Friday, June 29, 2007

THEY DONT' BELIEVE IT COULD HAPPEN HERE!



During last night’s democratic presidential debate at Howard University, hosted by Smiley Tavis, the reactions of the public were more significant than the performance on stage. I’d say it’s time for future debates to concentrate on the handful of candidates who have a serious chance of being the candidate. The second quarter figures may persuade the Bidens and other grandfathers to bow out, but they should not and probablyl will not deter Dennis Kucinich, who knew from the start that he was the odd man out.

Kucinich is more important than most people realilze. Not because he could get the nomination, but because he couldn’t.

If that sounds trivial, it’s not. Kucinich is the only candidate who is campaigning, for universal SINGLE PAYER health care. He and John Conyers have sponsored House Bill 676 that would eliminate health care for profit. All the other candidates are offering to make health care “more affordable”, but that is largely a myth since they have not taken on the health insurance companies. The look on the audiences faces when Kucinich said we had to get the insurance companies out of health care was eloquent: THEY DON’T BELIEVE THIS COULD EVER HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES.

Their well-placed incredulity is the result of decades of framing: free health care is not a right, it’s “socialist medecine”. It could take a generation to overcome this carefully constructed taboo, even though journalists have been given the green light by corporations eager to be releived of the bill for health care, to let the American public in on a deep dark secret: every highly developed country except the U.S. has one form or another of single payer universal health care.

Forty-two years after I had to travel to Cuba on my French passport to find out the inside story of the revolution, CNN is finally reporting that Cuban health care is indeed, as Michael Moore reports in “Sicko”, free. For one tenth our cost, Cubans live to an average of 77, like we do; and the Cuban infant mortality rate is in fact lower than ours.

What has this got to do with the look on the faces of the black audience at last night’s debate? It’s all about confidence. The Cuban “dictator” has consistently told his people that they could overcome their hurdles (most of which were put in place by the U.S.). Very differently, all but one of the presidential candidates (I don’t count Mike Gravel because he’s not being serious), is accepting to play the health game by the rules of corporate America. They are, in effect, in covert language, telling the American people that there are some things they cannot expect from their freely elected government (as oposed to Cubans, who do not enjoy the same “freedom”).

Last night, for the first time, I saw that Kucinich actually has a charming smile, though it is rare. His habitual sombre mien is telling the American people that their situation is hopeless, even as he tells them what needs to be done. He needs to project the hope that can onlly come from breaking squarely with the status quo.

A propos Cuba, following on the example of Ann Coulter, who wished out loud that John Edwards could have been assassinated, President Bush commented that one day, Fidel Castro will die. I don’t know whether this was in response to the release of the CIA’s “family jewels”, documents that detail decades of dirty work, including plans to use mobsters to assassinate Castro. At any rate, the president must be wishing the art of spin and framing that gave rise to “flip-flop” and other stick-in-your-mind slogans had never been invented, for now it has allowed his former friends to turn his base against him with just one word: ”amnesty”.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Their Reformation, Their Wars

As the plot thickens regarding which set of obfuscations will play out this summer over a hypothetical change of course in Iraq, it might be useful to imagine what would have happened had an outside power intervened in the European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Would there have been a Sun King, Napoleon, Bismarck, the Austro-Hungarian Empire - Hitler?  Or would the Europeans have reverted to the Dark Ages, continuing to live in a semi-feudal state?

