The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.
— William James
Power and authority, as substitutes for performance and rational thought, are the specters that haunt the world today. They are the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays. And politics is their familiar. Politics, throughout time, has been an institutionalized denial of man’s ability to survive through the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare. And politics, throughout time, has existed solely through the resources that it has been able to plunder from the creative and productive people whom it has, in the name of many causes and moralities, denied the exclusive employment of all their own powers for their own welfare.
— Karl Hess
Like most Republican plans, the idea is to sound reasonable while producing no results and selling off public assets for private profit. Republican voters aren’t bad people; they’re just really bad at spotting con men. That’s why their “family values” figureheads are always getting divorced or caught naked with underage boys.
— Giles Bowkett
Fundamentally, being Republican means being more outraged about someone lying to protect his privacy than lying to destroy another country.
— Wil Shipley
I’m sure I could find more, but I ran across both of these today and decided to post ‘em.
Excellent set of essays, coming from agrarian and writer Wendell Berry. He espouses his philosophy and does a good job of demeaning everything about modern–day american politics and society, but in a good way. I took so many notes I don’t want to write any of them down, plus it’s summer. Instead I’ll mark this here down to re–read in the not distant future.
Neal Stephenson is awesome. His brand of special, pure, joyful absurdity
shines through in this one as well as any of his others. It’s from back in 1994, a thriller dealing with a shadowy power structure and its exertion of power upon a presidential election. Brilliant, and yes you should read it. A few things that got me to tick the pages:
“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as mch character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”
Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator behind the “Oval Office” and set up the cans on the presidential desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.
“So what’s it about now?” Aaron said.
“Scrutiny. We are in the age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Roman haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered, we seek to establish a candidate’s fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations—whether his hands are open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws.
“I paint a depressing picture here. Be we, you and I, are like the literate monks who nurtured the flickering flame of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, knowing each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them toward the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote.” 92-92
Anyone who adhered, at least nominally, to any religion that was invented millennia ago by people who ran around in burlap and believed that the Earth was built on the back of a turtle—that is, any of the major religions—ran into little dilemmas like this on a regular basis. 141
“Positions change. People don’t. Earl Strong may or may not always be a so–called conservative populist. But he will definitely always be a pencil–neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal–Mart, as you pegged him.” 237
Now there’s a political insult.
New novel from Cory Doctorow (link). Definitely enjoyable, but there’s something about his novels that seems funny: it’s like reading blogs except it’s a long, coherent text. I do like this book, don’t get me wrong, but it bothers me how campy it is, sort of like a maelstrom of all the big ideas to have passed through the collective attention of blog-land. It’s just weird, makes me roll my eyes a lot. Might also have to do that this book is classed as young adult, but I don’t think so: put a 23 year old in place of a 17 year old as the main character and I don’t think that would change the book that much.
I read it all through my web browser. I’ve taken to reading books on the laptop lately. It’s awkward to hold, and can be less comfortable than curling up with a book, but the sheer availability of books off the internet is very nice. You can crank up the text size (when reading lots I like the text at 20pts or so, which I hope doesn’t mean I’m going blind) and scroll through.
You just leave the browser window open when not reading, at the proper spot. cmd-tab works great for finding where you just were if you lose your place, just pull two or three words out of your short term memory and in all likelihood they’ll take you back to the exact spot. Compare that with your page slipping away and having to slowly go through and try to find where your thumb ought to go.
I’ve always felt I read slowly, but trying to read faster has never worked for me. I like to take my time really. I’ve had Rescue Time running for about a week now (more on the disturbing amount of time I spend on my computer if I ever get the guts to confront that topic), and it says I’ve spent 6 hours on craphound.com. My calculations are that the book (excluding pre– and post–ambles) is 110,062 words, so that by 6 by 60 (hours and minute) is 305 wpm.
Wikipedia says this is on the high side of average, so I can’t be that slow, but also that people who train their speed–reading technique can get up to 800. But training my reading ability for speed seems questionable—reading is for fun, why mess with it and turn it into some kind of optimized algorithm? I wouldn’t want to turn it into something not fun for the ability to do lots more of it.
I actually read all but the first few chapters of the book yesterday in a conscious effort at productive procrastination (I need to be doing schoolwork, semester ends next week and I’m not ahead by any means). But here I am writing this silly post and still not doing my stuff. Ouch.
Naomi Klein
Really a harrowing book from Naomi Klein. Follows the ideas of torture as they evolved scientifically, and melded with the economic theories of Milton Friedman to inspire a new way to run a country: that of corporatism. The first place these ideas took hold was in South America, when the CIA funded multiple coups d‘état and established military juntas supplied with Friedmanite economists (The and los Chicago Boys). This system was for some odd reason lauded by the West, and the systematic torture used to pacify those living in these countries was somehow seen as separate from the economic policies, when the economics were really the cause of the dissent that caused unheeded violence.
The system spread to all over the world, until it was ensconced in the Western canon of developing all Third World countries, as the IMF and World Bank. Systems were put in place whereby any country needing emergency loans from the IMF could only get the money they needed to forestall complete and disastrous economic collapse by parcelling up all different aspects of their nation (water, electricity, industry) and selling it off to multinational corporations. Which led to the same things that happened in Latin America in the 70s.
Now, under George W. Bush, this radical doctrine of privatization has taken hold on the US government. The war in Iraq has been fought by mercenaries and contractors just as much as by troops. FEMA doesn’t actually have any responsibility for dealing with disaster, it’s just an organization to arrange contractors around whatever happens to be the disaster du jour.
