Barack Obama : Stop the Runaway Train

President Obama: Stop the runaway train of globalization.
Long range strategic innovation:

Globalization, the financial crisis, environmental planning, and getting out of Afghanistan

By Ray Reece / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2009

Call this a lesson in how to ensure your mail to the White House won't be answered. The following proposal was originally drafted in response to a call for submissions on the Obama Transition Team website. That was back in December, after Obama's election but before his inauguration. "President-elect Obama wants to hear from you," said the website. "Send us your ideas for change."

So we did -- we being the motley band of scholars, activists and free-thinkers scattered worldwide who constitute the nucleus of the organization named below. Ten months later, we're still waiting for a green light from the White House, or at least a form letter. We're not twiddling our thumbs, though. We plan to have a website of our own online by the time Obama delivers his State of the Union address next year. Stay tuned.

Like hundreds of millions of other people around the world, I'm excited by the prospect of having Barack Obama in the White House. I'm a Texas journalist currently working in Italy and Hungary. I'm also a researcher and activist in several spheres of policy and politics, including energy-environment, urban and regional planning, transportation, and, to put it bluntly, the runaway train of globalization.

I have recently joined the board of a new organization of like-minded activists in the U.S. and Europe called the World Coalition for Local and Regional Self-Reliance. In future dispatches, if you are receptive, I will spell out the specific implications of that. For now I want mainly to advance a pair of policy suggestions that arise from the premises of our coalition.

One is based on our conviction that the current approach in Washington to resolving the so-called financial crisis and "getting America back on its feet" is grounded in faulty, obsolete reasoning that will cause it to fail and even be counterproductive in the long run.

We contend that the financial crisis is functionally intertwined with other national and planetary crises, led by global climate change, or GLOCCH, and Peak Oil, the imminent depletion of the fossil fuel resources on which the entire 21st century "global economy" is based. The financial crisis is likewise inextricably bound up with the hyper-suburbanization of American cities, the egregious loss of farmland and other productive capacity, and, yes, globalization and its evil twin, international terrorism.

The latter, we argue, is nothing more or less than a violent response by the oppressed of the world -- oppressed culturally as well as economically -- to those perceived as their oppressors, meaning, above all, the purveyors of economic and cultural globalization on Wall Street and elsewhere, in league with their national governments.

The banking crisis is thus not merely a symptom of lax regulation of financial markets and greedy investors in recent years. It is systemic in nature, and a systemic crisis requires a systemic response. The trillion-dollar stimulus package recently approved by Congress is not a systemic response, since it purports merely to restart the sputtering engine of the failed larger system itself. Rather, or perhaps we must now say in addition to the stimulus package, the whole matrix of primary socioeconomic assumptions and institutions in the United States -- as a starting point and global model -- must be examined, assessed and, over time, fundamentally changed.

Toward that end, as our first policy suggestion, we urge President Obama to establish and fold into his brain trust a new Office of Long-Range Strategic Policy Innovation. This would be the place in the White House where staff would be recruited to "think outside the box," where vision, boldness and creativity would be prized over technical jargon and obeisance to America’s dying corporate mammoths and their powerful defenders in Washington. It is here that independent in-house thinkers, with appropriate input from real-world experts, would incubate the brave new concepts and paradigms the nation and world will need to survive and supercede not only the "financial crisis" but the web of corresponding metacrises mentioned above.

We dare to hope, indeed will strive to ensure, that among the big initiatives generated by a presidential Office of Policy Innovation would be the following:

1. a greatly expanded and modernized national rail system for passengers and freight alike, similar to the European system;
2. transformation of the urban/exurban population grid to a revised geography of small and mid-sized cities and towns that are largely autonomous and self-sufficient in the production of food, energy and other life-support resources;
3. promotion of small organic family and community farms as the mainstay of American agriculture;
4. at the macro level, encompassing all of the above and more, a liberation of human society from its self-defeating enslavement to the imperative of “growth” in favor of sustainability, sharing and reverence for the planet and its threatened wealth of species.

Our second policy suggestion would necessarily be implemented first, partly in order to redirect funds from the military budget to the crucial and expensive federal initiatives implied heretofore. We urge President Obama to make good on his promise to withdraw American military forces from Iraq. We further urge him NOT to nullify the positive effects of that decision by enlarging and prolonging the American-led NATO military presence in Afghanistan. Such a move, we believe, not only would not save Afghanistan from its own Islamic militants, nor strengthen the security of the U.S. and its allies.

It would have the opposite effect -- in fact might well produce a catastrophe on the scale of the wars in Iraq and Vietnam -- while diverting critical funds and other resources from the task of redesigning and rebuilding our own beleaguered society. To buttress our case, we refer you to a pair of recent articles in The New York Times, one a column by Bob Herbert, "The Afghan Quagmire," the second an essay in the Times magazine, "The Worst Pakistan Nightmare for Obama," by David E. Sanger.

Other references, to name but a few, include two books by James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand; Kunstler’s blog; E.F. Schumacher’s timeless classic, Small Is Beautiful; two books by Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land and Human Scale; Bill McKibben’s End of Nature; everything published by David Morris and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; everything published by Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems; La Decrescita Felice by Maurizio Pallante and his website.

[Ray Reece is affiliated with the World Coalition for Local and Regional Self-Reliance. He is a former columnist for The Budapest Sun and author of The Sun Betrayed: A Report on the Corporate Seizure of U.S. Solar Energy Development, among other published works. His most recent book is Abigail in Gangland, a novel. He is currently based in Cagli, Italy.]

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Columbia Military Pact : The Yanks are Coming

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe defends military pact with U.S. Photo from AFP.
U.S. and Columbia:
Military pact signed in 'private' meeting

Over There, Over There
Send the word, send the word,
Over There
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum tumming everywhere...

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2009

CARTAGENA, Columbia -- Well, it finally happened. U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield and three Colombian governmental ministers -- Jaime Bermudez the Foreign Minister (same as Secretary of State), Defense Minister Gabriel Silva, and Attorney General Fabio Valencia -- inked the deal in a secret (they called it “private”) ceremony in Bogota on Friday.

What was first described as a “military pact” was opposed by the Colombian State Council (the Cabinet), the Colombian Congress, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas (ALBA), the countries of Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and of course Venezuela. It has been in the works for four months (that we know of). It is now a done deal.

It provides for seven U.S. operations bases scattered throughout the country, a total of 1400 troops (although U.S. law limits it to 800) and 600 contractor/mercenaries, all with diplomatic immunity from Colombian law. There’s more but nobody knows what ‘cuz it’s secret. The public part of the agreement will be published in the Federal Record in 30 days according to a spokesman for H. Clinton.

The week opened on Monday with a two day visit from U.S. Secretary of War Robert Gates. On Wednesday Colombian Foreign Minister Bermudez announced that it wasn’t a military pact after all, but an addendum to a 2004 U.S./Colombian “drug war” agreement and so wouldn’t need the approval of the Colombian Congress anyway.

It all started when Ecuador refused to re-up on a pact to let the U.S. use an air base at Manta in their country. The lease ran out in June. The operations were shifted to bases that the U.S. has in Aruba and Curacao in the Dutch ABC islands. That wasn’t good enough, as always they need more. That set off the go-around.

First they needed three air bases in Colombia, the congress said no! So, then they needed five bases, again resistance, no joy there. Then seven bases… No! How about four? Every day it was a different number. When Bermudez said they didn’t need congressional approval it quickly went back to seven and that’s what they got, three air bases, two naval bases, and two army bases. We don’t know where yet, because they changed the proposed locations from time to time during the squabble.

We know one will become part of the Paloquemado Air Base in the Magdalena River Delta; the U.S. already has a 46 million dollar construction project going there to make the base “safer.” Colombia got 14 million to sign the deal on top of the 16 BILLION dollars that they already got under Plan Colombia, (now known as Plan Uribe).

Cartagena has been mentioned as possibly one of the seaports. The base in Cartagena already plays host to a couple of Coast Guard cutters. We got ‘em all here: CIA, DEA, HSA, USCG, ICE, maybe more but I ran out of letters.