We can’t know the answers to those questions, but we can see the parallels between the Protestant/Catholic wars and the strife between Sunnis and Shias.  The Muslim religious conflict is as inevitable as was the infra-Christian conflict.  And as with those European wars, the Muslim struggles are not only about religion, they’re also about equity.  Territorial struggles are about having an inherent right to maintain something that one possesses in the face of a stronger player. Struggles about God are about the inherent right of conscience, which ultimately led to the notion of equity.
Until we realize that our intrusion, motivated by the need for oil, into a region whose centuries’ long dichotomy is exacerbated by the march of history - of which we are the prime motors as inventors and carriers of modernity - no plan for exit will be convincing.  We will continue to weigh alternatives in terms of oil gained and lives lost instead of seeing Muslim lands as simply going through the same process that the Europeans went through five hundred years ago. The notion of a direct relation to God espoused by Protestants is mirrored by the Shia conviction that God wants them to treat their brothers as equals, as opposed to the more elitist ethos of the Sunnis, which could be compared to Catholicism.
Muslims the world over have to be left in peace to complete their transformation from feudal societies, with their corresponding rites, into modern polities with altered rites.  Consider for example the much more relaxed forms of Islam in Southeast Asia.  (The question immediately comes to mind whether Arab Islam retained a feudal outlook because for so long its neighboring Christians did, while Asian Islam benefited from the influences Buddhism and Taoism.)
Astonishingly, recent issues of both “The Economist” and “The Nation” included remarkable analyses of the Middle East crisis.  Both spell out its complexity in unexpectedly similar terms:  Under the headline “Martyrs or Traitors’, the conservative “Economist” writes: “In Lebanon right now the Hizbullah movement calls the beleaguered government of Fouad Siniora traitorous because it is propped up by France and America.”  Somewhat more ingenuously: “Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, needs to keep his distance from America to fend off accusations that he is a puppet of the occupation.”  But then:  “America’s allies cannot stop the martyrs by calling them traitors.  America has made itself deeply unpopular in the Islamic world by invading Iraq and standing by Israel.  This is bound to taint any Muslim leader who looks as if he owes his position to American military or economic power.”  In this lead editorial, “The Economist” provides an interesting detail: the new Palestinian Prime Minister appointed by Mahmoud Abbas is a former World Bank employee.
The left-wing “Nation” emphasizes the failure of the Oslo Peace Accords to fulfill Palestinian expectations, due essentially to a joint UN-Israeli policy of undermining first Arafat, then Abbas.  It also emphasizes that “the more direct cause of the Gaza mini-war lies in the Bush administration’s cynical manipulation of ‘democracy promotion’”.  Israel’s failure to pursue serious negotiations or release prisoners, even as it built a war of separation and expanded west Bank settlements, “weakened Abbas and the secular leadership in the eyes of the Palestinians.”  (It’s) failure to involve the Fatah government in its pullout from Gaza allowed Hamas to claim that armed resistance had triumphed. Finally, Hamas’s contrasting lack of corruption compared to Fatah, and its record as a provider of social services were more important to voters in last year’s election than ideology.  This is the same behavior that secures Hizbollah’s position in Lebanon, that has won support for many liberation movements around the world, and a long standing reputation got the Italian communists during the Cold War that ultimately led to left-wing governments that included them.  Unfortunately the plan appears to be to keep Hamas out of the picture.  It will be too bad if Tony Blair doesn’t realize that would be repeating the mistakes made in fighting the Soviet “evil empire”.
When a steadfastly conservative and an equally steadfast progressive publication see a political issue in similar terms, it’s time for all concerned to take notice. Window dressing can no longer obscure the fact that the US and Israel are denying the Palestinians the right to be governed by those who won a fair and open election, and the Lebanese from supporting Hizbollah’s elected representatives.  The reason alleged is that both refuse to recognize Israel  (as if a policy decision should trump an election!).  According to “The Nation”, Hamas’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and his political adviser, Ahmed Yousef, have both stated in recent op-ed pieces that they can live with a two-state settlement, or at the very least a long-term hudna, or truce.
The obligation of states to formally recognize each other in order to avoid war is a twentieth century invention.  In fact, I do not believe it has existed outside the parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.  While not wishing to provoke readers who may find it difficult to view Israel objectively, I believe that the Palestinian demand that Israel PROVE ITSELF TO BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR before granting it formal recognition, is perfectly reasonable.  As a diplomatic tool that has always existed in diplomacy, a truce should meanwhile satisfy the Israeli requirement of security.
Beyond enabling a two-state solution, a truce would enable Israel to pursue a policy of “constructive engagement” with its Arab and Christian neighbors.  That in turn would enable the larger Middle East region to pursue a similar evolution toward modernity to the one which saw Europe progress from religious strife to the industrial revolution, democracy, and finally, the creation of a European Union.  In this process, it is counter-productive for outsiders to decree that Muslim but non-Arab Iran should not play a key role, just as a centrally located and strong Germany did throughout European history.  That President Ahmadinejad has been forced to institute petrol rationing as a shield against international sanctions, suggests that Europe and the US should be helping Iran build more refineries so that it can rely on its own, for the moment, abundant supply of oil, meanwhile recognizing that Iran has as much right to prepare for nuclear energy when that supply dries up, as we do.
The Middle East will modernize just as did Europe. The big difference is that the world is a smaller place, and everything is related to everything else.  So it behooves us to try to meet our energy needs in ways that do not exacerbate the inherent difficulties of the modernization process.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

