Colonized by Corporations

Colonized by Corporations

By Chris Hedges
Common Dreams.org
May 14, 2012

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter
called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.”

In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt,
the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury
on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a
despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own
political class.

The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls
the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity
of colonial oppression.

The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns
between candidates who each are servants of colonial power,
Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing
the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people.

Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never
seriously addressed.

“The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent
those few who are prone toward political action from organizing
into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer
the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We
have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized.

We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty
to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism
are traitors.

They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and
enrich themselves at our expense.

The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the
Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon
called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans.

The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to
subsistence level.

The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as
labor unions, are dismantled.

The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a
superior education.

Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well
as criminalize dissent.

And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend
by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment
benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy
toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney
or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an
attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates,
but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political
process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks.

It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance
to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate
power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to
foster the common good.

But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must
accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed.

We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of
our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure
itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor.

The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do
not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become
cannon fodder.

The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals,
those educated middle-class men and women who are barred
by a calcified system from advancement.

Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms,
lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists
without newspapers descend economically.

They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge
between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they
are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite.

What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between
what people expect from their lives and what is offered.
This is especially acute among the educated and the talented.

They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied
what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And
the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying
is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to
ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student
debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of
power.

Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that
perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America,
Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from
déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or
middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their
professional and personal aspirations.

They were never part of the power elite, although often their
parents had been. They were conversant in the language of
power as well as the language of oppression.

It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that
makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United
States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil
and JPMorgan Chase.

They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the
uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of
corporations by the public relations industry.

These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in
economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power,
real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the
criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power
structure.

He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white
power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of
economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view.

Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until
we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us,
with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than
useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said.

“When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free,
and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe
that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy,
brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re
my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe
you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a
Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that
enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed.

They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat
into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They
devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as
possible.

They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly
disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of
Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers.

The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This
is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes.

Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of
nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do
to their shareholders.

A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own
longevity.

It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to
ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face
of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for
years,” Alexander Herzenwrote, “but it is hard for them ever to
lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession
of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people."

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the
elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because
they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets
charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with
protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a
decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress
rehearsal in 1905.

The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution,
have been largely nonviolent.

There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and
assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages,
more than help revolutions.

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution
condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only
demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers
and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests.

The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather
Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army
arose in the ferment of the 1960s.

Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression.
They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the
goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an
isolated and discredited ruling class.

These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for
personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence,
but they do little to advance the cause.

The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien
Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions.

They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow
revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of
the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in
building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the
widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for
justice and fairness that is essential to all successful
revolutionary movements.

The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not
go away.

It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of
the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems
of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through
habit, routine and inertia.

The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed
experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites,
are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements.

They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors.
They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The
assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult
for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly
hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival.

Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle
of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is
almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon
wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.”

“When they are presented with evidence that works against that
belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a
feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive
dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core
belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that
doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the
organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon
the elites and join the revolutionaries.

This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter
how sophisticated the repressive apparatus.

Once those who handle the tools of repression become
demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent.

Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in
minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported
leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death.

Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies
comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little
or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as
was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia.

At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back,
the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American
Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including
George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army.

Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by
Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as
Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount
widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda
and acts of civil disobedience.

The object is to try to get there without violence.

Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us,
are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs.

Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik
wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.”

And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of
victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution,
a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct
all our energy and commitment.

If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be
destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it.

The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we
are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and
only hope.

The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the
parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the
1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes
in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours.

Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time
or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your
polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just
enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get
back out onto the street.

That is where the question of real power is being decided.


Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/14-3

Alienation and Solidarity

Alienation and Solidarity

By Scott Thompson
Occupy Saint Paul
May 06, 2012

Alienation is the defining feature of our whole civilization, and
it operates on multiple levels- the mind is alienated from the
body, both are alienated from the spirit, people are alienated
from the natural world, races and classes and subcultures are
alienated from each other, neighbors are alienated from neighbors
and family members from other family members.

Everything and everyone is atomized, split into discrete pieces,
objectified and analyzed, exploited and manipulated.

A world like that is a dead world, a world where everything is
just an object, a piece of property or a resource or a useful tool.

A world like that has no humanity.

So it's no surprise that in a world like that, many people would
define freedom in strictly negative terms, the freedom to not be
interfered with while you are trying to acquire more property and
resources.

When you play “Monopoly,” just one person wins. When you play
“Risk,” just one person wins.