In any case, your correspondent will be traveling around to “our” various bases greeting our boys and reporting to you (since you’re paying for it) about what they are up to.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss : 'La Pensée Sauvage'

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: dead at 100.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Making sense of la pensée sauvage

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2009

In French sauvage means wild, not necessarily savage. In our language savage means aggressive, a value judgment left over from centuries of exterminations.

Heathens, savages, primitive people, natives. All these words describe a certain section of humanity, but they all mean something different. If confusion about our ancestral past is the price we pay to be modern, then so called “primitive man” will always be a source of much uneasiness. After the period when natives must be displaced and killed off, what do we derive from our relationship with them? Do we try in sad little ways to imitate their rituals at Boy Scout camp or on a football team?

For years the details of primitive people’s lives were catalogued by observers, anthropologists. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that one of these anthropologists, a Frenchman working for the Rockefeller Foundation, began to draw parallels from all the studies that had been made worldwide.

Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Brazilian Amazon, 1936. Photo by Apic / Getty Images.
To Claude Lévi-Strauss, the mind of the “primitive” was not a disorganized collection of confused myths and superstitions, but was in its own way searching for objective reality like all the rest of us. And the vast collection of mythology collected around the world from these types of populations could be catalogued and searched over for commonalities.

Lévi-Strauss himself did some of this pattern work, creating a new school of Western thought known as structuralism. Of course what structuralism points back to is what certain philosophers, psychologists, and poets have claimed all along: the existence of a universal human element, an originating unified matriarchy, one source and one basic pattern for all disparate human myths.

What Claude Lévi-Strauss succeeded in doing was bringing anthropology as a science to the brink of being able to understand human origins. The fact that he himself backed off before embracing the full Rousseau (Noble Savage), the absolute Carl Jung (Universal Unconscious) or the mother of all mythbreakers, Robert Graves (White Goddess), tells you right away he went too far. Two steps further and Levi-Strauss would have been back in alchemy land.

So it was that structuralism was attacked as simplistic, finally superseded by, you guessed it, “post-structuralism.” All male dominant science is ultimately one big ego-driven pissing contest. Truth can never flourish for long if we are to have neverending “progress” and new succeeding generations of intellectual leaders.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of the structuralist school of anthropology died this week. He was a hundred years old.

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Harry Targ : Legitimacy Crisis and the Vietnam Syndrome

Public suspicion of government on the rise:
The return of the Vietnam Syndrome

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2009

I teach a course on United States foreign policy. I was just finishing up a discussion of foreign policy in the Nixon/Ford (and Kissinger) period, 1968 to 1976. As I talked about how the consciousness of most Americans in the 1970s changed, I emphasized the rising crisis of legitimacy of American political institutions and opposition to presidents sending troops into foreign lands, the so-called “Vietnam syndrome.” As I lectured to a large group of students who may have been thinking, “What the hell is he talking about?” I began to reflect on what might be instructive about the mid-1970s for analysis and activism today.

Richard Nixon won the presidential election in 1968, promising that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. As the subsequent years unfolded the secret plan became clear: pulling most U.S. troops out of Vietnam while launching a massive bombing campaign targeting virtually every conceivable site in North and South Vietnam, and invading Cambodia.

The U.S.-led war expanded in the most brutal way, at the same time that ground troops returned home. To undermine growing opposition to the war he initiated carrot and stick policies, ending the draft and launching a nationwide program of counterintelligence and police violence against anti-war and anti-racist activists. The drive to repress dissent spread to opponents of the war in the Democratic Party including against the 1972 anti-war candidate Senator George McGovern. The Nixon team, from the White House to small time burglars, engaged in covert programs to disrupt the McGovern campaign. Thus the seeds were planted for the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign his presidency.

Because of the war overseas, repression at home, and rising economic crisis brought on by war in the Middle East, dramatic increases in the price of oil, declining relative competitiveness of the United States economy, the American people began to turn against their government. Enter “legitimacy crisis” and “Vietnam Syndrome.”

What is a Legitimacy Crisis?

Theorists as varied as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and a variety of American political scientists have written in their own ways about “legitimacy” of political institutions and how degrees of it affect stability and change. We can say that a “legitimacy crisis” exists when there is a substantial decline in the level of support for particular regimes, governmental institutions and/or the political leadership of a country.

Polling data from 1964 (when Lyndon Johnson won a huge election victory over conservative opponent Senator Barry Goldwater) until 1976 (at the end of the eight-year period of the Nixon/Ford administration) indicate a dramatic decline in the trust that the American people had in the government. In 1964, seventy five percent of the people said they trusted their government “always or most of the time.” That declined to thirty percent in 1976. The slide continued until 1980. By 1984 President Reagan’s popularity boosted trust to over forty percent. Then a decline followed bottoming out at twenty percent during the mid-1990s.

Trust in government increased after 9/11 in 2002 but by 2007 had declined again to 26 percent. While we can quibble over the meaning of numbers, methodologies, and questions asked, the general thrust of the data indicates a substantial decline in support for government and its leaders since the 1960s spurred by Vietnam, Watergate, and economic crisis at home. As popular as Ronald Reagan was, he never reached the level of support held by Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson.

The Vietnam Syndrome

As to foreign policy, polling data, protest activity, and pressure from influential and grassroots lobbying groups led politicians “inside the beltway” to conclude that the American people did not want their country to engage in another long, unwinnable, and controversial war again, such as Vietnam. Thus every presidential administration from Jimmy Carter on regarded with scorn the constraint that the “Vietnam Syndrome” placed on their capacity to act in an overt and massive military way overseas. President George Herbert Walker Bush confirmed this perceived constraint when he announced at the press conference ending the first Gulf War: “At last we have licked the Vietnam Syndrome!” He probably was premature in his exuberance.

More recently, political scientist John Mueller refined the idea of the “Vietnam Syndrome” by studying polling data from U.S. participation in three wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. He found a common trend in declining support for these wars. Namely duration and casualties (particularly number killed) are correlated with the systematic decline in support for the wars in question. When a president sends troops into combat, temporarily, the people “rally round the flag.” But as wars continue support declines.

Meanings of the Past

What is relevant about all this for today? Are there enough similarities between now and the 1970s to learn from the past? What is different today from the 1970s? Is there anything to be gleaned about the “consciousness of the American people” at various points in time that bear on the question of how to build a progressive majority and against more war and for social justice?

The 1976 candidate for president, Jimmy Carter, ran on a program, he hoped, to bring the disenchanted anti-war activists back into the mainstream political process. He said he would “learn the lessons of Vietnam,” cut military spending, and most important, use human rights as the primary criteria for foreign policy. He also pledged to continue the policies of “détente” that his predecessor had initiated with the Soviet Union.

The anti-war movements and social justice movements of the mid-1970s, never well-organized or interconnected, continued to disintegrate. After two years of modest efforts as promised, the Carter Administration tilted back toward the Cold War policies of its predecessors, spurred on by the trauma the collapse of the Shah of Iran created in the foreign policy establishment.

The Iranian revolution was followed by revolutionary change in Grenada, Nicaragua, and reformism on the horizon in El Salvador. In the summer, 1979, Carter signed a secret directive authorizing covert assistance to anti-Soviet rebels who were launching a war against the secular, Marxist regime that had come to power in Afghanistan.

In other words, as the social movements of the 1960s and '70s dissolved, American foreign policy returned to its historic struggle against revolutionary ferment, albeit in a more covert way. It was candidate Reagan who took the struggle for legitimacy further by promising a more aggressive foreign policy that would lead to victory against the Soviet Union, “the evil empire.”

Even so, Reagan had to gradually bring the American people along to military intervention by invading and winning a one week war in Grenada, and developing a covert strategy to fight communism in Central America, Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southeast and South Asia called “low intensity conflict.” U.S. military intervention was “low intensity” for Americans while it was “high intensity” for peoples of the Global South.

Relevance for today

Where is the consciousness of the American people in 2009? First, the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the illegal and immoral incarcerations and torture of suspected “terrorists,” egregious shifting of government funds to contractors tied to the administration, media manipulation and a host of other unethical and criminal act stimulated a substantial decline in legitimacy of government in the years of the Bush presidency. The campaign of Barack Obama, by contrast, mobilized masses of people to the political process in the hope that government could be made to work for the American people. His first six months in office, however, have raised some questions about the new administration's ability to deliver on the hope.

