The Root of Support for the Drug War

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Laurence M. Vance

Source: The Future of Freedom Foundation

Although many states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes, some states have decriminalized the possession of certain amounts of marijuana, and four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, bipartisan support for the drug war throughout the United States continues unabated and unquestioned.

Why?

Why do so many Americans think that the property of other Americans should be confiscated, and that some of their fellow Americans should be fined, arrested, put on probation, subject to no-knock SWAT team raids, be treated as criminals, or locked in a cage for growing, manufacturing, processing, buying, selling, distributing, “trafficking in,” using, or possessing some substance the government doesn’t approve of?

Why do so many Americans support a war on drugs that

unnecessarily makes criminals out of otherwise law-abiding Americans, clogs the judicial system with noncrimes, and expands the prison population with nonviolent offenders;
violates the Constitution, the principle of federalism, and increases the size and scope of government;
has utterly failed to prevent drug use, reduce drug abuse, or end drug overdoses;
fosters violence, corrupts law enforcement, and militarizes the police;
hinders legitimate pain management, hampers the treatment of debilitating diseases, and turns doctors into criminals;
destroys personal and financial privacy, and negates personal responsibility and accountability;
has been unsuccessful in keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts, teenagers, and convicts;
assaults individual liberty, private property, and the free market; or
wastes billions of taxpayer dollars and has financial and human costs that far exceed any of its supposed benefits?

I see a number of reasons that Americans in general support a government war on the mind-altering and mood-altering substances we refer to as drugs.

For some the reason is history. As far as many Americans are concerned, drugs have always been illegal and should therefore always remain so. It is simply unthinkable that it should be any other way. Yet, for the first half of our nation’s history there were no prohibitions against anyone’s possessing or using any drug.

For some the reason is society. The use of marijuana — for medical reasons or not — is still viewed negatively. And of course the use of other drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and heroin is disparaged even more. There is almost universal support for the drug war among all facets of society: engineers, teachers, preachers, physicians, clerks, accountants, secretaries, and housewives. But, of course, it doesn’t follow that because a majority of society supports something the power of government should be used against those who don’t.

For some the reason is political. The war on drugs enjoys widespread bipartisan support. Liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, moderates, populists, progressives, centrists, Tea Partiers — they all generally support government prohibition of certain drugs. The drug war is never an issue in any congressional primary or general election. As long as their party or their political group supports the drug war, most Americans will follow suit. The decision to use drugs should be an ethical, religious, medical, or moral decision, not a political decision.

For some the reason is religion. Support for the drug war can be found across the religious spectrum, encompassing Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and progressives, and Trinitarians and Unitarians. Yet, there is no ethical precept in any religion that should lead anyone to believe that it is the job of government to prohibit, prevent, regulate, restrict, or otherwise control any substance that any adult desires to ingest of his own free will.

For some the reason is morality. Because, some assert, it is immoral to alter one’s mind or mood with illegal drugs, the government should ban the use of these substances. Do drug warriors likewise believe that it is immoral to alter one’s mind or mood with alcohol? If not, then they are woefully inconsistent in their proscription; if so, then they are woefully inconsistent in their prescription.

Dangers and vices

For some the reason is safety. Because it can be dangerous to use illicit drugs, some think the government should ban them. Yet there is no question that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than drinking alcohol. Alcohol abuse is a factor in many drownings; home, pedestrian, car, and boating accidents; and fires. How many drug warriors propose that the government ban alcohol? There are plenty of things that are much more dangerous than using illicit drugs: skydiving, bungee jumping, coal mining, boxing, mountain climbing, cliff diving, drag racing — even crossing the street at a busy intersection. According to the Journal of Forensic Sciences, there are more than 28,000 chainsaw-related injuries annually in the United States. Shouldn’t governments across the country declare war on chainsaws?

For some the reason is vice. Using drugs is said to be a vice like gambling, profanity, drunkenness, using pornography, and prostitution. But as only the latter is actually banned outright by the government, arguments for government action against select drugs are extremely weak. And what about the vices of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust? Why don’t drug warriors advocate government action against them? Vices in 2014 are still as the 19th-century political philosopher Lysander Spooner explained:

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

For some the reason is health. The use of mind-altering and mood-altering substances is said to be unhealthy. The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” But even if drugs such as marijuana don’t provide benefits for certain diseases and medical conditions, they are certainly not nearly as deadly as the drugs administered by physicians that kill thousands of Americans every year, the drugs that cause thousands of hospital patients every year to have adverse reactions, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin that kill thousands every year. The most unhealthy drug is alcohol, which is a contributing factor in many cases of cancer, mental illness, fetal abnormalities, and cirrhosis of the liver. Alcohol abuse is one of the leading causes of premature deaths in the United States. There is no question that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than smoking tobacco. Common sense would dictate that it is tobacco that should be banned, not marijuana. And of course, the greatest health threat Americans face is obesity, not illegal drugs.

For some the reason is addiction. Certain drugs should be illegal, we are told, because they are addictive. The federal government says that marijuana “has a high potential for abuse.” But is that because it is addictive or because some people just want to get high? Legal drugs prescribed by physicians are certainly just as addictive as any drugs that are illegal. And of course, pornography, smoking, gambling, sex, shopping, and eating can be addictive. Drug warriors are very selective about which addictive behaviors deserve government action.

For some the reason is irrationality. Although every bad thing that could be said about drugs could also be said about alcohol, some drug warriors hold the irrational belief that drugs are just different from alcohol. Why? Because they just are.

For all, the reason is government. I believe the root of support for the drug war is simply this: trust in government. Unnecessary, irrational, and naive trust in government.

What’s so disturbing is that nowhere does the Constitution authorize the federal government to intrude itself into the personal eating, drinking, or smoking habits of Americans or concern itself with the nature and quantity of any substance Americans want to ingest. The Constitution is supposed to be the foundation of American government. The federal government is not supposed to have the authority to do anything unless it is included in the limited, enumerated powers granted to it in the Constitution. Yet some of the ardent enthusiasts of the Constitution are some of the most rabid drug warriors.

The war on drugs is a war on individual liberty, private property, limited government, the Constitution, American taxpayers, personal responsibility, the free market, and a free society that has ruined more lives than drugs themselves.

Every facet of government that contributes in some way to the monstrous evil that is the war on drugs should be dismembered, root and branch, and cast to the four winds.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 edition of Future of Freedom.

Terrorism, Violence, and the Culture of Madness

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Henry A. Giroux

Source: Counterpunch

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

— Giorgio Agamben

George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. The consequences can be seen clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor minorities and any vestige of the social contract. Free market policies, values, and practices with their emphasis on the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity now shape practically every commanding political and economic institution in the United States. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly militarized—or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins. Citizenship is now subsumed by the national security state and a cult of secrecy, organized and reinforced by the constant mobilization of fear and insecurity designed to produce a form of ethical tranquilization and a paralyzing level of social infantilism.

Chris Hedges crystalizes this premise in arguing that Americans now live in a society in which “violence is the habitual response by the state to every dilemma,” legitimizing war as a permanent feature of society and violence as the organizing principle of politics.[1] Under such circumstances, malevolent modes of rationality now impose the values of a militarized neoliberal regime on everyone, shattering viable modes of agency, solidarity, and hope. Amid the bleakness and despair, the discourses of militarism, danger and war now fuel a war on terrorism “that represents the negation of politics—since all interaction is reduced to a test of military strength war brings death and destruction, not only to the adversary but also to one’s side, and without distinguishing between guilty and innocent.”[2] Human barbarity is no longer invisible, hidden under the bureaucratic language of Orwellian doublespeak. Its conspicuousness, if not celebration, emerged in the new editions of American exceptionalism ushered in by the post 9/11 exacerbation of the war on terror.

In the aftermath of these monstrous acts of terrorism, there was a growing sense among politicians, the mainstream media, and conservative and liberal pundits that history as we knew it had been irrefutably ruptured. If politics seemed irrelevant before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it now seemed both urgent and despairing. But history cannot be erased, and those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly continued to appear to have little significance or political consequence. Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists’ attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar. Security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied about the war in Iraq, created a torture state, violated civil liberties, and developed new antiterrorist laws, such as the USA PATRIOT ACT. It imposed a state of emergency that

justified a range of terrorist practices, including extraordinary rendition and state torture, which made it easier to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions.[3]

Under the burgeoning of what James Risen has called the “homeland security-industrial complex,” state secrecy and organized corporate corruption filled the coffers of the defense industry along with the corporate owned security industries—especially those providing drones– who benefited the most from the war on terror.[4] This is not to suggest that security is not an important consideration for the United States. Clearly, any democracy needs to be able to defend itself, but it cannot serve, as it has, as a pretext for abandoning civil liberties, democratic values, and any semblance of justice, morality, and political responsibility. Nor can it serve as a pretext for American exceptionalism and its imperialist expansionist goals. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested rightly that under the so war on terrorism, the political landscape is changing and that “we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by an indifference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated—or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft.”[5]

The war on terror morphed into a legitimation for state terrorism as was made clear under the willingness of the Obama administration to pardon the CIA torturers, create a “kill list”, expand the surveillance state, punish whistleblowers, and use drones to indiscriminately kill civilians—all in the name of fighting terrorists. Obama expanded the reach of the militarized state and along with Democratic and Republican Party extremists preached a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than in a notion of social security that rallied against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and state terrorism. The war on terrorism extended the discourse, space, location, and time of war in ways that made it unbounded and ubiquitous making everyone a potential terrorists and the battlefield a domestic as well as foreign location, a foreign as well as a domestic policy issue. Obama has become the master of permanent war seeking to increase the bloated military budget—close to a trillion dollars–while “turning to lawless violence….translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq,” including an attempt “to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine.”[6] Fear became total and the imposition of punitive standards included not only the bombing, abduction, and torture of enemy combatants, but also the use of the police and federal troops for drug interdictions, the enforcement of zero tolerance standards in public schools, and the increasing criminalization of a range of social behaviors that extended from homelessness to violating dress codes in school.