The problem with seeing the whole world as a competitive game
is that almost everyone is going to lose.

A tiny elite will end up with almost everything, a larger number will
have enough to be comfortable only if they devote their entire lives
to maintaining the status quo and defending a system that defines
them as losers just because they didn't succeed in clawing their way
to the top.

The vast majority of people in the world will be left with little or
nothing, struggling for mere survival and viciously blamed for their
own poverty.

This imbalance is what we fight against, but it's just a symptom.
The cause of the problem is alienation, the multifaceted alienation
that defines our culture.

Just try to imagine a society where people weren't alienated from
other people or from the planet they live on or from their own
bodies or from their spirits.

Wouldn't it look almost completely different than what we have
now?

The word “radical” comes from Latin, and it originally implied
getting to the roots of a matter.

If the root of what is wrong with our world is alienation, then the
most radical thing we can possibly do is to refuse to be alienated,
the most revolutionary thing we can do is to challenge the
alienation all around us, and the one thing we can do that most
deeply and directly challenges the status quo is to stand together
in solidarity.

The defining worldview of any culture is invisible to most of the
people in that culture; it's like water to a fish.

That's why Occupy confuses people.

They think of us as a protest movement when protest is actually
just one part of what we do and not really the defining part.

They ask us why we don't have a leadership structure because
they mistake us for an organization and think we're just a poorly-
organized activist group.

They ask us why we don't have a list of demands because they
don't realize that such a thing wouldn't really be possible-
there's no orthodoxy or uniformity of opinion among us that
would allow us to issue such a convenient list.

They miss the central point of what we're doing, which is right
there in the name: we're Occupying space together, in multiple
different ways.

Sometimes in an encampment, sometimes in an abandoned
building, sometimes in a house threatened by foreclosure,
sometimes in a library or a cafe, and sometimes on the street.

We're Occupying space together so that we can hear each other
talk, so we can share a meal or exchange ideas or stand together
to resist a wrong.

We're Occupying space together, and it's changing all of us.

Never in my entire life have I spent time with such a wide range
of different people as I have in Occupy. People of different classes
and races and ages and sexual identities.

Most of the people I work with in Occupy are people I would
never have had a reason to socialize with outside of it.

Their life experiences are different from mine. They don't read the
same books I read or listen to the same music I listen to. They don't
look like I do.

When I spend time with people who do listen to the music I listen to
or read the same books I read, it's a fun experience.

When I stand side by side in solidarity with people who don't have
these obvious and superficial things in common with me, it's a life-
changing experience.

When I link arms with a person I don't even know so that we can
help another person we don't know to stay in his or her home, it's
a revolutionary experience, because it's a shared refusal to be
alienated.

We're not always that good at solidarity; we still have a lot to
learn about how to hear each other and how to treat each other
respectfully.

But let's not forget what we're here for and what makes Occupy
so promising and so exhilarating.

We could make a list of our ten favorite reforms and win them all,
but if we failed to address the alienation at the core of our culture
then we would not have fixed anything.

In the end, we would just end up creating the same mess all over
again.

Let's dare to be radical in the original sense of the word, let's dare
to look deep enough to see the roots of the problem.

Let's refuse alienation.


Scott Thompson is Writer and Media Team Member with Occupy
Saint Paul.

Why Are We Striking?

Or to Put it Another Way – What’s Wrong with the World?

By Mike David
Information Clearing House
Thursday, May 03, 2012

Of course, most of us know what’s wrong with the world. We
know about the poverty, war, violence and disease.

We’re conscious of the injustice, but not fully conscious of it,
because frankly, we have enough to worry about in our own lives.

As such, we’ve come to accept these injustices as simple facts of
life – prepackaged side effects of the human condition, as natural
and intertwined with our existence as water to a stream, beyond
our capacity to effect in any significant way.

This collective sense of powerlessness and default apathy is why
we’re striking.

Our growing sense of isolation and disconnection, whether from
ourselves, from those next door to us, or from those producing our
food and products halfway across the globe, is why we’re striking.

Our forced support of perpetual war waged for and by the 1% -
whether explicitly with speech, or implicitly with inaction and tax
dollars - without ever paying mind to the true causes and motives
behind it, is why we’re striking.

Our failure up til now to connect the dots and realize that
the benefits of a cheap iPod, lovely as it may be, would be
far outweighed by the benefits of a truly just world free of
exploitation, is why we’re striking.