ARMAGEDDON OR REDUCTIONISM?



One pundit this week chided Jordan’s present and previous ruler for warning that US intervention - or inattention - would cause the Middle East to go up in flames. Like several of his estimed colleagues, he affirmed that resolving the Palestinian question would have no bearing on the other conflicts.
I have always thought this was a narrow-minded view, consciously or not influenced by unconditional support for Israel. Now I think it’s part of a general failure to see the Middle East as part of a larger, global conflict, not between good and evil, but between modernity and a determination not to share it as it currently presents itself.

The pundit correctly poinits out that if we had to we could do without thr oil from the Middle East, which only represents 40% of our needs. Yet focusing on that crucial commodity, our leaders fail to see the big picture. This is a worldwide upheaval, affecting pretty much all the countries that have not made the transition to a modernity that is at once highly structured and free-wheeling.
In a speech to the UN in the seventies, Fidel Castro noted that third world countries have to do in a much shorter time frame what the developed countries did over the course of a century, but what serious deciders were listening to the upstart? Now we’re seeing the consequences of our failure to adopt policies that took into account that reality.

Whether they be desperate Africans crowded onto dinghy’s with the hope of reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa - or Malta; or the people of the Niger delta whose lives are being destroyed rather than buoyed by oil; of the inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest - or the Sunnis and the Shias in the diversely poorly governed lands of the Middle East, the message is the same: maybe we do, maybe we don’t want modernity, but if we do, we want our own version, and for an increasing number of us, that means a fair share of the wealth. (Saudi newly rich want a voice in decision-making, but even in a country where the locals don’t have to work, a rising number are poor.)

The Shia Sunni divide, which we correctly perceive as religious, is about Islam’s conflicting views of society: elitist vs egalitarian, no different from those that have always existed in every culture and historical period. The Shiite Ali was on the side of the people. No wonder, then, that while the United States desperately props up - more precisely gives infusions to - so-called democratically elected governments, the Sunnis and the Shias, Hezbollah and Hamas, al Queda and its offshoots, run riot over our efforts to imposes our brand of modernity. They surely disagree among themselves as to whether the Middle East should become more egalitarian, but by trying to impose on them a liberal order that doesn’t even raise the question, we aggravate the enmities hisrtory has accumulated.

The sooner we stop focusing on this battle or that surge, these weapons or that threat, the sooner we will be able to extricate ourselves from the present context. As Edward N. Luttwak correctly states in the current issue of “Harpers”, we need to focus on places “where hardworking populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past’, tighten our pumps and leave the Middle East to sort itself out.

But “ahead”, for those countries which have “arrived” will require a major overhaul with respect to the past. In the same issue of Harpers where Luttwak fumes, Rebecca Solnit illustrates the transformation of Detroit, an American wasteland into a new kind of city, where locally produced foodstuffs are preferred to gentrification. Getting the farm into the city not only empowers and feeds local inhabitants, it breaks the absurd logic of consuming Middle Eastern oil to haul food over long distances.

I wager the gunmen turning the globe into a shooting gallery would be for that.bq.