Under the regime of neoliberalism with its war-like view of competition, its celebration of self-interest, and its disdain for democratic values and shared compassion for others, any notion of unity has been contaminated by the fog of misguided patriotism, a hatred of the other now privileged as an enemy combatant, and an insular retreat into mindless consumerism and the faux safety of gated communities. With the merging of militarism, the culture of surveillance, and a neoliberal culture of cruelty, solidarity and public trust have morphed into an endless display of violence and the ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.[7]

The war on terror has come home as poor neighborhoods are transformed into war zones with the police resembling an occupying army. The most lethal expressions of racism have become commonplace as black men and boys such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are repeatedly beaten, and killed by the police.[8] As Jeffrey St. Clair has pointed out, one index of how state terrorism and lawlessness have become normalized is evident not only by the fact that the majority of Americans support torture, even though they know “it is totally ineffective as a means of intelligence gathering,” but also by the American public’s growing appetite for violence, whether it parades as entertainment or manifests itself in the growing demonization and incarceration of black and brown youth, adults, Muslims, immigrants, and others deemed as disposable.[9] It should come as no surprise that the one issue the top 2016 GOP presidential contenders agree on is that guns are the ultimate symbol of freedom in America, a “bellwether of individual liberty, a symbol of what big wants and shouldn’t have.”[10] Guns provide political theater for the new political extremists and are symptomatic less of some cockeyed defense of the second amendment than willingness to maximize the pleasure of violence and building a case for the use of deadly force both at home and abroad. As Rustom Bharacuha and Susan Sontag have argued in different contexts, “There is an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence,”[11] one “that dissolves politics into pathology.”[12]

Notions of democracy increasingly appear to be giving way to the discourse of revenge, domestic security, stupidity, and war. The political reality that has emerged since the shattering crisis of 9/11 increasingly points to a set of narrow choices that are being largely set by the jingoistic right wing extremists, the defense department, conservative funded foundations, and fueled by the dominant media. War and violence now function as an aphrodisiac for a public inundated with commodities and awash in celebrity culture idiocy. This surrender to the pleasure of violence is made all the more easy by the civic illiteracy now sweeping the United States. Climate change deniers, anti-intellectuals, religious fundamentalists, and others who exhibit pride in displaying a kind of thoughtlessness exhibit a kind of political and theoretical helplessness, if not corruption, that opens the door to the wider public’s acceptance of foreign and domestic violence.

The current extremists dominating Congress are frothing at the mouth to go to war with Iran, bomb Syria into the twilight zone, and further extend the reach of the American empire through its over bloated war machine to any country that questions the use of American power. One glaring example can be found in the constant and under analyzed televised images and stories of homegrown terrorists threatening to blow up malls, schools, and any other conceivable space where the public gathers.

Other examples can be found in the militarized frothing and Islamophobia perpetrated by the Fox News Network, made concrete by the an almost fever pitched bellicosity that informs the majority of its commentaries and reactions to war on terror. Missing from the endless call for security, vengeance, and the use of state violence is the massive lawlessness produced by the United States government through targeted drone attacks on enemy combatants, the violation of civil liberties, and the almost unimaginable human suffering and hardship perpetrated through the American war machine in the Middle East, especially Iraq. Also missing is a history of lawlessness, imperialism, and torture that supported a host of authoritarian regimes propped up by the United States.

Capitalizing on the pent up emotions and needs of an angry and grieving public for revenge, fueled by an unchecked Islamophobia, almost any reportage of a terrorist attack throughout the globe, further amplifies the hyped-up language of war, patriotism, and retaliation. Similarly, conservative talking-heads write numerous op-eds and appear on endless talk shows fanning the fires of “patriotism” by calling upon the United States to expand the war against any one of a number of Arab countries that are considered terrorist states. For example, John Bolton, writing an op-ed for the New York Times insists that all attempts by the Obama administration to negotiate an arms deal with Iran is a sign of weakness. For Bolton, the only way to deal with Iran is to launch an attack on their nuclear infrastructure. The title of his op-ed sums up the organizing idea of the article: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”[13]

In the current historical moment, the language of indiscriminate revenge and lawlessness seems to be winning the day. This is a discourse unconscious of its own dangerous refusal to acknowledge the important role that democratic values and social justice must play in a truly “unified” rationale response, so as to prevent the further killing of innocent people, regardless of their religion, culture, and place of occupancy in the world. Instead of viewing the current crisis as simply a new and more dangerous historical conjuncture that has nothing to learn from the past, it is crucial for the American public to begin to understand how the past might be useful in addressing what it means to live in a democracy at a time when democracy is not only viewed as an excess, but as a liability to the wishes and interests of the new extremists who now control the American government. The anti-democratic forces that define American history cannot be forgotten in the fog of political and cultural amnesia. State violence and terrorism have a long history in the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, and ignoring this dark period of history means that nothing will be learned from the legacy of a politics that has indulged authoritarian ideologies and embraced violence as a central measure of power, national identity, and patriotism.[14]

At stake here is the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights. Any struggle against terrorism must begin with the pledge on the part of the United States that it will work in conjunction with international organizations, especially the United Nations, a refusal to engage in any military operations that might target civilians, and that it will rethink those aspects of its foreign policy that have allied it with repressive nations in which democratic liberties and civilian lives are under siege. Crimes overlooked will be repeated and intensified just as public memory is rendered a liability in the face of the discourse of revenge, demonization, and extreme violence.

Many news commentators and journalists in the dominant press have taken up the events of September 11 within the context of World War II, invoking daily the symbols of revenge, retaliation, and war. Nostalgia is now used to justify and fuel a politics of in-security, fear, precarity, and demonization. The dominant media no longer functions in the interests of a democracy. Mainstream media supported Bush’s fabrications to justify the invasion of Iraq and never apologized for such despicable actions. It has rarely supported the heroic actions of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and others.[15]

Mainstream media has largely remained mute about the pardoning of those who tortured as a matter of state policy. Against an endless onslaught of images of jets bombing countries extending from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Gaza, amply supplied by the Defense Department, the dominant media connects the war abroad with the domestic struggle at home by presenting numerous stories about the endless ways in which potential terrorists might use nuclear weapons, poison the food supply, or unleash biochemical agents on the American population. The increased fear and insecurity created by such stories simultaneously serve to legitimatize a host of anti-democratic practices at home-including “a concerted attack on civil liberties, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press,”[16] and a growing sentiment on the part of the American public that people who suggest that terrorism is, in part, caused by American foreign policy should not be allowed “to teach in the public schools, work in the government, and even make a speech at a college.”[17]

This legacy of suppression has a long history in the United States, and it has returned with a vengeance in academia, especially for those academics, such as Norman Finkelstein and Steven G. Salaita, who have condemned America’s policies in the Middle East and the government’s support of the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians. Language itself has become militarized fed by an onslaught of extreme violence that now floods Hollywood films and the violence that dominates American television. Hollywood blockbusters such asAmerican Sniper glorify war crimes and produce demonizing views of Islam.[18] Television programs such as Spartacus, The Following,Hannibal, True Detective, Justified, and Top of the Lake intensify the pleasure quotient for viewing extreme and graphic violence to an almost unimaginable degree. Graphic violence appears to provide one of the few outlets for Americans to express what has come to resemble what could be construed as a spiritual release. Extreme violence, including the sanctioning of state torture, may be one of the few practices left that allows the American people to feel alive, to mark what it means to be close to the register of death in a way that reminds them of the ability to feel within a culture that deadens every possibility of life. Under such circumstances, the reality of violence is infantilized, transformed into forms of entertainment that produce and legitimate a carnival of cruelty. The privatization of violence does more than maximize the pleasure quotient and heighten macho ebullience, it also gives violence a fascist edge by depoliticizing a culture in which the reality of violence takes on the form of state terrorism. Authoritarianism in this context becomes hysterical because it turns politics and neoliberalism “into a criminal system and keeps working towards the expansion of the realm of pure violence, where its advancement can proceed unhindered.”[19]

The extreme visibility of violence in American culture represents a willful pedagogy of carnage and gore designed to normalize its presence in American society and to legitimate its practice and presence as a matter of common sense. Moreover, war making and the militarization of public discourse and public space also serve as an uncritical homage to a form of hyper-masculinity that operates from the assumption that violence is not only the most important practice for mediating most problems, but that it is also central to identity formation itself. Agency is now militarized and almost completely removed from any notion of civic values. We get a glimpse of this form of violent hyper-masculinity not only in the highly publicized brutality against women dished out by professional football players, but also in the endless stories of sexual abuse and violence now taking place in frat houses across America, many in some of the most prestigious colleges and universities. Violence has become the DNA of war making in the United States, escalating under Bush and Obama into a kind of war fever that embraces a death drive. As Robert J. Lifton points out,

Warmaking can quickly become associated with “war fever,” the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience with transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one’s nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people. ..War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home or against Americans abroad–and later to growing casualties in occupied Iraq.[20]

The war on terror is the new normal. Its adoration and intensification of violence, militarization, and state terrorism reach into every aspect of American life. Americans complain over the economic deficit but say little about the democracy and moral deficit now providing the foundation for the new authoritarianism. A police presence in our major cities showcases the visible parameters of the authoritarian state. For example, with a police force of 34,000 New York City resembles an armed camp with a force that as Thom Hartman points out is “bigger—that the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya,” and a number of other countries.[21] At the same time, the Pentagon has given billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to local police forces all over America. Is it any wonder, that minorities of color fear the police more than the gangs and criminals that haunt their neighborhoods? Militarism is one of the breeding grounds of violence in the United States and is visible in the ubiquitous gun culture, the modeling of schools after prisons, the exploding incarceration state, the paramilitarization of local police forces, the burgeoning military budget, and the ongoing attacks on protesters, dissidents, black and brown youth, and women.

Under the war on terrorism, moral panic and a culture of fear have not only redefined public space as the “sinister abode of danger, death and infection” and fueled the collective rush to “patriotism on the cheap”, it has also buttressed a “fear economy” and refigured the meaning of politics itself.[22] Defined as “the complex of military and security firms rushing to exploit the national nervous breakdown,”[23] the fear economy promises big financial gains for both the defense department, and the anti-terrorist-security sectors, primed to terror-proof everything from trash cans and water systems to shopping malls and public restrooms. The war on terrorism has been transformed into a new market, a consumer goods for the hysterical war mongers and their acolytes in the media while making politics and extension of war. Fear is no longer an attitude as much as it is a culture that functions as “the enemy of reason [while distorting] emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor decisions.”[24] But the culture of fear does more than undermine critical judgment and suppress dissent, as Don Hazen points out, it also: “breeds more violence, mental illness and trauma, social disintegration, job failure, loss of workers’ rights, and much more. Pervasive fear ultimately paves the way for an accelerating authoritarian society with increased police power, legally codified oppression, invasion of privacy, social controls, social anxiety and PTSD.”[25]

Fear and repression reproduce rather than address the most fundamental anti-democratic elements of terrorism. Instead of mobilizing fear, people need to recognize that the threat of terrorism cannot be understood apart from the crisis of democracy itself. The greatest struggle faced by the American public is not terrorism, but a struggle on behalf of justice, freedom, and democracy for all of the citizens of the globe. This is not going to take place, as President Obama’s policies will tragically affirm, by shutting down democracy, eliminating its most cherished rights and freedoms, and deriding communities of dissent. Engaging terrorism demands more than rage and anger, revenge and retaliation. American society is broken, corrupted by the financial elite, and addicted to violence and a culture of permanent war.