The fact that most of us are too busy being exploited to realize
we’re being exploited – too busy greasing the cogs of our economic
system to notice how the fruits of our labor never fail to float up
and out of our reach - is why we’re striking, as is the fact that most
aren’t able to do anything about this exploitation even when we do
notice it.

While some of us are lucky enough to have jobs and careers that
give real meaning to our lives, allowing us to take full advantage
of our talents and fulfill our destiny, most of us have jobs devoid
of meaning and dignity, yet full of the feeling that we are fulfilling
someone else’s destiny.

Our recognition that the ruling class’s seat at the top of the
pyramid is prepared and propped up by the working class is
why we’re striking.

Our knowledge that it’s actually the CEO who is the most
dependent among us, and that the ones truly indispensable
to our society are not bankers, lobbyists and politicians,
but workers, teachers and engineers, is why we’re striking.

Indeed, the fact that we have an economic system which
functions in the same manner as a virus is why we’re striking.

Just as a virus’s only reason for existence is to expand, without
regard or awareness of the effect of its expansion on its host body,
our economic system pursues its infinite expansion without regard
or awareness of its effect on human welfare or the environment.

Though the earth is finite, it is sustainable, so we reject, in
the words of Michael Nagler, “the inherent contradiction of an
economy based on indefinitely increasing wants – instead of on
human needs that the planet has ample resources to fulfill.”

We’re striking because we also reject the notion that selfishness
must be the driving force in our world.

We believe, contrary to propaganda, that most people in our world
are not selfish, and would rather work together than constantly
compete against each other.

We believe that the only people who really care about things like
power, corporate monopolies and global dominance only make up,
say, 1% of the population, making it seem only logical that we
should have an economic system which reflects the values of the
99% of us who don’t care about such things.

The fact that most of the decisions which have a profound impact
on how we go about our daily lives are made by folks in Washington
or Wall Street, rather than in our communities by the people
actually affected by those decisions, is why we’re striking.

The fact that power rests only with those who lust after it is
why we’re striking.

We’re striking because another notion we don’t buy into is the
presumption that the profit motive can have no outcome other
than the best possible one.

We understand that the success of McDonald’s has nothing to do
with having the best burger, and everything to do with having the
most cutthroat business plan.

We understand that building prisons, waging wars, polluting the
environment, and paying employees inadequate wages are actually
quite profitable.

Sustainability, economic justice and true equality? Not so much.

We understand that being ruthless and unscrupulous is an
economic advantage, and being truthful and virtuous is an
economic disadvantage.

We understand that money is treated as more natural and
inviolable as nature itself, and that too often our place and
perceived value in society is determined solely by how much
of it we make, or how much of it we make for someone else.

We understand that, whether or not you believe in climate
change, our ability to adequately address it or any other
pressing issue is greatly compromised when our shortsighted
need for profit skews our vision of the whole.

We’re striking to suggest new motives and new values going
forward.

The fact that you might not have known why we’re striking,
and you didn’t get and maybe still don’t get what Occupy
Wall Street is about, is why we’re striking.

And who can blame you?

Just like you don’t have the time or energy to really do anything
about the world’s problems, you probably don’t have the time or
energy to do the deep digging required to get your news from any
source other than the corporate outlets conveniently floating on
the surface.

It’s understandable that you wouldn’t see the inherent conflict
of interest of a handful of for-profit corporations with their own
interests telling the world’s story to the majority of people in
this country.

The fact that it’s so hard to be truly informed, and that it’s in the
1%’s interest for the majority of us to be uninformed, is why we’re
striking.

The fact that it’s entirely possible you could go about your day
today and not hear a thing about the general strike, is why we’re
striking.

To counter the charge that it’s unrealistic, and overly idealistic, to
want to bring about real change in our world, as well as the trusty
“life isn’t fair” rationale always used to justify injustice, is why
we’re striking.

We didn’t accept that line of reasoning during the civil rights
movement, and we don’t accept it now.

We think it’s far more unrealistic to think that a small cadre of
elites will be able to keep up their never-ending pursuit of power
consolidation and mass manipulation without waking us up in the
process.

We think it’s far more unlikely that in 1000 years, humanity will
still be playing this game of perpetual one-upmanship, instead
of picking up the far more efficient and beneficial manner of
interacting with each other in honesty, cooperation and genuine
respect.

Perhaps the biggest reason we’re striking is to simply exercise
that ever-cherished American value of freedom.

Just as our business leaders are free to use every means at their
disposal to maximize profit, we are free to use every means at
our disposal to maximize the realization of whatever objective
we feel is worth pursuing.