This book really damns the Western economic systems that have taken power over the past 50 years. The financial system, multinational corporations, governments, Aid organizations (even NGOs) have all had their part to play in the dismantling of countless struggling nations, only to benefit a clique of super–rich governmental and corporate tycoons. An awfully depressing read, but thankfully it looks like things might be getting better: the US seems on the verge of economic collapse, developing nations almost universally now scorn the establishments of the IMF and World Bank. They’re looking back to where they were before this plague of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism overtook them: developmentalism as opposed to “barbarian capitalism.” Good luck to them, here are my notes.
This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective bodhy politic as well as on countless individual bodies. 18
Ewan Cameron ran a research program funded by the CIA at a canadian university in which he pioneered the idea of shock therapy—that by dramatically altering someone’s environment and submitting them to excessive shock of various forms, they could be brought to a state of mental infancy, from whence they could then be rebuilt into functioning citizens.
Like pro–war hawks who call for the bombing of countries “back to the stone age,” Cameron saw shock therapy as a means to blast his patients back into their infancy, to regress them completely. 32
The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative1, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci–fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. 38
1 When the program came to light in a class–action lawsuit by patients of Cameron against the CIA, the media sensationalized the fact that LSD was administered. They forgot to mention the rest of Cameron’s program.
Jose Padilla:
Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Instead of being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all tights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was infected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.
[…] The Cameron–style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.” The Bush–appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fir to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.–run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the accountability of a civillian trial. 44
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Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn 50
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Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed. 55
And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong–headed but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi–academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations, but, in short order, spawned the global network of right–wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers world–wide. 56
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Suharto then send out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated. 67
Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all–out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth. 86
All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. THere is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide–eyed knowing and eyes–closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did no know what nobody could deny.” 91
The Latin American operation was modeled on Hitler’s “Night and Fog.” In 1941, Hitler decreed that resistance fighters in Nazi–occupied countries would be brought to Germany to “vanish in the night and fog.” Several high–profile Nazis took refuge in Chile and Argentina, and there is some speculation that they may have trained the Southern Cone intelligence agencies in these tactics. 91
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Rodolfo Walsh, a gregarious renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award–winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion. 94
The letter [Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta] begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery… You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours ro check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.” 95
The day after writing the letter, on a trip to Buenos Aries to distribute copies around to dissidents was ambushed by 10 soldiers at a supposed meeting to discuss a disappeared colleague.
Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river. 96
The leaders of the government had explicitly called for Walsh to be captured alive.
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To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it a “war for freedom and against tyranny… a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life… We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise themselves with social crusades.” 96
Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands ad the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people. 102
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“the only transcendental theology: solidarity” —Osvaldo Bayer 112
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In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery. “It was as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered up the economic program,” Acuna told me. 125
To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all pervasive system. Simone de Beauvoir, 126
Foreign monopolies impose crops on us, they impose chemicals that pollute our earth, impose technology and ideology. All this through the oligarchy which owns the land and controls the politics. But we must remember—the oligarchy is also controlled, by the very same monopolies, the very same Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. It’s the structure we have to change. This is what I have come to denounce. That’s all. Sergio Tomasella, 127
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The Falklands War, described by Jose Luis Borges: “a fight between two bald men over a comb.” 137
This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self–reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export–oriented economies, the more crisis–prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of melt–downs he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. 159
That meant that when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions [The World Bank and the IMF] for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. 163
The principle was simple: countries in crisis desperately need emergency aid to stabilize their currencies. When privatization and free–trade policies are packaged together with a financial bailout, countries have little choice but to accept the whole package. The really clever part was that economists themselves knew that free–trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly “obfuscated.” […] “no significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis.” 165
In other words: “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”
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…not only did the ANC renege on Mandela’s original pledge of “the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry” but because of the debt [racked up by the pro–apartheid white government], it was doing the opposite—selling off national assets to make food in the debts of its oppressors. 212
In the end, South Africa has ended up witha twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise money for this generosity? By stripping the states of its assets through privatization—a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when t agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets, and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue today. 213
After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results are scandalous:
- Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
- Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
- Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.
215
Russia and Poland got the same shit deal South Africa did.
Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago–style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. 228
But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile—it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the west. 229
The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth—it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money. As the Moscow Times journalist Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein put it, “a few hand–picked men took over Russia’s state–developed oil fields for free, as part of a giant shell game in which one arm of government paid another arm.” […] In other words, the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country. 233
…quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick–start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia’s Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia’s institutions. 241
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Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medecine to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… THe blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the entire world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name. Davison Budhoo, 261
In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more tnat the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming–in–pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”
After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results to the country. 262
In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won. With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMG was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 270
(Before the IMF’s demands, two of the candidates had run openly anti–IMF campaigns.)
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When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty–first century—turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before. 284
From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash–in–the–pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture. 301
What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand–wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end. 306
“Ch 15: A corporatist state—removing the revolving door, putting in an archway.”
It’s hard to believe—but then again, that was pretty much Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks. 339
In other words, the U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage—there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti–state counterrevolution—a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.
I don’t quite know what that last clause means either. But the court decision referenced was that in which Custer Battles—a contractor accused of blatant fraudulent activities in Iraq—appealed and won on the grounds that the CPA was in fact not a government at all, that Iraq was in fact outside of US law (under which the initial verdict was reached), as well as outside whatever Iraqi system of governance was being put into place.
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Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and f that government had real power, Washing would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. […] Within his first six months in the job, he [Paul Bremer] had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.. 364
In the first three and a half years of occupation, and estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth–baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical current running from live wires. 366
That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction. 364
It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900–a–day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead. 375
In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government. 377
The law passed. But not at first, when people were paying attention: it wasn’t rammed through until the insurgency and surge started to cause so much violence that Iraqis had better things to worry about then legislation.