The commanding institutions of American life have lost their sense of public mission, just as leadership at all levels of government is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. The United States is now governed by an economic and social orthodoxy informed by the dictates of religious and political extremists. Reform efforts that include the established political parties have resulted in nothing but regression, a form of accommodation that serves to normalized the new authoritarianism and its war on terrorism. Politics has to be thought anew and must be informed by powerful vision matched by durable organizations that include young people, unions, workers, diverse social movements, artists, and others. In part, this means reawakening the radical imagination so as to address the intensifying crisis of history and agency, and engage the ethical grammars of human suffering. To fight the neoliberal counter-revolution, workers, young people, unions, artists, intellectuals, and social movements need to create new public spaces along with a new language for enabling the American public to relate the self to public life, social responsibility, and the demands of global citizenship.

The left in the United States is too fractured and needs to develop a more comprehensive understanding of politics, oppression, and struggles as well as a discourse that arises to the level of ethical assessment and accountability. Against the new authoritarianism, progressives of all stripes need an inspiring and energizing politics that embraces coalition building, rejects the notion that capitalism equals democracy, and challenges the stolid vocabulary of embodied incapacity stripped of any sense of risk, hope, and possibility. If the struggle against the war on terrorism, militarization, and neoliberalization is to have any chance of success, it is crucial for a loyal and dedicated left to embrace a commitment to understanding the educative nature of politics, economic and social justice, and the need to build a sustainable political formation outside of the established parties.[26]

The United States is in a new historical conjuncture and as difficult as it is to admit, it is a conjuncture that shares more with the legacies of totalitarianism than with America’s often misguided understanding of democracy. Under the merging of the surveillance state, warfare state, and the harsh regime of neoliberalism, we are witnessing the death of the old system of social welfare supports and the emergence of a new society marked by the heavy hand of the national security state, the depoliticization of the American public, extreme inequities in wealth, power, income, and a new politics and mode of governance now firmly controlled by the major corporations, banks, and financial elite. This is a politics in which there is no room for democracy, and no room for reformism. The time has come to name the current historical moment as representative of the “dark times” Hannah Arendt warned us against and to begin to rethink politics anew through social movements in which the promise of a radical democracy can be reimagined in the midst of determined and systemic collective struggles. The war on terrorism has morphed into a new form of authoritarianism and its real enemy is no longer limited to potential terrorists, but includes democracy itself.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

Notes.

[1] Chris Hedges, “America’s ‘Death Instinct’ Spreads Misery Across the World,” AlterNet, (September 30, 2014). Online:

http://www.alternet.org/world/americas-death-instinct-spreads-misery-across-world

[2] Tzvetan Todorov, Torture and the War on Terror, Translated by Gila Walker with photographs by Ryan Lobo, (Chicago, IL: Seagull Books, 2009), pp. 2-3.

[3] See, for instance, Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Phillipe Sands, Torture Team (London: Penguin, 2009). On the torture of children, see Michael Haas, George W. Bush, War Criminal?: The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes(Westport: Praeger, 2009). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010).

[4] James Risen, Pay at Any Price (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

[5] Agamben cited in Malcolm Bull, “States don’t Really Mind Their Citizens Dying: They Just don’t Like anyone Else to Kill Them,” London Review of Books (December 16, 20054), p. 3.

[6] Ajamu Baraka, “Obama’s Legacy: Permanent War and Liberal Accommodation,” Counterpunch (February 18, 2015). Online:http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/18/obamas-legacy-permanent-war-and-liberal-accommodation/

[7]Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan, 2014) and Nick Turse , The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives(New York: Metropolitan, 2009).

[8] Henry A. Giroux, “State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner – Expanded Version,”Truthout (December 2014). Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27832-state-terrorism-and-racist-violence-in-the-age-of-disposability-from-emmett-till-to-eric-garner

[9] Jeffrey St. Clair, “When Torturers Walk,” Counterpunch (March 20-22, 2015), Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/20/when-torturers-walk/

[10] David A. Fahrenthold, ““In the hunt to be the 2016 GOP pick, top contenders agree on 1 thing: Guns,” The Washington Post (March 28, 2015). Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-presidential-hopefuls-sticking-to-their-guns/2015/03/28/b2ef4a1c-d3c4-11e4-8fce-3941fc548f1c_story.html

[11] Rustom Bharacuha, “Around Adohya: Aberrations, Enigmas, and Moments of Violence,” Third Text (Autumn 1993), p. 45.

[12] Sontag cited in in Carol Becker, “The Art of Testimony,” Sculpture(March 1997), p. 28

[13] John R. Bolton, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” New York Times (March 26, 2015). Online:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0

[14] There are many valuable sources that document this history. Some exemplary texts include: A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); Gordon Thomas, Journey Into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (New York: Bantam, 1989); Danner, Torture and Truth; Jennifer K. Harbury, Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

[15] Jamie Tarabay, “Obama and leakers: Who are the eight charged under the Espionage Act?” Aljazeerra (December 5, 3013). Online:http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/12/5/obama-and-leakerswhoaretheeightchargedunderespionageact.html

[16] Eric Alterman, “Patriot Games,” The Nation (October 29, 2001), p. 10.

[17] Cited in the National Public Radio/Kaiser Family foundation/Kennedy School of Government Civil Liberties Poll. Available on line at wsiwyg:5http://www.npr.org/news…civillibertiespll/011130.poll.html (November 30, 2001), p. 3

[18] See, Henry A. Giroux, “Celluloid Heroism and Manufactured Stupidity in the Age of Empire,” Counterpunch (February 12, 2015). Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/12/celluloid-heroism-and-manufactured-stupidity-in-the-age-of-empire/

[19] Franco Bifo Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody (New York, Autonomedia, 2009), p. 52

[20] Robert Jay Lifton, “American Apocalypse,” The Nation (December 22, 2003), pp. 12, 14.

[21] Tom Engelhardt, “Walking Back the American Twenty-First Century,” TomDispatch (February 17, 2015). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175957

[22] Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York,” New Left Review 12 (November/December 2001), p. 44

[23] Ibid. Mike Davis, “The Flames of New York,” Ibid., p. 45.

[24] Don Hazen, “Fear Dominates Politics, Media and Human Existence in America—and it is Getting Worse,” Alternet (March 1, 2015). Online:http://www.alternet.org/fear-america/fear-dominates-politics-media-and-human-existence-america-and-its-getting-worse

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. See, for instance, Adolph Reed Jr., “Nothing Left,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2014), pp. 28-36; Stanley Aronowitz, “Democrats in Disarray: This Donkey Can’t Save Our Asses,” The Indypendent, Issue #202. (December 16, 2014) Online:

https://www.indypendent.org/2014/12/16/democrats-disarray-donkey-can%E2%80%99t-save-our-asses

Who is Afraid of Conspiracy Theories?

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Lance deHaven-Smith

Source: Waking Times

In his book Philosophical Investigations, philosopher of science Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrated that words are more than designations or labels. They are signals in a context of activity, and are invested with many assumptions about the roles and social status of speakers and listeners.

In the 20th century, men often called women “girls.” This term, while indeed referring to something real – to women – was more than merely a label; it was demeaning and implicitly conveyed a subservient status. Wittgenstein called the common sense view of words standing for things, the “naming theory of language.” However, he pointed out, if words were merely labels, you could not teach language to children. If you pointed at a table and said “table,” how would a child know you are referring to the piece of furniture and not to the rectangular shape of its top, or the table’s colour, or its hardness, or any number of other attributes? Language is taught in the context of activity. You say to the child, “the cup is on the table,” “slide the cup across the table top,” “I am setting the table for dinner,” and slowly the child learns what a table is and how the word table is used.

Wittgenstein’s observation may seem simple, but it posed a profound challenge to all of Western philosophy since Plato, who had asked: What is beauty? What is truth? What is justice? Wittgenstein’s critique of the naming theory of language suggested these were the wrong questions. What needs philosophical investigation is who uses such words in what circumstances and with what implications.

The term conspiracy theory did not exist as a phrase in everyday conversation before 1964. The conspiracy theory label entered the lexicon of political speech as a catchall for criticisms of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that US President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman with no assistance from, or foreknowledge by any element of the United States government. Since then, the term’s prevalence and range of application have exploded. In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which conspiracy theory appeared. In recent years, the phrase has occurred in over 140 New York Times stories annually. On Amazon.com, the term is a book category that includes in excess of 1,300 titles. In addition to books on conspiracy theories of particular events, there are conspiracy theory encyclopedias, photographic compendiums, website directories, and guides for researchers, sceptics and debunkers.

Initially, conspiracy theories were not an object of ridicule and hostility. Today, however, the conspiracy theory label is employed routinely to dismiss a wide range of anti-government suspicions as symptoms of impaired thinking akin to superstition or mental illness. For example, in his 2007 book on the assassination of President Kennedy, former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi says people who believe JFK conspiracy theories are “as kooky as a three dollar bill in their beliefs and paranoia.” Similarly, in Among the Truthers, Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay refers to 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “political paranoiacs” who have “lost their grip on the real world.” Making a similar point, if more colourfully, in his popular book Wingnuts journalist John Avlon refers to conspiracy believers as “moonbats,” “Hatriots,” “wingnuts,” and the “Fright Wing.”

As these examples illustrate, conspiracy deniers adhere unwittingly to the naming theory of language. They assume that what qualifies as a conspiracy theory is self-evident. In their view, the phrase conspiracy theory as it is conventionally understood, simply names this objectively identifiable phenomenon. Conspiracy theories are supposedly easy to spot because they posit secret plots that are too wacky to be taken seriously. Indeed, the theories are deemed so far-fetched they require no reply or rejoinder; they are objects of derision, not ideas for discussion. In short, while ridiculing conspiracy beliefs, conspiracy deniers take the conspiracy theory concept itself for granted.

This is remarkable, not to say shocking, because the concept is both fundamentally flawed and in direct conflict with English legal and political traditions. As a label for irrational political suspicions about secret plots by powerful people, the concept is obviously defective because political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen. Officials in the Nixon administration did conspire to steal the 1972 presidential election. Officials in the Reagan administration did participate in a criminal scheme to sell arms to Iran and channel profits to the Contras, a rebel army in Nicaragua. The Bush-Cheney administration did collude to mislead Congress and the public about the strength of its evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. If some conspiracy theories are true, then it is nonsensical to dismiss all unsubstantiated suspicions of elite intrigue as false by definition.