In general, I believe we can conclude that despite ups and downs in levels of support for government since the end of World War II, there has been a substantial downward trajectory in support for government institutions and personnel. The American people are suspicious of their government and distrust their leaders. Many believe that government has been an impediment to the health and happiness of the people. Episodes of scandal, from Watergate, to Iran Contra, to Monicagate, reinforce the skepticism about government.

As to foreign policy, initial support for the invasion of Afghanistan and suspension of disbelief about the initiation of the war in Iraq has been superseded by the twenty-first century variant of the “Vietnam Syndrome.” Duration and growing casualties in both wars have led to growing anti-war sentiment.

In the 1970s, mass movements were dissipating. Today such movements, initiated over the last eight years, continue to grow. They are reinforced by the most significant economic crisis since the 1930s. Without mass movements, the twin consciousnesses of the America people as to legitimacy and foreign policy provide little hope for building a progressive majority. In fact, the legitimacy crisis, if not addressed with a progressive alternative vision of what government can be, can lead to massive alienation, right-wing populism, and violence.

Building a progressive majority, at this time, should include making our peace and justice organizations strong, presenting compelling images of what government can and should do, and strategizing about how the mass movements can demand participation in government. As to foreign policy, our campaigns should emphasize the length of our wars and the casualties resulting to Americans and victims in host countries, along with our arguments about the imperial underpinnings of such wars.

Even though the present and the future do not merely repeat the past, the past can inform what we do today,

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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James Howard Kunstler : Our Gods are not Happy

Rough beast, preparing to slouch. Art by Alex "Rhino" Voroshev.
Thinking the unthinkable:
Cornpone Hitlers and the agony of ordinary people

By James Howard Kunstler / November 3, 2009

A side-trip to the local mall -- where else to buy ammo around here? -- evinced an epic struggle for supremacy of the chain stores between the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus, with both fat-assed icons trying to shove the other out of the primary display sites as if the store aisle were a WWF ring in some grubby forsaken Palookaville far far from the salons of Washington decision-making, which, I guess, this is.

This is the kind of place that a Jimmy Stewart character would have called home in 1946; only today it looks like a place taken over by a certain species of space aliens, slovenly in mind as well as body.

Our gods are not happy. Anyway, that third fat-assed icon, the Thanksgiving Turkey, was nowhere in sight, perhaps due to the recognition that there is far more grievance than gratitude 'out here' in the fly-over zone.

America still does everything possible except prepare to become a different America, perhaps even a better America than the current release, and this is unfortunate because history is merciless. History doesn't care if the dog peed on your homework... or you had car trouble this morning... or the tattoo on your neck got infected... or (to take this in another direction), you justified robbing scores of billions of dollars out of the mortgage sector because your too-big-to-fail company came down with the financial equivalent of swine flu and the top executives were hallucinating that they lived in a world with no boundaries of law or common decency.

We're at another one of those weird inflection points of "current events" -- a momentous eddy in the larger stream of history. A good deal of the already-proclaimed return to normality ("normalcy" in WGHarding-speak) depends on something close to a normal holiday shopping season, when so much of the nation's merchandise inventory moves from WalMart to under the Christmas tree.

Of course, even if it were to turn out like a year-2005-type credit card binge, the result would surely be a sort of hemorrhagic fever of buyer's remorse afterward. An aerial view of the Heartland long about February 1st would show households blowing up like individual kernels of popcorn at an accelerating rate until the terrain itself was obscured by an evil fluff of financial woe suffocating the poor folks trapped under it.

Over the weekend, The Huffington Post ran a McClatchy news service story about Godman Sachs's misdeeds around the issuance of mortgage backed securities. The basic idea in it was that GS was aggressively gathering trash mortgages from fly-by-night "originators" all over America to bundle into tradable security paper, which they then pawned off on feckless, inattentive investors (pension funds, foreign banks, etc) seeking miracle returns -- at the same time that GS was buying credit default swap "insurance" by the bale, knowing full well that the collateral backing their own issuance of MBS was of a quality somewhere between dead carp and dog poop.

In other words, they were shoveling shit investments out of one window, and betting against the value of them from another window. Thus a picture resolves of GS's "true opinion" of the securities it peddled, and the question arises whether failure to inform the peddled of this opinion constitutes fraud. I certainly think it does.

I've been making substantially the same case for two years now, so it is interesting to see the mainstream media awaken to a story-line that an ambitious nine-year-old could have pulled off the Web over recent months. I also continue to assert that a flurry of bonuses paid out this holiday season by Goldman Sachs and its other amigos at the top of the banking food chain will be greeted by violence -- which will be the natural outcome of a society whose government fails to even give the appearance of protecting its citizens from organized crime. How did a sock puppet get appointed head of the U.S. Department of Justice, folks will wonder.

How bad is the situation "out there" really? In my view, things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the U.S. government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future. I'm not promoting a coup d'etat, you understand, but I am raising it as a realistic possibility as elected officials prove utterly unwilling to cope with a mounting crisis of capital and resources.

The "cornpone Hitler" scenario is still another possibility -- Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin vying for the hearts and minds of the morons who want "to keep gubmint out of Medicare!" - but I suspect that there is a growing cadre of concerned officers around the Pentagon who will not brook that fucking nonsense for a Crystal City minute and, what's more, would be very impatient to begin correcting the many fiascos currently blowing the nation apart from within. Remember, today's U.S. military elite is battle-hardened after eight years of war in Asia. No doubt they love their country, as Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte loved theirs. It may pain them to stand by and watch it dissolve like a castle made of sugar in a winter gale.

I raise this possibility because no one else has, and I think we ought to be aware that all kinds of strange outcomes are possible in a society under severe stress. History is a harsh mistress. For all his "star quality" and likable personality, President Obama is increasingly perceived as impotent where the real ongoing disasters of public life are concerned, and he has made the tragic choice to appear to be hostage to the bankers who are systematically draining the life-blood from the middle class.

Whatever we are seeing on the S & P ticker these days does not register the agony of ordinary people losing everything they worked for and even believed in. In a leadership vacuum, centers don't hold, things come apart, and rough beasts slouch toward Wall Street.

Source / Clusterfuck Nation

Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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Robert Jensen : War, the Ecology, and the Quest for Justice

Professor Robert Jensen.
War, ecological crises, and the quest for justice:
An interview with Robert Jensen

If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation.

By Calvin Sloan / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2009

[The following is an edited version of an interview with Robert Jensen conducted by Calvin Sloan for the radio show “The Pursuit of Injustice,” on KVRX in Austin. The podcast can be streamed or downloaded here. An earlier version was published by Energy Bulletin, October 30, 2009.]

Calvin Sloan: So to start off, let’s address some topical issues. The war in Afghanistan has been described in the mainstream media as America’s good war and as the cornerstone of the “War on Terror.” President Obama is currently debating an increase in troop levels there. He’s already sent an additional 21,000 since taking office, and as the Washington Post recently reported, has been deploying without public announcement 13,000 additional troops. You’ve been an outspoken critic of the war since its inception, what is your take on the current situation there?

Robert Jensen: I think any assessment of the current situation has to remember that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was illegal. The United States invaded the country with no legal authorization. It claimed the right to do this because of the relationship between the governing Taliban and Al Qaeda and the events of 9/11, but there were many ways that the United States could have pursued a just solution to the question of the terrorism of 9/11.

So, why would it pursue an illegal and, I would argue, immoral invasion? Here we have to remember that U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, whatever the stated reason for them, are really about energy resources. The Middle East especially is home to the most extensive reserves of petroleum. There’s a lot of natural gas in Central Asia, plus it has geostrategic importance. So let’s get rid of the idea that this is about the “War on Terror.”

Does the United States want to end terrorist attacks against Americans? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that this particular war is a war on terrorism. We also should remember the phrase is a bad joke, that terrorism is a method by which people try to achieve political goals. You don’t have a war on a method. If you’re going to make war, you’re making war for specific purposes against specific people in specific places, and the “War on Terror” is simply way too obscure for that.

So with all of that background, if the United States were to pursue a just and legal path it would begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan, pay the reparations it owes to the people of Afghanistan, and attempt to work with the appropriate regional and international organizations to try to help Afghanistan transition to a decent government. The United States has no intention of doing that.

