighbors with drugs, for gain but also to satisfy a twisted thirst for vengeance. It is the story of the resulting impoverishment of a potentially great nation whose people are forced out of desperation to flee, bringing about one of the greatest migrations in North American history.” (4)From its Spanish colonial origins, the Mexican government has grown over centuries into the regime it is today. It is not a democracy for and by the people. It is an extreme right-wing government, holding power by an iron fist. Except for rare anomalies, the presidents are selected among the ruling class and then passed through an electoral charade. Opponents to the selected presidents are not allowed to win the election. The process is fixed one way or another to make this happen. The proof of this lies in scandals that occur during elections, when ballot counting is fixed by various methods or where campaign funds are overwhelmingly stacked against the opposition.
An Evil Use of Branding and Marketing
The word “corruption” does not apply because the government operates by systematic self-enrichment of a dominating ruling class. “Corruption” implies some criminal exception to an otherwise principled government serving the interests of the general public. On the contrary, Mexico’s regime operates in secret from the general public and especially the United States. A clever use of branding, marketing, and public relations strategies, applied in Machiavellian tactics, enables the authorities to maintain a veneer of a disciplined and ethical system, while in reality the plutocracy, unaccountable to anyone, has always profited from operations like the harvesting of candelilla a century ago to supplying cocaine today. Drug trafficking operations in Mexico are now a billion-dollar business and offer so much profit that those in power cannot reject the drug trade as unethical or illegal. It is so attractive to everyone, it is unstoppable.
Today the government—the judicial system, the police, the military, and even the executive branch—participates in trafficking to further its ambition to garner wealth for the ruling class. Over centuries of rule, the Mexican government has developed a steadfast power arrangement in which a tiny group grabs the wealth at the cost of the rest of the population.
The Mexican government corrupts its own people by reaching down to the ambitious peasant classes and enabling and even sponsoring organized crime. Traffickers like Pablo Acosta or Amando Carrillo Fuentes, men from peasant backgrounds, did not buy and intimidate their way into power over la plaza. Rather, the government officials, from the local police all the way up to the president, allowed them to do what they do; they were encouraged, almost employed, to generate wealth for the men in positions of powerful authority, men who normally should protect and serve their country’s citizens. The Mexican government, under veils of secrecy and under-the-table deals, has refined its ability to tap into the ambitions and energies of individuals of lower classes and to channel them to increase the gains of their more educated and powerful masters in authority. When drug lords and others like them reach the end of their dangerous and glorious careers, the same system that sponsored them, now moves to kill them or jail them, and seize whatever wealth they may have accumulated.
Mexican officials and their civil servants fighting the war on drugs are part of a clever illusion, a public relations campaign. They call the media to witness and document how they ceremoniously burn marijuana stalks as a great stride in the battle against crime, but only after they have harvested the lucrative tips of the plants. When staging cocaine burnings, it is almost always corn starch, while the real coke is already sold to a favored cartel. They will seldom ever genuinely cooperate with U.S. drug enforcement officials beyond a mere charade of professionalism.
In one report to the next, from books like Drug Lord by Poppa (5) to Murder City by Bowden(6), Mexican officials vehemently deny any complaint or accusation of involvement. As proof of their commitment to fighting the war on drugs, they will pick out an ineffective drug runner to sacrifice in the name of the law and their own reputation. To hell with the drug-addicted victims in Mexico and much less in the U.S. Business continues, and it is good.
Like centuries before, today’s Mexico is a country of illusions, where public relations and marketed perceptions are tools in maintaining the status quo.
The GOP’s Use of Branding and Marketing
Just as Mexico’s ruling class covers its tracks through the drug industry by staging drug busts and jailing unreliable traffickers, so too, the ruling class in the U.S. creates the illusion that its political party, the GOP, advocates policies to improve the standard of living for the American middle class. The GOP greatly outperforms the Democratic Party by using consistent and harmonized talking points.
The GOP claims to stand for Christian beliefs and good, old-fashioned American traditions:
- It wants to reduce taxes and maintain fiscal responsibility—even though the last Republican president drove up historical deficits.
- It wants to reduce government power and size in order to enable the middle class worker to obtain a higher standard of living, even though weak governmental regulation of big business can ruin the economy for the middle class as we have seen recently.
- It wants to give more freedom to big business to create a stronger economy—leading to a further reduction in industry regulations, an increase in economic disasters, and an even more inequitable distribution of wealth.
- It seeks to create a unified Christian culture and society based on wholesome values, even though an overwhelming number of recent ethical scandals arise from conservatives such as Catholic and other Christian fundamentalists.
- It promotes solid Christian morality as a means to take away individual rights such as women’s choice about abortion and other individual liberties.