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It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and other like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami—it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arguam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumary said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.” 389
“Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests.” 399
Almost everyone I met commented on what one preist called “the NGO wild life”: high–end hotels, beachfront villas, and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand–new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the CHildren—as if they were visitors from a far–off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation, they were rolling microclimates. 403
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Blackwater has a 600 acre, $40-$50 million dollar compound in North Carolina. 416
When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the hob to one of its major contractors, MPRI—it no longer had the know–how in–house. 417
Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. 418
No Conspiracies Required:
The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous [than the current american conspiracies]. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short–term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis–creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot–com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower–intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). 426
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The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas [Developmentalism] were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled over by Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s, and Deng Xiaoping’s tanks. At other times, they were simply betrayed through what John Williamson called “voodoo politics.” […] It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place. 451
“barbarian capitalism” —Daniel Ortega 452
In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea of change in only two years. 457
So it’s like an actor. What does an actor do? He gives you a scene, and you read into it what the scene means to you. And that’s what he’s doing. It’s terrible, because what you read into it isn’t what’s going to happen, ‘cause he’s going to have the reality. The simplest one of all is we have a $50 to $70 trillion fiscal gap. There’s no money to do anything, never mind this imperialism, which is why there’s no money to do anything. Here. You recall that Hillary, Edwards, and Obama all said, when asked by Tim Russert, would you have the troops out of Iraq by the end of 2013? And all three of them equivocated, weren’t sure that they could do it. And then you heard just last night, oh, yeah; I’m going to start withdrawing them immediately. What are they talking about? Say one thing; say another thing. You know, withdrawing immediately, what does that mean? We’ll withdraw ten this month, and then I’m going to change my mind next month? It’s gross hypocrisy – is really what it is. It’s politics as usual, and that’s sad, because we’re at a turning point in ’08. If we continue with American imperialism, we’re done as a nation. Truly are.
All right america, we all know this is the guy we should elect as our next president. Now lets knock some sense into ourselves.
Greg Palast
I really don’t understand that a book like this could have been a NY Times bestseller, as it’s pimped on the cover, and not have seriously fucked with the way america operated before its publishing. But as you will no doubt have observed, Bush won again in 2004 the same way he did in 2000, if not downright illegally then contra-legally. Enron and WorldCom may have been made familiar with federal prosecutions, but that doesn’t reassure me there aren’t other companies out fleecing me for all I’m worth right now. The environment and the people who depend upon it most are still being fleeced by multinational corporations courting obscene profits.
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It must just be a profound coincidence that Kenya is, right now, dealing with what’s being looked upon as a civillian coup, a presidential election rigged by a “small group of hardline “leaders.” Considering certain elections in my great nation’s recent past, I see more similarities than differences. Of course it’s a good thing that 2000 and 2004 didn’t catalyze fighting in american streets. Of course what is happening in Kenya right now is beyond the terrible.
But is it overly hopeful to think seeds of a strong new democracy might be sowing themselves? While praying for a quick and bloodless resolution to whatever conflict may be to come in Kenya, is it uncouth to think that 200 years hence the long-time peaceful, solidly democratic populace of Kenya will look back on 2008 as the year they fought and won their own revolutionary war1? Again, I really don’t know anything, I’m only taking a contrarian viewpoint: could this fighting be the ultimate in patriotism? As overwhelming as the Civil War was to the US, there’s no doubt that it meant something to its future.
Surely now the world needs more peaceful and solid democracies. To hell with democracy, whatever form of government can engender a consistently peaceful and sustainable society gets my vote. I really can’t speak to whether the US fulfilled these goals in the past any better than we do today, but currently we’re far from being either at peace or sustainable. What are corruption, partisanship, greed, unnecessary war, and environmental destruction if not hallmarks of a violent and intolerable society. But hey, life really isn’t so bad. For me at least. I can’t speak for the Kenyans.
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Interrupting me writing this I went to shovel the driveway at my mom’s work. So afterwards at a cafe across the street sitting with my mom, sister, brother, and a piece of chocolate cake (my payment), I noticed a dour looking guy sitting in the corner one table away reading this exact book, which I though was fun. So I mentioned it to my family, and I’m pretty sure he heard me (I don’t know why you’d go alone to a cafe to sit in the corner and read, how does anyone concentrate enough to work/study/read in that environment?).
But as the conversation went on, it came to a business partner of my dad, a republican who at some point threw a fundraiser for Cheney and Bachman, inciting much titillation amongst the a DFL controlled Park Board with the privilege of giving the thumbs up or down to the project he and my Dad have been working on. Here political strife takes hold, the first guy being an idiot for holding such a fundraiser, the board being dickfaces for letting such trifles get in the way of a completely and totally unrelated decision2. I found myself accosting that most politicians, democrat and republican alike, should be shot3. This guy visibly squirmed. My little brother chimed in with the Jeffersonian The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. “It is it’s natural manure”:http://www.bartleby.com/73/1065.html.
. Really we should only shoot a few politicians, just throw the rest to the curb and try to start over. But I like the way we think.
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So quit the rambling. Here’s a book collecting essays and exposés that Palast, now an american-born investigative journalist has done over the years. “The most important investigative reporter of our time,” Palast has some good stuff. I know that America is messed up, and not just america, but the whole world. As I feebly understand it just boggles my mind. As a coping mechanism I like to radicalize myself, calming myself by thinking that it really can’t be this bad. Or looking at all the good things and rationalizing against them. (Would I give up the internet for world peace? I sure hope so, but the internet is so pretty!)