So, the proposed buildup in Afghanistan is not only immoral, it’s not only fundamentally unjust, it’s also incredibly stupid. On all counts, anyway you want to evaluate this, the United States is making crucial errors.

The fact that Barrack Obama, the alleged peace candidate in the last election, is willing to pursue this just reminds us of the limits of contemporary mainstream electoral politics with a choice reduced to Republicans and Democrats. What we should be thinking about is the whole structure of, and motivation behind, our involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia, and we should also be rethinking the whole structure of our political discourse at home.

CS: So if this is by all means a stupid endeavor to continue this occupation, why are we doing this? Who is profiting from this? What are the underlying motivations of our occupation?

RJ: Remember that just because people in power might be corrupt and immoral doesn’t mean they’re always competent in pursuing that corruption. If you look back at probably the most grotesque U.S. intervention in the post World War II period, the Vietnam War, there were corrupt and immoral reasons the United States invaded Vietnam -- mostly to undermine independent development and try to dominate the third world -- but in trying to carry out those objectives there were a lot of incompetent decisions made. And sometimes incompetence compounds itself, so as you get further and further into a set of bad strategic decisions, there is an instinct to want to rescue them, but unfortunately it often leads to even more bad strategic decisions.

So, why are we doing it? Well, there’s a certain amount of irrationality to these strategic decision making, even though it’s in the pursuit of a rational -- albeit I would say immoral -- goal, which is to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia. Why are we doing it? Are there profit motivations for private contractors, who are making a killing? Sure. Are there oil companies and gas companies that want concessions? Sure. There are always those things, but I think that the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy tends not to be the interest of any particular industry or any particular set of contractors, but the fact that the whole system is designed to perpetuate this quest for dominance. And those other factors, like the interests of Blackwater (which has changed its name to Xe Services) or ExxonMobil, just contribute to the motive force behind the policy more generally.

CS: So here we are in 2009, and we’ve entered the ninth year of the war in Afghanistan and we’ve similarly occupied Iraq since 2003, yet when you look around it’s hard to notice that we’re running on a war economy. It’s become so normalized, and from a student’s perspective it’s interesting to note that the majority of undergraduates across the country have spent all of their high school and college careers with our nation at war.

And my question is, how do you think history will judge this perpetual war? Do you believe we’ve entered into Orwell’s 1984 realm, are we living in a society where war has officially become peace?

RJ: I don’t think we have to wait for history to judge it. I think we can assess it today and it’s pretty straight forward. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a cover for other interests, and that’s all doubly true with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The whole project is corrupt beyond description. Yet, the propaganda industries, not just the propaganda emanating from the government, but the propaganda industries -- advertising, entertainment, journalism -- are all perpetuating this crazed interpretation of the War on Terror, because they all have an interest in doing that. They are all ideologically connected to the same project.

And yes, it’s Orwellian in that sense, it’s corrupt, it’s immoral, it’s illegal, it’s all these things that we’re talking about, and we don’t have to wait for history 30 years from now to make that judgment. What we have to do is recognize it, and try to organize against it. But I think what we should be doing is not just opposing this war but recognizing that the disease from which this war springs is more deeply set in the culture than ever before.

You can clearly see that on a college campus. Remember that when the United States invaded and began to destroy Vietnam, the opposition to that war started, and was always strongest, on college campuses. There was a kind of “natural,” if you’ll accept the term, resistance from students to that imposition of power from above.

Well in some sense, campuses are the most passive places when it comes to anti-war activity today. To the degree that there is an anti-war movement, it’s mostly rooted in the community. So, that tells us something about what’s happened in universities, the way universities have been turned toward a more corporate and ideologically neutered position, though campuses could potentially be centers of opposition, resistance, and struggle. Well, that’s about not just the war, that’s about what’s happened to American higher education, the corporatization of higher education.

In other words, the war is an indicator not just of the depravity of the war-makers, it’s a very important indicator of what’s going on in society more generally. And about that, I’m terrified. The direction the whole culture is heading is very scary. It’s an imperial culture in decline. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, at least in raw military terms. It remains the largest economy in the world. But it’s an affluent imperial society in decline, and such a society is very dangerous. I think we should be paying attention not only to what these wars tell us about foreign policy and military affairs, but also what they tell us about our society at a much deeper level.

CS: So are you saying that the universities aren’t actually free? Do you think that that’s affected by the politics of tenure and publishing grants?

RJ: It’s affected by the structure of financing, it’s affected by the rewards and punishments that faculty members respond to in building careers. For students, it’s about the economy that the students are going into, and how students are conditioned to believe that college is career training. It’s about trying to create the University as an allegedly politically neutral space, but of course any time you talk about political neutrality what you’re talking about is de facto support for the existing distribution of power. All of these things are part of it, and we should be concerned with it.

Is the University free? Well at some level, obviously yes. Here we are in a University office, I’m a University professor, we’re talking about things that will be on a University radio station. Of course it’s free in that sense, but it’s also a system structured in a way that is going to divert most people from the kind of conversation we’re having. So there are constraints. That’s true of any institution. There are opportunities and freedoms, and then there are constraints. I think what we should be focused on -- whether we’re talking about the Universities or the media or any of the other intellectual institution -- is how the freedom that exists on the surface is often masking a deeper kind of pressure toward conformity, a conformity that’s not enforced through the barrel of a gun, as in a totalitarian society, but a conformity that’s enforced in a much more complex, and in some a ways a much more effective, fashion, through the rewards and the punishments we’re talking about.

CS: I’d like to move on to your most recently published article entitled “Is Obama a Socialist?” In this article you express a deep concern for our evolving ecological crisis, specifically I’d like to refer to the following statement: “Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.” Can you explain this concept further to us?

RJ: For most of the past couple hundred years, we’ve been living really in a rather unique historical moment. First of all it’s a moment made possible by unleashing the enormous energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, the fossil fuels. That’s a blip in human history. There’s never been energy like that available to human beings before, and we’re quickly running out of it. So, all of this bonanza of consumption and material comfort is really subsidized by that energy source, and there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. All of the talk of alternative fuels and biofuels and wind and solar, that’s fine, they are all going to supply some energy, but they are not going to replace the energy we’ve been using from coal, oil, and natural gas.

The explosion of this energy is also the time in which modern industrial capitalism has emerged. It’s all based on a fantasy that is easy to understand because of all that energy. It did look like we could simply grow endlessly. But the ecological crises, and I use the plural quite specifically -- multiple crises, not just global warming but levels of toxicity in the air, water, loss of top soil, the reduction in biodiversity -- are part of a global pattern that is uncontroversial: We are reaching, and probably are long beyond, the carrying capacity of the planet, and we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet at a rate that is increasingly threatening, not just centuries from now, but likely in decades.

That’s all part of an era in which capitalism led us to believe we could have unlimited growth. It’s a crazy claim, and more striking is that it is a crazy claim that is considered to be the conventional wisdom. This is the kind of thing we should be worried about. We’re not having a debate about capitalism in this country -- there’s no debate for the most part in the mainstream. Capitalism is taken to be the only way to organize an economy, yet it is a system of organizing an economy that is literally crazy. Well, if that doesn’t scare people, then I don’t know what will.

CS: If you are implying that if we are at a level of overreach, that there will be, that we might reach a population crash?

RJ: I think it’s inevitable. Ecological overshoot is the key concept. The planet has a carrying capacity. The planet can host only so many human beings, depending on the level at which we live. I’m not a scientist, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not trained in any of this, but reading people whose judgment I trust, and trying to synthesize the information that I can, my judgment is that we’re probably well past the carrying capacity of the planet already.

And at the level of first-world consumption, we are dramatically past the carrying capacity. That is, if you are going to expand this high energy consumption and lifestyle of the first world to the whole planet, it would be game-over tomorrow. If everybody in the world lived like you and I live, the planet would literally die tomorrow. So the only reason we can continue this system is the fact that a good portion of the world’s population is living at a dramatically lower level than we are. Even at that level, I don’t think that the world can support this many people. So we’re in a position of overshoot.

When is the crash going to come? Well in some sense the answer is it’s already here. You have half the world’s population living on less than $2.50 a day, you have hundreds of people dying every hour in Africa from easily preventable diseases, you have the beginnings of ecological crises that are manifesting themselves not only in the reduction of biodiversity but in the direct threat to human life.