This fatal defect in the conspiracy theory concept makes it all the more surprising that most scholars and journalists have failed to notice that their use of the term to ridicule suspicions of elite political criminality betrays the civic ethos inherited from British legal and political traditions. The Magna Carta placed limitations on the King, guaranteed trial by one’s peers, assigned historic revenue sources to London, and in other ways recognised the dangers of unrestrained political authority. More generally, the political institutions of the English speaking peoples presuppose political power is a corrupting influence which makes political conspiracies against the people’s interests and liberties almost inevitable. One of the most important questions in Western political thought is how to prevent top leaders from abusing their powers to impose arbitrary rule or tyranny. The men and women who fought for citizens’ rights, the rule of law, and constitutional systems of checks and balances would view today’s norms against conspiratorial suspicion as not only arrogant, but also dangerous and historically illiterate.

The founders of English legal and political traditions would also be shocked that conspiracy deniers attack and ridicule individuals who voice conspiracy beliefs, and yet ignore institutional purveyors of conspiratorial ideas, even though the latter are the ideas that have proven truly dangerous in modern history. Since at least the end of World War II, the citadel of theories alleging nefarious political conspiracies has been, not amateur investigators of the Kennedy assassination and other political crimes and tragedies, but political elites and governments. In the first three decades of the post-World War II era, officials asserted that communists were conspiring to take over the world, Western governments were riddled with Soviet spies, and various social movements of the 1960s were creatures of Soviet influence. More recently, Western governments have accepted US claims that Iraq was complicit in 9/11, failed to dispose of its biological weapons, and attempted to purchase uranium in Niger so it could construct nuclear bombs. Although these ideas were untrue, they influenced millions of people, fomented social panic, fuelled wars, and resulted in massive loss of life and destruction of property. If conspiracy deniers are so concerned about the dangers of conspiratorial suspicions in politics and civic culture, why have they ignored the conspiracism of top politicians and administrators?

In my book Conspiracy Theory in America, I reorient analysis of the phenomenon that has been assigned the derisive label of conspiracy theory. In a 2006 peer-reviewed journal article, I introduced the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD) to displace the term conspiracy theory. I say displace rather than replace because SCAD is not another name for conspiracy theory; it is a name for the type of wrongdoing which the conspiracy theory label discourages us from speaking. Basically, the term conspiracy theory is applied pejoratively to allegations of official wrongdoing that have not been substantiated by public officials themselves.

Deployed as a derogatory putdown, the label is a verbal defence mechanism used by political elites to suppress mass suspicions that inevitably arise when shocking political crimes benefit top leaders or play into their agendas, especially when those same officials are in control of agencies responsible for preventing the events in question, or for investigating them after they have occurred. It is only natural to wonder about possible deception when a US president and vice president bent on war in the Middle East are warned of impending terrorist attacks, and yet fail to alert the public or increase the readiness of their own and allies’ armed forces. Why would people not expect answers when Arabs with poor piloting skills manage to hijack four planes, fly them across the eastern United States, somehow evade America’s multilayered system of air defence, and then crash two of the planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC? By the same token, it is only natural to question the motives of President Bush and Vice President Cheney when they dragged their feet investigating this seemingly inexplicable defence failure and then, when the investigation was finally conducted, they insisted on testifying together, in secret, and not under oath. Certainly, citizen distrust can be unwarranted and overwrought, but often citizen doubts make sense. People around the world are not crazy to want answers when a US president is assassinated by a lone gunman with mediocre shooting skills who manages to get off several lucky shots with an old bolt-action carbine that had a misaligned scope. Why would there not be doubts when an alleged assassin is apprehended, publicly claims he is just a patsy, interrogated for two days but no one makes a recording or even takes notes, and then shot to death at point-blank range while in police custody at police headquarters?

In contrast, the SCAD construct does not refer to a type of allegation or suspicion; it refers to a special type of transgression: an attack from within on the political system’s organising principles. For these extremely grave crimes, English legal and political traditions use the term high crime and included in this category istreason and conspiracies against the people’s liberties. SCADs, high crimes, and antidemocratic conspiracies can also be called elite political crimes and elite political criminality. The SCAD construct is intended not to supersede traditional terminology or monopolise conceptualisation of this phenomenon, but rather to add a descriptive term that captures, with some specificity, the long-recognised potential for representative democracy to be subverted by people on the inside – the very people who have been entrusted to uphold the constitutional order.

If political conspiracies in high office do, in fact, happen; if it is therefore unreasonable to assume conspiracy theories are, by definition, harebrained and paranoia; if constitutional systems of checks and balances are based on the idea that power corrupts and elite political conspiracies are likely; if, because it ridicules suspicion, the conspiracy theory label is inconsistent with the traditional Western ethos of vigilance against conspiracies in high office; if, in summary, the conspiracy theory label is unreasonable and dangerous, how did the label come to be used so widely to begin with?

Most people will be shocked to learn the conspiracy theory label was popularised as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a global propaganda program initiated in 1967. This program was directed at criticisms of the Warren Commission Report. The propaganda campaign called on media corporations and journalists around the world to criticise conspiracy theorists and raise questions about their motives and judgments. The CIA informed its contacts that “parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by communist propagandists.” In the shadows of McCarthyism and the Cold War, this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy theory label with powerfully negative associations. In my book, I refer to this as the “conspiracy theory conspiracy.”

About the Author

LANCE DEHAVEN-SMITH is Professor in the Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. A former President of the Florida Political Science Association, deHaven-Smith is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Battle for Florida, which analyses the disputed 2000 US presidential election, as well as The Hidden Teachings of Jesus: The Political Meaning of the Kingdom of God (Phanes Press, 2001). His latest book is Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2013). DeHaven-Smith has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, CBS Nightly News with Dan Rather, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and other US TV and radio shows. His website is www.dehaven-smith.com.

The Top 5 Moves That the 1% Uses to Maintain Dominance

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By George Lakey

Source: Waking Times

How Do You Beat the 1 Percent? Start by Learning Their Favorite Moves…

Gandhi confronted a number of adversaries in his day, including a world empire. He sometimes called them “a worthy opponent” — one that used shrewd strategy to try to defeat his movement. Even though Gandhi was deeply concerned with ethical issues, he didn’t think that taking a moral stand excused him from the need to strategize. That meant paying attention to the moves coming at him.

In keeping with my last two columns on this subject (see part one and part two), here are five more of the economic elite’s favorite moves, as it seeks to maintain dominance in the United States and elsewhere.

Create a lesser-of-two-evils choice

When the nonviolent campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline upset the “done deal” between Canada and the United States, a flurry of discussion took place among environmentalists. A prominent expert took to the airwaves to argue that, since the Alberta tar sands oil was going to be extracted anyway, wouldn’t it be better to have it transported by pipeline rather than dangerous railcars?

Many liberals bought her argument, overlooking the assumption beneath it: “the Alberta tar sands oil is going to be extracted anyway.” They (and the environmental expert) fell into the trap; they failed to notice that the very framing of choices supported the elite’s goal and created an environmental disaster.

The current energy debate in Philadelphia is over whether to accept a new vision of the region as a fossil fuel “energy hub,” enlarging pipelines for Marcellus Shale natural gas and North Dakota fracked oil, gearing up Philadelphia’s refineries and tanker shipping, and stimulating petrochemical manufacturing. Here the framing is: Would you rather create new jobs and expand our tax base to support our schools through this exciting vision, or stick with the status quo left by past deindustrialization?

At the moment, the Philadelphia climate justice campaign fights for traction because the choice appears to be between the lesser of two evils. There’s not a vivid climate-friendly vision for economic development with an abundance of green jobs. U.S. political culture habituates the public to “lesser-of-two-evils” choices, and overlooks the question: who sets up this framing? If we follow the money the answer is obvious, and raises the next question: Why leave vision work to the 1 percent?

For a long time the 1 percent has supported a division of labor for the two major political parties. The Republicans focus on meanness and repression, while the Democrats focus on compromise with progressive movements and co-optation. This division of labor works well for the economic elite, because they win no matter what party is in power. The track record of the Democrats, even when they control both houses of Congress and the White House, supports the ever-increasing wealth and control of the elite, while distracting movements from more effective options for exerting grassroots power.

Interestingly, the division of labor between the parties grows sharper as the 1 percent faces the potential political dynamite of a growing wealth gap. At times when income distribution in the United States is a bit closer to equality, bipartisanship in Congress is frequent. When income inequality becomes more extreme, the parties distance themselves from each other. Partisan polarization generates drama, as we saw during the health reform days early in the Obama administration. The healthcare reform coalition carefully avoided drama, disregarding the lessons of the civil rights movement on what actually works to bring about major change. The vacuum was filled by Tea Party Republicans, whose drama of course upstaged the reformers and resulted in the loss of a public option in the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans still have no health insurance, while the private health care industry reaps additional profits paid by taxpayers.

The emotion of drama comes from somewhere. The Republicans give voice to the growing fear and anger of millions who feel, and are, oppressed. While it’s odd to hear millionaire white male Republicans speechify about how pushed around and marginalized they are, the narrative plays well among white, middle class older men who now recognize their relative powerlessness.

Extreme and outrageous behavior among Republican office-holders is helpful to the Democrats, who look ever more rational and “grown-up” even while failing to deliver major gains for labor, women and environmentalists.

On the ground, this means that any progressive grassroots campaign that looks as though it has legs can expect overtures from Democratic Party operatives to “help.” It feels great, especially for people who have been marginalized, to “have a seat at the table.”

Results are something else. In Wisconsin, a powerful grassroots direct action campaign resisting the 1 percent’s attack on labor was co-opted a few years ago by the Democratic Party, and went down to defeat. On the macro level, anyone can spend 20 minutes on the Internet comparing the United States with the Nordic countries to see how allowing ourselves to be co-opted has worked out for us.

Make it vertical, then lop off the bottom rungs

This move beguiles middle class groups committed to measurement and the rational use of scarce resources. In Pennsylvania, a historic system of 14 state universities exists separate from the better-known Pennsylvania State University. One of the 14, for a variety of reasons, is booming, giving the opportunity for the elite to apply its verticalizing strategy: first “reward” the prospering one by loosening its link to the other 14. This step encourages a couple of others to seek the same status, over time supporting the urge to rank the 14 from “best to worst.” It then becomes easier to abandon the “worst-performing” schools. Fitting into the racist narrative is that the oldest historically black college in the country, Cheyney State University, will be on the chopping block. (Full disclosure: I’m a graduate of Cheyney.)

Verticalizing not only enhances competition and back-stabbing, usually a good thing in the eyes of the 1 percent, but produces an attractive (to them) bottom line: less overall public funding going to the schools that are left standing.

Set up a study commission

This move has enormous appeal as long as we forget about the reality of power. The governmentally-sponsored study commission is a graveyard for good ideas that threaten the economic elite. It also drains off the talent and brains of progressive intellectuals who could instead be working for a people’s movement, generating the vision that such movements too often lack.