One pundit this week chided Jordan’s present and previous ruler for warning that US intervention - or inattention - would cause the Middle East to go up in flames. Like several of his estimed colleagues, he affirmed that resolving the Palestinian question would have no bearing on the other conflicts.
I have always thought this was a narrow-minded view, consciously or not influenced by unconditional support for Israel. Now I think it’s part of a general failure to see the Middle East as part of a larger, global conflict, not between good and evil, but between modernity and a determination not to share it as it currently presents itself.

The pundit correctly poinits out that if we had to we could do without thr oil from the Middle East, which only represents 40% of our needs. Yet focusing on that crucial commodity, our leaders fail to see the big picture. This is a worldwide upheaval, affecting pretty much all the countries that have not made the transition to a modernity that is at once highly structured and free-wheeling.
In a speech to the UN in the seventies, Fidel Castro noted that third world countries have to do in a much shorter time frame what the developed countries did over the course of a century, but what serious deciders were listening to the upstart? Now we’re seeing the consequences of our failure to adopt policies that took into account that reality.

Whether they be desperate Africans crowded onto dinghy’s with the hope of reaching the Italian island of Lampedusa - or Malta; or the people of the Niger delta whose lives are being destroyed rather than buoyed by oil; of the inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest - or the Sunnis and the Shias in the diversely poorly governed lands of the Middle East, the message is the same: maybe we do, maybe we don’t want modernity, but if we do, we want our own version, and for an increasing number of us, that means a fair share of the wealth. (Saudi newly rich want a voice in decision-making, but even in a country where the locals don’t have to work, a rising number are poor.)

The Shia Sunni divide, which we correctly perceive as religious, is about Islam’s conflicting views of society: elitist vs egalitarian, no different from those that have always existed in every culture and historical period. The Shiite Ali was on the side of the people. No wonder, then, that while the United States desperately props up - more precisely gives infusions to - so-called democratically elected governments, the Sunnis and the Shias, Hezbollah and Hamas, al Queda and its offshoots, run riot over our efforts to imposes our brand of modernity. They surely disagree among themselves as to whether the Middle East should become more egalitarian, but by trying to impose on them a liberal order that doesn’t even raise the question, we aggravate the enmities hisrtory has accumulated.

The sooner we stop focusing on this battle or that surge, these weapons or that threat, the sooner we will be able to extricate ourselves from the present context. As Edward N. Luttwak correctly states in the current issue of “Harpers”, we need to focus on places “where hardworking populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past’, tighten our pumps and leave the Middle East to sort itself out.

But “ahead”, for those countries which have “arrived” will require a major overhaul with respect to the past. In the same issue of Harpers where Luttwak fumes, Rebecca Solnit illustrates the transformation of Detroit, an American wasteland into a new kind of city, where locally produced foodstuffs are preferred to gentrification. Getting the farm into the city not only empowers and feeds local inhabitants, it breaks the absurd logic of consuming Middle Eastern oil to haul food over long distances.

I wager the gunmen turning the globe into a shooting gallery would be for that.bq.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

NEW AND IMPROVED EMPIRES



Speak of the devil!  Yesterday I wrote that empires don't have allies, and today John Perkins, author of the best-selling 'An Economic HItman" is on "Democracy Now" telling about that book and also his new book entitled "The Secret History of the American Empire".

If you can catch the program tonight, where it will be aired on many public TV stations, or on D.N.s website, or on any of the many radio stations it's broadcast on, you wont' be wasting your time.
You'll not only learn about economic hit men and what they do - which is particularly relevant at a time when congress wil be voting to confirm a new president of the World Bank.  You'll learn HOW the United States became an empire and what John Perkins thinks could still reverse a historical trend that led us into our present quagmire.

He believes the culprits - our vast army of CEO's, leaders of corporations who enjoy that status of "persons" are beginning to realize that they have to change the way they do business.  Instead of their primary concern being to make money for shareholders and themselves - it should be, like any legal "person",  to care about the healh and welfare of their employees, their consumers and the environment.

This has every chance of being a pipe-dream unless we somehow manage to elect a President who sees things the way Perkins does.  But at least it's a start in the debate about capitalism versus socialism.