Palast makes it debilitatingly clear how real these radical concerns are, and he’s not just some crazy guy spewing doomsday prophecy, but he’s gone into all the filing cabinets and come away with real evidence to back up what he’s saying. These aren’t just theories or warnings, this is what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Uh-oh.
The US media is still peeing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. 5
I finally quit. It was dring my investigation of the Exxon Valdez crack-up. I was working for the Chugach natives of Alaska. Our team quickly discovered the oil spill was no accident: Before the tanker’s grounding, Exxon shuut off the ship’s radar to save money and a British Petroleum affiliate had faked the safety equipment reports. 7
There’s a whole bunch more on the Valdez later in the book.
Every newspaper in America reported that Florida bars ex-criminals from voting. As soon as every newspaper agrees, you can bet ir probably isn’t true. Someone wants the papers to believe this. It did not take long to discover that what everyone said was true was actually false: some ex-cons could vote, thousands in fact. I knew it… and so did Governor Jeb Bush.
A clerk in Jeb Bush’s office told Palast that: The courts tell us to do this [allow certain felons to vote as per state law] and we do that [not allow them to vote].
On page 49, Roberts talks about an interview he set up with Clayton Roberts, director of The Florida Division of Elections (underling to Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State). He had a document marked ‘confidential,’ which, when revealed, caused Roberts to jump and run off to his office. Camera rolling. The video is said to be on the BBC website, but looks like it’s been shuffled and lost. Dammit internet.
So a quick sum up of what Florida did: they hired a company, ChoicePoint of Atlanta (a database company), to sift through their records of felons vs. voters and provide Florida with a list of people that should be purged from the voter rolls. The confidential document mentioned above was a $2.3 million dollar contract between the two that specified these lists were to be verified by ChoicePoint, when both Mr. Roberts and Katherine Harris testified, under oath, that the verification was not actually up to ChoicePoint, but up to individual counties. Hmm. What actually happened was that paper was passed between the two parties informally saying something along the lines of: We want to bag as many black people as we can, because they’re almost guaranteed to vote democrat, and we don’t want that. Though not as directly.
And Florida used more than the voter purge in their “no-count” bag of tricks. In February 2001, I found a doozy.
This fact caught my attention: In a presidential race decided by 537 votes, Florida simply did not count 179,855 ballots. And whether your vote counted depended a lot on your color. In Leon, a primarily white county, only 1 in 500 ballots went uncounted, or “spoiled” as they say in the vote biz, that is, voided for one reason or another. In neighboring Gadsden, with a high population of black voters, 1 in 8 ballots was never counted. 62
Palast includes here a chart of 4 Florida counties with 25+% black population, 12, 7, 9, and 7% ballots uncounted and 4 white counties, 1, 3, 1, and 2%.
Her [Katherine Harris’s] office refuses to return their [unlawfully purged voters] civil rights. You can see her logic: What’s the use of stealing the 2000 race if you have to five it all back in 2002? Like a confessed bank robber who hides the loot and tells his victims, “It’s still mine suckers!” the stat is using every technical and legalistic trick in the book to keep illegally purged black registrations buried for good. 73
Next is from a new chapter printed with the second edition of the book, published in 2003. Palast calculates that at those rates according to Edley’s numbers, that’s 77,000 votes taken from Gore in Florida alone. Bush won the state, and thusly the race, by 537 votes. We have a winner.
Harvard law professor Chris Edley, a member of the Vivil Rights Commission, didn’t like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile and reported this deep inside the commission’s official findings: 14.4 percent of Black votes – one in seven – was “invalidated” in the state of Florida, never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of white voters’ ballots spoiled. 346
To put it into cold – chilling – numbers, approximately 1,007,000 Black voters cast ballots in 2000 that no one counted. 347
If Abdullah’s Bosnian operated “charity” was funding Chechnyan guerillas, it is only possible because the Clinton CIA gave the wink and nod to WAMY and other groups who were aiding Bosnian guerillas when they were fighting Serbia, a U.S.-approved enemy. “What we’re talking about,” says national security expert Joe Trento, “is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.” And, he could add, for the presidential father. 103
Where other US corporations throw a few million dollars into the political arena in the hopes of obtaining a few special favors, the Kochs have spent close to $100 million to change the entire tone of political discourse in America. 112
Regarding the abuse of child workers, I tried but failed to reach Wal-Mart’s former lawyer, Hilary Rodham. We now call her senator Clinton, but Sam just called her “my little lady” when he appointed her to the Wal-Mart board of directors, a well-paid honor left off her official White House biography.
Andrew Jackson ran for President on the platform of outlawing “Corporations”? 227
Public ownership of the Trade Center is no anomaly. Capitalization of corporations owned by the US federal government exceeds $2.85 trillion. Add to that state and local operations, like water systems, and the total invested in public enterprise elipses the stock market, making the United States one of the most socialized nations left on this sad planet. If you’re not American, you wouldn’t know that. And if you are, you probably wouldn’t know that either. There;s a lot you probably don’t know about America that would surprise you. 231
And yet in my home state of Minnesota, some fucker named Pawlenty won the election for governor by promising not to raise taxes. He didn’t. 5 years later, what happens?
The jury verdict on the Exxon-Valdez spill was $5 billion in damages. This was all to be paid to victims and put out to clean the shit up.
What you haven’t heard is that ExxonMobil hasn’t paid a dime of it. It’s been a decade since the trial. BP painted itself green and ExxonMovil decided to paint the White House with green: It’s the number-two lifetime donor to George W Bush’s career (after Enron) with a little splashed the Democrats’s way. The oil industry’s legal stalls, the “tort reform” campaigns and the generous investment in our democratic process has produced a Supreme Court and appeals pansls that look more like luncheon clubs of corporate consiglieri than panels of defenders of justice. In November 2001, following directives of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the jury verdict on grounds the punishment was too dear and severe for poor little ExxonMobil.