And by the way, even if you don’t support the Occupy movement,
whatever you think the Occupy movement is about, we respect
your view, because another reason we’re striking has to do
with our political system – the way it thrives and prospers
by pitting us against ourselves, encouraging us to demonize
each other while discouraging us from disagreeing civilly.

The fact that this post is completely and utterly inadequate in
expressing why we’re striking, is why we’re striking.

But that’s OK, because like May 1st, this post is just the beginning.


Mike David is an occupier in San Francisco. He blogs at www.primitivetimes.com

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31215.htm

Unexceptionalism: A Primer

Unexceptionalism: A Primer

By E. L. Doctorow
New York Times
April 30, 2012

TO achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would
render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished,
traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the
world, do the following:

PHASE ONE

If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, ignore the first sacrament
of a democracy and suspend the counting of ballots in a presidential
election.

Appoint the candidate of your choice as president.

If you’re the newly anointed president, react to a terrorist
attack by invading a nonterrorist country.

Despite the loss or disablement of untold numbers of lives,
manage your war so that its results will be indeterminate.

Using the state of war as justification, order secret surveillance
of American citizens, data mine their phone calls and e-mail,
make business, medical and public library records available to
government agencies, perform illegal warrantless searches of
homes and offices.

Take to torturing terrorism suspects, here or abroad, in violation
of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the
infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.

Unilaterally abrogate the Convention Against Torture as well as
the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of
war.

Commit to indeterminate detention without trial those
you decide are enemies.

For good measure, trust that legislative supporters will
eventually apply this policy as well to American citizens.

Suspend progressive taxation so that the wealthiest pay
less proportionately than the middle class.

See to it that the wealth of the country accumulates to a small
fraction of the population so that the gap between rich and poor
widens exponentially.

By cutting taxes and raising wartime expenditures, deplete
the national treasury so that Congress and state and municipal
legislatures cut back on domestic services, ensuring that
there will be less money for the education of the young, for
government health programs, for the care of veterans, for the
maintenance of roads and bridges, for free public libraries,
and so forth.

Deregulate the banking industry so as to create a severe recession
in which enormous numbers of people lose their homes and jobs.

Before you leave office add to the Supreme Court justices like the
ones who awarded you the presidency.

PHASE TWO

If you’re one of the conservative majority of a refurbished Supreme
Court, rule that corporations, no less than human beings, have the
right under the First Amendment to express their political point of
view.

To come to this judgment, do not acknowledge that corporations
lack the range of feelings or values that define what it is to be
human.

That humans can act against their own interest, whereas
corporations cannot act otherwise than in their own interest.

That the corporation’s only purpose is to produce wealth,
regardless of social consequences.

This decision of the court will ensure tremendous infusions of
corporate money into the political process and lead to the election
in national and state legislatures of majorities of de facto corporate
lobbyists.

PHASE THREE

Given corporate control of legislative bodies, enact laws to
the benefit of corporate interests.

For example, those laws sponsored by weapons manufacturers
wherein people may carry concealed weapons and shoot and
kill anyone by whom they feel threatened.

Give the running of state prisons over to private corporations
whose profits increase with the increase in inmate populations.

See to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American.

When possible, treat immigrants as criminals.

Deplete and underfinance a viable system of free public schools
and give the education of children over to private for-profit
corporations.

Make college education unaffordable.

Inject religious precepts into public policy so as to control
women’s bodies.

Enact laws prohibiting collective bargaining. Portray trade
unions as un-American.

Enact laws restricting the voting rights of possibly unruly
constituencies.

Propagandize against scientific facts that would affect
corporate profits.

Portray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists.

Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with
these measures, portray the federal government as unwieldy,
bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals.

Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry
to support this view.

PHASE FOUR

If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, decide that the police
of any and all cities and towns and villages have the absolute
authority to strip-search any person whom they, for whatever
reason, put under arrest.

With this ruling, the reduction of America to unexceptionalism is
complete.


E. L. Doctorow is the author, most recently of the novel “Homer
and Langley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/unexcep
tionalism-a-primer.html?_r=1

Patriot or Profiteer

You can be a Patriot or a Profiteer...But you can’t be Both

By Robert Greenwald
Disinformation
April 28, 2012

This week, the three military contractors that do the most
business with the Pentagon announced their quarterly profits
for 2012.

Their profits continue to grow while they push Washington,
D.C. to protect their budgets at the expense of the rest of us.