The GOP need look no further than south of the border to see their talking points in action. The Mexican ruling class has always maintained the policies that the GOP in the U.S. advocates. Both the right-wing in Mexico and in the U.S. seek to increase power for businesses and to weaken government, which only intensifies the distribution of wealth away from the middle class and into the hands of the wealthy. The policies have made Mexico third-world country it is today.
“Mexicans,” he explains, “know the army is a bunch of brutes. But what is going on now is a coup d’etat by the army. The president is illegitimate. The army has installed itself. They have become the government….The president has his hands tied, and he has tied them.”(7)Except for a few periods, Mexico’s right-wing plutocracy has succeeded to maintain its status quo since the Spanish conquered the native Indians centuries ago. In the U.S., the right-wing ruling class has also maintained its power to a lesser extent, especially during the period after WWII, when a middle class began to prosper from the industrial expansion.
But this is changing. The standard of living for middle-class families has dropped drastically since the 1960s.
“Most American families are worse off today than they were three decades ago. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 destroyed the value of their homes, undermined their savings, and too often left them without jobs. But even before the Great Recession began, most Americans had gained little from the economic expansion that began almost three decades before. Today, the Great Recession notwithstanding, the U.S. economy is far larger than it was in 1980. But where has all the wealth gone? Mostly to the very top. The latest data shows that by 2007, America’s top 1 percent of earners received 23 percent of the nation’s total income—almost triple their 8 percent share in 1980.”(8)This economic trend is eroding much of the American middle class. It continues increasing numbers of families will no longer find the means to assure their children’s health and education. This deteriorates our society in general and can destroy our democracy and economy, whose strength depends on critical thinking skills for all citizens. Reducing government means reducing social infrastructure, and leads to the dumbing down of America to the level of a Sarah-Palin culture of ignorance and greed.
By eliminating the social infrastructure that a democratic government is designed to maintain for and by the general population, the right-wing in the U.S., particularly organizations like the Heritage Foundation, has carefully dismantled Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, and Johnson’s Great Society. These initiatives, and others like them, were created to allow all American citizens access to opportunities to improve their living standard and to level economic barriers restricting access to education and healthcare.
Many of today’s right-wing organizations have their roots in the Christian Fellowship movement, also known as The Family, which took hold initially in the 1930s and grew in strength as it indoctrinated the wealthy as well as powerful politicians, including G. W. Bush.(9) The Family can trace its origins to even older American conservative organizations, including the KKK and Opus Dei, among others.(10) Like the twisted operations of the powerful mafia-style plutocracy that permeates the Mexican ruling class and government, a nefarious religious movement has now begun to seize control over the American government, including all its branches—the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—and even several state governments.
The Fellowship, like any church, interpretes the Bible and its prophets in ways suited for their own goals. The Family’s agenda focuses on gaining power by furthering the ambitions of many right-wing politicians. Since Jesus is an extremely popular, charismatic prophet, the Family uses Christ as a branding icon, a logo. It helps immensely in gaining votes. A large part of the American population follows most any agenda that includes an association with Jesus. The Family uses Jesus as a branding strategy just as McDonald’s uses the clown Ronald McDonald, although the Family’s political policies and agenda stray far from the ideals of love, peace, and equality that Jesus preached. The Family sees Jesus as a powerful, charismatic leader who captured a following of gullible masses just like other great men of history, including Genghis Khan and Mussolini.
“Look at Hitler,” he [Doug Cole, a leader of the Family] said, “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, bin Laden.” The Family possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.A quote from Genghis Khan sums up much of the Family’s fascist mission, especially in light of the neoconservative, preemptive invasion of Iraq:
“The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”(1)Drug Lord by Terrence E. Poppa, 1998, at 22.
(2)Id. at 222.
(3)Id. at 44.
(4)Id. at 336.
(5)Id.
(6)Murder City by Charles Bowden, 2010.
(7)Id at 204.
(8)The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, 2009; Forward by R. B. Reich, at v.
(9) The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet (2009)
(10)The “Christian” Mafia by Wayne Madsen.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Mexico: What Do Third-world Countries Share with the U.S.?
Now it’s official. General McChrystal has been placed in the pantheon of American icons, sanctified next to the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Wayne. He now aligns with the many American gods that are manufactured as fast as a Big Mac or an Egg McMuffin. Heroes like these are not human. They only play the image of what America wants them to be, but mostly they reflect the self-delusion of the American culture, a bubble where we are morally superior, smarter, and therefore richer.
This month The Atlantic magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust.
Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition.
In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.”
By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.”
Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes?
Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder.
Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.”
Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda.
Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62).
Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy.
If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional.
If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used.
Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64).
The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded.
In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.
Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels.
In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility.
This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements.
This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society.
All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy.
Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially.
Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general.
Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class.
The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves.
Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty.
This month The Atlantic magazine published an article, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” elevating General McChrystal to the heights of a Julius Caesar, the man who determines the course of history and who can rebuild Afghanistan into a democracy as prosperous as many imagine America to be, or as Rome was before it crumbled into history’s dust.