And so to this day all of $50 million has been paid. That’s 2%. Debts are settled. 266
To turn a quick buck, a slick line of academic hoodoo and some well-aimed campaign contributions will do the trick. Like Columbus bringing Indians back to the Old World for display, the power industry lobbyists brought Margaret Thatcher’s professors and their wheezing free market contraptions to California. In 1996, armed with the suspect calculations of well-compensated academics and inebriated with long draughts of utility political donations, the California legislature tossed out a regulatory system which, until then, had provided reasonably cheap, clean, reliable energy to the state.
In 1999, my parents sent me their bill from San Diego. Instead of the 20 percent savings promised by the law, in the first year of full deregulation, their energy charges rose 379 percent over the previous year. But before te big bills hit San Diego, the new planetary power merchants, using a combination of money, muscle, and Americans’ penchant to follow the Hula Hoop state, suckered twenty-three other states into adopting deregulation laws. 129
I’ll look for the link, but this is where a tape of a phone convo between Enron execs about sticking hot nails into old ladies eyes comes in. (No, I can’t remember the exact wording, but something to effect of gleefully screwing of the everyman in california.)
The March 19 Memo4 suggests “I may well be politically more acceptable to countries to accept international obligations which give primacy to economic efficiency.” This is an unsubtle invitation to load the GATS with requirements that rulers know their democratic parliaments could not accept. This would be supremely dangerous if, one day, the United States elected a president name Bush who wanted to shred air pollution rules. How convenient for embattled chief executives: what elected congresses and parliaments dare not do, GATS would require.
For example, as president – and previously as governor of Texas – George W Bush has fought to tear apart the one remaining effective control over corporate miscreants: the right of victims to sue corporations and executives that poison workers, kill consumers, and cook their books. As governor, Bush guided such so-called tort reform into Texas law in 1999, a favor to a business front group headed by Enron’s then-CEO Ken Lay. 171
I wonder if someone could sue for damages caused by their being denied the ability to sue for damages under these laws?
There are conspiracy ranks and paranoid anti-globalizers who imagine that the blueprints for WTO supranational control are designed in secret meetings between the planet’s corporate elite and government functionaries, with media leaders attending to adjust propaganda as ordered. They’re right. 173
Palast cites the LOTIS Committee.
TRIPS is the WTO‘s penal system for countries caught importing or exporting in contravention of marketing plans of corporations that own ideas.
The story of TRIPS Africa, and Argentina begins with this unfun fact: 25.3 million people in Southern Africa are going to die of AIDS unless medicine arrives now. Luckily, Brazil, India, and most aggressively, Argentina can make the necessary drugs dirt cheap and ship them to the dying. Bus US, British, and Swiss pharmaceutical giants howled about the proposed cross-border shipments.
During the Clinton administration, the US trade cops, led by then Vice President Al Gore and backed by Big Pharma, halted the life saving plan of selling cheap Argentine drugs to South Africans — Nelson Mandela’s pleas, Nobel Prize, and flowered shirts not withstanding. 185
Emphasis mine, but WHO THE FUCK can think, while in their right mind, that this is OK? How can profits stand above the lives of 25 million people. Even despite the fact that they not only have black skin, but also live on the poorest continent in the world.
Chávez moved to renationalize oil and rejected the sale of Venezuela’s water systems, while Argentina sold off everything including the kitchen-sink tap. Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research calculated that the loss of income from state businesses accounts for 100 percent of Argentina’s cavernous fiscal deficit. Argentina followed World Bank and WTO directions and sold off the banks and water companies owned by the state or Argentines to CitiBank, Enron, bank Santander, and Vivendi of the United States, Spain, and France. These swiftly vacuumed up Argentina’s hard currency reserves, setting the stage for the national bankruptcy at the first hint of speculator-driven currency panics. Imagine if Argentina had not sold off its oil companies on the cheap, or impoverished Ecuador had not dropped out of OPEC — they would today be wealthy, not wanting. 198
The Keystone Kops-style plot against Chávez by Venezuela’s military-industrial complex served Big Oil’s interests. But that’s an old-style shoot-‘em-up coup, likely to fail. The coup d‘états of the twenty-first century will follow the Argentine model, in which the international banks seize the financial lifeblood of a nation, making the official presidential titleholder merely inconsequential except as a factotum of the corporate agenda. 199
Amartya Sen is mentioned for being behind an economic scheme similar to that of Chávez in Venezuela, this in Kerala, India. My sister, excited to graduate with a global studies focus, has a huge crush on the guy for whatever reason. 204
It is estimated that one in eight American adults has worked at McDonald’s. This acts as a kind of moral instruction for the working class, as jail time does for ghetto residents. It is one reason behind America’s low unemployment rate. As my old professor Milton friedman taught me, unemployment falls when workers give up hope of higher pay. 301
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1 Probably, but then nobody reads this website anyway. My apologies to anyone that finds this speculation offensive. Of course war is terrible. I might wishfully be misconstruing tribal hate and primitive bloodlust for what I above clichéd “the seeds of democracy sowing themselves.” Although assuming there was any such hate or bloodlust would be so pointedly racist and completely unfair that I struggle to let myself write it. I have no idea what’s going on in Kenya (which I in fact can’t even type: I keep putting Kanya) beyond what I’ve read in a few newspaper articles. I just see an interesting parallel here.
2 The project is actually about installing electricity generating turbines into old mill waterways under what is now downtown Minneapolis, something one would think these democrats would be all about. But from what I hear there’s a rich group of riverside condo and apartment owners and developers who want to see nothing of the sort, which can’t help.