Here’s the breakdown so far for this year:

Lockheed Martin: $668 million

Northrop Grumman: $506 million

Boeing: $923 million

This week’s announcement raises a fundamental question: Should
people and companies be allowed to make huge profits from war?

Even raising this question in today’s environment may seem trite,
but we used to have different answers than those that prevail in
modern-day Washington, D.C.

“I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the
United States as a result of this world disaster.” President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 22, 1940.

“Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to
the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while
patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their
countrymen mouldering the dust.” –President Abraham Lincoln.

This last quote is particularly relevant to this week’s profit
announcements.

Lincoln referred to war profiteers making money by cheating
the Union Army. Outrage at war profiteering during this period
led to the passage of “Lincoln’s Law,” officially known as the
False Claims Act.

The False Claims Act is the very same law that two of the
companies listed above, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, violated
through price-fixing and double-billing the taxpayer, leading
to their having to pay roughly $20 million in the first quarter
of 2012 to settle suits brought by the U.S. government.

During Roosevelt’s time, the idea of a single contractor company
making almost a billion dollars worth of profit in three months
would have received short shrift.

As Roosevelt’s quote above shows, the idea of people profiting
from war’s “disaster” disgusted him, and during his presidency
the Truman Committee relentlessly investigated and exposed
war profiteers.

The closest analogy in our time would be the Committee on
Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which found
that up to $60 billion (as of September 2011) was lost to
waste and fraud in military contracting in those conflicts.

And yet, despite this historical lack of patience for war
profiteering, and despite the current record showing gross
misconduct and waste, the U.S. government keeps shoveling
taxpayer money at these huge corporations.

Could it be that the $5 million in campaign donations and
$32 million in lobbying dollars so far this election cycle from
the military contractors keep Congress intentionally ignorant
of the problem?

President George Washington knew a few things about war
profiteers, and he didn’t mince words:

“There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]…that it
is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so
little virtue and patriotism.”

As long as we continue to allow the profit motive to play a role in
America’s war, virtue and patriotism–to say nothing of peace–will
continue to be in short supply.

http://www.disinfo.com/2012/04/you-can-be-a-patriot-or-a-
profiteer-but-you-cant-be-both/

How Liberty Was Lost

How Liberty Was Lost

By Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

When did things begin going wrong in America? “From the
beginning,” answer some.

English colonists, themselves under the thumb of a king,
exterminated American Indians and stole their lands, as
did late 18th and 19th century Americans.

Over the course of three centuries the native inhabitants of
America were dispossessed, just as Israelis have been driving
Palestinians off their lands since 1948.

Demonization always plays a role. The Indians were savages
and the Palestinians are terrorists.

Any country that can control the explanation can get away
with evil.

I agree that there is a lot of evil in every country and civilization.
In the struggle between good and evil, religion has at times been
on the side of evil.

However, the notion of moral progress cannot so easily be thrown
out. Consider, for example, slavery.

In the 1800s, slavery still existed in countries that proclaimed
equal rights. Even free women did not have equal rights.

Today no Western country would openly tolerate the ownership of
humans or the transfer of a woman’s property upon her marriage
to her husband.

It is true that Western governments have ownership rights in the
labor of their citizens through the income tax. This remains as a
mitigated form of serfdom. So far, however, no government has
claimed the right of ownership over the person himself.

Sometimes I hear from readers that my efforts are pointless, that
elites are always dominant and that the only solution is to find
one’s way into the small, connected clique of elites either through
marriage or service to their interests.

This might sound like cynical advice, but it is not devoid of some
truth. Indeed, it is the way Washington and New York work, and
increasingly the way the entire country operates.

Washington serves powerful private interests, not the public
interest.

University faculties in their research increasingly serve private
interests and decreasingly serve truth. In the US the media is
no longer a voice and protection for the people.

It is becoming increasingly impossible in America to get a good
job without being connected to the system that serves the elites.

The problem I have with this “give up” attitude is that over
the course of my life, and more broadly over the course of the
20th century, many positive changes occurred through reforms.

It is impossible to have reforms without good will, so even
the elites who accepted reforms that limited their powers
were part of the moral progress.

Labor unions became a countervailing power to corporate
management and Wall Street. Working conditions were
reformed. Civil rights were extended. People excluded
by the system were brought into it. Anyone who grew up
in the 20th century can add his own examples.

Progress was slow–unduly so from a reformer’s standpoint–and
mistakes were made. Nevertheless, whether done properly or
improperly there was a commitment to the expansion of civil
liberty.