When is all of this going to come crashing? Well I don’t know, because I don’t have a crystal ball and no one else does. The question shouldn’t be when can you predict all of this is going to fall apart. More important is the recognition that it inevitably will fall apart, and we should prepare for it, in both physical terms and moral terms. My own view is that, if not in my lifetime certainly in yours, there will be a massive human die-off. That’s an antiseptic term -- it means that millions upon millions of people will die in large sweeps across the planet. What do we do about that morally? What do you do if you’re living in a world in which you know that simply by virtue of the luck of where you were born, you are protected from a scourge that is literally killing millions around the planet?

Well we’re seeing small examples of that today with such things as the devastation from easily preventable diseases in Africa for instance, but what if that happens on a massive scale? I don’t think the human species has a way to cope with that. We’re not ready physically, technologically, but we’re also not ready morally. And the only way you get ready for that is by openly discussing it, but it’s still a culture that cannot come to terms with this. Everything we’re talking about today would have been unthinkable as subjects for the presidential election. No candidate could talk like this and expect to be elected, because the culture is still in such deep denial about the fundamentally unsustainable nature of our economic system and the moral implications of that.

CS: How do you think nation-states will respond to these collapse scenarios?

RJ: First of all I think we should recognize nation-states are not inevitable for the rest of human history. My own view is that were going to end up finding other ways to organize ourselves politically, because the nation-state is at the center of so much of this destruction.

How will people respond? Well I think a lot of that has to do with how the most powerful nations respond. Remember that one of the aspects of being the most affluent and militarily powerful countries on the planet is that what you do matters a lot. You can continue to pursue insane strategies in a crazy system, or you can tell the truth. And if powerful countries tell the truth, start to actively reduce their energy and other material consumption, start to take seriously the demands of justice in equalizing the distribution of wealth around the world, give up on fantasies of control and domination, well that would have a huge effect.

The developing world, which clearly doesn’t trust us and shouldn’t trust us, might be able to move into a posture of more cooperation. Democratic movements within those countries might strengthen when they know there is in fact a commitment from the powerful states to real law, real democracy, real justice, real moral principles. Well, all of that is possible. It’s not a guarantee of success. We could do everything we can imagine in the realm of just and sustainable policies and still fail. The human species does not have some magic guarantee of endless success. Other species have come and gone, and it’s quite possible -- in fact, I would argue it’s probably likely -- were going to go that way relatively soon. And people always say, well that’s a rather depressing fact. Well if it’s a fact, it’s a fact, but of course there’s no way to know for sure, and we can struggle to create a different future, without guarantees.

But even if it does seem to be our future, what of the time we are here? I think part of what makes one fully human is to resist that, to struggle, even with no guarantee of success. And that’s where I put my faith. Maybe it’s a faith that is going to be betrayed, but I don’t see any better option at the moment.

CS: If we were to inevitably make this transition, or at least in the process of making it, do you believe that there will be restoration of matriarchal values?

RJ: I don’t think it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system that emerged in the last 8,000 to 10,000 years, and it imposed systems of hierarchy, not just around gender but around other differences as well, and we are still trying to get out from under those. If we succeed in that -- if we succeed in realizing that power does not come only with the ability to control other people, that power comes in the creative potential of human collaboration, it can come in non-hierarchical ways to organize ourselves -- it doesn’t mean obviously that there will be a matriarchy, if by that we mean a world in which women dominate. It means that we move into a real space where mutuality and egalitarian values can reign.

What will that look like? I don’t know. If we were to magically get there in my lifetime I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would look like. I know that it won’t look much like the institutions I live in today -- it won’t look like the modern corporation, it won’t look like the modern nation-state, it won’t look like the modern University. But you don’t really predict those things, you try to live them. And you live them in small steps, not in some grand utopian fantasy.

CS: Given our trajectory towards this cliff, this ecological cliff, should college students be rethinking their career choices? Are we being trained properly?

RJ: Reality is going to force college students to reconsider career choices, when certain assumptions will no longer hold. The most important thing that Universities could do right now is be laboratories for experiments outside of the dominant system, which is exactly what we’re not doing.

What we’re doing is still training people to be rats in a maze. Well, what if we said, the maze is over. For now, the maze may still exist out in the world, but we’re going to spend four years here going beyond the maze, and your job as a student, and your job as a faculty member, is to experiment with alternatives. That would mean a dramatically different curriculum, that would mean a dramatically different classroom.

I would like to see that happen. In journalism education, the collapse of the commercial journalism industry -- the fact that there are fewer jobs for our students in the traditional journalism institutions -- gives us a kind of opportunity. It’s a disaster at one level, in that the way we’ve done things no longer works, but it’s also an opportunity to reshape those methods.

In my own experience, there is a lot of resistance to that kind of change, because it is kind of frightening. If you’ve been doing something on a model that in the past has worked, or at least appeared to work, and now people are saying that model is over, well it’s not exactly easy to jump to that position where everything is up for grabs. But that’s what Universities should be doing. Unfortunately, not only in journalism but in the University at large, I think there is a distinct lack of that spirit. There is an attempt to kind of hunker down, and make this model work, but I don’t think the model can work. I don’t think it ever worked for real education, but it’s certainly not going to work in a dramatically changing landscape.

CS: What advice do you offer UT students, or just to activists of all ages, who want to participate, want to fight the system, but feel overwhelmed by its strength?

RJ: If you feel overwhelmed, let’s recognize that that’s a rational response. If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because we face an overwhelming situation. We’re facing a collapse economically, a collapse of U.S. power around the world, and ecological crises that defy the imagination. Well that is overwhelming. But we should also look at history and realize that this is not the first time the world has appeared to be on the brink, and people didn’t lie down and die in the past. People organized, people committed to long-term projects to create a different future, and we can still do that.

In my case, I’ve moved toward a focus on helping to build local community networks and institutions that can help people explore other alternatives. One of the groups in Austin I’ve connected with is the Workers Defense Project, a wonderful group that helps immigrant workers, especially undocumented immigrant workers, who are vulnerable to exploitation by employers. Through that work it offers a critique of the underlying power structure and a vehicle for people to build the power to change things. It’s really inspiring.

If we’re going to be effective, we’ve got to dig in for the long haul. There’s a paradox in all this. We may feel the crisis is more urgent then ever -- and I do feel that, more than ever -- but we have to recognize there’s no short-term solution, and we have to dig in for the long haul. That might be difficult, but it’s the only way I can see us moving forward.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). His film, Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, has been released by the Media Education Foundation. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. His articles on The Rag Blog are here and his writing can also be found here.]

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Hall of Fame Concerts : Rocking the Garden!

Hall of Fame rock 'n rollers: Bono and Mick Jagger. Photo from Mirror, U.K.
Hall of Fame benefit:
Taking rock and roll to a new level

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2009
[With Gary Baumgarten and Abbie Wasserman]

NEW YORK -- Music history has been made with two uniquely powerful nights of performances at Madison Square Garden in celebration of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- and the educational foundation it supports.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band; U2; Simon and Garfunkel; Metallica; Aretha Franklin; Annie Lennox; Stevie Wonder; Crosby, Stills & Nash along with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor; Dion; Patti Smith; Smokey Robinson; the Jeff Beck Band; a surprise appearance by Mick Jagger; intros (both nights) by Tom Hanks (who said he did it "just to get the access pass") and much much more turned midtown into the center of the musical universe once again.

With two (almost) completely different concerts (Jerry Lee Lewis played both nights) the Hall of Fame celebrated its 25th Anniversary and raised more than $4 million for a permanent endowment for the Cleveland-based museum and the educational work in which it specializes. An HBO special from the show will debut at the end of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Sunday, November 29.

Both concerts opened with the 74-year-old Lewis who, in a signature move, kicked over his piano bench the first night, then did it again on Friday.

Since his "Great Balls of Fire" was instrumental in kicking off the musical revolution that became Rock and Roll, it was a fitting pair of gestures.

Crosby, Stills & Nash's impeccable set opened with their loving ode to the festival at Woodstock, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary. As Graham Nash reminded the audience, 30 years and one month ago, CSN was here in the Garden for the legendary "No Nukes" concerts, whose platinum triple album and feature film raised money and awareness for Musicians United for Safe Energy.