3 Republicans for being trite, petty, not to mention wrong, and democrats for being trite and petty, more of what they say makes sense to me.
4 Concerning the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a WTO plank:
considering the difficult matter of how to punish nations that violate “a balance between two potentially conflicting priorities: promoting trade expansion versus protection the regulatory rights of governments.”
Or in other words, making sure nobody causes too many problems for the superrich who’ve placed themselves in positions with enough power to influence the formation of this treaty by outlawing the shit they peddle to us at a great profit to them and equal vitiation to everything but the bottom line.
One of Minnesota’s senators voted for the hack surveillance bill. I was pissed.
How dare you capitulate to Bush in his demands that the 1978 FISA laws be rewritten to legalize the current administrations illegal unrestricted spying programs. The 4th amendment? Have you ever fucking read the thing?
There you go.
There comes a time when giving in to the demolition of constitutional protections can no longer be considered a matter of being weak or unthinking. Rather it must be considered complicity.Enough AlreadyBy making the crimes of Bush legal at his own behest, under his threats – to refuse your summer recess, and to ‘hold you responsible for whatever terrorist attacks may take place in the future – you’ve done little better than incriminate yourself. I’m pretty sure that at his inauguration he swore to uphold the constitution of the united states of america, and you the same. I don’t see how you can sleep at night, much less how you can sit in the chambers of the senate and pretend to be doing your job.
But hey, maybe it’s a good thing. Who knows how many catastrophic bridge collapses this administration will be able to prevent through their unadvised and unsupervised surveillance programs. Who knows how many structural engineers they’ll be able to send to Azkaban\d\d\d I mean Guantanamo.
The Azkaban reference is a bit much, but I thought it was funny.
Obama: 17
Edwards: 12
Clinton: 12
Richardson: 10
Biden: 9
Dodd: 8
Gravel: 7
Kucinich: 7
all candidates: 3
Youtube/CNN democratic debate
Wonder who the frontrunner is…
(As computed by, I do like this haskell version of a similar program.)
Joe Bageant
Wonderful bit of writing on the ignored population of America – poor whites. Living in small towns, working paycheck to paycheck, being born again and again into christianity, voting defacto republican, etc. They’re where Bush can draw enough of the electorate to have ever managed to b e our president, despite his utter incompetence. People for which it comes to pills or heating oil. I’ve met precious few of these.
Bageant can take a look at these people with better perspective than most, having grown up in the small town spotlighted in the book, where he lives for a second time. But between he’s been places, moving west, getting college educated, moving through hippy circles, living on the Coeur d’Alene indian reservation, and in big librul towns. He can love and understand these people, while wanting to smack them for the idiocy they’ve been raised into.
Bageant himself describes the book: “one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them.”
Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership’s agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzche was right “one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity — one must first be sick enough for it.” 190
Over the past twenty-five years a boatload of America’s for-profit hospitals migrated to nonprofit status because it is more profitable. 231
Liberal or Conservative, the average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. THe neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body’s natural opiates—endorphins, including beta-endorphins and enkephalin, all of which act on the same brain receptors as opiates. Other research shows suspension of critical-thinking skills. Meanwhile, we watch television pleasurably, believing we understand what we have watched, believing we are always in control of the experience and are not unduly influenced by it. 256
Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie [an actual person from Winchester] or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we revive the conditioning required to sustain out acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects og the corporate sponsored hologram. 262
I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum were trying to control my life. And then I went to Boulder and got rid of my Birkenstocks immediately, because everyone else had them and I realized that these people over here want to control my life too. I guess that defines my political philosophy. If anybody’s telling me what I should do, then you’ve got to really convince me that it’s worth doing.
Here’s a good one. I’m not so much for anything as I am against most things. Something to think about. Is this reasonable? It brings to mind a cynical, pessimist, ‘hey kids! off my damn lawn!’ sort of attitude – an attitude that I embrace in a lot of ways – but one that at the same time I feel a little guilty embracing.
Piece on Garry Trudeau, the guy behind Doonesbury. I’m not entirely sure why I clicked onto it, or why I started reading it, or why I kept reading it; but it did a good job of pulling me in.
It turns out he’s not afraid of publicity so much as he’s horrified at being perceived as the kind of person who wants publicity.
I can empathize with that. I’ve never been one to attract attention to myself. But one of the things I wonder all the time is whether I’m just fake timid1. I mean I have a fricking public journal up on the internet for anyone to read2. I go out and play soccer on a field in front of fans, and although I hate to death the thought that people are watching me, I do sort of like it.
So do I maybe try not to attract attention just because I’ve never been paid tremendous amounts of attention? Or do I tend to deflect whatever attention I do get, thereby discouraging it from coming? The chicken or the egg.
There’s a difference between reputation and image, Trudeau explains. “These get confused in people’s minds,” he says, but one involves character, the other public relations.
“I just refused to get entangled by issues of image maintenance that fame implied. I made a deliberate retreat from a publicly visible life.”
It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.
1 Here meaning that I don’t want too much publicity/attention focused upon me.
2 People can read it if they wish, but I haven’t ever told anyone about my site, it’s linked from a few other places. But I don’t at the moment have a link to it on facebook, where of my friends would likely find it.
If you google for me it comes up, and if you see my station11.net email address (I mostly use my umn.edu addy for stuff relating to school) you might be inclined to see what site that is. But otherwise, the only reason someone would come here is because google led them, and there’s ostensible something I’ve put down in which they have interest.
Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
What has happened that the Senate is willing to turn America from a bastion of freedom into a caldron of suspicion ruled by a Government of unchecked power?