This commitment ended suddenly on September 11, 2001.

In eleven years the Bush/Obama Regime repealed 800 years of
human achievements that established law as a shield of the people
and, instead, converted law into a weapon in the hands of the
government.

Today Americans and citizens of other countries can, on the
will of the US executive branch alone, be confined to torture
dungeons for the duration of their lives with no due process
or evidence presented to any court, or they can be shot down
in the streets or exterminated by drone missiles.

The power that the US government asserts over its subjects
and also over the citizens of other countries is unlimited.

Lenin described unlimited power as power “resting directly
on force, not limited by anything, not restricted by any laws,
nor any absolute rules.”

Washington claims that it is the indispensable government
representing the exceptional people and thereby has the
right to impose its will and “justice” on the rest of the
world and that resistance to Washington constitutes
terrorism to be exterminated by any possible means.

Thus, the American neoconservatives speak of nuking
Iran for insisting on its independence from American
hegemony and exercising its rights to nuclear energy
under the non-proliferation treaty to which Iran is a
signatory.

In other words, Washington’s will prevails over international
treaties that have the force of law, treaties which Washington
itself imposed on the world.

According to the neoconservatives and Washington, Iran
is not protected by the legal contract that Iran made with
Washington when Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty.

Iran finds itself as just another 17th or 18th century American
Indian tribe to be deprived of its rights and to be exterminated
by the forces of evil that dominate Washington, D.C.

The vast majority of “superpower” americans plugged into the
Matrix, where they are happy with the disinformation pumped
into their brains by Washington and its presstitute media, would
demur rather than face my facts.

This raises the question: how does one become unplugged and
unplug others from the Matrix? Readers have asked, and I do not
have a complete answer. It seems to happen in a number of ways.

Being fired and forced to train your H-1B foreign replacement who
works for lower pay, being convicted of a crime that you did not
commit, having your children stolen from you by Child Protective
Services because bruises from sports activities were alleged to be
signs of child abuse, your home stolen from you because a mortgage
based on fraud was given the force of law, laid off by “free market
capitalism” as your age advanced and the premium of your
employer-provided medical insurance increased, being harassed by
Homeland Security on your re-entry to the US because you are a
non-embedded journalist who reports truthfully on US behavior
abroad.

There are many instances of Americans being jolted into reality
by the “freedom and democracy” scales falling away from their
eyes.

It is possible that becoming unplugged from the Matrix is a gradual
lifelong experience for the few who pay attention. The longer they
live, the more they notice that reality contradicts the government’s
and media’s explanations.

The few who can remember important stuff after watching reality
shows and their favorite sports teams and fantasy movies gradually
realize that there is no “new economy” to take the place of the
manufacturing economy that was given away to foreign countries.

Once unemployed from their “dirty fingernail jobs,” they
learn that there is no “new economy” to employ them.

Still seething from the loss of the Vietnam War and anger at
war protesters, some flag-waving patriots are slowly realizing
the consequences of criminalizing dissent and the exercise of
First Amendment rights.

“You are with us or against us” is taking on threatening instead of reassuring connotations, implying that anyone who opens his or her mouth in any dissent is thereby transformed into an “enemy of the state.”

More Americans, but far from enough, are coming to the realization
that the extermination of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 was
a test run to confirm that the public and Congress would accept the
murder of civilians who had been demonized with false charges of
child abuse and gun-running.

The next test was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Whose
explanation would prevail: the government’s or that of experts?

Air Force General Partin, a top expert on explosives, proved
conclusively in a heavily documented report given to every member
of Congress that the Murruh Federal Office Building blew up from
the inside out, not from the outside in from the fertilizer car bomb.

But General Partin’s facts lost out to the government’s propaganda
and to Congress’ avoidance of cognitive dissonance.

Once the “national security” government learned that its
pronouncements and those of the presstitute media carried more
weight than the facts presented by experts, conspiracies such as
Operation Northwoods could be put into play.

A 9/11 became possible.

The Pentagon, CIA, and military/security complex were desperate
for a new enemy to replace the “Soviet threat,” which had ceased
to exist.

The military/security complex and its servants in Congress were
determined to replace the profits made from the cold war and to
preserve and increase the powers accumulated in the Pentagon
and CIA.

The only possible replacement for the Soviet threat was “Muslim
terrorists.”

Thus, the creation of the “al Qaeda threat” and the conflation of
this new threat with secular Arab governments, such as Iraq’s and
Syria’s, which were the real targets of Islamists.