The trio was joined on "Love Has No Pride," "The Pretender," "Teach Your Children" and more by MUSE veterans James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, whom David Crosby described as "my favorite singer in the world."

The "CSN and Friends" show took the form of a "swing (and hug) your partner" fest in which a close-knit extended family of world-class musicians moved from their own songs to hits shared by the group in a graceful, loving minuet. It set the tone for all that followed.

Paul Simon (also a MUSE vet) opened with "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard," and "You Can Call Me Al." He was joined by Dion on "The Wanderer," Crosby and Nash on "Here Comes the Sun," and Little Anthony and the Imperials on "Two Kinds of People." Art Garfunkel brought "The Sounds of Silence," "Mrs. Robinson," "Not Fade Away" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water," in which he indeed conquered the high notes.

Stevie Wonder then delivered Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," "Uptight," "I Was Made to Love Her" and more. He was joined in succession by Smokey Robinson for "Track of My Tears," by John Legend for "Mercy, Mercy Me," by B.B. King for his signature "The Thrill is Gone," by Sam Moore for "Hold On, I'm Coming," by Sting for "Higher Ground" and "Roxanne," and by Jeff Beck for "Superstition," among others.

Stevie Wonder at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert. Photo by Henny Ray Abrams / AP.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band then anchored the stage for the rest of the night. Tom Morello joined in for "the Ghost of Tom Joad," John Fogerty for "Fortunate Son" and "Proud Mary," Darlene Love for "A Fine, Fine Boy" and "Da Do Ron Ron" and Billy Joel for "You May Be Right," "Only the Good Die Young," and "New York State of Mind." For a Star Spangled Finale reminiscent of the one with which they closed two MUSE nights in 1979, Fogerty, Moore, Browne, Love, Peter Wolfe and others joined Bruce and the E-Streeters in an unforgettable "Higher and Higher."

After Hanks again hailed Rock & Roll, and Jerry Lee Lewis again kicked over his seat, Night Two opened with the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin's "Baby I Love You" and "Don't Play that Song," in honor of the man who first signed her, the recently departed Ahmet Ertegun. Annie Lennox joined her for "Chain of Fools." Then came Lenny Kravitz for "Think." With "Respect" Aretha nailed things down, backed as she was by a 20-piece band that included her son Teddy on guitar.

Jeff Beck returned with a jazz/blues quartet in a set highlighted by "Drown in My Own Tears." Sting joined in for "People Get Ready," bluesman Buddy Guy for "Let Me Love You," followed by ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons for "Rough Boy" and Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady."

After an instrumental version of "Day in the Life," Beck gave way to Metallica's high-amp renditions of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "One." Lou Reed contributed "Sweet Jane" and then gave way to Ozzy Osbourne's "Paranoid" and "Iron." The Kinks' Ray Davies set the stage for U2 with the classics "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night."

The rest of the show belonged to Bono and his bandmates and friends. Opening with "Vertigo," the quartet sailed through "Magnificent" and "No Line on the Horizon."

Springsteen and Patti Smith came out for a group cover of her "Because of the Night" -- twice, apparently for the benefit of HBO, which may have needed the second take to cover a glitch the first time around. It's a good bet you'll see that one on the HBO Special at the end of the month.

Also a good bet is "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," along with the Black Eyed Peas' guest version of "Where is the Love."

To top the two nights, Mick Jagger brought his aerobic instructor's physique center stage with Fergie to do "Gimme Shelter" and "Stuck in a Moment."

U2 closed down more than ten hours of the two-night extravaganza with "Beautiful Day."

But not before Bono gave a monumental nod to "the saints, the heretics, the poets and punks that now make up our Hall of Fame." Rock, Springsteen added, is a form of liberation that demands everyone "have fun with it."

The fun was more than evident through both big nights, from Hanks's loosey-goosey introductions and Jerry Lee's pyrotechnics to a beautifully choreographed but gritty and completely professional 10-hour marathon from those who have created a culture that simply did not exist a half-century ago, and does not seem to be going away.

That a uniquely crafted museum stands to commemorate it in the nation's heartland seems every bit as fitting as two powerful nights in the nation's media center, a landmark event that has made possible the institution's first permanent endowment.

Close your eyes, for example, and the beautifully bedecked Aretha could have been singing in Detroit's New Bethel Baptist Church, founded by her father, where she first began to sing in the 1950s. The music industry has changed over the decades, she told us after her Friday performance, but it must do that to stay strong. "R&B, hip hop are alive and well," she says. "Some of the lyrics I like," she said, "some not so well." But the karma of the Rock Hall allows her to "see older members... that have come a long way" along with "the new people."

Among them might be Jeff Beck, who "thanked" Eric Clapton for being grounded by the gall stone operation that turned Beck from a back-up to a headliner. And Ozzy Osbourne, who challenged us to name another profession in which a performer knows that "when he's fucked up it's gonna be a good show."

A more subdued Steven Van Zandt paid homage to "the British invasion" which got the industry "where we are today." It was "fun to do a review" of multiple songs with multiple artists, as the E-Streeters did with Springsteen Thursday night. "It's like an old school rock and roll show. That's the way it used to be."

After nominating Darlene Love for membership in the Hall, Van Zandt lamented that if the Rolling Stones were beginning now, his radio show, the "Underground Garage," would be the only one to play them. "There is no format for new rock and roll," Van Zandt said. "It's almost impossible these days" for new groups to make a dent.

"When our generation goes," he added, "it's going to be weird."

John Legend might agree. "I am the luckiest kid in the world," he told us. "I haven't paid my dues, and I am humbled and honored to be with Stevie Wonder" and "all these amazing artists that have been making music for a long time."

"A new generation will be changing the world in different ways," added Bonnie Raitt. "In the change we feel brewing, I think the Internet and the advent of satellite radio and independent newspapers... will help get the truth out and keep the debate going," she told us. "I think music and rock and roll will continue to shepherd that along."

"Rebellion is a life-long thing," said Jackson Browne. "Rock and roll has always been the language of self-empowerment, freedom and community, and always will be."

[Harvey Wasserman is author of Solartopia! and Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States. He helped co-found Musicians United for Safe Energy, and spoke (for Greenpeace USA) at Woodstock II in 1994. Gary Baumgarten is the Paltalk News Network's director of news and programming and host of the network's News Talk Online; for CNN Radio he covered the 9/11 attacks in New York and Hurricane Katrina. Abbie Wasserman is a senior at Stern College in New York City, majoring in English literature.]

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Stevie Wonder



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Health Care Naysayers : Please Get the Message

Saying it all in sixty seconds:
Health care reform is a human issue

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / Novemeber 3, 2009

I just saw a TV health care message that sensitively illustrates what is happening to too many American lives. A message down on the human level instead of screaming about numbers and cold political minutiae.

Americans for Stable Quality Care produced this :60 second commercial. Its strong message looks at the end of a lifetime of deep love, memories and sharing. With not a word spoken, this powerful one minute message is a clarion call for jaded politicians to look outside their soured, isolated careers and at the need for universal health care for all Americans. This message should urge these career politicians to respond to the Americans they represent by expediting rather than politically picking over and rejecting a plan for health care reform.

Please take a minute to watch this powerful TV message that visually illustrates the words of Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, in an August 4, 2009, Washington Post interview:

As the political debate about how to pay for and pass health reform grows louder and more contentious, we shouldn't lose sight of the reason we're even having this conversation: We have a huge, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve the lives of all Americans, insured and uninsured alike.

How many of those in the House and Senate who have categorically rejected a proposed universal health care plan could watch this message and with dry eyes still stiffly say NO, clearly for crass personal and partisan reasons? That politicians of all stripes are saying YES to the strong health insurance and big drug manufacturing lobby and their millions in political campaign contributions is truly sickening.

Have a look at the national organizations that make up Americans for Stable Quality Care.

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Jonah Raskin : Fear and Loathing without Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo man: Hunter S. Thompson. Illustration by Ralph Steadman / The Badger.
Where is Hunter S. Thompson
Now that we need him?

At times he could he cynical and depressed, but he also had clarity of vision and a commitment to tell the truth.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 2, 2009

“The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” That is the title of an article by Hunter S. Thompson that appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly in June 1970, almost forty years ago.