Kaplan describes General McChrystal as a man who “has never submitted to fate” (p. 26). With such a job title for McChrystal, we might believe that he can also leap over tall buildings in a single bound. As our newly anointed Superman, the general sleeps four hours a night, runs eight miles, and eats one meal a day. McChrystal is America: the country no longer conceives new ideas because its vision is blurred by lack of sleep; the country can only run mechanically one foot in front of the other because it no longer innovates; the country eats its daily meal devoid of taste and nutrition.
In his story about General McChrystal, Kaplan takes the predictable and enjoyable job of describing the apparent virtues of the general whose “physical regimen…itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.”
By attempting to create a cult hero of McChrystal—the Army of One—Kaplan enjoys the easy road of fantasy and fanaticism while the rest of us scratch our heads and ponder. Why the hell did the Bush administration spend trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, nor had WMDs, nor harbored terrorists until after U.S. troops invaded. Despite this, Kaplan boldly states his preference for imperial war—“The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed,…”—as he bizarrely twists this invasion into “Balkan antecedents.”
Yet we wonder. Now that the U.S. has spent trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, almost ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than one million civilian lives, when are we finished? What’s the goal? What results do we expect? When the U.S. leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, will these countries be stable? What’s to stop them from simply returning to despotic, theocratic regimes?
Kaplan doesn’t consider any of these questions. Not once does he mention America’s dependence on oil and, consequently, its dire need to occupy much of the Middle East to ensure a stable supply. Instead Kaplan bloviates about how the most powerful military in the world can overcome fate thanks to the likes of General McChrystal who lacks sleep. Kaplan ignores the atrocities by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who now brags on mass media how he authorized the same sort of torture as Afghan and Mexican authorities use for power and plunder.
Kaplan describes a few characteristics of Afghanistan, which we find also in Mexico and other third-world countries, such as, “the country is so decentralized,…it is extraordinary complex, with different tribal and sectarian reality in each district.”
Likewise, Mexico’s history and current situation reveal how it has always plodded along with a weak central government. Each region in Mexico has always had its autonomous leaders (caciques), which, as in Afghanistan, have become drug lords reaping billions of dollars in the drug trade. As these drug lords gain wealth, they carry more power than their federal governments. The large profits of such unrestrained businesses are able to usurp governmental authority. This has happened in both Afghanistan and in Mexico. Whether they sell opiates, cocaine, or oil, the successful businessmen ply their power to increase their wealth and to impose their own politics, usually fundamentalism to the point of fascism, and ignore the freedom and development of the less privileged classes. The scenario resembles the U.S. Republican agenda.
Kaplan writes, “McChrystal believes that the ‘ideological piece’ of al-Qaeda is ‘truly scary’: that a new brand of totalitarianism—al-Qaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a ‘huge moral defeat’ to it” (p. 62).
Clearly as we invade and occupy foreign countries in order to control their resources, the more they will resist. Instead of fighting for reliable oil supplies, America must do what it does best: innovate and create renewable sources of energy.
If certain bellicose Americans were so concerned about moral defeats or moral responsibilities to carry the imperial burden and set the world straight, why didn’t the Bush administration invade the dictatorship of North Korea or China, or any other unjust government? Like many other neoconservative knuckle draggers, Kaplan refuses to state the crass and simple truth that the U.S. occupies Iraq and Afghanistan in order to secure stable oil supplies and, above all, to keep our enemies from taking control of the vast wealth the petroleum reserves represent. Making this clear to the otherwise beguiled, American middle class would only shatter America’s moral self-image, albeit mostly self-delusional.
If the U.S. were so altruistically concerned about saving other countries from dysfunctional governments, why not invade Mexico? Instead, under the Merida Initiative, we continue to pour billions of dollars ineffectively into the Mexican government, which morally defeats the U.S. because the Mexican government takes bribes from the various drug lords and explicitly supports the Sinaloa cartel over the others. As Mexico slips over the edge of complete anarchy and unbridled capitalism, the U.S. blindly funnels money without oversight as to how it is used.
Just as the U.S. props up a corrupt and crumbling Mexico, so too, it supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan, a mere racketeer operation. As Kaplan quotes, “’Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,’ says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. ‘We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy’” (p. 64).
The U.S. merely empowered the mujahedeen commanders to transform into gangster-oligarchs and drug lords under the American-supported Karzai. So long as the U.S. occupies Afghanistan, the people will enlist and fortify al-Qaeda and the Taliban as a form of resistance to protect their country. That’s exactly what Americans would do if they were invaded.
In the midst of all-out war between competing drug businesses in Mexico, the U.S. Homeland Security Department can only sit on its hands as billions of dollars of illegal drugs cross the border along with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens while millions of dollars of weapons are exported to support the Mexican chaos. Among the illegal aliens crossing the southern border, how many are al-Qaeda operatives carrying various types of WMDs? Let’s ask Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano.