Despite the evidence provided by experts that secular Arab
governments, such as Saddam Hussein’s, were allies against Islamic
extremism, the US government used propaganda to link the secular
Iraq government with Iraq’s enemies among Islamic revolutionaries.

Once Washington confirmed that the American public was both
too ignorant and too inattentive to pay any attention to events
that would alter their lives and jeopardize their existence,
every thing else followed:

The PATRIOT Act, the suspension of the Constitution and
destruction of civil liberty, Homeland Security which has
quickly extended its gestapo reach from airports to train
stations, bus terminals and highway road blocks, the
criminalization of dissent, the equating of critics of the
government with supporters of terrorism, the home invasions
of antiwar protesters and their arraignment before a grand
jury, the prosecution of whistleblowers who reveal government
crimes, the equating of journalism organizations such as
WikiLeaks with spies.

The list goes on.

The collapse of truth in the US and in its puppet states is a major
challenge to my view that truth and good will are powers that can
prevail over evil.

It is possible that my perception that moral progress has occurred
in various periods of Western civilization reflects a progressive
unplugging from the Matrix.

What I remember as reforms might be events experienced through
the rose colored glasses of the Matrix.

But I think not. Reason is an important part of human existence.
Some are capable of it. Imagination and creativity can escape
chains. Good can withstand evil.

The extraordinary film, The Matrix, affirmed that people could
be unplugged. I believe that even americans can be unplugged.

If I give up this belief, I will cease writing.


Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.
He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service,
and Creators Syndicate.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31167.htm

The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning

Why have liberals not rallied to the WikiLeaks source's defense?

By Charles Davis
Salon.com
April 23, 2012

More than three years into the presidency of Barack Obama,
it’s almost a cliché now to ask: What if George W. Bush did it?

From dramatically escalating the war in Afghanistan to
institutionalizing the practice of indefinite imprisonment,
Obama has dashed hopes he would offer a change from
the Bush’s national security policies – but he hasn’t faced
a whole lot of resistance from liberals who once decried
those policies as an affront to American values.

Like those on the right who now crow about fascism but spent
the Bush years gleefully declaring left-wing celebrities “enemies
of the state,” many of those on the liberal-left treat issues of
war and civil liberties as useful merely for partisan purposes.

When a Democrat’s in power those issues become inconvenient.
And usually ignored.

Former dean of the Yale Law School Harold Koh, for instance, used
to rail against the imperial presidency, speaking of the horror of
torture and “indefinite detention without trial.”

Now a legal adviser for the Obama State Department, he recently
declared that “justice” can be delivered with or with out a trial.

Indeed, “Drones also deliver.”

Don’t expect much more than a yawn from Democratic pundits,
though, much less any calls for impeachment.

It’s an election year, after all. And what, would you rather Mitt
Romney be the guy drone-striking Pakistani tribesmen?

“Obama and the Democrats being in power in Washington defangs a
lot of liberal criticism,” Chase Madar, a civil rights attorney in New
York, told me in an interview.

Indeed, but with a few exceptions – Michael Moore, Dennis
Kucinich, The Nation – those who would be inclined to defend
Manning were Bush still in office are the ones either
condemning him or condoning his treatment, which has included
spending the better part of a year in torturous solitary
confinement, an all too common feature of American prisons.

Even his progressive defenders, remaining loyal to the Democratic
Party, tend to downplay Obama’s role in the Bradley Manning
affair; his authorizing the abuse of an American hero is certainly
no means not to vote for him again.

“The whole civil libertarian message only really seems to catch fire
among liberals when there’s a Republican in the White House,” says
Madar.

When there’s not a bumbling Texan to inveigh against, all the
sudden issues that were morally black and white become complex,
and liberal media starts finding nuance where there wasn’t any
before.

That much is clear in the case of Manning, the young soldier
accused of leaking State Department cables and evidence of
war atrocities to WikiLeaks.

Under different conditions, he might be a liberal hero.

After all, much – though certainly not all – of what he exposed,
from the killing of Iraqi civilians to US complicity in torture by
the Iraqi government, happened during the Bush years.

But it is the Obama administration that is imprisoning him.

It is Barack Obama who pronounced him guilty before he
so much as had a trial (which he’s still waiting for after
almost two years in captivity). And so justifications must
be made.

One popular way is by attacking Manning’s character, by
arguing that unlike Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked top secret
Pentagon documents detailing U.S. failures in Vietnam,
Manning – who, if the charges against him are true, didn’t
leak a single piece of top secret information – was simply
a troubled young man.