Discredit the truth-tellers

Like the other strategy tools employed by the 1 percent, this move does not always work. The failure of this move in the case of Edward Snowden is instructive. Enough people stood up to defend Snowden as a whistle-blower such that the combined machinery of media and the White House didn’t fully work. This shows why activists should be careful not to exaggerate the power of the economic elite. When a radical voice is attacked, activists need to be ready to go on the offensive. At the height of the anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, for instance, U.S. civil libertarians in Philadelphia rented the Academy of Music and filled its 3,000 seats for a speech by a U.S. Communist Party leader who had been indicted as a criminal for violating the Smith Act.

There are many ways to counter the economic elite, depending on the specifics of the situation, but all are enhanced by preparation and going on the offensive. Not everyone who cares about justice loves strategy, but those who have a knack for it can join progressive movements and lend a hand.

About the Author

George Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Group which just won its five-year campaign to force a major U.S. bank to give up financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Along with college teaching he has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

Breaking Out of the Invisible Prison: The Ten-Point Global Paradigm Revolution

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. John McMurtry

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

As we enter 2015, the global corporate system deepens and spreads in its eco-genocidal effects. But the dots are not joined in their common cause across domains. Money-value coordinates like gross domestic product (GDP), commodity productivity and stock market indexes are still adopted as the measures of “economic performance” rather than life capital development which is systemically depredated.

More than any prior stage of history, we know not what we are doing at the macro level of life organization, nor why no uptick of American sales can remotely solve the problem of collapsing social and natural life support systems. Greece – the world’s emblem of the sacrifice of society to bank debt servicing – is now 45 per cent more in debt than it was before the “austerity” programs started. Global social and ecological collapse proceed in lock-step with predatory corporate and bank globalization, but the connection is taboo to examine.

Fatal mind blocks now rule that no economists see from within received models of understanding, and that no cognitive science lays bare. Unconnected spectacles of crisis are alone reported. Obviously, no recovery from the most wasteful and destructive economic disorder in history is possible so long as it is unseen. This is why we continue over the long cliff of catastrophe without an evident clue of what is happening at the macro level. As another new year opens with all degenerate trends deepening, a point-by-point resetting of our economic parameters to life reality is more than ever demanded. The fatally absurd economic box within which we have been conditioned to conform at a preconscious level remains life-blind at every step without knowledge of it.

Every one of the 10 points of re-framing the economy to life coherence is self-evident once seen. But every step is also revolutionary in paradigm shift from money-capital sequence to life-capital sequence as primary system decider. Once our thought is freed from the bars of the eco-genocidal disorder that now misrules, no step can be reasonably denied.

1. The One-Way Eco-Genocidal Trends

The evidence is now overwhelming that life on earth is in systematic decline toward collapse on all levels. But the meaning is nowhere recognized by any economic model. We have come to know that the climates destabilize to ever greater extremes, but do not connect this long denied reality to the deeper macro facts that the air, soil, forests and water sources are all cumulatively despoiled across the planet as the oceans themselves die back. Vertebrate species simultaneously become extinct at a spasm rate across cultures and continents, but no macro policy arrests their one-way collapse from song birds to coral reefs to pollinators to large animals all at once. Pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life systems at all levels, but no global system reduction has been made since the Ozone protocol over 25 years ago.

All the while, public sectors, services and regulators are defunded and dismantled to leave ever more tens of millions of people dispossessed, but tax evasion by the rich multiplies at the same time in one-way disastrous trend. The global food system produces more disabling and contaminated junk than it does food with nutritional value, while man-made non-contagious diseases from obesity to cancer escalate into the world’s biggest killer. Corporate state wars for the resources of the majority world never stop under false pretexts, while transnational corporate-rights treaties to the life capital (means of life that can produce more means of life without loss and cumulative gain) of all societies multiply at the same time. At the core of the system, the global financial system ceases to function for productive investment in life goods, while the future of the next generations collapses toward 25-50 per cent real unemployment, and a world where no birds sing. Yet nowhere is the common cause investigated or even conceived in the business press, education or high theory.

2. The Moral DNA of the Cancer Stage of Capitalism

In fact, the underlying value code driving every degenerate trend is never defined. It is, rather, assumed without question or examination and set into mathematical disconnect as the sole meaning of economic inquiry. Bertrand Russell’s warning here is apposite. “Mathematics may be defined as the subject where we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we say is true.” The co-author of Principia Mathemtica thus nailed “neo-classical economics” over a century ago. Yet no-one knew what it would come to mean. An academically coded corporate rule in a completely life-blind “Economics” was instituted with its assumption drivers hidden in symbols and closed to disconfirmation by facts. Behind all the self-referential hocus-pocus incapable of predicting its predictable disasters, a ruling value code crystallized to drive the world to ruin with no-one knowing why. This moral DNA of globalization regulates beneath consciousness by four absolute equations assumed in every moment of what is now still masked as “the neoliberal turn.”

Rationality = Self-Maximizing Choice
= Always More Money-Value for Self is Good
= Self-Multiplying Sequences of Ever More Money to the Top Under 1%
= the Ruling Growth System with No Committed Life Functions
= All Else is Disposable Means to this Multiplying Pathogenic Growth

One can test this ruling moral meta program on every degenerate trend. But because it is not seen, the greatest of all fatal confusions comes to be built into societies’ ruling meaning: that money-sequence growth = life value growth. No more malignant mutation of value and meaning has ever occurred. As on the micro level where the surrounding cell community does not recognise the multiplying gross cells eating the life-host alive, so too on the macro social level. Leading the mutant tides of hollowing-out dispossession and ruin of social and ecological life hosts is a private bank system creating tidal notes of bets, credit and debt without legal tender, and partnering with transnational corporations in predation of local economies across the world. It loots life and life bases as ‘necessary reforms’ everywhere it is allowed to move.

This is why there is not inflation while trillions of new dollars are printed for private banking operations with no life productive function. Endless slashing of life goods in wages, benefits, social security and environmental security take corresponding tides of money demand away from people’s lives and life support systems as money-demand powers multiply to the non-producing top. One can track back every step to the ruling value code at work that is taboo to see.

3. Contemporary Economics is a Pseudo-Science

None of this can be seen by ‘Economics’ because it is a pseudo-science. Its ruling categories are disconnected from reality with no life coordinates, and its defining postulates are unfalsifiable by any facts of the world. All organic, social and ecological life requirements are assumed away a-priori. Infinite demand on finite resources is presupposed as sustainable. Reversibility of all processes is taken for granted in a nineteenth-century liquid mechanics model. Consequences follow in the long run that are predictably fatal to human and planetary life organization.

Yet whatever does not fit this a-priori life-blind construction is heretical in graduate schools supplying economic advisers to governments and corporations, and taboo in the corporate press and media to the extent of its contradiction. It is not only a mechanical model, but is absurdly “freedom” and “well-being” at the same time. Whatever deviates from it, conversely, is “irrational” or “despotic.” At the system-wide level of ruling story, the plot is universal for all societies. Purely self-maximizing atomic selves in the market are believed to necessitate the best of possible worlds by an invisible hand of competition ensuring lowest money costs. Life costs do not compute, and “economic growth” is consistent with destroying all life support systems.

We find here, in fact, the underlying form of a fanatic religion. Supra-human laws dictate commands across peoples, and no deadly consequences diminish certitude in its production of the optimal state for all by the perfect design of the system. With the supreme conceit of a just-so story of dyadic market exchange producing the best of possible worlds multiplied to infinity with no possibility of being wrong, we find the inner logic of the global disorder. It rules as a totalitarian creed blind to all but its own growth free of any life value, standard or regulator.

4. Knowledge Wins in the End, but Not Until It is Known

Societies have thus been everywhere ‘restructured’ as subordinate functions to the inexorable transformation of humanity and the world into ever more private commodities and profits. This mutant value system is malignant to the marrow with no consciousness of its derangement or ill consequences. It is taboo to recognize what is everywhere confirmed – deregulated borderless money sequences multiplying themselves by life-blind models, treaties and wars through all that exists on earth whatever their destruction of human and ecological life systems.

Alarm at the growing deadly symptoms increases across thoughtful people, but without decoding connection. Top-down embargo on any other economic view or reality – including by NATO wars – suppresses alternative at every level. Policies of ‘solution’ only extend the pathogenic system further. Even as the reversal of life evolution on earth becomes undeniable under the global rule of private money-sequence multiplication, life-coherent restructuring is anathema and prohibited a-priori by the unexamined value system. It all seems hopeless, but knowledge wins in the end if not suffocated. Behind every step of degeneration lie failures of social knowledge:

(1) failure to diagnose the regulating value mechanism at work;

(2) failure to connect across the domains of life despoliation as predictable from the system’s blind money-demand multiplications;

(3) failure to define or demand any public policies against its despoiling and devouring life support systems with the public increasingly financing the out-of-control feeding cycles;

(4) failure to recognise any life-value principle or ground of the real economy itself.

5. Re-Grounding in Real Capital and Goods, True Supply and Demand

The failure to recognise the life ground and processes of “the economy” is built into the ruling paradigm in principle. As in the prior ruling religion, disconnection of categories and system from empirical reality and life needs rules out disbelief. But disconnect is in the name of “science” and “the invisible hand” rather than “God’s commands” and “divine design.” Adam Smith the founder of modern economics was a Deist, but doctrinal abdication of life ground and reality became totalized in so-called “neo-classical economics” which displaces the class divisions of classical economics and the possibility of any alternative social order.

Thus an absurd metaphysics comes to rule which cannot be decoded because its first principles and axioms are a-priori dictates not subject to critical examination. The first principle of this life-blind economics begins by disconnection from all life requirements, grounds and needs – thus mutating the economy’s provision of otherwise scarce material life goods into an opposite meaning where life goods and life capital do not exist. Capital is assumed as private money-sequences multiplying themselves with life capital blinkered out. Private commodities are assumed to be ‘goods’ although they are in fact increasingly bads for organic, social and ecological life hosts.

The ‘laws of supply and demand’ are simultaneously reduced to self-maximizing private money exchanges indifferent to the real economy of providing life goods otherwise in short supply. Demand is not need or necessity as in any real economy. It is money demand minted by private banks without the legal tender to back over 97 per cent of it: which is ever more unequally held by those serving no productive function, and which nowhere today stands for any life need whatever. The fatal metaphysic built into first principles does not end here. ‘Supply’ is not the life goods people need to survive and flourish, but increasingly the opposite – ever more priced commodities for profit now promoting ever more human and ecological ill-being across the world. Capital is not life wealth that can produce more life wealth without loss, but increasing transnational private money sequences hollowing out life capital on every plane.