There isn’t much that I can say.
At least 40,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past three years, with scores more murdered every day. Hospitals overflow with the wounded. Conditions are so bad, an estimated 1-million Iraqis have fled their homes for sanctuary in Jordan, Syria and Egypt. Iraqis, particularly middle-class families, who survived Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, are leaving en masse. Even Mr. Bush admits things are “terrible” in Baghdad.
Don’t you just love the smell of democracy in the morning?
The words “In God We Trust” were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy witch hunts.
The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them.
I quoted this previously in my notes on The Metaphysical Club, the quote just gets me so good that I haven’t forgotten it since.
Structuring voting districts so that your party the republicans can’t lose.
The post-modern ability the culture at large has adopted which has us giggling over abuses of power, sniggering at lies, whooping at war, and chortling at all the terrifying evidence of a country coming apart at the seems strikes me as irresponsible somehow.
I’ve already bought my pitchfork and set alight my torch. (Actually, what I mean is that I bitch alot on this website. And really all I do is copy and paste stuff that parallels my feelings. What dissent.)
I’m scared as all hell at the draft being reinstated, no way am I going off anytime soon to fight. But I absolutely see the points made below, think about it.
Without a draft, there’s really no antiwar movement, we’re willing to pay people to die for us. It doesn’t reflect very well on the character of our society. Charlie Moskos, professor of military sociology at Northwestern University
It shouldn’t be just the poor and the working poor who find their way into harm’s way. If the kids and grandkids of the president and the Cabinet and the Pentagon were vulnerable to going to Iraq, we never would have gone—no question in my mind. The closer this thing comes home to Americans, the quicker we’ll be out of Iraq. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D, NY
An anarchy is not the absence of government. It is the presence of a system which keeps the peace sufficiently well as to not allow any one entity to monopolize violence over entire regions (aka form a government).
Saudi Arabia gives us dollar for oil stability, we give them the 82nd airborne.
We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. Hugo Chávez
bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.
The case is made that Wellstone was assassinated. At this point in time, there isn’t much that I would put above the bush administration, or whatever shady cabal is currently heading our country. The case is made, and convincing enough for me. It’s hard for me to believe this sort of thing, but I think that I’m well on the way.
My willingness to take the assassination point of view does stem greatly from my bitter hate of the bush administration and my remorse over the death of Wellstone, so do watch out for the foam coming from my mouth.
An administration that would lie to send hundreds of thousands of young American men and women into harm’s way is not an administration that would hesitate to kill a single senator. 38
I sometimes feel like the authors fall back all to readily on the logical base they use to build up their arguments, that more emphasis is put upon the framework used to debunk than the actual debunking, but the motive alone of the Bush administration is enough to steer me right into the same conclusions. Further evidence gathered from eyewitnesses and inconsistencies in the established explanation only help firm things up in my head, and reduce my unwanted self image as that of a rabid nutcase conspiracy theorist.
...conspiracy theories have become a source of thrills for a bored subculture, one epitomized by its members’ reinterpretation of “accepted” history, deep cynicism about contemporary politics, and longing for some utopian future. 72
The last two fit me quite well, I would hope that not the first. I surely shouldn’t be bored, I have more things on my hands right now than I really want.
The further rigging of the NTSB’s ability to investigate plane crashes as criminal (the Attorney General can rule out terrorism as a possible cause in the NTSB’s investigation, further whatever the NTSB determines to be probable cause in a plane crash cannot be entered as evidence into a court of law. 132).
This sort of thing just makes my head hurt.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Republicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.
The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
The Marines who did the killing at Haditha will no doubt be scapegoated—like Lynnde England, of Abu Ghraib—for an unjustifiable and unwinnable war, created by venal politicians. If we’re to punish anyone for Haditha, we should start with President Bush and the congressmen, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who sent Roel Briones and Kilo Company on a murder-suicide mission in which there can be no justice.
I actually think this is the first thing bush has done that I can agree with. (How many months until the next election?)
Holes in the ozone the size of Brazil
Barges of trash in the chewable breeze
Pools of industrial wasteland paté
Sulfur dioxide dissolving the trees
Pretty soon it will all end with a boom
Why am I painting the living room?
Best song ever.
America is massively broken:
The inmates are running the asylum.
We all do indeed.
When you are that wrong, when you are defending Nazi war criminals and pinning their crimes on Americans and you get caught doing so twice, you’re supposed to say I’m sorry, I was wrong, and then you’re supposed to shut up for a long time. Instead, FOX washed its transcript of O’Reilly’s remarks Tuesday. Its Web site claims O’Reilly said in Normandy, when, as you heard, in fact, he said in Malmedy.
The rewriting of past reporting worthy of George Orwell has now carried over into such online transcription services as Burell’s and Factiva. Whatever did or did not happen later in supposed or actual retribution, the victims at Malmedy were Americans, gunned down while surrendering by Nazis in 1944 and again Tuesday night and Wednesday night by a false patriot who would rather be loud than right.
America is in the hands of half retarded criminal pigs. What am I gonna do about it? Sit here and foam at the mouth?
I would like to quickly encourage any and all terrorists who may be out there to aim their bombs toward the desk of Bill O’Reilly. Fucking maniac. He says that american young’uns are being indoctrinated with tolerance, diversity, and secular values, and that it’s a bad thing. Who’s to blame? Our bomb throwing entertainers (John Stewart and the Dixie Chicks) and the pop media that fawns to them. Watch the video, I’m not even sensationalizing the shit he says. He actually used the term bomb throwing entertainers.
That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.
We need a law passed condemning the phrase fair and balanced as outright farcical mania. Seriously america, go fuck yourself and maybe you’ll come back with a bit of sense.