The New York Times, for instance, published a piece that spent
several thousand words to essentially say he did it because he
had “delusions of grandeur.” And because he was gay, probably.

Alyssa Rosenberg, a blogger for the Center for American Progress,
declared her “main opinion of Bradley Manning” to be that “it
sounds like he has pretty serious emotional problems and turned
out not to be a particularly effective whistleblower.”

Conveniently, Manning is to blame for the fact the WikiLeaks
revelations did not alter the behavior of the American empire,
not the institutions of state power so often fawned over by
Rosenberg and her colleagues as fundamentally good and just.

Joy Reid, a Democratic pundit who often appears on MSNBC,
likewise dwells on Manning’s alleged emotional problems and gayness.

Because he allegedly divulged to a hacker-turned-informant
that he was struggling with his gender identity, Reid –
ignoring all the inconvenient comments about being outraged
by torture and civilian deaths – argued that Manning was no
hero at all, but rather “a guy seeking anarchy as a salve
for his own personal, psychological torment” caused by his
sexuality.

In this case one might well ask: What if Rick Santorum said it?

When the Nixon administration sought to discredit Ellsberg back in
1971, it played by the same book as Reid and other Obama loyalists
unwilling to believe their president is persecuting a hero, breaking
into his psychiatrist’s office in a vain attempt to uncover evidence
of mental illness.

Today, the liberal media does the government’s work for it.

A lot of that, obviously, has to do with partisanship. Though
Ellsberg’s leaks primarily exposed the lies of Nixon’s Democratic
predecessor’s, he was the target of a loathed Republican
administration, so liberals rallied to his defense; there was a
president to take down, after all.

By contrast, the treatment of Manning – labeled “appropriate” by
Obama; as “cruel” and “inhuman” by the UN special rapporteur
on torture – threatens the mainstream liberal narrative about the
American state.

If a Democratic president is torturing a whistle-blower who
primarily exposed atrocities authorized by his Republican
predecessor, it’s almost as if . . . well, best not to think
about that.

But it’s just brand loyalty that explains the liberal condemnations
of Manning – or the even more common silence.

As Madar, who just wrote a book on the alleged WikiLeaks source,
“The Passion of Bradley Manning,” notes, when it comes to Manning
and the broader issue of Obama’s continuation of Bush’s war on
terror, it’s about more than simple party politics.

“There’s a long tradition of liberals, especially in the first few
decades after the Cold War, of being opposed to, say, the vulgar
witch-hunting, hysterical anti-communism of Joseph McCarthy,”
says Madar, “but being supportive of the much more professional
anti-communism of, say, Harvard University.”

You can see the same dynamic at play now.

Bush’s imperialism was crude and unilateral, so it was condemned;
Obama’s is more sophisticated and multilateral, so it’s condoned –
or cheered.

Similarly, those on the right who condemn Manning do so in a
manner repellent to the more refined liberal palette.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, for instance – in the
midst of selling his children’s book, Can’t Wait Till Christmas! –
declared that for Manning, “anything less than execution is too
kind a penalty.”

How uncouth. How vulgar.

On the center-left, the position is much more sensible: don’t
outright murder the guy, at least not without a show trial,
but don’t you dare let him see the light of day again.

As Obama himself pronounced, “He broke the law,” which is
something that must be obeyed by everyone but bankers and
torturers and presidents.

We can’t just expose the state-sanctioned torture and murder
of innocents willy-nilly.

We can’t just listen to our own consciences when confronted
with institutional evil.

That’d be anarchy. Which is bad.

To be fair, liberals can’t really be blamed for their reaction to
Manning. What he did was fundamentally radical, not reformist.

He didn’t settle for working within a system explicitly designed to
thwart the exposure of wrongdoing, through a chain of command
that callously ignores concern for non-American life.

Having access to evidence of grotesque crimes no one around him
seemed to care about, he engaged in direct action, exposing them
for the benefit of the world and those paying for them, the U.S.
taxpayer.

“[I]f you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of
time,” Manning reportedly wrote to the man who ultimately turned
him in, “and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that
belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a
dark room in Washington DC… what would you do? ”

We know what his answer was.

And we know what the guardians of establishment liberalism would
have had him do: Nothing.

Judge for yourself which is more defensible.


Charles Davis is a journalist whose work has appeared on public
radio stations across the United States and at outlets including
Al Jazeera and Inter Press Service.

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/10/the_liberal_betrayal_of_bradle
y_manning/