6. Knowing Good from Bad as the Baseline of Life-Coherent Economics

At the normative level of this doctrine, a ludicrous and fatal doctrine of freedom rules the war and peace of nations beneath consciousness of it. Freedom = freedom for private money demand only = in proportion to the amount controlled = ever less freedom for those with less of it = no right to life for those without it.

Sane people, in contrast, recognise that life value matters more, the more coherently inclusive in self and world the better. But this ultimately self-evident value ground has been reversed without recognition. People called ‘pro-life’ usurp women’s choice of how they live. Nations assume that ‘standard of living’ is measured by private money spent. ‘Life sciences’ sacrifice billions of animal lives a year for the private money-sequence gains of big corporations. Animal rights theory itself has no criterion to tell the life value of a slug from a person. ‘New and better technology’ is the ruling panacea, but no life-value standard exists to decide better from worse.

What then are we to ground in as life value that the real economy must provide? The objective standard and measure can be stated in three incisive steps:

all value whatever is life value,
good versus bad equals the extent to which life is more coherently enabled versus disabled, by
greater/lesser ranges or capacities of thought, felt being and action through time.

This criterion of life value is no more a matter of opinion than people’s life necessities are. But what are these life needs that no economic paradigm – orthodox or revolutionary – defines? They are in every case that without which life capacities are reduced. Life capital, in turn, is that which produces and reproduces these life goods – from literacy and extending knowledge to the soil we grow in and air we breathe. The ruling value mechanism miscalled ‘the global economy’ is the opposite. It attacks life goods and capital everywhere as ‘externalities’ to its self-multiplying money-sequence and commodity cycles. But because such growth is assumed to be growing life value, the greatest value reversal in history is unseen.

7. Life Capital Base and Growth as the Real Economy Across Cultures

The moving line of the war of liberation begins with what we are able to control, our own lives. Here we can recognise that every value we enjoy, lose or gain has a bottom line – its life capital, that is, the life wealth that produces more life wealth without loss and with cumulative gain. We defend it by life goods to ensure our life capacities are not reduced but grow through time. Most are unpriced – the sun and air, the learning, the home environment, the delight in nature, the play, the love, the raising of children, the fellow arts, and so on. On the social level, the same holds and any well-governed society provides for them in many ways. All may recognise the principle of life capital in their own lives as self-evident, and that all which lasts through time that is worthwhile is life capital. But life capital does not exist as a concept in received economics. It is ruled out a-priori by money capital, the social instrument made the lord without life function.

Addictive internalization is how the system disorder grows on. Knowledge of life goods and bads is how it is rooted out, the unrecognised through-line of human evolution. That is why we find we live far better without corporate-ad television, regular private gas-vehicle use, any junk food or beverage, any throwaway item, any new fashion or commodity not more life enabling than the old, any business with big private banks. The organizing principle is as old as the good life, but is forgotten. The life-capital code is not stated, but becomes ever clearer in our time: minimize market demand that disables life capacities to enable life capital to grow and flourish. This principle is unthinkable within the ruling thought system, but defines transformation to true economy and life emancipation on earth. It liberates life wherever it moves.

The underlying turning point is as old as human evolution itself. Every human advance is by knowing what enables life through time from what does not. Collective life advance is transmitting this life-and-death knowledge across selves and generations. The life capital code holds across cultures. Life goods are always that without which life capacities decline and die. All real needs, all real demand, all real supply, and all real economics are known by this criterion. The lost line between good and evil is found in this principle, and so too human freedom and well-being.

We can define the meaning more concretely as follows Every human life suffers and degenerates toward disease and death without breathable and unpolluted air, clean water and waste cycles, nourishing food and drink, protective living space, supportive love, healthcare when needed, a life-coherent environment, symbolic interaction, and meaningful work to perform. All are measurable in sufficiency across cases. All are now degraded, polluted or perverted by the self-multiplying money-capital system defined above.

8. Collective Life Capital the Missing Link across Divisions

Collective life capital is the long-missing principle of the common interest and collective agency. The life capital code goes deeper than gender, culture or individual differences, and includes past as well as future generations by definition. It is objective, impartial, and universally applicable. It is the ultimate regulator of the economic principles of efficiency, productivity and development. It grounds political legitimacy and supersedes ruinous man-nature, economy-environment splits and individual-social conflicts of interest. By its regulation, freedom is made responsible to its own conditions of possibility. Life capital defines an inner logic of life value which cannot in principle go wrong within or beyond economics.

Collective life capital is the missing common ground and measure across the lines of death itself. It is the this-worldly bridging concept across the impasse of global culture wars, economy-versus – environment thinking, present-versus-future interests, male versus female conflicts, and all other warring dichotomies wrenching us from our shared life ground beneath property lines and the mors immortalis of reality on earth.

The difference from received ultimate principles of value across time and theories is in the objective precision of meaning and direction when value judgement and decision are governed by its laws of:

life value regulator from start to finish,
production of more life value capacity through generational time,
life-value measure to tell greater from lesser in any domain by margins of capacity loss or gain,
cumulative life gain as the organizing goal of the process throughout, and
the meta principle: the more coherently inclusive any decision or action is in enabling life capacities, the better it always is for the world.

9. The Life-and-Death War of the World

In fact, the global corporate commodity and money-sequence system usurps these life capital principles with impunity across continents, while captive corporate states increasingly subsidize, de-regulate, privatize and militarily enforce this life-blind rule over all ecological and human requirements and rights.But who sees the moving lines of the global life-and-death war?

Obviously a real economy would regulate for life capital conservation and advance with money sequences only as means – as is already is the case in a human way of life. Societies and individuals would transform to better lives if the paradigm revolution was enacted in their spheres of choice. Victory or loss in the war of the world lies as always in how we live. Knowledge of bads versus goods is always the inner logic of human evolution at individual and collective levels of action. It is the mark of being human, and begins in what we do not demand – for example, any new fashion or commodity not more life enabling than the old or the used.

The organizing principle of real economy is long anticipated by China’s Tao-te Ching and the West’s autarkia of human self-realization, and many prove it in their own lives. Minimal demand on short resources to enable maximum life capacities is the war of recovery on social as well as individual levels. While every corporate state now presses for ever more energy extraction and use with no limit of public and life costs at every imaginable level, the root of economic rationality – ration to need – is effectively taboo in official culture.

Once the life-capital system decider kicks in, the rules of selection for what compossibly enables rather than disables human and fellow life on earth become evident to reason and learning from mistakes – the ultimate incapacity of the now ruling global system. This is the transformation to true economy and life emancipation, and it can only proceed in accord with the life capital principle that holds across individual, social and environmental life hosts.

10. The Ultimate Choice Space of Humanity

Collective life capital is now fatally endangered on almost every plane across generational and ecological time. The common life interest has no meaning in the ruling global system because its sole law of growth is to multiply the very private commodities and money sequences without life function that mindlessly drive the end-game world disorder.

It follows that humanity’s very provision for the universal human life necessities that have evolved over millennia are blinkered out by the life-blind value measures of what is miscalled ‘the economy.’ Everything that makes a society civilized or liveable is excluded from view – life-protective laws including sufficient minimum wages and environmental regulations, common water and sewage systems for all, free movement pathways and life spaces without cost to use, non-profit healthcare and disease-prevention by public institution, public income security from disemployment, old age and disability, primary to higher education without multiplying debts, family housing, food and life means assistance for children without sufficient parental money, and public libraries and arts facilities with accessible books, films and works of art and art creation. This is more or less a complete index of the collective life capital bases modern society has evolved, but all are dismantled by the global corporate disorder to maximally profit from.

In truth, the organizing principles of common life interest and human agency cross the lines of death itself in the life capital code of value that steers any real economy in any place through generational time. It is the system-deciding choice all societies face without knowing it. History is the record of successes and failures at what still remains unconscious in economic thought. It is nowhere defined beyond slogan even in communism, and ‘the public interest’ has no life coordinates or ground in known modern politics across the spectrum. Yet life goods and life capital denote the only true economic necessity and growth – that without which human life capacities degrade and die. ‘The economy’ is not run by natural or divine laws, as the modern paradigm assumes. It is a social construction of binding rules which directs toward how we live better by what is not otherwise there.

The ruling value code fails more momentously in world waste and destruction than all other systems in history, but beneath recognition. Its built-in contempt for all life requirements and indifference to life ruin multiplies its demands across the planet in a fanaticism beyond ISIL in attacking life capital and goods with no committed life functions. Yet no economics yet allows the recognition of its predictably rising catastrophe through time as a global economic system.

The life capital economy is opposite in its regulating value logic. It grounds in common life capital and produces more of it by life measure as its goal and moral science. Its logic of value is not utopian, but the ultimate through-line of human development since language and cooperative provision of human means of life. It lives in all the civil commons we are made human by in the life security of a free humanity. It is invaded wherever its life capital and goods are turned into more private money demand, resource depletion and waste without limits – the moral cancer of the ruling system. The ultimate choice space of humanity and society lies in this unrecognised life and death meaning. •

John McMurtry is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: from Crisis to Cure.

The Transformer: Sabotage for Peace

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By William T. Hathaway

Source: Dissident Voice

A former student of mine works as a janitor. After graduating from college he worked as a market researcher and an advertising salesperson, but both jobs soured him on the corporate world. He hated being a junior suit, and the thought of becoming a senior suit was even worse.

He finds being a janitor a much better job. He’s left alone, it’s low pressure, and what he does improves the world rather than worsens it. The pay’s lousy but that’s standard these days. He loves music, so he loads up his MP3 and grooves to the sounds. Although the work is routine, it’s brightened by occasional bits of human interest: used condoms in executive wastebaskets, marijuana butts in the emergency stairwell, a twenty-dollar bill under a desk. His shift is from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., and afterwards he hits the late-night clubs, where he can enjoy the scene with the advantage of being sober. He works for a janitorial service company, and one of their clients is a defense contractor — not secret weapons, just ordinary supplies.

The man is a pacifist. Originally he felt that rallies, petitions, marches, and picketing would help turn public opinion against the war, and when the majority of Americans opposed it, our political representatives would vote to stop it. That’s what democracy means. The first part turned out to be true. Polls showed a clear majority of Americans wanted the war ended and our troops brought home. In 2006 they elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate who said they would do this. But rather than bringing the soldiers home, “our” representatives voted more money for the war so more soldiers could be sent to Iraq, a surge of troops for another attempt to crush the resistance there. Several months later they voted additional billions for a US troop surge to Afghanistan.

In 2008 the people elected Barack Obama on a pledge to bring peace. But the war still continues with thousands dying, despite the will of the voters to end it.

He began to realize the politicians aren’t representing us but what he calls the corpses, short for corporations. The majority of those want the war to continue. It’s the corporate majority that rules, not the citizens. That’s the democracy we have. When business leaders turn against the war, then it will end.

What would make them turn against it? When they stop making a profit from it, he concluded.

Finally feeling glad to be part of the corporate world, he decided to stage a surge for peace. He bought a 10-amp step-up transformer at an electronics flea market, the kind used to increase voltage from 110 to 220. Next time he was scheduled to work at the defense contractor and the weatherman predicted a thunder storm, he brought the transformer along in his dinner box. At the first flash of lightning, he took it to the data processing center. First he unplugged all the computers and auxiliaries from the surge protectors and zapped them with 220. Then he plugged them back in and zapped the surge protectors. A clear case of surge-protector failure: the damned things must’ve let the surge through before they shut down.

The stench of sizzled electronics gave him a headache, but other than that he felt fine. He figured the lost work and ruined equipment put a hefty dent in profits. The company will try to pass those costs on to the government, but with budget deficits and taxes already cripplingly high, congress will finally have to admit they don’t have enough money to conquer Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lost work also cuts into the military supply line. If supplies are reduced, war operations have to be reduced. Soldiers can’t fight without logistics. Both economically and tactically, destroying war supplies helps to end war.

He’s aware that direct action like this is unpopular. Many people are afraid of government repression that will make their already difficult situation even more unpleasant. But he’s convinced that their difficult situation — working long hours for low pay, living in a deteriorating society, raising children amid fear and hostility — is caused by the same forces that drove us to war. Capitalism manifests now as invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan, as privatization and impoverishment in Latin America, and as the destruction of the middle class in the industrial nations. It’s the same system operating in different environments.

Rather than sheepishly obeying in hopes of avoiding more punishment, he feels we must actively rebel and seize the power that has been usurped from us. This struggle won’t be comfortable, but it will be meaningful. By taking charge of our history, we’ll earn the gratitude of future generations. Otherwise our and their lives will be continually constricted by the rule of capital. He’s convinced the time is ripe for change, and it needs to be fundamental, not superficial.

He grew up in a small town where his family owned the local hardware store. When he was in high school, Wal-Mart moved to town. Their family store couldn’t compete with Wal-Mart and went broke. His father became a clerk in the Wal-Mart hardware department at a wage less that what he had paid his lowest employee. Soon he was joined there by the former owners of the local clothing, appliance, sporting goods, and toy stores, all of which had gone broke. Despite their expertise, none was hired as a department manager, all clerks, because they might harbor resentment. The managers were long-term Wal-Mart employees brought in from outside.

But it wasn’t just Wal-Mart that used economics of scale to destroy home-grown businesses. Many farmers in the area had to sell out to corporate agriculture. Local restaurants were replaced by cheaper chains. The real estate office was driven out by a discount franchise. And all the workers were making much less than before. The whole town, except for a few big new houses, became bleak.

His parents had enough money saved so he could go to college with the help of student loans and part-time jobs. But his younger brother and sister couldn’t. The brother went into the navy, where he wouldn’t have to actually fight, and the sister worked at Wal-Mart.

What’s happening to small businesses in the USA is happening to small countries overseas. Their economies are getting taken over, sucked into the maw of transnational corporations. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are economic weapons in this conquest. Countries that resist face other weapons, from CIA subversion to outright invasion. Feudalism has been revived and globalized. The nobility are the corporate rulers, the yeomen are their declining ranks of employees, and the serfs are the rest of us worldwide — the huge majority.

He’s certain that we’re not going to change this system without a fight, and we’d better start now while we still have some freedoms. Hoping to make basic changes through liberal reform is a delusion. We cling to that hope because we’ve been raised with the comforting myth that we live in a democracy. But behind the “we, the people” rhetoric lies entrenched power determined to maintain itself. The rulers are willing to change only in ways that make more profit, such as expanding the labor pool to include women and blacks, thus enabling them to reduce wages.

The “have a nice life” days are over in the USA. Conditions are getting inexorably worse. Americans are beginning to get the same treatment as people in the client states. As protest to this grows, the power elite will try to crush it. They’ll scapegoat the radicals, blaming them for the problems, trying to make them the target of rising populist anger. But dissidents aren’t causing these conditions, they’re resisting them. The conditions are caused by the predatory nature of capitalism.

In opposing this process, he’s a pacifist but not a passivist. He fights, but only in ways that don’t injure living creatures. Currently his transformer is stowed away, awaiting the next weather report when he can transform more war computers into peaceful scrap.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “The Transformer” is a chapter from Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of peace activists who have moved beyond protest into direct action: helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. Chapters are posted at Trineday. William T. Hathaway’s new book, Lila, the Revolutionary, is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice. Chapters are posted here and a selection of his writing is available at his website. Read other articles by William.

Why I Wept at the Russian Parade

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By William F. Engdah

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Something extraordinary just took place in Russia and it may have moved our disturbed world one major step nearer to peace and away from a looming new world war. Of all unlikely things, what took place was a nationwide remembrance by Russians of the estimated 27 to perhaps 30 million Soviet citizens who never returned alive from World War II. Yet in what can only be described in a spiritual manner, the events of May 9, Victory Day over Nazism, that took place across all Russia, transcended the specific day of memory on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1945. It was possible to see a spirit emerge from the moving events unlike anything this author has ever witnessed in his life.

The event was extraordinary in every respect. There was a sense in all participants that they were shaping history in some ineffable way. It was no usual May 9 annual show of Russia’s military force. Yes, it featured a parade of Russia’s most advanced military hardware, including the awesome new T-14 Armata tanks, S-400 anti-missile systems and advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets. It was indeed impressive to watch.

The military part of the events also featured for the first time ever elite soldiers from China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army marching in formation along with Russian soldiers. That in itself should shivers down the spines of the neoconservative warhawks in the EU and Washington, had they any spines to shiver. The alliance between the two great Eurasian powers—Russia and China—is evolving with stunning speed into a new that will change the economic dynamic of our world from one of debt, depression, and wars to one of rising general prosperity and development if we are good enough to help make it happen.

During his visit, China’s President Xi, in addition to his quite visible honoring of the Russian Victory event and its significance for China, met separately with Vladimir Putin and agreed that China’s emerging New Silk Road high-speed railway infrastructure great project will be integrated in planning and other respects with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union which now consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Armenia with several prospective candidates waiting to join. While it may seem an obvious step, it was not at all certain until now.

The two great Eurasian countries have now cemented the huge oil and gas deals between them, the trade deals and the military cooperation agreements with a commitment to fully integrate their economic infrastructure. Following his meeting with Xi, Putin told the press, “The integration of the Eurasian Economic Union and Silk Road projects means reaching a new level of partnership and actually implies a common economic space on the continent.”

It’s Zbigniew Brzezinski’s worst geopolitical nightmare come to fruition. And that, thanks to the stupid, short-sighted geopolitical strategy of Brzezinski and the Washington war faction that made it clear to Beijing and to Moscow their only hope for sovereign development and to be free of the dictates of a Washington-Wall Street Sole Superpower was to build an entire monetary and economic space independent of the dollar world.

The Parade of the Good

Yet the most extraordinary part of the day-long events was not the show of military hardware at a time when NATO is not only rattling sabres at Russia, but even intervening militarily in Ukraine to provoke Russia into some form of war.

What was extraordinary about the May 9 Victory Day Parade was the citizens’ remembrance march, a symbolic parade known as the March of the Immortal Regiment, a procession through the streets of Moscow into the famous and quite beautiful Red Square. The square, contrary to belief of many in the West was not named so by the “Red” Bolsheviks. It took its name from Czar Alexei Mikhailovich in the mid-17th Century from a Russian word which now means red. Similar Immortal Regiment parades involving an estimated twelve million Russians took place all over Russia at the same time, from Vladivostock to St. Petersburg to Stevastopol in what is now Russian Crimea.

In an atmosphere of reverence and quiet, some three hundred thousand Russians, most carrying photos or portraits of family members who never returned from the war, walked on the beautiful, sunny spring day through downtown Moscow into Red Square where the President’s residence, the famous Kremlin, is also located.

To see the faces of thousands and thousands of ordinary Russians walking, optimism about their future beaming from their faces, young and the very old, including surviving veterans of the Great Patriotic War as it is known to Russians, moved this writer to quietly weep. What was conveyed in the smiles and eyes of the thousands of marchers was not a looking back in the sense of sorrow at the horrors of that war. Rather what came across so clearly was that the parade was a gesture of loving respect and gratitude to those who gave their lives that today’s Russia might be born, a new, future-looking Russia that is at the heart of building the only viable alternative to a one-world dictatorship under a Pentagon Full Spectrum Dominance and a dollar system choking on debt and fraud. The entire Russian nation exuded a feeling of being good and of being victorious. Few peoples have that in today’s world.

When the television cameras zoomed in on President Vladimir Putin who was also marching, he was walking freely and open amid the thousands of citizens, holding a picture of his deceased father who had served in the war and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin was surrounded not by bulletproof limousines that any US President since the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 would have, were he even to dare to get close to a crowd. There were three or four presidential security people near Putin, but there were thousands of ordinary Russians within arm’s length of one of the most influential world leaders of the present time. There was no climate of fear visible anywhere.

My tears

My tears at seeing the silent marchers and at seeing Putin amid them was an unconscious reaction to what, on reflection, I realized was my very personal sense of recognition how remote from anything comparable in my own country, the United States of America, such a memorial march in peace and serenity would be today. There were no “victory” marches after US troops destroyed Iraq; no victory marches after Afghanistan; no victory marches after Libya. Americans today have nothing other than wars of death and destruction to commemorate and veterans coming home with traumas and radiation poisonings that are ignored by their own government.

That transformation in America has come about in those same 7o years since the end of the war, a war when we–Americans and Russians, then the Soviet Union of course—had fought side-by-side to defeat Hitler and the Third Reich. Today the Government of the United States is siding with and backing neo-nazis in Ukraine to provoke Russia.

I reflected how much my countrymen have changed over those few decades. From the world’s most prosperous nation, the center of invention, innovation, technology, prosperity, in the space of seven decades we have managed to let our country be ruined by a gaggle of stupid and very rich oligarchs with names like Rockefeller, Gates, Buffett and their acolytes in the Bush dynasty. Those narcissistic oligarchs cared not a whit for the greatness of the American people, but saw us as a mere platform to realize their sick dream of world dominion.

We let that happen.

I’ll let you in on a secret that I recently discovered. The American oligarchs ain’t all-powerful; they ain’t some new Illuminati or gods as some try to convince us. They ain’t omniscient. They get away with murder because we allow them. We are hypnotized by their aura of power.

Yet were we to stand tall and clear in the open and say, “These silly would-be Emperors have no clothes!,” their power would evaporate like cotton candy in hot water.