Right now, President Bush is being met in Germany by vociferous crowds demonstrating against everything he stands for, illustrating the fact that empires don't have allies: the leaders gathering for the G8 summit are "allies" iin the sense that they obey our diktats instead of doing what their constituents want them to.  Ironicaly, the German demonstrators are telling him to "go home" - reviving the slogan used by European demonstrators after the Second World War.
At that time, we were simply seen as an unwelcome foreign presence.  Now, we represent specific policies that the Europeans - and others around the globe - condemn.  After many false starts, it was 9/11 that finally made John Perkins sit down and tell his story to the end: he realized he had been personally involved in creating the conditions that made an attack on our soil inevitable.
When governments fail to do the right thing for long enough, the people take over.  They are not bound either by the nicities of parliamentary debate - nor by the rules of war that armies are exected to abide by.  Having to pose as an ally of an Empire puts governments in just such a situatiion.

He believes the culprits - our vast army of CEO's, leaders of corporations who enjoy that status of "persons" -are beginning to realize that they have to change the way they do business. Instead of their primary concern being to make money for shareholders - and themselves - it should be, like any legal "person", to care about the healh and welfare of their employees, their consumers and the environment. This has every chance of being a pipe-dream unless we somehow manage to elect a President who sees things the way Perkins does. But at least it's a start in the debate about capitalism versus socialism. Right now, President

Bush is being met in Germany by vociferous crowds demonstrating against everything he stands for, illustrating the fact that empires don't have allies: the leaders gathering for the G8 summit are "allies" in the sense that they obey our diktats instead of doing what their constituents want them to. Ironicaly, the German demonstrators are telling him to "go home" - reviving the slogan used by European demonstrators after the Second World War. At that time, we were simply seen as an unwelcome foreign presence. Now, we represent specific policies that the Europeans - and others around the globe - condemn.

After many false starts, it was 9/11 that finally made John Perkins sit down and tell his story to the end: he realized he had been personally involved in creating the conditions that made an attack on our soil inevitable. When governments fail to do the right thing for long enough, the people take over. They are not bound either by the nicities of parliamentary debate - nor by the rules of war that armies are exected to abide by. Having to pose as an ally of an Empire puts governments in just such a situatiion.

A CONTAGIOUS DISEASE



I’m not talking about the guy who flew around on commercial airlines knowing he had a resistant strain of TB. Im talking about the creeping (or sprinting) infection of fascism. Although not officially identified as yet, there is a disturbing similarity between the methods used by the U.S., Poland, Great Britain, Israel and other governments too numerous to name.

The latest edition of The New York Review (June 28), carries a piece by the well-known writer and Solidarity leader, Adam Michnik, entitled “The Polish Witch-Hunt”. What emerges from his report on efforts under way to identify former informants to the Communist secret police under the regime that ended in 1989, is a chilling echo of methods used in the U.S. Here’s a quote:

“Since their election victory in 2005, the Kaczinskis and their governing coalition have attempted to blur the separation of powers in order to strengthen the executive branch they control ‘ The president, the prime minister (who are twins) and the secretary of justice have attacked the independence of the courts in several ways: by publicly challenging any verdict they don’t like, by showing disrespect for the Constitutional Court, including suggestions that its judges are biased; and by the government’s rhetoric of fear and danger, which serves to justify its increase in criminal penalties and its criminalizing of acts that were previously considered civil offenses.”

The Kaczinski brothers tried to have the eminent historian and former foreign minister, Bronislav Geremek, a political prisoner under the Communist regime, dismissed from his seat in the European Parliament to which he’d been elected in 2004, because he’d refused to sign a declaration that he’d not been a secret police agent during the Communist years.
Shades of M McCarthy!

The obligation for anyone born before August 1972 and occupying professional positions in the private, public and state sectors, to sign the declaration, was pushed through parliament by the right-wing government, in a sweeping purge, known as “lustration” (as in shiny clean). According to Michnik, those who refused to sign, were replaced by unqualified but loyal newcomers. The independence of public radio and television has also been curtailed by changes in personnel instigated by the government and by pressures to control what was published and broadcast. Says Michnik: “The everyday language of politics has become one of confrontation, recrimination and accusations.....These measures have produced a pervasive climate of fear.”