Mexico and Afghanistan rank among the desperate third-world countries. Both countries enjoy strong religious traditions permeate through every fiber of their cultures, if not making them outright theocracies. As God’s dark humor goes, this means that corrupt men rule in an arbitrary legal system with authoritarian misconduct. Like Afghanistan, Mexico has a weak government, unable to control its own military and police, much less the marauding drug gangs grabbing power and wealth. Such weak governments have little to offer their people and are unable to restrain the barbarous greed of unbridled businesses such as monopolies and drug cartels.
In the U.S. a central debate rages. Made wealthier than the Democrats by corporate lobbyists, the Republicans are especially eager to keep government small, even weak, and to oppose regulating the otherwise unchecked greed of big business such as the healthcare industry, Big Oil, and Wall Street bankers. These elitist groups in America argue that large corporations should have more power than government—as if businessmen volunteer selflessly for the development of society. This political ideology, known as neoliberalism, calls for the rule of a small, wealthy social class—the patricians and the ruling political nobility.
This debate rose to a new height when the majority right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The mostly extremely conservative Supreme Court ruled that the government may not regulate corporations’ spending for elections. As President Obama said, this court ruling gives “corporations more power to drown out the voices of regular Americans” in political debates where already most have lost their sense of citizenry in the face of mammoth businesses. Now more than ever before, big business can buy the votes of congressmen and senators in the form of campaign contributions and additional investments in political advertisements.
This new, highly political ruling by the Supreme Court moves the U.S. another step closer to a complete coronation of power for 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth. This class power and inequitable distribution of wealth represents one of the defining characteristics of third-world countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered more power to the corporations while weakening the government’s ability to check corporate greed in the best interests of society.
All over the globe, the rulers of third-world countries from Arabia to Zimbabwe squander and squelch the good will of the broader lower classes. Out of some 200 sovereign countries on the globe, more than half operate with hugely inequitable distribution of wealth, where the vast majority of people live on poverty-line income, live with hardly a chance of education, and consequently live without much self-determination. Ironically, the larger social classes at the lower end of the income ladder are the ones who bear more children who, in turn, have fewer chances of education, and less freedom and autonomy.
Often the lower classes become so beguiled by the media, especially the likes of Fox News propaganda, that they ignore their own place in society and their rights. Instead they behave as if they are part of the highest social class, supporting the political interests of right-wing patricians. Perhaps by playing the part, they sense the tingling sensation that maybe they are affiliated with the wealthy at least for a moment, even as many are paid to badger Democrat congressmen at city hall meetings or choose to participate as Tea-Baggers and White Supremacists revolting against the government instead of taking part in the political system to defend their rights as regular citizens. The same is true for the middle-class, born-again Christians who vehemently oppose abortion, demanding that the government regulate individual women’s choice. At the same time, these confused activists oppose government regulations on the very industries—such as healthcare and banking—that devour them financially.
Meanwhile, a tiny social class rules society. The elite enjoy the power and privileges of education, usually secular, and of wealth. Given this inequality, corruption, and arbitrary rule, the governments of most third-world countries are weak. These governments often lack adequate social infrastructure to provide the broader population, the lower class, with healthcare and an education unfettered by religion, which would allow them freedom to choose more clearly about life-defining decisions such as reproduction, careers, and life-style in general.
Instead as, in Mexico, most of Central and South Americas, in Afghanistan, and in most of the Middle East, religious doctrine proves to be the most available form of education, and its authoritarian rules dictate almost all aspects of individual life, rendering the lower class submissive and ignorant. This, in turn, benefits only the wealthy class.
The various policies of the Republican Party in the U.S. serve no purpose for regular Americans. The American right wing has never worked for the best interests of the middle class. Born-again Christian fundamentalists generally want the government to dictate all aspects of an individual’s personal life from abortion to sexual orientation, and at the same time, they want to reduce government regulations over corporate power. From their contradictory belief system, we discover how their goals resemble closely the same theocratic ideology prevalent in countries like Afghanistan and Mexico. The Republican agenda also includes deceiving Americans to justify invading, occupying, and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the simple fact that the real purpose these wars is mainly to control the world’s largest oil reserves.
Like the government in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. government is weak. President Obama struggles against the overwhelming industrial power of the defense contractors pushing to sell more invasions while the Big Banks and insurance companies lobby to reduce regulation. As in Mexico and Afghanistan, the U.S. is in the grip of a right wing whose goals are to increase theocratic authority and ensure “less government.” As an icon of America, General McChrystal is fighting a war of morality which only lightly veils a war for power and plunder, while enjoying meals void of nutrition, sleepless nights that blur vision, and long runs on empty.
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