The article marked the start of what came to be called “gonzo journalism,” and that reached a crescendo in two powerful books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. The author, Hunter S. Thompson, was a fearless reporter who loathed the rich and the powerful, and took deadly aim at them in nearly everything that he wrote. Sadly, he committed suicide nearly five years ago on February 20, 2005.

In many ways American journalism has not been the same since his death. Though there are some exceptions, American journalism has become in large part the lapdog for the rich and the powerful. It is fawning, subservient, docile, and toothless. It is the decadent mass media of a decadent empire that stokes the egos of the wealth, and provides distractions from the realities of war, exploitation, poverty and disease. Were he alive today, Hunter S. Thompson would be writing articles entitled “The U. S. Is Decadent and Depraved.”

Thompson saw through the phoniness, the lies, and the deceit of American politicians, and lashed out at them, especially at Richard Milhous Nixon. When Nixon died in 1994, Thompson wrote a piece entitled “He Was a Crook” in which he said, “I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.”

Thompson spoke and wrote for the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the poor, the homeless and the persecuted. At times he could he cynical and depressed, but he also had clarity of vision and a commitment to tell the truth. It is true that he was not an objective journalist, that he wasn’t always fair and accurate. It is true, too, that he fictionalized, and that he made himself an essential part of the stories that he wrote about. That was gonzo and that was a part of the greatness and the genius of gonzo.

But gonzo was far more than just fictionalizing and making the author a principal player in the story. Gonzo meant lashing out at the American ruling class that is served by newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and Vanity Fair with their nauseating adulation of the elite. Gonzo was a karate chop to the heart of the newspaper establishment that lied year after year about war, and the military and economic invasions of countries.

Thompson inspired a generation of reporters. Some of them are still around, still writing, and still fighting the good fight with blogs and books. Thompson’s in-you-face style of reporting was very popular and contagious. Readers loved it because it was real, and because it was alive and genuine. Editors went with it for a time. But that time is past. American journalism is back to its old form: covering up, concealing the bodies, and telling lies.

Professors of journalism say that gonzo can’t be taught. Maybe they’re right. Maybe gonzo is something that a writer has to find for himself or herself in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson found it for himself. But let’s pray and hope that a new generation comes along that finds inspiration in Hunter S. Thompson’s fearlessness, and his loathing for the likes of politicians such as Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes.

In one of his stories published soon after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, he describes himself in the street along with the protesters. Just a few feet away were armed National Guardsmen, city policemen, and the national news media. One of the protesters offered Thompson a joint. He looked at it, looked at the soldiers, police and media and then he took the joint and inhaled. “It seemed at the time like a thing that had to be done,” he wrote. “I knew which side I was on, and to refuse that joint would have been -- in my own mind -- a fatal equivocation.”

Thompson always knew that there are sides. He always knew, too, what side he was on: the side without the power and the money; the side that had nothing to lose and everything to win. He gave it all he could for as long as he could, and American journalism and American reporting was better because of him.

Some of his former friends and associates are hard on him today. He could not stop drinking, they say. He couldn’t “clean up his act.” But that inability to “clean up his act” was his saving grace. It meant that he never did go to the Kentucky Derby to celebrate with the rich and decadent. He never went to any of the spectacles of the rich and decadent to celebrate with them, but to record and describe their depravity.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism: Revolutionary Critique of British Literature and Society in the Modern Age (Monthly Review Press), and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation (University of California Press.]

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Brad Will : Mexico's Legacy of Murdered Journalists

Brad Will -- Indymedia journalist murdered in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006 -- depicted in "Remembering Anarchists of the Americas" mural, Bound Together Bookstore, San Francisco. Image from Wikipedia.
Brad Will is still dead...
(So are 55 other journalists murdered in Mexico)

Despite the appalling absence of resolution in Will's death three years after the fact, his killers have long been plainly identified.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / November 2, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- Three years after he was gunned down by Oaxaca state security agents October 27, 2006, while filming a confrontation between activists and local police during the oft-violent campaign to oust tyrannical governor Ulisis Ruiz Ortiz (URO), a prominent member of the once-and-future ruling PRI party, U.S. photojournalist Brad Will is still dead.

So are 55 other journalists working in Mexico over the past ten years (eight more remain missing), according to a roster painstakingly complied by Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based journalists' group. Sixteen of those on the kill list have been slain since Brad's still unresolved death. With rare exception, the murders of journalists in Mexico are never solved.

Will, a 35 year-old community activist and troubadour turned Indymedia reporter, covered social protest in such Latin American hot spots as Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Chiapas before arriving in Oaxaca to interview leaders of the APPO (Oaxaca Peoples' Popular Assembly) and striking teachers whose prolonged street protests demanding URO's removal as governor galvanized that conflictive southern state during the summer and fall of 2006. Will is the only non-Mexican on the death list held by Reporters Without Borders.

Lead poisoning is an occupational hazard for journalists in Mexico. The most recent killing (at this writing) took place October 9th in the northern state of Durango where crime reporter Gerardo Esparza was executed with a coup de grace to the head in the state capitol; three journalists have been executed in Durango during the first ten months of 2009, two of them last May.

On September 23rd in neighboring Chihuahua, pistoleros burst into the newsroom at Radio Vision in Nueva Casas Grandes and gunned down crusading reporter Norberto "El Gallito" (“the Bantam Rooster”) Miranda who had been probing ties between police and 25 recent killings by drug gangs. Miranda was the third reporter killed in Chihuahua during the military occupation of the state that began in 2007 and is the fifteenth to be assassinated since 2000. In May 2008, Emilio Gutierrez Soto, a correspondent for El Diario, fled Nueva Casas Grande and applied for political asylum in the U.S. after receiving repeated death threats.

Despite the appalling absence of resolution in Will's death three years after the fact, his killers have long been plainly identified. A front-page photo in the national daily El Universal on the morning after the shooting that has since been displayed around the world frames up four Santa Lucia de Los Caminos' police agents firing at the Indymedia photojournalist from 35 meters away. Two of the cops, Abel Zarate AKA "El Chapulin" and Manuel Aguilar Coello "El Comandante" were arrested immediately after the murder and then inexplicably cut loose several days later.

Despite the very public identification of the killers (eight other journalists witnessed the killing), URO's then-chief prosecutor Rosa Lizbeth Cano (now the state auditor) accused four young APPO supporters who had pulled Will out of the line of fire and driven the mortally-wounded U.S. reporter to a local Red Cross hospital, as being responsible for his murder. Arrest warrants for the four remain outstanding.

Although ballistic experts from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) and the independent Physicians for Human Rights (PHR was asked to investigate by Brad's family) established beyond a reasonable doubt that the bullets that slammed into Brad's chest and side destroying his intestines had been fired from 35 meters away, presumably by the four police agents caught in the Universal photo, the Federal Prosecutor's Office (PGR), which has taken over the case from Cano, continues to claim that the Indymedia reporter was gunned down by APPO militants with whom he was standing when he fell.

The murder of an American citizen in Mexico did not make much of an impression on the U.S. State Department. Then-ambassador Tony Garza, a Texas political crony of ex-president George Bush, immediately blamed the APPO and Section 22, a rebel local of the National Education Workers Union, for inciting the violence that cost Will his life. Washington's only response to Brad's murder was to post travel warnings for U.S. tourists in the region. On the heels of Will's death and greenlighted by Garza's accusations, outgoing president Vicente Fox mobilized thousands of federal police to suppress the rebellion in Oaxaca.

Brad Will was not the only victim of police repression in that majority indigenous state. From August through November, 26 militants were gunned down by URO's police death squads that each night rode through the city firing on APPO barricades. No one has ever been charged in the killings.

Despite efforts by Tony Garza, now a Mexican businessman and married to the wealthiest woman in the country, to sweep the Will case under the diplomatic rug, Brad's family and friends have struggled to keep the case alive. Their campaign has been backed up by human rights kingpins like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. When AI director Irene Khan tried to present Governor Ruiz with her organization's scathing report on police abuses in Oaxaca, URO rudely rejected the document and handed it back to her.

During 2008, U.S. congressional hearings on the so-called Merida Initiative signed by Bush and Mexican president Felipe Calderon in that Yucatan peninsula city, which provides security forces here with $3,000,000,000 worth of hardware for Calderon's ill-advised war on Mexican drug cartels (13,000 citizens have died since it was declared in late 2006), Brad Will's friends and former co-workers disrupted the proceedings, arguing that Mexico's army and police should not be rewarded for committing human rights abuses.

As a result, language was inserted in the Merida Initiative implementation bill urging the Calderon government to begin a serious investigation into Will's death. 15% of Merida monies would be held back if a progress report was not issued in the next 120 days.

In October 2008, 48 hours before the 120 day deadline was to expire, the Federal Prosecutor's Office charged a young APPO supporter, Juan Manuel Martinez, the community sports coordinator in Santa Lucia de los Caminos, with Will's murder. Martinez was alleged to have been standing near the U.S. photojournalist when he was shot down.

The PGR asserted that it had two eyewitnesses (who it has never formally produced) -- one is the nephew of the mayor of Santa Lucia, a URO intimate, and the other a former Televisa camera operator who has reportedly since recanted. Both admitted that they had not seen Martinez with a weapon and were not witnesses to the actual killing. No motive has ever been ascribed to Martinez for the murder. Yet Juan Manuel Martinez remains imprisoned in Santa Maria Ixcotel, Oaxaca's maximum lock-up, charged with Brad Will's killing and is facing a 40-year sentence.

On the first anniversary of his arrest this past October 16th, several hundred APPO supporters gathered in the old colonial plaza of the Oaxaca state capital to remind citizens of this on-going miscarriage of justice. Like Will's death, Martinez's incarceration has largely been forgotten by the press and the public. Meanwhile, the real killers remain free and several are still on the Santa Lucia de los Caminos police payroll.

"That's all history now," PRI federal deputy Adolfo Tinoco, a staunch defender of Ruiz, commented to the left daily La Jornada, "Oaxaca is at peace and in order now thanks to our governor."

Juan Manuel Martinez's arrest satisfied the U.S. Congress that the deadline for pursuing Brad Will's murderer had been met and all Merida funds have since been disbursed. When outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a goodbye visit to Mexico to distribute checks October 22, 2008, one week after Martinez was jailed, she expressed satisfaction that justice had been done. The Obama administration and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not seen fit to revisit the matter.

Brad Will in Oaxaca on Oct. 26th 2006. Photo from Independent Media Center.
Since Brad Will's murder October 27, 2006, the political dynamic on both sides of the border has undergone a sea change. Barrack Obama has become the first Afican-American president of the United States and George Bush has been consigned to the garbage heap of history. Felipe Calderon, who came to high office in a fraud-marred election, has faced serial disasters that cripple his credibility.

In the early days of his presidency, Calderon scrupulously avoided any suggestion that human rights abuses had occurred in Oaxaca for fear of offending URO and his PRI party whose support he craved to pass his legislative package -- at the top of Calderon's wish list was the privatization of PEMEX, the national oil monopoly. The privatization of PEMEX is urged by Washington and both Tony Garza and his successor Carlos Pascual speak often of the need for private (U.S.) investment in Mexico's nationalized oil industry.

The PRI's hand was enforced by the party's strong showing in last July's mid-term elections that gave it a majority in the Mexican congress. Since the Great Tumult of 2006, URO and his party, which ruled Mexico for seven decades before being ousted in 2000 by Calderon's rightist PAN, have dominated local elections in Oaxaca and Ruiz has become a key player in the PRI's powerful Governors' Conference that now includes the chief executives of 22 out of the republic's 31 states.

With one year left in his stay in the Oaxaca statehouse, Ulisis Ruiz is confident he will finish out his term and hand off the office to "the next PRI governor." URO is said to have set his sights on Los Pinos, the Mexican White House.

Mexico's Supreme Court justices are some of the highest priced jurists in the world, knocking down half million dollar salaries that rival both Calderon's and Obama's take-home pay. Nonetheless, despite their financial fortunes, the tilt of the 11-judge court is quirky and unpredictable.

The Supreme Court voted to uphold Mexico City's abortion on demand law by a 10 to one majority (only two of the justices are women) but recently freed paramilitaries convicted of the massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indian supporters of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

When charged with investigating human rights abuses by state and federal police in the Mexico state farming village of San Salvador Atenco May 3rd and 4th 2006, during which hundreds were brutalized and arrested, two young men killed by police bullets and tear gas canisters, and 20 women sexually abused, the Court chalked the havoc up to a few rotten cops and absolved the governor Enrique Pena Nieto, the odds-on favorite to be the PRI's presidential candidate in 2012. After the 2006 incident, Pena Nieto boasted to reporters that he was "proud of his police."

The Court's ruling on Atenco did not auger well for victims of Ulisis Ruiz's hard hand in Oaxaca when the Supremes initiated a probe of the 2006 violence in that impoverished southern state. Indeed, the case was at first handed to one of the panel's most conservative members, Mariano Azuela, for preliminary investigation.

As anticipated, Judge Azuela produced a massive (926 pages) whitewash, absolving Ruiz and laying the blame for human rights violations on the APPO and the striking teachers whom the justice accused of seeking to overthrow the constitutional state government. Azuela was seconded by another right-wing member of the court, Sergio Anguiano, who labeled the victims "subversives and guerrilleros." Their draft document excused police misbehavior because Oaxaca, a poor state, does not have adequate police training facilities.

But a funny thing happened to Azuela's near thousand-page finding on its way to the full court. Despite personnel lobbying of each of the justices by URO to rubberstamp the whitewash, the judges rejected Azuela's conclusions and, by a seven to four majority, fingered the Oaxaca governor for abuses of authority and related atrocities, including 26 murders committed by his police during the summer and fall of 2006. Nonetheless, the court's verdict included no penalties or sanctions and the only remedy available -- the governor's impeachment ("juicio politico") has absolutely no chance of being consummated by a congress in which the PRI holds an absolute majority.

The Supreme Court's rebuke of URO curiously made no reference to the complicity of ex-president Vicente Fox, Fox's Secretary of Public Security Eduardo Medina Mora, the late Carlos Abascal, then Interior Secretary, or Felipe Calderon whose presidency overlapped the Oaxaca crackdown.

Federal police under their command were involved in brutal confrontations with the APPO and the striking teachers all summer long and on November 2, 2006, days after Brad Will was murdered, 5000 Federales were airlifted to Oaxaca and rounded up hundreds of Oaxaca citizens, some of them innocent pedestrians trapped in the dragnet, beat and tortured them and shipped them out of state to a federal prison 1200 kilometers away. The Federal Police commander in that carnival of repression, Ardelio Vargas, is now a PRI deputy in the lower house of Congress where he heads up the oversight committee on national security.

Who bears the brunt of responsibility for myriad violations of individual guarantees in Oaxaca in 2006 -- the PRIista Ulisis Ruiz's cops or the federal police sent in by Vicente Fox, a totem of the right-wing PAN? A glance back at the convoluted events on the ground in Oaxaca during that terrible season is instructive.

By July, the PRI had suffered an embarrassing shellacking in the presidential election and URO gave his police carte blanche to maim and kill APPO supporters, anticipating that the turmoil would force Fox's hand and turn Oaxaca into a federal problem.

But the more out of control the situation became, the deeper Fox dug in his heels and refused the governor's request for a massive infusion of federal troops. It was only after the murder of a gringo reporter that Fox got the green light from Bush's ambassador Garza and ordered the Federales in to stamp out the rebellion.

Despite the pivotal role that his murder played in the denouement of the Oaxaca uprising, Brad Will's name is not even mentioned in the Mexican Supreme Court's evasive verdict.

Brad Will! Presente!

[John Ross's monstrous El Monstruo -- Dread & Redemption In Mexico City (Nation Books) is hot off the press this Nov. 2nd, the Day of the Dead -- you can catch the author reading from El Monstruo at Northtown Books in Arcata on Friday the 13th and at Modern Times in the Mission on the 18th. He will also be speaking at UC-Berkeley on November 19th. These dispatches will be issued every ten days while the author is flogging his books in northern California. The "Ross & Revolution In 2010" book tour is gathering steam -- any bright ideas on winter and spring venues? johnross@igc.org Write .]

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