That’s what they’re terrified of. That’s why they are deploying the US Armed Forces into Texas to stage war games aimed at US citizens; that’s why they have torn up the Constitution and Bill of Rights after 911. That’s why the Created a Department of Homeland Security. It’s why they try to terrify our citizens to vaccinate with untested Ebola or other vaccines. It’s why they are desperate to control free expression of political ideas in the Internet.

Now, when I reflect on the true state of America today compared with Russia, it brings tears. Today the economy of the USA is in ruins. It has been “globalized” by its Fortune 500 global companies and the banks of Wall Street. Its industrial jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, even Russia over the past 25 or so years. Investment in the education of our youth has become a politically-correct sick joke. College students must go deep into debt to private banks, some $1 trillion worth today, to get a piece of paper called a degree in order to look for non-existent jobs.

Our Washington government has become serial liars who have lied to us about the true state of the economy ever since Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War ordered the Commerce and Labor departments to find ways to fake the numbers to hide the developing internal economic rot. The consequence, followed by every president since, is that we live in a fairy tale world where the mainstream media tells us we are in the “sixth year of economic recovery” and have a mere 5.4% unemployment. The reality is that more than 23% of Americans today are unemployed but through clever tricks have been defined out of the statistics. Some 93 million Americans are unable to get full time work. It isn’t the fault of Obama or Bush before him or Clinton, Bush, Reagan or Jimmy Carter. It’s our own fault because we were passive; we gave them the power because we did not believe in ourselves enough. We let billionaires decide for us who will be our President and Congress because we no longer believed that we were good.

By the same token, Russians today, amid brutal Western economic and financial warfare sanctions; amid a NATO war in Ukraine that has led more than one million Russian-speaking Ukrainians to flee to Russia for safety, despite the demonization in the western media of their country, exude a new optimism about their future. What makes Vladimir Putin so extraordinarily popular, with over 83% approval, is that he acts out that growing sense of representing that Russian soul, the people who are good, being just, being right, the sense that the vast majority of Russians today have.

That was overwhelmingly visible in the faces of the May 9 marchers. You could feel that Putin on the speaker’s podium felt it when he looked into the vast crowd. It was clear when Defense Minister Shoigu, a Russian-Mongolian Tuvan-born Buddhist, respectfully and humbly made the Orthodox sign of the cross with bowed head as he passed through the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower to take his place aside Putin. As Victor Baranets, a noted Russian journalist put it: ”At that moment I felt that with his simple gesture Shoigu brought all of Russia to his feet. There was so much kindness, so much hope, so much of our Russian sense of the sacred in this gesture.“ The legendary Russian Soul was manifest on May 9 and its alive and very well, thank you.

And that’s why I shed the tears on May 9, watching hundreds of thousands of peaceful Russians walk through their capital city, the city that saw the defeat of Napoleon’s army and of Hitler’s. I was moved deeply watching them slowly and deliberately walking into the Red Square next to their President’s residence at a time when Washington’s White House is surrounded by concrete barriers, barbed wire and armed guards.

You could see it in the eyes of the Russians on the street: they knew that they were good. They were good not because their fathers or grandfathers had died defeating Nazism. They were god because they could be proud Russians, proud of their country after all the ravages of recent decades, most recently the US-backed looting during the 1990’s Harvard Shock Therapy in the Yeltsin era.

I shed tears being deeply moved by what I saw in those ordinary Russians and tears for what I felt had been destroyed in my country. We Americans have lost our sense that we are good or even perhaps again could be. We have accepted that we are bad, that we kill all around the world, that we hate ourselves and our neighbors, that we fear, that we live in a climate of race war, that we are despised for all this around the world.

We feel ourselves to be anything but good because we are in a kind of hypnosis induced by those narcissistic oligarchs to be so. Hypnosis, however, can be broken under the right circumstances. We only have to will it so.

Postscript:

The last time I wept at a public event was in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and Germans—east and west—danced together on the symbol of the Cold War division between East and West, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy rang out. The German Chancellor made a speech to the Bundestag proposing the vision of a high-speed rail linking Berlin to Moscow. Then, Germany was not strong enough, not free enough from guilt feelings from the war, to reject the pressure that came from Washington. The architect of that vision, Alfred Herrhausen, was assassinated by the ‘Red Army Fraction’ of Langley, Virginia. Russia was deliberately thrown into chaos by IMF shock therapy and the criminal Yeltsin family. Today the world has a new, far more beautiful possibility to realize Herrhausen’s dream—this time with Russia, China and all Eurasia. This is what was so beautiful about the May 9 parade.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

So how should we “really” refer to these United States of America?

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Dave Lefcourt

Source: OpEdNews.com

So how should we really refer to these United States of America? A banana republic? How about an oligarchic plutocracy? They both fit quite admirably with what we’ve become. Actually I prefer the more vernacular US of BS. Sure it’s crude, base, coarse and of course “politically incorrect” but take a close look at America.

In almost every area one can think of it’s pretty much the same. Truth and honesty is what we’re indoctrinated with, yet in reality we’re a country imbued with dishonesty and lying. Hell, even with little kids nowadays it’s the parents always yammering “good job” here and “good job” there. My god, leave the little tyke alone. He, she will get it together without the constant praising fearing without it he’ll somehow become a failure.

Think about it; from the way we conduct war to being held personally accountable, the “American Dream” to our “color blindness” on race, from “official” Washington to the “independent” MSM, and how it’s all dispensed to the people, it’s all the same BS.

We go to war to bring “freedom and democracy” to the people we invade and occupy. That’s how “dubya” Bush put it to the American people. We commit torture but call it “enhanced interrogation techniques”. We kill innocents in those wars but refer to it as “collateral damage”; come on.

This didn’t all begin with our latest wars against “terrorists”. In Viet Nam, it was the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Communists and every VC we killed were the “enemy” including women and children. “Winning” that war was calculated based on the number of “enemy” reported killed. Read Nick Turse’s, “Kill Anything That Moves” where “My Lai” wasn’t an aberration-as the Army said it was-but an everyday occurrence. Terrorists are just the latest manifestation of a contrived, mortal “enemy” we’re told we must fight.

Now everyone we kill are all called “terrorists”, insurgents, al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS. But of course our killing with drones and missile strikes isn’t “terrorism” it’s what; winning the “hearts and minds”?

Go back further to our wars and “diplomacy” with our own indigenous people. It was all part of what we were taught in our schools called, “Manifest Destiny”. Well that was manifested with every treaty “official” Washington brokered with the true natives of this country being broken. The indigenous know it and now live with the circumstances that was forcibly thrust upon them. Plundering, confiscating the land and what’s now called genocide was really what it was about. You know, “from sea to shining sea”.

As far as who is held to account for their actions today, it’s mostly the poor, black or brown, those profiled, harassed, rousted and often killed but rarely are the police held accountable for their actions.

In the Ferguson police killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury exonerated officer Darren Wilson even though one of those testifying had earlier admitted to prosecutor Bob McCulloch to not being at the scene-which he later publicly stated she “clearly wasn’t present at the scene”- yet he let the panel hear her false testimony and they subsequently voted to acquit Wilson. As for McCulloch I believe he remains as the prosecutor in Ferguson.

We’re supposed to be “color blind” when it comes to race and ethnicity and enforcing the law, yet it’s not just Ferguson where the injustice is occurring it’s a country wide phenomenon. Our largest minorities are those disproportionately incarcerated. Justice? What justice? And for whom?

The “American Dream…a hoax. “Work hard, get an education, get a good job, get married and own a big house”. Maybe that’s true for a handful but the reality for most college students is debt for life. There’s over a $trillion in college student debt with outrageous interest rates tacked on. Too many are working as bartenders and wait staff. They can’t find jobs in their area of study as outsourcing of jobs has become endemic.

As “Americans” we embrace “capitalism” and despise “socialism”. Yet when the financial “masters of the universe” and the big banks brought the financial system to its knees with its fraudulent excesses in 2008, they were “bailed” out by the FED and the US Treasury-and unlike college students now get $billions in FED loans at near zero interest rates. It was government “socialism” that came to the rescue keeping the vultures afloat but sold as a “bailout” to the public. As far as “accountability” for the fraud they committed, other than a few millions in fines-and always with the stipulation they admit no wrongdoing as part of the settlement- that were miniscule and insignificant compared to the billions they made with their financial scheming, it was simply a financial bump in the road. And most significantly none went to jail. How’s that for equal justice under the law!

Our “defense” industry, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman -the big five of the lot- are considered as “independent” corporations but they’re all pretty much owned by the Defense Department-formerly known as the “War Department” until changed after WWII-as the bulk of their earnings is from government spending called innocently as “fiscal” policy. Well that fiscal policy goes to the tune of a $trillion each year when all expenditures are considered i.e. armaments, over a 1000 military bases, wars and occupations, homeland security, NGO’s directly funded by the government, the NSA, CIA, independent contractors, NASA, the VA et al. All against “enemies” not really a threat but conjured up as so to the public to make them fearful so “official” Washington can justify the bloated, unnecessary expenditures.

Every other 1st world post industrialized country has public health insurance for all, in essence a single payer, Medicare type system run by the government. Accept for those 65 and older on Medicare in this country we now have “Obama” care, the Affordable Care Act system still leaves millions without health insurance. But it sure increased the “benefits” to the private health care behemoths, essentially a monopoly with no competition- whereby they divide the country into distinct areas so they don’t compete with each other, akin to the mafia, that is inefficient, has excessive overhead costs but sold as the best health system in the world while in actuality its 37th in the world in delivering health care. So to an imagined “good ole boy” who remarks, “We ain’t got no stinkin socialized medicine in this country. What are ya some kinda commie or somethin?” Ah, but I digress.

And lastly- there’s no way to elaborate on all the BS befouling America in such a short piece; just substitute your own; the crock is endless – there’s the corporate MSM. What may have been a time of an independent free press, naturally skeptical of government with investigative journalism unearthing official wrongdoing has descended into what can best be described as the “ministry of propaganda”, a compliant, complicit, enabling organ of the state.

It “informs” us alright but mostly with lies, distortions and misinformation rather than keeping the public informed with the truth as it really is, not some fictionalized version to keep it in good stead with “official” Washington.

But that corporate MSM fits in quite nicely with this pieces hypothesis, the US of BS.

And an increasingly dangerous one at that not only to others in the world but also for Americans.

But don’t tell that to most Americans, we’re still “the land of the free and the home of the brave” .

Yeah, BS to the very end.

About the Author:

Retired. The author of “DECEIT AND EXCESS IN AMERICA, HOW THE MONEYED INTERESTS HAVE STOLEN AMERICA AND HOW WE CAN GET IT BACK”, Authorhouse, 2009

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After the Crash

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Category Archives: History

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