Michnik is confident the Poland of openness and tolerance, of John Paul II and Czeslaw Milosz will prevail. (After repeated government efforts to postpone the session of the Supreme Court and to impeach its judges, the court found the law to be unconstitutional.) But the current crisis over whether the U.S. should place interceptor missiles in Poland, over strong opposition from Russia, does not bode well.

As in many parts of the world, the Polish government has chosen to support the U.S. government over its people. Like the Israeli government that last summer blitz-krieged Lebanon and whose door-busting troops in Gaza and the West Bank are indistinguishable from ours and Britain’s in Iraq, it is part of a growing coalition whose arms are fear and intimidation.

Monday, June 4, 2007

EMPIRES DON'T HAVE ALLIES



The notion that we have allies stretches back to World War II. Then, we led, they followed, because their survival was at stake. As leadership turned to empire, our “allies” followed less and less persuasively: they paid lip service, they pronounced the ritual incantations about an Atlantic Alliance on requisite occasions. France has traditionally been a troublemaker, but it is no longer powerful enough to lead the others, especially when Germany leans toward the U.S. With the Iraq War following on the heels of 9/11, a tragedy which almost outweighed decades of irritation at our growing hubris, the tide turned decisively: American overreach was recognized for what it is: a brazen, unabashed determination to subjugate all peoples that possesses the black gold upon which our power is built.
Our so-called allies still needed a leader to authorize them to say out loud what they had been muttering among themselves for decades: you can no longer tell us what to do, Uncle Sam. Putin has stepped forward, and he will be followed, even though Russia’s lack of democracy is more blatant than that of the U.S. World wise Europeans, especially in the west, know it‘s all a question of degree.
The Bush-Cheney hydra may well react to having its first head cut off by fomenting war with Iran before the beast’s lair is cleaned out for new occupiers. Notwithstanding last night’s spirited Democratic debate, the courage to impeach would have been the only way to prevent that.
If we attack Iran, at least the fact that we are an empire rather than the leader of an alliance, will be clear for all to see.

Friday, June 1, 2007

THE KNOWLEDGE GAP



Having spent most of my life in Europe, it has been obvious to me for forty years or more that while American governments were complaining that Europeans weren’t spending enough money “on their own defense”, the Europeans were, in fact spending their money on social services that Americans were being told they didn’t need because they were “free”.

Having been “free” to pay for their own medical care and work 50 weeks a year, Americans have watched in dismay as their leaders stomped around the world “freeing” other peoples to emulate us. (Some underdeveloped (now called “developing” countries insisted on emulating the Europeans, and the Soviets were glad to help, thereby stoking the arms race that neither americans nor Russians were “free” to stop.)

When I lived in Italy, Italian workers had six weeks paid vacation a year to the French five: the emulation among Europeans countries was as to who would get the most unemployment compensation, the lowest retirement age and the most vacations. Even under Soviet “domination”, workers in Eastern Europe had a month vacation, and women in Hungary had three years paid maternity leave.

Now, sadly, the governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia, still under the influence of their naively pro-American liberation movements (think Solidarnosc and the philosopher-king Vaclav Havel) have accepted for us to station antiballistic missiles on their soil in anticipation of a possible Iranian attack. Possibly in the back of their minds is the image of the Russian bear, easy to anger. Putin’s response, to test missiles, would seem to confirm their fears, but I believe he is saying that the Iranian threat, like so many of those put forth over the years by the Pentagon, is bogus, and therefore the only country that should be worried about American missiles in Europe is Russia.
Russia’s former satellites have not only, for their and Europe’s benefit, joined the European Union, they’re creating a new European divide between those who defend the European social model as opposed to the American model, equating American missiles with its social model. They see the United States through the same rose-colored glasses that have been blinding Americans for half a century, draining energy away from the real threats, which are not Iran, a rising power, but climate change and third world poverty.