Nader speaking with Pat Buchanan, towards disenchanted conservatives, june 21 of 2004.
They’re almost all puppets. There are two sets: Congressional puppets and White House puppets. When the chief puppeteer comes to Washington, the puppets prance.
Well, that is what representative government is for, to counteract the excesses of the monied interests, as Thomas Jefferson said. Because big business realizes that the main countervailing force against their excesses and abuses is government, their goal has been to take over the government, and they do this with money and politics.
Let’s put it this way: it is impossible to exaggerate the dereliction of diligence in the Congress.
The point is this: work should be taxed the least. Then you move to wealth, and then you move to things we do not like. And you will have more than enough to replace the taxes of under $100,000 income and to provide for universal health insurance and decent public transit and to repair the public-works infrastructure.
Invade Venezuela.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.
Sources within the gov’t leak to reporters that the gov’t is breaking the law. The gov’t is mad. The gov’t claims not to be breaking the law. The gov’t refuses to allow any investigation of said law-breaking. The gov’t breaks the same law in the same way to discover which of it’s members originally leaked that the gov’t was breaking the law.
More sources leak to more reporters that the gov’t is more and more egregiously breaking the law, fostering more and more illegal activity, and thusly more egregious leaking of it’s illegal activities. Is anybody else’s head spinning yet? FBI Acknowledges: Journalists’ Phone Records are Fair Game
Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back. Howard Zinn, before we went into Iraq
Forget about Seals and Polar Bears. Even without taking the environment into account, drilling ANWR doesn’t make ONE OUNCE OF FUCKING SENSE. (à moins que vous êtes Halliburton, mais tant pis).
In a rightful binge of documentation, I went right from Why we Fight to The Power of Nightmares, written and directed by Adam Curtis and produced by the BBC.
Curtis explains how radical islam and neoconservativism have both arisen from disenchantment with mid 20th century liberalism. The liberal idea of the great society had failed, leaving people the world around empty and vapid, but without comprehension of their meaninglessness. The two groups may be construed as enemies, but really live and die in each others arms.
The conception of the west as a possibly a negative influence on islam society was conjectured by an egyptian studying for a time in small town 50s america. Islamists sought to overcome the western influence beginning to be exerted upon the middle east by the western powers. The Jahiliya, or reversion to pre-Mohammed ideals in the arab populace.
Neocons wanted to found America anew upon the foundation of myth, namely that of freedom. Reservations about modern liberal society led Leo Strauss to philosophize that liberal politics led directly to nihilism, and for a nation to generate meaning in the world it needed to be bound by a greater good than that of the individual. Freedom, and it’s deliberate proliferation by America.
When arab freedom fighters and american neocons colluded to expel the soviets from afghanistan, the religious fantasies of both islamists and neocons were fulfilled. The americans championed their freedom and the mujahideen their islam. The policies of american invasion continued, and the islamists embarked upon a terribly circular and deadly struggle to turn democratic middle eastern states to strictly islam governance.
With the failure of islamists to construct islam nations by means of aggressively killing those nations populace and undermining whatever support they may have had to begin with, they decided to mount an attack on the greater destructive force – america.
With terrorism focused on american embassies and culminating in 9/11, neocon politicians had stumbled upon a mightily persuasive societal myth1 – that of a coherent structure of terrorists, bent not only on the destruction of america, but also of freedom, the neocon idea of a greater good, the glue they needed to keep america from degeneration.
But Curtis asserts that such a structure doesn’t exist in reality. It is only a powerful tool leveraged by politicians, affording them power beyond that which their constituencies would otherwise grant them. Al-Qaeda is no more than a name given to a fantasized organization imagined by the american government in 2001, in an effort to prosecute Bin Laden under laws written decades earlier to prosecute mafia crime.
This inexistent notion of a coherent and stable terrorist rebellion against the powers of freedom and liberty have led america into a disillusioned and myopic state of affairs, trusting unprecedented powers to those who monger said nightmares to an overly sedated populace.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda. Whilst the 20th century was dominated between a conflict between a free-market Right and a socialist Left, even though both of those outlooks had their limitations and their problems, at least they believed in something, whereas what we are seeing now is a society that believes in nothing. And a society that believes in nothing is particularly frightened by people who believe in anything, and, therefore, we label those people as fundamentalists or fanatics, and they have much greater purchase in terms of the fear that they instill in society than they truly deserve. But that
WTF? I thought there we already had a May 1st holiday...
The President was upset? Good. I hope the President was sleepless with rage. At least then he’d know how most of us have been spending every night for the last three years.
I think the whole thing is a little overblown. Colbert didn’t even accuse the president of killing thousands. But better than nothing I guess.
Bush stole the election(s), I wish I could say people are starting to realize it. The 1+ year old Conyers report (dated 05 January 2005), detailing all of the electoral transgressions that took place in Ohio last election.
Mercenaries hired by FEMA to police settlements of Katrina victims won’t let interviews happen.
AMY GOODMAN: We were going in the car, and he said, “Please interview me.”
SECURITY GUARD: Yeah, he—he can’t. That
(A letter to my representatives in government)
Network Neutrality: “in order to promote innovation, network service providers such as telephone and cable internet companies should not be permitted to dictate how those networks are used (i.e., not permitted to ban certain types of programs, to ban certain types of devices connecting to the network, or to favor carriage of traffic to certain web sites over others).” (from wikipedia)
If the above was a bit much for you, and I’m indeed hoping that this isn’t being read by some intern, watch a quick introductory movie on the issue. Here’s a link which is likely to be much more coherent then my letter; and here’s a whole collection of material on the issue.
The crux of things is that:
